“Sir, please,” Kix says, the closest Cody has ever heard him to tears of frustration. It’s enough to make him stop dead, because Kix never sounds like that. “I just need to stitch you up, that’s all.”
With a sound of quiet sympathy, Kit reaches out, tapping his knuckles lightly against Rex's pauldron. “Forgive me, Captain, but I believe you would be far more comfortable without your armor. The beach cannot be a pleasant place for you right now.” Rex pauses, almost startled by the idea of taking his armor off. He’s on a mission, or at least the disastrous tail end of one, and unless he’s on leave, he almost never strips down to his blacks. And it’s been…months, since his last stretch of leave that wasn’t cut off before it even started. “Oh,” he says dumbly, and then flushes, reaching for the clasps on his armor. “Right, sorry, sir.”
“I'm not going to stay with the ship,” Anakin says, outraged. Savage closes his eyes, not quite praying for patience, but—reaching for it, certainly. Having a padawan has been good for his self-control in ways Savage hasn’t even wanted to consider too closely.
Getting flung five years into the past is pretty much a miracle. Crash-landing on the weirdest Jedi Master he's ever had the misfortune to meet is a lot more like one extended headache for Rex, especially when he also has to contend with a brand new Force sensitivity, old friends, a Force spirit wearing a familiar face, Sith Lords, ruthless cloners, and the looming shadow of a coming war. Maybe it really would have been easier to make like Obi-Wan and find a nice, sandy planet to bury himself on.
Quinlan finds a man frozen in carbonite on Geonosis. That's just the start of his problems.
“You have to take her to the crèche, Antilles,” Nico says sternly. Jon doesn’t clutch at the little Togruta girl, doesn’t bury her in his robes and hide her away from Nico's judgmental stare, doesn’t pick her up and run with her. Personally, he thinks it’s an admirable show of self-restraint, but given the downturn of Nico's mustache, he doesn’t agree.
Thire's grimace is apologetic, but that doesn’t stop him from saying, “We’ve got a guy from that group of infiltrators who got rounded up last night asking to speak with command.” Fox waits, brow raised, because if every lowlife who wanted to talk to command ended up in his office he’d never do anything else. Thire knows that, too. If this guy rates a mention, there’s a reason. Thire's expression says he needs a vacation, and also someone else willing to play messenger. “He says he’s a Jedi, sir.”
Jon Antilles has spent most of the war keeping his head down and staying out of the fighting. But when he and Fay find evidence of a new bioweapon going to production on a Separatist planet, they move to destroy it rather than let it be deployed against the clone armies. Dooku's presence is an unexpected complication, and rather than break cover, Jon lets himself be captured and thrown in the Count's personal dungeon. He's not the only one there, however. Rex and his men have also been captured, and they're not about to trust a stranger in their midst. Jon has to pick between keeping out of the war the way he has been or rescuing the clones, blowing his cover and losing the freedom he's fought so hard for.
Agen digs his fingers into the silver-veined bark, smiling a little. Pushes upright, flicking his hair back behind his shoulder, and pulls his outer robe off, draping it over a branch. “A trooper in distress,” he says, stepping forward. “I believe Jedi are supposed to rectify such things.” Two pairs of dark eyes snap to him, and Fives's widen with glee. He wriggles harder under Echo's pinning weight, like a landed fish, and cries, “General Kolar, help! I'm being overrun!”
“We’re getting a commander?” a loud voice asks, delighted as it carries through the trees.
“Leia, it’s fine,” a man says, and it’s not quite soothing. More entreating, and Boba wrinkles his nose, shifting slightly. His hands are cuffed behind him, and one of his captors was smart enough to steal the lockpicks from his belt. Boba hates smart enemies. “It’s not fine,” the woman says acidly. “Luke, he tried to kill us!” “Only once,” Luke says stubbornly. “And technically he was taking Han alive.”
Fox, Padmé, and a conversation about armor.
He knew the instant the flowers went away.
Tup gathers his courage, leans in. With a flicker of humor, Mace dips his head to meet him, taking the kiss without hesitation. Behind them, someone chokes.
The general is asleep. Not his general, of course. At least not officially. But Cody still pauses at the edge of the camp, caf in hand, and watches Mace breathe for a long, long moment before he steps closer and glances around them, checking whether anything has changed in the handful of minutes he was gone.
“Soon, padawan,” Qui-Gon says, and Obi-Wan doesn’t appreciate the amusement in his voice at all, but his disgruntled look doesn’t win him anything except a raised brow and the calmly bemused glance that always makes Master Windu eye Qui-Gon’s hair like he’s about to pull on it.
There's a moment of absolute silence as Fives and Echo trade startled glances, Rex gapes at Obi-Wan, and Kix and Jesse freeze, eyes widening. Then, deliberately, awkwardly, Rex clears his throat, face about four shades redder than it was a moment ago. “General, you—you know Quinlan?” No wonder they made it out of the smuggler’s mansion in one piece. Obi-Wan breathes in through his nose, lets it out, and then says, “Very well, yes. Quinlan Vos, I thought you were dead, and instead you were—were—playing hooker to a crime lord!”
The press of a body sliding into the bed behind him wakes Mace from a light sleep, too alert for any real sort of surprise, and he huffs as thick arms wrap around him, shift him. “So you took my invitation after all,” he says, and there's a sound behind him, rough and amused.
“I appreciate your willingness to indulge me, Commander,” Padmé says, keeping her eyes very firmly fixed forward as Tekla works. Just because she wants to stare doesn’t mean she will.
When one of Hondo's lieutenants unloads three kidnapped clones on him, Xanatos expects nothing but a massive headache and one more problem to deal with. He doesn't expect Kix, Jesse, and Tup to be the key to a power struggle that has been killing him by inches, and he most certainly doesn't expect all the shadows of his own past that Kix stirs up, even when they're supposed to be enemies.
When the massacre of the Tusken Raider village is uncovered, Anakin is recalled to Coruscant to face the Council's inquiry into his actions. Agen Kolar takes his place leading the 501st in a treacherous assault on forces trying to conquer Champala, but no one is happy with Anakin's sudden removal, his padawan and Torrent Company least of all. With little support in a campaign that's rapidly spiraling out of control and strange happenings starting to plague the battalion, Agen is in over his head, and Champala's oceans are more than deep enough to drown them all at the first misstep.
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.
“Well,” Kit says lightly. “This does seem to be a predicament, doesn’t it?” Pressed right up against him, gauntlets digging bruises into his almost-bare hips, Dogma squeezes his eyes tightly shut. “I'm going to kill my whole squad,” he says, perfectly certain and resigned to it.
When Boba shows signs of a very old ability from his mother's side of the family, Jango puts out a call to his mother's homeworld to find him a teacher, and to recruit two new trainers to join the Cuy'val Dar. Hakoda assumes it will be an easy way to earn a few extra credits and help his tribe. He's very, very wrong.
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.
When Mace joins the 212th on a dangerous world, it's meant to help them end the campaign there more quickly. But his presence there sets into motion something that started a thousand years ago, and won't be stopped so easily.
Mace's morning starts with far too much paperwork. Being kidnapped at blaster-point is honestly an improvement.
His head hurts, and Xanatos would very much like to find whoever chained him up facedown on a filthy stone floor and remove their spleen with a rusty spoon. (Or: Xanatos is not a Jedi, not a pawn, not in the right universe, and most of all he is not amused by any of this.)
In a sun-drowned field, Alina reaches for you with kohl-smudged hands, and the world in her eyes. Somewhere, she’s long since sketched the shape of you enough to commit it to muscle memory. Somewhere, she’s long since pressed you in between the two heaviest books she could find; breathless. There’s blood dripping from her palms.
“For as long as I can remember, a spirit has followed and assisted me,” Meng Yao said.
“Sect Leader Lan,” he said. “Please help me.” Lan Qiren stared down at him in horror, quickly crouching to pull Nie Mingjue up again. “Me? You can’t be serious!” “It has to be you,” Nie Mingjue said. “Sect Leader Lan, please. Please. It can’t be Wen Ruohan. It can’t.”
[“I just—“ Zuko begins, cuts himself off, opens his mouth to try again. Nothing comes out, and Sokka gives him a full-body squeeze to encourage him. “Maybe next time, you could, uh…” “Yes?” Rushing him does nothing but make him shut down, Sokka’s learned the hard way. Patience isn’t something that comes naturally, but it’s something that he’s learning, just like Zuko’s slowly learning to communicate. “Maybe next time, I want you to, uh, hold me down.”] Or, Zuko learns to use his words.
Nie Mingjue keeps trying to talk to Jin Guangyao, and Jin Guangyao doesn't know quite what to make of it. Still less did he know what to make of Nie Mingjue, of all people, being insightful about the difficulties of being a bastard son of the sect leader, recognized but never accepted. Has the world turned upside down? Maybe it had.
Wei Wuxian had been obsessed with the idea of a resonant bond ever since he first learned about it. The idea that he could one day, if he were very lucky, form an unbreakable connection to another person - a connection that generally manifested, it was said, as a mental bond that could not be severed, a tie that would keep them bound together no matter the distance. A bond that would mean he need never fear abandonment, to never need to worry about someone going out only for a little and then never coming back. It would be amazing, he thought - right up until he punched Jin Zixuan in the face for insulting his shijie and something just – Clicked.
"It was a plot point, dude," says Cucumber-bro, in the slow, patient voice of someone speaking to a stupid dog. "It was an actual, literal plot point you typed in with your own like, sinful hands." "No it wasn't," says Shang Qinghua immediately. "I think I would like, fucking remember writing a scene where some chick gets an actual fucking dragon corpse dropped on her door and immediately gives it up for the person who brought it!"
Scenes in the life of Shen Qingqiu, the multiverse's most reluctant female lead
"I had a question for the Peak Lord," says Luo Binghe, voice sweet, eyes cold. "A dialect question." If Shang Qinghua was sweating before, he's dripping fucking rivers now. He and Cucumber-bro communicate in a horrible mix of memes, internet slang, Chinglish and modern Chinese, mostly but not entirely incomprehensible for any outsider. Luo Binghe had decided it must be some hometown dialect that they shared, despite any evidence of Shen Qingqui and Shang Qinghua ever speaking to each other before they both had the shitty luck to be transmigrated, and devoted himself to learning his beloved Shizun's birth dialect. Fuck! Why was Shang Qinghua dumb enough to have made it a plot point that Luo Binghe had a god level ability to pick up languages! .... right, so he could pick up some girl's dialect and seduce her more easily, but it wasn't fair that this monogamous version of his son could still do it, okay!!
Nina looks at him like he’s an idiot. “Just keep the gloves on, then.” “What?” Kaz blurts. Or: Kaz Brekker conquers intimacy. It's both easier and harder than he planned.
Two children, Meng Shi decides, cannot possibly be that much more work than one. On the run from the Jin, Meng Shi encounters another young boy in need of love, a family and a home.
Proud Immortal Demon Way's fanfic selection is vast, terrible, and filled with things much worse written than the original work itself, and that's saying something. Shen Yuan was just enough of a masochist to willingly, after another stupid update where Luo Binghe has to papapa another sister for some ludicrous reason that doesn't even make any sense, decide to delve into that lurid cesspool of creative death and unbeta'd pornography far more explicit than anything Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky had ever written. Which is how he finds himself in a fanfic called Proud Immortal Demon's Milky Way.
A day in the life of one happily married couple: in which Jiang Yanli dresses her husband in lingerie, ties him to the headboard, and pegs him until he comes (multiple times) and cries.
“You idiot,” Ye Baiyi chuckles at Long Xiao. “He was already panting for someone to have him like a bitch before you poisoned him. You’re doing us a favor by encouraging these two soup-for-brains to go off into the woods and fuck their feelings out.” Wen Kexing swears at Ye Baiyi, then threatens to pluck his eyebrows bald. Chengling blinks as he takes in the scene with round eyes. Long Xiao smiles, showing off his full set of adult teeth, eerily out of place in a child’s face. Zhou Zishu feels sick to his stomach; he wishes he could be drunk. Wen Kexing gets hit with fuck-or-die sex pollen on the way to Longyuan cabinet. Everything would be fine, except Zhou Zishu’s been keeping an unfortunate secret: the nails in his chest mean he can’t get hard anymore.
Kaz had set aside his cane, hat and coat and he looked oddly delicate now, sitting beside her in his shirtsleeves and vest. His body was angled toward her as much as possible on the small sofa, holding her hand and keeping his bitter-coffee eyes trained on her face. His gloves were still on, but somehow she knew that it was due to the relative strangeness of her parents rather than to hide his hands from her. He held her hand so tightly that she could feel the little slits in the fingertips, little absences of contact from the leather covering the rest of her hand. ----------------------------- Takes place immediately following the events of Crooked Kingdom. We meet Inej's parents and get some closure for everyone involved.
Kaz recruits Wylan to help infiltrate the Ice Court. Wylan is under the impression that Jesper is flirting with him—until Jesper brings up his lost true love.
Five years after the death of the Yiling Patriarch, Jin Guangyao calls Jiang Cheng to Carp Tower, to involve him in a plot. It doesn't go the way Jin Guangyao thinks it's going to go.
Two gremlins, their husbands, and the horrible HOA board. As long as nobody gets arrested for arson or murder, we're gonna call it a win.
Her daughter is five years old when Ursa realises what she and Ozai have been doing to their children. By each choosing one to bestow with their approval, they’re pitting them against one another. Perhaps Ozai is doing it on purpose, but Ursa isn’t. She resolves to heal the damage she has done. In which Ursa tries to be a better parent to Azula, and it doesn’t change very much. And then, quite abruptly, it changes everything.
In which Zuko’s advisors won’t stop harassing him about suitable candidates for Fire Lady, and Zuko’s friends hatch an ingenious plan: pretend courtships.
Zuko's soul marks have been regularly burned away since before he knew what they meant. He knows that he cannot be loyal to his father and his nation while also being loyal to a soul family, so he doesn't look for them. Unfortunately, that means that he doesn't know when he's found them.
