#nirea velaran

[hydrospanners]

to wear my mind on my sleeve.

swtor genfic. group chat. ao3. In the galactic political order, there are two main factions competing for power and control. On Odessen, the dedicated public servants fighting for independence from these factions are known as The Alliance. These are their stories.

# babysitters-club

  Lana Beniko: @Theron Shan I thought you locked her out of all the social media accounts.

Theron Shan: I did. What now?

Lana Beniko: I can’t tell if she thinks she’s being clever or if she thinks people are that dumb.

big dick betti @notnireavelaran

if i was on coruscant i wouldv stopped malgus

Trest Derandon @trestderandon1

I was an actual Jedi in the Temple that day and lost an arm to a Sith in that fight. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

big dick betti @notnireavelaran

rip to ur arm but im different

Theron Shan: @T7-01 Explain.

T7-01: 01010011 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01000011 01101111 01101101 01101101 01100001 01101110 01100100 01100101 01110010 00101110 

Theron Shan: Traitor.

moustache rider: lmao ur one to talk

moustache rider: be nice to t7 hes the best of us

Lana Beniko: I see someone’s finally taught you how to change your name.

moustache rider: u did god hiding secret permisions from me but not good enough

Theron Shan: You do know everyone in the Alliance sees that name right? All of the people counting on you to lead and protect them?

moustache rider: 😏

Theron Shan: Oh hell, she’s figured out emojis too.

moustache rider: hey sis, ridle me this

Lana Beniko: Can your technological benefactor also teach you to spell?

moustache rider: what do you have one of but need more

moustache rider: and i have none of but get plenty

Lana Beniko: Dick.

Theron Shan: Dick.

moustache rider: 🍆 🍆 🍆 

moustache rider: im hilarious

Theron Shan: That wasn’t even a riddle.

moustache rider: not a riddle or a joke, but a secret third thing

Lana Beniko: Aren’t you supposed to be meeting with the Ambassador from Zakuul?

moustache rider: i am

Theron Shan: You’re supposed to be in the meeting or you are in the meeting?

moustache rider: it was this or take a nap on the table u shuld be proud

Theron Shan: Oh for the love of fuck

moustache rider: now we’re talking

Theron Shan: At least change your name, Rea. If you don’t, Lana will change it for you and it won’t be something you like.

—> moustache rider is now big dick betti.

Theron Shan: No.

—> big dick betti is now theron shan’s pointy nipples.

Theron Shan: No!

Lana Beniko: I don’t know; it has a certain charm.

Theron Shan: Not you too.

theron shan’s pointy nipples: be careful what you wish for lover

Theron Shan: Never call me that again.

theron shan’s pointy nipples: yea i regretted it as soon as i said it

Lana Beniko: Please tell me you aren’t using speech to text in the middle of your meeting with the ambassador.

theron shan’s pointy nipples: im not

Lana Beniko: I can see you on the security cameras, Nirea.

theron shan’s pointy nipples: ur the 1 who asksed me to say it

Theron Shan: How are you having typos when you’re using speech to text?

theron shan’s pointy nipples: t7 made an autocorrect. wanted to make sure i nvr sounded as uptite as u 2

Theron Shan: I’m sending my resignation now.

Lana Beniko: No you aren’t.

theron shan’s pointy nipples: no you arent

T7-01: 01101110 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 01101110 00100111 01110100 00001010 

[hoiist]

Gift art for @hydrospanners after she wrote me this really good fic that made me cry like a bitch

Its a redraw of that one scene from Thor: Ragnarok 

[meonlyred]

Nirea visited Rossa’s house on Manaan. While there she said “hello” to Rossa’s BF. 

“Just… just don’t kill him, please.”

(@hydrospanners​ I had to make a gif. I had to)

[hydrospanners]

WHAT THE FUCK THIS AMAZING??!!??!! Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am freaking out I love it!!!!!!!! What a good Secret Santa!!!!!!!!!!!! Also how did you guess I like Doc?!?? How does everyone know my deepest darkest secret!?!??

You have made me the happiest thank you so much!!

So, @hydrospanners , I’m your Secret Santa

I’ve noticed you like Doc a lot :)

I loved your beautiful Jedi Knight. May the Force be with her and with you.

@swtorsecretsanta

[hydrospanners]

[hydrospanners]

Hey, before we go. My new master, Tau? What can you tell me about her?

[hydrospanners]

an aging padawan, done with everyone’s shit

[hydrospanners]

a little help from a friend

the one where theron must choose between death or sharing body heat with his friend/nemesis. theron will wonder what he did to deserve this punishment. emotions will be tossed back and forth like a hot potato no one wants. friendships will be affirmed. nipples will be flicked. everyone will (probably) make it out alive. 

swtor; post-jedi under siege. slight spoilers. genfic; humor with a dash of friendship fluff. mostly f!jedi knight & theron friendship; f!jedi knight x doc discussed. 1800 words. ao3.

“This,” Theron says, shimmying out of his soaked trousers, “is your fault.”

  Rea’s top hits him in the face. “You’re welcome for your life.”

  “My life wouldn’t have even been in danger if you hadn’t--”

  “You have to take those off.”

  Theron, holding open the cover of the sleeping bag to step in, blinks at her. He only has one thing left to take off.

  “No,” he says.

  “You can’t warm up in wet fucking clothes, Theron. Don’t they teach you anything in SIS?” She gives him a look that tells him just how much she thinks of SIS training before throwing her wet bra in his face. Being that it’s at least as saturated with her blood as melted snow, it’s slightly warmer than her top was.

  “I’m not doing it, Rea.”

  “Stop being a little bitch and get naked with me.”

She strips out of her underwear and this time, he catches it before it slaps him across the face. “You’re a starsdamned menace,” he says. “Don’t look.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Like you’ve got anything I want to see.”

  Still, she keeps her eyes on the sleeping bag as she peels it open and slips inside. Theron keeps his eyes on literally anything else. Objectively attractive though she might be—and he’s gone through the personal messages of enough Alliance personnel to know she is—the idea of looking at her naked body turns his stomach. It would be like… looking at Satele. Like looking at a sister, he supposes, if he had one.

  It just feels wrong.

  “Will you get in the fucking bag already? I promise I’m not gonna look at your shriveled dick. And if I see it by accident, I promise not to laugh. It’s cold. It’s not your fault.”

  “I’m not—“ Theron stops himself. She’s just trying to provoke him and he’s not going to let her. After the shit she’s put him through today, he refuses to give her the pleasure of seeing him annoyed. “Scooch over,” he grumbles, and dives into the bag next to her.

  It is not, at first, very warm.

  Rea’s skin is cold as ice and slick with half-frozen blood and sweat.

  He forgot about blood loss.

  This is the thing about Rea that makes her so completely unbearable. Every single time you get angry with her, it turns out she was just pissing you off to distract you from your own hopeless misery, and that she did it while she was bleeding out from a blaster wound you didn’t even know she had. It turns out you’re the one being a fucking toddler while she’s over there sucking up a life-threatening injury like a champ.

  It’s hard to stay mad at her after that. Even if she is being an ass.

  So Theron grits his teeth and does the most he can for her: he wraps her in his arms.

  He’s petulantly satisfied when Rea goes rigid in his grip, clearly as uncomfortable with this arrangement as he is, no matter what she pretends. Blood loss or no blood loss, hypothermia or no hypothermia, this is just as fucking weird for her as it is for him.

  He wonders sometimes if he should be more offended that Rea, a woman who would put the moves on a lamppost in the right lighting, is so totally uninterested in him. But mostly, he’s too busy being relieved. The idea of her being attracted to him is nearly as repellent as the idea of him being attracted to her.

  It takes hardly a second for Rea to recover, to relax back into the bravado she wears like armor. Her tension releases and she snuggles into Theron’s embrace like they do this every day.

  It doesn’t bother him as much as he expected.

  He isn’t what you’d call an affectionate person. He can’t remember the last time he touched someone outside of trying to either save their life or take it. Or sex, but sex isn’t the same as this. Not the way Theron does it anyway.

  He can’t remember the last time he touched someone for comfort. For closeness.

  Rea wouldn’t mind it, he knows. She’s already touchy feely as hell with everyone else. She might not even give him shit for it. Terrible as she is, she seems to know which of his boundaries can be pushed and which can’t. She might spend twenty out of the twenty-four hours in a day giving him shit, but she almost never puts her hands on him if she doesn’t have to.

  He’s halfway to considering the possibility of allowing himself the smallest sliver of affection from this, the unlikeliest of sources, when she opens her mouth and fucks it all up.

  “Your nipples are like fucking knives.”

  It’s one of the worst sentences he’s ever heard. And then, one of her ice-cold fingertips pokes at his frigid nipple and that is easily one of the worst things he’s ever felt, which altogether makes this possibly the worst day he’s ever had.

  He hisses, and arches away from her as far as the sleeping bag they’re zipped into together will allow.

  It’s not very far.

  “Don’t touch my nipples,” he snaps.

  “You ever heard of moisturizer?” Rea asks, totally ignoring him and flicking his nipple with her finger.

  He would fight her if he wasn’t absolutely sure he’d lose, blaster burns and all.

  “You might have a condition,” she goes on, blithely. “When we get back to base, I’m sending you to Doc. He can at least give you a cream.”

  “I am not letting your husband touch my nipples,” Theron says. “And I’m done talking about it. Keep your hands to yourself.”

  He feels her shrug--she’s one to talk about sharp nipples, isn’t she?--and says, “Your loss. Most people don’t complain when I touch their nipples.”

  “If you say the word nipple one more time, I will kill you.”

  “You can try.”

  “We should’ve left you in carbonite,” he grumbles.

  His words are answered with silence. It lingers between them, the moment drawing out for endless seconds, growing heavier with every quiet breath, until finally Rea sighs. Until she whispers into the space between them, so quiet he almost doesn’t hear her say, “Probably.”

  And again he’s the asshole.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Theron tells her, a little gruffer than he means to be.

  He’s not good at comfort at the best of times, and having to get naked with the woman he reluctantly considers his best friend to combat hypothermia in the galaxy’s tiniest sleeping bag is not what he’d call the best of times.

  “I don’t know any other way to be,” Rea says. “Ask anyone.”

  “Rea…”

  “RonRon.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “SIS.”

  “Rea.”

  “Doc is so much more fun to get hypothermia with,” she whines, trying to snuggle closer. Like there’s any closer she could get without unzipping him and climbing into his skin.

  “Trust me, we would all be happier if he was here instead,” Theron agrees.

  What wouldn’t he give to be toasty warm and fully clothed in the medwing on Odessen right now? It sounds like a dream.

  “I almost brought him with us,” Rea says.

  Theron raises a brow. “To do recon?”

  “Stupid right? Best doctor in the galaxy and I’m gonna drag him away from the lab to the frozen asshole of space for what? So I can look at him?” She shivers, and Theron doesn’t think it’s from the cold. “I just keep thinking… What if he’s not there when I get back? What if he’s finally done waiting on me? Every single time I leave him behind, I get so scared about it I almost can’t breathe.”

  It’s not something he thinks she would ever admit in the light of day. But there’s something about the night, something about the yawning, too-quiet darkness of it that has a way of drawing truths out of people.

  Or maybe it was their shared brush with death.

  “Have you, uh, talked to him? About it?” Theron can’t imagine a worse person to be giving relationship advice, but there’s no one else here. And he has a sneaking suspicion he’s the person she’d talk to even if there was. He has a sneaking suspicion Rea reluctantly considers him her best friend, too.

  “Kind of? We always get distracted.”

  If Theron is translating right, ‘get distracted’ is Rea-nese for ‘feelings are complicated so we fucked instead’.

  “I’m not really an expert, Rea, but it seems like if he was going to run out of patience, he would’ve done it years ago.” If he was going to run out of patience, he probably never would’ve married Rea in the first place, but Theron doesn’t say that part.

  “I know,” she sighs. “Archiban said the same thing. That’s what’s so fucking annoying!” She knocks her forehead against his shoulder in frustration. “He says he wants to be here. He says he wants to be with me. And I believe him! He wouldn’t lie about it, and it’s not like he’s one of those people who don’t really know what they want. But none of that stops me from freaking out every time I get on a transport without him. It’s totally irrational and I just… I have no fucking clue how to stop it.”

  If Theron were a good best friend, he’d come up with something comforting to say. He’d tell her it’s going to be okay, tell her it’s normal, tell her it’ll all work out in the end.

  Theron laughs at her instead.

  “Hey,” Rea scowls, poking him hard in the gut. “I’m trying to talk about real shit like a normal fucking person, you asshole. Stop laughing.”

  “I’m sorry,” Theron says, not meaning it. “It’s just… You’re mad cause you can’t control your feelings.”

  “So?”

  “It’s a pretty Jedi thing to be mad about.”

  “You are such a dick.” Rea kicks him as well as she can with both their legs trapped together in the narrow taper of the bag, but it isn’t long before she’s laughing too.

  It’s nice to be on the other side of this equation for once. To be the asshole for a good cause. He understands, a little, why she works so hard to put herself here.

  “I hate you,” she grumbles at him, once their laughter fades.

  “Sure.”

  “You’re supposed to be nice to your friends, RonRon. Don’t they teach you anything at SIS?”

  Unbidden, Theron’s mind drifts to Jonas. He shudders. “The SIS isn’t big on friendship,” he says.

  “Well fuck the SIS,” Rea says. “You’re Alliance now.”

  “Yeah,” Theron says. “I am.”

  “You know what else you are?”

  “A dick?” He guesses.

  Theron can feel Rea’s smile against his shoulder. “Yeah, but you’re my dick.”

  “I wish you hadn’t said that.”

  She just laughs, that stupid deep belly laugh she does when she isn’t laughing to cover something else. It feels good to hear it. Feels like a win.

  He might not be so bad at this friendship stuff after all.

[hydrospanners]

t-3 minutes until that dress is covered in whiskey, blood, or both

[hydrospanners]

no better taste

an ordinary moment after a very extraordinary first date; or, doc and rea experiment with tenderness. a sequel-of-sorts to somewhere we’ve not been before; can stand alone. swtor act two. f!jedi knight x doc. fluff. no spoilers.1100 words. ao3.

By the time he slips from the blackness of Rea’s quarters, the night has turned to morning has turned to day. Shafts of light slant into the hallway from the large viewports of the cockpit, and it would be beautiful if the light wasn’t mostly neon and flashing.

  Maybe it’s just the night he had, but Doc thinks it might be beautiful anyway.

  He gathers his shoes and jacket into one hand, attempting to fasten the button of his pants with the other. He isn’t what you’d call modest, but he’s in a generous enough mood to tuck away anything Red or Junior would be really upset by. He’s got no idea where his underwear got off to, but he doubts he’ll ever see it again. Or his shirt. Or his socks.

  It was a hell of a night.

  A hell of a night that saw him waking up in Rea’s bed for once.

  He’d have a good time with her anywhere--they’d had a good time just about everywhere last night--but stretching out in the captain’s bed is a hell of an upgrade from the complicated knots they have to tangle into below deck, down in his cramped little cot in his cramped little room. He doesn’t know why she insisted on it before, just like he doesn’t know what’s changed her mind now, but he’s got a good feeling about it. A really good feeling. A feeling so good he’s not gonna ruin it by looking at it too closely and finding something he might not be ready to see yet.

  “Hey.”

  Doc jumps nearly out of his skin.

  Rea is leaning against the door behind him, her arms stretched overhead, crossed at the wrists and resting against the frame, looking six kinds of languid and twelve kinds of sexy. She’s wearing nothing but an oversized, threadbare tanktop--stolen from Junior if he’s any guess--that dips across the tops of her breasts and skirts along the crease of her thighs in the most tantalizing fucking way.

  His mouth goes dry, and even though he knows--he absolutely, unequivocally knows--the fuel in that particular tank is all used up, there’s a part of him that wants to reach for her anyway. To slip his hands beneath the hem of that shirt and run them up her sides just as slow as he can stand, to devour, just one more time, that cut statue of a body he’s done nothing but worship all morning and all night.

  His eyes rake up and down her body, up and down the lightyears of leg, of taut muscle and warm, brown skin. His eyes make her body a million promises that his hands and his mouth and his cock are all too tired and aching to make good on.

  For now, anyway.

  “You trying to sneak off on me?” Rea asks, and he finds her smiling one of those knowing smiles once he manages to bring his eyes up to her face again.

  (Not that her face is any less tempting, with those plush, bruised lips and bright, laughing eyes; with the kind of smudged makeup and mussed hair that just screams sex.)

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, Gorgeous.”

  He doesn’t say how he didn’t want to wake her cause he knows she needs the rest. That kind of thing is doctor talk, and right now he’s just the man shuffling from her bed, barefoot and commando after a marathon night of mischief and sex. The kind of man who notices the exquisite sculpture of her ass, not the dark circles under her eyes.

  The line between the two, he’s found, is important to Rea. It’s not a balancing act Doc is good at, not one he even likes--he’s always been more of an all in or all out type--but he’s not about to teeter over the edge now. Not after a night (and morning and afternoon) of perfect, simple pleasures.

  Rea laughs, dropping her hands from the doorframe to his shoulders, her thumbs caressing the sharp edge of his clavicles. Her smile is warm and easy as ever, but there’s something about the way she’s looking at him that he can’t quite read. Something new.

  She runs one hand along his shoulder, settling it in the nape of his neck, her long fingers toying with the downy hairs at his nape. It’s so gentle, so light, so different from every way she’s touched him before--a shiver runs down his spine. A sweeter kind of tingle than he’s used to, more pleasant heat than electricity.

  “I had a good time last night,” she says, her voice barely more than a whisper.

  “Me too,” he says, a little stupidly.

  It just feels so absurd, having such an ordinary exchange with a woman who couldn’t be more out of the ordinary if she tried. To be having it about a date so unusual, so delightfully and deliciously abnormal, that most people wouldn’t even recognize it for what it was.

  He wants to laugh. And from the look on Rea’s face, so does she.

  Instead, she leans in, eyes fluttering shut, and presses the sweetest of kisses to his lips. A kiss so soft, so brief, so chaste--the kind of kiss normal people share after a normal first date. A kiss that’s all tenderness and promise.

  The surprise of it, of tasting such gentleness on Rea’s lips, nearly brings him to his admittedly already-kind-of-trembling knees.

  He’d be more embarrassed by it if she didn’t pull away looking just as winded as he felt. If he couldn’t see her skin puckering up in gooseflesh to match his.

  The moment stretches out between them, languid and warm, and Doc just lets it. It never even occurs to him to make a joke, to say something vulgar or ostentatious that will warp things back into a more familiar shape. It just doesn’t feel like the kind of tension that needs breaking.

  Rea steps back first.

  Once the moment is stretched thin and the quiet starts to bear weight; once her throat starts to close around a feeling she can’t even begin to describe.

  Rea steps back, and reality snaps back into place. Her smile turns coy and her eyes glitter with mischief and Doc likes that so much he can’t even be sad it cost him whatever had just been growing in the space between them.

  He can’t be sad about anything right now.

  Rea runs her thumb along his jaw one last time before she takes her hands off him completely. Before she steps back across the threshold of her door, before the shadows of her room flow across the dips and curves of her silhouette, seeming to swallow her up.

  The last smile she gives him is pure playfulness, raising her hand to her ear in a gesture he’s seen a million times before on a million dates with a million different people. “Call me,” she mouths, just before the door swishes shut between them.

  Doc spends the walk back to his bunk wondering how soon he can do just that.

[hydrospanners]

#swagger

[hydrospanners]

when a problem comes along, you must whip it

when an explosion rocks the palace where they're staying in the night, jedi siblings rhese and rea handle the situation with their usual grace and efficiency. this is a very serious fic. swtor act two. genfic; f!jedi knight x doc mentioned. no spoilers. 2700 words. ao3.

Crack that whip Give the past the slip Step on a crack Break your momma's back When a problem comes along You must whip it Before the cream sits out too long You must whip it When something's going wrong You must whip it

-- whip it by devo

In the end, Rea does more property damage than the bomb.

  A year ago he might have let himself shoulder some blame for that, but now--Now Rhese is older. Rhese is wiser. And Rhese knows that his sister would’ve found her way to bringing the place down whether he’d done what he did or not. He has no bearing on Rea’s destructive inevitability, and he sleeps better at night now that he’s made his peace with it.

  He doubts if the Duke will ever get a good night’s sleep again. Not everyone is used to being stirred from sleep by explosions in their rotundas.

  Rhese can’t remember the last time he went more than a week or two without having his sleep interrupted by an explosion of one kind or another. He isn’t sure what that says about his life except that Rea is back in it.

  The building was still trembling from the blast when his feet hit the floor, and he barely took the time to slide his lounge pants on before he went chasing after that familiar pulse in the Force, the powerful thrum of Rea’s presence, knowing she would already be wherever the trouble was.

  He has regrets about that now. You’d think he’d know by now to never go anywhere Rea is without his lightsaber. You’d think he’d know to at least put on some underwear. But he was sleeping deeply and he’s always been a little slow to wake up. It’s the only defense he has for himself, for running into a clusterfuck like that half-dressed and unarmed.

  When he found Rea in the great hall, he could see she wasn’t any better prepared than him. She was messy-haired, empty-handed, and naked from the waist down, wearing nothing but a shirt too clean and too tight in the shoulders to be her own. It was pretty clear what she’d been up to; Rhese just hoped her evening’s entertainment didn’t rush down with as little consideration for appearances as she had. The situation was bad enough without trying to avoid eye contact with Doc’s erection.

  A dozen or so mercs and their assault cannons filled the hall with blaster fire like a driving rain, forcing them both to cover on opposite sides of the room, tucked behind the huge pillars that dotted the room. Normally a pair of Jedi wouldn’t even be inconvenienced by some hired muscle and a bit of blaster fire, but normally Jedi had lightsabers and plastoid armor.

  “Rhese!” He could hardly hear Rea’s voice over the torrent of blaster bolts screaming through the hall between them. She started pointing at him. “Rhese! Behind you!”

  He looked over his shoulder, muscles tensed for a fight, but no one was there. Nothing was there except the display case on the wall. The display case with the--the hilt of a--

  Shit. She couldn’t be serious.

  “I don’t know how to use that!” He shouted back.

  Even through the haze of red, he could see her rolling her eyes. He could feel her rolling her eyes, somewhere deep in his soul. “Throw it to me, dumbass!”

  Of course she was fucking serious.

  “You don’t know how to use that either!” He shouted.

  “Rhese!”

  Stars fucking dammit. He looked at the case then back to Rea, hoping he had somehow misunderstood what she wanted, but she was just gesturing for him to hurry it up. Because of course she was. Of course this was her actual, entire plan. Of course this was going to happen.

  Was one night of peace in a large, comfortable bed really so much to ask for?

  “Don’t look!” Rhese shouted, then dropped his pants.

He wrapped the fabric around his fist, cursing himself for forgetting underwear, and crept toward the case in a crouch. He didn’t see any obvious security measures and there wasn’t time for a more thorough check. The mercs were closing in. There was nothing to do but take the gamble and hope the Duke hadn’t installed anything more serious than a burglary alarm.

  Rhese punched the glass.

  It shattered, exploding in every direction, lashing his skin, leaving tiny cuts across his face and his arms and his chest and his legs. His fist burned as shards of it buried themselves deep under his skin, even with the fabric of his pants to protect it.

  He ignored the pain, too high on adrenaline and annoyance to care. The hilt of Rea’s No Good Very Bad Idea came free from its mount with a tug.

  It seemed to quake under his touch. There was something stirring inside it, something wild and alive. The feel of it coursed up his arm, racing across his skin like electricity, calling to something inside of him, to some dormant part of his--

  Fuck.

  Rhese tossed the thing like it burned him. The hilt hardly left his hand before he felt the tug of the Force pulling it away from him, drawing it into Rea’s waiting palm. Part of him wanted to pull it back, to feel the cool, unyielding metal against his skin, to be the one with his thumb on the switch.

  He smothered that part with a feather down pillow. Let her have it, he thought, a tremor running down his spine. I’m not the crazy one in this family.

  Maybe he should have warned her. Maybe he could have saved the Duke a few million credits and all of them a lot of grief if he’d just mentioned what he felt.

  But probably not.

  Rea’s never let things like total ignorance of what she’s dealing with or the threat of possession by a potentially evil incorporeal entity stop her before, and he doubts she would have started today. He doubts anything would have kept her hands off that thing once she realized she had an excuse to try it out. He remembers how she’d looked at it on their tour, with that hungry glint in her eye, the gears of her scheming little brain turning so fast you could almost see the smoke pouring from her ears.

  Things would’ve turned out the same, no matter what Rhese did or didn’t do. It was already too late for them the moment Rea laid her eyes on that thing.

  She barely closed her fingers around the hilt before the blade was igniting in a shower of sparks.

  If you could call it a blade.

  It was a rope of electric blue light that fell from the hilt in long coils, graceful and deadly, crackling as it melted through the carpet and into the marble floor beneath.

  Rhese had heard of lightwhips before, but never expected to see one with his own eyes, much less one that still worked. He hadn’t thought any still existed considering how badly the stories about them always end.

  And now they have another story for the list.

  Rea gave the thing an experimental crack, sending sparks flying as the thong streaked wildly through the air, a blur of electric blue that lashed across pillars and walls before snapping against a statue of the Duke’s great-grandmother, neatly severing the top half of her marble head. It shattered against the floor as the whip fell limp, leaving trails of lime scarring in the marble as it slid slowly to the ground.

  The flow of blaster fire stuttered, some of the mercs evidently asking themselves what the streak of light scorching its way across the hall might mean for their plans. He doubted any of them were scholars of esoteric plasma weapons, but you don’t survive long as a mercenary without some sense of when the winds of fortune have turned against you.

  Rhese ducked back behind his pillar before Rea made another crack. His night was bad enough without a firsthand lesson on the relative effectiveness of an ancient lightwhip against bare human flesh. He tried to shake the shattered glass from his crumpled pants, but it was no good. Tiny slivers were tucked so deep in the fabric he doubted he’d ever get them out.

  He wondered if he shouldn’t just put them on anyway; he wondered if a little pain wouldn’t be worth sparing himself the humiliation of going hand-to-hand against a dozen armed and armored mercs while his dick flapped in the wind. Then he remembered whose hands would have to dig all that glass out of his balls later and thought better of it.

  With another sharp crack, Rea brought the whip twisting back toward them, lashing wildly between walls and statues and--

  “Fuck!” Rhese swore, rolling out of the way just in time as the tip of the thong sparked against the pillar where his head had been not even a second ago. “Can you maybe try not to kill me?” He shouted.

  “Don’t get your panties in a twist,” Rea laughed, then paused, narrowing her eyes at him. “Where are your panties?”

  Rhese glared back, determinedly ignoring the blush creeping from his cheeks down to his chest. “You focus on the guys trying to blow us up. Let me worry about my panties.”

  “You want my shirt?”

  “No!” The only thing worse than going into a fight with his dick in the wind would be going into a fight with Doc’s shirt wrapped around him like a diaper.

  Rea shrugged.

  And then she was gone.

  She soared through the air, bare-assed and gleeful, cackling as she spun the lightwhip into a whirlwind of a shield. Blaster bolts bounced off it in every direction, blue and red blurring together into a haze of purple light that surrounded Rea like a halo.

  He’d had every intention of helping, of taking advantage of the distraction to drop some of their attackers as mercifully as possible, or at the very least without having to bisect them. But then Rea landed among them, whip lashing, and he watched in abject horror as it tore through their bodies and the walls as easily as if they were flimsi. He watched it snap and whirl and crack with abandon, striking like lightning at anything within twenty feet of his sister.

  Before Rhese could decide if saving people who’d come here to kill him was worth the risk of Rea cutting something from his body he’d much rather have attached, a terrible crack echoed through the hall. A column, gouged and abused by the slashing of the whip, crashed to the floor between them.

  The columns, as it turned out, were not entirely decorative.

  The ceiling groaned where the column had stood just moments before, large cracks splintering out like a spider’s web from the place where the column broke away. Dust and debris poured from the crack, and the alarms finally began to wail as other cracks echoed through the hall, the other columns straining under the load.

  Rea’s laughter and the sharp snap of the whip grew distant as the columns crumbled, and Rhese knew what was left of the mercenaries had tried to run. He knew she was giving chase.

  He dodged chunks of marble and bits of gilded metal as he scrambled through the collapsing room, columns and pieces of ceiling smashing against the floor in turn. His nakedness was forgotten, and he hardly even felt the shards of glass and broken rock buried deep in the soles of his bleeding feet.

  The nakedness is the thing he’ll regret most later, when he sees himself in the holos, dusty and bleeding and wearing nothing but a too-small censor bar over his genitals.

  He follows the path of destruction, hardly noticing the household staff and other guests scrambling past him to escape the building. Definitely not noticing the way they were noticing him, running through the halls with his wang in the wind, screaming bloody murder at his sister.

  It is not one of his finest moments.

  He thought it wasn’t one of Rea’s either. As he was running through the halls, deflecting crumbling chunks of stone and durasteel with the Force, he was so sure she’d been possessed by the sweet pull of chaos he’d felt inside that lightwhip. He was sure that this time, she needed to be saved.

  As usual, he’d been wrong.

  Rhese heard a second explosion just moments before he spilled out into the palace’s rear garden, where the mercs and all their reinforcements were trying to clamber past each other through a hole in the outer wall that had not been there that morning. Rea was there too, strolling toward them almost lazily, snapping her whip in arcs so graceful she might’ve been making them her whole life.

  It’s only then Rhese notices how there aren’t bodies and bits of bodies littering the yard. Only then that he realizes he hasn’t seen a single cut up corpse since the mercs she dropped at the very start of the attack.

  It’s only then, standing in the courtyard ass naked and bleeding, with household guests and staff pouring in from every direction, their holocams live, that Rhese realizes what a complete and total dumbass he is.

  Rea was never possessed by some dark force of chaos trapped inside a lightwhip. She wasn’t murdering mercenaries left and right in a fit of uncontrollable bloodlust. She was putting on a show. With her lightwhip and her crazed laughter and bare-assed acrobatics, she was just trying to scare them off.

  And he fell for it.

  “Fuck,” Rhese swore. Again.

  Rea turned to him, a satisfied smile on her face as the lightwhip fell to the ground beside her in perfect coils “You okay?” She asked, the triumph in her eyes turning quickly to worry.

  “I’m fine,” he lied.

  A voice from the growing crowd shouted, “Yeah you are!”

  Rhese felt another blush rising, setting his chest and the tips of his ears on fire. Laughter spread through the courtyard as he stood there, paralyzed by his own embarrassment.

  Rea, taking pity on him for once in his life, stripped out of Doc’s shirt and tossed it to him. No one would ever laugh at her nakedness. He wasn’t sure what the difference was, but it probably had something to do with how she would never blush about it.

  Rhese’s entire body was flaming red by the time he managed to cover what remained of his dignity.

  And then, as they stood there together, filthy and bloodied and naked, the entire east wing of the Duke’s palace finally collapsed.

  Rea watched it crumble with a smile on her face.

  “You know,” Rhese observed, thinking of how gracefully she’d lashed the lightwhip back and forth when she was menacing the mercenaries out through the wall, “you didn’t have to destroy the whole thing.”

  “Don’t you wonder why the mercenaries came to kill him in the first place?” She asked.

  “To kill him?” Rhese stared. “I thought they were here for us.”

  Rea rolled her eyes. “They would’ve brought bigger guns if they were here for us.”

  That was probably true. Mercenaries didn’t stay mercenaries very long if they were stupid. “And you think they were after the Duke?”

  He was a foolish, frivolous sort of man who was easy to dislike, but Rhese had difficulty imagining what he might have done that would be worth killing over. He didn’t even have much of value to steal outside of the palace the mercenaries had clearly planned to destroy anyway. That and the lightwhip they likely hadn’t even known about.

  “You remember what he said this morning on the tour? About his family owning this place for centuries?”

  The Duke had bragged about that quite a lot, and the fact that he’d doubled the palace in size during his time at the head of the family. Rhese nodded.

  “He’s selling slaves,” Rea said, watching the Duke stare at his wrecked home in abject horror. “He used his own product to build the east wing. But our friend there’s not a very good salesman, and his supplier isn’t happy with him. This is what a negative performance review looks like in the slaving industry.”

  Rhese thought for a moment, frowning. “We were never here to negotiate for a listening base on his land were we?”

  Rea just grinned. 

[hydrospanners]

vacation, all i ever wanted vacation, had to get away

[hydrospanners]

my hobbies include putting small boxes inside of larger boxes, nihilism, and roasting my own video game characters

[hydrospanners]

thrusting back into my skin i feel anew

time can be a thief if you let it. nirea and doc try to find their footing with six years of time, distance, and damage between them. spoilers for onslaught. swtor. f!jedi knight x doc. angst with a happy ending. 1800 words. ao3.

She’s so still.

  Doc isn’t sure why it keeps him up like it does, all the little movements she isn’t making. By all accounts he should be sleeping better without Rea doing gymnastics in their bed.

  He isn’t.

  He’s lying awake, blinking tired eyes at the exposed rock she calls a ceiling in this dank little cave of hers. He’s clenching his fists and grinding his teeth and opening his mouth to ask what the deal is and then closing it again because that’s a stupid fucking question, isn’t it? He knows what the deal is. The deal is the Emperor coming back from the grave  again  and more Sith magic no one knows anything about and that new softness in Scourge’s voice and that new steel in Kira’s eyes. The deal is Corellia burning again and Malgus and the Empire and slavers and Jedi Padawans and Jedi Councils and probably three dozen other things she hasn’t had time to catch him up on.

  He knows what the deal is. He just doesn’t know what to say about it. He doesn’t know how to get back to the way things used to be, to their easy understandings and wordless conversations. He doesn’t even know if she wants to be touched right now.

  But Rea--

  Stars shine on her, Rea’s never needed to know how a thing should be done before she just did it.

  “Do you think I made the right call?” She asks, like they haven’t been laying in tense silence for the last hour.

  You’re the Jedi. How should I know?  The words jump to his tongue, an old, familiar joke, but it doesn’t feel funny anymore. Nothing much feels funny about this day.

  “I’m not sure it matters what I think, Beautiful.”

It’s not like he’s insecure. If he isn’t the  best  doctor in the galaxy--and considering the life expectancy of a half-decent doctor these days, he’s pretty sure he is--Doctor Archiban Kimble is definitely top three. He’s damn good at what he does, the shooting and the scheming just as much as the healing, and he knows it. He works hard to make sure everyone else knows it too.

  He isn’t insecure. But he isn’t stupid, either. He can’t just  not notice  the big fucking gap between the galaxy’s most valuable doctor and the galaxy’s most valuable person, period. He can’t not notice that, as much as he carries life and death in his hands, entire empires rise and fall on Rea’s shoulders.

  The gap was always there before, but it’s so much bigger now. He doesn’t know how to get across.

  “It matters,” Rea says, and finally moves. She rolls onto her side, her cheek pillowed on folded hands as she stares at him with this intensity he doesn’t even recognize. “It matters to me.”

  And because he’s a helpless idiot who can’t do anything but follow her, even after all this time, he rolls onto his side too. “That’s kind of a big deal these days.”

  “It was always a big deal,” she says, but she can’t quite manage a smile. “I’ve been waiting all day to ask, you know.”

  Waiting is probably a strong word, but he likes to hear it anyway. He likes to hear that it matters to her what he thinks, even if her opinion is the one that counts. He likes to hear that it’s something she considers, when she’s out there shaping the galaxy. That  he’s  still something she considers.

  (She promised she still loved him. Promised she never stopped, that there was no one else and nothing else and she looked for him for a year and he believes her it’s just that--it’s just that everything’s so  different  now.)

  “I don’t know any better than you what the right call is, Gorgeous.”

  She moves her hand into the space between them, fingers curling like she wants to reach for him, but she doesn’t. He wants to reach out too, to touch her and tell her it’s okay. He wants to know what’s holding her back.

  He’s too afraid of the answer to ask.

  “What would you have done, then? In my shoes.”

  “Got some smaller shoes?”

  She smiles finally, a small thing but real, and the tight coil of something in his gut starts to relax. “Jackass. I’m having an existential crisis here, okay? I need your advice.”

  “No you don’t,” Doc says, finding himself smiling right back. “You don’t need me for shit, Gorgeous. I always said so, and the last six years prove it, don’t they? You can get by just fine without me.” He takes the hand that had reached for him in his, feels the flutter of her pulse under his thumb and draws it to his lips.

  He meant to give her space this time, to let her come to him on her own, but he’s no better at staying away now than he was the last time. Doc can’t help pushing, even if he can’t tell which direction he’s pushing her in.

  He kisses her wrist, her palm. He kisses the pads of her fingers, never looking away from her eyes, so wide and so blue in the dark of their room. “You’ve never needed me,” he says, smiling. “But I like that you  want  me.”

  Her hand curls around his and she’s moving again, wiggling her way across the gap between them, pressing closer and closer until their bodies are flush together and her toes are caressing the backs of his knees.

  “Of course I want you, Dumbass. I never  stopped  wanting you.” She takes a deep breath and her eyes fall shut as she brings their joined hands to her lips, dragging kisses across his knuckles. “I never stopped,” she whispers, her voice tight. “I’m sorry if it doesn’t seem like it. If I forgot how to show you--”

  Doc feels the heat of tears against his hand. “Hey,” he says. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay, Gorgeous, you didn’t--”

  But he has stop himself. Because she  did . Because she’s Rea and he knows her, knows her better than anyone in the galaxy knows her, knows her better even than her brother, better than her new pet spy. He knows her instinct when she’s hurting is to close up and pile the armor high. He knows how much it scares her to lean on another person, to  want  something that could easily be ripped away.

  He knows these last six years have torn all those old wounds open and left her raw and aching.

  “I’m trying,” she whispers, more solemn than sad. “I hate that I have to. It used to be so easy. I  wanted  this to be so easy, just like old times, but…”

  “I get it,” Doc says, because he does. Because she’s not the only one fighting battles that were supposed to be already won.

  Rea squeezes his hand, drawing it against her chest as she opens her eyes to look at him again. There’s tears there, but strength too. Determination. “Things have changed so much. I keep being terrified you’re gonna look up and realize none of this is what you signed up for, that  I’m  not what you signed up for anymore. And I just--I’m so scared of losing you again that I can’t even enjoy being with you while you’re here.”

  Stars. He isn’t surprised, but hearing her say it is still-- Stars .

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he promises. “I’ll be right here with you for as long as you still want me.”

  He sees the little furrow in her brow, the little twitch that tells him she heard exactly what he said and exactly what he meant and she’s not about to forget it.

  “Besides, I couldn’t leave if I wanted to, Gorgeous. I’m an Alliance citizen now.” He nudges her with his knee, grinning. “Not saying I’m not flattered, but you really didn’t need to blow the Republic off just to keep me on Odessen.”

  Rea doesn’t smile. “So you think I made the wrong call? You think I should’ve taken the offer?”

  Doc sighs, his own smile fading quickly. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’d want to balance on a razor’s edge in the minefield between the Republic and the Empire if I could help it, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s you Rea.”

  “Are you just saying that to make me feel better?”

  It hurts a little that she has to ask, but he can’t say he blames her. “I know how to make you feel better, Gorgeous, and it doesn’t usually involve words.” This time, she does smile. “I  mean  it. Don’t know what the Alliance is gonna do when I finally convince you to retire, but as long as they’ve got you they’ll be fine. There’s no one in the galaxy who can stop you when you’ve got your mind set.”

  “It’s a big gamble,” she says. “I know it is. The whole thing is riding on me and Force fucking knows I need more of that like a hole in the head. But--” She swallows, letting her eyes drop to their hinds, still wound together and pressed against her chest. “I promised these people I’d take care of them. They trusted me with their lives and I just wasn’t sure I could keep my word if we got tangled up in Republic bureaucracy again. You know what it’s like, how easy it is to slip things through the cracks.”

  He nods. He does know. Probably better than anyone except Rea herself. “But what about you, Gorgeous? You’re not making your job any easier here.”

  “When have I ever done anything the easy way?”

  “You do prefer things hard.”

  Doc laughs shamelessly at his own joke and it’s enough to make Rea laugh with him. She presses her lips to his and laughs right into his mouth, sloppy and easy and so very  her  it makes his heart stutter. Then she’s sliding her toes along the back of his leg, just as limber and just as eager as she used to be and suddenly his joke is not a joke at all because this-- this  is just as easy as it always was. Because their bodies always know just what to say and how to say it.

  “Let’s have sex,” she mumbles, already kissing her way down his throat, her hand already teasing him through his shorts, and he can only hope the sound he makes in answer sounds adequately like a  yes .

  Their voices echo against the exposed rock of what passes for a ceiling in the dank little cave Rea calls a bedroom, and if it isn’t quite like old times… Well at least they aren’t lying still.

[hydrospanners]

same energy