Why evryone want to turn you into tree 🥹
they probably just thinkin I’m all bark no bite
if that’s the case, they wood be wrong
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Echo’s world has gone decidedly… wobbly. Blurry. Fuzzy at the edges, and what-will-you-else. He can’t feel his fingertips, is his first thought. Kriffing overdid it on the glowing green shots, is his second.
“Holy kriff, Echo, that manhole-cover underneath you is moving!”, Fives exclaims, third. Or more like slurs into Lt. Jesse’s shoulder, who is himself moaning indistinctly into the Captain’s pauldron, who is in turn swaying back and forth gesturing at Commander Cody.
And it really is - the manhole cover, that is, once Echo stumbles off it with a shriek. Jumping up into the now open air with sudden force, steadying and then scraping across paveme-
“Are those kriffing hands?!”
In an instant, seven highly drunk pairs of fists and one blaster, courtesy of Commander Cody (the only one present who’s sober enough to be legally handling it) are aimed in a circle around the cover slowly being shuffled to the side, then the hands reaching up to palm at the edges of the hole -
- and are slowly being lowered again when two white-red painted helmets are heaved into view, along with chest-deep groaning and grunting. Two armored Corries collapse in a heap at Commander Cody’s feet, who stares down at them in open-mouthed shock.
Slowly, Echo blinks. Slowly, he raises a hand to snap his fingers in front of his face. No, still there. Slowly, Fives grabs for a piece of flank underneath his blacks and twists. Echo yelps, and slaps his hand away hard enough to hurt himself. “OI!”
“B’have, boys”, Captain Rex makes a brave attempt to slur out as he sways on his feet, still staring down at the trembling heap of armor at their feet. Whoa, Echo didn’t know they had those kinds of funky armor designs in the Guard. Very avant-garde.
“That’s blood, Ey’ika”, says Appo.
Oh.
Slowly, Hardcase raises his right foot, inching towards-
“Don’t even think about it”, Commander Cody snaps, and Hardcase’s foot whips back to the ground next to its companion. Fives chortles. “Yeah, genius, those are Commander kamas - they’d put you down in a second flat!”
“Why would two Corrie Commanders go crawling out of holes in front of 79’s, huh, genius?!”, Hardcase retorts, somewhat justly, Echo feels. Next to him, Commander Cody frowns, and kneels carefully. “Good question, trooper. Fox, can you hear me? Fox’i-“
Which is when one of the bodies - Commander Fox, Echo realizes with a shudder, The Marshall Commander Fox - convulses on the ground, and an arm rears up to nail Cody face-first with the back of a hand, sending him sprawling back into the pavement with an undignified squawk.
“Thorn”, the sad figure that is the highest decorated clone in existence groans, still faceplanted into pavement, “Thorn, I’m hallucinating Cody. Thorn, tell him to shut up.”
“Shuddup”, Commander Thorn heaves, loyally. Cody makes an affronted noise, braced back on his shebs. “Sdubid Codeh.”
Commander Fox’s visor scrapes against the ground with his nod, a sound that sends the surrounding vod’e cringing. “Yeah, you go, Thorn. You’re my favorite.” A considering pause. “Oh, kark. I need to call in medevac - Fox to Stabby, Fox to Stabby - the kriffing Narglatches are back on the lower levels.”
The Commander’s comm crackles to life, as he heaves himself over with a punched-out moan - oh, yup, that dark patch’s definitely not paint, and are those teeth marks?! On plastoid??
“I’m going to wring Senator Hliii’s neck, and then I’m going to twist him into a human kriffing meat-lasso to catch every last one of his little pets with”, sounds through Fox’s comm, who just hacks out a laughcough in response. “Pinging your location now. Where’s Thorn?”
“Pr’snt”, slurs Thorn.
“Concussed”, adds Fox, “We crawled out forty levels to behind 79’s, so no one would see us.”
Awkward silence follows.
“Uh, about that”, begins Rex, only to be interrupted by a deep groan from Fox.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kriffing kidding me! As if Cody’s ugly mug wasn’t - WHAT THE KRIFF ARE YOUR KRIFFING ARC KARKHEADS DOING IN MY HALLUCINATION, REX?!”
“Shuddup, Rex”, Thorn moans bravely.
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tgcf book spoilers, but one mu qing and xie lian snippet that I think about a lot is this one, at the start of xie lian’s second banishment when he’s surprised to hear mu qing being described as generous and kind:
as opposed to this memory from before his first ascension when mu qing started giving out cherries to the kids in the city:
I think it just really goes to show 1) how deeply mq’s actions truly affected xl and what he thought of him, but also 2) just how different mq and xl are fundamentally in the way that they think and approach things.
I don’t have a lot of commentary on xl that hasn’t already been said, but bc we get the story from xl’s pov, we see a lot of mq’s actions being framed as selfish or suspicious (which is fair, bc again, we know how much his actions hurt xl), but we also see a lot of misconstrued kindness, like in book 8 where it’s revealed that he knocked out fx in order to save him. it’s also pretty obvious how much mq still cares abt xl, with how quickly he volunteers as fu yao and the lengths he goes to protect him when he deems hc a threat, so I also think it’s very likely that mq leaving the trio first was exactly what he said it was — that he thought becoming a junior official, ascending quickly, would be the best way to take care of not just his mother, but also xl, fx, the king and queen, and himself, and so in a way, him leaving was him acting on his kindness. but ofc it doesn’t work out, and he spends the next 800 years fighting w/ fx about it, defending himself, his decisions, and his kindness, and nitpicking the accuracies of his statues while he himself remains completely misunderstood by the two people he probably cares abt the most.
and idk, I guess I just think that’s probably a really lonely way to spend 800 years.
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