#please tell me you didn’t rummage through someone’s guts man no that’s not very silly dude

[masonjarart]

What if we both saw the horrors of the silly little simulation we’re trapped in

[fictionxing]

When It Rains... Mando x Reader | 2033 Words | Fluffy Goodness

A/N: So uh, forgive any weird tense shifts. I’ll try and fix them tomorrow when it’s not 2am. Also might make a part two where there’s more flirting if there’s interest!

Of course you would get stuck here. It was, after all, supposed to be a quick job. Land on the planet, find the bail jumper (as there seemed to be many bail jumpers in the outer rim these days), cart him back to the ship. The contact didn’t bother to mention that the planet the bail jumper was on had an ever present storm that roamed across the plant and it was scheduled to occupy the area right after you landed. Which, none you knew until after you landed.

So, it was more like the ship got stuck here and, therefore, you, the Mandalorian, and the tiny green child were stuck here too. You personally found the rain calming and watching the rivets travel down the windows in the cockpit was fairly occupying. Your companions, however, were not enjoying the days spent cooped up in what is honestly a rather small ship. Privacy was becoming an ever present and highly sought after luxury.

And, to your credit, you tried to keep out of Mando’s hair. It couldn’t be comfortable being forced to wear the helmet all the time and the poor man needed to eat on occasion. The child, on the other hand, was beginning to find all new places he could explore, which only made you and Mando more stressed. He was curious which meant he was often mischievous after exploring all of the easy to access places. In turn, it meant Mando and yourself were often having to keep a closer eye on him than normal causing further frustrations.

Glancing down, you tapped at you HoloPad once more, attempting to see if you could get any signal at all. If you could find when the end of the rain would be here, it may make it easier for Mando. At least, you thought it could help, as it would signal an end to being in cramped quarters. However, the storm was causing all sorts of interference due to being both incredibly large and seemingly never-ending. You sighed and tossed the tablet onto the dashboard. It was of no use anyway.

Behind you, you hear the sound of the door opening and you turn to see the Child waddling towards you. When he see you, he coos and waddles faster, extending a hand towards you in order to give you whatever it is he’s holding.

“Mah!” he pronounced proudly, his small arms reaching up towards you.

“Ah, what do you have here?” you asked, grinning down at him. No doubt he was involved something mischievous but seeing him so proud of his present was heartwarming. Reaching down, you took the long metal tube he was holding, realizing it was the removable scope Mando kept on his Amban rifle. “Hmm, are you supposed to have this?” you asked, an eyebrow raising as you glanced down at the child. His ear drooped slightly, obviously upset that you weren’t pleased with his gift. He babbled for a moment and you sighed, reaching down to pull him into your arms as you stood.

“Thank you for the gift,” you said. “But, this belongs to Mando and I think he’s really going to miss it. We should probably return it to him.” He responded with a long coo, ears hanging low. It pulled at your heart to see him so sad, so you tweaked one of his ears and smiled once more. “Come on, let’s go find him, hm?” The child perked up a small bit at your good humor and you began to make your way down to the hold of the ship.

Climbing down the ladder with one hand was tricky, but you managed by going slowly. As you reached the bottom, you could hear the sounds of Mando rummaging through one of his crates. Before you came into view, you knocked loudly against the metal siding of the ship, warning him of your presence just in case. You could hear him softly sigh before calling out, “Yes?”

Taking that to mean you could round the corner safely, you stepped into the loading dock to see Mando surrounded by several opened crates and the Amban rifle sitting on the small table in a few pieces. “I’m sorry,” you apologized, setting the child on one of the unopened crates. “I just wanted to bring this back to you. Someone decided to bring me a gift, but I figured you needed it more.”

As you held out the scope towards him, you heard him sigh again - this time deeper than before. “I was wondering how I had lost it,” he said, reaching out to take it. “I probably should have guessed it was the womp rat.” Despite the rather uncouth nickname, you could hear the warmth in his tone. Even the battle-hardened Mandalorian couldn’t stay mad at the child, it seemed.

“I can say he has wonderful taste,” you replied. “Even without the rifle, that’s a handy piece of tech.”

You felt your body warm as he chuckled. “Yes, it is,” he said simply, moving back to the table in order to properly finish the job of reconstructing his rifle.

You stood there awkwardly for a few moments, not knowing quite what to do. After a moment, a rattling noise caught your attention and you turned to see the Child attempting to climb inside one of the open crates. Sighing, you pulled him out and setting him on the table next to Mando before turning and beginning to pack away the crate.

“You don’t have to do that.” You turned to look over your shoulder, seeing Mando grabbing a few items as well.

“It’s fine,” you assured, giving him a small smile though feeling a weight in your gut. “I’ll just gather up everything and close the lids and then I’ll head back up.” You didn’t to impose on his company if he didn’t want you there, but he was also currently occupied. It would only take a few minutes to tidy up and then you would leave him to his work.

“It’s my mess,” he replied. “I can take care of it.”

“Of course,” you said, wanting to argue but your logical side urging you to keep the peace winning out. “I’ll just… head up back up then.” You stepped around him, making sure to keep a wide berth. You heard the child coo in confusion as you walked past but you ignore him.

As you climbed the ladder, you felt a lump in your throat form. Once you had safely made your way back into the cockpit and the metal doors were safely shut behind you, you leaned against them and gently thumped your head against it. “Idiot,” you thought. “You know he isn’t the mood for your hovering.” Sighing to yourself, you pressed the heels of your palms into your hands to will yourself to stop the feeling of tears forming. “What a silly thing to be upset about,” you thought. It was becoming more apparent over the course of your time stuck together that you had started develop feelings of… fondness… toward the Mandalorian. While you originally admired him and found him to be a fair and capable partner through your adventures in the galaxy, you had come to treasure the quiet moments between you.

You knew what was happening - you weren’t stupid after all. His chuckles caused your stomach to come to life with butterflies. The brief and rather innocuous touches caused your heart to beat faster. And anytime you saw him with the child your stomach would flip. But a crush on a Mandalorian… it was idiocy. Yes, he was a good man and no, the fact that you’d never seen him didn’t bother you. But you knew, in broad strokes, what his code was and the obligations he was required to fulfill. He had made both very clear when you’d joined his crew. You respected it and even found yourself doing what you could to help him reach his goals. But within that… there wasn’t much room for romance. Thus, all of these feelings were pointless and made you act like a fool.

“No point beating yourself up,” you murmured. You can be his friend. You can help him. Both of those are important and worthwhile even without acting on your feelings. Focus on those instead. Taking a final deep breath, you began to stand up when the door behind you suddenly opened, sending you falling backwards.

Thankfully you didn’t tumble to the ground, but instead felt your back collide with a rather solid and hard chest. You looked up to see Mando staring down at you and you can see your shocked face staring back at you in the shiny metal.

“Are you alright?” he asked quietly, and you could feel the rumble from them in his chest.

Blinking a few times, you finally came to your senses. “Yes! I’m fine!” you said, a little too loudly and hastily moved to stand upright. “Sorry! I didn’t realize you were coming up behind me.”

He was quiet for a moment, simply staring at you through the visor of his helmet. You felt yourself start to fidget and forced you hands behind your back. Suddenly he asked, “Is something wrong?”

The question took you by surprise. Again, you blinked at him a few times before your gaze fell the the floor. “Um, no?” you said.

“You don’t sound sure.”

“Just probably feeling a little cabin fever,” you said.

He didn’t respond, but instead moved into the cockpit more fully, finally letting the doors close behind him. “I…” he started, sounding unsure of himself. That was… new. “Are you…”

“Really, Mando,” you said, interrupting him and forcing a smile on your face. “It’s fine. I’m okay.” You gave him an affirming nod and turned to sit down in the co-pilot’s seat but felt his gloved hand catch your wrist. It surprised you, and you turned to face him again. He didn’t immediately speak and you wondered what he was thinking. You wished you could see his face so at least you could get some clues.

“I just…” he started, still sounding unsure. “I just wanted to make sure that I haven’t… done… anything.”

“Done anything?” you asked. “No, of course not!”

“So… you’re not… frightened of me?”

“Frightened?” you repeated. “No, not at all!”

“Then why have you been avoiding me?” he asked and even without seeing his face you could tell he was feeling vulnerable at even asking.

“I haven’t-” you started, but he cut you off before you could continue.

“Don’t lie,” he said. “You’ve been… fidgety. And you don’t look at me much anymore, like you’re avoiding me. You’ve been jumpy when I speak. And don’t say it’s because we’re stuck here. It’s was happening before we landed.”

Your mouth opened and closed a few times, and you felt a little like a fish just gaping at him. “I’m not… jumpy. I’m just… I mean, it’s been stressful and… uh.” Now it was your turn to be tongue-tied, it seemed. “I didn’t want to intrude on your space,” you finally said, sighing. “It’s just me being weird, is all. It’s nothing you need to worry about. I promise.”

He stared at you for a long moment before he did something that surprised you. In a slow and, perhaps, unpracticed motion, he pulled you closer and wrapped his arms around you. Mando was… hugging you? It was a strange hug, considering the stiffness of his arms and hardness of his metal armor, but a hug nonetheless. You wrapped your arms around him in return, pressing your face against the cool Beskar against his chest.

“Thank you,” he finally said. “And… know that you are never intruding. I’ve… uh… missed your conversations. It’s hard to have one with a kid who doesn’t talk, after all.”

You giggled and pulled away from him. “That’s fair. I just know that it’s probably difficult and I didn’t want to feel compelled to always wear the helmet, just for my sake.”

“It’s a small price to pay for your company,” he replied and you felt your cheeks light up. Oh, what you wouldn’t give for your own helmet now.

[babbushka]

Last Straw (6/12)

Newly married to your high school sweetheart Kylo Ren, the two of you move into Skywalker Ranch, a farm recently passed down after the death of Kylo’s grandfather. The place is charming, and the people seem friendly…but are they?

Content Warnings: Major character death, extreme violence, amputation, mentions of cannibalism

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

Your guilt gets the better of you in the end, and you look at Kylo for his opinion. It was his house too, and it was an area he was more familiar with. Your gut was screaming at you, telling you no, telling you to run, you have to run you have to flee you have to leave – but in the end, you’ve made up your mind.

“Okay.” You say, and you already are filled with regret with the way they smile at your decision. “But only in the barn, and just for the night. In the morning, we’ll call someone to come out and make sure you’re all okay.”

Brendol reaches out a hand for you to shake and you take it, only for a moment. You saw what he had done to Kylo’s hand, how there were still marks from his nails in Kylo’s palm.

“Oh thank you, (Y/N), thank you so much for your kindness.” Brendol said, so polite, too polite.

You go cold.

“We’re going to go to sleep now, I’m afraid there’s nothing in the barn.” Kylo says, an arm around your waist, as you reclaim your hand and tuck yourself against Kylo’s side, mind racing racing racing.

“Not to worry, hay is quite warming, thankfully.” Armitage says, although he glares when he says it.

You wonder how many barns he’s slept in, to know that.

“Alright.” You say, closing the door a little too forcefully, a little too quickly.

But once it’s shut you can hear from the other side of the wood, an all too satisfied,

“Sleep well.”

In the bedroom, you refuse to leave Kylo’s side. You are glued to him practically, on the mattress, under the covers. All those silly fears of monsters under the bed come rushing back from childhood, and you make sure your feet are fully tucked under the blankets.

You have a horrible, eerie feeling, that someone is going to grab you.

Kylo doesn’t seem as perturbed. He’s lying on his back and has you pulled against his chest, his hand carding through your hair, kissing the top of your head like nothing was wrong in the whole world.

“See? We did something nice for someone.” He says, pleased as punch.

Until.

Until you look up at him with afraid eyes, terrified eyes, until you say,

“I didn’t tell him my name.”

The hand in his your hair stops.

“What?” He asks, sitting upright slowly slowly slowly, until he’s against the headboard and you’re still buried up to your chin in covers.

“That man, Brendol. I didn’t tell him my name.” Your voice trembles, and you know this isn’t some random coincidence, this isn’t some happenstance.

This was planned.

And you feel like a moron for falling for it.

“Go check the drawer for me.” Kylo says quickly, as he starts rummaging through the bed-side table for something.

“Which?” You ask, reluctantly getting out of bed, tip-toeing across the floor in your robe to the dresser.

“The one with our underwear.” He says, finally finding what he was looking for, a little box of bullets, stock full.

“You stashed it here?” You ask, when you pull out the revolver that he had hidden under the socks.

He nods, and reaches his hand out for it, for you.

“Give it to me, I don’t want you have to get your hands dirty.” He says softly, and you sigh.

This wasn’t the first time he had done this, and you hate the resignation in your voice. You don’t give him the gun, you don’t want him to be alone in this. You don’t want him to have to be an attack dog anymore.

“Kylo do you think something is going to happen? Should we call the cops?” You ask, keeping the revolver in your own hands.

“I don’t know.” He says, scrubbing a hand down his face, “I don’t know, but if something does fucking happen, I’m not going to leave us defenseless. Cops would take ten, fifteen minutes going top speed, which they won’t do since it’s dark.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have done something nice for someone.” You say, a lame attempt at humor, an attempt to try and take the edge off.

It doesn’t work.

You stay awake all night. Each hour that passes feels longer and longer, like time is perpetually stretching on and on. Neither of you can sleep, can even think about falling asleep. You both have your eyes and ears trained. You steal glances out the beautiful bay window, and Kylo keeps his hearing set on downstairs.

For a while, it seems like nothing is going to come. The clock strikes midnight, then one o’clock, then two.

But on the stroke of three o’clock, there’s a knock at the door, the same rap rap rap that had gotten you both out of the shower only just earlier that evening.

“Did you hear that?” You ask, and Kylo’s already got his mask on, his blank, merciless mask on, one that you thought, prayed, you’d never see again.

“It’s them.” Kylo nods, stands up and cracks the joints in his neck, in his spine. He lets you keep the revolver, but he goes to the closet and grabs his shotgun rifle, loads it up. You sigh, but he only gives you a hard look. “Get behind me, (Y/N) I’m not playing this game right now.��

You don’t argue with him, not now, not this time. You get behind him and walk down the hallway, carefully, slowly. You have the revolver and it’s ready to go the second he tells you to shoot, the absolute second he tells you to strike them down. You both avoid the squeaky stairs carefully, avoid the weakspots in the wood as you make your way down down down.

They’ve opened the door, the three of them. Somehow managed to get through the lock.

They’re backlit by the moon, their eerie figures are standing there, just standing. But they’re standing in the foyer, they’re through the door.

Trespassing.

“If you take one more step,” Kylo cocks the shotgun, “Inside my home.”

“You’ll what?” Armitage sneers.

For some reason, he’s standing in front of both his brother and their father. This surprises you, you would have thought Brendol would be front and center in the limelight. Maybe Armitage is a better killer, you think, more ruthless, more efficient. You swallow down bile hard.

“I’ll blow your fucking brains out.” Kylo replies, just as evenly.

Armitage scoffs, rolls his eyes at such a statement.

“You don’t have the – ”

But before Armitage can say whatever it was he was going to say, Kylo pulls the trigger, and does just that.

You’ve never seen it before, someone being killed. You’ve never witnessed a murder, not a real one. Not one that wasn’t pretend, on TV or in a movie somewhere. You didn’t realize how different it would be, how harrowing. You can’t scream, frozen in place, as the back of Armitage’s head is exploded across the doorframe, splattered onto Brendol and William.

“Don’t try me.” Kylo says, holding the shotgun level with the other two, aimed right at their heads too, right at their fucking faces.

“You’re going to pay for what you did to my son.” Brendol seethes, hisses and screams, screams and screams in agony as if it were his own, as if the pain were coming from his own mind.

You watch in horror as the man contorts and twists, as his spine snaps and breaks as he crouches down on all fours, a bear poised to attack. Behind him William is shaking, shivering, a horrible, disgusting noise coming from deep in his chest.

It is an awful clicking sound, like a thousand beetles pouring from hell, wings beating, legs rubbing together. It is horrible, and it is so loud – but then no, you think, it is not like beetles at all, it is like teeth, the skittering, the clacking, it is like mouthfuls and mouthfuls of teeth, freezing frigid cold.

“’Tidge,” He wails, voice high and loud, discordant, like a hundred voices all at once, all at the same time, “’Tidge no.”

And you frown, because even though he was cowering in fear from his brother only an hour ago, now he’s mourning the loss of him. You wonder what the fuck went wrong in this family, to have messed up these kids this badly.

“William, sick.” Brendol sets himself over Armitage’s body, protecting it, trying to salvage what he can.

Or…or maybe…maybe that isn’t what he’s doing, you think with growing horror, as Brendol’s tongue begins to lap up the gore and grime that’s splattered all over his forearms.

There’s not time to question it, because William, the shaking chattering clacking hissing whining crying thing, is bolting towards you, running, running at speeds which don’t make sense, even as he’s crying, as his hands are outstretched as if desperate to be saved.

Kylo fires and fires, until there’s no more in the shotgun, and you don’t think, you empty the revolver into William as he gets closer and closer.

The kid drops to the ground in agony, but to your absolute horror, gets back up, forces himself to get back up.

Brendol lunges then too, having licked himself clean, his hands at the very least. He strangles Kylo, catches him off guard where he was trying to swing punch after punch to William’s face.

“No!” You scream as Kylo and Brendol fight, as they wrestle to the ground, “Get your hands off of him! Get off him!”

William has set his sights on you instead, and before you know it, he’s jumped onto your chest, has crushed you to the ground, has knocked you out.

It’s dark, in your head.

Dark and cold. Very cold. There’s pain, burning and screaming through your veins. It’s the pain that wakes you up, the pain that makes you come back from the dark.

You don’t know, what’s happened. You don’t know what you missed. You’ve managed to make it back, all the way up to your room, somehow. Somehow alive. But you have a feeling, an awful, sick feeling, that this is it. This is the end for you, for Kylo.

You look down, and you let out a choked sob, for where your lower half should be, there’s nothing. There’s just nothing. They’ve sawed off your legs, you can’t even see your thighs, you can’t see. You scream, scream and scream and sob, the pain blinding. You try to move your legs but they’re not there.

They’re just not there.

Your eyes burn, but you can’t tell if it’s from the smoke that fills the air, or the tears, or both. You reach for Kylo’s hand and you cry all over again when there’s nothing there for you to grasp. They must have cut it off too. But the cuts are clean, like they did it with a cleaver, like they did it with care, like you were animals, livestock for slaughter.

“Kylo, fuck I’m so scared, I don’t – fuck I don’t want to die. I love you I don’t want to die.” You sob, aching and screaming, choking on smoke.

“We won’t, we won’t it’ll be okay, it’ll – fuck!” Kylo rolls over, missing his hand he still pulls himself up and rolls over, protects you from the rickety wooden beams of the house which come crashing down. “(Y/N)!”

“Kylo!” You try to kiss him, you try, but your mouth is still so pinched from sobbing that you can barely pucker your lips.

Everything all at once feels very far away, like you’re floating. You know the house is on fire, you know. You can feel the fire licking up your legs. You want to scream but, at the same time, you can’t open your mouth to make a sound.

Is this what it’s like? You don’t know. You don’t even know what this is, what what is like. Is this death, or is this dying?

Kylo is on the floor with you, on his back. He’s got his face turned towards yours and you wish you could tell him you loved him, wished you could tell him one last time.

With the world crashing down around you, with Brendol and his son feasting on your limbs back in the barn, you wonder what you did to deserve this, why you were being punished this way. Where did it all go wrong?

You don’t know.

But you can find out.

Go back to the beginning and make new choices, see where the night will take you.

Will you survive? Or suffer a fate more gruesome than you could possibly imagine?