#spool up those same neurons'

[vickysaurus-art]

Prisoner playing the piano, since it is quite prominent in her part of the soundtrack. Also an excellent excuse to draw dapper Prisoner.

[beskarberry]

Bilgerat

Bargaining with Beskar, Chapter 10

(The Mandalorian x f!reader) (+18)

"The grip on your back tightened, and a low growl reverberated through the iron underneath you. You’ve got company."

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Rating: Explicit

Word count: 18.3k whoopsie

Content warnings: Big kinky: cock warming, wet-ish dreams, knife play (no blood), vibrator play, squirting. Small kinky: predator/prey dynamic, lots of biting, soft choking, mentions of chapter 9's shenanigans. Kinkles (kink sprinkles): breeding/pregnancy, begging, overstim. Not-smut stuff: alcohol consumption, lots of story, introduction of OCs, more backstory for reader, some fuckin ANGST.

A/N: Story time! Some slice of life, some romance, some adventure! Once again Mando and his love get themselves in trouble because they tried to be cute so shocker-roony-roo there's some long fluff scenes cushioning the smut that I hope you enjoy~

Chilly.

You grumbled and squished yourself closer to the heat source you were wedged against, but your backside was uncovered and prickling with goosebumps in the faint, icy wisps that still made their way through the slap-n-patch fixes you’d made to the Crest’s busted walls. Groping blindly you searched for your bantha wool blankie, but all you found was the cold, unforgiving durasteel of the sleeping alcove under your fingers. You flopped an arm over the hot body pressed to your chest, trying to see if the blanket was on his side, but only found more frigid steel. Din rumbled and hugged you closer, nuzzling his face against yours like a big dopey massif and snoring right in your ear. His arms and chest were wonderfully warm, but the skin on your booty stung in the chill air. Blanket.

You pressed a lazy kiss or two to his sleeping face and started trying to untangle yourself from his limbs. His fingers burrowed deeper into your sides, begging you not to leave. I know, just gimme a sec. Somehow you managed to get yourself sitting up, and you glanced around the cot trying to find your cover. The only thing beside you in the narrow space was the stretched out body of your Mandalorian, the dim emergency lights catching on his many scars. The smooth patches of skin outlined his form in the dark like lost stars that had come to rest next to you, shimmering over the sleeping warrior with each slow breath.

It was still a little strange to see him so vulnerable, though you had earned the right to see him this way, he usually chose to wear his full beskar even in your presence. However, squashed into the sleeping alcove next to you he was buck-ass naked, and you couldn’t help but stare. Stars above he’s beautiful, even as a dark smudge in the faded light you could see the way he was built. Muscle, and lots of it, laying gracefully under his marred skin. He wasn’t bulky by any means, but he was big. At his full height he was an impressive stack of meat and sinew, but laying on his side he looked like a mountain range, rolling peaks and valleys that called you to climb them.

You let yourself indulge in the sight of him, just for a moment. Battleborne shoulders nestled on either side of a wide, sturdy back that led your eyes down the dip of his spine to the rise of his hips, over their swells, and down to the slopes of his legs. His angled knees sent your eyes right back up, past the tuft of fuzz that hid his groin and over the soft, sweet rolls of his tummy. The breadth of his chest was hidden by his long arms, but their lovingly chiseled curves brought your eyes to his wide, calloused hands.

Maker above those hands. Versatile and strong, hands that fired weapons with lethal accuracy, tossed bounties like bags of garbage and drove blades through bone like it was wet paper. And yet they held you so perfectly, so softly when they wanted to. They sat beautifully anywhere on your body, your hips, your shoulders, your breasts. Perfectly cupped to lay flush with your skin wherever they roamed, and just the right size to lace between your fingers while you slept. Or finger you til you passed out.

Distracted by the sleeping warrior you shivered in the cold air, reminding you that you could lay back down next to the man you’d chosen to walk the stars with as soon as you found your fucking blanket. As you worked yourself off the bed you set a hand on his hip, gliding your fingers through the soft fuzz that dusted his thigh while you snuck out of the cot. He grumbled and twitched from your touch, his own hands fidgeting in his sleep to try to find you.

You scootched off the bed, holding onto his leg for support as you did. Your bare feet hit the floor, and you nearly screamed from the cold of it, oh fuck cold! The icy floor of the ship woke your ass right up and had you doing a stupid dance to escape the frostburn. Ouch ouch ouch! You jazzed your way to the closest locker, grabbing a blanket and a pair of socks and hobbling back over to the bunk. Why don’t I have socks on? Oh, that’s right, hehe.

Yesterday’s events lazed through your mind while you tugged the tubes up your legs, realizing that they weren’t your socks when the heel stretched past your ankle. Sitting on the edge of the bunk you noticed the beskar strewn about the cabin like so many scattered plates. It wasn’t like him to just discard his cultural armor, but you remembered what the hydra’s nectar had done to the both of you, your face going hot at the memory of his face buried in the apex of your thighs, dripping with sweetness.

Idley you ran a palm over your middle, poking yourself in the guts just to be sure. Nope, no stragglers. You pushed your fingers as far into your stomach as you could, relieved and a little surprised to find that you felt no pain. Din had done a fantastic job of ridding you of your…quarries, though you were still a little bummed that you had only managed to capture one. You weren’t sure where it was at now, probably stashed in one of the many mangled lockers with the trophy you had taken from the last hunt, hopefully not growing anything. Hmm, wouldn’t mind taking another ride on that amorous anemone though, truth be told. You chuckled at the thought, the movement of air in your throat making you thirsty, and you headed to the fresher to get something to drink.

Draped in your blanket like a cloak you tip-toed in your stocking feet to the tiny space, squinting your eyes closed before you turned on the light. Dark, slime-covered shapes clogged up the narrow alcove, and you begrudgingly collected the laundry to chuck into the automated cleaner. Something clankered out of the fabric when the clothing hit the drum of the washer, check the pockets, dingus!

Son of a bitch there was a lot of shit in those pockets, from munitions to bacta to petrified teeth, and you started to tick yourself off that you had somehow started doing chores in the middle of the night. I should have just stayed in bed! The fresher sink heaped with junk when you finally had all the pockets cleared and the fabric piled in the scrubber. You punched the cleaners activator, mindlessly watching the clothes spin round and round while you sipped at a cold cup of water.

Frazzled neurons blared the word ‘foundling’ through your head, and you strode through the poorly illuminated space to where the child’s pram hovered on the other side of the cabin. As you went you took a moment to glance up at the distant night sky through the ladder hatch, cursing when you tripped over a piece of tossed beskar. You slid the cradle’s lid open as quietly as you could to see the sleeping prince, curled in a little ball in his father’s cloak. It’s too cold for you to be by yourself, you need to be with your boo-ear.

Out like a light, he didn’t budge when you scooped the heap of fabric into your arms and snuck back over to your bed. You clambered over your sleeping partner and plopped down on your butt, keeping the child in your lap while you adjusted the warm blanket to fit over you and your mate. You tucked Goobs up under your chin and made yourself into the middle spoon, pushing your backside into the hollow of Din’s hips. The mighty warrior hummed fondly against the back of your head as he spooled himself around you. Aaannd… there it is.

You grumbled and reached down to adjust your thighs, settling the pillowy flesh around the stiffy that prodded against your ass. Din huffed and rutted between your legs with a deep sigh, his cock twitching softly against your mound. It’s only natural you’d once told yourself, and it’s not like either of us are going to accomplish anything. Fine, you can bunk with me, mini-mando. You ignored Din’s poker to get the foundling comfy in between your arms and the arms that were wrapped around you like a big warm octopus. Snug as a bug in a rug the baby was, and a gurgling snore made your heart swell. Like father, like son.

A whiskery muzzle snuggled against the back of your head, brushing through your hair and bumping against the shell of your ear. Tiredness tugged at your eyelids, and you were almost back to sleep when the beast between your legs shifted, sliding backwards and forward again to catch uncomfortably in the dip of your mound. Damn it all are you kidding me! You shuffled your hips, dislodging him from the poorly stuck spot to sit like a sausage in a bun between your thighs. There, stay put you big horndog.

Nope, the sleeping mountain humped again, snagging himself in the same spot. You suck. With a groan you stuffed your hand down between your legs and notched the tip of his cock into the slick space it was made for, the heat of it making a delicious shiver work its way up your spine. Din moaned and hugged you closer, rocking himself deeper into your core and mumbling some Mando’a against your hair with another warrior’s snore. You were still decently lubed with yesterday’s happy fun times, and you slid your thighs against each other to roll your coils around the deliciously thick spear you now had sheathed in you.

His warm, velvety length sat perfectly in your hearth, sending plumes of heat spreading through your body. You were nice and toasty now, snuggled under the wooly blanket and squashed between the snorers on either side of your body. Din sighed in his sleep and let himself be still, keeping his cock warm in the blessed heat of your core. You could feel him, not just as the human blanket impression that he was doing wrapped around your body, but also between your legs, the gentle thrum of his heartbeat felt inside and out; and the slow, steady rhythm put you to sleep in seconds.

~

Thirsty.

Din was thirsty, the dryness in his mouth waking him up from the most wonderful dream. In his nectar-addled mind he was making love to you on some lush, sundrenched world while the setting sun lit up like a halo behind you. Your legs had been thrown over his hips while you rode him, the swell of your pregnant belly sitting heavily on his abdomen. What a sight she is! Maker above truly there can be no other creature as beautiful as her. In his dreamscape his words were distant, but he remembered telling you how much he loves you, how much he will love your younglings, how proud he is to be your husband. He watched awestruck as you crested above him over and over again like a ship breaking the waves, mighty and unyielding as a galleon in a storm.

He didn’t want to wake up from that perfect vision, but the feeling of his tongue sticking to his teeth forced his eyes open. You were pressed so close to his chest he couldn’t tell where he ended and you began, and he carefully slid his hand down your arm to find the foundling nestled against your chest. When did he get in bed? Din didn’t remember you getting up, and he knew he had left the child in his pram right before the ambrosia took control. I must be sleeping heavier than I realize.

Bantha wool brushed against his arms while he let his free hand roam, sliding his rough palm over your soft skin. He made a loop from the sides of your hips, up the curves of your waist, and down your arms to the foundling again; running his thumb over the long green ears of his adopted son and smiling at the gentle coo noise that came from under your chin. How did he get so lucky to have the two most precious creatures in the entire galaxy right there in his arms? He kissed the back of your head, the movement reminding him what had woken him up in the first place, thirsty.

Din carefully started to pull himself upright, only to find himself stuck, and he shuddered at the sensation of discovering what else he had slept through. Brows knit together, he blinked and squinted in the dark down the curve of your spine to where he was buried to the hilt between your legs, wondering if he was still dreaming. How rude of me, hasn’t she had enough of that? Hot embarrassment scalded his cheeks as he tried to work himself out of your silken folds, but the squeeze that you bore down to keep him in place had him biting his lip to keep from moaning out loud. Stars above…

Gently he slid himself out, torn between trying not to wake you and desperately needing to free his wandering cock. Fuck though you were so warm, and wet… wonderfully wet. He’d nearly pulled his length free when you shuffled in your sleep and stuffed your ass back against him, and the groan that broke its way out of his throat couldn’t be suppressed, the heat of it fanning steam against your hair. He bit down hard on his tongue and tugged his cock out, wincing from the quick draw.

Din pressed a chapped kiss to the side of your head and snuck himself out of the sleeping nook you both shared. It was frigid inside the ship, and the cold air that circulated in through the damaged air ducts stung against his flesh. Silent as a lothcat he slinked to the fresher, and the first thing that caught his attention was the sound of the automated cleaning unit spinning round. It had nearly finished its cycle, and he smiled a little sheepishly at the pile of trinkets that heaped out of the sink.

He picked a krayt’s tooth out of the pile, slowly running his thumb over the intricate patterns carved into the opalized bone with a lopsided grin on his face. My riddur. Pushing the rest of the items aside, he carefully turned the faucet and filled a mug. She must have gotten up at some point then. Din sipped quietly at the chilled water, watching the laundry spin round and round in the hazy lights. I wonder why, it’s not like her to wake up in the middle of the night. He giggled to himself in the dark, that woman sleeps through everything, including me.

His brain was slowly coming out of power-saving mode, and the reason for the clothes needing to be washed gooped its way into his frontal lobe. Quarry. A weird mix of emotions sloshed its way through him, first and foremost was rage. Knuckles cracked in his tightening fist, I’ll strangle whoever commissioned that bounty, there was definitely some need-to-know information missing from that fucking puck!

Gross jealousy sizzled behind his eyes at the thought of what that thing did to his wife, followed by a shudder at what it might have done to him. He took another swig, the ice water burning on the way down, at least she’s not hurt. She actually looked like she enjoyed it. A new heat made itself known across his cheeks, what had that looked like before I showed up, I wonder?

His shaft had just started to cease its midnight delinquency, only to perk right back up at the thought of the show he had missed out on. He shook his head and strode over to a mangled locker, finding himself some long johns to pull up and contain himself with. But the thought wouldn’t leave him, that thing had literally fucked you fuller than his wildest dreams. Lust tangled with envy in his chest, between the image of that thing pumping you full and the memory of what it had filled you with he was starting to sweat. But both feelings lost against the ultimate competitor: fear.

What if she’s in pain?

Suddenly fear crept its way to his throat, tasting like bile on the back of his tongue. That was a lot to take in at once, what if that’s why she got up to dig through the pockets, to find some bacta for her sore stomach? The sweat on his brow turned to ice, maybe it wasn’t your stomach that hurt. He cast a glance over to where you still laid with your baby, curled up in a protective ball around him. She would have told me if she was in pain though, right? One thing he knew for sure about you was that you were stubborn, and you usually chose the ‘suck it up’ route over asking for help. Help. I should help! I’m a good helper!

Downing his drink he dug through another cabinet, trying to stay quiet as he did; though probably more so for the foundling than for the bantha he bed with. He found one of the big tubes of bacta salve that he kept for emergencies, forgoing using one of the e-bacta shots he kept for emergency emergencies. Tube in hand, he slid back into bed behind you, carefully bunching the blanket over your side so you wouldn’t get cold. He warmed a big glob of bacta between his palms and slowly massaged it over your tummy, trying not to get it on the blanket or the foundling as his fingers kneaded the soft, supple flesh.

Bacta was a strange marvel of science, and maybe a little bit of magic. With enough of it you could patch a wound or heal a burn, and Din hoped that if he slathered enough of it on it would soak into your guts and fix anything that might be broken. This is mine, and I must protect it. Protect her. You grumbled in your sleep at the sensation of the medicinal salve, but your eyes stayed closed, allowing your riduur to lovingly caress at your precious belly. Never hurts to be cautious.

When he’d finished his administrations he wiped the remaining bacta off on his under-armor, trying to clean the ointment off his fingers before they went numb. Squeezing himself back into place along your spine, he burrowed his nose in your hair and sighed deeply, letting the scent of you fill his lungs. I told you I would bring you the stars, my love, I can bring you bacta as well. His adoration for his lifemate lead his lucid mind back to the dreams he had left, and he curled himself around you and the foundling as he drifted back to sleep.

~

“Electrical?”

“Up and running, seventy-eight percent capacity.”

A frosty morning had greeted you in the bottom of the glacial basin you were still stuck in, though hopefully not for much longer. Ship repairs had been finished to the best of both your abilities, and you were scurrying from task to task, helping Mando make the final prep checks before you hobbled your way off of fabulous vacation destination: Hoth. You had woken up that day feeling like a fat, lazy lothcat all curled up on your bunk, comfy and warm in a pile of bantha wool.

“Comms?”

“Operational, for now. Might lose those when we break the stratosphere, though.”

A mug of hot, watery caff had been waiting for you in the nervous hands of your re-armored riddur, and you’d drank it like you’d been stranded in the desert for days. He’d watched you eagerly, those honeywell depths of his full of curiosity and reverence, never leaving your form until you’d emptied your mug. Din had offered you another, and three more times you drank it down. Thirsty.

“Cabin pressure?”

“Holding!”

Still covered in the bacta you had been slathered in while you slept, you’d finally gotten to do the repairs on the ship’s exterior like you had planned to. The foundling was left on the flight deck, and you would wave to him through the transparisteel while you were on the roof. The pair of you gave it everything you had to piece the broken bird back together, but you had been right in your assumptions that an actual mechanic would be needed to suture the gashes that still twisted the iron flesh of the Razor Crest. Hyperdrive was too much of a risk to take in such a condition, and you would be holed up in the crowded cockpit until you were able to limp your way to the nearest station.

“Navigation?”

“Functional, sorta…”

“Radar?”

“Hot garbage.”

Everything you didn’t want to lose to the vacuum of space had to be moved into the upper deck. Weapons and quarries and all the amenities that made space travel bearable had to be crammed into the auxiliary space between the flight deck and the fuselage access door, leaving very little room for the living creatures that called the Razor home.

“What’s our offensive capabilities?”

“Zilch, unless you wanna roll down a window and we can shoot at whatever comes our way.”

“Fucking fantastic.”

This would be dangerous. Your forecanons were mangled, curling upwards like a pair of tusks from the mechanical beast. The blackmarket blaster cannons would probably need to be replaced, though the last dredges of your credits would have to go towards the ship itself.

“Foundling?”

“Snacking! Want a biscuit? They’re double chocolate.”

“...Yeah. Thank you cyare.”

Din stuffed the cookie in his mouth and pulled his helmet back down, signaling the start of the launch sequence. Your checklist was complete, and you made to buckle yourself and the foundling down to enjoy your pile of trip snacks when a heavily armored paw caught your arm. “How are you? You haven’t said anything about… the encounter.”

You shrugged, truth be told you were fine, though you weren’t sure if your ‘encounter’ had left you numb or if it was the ridiculous amount of bacta you had been drenched in while you slept; but either way you were just dandy. If anyone was still reeling from the events in the creeping reef, it was him.

“I’m alright, fussbucket. Really!” You curled your lips with a sneer, “Wanna open the thermos? Take a sniff?”

“No! Keep that damn thing locked up, if anything just so it doesn’t dry out. When we turn that fucking puck in I’m going to strangle whoever commissioned it…” Rage quaked his shoulders, but he shook the fury off, bringing his attention back to you. “Do you need more bacta?”

“No I do not need any more bacta! I feel like a damn stifling I’m so slimy. Do we even have any left over?” He gave a half-assed shrug, and you added bacta salves to your mental grocery list. His gloved hands fidgeted against his armrests, and you reached out to squeeze one. “How about you, are you alright?”

“Fine.” came a curt reply, quick and decisive and obviously a lie. ‘Fine’ was a four-letter-word as far as you were concerned, but it would have to do for now. You could discuss whatever was bugging him more in depth when your ship wasn’t threatening to fly apart at the seams and you were off of this frozen hell-hole.

“If you say so.” You tugged his hand to you and gave it a long, strong kiss. He pulled your hand back to him almost too quickly, knocking your knuckles against the brow of his helmet. A foolish tug of war ensued, both of you trying to keep the other’s hand for themselves. Neither of you won the battle, opting to just lace your fingers in the space between the two chairs and let your hands hang together. He was motionless besides the gentle roll of his thumb over your knuckles, and the tension in the air gave you the feeling he wanted to say something, but a final squeeze was given before he returned to the steering controls. Later.

“Alright, starting engine sequence.” Rocketeer extraordinaire, your Mandalorian fired up the old ship, carefully taking her through her paces. “Routing power to main ion accelerators… now.” The turbines that jutted out from the ship’s sides sputtered and roared, backfiring so loudly that chunks of ice fell from above and crashed into the window. Mando cursed under his breath and eased off the accelerator, flipping a handful of switches and gently pushing the joystick forward again. The engines spooled back up, barking out a few more explosions in protest before they were chugging away.

“Yeah that’s not terrifying or anything.” You held your hands over the foundlings ears, trying to protect his sails from the noise. The child was happily distracted by the crumbly snack he was working on, and glanced up at you with eyes too big for his head. Out the window you could see one of the offending engines, sparks splashing out over the patch job the two of you had made. “Come on baby girl, you can do it! Booger, help me out.” You held your hands out in front of you and waggled your fingers at the engine, and the foundling did his best to copy you without dropping his snackies.

Your combined sparkle fingers must have worked, because a final -kErPlOw- rocked the boat to her core before she was lifting off from the ground. As dainty as a cement mixer full of bricks she rose through the cerulean cathedral, shaking snow and ice from her iron mane. The Mandalorian’s grip on the steering controls creaked when she tilted to one side, listing unevenly while he tried to level her out. Slowly she ascended, and soon the -KaRunCh!- of the frozen ceiling hitting the roof echoed threateningly in the cabin. Just a bit more…

The breach fell away beneath you, a dark, jagged stain on an otherwise pristine sheet that blazed with the fading sunset. The ice plains of Hoth spiraled away until you were in the clouds, crystals freezing on the window as you started to break through the atmosphere. The Crest rebelled, shuddering and creaking as she bullied her way through. Over the roar of the engines you could hear the sound of your heartbeat, galloping like a fathier while you clutched the foundling to your chest. He didn’t give a royal fuck, and you wondered just how much bullshit he’d gone through before you met.

The shuddering stopped when you broke the exosphere, and you watched the secretive ice planet glide out of view. Ideally you would have flown to an on-world shipyard to get repairs, but aside from the ‘friends’ you’d made, there was no sentient life left on the forsaken snowball. The Empire had seen to that. Your star maps indicated that there was an outpost near the system’s rim, but traveling under the speed of light meant you would be on the proverbial road for almost a cycle. At least you had good company.

Sorta. The foundling was a riot, and the two of you sat on the floor and played with the little silver ball that usually screwed onto one of the levers, rolling it back and forth trying to score ‘goals’ against the other; and you were losing by a landslide. Your pilot on the other hand was dead quiet, focused intently on getting to the station. It was just as dangerous not to be in hyperspace as it was to be, though for entirely different reasons. The streaking stars could rip you to pieces if you got your math wrong, but taking a leisurely stroll through the void could make you an easy target for roving outlaws.

The foundling grew bored of the ball game eventually and wandered over to his papa, who pulled the silly creature into his lap to look out at the unmoving stars. The child went right for the flashy buttons on the dash, earning himself a weak scolding and unfortunately inventing himself a new game: bug dad! So many buttons, so many choices! What does this one do? How ‘bout this one? Oooooh, levers! Tiny green paws raised hell from his perfect perch until the metal monolith sighed and hugged the baby tight, making the tiny terror gibber grumpily at his living prison.

“That’s enough, womp rat, we don’t need to crash a second time.” Though he was trying to be stern, Mando couldn’t help but bounce the baby on his knee, making the child giggle sweetly. You glanced quickly at the star maps before joining your crew, noting the distance you had put between here and Hoth and how much further you had to go. There were a few orbits you would have to pass through before you got to the station, and you made a mental note of a planet that seemed to mark the halfway point of your journey.

You joined your boys at the front of the flight deck, lazily draping your arms over your oathsworn’s shoulders and patting the baby on the head. Din leaned his helmet into the crook of your neck while you tried to teach the foundling how to play patty-cake. “Ok hands up, lemme see your- there we go. Hold your paws up like this...” You clapped your hands together and slowly patted the child’s palms in turn, “Say, say oh play-mate, come out and play with me…”

Beans gibbered and laughed, though he wasn’t able to follow along very well, but as long as he was having fun then so were you. You finished a round and grabbed Din’s gloved mitts, holding on to his wrists and making him play with the baby too. He huffed against you, but your ears had long since learned to tell the difference between a disgruntled huff and a contented sigh.

A handful of road trip games ensued until the child yawned, and the two adults yawned with him. Din passed the baby off to you, insisting that he take the first watch and that he would wake you when you were closer to the planet that marked the half-way point.

Snuggled up with the foundling you had yourself a catnap, though more to pass the time than to actually rest. You were dreaming about a parade of Ewoks in funny hats when you felt something tug on your leg. Opening sleep-crusted eyes you squinted at the visor that was in your line of sight and grumbled, “Are we there yet?”

A warm laugh rumbled his beskar, “No, but there’s something I want you to see. Look.” He cocked his head towards the front window, and you followed his gaze to see the jaw dropping view spread out against the transparisteel. You had traveled space for many moons, seen countless wonders that many a spacer had written odes to, but the ships you sailed on rarely got so close to a gas giant as big as this.

It was massive, clouds the color of a raging wildfire swirling over its surface, a fireball of reds and golds that overtook the starry backdrop it hung against in a blaze of glory. A broad splotch of crimson smeared over the atmosphere’s surface, a storm the size of a hundred worlds. Though the celestial sphere was a beauty on it’s own, its crowning jewel was the expansive ring that curled around it. Thousands of miles wide, the glittering bands of ice and nebular material shimmered in the distant light of the star that the planet orbited, and only got brighter as your ship glided closer.

Your captain brought the old gunship in smoothly until the belted disk was directly beneath you, and at this range the rings spread out to infinity on either side of the window from the radiant planet to the void of space; chunks of quartz and silica flashing like flames with the reflection of the gas giant as they disappeared under your keel.

The faint whirring of the ship’s innards didn’t do the scene justice, though her engines seemed to be tuned to a specific note that started a symphony between your ears that soon grew an entire orchestra for your thoughts alone. The rings of the world before you would serve as the staff that the notes rested on for your celestial song, and you let your own mind be the maestro to lead it.

A swell of strings, clear and mellow would rise to the occasion, lifted by a deep harmony of bass. Bows slide over the strings of oaken cellos, low, slow and strong, their notes as rich as gold. Like an outstretched hand their swells beckon a viola to dance. High and fast, beating like a hummingbird's heart. One two three, one two, one two three, one two. Step, slide, spin, throw! The notes become a ballet, the viola pirouettes, leaping from the arms of her cello she soars! Cosmic wings unfurled like solar sails she climbs, higher and higher, her flight sending a meteor shower down to fall on a brassy percussion that serenades the stars.

A minor chord summons the viola back to grace the stage, and she bows before the major key returns victorious. A woodwind competes with the melody, a challenge of fire and ice, knives of frost and bolts of lightning. A rise like a comet burning through the atmosphere fills the astral amphitheater as the polyphonic harmony blends into one single sound. A crescendo blooms the symphony away into the depths of space, and it fades from your thoughts to herald the planet’s dawn to the unending corners of the Universe, pouring like molten gold.

Magnificent.

Spellbound by the music that never met your ears, you were almost startled to feel a gloved hand settle on your arm; careful not to disturb the foundling that you still cradled. You peeled your eyes away from the window to meet with the tilted visor of your companion, giving him a sheepish little smile when you realized he had been watching you. With one hand still on the steering he brushed the backs of his knuckles against the skin of your arm, and you adjusted the sleepy green baby to let one of your hands find your husband’s.

Din tugged gently on your hand and bid you to him until you were seated across his lap in the way you sometimes rested together. Leaning your head against his beskar, you cuddled the foundling and watched the enormous span of rings flow under you. Din only needed one hand to drive, the other wrapped protectively around your back to hug you tight. There was no reason for him to be this close to the planet’s rings, you realized, he had chosen to bring the ship in, just for you to see.

Or maybe just to see you see.

“Thank you.” You whispered against the armor where his ear should be, pressing a kiss to the cool metal as you did. “It’s beautiful.”

“Not as beautiful as you, mesh’la.”

You’d left your own beskar by your seat, so there was no chime when you knocked your brow against the side of his beskar, but he rumbled against you anyway. With a flick of his wrist he angled the Crest through a thin patch in the ring, flipping the disk over your head. The artificial gravity in the ship was the only source of relativity in the vastness of space, and the change in position gave you a slight sense of vertigo now that you appeared to be flying upside down. The Mandalorian could probably thread the old ship through the rings more adventurously if the busted bird was in better shape, but for now just a few dips would do.

The ship breached back up through the rings once more like a durasteel whale, sailing towards the black smear where the planet blocked the closest starlight from reaching the disk. The shadow of the sphere draped over the rings ahead of you, a blanket of night on an otherwise glaring garter of galactic glitter. Your ship coasted into the umbral shadow, making the daylight side of the planet fade into a sliver of light, eclipsing the stars with a ring of fire. The darkness made the belt nearly invisible, but the stars above glittered brighter than ever against the backdrop of the void.

You’d nearly cleared the dark side when something else glittering caught your eye. Against the black, starless space where the planet was something shimmered.

Something metallic.

From out of the celestial giant’s shadow a wide-winged ship soared out of the umbral cast, the distant starlight shining brightly on its copper-colored hide. A sleek aerofoil, long and flat like a manta ray with a wide receiving port on its bow coasted towards you, casting its own shadow over the planet’s rings. The grip on your back tightened, and a low growl reverberated through the iron underneath you. You’ve got company.

A red light began flashing on the comms panel, announcing that you were being hailed. “The fuck do they want?” You stood up from your armored seat and made to hit the open frequencies button when an armored paw stopped you.

“What are you doing? We have enough to deal with.” His voice was level and cold, commanding like a captain’s should be, and the rasp of it almost made you want to be complicit at his orders. He wasn’t wrong though, you had no guns and barely a ship to sail in, the last thing you needed to do right now was make friends.

You glared at the blank radar screen, giving it a bit of percussive maintenance until the nearby ship flashed to life on the green and yellow field. “Hunk of junk! So what, we're just going to ignore them?” A single stiff nod was your only reply, but the comms light kept flashing away. If they were in distress then they were shit out of luck, because fuck, so were you.

The blinker on the dash was joined by another, more ominous blare: enemy targeting systems locked on. “Shit balls of hell, Din, they’re going to shoot us! Fucking answer them!”

He slammed down on his only option, the busted communications transmitter sputtering to life with a maliciously friendly voice. “Greetings and salutations! You lost, friend? Nobody comes ‘round these parts, especially at such a leisurely pace as you! Don’tcha know how dangerous it is through this system? We’d be happy to… escort you out of the area...”

“No, thank you.” Din barked into the microphone, “We have everything under control.”

“Oh do ya now? I reckon’ by the looks o’ that hackjob holdin’ yer fuselage together I’d say you were in quite a pickle. Haven’t you heard there’s pirates in this neck o’ the woods?”

Pirates. Of course there’s pirates. Your armored companion growled low in his throat, the timbre of it making the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. These spacers were threatening his crew, and to him and his Creed that was an act of war. He cleared the venom from his throat before opening the receiver again. “We can handle it, please go about your business.”

The copper ray’s propulsion engines flared as it drifted closer to your ship until it was nearly on top of her, drifting along just behind your stern and casting shadows over your wings. Big. The Crest was nothing to scoff at, but the monstrosity that floated over top of your little old lady could swallow her alive.

It just might.

The voice on the other end chuckled darkly. “Ah but my friend that’s where you’re mistaken, y’see, helping others is our business! And business is boomin’!”

-CruNcHa-krUnCH!-

The rancorous words were articulated with the destruction of something striking your already damaged wings. From the jagged maw on the front of the ray a pair of vicious grapples had coiled around the stinted wings of the Crest, sinking their teeth into her wounded flesh. The old girl lurched when the lines were pulled taut, the screams of twisted durasteel echoing loudly behind the blast doors that protected you from the vacuum of space. Mando swore, “Fucking pirates! As if there isn’t enough bullshit going on-”

You cut him off with a hand on his shoulder. “Let me take the comms, I might be able to negotiate something.”

“I’ve heard your negotiating, I don’t think that’ll help us right-”

“Just let me try? We don’t have much in the way of options.”

For a moment he was still as a statue, then he gave the faintest nod. “Alright.”

You cleared your throat and took a long, deep breath, switching into your best communications mode. “This is the co-captain speaking, We have nothing of value on this ship or anything that would be of use to-”

“Now, listen ‘ere, missy, I know bounty hunter sigils when I see them. Hand over your quarries and your credits and maybe we won’t clip your wings!”

“As previously stated we are not carrying anything of value, including quarries. We were engaged in a skirmish planetside that rendered our ship unfit for hunting. Release our ship and we will exit your domain posthaste.” Ugh, I hate using this voice.

The pirate was silent for a time, then a slow, malicious laugh rumbled through the comms.

“Then I guess we’re taking your weapons as consolation! Prepare to be boarded, bilgerat!”

Fucksake is it that obvious?! Auxiliary jets fired on the grapple’s edges, adding power to the winch aboard the rayship, and the Razor was dragged backwards against the pull of her engines. The wounded bird sputtered and died from the strain, giving up the ghost as the cutthroats hauled her towards the open hangar. You watched as a bluish field slipped over the rounded window, the edge of a magcon field that protected the maw. Your ship wasn’t just being boarded, it was being captured.

The Crest was swallowed whole by the assailing ship, and in a few more seconds your ship was dropped unceremoniously to the floor when the artificial gravity kicked on inside the hanger you now found yourselves in. More screeching metal told you that some of your patchwork had been ripped back open in the hold below. Well fuck, there goes our motherfucking repairs.

“Damn it!” Mando roared, “I thought you said you could negotiate?!”

“I did my fucking best, ok?! I didn’t see you coming up with anything better!” Ahead of you the jaws of the hangar snapped closed, trapping your ship inside the belly of the beast. You scurried back to your seat, grabbing your armor and your guns. “If it’s a fight they want, then it’s a fight they’ll get! We can handle Imps and poachers, I think we can handle some motherfucking pirates, don’t you?” Your armored companion nodded sharply, rising from his seat and drawing his blasters; slamming a fresh cartridge into each one.

“I don’t care how many there are, they’re not getting you or our foundling.” His growl made you shudder, and a nagging thought in the back of your head wondered if you would ever get used to how scary he was sometimes. Mandalorians were drop-dead lethal, and this hunk of metal was no different. Good thing he’s on your side. He snapped his wrist, making an array of lights pop out of a conical prong that jutted off of the vambrace. “I have spoken.”

“Cool.” Beskar slid over your face, replacing your vicious grin with Mandalorian steel. You made to hide the foundling in his pram when something on Mando’s belt caught your eye.

Something red.

Something flashing.

Fast.

You tore his cloak out of the way to yank the flashing bounty fob off of his belt. This is what you get for not checking your pucks! It wasn’t often that quarries just delivered themselves to you, but at least that meant you might save yourselves some fucking fuel. You dug through his pouch to get the accompanying puck, but before you could find out exactly who aboard this copper coated colossus you were hunting, the light on the comms panel flashed again, this time with a secondary light: incoming holo.

Mando slammed down on the receiver, making an image flicker to life where only a voice had once transmitted. A tiny ghost arose from the dashboard, showing the image of a tall, overly dressed Togruta woman. She very much looked the part of ‘space pirate’ in her complicated overcoat that stretched past her knees and the bandanas tied around her montrals and lekku. She was crisscrossed in holsters and belts that were straining under the weight of all the armaments she carried, from blasters to vibros and everything in between. Show off.

Her voice was clear now that your fucked-up transmitters were in such conveniently close range. “Hello hunters, put down your-”

“You listen here,” Din snarled, his teeth biting down on his venomous words. “You’ve made a big mistake, capturing my ship, putting my family in danger-”

Aww he said family. You peeked around your bristling oathsworn to brandish a pistol at the miniature maiden that was making demands of you, but your phantasmal orchestra started to ring the bells of familiarity between your ears. Din was still going off like a Nexu firing his verbal barbs, and it took several good shoves to move him out of the way so you could get a better look at your host.

Though the blue light of the holoprojector gave her a monochrome appearance, her lavender skin and tall swirled montrals were still clearly visible. She smiled arrogantly at your tilted armor, making her sharp fangs glitter like polished pearls and rolling her cheeks right up into her sapphire eyes. It can't be…

You slid your armor to the top of your head, bunching your brows at the tiny, noble-birthed face until they were nearly dancing off of your forehead.

"Alewyn?”

The pirate princess cocked her head, and the whites of her facial markings went wide around her pedigree eyes. “No fucking way!” Her melodic voice chimed with a laugh, “Hunter! Long time no see! What in Maker’s mishaps are you doin' out here?"

"I could ask you the same fuckin’ thing! Hey don't shoot me I'm comin' out!" You could hear Alewyn yelling at her crew to stand down as she hung up on you, and you stood with hands on your hips and a big stupid grin on your face. "How the fuck…"

Behind you Mando was staring at you with that black hole gaze of his, his visor tilted with confusion. "Friend of yours?"

You nodded "You could fuckin' say that!" You scooped up the foundling and patted your partner on the shoulder, trying to be reassuring. It took him a few good breaths to clear the adrenaline from his veins, though his shoulders still jutted wide like he was ready to tackle the entire galaxy to defend his clan. Another twist of his wrist had the little explosives on his vambrace tucking themselves away, and he watched you disappear down the ladder first before following suit.

The Crest's ramp chuggered as it opened, sticking halfway down and forcing you to jump off of it to escape. Your boots hit the hangar floor, putting you in front of almost a dozen of the most ragtag looking bunch of scoundrels you'd ever seen. They were a myriad of species, from Twi'leks to humans and even a Gungan for fucks sake, but what struck you as oddest of all was that they were all ladies. Ferociously armed to the teeth, the gaggle of gals murmured amongst themselves before a loud, commanding voice soared over their heads.

"Move aside you bunch’a blaggards! Lemme greet my guests…” The crowd parted, allowing the newcomer to saunter between them. Long, lavender-swirled montrals waggled on top of the well-dressed and well-armed lady who was making her grand entrance, and you couldn’t help but stare. She walked with an undeniable air of nobility that couldn’t be hidden even by her swashbuckling swagger, the strength of her bloodline showing through even at her most roguish. She swung her arms wide as she rushed you, “Hunter! It is you! Can’t get enough’a me can you?”

"Alewyn! If you wanted to see me again you could have just called!" You took her wild-armed hug with gusto, ignoring the many pokes of the blades you both carried. Stars above, of all the strangers in the galaxy you’d run headfirst into the one and only Princess Alewyn of Shimi, the Togruta woman who you had let escape your bounty so many moons ago. Freeing her had sullied your reputation with the Guild and put a hefty price on your head that had led the most fearsome bounty hunter in the parsec to your doorstep, and eventually into your heart. You had a lot to thank her for, but for both your safeties it was best that you never saw each other again. Yet here she was, decked out in blasters and blades, surrounded by a wild pack of pirates that she no doubt led as their captain. Good for her.

She squeezed you tight, making the child that you had tucked under your arm grunt in protest. The captain stood back from you to get a look at the creature you carried.

"What in blue blazes’s that thing? It’s cute!” She reached out and ran her thumbs over the child's long green ears and pinched his chubby face, making him fuss and bat his tiny paws at her. “Aw I’m sorry pumpkin, I didn’t mean to upset you! My baby girl is so rough’n tumble I forget little’uns are s’posed’ta be soft. She’d love’ta play with you though!”

That’s right! The last time you had seen Alewyn she was defending her swollen belly, ready to shoot you dead if you tried to stop her egress. Your big mean bounty hunter heart couldn’t take the idea of a mother not being able to raise her youngling, and you’d given up your own ship so she could escape. How time flies.

“Alewyn, this is my boy.” You covered his ears, “He’s adopted.” The princess snickered at the obviousness of your statement, but the mirth quickly left her face at the sound of armored thunder dropping down off of the ramp behind you. Her lovely eyes did their best to hide the terror on her face as the Mandalorian you traveled with sauntered up behind you. “And this,” you made a grand gesture of waving at the mountain of living beskar, “Is my partner. Life partner.” You grabbed his hand and threaded your fingers through his, making his helmet tilt just slightly on an otherwise stiff stance.

“Well a’ll be damned, you’ve been busy! But I guess... so have I!” The captain threw her hands in the air, and the crew around her cheered. “Alright you lot! Show’s over, we’ll not be rescuing anything other than these two guttersnipes from that ship.” The fem fatales groaned and roared, laughing and shouting in a multitude of galactic obscenities as they wandered away.

You cocked a hip, jutting your baby out on one side and stabbing your hand to the other with an air of indignation. “Rescuing? You nearly tore our wings off! What kind of rescue operation are you running here?”

Alewyn laughed, bright and chipper. “Let’s just say all bounties aren’t warranted, I should know! Come on, I want you to meet my wife and daughter and the rest of my crew. I can tell you more over some spicewine. Welcome aboard the Sunskate!” She stuck her hand out to you, tugging on you so hard you almost keeled over. You cast a wayward smile over your shoulder at your husband as you were led over the hangar floor to one of the corridors that branched off of the open space. He sighed and looked back forlornly the busted body of the Crest before dutifully following along.

A multitude of crewmates scurried around you as you made your way through the ship on the arm of the pirate princess, listening to her tell you all about her travels. “-and then my dad said ‘Wynnie you disgrace this family with the company you keep! You will marry the duke and stop this nonsense’ blah blah blah.” She made talking motions with her hand, bobbling her montrals with sassy head tilts. “And I said fuck you dad! I’m in love and nothin’s gonna keep us apart!’ Course daddy wasn’t gonna have none’o that, sending fuckin’ hunters after his own daughter.” The sting in her voice was obvious on that last word, anger and pain enunciating her words. “But you know what they say, love conquers all, yeah?”

“Yeah!” You squeezed the foundling under your arm, bringing him in range of a kiss. The sound of armored footfalls echoed behind you, your oathsworn keeping a polite distance. The winding corridors of the Sunskate flowed more organically than anything built on Corellia, and eventually they led you to a recreational space where more of the pirate crew were talking and eating. At the center of the group was another Togruta, this one a gradient from navy blue to bright sunshine yellow. On her knee a tiny cotton-candy colored baby nibbled on the woman’s lekkus, adding fresh marks to her already scarred tendrils.

The infant noticed your approach first, throwing her chubby arms up in the air and flashing her razor sharp teeth in a smile a mile wide. Alewyn let go of your captured hand and strode to the pair. “There’s my girls! Fae have you been trying to eat mama’s lekku again?” Alewyn bent and picked up her daughter, peppering the gibbering baby with kisses before leaning down to kiss the other woman. “Hello kitten, need me to kiss those, make them better?”

“Wynnie you flirt!” The sunrise Torgruta laughed into the kiss that was being pressed to her lips. “Can you be professional for one second?”

“Would you love me if I was?” The princess chided, brushing her palm down the swell of the other woman’s lekku until she had the chewed-up tip of it in her hand. “Fay-fay has done quite a number on these!” She pressed a kiss to the marked skin before turning back around to face you and your own crew. “Lilah, you’re not gonna believe who we picked up! It’s the hunter, the hunter! The one that spared me from carbonite back way back when.”

Lilah stood and reached for your hand, clasping your elbow as she shook it. “Well blow me down, I never thought I’d get a chance t’thank you for what you did.” The handshake slid flawlessly into a brash hug, the air squashed from your lungs in the process. “Thank you for giving me my Alewyn back, her father didn’t exactly approve’a us.” She patted you on the back and held you out at arms length. “I don’t s’ppose you got a name now do ya, hunter?”

“My name is Tra’laar!” You beamed, flexing the sound of your gifted name against new ears. At that Mando placed a hand on your shoulder, giving it a gentle pat before falling back down to his side. Lilah’s emerald eyes flickered between your face and the armored man standing at your side, then down to the baby that you carried in your arms.

“Well, Tra’laar, you gonna introduce those two?”

You knocked a knuckle against the beskar of your partner “Oh sure, this is-” Uh…

“Mando.” Din filled in the blank for you, sequestering his true name to be known by his clan alone. He stepped forward and gave a stiff, respectful handshake that made Lilah’s montrals whip with the strength of it. She laughed heartily at his uptight demeanor.

“So, we got Tra’laar and Mando, who’s’s lil’ guy? What’s’s name?” She gently took your foundling from you, and the change in the electricity in the air was palpable. At your side your oathsworn was bristling defensively under his armor, fighting the urge to pull his child away from the stranger you so easily trusted with your precious cargo. You ignored Mr. Scary to ponder the question you had just been asked.

His name...?

HiS nAmE?!?!

Oh fuckadoodledoo! What a question! Nobody in your crew got called their own name that often, from cyare to tinman to Beans the Crest was full of fondly fabricated titles. You’d just accepted it, using what Din called him: the foundling, the child, womp rat sometimes. You usually went for more adoring choices, beans and goobs and booger, but the child never had a real name.

How?! How does this child not have a fucking name?!

The gears in your head spun out of control, you can’t tell these women that your baby's name is Booger! Shit fuck fuck fuck!! Uuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh…

You stared at the child, meeting his nebulous eyes with your own distressed gaze. He tilted and blinked at you as though he could hear the machinations in your head melting together with the friction of them grinding to a halt. Your thoughts went wild, the musicians in your mind dropping their instruments and tripping over their own feet, crashing cymbals and tooting horns in cacophony of confusion.

Green Beans… Goober… Booger...Grooboog… Groobeans... Grooberoo... Grober Gro…

“Grogu.” You didn’t break eye contact with the child, watching as his cosmic orbs lit up like fireworks. “This is our son, Grogu.”

Fucking Maker are you kidding me?! Grogu?! What kind of-

“Patu!” The green terror shrieked in delight, drawing the attention of everyone in the room. He churruped and flailed in the wide blue palms of the Togruta woman that held him until she was passing him back off to you. He wiggled like a womp rat in a trap, flashing his tiny toothy grin at you while he wildly patted at your cheeks.

“I’m so sorry, that’s a terrible name.” You whispered to him alone, but he took your whole face in his arms and squeezed, giving you little baby kisses that made your heart flood with warmth. The baby didn’t usually do kisses, that was supposed to be your job. “Do you like that or something? Grogu?” The foundling kissed your nose and butt his forehead against your own,the most sacred show of love known to his clan, his family, and suddenly it just clicked.

Grogu.

You pulled the child to your chest, hugging him tight while you looked at your partner. He was motionless as always, a silver statue catching the fluorescent lights of the wardroom on his many plates. His visor tilted slowly, so imperceptibly slowly that only the light sliding over the black gloss of his singular eye gave away the movement at all. In that moment everything faded away. No more pirates, no more Alewyn and Lilah and pointy-fanged Fae, or their band of misfits. Even the Sunskate disappeared into the background noise of the universe. Nothing else existed except for you, your Mandalorian, and the foundling.

“Grogu?”

The name rasped out of the modulator with gravelly relevance, tentative and soft. Sailcloth ears perked up at hearing his papa repeat the ridiculous name you had bestowed, followed by a pair of fat grabby baby paws reaching towards the metal mountain. The potato sack of a child was passed again, this time into the armored embrace of his father where he could patta-patta on the indents of his cheeks.

“Grogu…” Mando spoke it again, lowering his brow to meet with the baby’s. Seeing the pair of them so close together in that moment almost made you melt into the floor, and you sighed heavily before turning back to your hosts, recomposing yourself.

“Yep, them’s my boys. Mando and... Grogu.” You puffed yourself up, trying your fucking damndest to stay dignified. Alewyn snickered again, sweet and trilling as she leaned over to Lilah.

“He’s adopted.” She whispered, making the other woman giggle as well.

“Good to know, I was starting t’wonder how Mando kept ‘is ears hidden under that helmet’a his.” Her laugh was warm and rich like aged whisky, reverberating around the rec-room. “Welp, you kids wanna stay for dinner?”

You thought back to the ruined ship that you’d left back in the hangar, not going anywhere any time soon. “Yeah dinner sounds great, thanks.” You followed the pair of pirates to where the rest of the crewmates had gathered, preparing to take supper. Mouthwatering scents wafted from the galley while you made friends with the rest of the wild women, getting to know them between the uproars they frequently broke out into. They were rough, undisciplined, and unbelievably vulgar, and you loved every second of it. Though you had a family now, you never really had a people after you left your sailor life behind, but if you did, they would look just like this.

When dinner was served you nearly drooled on yourself, but you forwent eating to feed your son, opting to eat with your partner later. A bottle of spicewine was opened by your rambunctious hosts, and a tall goblet was filled for you more than once, so at least you weren’t insulting them by not accepting any of their offerings. Grogu ate heartily, and in between his bites you spoonfed little Fae who sat in her mama’s lap at the dinner table. Alewyn razzed you several times about not eating her chef's hard-cooked meal, and you slugged her playfully each time.

“So whut, he don’t take that thing’off? How’s’at work?” She said with a mouth full of food, swirling her fork in the air.

“We make it work.” You scolded, and she shrugged.

“Is’e cute?”

Next to you Mando went stiff as a board, and you snorted a laugh, trying to hide your smile with a spoon. He gawked at you behind the visor, thankful that it hid his embarrassment so well.

“Yeah he’s cute, I think so, anyway.” You poked at his armor with your spoon, earning yourself a trademark huff. He didn’t say much for the remainder of the dinner, though your conversations with the runaway royal got progressively more invasive until you could feel the heat coming out from under his beskar.

“Is he human?” Yes

“Does he have a nice ass?” Well obviously, look at it.

“Is’e good in bed?” Fucksake.

“DOES THE HELMET STAY ON?!” Alewyn!!

Lilah scraped her plate directly into her mouth and slammed it back down on the table. “Wynnie leave’em be! Look how fuckin’ red her face is, can’t you tell you’re embarrassing her?” She laughed and shook her head, pouring herself another full glass. “Since yer not gonna eat then you better entertain. Tell me, hunters, do either’a’ya know any songs?”

“Do I- do I know any songs?!” You sputtered, thankful for the rescue but feeling just as indignant. Jumping up from your seat made you wobble a bit from the wine. “Do you know The Ballad of Transport Eighteen?”

Lilah nearly cackled, raising a glass and clearing her throat, “We were thirty-eight crewmen on Transport Eighteen-”

You joined in: “The hour was late and the talk was obscene!”

The towering Togruta stood up, one boot on her chair and one boot on the damn table, and you followed suit, singing the old sailor ditty in unison and waving your wine through the air.

“When the raiders streaked down and their bright lasers cut, some twenty-odd holes through her steel-plated gut!”

The noise the two of you made was absurd, and a handful of other cutthroats joined in with their own ragged voices. By the time you were to the second verse the walls of the Sunskate were ringing with your songs. When you’d finished Ballad, another pirate stood and started up a shanty that you didn’t know, and you did a silly little dance that you were finally getting to learn a new song or two.

Most of the ladies had songs of their own, but after several rounds you were so shitfaced on spicewine that you couldn’t remember them if you tried. But what you could do, at least what the wine told you that you could do, was dance! You swung Grogu around in your arms, kicking your feet and prancing around the room with the rest of the swashbucklers. A bug-eyed Rodian whipped out an instrument that resembled an accordion, pumping out an upbeat ditty that had the whole room stomping. Lilah took Grogu in her arms, holding him next to Fae while you danced with Alewyn, the two of you knocking elbows and spinning one way and then the other, laughing like schoolgirls the whole way.

The shanty slowed way down, letting some of the gals catch their breath or get another swig of ale. You took your son and the Togrutan youngling in your arms so that the captain could dance with her wife. With a babe under each arm you swayed over to your partner, who had only been tapping his foot along to the beat. You dipped Grogu to him, then Fae, swaying in time with the music. Mando brushed a gloved palm over his son's wrinkly little head when it came back to him, tilting his helmet softly.

Fae yawned and rubbed her emerald eyes, and Grogu followed suit. You danced over to where a padded bucket seat was, setting the two younglings down so they could rest and you could free your hands. Sauntering back to your tinman, you took his hands in yours and pulled.

“Mando dance with me.”

He stayed firmly in his seat, “I.. I don’t know how.”

“Pff, neither do I, bucket boy. Just.. just get up here!” You yanked again, and this time he allowed you to pull him along. You held his hands and did your own dance, using him like a mannequin to hold one of his hands up in the air and spin underneath it. He barely moved, too nervous to show any softness in such company. The slow dance started to near its completion, and you moved one of Din’s hands to your waist, lacing your fingers between the other and leaning in close to his audio intake. “Hey, remember that ‘courtship ritual’ you tried on me the other day?”

Heat radiated out from the beskar you were pressed against, any hotter and you could cook an egg on it. “Y-yeah…”

A catty smile crept over your face, “Think you can do it again? I’ll say when.” He was still for a moment, then nodded faintly. You waltzed around him slowly in time with the music, doing the dancing for the both of you until the final stanza was being played. Pressing yourself as close to his body as you could so you would only have to whisper, you met his visor with your own gaze. “...now!”

The arm on your waist went tight, and the one holding your hand twirled you around until you were parallel to the floor, earning a slew of cheers and whistles from the schnockered swashbucklers. You’d known the dip was coming, but your face flushed beet red anyway, and you fought the urge to knock his helmet off and kiss him right then and there. He seemed to feel the same longing, his breath catching in his modulator above you and making his chest heave. You could just imagine it, the feel of his plush lips against yours, the heat of his kiss on your face and the softest touch of his tongue making its way past your teeth to find your own.

“Later.” He whispered, slowly spinning you back up to your feet. Blushing, you nodded, only now realizing that the music had stopped before you were standing back upright. Many eyes on you made your face burn until it was nearly melting off your skull, and you sheepishly looked to your hosts. The Togrutas were sitting back down, though Alewyn was using Lilah as a chair and playing with her lekku.

“You two make quite a sight.” The captain purred, crossing her boots on the table. “Maybe you should get a room!” She shouted with a laugh that had the rest of the crew in an uproar. Inside you wanted to shrink away until you didn’t exist anymore, but brashness and vulgarity came more naturally to you than cowardice.

“We would, but somebody totalled my ship! I’m lookin’ at you two tangle-heads.” You glowered at them with a cocky grin. Alewyn’s chiming laugh coupled neatly with Lilah's oaken bass, perfectly in tune together. The pirate princess twirled the end of her wife’s lekku between her fingers and fixed you with a playful glare.

“Yeah yeah sorry ‘bout that. We can give ya a lift’ta Elgon Station since it’s conveniently on the way. We’re makin’ our way to Thrask to drop that’un off.” Alewyn jabbed a thumb back over her shoulder at a short, pinkish frog woman who had been hiding back in the corner. Between her knees sat a large tankard filled with orangish orbs. The dainty woman croaked with surprise at being noticed finally, hugging her container a bit closer. “Can’t get in’ta hyperspace with that jug’o eggs she’s got there. They’ll pop.”

The ovatious reminder of your last hunt wormed a shiver up your spine, but you shook it off to throw your host a nod. “Thanks, Alewyn, ‘preciate it.” Your host hopped up from her lavish throne, slowly letting her wife’s lekku fall from her hand as she sauntered to you. She reached for your hand and pulled you along behind her, asking you to walk with her through the Sunskate's corridors. Eventually you passed through a bulkhead to the flight deck of her ship, the transparisteel showing nothing but stars as far as the eye could see. A radar screen near the navigation panel blinked with a lazy yellow light, showing the location of Elgon Station where only void met your naked eye.

“Hunter, I wanted to talk to you in private.” Her voice was level, and all traces of her raunchy, spacefaring, swashbuckling accent evaporated, and you were once again talking to the Queen-in-Waiting of Shimi. She didn’t meet your eyes, her sapphire globes flitting between the stars ahead while she locked her elbow to yours. “Remember when we met? I was pregnant with Fae, on the run, just… just trying to get back to my Lilah…” Her voice trailed off at the memory. You nodded, but allowed her to continue without interruption. “If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be standing here right now. Doing exactly what I want to do with my life. I wasn’t cut out for nobility, no matter how badly daddy wanted me to be his perfect little princess, I just wasn’t. He never did take that well.”

She forced a laugh, patting your forearm with her other hand to compose her thoughts. “First and foremost I wanted to tell you thank you,” She turned to meet your eyes with the jewels that sat in her orbits, their vibrancy shining with more stars than there were out the window. “Since that day we’ve been living on the edge, just like I always dreamed of! Taking out hunter ships, sorry about that, by the way, and rescuing their quarries. That fucking Guild of your’s is indiscriminate. Princesses, pirates, popes for fuck’s sake I’m sure.” Her eyes rolled at her own joke. “Not all of them deserve to be carted off in carbonite. I certainly didn’t.”

She took herself off of your elbow and held both of your hands, asking you to face her directly. “Hunt- Tra’laar,” There was an edge of seriousness to her words now, sharp as a dagger with her noble voice. “If you ever want to stop working for those quacta-kissing skuglords, you give me a call, ok? You’re always welcome back aboard my ship. Could use a good pair of asskickers, and your baby boy too, of course.”

The smile on the lavender lady’s face could melt Hoth with its warmth, and you let her pull you in for another hug. “You’re welcome, Alewyn, and thank you for the offer.” You hummed against the side of her montral where an ear might be, though you couldn’t be sure. “I’ll… I’ll consider it.”

“Fair enough.” She stepped back from you, holding you at arms length so you couldn’t escape her eyes.

“Alewyn, were you on the comms? When you roped our ship?” She nodded. “How… how did you know?”

Her head tilted. “Know what?”

“That… that I was a bilgerat.” You spat the word out like it was poison, but the captain only laughed.

“Half of my crew were bilgies at some point, you get an ear for it after a while. Nobody else uses the word posthaste besides those that were raised as boat-brats.” You rolled your eyes at her, relieved and a little offended that she had clocked you so well. She saw your half-hidden embarrassment and decided to dig a little deeper, a wry smile tugging at the corners of her lips. “Is he good to you?”

Her question caught you off guard, making your brows fly high and your cheeks flush. “Y-yeah, he’s good to me. There’s a lot more to him than meets the eye, y’know.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

“Like… he’s sweet. And caring. And he loves that boy of ours, he’d die for either one of us, nearly has once or twice. Fuck me sideways you’re nosy!”

Her lilting laugh was bright as a fresh spring day, and just as sunny. “Just checking! You wouldn’t believe some of the stories those women have told. Don’t even get me started on that Gungan! She’s deadly, if you catch my drift.” She said with a wink and a laugh, though you weren’t sure if you did. “But seriously, if he treats you wrong you tell me and I’ll gut him like a fish!”

“I can handle myself, Wynnie!”

“I know that! Just looking out for you is all. I’m glad we ran into each other again, and I’m glad to see you doing so well for yourself.”

“Right back atcha, Captain.”

“Come on, we better get back to our spouses before Lilah challenges your Mando to a fight, she’s dastardly! I love her so much, and our daughter Fayfay. Pair’a lucky ladies, ain’t we?” Her spacer accent returned, coarse and arrogant as ever while she jabbed you in the side with her elbow.

“Unquestionably.” She started to walk back towards the door you had come in from, but you stopped her, grabbing her hand. “Wait. I have something for you.” From your pockets you dug out the blinking fob and puck, stuffing them into Alewyn’s purple palms and closing your fingers over her fists. “Not all bounties are warranted.”

Stars shimmered in her noble eyes the same way they had the first time you’d met, glittering softly when she nodded and pocketed the hunter tools in one of her many secret compartments. You’d never know who the puck was meant for, and you didn’t care.

The captain's frock coat swished against the side of your leg as the two of you walked back to where you had left your crews. Contrary to what she had predicted, the crewmates that weren’t passed out on the floor seemed to be engaged in some kind of discussion, circled around Lilah and Mando in the center. You couldn’t see much over the heads of the many miscreants, but you caught the wave of a sheathed vibroblade in the blue palms of the co-captain’s hands. Mando was listening to whatever it was that she was saying intently, leaning forward as not to miss a single word.

When they noticed the approach of their wives, Lilah smacked your tinman and cut the conversation short, but not before she flashed him a wink and a grin. She stood and pocketed the knife, “There they are! We were startin’ta think you’d gotten lost.” She made an exaggerated gesture of yawning and stretching. “Whelp it’s gettin’ late, since you two ain’t goin’ anywhere any time soon, why don’t you two getcher selves comfortable. We got space.”

You grabbed the plates of cold food from the table and made to follow her when you remembered your foundling. He was still curled up in the padded seat with the Togrutan youngling, though even in her sleep Fae was trying to nibble his ears. You rescued his ear from her relentless biting, but he looked so comfortable that you were reluctant to move him. Alewyn stood beside you and brushed her hand over her daughter’s montral buds, “Let them sleep, they’re safe here.”

Mando loomed over you, and you could feel the reluctance coming off of him without him uttering a single word. You turned and flashed him a look, somewhere between a glare and a plea. “Let’s go eat dinner, then we can come back for him, sound good?” His slight nod was almost nonexistent, but it was good enough for you, and you followed your host to one of the many extra quarters that the Sunskate boasted.

You waved a thank you to the departing co-captain, ignoring the lecherous wink that she gave you before walking into the modest suite. The room was small, though not cramped, and it even had a little porthole for you to look out of, fancy! Instead of beds there was a broad hammock hanging in the corner, heaped with blankets and quilts; an unusual choice in space but welcome nonetheless. The Togrutans made sure that any of their ‘rescues’ would be comfortable, though you were curious as to how both of you would get in the hammock. But first, dinner.

A small table and singular chair wouldn’t be enough for the two of you, so you plopped down on the floor and beckoned your partner to you. He glanced around the room, suspicious as always, then closed the door and carefully dropped to the floor behind you. You dug in, shoveling much-needed sustenance into your gob, but your partner remained still. You turned to him with a mouthful of food, “You gonna eat?”

“There might be cameras, or people watching. I can’t-”

“Fuckin’ bucket, hang on.” With a groan you set your plate back on the floor and wobbled over on your knees to the hammock, tugging one of the blankets off of it and accidentally pulling down the entire stack. Picking what you guessed was the biggest you fluffed it in the air and draped it over his head, giggling as you snuck underneath your blanket fort with him. “How’zat?”

Hissing latches answered you, and the offending beskar fell away to reveal the handsome man that had remained hidden from you for so long. “Thank you, cyar’ika.” Dinner was obliterated in a matter of minutes, but once you’d both finished you stayed under the covers with him, just to enjoy seeing his face in the low light. Scooting around to his front, you brushed the side of your face against his, feeling the stubble on your skin. He hummed and nuzzled against you, bringing his hands up to cup your jaw and slide you over for a much-awaited kiss.

He tasted like dinner, but the scent of him was strong, and the combination of flavors and smells made you giggle a bit. Din’s lips were soft against yours, gentle and tender and a little ticklish from his facial hair. Arms wrapped around you and hauled you up into his lap, making you gasp faintly into his unbroken kiss. Seated on his lap side saddle, you kissed him with vigor, only now aware of the twinge of jealousy you had felt at the two lekku-laden-ladies getting to kiss each other whenever they wished. Speaking of…

“So, what were you and Lilah talkin’ bout?” you asked directly into his mouth. A sharp little inhale hinted that maybe you’d caught wind of something secret.

“She was just giving me some… uh… suggestions.” Even in the dark of the pillow fort you could see heat rising to his face. Like a knife you dug in deeper.

“Ohoho? What kind of suggestions?”

A boyish smile tugged on the edges of his lips, and his eyes went a little darker. “Why don’t you let me show you instead?” Warm lips were pressed to yours again, longer and deeper with every kiss. You were only marginally aware of the change in your position, slowly being lowered onto your back while his tongue pushed its way to yours; licking into your mouth. Soon you were laying down fully with him over top of you, caging you in with his metal plated arms. You felt him shuffle, then an ungloved hand snaked its way to your shirt, tugging it up over your head and taking your mask with it.

A strong hand kneaded at the pillowy flesh of your breast, letting the weight of it fill his palm. Warm fingertips pinched at your nipple, rolling the sensitive bud gently til it pebbled between his callouses. The sensation pooled heat in your belly and tightened in your guts, but this wasn’t anything new. Appreciated, for sure, all of his touches were, though you couldn’t help but wonder if this was what was suggested. His kisses continued in tandem with his fingers, building with intensity until his teeth were biting at your lower lip and tongue, catching the sensitive skin in his sharp bite.

Hot breath fanned against your neck as he tilted his head to chase along the edge of your jaw, letting the bone’s curve lead him to the soft spot under your ear. He wrapped his lips around your earlobe, and the nick of sharp teeth coupling with the steam in your ear made your eyes flutter and roll. You tried to kiss at his neck, wanting to repay the favor, but the teeth on your ear snarled and sank into the meat of your pulse point, making you cry out against him. Biting turned to sucking, his fervent kisses pulling the tender skin up and leaving blooming welts to mark you as his.

His hand left your breast and disappeared from your body, but you were too busy worrying about having your throat ripped out by the man who had you pinned. Of course he wouldn’t hurt you, but the flight instinct was still there, making your heart try to pound out of its cage when those sharp canines bore down on your larynx. Without taking his vicious teeth from your neck, he started digging at your belt, and you let your body relax since you knew what was next.

The hand came back up, forcing a needy groan out of your captured throat from his teasing, but your eyes snapped wide when you felt cold metal on your skin. Din released your throat and met your eyes with his half-hooded honeywells, bearing his teeth to you in a wolfish grin. “Cyare…” he purred with a lust laden drawl. “Tell me to stop, and I’ll stop, but I want to… try something.” You weren’t looking at him though, you were looking at the blade that he had drawn, the edge of it pressing into the side of your neck.

“Um… ok… I trust you.” Eyes wide with fear and stuck fast to the knife you watched him move it down your chest over your sternum. “Do not cut my clothes off.” You scolded, and he hummed a deep, dark laugh. The blade coasted over your belly, your belt line, and then sat right at the top of your mound, sending adrenaline burning through your veins. What the hell?

Leaning back from you, Din rocked up to his haunches and traced the sharp edge of the vibro over where your slit pushed against the duraweave, and you furrowed your brows at him trying to decipher just what the fuck he was up to. Please don’t stab me in the snatch. From your belt he tugged the empty leather sheath off and slipped it over the knife, then holding it by the blade end he flipped on the thrummer, making the vibroblade come alive in his hand.

“Are you ready, cyar’ika?”

Shrugging, “Yes? I still don’t- ooo-ooo-ooh-hhhh~!” Your entire body tensed up when he pressed the vibrating hilt to your crotch, using his whole body to keep your knees from snapping together. The muscles in your abdomen convulsed, forcing your hips to cant upwards with each shaky spasm. “F-f-f-fuuck! Th-th-hat’s n-n-ne-ew-ew-w!” You stuttered through clenched teeth like you’d been shot with a pulse rifle, but this was a thousand times more pleasurable. Even through the thick fabric of your pants the strength of the vibrations felt raw, untethered. Hands dug like claws into the blanket’s edge, knees squeezing at armored shoulders, eyes screwed shut. The intensity was overwhelming, and your bootheels scootched out from under you when you tried to find your footing, squirming on the floor like an electrified worm.

The knife was pulled away from you and its vibrator silenced, and you were instantly torn between happy to catch a break and desperate for its return. With blurred vision you squinted at him in the low light, panting and shaking. He had used no effort whatsoever to coax you so close to climax, and the pride of it was obvious across his face.

“Do you want me to stop?”

Bared teeth and a snarl was all you could muster, and you stabbed your thumbs down to your belt, trying to pull your remaining clothes off. Din grabbed you by the hem and yanked, nearly ripping your pants off to expose you to him. The salacious humming started again, and you stuck your tongue out between your teeth in a wry grin that was obliterated in seconds when the pommel found your clit. High pitched cries broke their way out of your throat as the Mandalorian softly rubbed his fun new toy around the pearl of nerves that quickly spun you to a frenzy. Every muscle in your body went tighter than a guitar string, making your back arch and quiver until Din was pushing a palm to your sternum, holding you down against the floor. Aside from keeping you in place he exerted barely any effort, meanwhile you were being flung into hyperspace, trying not to lose your mind.

Molten lava burned in your veins and your tightened muscles, an eruption building quicker than you knew how to stop, and the fire of it nearly burned you alive when it combusted. Knees jerked and claws scratched when you came, and through the feverhaze of it you were almost aware of your scream. You squirmed in his grasp, the singing dagger playing its song with your own vocal cords, unable to stop coming. Hot slick coated your thighs, drenched them, flooded them, fuck! Blinded by your ecstasy you wailed, crying and straining, begging him to stop. Only when the knife left your swollen, engorged clit did you notice the tears in your eyes, pooling in their corners and streaking down your cheeks.

You threaded your hands through your own hair, trying to force yourself back down out of hyperspace. A question was posed to you that you didn’t hear, one that was repeated a second time. “Are you ok?”

“Fuuuuuuuck...” Was all you could come up with. You felt him shuffle between your legs, and you jerked when his hands found your drenched cunt. Warm, villainous laughter oozed against your ears.

“That’s a good girl, coming so hard for me. Did you like that?” Breathless, you nodded. “Hmmm… I wonder if you can do that again.” His fingers slid up your sopping wet pussy, soon joined by the vorpal blade and making you choke on the air in your throat. Long, calloused fingers pumped in and out of you, digging at the sweet spot he had so expertly learned to find, working in tandem with the vibro that was spinning you right back up faster than you could think. “Come on, come on my hands, ner riddur, give me all you- oh!” You sucked air between your teeth in a silent scream and bore down on his fingers with bone-breaking strength to squirt a hot splash of cum all over his hand and wrist. “Holy shit.”

“Th-that’s not u-usually what… what someone w-wants… t-to hear after th-they come…” You let your legs drop to the sides, letting you get a glance at the man between your legs. He looked mystified, staring at his hand and wrist and vambrace with some kind of mix between arousal and reverence. He licked a broad stripe up his wrist and palm, taking each of his fingers in his mouth one at a time to lick them clean. You sneered at him, “Dirty boy.”

He pulled the last of his soaked fingers out of his mouth with a pop!, glaring at you with hooded eyes that swirled with desire. “Dirty? I’ll give you dirty, cyar’ika. Flip over.”

“Make me.”

Din growled and wrapped his arms around your boneless form, flipping you effortlessly on to your knees. He stuffed his own legs under your hips, keeping you up off the floor that you so desperately wanted to melt back down onto. He freed himself in short order, giving himself a couple of warm up tugs before he was thrusting his length into you; but rather than fuck you stupid he just let himself fill your folds as if he was warming his cock.

You were about to give him hell when you heard the -wrrrrrrrrr- of the vibro again, and suddenly you didn’t need him to move for you to be pleasured. The wet, slick pommel tapped against your clit, and every muscle in your gut snapped tight, curling you nearly into a ball. Behind you you could hear him hiss through clenched teeth, and the little spasms from his thighs told you that he was enjoying the toy as well. Again you were sling-shot to your climax faster than you could process it happening, making you clamp down on his thick, girthy length and forcing a choked moan from the Mandalorian that was lost so deep inside you.

He fell forward against the curve of your back, trying to roll up in a ball as well, but you were conveniently in the way. The cold of his beskar stung against the arch of your spine, but the heat coming off of you warmed it right up. Hot breath puffed against the back of your neck, followed by the nick of sharp teeth and the drag of a flattened tongue. He slid a hand up between your breasts to your collarbone and he fell backwards to his haunches again, making you straddle his legs with him still buried in your heat. You were squished as tightly to his chest as he could get you, and the knife’s blunt end was pressed again to where you were joined together.

Little thrusts were all he could manage in the throws of the vibrators strength, as if you could do any better, squirming and thrashing on the spear that split you while the vibro tore another climax from you. If your eyes had been open you would have gotten to see yourself come, the glistening splash flying out from where the hilt met your swollen bud and coursing hot down Din’s shaft and balls til it was dripping onto the floor. You mewled against the side of his scruffy jaw, feeling the tears spring to your eyes from the overstimulation; but thankfully it didn’t last too much longer. He gasped and growled in your ear, pressing the vibro against the marriage of your slick lips and his throbbing cock, and a handful of short, desperate thrusts were all he needed to drop over the edge of ecstasy with you; adding his own cum to the growing pool between your knees.

The vibro was dropped, rattling on the floor until you bent down and grabbed it, flipping the switch and silencing its song. Ragged panting filled the tiny space of the blanket fort, yours high and shaky, his deep and growling like a wild animal. You reached back and found him, tangling your fingers through his soft curls, digging into them so his face was pressed against yours. Bristles tickled your skin with each breath, followed by sloppy, needy kisses. His lip dragged against your skin, whispering praises in your ear and sneakily trying to eat you alive. Teeth nipped at your cheek, then down your jaw, finding the spot that he had started with and sinking them into your tender flesh a second time. A third. Fourth.

“Din p-please!” You begged, your voice going higher and whinier than you had intended, but he ignored you, lost in the wellspring of desire that he called his wife. He licked a broad stripe up from the crook of your shoulder to the bottom of your ear.

“I like it when you beg.” He bit down and sucked, turning your throat into a red and purple patchwork of his territorial markings. “You sound so pretty. So needy.” His cock throbbed between your legs, refusing to soften just yet, forcing another hot gush of your mixed cum to flood down your thighs. A broad hand snaked its way to your tormented throat, squeezing ever so gently but still making you gasp. “I want you to beg every time I breed you.” His armored embrace constricted around your ribs and throat, making you choke on the air you so desperately needed. He forced his cock in just a little deeper before pulling his length out, making the head of it bob against your engorged cunt and sending shivers through every inch of your body.

You were gently lowered from his arms, flopping on the floor like a glob of useless jelly. The Mandalorian laid down on top of you, slowly returning to his loving, doting self. He kissed at the welts he had put on your neck, each one a delicious combination of pain and pleasure. Dark, lust-soaked eyes became soft and doelike again, watching your heaving form with adoration under lifted brows. He kissed your lips tenderly, plush and promising, gentle as a rose petal and just as sweet.

“Are you alright? I’m sorry if that was a little rough…”

You shook your head, feeling your brains slosh around in your skull, drowning in dopamine. “What? That wasn’t rough, I’ve seen you rough, but that was… different.” A little pouty face told you that might not have been the best word to pick, so you tried again. “That was amazing, but maybe we should invest in an actual toy instead of using the same tools we use for work.” That got you an excited nod and a dazzling smile. Realization dawned on you, “Is that what Lilah suggested?!” His magnificent smile went sheepish under bright red cheeks, and a slow nod made the curls on his head bounce. “We should hang out with them more often...”

The Mandalorian laughed, kissed you deeply once more, and pulled his helmet back on, allowing the two of you to get back out from under the blanket fort. You readjusted your clothes and armor, making yourself presentable, then strode over to the door to go find your foundling. The bulkhead door lugged open, and you swore you saw something, or someone, dashing down the hallway. Was someone eavesdropping!?

You didn’t see anyone until you got to the rec-room where you had left your child. Grogu and Fae were still curled up in the padded seat, but the seat itself had been scootched closer to where the Torgrutas had fallen asleep in their chair. You stepped over the handful of pirates that had passed out on the floor until you could get to your foundling. He gibbered at you, and you tucked him under your arm, jumping slightly when you caught the glint of green eyes.

Lilah watched you drowsily, a smile tugging at the corners of her lips, and the ice froze in your veins at how well she had read you. She winked and hugged her Alewyn closer, burying her face in the other woman's lekku and letting you escape ungoaded.

The ship was quiet all the way back to your room, and you tucked back into the little suite with your foundling in hand. He had woken up during the walk and chirruped at you sleepily, cooing softly when he saw his papa as well. “Fucksake...You know what I need? A shower! You want a rinse, Grogu?” He chittered at the sound of his goofyass name, and you held him up to your nose, tickling him your sniffs. “Hm… Nope, you’re good. Stay here and keep papa company, won't cha?” Grogu chirped with what you decided was a ‘yes, buir’, and you set him down in the hammock. “What about you, tinman? Shower?”

Din was seated in the little chair, cleaning the stains from his armor, stains you had made. “No thank you, I’d like to keep my armor on while we’re here.” You shrugged, since you were used to his strange rituals by now, and strode into the fresher room to find something you hadn’t seen in a long fucking time.

A mirror.

In the fresher stood a formidable figure, though definitely one that needed a fresh change of clothes. There were no mirrors on the Crest due to some kind of mando mumbo jumbo, though you guessed if you spent all your life in the same outfit you really wouldn’t need to know what it looked like every day. You leaned on the modest sink to inspect the bags under your eyes and pick at something on the side of your nose, the tilt of your armored crown catching the light and drawing your eyes. The beskar slid around its pivots until it covered your face, and you stared at the warrior before you.

Maker above, is that what I look like? No wonder that merchant had fled from you so quickly, the sight of your armored visage was terrifying, just as ferocious as the bonafide Mandalorian you traveled with. You tilted your head and jutted your chin, trying to intimidate your own reflection as if that was difficult. The foggy vanity lights streaked like quicksilver over the beskar and the black gloss of your visor, catching faintly on the embossed mudhorn on your brow. You reached a hand up to brush over the raised emblem, feeling it with your fingers and watching how the light moved over its curves.

You were just reaching the tip of the animal’s horn when your doppelganger was joined by another armored hunter. Standing behind the woman in the mirror was a large, broad shouldered Mandalorian, his own visor rising a whole head above hers. He towered above her, tilting his helmet slightly while he rested his palms on her waist. The yellow tipped gloves coasted down her sides to her hips and pulled her backwards, and you could no longer ignore that the show you were watching was your own reality.

“Hello, mesh’la.” Din pressed his chestplate to your back and wrapped his arms around you, holding you tightly to his armored chest. Though he had gotten his armor cleaned he still smelled like sex, sweat and sweetness; the mix of your bodies pooling together like your arousals had pooled on the floor. He tucked the edge of his helmet against the side of your neck, and you turned enough to chime your beskar softly against his. The ironsong rang clear and true over a rumbling hum.

“Hiya bucket boy.” You set one of your palms on where his were overlapped on your middle, bringing the other one up to hold the indent of his cheek. He leaned his weight on your back, rocking with you slightly.

“How did you come up with that name, Grogu?”

“I’m… I’m not really sure.” That wasn’t a lie, though it felt like it was. “I’m sorry, I know It’s terrible, we can change-”

“No, it’s perfect. Did you see his face when you said it?” You nodded softly, thankful for the beskar that covered your shyness. “He likes it, that’s what matters.” His gloved hands brushed over the fabric of your tunic, wrapping one around your waist and crossing the other between your breasts like a seatbelt. “You make a very good buir. I’m proud to call you my mate.”

Your face stung against the cold of your faceplate, flushing with heat at his term of endearment. “Aww you like me.” You whispered with just a touch of sass, blushing at his adoration. The hand on your middle slid lovingly over your tummy before moving up your chest with more direction. In the mirror you watched your reflection as she was attended to by the man behind her. His gloved hands came up to her mask and lifted it gently away, setting it down on the counter. It was hard to break your own eye contact, but those yellow tips of his gloves were so much more fun to watch.

Din brushed the back of his hand down your cheek, setting his fingertips on the bottom of your chin before dragging them down the expanse of your bruised neck. For a moment you thought he was aiming for your breasts, but instead his palms came to rest on your shoulders. His own armor plated shoulders stuck wide out past yours nearly by the entire width of his arms, dwarfing you with their size. You were just about to ask him what he was up to when you felt his thumbs dig into the meat of your back, making you groan whorishly at the sensation.

“Does that feel good?” You could barely nod, letting the circles his thumbs were making do the work for you. The feeling of him working the knots out of your shoulders hurt so good, and you let your eyes close while he massaged your back. His wide hands captured the muscles in your back with ease, diligently kneading the residual tension away. He pushed the pads of his thumbs closer to your spine, and you heard the crack-crack-crack of your vertebrae popping with each honed squeeze.

You had to lean on the counter for support, though your Mandalorian wouldn’t let you fall no matter what. Din’s hands followed the path of your spine, rolling strong circles into the aching muscles and putting extra pressure on each rib joint to get them to pop. His fingers hugged the bottom of your rib cage once he’d made it that far down, keeping you in place as he slid his circles down to the top of your pelvis. The pressure on your sacrum had you arching your back into his hands, more or less accidentally pressing your ass into his groin. He pushed back, but maybe more to keep you steady then to be suggestive.

Deft hands glided back up your spine, and you flickered your eyes back open to see the pair of you in the mirror. Heat returned to your gut at the sight of the massive mountain of metal standing behind your bent figure, pressing his hips tightly to yours. You bit your lip and smiled at him in the mirror, watching the way his visor cocked at the look you were giving him. “You seem to be very good at picking up new tricks, tinman.”

He shrugged, “I just want to take care of you.” What an understatement that was. You and the foundling were his everything, there wasn’t a single thing in the entire universe that mattered more than the two of you. You were his wife, his riddur, the living culmination of all his dreams and desires strutting around like you owned the place; and he was honored to be asked to stand in your presence. “Can I get you anything?”

“Hm…” Poking your head into the shower you inspected the soap that was provided, giving it a tentative sniff. It smelled like a girl, flowery and pretty and not at all what you were expecting from a literal pirate ship. It wasn’t for you. “Don’t happen to have any of our soap on you, do ya?” He shook his helmeted head, and you batted your lashes at him with a pleading pout. “Pwease would you get me some of our soap? Please… oh please?” You begged him sarcastically, reveling in the way his shoulder puffed up while you exploited his kink. His cape billowed behind him he spun around so fast, dashing out of the fresher and the room without another word. Laughing, you turned on the shower, letting it heat up a bit before you got in.

The curving hallways of the Sunskate were quiet and dark, save for the few gravediggers that ambled through the corridors, sipping at their piping hot caff. Soon the hangar doors parted, and he felt a wave of sadness at the sight of his ship. The old dropper had been through so much, but at least she was still kicking. As he got closer he noticed a few tools scattered around the area and a fresh, silvery patch job that had been added to the side of her hull. Somebody has been busy. He ghosted a hand along a welding scar, it wasn’t enough to get her starborne, but it would keep her from dissolving into a heap of scrap metal when you reached the station.

He would have to find out more later, for now he was on a mission: soap! Climbing up the half-hanging ramp he strode to the ladder, hauling himself up to where all of your utilities were stashed. You had packed like you were on the run, shoveling shit in wherever it would fit, and Din was cursing to himself at the mess he was sifting through. While he was at it he grabbed you some fresh clothes, filling up a little satchel with goodies for his lovely, can’t-pack-worth-a-shit wifey-poo.

The smell of fresher soap caught his nose, and he dug down into a deep crate, looking for his objective. He pulled a rifle out, a bundle of towels, an electric kettle, the smell growing stronger the deeper he got. A severed tusk was tossed aside, then a full thermos.

-sloshCLAck!-

Din stopped his search at the noise, clack? He picked up the impromptu quarry capture device and shook it carefully. -slosh-clack-slosh-clack-

That was very much not the noise it had made when he had filled it, distinctly remembering the sound of a metallic plonk instead. Heebie-jeebies prickled under his many layers, and morbid curiosity drove him to place his hand on the lid. No! What if it’s alive? He set the canister down and fished a knife from his belt, holding it in his pinkie while he unscrewed the lid. Heart in his throat and breath held firm he opened the jar, pointing the end of his blade at the syrupy goop that sloshed around, ready to stab anything to death should it try to jump him.

Nothing moved.

He swirled the container, watching the holographic slime shimmer on top of the large purple pod that had sunk to the bottom, and he heard the metallic noise again. Running out of air, he carefully poked his blade into the pool of nectar, nudging the seedpod out of the way to reveal something sitting underneath. Using the vibro’s tip he scraped the curio up out of the goop, slamming the lid back on the jar the moment he had whatever it was in his hand.

The deep breath he took filled his lungs with the residual essence of the hydra’s perfume, sending fresh blood to his spent cock. Focus, Djarin. Glistening in his palm was the tiniest microchip, about the size of a grape and roughly the same shape. On one side it had a set of tiny legs with little grips on their tips, designed so that it would stay in place wherever it was at. Had this been what the bounty was for? Maybe it wasn’t the pods at all, maybe it was this thing. Though what was it doing all the way down at the bottom of a cave?

He bumped it with the tip of his knife, getting it to stand on its feet and making the rainbow sludge slowly reveal the item in its entirety; and suddenly he had more questions than answers.

Blood turned to ice in his veins, freezing him solid. There, in the light coming off of his helmet, proudly stamped on the top of the device, was an emblem. It was a circle with a gear in the center, sort of shaped like a snowflake with a second gear hollowed out in the middle. It wasn’t popular any more, but Din had seen it many times in his life, most recently when Moff Gideon tried, and failed, to take his son away from him.

But the first time he had seen it had been burned into his memory for decades. Emblazoned on the sides of gunships and walking tanks that rained decimation on to his adopted homeworld, purging all life from Mandalore and turning the wartorn planet’s surface into a sea of glass.

It was the mark of the ones who had tried to hurt the child.

It was the mark of the ones who had decimated his clan.

It was the mark of the people who would destroy entire planets just to assert their dominion over the citizens they subjugated.

It was the mark of the Empire.

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[boeing747]

(Revised) A List of Objects:

I am the kitchen sink that’s been dripping for months, but you haven’t bothered to call your landlord about. I am a spool of white thread and needle that you’d bought at the grocery store, tucked into a drawer and forgotten about. Resting on top of the shirt you’d meant to mend. I am your old car resting curbside next to your Mother’s house; leaky breaks, cracked windshield, blown transmission, key scratch across the drivers-side front door. You keep meaning to fix it, or sell it, or send it to scrap. I am the busted blinds in your bedroom, trailing sunshine across your face in the morning.

A Second, Unrelated List of Objects:

A pile of coins, about fourteen dollars worth if converted to USD at the current exchange rate (16/06/2020). An oyster card, unburdened of its original purpose and expatriated to the metal mesh coffee table. Two separate brands of cigarette papers. A pair of glasses, an empty coffee-stained mug, two mismatched wedding bands, an open pack of NSAID pain-relievers.

The Things that fill the Spaces between us:

The square kilometre area of the Azov sea. Forty five minutes on the subway and fifteen on a bus, other times. Occasionally, well, it’s a question of physics isn’t it? The answer to which, as far as I can tell, is that no two things ever really touch. (Except sometimes they do.) Two years ago you lived next door. We travel through time and space like this. First the Past (which doesn’t exist, as agreed by Philosophers), and then the Present (which surely does). The distance, if I choose so, can also be defined by how long it takes individual neurons to go from impulse to irrational decision. Which I suppose is still traveling in it’s own way, still time and space. The scale is as infinitely small as it is large.

Bathroom Sink Catalogue:

A stick of deodorant. An old mug, inside which: Two plastic toothbrushes, two tubes of toothpaste, grime. A spool of dental floss. Mouthwash for sensitive teeth. Organic liquid soap. Two dried drops of blood.

What I Remember About your Parent’s House:

That time your mother had made us dinner that week-night because I’d stayed over late studying with you and I don’t remember which test we’d been studying for but what I do remember is your mother getting The Call and how even though I barely knew him I felt tears well up in my eyes as we sat there, around the table. I remember sitting there, without any fond memories to remember him by and thought about the tidal wave of re-definition of objects and spaces that runs through the threads of our lives and memories.

What I remember about your Mother’s house:

Grilling in a torrential downpour with your Garage door open. Throwing up in the overgrown rose bushes at the wake that she’d held there for him. Keying Andrews car. Several awkward dinners before your Mother decided to move the TV so it’d be visible from the dining table. The weekend I spent making one thousand little paper cranes for Julia like we’d decided while you laid on the bed and stared up into the ceiling, feeling real damn sorry for yourself.

What You remember about My Parent’s house:

A Short timeline of things that happened to Andrew’s car:

0, as we understand it: Raw Potential? Space Dust? The Holy spirit? 1999: Assembled. 1999: bought by a young mother of three. 2003: sold to Andrew. I asked Andrew one time if he knew what happened to the lady who’d sold him the car for that cheap and he’d shrugged and told me that he’d never really thought about it. Timely oil changes, well kept interior. 2010: The first time I’d sat in it. 2011: Andrew gets rear ended by a teenager. 2012: Fight of the century: My Apartment keys versus Car Paint. 2013: we bought the car but still called it Andrew’s car. I was trying to reclaim what you did as mine, to reinterpret the space and time and context. We keep calling it Andrew’s car. 2019: I throw a rock at the windshield. For the few milliseconds of impact, it’s your car. It’s your car even though I’d paid half. The leaky breaks aren’t my fault, how would I lie about that. 2020: it’s at your Mother’s house. You call it your car, I call it Andrew’s car. I have a hard time breaking habits. It doesn’t go anywhere. The Future:

The Potential Careers we came up with for our Future Child that one night:

Pilot Engineer Painter Astro-physicist Journalist Doctor

The Conclusion I am Choosing to Draw:

Let’s say everything is a fruit. A house can be just akin to an apple. You seek out a home too early and it turns sour, too late and despite a beautiful exterior, it’s rotten to the core. The same goes for rings and people and whatever else you want to think of. Every single thing has a point in time in which it is bitter (usually this point comes either before or after it is sweet. Although some things exhibit all properties at once; those are the special things.)

(Addendum)

A non-comprehensive list of Objects in our Home: Kitchen sink. A needle and a spool white of thread. My button down that I’d accidentally ripped at work. Your car. The busted blinds in our bedroom, the ones you keep telling me figure out how to fix, but I never do. I tell you I enjoy feeling the sunshine trailing across our bodies in the morning.

[amarsmellow]

Coffee

It had been a good day, one of the best between them.

Strolling along in the town of Innsmouth the Gypsy had become more and more accustomed to its people and they in turn, mostly ignored her presence. Today was no exception because she walked with the Pharaoh beside her and if they came across a crowd, they parted like the Red Seas. One brave soul or two actually knelt, their heads bowed in reverence to the Black Pharaoh, mumbling words in a strange, alien language that hurt Vera’s ears and sent her head spinning.

She found it helpful to keep all her mental guards in place, blocking out the rather strange energy the whole place seemed to be saturated in. It felt like white hot electricity riding the air currents, threatening to short circuit her neurons, making her tongue tangle in words the old mammalian brain remembered but dared not speak.

When this happened she always sought him out, her hand blinding seeking his, as if by anchoring herself to the very source of her building distress it would dissipate. The conundrum of it all is this worked! Vera would cling to him, pressed to his side, and funnel back what she unintentionally took within her own essence. The feral glow slowly disappearing from the kaleidoscope of her eyes, a spiraling mixture of brown and gold. Uneven breaths sputtered to a more even rhythm and her burgeoning descent into madness itself evaporating as though it had never happened.

But not today! Today she had her coffee and she had – whatever she had with the Pharaoh. It really helped that she didn’t examine too closely the parameters of their association. The word “relationship” was certainly forbidden to enter her mind – if it did she would then have to seek out some appropriate label and then her brain would truly fry itself out.

No, far simpler to leave it be.

And this fine morning stroll – a rarity really! – was to be savored. He indulged her questions, his smile sly and the tongues in his mouth answering her directly, sometimes. Mostly it was the same old song and dance; evasion, quips, and notable eye-rolls when she asked a particularly banal query. Vera wondered if they would ride this merry-go-round to her grave but kept the thought to herself.

Of course nothing goes perfectly in her world and tragedy had to strike.

One of the Pharaoh’s sycophants jostled into the Gypsy, eager to get closer to their literal God.

The result was a slow motion series of gross unfortunate events.

The son-of-bitch-bastard knocked Vera’s coffee cup out of her hand. Gasping she watched in shocked dismay as it tumbled down, as though in slow motion, to the ground. Her eyes flared wide in such disbelief and her hands fumbled to save the precious.

Precious could not be saved.

And those on-lookers, the ones who had yet to scuttle away to safety, watched equally as horrified.

The Pharaoh, too, was highly displeased. He knew – oh did he know – how this was going to play out.

“Don’t start.”

“MY COFFEE!”

He took a deep breath.

“We will get you-“

“OhmyGod! The coffee!”  

He pinched the bridge of his nose.

Those who knew her would not find the sight of her on her knees, in the dirt and filth, with her arms held beseechingly to the sky, strange.

“I always knew you worshiped the ground I walked on.” Maybe he could provoke her out of her tantrum.

Vera wailed and hissed in return, her head mournfully lowered.

The Pharaoh was equal parts amused and frustrated. “You are making a Fool of yourself over a nothing.” He slurred, growing bored and disenchanted.

Vera, who had descended into full blown brat-mode, “YOU’RE A NOTHING!”

The Pharaoh winked out of existence and left the Gypsy to pout, very much alone.

And she hated it.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Vera opened the door to her sea-side cottage, still in a stint over her spilled coffee. It wasn’t that she was such a mercurial creature that she had such little control of herself. The Pharaoh certainly gave her much leave-way and when any other mortal would have been snuffed out for her comment, he punished her in the best (worst) of ways.

He left her alone.

He could have crawled into every corner of her mind and left her a gibbering, jabbering wreck on the street, nails ripping furrows in her cheeks, a hollow shell of a human being.

He could have descended on her like a nightmare but instead, treated her exactly as how she acted – a spoiled child in need of a time out.

And so true to form she went stomping through her cottage, her words an unintelligible mumble of several languages, strung together haphazardly.

She was stopped cold though by the sight that met her eyes when she ventured into the kitchen.

There was the precious! ALL OVER! Coffee cups of varying sizes filled every available counter space.

Vera – who should have seen a carefully laid trap – was ecstatic!

“You do love me!” she shouted, running like a child at Christmas into her kitchen, eager for her presents.

And of course she drank. Every. Single. Blessed. Cup.  

 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

He knows his Gypsy – he knows her very well.

The Pharaoh appeared gradually in her midst, coalescing in front of her, his smile stretched wide – wider than should have been right but so much about him was wrong. He was here for the show.

But the sight that greeted him, did indeed, give Chaos some … pause.

Plastered on the walls were crude drawings (did her spawn make these?) of writhing tentacles (he thinks they are supposed to be tentacles), something resembling the head of a goat, and another with curved back hind legs like a – (kangaroo)?

“YOU CAME!”  

Vera ran excited circles around him and before he could form a response, began to climb up him as though he were a tree.

Hands gripped the back of his linen tunic, fingers tangled in the black, silken waterfall of his hair, which she used like a rope to propel herself up, up, up until she was able to encircle her arms around his neck. Long legs clamped around his chest, hooking at the ankles where a normal, human breastplate should be.

Giggling like a demented three year old high on sugar the Gypsy latched herself to him like a leech. Anyone else and ragdoll physics would have been employed but the Pharaoh became still, still as death, and waited.

Rapid fire she shot her words out to him, her accent slurring vowels and dropping consonants, leaving emphasis in all the wrong places. The gist of it:

“I just want to express how thankful I am for all the coffee and OhmyGod, I did more work and research than I ever have before! Now, I know I was not supposed to look into all those old, old, old books you have but I only snagged the one and took the teeniest, tiniest of peeks! It took forever! Lifetimes! For me to decipher some of it and when I did – ooooooh wow!”

The rest was lost in a mixture of Romanian, Romani, and ….

… It was then the Pharaoh realized he had made a terrible mistake.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The truth of this occurrence was far darker than one could imagine.

While one might assume the Pharaoh hadn’t intended for this to happen, at all, it was more along the lines he hadn’t intended for this to happen now.

This was always going to happen, this was nature at its base core taking place, and unfolding beautifully before his eyes.

Vera laughed until her throat felt raw or was that from the occasional shrieking? Or the sobbing? Nothing made sense anymore and she was left dancing on a knife’s precipice, leaving her bloody and butchered. She had been warned oh – she had been warned countless of times but she didn’t listen.

Did she ever listen, truly?  

He counted on her short comings like the most studious of bankers.

It was a miasmas that filtered through her conscious thought, bringing with it visions of faceless monstrosities and a huge hulking figure buffered by a tumultuous sea. It was a glimpse of a possible future - of fallen cities and humanity exuberant in its own destruction. Visions of maggots crawling in the dirt, devouring visceral fat, and centipedes burrowing into her ears. The hysterical cries of mothers, chased by the heartbreaking silence from infants.

Vera fought and fought against it, and when she feared becoming consumed and lost – the Crawling Chaos appeared before her and in her delirium, saw him as her Savior. This is what compelled her to rush at him, to cling to him like the proverbial rock in her storm.  

There was an aurora borealis of light surrounding the Pharaoh as though this cosmic light (energy) resonated from his very essence. And as bright it appeared to Vera it was also abyssal – depthless.

She had no control, no more barriers to keep her safe, and with every mental guard down she took him in whole. Siphoning energy from him and spooling it dangerously to become her own bindings – she bounded herself to him, unwittingly!  

For several terrifying moments, where clarity dared to intrude, she realized she could no longer tell where he began or she ended.

The Pharaoh is an ouroboros – there is no beginning, there is no end.

Gasping out, choking on her own air, she clenched her hands into the endless black spill of his hair, and fought the convulsions that wrecked her body. There was no more peering through a glass darkly – for in this moment she could clearly see the Truth of what he is, and this was the price she paid.  

She is a Daughter of Eve and hungered to eat more of the Tree, to bite into the crisp flesh of fruit to better satisfy her yearning.

Her eyes had been bigger than her stomach.

She should’ve of listened to all the warnings.

Whimpering now, her hold on him becoming as unstable as her mind, Vera started to slip and would have fallen had it been for the Pharaoh grasping at her legs ‘round his chest. Left to sway Vera experienced a moment of non-gravity before he let go and the floor rushed up to meet her.

Blacking out is a mercy he doesn’t allow her to have.

[topmixtrends]

I WENT TO LUNCH with Ben Loory a couple years back, and afterward, we walked to a gelateria. While I wolfed down gelato, he sat across from me, not eating, and asked how he should end a story about an ostrich and a UFO. He gave me the premise and the outline of the story so far, and I puzzled along with him, but mostly nodded with my mouth full while I watched him chase down his own neuron fire like some kind of fabulist Good Will Hunting. About 15 minutes later, we were talking about something else entirely when he announced that he had it: “The aliens put their head in the sand.”

It all made sense when I read “The Ostrich and the Aliens” in his spectacular new collection, Tales of Falling and Flying. As with all of his stories, I felt that satisfying click, the visceral understanding that the pieces locked together, even if I wasn’t quite sure how.

I asked Ben over email about his stories, his process, and other Ben Loory things. Here’s a look at the inside of his weirdo genius brain.

¤

STEPH CHA: You have this distinctive metered style that makes your stories instantly recognizable as Ben Loory stories. How did you develop this style? Are there unpublished proto-stories where it’s halfway there? How defined are the rules? Do you have like a personal style guide?

BEN LOORY: It’s weird, you know, no one has ever asked me about that. I think most people don’t even notice. (Which is good, because if people started calling me a poet, I’d probably never sell another book.) Anyway, yeah, that just emerged gradually. Going way back: When I first started writing stories, I was really just thinking of them as story ideas — as outlines or treatments; I was brainstorming, hoping to find a good one to write a screenplay out of. It was only after I’d written maybe 15 or 20 of them that I started to think, “Hey, these are actually really cool as they are, as these very short, simply told, action-packed little stories.” They didn’t have a lot of extraneous description, didn’t rely on metaphors or similes (or anything people usually remark upon as “good writing,” really), didn’t have much internality or background characterization — it was all just pure story, pure happening, beginning to end. And I started to ask myself, “Why don’t people write stories this way?” I mean, this is the way people tell each other stories, if we’re all just sitting around talking, at a bar or a party or a dinner or something. So I figured that was the assignment I was giving myself, and I set out to write a book of these stories.

But then — okay, getting to the point now — after I’d been writing those stories for about a year, I remember there was one night — and I wish I could remember which story it was — but there was this one night where I was writing a story, and it ended, accidentally, in a kind of rhythmic half- or slant-rhyming couplet. And at first I was like, “Oh jeez, gotta change that”; but then the more I looked at it, the more I liked it; I liked the way it brought the story together at the end with this kind of bang, the way the rhythm of the prose told you the end was coming, and then the semi-rhyme made it feel complete. So then I started ending all the stories that way — sometimes with a full rhyme, but usually with a near-rhyme or half or slant rhyme, and always trying to get the meter of those last sentences moving that way to build up to it. I don’t even know how to describe it, really — I think it might be ballad form? But I’m not an expert. And then, over time, that rhythm that began in the closing paragraphs began to spread backward through the stories, it just started to infect my prose in general, until finally I just found myself writing in that meter, even when I wasn’t planning to. I remember the night I noticed that — I remember sitting there, thinking: “Be careful! This is what happened to Dr. Seuss!” But then I was like, whatever, Dr. Seuss did okay, so I just embraced it and have pretty much written in that meter ever since.

So yes, to answer your question, there were early versions, at least of my early stories, that were written before that meter emerged, and yes, I had to go back and shift those stories around in order to fit the “guidebook” — but that guidebook isn’t written down; I don’t even really understand it. I just kinda know when it feels right and when it doesn’t. I like the way the meter adds this beat, this pulse to the story, that propels readers along — I think it’s kind of hypnotizing.

I know you read widely, in pretty much every genre. I wonder if you ever think, like, “One day, I’m gonna write a dystopian trilogy, or a 600-page realist novel set in New Jersey.” When you sit down to write, is it always short stories that come out?

Well, yeah — so far! I’ve always said, “Hey, if one day I sit down and a novel starts coming out, so be it, I just do what I find myself doing.” (That’s my rule.) That being said, I did actually have a novel idea not too long ago — it came to me in the night one night sometime about a year ago. I wasn’t writing, I was just lying there, staring at the ceiling, and it came to me, just sorta crept on in, and very quickly I saw the whole thing spooled out — it’s this Jonathan Franzen–type multiple-perspective decades-spanning realistic novel centered around a thrash metal band, starting in the mid-’80s. It even has a title (which is a really good title!) and I know how the whole thing goes, even the last line. (I’m leaving out all the cool stuff about it — don’t worry, it’s better than it sounds here.) So then I spent some time thinking, “Well, do I write that?” I figure it would probably take me about two years. And I did actually toy with the idea for a while, and even wrote the opening chapter, but in the end (at least, so far) I decided it wasn’t worth it. That two years would be two years I wouldn’t be writing stories, and I could probably write between 50 and 100 stories in that time! And those stories would be good — or at least, I hope they would be — and they would be my stories, which I kinda feel like only I write. So do I really want to preemptively flush those stories down the drain in favor of writing a novel that pretty much any writer could write? I mean really, it might be good, but it would just be another realistic novel about some people in a band … only really differentiated by the specific flavor of my prose. Which just doesn’t seem like enough to keep me going. I don’t know; I might do it someday. Mostly because I really love the title.

I feel like when a reader picks up a book by an author she likes, the expectation is that it’ll be the same, but also different. How do you think your writing has changed since you published Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day?

I don’t know. I don’t think it’s changed much; my hope is it’s just gotten better, more focused. This book does come out of a better time in my life, though; Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, I started writing when I was really at rock bottom; it was a scary and kind of terrifying time in my life, so the stories were pretty dark, pretty horror-based. The last few years have much better, so while there’s still a lot of (at least) existential horror in this book, I think a lot of it is more fable-y, fairy tale-y, maybe a little more fun? But I could be wrong. It’s hard to step outside and judge.

I noticed you wrote some stories in the first person this time. That’s new, isn’t it?

Yeah, first person was a bit of an experiment. I actually started doing that a long time ago — it was right after I’d finished (or at least, thought I’d finished) my first book … I’d been writing all these third-person stories where no one had names and they all took place in this kind of nebulous, cartoony otherworld. And when I finished that book, I got up the next morning and I was like, “Okay, what do I do now?” So I figured, well, I guess I’ll write some more stories. But when I sat down to do it, I suddenly felt like I was faking it, like I was just copying what I had done before. So I decided to switch it up and just do the opposite of everything. So I wrote a lot of stories (and I do mean a lot, probably around 200 [just first drafts, but still]) and they were all in first person and they were all about “real”-seeming people, characters with names who lived in the same “real”-seeming town. For a while, I was planning to put out a whole book of these stories, it was like Winesburg, Ohio, but in the Twilight Zone, was how I saw it. Anyway, that ended up not panning out, for a couple reasons (first off being that all the stories ended the same way, with the main characters either dying or leaving town, which got kind of ridiculous after a while). But I still kept writing the stories — I really liked a lot of them — and after a while I started going back and forth between those and the ones in third person. Now I just sort of indiscriminately move between them, whenever I start to get bored. It’s just become another arrow in the quiver.

I will say that first person was really hard for me at first. Coming from screenwriting, I tend to see stories from outside — as pictures, as people out there in front of me, walking around, doing things. First person is weird because now you’re in some character, and what are you doing there? You have this body, this mind, this whole past and language to deal with, and how do you stay in that and deal with the expansiveness of it all and not let the outside world just get completely washed away? In the end I think my first-person stories remain a little mysterious. The person at the center of them is always a little blocked out; it gives them an interesting feel, but they get a little claustrophobic if you read too many of them in a row. I was actually thinking of them recently when I was reading those new Rachel Cusk books. She does the same kind of thing, where there’s this big hole in the very center of the narrator, where you’re used to this grandly etched monument. It’s unsettling.

How do you start a story? Like the first story in this collection is about a dodo who hasn’t gone extinct with the others, and who wants to prove to himself and others that he is in fact a dodo. Where did that come from? I have about one good story idea every one to three years, which is why I write novels. Are you getting hit by new story ideas like every week?

I don’t actually have ideas, is the thing. People always laugh when I say that, but it’s true — I don’t even want ideas. In the past, I always sat around waiting for ideas, waiting for a “great story” to fall into my lap, fully formed, thinking then I’d go off and write it. And every now and then I would have what I thought of as an idea, but then I’d cling to it so tightly, so desperately, so carefully, that I would never actually do anything with it out of fear I might lose it or mess it up or something and never get another. So finally I decided to just let all that go, and now I don’t deal in ideas. Now I just deal in images and characters, I start simple and then just follow the characters and let the stories unfold.

So, for instance, in that story about the dodo, I started with just the “idea” of a dodo. It’s nothing fancy, a million people have done it. So whatever, a dodo comes to mind, so now I’m writing a story about a dodo. So I sat down and wrote that first part of the first line: “Once there was a dodo.” Then I looked at it and wondered what would happen next, and the first thing that came to mind was that he probably died, because they all died, and that made me laugh, so I wrote it down: “… and he died with the rest.” So then there I was, it seemed like the story was over? But how could it be over, it just began! So then I added: “But then he suddenly got back up again!” And then after that, the whole thing just flowed out, he’s running around proclaiming that he’s a dodo and no one believes him because the dodos are all dead and he’s trying to prove it but there’s no way to prove it — it all just follows inevitably. But that wasn’t the idea, it didn’t start with that — it just started with an image, a simple statement: once there was a dodo. That’s it.

I think a lot of people think about imagination as this kind of telephone that you pick up and then someone tells you what to do. But for me, it’s more like an openness, a determination, to just follow what you have right there on the page and respond naturally and honestly to what’s happening. It’s a matter of just trusting your instincts, all the time, and resolving to never turn away from them.

I know you work on some of these stories for years. When do you know that a story is done?

For me, there are two parts to a story being done. The first is the hard part, that’s getting the actual story right, which for me is mostly figuring out how it ends. Most of my stories tend to hinge on paradoxes or logical contradictions or impossible things like that, and so somehow managing to resolve those unmatchable threads in the end always throws me into a terrible brain pretzel. Usually what happens is eventually something gives and the emotional conflicts in the story come together and then the last line appears and at that point I usually burst into tears. Either tears, or I feel like a great big giant hole has opened up inside me and I’m falling down into it (those are the scarier stories, I guess). And it’s that moment, that point where the story suddenly surprises me with an unexpected emotional charge, that I’m looking for, and once I’ve found that, I know I’m at the end. It’s always an emotional thing — there it is.

After that, I leave the hard part and move on to the impossible part, which is getting all the words right, getting the whole thing flowing properly. That usually consists of me sitting in my house, reading the story out loud to myself over and over and over, making sure I don’t trip or cringe at any point, and then doing that again and again and again. And that work could go on forever and ever, because what seems perfect today is never perfect tomorrow. As a writer you grow and change and you’re always in different moods and different psychological/intellectual places and you’re always seeing the story from different vantage points in your life, so, whatever … long story short, you can never actually get a story perfect, I hate to say. So eventually, after straining for perfection for however long, eventually you just kinda get tired of moving the same couple of commas back and forth, or sticking a word in and taking it out, and at that point you just kinda say, okay fine, whatever. And then that’s the end of that.

This is a book of 40 stories in three parts — 13 each plus a bonus. I’m guessing this was deliberate, since your first book was organized the same way. How did you land on that structure? And how did you group/order the stories?

That structure just emerged during the editing of the first book. I’d started out with a manuscript of 101 stories, but Penguin asked if I could cut it down to 30 or 40 (they seemed to think a 500-page book of fables by a first time author was a bad idea). Of course I went with 40 because I didn’t know if I’d ever get a chance to put out a book again. My editor thought it might be helpful to divide it up into different sections, as a way of giving people guideposts, sort of rest stops along the way, so I just immediately split it into three, because I’m obsessed with three-act structure. That made 39 — three sections of 13 stories each (which I also found numerologically pleasing) — and that meant one story would be left over, to kind of hang out by itself at the end. That made good sense to me because that last story was the one from The New Yorker, which was longer than the rest of them and had been written in a slightly different style.

As for order, for the first book, I basically just put the stories in chronological order by when I started writing them. This was after months and months of trying (and failing) to make up a natural-seeming order for them. Chronological order worked out well, because there’s already a natural evolution to the stories; they start out kinda scary and about mostly unnamed people, and then slowly start to change, they get weirder and wilder and then animals start talking, and then all hell breaks loose. And at the end, in the last few stories, it contracts; the stories settle down into this strange, spooky, surrealist thing, and then it goes out on the explosion of “The TV.”

For the second book, I didn’t how to structure it, so I just went with 40 like before, and kept the three sections and that +1 at the end — I really like having that “+1” spot because it gives me a place to stick a story that’s a little different from the rest. In the case of Tales of Falling and Flying, it’s the story “Elmore Leonard,” which is longer and maybe a little more “real world” than the rest. I’ll probably do the third book the same way.

Did you write toward 40 or did you leave tons of stories on the cutting room floor? How did you decide what to put in and what to leave out?

Well, I did aim for 40, but it was more of a corralling and whittling down — I don’t leave anything on the cutting-room floor, exactly, it’s more like some stories just go back into the oven. I have hundreds of stories I’m working on at any given moment, and I’m always writing more and juggling them around and moving back and forth between them. So the ones that came together and really felt exciting to me come deadline-time, those were the ones that went into the book. The others will come together someday, for some book. I never give up on a story.

Do you have a favorite story in the collection?

No. They are all my favorites. But! There are some that I feel particularly attached to, usually because I worked on them for so long — they sorta feel like family members I lived with for years, trying to help them get on their feet. “Death and the Lady,” for instance, I think I worked on for 10 years (not a solid 10 years, but coming back to it again and again). “The Rock Eater” and “The Sword” and “Elmore Leonard” are in that group. And “The Woman, the Letter, the Mirror, and the Door.”

There are also those stories that still feel mysterious to me — the ones that I know feel done to me, but are still just slightly beyond my comprehension. Those I always love because I don’t really feel responsible for them; they feel like these gifts that sorta floated into my life and began to eat from my hand. So in this book, those are “The Fall,” “The Madman,” “Gorillas,” and to some extent “Picasso” and “The Ambulance Driver.”

And then, beyond that, there are the ones that just make me laugh, the ones that when I read them, I just feel like a little kid sorta discovering stories all over again, which is weird because they’re my stories, but hey, I’ll take what I can get. “The Porpoise” in this book is like that — I’m smiling now, just thinking about it — and also “The Cape” and “The Frog and the Bird.”

And fine, okay, “War and Peace” is my favorite.

You’ve done a lot of teaching since your first book. Has that taught you anything about writing? Any great advice you give to students that you don’t actually follow?

The main thing I’ve learned as a teacher is that what works for you as a writer is not necessarily what works for anyone else. You can’t just say, “Here’s the key, do this,” because the key to everyone’s personal creativity is different. So instead you have to come up with lots of different keys — even ones that you yourself don’t find even slightly useful — and just keep throwing them out there in the hopes that someone will catch one and it will work. Being a teacher requires a much more open mind; being a writer is just a matter of being true to yourself. They are related of course, because you’re dealing with the same field. But the skills involved are completely different.

As a writer, the main way being a teacher has changed me is that it’s made me a much better editor. I’ve gotten much quicker at zeroing in on story problems, whether in other people’s work or my own. Somewhere along the way, I developed a list of common questions — How does this character pay their bills? What does this character do when they’re not at work? Does this character have any friends? Do they like them? What are they afraid of? et cetera — that I find are usually pretty helpful for beginning writers. And hey, you know, they work for me too! You just get to know the territory a lot better.

Do you write for any particular kind of reader? What do you hope people get out of your writing? Like what’s the best kind of email you can get from a fan?

I don’t really think about readers when I’m writing (when the book is out, they suddenly become very real). I just figure that we’re all basically the same, so if it works for me, it’ll probably work for everyone. Sometimes I wonder if people will know some strange word, but in the end I just go with whatever feels right — that’s the only thing I can be sure of. I never know what people mean when they talk about writing for a particular audience; it just seems really condescending and bizarre — not to mention completely impossible. I have a hard enough time figuring out how the story goes, what the characters want, how the events are going to unfold — now somehow I’m supposed to change all that around to please some nebulous, generalized group of nonexistent people, based on how I think they’re going to react? Just seems like a cynical and doomed undertaking. If the readers like the story, then they become the audience — that’s about the best I can figure it.

As for what I hope people get out of my writing: basically, I’m just hoping for an experience! An emotional, experiential, hallucinatory one, and one they can’t turn away from. Ideally, I think a story should provide an experience that a reader’s never had — or even dreamed of! Both as a reader and a writer, I’m always hoping for a roller-coaster of the mind and the heart and the soul.

I’m always happiest when people just tell me they like the stories, or when they tell me they were moved by them, that they made them happy or sad, or made them laugh or cry. I’m always a little distrustful when people compliment the details; when they pick out a particular line or some specific image or moment. I feel like when you love something, when it really affects you, there isn’t a whole lot to be said. (Wow, thank you, that was great — that’s what I’d tell Tobias Wolff if I could.) Not that I won’t take any and all compliments! But it’s the emotional response I’m after.

What’s next for you?

Well, I’ll probably write some more stories. And one day maybe I’ll vanish into the night.

¤

Steph Cha is the author of Follow Her Home, Beware Beware, and Dead Soon Enough, all published by St. Martin’s Minotaur. She’s the noir editor for LARB and a regular contributor to the LA Times. She lives in her native city of Los Angeles with her husband and basset hounds.

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