pet names
[ID: Black and white comic of Vash and Wolfwood from Trigun Maximum. Vash overhears a conversation from a nearby table at the restaurant they're seated at, the unnamed character saying, "Honey, can you pass me that?" Their partner says, "Sure thing, angel." The unnamed character begins again, "Say, did you hear the news from earlier?" In response, "Haven't got the chance. Tell me about it?" Vash smiles fondly, listening in as the conversation continues, "You'd never guess, babe! The runner--" Abruptly, the conversation is cut in by a "Needle nogging", Vash's expression changing instantly and no longer smiling. The panel cuts to Wolfwood who smiles lop-sidedly, pointing at Vash's plate and says, "If you're not going to eat that. I'll take it." Vash grabs the plate and holds it away and says, "Mine" while Wolfwood clicks his tongue. He pauses for a moment before asking slowly, "Hey, is there any reason you don't use cute names with me?" Wolfwood lifts a cup of water up to his lips, looking confused. He says, "I do though." Vash cuts in, "Spikey and needle nogging aren't cute!"
Vash continues with a shy expression, "Since we're together now..." he trails off and Wolfwood picks up, taking a sip of water as he says thoughtfully, "Together, huh..." Vash pauses in his sentence with a look of confusion before reaffirming, "We are together, right?" Wolfwood nods, "Right." Vash says, "Right", before continuing, his shy expression returning, "Then you can use stuff like... honey or-" Wolfwood cuts in this time and says casually, "You're not a honey though." A panel cuts of Vash's expression changing again, shocked. He asks, "Huh? Then who is?" Wolfwood says immediately, "Milly." Vash exclaims, "Milly?!" Wolfwood continues, "She's sweet, just like honey." A bubble pops up of Milly smiling as Wolfwood speaks. Vash continues, "Okay, true... What about sweetpea?" Wolfwood responds, "Kids. Kids are sweetpea. And pumpkin too." Vash continues, "Okay... What about baby?" Wolfwood says without hesitation, "Meryl." Vash exclaims again, "Meryl?!" Wolfwood explains," Noisy, like a baby." Vash mutters, "Hey, that's a bit mean..."
Vash continues persistently, "Then what about babe?" Wolfwood shrugs with a grin, "You are not a babe." Vash looks at him, slightly frustrated before exclaiming with flushed cheeks, "Then what am I?!" Wolfwood points at his hair and smiles softly, "I told you. You're the one and only needle nogging." A panel closes in on Vash's widen eyes, cheeks still red, pausing before he ultimately resigns, planting his face into the palms of his hands and muttering, "I give up..." At the same time, Wolfwood sneaks and grabs the plate of food that Vash left unattended, saying in response, "You get up cuaght up about the dumbest things, y'know that?"
The comic then picks up again to a jump in time, after they've left the restaurant. Wolfwood muses to Vash, "You said all that about the names earlier, but I don't hear ya using them for me." Vash looks to him excitably and asks, "Did you want me to?" Wolfwood looks at him with an uncertain expression, "Not really, but I guess I am curious..." Vash beams, "Then let's try some, okay... dear?" He fingerguns Wolfwood with a grin, little hearts surrounding him. Wolfwood just looks at him neutrally and says, "Okay," while thinking to himself, "Cute..." Vash exclaims, "So unenthusiastic!"
The next comic picks up at a different time, but on the same theme of pet names. Vash hugs Wolfwood and says to him, "Thank you, my love." A panel close up of Vash steadily opening his eyes before he sees Wolfwood's reaction up close, his eyes glancing away, cheeks flushed, and the smoke out of his cig forming soft hearts as he mutters, "Sure..." In a smaller, cartoonish style, Vash has a comedically exaggerated expression of shock and widened eyes as he grips Wolfwood by the shoulders while Wolfwood still wears a shy expression. He then nudges his head to the side of Wolfwood's with a close eyed happy smile, hugging him close and says, "So, there WAS one you liked!" Wolfwood, still looking away, but now with an irritated and embarrassed expression, grumbles, "Shut up..."
The final image is a short sequence. Wolfwood is working on something, spacing out as he does, while Vash from off screen calls for him, starting with "Babeeee? Babe? Beautiful? Honey? My love?" All of which gets no reaction from Wolfwood. Vash pauses for a moment before piping up again, "wolfwood?" Wolfwood turns around, finally noticing that Vash was calling for him and asks, "What?" A box at the bottom of the page says, "Unresponsive to anything other than his names." END ID]
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I'm begging on my hands and knees for more Twilight au, and those are words I never thought I'd say! Anakin being able to resist compulsion, and Obi-Wan seeming instantly obsessed, and poor Shmi! Pretty please 🥺🙏
hey!! sure! here's some more!
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Having a sheriff for a mom sucked a lot when he was a kid growing up in a small town. There was probably nothing Anakin was rebelling against more at eleven, at thirteen, at seventeen than the rule of law his mother represented.
All things considered, she was pretty good at separating her home life from her worklife. It was Anakin who was bad at respecting the separation, Anakin who couldn’t keep son out of delinquent. There’s only so many times he could be pulled out of wreckage and bars and buildings with Keep Out No Trespassing signs on them before he got The Sheriff at home and out in public.
He’d hated it growing up and had come to grudgingly respect it later and in fits and starts. His dad dying had, terribly and ironically, helped a lot. His mother had had a stroke just before and then Anakin had been faced with the possibility of being an orphan, and the terror of that had mellowed him out.
Sorta.
He still hates a lot of things about his mother’s job. Especially the fact that she’s the sheriff of a very small town.
And when people talk, she listens.
The thing about small towns is that everyone’s always fucking talking. And other people are always fucking lsitening so they can talk later. One big fucking community, which means when Anakin comes home from his weird doctor’s appointment with Dr. Kenobi, a few hours later because he took a detour biking along the edge of the seaside cliffs just to spit in the good doctor’s metaphorical face, Shmi Skywalker already knows more than Anakin ever planned to tell her.
Like, for instance, “Sheila says that Dr. Kenobi thought it would behoove you to spend some time at the local library volunteering.”
Anakin pauses, backpack half-slung off his shoulders. He hangs his stuff up slowly, careful to keep his tone very light. “Did Sheila say what I told him after he said that?”
His mom’s silence is very loud.
“I don’t want to do i—”
“I asked the new librarian about it on my way home from the station. She thinks it’s a wonderful idea. Apparently we used to have a program like that in the forties but it died out during the war.”
“Mom, come on—”
“It’ll look good on resumes, saying you created and supported a local reading program.”
“Yeah, but I’m a bit too old to be applying for babysitting positio—”
“It’ll look good for me as well,” Shmi says in her sheriff voice. “Elections are coming up soon. It’ll be good, if my kid was involved in the community.”
Anakin’s glad that his back is still turned to the living room, where his mom is sitting. “Are you gonna run again?” he asks, paying special attention to his tone this time.
“Why wouldn’t I?” his mom replies. “I’ve been sheriff for a decade and a half.”
Anakin lets his eyes fall closed for a second, knowing that his face can’t be seen. This is how they end up half the time: Shmi’s ardent belief that she is invincible, going up against Anakin’s desperate desire for her to be so.
And they just don’t talk about it. As if they’re actually in agreement.
He knows how this is going to shake out.
“Do you have any plans tomorrow?” His mother asks.
Anakin’s eyes remain closed. “I guess so,” he says.
—--------
Mrs. Kenobi—call me Satine—is sort of scary up close. She’s tall. She glides between bookshelves. Anakin’s never met someone who glides before. And she’s so intensely, incredibly, blindingly perfect that Anakin would rather be anywhere but in her vicinity. There’s something incredibly unnerving about the symmetry of her face, the sharpness of her cheekbones. She’s obviously an absolute knock-out, just drop-dead gorgeous, but it makes Anakin’s skin crawl and his heart beat fast, but not in a good way or a normal teenage boy way.
Anakin tries to keep the unease off his face as Satine leads him through a tour of the library, a gentle hand on his forearm. That’s another thing Anakin doesn’t really like. She’s wearing satin gloves. He doesn’t know anyone who wears gloves anymore.
It’s just all a bit…unsettling.
“I put in a few words around the school yesterday afternoon,” Satine tells him. They pass by the mystery section, the fantasy section, and take a hard right into the young adult section. The shelves are smaller here, and Anakin feels rather stupidly gigantic as he and Satine walk through them. “To some parents picking their children up after school. They agreed it would be good exposure to bring them to the library for an hour or so of reading before supper.”
Anakin highly doubts it will be, but Satine hasn’t really asked him.
She sweeps past his figure and pushes open a pair of double doors with a flourish better suited for a Russian tsarina hosting an elaborate ball than a small town librarian showing off a small, cramped, and dusty room filled with padded seats and threadbare rugs.
And then, as if she has been waiting to put the last nail in the proverbial coffin, Satine adds, “A few students from the local high school will be here as well.”
“Sorry,” Anakin says, “are you saying I’m going to be reading to high school students? Can’t they do that themselves?”
After all, Anakin went to high school here. Academics hadn’t been too rigorously challenging, but they’d taught the fucking basics.
Satine raises one perfectly plucked eyebrow in his direction. “They’ll be volunteering as well.”
Oh. Right.
“It looks good on their college applications,” Satine waves a hand through the air and the words linger there. Anakin looks out the rather dirty window, jaw clenching. “I’ve already chosen a handful of books I think the young ones will enjoy.”
Anakin, committed to his fate, pads over to the titles placed carefully ontop of a short, stout side table.
“Peter the Rabbit,” he reads off the top. “Peter Pan. Alice in Wonderland. Treasure Island. The Prince and the Pauper—look, you’re the librarian here, but don’t you have anything written this century maybe? Harry Potter, even.”
“These are classics,” Satine tells him, her nose raised into the air as if she has encountered something particularly foul-smelling. She turns away, presumably to return to the front desk so she can welcome half the fucking town inside the library so Anakin can read them fucking Anne of Green Gables and become a better person.
“These are fucking boring,” he mutters to himself, flicking the cover of the first book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz open. Publication date: 1900. “I’d rather be in Kenobi’s office getting lectured at.”
There’s a sharp noise of disapproval from the doorway, and Anakin’s head snaps up to see the tail end of a very heated look from the librarian before the door closes behind her.
He shivers, alone in the emply room, and it takes several long minutes for his heart to settle back into its normal pace.
—----------
After the fourth kid sneezes, Anakin closes his book with a snap and stands from the very small chair they’ve got him sitting on. “Come on,” he tells the cluster of children he’s been assigned to. “We’re getting out of here.”
“Are you kidnapping us?” One of them, a snot-nosed kid who’d started the sneezing says, rubbing at her cheek beneath her glasses. “Cause mommy says that’s not allowed.”
“I’m not kidnapping you,” Anakin snaps back, barely holding in his natural follow-up to the sentence which is of course, I don’t want to be around any of you in the first place. “Also, just for future reference, you shouldn’t ask if someone’s kidnapping you after you already start following them.”
The girl scowls and reaches up her hand to hold onto Anakin’s.
For the love of Christ.
“We’re just going to go into the main part of the library,” Anakin tells his children, all six of them. “They have windows out there.”
They have windows out there and they also have parents. Parents who absolutely should be doing other things with their lives and precious hour of extra freetime.
Parents who are clustered instead around the library’s front desk as the town’s newest librarian holds court.
“Is reading time over?” one of the kids asks him, turning his head to look up at Anakin.
Anakin thinks about it. “Do you want reading time to be over?”
The kid thinks about it back. “Yeah,” he decides. “You don’t do the voices good.”
“It’s a boring book,” Anakin tells the kid. “Voices aren’t going to make it better.”
“Voices always make it better,” another kid says. “They make everything better.”
“Oh look,” Anakin says. “Is that your father?”
He gestures vaguely towards the cluster of drooling middle-aged somethings focused on Satine.
The kid peeks around his thigh and then shakes his head. “No,” he says. “That’s Dr. Obi.”
“Dr. Obi!” The kid holding Anakin’s hand says, and she lets go.
Anakin gets a bad feeling about this, a feeling that only doubles when he turns around to see Dr. Kenobi sauntering towards him, hands tucked into the pockets of a long dark jacket that makes him look even more pale than he already is.
He scowls automatically as the man gets closer. “Dr. Obi.”
Dr. Kenobi spares him a look that’s far too amused for Anakin’s pleasure before he crouches down to the level of the kids. “Hello there, young ones,” he says, opening his arms to accept a hug from the traitor of a girl Anakin’s just spent thirty minutes reading to. “Are you eating all your vegetables? Even the brussel sprouts?”
“I like brussel sprouts,” one of the kids reports sounding proud, and that starts a cacophony of opinions about brussel sprouts from all around Anakin.
“Wow! One of mine just absolutely hates them,” Dr. Kenobi says. “She refuses to eat them, so you’re very brave, Michele.” He lets go of the girl and turns his golden-brown gaze up to Anakin. “And what does Mr. Skywalker think?” he asks, raising a hand for Anakin to take. It’s very obvious he’s asking for a hand up and Anakin is obeying before he thinks about it. He snatches his hand free almost too soon, but Dr. Kenobi doesn’t even have the grace to lose his balance and fall over.
His hand is like ice in Anakin’s, and Anakin stuffs his fingers into the pocket of his jacket automatically a second later.
“Do brussel sprouts help with circulation?” he’s biting out before he can stop himself. “Cause you may need some then.”
Kenobi’s head tilts very slightly to the side as his eyes catch and hold onto Anakin’s. “Oh?” he asks lightly.
“You’re cold,” is all Anakin mutters in return. He swipes his other hand against the back of his neck. “”S poor circlutation, isn’t it? Something in your diet maybe?”
Dr. Kenobi blinks at him and then breaks into a wide smile. “I can assure my diet is very…circulation-mindful,” he says. “Blood health positive.”
Anakin’s mouth thins into a line. He guesses that’s what he gets for trying to give health advice to a doctor, especially a doctor like Kenobi who just so happens to be devastatingly attractive and also smart.
And also an asshole. And also married.
Speaking of which. “Are you here to fend off your wife’s admirers with a scalpel?”
Kenobi’s eyebrows raise. “Young ones,” he turns his head away from Anakin, down to the children.
The strangest feeling breaks of Anakin the second Kenobi looks away, almost as if a strange pressure he hadn’t even realized had been building was suddenly dissolved.
The very small beginnings of a headache begin to thrum in his temples.
“Young ones, it’s time to find your parents, isn’t it?” Kenobi says, and like fucking magic, the crowd of six children around Anakin disperse, children swarming away from him towards the group of adults surrounding the front desk.
“Can you teach me how to do that?” Anakin blurts out, even though he’d meant to ignore Kenobi now that he doesn’t have to make nice in front of small kids. Not that he was really making nice in the first place. But now he definitely doesn’t have to.
Kenobi gives him a half-smile, eyes heavy-lidded. “It’s a special sort of skill that takes, above all else, much practice.”
Anakin scowls. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Does Kenobi think he can’t commit himself to something even as mundane as a fucking commanding persona? Does he think he doesn’t have it in him to be–-
Kenobi’s eyebrows go up again. “Has anyone ever told you that you are exceedingly defensive?”
“You’re extremely nosey,” Anakin snaps back, crossing his arms over his chest. “Don’t you have better things to focus on right now anyway?”
He gestures loosely towards Satine, who has started playing with one of the mother’s bracelets as the other woman stands and looks at her rather dumbfounded.
Kenobi follows his gaze and then lets out a huff of laughter. “Satine can take care of herself,” he says, even though it hadn’t really been Satine that Anakin was worried about.
He’s about to open his mouth to say so when Kenobi turns back to him. His eyes are piercing, a dark, captivating sort of gold.
“Do you find my wife beautiful, Anakin?” he asks.
Anakin blinks. His headache is getting worse, which is probably down to what can only be a trick-question fashioned to look like a grenade lobbed at his feet. “I don’t think there’s a good answer to that,” he mutters, rubbing absently at his forehead. “What the fuck.”
“An honest answer is a good one,” Kenobi says lightly. “Tell me honestly.”
The words feel pulled from Anakin’s stomach, and he’s opening his mouth before he realizes it.
“No,” he says.
Kenobi’s eyebrows crinkle together. “No?”
Anakin curses his stupid impulse control. “She’s beautiful,” he adds quickly. “Really. But…it makes me uncomfortable.”
Kenobi’s lips purse, and then there’s something like disappointment in his eyes as he examines Anakin. “Ah yes,” he murmurs. “I’ve been told my wife can make countless young men feel rather uncomfortable. It’s normal in men your age, Anakin. Sexual ar—”
“Uncanny,” Anakin blurts out. He doesn’t mean to, but he also doesn’t want to listen to Kenobi trying to lecture him on fucking arousal in the public library. When it’s not even relevant. “She’s so beautiful, it’s uncanny.”
“Uncanny.”
“Yeah, like. Monstrous.”
Kenobi’s mouth falls open, pink lips parted in what looks like honest surprise.
Anakin’s own eyes widen as it hits him that he’s just called Kenobi’s wife a monster to Kenobi’s face.
“Shit,” he says. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that. I’m going to go.”
He throws a look at Kenobi, whose eyes are lit with something a lot like interest and then across the library to where Satine’s head is turned, cocked, and eyebrows up high on her forehead, as if she’s just heard everything he’s said.
He decides rather immediately that he’s going to take the backdoor exit.
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