#but no references for colours i just went with what my heart told me. kudos to you if you spot the colour choice and know what it means!

[hannah-catkin-artses]

Day two: Spider!

Time taken: forty-eight minutes.

[the-lady-of-stars]

Wishing you were somehow here again - part 1

Commander Wolffe x Jedi ! Reader

Summary: Wolffe loves you, his Jedi, more than anything. Nothing could ever come between your hearts. Or at least that’s what you believed up until he was commanded to kill you under Order 66.

A/N: Unfortunately for you all I have returned, once again inspired to write more heartbreaking angst for Wolffe. Luckily for you, however, this first chapter will exclusively be fluff. Kudos for anyone who knows what the title is a reference to. Enjoy my lovelies ;) 

You had always thought that Wolffe looked most handsome under the light of the moon. The way the silver glow framed his face made him out to be some ethereal being sent from the stars themselves.

From where you lay next to him on the grassy hill you could just about see the blissed out smile that graced his features. He had brought you out here away from camp to bask in the beauty of the night with him, and there you were, fingers clasped with his as his thumb stroked tender circles on your palm, grounding you in the moment. His eyes were gazing up at the vast expanse space above you, but you couldn’t bring yourself to peel your sight from him. Sensing your lingering stare, Wolffe turned his head to you, smile broadening at how enamoured his beloved looked. 

“What’s goin’ on in that pretty little head of yours, hmm cyar’ika?” he coaxed sweetly, squeezing your hand. 

“I really love you, Wolffe,” you spoke softly, not daring to break the pure serenity of the moment. 

He huffed in loving amusement, rolling onto his side to look down at you with fond eyes.

“And I love you, my starlight. But what’s brought this on? You goin’ all soft on me, General?”

“Can’t help it, Commander. ‘S all your fault. Might just have to court martial you for it,” you mused. 

“Court martial! And what exactly would the reasoning for this court martial be, might I ask?”

“Mm, well, quite a few things actually. For starters I’d accuse you of making your Jedi General fall hopelessly in love with you- that’s the most important one.” Wolffe grinned down at you as you spoke. “Next I’d accuse you of distracting your General from patrol and making her stargaze with you instead. Also important. Finally I might accuse you of having brought me here over an hour ago yet not having so much as kissed me on the cheek even once, although that can be rectified before it’s too late.”

Wolffe let out a genuine laugh before leaning down closer to you, putting his weight on his forearms, obscuring most of your vision but leaving a slight backdrop of the blinking stars surrounding him.

“Ah well, in that case I suppose I had better make a start. You have my sincerest apologies, Mesh’la.”

“I might find it in me to forgive you, but you’ll have to make it up to me first.”

“Yeah?” he cooed. 

“Mmhmm. Real nice.”

“I think I can do that.”

He began with a gentle kiss to your jaw, rising up your face to your cheeks, brows, forehead and nose, spoiling every inch of you in the loving way he thought you deserved. He muttered compliments and praise in between kisses, soothing you with his whispers of  “sweet girl,” “so beautiful,” and “so good for me.” You both sighed in harmony as he finally closed the remaining distance to meet your lips, locking them against yours. Your noses pressed together, eyelids fluttering at the sheer intimacy of the moment.

When you eventually separated from each other, you remained with your foreheads touching, both panting to reclaim the breath you had stolen from the other. You remained there, silence unbroken for minutes, just enjoying the moment. 

Wolffe was the one to break the stillness, pushing himself off of you to lean on his side again, eyes wandering over your face in thought. 

“What is it?” you spoke serenely, surveying his expression. He appeared to be deep in thought, although what about you couldn’t tell. 

“Do you remember when we first met?” he spoke up after a few more moments of thinking. 

“Of course, how could I forget?”

“We all knew that General Plo had trained a padawan to knighthood but we’d never actually met you. I remember on one campaign to some planet in the outer-rim we were resting for the night and Wildfire asked the General to tell us a story to pass the time.  That was the first time he told us about you. Told us how you’d taken out an entire squadron of clankers all on your own and without your saber. I’ll admit I fell a little bit in love with you right then. The more he told us about you the more I wanted to meet you. That night I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking about what you might have looked like. I lay there picturing your face, wondering things like what colour your eyes might be. If there’s one thing I guessed right it was that your eyes would definitely be striking, had to be to match the personality that went with them. So in some way I suppose you could say I was in love with you before I had even met you. I’ve heard Master Plo saying before that the force can bring people together. I don’t know if that’s real or not, I’m no Jedi, but I like to believe that we were meant to find each other, you know?

“Wolffe, you’ve never told me any of this before,” your eyes were glued to his lips as he spoke, captivated by his words. 

“I was always too embarassed to tell you. Honestly I’m surprised the boys didn’t get to blabbin’ about it to you before now. And the first time I actually met you? Stars. If you ask the boys they’ll tell you that I looked hypnotised. According to Sinker my mouth was wide open like I’d been hit straight on by a gunship. Nothing I’d imagined before could even compare to how beautiful you were. If I wasn’t in love with you before that then I definitely was then. My vode still haven’t stop teasing me for that one. But you wanna know when I was sure you were the one for me? You remember that time I got injured on Naboo after that clanker we didn’t notice hit me good in the knee?”

You winced, the memory still fresh in your mind. “I still have nightmares about that sometimes. Thought I was going to lose you, and even though I hadn’t known you all that long I realised then that I couldn’t bare to live without you.”

Wolffe took one of your hands in his, pressing a reassuring kiss to your knuckles in comfort then moving to play with your fingers absent-mindedly as he continued to speak. 

“And that’s why I fell for you. You looked after me all day and night, even while I slept, making sure I was clean, hydrated, comfortable and not in any pain. You cared for me so selflessly. When I woke up and saw that you had fallen asleep next to me in exhaustion I wanted nothing more than to show you just how appreciated you were. But I just couldn’t find the words no matter how hard I tried.” He looked into your eyes, noticing how they had glazed over slightly from how close you were to tears. 

“I know. I felt your emotions through the force. No one had ever felt that strongly for me in my life. Which is why I kissed you when you woke. Couldn’t find the right words either,” you smiled at him, lips trembling with emotion. 

“You’ll never know how often I think of that kiss. Think I nearly passed out again when it happened, my heart was racing so fast. You had me absolutely doll dizzy. But you know what the funny thing is? You’d think that I’d have become more used to it by now, you kiss me at every chance you get, but I haven’t. Every single time you kiss me I feel that same way I did the first time. You’ve got me good, sweetheart. Point is- I don’t ever want to stop feeling that way. I want to be able to lean over and kiss you for the rest of my life. So, Y/N, I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and I’ve decided. I want to marry you.”

“What?” you gasped, heart pounding against your chest. 

“I know it technically won’t be a legal marriage seeing as I’m a clone and you’re a Jedi, but that doesn’t matter to me. We don’t need paperwork to prove our love for each other. I want you to be my wife. My wife who I can spend every day of the rest of my life spoiling in the way she deserves. So, what do you say? Y/N Y/L/N, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?” 

Both of you now had tears streaming freely, a sob catching in your throat as you went to reply. 

“Yes,” you choked out. “Yes, Wolffe, I would love to marry you.”

The two of you were crying your hearts out, smiles pulling at your cheeks so brightly that it was nearly painful. Wolffe wasted no more time before standing up and pulling you to your feet then into his arms, picking you up to spin you in pure unbreakable joy. 

He set you down and instantly brought your lips together, giving him a new most passionate kiss to think about for the rest of his life. 

“I love you,” he laughed through his tears. “I love you so much!”

“I love you too. I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you.”

Wolffe paused for a second, visibly thinking before kneeling down to the grass. 

“What are you doing?” you asked, but he was too distracted with what ever he was doing to reply.

You watched as he plucked a long blade of grass out of the soil forming a loop with it then tying it off so it was shaped like a circle. 

“A ring. I’m sorry I can’t get you a pretty one straight away, so this will have to suffice for now, but one day, after the war, I swear to you I will buy you the most beautiful ring I can.”

Wolffe took your left hand delicately in his, sliding his grass ring onto your fourth finger. You once again sobbed at his actions, throwing yourself into his chest and tucking your head under his chin. 

“Wolffe, it’s perfect. I don’t need a fancy ring, I only want you. And if you think I’m not treasuring this ring made from the grass of the hill you proposed to me on for the rest of my life then you don’t know me like I thought you did.”

He laughed, a wide grin settling on his face as he pulled you tight against him, rocking you in a slow dance as you both tried to stop crying. 

Absolutely nothing could tear the two of you apart. Or at least, that’s what you believed. Palpatine, you would soon discover, thought otherwise. 

[lightraker]

Du He Tao

Du He Tao

Those of us who went to Eric’s book launch have a head start on this one. Because here he told us that this was written for his girlfriend and the title refers to walnut gambling in China. Identical walnuts (or as similar as possible) are very valuable. They are used, I think, for playing with in your hand to relax you like those balls. I just typed in “relaxing hand balls” into google and apparently those metal ones are Chinese and they’re actually called “baotang balls”. So the more similar the two walnuts are, the more valuable. There is a practice of paying a set price before the walnuts’ green coverings are removed as a kind of gambling on whether you’ll get a matching pair which would be worth more than you’ve paid. We can see that there’s a nice metaphor for dating or starting to go out with someone and taking a chance on whether you’ll fit together. It’s interesting that it comes straight after “Tact” which is kind of about how you shouldn’t be too similar.

Eric runs through an amazing array of metaphors linked to this. So we have sciencey/atomic, DIY, bomb-disposal, safe-cracking, bird-pecking, gambling, computer-language, biological/medical sort of, but not strictly, section by section.

“When I’m all hulled up” - Eric draws out a nice metaphor for the single man being confined in his walnut or way of life or bachelor pad and love makes its way in.

“Husky” - having an outer shell, or having a sexy voice. I hope Anne-Laure doesn’t mind it if I suggest that this may refer to her sexy French voice.

“the heartnut aches” - heart nut is the seed of a Japanese walnut. Also an allusion to the opening of Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale “My heart aches”.

“You ground around it lick” - In China, apparently, experts have a better chance of spotting identical pairs. However, I saw nothing about them licking them. I’ve been quite taken aback by how surprised everyone seems to be about my sexual readings of the first two poems. So I’m just going to leave you with the image of the buyer putting their lips around the two walnuts. And say nothing more.

“Give lip… flushed over… quite tight”. Nothing more to say. Nothing at all.

“Fetch Felix… Radical Squad, Trojans.. long walk” - This is about bomb disposal. The first bomb squad (in New York in the earlier 20th Century dealing with mafia since you ask) were called the Radical Squad. Felix means lucky in Latin and is the name of the unofficial mascot of bomb disposal. Trojan is a mine-clearing vehicle. And the long walk is a phrase used about bomb disposal. And we see this metaphor in the verse with “hair-triggers… trip-wire”.

“With ink from crushed walnuts” this is what Da Vinci used in his notebooks.

“a foetus in utero” - Da Vinci did draw one of these. But also in keeping with the walnut image.

“If there is no love, what then?” a quote from Da Vinci in prison (enclosed) for sodomy.

“Ectoderm” - outer skin.

“brain-pan” - skull.

“Passerine” an order of birds. Passer is the latin for sparrow. This section moves more to the image of a bird pecking at a nut.

“A man’s house is his castle and each man’s home, his safest refuge”. This is a quote from Edward Coke, an Elizabethan Lawyer, so right up Eric’s street. I was wondering where the second bit came from, but that’s the whole quote. I think now we move into the idea of your girlfriend moving in with you. If you let someone into your house, they’re going to change things.

T5 to T8 - I’m not sure this can be right, but this seems to refer to a type of lighting strength. Certainly I still have energy efficient lightbulbs in my flat that date back to when I had a more-ecologically minded boyfriend move in with me. So, you know, this bit really spoke to me.

“Pericardium” membrane enclosing the heart.

“Epicardium” - membrane which forms the innermost layer of the pericardium.

“Myocardium” - muscular tissue of heart.

“Endocardium” membrane which lines the chambers of the heart.

“Ventricle” - cavity of the heart. (I think we get what kind of stuff is going on in this section).

“seventy-two times per minute” - heart beat? But why 21,000? STOP PRESS. I cheated and asked Eric. It's the number of nerve receptors in the human epiderm (he thinks)?

Vena Cava - the name of the vein that runs from the heart.

Chordae - tendons in your heart, known as the “Heartstrings”. I’d never really thought that would be an actual thing that was your heartstring. Huh.

“O, O, O” - what is this? I can only think of the Wasteland (O O O O that Shakespeherian rag).

“Peterman” - slang for safe cracker.  We get a heist theme in this section like Eric’s walnut is a safe waiting to be cracked.

“Bertha’s Gift and Home Furnishings”. The Hole in the Wall gang were caught breaking into here, it’s a store in Las Vegas, in 1981. They were called the Hole in the Wall gang because… yup.

“Tete de Femme” - Picasso painting stolen from San Francisco Art Gallery in 1965.

“Bourne-shell” - this bit is all about computing. These are different “shells” which are how you access your operating system on your computer. “Korn-shell” is a development of the “Bourne-shell”. And C-shell and Bash are the same kind of thing.

“-sh” is the name of an executable file for Bourne shell (or something like that).

| - this punctuation (?) is used in computing language.

“Heartstone” - is this something to do with Dungeons and Dragons and the kind of person who’s into computers?

“shortcut” - computing.

“Platforms” - more internet speak.

“relational” - a relational operator is a programming language.

“Give me that man and I will wear him at heart’s core in my heart of heart”. - Hamlet says this. It misses out the phrase “that’s not passion’s slave” - so Eric shifts the meaning to make it romantic.

“hus” - this is icelandic for house. (It’s also hungarian for meat!)

“the hot crowd of thermal swarmed electron of eased atomic orbital in gradient still and radiating” - I asked a wise and lovely Science teacher at my school about this and he replied: “It doesn’t seem to mean a specific thing. If it’s meant to be metaphorical” LOL, let’s hope so, “electrons move quicker when heated and can jump up an orbital (they orbit atoms like planets). When they cool, they slide back down (an energy gradient), radiating light energy. Each atom releases a specific colour of light, like an optical fingerprint. Not sure if that metaphor works with my explanation, but that’s the closest thing it could be. Or he’s just bunged some atom based words together.” <crying with laughter emoji>

“Au coeur du corps” - to the heart of the body. Did I mention that Eric’s girlfriend is French?

“red electric” - we’ve done some DIY and got down to the live wire.

“Lin Changzhu” is a walnut farmer with whom there is an interview in some online paper about the exact thing of walnut betting. He makes 2 million yuan a year from his walnuts.

“betting on skin” this is how the thing where buyers pay a fixed price before the green outer covering is removed. It feels to me like there’s a tension here between the fact that the buyers aren’t interested in the actual kernel of the walnut but the shell despite the fact that a lot of this poem is about drilling into the inner part.

“Cupule” - cup shaped.

“English walnut or nux Gallica” - Eric mentioned this at the launch. He’s English, his girlfriend is French. English walnut is a type of walnut. Nux Gallica is Latin for walnut. Gallica means from Gaul (France).

“Mopan-mopan” I wish I could nail this exactly. mopan walnut is I think a type of walnut you use for massage; mopan is the chinese for disc; mopan-mopang are grinding stones found in prehistoric China used for grinding nuts.  

“dog-throw” - there are a number of references to the Ancient Roman knucklebone betting game. The dog was the lowest number on the knucklebone. “Vulture” was the lowest roll of all the bones, and the “Venus throw” (appropriately for the Goddess of Love in a love poem) was the highest roll.

“ratscrew” - Egyptian ratscrew is the name of card game like snap.

“slapjack” - I can’t remember what we used call this, but I played it loads, it’s like snap but there’s that thing where you race to slap the pile. Anyway, once again trying to get by luck a match. (Although incidentally if you wanted to score high in knucklebones, apparently, you wanted the bones to all be different, not matching. I’m not sure if we’re meant to worry about that).

“government official’s hat, a chicken’s heart, a lantern” - these are, delightfully, names the Chinese give to different shapes of walnuts.

“front-run vigorish” I almost didn’t bother looking these up, which is kudos to Eric, because it just sounds like in a rush and kind of vigorous. But I did. And so I discovered that “front-running” is when you buy stock because you have some secret knowledge that it’s going to go up and “vigorish” is the percentage deducted from a gambler’s winnings.

“nutshell” - Has it really taken this long for our Hamlet-loving poet to use this word in a poem about nuts? And is this all he’s going to give us? Is it too obvious? Do you think Ian McEwan has ruined it for him?

“acupoint” - acupuncture point - obviously Chinese link.

“kerf” - slit made by cutting with a saw.

“swarf” - filings produced by machining.

“surfy cream curls and open out” - when Eric read this poem aloud, it sounded like it was totally filthy. And I swear I wasn’t the only one to say that. You’ll notice how restrained I’ve been typing here. But aside from the testicles, the whole thing really is about getting into someone’s vagina, right? I guess those of us who know Eric and Anne-Laure can be pleased that it seems to be a poem about Anne-Laure getting into Eric’s vagina.

“sat with a crimped copy of Homer and a lucky cricket”. This is lovely, isn’t it? Little Eric squashed in his nutshell. It feels like this is an actual allusion to something. For example, why Homer? Maybe it’s a personal allusion between him and Anne-Laure. If not, the best I can do is it made me think a bit of Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” with that sense of sudden new discovery etc.

“rolled round, palmed around” - now that someone’s got into Eric’s vagina, they seem to be giving him a good “palming around”. This goes back to the purpose of these walnuts which is to rotate them in your hand and it’s meant to be good for the “circulation”.

“I type up slow happenstance on keywater brightboarding” - This give me an image of the two of them in bed, Eric typing up his poem, but quietly and slowly so as not to wake her, and the glow of the keys being the “brightboarding” as well as a little sense of sailing away, stretching out, freed from the shell.