#you took him out of the birthing pod too early

[beanutbutterbisquick]

y’all this mans was fresh out the womb and you’re thirsting over him huh that cringe fail personality really got you didn’t it?

For legal reasons I kid around

[aonungyoufuck]

Runaway {Part 11}

Runaway masterlist

DNI/BYF

Synopsis: you have finally mated before eywa.

Warnings: Mention of Mating +18? but like no smut at all just making out and feeling each other +  Pregnancy 

“I cannot wait anymore my love” 

Ao’nung was kissing you. Kissing was not uncommon sure. But feeling him so close was. It was nice to feel him so close. His hands roaming you feeling you from the bottom to the top. And it was ever so addicting. 

The burning that came from his hands. The erratic feeling it was desperate. 

It was all you could ask for. 

“Ao’nung. Please wait.” You spoke between your teeth, feeling his lips linger far too long. 

“We waited enough haven’t we?” 

“Understand that once we do this ill be with you forever” 

“That is what I want” he whispered, nipping at your neck. 

“I am serious Ao’nung. I want to know that this is really what you want from me. I been wanting you for so long and this is what i crave i want to be with you as one. But if we ever go home-”

“No” Ao’nung kissed you. Biting your lips to hush your sentence “i Dont ever want go home for i have you here with me. I have everything i ever wanted with you. And ive been far to happy and liberated by your ever waking moment. And i want to be with you now. Feel what you feel” 

You took in a sharp breath feeling him rest his head on your chest. Looking at you with an intent you hadn’t seen since the day he spoke those sweet nothings. 

“I want to be wild with you. Be your every waking thought as you are mine. Feel your sorrows, your pain and your love. I want to have a family with you. Grow old with you.”

Kissing your chest he grabbed his Queue. Its nerves dancing with an excited joy that you knew too well too. 

“ I want to have you here and in our many lifetimes to come. Eywa may bless me to be born alongside you again. I want to have our kids find those they love and experience it as we have now. I want to have you all. If you so much as graced me to be known as yours”

Your breathe was taken. The glow of the tree illuminating you too. You kissed his forehead. Then his left cheek and the right. Before settling on his lips, consuming his breath. 

You grabbed your own queue. Looking at him before finally bringing them together. The sensation was warm. Too warn. The feeling of his arms now burning hot. He was gulping down his breath as he felt what he was doing to you. 

You were crazy adults in love. So desperate to finally have a name to it. Mate’s forever and always. 

“Sa’nok!” Neytiri went ahead to see her mother. As if she was just an illusion. From the looks of it. She had a tiresome flight. 

He didn't wait grabbing your waist and placing you on his lap. It would be a few hours before morning and you two would have to go back to your makeshift home. So for now he’ll enjoy what he can. 

“Mo’at!” Jake exclaimed looking at her. After the formalities. And letting Mo’at drink something after flying for so long. She began to talk

“ I see Your eldest isnt here” 

“So she isnt with you?” 

“No. We have moved once you two left. Be rest assured that our People are safe and well. Ninat has actually Given birth this past cycle” 

The Family was puzzled. Sure they hadn’t been able to find their old clan but they had tricked themselves into thinking that by any possibility that you two were with them. Safe and sound

“I came here to see Y/n and Kiri”

“Wait for what?” 

Mo’at grew quiet. There was clearly some distress in her face. 

“In the morning early. I had taken the New Tsahik for a communication with Eywa. However it seems that something was amiss. I do not know what it was. But it seems like one of my Granddaughters, Has come to that place for a mate. I came here to see if that was true” 

Jake's ears lowered. As is the mood of the pod as well. Mate? 

“Kiri?”

Kiri could only roll her eyes. “No its not I” It was no secret how close she got to a certain Mekayina boy. Though she often brushed it off as nothing more than friendly banter. 

“Ma Jake” Netriti spoke. Sharing knowing looks. There was only one person and they weren’t here. 

“Mo’at… Y/n.. She’s been gone for 3 years now marking yesterday”

Mo’at rose a brow. Crossing her arms as she looked at everyone in the pod. “For What reason”

Ronal had never felt fear. She was fearless, Like to show how powerful she was. How much she did not fear people at all. But right now she was so terrified of the older woman in front of her. “ I forbade her from establishing a relationship with my son”

Mo’at wasn’t angry. Not that she would show it. And that's what made her terribly frightening to  Neytiri who lowered her head in shame. 

“And where is your son?” 

Ronal’s ears flattened. Her arms were shaking. Trembling with a fear any mother would know. “I do not know” She wept. She didn’t know. How she wished she knew where on pandora her son was. Far too long she’s wondered. Far to long has she constantly woken from nightmares where he was just out of reach. “I do not know” 

Mo’at took her hand and rested it on her shoulder. Grounding her back to reality. 

“Tell me Jakesully. Do you know if Her son went with her?”

“I don-”

“He did! I know Grandmother” 

Everyone turned to look at Neteyam. No longer the little warrior boy that was always sitting by quietly. He needed to confirm it 

“He is fated for death. For Eywa told me so” 

“What?”

Mo’at rose her hand. Her face unchanging from her stern look. “All of them. The spirits and the past. All grew quiet with dread. And its only intuition to interpret her words. But it seems her mate. Your Son. Is fading from the strong man he is”

“You don't know what you speak of! My son is strong” 

“Your son isn't here” 

“Mo’at are you sure?” 

Mo’at could only sigh. She had experienced the hurt and the pain that was to lose your beloved. She had mourned so briefly. But the pain is one that she would never wish on anyone. Let alone her own grandchild.  

“I am not certain, however i am certain something is wrong.”

“How long will you be staying here?” Jake asked

Mo’at looked at him. Then pondered for a bit “A week. It is all i can stay before going back” 

“Okay okay. Neteyam. Lo’ak. You two and i will  search where we can. If they came to that tree surely they wouldn’t be far from there.  You two come back as soon as you can i’ll stay and look some more”

Ronal rose from her seat. “I’ll go and look in the clan on the eastern sea. Maybe their Tsahik or Olo’eyktan has seen them”

“I’ll come along too” Tonowari commented, turning back to his daughter. “Daughter. You stay here While we are out” 

“I’ll stay with her.” Neytiri commented standing behind her mother. 

Jake nodded. “Alright. Good plan” 

That was the Plan. Mo’at could only hope that you would not experience the pain of loss. 

—---------------------------

The week went by in a flash. No sign of you anywhere. And your family was growing desperate. 

Life was going on and that's the way Ronal had to have it. Days passed. Weeks maybe? Ronal had lost track after the first year. Ateyo and Tsireya were her grounding points. And even they seemed to move on with the passing of time. 

“How long has it been”

“A month since Mo’at left. A month and three years since they did”

“Tonowari i dont think i can do this” Ronal spoke. It was dark. It was night. And for once she had time to speak her hearts sorrows.

“Be strong Ma Ronal” 

“I know. But i feel my heart breaking. Hear it every time i wake it falling and shattering. I want my son. I want him back at whatever costs” Ronal croaked. 

Something so deep in the core of her being was screaming. 

There was no comfort for this kind of thing. For its sad. And this thing does not happen. 

“Ma ronal i-”

“Tonowari i dont think i can wait anymore. My heart cries any time i ask for any glance of my son. Aches”

“I know ma Ronal. But be patient. I will be here with you” Tonowari spoke kissing her forehead as he hugged her tight. Too much time was passing

It had been Pure bliss really. The loving touches. The words and the feeling. That morning when you had awoken from Mating before Eywa would always be engraved in your feelings. 

And he could only ask for his son’s life. 

Tsaheylu was always a warm feeling. A feeling of becoming one unit and it was really nice. But Tsaheylu in the form of a mate? It was different. A good different. 

You had always imagined it would be different and under different circumstances. You would have a man of your clan and they in turn. And everyone would be happy for you. 

But this wasn't what you pictured. Ao’nungs hands. How he felt you. How his body worked alongside you. And connecting as one more than tsaheylu. It was something else for sure. 

You had felt it once more on one “date night” as Ao’nung had put it. But there was no room for that now. 

Ao’nung had been growing weak. And You had been growing tired. It was only a week and some days into your new bond that you had your suspicions and gathered the few leaves you had established that you were blessed with life inside of you. 

You were going to tell Ao’nung. But he had been laying in his pond far too long. And yet he had made it so known how happy he was for you two. 

“Ma Ao’ you seem paler today than the last days” 

“Its alright” He rasped out. His eyes were heavy with a tiredness you never knew. Exhausted, sunken into himself. You could count his lower ribs. His pale appearance now always wrapped in ointments to keep him comfortable

“I ask you to please lets head home.You are growing so ill now please”

“No. And risk my Mother taking you away from me?” 

You frowned. Placing your hand on his sunken cheek bone. “Please You are ill”

“You are the thing that keeps me going Ma Yawnetu” Ao’nung smiled,  Eyes closing. 

You had watched him fade and it scared you how you were alone. You laid your head on his shoulder. Feeling his breath slow. You sighed, feeling tears in your eyes. “Ao’nung i have something to tell you”

It was quiet. Far too quiet and far too long. 

“Ao’nung?” 

His eyes were shut and his breathing uneven. 

“Ao’nung!”

But it fell on deaf ears. You cursed under your breath. Wiping your eyes as you called to your Ikran. Grabbing his shoulders you Pulled him from the water. You didn’t want to do stuff without Ao’nung to know. But you had bit back your tongue far too long. 

Tossing Ao’nung over your shoulder and onto Mezu “Come on Ao’nung hold on a little longer” You whispered making Tsaheylu as you took flight. 

Praying and hoping that you could hold on just a little longer too

============================================

Taglist: @simp-erformarvelwomen / @luvlykrispy / @yeosxxx / @fanboyluvr / @littlethingsinlife / @eirianna / @elegantkidfansoul / @tsukibaby1 / @adaiasafira / @1-800-not-simping / @reggiesslut / @cmfouatslota77 / @slutforsmut4ever / @zatarias-pandora / @valovesyou / @tachiara / @ghost-lantern / @victorianhorrors / @irlydontknoanymore / @hellok1ttycake / @sweetheartlizzie07 / @audigay / @kiyolover / @bogwaterswamp / @guska0 / @thatoneembarrasingmoment / @anxietydrogz

[brightdarkness-2013]

Chapter 21: Kick It Harder And Maybe It'll Get Somewhere!

Summary:Jazz thinks up ways to cheer Prowl up.

“You’re really strong, Prowls. I know it doesn’t really seem like it, but you’ve endured a lot since the destruction of your nest.”

It was a warm Thursday afternoon. The early morning chill had long since passed and my main jobs seemed to be with the mers so far as it was better for me to be in the area to support Prowl. It had been brought up by Ratchet and supported by Aid. Since Blaster had his own goals I was the only other option. So I had little lessons on mers to look forward to every once in awhile when they had time and how they behaved and reacted to various marine life in depth. Ranging from pod members themselves to how they acted and reacted to different mer pods of various species to the plants they were familiar with.

“You’ve really had a rough go of things since birth really. Splitting off on your own to find another pod to merge with. Must’ve been difficult to find a pod to merge with that had two spots open. And you’ve lost a lot since then. But things will get better. Just hang on a little longer.”

I looked up to look at the mers that were watching as per usual. Quiet and dare I say curious? Their behaviour was something else. A complete 180 since Barricade had fallen ill and was taken away to the medbay. I took a second to place a name to them. Magis Accuratius. They were a type that were built for strength rather than speed or stealth as several others, but they were a peculiar type. It was actually kind of amazing how they worked. They built their nests with anything they could. They were known to make little fortresses for protection out of sunken ships and anything else that they could get their hands on. They caused trouble sometimes by taking apart structures underwater that were still in use, but most of the time they stayed away from the shore and people. Unfortunately they came into contact with people who went to scavenge the sunken materials and they were aggressive and protective of their nests like any mers. They had plenty of materials in their tank to build what they’d like, but so far it was untouched. What they had started had been abandoned with the death of their pod mate.

Prowl didn’t pay them any attention. He never spared a glance their way anymore. I knew he was aware that they were watching him, but I suppose it didn’t really matter when he was hurting like this. He was suffering so what did they matter? I shifted to slide him off of my lap and lay next to him. He reburied himself into me. Effectively hiding in my chest. I pet his ear fins.

“I promise ya that things will be ok. We just need to take this one day at a time. Keep looking too far ahead and it’ll seem impossible. Ya can’t see the end from here and it makes it seem hopeless. Trust me, Prowl, I know. I’ve had my own struggles. Different, but it’s the same concept. Ya can survive this and one day ya can look back and you’ll realize how far you’ve come.”

He was quiet, but his ear fins twitched. He was listening at least. He had been silent ever since that day and I wanted him to say something even if no one could understand. He had no one to talk to now, but that didn’t stop me from hoping. He had made sounds back at the cove and had greeted Blaster back when he had first gotten here with Barricade. Maybe he’d be able to talk with the others. They weren’t threatening him anymore so maybe they’d start talking one of these days. I know Prowl could use someone to talk to. Hell I wouldn’t mind him talking to me. Even if I couldn’t understand I’d still listen and he’d get it out. Damn language barriers.

“Ya know if ya want to talk I’ll listen… I know it seems really stupid as I can’t understand and I have no clue whether or not ya can actually understand me, but I think it’ll be good for ya. Ya can talk whenever ya feel like it and ya can take all the time you need. Otherwise I can just talk your ear off. I can be a pretty good distraction I think. It’s better than just sitting in silence and thinking about what happened. It’s kinda why I turned to music so long ago. It fills the silence and chases away the demons. Do ya have music down there? I know your language kinda sounds like you’re all singing, but that’s different.”

I paused as he shifted and curled further into me. I had hoped he was going to do something, but no. At least he had moved. I slid my hand down to his restless wing fin. It ceased its twitching when I pet it.

“Ya can just hit me or something if ya want me to shut up. I can’t tell what ya want, but I’m sure ya can get whatever ya want across. You’re smart. Look at ya opening doors and escaping traps and what not. Ya really are the sharpest they’ve come across so far from what they’re saying. Honestly you’re probably more clever than a lot of people in the world come to think of it. Oh I know maybe I can bring in some puzzles or something and we can work on those together. It’ll give ya something to do and it’s much better than just sitting here all day.”

This was actually a good idea. Prowl needed something and a change could help. Maybe we couldn’t speak, but we could make this work. We could work together on something. I could get some puzzles and buy a can of that ‘Never wet’ spray stuff and some puzzle glue so they wouldn’t fall apart.

“I bet ya could figure out puzzles if ya could figure out doors. It’s kinda the same thing.”

Next

First

Masterpost

[andswarwrites]

Day 3

Growing up my parents moved every few years.  The first time we moved I was seven, and I was so upset about it that I told my Mom that I was going back to live in "my house".  Mom reminded me that strangers were living there now, and that wasn't as much of a deterrent to me as the fact that I would have to walk, and it was very far.  That first house I ever lived in was where I was born.  My mother gave birth to me in her bedroom.  I shared a room with my sister.  Dad took a picture of my mom and siblings all sitting on the floor of the living room with me, playing with a colorful activity toy they had just got for me.

I remember looking up at the book case looming over me, and fearing that it would fall over and topple on me.  I have no idea how old I was, but already a little bit of anxiety was creeping in.  I'd get up early enough to go and watch my father shave.  It was a quiet moment, everyone else was asleep, so I had him all to myself.  There was a window in the kitchen, so my mother could keep an eye on me while I played in our back yard.  I would pick fresh peas from the little garden, and open the pods to eat them.  I would also pick sorrel growing in the grass, and I'd play in the cedar hedge.  Not along the hedge, in the hedge.

When we moved we left a little development in a small town, where there were streets packed with neighbors and a nearby park, to a long country road with a long driveway to this stone house with dormers.  The property was lined with trees and the backyard had a pool.  My father had taught me to swim young; our whole family would get a membership to the public pool every year; you had to sew a little pass onto your bathing suit.  Anyway, what I'm getting at is having a pool made up for the fact that we had left my cherished home, and house number two became home too.

My dad built me a swing.  Since I was homeschooled, the education part of my day only took a few hours, and then I got to play outside until dinnertime, unless it was raining; then I could read indoors, or draw.  And every day I was allowed educational TV from PBS.  My favorites were Bill Nye and Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego.  My daughter and husband and I were just discussing our favorite childhood shows.  I was telling them that Cyranose from Sesame Street stressed me out.  When my daughter was very little she would watch Pocoyo and Puffin Rock and Yo Gabba Gabba.

Alright, moving on.  I was between eleven and twelve when we moved to the north shore of Quebec.  For my parents, it was a bit like coming home, because they had met in Forestville and had lived in Sept Iles and Port Cartier in their early marriage.  We lived in Baie Comeau.  Again, the transition was hard for me.  We went from a huge back yard with a driveway long enough for me to ride my bike around on, to a semi detached with a big patio but a little patch of grass.  My mom softened the blow by letting me help her pick out paint colors and wallpaper to decorate not only the living space and her bedroom, but my room as well.

I chose a design of galloping horses on a border of wallpaper, and the color green.  There was another color but it was nondescript.  I really loved that green.  And I loved my dog.  We'd had several dogs.  We'd had a black dog named Belle, and a beagle named Wendy, and also a puppy Labrador named Skip.  My best friend called him Skippy Peanut Butter.  But I never connected with those dogs (I know, heresy!).  It was Rascal, our rottweiler, who stirred deep affection in me.  I'd play with him in the pokey back yard.  In fact one time, he was excitedly circling me and I lost track of where he was, so I turned and tripped over him.

Pain shot through my elbow and I rose, and danced around, clutching my arm.  Rascal danced around with me.  I went into the house and told my mom I had hurt myself.  Now, I had gotten distracted from the task my Mom had assigned me, which was to sweep the patio, so she told me to go back out there and finish the job.  I tried to do it with both hands, but my arm was pulsing, so I swept the whole space with one hand.  In a few hours my arm was aching, I was writhing, and my mom decided to take me to the hospital.  She thought it was going to be a waste of time, but turns out my elbow was broken.  Poor Mom, she felt pretty bad.

So we lived in Baie Comeau for two years.  We moved to the region of Quebec City, and lived in Lac Beauport.  That was a brief sojourn.  My parents bought a house that was more in the Montreal area, and we would commute; stay in Lac Beauport during the week, so I could attend school and Dad could work, and then go to the house on the weekend.  I don't think that lasted more than a few months, and then my Dad retired and we moved permanently.  Well, not permanently, after a few years they divided their property into two, sold the place we'd lived in, and they built a house, a beautiful open concept home, which Dad finished in pine on floors, walls and ceiling.

That was the final house I lived in with my mom and dad.  By the time they built the house, I was eighteen, and a good friend and I were figuring out that we really liked each other.  That is another story for another time.  I moved out at nineteen, and Mom and Dad lived happily for a while in the house they had built, but Mom's health had deteriorated since living in a polluted environment for two years, and she and Dad wanted to find a place where she would feel better.  I was pregnant when they decided to move to Newfoundland.  I was due in July but N- decided to join us in May (I'll be telling that story too), on the very day my parents were scheduled to leave the province.  They literally took their stuff to Newfoundland, turned around and returned to the hospital to be with me, S- and N-.

When N- got out of the hospital, we brought her to the house Mom and Dad had built.  That was her first home.  We only lived there for a few years.  Mom and Dad lived in Newfoundland for less than a year, and then they found a home in New Brunswick.  We visit them every summer, and this past year, we visited in the winter too.  I remember setting foot in their house and looking around, and realizing this was the first house I'd ever seen my parents have that I have never lived in.  It was pretty neat to see all the touches my mom made; the curtains she chose, the paintings I'd watched her collect all my life, hanging on the walls, how she had arranged the furniture.  My parents have always, my whole life, made houses into homes.

[ts-porter]

The Shanty and the Hive

.

The first time the humans told us they sang their way through subspace, we thought it a translation error.

.

We-the-hive were overjoyed to meet them. Finally, finally, it was proven that we were not alone! And though we already knew that we must not be, given the vastness of time and the multiverse, we also knew that those same vastnesses were against us. Civilizations we could meet are greatly outnumbered by those who came before us and we are too late to meet, those who will come after us and we are too early for, and those so far away that we cannot find them.

A starfaring civilization, like our own, increased the chances of meeting greatly. One of our most distant scientific surveyors sensed a faint and far away disturbance, similar to the waves our own ships make when diving into and out of subspace. An exploratory team was sent to investigate, and there at the furthest reach ever taken from the hive's center, to our everlasting joy, we found human explorers on the far edges of their own range.

Their ships were strange to us, and their selves even stranger. Translation, and the mutual communication of peaceful intentions, was difficult. Mathematics was the first understanding we were able to share, as the basic principles do not change—though their and our systems of harnessing it are different. Science followed after, as the elements and natural laws are unchanging. So it was discovered that we-the-hive and the humans share the common ground of being carbon-based heterotrophs who consume water to maintain life processes.

These commonalities were far outnumbered by our differences. Yet, the most important thing we had in common was the desire to understand each other. With earnest effort, with forgiveness for unintended insult and misunderstanding, we worked to learn each other's languages.

Science being an early part of our understanding of each other, we asked them about the construction of their ships. They told us of their material compositions and their subspace engines, different in design but similar in purpose to our own technology—but when we asked them about the shielding and stabilization they used to make the journey survivable, they told us only that they sang their way through.

Translations were imprecise, and their language often contradictory. Of course we believed that it was yet another translation error. We believed there was a nuance we were missing.

The humans were a very musical civilization. They were always singing, all of them. They sang for joy, and they sang for mourning, and they sang for any reason at all between the two extremes.

(Later, we would discover that this was not universally true. That those who crewed their ships were chosen from the most musical among them. We only met their singers, their travelers, their ship's crews. How could we know differently?)

We believed, with music such a central part of their civilization, that they had given the words for song more meaning. Their subspace stabilization and shielding technology, without which any ship that dove into the confusion of subspace would be utterly destroyed and lost, had taken its name from music. We-the-hive noted the mistranslation, and worked to increase our understanding.

As our trust and understanding increased, as the human linguists became haltingly conversant in our language and we in theirs, the humans introduced to us a group of their hatchlings. It was a mighty show of trust, as they valued their younger generations as deeply as we did our own. Though still flexible, an adult human's mind was too set in its ways to easily become fluent in another language. That of their hatchlings was far more suited to the acquisition of language. With equal time spent between their own language and ours, it was hoped that the young would grow to be adults who could serve as translators and teachers to increase the closeness and understanding of our peoples.

We allowed our hatchlings and theirs to mingle, to play together, to bond. We spoke to the human hatchlings, and the speed at which they learned our language matched the speed they learned the language of their own people. It was to be a long project, but a joyful and an exciting one.

We learned more about the humans, and they learned more about us. Along with scientific sharing, we established a small trade, exchange of goods and curiosities from one civilization to another.

Our understanding grew, but we still did not understand completely. The humans told us that they sang their way through subspace. When we could no longer believe that the translation was so deeply in error, we instead believed that the crews who piloted the human ships did not understand the technology they used. They were such a granular species, not unified. We believed that those who built the ships had not shared knowledge with those who piloted them, and so they had developed superstitions around technology they did not comprehend.

We-the-hive asked to send a pod of researchers through a subspace dive on one of the human ships. We asked for it. The humans agreed, willingly, in exchange for an equal number of their own scientists to take the same trip aboard one of our ships. Our pod and their scientists were chosen. The ships and the destination were chosen.

The pod boarded the human ship with nothing but curiosity and excitement. As the humans were wont to limit the number of dives they took and make the most of every trip, a ship carrying cargo on one of their usual supply runs was chosen. The ship was called the Merry Dancer, of the type the humans called a 'small freighter'.

It was greatly open through the inside. The 'bird's nest' hung from the ceiling at the center, and there the Captain and Pilots had their stations. Room had been found to rig up two safety harnesses, to secure two individuals from the research pod where we could watch the Captain and Pilots work. The rest of us joined the singers, who stood in a line from stem to stern along the bottom of the ship.

The mood was solemn and focused as the humans prepared for the journey. The subspace engines were prepped, their rumble vibrating through the ship. The Pilots and Captain stretched their hands and rolled their necks, loosening themselves up. The singers took deep breaths and hummed, warming their voices.

"All Ready?" the Captain asked. She was a small human, her wrinkled skin a pleasingly luminous deep brown and her thickly curly silver hair tied up in many braids and twisted into a knot at the back of her head. She was called Janette, and when she spoke, in her firm and quiet voice, the crew of the Merry Dancer listened closely and with respect.

"Singers in Position," the chief among the singers—the Lead Chanter—reported. "At your command, Captain." He was a large human, hairless and very round, with pink skin heavily freckled with brown spots. He was called George, and his voice was big and booming as so many of the ship's singers were. Even when he was not working he was always surrounded by the singers of the Merry Dancer, in a loud and happy group that was always singing, for they trusted him and liked to be close.

After a look and a nod with the two pilots, the Captain spoke again. "You may begin when ready," she said. And then, informally and with a small smile, "Sing to me."

Lead Chanter George stamped out a beat that the rest of the singers took up immediately. He inhaled a massive breath, filling his belly and broad chest to its limit. (And we had heard of the training most ship's singers chose to undertake from childhood, exercises to increase their lung capacity and improve the volume and resonance of their voices, that they might sing loud and long without doing themselves damage. George epitomized the results, as so many lead chanters did.)

He belted out the line to song we had heard the humans singing before. A 'shanty', they called it; an old one. It was dated from long before their species even dreamed that they could leave their birth planet and sail across the stars rather than the oceans of their homeworld.

"Oh, we'll blow the man up and we'll blow the man down!" George led.

And every singer through the ship, in time and at great volume, sang out in answer: "Way, hey, blow the man down!"

George spared a brief moment of attention to wink at the nearest member of the research pod as he led again: "We'll make the trip over, won't let our friends down."

"Give us some time to blow the man down!" the singers responded.

The sound of their voices and the solid beat of their stamping boots vibrated the entire ship. It was clear that the acoustics were designed such that the vibrations bounced off the walls of the ship, centering unerringly on the crow's nest. The Captain and the Pilots nodded in time as the Lead Chanter improvised the next verse and sang it up to them, as the singers responded in tuneful chorus.

The Captain's hand clenched on a lever, the subspace engine throttle, tight enough her knuckles paled. A deep breath, and she slammed the throttle wide open in time with the singers. The engine roared briefly, outclassed only by the song. Immediately it was clear why the humans, in their language, had named their version of the subspace dive after a violent strike—the punch. It was a hard transition, swift and jarring.

Then. Oh, then. We understood, suddenly and most terribly, why the humans could not describe their subspace shielding and stabilization technology to us, for they had none.

They had none!

Their minds, bodies, and their entire ships were fully exposed to the nongeometrical confusion of subspace. The research pod, we who had asked to be there and been eagerly chosen, were caught up in it as well. Spacetime was ruffled, twisted, wrinkled, defying understanding in ways that three-dimensional space and regularly linear time never did. Unshielded subspace was a mind-destroying horror, the likes of which we-the-hive had never experienced.

And through the midst of the direful disorientation, the humans were singing.

We-the-hive discovered the principles of subspace engines, the basics for the traversing of subspace to make the lightyears of interstellar travel pass in hours, long before we used them. The dive to the space below the three dimensional and outside of linear spacetime requires mere force. Three generations were born and died while we developed the much more difficult shielding and stabilization technology, which requires finesse. Only when we had perfected it, when we could hold an entire ship in a stable pocket of three dimensions through a subspace trip, did we become starfarers.

The humans had taken a very different approach.

Lead Chanter George stood like a stone against the wind, inventing lyrics for his ancient shanty, and the ship's singers stomped the deck in time and answered, never faltering. Above them, Captain Janette and her pilots listened hard to the song and the echoes. Their hands were on their controls, manually firing the ship's small stabilization engines. They judged by the sound alone whether any part of the ship was warping, if it was redshifting or blueshifting out of tune or out of time.

Ship's singers had told us, proudly, that they lived and died by their voices. We had thought it hyperbole.

The twist and shake of the ship, what the humans called the shimmy and roll and the bucking gravitational waves, never abated. The singing never ceased. In between lines of the call and response of the shanty, singers took sips of water from the bottles on their belts to keep their throats from growing dry. George communicated with his Second with brief hand signs, and sie took over leading with a different shanty—another ancient song, The Wellerman. The pilots breathed hard with the effort of concentration. Sweat beaded at the Captain's hairline. A thin trickle ran down her cheek and neck in a jaggedly uneven line, pushed and pulled by the roiling of subspace.

The humans, with their fortitude and adaptability, and specifically the crew of the Merry Dancer with their long experience, were able to keep functioning. They could continue to work despite the tearing disorientation, else the ship and all in it would have been lost. The members of the research pod were not so prepared, and were not so adaptable. With communication disrupted between us so each was utterly alone, with the confusion and isolation overwhelming, we had all curled up tight inside our carapaces for safety, like frightened hatchlings. Only one in three were able to even peek a single eyestalk out to observe with shattered perception, to increase our knowledge and understanding as had been the intention of the trade.

(On the hive's ship, mid journey, one of the human researchers aboard hesitantly asked when the trip was going to begin. This caused great confusion all around.)

Another unknowable and incomprehensible time later, the Second signaled to Lead Chanter George, and he led again with a third song—Roll The Old Chariot Along. The music, sure and unending, was a comfort in the confusion. The singers' strong voices, unified, were a touchstone in the chaos.

The third song was ongoing when the subspace engine began cycling again, powering up for the punch back out. Despite the strain, despite the confused length of time of their singing, George's voice grew in volume, and the rest of the singers followed. They overwhelmed the sound of the engine, providing Captain Janette and the Pilots with the guidance they needed through the last moments.

The second punch was every bit as harsh as the first. Space time warped, twisted, and then snapped back into three dimensional linearity. Through the transition, the singers never faltered. The reverberation of their voices rang through the ship, a joyful shout. George had his hands raised high as he led one final chorus at half time.

"Lead Chanter, singers, you may stand down," the Captain announced, formally, and then smiling but still dignified despite her obvious weariness. "Nicely done, crew."

Some of the singers cheered and hugged each other, or slapped each other's backs in celebration. Others, though, ran and fell to their knees by the nearest of the research pod to them.

"What happened?", "Are they ok?" "Are they hurt?", "I don't understand they just collapsed as soon as we punched!"

Lead Chanter George, trusted and respected by the singers he led, sang out calming words even as he sat on the deck beside one the nearest researcher from the pod—one who had an eye stalk out monitoring. He smiled at us, human expression of happiness. He placed one large warm hand on the back of the researcher's carapace. He could not speak our language, but with his tired voice he sang the tone of safety—with the caress and the crooning he communicated an absence of danger as we might to our own hatchlings.

We would learn that a young relative of his was among the human hatchlings who mingled with ours, that by observing us with our own hatchlings he'd learned the way to offer comfort. One and another of the singers took up the tone, until the ship throbbed with it. The research pod were given care and reassurance, and with the sharp reduction in stress we were able to uncurl, to communicate and reintegrate and return to a harmonious whole as we worked to piece together our shattered understanding of what had occurred.

The touch and the tone were not quite the same as our own, similar enough, but different. Still, the difference was not unpleasant. In that moment, in the relief and the... the kindness, the sonorous resonance of a human singer's voice and the softness of a human hand were fixed as beautiful. These humans were not us, not ours, but become beloved. When the research pod was reintegrated in the whole of we-the-hive, the beauty and affection remained.

We would learn that the journey we observed had been 'easy', routine, as safe as any trip could be. The humans had pride in the safety of their ships and in the training of their capable crews—that they lost, astoundingly, merely one in two thousand ships in unstabilized dives.

They had done so much with so little, singing their way through subspace while still researching the technologies that would make it safe.

When we-the-hive truly understood the risks the humans took with every single journey, when the research pod's knowledge was fully integrated, we knew we could not leave them without the advantages we had.

.

The decision to share all details of our subspace shielding and stabilization technology with the humans—with our friends—was swift and without dissent.

.

.

Edit - 04/20/21 So! This story is actually an eventual-future-worldbuilding of a short story about space shanties that I wrote in 2018, and which I have finally found a home for! The story in question sadly does not include aliens, but it does have ace lesbians singing their way through danger. It’s sweet and hope-punky and I think that if you enjoyed this one, you’d enjoy that one too!

“(don’t you) love a singer” is available in the It Gets Even Better: Stories of Queer Possibility anthology by Speculatively Queer. You can grab a copy [here]!

[draconic-ichor]

How would you feel about a drabble about the lil baby twins? I really love all the Heisenbabies you’ve created and I’d love to know a bit about how they came into the world or what they’re like as newborns/toddlers.

Their birth was hard…the hardest so far for the family.

Dabble undercut:

Warning: strong language, blood, premature babies, medical staff/equipment

Kolt sat in the waiting room, worrying his hands together and fidgeting with one of his rings.

“It’s too early…” he murmured, pale eyes full of worry, “They shouldn’t be coming yet.”

He felt a hand touch his knee, ripping him out of his imaginings. He blinked looking up into the same pale eyes as his own.

Netta sat beside him, patting his leg in an effort to comfort him. She had an open book in her lap, and her messy hair pulled back in a loose bun.

Kolt gave her a weak smile, “I’m just worried, you know?”

She nodded, “It’s normal.”

“What?” He smiled more toothily, “Me being a big worry wort??”

She shook her head, “Twins to come early.” She reached down and flipped the book closed, showing Kolt the cover. It was a medical journal about twin pregnancy.

“…Ah…” Kolt nodded. Netta had a intense love of reading. Books didn’t have complex social structures or loud noises. She loved books, and even though she did speak more now if you really wanted to get her going, ask about her book.

~

In the delivery room, things were taking a turn for the worse.

Heisenberg was at Juniper’s side, as he always was, but she was growing pale. Her grip on his hand loosening.

“Stay with me, buttercup.” Heisenberg urged, looking up as more hospital staff entered the room. His heart hammered in his chest.

Suddenly, with a scream from Juniper, the warbling cries of a newborn broke the air. But the moment of relief quickly soured in Heisenberg’s gut as the tiny little thing was whisked away.

“Wait! Is he ok?” Heisenberg straightened, fear clawing at him.

One of the nurses started to usher him towards the door as well, saying they couldn’t have him in the way right now. His pale eyes flicked back at Juniper just as a fresh rush of blood left her body.

“I need to stay with her.” He growled.

But the nurse was firm, “Please sir, wait with your family…we need space to help her.”

Everything in his body screamed to stay but he relented, allowing himself to be led to the waiting room.

As soon as he went through the doors, Kolt was on his feet giving him a barrage of questions,

“What’s going on? Are the kids ok? How’s Ma??”

Heisenberg just fell into a chair, looking at his hands. He seemed deathly quiet, tension gathering in his shoulders.

“Pa…what’s going on?” Kolt asked more quietly, sitting down beside him.

Heisenberg shook his head, “She’s not doing good…” he swallowed thickly, “The first one came out. I heard him…but they took him away before I got a look at ‘em.”

Otto was born first, able to eat on his own. Oswald came later, underdeveloped and gasping for breath. Juniper lost a lot of blood, her insides ripping. Heisenberg was the first to see the babies, while Juniper was in recovery.

He walked into the room where they were kept, steps feeling heavy. They were inside plastic pods, with their chests and bellies covered with sensors.

His stomach clenched, heart hurting. They were so small, each able to fit in his palm. He knelt down, looking in at the little ones.

He wanted desperately to pull them from the pods, take them home to be safe. Seeing them full of wires brought painful memories of his own youth bubbling up in his mind.

It was for their safety…their well-being, he tried to tell himself.

~

They bundled up Otto, in a little blue blanket, handing the baby to Heisenberg. He took him carefully, never ready for how small and fragile newborns were. And Otto was so so small, bigger than his brother that couldn’t leave the pod yet, but still the size of Heisenberg’s palm.

Heisenberg gave a shaking exhale, cradling the tiny bundle.

“Hey there pup…you really scared your Papa.” Heisenberg spoke softly, eyes glassy.

Eventually Juniper could meet them, experiencing the same bittersweetness her husband had. They were alive and here, but hooked up to machines.

They were fighters, and after two weeks were able to be free of their pods. They held their little hands together when they were sat side by side, perfect little mirrors.

Heisenberg didn’t let the other see the wetness of his eyes when the nurses happily told them they could all go home.

His tuff little babies…finely able to go home.

[kingstylesdaily]

Playtime With Harry Styles

via vogue.com

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In 1D, Styles was making music whenever he could. “After a show you’d go in a hotel room and put down some vocals,” he recalls. As a result, his first solo album, 2017’s Harry Styles, “was when I really fell in love with being in the studio,” he says. “I loved it as much as touring.” Today he favors isolating with his core group of collaborators, “our little bubble”—Rowland, Kid Harpoon (né Tom Hull), and Tyler Johnson. “A safe space,” as he describes it.

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy, setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard charts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicks album cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness, is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matches.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Diana bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”

[smarchit]

Look Around, Look Around pt 4

Summary: You escaped an abusive marriage, pregnant with your husband’s child. He sends a bounty hunter after you to bring you back. Everything changes. Din Djarin/pregnant!reader, no use of y/n

Word count: 2.2k

Warnings: Pregnancy/related topics, implied/referenced rape, mentions of abuse, blood, brief mentions of medical procedures

Notes: /finger guns/ no comment, your honor. also, these chapters were originally titled on Ao3. I completely forgot about that lol

You knew something was wrong when Mando returned early from his job. You knew either that it had gone sideways somehow, either the guy put up a fight, he was already dead, or worse, Mando got hurt.

All the times he came back to you injured it was nothing life threatening - slashes across the arms, blaster shot to the beskar that knocked the wind out of him. He always made a big deal out of that one, the drama queen. The worst one of them was that time a Trandoshan bounty tried to shank him; it ended up not being that bad, he just got him in the ribs with a dull knife that took a week to heal.

So now here Mando was, back from a job. You heard him shoving the bounty into the carbonite chamber downstairs, heard him clattering around as he struggled to put his weapons away. You heard a low grunt of pain and descended the ladder to the lower level of the ship to find him. 

It was dim, but you didn't need light to notice the wide gash in his shirt, or the blood that stained the light brown leather of his gloves as he pressed a hand to his stomach.

He was leaning against the wall, taking shallow breaths as you laid eyes on him, and he lifted his visor to look at you.

"Should see the other guy," he wheezed in a half-joke as he slid down to sit on the floor.

You looked over at the carbonite and noted the crumpled way the bounty was situated - and the bloodstain that had been tracked in when Mando dragged the body behind him.

"I'll get the medpack," you said quickly. It was hard to tell at that point what blood was Mando's and which was the bounty's, all you knew was that there was too much of it and the smell was starting to make you nauseous.

You retrieved the medpack and returned to his side, knees aching as you knelt down just a bit to quickly. A dull pain spread up into your belly, spreading white hot, like a fire poker shoved through your gut. You clenched your jaw with the pain and turned your focus to Mando. 

His head was leaned back on the wall, the tiniest sliver of his scruffy chin poked out from under the bottom of his helmet. He was still breathing shallowly and you imagined his eyes were squeezed shut to try to keep himself steady.

You lifted his breast plate up a bit and winced - it wasn't a big cut, but deep enough that it could be dangerous. You grabbed the bacta spray from the kit and administered it quickly.

One of his hands wound its way around your wrist as you dabbed away the excess blood around the wound.

"'m okay," he mumbled, his head lolling to one side as he gave your wrist a reassuring squeeze.

"Good," you said with a worried smile, bringing your other hand up to cup the side of his helmet. You lightly rapped on his temple with your knuckles - three taps for I'm glad you're okay.

"Can you stand up?" you asked after a moment. You really didn't think you'd be able to help him stand, especially with the pain that was now steadily increasing in your belly.

He nodded once as if pondering this. "Yeah, I'm fine." He already sounded a bit better, at least. His visor locked on your face. "You okay? Look a little pale."

"There's just a lot of blood," you chuckled, though your voice sounded strained. "I just cleaned the floors."

Mando laughed and got to his feet.

"I'll clean them later. We should get out of here - we'll head back to Nevarro."

You nodded and followed him up the ladder to the cockpit. A bead of sweat rolled down your leg under your skirts and you grimaced at the slightly uncomfortable feeling. A second trickle of sweat soon joined it.

Once you got to the cockpit, you sunk into the copilot's seat and leaned your head back with a sigh. You rubbed lazily at your stomach, chalking the pain up to nerves.

The ship took off with no trouble and it wasn't long before you were whistling through hyperspace towards Nevarro.

The baby, who had been asleep until now, woke up and was crying and babbling worriedly. You lifted your head and looked over at him, thinking he wanted to be held. He was looking between you and Mando, his tiny brow wrinkled in fear.

You moved to hoist yourself off the seat to go to him, your hand cradling underneath your stomach. You touched something wet at the juncture of your thighs and your heart dropped to your toes and then leapt up to your throat. When you pulled your shaking hand away, your fingers were covered in blood.

"Mando," you whispered, your voice barely audible to you over the rush of blood in your ears. When he didn't turn, you spoke louder and you heard your voice crack. "Mando!"

Instantly, he turned in his chair to face you. He stared at you for a minute and then jumped up and rushed to your side. "Hey, hey, what's wrong? Are you hurt?"

Dazed, you shook your head no. You weren't hurt. You didn't fall, didn't do much of anything these days except take walks on pretty planets and watch the small green baby.

"The baby," you said, cupping your bloody hand over his helmet. "Something is wrong."

Mando nodded and gently knelt between your parted knees and gripped your hand tightly. "I'm gonna get you to Nevarro, okay? We're almost there. There's a hospital I'm gonna take you to."

Stars, you could hear the worry in his voice as he assured you. He put a gentle hand on your thigh and then stood to lock down the baby's cradle to try and quell his frantic cries.

You gripped your belly in fear and looked up at Mando who was now back to standing in front of you.

"It's going to be okay," he promised you. "Just a bit longer."

After that, everything was a blur. Mando quickly parked the ship and helped you down the ladder. Then he scooped you up in his arms and helped you off the ship. The baby's pod followed close behind you both as he carried you through town. You could still feel blood seeping through the fabric of your underclothes and dress. You wrapped your arms around his neck and buried your face against his chest. 

Maker, help me.

***

You woke to warm sunlight on your face and the low hum of a droid reverberating in your chest. You were comfortable and you didn't even want to open your eyes to start your day. If it weren't for the persistent, unrelenting need to pee, you may not have opened your eyes at all.

Everything came crashing back down in an instant. The blood, the pain, the dull shock of potentially losing your baby.

Your baby.

You sat up, perhaps a little too quickly, you thought as a nurse droid assistant gave an angry squeal at you. Your hands immediately pulled your gown up to observe your belly, still warm and round and full, decorated with lines and freckles and stretch marks.

"Maker," you gasped as tears flooded your eyes. "I'm so sorry, my little moon." You cupped a hand over your belly, feeling it's warmth and it's softness beneath your palms.

A sleepy groan and a shuffle in the corner caught your attention. The Mandalorian was sitting in a chair, his thighs spread wide as he stretched sleep from his muscles.

"You're awake," he said softly as he straightened.

You wiped the tears from your eyes and scooted yourself backwards to sit up against the pillows.

"For the record," you said, wanting to attempt to break the tension, "I woke up before you."

The Mandalorian didn't respond to that, but he got up and moved to stand by you. He looked at you, and you would have shrunk away had he not grabbed your hand gently. The action no longer startled you.

"Everything is okay," he said quietly, rubbing a circle on the back of your hand with his thumb. "Baby's fine. You're fine."

Somehow, it felt like he was assuring himself more than you.

You nodded and looked from his visor to his hand on yours. The worry radiated off of him in waves, but you felt strangely calm and safe with him so close to you.

"Verd'ika," he chuckled quietly, helmet turning to observe your belly.

"What happened?" you asked, not wanting to let him go.

A doctor came into the room then, a Nabooian woman in a simple head covering, followed by a small droid unit carrying a tray.

"Good morning," she said brightly as she nodded at you. "I see we're all awake!"

"Almost all of us," Mando said as he finally let your hand go. He nodded in the direction of the floating cradle where the baby slept.

The nurse chuckled and moved to stand by your head on the opposite side of the bed from Mando. 

"You all needed rest," she said, looking at the two of you. "Not many can go traipsing around the galaxy at seven months pregnant like that."

You smiled sheepishly and she laughed. 

"I'm Madera," she said, sitting down beside you on the bed. "How do you feel?"

You shrugged. Really, you felt fine. No aches, no pain, even your hips felt fine.

"Good," she said, pressing a cool hand to your belly. The baby inside you fluttered in response to the touch and her smile grew. 

"What happened?" you finally asked as she pushed on a few other spots on your stomach.

"Based on the bleeding," she said with a sigh, "It seems like the placenta shifted downwards slightly. It isn't unheard of, and not as dangerous as it sounds. Though it may complicate the birth a bit. I would stick close to home."

You nodded and looked up at Mando, who seemed to be watching you closely.

"So, dad," Madera said, looking up at him to catch his attention, "Take her home, keep her comfortable."

You both spoke at the same time.

"Oh, he's not--"

"I'm not the baby's father," he corrected gently. 

Madera nodded. "Right. Ah, right." She turned to you and touched your hand. "You don't have to be on bed rest, but if you experience anymore bleeding or discomfort, then limit walking and exercises, okay?"

You nodded. All that scare for nothing.

"Thank you," you said with a small smile.

She nodded and handed you a holopad to sign. "Alright, there's clean clothes there for you, dear." She gestured to a chair and then exited the room.

You looked up at Mando and he sighed softly. 

"Get dressed," he murmured, "I'm taking you back to Sorgan. I shouldn't have kept you away this long."

"Mando, it isn't your fault," you said, swinging your legs over the side of the bed. "Really."

"It's dangerous. You could've... Something could have happened to you or the baby."

"Mando, please," you said, looking at him, trying to scan the helmet.

He shook his head. "We're going back to Sorgan." His tone was firm, and this really wasn't the place for an argument, but he was shouldering too much responsibility himself and you knew deep down he was right. But you were pregnant and damn it all if you weren't going to use that to your advantage.

"I'm not done exploring," you said as it were the most obvious thing in the world.

He stared you down. 

"One more and then I'll go," you reasoned. You bit your lip and gave him a small smile. For good measure, you added, "Please?"

The Mandalorian sighed heavily.

"One more," he said. "I have a job not too far from here. It's on the way to Sorgan, and then I'm taking you back. Got it?"

You nodded excitedly and went to grab your new clothes off the chair. You began to untie the gown when Mando coughed behind you.

"Should I... I dunno, wait outside or something?" he asked.

You hesitated slightly. "I won't turn around."

Mando shuffled awkwardly and turned to the other side so he was slightly facing away from you.

You quickly got dressed and then remembered---

"I can't put my shoes on."

He turned back and laughed at you, bent over your belly, supporting yourself against the wall as you tried to put your boots on.

"Don't you laugh at me!" you squawked as he came over to help, still chuckling at your misfortune.

"You want help or what, me'suum?" he asked.

"No, please, I would love to keep struggling, but thanks for the kriffing offer."

"Sit," he said," guiding you to the chair. He sat you down and knelt to put your shoes on. He slid one foot into its boot and fastened the strap, one hand gently holding the back of your leg. The other shoe went on and he held his hand against your leg longer than he probably should have.

You coughed to get his attention, but he didn't look up at you. Instead, he gently pressed his forehead against your belly. He sighed softly and held his head there for a moment before he stood up.

"Come on," he said softly, holding his hand out to help you stand, "Let's go."

TAGLIST (if you wanna be added, please let me know!):

@miscellaneous-mando @lestrange2703 @someplace-darker @letsgetfuckingsuperwholocked @poeticparker @blackbird337 (it won’t let me tag you!) @the-last-twin-of-krypton @divineangelix @c1996 @mell-bell

[vegalocity]

So bc everyone's really enjoying that Protag Swap AU with Red Son I've been thinking about it myself quite a bit and so now here i am

Here's a scene from The Beach Car

--

The cat's pod was... minimally challenging to fix. no more complex than his Inferno truck. He knew there was a heavy enough chance that the cat was lying about having connections to the conductor, but if her only payment was fixing up her travel pod for her and a lightning protection charm, then it was worth taking the chance. (Though she had tried to have him sell OneOne to her, it seemed like legitimate magic was far more interesting for her. And it made sense to have a lightning charm, who knew when her pod would malfunction again and electrocute her)

“Tomcat, tell me something-” The cat poked her head into his line of sight and Red Son raised a brow.

“Don't call me that.”

“Why did your parents choose such a... literal... name for you?” The Cat continued as though he hadn't spoken. “out of all the names in the world, why did they look upon their child and say 'ah yes, 'Red Son' will be perfect for our red haired son? Why not something less descriptive? Isn't it also a naming custom to affiliate your child with what you hope of them? Though I admit I wouldn't know.” The cat primly began to groom herself. “Never had any kittens of my own.”

“None of your business.”

“Red Son!” OneOne chimed in rolling up to his work area “How tall are you?”

“172 centimeters, why-”

“What is your hair? Is it fire? Is it hair?” “Is it a reflection of your inner turmoil bubbling to the surface?”

He felt his hair spark to life at the surprisingly pointed commentary. “That's none of your-!”

“Why DID your parents name you after your hair color?” OneOne interrupted again.

“Ugh! Why does that matter?”

“The orb is rather talkative Tomcat, you sure you don't want me to take him off your hands for you?”

“OneOne isn't for sale fleabag.” The cat gasped in mock affront.

“how rude! I was only trying to take such an irritating thing off your hands!” She was enjoying this. He could see the amused glint in her eye as her tail swished back and forth.

A wire darted across his hand and with a prick of pain he was now bleeding. Red Son let out a shout of frustration and rolled out from beneath the pod. He had some small bandages he could use to patch up his hand but he was flustered and it was making his hands shake.

“Fine. You both want a story so bad?”

“Frankly I could care less, Tomcat.”

“Story!” OneOne scurried up and made themself at home in Red Son's lap.

“Well it's not much of one-...” then again father did love to tell it when he was young, every year on his birthday, the exact time right down to the minute. And whenever allies would come over and make some idle comment about his strength, his father would launch into the story with the premise of 'My son has been a fighter from the moment he was born'

He wondered if father would tell it any differently now that Red Son was a disappointment.

“Technically they named me Red Boy, I changed it to Red Son myself when I became of age and thus was no longer a boy. But as my father tells the story, I came out... Early. Very early.”

His hands had stopped shaking, so he began to apply the bandages to the sluggishly bleeding wound. “Back then a premature birth was gravely dangerous for mother, but a death sentence for me. Healers had long since known there was no point in working in favor of the child if it wouldn't last a week let alone the customary month, So they prioritized mother's life instead. Which s it turned out, didn't matter because I was born anyway. And I didn't die. When I'd first come out my hair was black like mothers, though I didn't have much of it. I was alive, but I wouldn't stir. I wouldn't open my eyes or cry or een give the smallest twitch on my own. The healers informed my parents I wouldn't live to see the sun rise.

“Father couldn't stand the idea of any offspring of his perishing without a fight, so he ordered the servants to make the fire in the room burn as hot as they could possibly get it, as he thought I would fight harder if my surroundings better resembled the womb I left too soon. But I don't think he truly believed I would survive, he just wanted me to last longer than the healers predicted. It was a somber affair, So I've been told, the two of them waiting for the end. Mother recovering from her injuries in a sweltering room and my life slowly fading, father the only one in the room whole and hale enough to be acutely aware of the fact that one or both of us would perish."

“Oh my!” “Did you die?”

“No OneOne, I didn't die.”

“Sure enough the sun rose, and I was still breathing. Mother was resting still, and Father was feeling restless. He felt as though he had to stay awake to ensure that should I slip away I would do so with one or both of them there to send me off. And in a state of restlessness took to tending the fire himself.

“At the time even when he was shrunk to the smallest size he was comfortable with I was still small enough to fit in a single hand. Or so he told me.

“So he had me in one hand and tended to the fire with the other. Then the wood gave an unexpected crack, loud as a catapult he told me; cinders and embers went everywhere, and a few landed on me. But when father went to check me for wounds, he saw me do something I had lacked the strength for previously. I stirred. And for just a moment, I'd opened my eyes. ���Immediately he shouted for mother to awaken and barked orders to the servants to throw the bassinet into the hearth, Mother thought he'd been thrown into a fit of rage and wanted all of the things they'd set up for me to be destroyed and began to insist that such an action was a waste of furniture, but the bassinet was already burning by the time she did so, and father placed me inside.

“The fire was all around me, and so the story goes, I stirred in the heat, opened my eyes to the warm glow, I breathed in the smoke-” he lit his fist aflame, careful to keep it far enough from OneOne that he wouldn't damage the little guy. “And I screamed. Father considers that the moment I truly was born.” He remembers waking before the sun in his childhood eager to begin his days, and just as the sun began to raise over the horizon on a certain day his father would pull him aside and begin on the story. “They uh- they left me in there chucking more and more bassinets into the fire until they were sure I'd grown strong enough to survive without it. And by the time that had happened a few months later, my hair had turned red like black coal turning to red embers. So they called me Red Boy.”

“That's a mighty ability tomcat.” The cat chimed in, striding forward and leaning as close to the flame as she was willing to risk. “You say your father realized that ability was yours simply on the fact that you weren't burned by the fire?”

“You were a very brave baby. You already knew what you needed to live but since you were a baby nobody listened to you” OneOne chimed, their cheerful voice surprisngly somber, before the dour voice came in “I can relate, Nobody listens to me either.”

“I didn't know what I needed OneOne, I was a baby. I didn't know anything.”

“I bet you were cuuuutteeee” OneOne chimed again, far closer to their normal tone. Red Son felt his hair spark to life again, his face burning in turn. The cat chuckled.

“Settle down Tomcat, don't want you burning my pod up much like your numerous bassinets before you can fix it.”

[starkeristheendgame]

Tony hadn't been the same since pepper died in a car accident and leaving him with their daughter, morgan. Then everything changed when he and morgan goes to a flower shop and meets florist peter.

I loved this one! Gosh, there were so many ways I wanted to take this. Thank you so much for the prompt, Non! I hope that this satisfies you. I was so tempted to make this a two parter 😅 If you enjoyed this, please consider giving it a reblog! 

TW: Mentions of grief | Grief processing | Allude to depression  SFW

This time of the year always rolls around quicker than he can prepare for it. Her birthday is hard. Their wedding anniversary is harder. But this...The death date...It hits like a freight train, an unstoppable force of grief and nostalgia that if not for Morgan would render him useless. 

As it is, dates outside of Halloween, Christmas and her own birthday don’t really mean much to her at this age, so where he wakes up immediately wanting to go back to sleep for the next week, she wakes up and begins bouncing on his head, shrieking about cereal and flowers. 

“Wh’was ‘ah ‘bout flowers?” he grumbled, rolling away out of the danger zone of her spindly little legs. This was a day of shit-pot luck, though, and no sooner had he settled on his side away from her did a flailing elbow strike him across the temple. 

“Flowers! You left a note on the fridge that said we needed flowers today,” she chirped, planting her tiny hands on his bare shoulder and shaking him with strength no six year old should possess. When his brain had stopped rattling around like a marble in a bean can he grumped and groused his way into sitting upright, rubbing at his temples. 

After Morgan had gone to bed he’d stayed up, drinking the whiskey he’d promised himself he wouldn’t buy and looking at the photographs he’d promised he’d never unbox. It was the same every October 11th, a habit harder to break than being addicted to crack. It left him worse for wear each time, doubling his misery. 

“Alright, bug. Go make yourself cereal. Daddy’s gonna shower and get dressed.” Her bony little heel caught him in the kidney as she scrambled off the bed and he wheezed as he pulled himself upright, staggering into the bathroom. 

Not for the first time, he considered enrolling her in a martial arts class. She could be a champion by the time she was ten, if not just for the fact that all her opponents would be in the accident and emergency room.

He ran the shower too hot and stayed until his skin felt over-hot and numb, and forced himself to dress in a semi-nice shirt and the cleanest pair of jeans he owned. When Pepper was alive he’d always dressed to impress, loving the way she’d tease him or grab him by the shirt to drag him back into the bedroom, but these days the outside world was lucky to see him at all. 

Morgan was on her second bowl of Lucky Charms when he dragged himself downstairs, and she looked at him intensely for a moment. “It’s Mommy’s death birthday, isn’t it?” she asked after a moment and he forced himself to contain the flinch, wandering over to her and soothing a hand over her hair, before he tugged her against his stomach in a hug. 

“It is,” he confirmed roughly. It’d been five years but it was still like rubbing citrus over a fresh wound. He hugged her tighter for a moment, then let her go. “That’s why we have to get flowers today. We have to take them to Mommy’s grave.”

He reached for the lopsided note on the fridge and crumpled it, then threw it in the waste bin. 

Pepper had wanted an ‘environmentally friendly’ burial and had been one of the first people in Manhattan to be buried in a ‘grave pod’, a hemp pod filled with seeds and fertiliser and her body. Over the past five years her burial had birthed a small silver birch tree with a sprinkling of wildflowers at its base. 

The stupid tree made him smile each time he saw it, no matter how much his heart hurt. It was just the type of person she’d been, to do something so out-there and environmentally conscious, even in death. He was smiling now just at the thought of it, a quirk of his lips chased by bitterness as he let Morgan pull him down the street. 

He always let her choose the flower store they went in it, and today she steamrolled other pedestrians out of the way on her mission to reach a gold and blue fronted store that proudly proclaimed itself as The Natural Gallery.

The store front was covered in various bushels and bunches, and even had a small stand full of singular flowers that were clearly left overs or on their way to wilting with a sign say ‘take one and spread some happiness!’

The scent of flora and soil was rich when Morgan yanked him through the doorway, and Tony breathed it in deeply as he looked around. The store’s arrangements inside had been organised like a rainbow, a solid curve of shelves that ran in a horseshoe shape from one wall to the other and behind the service desk. 

Morgan immediately abandoned him to peruse the selection and Tony wandered up to the desk, peering with vague boredom at the unorganised mess that covered the desk as he waited for them to be served. There was a rustle from an open doorway just off to the side, a dull thump, and then what looked to be a teenager came staggering through the open space in a cloud of glitter. 

Tony took a wary step backwards and was prepared to make his excuses to leave when the teenager turned around, and he suddenly found himself utterly disinterested in speaking at all. The young man was a touch on the shorter side but leanly built, with a chiselled face clinging to the last of its baby fat and the most doe-ish set of brown eyes he’d ever seen, shade matching the glitter-dusted mop of curls that sprawled over his temples. 

Pretty. That was the word for it. 

“I knew I heard you guys! Hey, I’m Peter. Sorry about the carnage, it’s a birthday thing,” the young man gasped, shaking off his shirt and bounding up to the desk with energy that could rival Morgan’s. 

“What can I do for you today?” the florist asked, leaning against the counter in a casual pose. Tony noticed for the first time then that he was wearing a women’s style wifebeater, a shirt that proclaimed in glittery pastel letters Nazis deserve to be punched. 

“I uh, I need flowers. For a grave.”

The florist’s cheery face immediately morphed into something softer. Tony hated that so he looked away. Hated the stupid expressions of pity and sympathy that people cast him every time he mentioned Pepper or her death. But when he forced himself to meet Peter’s eye again, it wasn’t exactly pity that he was met with. It was just something...Gentle. 

“Of course. Are there any flowers in particular you know they liked, or any arrangements you had in mind?” the florist was already reaching for a notebook and the sample book as he spoke. Tony glanced over his shoulder to reassure himself that Morgan was still mooning over the pretty flowers, then turned back. 

“Colourful. None of that... Sad, plain crap,” he breathed after a moment, keeping his gaze off to the side. Morgan had found an abandoned flowerhead on the floor and was cradling it carefully in both hands as she waddled towards them. 

“Alright, I think I have an idea for an arrangement. And when are you looking to pick up?” Peter continued, flipping to a blank page in his notebook and immediately beginning to scrawl in slightly messy cursive. 

“Today. Any time.”

The florist seemed surprised, pausing and chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip, but then he nodded and jotted down another note. “I can get something done in half an hour? I’ll just need a $10 deposit, and-- Oh, okay.”

Tony held out his bank card, gaze dropping down to Morgan as she approached the counter. “Take the full cost now,” he instructed blandly as she set the flower down on top of the counter. 

“Mister! This one lost his friends. And his body,” she greeted, pushing the flower across the counter towards the florist, who cast her a warm smile and picked up the flower head with the same careful cradle of his palms. 

“Oh dear, so he has,” he agreed, inspecting the flower carefully. “But that’s okay, because I know of a special job he can do even without a body.”

Morgan appraised him for a long moment before speaking. “Flowers don’t have jobs. They don’t need money,” she informed him seriously, before he turned to look up at her Father with pleading eyes. “Can we get cheeseburgers?”

Weak as he was, he couldn’t deny her anything even when he felt like this, and once the florist had rung up his card and handed him the receipt they left the store and headed to the nearest burger van. 

Morgan chose her customary single cheeseburger with so much ketchup it dripped out of the sides, and they sat down on a nearby bench to people watch as they ate. 

“I think his shirt is right,” she piped up after several bites, and he cast her a weary, wary gaze, reaching out to rub ketchup off her mouth with a napkin. 

“Who’s shirt, bug?”

“The pretty flower man. His shirt said we should punch Nazis. I think it’s right.”

Tony blinked at her and wondered where she’d even learned about Nazis (perhaps he should have paid more attention to the curriculum sheet her elementary had mailed him) before he bit into his own burger, watching passively as a particularly bold pigeon chased after a small, fluffy dog. 

They’d passed almost twenty minutes by the time they threw their wrappers in the bin, and Tony let Morgan tow him along back to The Natural Gallery. 

Peter was ready for them when they stepped inside, despite the fact that they were five minutes early. The young florist was half-hidden behind a large arrangement of colourful flowers that made Tony’s chest constrict when he saw them, and he weakly let go of Morgan’s hand so she could power on ahead to the counter. 

Peter looked over to greet them and seemed to realise that Tony needed a moment, because he immediately began to talk to Morgan about the flowers. 

“The tiny blue ones are called forget-me-nots. Your Daddy didn’t want anything plain, so I used these instead of a flower called baby’s breath, which are tiny white flowers. These big ones are sunflowers, these are roses, and look, here’s the flower you found on the floor!”

Tony forced himself to wander closer. The arrangement was an artful splash of primary colours tied together with what looked like coloured rope, and the slightly rumpled flowerhead had been sewn into the front of the front of the rope, almost like a brooch. 

It was the exact kind of simplistic yet artistic thing that Pepper would have loved, and Tony could feel his throat start to close up the longer he stared at it. 

Peter didn’t do him the indignity of offering any pandering sympathies or well wishes, the energetic florist simply explained the meaning behind the flowers used, explained the rope was hemp dyed with red wine so it was all 100% biodegradable, and gave Morgan a pretty, yellow flower to tuck behind her ear.

Tony left him with a $10 tip for being a ray of sunshine despite the fact that he’d undoubtedly been a prickly, unapproachable customer, and that was the end of it. 

Until a few months later, when Morgan hauled his ass straight back to The Natural Gallery like a greyhound after a rabbit for Pepper’s birthday. 

Her birthdays were probably the ‘easiest’ of all the dreaded dates. It was more nostalgic than painful, and he often passed the day away looking through old memories and thinking of all the birthday plans they never got to do together.

This year, however, Morgan insisted on getting Pepper flowers as a present, and hadn’t even hesitated between the car and her single-minded charge to the florist. Tony was beginning to suspect this was premeditated. 

The store hadn’t changed much since they’d last been here, and the florist was already at the counter with another customer when Morgan barged through the door. 

“Hello again, little Miss. Stark,” he waved at her as she hauled Tony towards a display of pink flowers, and he frowned before remembering his name had been on his bank card and he’d told the florist to hold the arrangement under ‘Tony Stark’. It was painfully obvious Morgan was his daughter, so it was also easy to denote that her name would be Morgan Stark.

Still. The kid had remembered, out of all the names and people he’d seen in the months since.

It didn’t take long for the young man to finish up with the customer, and then the florist stepped around the counter, coming towards them with a broad smile. Tony desperately tried to remember the guy’s name, even as he found himself distracted by the lazy-casual outfit the teen wore. 

His nails were painted purple. 

“Peter! Mommy needs flowers for her birthday!” Morgan shrilled in greeting, and Tony could feel his expression twist. She said it so simply, as if ‘Mommy’ was just at work or home and it made that familiar sinking weight in his chest grow. In front of them Peter’s nose scrunched when he smiled, and he set his hands on his hips in mock thought. 

“Hm, that’s a good present for a birthday! Do you know what flowers Mommy likes best? Or her favourite colours?” The florist - Peter - was just as cheerful as Tony vaguely remembered him being the last time. Tony piped up before Morgan could talk again. 

“Same as last time. Please. Colourful.”

Peter seemed to get it instantly. His cheerful smile took on the softest warmth for a moment, before it became vibrant and lively again as he looked down at Morgan. “I think we can manage that, hm? If your Daddy doesn’t mind you being my assistant for a few minutes?”

“Daddy doesn’t mind,” Morgan answered on his behalf, and Tony found he didn’t have the motivation to argue, standing back and watching and Peter let Morgan pull him all around the store, pointing out every bright and pretty flower she came across. 

Against his own will, something fragile and new began to bloom in his chest. It felt horrifyingly like warmth, like something...Verging on fond.

And it wasn’t entirely for Morgan. 

The florist was a natural with her. He didn’t talk to her like most people talked to young children, infantizing and almost condescending. He listened intently to every word she said and taught her little snippets about each flower she pointed out, letting her touch the petals and letting her tow him around without ever reaching for her first, mindful of the fact that she was not only her own person, but the young child of a stranger.

He allowed himself to briefly imagine what it would have been like if Pepper had lived. If they’d had a son before Morgan, so she could grow up with a doting older brother that would smile at her the same way and indulge her every whim. Another doting family member to wrap around her little her finger. 

“And one for Daddy too!” brought him out of his twisted musings and he looked across the room. Peter stood with a little wicker basket full of orange and red flowers, and Morgan had what looked to be a tulip tucked behind one ear. 

Peter was holding another in his hand, and when he looked up the teen tipped his head a little, arching a brow with a smile that said may I?

He grunted, and while Morgan busied herself with preening in a tiny mirror, Peter crossed the room towards him.

“She’s wonderful. I hope if I ever have children, they turn out like her,” the teen murmured as he reached out and carefully tucked the flower into the breast pocket of Tony’s jacket. This close he smelt like flowers and a refreshing undertone, like clean water. 

There was flower pollen in his hair and his lips were bitten a rosy pink. Freckles dusted the bridge of his nose in the barest hint of colour. 

“She takes after her Mother,” he said it before he could even think about the words, but Peter’s smile remained steady and warm, with none of the usual overly sweet pity he was often met with. 

“She takes after you, too. The perfect mix, I imagine.” And was that... A touch of teasing, maybe? The slightest sparkle in those eyes? Tony shifted under the scrutiny and looked over Peter’s shoulder, back to his daughter. 

He supposed it was true. Morgan had every bit her Mother’s personality, but looks wise she’d taken after him the most. Her dark hair, fair skin and shapely jaw were all his features. 

“She’s better than I am,” he breathed after a moment. She had none of his bitterness, none of his cynical bones. Perhaps it was her youth, but not even losing her Mother had soured her outlook on life. When he looked back Peter was still staring at him, and Tony realised just how close they were still standing. 

Evidently, he wasn’t the only one. 

“Are you gonna kiss ‘im?” Morgan asked from a little way across the shop, and Tony jerked, looking at her in alarm, but Peter simply gave a light chuckle, turning away and moving back towards the counter. 

“Your Daddy is very handsome, but I’ve got to organise these flowers for your Mommy! If I get started, do you think you’ll remember to come back in twenty minutes when they’re ready?” 

Morgan solemnly promised to be back here in exactly, precisely twenty minutes, and immediately demanded that Tony took her to find some juice. Tony held her hand as they walked out of the store, and he frowned down at her. 

“Don’t say things like that again, sweetheart. I’m not going to kiss random people. Especially not on Mommy’s birthday.” It came out perhaps a little sharper than he’d intended, and he bought her an extra juice to make up for the almost hurt way she’d looked up at him afterwards. 

The flowers were just as beautiful as last time. He left Peter with another tip, and tried to ignore how Morgan spent ages telling Pepper’s tree all about the ‘pretty flower boy’ that was ‘her and Daddy’s new best friend’. 

He didn’t have the heart to correct her, and he had the sneaking suspicion that the next time she came with him to get flowers for something, she’d drag him straight back to The Natural Gallery. 

He was half right, as it turned out. Morgan’s apparent adoration for the florist had transferred into a love for flowers, which became a blatant excuse to visit Peter again when it became clear Tony didn’t know anything about plants beyond shoving seeds into the soil of their backyard and hoping for the best. 

“Peter will know!” she announced, after five minutes of the two of them standing helplessly in the plant food aisle of their local gardening store, staring at no less than forty different brands and bottles of plant feed. 

“Honey, he’s just a store florist, he might not know everything about actual horticulture,” Tony tried valiantly, but she would hear none of it, and first thing the next morning she woke him up by kicking him squarely in the middle of the spine and shouting PeterPeterPeter!

Thus, he found himself hobbling gingerly into The Natural Gallery barely an hour after its opening time, grimacing at the early morning sunshine and cradling his coffee, which he’d had to pour into a travel mug because the longer he’d taken to drink it, the darker Morgan’s stare had gotten. 

“Hi! Welcome to-- Tony?” Peter came up short where he’d popped around the corner, looking surprised to see them. It had been less than three weeks since their last visit, and the teen looked the most put-together Tony had ever seen him, far too chipper for this hour. 

Morgan greeted him with a wave that bordered on violent, and she promptly ditched Tony in the doorway to bound up to the counter. 

“We want a pretty garden but Daddy is useless and doesn’t know anything about flowers, so you have to come to our house and help us!”

Tony shot upright then cringed and reached for his back like an old man. 

“Now, hang on. We never said anything about him coming over,” he warned Morgan, casting Peter an apologetic glance as he forced himself to catch up to his runaway child, giving her a stern look when he finally leaned against the counter. Morgan, unperturbed, looked at him like he was a simpleton. 

“How else is he gonna help us plant flowers? Duh, Daddy,” she huffed at him, before she looked back across at Peter. 

“I want pretty flowers like the ones you have. Daddy bought all the seeds and everything but it still looks plain and boring.”

He was almost offended on behalf of his garden. He had a very nice lawn, thank you very much, and the few flowers that had somehow survived with Pepper being there to care for them still came doggedly back every year. 

“Morgan. You know the rules about going to strange people’s houses and inviting strangers home,” he reminded her pointedly, mock flicking her between the eyes. 

“But Peter is our friend, and you said friends are allowed home as long as I ask and you make sure its safe!” Morgan protested, and Peter cooed. 

“Aw, I think you’d be a wonderful friend, Morgan, but your Daddy is right. But! How about I give you and your Daddy some tips to write down for getting a really nice garden, and maybe you can take pictures when it all blooms and come show me?” Peter’s looked up at Tony when he said it, and Tony found he couldn’t do anything except - somehow - smile. 

God, Pepper would have loved this kid. 

It took Peter offering Morgan a freshly bloomed pink lily for her to fully accept the fact that she couldn’t bring her new ‘friend’ home, but eventually she came around to the idea, and Tony found himself in a surprisingly spacious back area of the store, surrounded by various floristry supplies and flower off-cuts and Peter tapped around on a slightly beaten up laptop, showing them different plants that were generally ‘safe bets’ to have in a garden, fertiliser types and the most common downfalls many a hopeful gardener faced when starting out. 

As Morgan leafed intently through one of the many flower-based magazines laying around, Tony forced himself to speak. 

“Sorry. She gets ahead of herself.” He didn’t need to elaborate on what he was referring to, but Peter just cast him a broad, warm smile, and nudged their shoulders together lightly. 

“Don’t apologise. She’s a delight. I almost wish I was her age again. I don’t mind when you guys come here. It makes the day a little bit brighter. Who knows, maybe one day I might even get to see you smile.”

And Peter more or less embodied the smiley face emoticon at the end of the sentence, grinning sunnily at Tony before Morgan thrust a magazine page in his face and demanded to know what flower was being shown in the picture. 

They left with a stack of print-outs and magazines, and as Morgan sat in the car on the way home she looked across at him thoughtfully. 

“Peter is very pretty.” She probably meant it as a question, but it came out so firmly it sounded like a statement. He let the car roll to a stop and side-eyed her warily. 

Was this her first crush? No, it couldn’t be. She was six. Tony hadn’t had his first crush until... Okay, yeah, no. It could very well be her first crush. 

“Do you think so?” he asked after a moment, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. She looked at him like he’d just asked her what 1+1 was, and rolled her eyes before she looked forwards again, apparently not dignifying him with a response. 

The next morning she woke him up right at the strike of six, and not even an hour later he found himself on his knees in the dirt of the garden, diligently rooting around in the dirt to pluck out weeds, rocks and to replace no less than half of the dirt with fertiliser from a big, stinky bag while Morgan dutifully moved each and every critter they came across to safety. 

It took him four hours, but eventually every border of the garden had been re-dug, replanted and soaked through with the garden hose. Tony schlepped off to the shower with a groan, almost regretting the outcome of raw dogging his wife, no matter how good it had felt at the time. 

He lathered himself up thoroughly and felt somewhat more alive by the time he made his way downstairs for another well earned cup of coffee. 

To his both his joy and his dismay, gardening with Morgan became A Thing. Twice a week if it didn’t rain they dragged the hose out of the garage and watered all the grass and tiny little green shoots and once every two weeks they both found themselves kneeling in the dirt to painstakingly weed the soil and make sure their little ‘baby flowers’ as Morgan called them were growing unhindered and healthy. 

Perhaps worst of all, he found himself thinking about Peter each time he tended to the garden or watched Morgan chat excitedly to her teachers and friends about all her new flowers and the pretty flower boy who taught her and her Daddy how to have a nice garden. 

He thought of that sunny smile and those bright eyes, the curls that permanently looked like the kid had just woken up and the random assortment of clothing he seemed to just roll out of bed and throw on. 

He’d had one or two hook ups since Pepper had died. Had briefly tried dating before he’d found he hated the differences too much, hated the lingering cloud of Pepper over each potential relationship, hated the way other kisses tasted like betrayal. Yet here he was, thinking about the lips on a kid he’d met three times. 

Almost three months had passed, and Morgan had dragged him back to the gardening store to see if they had any pretty ornaments they could put in the garden. He turned to ask her if she wanted to bunny or the fox when he realised with a jolt of cold panic that she was no longer at his side. He tried to calm himself and glanced up and down the aisle, but she wasn’t in sight either. 

Alright. Calm. She was probably the next aisle over. She knew not to wander off without telling him, but maybe she’d been distracted or he just hadn’t heard her. He set the ornaments down and jogged to the end of the aisle, stepping around the other one. No Morgan. No Morgan in the one on the opposite end, either. 

“Fuck!” he huffed, spinning on his heel. The checkout desks? Maybe she’d tried to find a toilet-

“Tony!”

He spun on his heels and stared as he spotted Peter trotting towards him, hand in hand with one Morgan Stark, who looked happy but a little meek, especially once she met his eye. 

“Hey, Mr. Stark. I’m so sorry, I was here buying seeds and I turned around and she was right there. She said she was here with you and she saw me walking and wanted to say hello. We came straight back to you, didn’t we, Miss. Stark?” Peter asked, looking down at where Morgan hung off his arm like a guilty koala. 

“Uh huh. Because walking off from Daddy without saying isn’t good and makes him sad.” She evidently repeated from something Peter had said, looking up at the florist before she let go of his hand and bounded across to Tony, clinging to him when he lifted her up. 

“Sorry Daddy. I didn’t want to make you said. I just wanted to see Pretty Peter,” she mumbled into his shoulder. 

Peter’s cheeks were pink when Tony looked across at him again, and there was soil under his pink fingernails and dusted on his shoulders. 

He took in a breath. 

“Well... Maybe I can give Pretty Peter my number. Just so next time you run off because he’s better looking than me, he can call me so I don’t get sad, huh, bug?” he ran a soothing hand down her back when she pulled away to grin and him, and Peter’s cheeks looked like hot coals by the time Tony hesitantly glanced up at him. 

“I’d like that,” the florist beamed at him, shuffling sweetly on the spot. “And, for the record... I think you’re plenty good looking.”

[passable-talent]

Going with Ani to free his mom because you know it’s such a big moment for him (and obviously being there for the aftermath)

oof. here I go to make myself angsty for the evening

same day request answering. its like its april.

Padme Amidala is a really good person. It pretty much all comes back to that. 

She’s kind. She’s empathetic. She recognizes when someone is in pain, and when someone needs help. She understands when an unwise course of action is one that needs to be taken. 

So, of course, she understood when the Jedi apprentice meant to protect her instead wanted to run away to his birth planet and help his mother. Of course she did. 

Though, level headed as she was, she thought that it might be wise to gather up another Jedi. To watch over her while Anakin was distracted, or possibly to help Anakin face whatever plagued his mother. 

She suggested Anakin call upon Obi-Wan, which he refused. Obi-Wan’s mission was just as important, and if he knew what Anakin planned, Anakin would never be allowed to go.

So, instead, he called for you. 

You were also a Jedi apprentice, at that time training between missions at the temple on Coruscant. Your master, Shaak Ti, trusted you immensely, and granted you permission to leave on your own. You commanded a Starfighter and were on your way- opening a com to Anakin en route. You had never been to Tatooine before, but had heard about it whenever Anakin felt like sharing his childhood. As his closest friend other than his master, you knew how much his mother weighed on his soul, and how much he had wished that Qui-Gon could have saved her, too. You had known that one day, he would try to return. He had promised his Shmi as much. 

Anakin’s reunion with Watto was tense for just about everyone there. You didn’t know the terrain, you barely knew Padme, you certainly didn’t know Watto, but you felt the impatience rolling off of Anakin. It put you on edge, and so as he followed Watto into the shop, you kept pace behind Padme, ensuring her safety. It was the one thing you felt you were capable of doing, the one thing you could control. 

Anakin wasn’t very talkative. Padme tried- but he was a focused man, and felt closer to finding his mother than he had in a decade. You were a silent support, beside the senator, as though you could take some of the weight off of Anakin’s shoulders. Every emotion he experienced seemed to radiate out from him, and it almost made your head pound to get blasted with them all- the guilt, the fear, the anger. You just hoped that he’d find his mother alive, or else, you imagined, this would get so much worse. 

When you left the ship again, you found yourself in the most flat, barren landscape you’d ever seen. Growing up among the skyscrapers of Coruscant, it was almost unfathomable, to look out at the horizon and see nothing between you and it. 

There was, however, one little building, which you could gather was your destination. And a droid. 

Anakin’s mind must have been clouded by his emotion, or maybe he just wasn’t showing it, because you could feel that something was off. From the moment C-3PO requested to go inside, you knew that there was nothing but bad news here. You couldn’t say anything, though- you felt it wasn’t your place. Anakin was among his family, now, even if they’d never met him, and he needed to hear it from them. 

You could tell. Shmi Skywalker was gone. 

“It was just before dawn,” Cliegg Lars explained, “they came out of nowhere. A hunting party of Tusken Raiders.” You had heard of them before- in Anakin’s ramblings of the pod racing he did as a child. You sat at the end of the table opposite Cliegg, though it did feel informal. The head of the table was meant for anyone other than you, surely- but Anakin had his place at Cliegg’s right hand, and Owen at his left. 

“Your mother had gone out early, like she always did, to pick mushrooms off the vaporators.” At the very least, you were silently happy that Shmi had spent her last years as a free woman with a husband that clearly cared about her greatly. 

“From the tracks, she was about halfway home...” Your heart broke with every word for Anakin Skywalker, who had spent years dreaming of returning for his mother, only to arrive too late. “...When they took her.” Anakin’s face was devoid of clear emotion, but you knew him well- you could see that famous temper brewing inside of him. But, this was more than a frustration. This was so much deeper than that. 

“Those tuskens walk like men,” Cliegg continued with a sigh, “but they’re mindless, vicious monsters. Thirty of us went out after her, four of us came back.” You lowered your head in respect, but kept your eyes on your friend, whose brows were tightly knit. He was thinking, mulling it over, considering, processing. You couldn’t blame him, but wished you could make it easier. 

“I’d be out there with them, but...” Cliegg, too, was weighed down by his grief. His loss, you could see, was still just as raw as Anakin’s. “After I lost my leg, I just couldn’t ride anymore, until I heal.” Anakin’s heart seemed to break open wider with every moment that passed him by, and Cliegg continued, trying to reassure his lost stepson that his mother hadn’t died unloved. 

“I don’t want to give up on her, but she’s been gone a month.” Unimaginable it was how much it must’ve hurt Anakin to know that he had missed her by only a month. “There’s little hope she’s lasted this long.”

And there it was- the clear implication to Anakin that his mother was not only gone, but dead. That there was a finality to it, and nothing he could do. You watched him, carefully, as he turned his head, and clearly you could see that he didn’t take such helplessness well. 

He stood, and you made to do the same, but the both of you were interrupted by Owen, asking Anakin’s intensions. 

“To find my mother,” Anakin said, and you let out a short breath. 

“Your mother’s dead, son,” Cliegg said, with the voice of a heartbroken husband, “Accept it.” 

Anakin left without a word. 

You followed, knowing his plan. 

“Anakin, it’s dangerous,” you told him, and he turned, shaking his head. 

“I’m going. I have to.” 

“I know,” you said, and in the gaze you shared with him, he realized that you meant to come with him. 

Padme emerged from the entrance, and her gaze met yours. You nodded, and she gathered that you hadn’t been able to stop him. You hadn’t tried. 

“You’re gonna have to stay here,” you said, a little more hardness in your tone than you had intended. “You’ll be safe until we return.” Anakin stood behind you, grief and anger rolling off of him, and though she could not feel the Force, Padme clearly could see a man in pain. After all, Padme Amidala is a really good person. She walked to him and gave him a brief hug. 

“We won’t be long,” you promised as they parted, and as she retreated inside, you followed him to the speeder. 

The longer he rode, the more anguish he felt. He hardened before you, from a boy who lost his mother, to a man who sought revenge. You could only hope you would serve to curb the damage. 

Just after nightfall you reached the encampment of the raiders, their domes still lit by dying fires. You deferred to Anakin’s lead, assuming that he would know your enemy better than you. It had been a while since the two of you had gone on a mission together- if the atmosphere were less dire, you might have even enjoyed it. 

You don’t know how he chose which dome to enter, but it was the right one. You felt the world change when Anakin laid eyes on the bloodied woman tied to a post, like you were recognizing her yourself. Shmi Skywalker, still alive.

“Go,” you whispered, stationing yourself between the opening of the dome and the opening Anakin had created. His reunion was his own, and you gave him the best security and privacy you could. It was astounding that she had survived, all this time, and for a moment you were filled with hope, joy, that he had disobeyed Cliegg and searched for her anyway. Otherwise, she likely never would have been found. You kept your eyes to the night outside the dome, a lookout, your breathing calm with the joy and love and relief that Anakin had once again allowed into his body. 

And then you felt it change. 

You whirled around, and she was dead, and Anakin’s silence was suddenly all you could hear. The world was turning red around the both of you as he felt the grief of his mother’s death for a second time, and his eyes lifted to yours. 

“Anakin,” you breathed, knowing nothing else to say. His grief hardened into anger, but he gently closed her eyes and held her close. You didn’t know what to do. Panic hit you hard as his anger curdled into rage, and his eyes lifted. 

“Anakin, we need to take her home,” you said, hoping to deflect his focus. He didn’t listen. 

As he lowered her gently to the floor so that he could stand, you tried to move into his way, and successfully you cupped his face, catching his eyes for just a moment. In them, you didn’t see the anger you felt from him. In them, you saw so much sadness. 

And so you let him go. 

It wasn’t the Jedi way, you knew that. And you wished you could will yourself to move, to stop him, because the pain that his actions would cause would haunt him, possibly for the rest of his life. But it felt as though he needed this, as though it was the only thing that would sate his soul. So you breathed mantras, and did your best to combat his anger with peace, thinking that it might invade him. 

And when the Tusken Raiders had all given their last breaths to Anakin Skywalker, you went to him. 

He collapsed to his knees under his own weight, no longer grieving but feeling a consuming emptiness. You had to force yourself to block it out as you ran to him, and pulled him against you. Never before had you felt someone who needed a hug so bad, and only then did he begin to break, knotting his fingers into the robes at your back. He buried his face, but did not cry, and you stayed as long as he needed you to. 

You drove home. He held his mother, behind you, cradling her like she had once held him. You rode through sunrise, back to Cliegg’s home, where quickly you were met by Owen, Padme, Cliegg, Beru. You dismounted quickly and retreated, knowing that this was Anakin’s moment, and his alone. His anger had returned, but it didn’t feel so sharp anymore- it was anger and sadness and frustration, and it just felt to you like pain. Incredible pain. 

You stayed in the room with him, wherever he went, continuing the strategy you’d had back at the camp. You held peace in your chest, and hoped that he could feel it the way you felt his pain. You hoped it would calm him. His pain did not fade, but it did dull, and for a while as he tinkered with the shifter, it felt as though maybe the anger had drained from his body. 

Padme entered with two meals, and she handed one to you before approaching Anakin, her footsteps light, but her presence noticeable. 

“I brought you something,” she said over his shoulder, and when he didn’t respond, she moved around to his front. “Are you hungry?”

“The shifter broke,” he told her, and if it wouldn’t have taken from your concentration you would’ve chuckled. He avoided the question- you knew he hadn’t eaten in at least a day. “Life seems so much simpler when you’re fixing things.” You would give anything to have back the boy you’d trained with on Corellia. So heavy Anakin felt now, with everything that had happened. You wished you could give him back the peace he had once felt. Padme looked to you briefly as she moved to set down the tray near Anakin, and you nodded. You’d get him to eat eventually. 

“I’m good at fixing things,” Anakin continued, “always was.” Padme turned back to him slowly, the both of you noticing the waver in his voice. “But I couldn’t...” he trailed off, putting down his tools. “Why’d she have to die? Why couldn’t I save her?” You sat up, more toward your feet, ready to approach him if you felt the need. He was getting ramped up again, but the jagged edges of his grief this time was less anger and more blame. Blame on the Tuskens, blame on himself. “I know I could have!” He turned from Padme and for the briefest of moments his eyes met yours, but he moved forward, away from both of you.

“Sometimes there are things no one can fix,” Padme said softly, and you kept your breathing steady to combat his erratic emotion. “You’re not all powerful, Ani.” 

“Well, I should be,” he said, giving her words no time to hang in the air. 

“Anakin,” you said, showing disapproval of such a thought, and for the first time wished Obi-Wan was there. 

“Someday I will be,” he insisted. “I will be the most powerful Jedi ever.” He turned to face you and Padme again, tears glistening on his face but his expression angry. You didn’t know what to say, even when he levied his gaze toward you. 

“I promise you. I will even learn to stop people from dying.” 

“Anakin,” it was Padme’s turn to say, and what he said next shook you to your core.

“It’s all Obi-Wan’s fault!” he shouted, “He’s jealous! He’s holding me back!” Anakin launched whatever he’d picked up across the room, and it clattered quietly before coming to rest. 

“You know that’s not true,” you said, quickly rising to your feet. You took a step closer to Anakin as he turned away, but did not get too near. 

“I know,” he conceded under his breath. Padme sensed what was really going on.

“What’s wrong, Ani?’ She asked, and finally you realized what was truly causing his pain, in this moment. He was looking at his hands as he stuttered the beginning of a sentence, the hands that had killed so many. 

The peace in your body faltered- if you had stopped him, he wouldn’t be grieving nearly so much now. It was your fault.

“I killed them,” he explained, “I killed them all. They’re dead- every single one of them.” He turned to Padme with rage at himself and the raiders twitching his lips, tears still falling from his eyes. “And not just the men, but the women and the children, too. They’re like animals, and I slaughtered them like animals!” You lowered your head, trying to push away your own guilt so that you could be there for him. His pain, you knew, was greater than yours. 

“I hate them!” 

Hate leads to suffering. 

As Anakin sank to the floor, you and Padme sat to flank his sides. You were his best friend, closer to him than anyone else in the world, and so you leaned against his side while Padme offered her words. 

“To be angry is to be human.” 

“I’m a Jedi,” Anakin insisted, “I know I’m better than this.”

“Most Jedi never know their parents,” you said softly, “and never form attachments. There is no one in a Jedi’s life who matters as much as your mother does to you. I’m sure you’re taking this with more grace than Master Windu would have.” Anakin didn’t laugh, but he did quiet, almost as though he believed you. Slowly you found the hand he held beside his knee, and gathered it into yours. 

Padme leaned forward and gave him the best hug she could from the side, but then left Anakin alone with you. 

She’s a good person, like that. 

“Anakin, I’ve known you for a long time,” you started quietly, “and all of that time I’ve known you to be a kind man. A compassionate man. Quick to anger, yes, but not to judgement. They earned your rage, and that’s okay. It does not outweigh all of the good you’ve done in your life.” His grip tightened on your hand, still his breathing erratic, but once again the jagged edges of his mind began to soften. You let silence drift into the room for a moment as he slowly evened. 

“She was beautiful,” you said, laying your head down onto his shoulder. He nodded, and slowly, there grew the beginning of a smile on his face. “And she won’t be forgotten.” 

-🦌 Roe

[nanoland]

new chapter (lucifer fic)

(earlier parts are here; whole thing is here) 

Ponder on the Narrow House, part 3 

Mazikeen + Eve + Michael, gen fic (for now), warning for gun violence 

0   

Along the California coastline, the cruise ship Illustrious Voyager bore four thousand three hundred and ten passengers, one thousand two hundred and ninety-six crewmembers, and two guide dogs.

Five thousand six hundred and eight souls, in total.

At around 4pm, without anyone noticing, that number became five thousand six hundred and nine.

Hands clasped behind her back, Eve strolled down the promenade, admiring the vessel’s size and beauty. This fresh new millennium’s wealth astonished her. Sickened, sometimes. Entranced, sometimes. But always astonished.

Back in the garden, they’d slept on and under rocks. When it rained, they got wet. When large animals came by, they hid. No weapons. No shelter. No blankets. The only resource they’d had in abundance was food. Good grief – so much food. God had been so proud of all the different fruits and nuts and mushrooms he’d made available to them, and Adam had been so grateful. Eve supposed she had been, too.

It hadn’t stopped her from one day approaching her husband and the plump rabbits resting in his lap – two of several dozen pets – and asking if he didn’t think the cold nights would be much more endurable if they each had a warm pair of fur slippers.

Then she’d met Lucifer. Fallen in love. Bitten the apple. Learned how powerful he and his Father truly were. That was when the real questions, the sticky, prickly questions, had come bubbling up.

If Lucifer has such a vast family, with so many siblings, why can’t I have even one? she’d asked the sky. Why is Adam all I get?

And later: If You can simply bring people into existence, why must I scream and bleed and shit myself in order to have children? Am I doing it wrong? Is there another way? If there isn’t, why not?

And later: Why is nothing fair?

And, most recently, after meeting Mazikeen: Why isn’t everything at least equally unfair? Why do humans get a world of options while Maze and her family are expected to serve angels from birth to death? Why isn’t Maze allowed into Heaven, even after an eternity of loyalty and hard work?

“Sorry,” she said, flashing white teeth at a passing crewmember. “I’m trying to find a friend of mine. Can you tell me how to get to Room 835?”

Half an hour later, there was a splash and the ship’s population dropped to five thousand six hundred and seven.

Before binding his arms and legs, Eve had secured Andrew Bismarck’s lifejacket and gagged him. Furious and helpless, he bobbed alongside her as the ship moved on and Mazikeen rowed up in her inflatable raft, wearing a sunset-orange swimsuit.

“Should I be worried about those, babe?” she asked as she gripped Bismarck’s lifejacket and hauled him out of the water.

Eve smiled at the dolphin pod swimming in playful loops around her, and patted the nearest one’s nose. “No. They’re my friends.”

The inflatable wasn’t big enough for three people, so Eve held on to a friend’s dorsal fin and let him drag her back to The Choronzon.

Michael stood on the deck, looking bored. As they climbed aboard, their prisoner slung over Mazikeen’s shoulder, he drawled, “Seriously? This sad specimen’s worth two million dollars?”

“Actually, his net worth is eight hundred million,” said Mazikeen, dumping him down. “Two million is just what his ex-wife is willing and able to pay.”

Wringing out her hair, Eve added, “She took half his money in the divorce but she gave almost all of it to a chimpanzee shelter. I really like her!”

His lip curled. “How delightfully sordid. Isn’t this all a little beneath you, Ms Mazikeen? I mean, you’re a big deal in Hell. High Commander of Lucifer’s legions, head advisor to the king himself. Aren’t you worried taking jobs like this diminishes you?”

Busy handcuffing Bismarck to the railing, Mazikeen said, “Eve, honey? Do me a favour?”

“Boop!” Eve chirped, having already snuck up behind Michael, and pushed him overboard.

“I know it’s your whole gimmick,” Mazikeen called down as he splashed and spluttered, his face red with princely indignation. “And I know you don’t have a lot else going for you. But the next time you try that on me, I will stop being nice. Kapish?”

“Kapish,” he muttered.

The Choronzon had barely travelled a mile before Eve spotted Bismarck’s henchmen coming after them.

“Someone gimme details!” shouted Mazikeen, busy putting a bulletproof vest on over her bikini and opening up the box she’d told Dan contained a fishing rod, not a halberd.

Eve peered through her binoculars. “Two speedboats. Twelve guys on jet skis. Guns everywhere.”

“Heh. Awesome. Mickey – move that tight ass to the front and make like a nice juicy target.”

“Wait, what about-…” Michael began, trailing off as Mazikeen dove gracefully into the sea.

Bouncing from foot to foot, Eve shot him a grin. “Don’t look so glum, sourpuss. This is the fun part.”

She’d never spoken to Michael in Heaven, despite the millennia they’d both resided only two miles apart, her in a lakeside cottage on the outskirts of the Silver City, him in the crystal palace in its centre.

Granted, she’d not exactly had a warm and fuzzy relationship with any of Lucifer’s siblings. They all knew what had happened in the garden. Some had been nice – Amenadiel had visited often, even though he’d never had much to say and they’d spent their time together skipping stones across the lake’s surface. But the others had kept her at a distance. She was a bad influence.

Michael, however, was the only angel she’d not ever said one word to.

She’d seen him, now and then, in the early days, when she was the only human in Heaven and, as such, grudgingly invited to divine family get-togethers. On those occasions, she’d spent too much time feeling awkward and out-of-place to pay attention to the sullen figure lurking in whatever shadows were available. The one time she’d glanced his way, it had been to marvel at the stories of people getting the twins mixed up; beyond the raw basics of bone structure, Michael couldn’t have looked less like her old lover.

Bullets sprayed across the hull. Humming, Eve stepped daintily into Michael’s shadow, seconds before they started bouncing off his shoulders and chest.

“It is beneath her,” he muttered.

She made an ambiguous noise. “How d’you figure?”

There came a shout and a splash from the nearest jet ski. The bullets stopped.

“C’mon. She’s Mazikeen. Everyone in the Silver City knows about Mazikeen. Ordinarily, we couldn’t give two dry shits about Lucifer’s minions, but her? She’s a minor celebrity. The power behind Hell’s throne. Christ, it’s no secret my beloved twin couldn’t govern his way out of a paper bag.”

“Yeah,” she said, smiling fondly. “He’s kind of bad at everything. Except music. He’s a great musician.”

More shouting. More shooting. More bullets bouncing off Michael’s torso. Mazikeen rode by, one hand gripping her newly-acquired jet ski’s throttle lever, the other clutching her bloodstained halberd. Watching her circle the enemy, Eve was reminded of a sheep dog.

Michael went on: “And then there’s the fact that for a while, everyone thought Lucifer was going to marry her. It was all anyone could talk about. Jophiel was taking bets on when the proposal would happen. She’d have been High Commander and the Queen of Hell. Instead? All of a sudden, Lucifer takes an indefinite vacay to the mortal realm, drags her with him, and next thing anyone knows, she’s working behind a bar.”

The remaining jet skis and their terrified, wounded riders had been neatly rounded up, which meant it was time for Eve to open her purse.

“Um – how long have those been in there?” asked Michael, watching her take out three grenades.

“You want one?” she offered. “Don’t forget to take the pin out before you throw it. I did that my first time.”  

One thing to be said for millions of dull, dull years spent sitting next to God’s Greatest Warrior, skipping stones across a lake; your aim got good.

The first blast was a warning, not close enough to actually kill any of Bismarck’s men, though the resultant waves did knock several into the water. They tried to retreat, turning their vehicles around, only to remember Mazikeen, corralling them single-handed and now armed with machine guns she’d confiscated from those already bested.

When they saw the second and third grenade incoming, they gave up and abandoned the jet skis, jumping into the sea and swimming for their lives.

“Fuck!” Michael yelped, blocking his ears at the concomitant explosions.

Gazing past the debris and smoke, Eve saw Mazikeen head for the nearest of the two speedboats. Its occupants, preoccupied with aiming a rocket launcher at The Choronzon, saw her coming far too late.

“I get your point,” said Eve, as her girlfriend and her halberd made short work of the crew. “But that’s a really… how can I put this? It’s a really angelic way of looking at things. Maze doesn’t consider anything ‘beneath her’.”

“Wow. Sick burn. You’re basically admitting she has no pride.”

“Oh, she’s got pride. Tons of pride. Her pride’s just dependant on how well she does a job, not on the type of job she has. She wasn’t happy working at Lux, but that wasn’t because she thought bartending was ‘beneath her’; it was because she prefers doing things she’s good at. Customer service isn’t really one of her strengths.”

The second speedboat was abandoned by its crew mere seconds before Mazikeen rammed the first speedboat into it, cackling victoriously.

“Actually,” Eve said, moving from Michael’s shadow to where Mazikeen had earlier set a crate of peach soda – her favourite – out on the deck, “now that you mention it, I guess I’m the one with no pride. Haven’t really ever had anything to be proud of. Your Dad never gave me the chance. I was never meant to do things. I was just meant to be.”

Michael snorted. “Lucky you. Trust me; he may have softened in his later years, but back in the day he never, ever stopped riding our asses. You think Lucy really rebelled because he had better plans for how the universe should be run? Because he was an innovator? Nope. Lazy dick just hated being told to do his chores.”

By the time Mazikeen swam back to them, saltwater had washed off the blood and her ponytail had come loose.

“Oh, hey,” said Eve, gripping her hand and pulling her up. “A mermaid.”

After pressing a rough kiss to her cheek and taking a swig of peach soda, Mazikeen asked, “You okay? He did his job?”

Eve patted the angel’s shoulder – the one that wouldn’t hurt. “He was terrific! Awesome addition to the team.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Michael mumbled.

Ignoring him, Mazikeen snatched up a towel to dry her hair. “Glad to hear it. Alright! Let’s get Bismarck back to shore, get paid, and find a place to have dinner so we can toast Team Hellrazor’s first successful mission.”

“R-A-Z-O-R,” Eve informed Michael. “To make it cooler.”

[tatooines-ghosts]

For the kiss prompt. If it works maybe some platonic affection for Jango and Anakin in the au. If platonic doesn't work... 👀

Thank you, Nonny!

I think I managed to find some platonic kisses (with bonus Keldabe Kissed because mandalorians) but I maybe went and made things sad...

I picked #39, Kissing tears from the other's face.

Minor content warning for pregnancy/premature-birth related trauma and anxiety.

Send me a Kiss Prompt for Valentine's day!

💋💋💋💋💋

Jango woke with a start the instant his bedroom door slid open. He’d always been a light sleeper – hazard of the job when he sometimes slept in unfriendly company – and nobody ever had any good reason to come to him in the middle of the night. He could tell from the dark silhouette in the dark doorway it was Anakin.

“Jango?”

Her voice sounded tight, hoarse.

Jango turned on the light to illuminate a pale, terrified Anakin, one hand on her round belly, the other holding onto the door frame as if it was the only thing keeping her upright. Jango smelled the blood before he saw it on her night dress and running down her legs. He was on his feet in a heartbeat.

“Something’s wrong…” Anakin said weakly, taking a stumbling step forward.

Jango barely managed to catch her. “I’m taking you to medical.” He scooped Anakin into his arms, carried her out of their apartment, and only stopped long enough to jam his elbow into one of the intercoms and forewarn the medical ward of the incoming emergency.

The Kaminoans were ready, taking Anakin from his arms and into one of the surgical wards. Jango answered what questions he could – which weren’t many – and then had to wait outside the ward window for news. After an excruciating half hour Wei Luma came back with good news and bad news.

The bad news, the baby was on his way several months before his expected due date. The good news, the Kaminoans were perfectly equipped to ensure both Anakin and the baby came out of this perfectly healthy.

Jango had been let into the surgical ward whole they prepared Anakin. They put up a shield, so she couldn’t see, and tasked him with the job of keeping her calm. Kind of an impossibility, given the circumstances, but Jango did what he could. He took Anakin’s hand, and told her every assurance that came to mind. Jango was good a projecting an icy cold demeanor, even as his heart felt like it would pound right out of his chest, and his strength seemed to hearten Anakin.

The surgery was fast, and within a few minutes the baby had been moved to a gestation pod and it was time to get Anakin patched up.

“Go with him,” Anakin urged, her voice weak and slurred from the cocktail of medications they’d given her. She was barely handing onto consciousness and probably wouldn’t rest unless he went.

“I will.” Jango squeezed her hand. “I’ll go watch him. You rest, recover. He’ll be here when you’re ready.”

There was no mistaking the relief on Anakin’s face as her eyes slid closed. Jango gave her hand one last squeeze before getting up to follow the gestation pod.

It was… shocking to see the baby like that, floating unconcerned in the gestation pod. He looked too small, almost skeletal there didn’t seem to be any muscle on him, much less the fat reserves a full-term fetus would have. He was underdeveloped, it was way too early for him to have been born. Seeing a baby in this stage should not have been a shock to Jango – every single clone had gone through the exact same developmental stage while gestating, and he had watched Boba develop in his pod. He just… hadn’t expected to see Anakin’s baby like this.

Jango laid his hand on the pod’s glass and then rested his forehead gently on the glass. “Hang in there, verd’ika, be strong.”

Jango sat with the baby for an hour until Wei Luma came to him. “Anakin will be under sedatives for a few more hours. We will call you when she wakes. The baby is doing well too.”

Jango checked the time. It was morning now; Shila would be waking up soon. She would need him there. Jango got to his feet, stretching stiff joints.

“Will you move him to Anakin’s recovery room. She’ll want to see him when she wakes up.”

Wei Luma assured they would take care of it. Jango trekked back to their apartment. Somehow, he wasn’t all that surprised to find Shila and Boba awake when he got home. They were curled on the couch together, Boba was holding a holobook but Jango didn’t think they were really paying attention to the story. As soon as he entered, Shila wiggled off the couch and ran to him tearfully.

“Buir Jango, where’s Ani?!”

Jango scooped her up and hugged her tightly. “Anakin had to go to medical, adika, but don’t worry, she’s all right.”

Shila buried her head in his shoulder and sniffed. “I wanna see her.”

“She’s sleeping right now, but maybe later this afternoon. Then we can all go see her.”

After Anakin had some time to come to terms, to recover, to compose herself.

When she called for Jango, he went alone. He found her in the recovery room, sitting at the edge of her bed, as close as she could get to the gestation pod. Silent tears were running down her cheeks, and she didn’t say anything as Jango sat next to her on the bed. She held one hand against the glass.

After a long moment of silence, she asked in a cracked voice. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No.” Jango said firmly. “Doctors said it might have been because of his hybrid genetics. Your bodies because incompatible… You were lucky to get so far.”

Anakin stifled a sob. Jango put an arm around her and she let him pull her into a hug.

Taking a comforting tone, he added, “You couldn’t have been in a better place. He’s perfectly healthy otherwise. He’ll be fine in the pod until he’s ready to be born.”

“I still feel like I failed. I did something wrong.”

Jango leaned his head down, brushing his lips gently over Anakin’s tear-streaked cheek, before resting his forehead against hers.

“You’ve done the best you can. You gave him the best chance he could have in this galaxy. You did everything right.”

[hldailyupdate]

Playtime With Harry Styles

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In 1D, Styles was making music whenever he could. “After a show you’d go in a hotel room and put down some vocals,” he recalls. As a result, his first solo album, 2017’s Harry Styles, “was when I really fell in love with being in the studio,” he says. “I loved it as much as touring.” Today he favors isolating with his core group of collaborators, “our little bubble”—Rowland, Kid Harpoon (né Tom Hull), and Tyler Johnson. “A safe space,” as he describes it.

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy, setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard charts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

“There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicks album cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness, is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles cuts a cool figure in this black-white-and-red-all-over checked coat by JW Anderson.

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matches.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence,” says Olivia Wilde

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

There are references aplenty in this look by Harris Reed, which features a Victoriana crinoline, 1980s shoulders, and pants of zoot-suit proportions.

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Diana bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”

[hlupdate]

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In 1D, Styles was making music whenever he could. “After a show you’d go in a hotel room and put down some vocals,” he recalls. As a result, his first solo album, 2017’s Harry Styles, “was when I really fell in love with being in the studio,” he says. “I loved it as much as touring.” Today he favors isolating with his core group of collaborators, “our little bubble”—Rowland, Kid Harpoon (né Tom Hull), and Tyler Johnson. “A safe space,” as he describes it.

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy,setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboardcharts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

“There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicksalbum cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness,is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matches.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence,” says Olivia Wilde

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Diana bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”

[raidbossmadi]

PLU: Mama Who Bore Us

Sold to the Atlas corporation at birth, Leda spent most of her early life as a corporate Siren lapdog to the Atlas corporation. Her handlers, members of the Eridian artifact requisition team who she was raised to see as her parents gave her the last name Calypso in reference to the daughter of the titanic Atlas, whether this was them being cruel or clever is up for debate.

Always clever herself Leda gave the Atlas researchers that cared for her a run for their money with her ever inquisitive mind. She questioned even her own Siren abilities and longed to know more about the natural world that was at her beck and call.

Having read stories of what happened when you poorly socialised a siren Leda’s childhood was mostly uneventful and she was allowed to interact with the children of the Atlas employee’s the only active research being done on her being tests of her power and genetic sequencing. Atlas had wanted a Siren for war but they realized that what they had was infinitely more valuable when Leda picked up the Eridian language and ran with it.

In her teen years Leda had a rebellious streak, trying to run away from the Atlas tower and got her first reminder that while she allowed freedoms Atlas considered her property. She had her Atlas asset number tattooed on the back of her neck and was fitted with a compliance collar usually only used on penal workers. This curbed her rebellious behaviour though at the back of her mind she knew one day she would escape Atlas control.

After being allowed to pursue a college education she attended Promethea University and majored in Galactic anthropology while minoring in Xenolinguistics, at the time of her graduation she was considered the person most fluent in Eridian this side of the six galaxies. Upon graduation she was conscripted into an Atlas Eridian Artifacts research team and sent across the galaxy to acquire knowledge about the lost civilisation and the vaults they built so that Atlas might lay claim to what was inside them. Leda of course had different motivations. Guided by Hesperia, the last bearer of her siren power, Leda was guided to Athenas to meet Siren Queen Dido. Dido warned her that as long as she was under the thumb of Atlas the knowledge she sought would be lost to her, but gave her a book written in Eridian and told her to hide it amongst her things, it was for her and her alone.

The book turned out to be the diary of Demeter, the Firstborn Nature Siren and in it detailed the life of the firstborn Siren and after Leda’s interest in the content she had written, Demeter came forth from the aether to speak to Leda directly. Demeter told her of their missing sister, whom she had loved beyond words and the treachery of the other firstborns that saw her love sealed away forever.

Leda knew what she was destined to do. This would be the push she needed to break her chains, she knew who she had to find to get her where she needed to be. It was too easy to crash the drop pod on Pandora and make her crewmates disappear never to be heard of again. She sought the one civilian Atlas had a file on that was as detailed as the one they had kept for her, Typhon Deleon, the man who found the vaults.

Her intent had been to use him to get what she wanted, a stepping stone in her plans that would be cast off when she no longer needed him. What she did not plan for however, was that this strange little man who saw the world so differently than the cold and calculated handlers she’d known her whole life behind Atlas walls. She scarcely knew what love was and yet she found herself falling head over heels in it. They were an odd couple, everyone who met them could attest to that but they worked. The vault hunter and the siren, none of their friends could disagree that they were a perfect match. They would talk for hours about topics even their most scholarly friends would end up losing the point on. When it was all said and done, they married after finishing their map to Nekrotafeyo said their goodbyes and took off into the great dark beyond.

The Centurion was an older transport class ship, nowhere near as impressive as the likes of Montgomery Jakobs “Family Jewel”  but it had a class 2 laboratory and medbay on board so it suited the needs of the couple just nicely. Typhon had said the ship had been in his family for decades and Leda could believe that.

As populated space disappeared behind them and travel continued they discussed the one thing Leda had never thought would be on the table: starting a family. They had never intended to stay on Nekrotafeyo, the plan was to go, explore, and see if the vault of the serpent truly held the lost siren. So the idea of escaping into the vast expanse of space after that, raising children among the stars, it was quickly becoming a goal Leda realized she wanted so they began to try for children.

What they did not expect was Nekrotafeyo’s gravity to be as strong as it was, the miscalculation combined with the Centurions age led to a rough landing destroying the landing gear and several important navigation tools as well as damaging the left engine. The reactor still worked so they had access to all the amenities of the starship but they were stranded unless they could set aside time for the dedicated repairs. There was much to explore on the planet though so they set it aside for a future problem.

Before long Leda was travelling from ruin to ruin translating the Eridian runes that survived all this time and examining their complex crystalline machinery that responded to her powers if she tried hard enough. Typhon built them a suitable home in the shadow of the Centurion out of scrap metal he had in the cargo hold and before long they realized they liked life away from the people who would use them for their specialized abilities and talents. Furthermore, though they had still not located the vault of the serpent they had a new discovery that was equally as exciting; Leda was pregnant.

Typhon had hoped that his wife would settle down in pregnancy worried for the safety of their unborn children however it only spurred Leda to continue her search for the missing vault. They found it and went to battle with the Serpent, a seven headed vault monster (demigod) that was ultimately defeated. In opening the vault released the spirit of Nyriad, the lost siren so frightened she latched to the first unclaimed female presence she felt, the unborn Tyreen.  Unaware that her daughter being the bearer of the siren power would have adverse effects on her unborn son Leda assumed that things would be fine from here on out, she had done what she had set out to do. Everything else was icing on the cake.

Of course it would not be the easy ‘retirement’ the twins were discovered to be conjoined close to their due date and Tern opted to perform an emergency C-section then and there to prevent losing them both. When the twins were delivered no one expected Troy to make it more than a few days. He was struggling to survive outside an isolette and despite being fed he wasn’t gaining weight.  As if guided by an instinct Leda desperate to keep her son alive offered a tiny bit of her power to her son and when his little red marked fingers crossed the glowing blue of her markings her offered power flowed into her son and his little red marking flared to life for the first time since he’d been cut from his sister.

She was so relieved, her children would make and she would give them the world. In the end of course she gave them so much more than that.