#a natural history of tatooine

[classicanalyzer]

LEGO Star Wars Rebuild The Galaxy Thoughts

"Nothing makes sense, and everything's mixed up, and that's okay. Things fall apart, but maybe they can come back together better than before." Sig Greebling

Rebuild The Galaxy is my favorite out of all the D+ LEGO SW specials. I really love the connections to LEGO and SW, including the previous LEGO SW shows, especially Freemaker Adventures. Michael Kramer did an amazing job with the soundtrack, Sig's and Yesi's themes were well-composed.

Part I

"For someone who spends all his time telling stories about heroes, you have no idea how to be one. Maybe that's why you like history so much. It's over and done, but your life isn't. There's so much ahead of you if you'd just try, but you're afraid." Dev Greebling

Sig Greebling is such a cool name. I really love how he's a literal in-universe SW fan, yet someone who actually wants to be normal despite his Force sensitivity. I find it funny he's a literal Nerf herder. I do emphasize of how he wanted to avoid all the expectations if people know he's Force-sensitive.

I love the reference to Wookiees originally being a part of RotJ before being replaced with Ewoks.

Fennesa is a cool-looking world. Yesi Scala is another cool name (I get reminded of Scala Ad Caleum from KH haha). It's too bad Sig's indecisiveness and inability to step out of his comfort zone translates to his social life, even his crush. The background painting showing the sunset is so beautiful.

I really like how the Ackbar Troopers are the Clones in this universe. They must have chosen Ackbar as the main host due to his skills since he was a skilled warrior and leader, but definitely also for the memes out of universe. I also love how Phase I was used because the Kaminionans designed the Phase I suit based on aquatic species like themselves and would fit the Mon Calamari Clones.

The fighting animation and choreography for Yesi's fight against the Ackbar Troopers are so well animated. I laughed seeing that one Ackbar Trooper shooting with two blasters. I can see why Sig likes Yesi. Also ooff, Yesi lost her father in this timeline to the Empire. You can feel the bleak state of this galaxy under this Empire. At least, Yesi's desire to fly among the stars and not live in a backwater world is still there. I like how Sig also mentioned how Rancors are actually misunderstood intelligent creatures.

Double ooff, Sig's brother is now Darth Devastator "Dev". At least we finally get our first on-screen appearance of Jedi Bob!

Part II

"Being a hero is easier when you don't know the cost...Sig, the Force doesn't work that way. The dark side is loud and obvious like a big, mean Gamorrean kicking you in the head over and over. But the light side, the light side of the Force is just a whisper in the back of your mind." Bobolian Afol "Jedi Bob"

Darth Rey as Dev's apprentice feels so wrong about the intentional nature of aspects of this new universe. Jedi Bob!...or rather Bobolian Afol lmao (I also love how the markings seem a bit faded which signals his age). I love this cynical Jedi who sucks at fighting but is amazing at the Force...which is what a true Jedi should specialize in.

FREEMAKER LORE! THE FORCE BUILDERS ARE BACK! I love seeing them once again and hearing Bob recap them feels cathartic.

Ewok Bounty Hunters is one thing but bounty hunter C-3PO channeling his Triple 0 and HK-47 vibes in a Naboo Royal Cruiser with gold plating feels so right yet so wrong in the best ways possible. Yesi really has a lot of baggage with her wanting to prove herself and redeem herself for accidentally getting a rebel base captured.

Mos Eisley Marina made me die on the inside lmao. Tatooine isn't boring anymore lmao. I do love how this is a nod to how the BoBF and Legends mention Tatooine being once covered with oceans before becoming a desert world.

Like father like son indeed, however, even Anakin wouldn't go that far to cheat. I do love how Luke and Anakin use the same Podracer. Poor Max Rebo.

I love how Maul in this galaxy is much more relaxed and happy. At least, in this galaxy, Maul gets to live his life without the tragedies in his main galaxy life.

I love the implication that Nubs is well-known in the main galaxy that Sig knows about him. I'm incredibly confident that Darth Hammerhead is Rusty. Even in another universe, nobody remembers his name lmao.

That brief Duel of the Fates theme playing when Darth Jar Jar appeared was so hype and chilling. His line goes unironically hard.

Part III

"I know you can't restore a galaxy once it's gone because I tried to restore my own, and I failed. In the galaxy I'm from, things were simpler. I was a Padawan on Alistan Nor, learning the secrets of Force Building. I'd heard rumors about the Cornerstone. The more I read, the more obsessed I became. Was it possible to remake an entire galaxy? I needed to know the truth. My Masters forbid me from searching for the Cornerstone, but I wasn't exactly good at following orders. There were so many rules. I just wanted to do things my own way. I thought I could control the Cornerstone. I never thought -- When I left that temple, everything was different. My galaxy was gone, Sig. And yours had just been born." Bobolian Afol "Jedi Bob"

We truly reached the pinnacle of miniaturized Death Star tech with the Dark Falcon lmao.

Darth Jar Jar definitely isn't dead and I love what little time we had with him.

I love the lights looking like the Binary Sun and the music playing as Luke looks towards them.

I love how Palpatine in this universe is a cynic who gave up on fighting. I like that fascinating take on this alternate Palpatine. The new Jedi Council (I like the faded and scratched markings similar to Jedi Bob signals their age and tiredness of a seemingly hopeless war) is insane with Jedi Vader (I love that this is a SW Infinities comic reference, it felt cathartic to see it realized in visual media), Dooku, Cad Bane, Jannah, Lobot, IG-88(?), and even Jabba. I really love that Jannah has more to do here including her actress returning to voice her.

Greedo being the Han of this universe was so funny. He even has the Rodian ears for his Slave I Firespray ship lmao.

I love how Yesi recreates the energy in TFA when she does smth incredibly insane with Greedo's ship. Sig saying I do feels like his and Yesi's "I know" moment. And a Star Trous mention. I also feel like Yesi's point of how you fix the mistake got to Jedi Bob and got to him into revealing the truth. I love how Grevious is one of the rebels in this universe.

Alistan Nor!!! THAT'S THE FORCE BUILDER WORLD AND IT WAS MENTIONED IN FREEMAKER ADVENTURES.

Damn, this Han really became just like his mentor in the old universe. A true scoundrel.

God that twist of the old universe never coming back is gut-wrenching...especially since Jedi Bob is the only survivor of his old universe. The story of Jedi Bob is beyond tragic. One simple curiosity into the cornerstone left him the only survivor. Spending all that time alone in the Temple to make sure it doesn't happen again...only for it to happen again. I also really love how the simple galaxy is represented by 4:3 aspect ratio and all LEGO figures are the classic yellow designs.

WHEN SERVO WAS DESTROYED, I FELT MY HEART BREAKING APART. God that was heartbreaking to see, just like many heroes before him in his stories, to save his friends Sig gave himself up.

Part IV

"The tales of my galaxy. The tales of people like Dev. My Dev. I don't wanna forget them. They matter." Sig Greebling

God the intro with the sad music and Servo shutting down just hurts me in ways I cannot comprehend. The collapsing logo really showcases we're in the endgame.

I love how Yoda is voiced by his Young Jedi Adventure VA in this show. It is heartbreaking to see Ian Han hate Yoda given the very first major LEGO SW special (The Padawan Menace was one of my first non-SW movie experiences in my childhood).

Even if Dev is mentally messed up, I really like how he came around to having a brother and want to be brothers. I like how Sig realizes this is all a fantasy of a galaxy he can never restore. He fights to save this galaxy now.

I'm happy Tico got to a substantial role in this show alongside Rey. Reusing the Nobody line toward Darth Rey was pretty cruel.

The space battle was shot very well and I love the designs of the Calamari Destroyers.

Dev's breakdown was pretty disturbing to see and how he took the rage and lack of happiness in his life to put his idea of "order" and to take control of his life. Especially how he sees himself as beyond redemption and the point of no return.

The quote I used for the introduction quote is beautifully anti-nihilist.

The fight is so well choreographed and so peak, especially when the brief moment the windows were destroyed and the energy shield was activated. The fact the Nerf herder stick came back to be a major turning point in the fight against Dev is great. It was heartbreaking and I got a bit misty-eyed to see Dev ultimately decide to remain evil.

My heart repaired itself as Servo was reconstructed. The old galaxy is gone but the stories will live on. And leave it for Servo to interrupt Sig and Yesi's tender moment haha.

The ending shot with the new crew really felt like the passing of the torch between the Freemaker Adventures to Rebuild the Galaxy. I hope we get to see the Freemaker cast, especially the Freemaker family on Alistan Nor.

Also, The Landolorian and Evil Grogu has been so hyped as the sequel hook alongside Darth Rey and Tico being in charge of the Empire.

This is such a great show and I can't wait to see more LEGO SW stories set in this universe.

I love the score by Kramer who is also responsible for Ninjago’s score (alongside Jay Vincent):

[sethnakht]

there's an au in my head where vader shows up at jabba's palace before luke but after leia's capture on a tip call from boba fett. leia, captive on jabba's throne, senses his arrival well before she sees him; watching his descent into the throne room, she regrets conjuring the spectre of "powerful friends" to scare jabba. vader has strangled several guards by this point; jabba doesn't care; he receives vader as though they were old business partners, without a translator. vader interrupts jabba in the middle of a self-congratulatory overture - jabba is harboring the leader of the rebel alliance, he says, pointing at leia, and must surrender her immediately. this escalates; jabba offers han instead, vader counters that jabba will relinquish the princess or die, jabba reaches for the controls to his rancor pit, leia averts her eyes, unwilling to key vader into the trapdoor beneath his feet, and suddenly vader is gone and she and the whole throne retinue are sliding, lurching, falling; they're the ones in the pit, and when she looks up, she sees vader staring down at them with an ignited lightsaber, surrounded by poorly aimed blaster fire. she looks away just as he begins to deflect it.

vader has decided to pay boba and lure luke and punish jabba all at once; he leapt over the throne and pushed its occupants with the force, pickled frogs and leia included, into the rancor pit. he still fully intends that leia be made his prisoner - he doesn't want to kill his best line to luke - he simply assumes that since she's survived him, she can survive anything. as it happens, leia does escape the rancor because it feasts on the stunned jabba first, breaking the chain that connected her to him; dodging the panicking attendants, who also end up eaten or mauled, she finds the pit entrance and secures herself by bringing down the threshold gate. if vader's right about leia, though, he's wrong here about luke, who isn't provoked into appearing. becoming impatient - having slaughtered every guard who hasn't fled - vader deprives artoo of luke's hidden saber and decides to draw luke to him where he cannot fail to appear. stuck between gates in the dungeon, leia shrieks and missteps, slicing open her boot and her foot on a misplaced axe; vader has materialized silently, like a shadow that shouldn't be in the desert. he's in a foul mood; ignoring her limp, he pulls her out by the chain still attached to her neck (because he's petty and hasn't forgotten her comment about his 'leash') all the way to his private ship (the nubian j-type that symbolizes and effected his removal from tatooine, the ship he has in the comics). with usual bumbling luck (let's say his restraining bolt no longer works because jabba is dead), threepio trails them and ends up boarding too, commenting blithely about the ship's royal trappings.

well aware luke is on tatooine, vader doesn't leave the planet; flying in a way that leia first thinks is just intended to keep her off-balance, he heads for the lars homestead. lashed to the co-pilot's seat and without a sense of their direction, leia looks at featureless sand and can't help but call up the map in her mind to where obi-wan would have lived. it's popular fanon that vader can't read leia's mind owing to natural mental shields; I could see exploring an alternative where he can sense her strong emotions, where he does swoop in and catch the fish swimming right at the surface - only that what he catches is what she's chosen to sacrifice, or what she sees no reason to hide. what to him is a prize is to her an acceptable loss. so maybe in this au, there's this history between them: on the death star, she'd given up that obi-wan was part of her mission, anticipating that he'd be on alderaan and out of reach, while protecting the location of the rebel base; maybe that's why she survived her interrogation, because vader had gone so distracted with the bait that he'd lost interest in the fish. point being, vader is well aware that she's thinking about obi-wan right at this moment, and leia is chilled to realize, just from the quality of his silence, that she knows that he knows.

but this soon doesn't matter, because she realizes they're being pursued by what's left of jabba's guard and the millenium falcon. vader is possibly an even crazier pilot in atmosphere than in space, performing stomach-turning stunts like killing the ship's engines and going into a freefall dive to get each attacker but the more distant falcon to destroy itself; the falcon he shakes off by heading straight into a massive sandstorm. droid-like as he is, leia realizes he doesn't rely on the ship's instruments when the storm causes half to fail and they still make it past flying debris. after landing, vader orders leia to put on a flightsuit and helmet before they exit into the storm, lest she take unnecessary further damage. freeing herself of the mask the moment they're in an enclosed part of the homestead - which required passing through a courtyard open to the hostile elements - leia is first surprised by vader's choice of an abandoned hovel, then concerned when threepio reveals where they are. the more details threepio spills (the more the limits of his memory banks are revealed to vader), the more uneasy leia becomes. luke's family died because of the empire. but they'd still be alive, she can't help but think, had she not sent the death star plans to this planet. perhaps enjoying this dark turn to her thoughts, vader doesn't interrupt the flow of commentary. evidently unfazed by his own role in murdering luke's family, he prowls through their home as though it were his own castle. leia can imagine he's designing a trap for luke. silently, she implores him to stay away.

luke doesn't come. a massive piece of farming equipment, left unmaintained for too long and violently unmoored by the storm, smashes into vader's ship, taking out an engine. bounty hunters hired by angry hutts try to finish the job; vader kills them, but not before they've set his ship on fire. and vader starts to go slightly more mad than usual; the tatooine sand in his suit and smoke preventing use of his ship's hyperbaric chamber and luke's refusal to acknowledge his psychic pleading/threats and threepio's obviously mindwiped chatter and leia's scorching presence, her immense grief and scorn, her way of judging without having to speak a word - it all warps, and blurs, as he paces like the suit is cooking him from inside, and touches the wall disjointedly, and makes sudden disappearances to repair his ship with cheap moisturizer parts. for her part, leia is judging. she knows why vader wants her alive, and she's angry to be used again as bait, to say the least. and she's also judging her own chances: she's not eaten, not had access to water, she's lost a good deal of blood, her foot is bandaged with dirty cloth, and luke's lightsaber is hanging from vader's belt, tantalizingly near.

she tries to goad vader, to distract him from his ship repairs and the trap he's creating and the second lightsaber on his belt. he's become predictable, and luke won't come. she has no reason to hide her love for luke, so when vader lashes out mentally - jealously pilfering surface impressions of luke from her mind - he can remain blind to her intentions. only vader is paying real attention to her now that he's gotten to taste those memories, she's fed a hunger she hadn't known could devour, and she understands that he's draining her, taking from her, that she's shriveling up from thirst and regret and this connection. he's seeing her value as for the first time and isn't seeing her at all - and when threepio begins crying for help, drawing vader's attention away, leia is certain she is going to die.

vader wants to know when threepio entered her service. threepio is only too glad to answer exactly. leia is too depleted to care about what he shares - better that he spill the secrets of the dead captain antilles than having vader back in her head - she drifts into unconsciousness, and dreams. she's back at the palace in aldera, in the oval garden, where a stone statue of queen amidala had stood watch over beds of white asters. leia had liked to look into the child-queen's solemn face - her mother had often brought her here to tell her stories of amidala's adventures - but in her dream she is facing the statue's back, a meaningless circumstance that somehow chills her. she circles closer and yet can't get around to the front, and the harder she tries the more the details slip from her, until she can't even remember amidala's face. this too, she has lost.

anyway, that's the setup. it escalates from there. vader is paying enough attention to entertain new suspicions about luke's strong feelings for leia; amongst the many other threatening things he does, he finds desert cacti and makes leia drink the nectar. (for all she knows, it's poison, and the spikes on the surface cut her fingers and press against her face like needles.) leia, still certain she is dying, commits to saving luke as her final act, which she believes means killing vader. vader repairs his ship; leia ensures the self-destruct goes off while they're both on it. vader absorbs the blast, keeping leia alive at the cost of compromising his own life support; suddenly faced with the chance to fulfil her wish, luke's lightsaber in her hands, leia finds herself unable to follow through - because vader tells her to do it.

at last, a figure on the horizon. luke is come.

[shadowmaat]

Old Friends, part 2

(part 1)

Finding Obi-Wan Kenobi alive and (relatively) well on Tatooine was a surprise, to say the least, but Cody adapted to it well enough.

Not much changed, on the surface of things. He still reported in to Senator Organa, he still helped the local populace when and where he could, and he still moved his quarters every few weeks to make it difficult for anyone- local or Empire- to find him.

It was just that now, Obi-Wan became part of his regular patrol. Most often that meant trekking out to the dusty hut in the Jundland Wastes that Obi-Wan now called home, checking to make sure he was still alive and testing his security measures. Security measures Cody himself had installed, since Obi-Wan seemed content to rely on the Force to protect him. Tsk. Some things never changed.

Occasionally it was Obi-Wan who did the trekking, most often because he needed supplies. Or so he said. That might make sense for Bestine, which was the nearest city to him, but didn't explain his occasional forays into Mos Eisley or even Anchorhead. Cody didn't ask and Obi-Wan offered no explanation, but it made for a nice break in routine. They'd hole up in a cantina or caf shop and have coded conversations of their past.

Obi-Wan was, naturally, curious about why Cody had turned on him; why all the clones had turned on the Jedi. Cody gave him what answers he could, much the same as he had when Organa had asked, but with more regret. "It seemed like the right thing to do at the time" was a weak answer. Even Cody himself had questions about it, but it wasn't like he could go back and change things. He was here, now, and he wouldn't be going back to the Empire. Not that they'd take him; there was a "kill on sight" order in place.

There were times, of course, when Cody was called offworld to deal with some disaster or another of the Rebellion. Sometimes they wanted to pick his brain over military strategy and how troopers fought. Other times it was to participate in raids on supply depots or even the occasional prisoner rescue. Those missions always made the back of his neck itch because he could tell the people with him didn't trust him. Organa's word could only go so far when Cody's own history as an Imperial stormtrooper spoke for itself.

For the most part, Cody bore their suspicions and hostility with understanding. He regretted some of the things he'd done, of course, but he'd also been a soldier, and soldiers were there to follow orders. Until they started asking questions, anyway.

There were only a couple of times where he had to get aggressive; when someone was so ready to fight that no amount of deescalation would work. He put them down fast and made sure they'd be able to get back up again.

Returning to Tatooine was always a strange bit of relief. As a clone trooper, Cody was of the belief that "home" was an idea you carried with you; built into your armor, maybe. But there was something about stepping foot on that arid world and breathing its parched air that gave him a feeling of... belonging.

Obi-Wan was usually nearby when he landed. Cody was reasonably certain it was because Organa told him rather than "the Force," but it still eased his heart to see proof that his ex-General was still alive and hadn't managed to get himself killed in Cody's absence.

"Not dead yet, huh?"

"I'm afraid not." Obi-Wan smiled at him. "How was your trip?"

"A clusterfuck, as usual." Cody headed for a nearby cantina, Obi-Wan keeping pace beside him. "What about you? What krayt's nest did you kick over this time?"

"Whatever makes you think I'd do something like that?"

The innocence in his tone was polished to a shine. Cody snorted.

"Because I know you."

Obi-Wan sniffed as Cody ordered their drinks, heading for a dark table in the back.

"I'll have you know I was on my best behavior while you were gone. Nothing happened."

The fading bruise at his temple and the scrapes on his knuckle told a different story, but Cody let it slide. He knew Obi-Wan was keeping something important from him, but it wasn't his place to question it. Either he'd be told when the time was right or he'd never find out at all; Cody was fine with it either way.

For now he was content to simply enjoy his drink and continue to sass his old friend. Storms, it was good to be home.

[burnwater13]

Boba Fett facing Cad Bane on the streets of Mos Espa. Image from The Book of Boba Fett, Season 1, Episode 7, In the Name of Honor. Calendar by DateWorks.

NOTE: 

In lieu of writing a story all about the long running history of Boba Fett and Cad Bane and how it had resolved itself, first with name calling and then with something a little more permanent, Grogu elected to write a story that the people of Earth could appreciate given the nature of their celebration of Halloween. No reason to talk about really scary stuff, when you could talk about more mild scary stuff. Cheers!

Trick or Treat

It was a beautiful day on Nevarro. The few trees and scrub bushes that framed the cabin Grogu shared with the Mandalorian had begun to show signs that the air had been cooling and the weather was getting a little wetter. There leaves were changing colors and they had bloomed. Everything smelled a little nicer and looked a lot prettier. 

The harvest was going to be collected that night according to IG-11. Not your traditional harvest of veggies, fruits, nuts, berries, and other things people on the strange planet ate. Nope. That happened all year long. No. Now it was time to harvest the moonstones. 

At least that’s what Grogu had heard people call the crystals that folks all over Nevarro collected one night a year when the lava flats burped them up. He suspected that was why the Imps had even recorded Nevarro on a star chart. Unfortunately for them (the Imps that is) it only happened one night a year and once the scouts had reported that, after spending an extremely dull year there, the Imps had left the place alone, until they realized the true utility of a planet no one cared about.

Right now he was just working with his dad to make sure that the protective clothing he had to wear was ready for the big event. His dad had originally suggested that they go to a planet than actually held a harvest festival, like Sorgan, but Grogu had refused. They had a home on Nevarro and while the cabin was small, kind of drafty, and often covered with fine black powder from the lava flats, it was their home now and it was about time they participated in some of Nevarro’s traditions.

Yes, he knew he was giving up the opportunity to spend all night collecting sweets and eating them before his dad worked out that no one on Sorgan really handed everyone in a costume a couple of krill for all that hard work of dressing up and wondering around. He was also giving up a trip to Tatooine where he would hang out with Peli and the pit droids and win something no one wanted when he beat her at sabacc. Again. It was okay. He really did want to see what the whole moonstone thing was about.

He’d been talking to the High Magistrate’s protocol droid about the plan it had been developing for the collection, measurement, and evaluation of lava flat moonstones, because he’d never heard of them and didn’t know why anyone would want to collect chunks of rock that came from the small body that orbited Nevarro. That’s when he learned so many things. 

First, Nevarro didn’t have a moon. That’s right. It didn’t even have a small satellite that people might mistake for an Imperial battle station. Then he’d learned that due to some weird aspect of the heating and cooling cycles of Nevarro’s liquid core, the magma and lava flows produced two strange things. 

The lava produced fine crystals that, if you happened upon them, you’d noticed that they glowed softly, day or night. Many of the children on Nevarro sprinkled them on paths to fun places to play, favorite vendor’s stalls and shops, as well as in their rooms to provide a soft light in the evenings. 

Grogu had managed to acquire a few of them from IG-11-M and had them in his bedroom until the Mandalorian complained about them being too bright. Until then, Grogu had no idea that sometimes his dad took his helmet off at night when he puttered around the cabin, thinking Grogu was asleep. Of course, Grogu had been asleep, dank farrik!

The magma produced large amorphic crystals that would eventually make their way into the lava flows and then cast up on the banks. They could be polished, but they didn’t glow at all and they were a kind of deep brown. Not very pretty and not very useful, unless you wanted to create an outline for a landing pad. 

However, there was another that could happen. The tiny lava crystals could get swallowed back up in the magna when it returned to it’s underground channels and pools. Then, the amorphic crystals would collide with it and suddenly you’d have a very large, very pretty, very bright moonstone. But only if you happened to be out on the banks of the lava flats on the right night of the year when the flow would start burping the things up. 

No one knew how they became known at moonstones, but Grogu liked to think that someone saw them and was reminded of the moon from their home planet or something like that. He still didn’t think any one thought they came from an actual Imperial battle station. 

But, and this was important, you couldn’t just pick up a moonstone like it was a stone or pebble or credit you found on the streets of Nevarro City. Those things had just been burped up from deep underground and were still amazingly hot. If you caught one without proper protective equipment you would never have to worry about catching another one. You went almost instantly to way too warm and just as suddenly to permanently cold. It was bad. Don’t do it. 

Instead, the fine people of Nevarro had worked out that they could wear special safety gear that would allow them to handle the stones long enough to move them out of their way as they spent the night collecting them. The protective gear itself was kind of funny. It was silver in color, was shaped like a hooded poncho, but it went all the way to the ground and it only had small holes to look out of and some slashes for your hands to fit through. Of course you had to wear thermal protective gloves made out of the same stuff to protect your hands. 

The Mandalorian had said everyone looked like a mech with a thermal blanket covering it. Grogu didn’t argue. His dad wasn’t wrong. They were just a lot taller or wider or longer than most of the mechs Grogu had ever met. And, if you sent your mech to do the work, you still needed the protective equipment to make sure that they didn’t melt from the heat of the stones. 

“You know you can’t eat these things, right?”

Grogu nodded his head, although the motion was barely perceptible under the thick silver blanket. 

“Good. Remember, we are just moving them so they can be collected and measured and all that. Karga’s got big plans for them.”

Grogu nodded his head again. 

He knew all about the High Magistrate’s plan. Once the moonstones were collected, measured, evaluated, tested, recorded, and all that, they were going to be used to create a series of markers that would indicate the way to all the major sites on Nevarro. He didn’t want tourists getting lost at night because they all complained that IG-11-M scared them when it appeared out of the gloom. 

Grogu just hoped his dad didn’t mind the fact that the protocol droid’s plan now included outlining all the major landowners’ property boundaries with the things. Based on what Grogu had suggested, the Mandalorian was never going to find any place on Nevarro dark enough to take his helmet off again. But if Grogu couldn’t see his face, there was no good reason anyone else should either. He has spoken.

Happy Halloween. 

[mandos-mind-trick]

Instinct - Part 9

Summary: Omegas were rare. Some even thought them extinct. So when Boba contacts Din saying he has a gift Din can’t refuse, the last thing he expects to find is an omega in need of an alpha. Din has to make the hard decision, but what else was he really doing anyways? But naturally, there’s more to this omega than meets the eye.

Pairing: Din Djarin x female!reader

Warnings: Some violence, PTSD, Boba being Boba.

A/N: Wow, two in one week. I’m super inspired so maybe more?

< Previous | Next > | MASTERLIST | OC Version

You grunt as you hit the ground once more. You're covered in dirt and grass stains, your muscles aching with every impact. Training with Fennec on Tatooine had been hard, even with her pulling her punches. 

Din doesn’t hold back. 

“No one’s going to go easy on you just because you’re a woman.” He says, circling you as you push herself back to your feet. You're tired and sore, the sun close to setting. You’ve been at this all day. “If they want to hurt you, they will. That’s why you need to learn to defend yourself. Why you need to learn to tap into those omega instincts.” 

“I told you I don’t know how.” You say, pushing yourself up to stand, brushing grass off your pants. 

“If you feel threatened, your omega will defend you.” He stills, facing you, your back to the ship. 

“Well, maybe I just don’t feel threatened by you.” You huff, getting tired of his constant warnings, his constant reminders that your omega should protect you.

You can practically see the change in him with your words. His shoulders tense, squaring up, hands clenched into fists at his sides. He looks ready to spring at any moment. This must be what his quarries see when he’s hunting. A prime alpha ready to catch its prey. Your omega shifts inside you, telling you to turn tail and run. 

You make it around the side of the ship, heading for the treeline when he reaches you. His arms slip around you, lifting you feet off the ground. You let out a yelp, your back hitting the grass once more. 

He drops over you, caging you in with his arms. “Running’s good, but it only helps if you can get away.” 

You make a face. “I told you, I don’t know how to do this.” 

He leans down, pressing his helmet against your forehead. “You need to know. What if I’m not there to protect you?” 

You give him a grin. “Then you’ll just have to make sure you are.” 

You squeal as he wraps his arms around you, lifting you off the ground with ease. 

****

His fingers brush your side again, running over the blaster tucked under your shirt. There’s a vibroblade tucked into your boot, and another up your sleeve. He’s a bit apprehensive about bringing you along, but he knows he can’t keep you shut in the ship all the time. Plus, this should be an easy hunt. It’s a decently sized city with plenty of eyes. It’s not a place where things like this happen often, so he’s less worried about something happening to you. 

“Don’t engage unless you have to.” He says, eyes sweeping over the busy street. “He likely won’t be alone.” 

“I don’t even remember what this guy looks like.” You say, warily looking at every passing face. 

“Hopefully he doesn’t remember you.” Din says, making his way towards the cantina where his quarry is said to frequent. 

He stops in an alley facing the cantina doors, leaning against the wall. You lean next to him with a sigh. You’re a bit nervous. You’ve never been on a hunt before, much less one that’s for someone that has a history with you. It’s exciting, but it’s also terrifying. 

“How long do you think?” You ask, looking up at Din. His gaze is turned towards the cantina. 

“Don’t know.” He answers. “He’s either inside already, or he’ll be arriving soon.” 

“And so we wait.” You say. It’s not much of a question. You know going inside would be too much of a giveaway. The man would likely bolt as soon as he saw you two. You have to be sneaky about this. The less of a scene you could cause, the better. 

You sigh again as you lean against the wall, fiddling with the hem of your shirt. It was going to be a long wait. If he was already inside, he’d likely be there for a while. Din is practically unmoving next to you, like a predator stalking prey. He could stand for hours doing nothing. You were not used to that. You feel antsy, like you need to do something. 

Din tenses next to you, a subtle movement, but you pick it up. You stand up a little straighter, peeking around him. “There.” He says, nodding towards a group that’s entering the cantina. 

“That’s a lot of them.” You say, counting six total. “What do we do?” 

“Wait.” He says. “Give them time to settle in.” 

You let out a sigh, leaning against the wall once more. “Is every hunt like this?” You ask. 

“No.” He says, still facing the cantina. “Not all of them are this easy to find, either.” 

You look up, studying the blue sky. It’s nice to be outside, breathing fresh air. You take in a deep breath, letting the exhale extend as you close your eyes. 

“Everything okay?” Din asks, glancing over his shoulder at you. 

“Yeah.” You say, opening your eyes once more. “Just nice to be outside. I do miss Tatooine sometimes, but I don’t miss the heat.” 

“We could go back.” He says, facing the cantina once more. “Just say the word, and we’ll leave this and go back.” 

You stare at his back for a long time. Part of you wants to say it. Part of you wants to go back, be with Boba and Fennec where it’s safe. You know, though, you can’t give up yet. These men did horrible things to you and you can’t be the only one. You won’t be the only one if they don’t stop them. 

Din tenses again, hand falling to his waist. You peek around him again, five of the men that had entered the cantina with their target have exited, blasters in hand as they look around. 

“Someone must have tipped him off.” Din says, gripping your arm. “Get back to the Crest. Comm me when you get there.” 

You want to argue, but you know you’ll only be a liability in this fight. You can’t fight. You’re a decent shot, but that won’t do much good here. 

“Go.” Din almost commands, his alpha creeping into the edges of his voice. 

You have no choice but to turn, making your way down the alley. You keep your pace quick, but you don't run, not wanting to draw attention to yourself. The last thing you needed to do was draw attention, causing more trouble than Din probably was. 

The sound of blaster fire has your pace stuttering a bit. Those still on the street look around, looking for the source. 

Things like this don’t happen here. 

Din had told you that when he’d said you could come with him. This was a decent place, where fights didn’t break out constantly on the street. Perfect cover for someone looking to hide something dark. 

You pick up your pace even more, trying to calm your breathing. The quicker you could get back to the ship, the sooner you could relax. You could comm Din, hear his voice, make sure he’s alright. You trust him and his abilities, but five against one...those weren’t exactly favorable odds. He’d been in worse situations, though. He’d told you a bit about his adventures before he’d met you. He’d made it with worse odds. 

Maybe they should go back to Tatooine. Maybe this was a bad idea. 

You turn a street corner, picking up your pace even more as you see the spaceport in front of you. You’ve given up calming your breathing, feeling something tickling in the back of your mind. There had only been five that came out of the cantina. Where was the other one? 

You stop dead in your tracks as you approach the Crest. Leaning against the side of the ship is a light-haired man. He’s leaning casually, like he was waiting for someone to arrive. Your stomach clenches, your breath catching in your throat. Your hand slowly lifts, reaching for your blaster. 

“This isn’t what I was expecting.” He says, tilting his head at you. “When the bartender tipped us off that a Mandalorian was looking for us, I didn’t expect it to be because of this.” He looks you over, making your skin crawl. “You probably don’t remember much. You were drugged out of your mind, but I remember you. You’ve grown up since then.” 

He pushes himself away from the Crest, taking a couple steps towards you. Your hand is on your blaster, ready to draw it, but you can’t seem to. 

“Still a scared little omega.” He says, the title coming from him making you shudder in disgust. It feels wrong, hearing someone like him say it. 

Run. 

Your brain is screaming it. You can’t fight, you can’t even get your hand to draw your blaster. Running was what omegas did. It was their first defense. You’re in an open space. You can get back to the exit quickly. There’s people on the streets, crowds you could hide in. Wait until Din found you or found the man. 

You turn, ready to run. He’s faster than you are, your back slamming against the side of the ship as he grips your chin in his hand. He leans into you, his breath washing over your face. You’re starting to panic a bit. You feel trapped, stuck. 

Your hands close around his wrist, fingers trying to dig into his skin. “Let go.” You’re panicking, feeling closed in as his other hand rests on the ship beside your head. “Let go!” You yell, struggling against him, but he doesn’t let up. 

Suddenly you're not in the spaceport anymore. You're not staring at a stranger. You know him. You remember him. You can see him, you can see all of them. The faces of every man who had hurt you, every one of them that had taken advantage of you. You can remember every single one of them, all of them flashing through your mind. 

A sudden, strange calm feeling begins to wash over you, your panic abating. You feel warm and light, almost like you're watching everything unfold from outside your body. It feels good. You feel safe. 

It surprises both of them when you rear back, driving both of your feet into his chest. It’s a strong enough hit to have him stumbling back. You drop on your side on the hard ground, but it doesn’t seem to phase you. You're on your feet almost instantly, rushing at him. He doesn't have time to block you or move, your shoulder driving right into his stomach. He grunts, hitting the ground hard. 

He barely has time to roll away from your elbow as it drops, aimed for his neck. You grab a handful of his hair, yanking him back onto his back. He yells out, hands scrambling for his blaster, but you're faster. You're on top of him, a blaster pointed right at his face. He doesn't have time to react, can’t even get a word out before you fire. 

Your name draws your attention away from the man. You lift the blaster at the approaching figure, firing. It takes him by surprise, bouncing off his helmet. 

“Stop!” He calls out, but you fire again. He’s ready this time, dodging it. 

He rushes you, doing the only thing he can think of. He tackles you to the ground, your back hitting the ground hard, but he doesn’t have time to think about that. He wraps his arms around you, trying to keep you still. 

“Stop.” He says, putting as much of his alpha in his voice as he can. “Enough.” 

Your fighting stills, your body shuddering before going lax in his arms. Your head falls back, baring your throat to him in submission. He hates himself as he watches you, removing his hand from the back of your neck. 

Boba had been right. Your omega is strong. Strong and out of control. 

He gently strokes the back of your head as you whimper quietly, nuzzling against him, trying to reach his neck. “It’s alright.” He soothes you, trying to push as much of his scent forward as he can. He hates doing it, but he had seen the intensity of your gaze when you’d looked at him. There was no one there but your omega. Nothing but pure instinct driving you forward. 

He wishes he knew more about omegas. More about how to help you. 

There still are some who could help. 

He pushes the thought from his head. It would be a risk. He knows he’ll have to face it eventually, but he doesn’t want to do that to you. Not right now, when you were in such a delicate space. 

He stands, holding you in his arms. The sun is setting, painting the sky above them a bright orange. You're limp, riding the wave of calm he had forced into you. He ignores the body behind him, carrying you into the ship, closing the ramp behind him. 

He lays you in the makeshift nest, wrapping you in his cloak. You reach for him as he pulls away, mumbling incoherently. “I’ll be right back.” He says, squeezing your shoulder gently. He climbs up to the cockpit, not letting his shoulders relax until they’re in hyperspace. 

He climbs back down to the hull, stripping off his armor. He tries not to think about all the things that had gone through his head when you didn’t comm him. He had been terrified, thinking maybe you had been taken again, or worse. He feels sick to his stomach at the thought. He strips out of his flight suit, crawling into the nest beside you, wrapping his arms around you. 

****

“I saw them. I saw all of them.” 

Din wakes abruptly, disoriented. He didn’t remember falling asleep. He hadn’t meant to. The spot next to him is vacant, but still warm. The blanket is still tossed over him, but his cloak is missing. 

“I remember their faces.” 

His gaze is drawn down towards his feet, towards the end of the nest. You're sitting there, wrapped in his cloak. The faint blue of a holoprojector is lighting the hull of the crest. 

“How many have you found?” Boba’s gruff voice reaches his ears. 

“Just the two.” You say, sniffling. “I killed him.” 

“He would have killed you just as quickly. Or worse.” 

You sniffle again. “I shot him.” 

“You did what you had to. You’ve saved a lot of lives by doing it. People always get what they deserve eventually. Sometimes it’s a blaster bolt to the head. You did good, ad’ika. Let me know when you get where you’re going next.”

You nod. “Okay.” 

Your shoulders slump a bit as the blue glow of the holoprojector disappears. You set it down with a clank on the metal floor, letting out a shaky breath. 

“It’s quite a feat, you know,” He says quietly. 

You turn to face him, red rimmed eyes meeting his. “What?” 

“When I started bounty hunting, I heard stories about the famed hunter Boba Fett. How ruthless and bloodthirsty he was. How sometimes his quarries would turn themselves in to avoid having a run in with him. Yet here you are, just a little omega, turning him soft.” 

You scoff. “I don’t think he’s going soft. I think he’s just getting old.” 

Din wraps an arm around your waist, tugging you back so you're lying next to him. “We’re close in age, you know.” 

You poke his cheek. “Then that means you’re old too.” 

He playfully grumbles, wrapping his arms around you. You settle into his hold, nuzzling your face into his neck. He rubs your back gently, tilting his head back a bit to allow you to scent him. 

“Are you okay?” He asks, not wanting to bring up anything that you might not be ready to talk about yet, but he needs to ask. 

Your body stills, a shaky breath fanning across the skin of his throat. “I saw them. I saw all of them. Somehow...somehow I remember...” 

He tightens his hold around you. “I’m sorry you had to do that. I didn’t think...somehow he found out.” 

“The bartender at the cantina tipped him off.” You say. “Found out somehow.” You press closer to him. “What if they all know? What if someone’s told them?” 

“That’s a risk we have to take.” He says. “They do have connections, or at least they all did at one point. Eventually they’re going to start taking notice.” 

You are quiet for a moment, so quiet he thinks you’ve fallen asleep. Your breaths are steady against his skin, your own skin warm where it’s pressed against him. “Would you really go back?” 

He hums, pressing his face against your hair. 

“To Tatooine?” 

“All you have to do is ask.” He murmurs against the top of your head. 

You should ask. You know it. You should stop this now, before it really gets dangerous. Still, there's something in the back of your mind, something telling you to keep going. Something telling you to wipe them all out, once and for all.

Taglist:

@donttamethebeasts​, @unicorntrooper​, @spacecluster​, @hugmedin​, @hungrhay​, @fic-for-readers

[it-rains-on-coruscant]

It Rains on Coruscant

I was suddenly hit with inspiration while in the shower, so I wrote a little fic about Luke and Anakin each seeing rain for the first time! A lot of this is probably canonically inaccurate, but yea lemme know what you think, I might write more in the future :> (no promises tho)

Sorry the second part is like, twice as long as the first lol I might rewrite it now that I think of it-

********************************************

Water had always been in very short supply on Tatooine. It was used strictly for drinking and very little else. The most water Anakin had ever seen in one place was when he ran into a vendor from Naboo selling it out in large barrels for lots of money or valuable trades.

So of course he was stunned when one day on Coruscant, walking with Master Obi-Wan through the extensive gardens, water began pouring out of the sky.

Anakin stopped in his tracks. What was going on? This- this couldn't possibly be real, could it?

"Anakin?" Obi-Wan called from where he now stood several feet ahead. "Anakin, what's the matter?"

"Master, it's... what's going on?" Water, and so much of it, was dripping off his face, soaking his robes, gathering in puddles beneath his feet.

"It's just rain, Anakin, we need to get inside before you catch cold," Obi-Wan sighed, striding over to his Padawan and pulling his hood over his head.

"But Master, I... there's so much water! What's it... why..."

"What do you mean, Anakin? It rains all the time!" Obi-Wan took Anakin's hand to guide him inside the temple.

"Not back home, it doesn't," Anakin said, examining his wet boots. How the water collected in beads on the shoe's material, little droplets rolling into one another, gathering together until they became too heavy to hold themselves up anymore, and finally sliding to the ground.

Obi-Wan blinked, startled. "Doesn't it? Have you never seen rain before?"

Anakin shook his head wordlessly. How beautiful this new world was. If only his mother could see him now.

***~several years later~***

"Hey, Princess, have you seen Luke?" Han called. "I haven't seen him all day."

Leia looked up from an article she'd been reading. "He's probably sleeping, it's been raining since just after breakfast."

Han shrugged and stood up. He was bored and wanted somebody to talk to; Chewie was off Force knows where, and Leia- Well, who wanted to talk to a princess anyway? She probably only knew about politics and politicians and old history, which Han didn't feel like involving himself in right now.

"Hey, kid?" He walked into Luke's room and turned the lights on. "You in here?" But it was quiet and empty, so Han resumed his search elsewhere.

Half an hour later, Han flopped down in a chair. His expedition had been unsuccessful, and now he had nothing to do.

"Hey, pilot." Leia walked into the room with a hot drink. "I found him sitting in the rain, can you bring this to him? I'm afraid he'll get sick."

"Can't you do it yourself?" Han whined.

"I'm busy," was the only response Leia gave as she handed him the steaming mug.

"Fine, but only because you're a princess." Han said the last word venomously, but Leia simply ignored him and turned away.

He carried the cup outside, where rain was pouring down in sheets. Han scoffed to himself and pulled his jacket closer. "Luke?" He called out. "Luke, if you don't answer me in five seconds, I'm locking you out."

But just before he turned to go back inside, Han spotted a dark shape a couple feet away. "Hey, Han," Luke said softly.

"What the hell are you doing out here?! It's storming!" Han shouted.

Luke didn't answer. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground, with his eyes closed and his face tilted toward the sky. He looked so happy.

"You act like you've never seen rain before." Han rolled his eyes. "Enough about the Jedi being 'connected to nature', if you get sick and die-"

"This is rain?! It's amazing," Luke said suddenly.

"Wait, what?"

"It's even better than what Ben told me. He said my father loved it too."

"It's not that spectacular," Han huffed. "Now I'm soaked..."

Luke smacked Han's foot and stood up. "You can go back inside," he said, "but I'm staying out here." Then he sneezed.

"Nah, kid, you're coming too. You've been out here for hours."

"No I ha--" Another sneeze.

Han grinned and handed Luke the now cold and watered-down drink. "You can sit in the rain next week. I'm sure the princess'll know what to do with you." He ruffled Luke's wet hair and opened the door to let them both back inside.

[idk how to end stories so this will have to do for now lol. I might come back and edit but I'm nervous enough posting this as it is lol thanks for reading!! have a good day!!]

[marvelstars]

"I had a dream, I was a Jedi, I came back here and freed all of the slaves"

The Kairos and The Kronos in Star Wars

Art by means1974

Kairos: (Ancient Greek: καιρός) is an ancient Greek word meaning 'the right, critical, or opportune moment'.

Kronos: Kronos may be derived from ancient Greek “kroúō/κρούω” meaning “to strike” or “to smite”. Besides, Kronos could mean “time”

"Fully defeated by just anyone, the dark side cannot be, but only by the Chosen One. And who might be this Jedi? Know I do not, but not yet born is he or she. This much, sense I can. A vessel of pure Force the Chosen One will be, more powerful than any Jedi in history." ―Yoda, from the Great Holocron

Anakin´s so called "attachment" problem would not have become an issue if he had been raised with his family, becoming a Jedi meant for Anakin abandoning his mother in a state of slavery, not knowing what was happening to her and then dreaming of her being tortured until she died in his arms. This trauma made him fearful of losing his loved ones to an extreme degree, which later lead to his extreme fear of losing Padme.

Before becoming a Jedi he was a sweet/sneaky and resourceful kid, who worried about others, made everything he could to help, not expecting a reward, he had great dreams and initiatives to make life better for his friends and family on Tatooine but becoming a Jedi meant he had to give up all of it in favor of following the Council and the Senate dictates which wasnt bad on principle but it often messed with his mental stability, especially when it came to the slavery issue when he had to help the outerim slavers like Jabba or ignore the Senate links to that system

For Anakin in particular the Jedi life was inherently traumatic, not so much for the content of their teachings, at least not all of them but because he had to give up parts of himself that made him emotionally stable, happy and helped develop his personality as a leader focused in helping to make the galaxy a better place, all qualities he still developed in the clone wars but not to their full potential and sadly later were used for the Dark side as Vader.

On the Jedi temple thinking about his mother made him attached, on Tatooine his mother was an example to follow and an upstanding woman making the best of what they could given the circunstances.

On the Jedi temple Anakin was teased over his past as a slave and expected to just forget about it, on Tatooine it was a harsh reality but the company of the other slaves gave him estrenght to overcome those difficulties and inspired him to try to free all of them.

This is why I personally think that of all of Anakin´s prohecies,the one who was meant to bring the better end for him personally and for the galaxy, was the first one, because it would have lead to him growing up in an envoirment in which he didn´t need to feel afraid of losing loved ones, he would have naturally grow to know it could and did happen but it would not have been a source of trauma for him and sooner or later, his initiatives to free his fellow slaves, would have clashed with Palpatine´s Empire but this time he would not have the emotional bond to him that keep him from truly doing all he could to stop him.

Palpatine´s empire would have raised up anyway, sometimes fans blame Anakin for it and the jedi massacre but they forget the fact the Republic end was brought by the Senate own inner corruption helped along by Palpatine and that without Anakin there to serve as a distraction to the Emperor, he would just have made Dooku his second in command, never would have made himself vulnerable to the Jedi Council trying to turn Anakin and just would have sent the Clone Army to the Jedi Temple once it was secure to do so with the support of the Senate.

The Empire would have raised up anyway but I believe it would have lasted less time, especially with an Anakin focused on stopping it, a lot of Jedi left alive after the fall of the Temple and many people who followed the separatists and part of the clone army feeling betrayed for being used as pawns in the clone wars and being changed from one bad goverment to another.

So Anakin´s complying with his first prophecy would have brought a Kairos time to the galaxy to end the empire sooner while what happened in the actual saga was Kronos. That´s my take.

[lunarsilkscreen]

Anakin's fall to the Dark Side

Anakin was born Sith. This is a term bestowed upon him by Qui-gon when he noted that he's "Probably the chosen one" and the reason why the Jedi Council wouldn't train him.

But still; that doesn't quite explain his fall to the "Dark Side" does it?

That statement holds a lot of different pieces of Star wars lore, about the "Sith'ari". A lot I don't want to extrapolate here because many content creators already have.

Because of this the term "Sith" doesn't have any dark side connotations. And the only one who identified himself as "Sith" was the Emperor Palpatine.

So there's a lot of unexplored territory as to what "Sith" actually means during this era of the Star Wars franchise. And while KotoR designated the name for a race of evil beings... I'm not quite certain that's the whole truth either.

What happened to Anakin; Force Balancer?

Seemingly trapped in a lifetime of slavery he momentarily gained his freedom to be trained as Jedi; only to lose it again when his mother died.

At this point in time; Anakin was a Jedi Warrior. Not a good person. The Jedi were not good. They fought and they killed people. By the time he took his wrath out on the people he thought murdered his mother; he had already [lifed] whole peoples under Jedi order.

Most of the media portrays this as just him fighting robots. But to him; C-3P0 was more than a robot..a person. And also; he was tasked as a General in war against *real people*. The things they don't tell you in Jedi history. To make them seem more benevolent.

This was already second nature to Anakin thanks to the Jedi teachings and the Orders given to him by "The Light Side of the Force".

There's no telling if the People of Tatooine actually tortured his mother, or if they were directed to by another source or if they actually tried to nurse his mother back to health *but* their medicine was poison to human.

I don't think Anakin even knows. The Force Guided his actions because he wasn't fully conscious of them. That's what Blind Rage can do, and why the Jedi teach you to be cognizant of them.

Even Obi-Wan was not immune to this, but the only two people alive that he might've cared about were Qui-gon and Anakin. He didn't have to face the same pain Anakin had.

This is the point Anakin was chained to the dark side. He was being controlled by Palpatine through the dark side of the force.

It's likely he either couldn't articulate the problem to the council; or that they wouldn't listen. The Sith don't exist anymore afterall, and *those* teachings were buried by Councils past.

We do know that the Jedi stood in the way of Profit margins, but we don't know what impact that had on the people they were blocking.

We may never know.

What we do know is that Anakin was molded by the people who sworn to serve the light and peace into a perfect weapon. And then disallowed to voice any dissent.

This opened him up to the dark side, to be wielded by somebody who would use him for evil.

Anakin isn't dumb, Obi-Wan had the high ground.

"You don't know what's going on with me" he pleaded and cried. And launched himself at Obi. Not in hopes of victory, or this hardheaded arrogance that he was painted as.

He was [ritual of lifing] he wished for obi to save him by releasing him from his bondage. The only way he could think to do it.

It wasn't Anakin that defeated Dooku, he did not want to pull the trigger at the end. He hesitated. But in the back of his mind Sidious words echoed "Do it."

Unfortunately, it was Obi's own reluctance that sealed Darth Vaders fate. Anakin was sealed off from the force, and thus the only connection he had to life; Padmè Amadala.

And the Emperor's victory was complete. The pawn became his Queen.

[average-transdalorian]

Oh boy oh boy am I having Thoughts about how I would’ve written The Book of Boba Fett if given the chance! It’s probably gonna get pretty long, so I’ll stick it under the cut

Episode 1. This one would have a LOT of Jango screen time. In fact, it would almost ENTIRELY be Jango screen time (one of my biggest complaints about tbobf is how it utterly failed to address how Jango’s parenting affected Boba at all). It would start out with the tail end of what’s clearly a history lesson about the Echani, a warrior people who may not have made the jump from Legends to Canon, I can’t remember. Anyways, young Boba (VERY young, we’re talking like. 4-6 years old so he has plenty of time before Geonosis) would ask for another lesson, and Jango would say “alright, let’s do… the Sand People of Tatooine.” From then on, most of the episode would be about a bounty Jango and his Grunts took on before Korda VI, where they had to work together with some of the Sand People. Jango’s narration would occasionally interject with facts about the Sand People, and at some point in the episode, there’d be a line about how “Jas’buir says that battlesign” (I’d have it be a full language in its own right, but I’m not sure where to put that detail) “is so similar to their own sign because a Sand Person verd invented it after joining [whichever Mandalorian group was the big one whenever they joined].” This line would have a lot of worldbuilding baked into it; Jaster existed, was a history nerd, and did fully adopt Jango. Mando’a Battlesign exists, and is distinctly similar to Sand People sign language. The second to last scene of the episode would be back on Kamino, with Boba asking if he could learn battlesign, and Jango saying he’d get right on putting together a module for that. The episode would end with the Jawas pulling Boba out of the Sarlacc, taking his armor, then being scared away by someone offscreen. The last shot would be a gaderffii stabbing down between the camera and Boba’s unconscious form.

Episode 2. This one would also be a good bit of Jango content, but with more Boba interspersed in. It would be short stories, Jango telling Boba of some thrilling fights and hunts he went on (with his Grunts, with Jaster, alone, however works best), immediately contrasted with Boba and the Sand People facing a similar fight, and showcasing the similarities and differences between Jango and the Sand People. The second to last story would be Jango’s escape from Gardulla (as seen in Star Wars: Bounty Hunter), and then Boba and the Sand People facing a Hutt who had decided to come and claim Tatooine for their own, now that both Jabba and Gardulla have been gone for a bit. Obviously, Boba would trick him into being eaten by a Krayt dragon. I get that this all is probably a bit heavy-handed, but swagever. The last story would be Jango’s verd’goten, with full cultural context. The episode ends with Boba finding Fennec (who’s a bit dying), saying he needs to get her to help, and being told that he has to pass the Trial (I’d try and make up a word, but it would pretty obviously draw parallels to a verd’goten) before he can leave. That’s what we end the episode on

Episode 3. Drug-and-Force-magic-Trial-trip! The first big part would be Boba confronting Jango, but it would clearly be his perception of Jango. Jango would be altogether bigger and faster than he was in real life (because Boba never got the chance to know him as one adult to another), but his neck would be lit by a torc of purple (because trauma). They throw down (naturally), and at first, Jango is winning handily. However, Boba starts noticing that Jango is making some of the same mistakes he made in the stories from the last two episodes (mistakes which were covered for or glossed over then, but in full relief here), and he takes advantage of those until he manages to grab a stick out of seemingly thin air, and whack Jango real good. Jango, defeated, smiles at Boba, and tells him “I’m proud of you, ner ad. May the Ka’ra watch over your hunts.” Boba turns around and finds a Being (a deity? A specific Sand Person? A conglomerate of his mentors, past and present? Idk man, whichever is most Thematically Satisfying), who walks him through making his stick into a gaderffii. Boba wakes up exactly where he started the Trial, with only “a quarter-hour of sunlight” having passed. He takes his gaderffii, a cycler rifle, a bantha, and Fennec (who is bandaged and stable, but won’t survive without significant medical intervention), and rides off towards Mos Espa, with the last shot lingering on the sign for the place where the Mods do their cybernetics

Episode 4. Boba needs money in order to pay the mods to save Fennec. He could be Jango Fett’s son, and take a bounty job real quick. OR he could be his own man, stepping out from his father’s shadow, and fill that power void on Tatooine that he conveniently kept empty two episodes ago. This is a “Boba Fett kicks ass even without his armor” episode, and BOY does he do that! With Fennec fixed up (and having sworn a life-debt to him), he negotiates a treaty between the settlers and the Sand People, and then takes off with Fennec to grab his armor

Honestly, this is where my initial ideas run out. If there was one more episode, I’d have there be a short mid-season hiatus, then the latter 4 episodes would follow a formula of Jango Story Re: Governance, Boba Faces Similar Problem, Sand People Faced Similar Problem And Did X, Boba Does Y, Which Is A Cross Between X And What Jango Did. But, that doesn’t really work, so I guess I’ll just put the general subject matter I want each episode to explore

Episode 5. What does it mean to be a Mandalorian? Does Boba want to be a Mandalorian?

Episode 6. More Hutts trying to take control of Tatooine, this time using the Tatooine contingent of the Pyke syndicate. Boba would arrange for the Sand People to take care of what the baddies set up in the desert, then raise a militia to take care of defending the cities (it would be less of a battle than the big one in ACTUAL tbobf; Tatooine folk are Free now, and they will not return to chains in life, but it would be planet-wide, because Boba is ruler of Tatooine, not just Mos Espa)

Episode 7. Boba Fett introduces himself to the New Republic as the People’s Leader of Tatooine. Most of this episode would probably be planning for that, and calling in favors

So uh. Yeah. That’s what that is. I feel like tbobf spent too much time in Boba Fett, Daimyo, and not enough time on Boba Fett, son of Jango Fett

[tiredassmage]

This isn't really a question, just something to give you an excuse to talk about Leo and Heleda. I miss them.

Literally, anything you want.

klfnadlsk;f I guess I could've used this last night, but I'll finally use it as a jumping-off point. I've had this one sitting for a while because aforementioned business with life and the other interests taking over most of the free brain territory, but since the man, the myth, the goblin is back, let's go!

Heleda's a bit of a quicker one, unfortunately, because she hasn't quite stuck. Which is kind of an ironic theme for me personally; Sith Warrior is still one of my favorite of the class stories, but I think Savosta's the only Warrior I've made that's really stuck with me, and even him I don't talk nearly enough about, though he's also been a bit more on my mind intermittently lately.

I think some of the concepts I intended to put in her were cool. She was my second intention to create more of a "beast master" in the Warrior's role, possibly partially because I do like how it'd theoretically fit with the Tatooine arc in the Warrior's story, and it'd create interesting parallels for someone (me) who likes the hound on a leash motifs you can go with given the Warrior's later role as the Emperor's Wrath.

Since I know this'll be a ramble, I'll put a cut here just to get that out of the way.

So, I don't remember if I ever brought it the blog, but one of Heleda's backstory points was a younger brother that didn't end up being Force-sensitive, but did end up serving in the Reclamation Service, and in that way sought to serve the Sith and still bring honor to his family. Heleda was quite proud of him for this and I imagined they were still fairly close. Heleda always intended to keep a respectfully distant enough, but still protective eye on him. One of her unspoken private goals of rising to what station she may was to be able to guard her brother and make sure he and others like him still had a place in Imperial society.

She's also of the small class of characters I'm slightly mad at (lighthearted and kinda affectionate) for being very cool to me conceptually, but not occupying a lot of my brain, but also having some of the coolest lightsaber assignments out of my characters.

I still haven't really reused this particular saber or color crystal for anyone else because it's still 'Heleda's' trademark in my mind. A neutral color, a gray-toned crystal that was meant to represent her valuing of honor - honoring the pacts made, the services rendered, the power inherent in nature, in the Force, and in each of them - over a dogmatic loyalty to a code. Heleda's probably not someone who would ever leave the Sith for the Jedi, nor would she probably consider leaving for some order in between - short of something born out of necessity like the Eternal Alliance of the KOTXX era, but her and her brother's studies of history and their family's interest in the cultures of the galaxy developed a sense in her that bootcrushing domination was not absolute power in the way many Sith tended to present it.

That all never meant Heleda was any less willing to settle matters with her martial skills, but she needed a better reason to cut a good officer down than 'I am annoyed.' In the long-run, Baras's "ideal" apprentice was probably someone that was somewhere between brute enforcer and cunning enough to be semi-mindful of tactics, but, ideally, wouldn't have been someone that gets ahead of him at his game as the Warrior might. In Heleda's particular case, I don't think she'd anticipate the exact way Baras eventually betrays her and tries to eliminate her, but hearing fairly early on that Baras was likely to only use her as far as she was useful to him was not heretical or unforeseeable - nor did she particularly plan to overtake him in that exact moment. For now, she has her duty and, Force-willing, she'd be able to serve the Empire in the way it needed, when that time would come. But overworrying about it in paranoia would not be productive to her, either. I think of her as a pragmatist.

So, that all said... I have a... fair idea of her in my head, but there's... something kinda missing from the formula that I haven't quite put my finger on. I haven't found quite something to hook me into her motivations and drive me up a wall for them. Further exploration could probably do it, could probably more clearly define her 'why' in a way that'd make it more enjoyable for me, but for now I don't know if I have particular plans to return to her and dig any further with it because I don't think I ever figured out where I wanted her to fit story-wise. She's also... probably generally suffering from my seeming preference for my tech class characters, lol. I think the repeated tracks in how Jedi and Sith characters tend to run sort of wears me out of them a little faster - ground that's already well-paved and well-traveled and all that, which might sound ironic because Star Wars is maybe about the laser sword people for... maybe most Star Wars fans, but... I digress, I think. xD

So! Anyway! Leo! Speaking of my tech classes, lol! Leo, Leo, Leo... I do love Leo... Now, I know there's some common giggles for the smuggler's methodology being kinda fucking around and finding out without finding a single goddamn thing out, but I think... I do really enjoy Leo because he's not... exactly in all of the smuggling business by choice. Leo is both... terribly devoid of confidence in his life, and the kind of character that tends to at least act like things are... alright, at least. He's not at all a plans man. He's not good at plans. Sometimes he'd feel as if he's barely got the week figured out, let alone five or ten years out from now.

And I think maybe especially with given how this year has panned out so far for me, there's maybe something a little comforting in that as well. Like I do love to say he's my disaster, don't get me wrong. It's a lot of his charm to me that I can't emphasize enough that he's... wildly imperfect. And he struggles a lot.

But Leo's like 27 at the beginning of the class stories, if I remember correctly, and life hasn't worked out... really at all how he may have ever planned - not that he was ever a plans man to begin with, again. And... there's something comforting in the potential narrative that it still works out for him in the end, anyway. Because I'm... changing a lot right now, to be brief, lol. I'm looking at changing my entire focus path in life and finally facing the prospect of moving away, of eventually moving out of a job and a job field I've been at for almost five years. Not to be too deep on main, but that can be pretty terrifying sometimes.

And I'm not sure Leo even knows how afraid he is. Of... a lot of things, frankly. In the same briefly aforementioned from an answer or two ago conversation with a friend on Discord, I poked a little at how Leo's... actually kind of afraid of how he got into smuggling in the first place. It wasn't a good deal for him. He fucked around and found out, in the simplest terms. Leo's likely piloting smuggling operations now because he owes the Black Sun. Big. For not knowing how to keep his mouth shut, essentially, on Coruscant. When Leo was first trying to find his feet after Dash helped him defect after Begeren, he picked up sort of whatever odd jobs he could once he sort of found his feet again just so he had any kind of income that might justify him living in Dash's apartment. And that... sorta kinda accidentally-but-not led Leo into picking a few fights sometimes with thugs and gangs in the Lower Levels because Leo, at least, knew which end of a blaster was the barrel a plasma bolt came out of after surviving a couple years of service in the Imperial Army. And the kind of people he tended to be doing odd jobs for were people who didn't have a lot - a lot like himself. People who didn't always know where their next credits were going to come from. People that got caught in the crossfire of a rock and a hard place between a Republic that was maybe a bit too busy to solve their problems without a lot of red tape, and criminal groups like the Black Sun and the Justicars that robbed what little they had left and would call it "security."

The problem is that Leo proved pretty good at getting into shit he didn't belong in and getting into places he didn't belong in - and... arguably, that saved his life. Because rather than kill him for the claimed "losses" and "defamation," he was "offered" the job of smuggling for them. Arm twisted behind his back, really, lest he either get himself killed, or have to fess up to Dash he'd gotten himself in bigger trouble than he could handle himself, or both, or worse. The other problem for Leo is that Dash was rightfully getting called a hero for what happened on Begeren. Dash's got his whole life ahead of him. Leo, on the other hand, has always been particularly skilled at shooting fairly decent chances in both toes like a bad line dance in a backwater cantina.

Which is why Leo is still historically horrendously bad at asking for help. And he'll try every which way to deflect the fact that he probably should - except he's... kinda shit at actually deflecting because it's not that he's exactly a liar, or a decent one, at any rate - not to someone that actually matters to him. Not someone like Dash, whose only ever been good to him, even when Leo can't see the reason why he'd do such a damned thing.

Leo's afraid of his past catching up to him, of the kind of... boogeymanification he's made of word getting back to his father that he's still alive and that he fled to Republic space instead of dying as would've been convenient for a family disgrace like himself. And I'm not sure he's ever been really straight enough with anyone about just how deep he is in how he started smuggling to realize he's scared of that getting him killed sometimes, too.

He's kinda... still gotta figure out that he can get himself out of that kind of cycle. That it is okay, ultimately - that he doesn't need to be so hard on himself. That he both needs to realize he is holding himself to the same standards that hurt him and that he loathes having been set for him by how he grew up, and that he doesn't owe anything to those standards either way. Part of that journey is letting himself love Dash and be true to that, to actually pursue that. But I think he's got a lot left to unpack yet and I think... probably by the end of it, he'll feel he owes an apology to people like Dash and Liv for keeping 'em waiting so long on him to figure it out, and how atrociously stubborn he could be about not getting helped along the way there.

But he's capable of getting there. There's a happy ending in there somewhere for him. And I'm glad to be able to see the journey there.

[charlieirons]

A Long Time Ago in a Theatre Far, Far Away....

Like so many I am a big lover of Star Wars. Unlike so many, though, I'm an original 77er; having seen the film first run. In point of fact I've see all three movies first run.

Naturally I soaked up everything Star Wars as a boy. EVERYTHING. Which included From Star Wars to Jedi: The making of a Saga; included in the then 25th anniversary VHS box set. (Which, like many early interviews with Lucas, revealed that there was no actual plan for all the films, as later claimed.)

In this clip, narrated by a very young Mark Hamill, we get a glimpse into the making of the various creatures that inhabit the palace of Jabba the Hut; nefarious gangster of Tatooine; with a very interesting reveal about Jabba's development history...

One of the more fascinating things for me is the development Sy Snootles and The Rebo Band. I have always enjoyed their hit song, that appeared in Return of the Jedi "Lapti Nek".

The clip above also features one of the two music tracks I still don't own from the original series; Lapti Nek (English version) whose lyrics where penned by Joseph Williams, son of John Williams, and translated into Hutteese. It's available on the original soundtrack, as well as various out of print side projects, and - obviously - Mecco's huge disco hits album. But my favorite cover is by Rue Mevlana; who adds a much appreciated modern 21st century flair to the whole of the thing.

[comic-bastards]

The Place That's Farthest From: 'Andor' and the Star Wars Legacy

By Justin Wood

The key component to longevity and the near-universal appeal of the Star Wars franchise has always been its simplicity. A student of international artistic influence, George Lucas distilled richer, headier works down to a pastiche of oblique references and mythological constants and a critical focusing by undersung contributors Brian De Palma and Marcia Lucas resulted in a tight, perfectly-accessible adventure film that seismically redefined how popular media was packaged and presented. Beyond simply being a defining achievement in special effects, the polished gleam of binary morality at its core stood in as a radical contrast to the storytelling environment of the 1970s with its grim post-Vietnam ambiguity and despair. 'Star Wars' was the Happy Meal waiting to happen. Its hero plucky and apolitical, motivated by primal narrative impulses of thirst for adventure and romance beyond his station, his opposition unsubtlely dressed by John Mollo by way of Hugo Boss in Gestapo uniforms, pop narrative shorthand later reused by Lucas and Spielberg in their Indiana Jones films. Only a few decades removed from the very real Third Reich, Lucas needed little world building to immediately communicate the partisan lines the audience would be asked to sympathize on. Some distant conception of a Galactic Senate is mentioned to be finally dismantled. An instantaneous Holocaust is bloodlessly committed. We don't need to see the state of the galaxy beyond the barren, untamed Tatooine, our imagination and familiarity with very recent history can fill in atrocities for us, allowing guilt free catharsis at the film's climactic Boom. 'Empire', despite its reputation for its startling dramatic left turn into a twistier universe with its branching storylines and iconic twist, never challenged that moral simplicity. Dramatic heft was carried by a greater sense of consequence and the peak of the trilogy's character writing resulting in heroes we were more concerned with but complexity never surpassed the cheeky scoundrel hearts of Han and Lando. Bewilderingly, Lucas's original conceived ending for 'Return of the Jedi' was to take a wild turn with Luke succumbing to the Dark Side, discarded for the most telling moment of binary morality in the trilogy: the redemption of space Nazi enforcer Darth Vader, unwriting a supposed lifetime of evil acts through the breakthrough of an ambiguously meager kernel of 'goodness' that emerges in an act of self-sacrifice.

Light side. Dark side. Even with Lucas's wildly accomplished contradiction of somehow muddling the nature of the Jedi by defining its Order, the binary was retained, undercutting any potential moment of reflection on the kinds of story Star Wars could be in depicting the fall of Anakin to Darth Vader. Later, during the cataclysmically divisive 'Last Jedi', Riann Johnson and the executive class at Disney were accused of an inanely comprehensive battery of motivations for the the dissatisfaction of audience members but couched in all of them was a sense that whatever ambitions the director had they had come at the cost of disrespecting the capital-L Legacy. Simplicity had seemingly been stripped away from a functionally basic world of heroes and villains. After years of imagining a Goku-like Force God Luke Skywalker crushing Star Destroyers like Coke cans, the historically subversion happy Johnson gave them a spiritually broken hut-dweller, drinking unpasturized giraffe milk and lecturing against the very binary heroism that had made the series successful. It excited some, disappointed others, and impossibly enraged the most vocal remaining. However, Johnson's failure was always that for all of his cheeky ruffling of a narrative construct he was foolishly expected to uncontroversially maintain, it ultimately amounted to no genuine confrontation of the status quo. 'The Last Jedi' teased ambiguity, stepping up to the edge of challenging the nature of Star Wars stories and then baldly whipping back to the Millennium Falcon popping TIE Fighters, a restored heroic Luke, and a happy ending that managed to say nothing and viscerally satisfy few. For all of the accusations of Johnson not understanding the brand, he in reality did the most to suggest that at a certain scale Star Wars was never going to fundamentally grow beyond its mythological simplicity. His failures arguably had more to do with an overabundance of respect limiting the scope of the film's imagination, not a deficit of it.

Disney+'s 'Andor' doesn't suffer from this problem. Whether intentional or not, by intending a more grounded and adult approach to telling a war story in the Star Wars universe, creator Tony Gilroy and crew have managed to produce a show that serves as a refutation of the franchise's approach to storytelling and perhaps even the health of the brand's audience's preferred taste in narrative. Consequently, it effortlessly ranks as one of the most interesting things to be made with the Star Wars brand.

On its most basic quality, 'Andor' succeeds by not requiring any familiarity with the film it serves as a direct prequel to, Garth Edwards 'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story', which featured reshoots by 'Andor's Gilroy. 'Rogue One' also dabbled in challenging the simplicity of the Star Wars universe's binary, with Rebel Intelligence Officer Cassian Andor desperately murdering a rebel contact to avoid exposure in the film's opening act, communicating that the film's grittier approach to the Rebel Alliance would be more in line with modern approaches to war espionage fiction and its grimly pragmatic operatives. In 'Andor' we meet the man behind the trigger in far more explicit detail but part of the reason why the show stands so confidently apart from the film it is leading up to is that Andor himself is only a wing of a larger story. As small events mutate into having larger consequences he unwittingly begins serving as a MacGuffin for distant powers with ambitions that only superficially are centered on him. While clearly part of the show fulfills the function of telling how a tribal scavenger from a forgotten moon became one of the unsung heroes behind the destruction of the Death Star, the show's real focus comes from depicting, for the first time on screen in detail, the texture of the galaxy in the claws of the Galactic Empire.

Indignant criticism has been mounted against 'Andor's pacing, accusing it of being intentionally boring to give it an artificial aura of maturity or padding for length. What is being felt is instead a deceleration of an adventure franchise to the speed of human life in a galaxy of dazzling intergalactic thrills. Characters eat breakfast cereal. They have casual late night hookups. They check in on elderly neighbors. They fret about their dysfunctional relationship with their daughters. In between very sparsely included set pieces of violent action the series keeps pinning moments of mundane existance to the spine of the show's central espionage plot. While frustrating for an audience raised on increasingly high bars for spectacle, these little moments fuel the heart of the show's tone. It gives character's with very little to begin with the last vestiges of agency they have to lose.

We meet Cassian Andor as he solicits a brothel trying to locate his long lost younger sister who he was separated from as a child. A simple and familiar cliché motivation for an antihero, Cassian is immediately knocked astray from this character goal by a corrupt back-alley police shakedown gone wrong that results in his priorities being reorganized to immediate survival. The vortex of escalating consequences he finds himself sucked into exposes him to a spectrum of ways in which the Empire's closing grip affecting the galaxy. Classically, the stories of Andor's adventures would all be morally instructive to the politically agnostic Cassian. The expectation is you'd see the puzzle pieces click in, that by witnessing the misery, despair, sacrifice, and the Empire's atrocities you'd see Cassian's moral rebirth, generating altruism and the construction of a heroic constitution in place of self-interest. You keep waiting for the thudding platitudes of hope and fighting for something greater and doing the right thing for its own merit but when they come they are only delivered by characters with ulterior motives or by characters distantly removed from the forces that actually influence their often bleak fates. Diego Luna, leading a comprehensively excellent cast, plays Andor as a survivor who has never known anything but the bootheel of malicious authority. His seething anger never fully overwhelms his cat-like instinct for self-preservation. 'Andor' slows down and shows us human life in a way Star Wars never felt obligated to before because it understands that the only way many people, especially those who already live on a knife's edge when it comes to resources and freedoms, can be pushed to confront evil is to truly be suffocated by it.  In a brilliant turn midway through the season, Cassian participates in a heist of Imperial funds that gives him his escape from the boot-heel. Money, transport, luxury as long as it keeps his head low enough to avoid detection. His reward is a lengthy prison sentence but his arrest and conviction have nothing to do with his undiscovered participation in the heist; instead he is swept up as an innocent bystander by an viciously apathetic government for being on the wrong beach in the wrong moment. Not even money can save him from just not being Imperial enough.

Despite its grim and serious fantasy depiction of very real world expressions of authoritarianism, it is hard to argue that 'Andor' necessarily is a uniquely qualified piece of fiction to meaningfully speak on the perpetually relevant issue of real world fascism. Police oppression, prison labor, all represented with a with a seeming respect to its non-fictional victims. Regrettably however, the lingering Disney brand looming over the show's role, at the end of the day, as a product, will always hobble most of the ambition of the writers from being able to say what other qualified and personally invested artists haven't already on the subject. Despite this, with the many and thankfully not inappropriately included allusions to our global haunting by populist no-authoritarianism, 'Andor' does draw a stark and damning comparison to the brand that has come before it.

The realization comes when thinking about what story 'Andor' is leading up to. 'Andor's characters, across the class spectrums, are called on to make compromises, often awful personally devastating ones. The Rebels on the show do so out of the bleak knowledge that in one way or another they are seeing the galaxy become inhospitable to however they don't align with the monocultural Empire. Either through allusions to the present social climate or implicated through actions on-screen, characters are driven to sacrifice comfort, love, and humanity because the non-negotiable aspects of their birth, race, sex, and orientation will eventually doom them under the resource hungry and indifferent gears serving the Emperor. The struggle depicted here comes in stark contrast to the hero who is the eventual beneficiary of their grief: Luke Skywalker, a bored farmboy who dreamed of becoming an Imperial pilot before his magic genetics fated him to save the galaxy with all of the admiration and literal trophies involved. Contrasted with the cost incurred by rebelling inflicted on the characters of 'Andor', Luke's story reads like the propaganda film the New Republic would have made after winning the war to spin the way their victory was remembered.

The criticism here isn't necessarily that there is anything wrong with escapist entertainment or stories with non-comprehensive approaches to complex real world ethics. Entertainment and art is largely experienced as escapism and has a real role to play comforting, thrilling, and inspiring us in whatever way is most successful and demanding an instructive or social function from art as a justification for its existence is far more in line with the views of history's tyrants. Where the sting of 'Andor's portrayal stems from, intentionally or not, is that it is telling its story in a world that has always benefited from facism as trope without that portrayal taking any responsibility for the history it references. The work of Leni Riefenstahl  and Adolf Hitler is used as props because of the inherit potency imagery related to the Nazis is, a result of their being one of the first autocratic beneficiaries of identity sculpting via modern media technologies making their personal branding uniquely iconic.  For all of the language borrowed from the Nazis to depict evil, Star Wars was never going to make itself responsible for engaging with why the Nazis were a shorthand for evil. The victims of the Empire, unless immediately relevantly fridged for a specific character, are overwhelmingly vague. Star Wars couldn't be bothered to have anything to say about the evil it exploited the identity of. Star Wars, once again a fantasy toyetic pop brand, also didn't really have the right platform to stage any sort of ambitious criticism of real human evil either, but the present moment only exacerbates what was probably always the case: that exploiting the echos of dark history for escapist entertainment dilutes its meaning in exchange for comfort and profit.

As we creep into the 2020s, autocracies are presenting themselves again to the people of the world as a too quickly dismissed alternative to the unwieldy, hypocritical democracies that served as the scales of power during the post-World War II era. Appeals to traditionalism, renewing the sapped spirit of masculine vigor, sweeping away the complicated trappings of progressive identity politics and negotiation in favor of a binary world right at home in Lucas's original mythos. Disney, like most corporations operating at a scale akin to small nations, is inextricably complicit both in donations to candidates and causes aligned against oppressed communities as it is their cooperation with how their product is distributed abroad, clipped and censored to the tastes of despots. Its understandable that the anxiety surrounding this would encourage the appeal of escapist pop fiction, but when it dresses up in the same armbands as worn by the men at your door without asking any questions of itself, it dismisses its responsibility to the cruelty those allusions draw potency from in a way it has less of a right to. And when, bewilderingly, a show like 'Andor', that eschews self-referential brand building in favor of telling a more adult story in its comic book landscape does so, it can only reflect back at its foundation just how poorly and insubstantially the simplistic language of its world has served us. What began with George Lucas and crew crafting a film with bluntly simple allusions for the sake of storytelling convenience had his choices drawn out over multiple decades as a financially valuable franchise. Star Wars didn't have to point back to the source of its evil, it could just reference itself, turning the word 'stormtrooper' into a child's backpack, thinning the already fragile thread linking the history it exploits to its profitable use of it. With 'Andor', Tony Gilroy and team has crafted a story that put the Nazi back in the Imperial uniform and while it certainly can't be championed as brave it at the very least takes some responsibility for the story it tells in our present moment in history.

[local-neko-girl]

Chapter Three:

She awakes on the Phantom, horrible headache and in a weird dizzy daze. She remembers everything then sits up fast, surprising Ezra.

“Hey! You’re awake! Are you alright?” Ezra asks, then gasps as he sees her eyes are still red.

“Where’s Maul? What happened?” she felt a little panicked.

“He got away from us. Ashoka is also… gone. She was fighting Vader last I saw before everything exploded.”

She sighed, a deep despair filling her chest.

“Are you sure you’re okay? You’re eyes, their red?” he was confused.

She leaned back into the bed and closed her eyes.

“I think the temple did something to me… I don’t.. I feel weird.”

She sighed.

“So I take it Kanan nor Ashoka told you about me?”

“No, just you used to be a Jedi too.”

“I’m more than that. I’m… have you ever heard of a Sanguine?”

“No never, who are they?”

“I am them. I’m the last of my kind. A Sanguine is a naturally born force wielder, but our kind were born with a curse. We need to drink blood to survive. To live.”

Ezra took a step back, worried.

She chuckled,” You don’t have to worry, I know how to control it.”

“So, you’re a vampire then?”

She laughed,” I guess that’s what they started to call us and made us a myth.”

“So wait, how old are you?”

“Very old. My father was a great Sith Lord actually. And my mother, surprisingly, was a very powerful Jedi Master. I was frozen for a long time too.”

“A Sith Lord? And a Master Jedi?”

“I know, they seem like quite an unlikely pair right? She loved him. And he loved her honestly.”

She looked at him again, and he was a little shocked still, so she knew her eyes were still red.

“Somehow I reacted to the temple and it’s messed with me. I’m not sure how though.”

There was a moment of silence.

“So… how do you know Maul?” he asked.

There was a stabbing feeling in her heart at the mention of his name, an aching pain of sorrow.

“He.. he used to be my Master actually.”

“Wait, he did? What happened?”

“So, long back, I was on the dark side. It was only natural to me given my nature. And he ended up taking me on as an apprentice. Well, he had to leave for a mission to Tatooine, and when I was off on my own, I was captured and held prisoner for many years by a cruel and sadistic man. My sister, she was a Jedi, managed to contact me after years, and when I escaped, I ended up back on the dark side and was trained by Count Dooku then. My sister didn’t want me there, but it was honestly safer being among droids than clones I could drink from and kill. So I joined the Jedi, and my master was Plo Koon. He was an amazing man, and a great teacher. He died in Order 66 sadly, same as my sister.”

She paused, trying not to cry at retelling the story.

“Maul and I got very close during my training. And when I heard that Obi Wan had killed him, it tore me up inside. But inside I knew he wasn’t dead. And then I saw him again during the clone wars on Florum. It was… a dark time for him. That was the last I saw him…”

“The way you talk about him, sounds like you had feelings for him.”

Kanan walks into her quarters.

“Hey Ezra, would you mind giving me and Arvanna a moment to talk?”

“Yeah sure,” he said. “Feel better.”

He nodded and left. She looked up at Kanan, confused as to why he was wearing a mask, noticing his eyes.

“Oh no, what happened to your eyes?” she asked.

“Maul. He blinded me in a fight.”

She was silent and learning that made her heart ache even more. How could he? Why?

“What happened after I passed out?”

“Ezra did his best to carry you back to the ship and help me walk as well. He said you had weird markings around your eyes, and were mumbling the whole time.”

“I think the temple did something to me.”

“I told you to stay in the ship, there was a good reason I told you that.”

“I-I know. But when Ashoka said his name I just… I just had to see him.”

Her voice got softer toward the end.

“I know a little about your history with him, but it was extremely dangerous for you to come out.”

“I know. I’m sorry Kanan.”

“I’m sorry too, I wish I could have been able to help you.”

“You have no reason to be sorry. Things happen.”

There was a moment of silence amongst the two.

“So my eyes are still red,” she said. “And I feel… weird. I don’t know what happened and I don’t remember anything when I was unconscious. Ezra said I had markings around my eyes, and was mumbling something.”

“I see. Well we’re headed back to Chopper Base.”

Kanan could feel how anxious she became after that.

“What’s wrong?”

“Is there somewhere you could drop me off? I… there’s someone there I don’t want to see right now…”

“You mean Rex?” he asked.

Another stabbing pain in her heart hit and her breath caught again. Kanan could sense that.

“We don’t have any other stops and have to get the Phantom back to base. Would you please come with us? I can tell Hera to just escort you to a room.”

“No. I can’t. Please drop me off someplace,” she asked again, voice softer.

He sighs, knowing he can’t force her to join them.

“How about we get you a ship and you can leave from there?” he asked. “There’s really no where I can drop you off, and I have to report back.”

“That’s fine then. I can pay for the ship too.”

“I’m sure that will help us too.”

“When will we get there?”

“Actually, we’re a few minutes away. I have a cloak you can wear if you don’t want to make contact and just want to go straight to a ship.”

“Okay, yeah that would be best.”

He nods and they both leave her room and go to his for him to give her the cloak. She takes it and puts it on immediately. The ship sounds like it has docked and she takes a deep breath.

“It’s showtime,” she sighs.

Ezra, Kanan, and Arvanna all exit the Phantom, and everyone is waiting for them right outside. Arvanna keeps her head down as everyone mourns the loss of Ashoka. She saw Rex come out, and did her best to stay back and away. Out of sight. They all walked inside and went to see Commander Jun Sato, to give him the news. After everything was dealt with, she just kept quiet and her head down, shrouding her face.

“Another Jedi friend?” Sato asked Kanan.

“Not exactly. Could we get her a ship? She has money to pay for it.”

Sato was a little confused, but everyone wondered who the Jedi was.

[burnwater13]

Three members of the tribe of Sand People who captured and trained Boba Fett (out of frame) in their ways, on Tatooine. Image from The Book of Boba Fett, Episode 2, The Tribes of Tatooine. Calendar by DataWorks.

Grogu was confused. Why did people call the Sand People, Tuskens? The fort they attacked was Fort Tusken. Not the people. And why call their language Tusken? Again, the Sand People didn’t call themselves Tusken, why would they all their language Tusken? It didn’t make sense. 

Of course calling them Sand People wasn’t great either. They lived on a planet that was mostly sand, but as far as he could understand, after speaking with Daimyo Fett and his dad, Din Djarin, they didn’t refer to themselves as Sand People any more than they called themselves Tuskens. 

Grogu understood how people wanted to call them something. You couldn’t just call them ‘Hey, you!’, or ‘Buddy’, although people often called Grogu those names. Most folks didn’t know the name of his species or where they were from or what they called their language. But they didn’t just make up a bunch of names for all that. So what was the difference? 

He went to the Daimyo and asked him. After all, Boba Fett had been welcomed into a tribe of Sand People after saving one of their children and defending them against spice runners. If anyone would know it would be him, right?

“Sorry little one. I didn’t spend that much time with them and I was an adult who was very focused on surviving. I know many of their customs now and some of their language, but I never learned their history, other than to say, that they are native to Tatooine. While I have not been on every planet of the galaxy, I can say, I’ve never met Sand People anywhere but here.”

Womp rats!

“Perhaps you should ask Fennec. She travelled even more widely than I have and may have insights that I lack, despite the time I spent with my tribe.”

Grogu considered that for a moment and decided to follow the Daimyo’s advice. He trotted out of the throne room and went to find Fennec. Given all the things she did to support palace operations, she could be almost anywhere. 

He tried her suite of rooms first. Nope. Then the kitchens. Nope. Then the garage. Nope. The detainment cells. Nope. Grogu was running out of places to go and energy to go there, when he decided to go down and talk to the rancor trainer. Maybe he’d seen the wily administrator? It was a long shot but Grogu was willing to give it chance because he just liked visiting the rancor and his trainer. 

When he reached the rancor’s enclosure neither Fennec, nor Ranky’s trainer were anywhere to be seen. Grogu sat down and grumbled. Technically he wasn’t supposed to go into the enclosure and just hang out with the rancor unless another person was present. So this was extra disappointing. 

“Young Jedi… what troubles you?”

Grogu looked around and didn’t notice anyone and then he looked up. Yup. It was one of the monk’s of B’omarr, being carried by one of the mechanical ‘spiders’. 

Grogu tried to explain his question to the monk. They had lived on Tatooine for a long time and communed with nature and the Force through a process he did not fully understand. Their way was not the way of the Jedi; he knew that much.

“Ahhh… They were here before us. They were here before many. It is /believed that the ocean’s of Tatooine were their home for millennia. But there was a disruption in the Force and the oceans slowly left Tatooine, causing these people to change as dramatically as their planet. Many did not survive the changes. Such is the way for all who take action but do not understand what their actions will lead to. They did the best they could. We find them to be a marvel and try not to affect them. When we arrived we gave them many gifts as they gave us the gift of the land, upon which our monastery still exists. That is why Jabba let us remain. If we had been pushed out there would be no agreement with the People and this dwelling would be gone. Does that satisfy?”

Grogu nodded his head. He still didn’t know what they called themselves, but that didn’t seem to matter as much now. He supposed he could always ask his dad to ask them the next time they met, whenever that was.

“They call call themselves ‘The People’ and call everyone else ‘The Visitors’. They have at times yearned for a time when there are no ‘Visitors’ but that has slowly changed. Now many of the People call the ‘Visitors’ the ‘Younglings’. Like children they are… excitable, confident, and impatient. Some, like your friend the Daimyo and your guardian, are given names to show that they have grown from younglings to something like your Jedi term padawan.”

Grogu smiled at that. He was glad that his dad and the Daimyo were honored like that, but then he had one more question.

“You. They call you ‘The Jedi’. Make of that what you will. I must go now.”

‘The Jedi’? Well, that made sense. He was a Jedi. How the Sand People knew that was just another question he wanted answered. But then, Jedi were taught that every question did not need to be answered at once and that many might never be answered at all. He could hear Master Yoda telling all the younglings, that their questions would be answered in due time, if the Force willed it to be so, or words to that affect. He just hoped the Force might want it to be so sooner rather than later. He hated being kept in suspense. It always messed with meal time.

[mandos-mind-trick]

Instinct - Part 9

Summary: Omegas were rare. Some even thought them extinct. So when Boba contacts Din saying he has a gift Din can’t refuse, the last thing he expects to find is an omega in need of an alpha. Din has to make the hard decision, but what else was he really doing anyways? But naturally, there’s more to this omega than meets the eye.

Pairing: Din Djarin x OC

Warnings: Some violence, PTSD, Boba being Boba. 

A/N: Wow, two in one week. I’m super inspired so maybe more?

< Previous | Next > | MASTERLIST | Reader Version

She grunts as she hits the ground once more. She’s covered in dirt and grass stains, her muscles aching with every impact. Training with Fennec on Tatooine had been hard, even with her pulling her punches. 

Din doesn’t hold back. 

“No one’s going to go easy on you just because you’re a woman.” He says, circling her as she pushes herself back to her feet. She’s tired and sore, the sun close to setting. They’d been at this all day. “If they want to hurt you, they will. That’s why you need to learn to defend yourself. Why you need to learn to tap into those omega instincts.” 

“I told you I don’t know how.” She says, pushing herself up to stand, brushing grass off her pants. 

“If you feel threatened, your omega will defend you.” He stills facing her, her back to the ship. 

“Well, maybe I just don’t feel threatened by you.” She huffs, getting tired of his constant warnings, his constant reminders that her omega should protect her. 

She can practically see the change in him with her words. His shoulders tense, squaring up, hands clenched into fists at his sides. He looks ready to spring at any moment. This must be what his quarries see when he’s hunting. A prime alpha ready to catch its prey. Her omega shifts inside her, telling her to turn tail and run. 

She makes it around the side of the ship, heading for the treeline when he reaches her. His arms slip around her, lifting her feet off the ground. She lets out a yelp, her back hitting the grass once more. 

He drops over her, caging her in with his arms. “Running’s good, but it only helps if you can get away.” 

She makes a face. “I told you, I don’t know how to do this.” 

He leans down, pressing his helmet against her forehead. “You need to know. What if I’m not there to protect you?” 

She gives him a grin. “Then you’ll just have to make sure you are.” 

She squeals as he wraps his arms around her, lifting her off the ground with ease. 

****

His fingers brush her side again, running over the blaster tucked under her shirt. There’s a vibroblade tucked into her boot, and another up her sleeve. He’s a bit apprehensive about bringing her along, but he knows he can’t keep her shut in the ship all the time. Plus, this should be an easy hunt. It’s a decently sized city with plenty of eyes. It’s not a place where things like this happen often, so he’s less worried about something happening to her. 

“Don’t engage unless you have to.” He says, eyes sweeping over the busy street. “He likely won’t be alone.” 

“I don’t even remember what this guy looks like.” Kai says, warily looking at every passing face. 

“Hopefully he doesn’t remember you.” Din says, making his way towards the cantina where his quarry is said to frequent. 

He stops in an alley facing the cantina doors, leaning against the wall. Kai leans next to him with a sigh. She’s a bit nervous. She’s never been on a hunt before, much less one that’s for someone that has a history with her. It’s exciting, but it’s also terrifying. 

“How long do you think?” She asks, looking up at Din. His gaze is turned towards the cantina. 

“Don’t know.” He answers. “He’s either inside already, or he’ll be arriving soon.” 

“And so we wait.” She says. It’s not much of a question. She knows going inside would be too much of a giveaway. The man would likely bolt as soon as he saw them. They had to be sneaky about this. The less of a scene they could cause, the better. 

She sighs again as she leans against the wall, fiddling with the hem of her shirt. It was going to be a long wait. If he was already inside, he’d likely be there for a while. Din is practically unmoving next to her, like a predator stalking prey. He could stand for hours doing nothing. She was not used to that. She feels antsy, like she needs to do something. 

Din tenses next to her, a subtle movement, but she picks it up. She stands up a little straighter, peeking around him. “There.” He says, nodding towards a group that’s entering the cantina. 

“That’s a lot of them.” She says, counting six total. “What do we do?” 

“Wait.” He says. “Give them time to settle in.” 

Kai lets out a sigh, leaning against the wall once more. “Is every hunt like this?” She asks. 

“No.” He says, still facing the cantina. “Not all of them are this easy to find, either.” 

Kai looks up, studying the blue sky. It’s nice to be outside, breathing fresh air. She takes in a deep breath, letting the exhale extend as she closes her eyes. 

“Everything okay?” Din asks, glancing over his shoulder at her. 

“Yeah.” She says, opening her eyes once more. “Just nice to be outside. I do miss Tatooine sometimes, but I don’t miss the heat.” 

“We could go back.” He says, facing the cantina once more. “Just say the word, and we’ll leave this and go back.” 

Kai stares at his back for a long time. Part of her wants to say it. Part of her wants to go back, be with Boba and Fennec where it’s safe. She knows, though, they can’t give up yet. These men did horrible things to her and she can’t be the only one. She won’t be the only one if they don’t stop them. 

Din tenses again, hand falling to his waist. Kai peeks around him again, five of the men that had entered the cantina with their target have exited, blasters in hand as they look around. 

“Someone must have tipped him off.” Din says, gripping her arm. “Get back to the Crest. Comm me when you get there.” 

Kai wants to argue, but she knows she’ll only be a liability in this fight. She can’t fight. She’s a decent shot, but that won’t do much good here. 

“Go.” Din almost commands, his alpha creeping into the edges of his voice. 

Kai has no choice but to turn, making her way down the alley. She keeps her pace quick, but she doesn’t run, not wanting to draw attention to herself. The last thing she needed to do was draw attention, causing more trouble than Din probably was. 

The sound of blaster fire has her pace stuttering a bit. Those still on the street look around, looking for the source. 

Things like this don’t happen here. 

Din had told her that when he’d said she could come with him. This was a decent place, where fights didn’t break out constantly on the street. Perfect cover for someone looking to hide something dark. 

Kai picks up her pace even more, trying to calm her breathing. The quicker she could get back to the ship, the sooner she could relax. She could comm Din, hear his voice, make sure he’s alright. She trusts him and his abilities, but five against one...those weren’t exactly favorable odds. He’d been in worse situations, though. He’d told her a bit about his adventures before he’d met her. He’d made it with worse odds. 

Maybe they should go back to Tatooine. Maybe this was a bad idea. 

Kai turns a street corner, picking up her pace even more as she sees the spaceport in front of her. She’s given up calming her breathing, feeling something tickling in the back of her mind. There had only been five that came out of the cantina. Where was the other one? 

Kai stops dead in her tracks as she approaches the Crest. Leaning against the side of the ship is a light-haired man. He’s leaning casually, like he was waiting for someone to arrive. Her stomach clenches, her breath catching in her throat. Her hand slowly lifts, reaching for her blaster. 

“This isn’t what I was expecting.” He says, tilting his head at her. “When the bartender tipped us off that a Mandalorian was looking for us, I didn’t expect it to be because of this.” He looks her over, making her skin crawl. “You probably don’t remember much. You were drugged out of your mind, but I remember you. You’ve grown up since then.” 

He pushes himself away from the Crest, taking a couple steps towards her. Kai’s hand is on her blaster, ready to draw it, but she can’t seem to. 

“Still a scared little omega.” He says, the title coming from him making her shudder in disgust. It feels wrong, hearing someone like him say it. 

Run. 

Her brain is screaming it. She can’t fight, she can’t even get her hand to draw her blaster. Running was what omegas did. It was their first defense. She’s in an open space. She can get back to the exit quickly. There’s people on the streets, crowds she could hide in. Wait until Din found her or found the man. 

She turns, ready to run. He’s faster than she is, her back slamming against the side of the ship as he grips her chin in his hand. He leans into her, his breath washing over her face. She’s starting to panic a bit. She feels trapped, stuck. 

Her hands close around his wrist, fingers trying to dig into his skin. “Let go.” She’s panicking, feeling closed in as his other hand rests on the ship beside her head. “Let go!” She yells, struggling against him, but he doesn’t let up. 

Suddenly she’s not in the spaceport anymore. She’s not staring at a stranger. She knows him. She remembers him. She can see him, she can see all of them. The faces of every man who had hurt her, every one of them that had taken advantage of her. She can remember every single one of them, all of them flashing through her mind. 

A sudden, strange calm feeling begins to wash over her, her panic abating. She feels warm and light, almost like she’s watching everything unfold from outside her body. It feels good. She feels safe. 

It surprises both of them when she rears back, driving both of her feet into his chest. It’s a strong enough hit to have him stumbling back. She drops on her side on the hard ground, but it doesn’t seem to phase her. She’s on her feet almost instantly, rushing at him. He doesn't have time to block her or move, her shoulder driving right into his stomach. He grunts, hitting the ground hard. 

He barely has time to roll away from her elbow as it drops, aimed for his neck. She grabs a handful of his hair, yanking him back onto his back. He yells out, hands scrambling for his blaster, but she’s faster. She’s on top of him, a blaster pointed right at his face. He doesn't have time to react, can’t even get a word out before she fires. 

“Kai-” 

She lifts the blaster at the approaching figure, firing. It takes him by surprise, bouncing off his helmet. 

“Kai, stop!” He calls out, but she fires again. He’s ready this time, dodging it. 

He rushes her, doing the only thing he can think of. He tackles her to the ground, her back hitting the ground hard, but he doesn’t have time to think about that. He wraps his arms around her, trying to keep her still. 

“Stop.” He says, putting as much of his alpha in his voice as he can. “Enough.” 

Her fighting stills, her body shuddering before going lax in his arms. Her head falls back, baring her throat to him in submission. He hates himself as he watches her, removing his hand from the back of her neck. 

Boba had been right. Her omega is strong. Strong and out of control. 

He gently strokes the back of her head as she whimpers quietly, nuzzling against him, trying to reach his neck. “It’s alright.” He soothes her, trying to push as much of his scent forward as he can. He hates doing it, but he had seen the intensity of her gaze when she’d looked at him. There was no one there but her omega. Nothing but pure instinct driving her forward. 

He wishes he knew more about omegas. More about how to help her. 

There still are some who could help. 

He pushes the thought from his head. It would be a risk. He knows he’ll have to face it eventually, but he doesn’t want to do that to her. Not right now, when she was in such a delicate space. 

He stands, holding her in his arms. The sun is setting, painting the sky above them a bright orange. She’s limp, riding the wave of calm he had forced into her. He ignores the body behind him, carrying her into the ship, closing the ramp behind him. 

He lays her in the makeshift nest, wrapping her in his cloak. She reaches for him as he pulls away, mumbling incoherently. “I’ll be right back.” He says, squeezing her shoulder gently. He climbs up to the cockpit, not letting his shoulders relax until they’re in hyperspace. 

He climbs back down to the hull, stripping off his armor. He tries not to think about all the things that had gone through his head when she didn’t comm him. He had been terrified, thinking maybe she had been taken again, or worse. He feels sick to his stomach at the thought. He strips out of his flight suit, crawling into the nest beside her, wrapping his arms around her. 

****

“I saw them. I saw all of them.” 

Din wakes abruptly, disoriented. He didn’t remember falling asleep. He hadn’t meant to. The spot next to him is vacant, but still warm. The blanket is still tossed over him, but his cloak is missing. 

“I remember their faces.” 

His gaze is drawn down towards his feet, towards the end of the nest. Kai is sitting there, wrapped in his cloak. The faint blue of a holoprojector is lighting the hull of the crest. 

“How many have you found?” Boba’s gruff voice reaches his ears. 

“Just the two.” She says, sniffling. “I killed him.” 

“He would have killed you just as quickly. Or worse.” 

Kai sniffles again. “I shot him.” 

“You did what you had to. You’ve saved a lot of lives by doing it. People always get what they deserve eventually. Sometimes it’s a blaster bolt to the head. You did good, ad’ika. Let me know when you get where you’re going next.”

Kai nods. “Okay.” 

Her shoulders slump a bit as the blue glow of the holoprojector disappears. She sets it down with a clank on the metal floor, letting out a shaky breath. 

“It’s quite a feat, you know,” He says quietly. 

She turns to face him, red rimmed eyes meeting his. “What?” 

“When I started bounty hunting, I heard stories about the famed hunter Boba Fett. How ruthless and bloodthirsty he was. How sometimes his quarries would turn themselves in to avoid having a run in with him. Yet here you are, just a little omega, turning him soft.” 

Kai scoffs. “I don’t think he’s going soft. I think he’s just getting old.” 

Din wraps an arm around her waist, tugging her back so she’s laying next to him. “We’re close in age, you know.” 

She pokes his cheek. “Then that means you’re old too.” 

He playfully grumbles, wrapping his arms around her. She settles into his hold, nuzzling her face into his neck. He rubs her back gently, tilting his head back a bit to allow her to scent him. 

“Are you okay?” He asks, not wanting to bring up anything that she might not be ready to talk about yet, but he needs to ask. 

Her body stills, a shaky breath fanning across the skin of his throat. “I saw them. I saw all of them. Somehow...somehow I remember...” 

He tightens his hold around her. “I’m sorry you had to do that. I didn’t think...somehow he found out.” 

“The bartender at the cantina tipped him off.” She says. “Found out somehow.” She presses closer to him. “What if they all know? What if someone’s told them?” 

“That’s a risk we have to take.” He says. “They do have connections, or at least they all did at one point. Eventually they’re going to start taking notice.” 

Kai is quiet for a moment, so quiet he thinks she’s fallen asleep. Her breaths are steady against his skin, her own skin warm where it’s pressed against him. “Would you really go back?” 

He hums, pressing his face against her hair. 

“To Tatooine?” 

“All you have to do is ask.” He murmurs against the top of her head. 

She should ask. She knows it. She should stop this now, before it really gets dangerous. Still, there’s something in the back of her mind, something telling her to keep going. Something telling her to wipe them all out, once and for all.

[svgoceandesigns1]

Star Wars Visit Tatooine SVG - Droid Sale Every Week SVG PNG, Cricut File

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