After the fighting is over, then come the hot baths, ice packs, resurrection from the dead, political maneuvering, and happy endings (not like that, Tony).

The dead fell. The dead fell, and Gendry’s heart was racing, pounding so hard inside of his chest that he could hear the blood rushing in his ears. Silence crept across the courtyard and the sound of his heart beating only got louder. Puffs of air left his lips in tiny, gasping breaths as he stared down at the mountain of bodies below. Next to him, Tormund, the ginger wildling who had somehow wound up next to him atop the heap, spun in a circle, surveying. Across the courtyard, Gendry could hear someone shout, “What is this?” “Is this a trick?” Someone else responded. “He did it,” Tormund breathed. His voice was as soft as a whisper. Gendry turned to him, his heart still pounding in his chest and his fingers still wrapped around his hammer so tightly that he could seldom tell where his skin began and the shaft ended. Tormund’s blue eyes turned to him, wide, joyous. “That bloody crow did it.” Gendry couldn’t speak.

Feral gets kidnapped by a Jedi Master. It's the best thing that's ever happened to him. Aka how Plo Koon’s foray into Sith-napping saved the galaxy, featuring galactic road-trips, daring expeditions into Sith strongholds, plenty of soul-searching, pirates, the Death Watch, senators with big blasters, more pirates, and three brothers who weren’t prepared for any of it.

A week after an attack that nearly killed him and his son, Jaster Mereel finds Mostross dead on a battlefield. His killer is a Jedi, grievously wounded, who Jaster takes into his care. By Mandalorian tradition, Jon Antilles owes him a life-debt, and Jaster is cunning enough not to let such a thing slip away. It's meant to be an entirely political arrangement. It doesn't stay that way for long.

The light overhead isn't from Minion island's overcast sky but instead a steel plated ceiling shining down fluorescence, glass and plastic bottles rattling on shelves against the walls. Everywhere there's monitors and familiar machinery and the distinct tang of antiseptic, sharp beyond the memory sense of blood and snow. For half a second Law looks at it all very blankly and thinks, What The Hell. Is he dreaming. Is he hallucinating. Is he just plain dead. His sight-line completes the rotation of this impossibility to fall upon speckled jeans and a long sweeping coat. And the man standing in front of Law has the blankest expression Law's ever seen. And the man standing in front of Law has Law's father's face. Underneath Law's blood-slicked fingers, Cora-san's pulse shudders. (This is a story where the past and the present collide. Wherein thirteen year old Trafalgar Law and twenty-six year old Rocinante tumble sideways through time-space via the blue desperation of a newly eaten devil fruit, from Minion island to a future distant. Right, unwittingly, onto the submarine deck of a another Law shortly after Doflamingo’s fall.)

This, Fox thinks, staring up at the fabric of the tent above him, is absolutely not what he remembers from before he closed his eyes. Right along with the realization comes the desperate, sinking sort of feeling that what he was most afraid of happened again. One step down the hallway in the Senate, heading somewhere, and then—

Not even two days later, Fox revised his opinion. This wasn’t a disaster. This was a Grade-A, first order, fresh off the hot plate fuckfest. Fox’s day had gone something like this: lay in bed. Get up. Knock back some of the sludge in the mess masquerading as caf. Go through forms. Fill out forms. Bust open a closet in which the Senators for Uyter and Kinyen had both managed to get “stuck” in. Go through more forms. Fill out more forms. Get called up to the Senate dome to tell a Senator that no, the Guard did not address noise complaints. Find that the stack of datapads on his desk had somehow tripled over the last two hours. Despair at the state of his inbox. Etcetera, etcetera. And then.