#a quiet moment of family in this very upsetting time. it means so much 2 me

[drasticdoodling]

thinking abt my tabris now bc im trying to plan worldstates and like. alistair in the fade makes me really sad BUT alistair is in the fade and then tabris goes to skyhold to get answers and then meets fiona who’s also mourning is very compelling to me

[us3rnam3-r3dact3d]

and my body remains (but the person is gone)

Chapter 2: that fire from within (i put it out to grieve him)

Ao3| 1.9k Words | David's POV

David comes to help.

TW: Blood, allusions to dismembered body parts, aftermath of trauma.

David was supposed to be taking a math final. He watched, out of the corner of his eye, as the clock on the dash of his sedan flipped over to eight o’clock. He knew he was going to miss this test the minute he’d gotten off the phone with his dad. He’d abandoned the uniform he’d laid out the night before, left his packed backpack by the door, and stuffed an empty duffel bag with enough clothes for himself and his dad to last a few days. 

Something was wrong with Asher. So he and his dad would take care of him. It was as simple as that. 

That didn’t mean, of course, that he didn’t have a spike of anxiety when his missing the final was cemented in time. David had made perfect scores on all of his math tests that year, beating out his ninety-seven average from last year. He hoped that Mrs. Hatchworth would allow him to retake the final without a penalty. These were mitigating circumstances, afterall. She was unempowered, so she didn’t understand the way that a crisis rippled through a shifter pack, but she certainly could understand a family emergency. 

Asher’s house was dark and quiet when he pulled up. Something had felt distinctly off since last night. David had woken just after midnight, pulled from a strange dream. He’d been running through the woods, searching for something. He could have sworn he heard Asher’s voice calling out for him. 

That crushing need to find him, to protect him, still stirred uncomfortably in David’s chest. The pack bond that tied them together pulsed with worry. David’s core bounced along with his heart, his threads reaching for Asher’s familiar magic. 

A few years ago, when their cores first emerged, Ash had expressed that it felt strange and foreign inside of him. He said that it felt like something had crammed its way between his ribs, leaving him too full. David felt almost the opposite. He had had a hole in his chest since he was a child, and when his core coalesced, that hole filled up. It fit perfectly inside of him, and despite Asher’s discomfort, his magic fit perfectly too. 

They were meant to be like this, he and Ash, their cores as familiar to each other as they were to themselves, too much and too little and evening each other out. 

There was a cardboard box sitting on the front porch. He stared down at it as he rang the doorbell, his brow pinched in confusion. It was one of those filing boxes his dad used for pack paperwork and kept piled up, unorganized, in the garage. It drove him crazy. Those things held on to moisture like nothing else. The cardboard of this box was beginning to crumble under the dark, viscous liquid that was pooling in its bottom. 

David knew what blood smelled like. He swallowed at the tang of metal forming in the back of his throat. He wrinkled his nose and stepped around it. 

His dad came to the door, his face creased with something heavy and uncertain. David’s dad was, considering it all, a pretty carefree guy. He looked so unnatural like this, stressed, on high alert. 

“Where’s your uniform?” His dad asked, looking over David’s sweats and t-shirt. 

“I’m not going to school.” David replied simply. He didn’t ask, he told. He thought that there was very little in this world that could stop him from getting to Asher in this moment. “Ash needs me, right?” 

His dad stared at him for a long, tense moment. For the first time in a long time, David was very worried that he’d done the wrong thing and that his dad was going to be upset with him. 

And then a smile, soft and dampened, broke out on his dad’s face. One heavy hand landed on his shoulder and pulled him into a tight, back-cracking hug. David’s dad was a tactile person, and he wasn’t afraid to show his love and pride through touch like some men were. David usually bristled when Gabe hugged him, ruffled his hair, pressed their foreheads together in pack-greeting. But now, he let his dad hold on as long as he needed. 

“I love you, David.” He murmured into David’s shoulder. 

“I love you too, Dad.” He replied. 

His dad tried to warn him. He didn’t give David any details, but he was a smart person. Something had happened to Asher last night, and he was changed. That much David could feel in the air of the O’Connell house. Something was missing that had been there before. Asher was changed and he might not be back to normal for a long time. He might never be. That was fine. David didn’t need anything from Asher, never had. All he needed was Asher there. 

Mrs. O’Connell was on the floor of Asher’s bedroom, the lavender fabric of her dressing gown spread around her like rippling water. Her fiery curls, the same as Asher’s, fell around her face and head in a halo. She was facing the shadowy space under Asher’s desk, piled high with unfinished homework and a few, half-built lego sets. Her hand was outstretched towards the darkness, her fingers twitching lazily. 

At first, David thought that something was wrong with her, but she jerked and looked up as he came in, magic rippling through her body and threatening to shift as she processed a new aura in her vulnerable space. Her eyes locked with David’s and her shoulders slumped. She sat up, drawing her dressing gown close and crossed her legs under her. 

“David,” she said softly and held a hand out to him. He entered the room slowly, mapped out his movements clearly so he wouldn’t startle her. 

When they were eight, Asher had fallen out of an orange tree in David’s backyard and snapped his leg in half. Mrs. O’Connell hadn’t let Asher out of her sight for weeks afterwards. 

David slipped his hand into hers, and she pulled him down to kneel next to her. Her hand rested on the nape of his neck and bent his back so that their foreheads brushed together. David had always found pack-greetings to be somewhat uncomfortable. Contact wasn’t always easy for him, especially with people he didn’t know or didn’t know well. The pack was family, of course, but he wasn’t close to all of them. It was easy and familiar with his dad and with Asher, who always seemed to be touching him somehow, somewhere. Mrs. O’Connell seemed to note his discomfort. She was as tactile as her son, always running her palm over his forehead, pulling him into hugs, pressing kisses into the crown of his head, even when he grew taller than her. But she kept her distance from David, respected his space. It was something he had always appreciated about her. 

So he knew, in this moment, that the contact was for her sake and not his. She held him there, exhaling as a weight left her shoulders. 

“Shifters like having their pack close by,” his dad had told him when he was very little, “especially when somebody is hurt.” The O’Connell’s stayed in their house for three weeks after his mom died. Asher was glued to his side the entire time. 

Mrs. O’Connell broke away, her face turned down bashfully. She looked back over her shoulder to the space beneath the desk. He followed her gaze. At this level, he could see what she had been reaching to. Asher was pressed tightly against the corner, his long limbs wrapped up into a tight ball. His shirt was torn and hanging off of him awkwardly. Blood was smeared over his face and hands. Not his blood. The same blood that David had smelled on the porch. 

“Aíne,” his dad called from the doorway. She didn’t look away from Asher. Neither did David. “It’s here.” She took her bottom lip between her teeth, her body tensing.

“I’ll stay with him.” David said softly. “I won’t let anything touch him.” 

Mrs. O’Connell’s gaze finally broke away from Asher and back to him. Her eyes held his captive for a long, tense moment. Finally, she unfolded her legs from under her and stood. Her hand came to his cheek and tilted his head up so she could press a kiss to his forehead. 

The door closed behind her. David let his breath out in a puff. 

He lowered himself fully onto the floor, laid out on his side, so he could meet Asher’s eyes. They were open and wild, something crazed and defensive in them. Ash looked so different, even from how he had looked the day before. Christ, it had barely been twelve hours since he’d seen Asher. He’d left David’s house around seven-thirty the night before to head home. David had been on him about reviewing for their math final. He should have driven Ash home. He should have gone with him. He should have guarded him against whatever had hurt him this badly. 

He blinked, squeezed his eyes shut. That was ridiculous. Asher was capable as all hell. He didn’t need David to look after him like a lost puppy. David was still getting used to the possessive thing in his chest that had come with his wolf. At least he’d stopped snapping at the other kids in school when they touched Asher or Milo. 

Ash seemed to be looking through him, eyes glazed and strange. David exhaled slowly and tried to calm himself. 

“Ash,” he said, his voice painfully quiet, “I’m right here. Whatever you need… whenever you’re ready. I’m gonna be here.” 

He extended his arm out, palm up, towards Asher. He mirrored Mrs. O’Connell’s vigil. 

Eventually, she came back, Mr. O’Connell with her. She knelt next to him, her fingers running through his short, dark hair. She smelled like blood. At some point, they both shifted. He found his head pressed against the warmth of Mrs. O’Connell’s coat. Mr. O’Connell stalked the room a few times before settling, sitting sentinel with his back to David and Asher, perched and ready for anyone who could enter unwanted from the bedroom door. David pressed himself into them, his core thrumming to the sound of pack, pack, pack. 

The afternoon sun had cut across the room by the time Asher moved. David was sitting in the warmth and quiet, so close to sleep. He barely contained the jolt that ran up his spine when cold, thin fingers spread across his palm. He opened his eyes wide. Asher’s were staring back, a bit clearer, a bit more his. 

“Hey,” he said softly, “hey, Ash. We’re here. When you’re ready.” 

It took hours, coaxing Asher out inch by inch, slow movement by slow movement. By the time the sun had set, Ash was pressed against him, head to toe, his head resting on David’s outstretched arm, his fingers curled tightly in David’s t-shirt. David moved just as slowly, left Asher the room to pull away or reject every touch. He didn’t, though. 

His shoulder ached from being pressed into the ground, his thigh numb from resting under his other leg. He was sweating from the heat of having two wolves pressed on either side of them, and Asher’s space heater of a body curled against his chest. He didn’t move, though, didn’t complain. 

As long as Asher needed him there, that was where he’d stay. If it meant he spent the rest of his life curled up on Ash’s dirty bedroom floor, it would be a life well spent. 

[aemondslefteyeball]

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi (6)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

[Modern!Aemond x Fem!Reader]

[Warnings: Substance use, gore, spooky shit]

[Summary: Origin of the McNugget]

(See you next week bbys drink water have a good time)

Word Count: 5.9K

Chapter 6

The cold winter air nipped at every exposed part of your face. Lys had the closest thing to a perfect climate– according to tourism boards– but you had always longed to watch the snowfall. You pulled the squirming kid into your arms before the two of you settled onto the rocking chair. You rested your head on Jaehaerys’s, the wool fibers tickling your chin. “That one is called Pleiadys.”

“Why?”

 By this point, everything you said was met with the same response but you found yourself endeared by his curiosity. Raising a gloved finger to point at the constellation, you moved an arm to cradle the boy as he shifted to look. “It means the seven sisters.” Jaehaerys nodded eagerly, face alight with curiosity and a thousand more questions. “And that one, right there.” You moved your hand across the freckled sky, pointing to a new target. His gaze shifted to the general area to which you were pointing, but you knew it needed a finer eye. Wrapping your hand around his, you gingerly led it to the exact one. “Is Rigel. It’s my very favorite star.”

“Why?” As you continued babbling about the constellations, you caught sight of the toddler’s eyelids starting to grow heavy. His head rested against your chest as you tiptoed through the mansion before quietly tucking him into bed.

A tense quiet sat over the car. You found yourself wondering once again exactly what unspoken rule you had broken but decided to let your husband seethe just a little bit longer. “I specifically told you to not speak with him,” the low growl eventually emerged. You turned to see him gripping the steering wheel as hard as humanly possible. You rolled your eyes and turned back to the window, a small smirk on your face as you shook your head in disbelief. “You may be naive, but I know Aegon.” Sometimes it caught you off guard at how jealous he was, especially for somebody who spent so much of his time actively pretending you didn’t exist. If anybody could be upset over you tossing a child to another man, of course it would be him. 

Taking a deep breath in you thought for a moment more, gaze fixed on the street sign across the way. He stayed put at the red light for just a second longer before his eye snapped to meet yours. You didn’t grant him eye contact, knowing that if you did he would try to cow you into relenting once again. You just waited for him to hiss through his teeth and drive again. “Yeah.” Leaning back into the chair, you turned to finally look at him. “I’ll really convince your family we’re happily married, by ignoring all of your male relatives.” Silence fell over the car once again. It continued into the next few days until a gift bag containing earrings was draped onto your bedroom door handle. What a lovely gift from his secretary. 

You crouched next to a fern, putting your hands on your thighs before reaching out to tear a leaf off. “Seriously?” Myrielle stood and kicked a nearby bush, dropping the bucket on the ground with a clang. “How are there no fucking berries?” Rolling the leaf between your thumb and index finger, you pushed down the memories of a girl’s trip with Tanselle to the Highgarden Conservatory.

“Could be birds picking them off. Or like, mice.” 

“Gods, I could eat the fuck out of a mouse right now.” Sabitha mused, a chorus of disgust ringing out amongst the group. 

“You know some animals live off eating their own vomit?” You piped up, unsure of exactly where the compulsion to do so came from. Letting the ball of plant matter fall back to the ground, you suddenly regretted speaking at all.

“Okay, thanks for that image Y/N.” 

“Did the ghosts tell you that? Or do you just, like, talk about blood and stuff?” Ever since the seance it was like this every day with Myrielle. 

Smacking your hands onto your knees before rising, you shot her the most passive-aggressive smile you could. “Mostly we just chat about how Rymund Manwoody dumped you for his cousin.” You didn't wait for her to retort, walking off and ignoring whatever she shouted after you. You came to a small clearing, and behind a felled tree a stag bent down. Holding a breath for a second and thinking of the quietest way to get Baela’s attention, you took a step back. The stag lifted its head, horror bubbling within you as you saw viscera coating the antlers. Stealth damned, boots rustled softly against the dirt as you backtracked. 

“Hey, look, ignore Myrielle.” Sabitha reached a hand out to jostle your arm. Noticing your expression, she paused for a second longer. “You doing alright?” You simply nodded your head in response and looked back at the deer once more before walking back to the cabin.

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dinners with Helaena and the twins had come to be a ritual, and in a way, Aemond relied on it. It went the same way each time. She entered, fussed over him, and asked how therapy was going. The past two times he had simply ignored her, or answered with a hard stare. This time, he looked at her for a second before mumbling “Fine.” It was still a waste of his time, but he couldn’t argue that it wasn’t improving his work performance. Besides, the better he performed and the more people would realize that he was alright. After they continued their meal in relative silence, he looked at her. “They’re doing a scan.” He forked a piece of chicken and chewed on it, swallowing before he continued. “Over Moat Cailin.” 

Helaena’s gaze softened as she spun her chopsticks around in the sauce and rice mix covering her plate. “You’re really good at keeping up with the updates.” Aemond sighed tiredly, hoping this wasn’t a segue to unsolicited life advice. 

“It’s the right thing to do.” He moved his fork over to a piece of bell pepper, lifting it to his mouth and chewing thoughtfully. By this point, he had sunk more money than he was comfortable thinking about into the search efforts and strong-armed Aegon into following suit. Aegon, as per usual, seemed entirely unaffected by the lives of those around him imploding. He idly wondered exactly how Sara would react to seeing his brother again before his mind drifted to when he would reunite with you. 

“I think it’s good.” Helaena paused, her expression careful as she set her utensils down. “That you care about… doing the right thing.” 

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The brush slipped through Barba’s hair effortlessly. Pulling it back before parting it into three sections, you began to braid her hair. The insects chirped as the two of you sat there. Barba’s gaze was tilted upwards as you worked on the sections at her crown. “Do you think survival training will be like this?” Barba laughed softly, her face lighting up. 

“I think we’ll have an edge up on everybody else there.” You sat for a moment longer, the braid laxing before you tighten your grip again and weaved the next few sections in. 

“Okay, but like.” Taking a deep breath in, you let your hands rest against her. “What about a psych eval?” 

Barba nodded, chewing on her lower lip for a second. “I don’t think we’re at the point where we need to worry.” She finally stated, her sing-songy voice comforting against the chirping of insects. “I think we’ve got a good shot at getting out of here.” You went back to plaiting her hair. “I have an idea.” When the final sections of hair were done, you wrapped it up and tapped her on the shoulder. Taking it as a sign to continue, she turned to face you. “The Cessna.” Her tone was laced with naive hope, and your stomach sank. 

“It’s not safe.” Shaking your head you brought your fingers to rub against your temples. The desperation in the camp was growing, and you were all starting to feel the effects of hunger. But human sentimentality was not so easily relinquished.

“It’s not safe for us to sit around and wait either. We’re on our own.” 

From a strictly rational standpoint, you know she had a few good points but couldn’t stop the fervent shaking of your head. “Barba, no. We have no clue how long that thing has been sitting there. We have no idea what condition the fuel is in…” She had set her jaw, pulling her long black braid over her shoulder. “With our combined flight hours, we’re not qualified to even apply for astronaut training.” The futility of the last few years suddenly dawned on you. All the early mornings you spent at the airfield, all the hours you cracked open books. And it was all fucking useless here. “And these conditions… the mountains would fuck up even seasoned pilots. We are grad students who go joy riding…” 

“Y/N.” Barba had sat silently while you had rambled on, her expression too calm for your liking. “The sacrifices we have to make?” Her icy blue eyes locked onto yours, her face uncharacteristically stoic. “That doesn’t just start when they hand you the helmet.” We can’t even be considered for wearing a helmet. Kids playing heroes.  She reached a hand out, rubbing your knee gently. “If I die doing this, it’ll be no different than if I die in space.” She pulled her hand back and grasped the weirdwood pendant on her neck. “The Gods are going to see us through this.” 

“How do you know, though?” Barba came to sit behind you, pulling your hair over your shoulders before she started to run the brush through your lengths. She was right, in that the career field the two of you had chosen was dangerous. But it wasn't a tangible danger. It existed as an abstract. 

“I don’t, but I also don’t think faith is mutually exclusive to knowledge.” You sighed, nodding slightly before she yanked on your hair in a silent command to stop moving. Quiet permeated the woods around the two of you as she continued. Upon completing the braid, she moved to sit next to you again. “Hey, I know you’re stressing about this.” She grabbed your hand. “But you’re going to do fine, if you’re really so worried just… edit.” Moving her hand, she reached to grab yours. “But I don’t think you’re crazy.” 

You hadn’t realized how much you needed to hear somebody else say it, nodding quietly as you pulled your lips back over your teeth. “In your religion...” You let the words hang in the air for a second. Neither of your parents had been particularly pious, and your father’s funeral was the last time you stepped foot into a Red Temple. “I’ve been having really weird dreams.” Letting out a breath and gathering your courage, you faced her. “I think I’ve been having visions. You guys have like, tree prophets, right?” 

“We call them greenseers.” Barba corrected with a small smile. “But yes. The old Gods sometimes send visions to guide us.” 

“It doesn’t feel like being guided. It’s… disorienting.” Truthfully each time it happened it felt like your very soul was hungover. 

“Well, they could either be a warning or a revelation.” 

“But how do I know I’m not just crazy? And even if I have some gift from the Gods, I’m just a fucking person.” The plastic bracelet twisted on your wrist. “How do I know I won’t fuck up the interpretation?” 

“I think, because the Gods gave them faith. Faith is the substance of things that are hoped for. And the evidence of things unseen.” She paused for a second, looking down. “I know people think I’m weird. Just as I know that no Maester has found concrete proof of religion or magic. Better yet, I know that we kind of just pray to trees. But I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that every culture on the planet has independently come to the conclusion that there’s something more than just the trees. But I know it because I believe it. I think it would help you to open yourself to that.” She lowered her eyes to yours, “Look. The Gods want us to do the right thing. No matter the religion, that tends to be a basic tenet.” You nodded, avoiding eye contact. “Even if praying to the trees isn’t what you want, there are lessons that can be learned from it. If you open your heart to greater things, they will help you discern the true from the false.” 

“I don’t…” You pressed your lips together. “But how would I even open my heart?” 

“I want to show you something tonight.” A smile broke out across Barba’s face as she stood up and headed back towards the stack of firewood.

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Aemond sat at work, tapping his finger against the mouse. There was some tune that was stuck in his head, but he couldn’t identify any lyrics. Or knowledge of where he had actually heard it. Huffing at the earworm, he went through his usual day. Have meetings, check to see if there are any updates on the search, lunch, emails, paperwork. Routine. His fingers tapped until he finally shifted them to the keyboard. His search finally led him to the website of a boutique tucked into the beachfront of Lys. Aemond Targaryen was a man of principle, and he had to rectify his mistake. To his chagrin, your duvet had stopped being sold years ago. Gladdened that at least the worst part of his workday was also the end of it, he sat in his car for a few moments. He started it but sat parked in the lot. He had known this was coming for some time, but a touch of guilt still tugged at him. Not enough to stop him from pulling up the familiar contact number and pressing call. 

“Hello?” Alys’s voice had the same seductive edge to it that it always possessed. Years ago it had excited him, but these days his life was too turbulent to keep up with all of it. Alys, sensing the ominousness of the time he took to answer, sighed. “Aemond. I’m busy.” 

“I don’t think you should come around anymore.” It shocked him how easily the words flowed from his lips. They hardly lived a white-picket life but they had still been sleeping together for the past few years. He should feel guiltier, but just couldn’t muster it.

“Okay.” Okay? Alys waited a minute longer before sighing once more. “I should’ve seen this coming earlier.” He could sense the disappointment in her voice, but he got the feeling it wasn’t because of him breaking it off. Rather that she didn’t have the power of breaking up with him. “You’ve been stringing me along for a dead woman you hated. For months. You’re an asshole.” Three little beeps sounded. Aemond supposed that he shouldn’t have been surprised. He felt angry and thought about what Dr. Greenwood had said. He rolled his eyes in disbelief that he was actually falling for the bullshit she peddled. Figuring that he might as well make use of his money, he sighed and thought about it for a second. He knew he was an asshole, that bounced off him like rubber. It didn’t bother him that she pointed out him stringing her along. She was objectively right about that as well. ‘I want you to focus on what thoughts you’re experiencing when your anger starts to get above a five’ Aemond leaned back into the headrest, closing his eyes. You aren’t dead, and I didn’t hate you. I don’t hate you. He opened his eyes once more and shifted the car into gear, leading an uneventful drive home. Fingers tapping on the steering wheel.

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------

You coughed so hard you thought your lungs might burst out of your mouth. Waving the smoke away with your hand, you took another puff before passing it over to Sabitha. She inhaled deeply, before following it up with another hit. She passed the joint onto Aly and leaned her head back, half-moaning. “Fuck. I didn’t know how much I needed that.” Sabitha handled it like a champ but you, unfortunately, have bitch lungs and proceeded to hack a little while longer. 

Aly smirked at you and nudged your shin with the toe of her shoe. “Try not to die on us, yeah? This would be a really weird death to explain to your Mom.” The three of you laughed around the little fire. You came out here when you needed to clear your head. This evening Sabitha and Aly showed up with a much-needed offer for company, but more importantly, a joint. Since the plane was private, pretty much all of you had taken the opportunity to smuggle things airport security would normally confiscate. Thankfully for you, Sabitha apparently packed a garbage bag full of weed in her carry-on. 

Taking another two puffs off it before quickly passing it to Sabitha, you held it in a few seconds before a fit of coughing wracked you. “If I die, who's going to third-wheel for you two?” Sabitha nodded and shrugged before exhaling. “Do you guys?” The high had started to sink in at this point, your muscles relaxing. Your question was cut off by the next round of hits, coughing again before composing yourself. “Do you guys think you feel better or worse having each other out here?” 

The two of them looked at each other in quiet contemplation. Aly glanced back at you for a moment before she put the joint out. “I don’t think I’ve really thought about it.” Sabitha nodded in agreement. “It just kind of… is. You know?” 

Sabitha bit her lower lip in brief concentration before exhaling. “It fucking sucks that she’s in the shit.” She admitted, unable to look at her girlfriend. “But I don’t think I’ll ever not be grateful she’s with me.” 

Aly awwed and you pantomimed gagging before throwing a pebble at the two of them. “Yeah, yeah. Rub it in.” 

“Well if you wanna talk about rubbing…” 

Aly shot a look at her girlfriend, and Sabitha just smirked in response. Aly turned back to you, her expression soft. “You’ll see her again soon.” 

You wanted to believe it but just sighed instead. “I know it’s selfish.” You had grown up a Navy brat until your teenage years. A Dear John letter wasn’t a foreign concept, but you didn’t even have a fucking address here. Everything hung in limbo. “I just really hope she’s missing me, you know?” You steadied your breath before fiddling with your bracelet. “I know it’s not fair because we have no idea when or if help is coming. But I just want her to wait for me.” After your admission, Aly flicked another match and lit the joint again, passing it to you. Gratefully, you took an especially long hit before leaning back and exhaling slowly. You wondered what Emerson was doing– if she was sleeping well at night–  and took another hit. “I really fucking miss her.” 

“Hey, soon enough you can divorce Aemond, and the two of you can do whatever the fuck you want.” A smile broke out across your face at the thought, your forgotten wedding ring sitting somewhere with the rest of your stuff in the cabin. 

“God, that time could not come quickly enough.” You threw your head back and groaned, digging your heels into the dirt. 

“Aww, what? You don’t miss the hubby?”

“Fuck no.” Sabitha could barely finish her question before you spat out the response. The two of them wasted no time breaking out into laughter. “Seriously. I hope he gets kicked in the shins every fucking day.” You rolled your eyes and took your hits before passing it on once again. “You know he demanded that I start sleeping with my door shut so that his cat wouldn’t come nap with me?” The problem was only exacerbated when the two of you discovered that Vhagar could somehow open doorknobs as long as they weren’t locked. You had no fucking clue how, but at this point, you had accepted she was higher than you on the pecking order. It’s not like you hated waking up to a sweet old cat purring into your shoulder either. 

The two of them looked at each other conspiratorially before Sabitha spoke up. “Okay, but I have to know.” You furrowed your eyebrows suspiciously as soon as she said it. “You’ve met his girlfriend, right?” You sucked the air in through your teeth. Alys was actually pretty nice, as it turned out. The two of you had once chatted for a few minutes about the news before Aemond stormed in and put an abrupt end to whatever friendship could have formed. “You know. The thing is that.” You let the two of them wait on the edge of their seats, using it as an opportunity to take an extra hit. “She’s really fucking hot. Quick as a whip too.” You pulled your lips back into a smirk just as Sabitha broke out into laughter. 

“Okay, but you realize what you have to do though, right?” You gestured for Aly to elaborate, while she just smirked and turned to look at Sabitha. 

“Y/N entering her Mr. Steal Yo Girl era.” 

“Yeah, I got it” You giggled, nudging Sabitha with your shoe. “In the divorce, he gets the house and I get the girl.” 

“Rom-com in the making.” Sabitha japed, finally tossing the dead joint into the fire. Once the joint was tossed in, you poured a pail of water over the fire before the two of them went back to camp, and you went to the clearing where you had met Barba earlier. 

She held a hand out, the firelight from her torch flashing in her icy eyes. You hesitantly stepped forward and grasped it before she led you through deeper parts of the brush. After countless scratches and spiderwebs, she stopped in front of you suddenly. You were off the game trail and felt the need to watch each footstep. Almost running into her, you let go of her hand and raised your eyes. Before the two of you stood a massive tree. Blood-red leaves shone black in the gathering dusk, and red sap dripped down the sturdy branches. A strange feeling overtook you right then, an animalistic understanding that you were in the presence of something ancient. Something primordial. Torchlight danced across the terrible face carved into the tree, crusted red sap flowed down the forehead but the rest of the face was twisted in rapture. You stepped back, suddenly frightened. Barba caught your upper arm with her hand, shushing you softly. “It’s okay, the Gods want this.” With that, you took her hand and approached the tree. The two of you stood next to each other as you both stared at the ancient, gnarled thing in awe. 

“What do I say?” You looked at her for a second, a dull throbbing in your forehead. Ghostly blue eyes affixed on the blackening leaves once more. 

“You don’t have to say anything.”  Her head tilted back as she closed her eyes. She took a deep breath in and tapped the side of your hand. “Listen.” The expression on her face was placid, and she reached out a single hand to put on the tree. As you closed your eyes, you took a deep breath in and held it for a few seconds. “Open your heart.” That’s when it started again, the dull chanting that whispered beneath the surface of the breeze. A gale burst through the canopy of the forest and howled through the Weirwood leaves. You reached your hand out and placed it on the bark. 

The first thing that registered was the lack of gravity on your body. You were falling but with no force. Blackness enveloped the void you had found yourself thrust into. Your hands waved and your breath bubbled. Bubbled? Every instinct screamed against what was happening. But panic didn’t overtake you, just acceptance. 

Water pooled on the floors of the stone tunnel. You put your right hand onto the wall. Flashes of dragonfire licked through every crevice of the mazes. Dragons roared in the sky as Andals turned to ash before you. Stepping back in horror, you looked at where your hand had been and held back the urge to wretch. Scoured into the maze wall was the humanoid form of somebody dead centuries before your birth. You took a few deep breaths to steady yourself, nails digging into your palms. As far back as you could remember, your Dad had been a huge horror buff. Shortly after you turned eleven, he finally deemed you old enough to watch The Shining with him. ‘There’s a trick, you know.’ Your heart beats harder at the memory of his voice. ‘Keep going right.’ Unclad feet splashed through the puddles on the floor as you continued onward. That’s when a familiar silhouette entered your peripheral vision. A stag raised its head to you when it finished lapping at the pools of brackish water. It led you to a staircase that had candles interwoven with the spiral of the structure. Your calves started to ache as you ascended. A sense of foreboding twisted in your gut and you knew better than to open any of the doors that shifted along the sides of the staircase. Those few doors that were open showed you things that made your stomach churn. Doorways kept moving, and candles continued to flicker as you ascended to the clouds. You looked down and a vast structure of oily black stone rested at the base of wherever you stood. Disoriented, you turned back from the balcony to enter the room. A shrine sat on the opposite end of a new room. Dozens of candles burned, filling the air with the sweet scent of lavender. In the middle stood a terrible black cylinder. You reached a few fingers out to touch it and hissed when they came back coated in blood. A few droplets ran down the blackened glass, and you sucked on your finger for a moment before looking back to the surrounding candles. Taking a wooden lighting stick, you held it into the flame until the end curled and turned black. You lifted the stick to the top of the glass candle and lit it before blowing the stick out. Queer colors flickered across the room, white light burning your eyes from the intensity. Yellows danced across the walls as gold, and the shadows sank into an abyss that awoke primordial fear in you. The light of the glass candle grew brighter, as a form started to emerge from it. Barba’s hand was on the back of your neck, a warm smile on her face as she greeted you. Her face darkened to shadow as the light of the candle overtook it. Blurred into a humanoid form, light overwhelmed your field of vision. Joining it after came a flash of flames, burning in a halo around her concealed face. You screamed as her face twisted in concern. 

“Y/N?” You wrenched yourself from Barba’s grasp as quickly as you could, chest heaving as you ran to put distance between you and the tree. “What is it?” 

Your hands shook as you started to rub them against your neck, shifting your weight between your legs. “I saw fire, and light.” Your voice cracked, but Barba’s lit up. She felt as if you had been touched by divinity, you felt as if you were being eaten alive by something within. 

“That’s the light of the Gods, Y/N.” She pulled you in for a hug, beaming in the darkness. “You’ve let them into your heart.” Her thumbs rubbed circles into your shoulders, and you stared over her shoulder into the terrible face of the weirwood.

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Aemond hated strangers being in his home. From the first day he met you, up until now when he was forced to accommodate a whole party’s worth of strangers. His Mother talked to one of the radar techs, her face twisted in worry. Helaena met your gaze with a small smile. Aegon had his face buried in his phone, and between them sat the team that had been giving updates since the disappearance. At the very edge of the table, Emerson was being emotionally supported by Taenys. Your girlfriend at least had the presence of mind to look worried, her friend just made doe eyes in the brunette’s direction. As his singular eye met Emerson’s hazel ones, hers shifted away immediately. Emerson usually didn’t miss an opportunity to fight with him, which told him everything he needed to know about how her life had been evolving. Her presence here was a formality after all, as far as the search team knew she was your wife’s close friend. His eye bored into her for a few minutes more until techs finally spoke up. “We’ve been given permission to repurpose military equipment for the search.” A smile fell across his Mother’s face, relief written on her features. He didn’t understand why she was so attached to you. She wasn’t particularly close to his cousins or nephews either. “But the conditions in Moat Cailin aren’t ideal for this kind of thing, you have to understand.” The happy look on Alicent’s remained there, but the hope in her eyes dimmed. “It’s likely that the plane crashed there, but the plant life effectively turns it into finding a needle in a haystack.” It was bleak, but by this point, almost every meeting had been the same. Some vague solution is proposed before they come up with another excuse for their own failures to find you. All the while they found a way to avoid telling the families that they weren’t expecting to find much other than remains.

“Why do you guys think it crashed in Moat Cailin?” Helaena piped up, running her middle finger along the rim of her glass. 

The man who had been explaining looked over to Helaena, his face unreadable for a moment. “Well, drones have combed through every inch of the north from the Neck to Winterfell. If a plane carrying twenty people had crashed there, somebody would have noticed it.” His voice droned on, and the man made eye contact with him and Aegon as he explained. “So the area around Greywater Watch seems the most likely culprit for where a plane of that size could crash and go undetected for as long as it has.” 

Aegon was on his phone while the man was speaking, looking up every few seconds and pretending that was multitasking. Helaena chewed on her lip for a moment before taking a sip of wine. “What if you’re looking too far south?” She suggested, spinning the wine in her glass. “What if they’re further north than Winterfell?” Her eyes rested on the opposite wall, expression detached. 

The tech smiled for a moment, rubbing his face before turning back to Aemond. “Yeah, that’s uh.” He met eye contact with another tech there, raising his eyebrows at the other man. “We’ll look into that, Ms. Targaryen.” Slender fingers tapped against the wine glass before Helaena once more started running the pad of her finger along it. 

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------

You swore at that moment that Baela was salvation itself. The deer was being carried on a pole by your best friend and Jacaerys. Choruses of joy rang out from the group as they all crowded around the pair excitedly. When you took a closer look at the stag, your eyes widened in horror. 

“Whoa. That thing is gnarly.” Sabitha’s face twisted in disgust at the viscera hanging off the edges of the antlers. You took a few steps back, your calves brushing against the front of the log. 

“It’s like Freddy Kreuger and Bambi had a baby.” Nettles’s eyebrows wrinkled at the sight of it, her arms coming to cross over her chest. 

“I’m not eating that.” Luke’s voice rang out as he shook his arms, locking eyes with Jacaerys. 

Criston shot him a weary look. “C’mon, guys. Deer shed their antlers every season. It’s perfectly normal.” He crutched closer to where the dead animal rested on the ground, looking back toward the group. “Floris, do us the honors?” She nodded and grabbed the knife that Jace had passed to her, kneeling in front of the stag. Digging the knife in with a well-practiced cut, you held back the urge to wretch as the smell of rot filled the air. The abdomen of the stag was crawling with maggots, the flesh sloughed into a pinkish slurry. Floris lifted a hand covered in gore and insects, shaking it off before wiping it on a rag. 

“That normal too?” Sara crossed her arms and locked eyes with Ser Criston. 

You lowered yourself to sit on the log, pulling one leg up to your chest before looking to Barba. “I’m not crazy.” Her hand rubbed along your shoulder blade. 

“No, you have a gift.” 

“We can’t keep fucking doing this, you guys!” It was the first time you had ever seen Aly actually lose her shit. Her arms came up to her head, fingers weaving into her dark hair. “What happens when winter gets here? We fucking starve to death or freeze?” She gestured at the festering deer, the glop that was once entrails seeping out of Floris’ incision. “We can’t count on getting rescued anymore.” She shook her head, a threat of tears wavering in her tone. “All of us know that is not gonna happen. We have to save us. I’m heading south in the morning to go find help. Be there after breakfast if you want to get out of this fucking hellhole.” 

Sometimes dreams came to you in fractals, and tonight was one such night. You sat up in your bed, looking around yourself. Seeing Baela’s chest slowly rising and falling, you got up. By now you were practiced in avoiding all the creaky floorboards, and you looked back at the sleeping bodies in the cabin before grabbing a lantern. The stag’s head that had been mounted onto the wall decades before you got there stared emptily back at you. Shuddering once again at the memory– and smell– of the diseased creature you opened the door and stepped into the night. The moonlight lit the clearing in a glow that was almost loving, kissing against your exposed skin. Goosebumps rose at the chill slowly accumulating off in the distance, and you found yourself wishing you brought a hoodie. The smell of weed still faintly lingered in the air of the clearing, and you lowered the torch to your side before sitting on the log and gazing up at the stars. You sat and listened to the wind for a few moments. The whispers on the breeze bounced around the inside of your skull, and your head snapped in the direction of a sound you hadn’t registered prior. Picking up the lantern, you raised it and approached before finding the source in the tree line. There, Alysanne Blackwood was crouched in the dirt. Her expression ghoulish as she shoveled a fistful of dirt into her mouth, letting out feral growls only to replace it with the next handful.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Taglist: @chainsawsangel

[cassynite]

OC Tag Game

I was tagged by @dujour13 and @spyridonya for this, thank you both for thinking of me!!

Favorite

PWOTR

This one is so hard...like choosing your favorite child...and also it just tends to be who I'm thinking of the most at that particular moment.

I guess the one I love the most is always going to be my Knight-Commander, Sparrow--captured and sold into slavery at a young age, she became a body double and guard for a Cheliaxian family and goes to Kenabres to try and find escape and freedom.

She is a deeply reserved and quiet individual, keeping her feelings and thoughts close to her chest, and cautious to a fault. But underneath that is someone with deep feeling and passion, an incredibly warm and loving person who is desperately lonely and just wants to find someone who won't leave her, as every person who she has loved has done in the past. She romances Daeran Arendae and they both work through their shit together <3

Newest

The Wayhaven Chronicles

The newest OC is technically still cooking, but he's my latest detective in the IF The Wayhaven Chronicles! His name is Bastian Roche, a nervy little man who would just like everyone to get along, please, and who has a tendency to fail upwards, much to his chagrin. He loves his little town and loves his mama, and is very upset at the recent murders going on and then the supernatural bullshit that ends up crawling out of the woodwork as a consequence.

He's gonna romance Felix and I'm pretty sure is going to be the only detective I've played who doesn't become friends with Adam or Mason by the end of book 2 because he has a spine made of wet tissue paper.

Oldest

Dragon Age: Origins

I might have had older OCs but I don't remember them--the one that still exists in any form would be Dannia Tabris, my canon warden in DAO. She's a daggers rogue, duelist and assassin specialties.

She's the first real Specialist Little Snowflake I ever made, but like in the worst way--I made her as I played the game and headcanoned that while not a mage, she was born a little "closer" to the Fade than others, and because of that she can see the future. This was to accommodate the fact that I always had a game guide open because I hadn't learned that you can't really play an RPG wrong by that point.

Dannia puts up a good front and tends to present herself as funny, warm, and cavalier in front of friends and family, but inside she's a melancholic, vicious, calculating person who is desperate to ensure the safety of people she loves by relying on her frequent visions for guidance.

She lost her mother by ignoring her visions and she refuses to lose anyone else, so of course in the process she does lose everyone--she becomes a Warden and is permanently separated from her family, a vision showing Alistair's execution makes her put him on the throne which he does not want and which ultimately causes the end of their relationship, and she sabotages basically all of her friendships and relationships in general because she sees visions of herself dying to slay the Archdemon.

Then Morrigan comes along, offers the Dark Ritual, and she takes it out of blind hope...and survives. And has to try and live on past her own self-imposed expiration date, now knowing her visions can be false and that her sacrifices up to this point might have been for nothing.

Meanest

PWOTR

I don't really do mean OCs honestly lol. But I'd have to say that the one who is most willing to say mean shit is going to be Kallesto "Vonzi" Voness, my mercenary OC for PWOTR!

Vonzi is an oracle whose patron has given her powers over extreme cold--and, more significantly, powers over time. Vonzi has the ability to time travel, but with a major caveat: jumping back in time forces her to "hold on" to the timeline she creates by changing things, something that takes her very life force. She can either let go, undoing the changes she has made, or die in that time, cementing it as the new reality.

In-game, her main quests revolve around the fact that she is suffering from going back in time to save her family. The KC must either let her die, convince her to let go of the timeline and allow her family to die again, or a Secret Third Thing.

Despite all the shit she goes through, Vonzi is a very confident, very cavalier person. She does not suffer fools lightly and isn't afraid to speak her mind even if it means rocking the boat, and she will tell people what she thinks of them regardless of how unflattering it is. If she likes you, she might be more circumspect, but especially in game she doesn't have the time or energy to be nice. Despite her being a genuinely good person and good friend she puts a lot of people off wit her abrasive attitude.

Softest

Dragon Age Inquisition

Softest OC would have to be Phaedre Lavellan, my canon inquisitor from DAI! Phi is a mage, though not a very well-trained one; when she tells people she was the clan's first, she's lying.

Phaedre like so many other OCs suffered tragedy when she was younger, with her childhood friend and intended--the clan's First at the time--dying to maleficar when Phi, desperate to prove she was grown up enough for vallaslin, goes out on the honorary hunt to earn it and gets in way over her head. The event deeply traumatized her, as it was her fault Ghandriel was out there to begin with. It causes her to retreat from any and all responsibility. Her clan enables this, as she's always been seen as a bit of a baby, and the tragedy causes them to close ranks in an effort to protect her. By 9:40 Dragon, Phaedre is 25 years old and has still not gotten her vallaslin.

News of the Conclave and the spies clan Lavellan plans to send is the last jolt needed from a long-growing feeling of guilt and stasis Phaedre has been in. Sneaking away ahead of the actual spies, Phaedre gets sloppy fake vallaslin from a city elf and joins the Conclave in an effort to prove to herself that she can be useful to her clan and an adult in her own right. And then the Conclave explodes and suddenly she needs to grow up real fast.

Phaedre tends to try to be bubbly and optimistic. She's a little naive but tends to appear even more so because her conflict-averse nature makes her avoid giving out her opinions on anything, which makes it seem like she just doesn't know a whole lot. She's deeply empathetic and emotional, laughs when she's nervous, and wants everyone to be her friend--and it's hard not to be, even when she starts gaining confidence and making decisions that cause disapproval. Phaedre romances Sera.

Most aloof/standoffish

PWOTR

Another non-KC OC, Ophenia Thwait, is going to fit this bill! She's a dhampir that's going to enter her second century soon, and she lost everyone she ever cared about already, including her entire family and her first wife, who she loved more than anything. She wrote books with them as characters to deal with her grief, those books took off, and she spent the next several decades establishing herself as a varied and talented author in several genres. She's currently made a name for herself writing pulp novels of the romance and adventure variety, earning her wild fame and derision in equal measure.

Ophenia keeps all of life at arm's length, looking at it with the clinical mind of a writer that's trying to put together a plot for her next story--because she is. Any character read in an Ophenia Thwait book is based on someone she has met. She considers it the greatest compliment to write using another person, immortalizing them in a story while they age and wither and die. They will at least live forever in her books and the minds of those who read them, but it gives her a tendency to think of people as little more than props for a story that's brewing in her mind, and she will do awful things on purpose just to see what the reaction ends up being or what the consequences are. Gotta get more inspiration, and keep her stories interesting.

Dumbest

PWOTR

Dumbest OC award has to go to Evaethi Arvanxi, Sparrow's "original copy"--the young woman she acted as a body double for! Evaethi means well, mostly, but has learned through a painful childhood that the only real thing she's good at is horses and, later, fighting on them. She fled her noble life of luxury and duty the first real chance she gets, leaving the far more impressive and competent (in her eyes) Sparrow to deal with the aftermath, and joins the Pathfinders, where she will hopefully get some wakeup calls about the way she lives her life. No matter what though, she will never gain the common sense that god gave a goldfish.

Smartest

PWOTR

Isore "Crow" Cygnarus, Sparrow's biological brother who maybe-probably dies in her canon when she was young. I can't even describe how smart he is because "waaaay smarter than me" is about as good as I can get, but he was a savant, a child genius who excelled in mathematics and engineering, who rose to prominence at an astonishingly young age in Alkenstar as an architect and artificer.

He had a lot of ideas, many of which he hoped to spread and see implemented throughout the world--ideas about how society should be run to ensure as little waste, pain, and chaos would be generated, ways that he felt the ills of the world could truly be solved. But before he could do any of that, he had his younger sister with him, who needed to be raised, and he recognized that wandering the world and focusing on your own ambitions was insufficient for rearing a young child. So he settled in the idyllic country of Dehrukani, helping them improve their crystal towers and develop new and interesting ways to store magical energy, and waited for her to grow up right to the point where he is murdered by slavers.

Crow's personality was whatever he needed it to be to get the most out of the people around him--Sparrow remembers him as a kind, patient, perfect older brother, because that's the mask he put on around her. In reality, he was an extremely distant, cold, and ambitious individual. His brilliance came from his natural ability to see things broken down into parts working together as systems, and ultimately that's how he saw people--as parts within the system of society. The closest he ever came to love was the mix of responsibility and interest he had in his little sister.

OC you’d be best friends with IRL

I feel like I would be intimidated by most of my OCs lol. I think I'd get along with Evaethi but would find her self-absorbed nature incredibly grating and honestly she'd be tiring to be around.

The person I'd be best friends with is Vonzi! I'd find her funny and her confidence inspiring.

[thecpdiary]

Hidden Realities

“To the outside world families may seem ordinary, but there was a quietness that shaped my childhood, creating an altogether experience from what others might have expected.

I always felt different. The world around me moved at a pace I struggled to keep up with and moments that brought fun to my peers felt dauntingly overwhelming. I didn’t laugh, there was no humour with me, instead those were replaced by a quiet contemplation that lingered. I was stuck in my own little world. I had no idea why. While other children played, I remember being on the side-lines, observing, analysing, wishing I could join in, feeling angry, upset with myself – yearning for a connection I could never quite grasp, or understand. As I grew older, my parents seemed determined to maintain an air of normalcy around me. Conversations about developmental milestones didn’t arise, diverting attention, reassuring family and friends that asked about me that everything was fine. And that’s how I fundamentally grew up. My disability or what I later learned was a disability wasn't on the radar. I became adept at masking my struggles. I practiced the art of pretending, slipping into the roles that others expected of me, while feeling the weight of my realities. I navigated the school halls, without understanding the noise and chaos, traffic jam in my head. I soldiered on, eager to please. My schoolwork took a hefty knock, teachers noticed my struggles, but nothing was ever done to help me function in my school years. I was very young when some of the truth began to unravel. The specialist raising a question about my mental abilities when I was just 2 years old helped open the door, but it was simply a thought process that continued to remain tucked away. Nothing was done; I soldiered on, still living with physical, mental and emotional struggles.

I spent years feeling disconnected from my own reality, unable to understand why I was affected in certain ways. It took a long time to untangle the confusion and uncover the truth. When I finally began to understand, it was overwhelming at first, but gradually it became liberating. These revelations brought much-needed clarity to the hidden mental battles I had been fighting for so long. It wasn't until my forties that I received a late diagnosis of cerebral palsy, and then in my fifties, a diagnosis of autism, that everything began to make sense. The challenges with coordination, the struggles I faced in school, and the constant sense of sensory overload finally had explanations. But with this understanding came questions. Why had these truths not been acknowledged and why had no one confronted or dealt with them earlier? I did eventually manage to ask the question of why I wasn’t told, and what came back from my father I didn’t anticipate or expect to hear and which took me by surprise. Years on from that late conversation and my take on it, is that while my parents had spent years avoiding my disability, wanting me to be the same as my siblings, this wasn’t much about that, more about it was easier to ignore because then the whole situation would go away and it didn’t need to be addressed. My disability didn’t fit into their lives and as a result I continued to struggle and soldier on. It was never about protection because ignoring something as big as a disability doesn’t mean you’re protected – ignoring it will make you even more exposed. This was my life. It mattered to me – knowing who I am and why I've spent a lifetime struggling is important – understanding why I feel the way I do – they are a part of me that I needed to find acceptance on – we all have a right – no one should have to remain hidden. Through my writing – and for the first time I feel seen – as an individual with a profound story of resilience. Though the journey ahead isn’t easy, I have discovered strength in authenticity. With renewed purpose, I continue to advocate for myself, determined to navigate life on my terms. I embrace my unique perspective, learning to celebrate my differences and forge connections in a world that now feels a little less daunting. In my growth, I have found the power to rewrite my narrative, paving the way for others to do the same – a story no longer hidden, but shared, full of hope and possibility. Writing about my disability not only symbolises the light of understanding on a disability I knew nothing about, but the endless potential for me to have a brighter tomorrow."

For more relatable, inspirational and lifestyle blogs, please check out my site https://www.thecpdiary.com

[greymantledlady]

You have to think of it like table tennis! Lightly bouncing a small ball without much substance back and forth.

This feels silly to bother writing down but I know when I was younger and very shy these were all hard for me, so here's my scripts (as a front desk person who deals with hundreds of people every day). Once the script is started, a lot of people will fall into line with it instinctively. These also work for introverts and very busy people because there's a clear start and finish point with no need to prolong the conversation if not needed.

I have these nothing-conversations with people all day and don't use a single speck of brain power for them (though it definitely helps if you can manage to inject enough warmth into your voice and smile that the questions come off as genuinely interested. The exclamation marks are there for a reason.) This isn't even intended to be cynical; needing a script doesn't mean you don't care, but it also covers you for the times when you're personally exhausted or upset but still need to be professional.

Beginning of the day/Greetings/People arriving:

Speaker A: Hello! How are you?

Speaker B: Hello! I'm fine thanks! How about you? // Good thanks and you?

Speaker A: Good thank you!

Then smile as brightly as you can and go about what you were doing.

End of the day/Farewells/People leaving:

Speaker A: Goodbye! // See you later!

Speaker B: Bye! // See you later! Have a good afternoon/evening/weekend!

Speaker A: Thanks, you too!

Smile brightly, then go about what you were doing.

If you're feeling ambitious on a Friday or before a holiday you can add:

Speaker A: Do you have any plans for the weekend/holiday?

Speaker B: 1-2 short, simple sentences describing any specific plans that are okay to be shared (eg: Oh, I'm going kayaking with my friend. Should be fun!)

OR, No real plans yet, might see what [family member, person you live with] feels like doing.

OR, No, just having a quiet one this time!

Speaker B: Oh, that's nice/That sounds fun!

Then you can optionally repeat the process to ask the other person what they are doing for the holiday.

If someone tells you something sad (their pet died, they were sick on the weekend) and you don't know them that well:

You: Wow, that (really) sucks.

(for pet or human deaths, or serious/long-term illness. Soften voice, stop everything you are doing for a moment and if possible make eye contact to indicate sincerity.) I'm so sorry to hear that. (optional) That must be incredibly/so hard for you.

(for regular illness with no long-term effects) I hope you're feeling better // I hope you recover soon!

If someone tells you about something they're clearly happy about, like a new pregnancy/baby, big holiday, new pet:

Wow, that's so great! So happy for you! (Big, bright smile)

I feel like in the rush of “throw out etiquette who cares what fork you use or who gets introduced first” we actually lost a lot of social scripts that the younger generations are floundering without.

[keeekii]

Get to know me

°¦Name:

Kea Ki Jung

°¦Name meaning:

-Kea(pronounced Ke-ya, ke-yeah or

-Kia(yes like the car Kia) ): gifted

-Ki(pronounced Key) : Arisen

-Jung(pronounced Jeong) :young

°¦Nickname(so):

-Keke

-Keks

-KJ

-KiJ

-Mon Ange(this means “My Angel” in French, given to her by her mom, since her name also means Angel her mom thought it fit.)

-Buttercup(Her dad calls her this cause at one point,Kea's father learned about flowers so he can use the ones edible as ingredients to his meals he cooks at his restaurant, and once he found out meanings of some of the flowers he calls Kea them as nicknames, mostly Buttercup which means Joy, Youth, Purity, Happiness, Friendship, Playfulness, Cheerfulness and Sunshine.)

Birthdate: 15.04.2004

°¦Age:

19(turning 20)

°¦Zodiac sign:Aries

°¦Race:mixed-race(Asian and African, but is she had to choose she would probably say African since she looks African but with Korean features)

°¦Religion:she is either agnostic or Nondescript, but at times she might seem like a catholic, a lot of her mom's side of the family is catholic and Orthodox.

°¦Job:

-Content creator

-Independent Artist as of the moment

-Dance choreographer/teacher

-Sometimes helps her friend coach her basketball team(doesn't get paid to do this)

-volunteers in a lot of places depending on her schedule and time as well as her health(maybe, obviously doesn't get paid for this).

Gender:Female

Sexuality:

Straight

°¦Relationship:

Single

Languages:

-Setswana(fluent)

-Korean(fluent)

-English (fluent)

-Amharic (fluent)

-Mandarin (she is learning but is almost semi fluent, she still sorta trash to be honest)

-Zulu(semi fluent, she can also sorta seek Xhosa)

-Afrikaans(she can speak it enough, isn't bad at it, but she isn't semi fluent)

-French(fluent-ish)

-Spanish(almost semi fluent, is learning)

(he goal is to speak as many languages as she can so she can communicate with her fans with little language barriers, she is planning to learn Filipino)

°¦Primary values:

Top 3

1.)Honoring heritage and cultural diversity.

2.)Embracing both sides of their heritage and exploring their mixed racial identity.

3.)Honesty and integrity

°¦Voice tones:

Normal tone of voice:

Kea's tone of voice has been described as many things like such as a soft hoarse tone, low tone, modulated tone, orotund tone, sing song tone as well as smokey, but if you were to sum it up altogether just mix soft hoarse, modulated, orotund, sing song as well as smokey together and boom you have her tone of voice.

°¦Angry tone of voice:

When Kea is angry her tone of voice is smokey, rough, vivacious, petulant, stoush, witty, vitriolic, imperative, snappy, sour, low matter of fact breathy and throaty, she usually mainly gets irritated instead of angry and when she is irritated she prefers to just shut up and ignore whoever annoyed her or irritated her, maybe even ignore everyone else in the process.

°¦Sad tone of voice

Kea doesn't allows show signs of her being upset, it's usually just her not bothering to show it, she doesn't like to get into the topic unless necessary, but if you know her it's easy to tell when she is way to quiet, only responds with short sentences or her sentences are more logical?, her voice becomes breathy, flat, gravely, monotonous and sometimes sort of a low abjective tone of voice but not at the same time.

Happy tone of voice:

Kea's happy tone isn't much different from her normal tone just more upbeat, loud and more energy, though she begins to ramble a lot and talk fast, like very fast and it gets hard to understand what she is saying, she might switch between Korean and setswana mid sentence without knowing it.

Sick tone of voice:Kea's sick voice is a deep feminine voice, it's raspy, low, rough, breathy croaky, brittle at times, dead, flat, very gravelly, nasal, guttural, hoarse and very low adjective,though she prefers not to talk, she claims to like her sick voice better than her normal voice.

°¦Likes

-Place:The Montecasino Entertainment

-Complex and Gold Reef City(both in South Africa, Johannesburg)

-Color:Ube purple and Pigeon blue

-Element:Wind

-Food:Biltong and Doro wat

-Drink:Stoney

-Animal:Otters and clouded leopards

-Music:R&B and Hip-hop

-Clothes:Y2k and streetwear style, and some traditional clothing here and there.

-Season of year:Winter and autumn

Sport:Basketball, Skating(board and figure), dancing, gymnastics.

-Flower:White Buttercups and White/pink roses)

Special thing(s):

She is musically and sports talented, also academically talented but she had to and still has to work for that very much.

Object(s):

-Headphones

-Speaker

-ipad

Hobbies:

-Fitness

-art and musical

-cooking/baking

-Language learning

Extrovert or introvert?:

-seems like an introvert and sometimes can be seen acting like the definition of introvert but is actually a huge extrovert, by that I mean she sometimes prefers solitary activities to social gatherings just enjoying time alone and finding it peaceful or relaxing, she sometimes prefers to observe or listen rather than engage in conversations as well as Being more reserved or private in her feelings and behaviors a lot of the time.

Family

-Mother:

Akayang Lorelei Jung

Race:Black (Half Ethiopian and half Setswana)

-Father:

Jung Yongsun

Race:Asian(Korean)

-Siblings:

7 older brothers

-Cousins:

~5 cousins on dad's side

~10 on mom's side

-Aunts:

~3 on dad's side

~3 on mom's side

-Uncles:

~one on dads side

~7 mom's side

-Grandmas:

~one of dad's side

~one of mom's side

-Grandpas:

~one of dad's side

~one of mom's side

[thoughtsofnowandagain]

22 feb 2023 ...minus the trauma

Before I went on a trauma tangent about a 10 year old grudge, (unedited by the way! Really trying to keep it real and not the fluffier version) I thought it would be cool to look back at this and realise my problems get smaller with time and hopefully it'll help me see the bigger picture, that the hard stuff doesn't last as long as I think it would.

At the moment I really stressed about money. I'm at the end of my quiet period, so I know it's about to pick up soon but man it's been a difficult stretch. My cousins Alex and Jeremy are getting married, in two different countries, about 5 weeks apart. Alex is getting married to Katie in Paphos, Cyprus at the end of April, early May. Jeremy's getting married to Ayse in Bodrum, Turkey end of May, early June. Because they're abroad, we're going for a full week in both destinations so we have 2 holidays this spring, and 2 holidays to pay for too.

Alex and Katie's in Cyprus is an air bnb type of thing, so flights and accommodation has had to be paid straight away. My sister Sarah and mum have very nicely spotted me and sam because we didn't have a spare £700 each at that time and because theres 6 people going and it was in the best location, it needed to be done asap.

Jeremy and Ayse's in Turkey is a package holiday that we found on Jet 2. Which means it didn't have to be paid until next march, as in next week type of next march but we booked this in June so in our heads 'next march' is much further away than it actually is. So we're really scrambling for money to pay for that. it's also £700ish and I had £600 saved up before christmas but Sam bought a car and he needed £600 in cash so I had to give it to him last month. I'm low key kind of upset about that. Not that I had to lend money to him but more like now I'm having to find the money in a much less amount of time. He also said that he'd give it back before the deadline but it's a week away and he's given me £250 of it back so far and I don't think I'll be getting it back in time.

On top of this, we went to dinner with my family last monday for Sarah's birthday and sam overstayed the time limit on the car park so he had a parking ticket through the door yesterday. It's £45 and I just knew it would be easier to pay it myself with my own money rather than endure his 'I just won't go to these holidays, they're not even my own family getting married' tantrum. Which I know if I said that to him he'd say 'I wouldn't say that' but he would and has in the past.

I also had to pay £82 for fuel in my car yesterday which I know is unavoidable but that just makes it more painful to pay. I also have to pay for hello fresh now. Sam initially paid for it but he got too stressed about paying it so I switched it to my bank details so now I pay it.

I know the cat and the dog needs their raw food buying soon but I've paid for the last few lots and I can't ask sam to pay it. We also have a cleaner who comes every 2 weeks for £50 and although I can't live without her, we were supposed to half it but I pay for it every time.

Although I'm stressed about it, I know that if I speak to sam about it I know exactly what he'd say. He'd say how much he pays for the bills on the house, how the mortgage is like £500 every month, how he pays his Nana £200 every month for lending him the deposit on the house and how I don't send him 'rent'. I know he pays for a lot but the way I see it is, he earns more than me, he can actually afford that, it's a stretch yes but he can still afford it nonetheless.

I think I'll have to ask mum to pay for the holiday. She's already paying for Cyprus. I'm going to have to ask her to pay for Turkey. But she'll ask where that £600 has gone, because then she'll ask why Sam needed to borrow that money.

[georgiaheartsdilfs]

family events | sebastian stan x reader

my masterlist ↪M A S T E R L I S T

prompt ↪your family still invites sebastian to all of their family events despite the breakup. And sebastian actually goes.

warnings / other notes ↪ alcohol use, sort of.

Today was thanksgiving, meaning that every single family member would be coming or the ones we know anyways and that wasn't very much.

Placing the cover over the food on the table my mother walks up behind me "i hope you don't mind hunny, i've invited sebastian over." my heart sunk.

I hadn't seen Sebastian in months, not after the breakup because who would see their ex after breaking up with them. "darling?" my mother says pulling me out of my thoughts.

"it's fine, the kids love him." I clear my throat, Sebastian was a great guy to the kids and to me I think it was just the right person wrong time, the media noticed the breakup not long after it happened so he was visibly upset over it.

"besides, who knows he might not come." I shrug spinning around to my mother and she gives me a doubtful smile as did my sister walking up behind her.

My family were big supporters of Sebastian's work, they actually treat him like he was apart of this family. I mean he had done everything right in the eyes of my parents, sometimes i think they preferred him over me.

"Aunt Y/n" the kids come swarming in as my older brother and his partner Gemma come walking into the house with their plates, all the kids wrapping their arms around me "wheres uncle Seb?" my niece Scarlett asked.

Scarlett was Sebastian's favourite, secretly. He always bought her snacks and lollies, took her out places like to the movies.

"uhm, i don't know hunny he'll be here shortly" I smile to her "are you mad at uncle Seb, he is a good guy i promise." she says in her cute 5 year old voice.

"oh no, Scarlett hunny I love Uncle Seb he's just running a little late." i lie checking my watch. I was dreading the moment he walked through the door, because I knew I'd fall in love with him harder.

"gosh, i don't even know if he will co-" "guess who's here!" a familiar male voice says bursting into the house with two big boxes on each arm, all the kids run to him wrapping their arms around his legs "UNCLE SEB" they all yell in excitement.

"thats only half of them" my brother chuckles since our youngest sister hadn't quite made it.

"hey y/m/n" Sebastian says making his way around the room to my mother kissing her on the cheek "oh sebastian hunny, glad you can make it." my mother smiled to him and my father walked out "the man of the hour" my father says in a delightful tone opening his arms towards Sebastian wrapping them around him "y/f/n glad i came" he laughs.

Sebastian makes it to me before giving me nothing but a gentle smile "hey" his voice was quiet, almost like he had forgotten about me until now "kiss, kiss, kiss" all the kids said "maybe another time" I look down at the, disregarding their comment.

"let me help you" I clear my throat pushing my hair out of my face, grabbing a box out of his hand "they're just tiny gifts, i had made for everyone." he cleared his throat awkwardly "right i'll put them over here, follow me" I say awkwardly leading him to the fireplace placing the box down next to it.

"i need a drink." i huff walking to the fridge pulling out a bottle of Chardonnay before escaping out the back door to the large patio popping it open and shoving it against my lips.

Parting the bottle from my lips, I admire the night sky.

It felt like yesterday when I had broken up with Sebastian, not on bad terms or anything, I just felt like after 2 years there would be some sort of change in the relationship maybe like getting a pet or something but I didn't even want a pet, I just expected it you know. I expected every typical wattpad relationship.

Maybe half an hour passes and my youngest sister arrives with her two kids "y/n" my father walks out, I spin around to see my father against the closed back door "that's some good chardonnay going to waste." he says crossing his arms as I look down at the bottle to see half of it gone.

Yet I didn't feel the slightest bit buzzed "drowning in your sorrows, a trait of mine" he mumbles stepping closer to me "admittedly not the best trait of mine you got." he huffed taking the bottle off of me "oh come on, it's thanksgiving" I whine.

"yes and im giving thanks to you giving me the bottle." he says "now come on, your sister is here, you can eat." he says placing a hand on my back and I nod standing up and following him into the house.

"Aunty Y/n!!" my youngest sisters boys come running into my arms "hey jack, hey desmond." I smile hugging them both "right, shall we?" my mother asks pointing to the table.

All the kids run over to the table sitting down, I look over to Sebastian who already seemed to be looking at me.

"y/n are you hungry?" my father asks and I burp "oh sorry, uh no i'm fine." i mumble, i think the wine was catching up with me and not in the mindset way more like the gas way.

Continuing to stare at Sebastian who was now serving himself a plate I walk over to the kitchen island, sitting at it like the black sheep. The bottle of chardonnay placed right in front of me.

Then he sits next to me, the bloody idiot sits next to me as if it weren't awkward enough him being here.

"how are you?" he asks "living my best life, and you?" i lie "just fine" he shrugs. "did you know i was coming?" he asked not making eye contact "if i did, i wouldn't have come. To save my misery." I mumble eyeing the half empty bottle that was begging to be drunken.

"alright, so why didn't you leave." he mumbles "why did you come, it's my blood." i mumble back, he came off rude and harsh although that probably wasn't his intention... i hope.

"do you have another question?" i clear my throat "do you think about me often?" he huffs turning to look at me, the loud chatter from my family thankfully continued but my brain stopped working.

"uh- i -uhm i- wh-w-" i start uncontrollably stuttering "i'll take that as a yes" he says eating his food and I roll my eyes snatching the bottle drinking the rest of it.

Everyone finishes eating, putting their plates in the dishwasher "present times" Sebastian says getting all the kids excited "all the kids sit in a circle alright, i'll give your presents." he smiles walking over ot the boxes as the kids sit in a circle.

Handing them each their presents, Scarlett, Desmond, Jackson, Deziray, Cody and Mya. All the kids squeal in excitement ripping the paper of their presents.

Sebastian continues to hand out the presents to my siblings, parents and then he gets to me "here you are my love" he whispers before sitting down "sebastian you didn't have to" Gemma smiled to him hugging him "i insist, you all treat me like family." he says.

My present was small, I wasn't complaining it was probably something amazing knowing him but I'd rather open it by myself because I'd probably cry.

The night was coming to an end, all the kids started yawning as did some adults so after we all tidied up I walked out to the back since we usually watch a movie at the end of thanksgiving to end the night.

The moon was the only thing in the sky, I sat down on the patio. My hand in my pocket still holding onto the present Sebastian gave me.

"I notice you didn't open my gift." he said walking outside "I notice you called me your love, still." I mumble as he sits down next to me once again "open it." he insists.

"what- no" i say "open it." he insists once again, I sigh pulling the small box out of my pocket as Sebastian opens his beer drinking it slowly.

Unravelling the ribbon, then tearing the paper revealing a black box. A small black box, I look over to him and he nods at the box. I open the box to reveal it was a ring.

A ring I had specifically told Sebastian to get me once we were married "we aren't getting married" he paused "so i thought i'd get it for you anyways since i know how much you loved it." he said giving me a fake smile looking up to the moon.

Pulling the ring out putting it on my ring finger, perfect fit.

"you and i may have ended things, you know. But you are and always will be the best thing that happened to me." he sighed "I just thought that the only way I'd contact you is by coming here" he continued.

"all the things i could say instead i bought you that ring, so you remember me when you're big and famous." he chuckles as a tear trickles down his cheek "sebastian" i whisper looking from him to my hand.

"look y/n, if this is the last time we see each other. I just want you to know, I love you in this universe, in the past and in the next. I love you in every universe." he smiles to me placing a hand on my cheek.

He gets up and randomly starts dancing with a smile "besides, you'd miss these dance moves anyways" he says making me laugh as tears roll down my cheek.

"i'm kinda glad you came to the family event." i say licking the inside of my cheek "yeah?" he says sitting back down and I nod.

"i mean i was dreading it, seeing you again. I pelt back a whole bottle of chardonnay for crying out loud." I say loudly and he laughs placing a hand on mine "I don't think I could get you out of my mind." he says "neither".

[the-lone-witch-and-secret-room]

Camila Noceda and Flawed Parenting

A perspective by a flawed person with loving but extremely flawed parents

I’m genuinely baffled at some people’s hostile reaction towards Camila. Like… do any of you have flawless parents that always know the best solution instantly, make no mistakes and never get emotional?

My parents are great. They’re super supportive and I love them very, very much. Overall I think I got very lucky in the parents department.

But god, they are far from flawless. I still live at home, and despite all the good, there’s moments when I can’t take my dad anymore. He’s the kind of dad that stayed up until two am to help me with homework when I was in school, and he does so, so many things to make sure I’m happy. I know that. But despite all of this, I have told my mom in emotional moments before that I’m not sure if I can keep living with him, because for all his good sides, he has a couple of fatal flaws that sometimes make him unbearable.

My mom listens to me and is very open to being educated on certain topics, but she has her flaws, too. She hates when I fight with my dad, and gets so torn up about it that I’ve once apologized to my dad out of fear of her getting into a car crash otherwise. She’s very vocal about certain flaws of mine, and sometimes uses the things she does for me as leverage against me when she gets very emotional.

And both of my parents pay a lot more attention to my brother because he needs it more, because he’s more of a “problem child” while I “seem so capable” even when I’m not.

And guess what? I’m not a perfect child. I make mistakes sometimes, some of them pretty severe. Just like Luz, I’m the kind of person that struggles to communicate certain issues of mine to her parents. I’m stubborn, and when I get emotional, I say very hurtful things sometimes. So do they.

And this has nothing to do with my parents being horrible or abusive. They’re neither of those things.

The takeaway from this should not be that my entire family is made up of terrible people, but that we’re all flawed in our own ways, despite loving each other and trying our best. There’s things about my parents I wish I could change, and there are things about me that my parents wish they could change. And to an extent, that’s perfectly normal.

In our strengths and flaws and frustration with each other, we’re all human.

Specific, spoiler-y Camila and Luz things under the cut since this got very long.

We have no indication that Camila has a pattern of emotionally manipulating Luz. Her “emotional manipulation” as I’ve seen some people put it, is people for some reason thinking that the second you become an adult, you’re suddenly perfect and can no longer make mistakes, lest you’ll be dubbed horrible and abusive.

The whole concept is absurd to me. There is no perfect way to parent. There simply isn’t. Of course, there’s some genuinely abusive patterns that are horrible and inexcusable. But out of the parenting styles that aren’t, which one works depends on a number of factors, one of which absolutely includes that every child is different and has different needs. Camila is an amazing parent for Vee, giving the kid everything she’s ever longed for. She’s not an ideal parent for Luz. And that’s because Luz and Vee have fundamentally different needs.

Likewise, Luz is a pretty great child for Eda, but not a perfect fit for Camila. Luz relates to Eda a lot more than she relates to her mom, and that’s why the two of them have an easier time understanding each other. Both of these mother-child relationships exist, and one is not more doomed to fail than the other, but I think you’ll agree that the better you understand someone and where they’re coming from, the easier it is to communicate, pick up on certain signs, etc.

As mom and daughter, Camila and Luz are both flawed and have issues seeing the other’s perspective because of how different they are. And we should simultaneously acknowledge both of their roles in the issue and give both of them the space to learn and grow past those issues.

Luz struggles to communicate her problems. She doesn’t want to burden people in the demon realm, and it’s a given that this started out as not wanting to burden her mom. So she keeps quiet about her issues. Camila tries hard but can’t read her daughter’s mind, so there’s only so much she can do to understand and help the way Luz needs her to. Hell, Eda, who Luz is a lot more open with than her mom, struggles to help her, because Luz doesn’t tell her what’s wrong. I don’t see anyone calling Eda a terrible mom for that.

Camila tries her best, but she struggles to understand her daughter because of this, and because of how fundamentally different they are. She loves Luz’s creativity, we actively see her supporting it in the new episode—she keeps the weird stuff Luz made because she thinks Luz will regret throwing it away, and even plays along in what she assumes to be some elaborate role play because “she’s glad Luz kept her creativity even though it’s not made things easy for her at school”. But at the beginning of the show, said creativity got out of hand and people got hurt. Luz could’ve gotten hurt. So of course Camila had to interfere. I love Luz dearly, but she thought it was okay to bring snakes to school and set off fireworks inside a school building. Creativity is great. Doing reckless stuff that causes people to get hurt is not.

In sending Luz to camp, Camila tried to have someone else fix her issue because she didn’t know how to help Luz. That was a mistake, and a bad one at that, but she’s realizing that. She looks disheartened when Vee tries to throw out Luz’s stuff, because she never meant to change her daughter or take that part of her away. She just thought Luz needed a reality check—which, for the record, is something the narrative actually agrees with.

Luz spends her time in the demon realm getting reality check after reality check, realizing that even her ideal fantasy world where she has everything she always wanted doesn’t mean she’s free of consequences. She goes overboard constantly, causing:

-Eda to be forced to fly into a trap because Luz is chasing a fantasy (Witches before Wizards)

-Eda to almost be branded by her sister because Luz doesn’t think through why Eda doesn’t use magic to publicly announce her presence constantly (Once Upon a Swap)

-Eda and the twins to get kidnapped by a Slitherbeast because Luz stole Amity’s wand (Adventures in the Elements)

-Her friends to get hurt when she goes overboard trying to help Willow (Wing it like Witches)

-Eda to be captured and almost petrified because Luz thought she could just steal from the Emperor with no consequences in an attempt to help (Agony of a Witch)

I’m like 90% sure these aren’t even all. None of those make her a terrible person, for the record, but as all humans are, she is flawed and makes bad choices. She learns from these experiences and matures, just like her mom had hoped she would at camp. She’s also made friends there, which was another thing Camila wanted for her daughter.

You’ll probably realize that a lot of Luz’s behaviors I mentioned follow one of two patterns: 1. Luz’s idealized fantasy world causing problems, when she walks around with rose tinted glasses and gets people in trouble in the process because she hasn’t thought about the consequences, and 2. Luz trying to help someone she loves, but instead making things worse in the progress. The issue with this one is often that she doesn’t communicate her ideas/listen to the people she’s trying to help—like when Willow and Gus said they’ve had enough of Grudgby, or how she never actually talks to Eda about the healing hat idea before doing something reckless.

…does the latter one sound familiar to you at all? No? Because it’s the exact same thing that Camila did.

Some of the things Luz does are reckless and actively endanger others and herself, and that’s something that I think we need to acknowledge before judging Camila. As Luz’s mom, it’s Camila’s job to interfere in those situations. That she made a mistake while trying to protect Luz doesn’t make her a terrible person, especially as, again, the narrative proves her right to an extent.

I’m not saying her making Luz promise to come back and stay isn’t something that hurt Luz—it absolutely is. But it was born out of desperation. She’s emotional and in shock. She’s so full of pain and regret. She just wants her fourteen year old daughter home safe, and there’s nothing abusive or even morally ambiguous about that.

From Luz’s perspective, what she says is absolutely heartbreaking, but from Camila’s, it’s perfectly reasonable. I doubt Camila has the full picture, but even if she does, she’s had a full fifteen seconds to process that her daughter has not only been lying to her for months, but chose to leave her, and is in the demon realm of all places. Of course she’d be emotional and upset about that! Who wouldn’t? Camila isn’t a robot. If she’d been calm about this I’d be way more concerned, honestly.

My parents don’t get mad that easily, but if I would lie to them for weeks on end, they’d be pissed off too, not even taking the running away from home part into account. That’s a normal thing. People don’t like being lied to. Camila is absolutely devastated in that moment because she’s scared that Luz left because she hates her, when Luz actively states that her leaving wasn’t about her mom—which is another thing we should really be acknowledging.

Abusive parents suck and abuse should obviously never be apologized or trivialized, but saying something hurtful in the heat of the moment isn’t the same thing as being an abusive parent. My parents have done this. I’ve done this. And yes, those things can be emotionally manipulative, but there’s a huge difference in whether that’s a habit or a person speaking out of hurt and desperation in a very specific context. I doubt there’s anyone on the entire planet that hasn’t had a bad moment where they’ve said something like this because they were hurting. People lash out when they hurt, and they beg for reassurance when they’re scared. That’s something we all do.

The whole mindset of “all parents have to be perfect and can never get upset or make any mistakes” is harmful as hell, and honestly also very unrealistic. No parent is perfect, and especially people like me who have a relationship with their parents that’s very good overall should know that.

Once you have a child, parenting is a non-stop learning process, every day for the rest of your life. Taking away that room to grow and expecting perfection isn’t helping anyone, especially not struggling single parents.

And I see Camila as someone who is very willing to learn, because at the end of the day, all she wants is for Luz to be happy. Let’s give her some time to wrap her head around this whole situation. Let’s see what she says once she sees for herself how happy Luz is in that world, may it be via the videos eventually coming through or Camila visiting and meeting Luz’s found family, her friends and her girlfriend.

Ultimately, I don’t think Camila will force Luz to stay at home, but we have to give her some time. She wants what’s best for Luz, and she’s gonna need some convincing that a dangerous magical world is what’s best. I feel like that’s very normal considering the circumstances.

Her and Luz need to work on their communication on both ends, they both have things to learn, but I’m certain they’ll manage to fix their relationship in the long run.

If the bunk bed is any indication, I think Vee is gonna stay in the human realm permanently while Luz sleeps at home but keeps attending Hexside in the daytime. That feels like a solution that keeps everyone happy, and allows Luz to spend time with all the people she loves. I can’t see her being forced to choose at the end.

As a closing statement: Eda isn’t an ideal mom, Amity isn’t an ideal friend or girlfriend and neither is Luz, Lilith isn’t an ideal sister… but that’s because no one is ever an ideal anything. Being flawed is a big part of being human. Everyone has different facets to their personality. Their flaws are what makes them such great, relatable, believable characters.

And I feel the same way about Camila. She’s an extremely believable character that reminds me of my own parents, flawed but very loving nonetheless.

(Also honestly, I think it’s pretty telling that some of you guys immediately bash the black single mom that’s obviously trying her hardest while giving the benefit of the doubt to Alador, who has been portrayed as neglecting and threatened his six year old daughter on screen. This was already a thing before we knew much about either of them, and I’m disappointed but unfortunately not very surprised that it still is.)

[otakusheep15]

It’s straight up been six (6) months since I’ve written the first half of this lol, but here we are. Finally getting to the little bros, yay! @saffron-kyotaro so sorry for taking this long lol, hope you enjoy it. 

Go read the first part if you wanna see the lead-up to the actual scenarios, but you don’t have to if you don’t want. 

MC’s Past Trauma (pt 2)

Satan

Immediately stops yelling the moment you run out the room

He knows it’s probably a bad idea to go after you while he’s still in his angry state, so he goes to his room for a bit to chill off

Thinking back on it, the original topic of the fight wasn’t even all that major, and Satan should have known better than to let it get to such a point

It takes a while, but eventually, Satan is able to calm himself down and works up the nerve to go look for you

He finds you in your room, and you look like an absolute wreck

By now, the tears have stopped, but you have yet to try and fix your appearance at all, and you’re clearly still shaken up

Satan completely understands if you don’t want to talk to him, especially after what you just saw

At first, he’s not really sure how to approach the situation

The last thing he wants is to make you uncomfortable by invading your space, but he also feels that it would be awkward if he doesn’t do anything

For now, he just sits at your desk and waits for you to make the first move, and he’d honestly wait forever if you needed

If you decide to talk to him, Satan listens very intently and doesn’t interrupt until you’re done speaking

Regardless if you’re ranting about your past trauma or simply telling him off for fighting, he listens and truly takes in all you have to say

If you can’t bring yourself to talk, Satan understands and won’t push you

Instead, he’ll ask if you need anything, such as a snack or some water, or maybe even just a hug

Whatever you decide, he’s super quick to give it to you, and he doesn’t complain at all

In Satan’s mind, it’s the least he can do to make up for scaring you like that 

Asmodeus

He was probably live streaming the whole argument

Or just sitting there, laughing at his brothers for getting into such a dumb fight

When you run off, his happy, albeit mocking, demeanor is gone, and replaced with concern

Asmo has never seen you run off like that, and he’s immediately following you to make sure nothing is wrong

Eventually, he finds you in your room, and his heart absolutely shatters 

He hates seeing you like this, especially when he or his brothers are to blame

Definitely much gentler than most of his brothers when it comes to comfort

Keeps his distance for a bit so as not to scare you any further

Asmo is the type to wait for you to come to him instead of crowding you right away

He’ll give you as much time as you need, even if it takes all night

When you do come to him, he is ready to give you whatever you may need

If you want a snack or drink, he is running to the kitchen without any hesitation to grab you something 

If you want a bath, he’ll draw you one, and he’ll even use his fancy products if you want him to

Even if you just want a hug, Asmo gives some of the best hugs around, and he’ll hold you for as long as you need

Does not ask you any questions since he doesn’t want to send you back into that headspace by accident

He’ll listen if you wanna talk about it, but he won’t pry if you wish to keep it quiet

Asmo also makes sure you know his brothers didn’t mean to upset you, and that they also feel very sorry 

Offers to spend the night with you so that you won’t be alone, and so that he can watch over you

Beelzebub

Beel is not one to engage in much family drama

Usually, he’s just there to defuse the situation when it gets too out of hand

In this situation, I imagine he was standing around, waiting just in case he was needed 

When he sees you run off, he’s quick to follow you to make sure nothing’s wrong

Before he even gets to you, Beel can kind of guess what’s wrong right away 

He figures it had something to do with the yelling, even if he doesn’t know the full story

Beel’s natural form of comfort is food, so that’s what he relies on to comfort you right now

Once he checks on you to make sure nothing is going to scare you again, he runs down to the kitchen to get you a snack

I imagine Beel is also the type to stalk up on any foods or snacks you might like, both from the Human World and the Devildom

He gets every snack he knows you enjoy, and heads back to your room

Seeing you in the same position as before is a good sign to him, since it means nothing big has happened since he left

He’ll sit down near you, not too close just in case, and he’ll put down the pile of food between you

Beel isn’t the best at words, so he chooses to stay quiet for now, knowing you’ll come to him when you’re ready

For now, he sits next to you, trying his best to refrain from eating all of the snacks since he brought them for you

If you do decide to vent to Beel, he’s a great listener, and will let you talk about whatever you want to without saying a word

He’s not the best with advice, but he is pretty decent at reassurance, and that’s exactly what he does

Beel reassures you that none of his brothers will hurt you while you’re here, and especially not while he’s around

But if you’re not feeling up to talking, he understands

He does try and encourage you to eat, even if only a little, since he knows it’ll help you gain some strength back 

Beel is also good for hugs if you want them, and he is very gentle and soft with you

Belphegor

Belphie also isn’t one for fighting all that often, so he’s probably just lounging off to the side, watching shit go down

Honestly, he usually finds his brothers’ fighting to be pretty entertaining, so he’s never really minded it

When he sees you run off in tears, he’s confused, and even considers just leaving you be

In his experience, when someone runs off crying, they usually want to be alone for a while

But something else compels him to follow you, so he gets up and walks to your room

Debates on whether or not he should go in when he still hears you crying, but decides to just screw it and walk in

Even if he’s good at masking it, he is genuinely distraught at seeing how messed up you look in this moment

To be honest, he’s not the best at comfort since he’s usually the one receiving comfort from his brothers, but he tries his best

Most likely just flops down on your bed and sits there in silence

He knows it’s probably not the best idea for him to talk first, so he waits patiently for you to come to him

In the meantime, he slowly begins getting closer to you, careful to to make you uncomfortable or scare you off

With your consent, he pulls you down and cuddles you until you start to feel a bit better

At this point, Belphie is all ears if you wanna talk

If you do decide to rant to him, he listens very well 

He also makes sure you know that his brothers meant you no harm, and that they certainly felt sorry about upsetting you

However, he gets if you don’t want to talk, and he offers to just stay with you and cuddle longer

The two of you will likely stay cuddled up for the whole night, and Belphie makes sure you get plenty of rest

[absolutelyfizzing]

Sifu Hotman

zuko x water tribe sibling!reader

request - I want to request a Zuko x fem reader being Sokka and Katara's sister. She can be the older sister or sokka's twin sister. Also when they start dating Sokka and Katara can like threaten him by saying don't hurt my sister or else.

A/N - This is taking place after the war, I'm vaguely uncomfy writing for underage people (or like younger than 17) so I just went ahead and aged them up. I'm sorry if that's not what you were wanting! I'm also sort of ignoring the plot of the comics and stuff and we are ignoring Mai's existence. I don't feel like this was my best writing by any means but i tried and i thought it was a cute idea. There will probably be more zuko x reader coming soon

word count - 2000

MASTERLIST

You took a deep breath in, the warm air refreshing after having just spent the last month in the southern water tribe with your family besides Katara who was off saving lives with Aang. Your twin brother stood beside you, his hair grown out and tied into a ponytail. Your sister would be here in the fire nation in a week with Aang. It had been three years since the war, you had just been kids at the time. You and Sokka were 15 during the last battle and you had felt so old then. Now, looking back, you had been immature and childish but you had grown up. After the war ended you remained in the fire nation for a few months. You had wanted to get a little bit of quiet before you started going on more adventures with your brother.

You had been very close with Zuko while he was traveling with you and the gang. You didn't know why but you trusted him, maybe it was because you trusted Toph's judgement but either way you had accepted him quicker than the others. You remembered how cold the rest of the group had been to him and it almost was funny to you now considering that Katara had just told you a story in a recent letter about Toph, Aang, and Zuko getting into a bickering match about fire flakes that ended in Toph trapping both of the boys into a earth tent. It was also hard to comprehend that Zuko was the new Firelord and he ruled over a whole nation.

It had been 2 years since you saw Zuko in person. It wasn't on purpose but you kept getting pulled in different directions, none of them leading you into the fire nation. You were excited but also scared to see him, butterflies filling your stomach at the thought of seeing him. You'd had a bit of a crush on the new Firelord when you last saw him but you refused to tell either of your siblings, knowing that they would threaten him to high heaven before he even knew about it.

Your brother walking beside you calmed you a bit, his presence being comforting to you. He was much taller than you now and he was more confident than the kid he had been during the war. You knew that the same was true for Aang, though he never grew up in personality. As you approached the gates of the palace you wondered if Zuko had changed.

You realized that he had as the gates opened and he was stood on the steps up to the palace waiting for both of you. His hair was long and it was pulled into a messy bun. His scar was no longer shrouded in his bangs and he seemed more confident in his stance. His robes were long and elegant and you wondered if he wore them by choice of if they were required because of his position. Your brother jogged slightly to get to Zuko faster, having grown to hold a strong bond with the man. You walked calmly but there was a smile on your face as your brother and Zuko embraced. Once the released each other Zuko turned to you. You noticed him gulp a bit and a blush threatened to cover your cheeks. Your grin became wider the closer you got to him and soon you were wrapped in his embrace.

You noticed that his frame was larger. You leaned your head back from the hug to look at his face and he looked well. Like he was happy and maybe even getting enough sleep.

"Hey there, Sifu Hotman." You smiled and Zuko rolled his eyes as he released you from the hug.

"I see we haven't matured in 2 years?" He grunts but you can see the smile trying to creep onto his face. "Toph still calls me that too." He grumbled lowly and you started laughing.

"Where is the little demon?"

"She's away dealing with some prisoners for me. She should be back in a week or so." Zuko smiled. "She's taken up a pretty important role here. She's like my personal lie detector. She likes to sit in on council meetings and scare everyone."

"I think that's actually her dream job." You smiled and Zuko hummed in agreement. There was a bit of a silence as you and Zuko just gazed at each other. He seemed so sure now. You had missed him dearly.

"Okay! Let's get this show on the road, people!" Sokka yelled and you internally groaned that he had to ruin the moment. Before you all turned toward the palace, Zuko sent you a wink and you felt a blush cover your face. As you headed up the steps of the palace you felt a comforting hand on your lower back as the Fire Lord gently followed behind you, Sokka running ahead of you, likely to find the food in the kitchens that he was accostomed to spending all of his time in.

"Can I speak to you in private when we get a moment?" Zuko asks and again your heart rate picks up. You turn your head to look at him.

"Of course" You smiled and he smiles back at you, making your head spin a bit. You spent the next few hours meeting new advisors, getting a tour through new parts of the palace, and catching up with Zuko who seemed to be acting more clingy than you had ever remembered him to be.

"Y/N, would you mind coming with me?" Zuko asked and you turned to face him with a smile.

"Of course!" You chirped as he led you to a secluded hallway away from your brother who was discussing war strategy with an advisor of Zuko's.

When you reached a place where you were out of earshot of others Zuko gently took your hands.

"I have something to confess." He stated and you felt fire on your cheeks, you nodded for him to continue, "I'm in love with you. I have been for years and I've never acted on it because there was always something going on and I was so unsure but now-" he gazed into your eyes with sincerity, "I couldn't be more sure. I want to be with you. If you'd have me, that is." Instead of answering you jumped forward, pressing your lips onto Zuko's in a searing kiss. He groaned and pushed back, trapping you against a wall. He pulled away to press his forehead into yours and you closed your eyes for a moment before opening them again and gazing at the man in front of you.

"Katara is gonna kill you." You mumbled and Zuko smiled.

"You aren't worried about Sokka?"

"I just know that Sokka can't win in a fight against you. Katara on the other hand..." you trailed off and Zuko looked offended.

"That's pretty rude to say to the man who just confessed his love for you."

"I'm just being honest. Toph might have some words too."

Zuko shuddered at the thought of what they could do to him. Sokka would be upset but he could probably handle it. Aang would be happy for both of them he was sure, always the peacemaker and moderator. Aang would probably be the only reason that Katara wouldn't attack Zuko immediately.

Over the next week you snuck around with Zuko, taking alone time any chance that you got. Sokka rarely let you get any peace as he stayed with you nearly constantly. He was always a little on the defence with you and he would likely settle in and ease up over the coming weeks as he got used to the new environment. You were never a huge fighter, though you could hold your own. You also couldn't bend. You were the one of the group who took care of everyone, you were the smartest in strategy by far, and you were the only one who could reason with Toph. Because of this, Sokka had gotten used to just being near you in case anything happened, though it was rare that anything did. You appreciated it normally but now you wanted time alone so that you could spend it with Zuko as you got used to being in a relationship that was more than platonic. But today was the day that the rest of the gang was arriving, even Suki would be joining you so you hoped that would take some of the clingy-ness of Sokka away. You all stood at the front of the palace, much like Zuko had stood for you a week earlier, and watched as Appa approached in the distance. He flew gently in front of you and as soon as he landed in front of you he licked you with his giant tongue and you were covered in slobber. Despite this you couldn't be happier to see the giant animal and you embraced him. You were suddenly pulled away and brought into the arms of your little sister.

"I missed you, Y/N." She mumbled into your neck and you smiled into hers, it had been so long since you had seen her and you felt tears come to your eyes at the relief of having her near.

You spent the next hours catching up with Katara and Aang, who had grown to be taller than you since you last saw him. Toph and Suki arrived that night and you were all glad to be together again at last, old memories coming back and filling you all with joy. You and Zuko looked at each other and you took a deep breath. You had discussed that you would be revealing your relationship to the rest of the group when you were all together but you were nervous for their reactions.

"So... I have something I would like to tell you guys." You stated and all of the conversation died down, all eyes suddenly on you. "Me and Zuko are together." You rushed out and you only got blank stares for a moment before there was groaning from Toph and Sokka.

"You couldn't have waited another year? I didn't think you would have figured it out by now." Toph grumbled and pulled some coins out of her pocket, Sokka doing the same. Suki and Katara held out their hands and money got dropped into them, both with smug looks on their faces. Zuko looked over at you and had the same look of shock that you likely did.

"What?" You mumbled.

"We all knew you were going to get together of course, you've been pining after each other for years, but me and Suki said you would be getting together this month and Toph said in a year. Sokka actually said in 3 months so he was closer than Toph was." Katara stated simply and you still just stared at her, mouth agape. "We also talked about the fact that if he hurts you," Her gaze shifted to a nervous looking Zuko, "we would all be committing some crimes."

"I feel like I should clarify that those crimes include maiming and murder." Sokka glared at Zuko and he gulped.

"But I'm so happy for you two!" Katara exclaimed, her attitude shifting completely. You and Zuko stared at each other in shock and then you smiled at him. You were so happy to finally be together and to have your friends around you.

[phoenixyfriend]

Auntie ‘Soka and Little Leia (and Rex)

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

Listen. You all knew this was coming.

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

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

Rated T, gen.

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

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

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

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

Reminder that none of them have been born yet.

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

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

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

(Ahsoka can fake Mandalore. Sometimes.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

That, of course, is when things get interesting.

Specifically, Ahsoka spots a Mandalorian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wanna explain why your kid has my face?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are you staying?”

“What?” Leia bites out.

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

Well, kriff you too, Ahsoka thinks.

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

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

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

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

“For free?” Rex demands.

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

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

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

“Yeah?”

“How much?”

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

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

Leia glowers, cute and furious. “No.”

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

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

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

“You’ve got conditions,” he guesses.

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

“Yeah?”

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

“You’re children, I wouldn’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There are other risks.”

“There are.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You already know my name.”

“I do.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My last fight--”

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

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

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

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

“Jedi?”

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

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

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

“Bit young for that.”

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

“Not in command.”

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

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

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

This part of the story is his.

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s the difference?”

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

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

“Time travel.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s say I believe you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That why you’re special?”

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

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

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

Rex grins. It is not a kind expression.

“Let me tell you about Kamino.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Caf?”

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

“Whiskey?”

“That’s a definitely shouldn’t.”

“Hoth chocolate?”

“...please.”

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

“Do I ask what it was this time?”

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

“Try me anyway.”

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

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

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

She can feel the tears. Fuck..

“You want to dull the edges.”

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

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

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

“You’re hard on yourself.”

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

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

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

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

“Auntie ‘Soka? Why’d you stop?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ahsoka feels light-headed.

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

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

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

It’s Depa.

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

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

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

“Are you Depa?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then Depa is standing right in front of her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s like the start of a sick joke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Auntie Soka? You’re shivering.”

Is she?

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

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

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

Does she?

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

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

Right. That.

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

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

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

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

That was a forgone conclusion.

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

She does.

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

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

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

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

She feels more like a person come morning.

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

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

“Feeling better?”

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

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

Ahsoka nods slowly. “Okay.”

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

Her complete spiral into nonbeing?

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

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

Of course it isn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She already told Jango Fett, of all people.

“Padawan Torrent?”

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

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

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

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

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

"No, thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’ve done this before.”

“Regularly,” she confirms. “You?”

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

“Fett?”

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

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

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

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

“And you just kept doing it.”

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

He doesn’t answer her.

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

Rex greets them before she does.

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

She recognizes one of them.

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

“Jedi,” Ahsoka grunts. “Here.”

“I see.”

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

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

One human, one Kiffar. She knows the latter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not like they know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Um,” Quinlan says. “I just--”

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

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

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

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

She definitely preempted the actual flirtation.

Fuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What was what?”

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

That’s pretty true.

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

“Yeah, we can tell.”

“Leia.”

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

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

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

“Stop.”

“I’m serious, you--”

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

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

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

“I get it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jango never does ask what she did with the slavers.

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

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

“GAR?”

“Grand Army of the Republic.”

He finally looks at her.

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

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

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

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

Ahsoka shrugs. “Yeah, well--”

“You said the clones were ten.”

There’s the rub, isn’t it?

Of course it was about the clones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That one gets her an odd look.

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

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

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

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

“That was inappropriate, padawan.”

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

“Um, so--”

“How old is the kid?” Fett interrupts.

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

“And how old am I?”

“...early thirties?”

“I’m twenty-seven.”

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

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

Quinlan rallies. “So, brothers?”

Tholme sighs loudly, hand over his eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Drop your elbow.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hm?”

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

“And you?”

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

��Are you going to spar with the Jedi?”

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

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

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

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

Would she be able to hold back as she fought?

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

“Do you think you can?” Rex asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leia glares at him next.

“So, Kamino?”

“Planet by Rishi,” Rex says.

“Why were you there?”

“They specialize in cloning.”

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

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

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

He licks her palm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Whose idea was this?”

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

“Did he know he was volunteering?”

“No comment.”

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

Ahsoka shrugs. “Constructive bullying?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Know... what?” Ahsoka asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will you be telling Vos?” She asks.

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

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

“This family?” Tholme repeats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey!”

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

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

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

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

“I don’t have sleeves.”

“Armwarmers-slash-greaves, then.”

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

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

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

Tholme lights his saber and sinks into an opening stance.

Ahsoka mirrors him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” Quinlan sighs. “I know.”

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

Then fucking Denon happens.

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

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

Fuel.

Paperwork.

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

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

It’s just a pit stop.

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

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

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

“Language,” Tholme says, voice idly unconcerned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hah. That slang doesn’t even exist yet.

“Great. With me!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Commander?”

“Hm?”

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

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

“Who’s getting steamrolled?”

“Uh, Maul’s here,” Ahsoka admits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t call me that.”

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

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

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

He’s examining a papaya.

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

“Are you imagining a flying kick, Sir?”

“Yeah...”

“He’s examining a papaya, Sir.”

“I know...”

“Does he know we’re here?”

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

“No.”

“Should I hit on him?”

“No, Sir. I would not advise that.”

“He’s looking at the neloms.”

“I can see that.”

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

“It appears so, Sir.”

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

“Seems it.”

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

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

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

Ahsoka waves. “Hi, Master Tholme.”

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

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

“Is it now.”

Rex shifted. “He’s on the move!”

“To kill someone?!”

“No, to the deli meats.”

“Kriff.”

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

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

This was true and accurate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A baby,” Rex agrees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rex snorts derisively.

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

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

“You’re useless,” Leia tells her.

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s a Sith.”

“He’s fifteen, it’s tacky.”

“But it’s Maul.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay?”

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

“Oh, yes please.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quinlan is not impressed by the claim of Sith.

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

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

“Uh, decent?”

“Great! Fett’s the projectile!”

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

“I’m wh--”

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

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

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

Hm.

That definitely dislocated something.

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

He’s utterly silent.

That’s disturbing. Expected, but disturbing.

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

“No, Vos threw you.”

“Because you told him to!”

“Yeah, it’s a good strategy!”

“It is not!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, Master Tholme has them.”

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

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

Rex snorts.

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

“About?”

“Throwing people being standard practice for the GAR.”

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

“What’s the GAR?” Quinlan asks.

“None of your damn business,” Fett snaps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am not a child!” Maul spits.

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

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

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

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

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

“I--what? No, that’s--what?”

Ahsoka smiles brightly. “You asked.”

Tholme finally shows up with the cuffs.

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

“You should eat something.”

He glares at her.

“Baby Sith Lords need to eat.”

He keeps glaring at her.

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

He bares his teeth.

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

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

“Not to.”

“And what are you doing?”

“Making him eat his vegetables.”

“Soka.”

“Rex’ika.”

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

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

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

“I’m allowed to be mean to him.”

“He’s going to bite you.”

“I’ll bite back.”

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

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

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

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

“A girl’s gotta eat.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

His nose scrunches up as he makes a face.

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

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

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

“Now listen here, jetiika--”

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

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

Well, then.

She smiles thinly. “Of course.”

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

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

He sidles out.

Tholme doesn’t.

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

“I’d prefer not to.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their accusations aren’t unfounded.

They deserve an apology.

She is in the wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She goes to the cargo hold.

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

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

She’s fine.

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

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

“Um.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Want to spar?”

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

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

“You’re serious.”

“No, I’m Quinlan.”

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

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

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

“...yes?”

“Was it cuffs?”

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

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

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

“No, you don’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She doesn’t break right away.

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

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

“Sokari?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“COMMANDER!”

Rex.

Rex is here.

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

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

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

“Commander.”

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

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

Right, sparring.

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

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

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

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

“F-F-Fett,” she manages. It’s enough.

“And where were you?”

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

“Soka.”

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

Her breath hitches, and she wails.

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

Our long awaited meeting.

I destroyed him.

Then you will die.

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

“Soka?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course he does.

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

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

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

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

“He’s--”

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

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

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

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

She’s in need of a lot of therapy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you, Princess.”

She sips.

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

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

She shivers.

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

She probably should.

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

“Can you make it dreamless?” she whispers.

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

She nods. “When I finish the chocolate.”

“Of course.”

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

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

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

Again. Again. Again.

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

Rex worries. Fett worries. Vos worries.

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

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

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

She just stares at him.

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

She can’t.

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

Then you will die, her memory growls.

She flinches.

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

She curls in tighter and tries to just breathe.

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

“Tell me something good.”

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

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

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

Good things.

About Anakin.

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

Did they?

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

Wait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Soka.” Rex.

“Hm?”

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

She does.

He’s right, that’s a good story.

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

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

“Tholme’s hiding something.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You... want to be sedated?”

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

“So he should tell me or Rex.”

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

“You don’t know that.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“...why?”

“Viszla.”

“I see.”

She does.

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

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

“That’s all?”

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

“You’ll help me achieve it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not the beskad?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s not even trying!”

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

“I’m not a--”

“Teeth.”

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

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

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

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

It takes long minutes before either of them say anything.

“Do Jedi believe in souls?”

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

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

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

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

“What about those not yet born?”

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

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

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

“The stories we told Leia about the brothers.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Jedi does not hate.

I am no Jedi.

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

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

“You’d build an army of slaves.”

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

She holds his gaze. She looks away first.

“Torrent?”

“I’m thinking.”

He lets her.

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

“Understandable.”

“I don’t like this.”

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

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

“Hyperbole doesn’t suit you.”

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

Great. Just what she needed.

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t care.”

“What did Fett say?”

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

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

He knows all of this.

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

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

He clings to her and shudders.

“Rex?”

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

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

“It’s sucks Gungan balls, ‘Soka.”

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

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

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

“He’s not vod.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bantha poodoo.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well something had to!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good enough,” he’d sighed.

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

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

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

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

“Stable?” Fett grunts.

“Thrusters are good,” she confirms.

“I meant you.”

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

She hesitates, but manages to speak before he does. “You?”

“I’m not the one walking into an entire building of triggers.”

“Only because you’re not entering it,” she says. “It’s the home of your ancestral enemies who, bad info or no, killed off a whole lot of your friends.”

“I get to leave,” he says. “You don’t.”

She plans to needle him a bit more, maybe on something a little less based in both their traumas. She needs to talk, if only to fill up the silence and keep herself from reaching out to all the lights in the Force. It’ll be too much, she knows.

Tholme enters the cockpit. “Change of plans.”

“Better be a good reason,” Jango says, voice flat.

“Leia’s crying.”

Ahsoka’s unbuckling herself before she can process the words fully. “What?”

Leia doesn’t cry for no reason. Her emotional control is as difficult as the body makes it, but she doesn’t just cry. There’s always a cause.

“I don’t know. Rex said to get you,” Tholme explains. “She was saying a name. He seemed to recognize it.”

Not good not good not good. If Leia was feeling the Emper--No. She cuts the thought off there. No catastrophizing. Information first.

“What name.”

“Luke. Mean anything to--and she’s gone.”

Ahsoka ignores him, just sprints to where she knows the ‘young ones’ are. They’re all in Maul’s room, because nobody wants to be alone with him now, but it’s the worst time to leave him without supervision. It’s not the worst option; he mostly refuses to talk, still.

This holds true, because he definitely isn’t talking when she bursts in. He’s sitting on the bench, in a corner, hugging his knees and watching Quinlan try to calm Leia down.

“Captain, sitrep.”

“Vos and Tholme attempted to show Leia how to reach out to feel the Temple from a distance. They felt that it would be a good use of the time, and an interesting exercise at this distance. She attempted to do so, struggled for several minutes, and then reacted with shock. She has repeated the name ‘Luke’ several times since then, and we’ve been unable to fully calm her down. I asked Tholme to get you, as you are the only Force-Sensitive on board that understands the situation in full.”

“Understood.” She nods to him, and then goes to nudge at Quinlan. “Vos, move.”

“Torre--”

“You can sit behind her, hold her in your lap like you did when we had lunch the other day, but I need to get in her face.” She waits for him to comply, and then drops to her knees and takes Leia’s hands in her own. She radiates calm and assurance, even though she knows Quinlan’s probably been doing the same since this started. She dips her head enough to get in the girl’s line of sight, waits for her to meet eyes.

“Princess,” she says, and meets Leia’s eyes. “What did you feel?”

“Luke.”

From this distance... they’ve got half the system to go, at least, and Leia’s training shouldn’t reach that far for anything more than the fact that the Temple is there. Ahsoka could feel unshielded individuals from here, if she focused, but she’s also been doing this much, much longer. The twins theory holds more water than ever.

“Can you show me?” Ahsoka asks, instead of asking for more clarification. She squeezes Leia’s hands and smiles. “In the Force?”

Leia nods, and closes her eyes. It’s not the first time they’ve done this, but it’s the first time in a while that Leia’s needed Ahsoka to guide her through.

Luke’s light, for all that it’s unfamiliar to Ahsoka, is brilliant among the rest of the signatures in Coruscant. Like Anakin and Leia, he’s a star in his own right, but he’s brighter. He doesn’t have Anakin’s bitterness or Leia’s righteous anger, just... light. Ahsoka had asked Leia to show her instead of looking for herself because she’d expected to not recognize the boy, but she needn’t have. He’s unmistakable.

He’s so bright that she almost misses the other signature that she does recognize. She shies away, knowing that it would be there, but... but it’s almost twinned with another nearby. Not identical, but different in a way that comes with age, with trauma, with... death.

Leia hadn’t arrived alone, after all.

Why would Luke?

Her eyes snap open, her hand coming up not-quite-fast enough to clap over her mouth as she gasps. She feels a shudder, one that starts in her shoulders and reaches deep into her ribcage, finds a home in her chest and doesn’t stop.

“Oh fuck,” Quinlan whispers. “Torrent? Um, Sokari?”

Rex steps closer. “Commander?”

“That shabuir faked his death again,” she manages. “Three times, Rex!”

He blinks at her. “...I know way too many people who fit that description, Soka.”

“Master Ke--” she cuts herself off. He might have changed his name, just like she had. There’s already an Obi-Wan here. Rex seems to be figuring it out, but she needs to give him another hint.

“He pulled a Hardeen,” she stresses, and Rex’s eyes snap shut with a tired groan.

“Who?” Leia asks, her own tumult of emotion paused in the wake of Ahsoka’s shock. There’s a hope and relief to her, and Ahsoka belatedly realizes that her main worry had been that she’d misidentified what was going on, that she’d given herself a false hope. Ahsoka’s internal reaction, her approval and awe at Luke’s presence, had trickled over enough to give Leia the reassurance she’d needed.

Unintentional as it was, Ahsoka was glad that she’d succeeded in helping her charge.

“Er...” she trails off. “I don’t know what name he’s going by, right now. We’ve spent so long in hiding...”

“The man Luke knew as Crazy Old Ben,” Rex says, and Leia’s eyes light up.

“Oh,” she breathes. “General O--no, names. The High General, then.”

“Yeah,” Ahsoka says, not a little soft. “Yeah, I guess death didn’t stop him any more than it stopped me.”

“I could have told you that,” Leia says, smiling far too widely. She squirms where she still sits on Quinlan’s lap. “He was... he taught you, right?”

“As much my master as the official one,” Ahsoka says. She glances as Quinlan, feels Maul’s gaze on the back of her head. “Your f... my official master was very young when I was assigned to him. He wasn’t ready to teach, wasn’t even ready to be a knight, entirely, so my training was split between him and his master.”

Quinlan pops in at that moment, “Your grandmaster was military, too?”

We all were, she thinks. Even you, in your own way.

“I landed in their care mid-battle,” she says carefully. “It was a complicated situation.”

He nods, and she vaguely notes that he’s got his arms wrapped around Leia, and his chin tucked on top of her head. She isn’t sure if Leia’s noticed, but Quinlan’s picked up ‘baby’-sitting duty so often recently that she’s fairly certain he’s all but declared her ‘little-sister shaped.’ It doesn’t matter that Leia’s older--she’s still taking the juice boxes and gummy snacks that Quinlan shoves at her every single snacktime.

“Do you think...” Rex trails off, something uncomfortable twisting in the Force, even though his face keeps it mostly hidden. “My brothers. If the General survived and... and made it back...”

“I didn’t feel any,” Ahsoka says, because she knows she’d have noticed if it was anyone she’d met, and likely any clone at all. They all felt different in the Force, but they all held a spark that made her know it was one of them. “I’m sorry, Rex’ika.”

“A long shot,” he says, that dash of hope shriveling up. He must see something in her face, because there’s a curl of warmth in him, even if his smile is brittle. “It’s fine, really. I have you, ‘Soka.”

Rex and Ahsoka. Two halves of one whole.

She can’t wait to hear the lectures on attachment, the way people who haven’t seen her wars try to criticize her for clinging to any chance at still having a will to live. She can’t wait to see them justify telling her that it’s selfish to hold her sanity in her hands and refuse to let the grief take it away. She can’t wait to stare someone down for asking her to ‘learn to let go’ after she’s lost her family, her life, her universe three times over.

Most of the Jedi are more sensible than that, are reasonable enough to see those shades of grey and how to approach rules in the spirit they are meant instead of the rigid letter, but there will be some.

There will be more than enough telling her she is wrong to hold her oldest, closest, best friend as dear as she can.

Attachment, they’ll say.

What they’ll mean is ‘codepedence.’

They won’t be entirely wrong.

She reaches out for him, lets him fall into her side and stay there, closes her eyes and reaches out for the man she’d long called father, when they’d still been in each other’s lives.

This time, past the deafening flare of surprise-love-hope of the little star next to him, she can feel him reach back.

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

The second the ship has landed, even before Tholme and Fett are done with the checks, Ahsoka’s waiting at the exit. She strains her hearing so she’ll know the second the system will let her open the massive door of the cargo hold.

Leia clings to her side, and the boys stand to her back.

Quinlan’s stressed enough that she can feel it like a cloud. She is very much not trying to feel that stress. Quinlan’s stress levels, back where he’s got Maul so he can keep an eye on Ahsoka and the Baby Sith at the same time, are so low on her priorities list that it’s a a little sad.

It doesn’t take long for her to be able to punch the button and open the damn door.

It opens slowly. She bounces on her toes, because there’s a beacon of light and a steady, familiar glow on the other side, and she’s so, so close. She can’t see through the crack yet, because it’s day in this part of Coruscant, and the sunlight is blinding against the dark of the hold. So close. She’s so close.

“The hell’s wrong with you?”

Fett? Fett. He’s already here to get off? This door’s slow.

She doesn’t answer him, because the door is finally open enough to let her out, and she leaps through the gap.

She lands on a pourstone floor, feels pebbles and grit compress under her boots, frantically looks around as her eyes adjust to light and--

The High General, the Negotiator, Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, looking just as he did when she first met him, if a little less armored and a little more fed. The hair, the beard, the crinkle in the corner of his eyes. His spirit is a little older, his smile a little more strained, his posture a little more tired, but it’s him.

He spreads his arms, low enough that she could have dismissed it if she’d cared less for hugs, except she’s almost as small as she was when they met.

And every other hug she’d given back then had been, functionally, her being a living missile aiming her montrals for someone’s organs.

She’s a little more aware of how to avoid stabbing her friends in the intestine now.

“Master!”

She sprints for him, collides and sobs, feels him stumble back and then sink to his knees on the too-hard floor, and can feel the tears pouring out of her already. Her breath hitches, and she wails like a child, and that last part of her that couldn’t even grasp at safety shreds itself. His arms are tight around her, warm and strong and Master Kenobi don’t you dare leave again.

It doesn’t matter that Sidious is out there, that the Republic’s been building towards war for a century, that even now someone’s kicking up the Trade Federation. Her dad is here.

“I’ve missed you too, my dear,” he says, pressing a kiss to the side of her head, the bristles of his beard scratching along the skin of her forehead. Off to the side, the binary suns that are Luke and Leia grow brighter in proximity, so bright she can barely bear it.

(“Fett, why the kriff are you reaching for your blaster?!”)

(“Torrent said her master tried to kill her.”)

(“Different guy, that was a different guy, put the blaster away.”)

(“You could have just warned me.”)

(“I didn’t expect you to go for a shot on sight!”)

(”Calm down, Jetiika, if I was going to shoot on sight, we’d already be in a firefight.”)

She ignores everything.

“If you fake your death one more time, I swear I’m going to kill you myself.”

He tries to pull away to talk to her more directly. She does not let him. He apparently resigns himself to this, because he just adjusts how he’s sitting and pulls her in closer.

“In my defense, I was far from the only one presumed dead that took advantage of that status, by the end,” he says, letting her slump into his lap and cry herself dry. “I’m proud of you. You know that, I hope.”

She nods against his chest, smearing tears and snot across the linen and wool. She doesn’t care that they’ll need a thorough washing. She can have her public breakdown and it’s fine because Master Kenobi is here.

He doesn’t even know what she’s spent the past fifteen years doing. Luke wouldn’t have known. He doesn’t know she’s thirty-two and broken, beyond a shadow and cut down by her own master. There’s so much he doesn’t know but the Force rings with the truth of it: he’s proud of her anyway.

“I’m going by Ben, now,” he mutters against her montral. “There’s already an Obi-Wan here, after all. Still, I remain a Kenobi.”

She can’t make the words come out of her mouth. She’s overwhelmed, so much so that speech is a mite bit beyond her.

Sokari Torrent, she presses along the frayed bond that’s knitting itself back to life with every breath they take. Leia was already calling me Auntie Soka, and Rex and I both took Torrent, for...

“For the men you lost,” he mutters. “Yes, that’s fitting.”

He smells like sapir tea and a spiced beard oil.

There’s a whirl of activity about her, greetings and ‘a Sith apprentice?’ and introductions. She distantly notes when Fett almost shoots Dooku before Rex shuts that down and advises the Master to leave the area before things spiral out of control. She feels Ben stand, and she stands with him, clings to his side like a child and trusts that whatever happens, whatever needs to happen, he’ll take care of it until she can stand on her own two feet without swaying.

Rex grabs her free hand, and she feels herself settle back into her skin, bit by bit.

She’s back at the Temple. The twins are safe. Her grandmaster is here. She has her other half.

They can save the galaxy this time.

She’s alive she’s home she’s okay.

She’s okay.

Everything’s going to be okay.

[emeto-secret-agent]

Would you be willing to write Celia with one of the novemetovember prompts? I can’t decide between 2 or 16, whichever you think you want to do the most. Don’t feel pressured to write it if you don’t want to! I hope you have a good day!

Thank you for the request! :D

I've chosen Day 2 hope you'll enjoy it~

@monthofsick

Warning: -

-

Novemetober Day 2 - Hiding it (or at least trying to)

Even Celia felt how forced her smile was. She tried her best, really, she didn’t want to upset the prince, but Florian somehow found the perfect time to request for her when she wasn’t feeling good. Celia wanted to take it easy for today, maybe drink some soothing tea and sleep – a lot – but when one of the guards knocked at her door, she haven’t had a choice. Well, she could have refused the invite since Florian wasn’t sick, just wanted to see her, but Celia couldn’t do it. She saw his sad smile before her eyes if she declined and that look was something she never wanted to see. And maybe she longed for his presence too. She had no family in the castle and her friends were good to her, but they couldn’t have even been compared to when she was next to Florian. And this is why Celia found herself in Florian’s chamber, sitting in front of the prince, trying with every remaining strength to smile back at him. 

These little meetings became kinda frequent in the past few months and while Florian didn’t have that much free time, it was good to see him when he wasn’t actively sick and Celia was grateful that the prince managed to spend time with her. It made her feel a little special. Well not like they had any chance to actually be together romantically, but this was good enough. Or could have been better, if Celia’s stomach haven’t started to hurt half an hour into their little meeting.

‘Do you have a lot of work these days?’

‘Do I look that tired?’ chuckled Celia and Florian immediately looked horrified.

‘No, of course not, you look fine, I mean very beautiful, I mean-‘

‘It’s alright Your Highness.’ Celia couldn’t help but notice the blush growing on his face. Gosh if only she wasn’t feeling this sick… ‘I do have work to do, but it’s nothing compared to your duties.’

‘But I’m sure it’s not easy for you either. Please take enough rest if you need it.’

Celia wanted to laugh. Oh, she wanted to do exactly that right now and it felt weird to hear it coming from the prince. Like she hadn’t needed to cure him back from exhaustion every other month.

‘I’ll do that then. Thank you.’

A small quietness sat over them, Celia too concentrated on herself to continue the conversation, but her tummy decided this was the best moment to loudly let out a gurgle. There was no way Florian haven’t heard it or seen the way the girl clutched her stomach. Why the hell did it hurt so much?! She can’t be sick right now… Celia tried to blurt out an apology, however, the prince was faster.

‘Do you want to take a little rest?’

Celia almost shook her head to say it was fine, she was fine, but her body didn’t obey. It didn’t want to move as cold rushed through her, leaving a layer of cold sweat on her skin, feeling a gag coming up in her throat. She should’ve declined Florian’s invite, now the prince’s going to catch whatever she has…

The realization that she was about to throw up in front of Florian came later but that more horrifyingly. Because she was going to throw up. There was no denying, she was sick, and since it’s the way of nature, her stomach contents wished to emerge out of her and Celia had no choice.

‘Celia?’

Concern and incomprehension rushed through Florian’s face as the girl jumped up and suddenly paled down as she slapped a hand over her mouth. He noticed that something was off with her when she arrived at his chamber but only now started to realize something was really wrong.

Celia did everything in her power to hold back the dry heave that was trying to burst through her fingers but the room started to spin and her legs wouldn’t take another step. She couldn’t run to the bathroom, she won’t make it. Celia tightly shut her eyes but couldn’t stop the burp from coming out. She felt Florian’s steady hands on her shoulders and she could only wish that he wasn’t standing in front of her when the vomit burst out of her fingers.

Well, Florian couldn’t say he wasn’t surprised when Celia hunched over and a forceful gush of vomit rushed out of her, right in front of them and splashed on the floor with a disgusting sound. It wasn’t exactly what he had in mind when he was thinking about spending a little time together, but as the girl gagged again, he was quick to act. With one hand he prayed Celia’s fingers away from her mouth and with the other, he hold her hair back.

‘It’s alright, you’re alright…’

Her chest heaved with such brute force Florian was getting scared for a second she was going to fall over, so he grabbed into her a bit stronger. Just to make sure she isn’t going to collapse on him. But this exact touch was that made Celia’s knees even weaker. Florian was sick quite a lot, but he never avoided his training so he had the strength if needed and it was too much for the poor girl to take in. Especially when another gush of vomit rushed out of her and the familiar burning sensation came back between her legs. She was too close to Florian…

‘Good, you’re doing well. Just let it out.’

‘I-I’m sorry…’

‘Shhhh… Everything’s fine.’

Celia wanted to cry. She was sick and literally vomited in front of the prince but his voice was so smooth and comforting. She wanted to stay like this, between his arms and just listening to his quiet and kind words.

‘How are you feeling?’ asked Florian a few minutes later when nothing came out of Celia only burps and a few hiccups.

‘Still nauseous…’

There was no point in lying now and Celia was too exhausted to even try to. She lifted her hand up to wipe down the vomit and tears on her face, but Florian stopped her in the movement and pulled out a handkerchief.

‘Let me.’

Celia wanted to protest but no words came out of her mouth as the prince gently whipped down her hand which was covered with vomit and then her face too. It was an expensive handkerchief. And now it was ruined with her puke.

But when she looked up at Florian there was no anger or regret in his eyes, only some kind concern.

‘If you’re feeling sick, please tell me. I know that it’s not our usual… line-up, but I also want to take care of you if you’re feeling unwell. You don’t have to hide it from me.’

Celia haven’t seen such a kind smile before and she couldn’t stop the tears from forming in her eyes. She must be feverish too, she can’t control her emotions when she’s like that. Florian quickly wrapped her in a warm hug when he noticed the tears running down on her face.

‘You’re fine now, I promise. Just don’t hide it, alright?’

Celia sniffled a few times as she burrowed her head into Florian’s chest. He always had such a nice scent… Her heart felt like breaking at the thought that she won’t be able to feel him like this right until they die.

‘Alright…’

[mentathemint]

MRS.EMILY AU FACTS/HEADCANONS:

*Mother of Charlotte and Sammy Emily *Married to Henry Emily

-Her name is Rose Clark . (Personality type: ESFP-A)

-175cm (5’7)

-Born 3rd of July, 1955 in Austin,Texas. . She moved to San jose,California when she was 15 and went to an art school there where she met Henry(Who at the time was taking a few classes there along side his university classes) They got engaged in 1977, and after Henry graduated from uni they moved to Hurricane,Utah together.

-Considers herself a freelance artist though she has never worked a day in her life for anything except when she helped do all the paintings/murals and advertising for Fredbear’s family diner.

-Started smoking at 18 and is a heavy smoker.

-Owns 2 guns, a pistol and a shotgun. Henry is very cautious about making sure they’re in a safe spot and no one has access to them except her.

-Not an empathetic or caring person, though she really tries to be. Even as a kid, if someone she thought was important to her came up to her and started crying and telling her a heartbreaking story, she wouldn’t feel anything, or any sort of emotion. As she grew older she learnt that she has to show atleast some kind of emotion or else people would think she was rude and stay away from her. . She has dated a lot of people before, a lot of them for a very short time, in hopes of ‘maybe if I fall in love with someone I’ll actually care about them and won’t have to pretend’ but none of her previous relationships really worked out, she stayed with Henry because he was just nicer than anyone else and she could somewhat sympathize with him. But it was easy for her to just leave him out of the blue because she didn’t recognize how upset he’d be and if she did, she couldn’t bring herself to truly care, even though she did love him a lot (My first language isn’t english so sorry if this didn’t make a lot of sense..)

-Her hair is naturally straight but she always and I mean always curls it

-Sammy was kinda like her favorite child, only because he was quiet and never made a mess, unlike Charlotte who from the moment she learnt how to walk, was very energetic and made a lot of messes everywhere.

-Left Henry the night that Charlotte was killed because he got very emotional and just completely mentally destroyed and she thought he was “too much” to handle. (She stayed in a hotel for a couple days then went to live in her parents house back in Texas)

-The day of her 30th birthday, she decided to visit Henry, after 2 years of leaving him. He wouldn’t answer the door and his front door was open so she decided to walk in herself, after a couple times of calling his name she heard him scream, she went in the living room and found that he had stabbed himself. With the knife that was meant to be on the robot he had built to kill him, though before turning it on and finishing it, Rose had come by and he kind of just snapped after hearing her voice and did it himself without the robot thing.

-Mrs.Afton(Mary) was her closest friend for many years, they met in highschool after she moved to California.

-She got along very well with Afton.

-She was alright with Jen, but would never consider them friends though, just acquaintances who may or may not slightly hate eachother.

-Knew how to sew really well and made a few clothes for Charlotte and Sammy. One of which Henry went on to give to Ella after Charlotte died.

-Would only ever buy Henry Roses and/or Rose shaped chocolates for Valentines because she thought it was funny

[sunflowerdarlingx]

Fred Weasley - “Fred doesnt date” 2

Hi everyone, I hope you’re all okay <3

Here is part two to “Fred doesn’t date”, please let me know what you think, I do have a part three idea ready but wont post it unless some of you want it. 

PART ONE

Female Reader 

Warnings: none 

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

Some might say Fred Weasley was scared to commit, some would say he enjoyed the player lifestyle and others would say he was some sort of sex addict who just enjoyed multiple partners but not all at once.

The truth was, Fred was indeed scared. He felt that the people close to him were he only ones he could trust, the only ones he could truly open up to. He was very happy with his life and his relationships, those he chose to build were stronger than most. He never expected to be drawn to Y/N, he also never expected to develop the feeling he did.  

He was utterly shocked at the way their relationship progressed, he had never felt this before, the butterflies he would get when he saw her or the way his heart fluttered when their skin made the slightest contact or the undeniable feeling of love he had when she fell asleep in the common room all cuddled up into Fred’s chest after a night of her homework and him planning pranks.

This is why Fred Weasley didn’t date. It always got complicated. Feelings of anger, hatred, sadness filled him up and he couldn’t take his eyes away from the scene in front of him. Cedric placed a kiss on Y/N’s jawline before placing one on the corner of her lips. Soon enough his lips were on hers as his hand moved down to her waist whilst the other supported the back of her neck so he could pull her closer.

Fred knew he should look away, he knew he was torturing himself watching the scene in front of him unfold.  

He wanted to scream, he wanted to go over there and pull Cedric as far away from Y/N as he could. An overwhelming need to break his hands for even touching Y/N in such away creeped inside his body and his fists clenched at his side.

How dare he.  

How dare he stand there and touch her, kiss her, do all the things that Fred should be doing with her.  

Surely he had heard the rumours. He knows how close they had been getting. How dare he interrupt that and take her away from him.  

Tears pricked at the corner of Freds eyes, threatening to spill at any moment. He knew he couldn’t stay there, so he didn’t. He forced himself to look away form the two and turned to head back to his dorm.  

He thought Y/N liked him, he thought she felt the same way he did. Why did she kiss Cedric if she knew?

He was angry with himself, he was so stupid to let himself get attached to her in the first place, he knew it was a bad idea but she was so bloody addictive. Every little thing about her drove him mad but in the best way possible.  

As Fred walked down the corridor the tears started to fall freely from his eyes, scared someone would see him he ran as fast as he could up to his dorm. A few girls saw him and tried to stop and speak to him but his feet carried him straight past them. His top teeth were embedded in his bottom lip to stop the sound of heartbreak escaping his mouth.

Even after what he just saw, no other girl could take his attention away from Y/N. He made it to his dorm, he was greeted by a smiling George who soon had a look of fear paint his face.  

“What’s wrong Freddie?” his voice was laced with concern as he walked over to his brother. He had never seen Fred in such a state. His eyes were red and puffy, his cheeks were wet with tears and his lip was bleeding slightly. It was obvious this wasn’t from a fight so what had gotten Fred so worked up?

Fred stood still in front of his brother, he looked around the room before a broken sob left his mouth, George’s heart broke at the sound. George wrapped his arms around Fred and pulled him close. “Mate what is it? You know you can tell me anything”  

Loud broken cry’s left Freds mouth as all his emotions bubbled over, chocked sobs and snotty sniffles filled the room as he collapsed against George. Though Fred and George loved each other dearly, they never really hugged, it wasn’t uncommon but it wasn’t something they did regularly. They usually hugged when something good happened, like when they got the money for the shop that they planned on opening over the summer or when it was their birthday. George couldn’t believe that the reason they were hugging was because Fred was, well heart broken.

“Digger kissed her, he actually fucking kissed her” Fred shouted as he pulled away from George. “How fucking dare he, who does he think he is” he pulled his shirt over his head and wiped his face with it before putting it in the wash basket.  

“Fuck...Fred I’m so sorry” George had never seen Fred so angry, even loosing quidditch to Slytherin never had him this mad. His hands were in fists by his sides whilst his chest heaved with anger, jaw clenched.  

“I should have asked her sooner Georgie, why the fuck didn’t I ask her sooner” soon the anger was replaced by sadness, which consumed Freds body as he lay in his bed. He’s never been so emotional before, his heart literally felt like it had been broken in two, he felt weak… hopeless  

“Cmon mate, why don’t we go down to dinner, food will help and I’m sure we could see if the elf’s could get you ice cream, like what mum does when you’re upset”  

Fred buried himself in his duvet, “nah I think I’m gonna stay here, don’t really want to have to sit and watch her and perfect Diggory be all over each other again”

“I’ll take you something back then, just please come and find me if you need me, even send one of the first years down and I’ll be here as soon as I can okay?”  

Fred nodded “turn off the lights please on your way out”, George left the room and anger flooded his body. He hated seeing any of his family sad but the fact it was Fred, it was prankster Fred who was always laughing but now broken, angered him even more. He wanted Fred to be happy but after seeing the state he was in, it felt like it would be a while before laughing Fred returned.  

-

“Ced, I really think we should go and find Fred, what if he’s looking for us” Y/N pulled Cedric by the hand towards the staircase leading to the Gryffindor common rooms.  

Cedric pulled her back toward him, wrapping his arm around her waist “cmon you agreed to a snack first” he looked down at Y/N with his best pleading eyes. She rolled her eyes before grinning at the boy beside her “fine, only because I’m hungry”  

They made their way down the corridor, “he’s probably off shagging some girl in our year, doubt he’s looking for you”. Y/N felt angry hearing that, she knew Fred had a reputation but they had been getting closer and going on dates and stuff, surely he wouldn’t be off seeing other girls when he was suppose to be spending the day with her George and Lee.  

“I don’t think so Ced, he was suppose to be spending the day with us” her voice was quiet as she looked ahead of her.  

“Oh cmon Y/N you can’t be serious, Fred doesn’t care about that, as long as he’s getting a shag then he’s happy” Cedric laughed. “What’s going on with you two anyway?”  

“Fred and Me? Nothing...we are just friends” Y/N looked down at the ground, the thought of Fred with another girl upset her, Y/N had always hoped that the rumours going around school just now were secretly true. That Fred was finally settling down with someone. With her.  

Cedric turned them so Y/N rested against the wall, “are we friends Y/N” he asked as he rested his elbow above her.  

“Of course Cedric, why would you ask that?” she looked up at him, forcing a smile.

“Well if I’m honest, I’ve always liked you Y/N, obviously I figured it’s better to tell you now before it’s too late. Especially since I’m leaving at the end of the year.”  

“Oh Cedric...I’m not sure what to say, I’m flattered really” suddenly her shoes looked very interesting.  

“Cmon Y/N, I’m so much better for you than Weasley, he can’t give you the things I can, plus you know his reputation just as well as I do. Remember that time Lucy is my year came into the common room crying her eyes out because Fred said he didn’t want her? What makes you think you’d be different?”

Y/N couldn’t help but frown. Cedric was right, Fred did have a reputation for hurting girls, she never thought he would really mean to hurt them but what if he did? He’d led her on and now he was no where to be seen.  

Why would Fred change for her? She was nothing special. Plenty girls at school were prettier than she was, smarter than she was. She was a fool for thinking Fred would want something more.

“We would be good together Y/N and you know it. Summers in Italy or at yours, your brother loves me already so we know he’d be on board with it us. Plus, look” he gestured down to his body “who could say no to all this”.  

Y/N couldn’t help but giggle at Cedric, she had always found him quite attractive, though they really only started speaking last year, Y/N had lost all her puppy fat over the summer, her boobs had gotten a bit bigger and her arse and curves were more defined.  

“Hmm summers in Italy do sound good” she teased  

“I’d hope I’d get your attention more than just through the summer” he leaned down placing a kiss on her cheek.  

“I’m sure we could arrange that if it’s your deepest desire” he smirked against her before placing another kiss on her cheek.  

“It’s all I’ve ever wanted” he teased, placing another kiss on her jaw, “can I kiss you?” His voice was a low whisper in her ear. Y/N wasn’t sure what to say, on one hand she would like to kiss Cedric, she did use to have a crush on him, but the other part of her wanted to say no, hopeful that Fred would maybe want her.  

Her body reacted before she could, nodding at Cedric. He grinned down at her, he ran his hand across her cheek pushing her baby hairs back form her face, she giggled at the contact.  Cedric placed a soft delicate kiss on her jaw and then her lips, soon enough their lips where moving in sync but something felt off.  

She pulled away before smiling up at Cedric “cmon we better go and get ready for supper” she places her hand in his and pulled him towards the common room.

-

When she got to dinner she sat with Cedric, laughing with him and his friends, her attention was drown to the flash of ginger hair walking into the hall. It was George, she looked over and smiled at him, shock consumed her when he glared at her. If looks could kill she’d have been dead.  

His eyes trailed down to the table where Cedric has his hand rested on top of hers. George looked angry, his face turned slightly red and his nostrils flared. He walked over to the Gryffindor table, immediately meeting with lots of “you okay George?” “Where’s Fred?” “What’s got you so angry?”.

He was sat with Lee, Angie, Alicia and Katie, once he told them all what happened they were fuming. None of them really liked Diggory in all honesty, from the way he acted during quidditch to his show off personality, they all thought he was a bit of a tool.  

To say there were all shocked was an understatement, they had all seen Y/N and Fred together and even they knew they were more than friends.  

“Well I won’t be saying hi to her again any time soon” Alicia said in a bitchy tone, “how could she do that to Fred?”.

-

Fred eventually got hungry, and honestly he hoped food would comfort him. He pulled on a hoodie with his grey joggers and made his way down to the great hall. As he entered he avoided looking over at the Hufflepuff table, usually he would look for Y/N and send her a wave or a wink or a goofy grin but not today. Not ever again, he thought to himself when he reached his friends. He was sat in between Lee and George, both of them giving him a pat on the back as he sat down.  

They tried to distract Fred by talking about new pranks and quidditch plays but he wasn’t really paying attention. He was desperate to turn around and look at her, to go over and pull her away from perfect Diggory and convince her that she should be with him instead but he knew he had to be strong. He knew he didn’t stand a chance against Diggory, after all, he he was the better option, he would give her the things Fred couldn’t, like luxury holidays to Italy.  

Ginny came over to them and sat in-between Fred and Lee, giving her brother a comforting hug once he explained what happened. A few little sobs leaving his mouth which he covered with a cough. Fred had spoken to Ginny loads about Y/N, she was the only one who wouldn’t slag him off for being all lovey dovey about her.  

“Fred, don’t look now but Y/N is coming over” Alicia said as she kept looking over to where Y/N walked over towards the table. Fred groaned and felt his eyes start to water.  

Ginny turned around and glared at the girl coming towards her, “bitch” she mumbled before turning to Fred. “Want me to tell her you don’t wanna talk?”

“Fuck” he rubbed his eyes with his pointer finger and thumb, “it’s okay gin, I can’t exactly avoid her”. Y/N came over and wrapped her arms around Fred’s neck, pulling down his hood “what’s up with you Freddie?” her voice whispered in his ear. Fred tensed at the contact, before relaxing at her voice.  

Y/N was worried about Fred, he was never usually late to dinner and she didn’t even get her usual goofy smile off him.

Her voice was one of his favourite sounds, he often fell asleep to her voice in the common room late at night when he’d sneak her in. His head would rest on her lap as she read muggle tales to him, the way her voice soothes him sent him into deep slumbers. He couldn’t help but melt in her arms and at her words, she’s always so caring.

He looked at his friends who were all sending glares her way. He sucked in a breath before pulling her hands away from his neck, he turned around and looked at her. She frowned at his current state, his hair was a mess, eyes bloodshot and face red.  

“Nothing I’m good” Fred stood up and, made his way out of the hall.  

“What’s up with him Georgie?” She turned to look at Fred make his way out the hall.  

Ginny scoffed and rolled his eyes at her, “hmm I wonder” sarcasm laced her voice as she tapped her chin. Ginny learned at a young age to look after herself and then she very quickly realised she had to look after her family. They always came first and no one said anything bad about them.  

She’d had her fair share of arguments with boys and girls over the years, boys trying to slag off her brothers out of jealousy and girls complaining about rejection. Knowing how much Fred liked and cared for Y/N only made Ginny angrier, Fred actually allowed himself to get close to someone and she broke him. She stood up to face Y/N, eyes staring her down, “why don’t you go ask your new boyfriend Diggory? Maybe you two can recreate some of the dates my brother took you on”, her voice was cold as ice as she spoke. She shoved past Y/N and went to look for Fred.  

Y/N’s eyes widened as she looked down at George, he just looked at her before a “she’s right” left his mouth and him and the rest of the people he was sitting with left the hall.  

-

Y/N was shocked, she was an idiot for underestimating what she and Fred had. She stood for a moment trying to think about everything that had happened. She majorly regretted kissing Cedric now, she should have spoken to Fred, asked how he felt but she was an idiot. She let her insecurities get the better of her.

She decided to go to her dorm and call it a night, at about 2 am she woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, her mind in overdrive. She decided to go for a wander out to the gardens to look at the stars.  

-

Fred was in and out of sleep, if he wasn’t having dreams about him and Y/N, he was dreaming about her and Cedric.  

He woke up after dreaming about walking in on Y/N and Cedric, Cedric was above her, hands running down her body, they were laughing at Fred as he stood at the door watching.

“Oh Freddie, you didn’t actually think you had a chance with me, did you?” Y/N’s giggle flooded the room but it wasn’t her normal laugh, it was laced with mockery and hate. “Why would I settle for you, poor little Fred Weasley, can’t even commit to a girl. You honestly think I’d settle for that? Cedric treats me so much better”. Cedric leaned down kissing her roughly..

Fred shot up from his bed, chest heaving as he tried to calm down. He was an idiot for thinking he stood a chance, why would she be his when he’d been with so many other girls? When Cedric could offer her the world and he could offer her a summer at the burrow?  

He got up and chucked on shorts and a hoodie, making his way out his dorm and out the portrait. He made his way around the castle avoiding the prefects and Filtch. He reached the gardens and was sat on the grass looking up at the stars above him.  

He was staring up at the moon, all he could think about was Y/N, the way she laughed, the way she listened to everything Fred had to say, the way she could brighten up even the darkest days and the way she made everything better.  

He thought about Christmas, he’d asked her to stay with them over the festive period. He was looking forward to spending all his free time with her, playing in the snow and showing her all his favourite places around the burrow. He knew she’d love their garden, the stars were even clearer there. He was to engrossed in thought that he hadn’t heard Y/N walk up behind him,  

He was even looking forward to having her meet his mum and dad. Molly was shocked when she saw the letter from Fred asking for his new friend-girl to stay over at Christmas. Molly had a feeling another sweater may be needed.  

“Freddie….” Her voice was a whisper but still managed to make him jump “can I join you?”……..

Part Three

Tagged

@manuosorioh @itsbebeyyy @britishspidey @supermassiveblackhope @impossibelle @jenniweaslee