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ghostofhyuck · 22 days

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Gang AU Series 1

Bodyguard! Mark Lee x Mafia’s daughter! Reader

Summary: “I’ll be happy to die, if it means protecting you.”

cw: violence and mentions of death.

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“You know, it’s a bad idea —-”

“Mark please!” you let out a deep sigh. “Stop being an overthinker! You’re making me nervous.”

“See! Even you're nervous about it, that means there’s something wrong with it!”

“I’m nervous because I might fuck up my speech if you don’t stop talking!” you shouted, proceeding to go to your dressing room and slamming the door against your bodyguard.

You felt peace now that you’re not in the same room as with Mark. You went to the drawer full of jewelries, pulling the first slide as your mother’s collections of pearls went on full display. You only smiled bitterly as you recall how your mother is so obsessed with pearls. You remember when you’re just a kid, you watch your mother dress up and wear her sets. Now, it’ll be you who’s wearing it.

You felt your heart tightening. It’s been a year since your parents died. A year since they left you and your older brother Johnny to take over their empire. An underground black market that sells illegal products and trades with guns.

It’s been a year and yet you still couldn’t comprehend how they died. An ambush, during a mayor’s dinner party. There weren't any other casualties aside from them. As if they’re the targets. After all, after their death, a lot of people attempted to take over the empire. Luckily, your brother is already accustomed to managing the market. Your brother was a powerful man, that’s why they didn’t stand a chance against him.

On the other hand, you tried your best to live a normal life even though you never had a normal family background. Coming from a family who’s been in a gang for years, there’s a huge part of your life that needs to be hidden. Not to mention, being the only daughter means they’re much more protective when it comes to you.

That’s where Mark comes in. He’s used to working under the gun trades but Johnny seems to be fond of him along with some of the other members, that’s why he made Mark your personal bodyguard.

“Yn, are you done? Because it’s almost 8 am, and we don’t wanna get stuck in the traffic,” Mark said behind closed doors.

“Yeah! Just a minute,” you shouted back. Wearing the last assembly of the set which is the pearl necklace. You went to the full-size mirror to check your fit. You only smiled because the pearls complimented your outfit. You went out and saw Mark on his phone. He glances at you and stands up from his seat.

“So,” he clears his throat. “You’re really going —-”

“Mark, shut the fuck up,” you cut him off. “I am going whether you like it or not, Johnny already gave me permission plus it’s a school event!”

Mark became quiet, he was about to say something but then thought that it’s a bad idea.

“What is it?” you asked with gritted teeth.

“I’m just trying to look after you,” Mark justified.

“Well it’s not helping, you’re suffocating me,” you answered one last time before storming out of the room, where the others are waiting.

“Damn, Mark-hyung got you already?” Donghyuck teased.

“Shut up Hyuck, is the car ready?” you asked.

“Of course it is princess,” the latter said.

You had Mark as your bodyguard four years ago. He’s three years older than you but your brother assures you that he’s a skilled fighter along with the others.

Having Mark as your bodyguard meant having another annoying older brother. He’s overprotective and an overthinker too. At some point Mark was definitely much worse than your brother who’s very chill with you as long as you come home alive.

It got worse when your parents died. Something shifted inside Mark that he became twice as overprotective and overthinker than before. It went to the point that you feel like you have no freedom at all, and it sickens you.

You tried numerous times to shove him away, even complaining about it to Johnny who only laughs at your complaints.

“Soon, you’ll understand why you need someone like Mark,” Johnny winks at you before leaving you alone in your room. You sat there, surprised because of your brother’s words. You tried to understand his side but as day passed by, Mark just didn’t do anything but to get into your nerves.

The car ride was tense, you notice how many times Mark glances at you in the rearview mirror while seated at the passenger seat. You tried your best to keep calm, practicing your speech numerous times. You are required to attend a school event because you’re the awarded student leader in your college department. It was an honor for you and you also wouldn’t miss the opportunity to hold a speech and talk for your fellow students.

The university was bustling with people, perhaps it was because of the annual school festival. There’s a lot of booths, activities, and events prepared for the whole week. Mark became more tense as they arrived inside the campus. You stepped down from the car, the remaining others getting out of the car.

You were about to leave when Mark grabbed your arms.

“Mark, we’re inside the school campus, it’s okay —-”

“It’s not okay yn, just this once please,” he said with a soft tone. “I can just accompany you alone if you want, there’s no need for the rest to come.”

You raised your eyebrow but you saw the worried look on his face and somehow, you couldn’t help but to soften. He’s right, and you feel like you’re being too harsh to him. You could only tug your arms away from him before proceeding to walk.

“Donghyuck can come too.”

“You heard her!” Donghyuck chuckles. “See you later losers.”

All eyes are on you as you walk towards the auditorium where the event will be held. It couldn’t be helped especially when your family’s background earned you quite a reputation too. And to think that you’re walking around the campus with two guards behind you just adds more to your image.

As you reached the auditorium, you were welcomed by the event organizer who’s a friend of yours. You only smiled as she ushered you towards the backstage but you remembered the two.

“You two just stay here, get a seat maybe, the talk will start in a few minutes. I just need to freshen up,” you told them. Mark only nods while Donghyuck gives you a thumbs up and “Good luck!”

As Mark watched you walk away, he couldn’t help but to let out a sigh. Donghyuck glances at the older.

“Stop worrying too much,” Donghyuck chuckles, playfully slapping Mark’s arms.

“I don’t know man,” Mark replies. “I just feel like something is off.”

The program started a few minutes later. Mark and Donghyuck stood there and watched you enter the stage with a bright smile on your face. Their eyes are locked on yours as you went to the podium and started delivering your speech.

Mark still couldn’t feel at ease as you delivered your speech. Everything feels off and he wanted to to trust his guts despite what you and Donghyuck said. He glances at Donghyuck who’s only smiling proudly, watching you deliver your speech in front of your fellow students. As Mark glances at his right, his eyes widen.

There were two men talking to each other. They were wearing caps and shades, trying to hide their identity. He nudges Donghyuck who only ignores him. As the older nudged Donghyuck harder that’s when the younger complained.

“Hyung what the fuck —-” Donghyuck wasn’t able to finish his words when he heard gunshots.

“Fuck, get yn!” Mark shouts, as the sound of another gunshot was heard.

You didn’t know what happened, all you knew was the first gunshot was heard and the next thing you knew, you felt something painful scraping against your arms. You fell down out of shock, and the continuous firing can be heard. You watched as the students panicked, trying to find their way to exit the auditorium.

You were helpless as you tried to stand up and escape when someone grabbed your arms. You almost screamed when you were welcomed by a familiar face.

“Yn it’s me!” Donghyuck shouted.

“Where’s Mark!?” you asked.

“Handling the guys, we need to leave —-”

“ — wait, what about Mark!?”

“He can handle himself, don’t worry,” Donghyuck said one last time before dragging you and escaping your way out of the auditorium.

You watched as the school ground turned into chaos. You couldn’t believe that what’s supposed to be a great day turned into a nightmare not only to yours, but also to innocent students. You wanted to help them but Donghyuck’s strong arms dragged you away from the chaos.

“Hyuck!” You saw Jeno approaching along with Jaemin.

“Help Mark-hyung there! We need yn safe,” Donghyuck orders.

“Renjun’s already had the car started!” Jeno shouted before going inside the auditorium.

You couldn’t help but to cry as you entered the car, Renjun immediately drove away from the campus as soon as the doors closed. Donghyuck could only pat your shoulder lightly, trying to assure you that everything’s going to be alright.

“It’s my fault Hyuck, I should’ve listened to Mark,” you said between your sobs.

“Hey, it’s not your fault,” the older one said. “Also stop worrying about Mark-hyung, he can handle it. He wasn’t hired by Johnny-hyung if he was weak.”

“This is bullshit, who the fuck would do it at a school event!?” Renjun muttered angrily as he drove.

“Hyung! Focus on the road!” Jisung shouted.

“It’s obvious that it was a perfect timing for them, especially since it’s yn’s first appearance after Mr. and Mrs. yln died,” Chenle explained. “But they probably hired the wrong people, look, they barely shot you.”

That’s when you remember that you grazed your arms. Your sleeve was stained with blood but it wasn’t that deep. You only wince because of the pain, while Donghyuck covers it with his handkerchief.

“You should rest for now yn, we’ll just tell you when we arrived,” Donghyuck said.

And you couldn’t even protest. That’s when you slowly felt exhaustion get into you. A few minutes later, you doze off to sleep.

You don’t know that it was already night when you woke up. As you sat up from your bed, you couldn’t help but to groan in pain due to the sudden movement. You look around and notice that you’re in your room, and as you look at your clothes — someone changed it into a comfortable tee and cotton shorts. Your arm had a bandage wrapped around the graze, that it’s most likely your bodyguards’ doing.

You noticed that the pearl set that you were wearing is resting idly on your side table along with your bag and phone. You grabbed your phone and saw that it was almost eight in the evening. You were asleep the whole day.

That’s when you decided to get out of your bed and have yourself some food. You opened the door and was surprised to see that the hallway was empty. Usually, your bodyguards will be there waiting for you. Now that you notice it, the house was eerily quiet.

But as you enter the kitchen, you heard small noises and to your surprise —

“Mark!” you shouted.

As he turns around, he only gives you a smile, making yours drop.

“What happened to you!?” you asked as you saw his cuts and bruises, not to mention, the arm sling.

“It’s nothing, just a fracture bone —-”

“Are you stupid!? How can you say that it’s just nothing?” you shouted. You couldn’t help but to cry, seeing Mark all rugged-up because of the event earlier.

Mark approaches you and slowly places his other arm around you, pulling you closer as you continue to cry.

“Hey it’s okay, I’m okay see?” Mark said softly. “I just fell on the wrong side, that's why I broke some bone.”

“I can’t believe you let yourself be left behind, what if you died!?” you shouted.

“Well that’s my job, if it means dying to protect you, I’ll do it,” Mark explains, and because of his words, you punched him in his chest, making him exclaim in pain.

“Stop that,” you said.

“No seriously, I swore that to Johnny-hyung,” he said in a serious tone. “I’m going to protect you no matter what.”

You became quiet, your swollen eyes staring at his brown ones. Mark only gave you his sorry smile and you don’t know what to say. Perhaps this is what your brother is trying to say to you.

Mark’s loyalty cannot be compared to the others. He was dedicated to protecting you no matter what, even if it means sacrificing himself, he would willingly do it for you. You only fall into your own thoughts as your eyes wander around his wounds. You don’t know why but your hand intrusively reached for his cuts, you saw how Mark tried to cover up his pain.

“Can you promise me something?” you asked.

“Anything you want, I’ll do it,” he swore.

“Don’t die for me,” you stated. “If you want to protect me forever, you have to keep yourself safe too.”

Mark only chuckles, grabbing your hands as he kisses the palm of it. “If that’s what you want, then I swore to you that I’ll be safe.”

#nct imagine #nct dream fic #nct dream #nct fic #nct #nct x reader #nct dream imagine #nct mark #nct mark fic #nct dream mark #mark lee #mark lee imagines #mark lee fic #nct 127 mark

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alltheirdamn · 5 months

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A Bounty for Reward (Mando x f!Reader)

CHAPTER 1

Summary: when you discover a bounty has been put on your head, your future and freedom are on the line. Warnings: mentions of death, drugs, weapons, angst, language (future smut, don't worry) Word Count: 6.5k A/N/: this is my first time dropping any sort of writing into the world, so pls be kind & i hope you'll stick around for the rest of the fic <3

Swiping greased hands over your work smock, you looked towards the horizon to see the Twin Suns dipping below the rolling sand dunes. The work day was over, yet you felt you barely made a dent in the new land speeder your parents had bought. You were accustomed to working with older models of land speeders, preferring the engine types over the newer models. The new models were made for looks rather than efficiency, and you didn’t understand how the citizens of Mos Eisley could afford them.

Composed of a ship hangar and various piles of scrap parts, the junkyard overlooked the southern border of the city, your own home barren and abysmal due to years of decline in business. It was rare your parents got business, and if it was… it usually wasn’t the best clientele. You had your run-ins with smugglers, pirates, and crime bosses, and every time, you worried for your family’s safety. It was only you and your parents, after all— you had no one else to call home.

As you tidied your workbench, stowing away the tools, scrap metals, and loose wires, you heard an unfamiliar buzz of speed bikes approaching the junkyard. It was unusual to get clients this late, let alone any visitors. Your family was nearly invisible to the citygoers, barely knowing one or two vendors on the streets that sold food.

In a haze of dust and dirt, the men made laps around the junkyard, their voices loud and violent as they called out for your parents. Heart thudding in your throat, you rushed to the small home tucked in the dunes, frantic to find your parents.

You hadn’t realized your father was already at the front entrance, sniper rifle in his grasp.

“Kono Halcard!” One of the front men yelled, his speeder coming to a halt in front of your father.

You watched from afar as your father stood tall and strong, his suntanned skin glowing in the golden hour of the falling suns. Time had aged his skin whitened his hair, but he was still a force of nature. He had lived in Tatooine his whole life, as had you, and he was no stranger to the scum that roamed the planet. Out of the corner of your eye, you spotted your mother, Mana, peering behind the windows of your home. She was not so much the fighter as your father.

But you were your father's daughter.

Grabbing the hidden blade on your work belt, you followed the trail up to the front entrance, watching the wind kick the billows of dust into tornados of sand as the men’s bikes stopped behind their very vocal leader.

“We want nothing to do with you, Jissard,” your father’s voice was stern.

Jissard, which you assumed was his last name, was a hateful-looking man. He was human, at least from what you could discern, as he stood several feet taller than your father, wearing a tattered tunic and worn leather coat. Most of his face was covered by a low-brimmed hat, the same color beige as the sand surrounding you, but you could still glimpse his piercing yellow eyes. The look of them alone forced your spine straight, nerves electrifying within every inch of your body.

The men behind him wore the same type of clothes– all worn, all dirty. It was obvious from the looks of them that they were a band of spice traders, the residual of the drugs lingering on their fingers and skin. They dismounted their speeders, flanking Jissard on either side, their hands resting carefully on their concealed blasters. You shifted your weight, your grip tightening around the handle of your blade.

“Oh, Kono,” Jissard drawled, a thick accent falling off his tongue. “You’re a few payments behind, aren’t you?”

“I owe you nothing. I paid the Pyke’s back in full nearly three months ago.” Your father straightened his spine; the rifle still lifted at eye level towards the traders.

“If you had, I wouldn’t be here, my friend,” Jissard grinned, revealing a row of rotting teeth. It was a menacing grin, one meant to elicit fear.

It didn’t elicit it from your father, but it did from you.

“Ah, and I take it this is your daughter, no?” Jissard continued, glancing in your direction.

The handle of your blade was cutting into your palm now, your pulse thudding in your ears. You stepped forward, aligning yourself with your father, exchanging a weary glance between one another. He wasn’t shocked you were beside him, but you caught a glimpse of regret in his eyes. A fading sentiment of, I’m sorry, as you gathered the unspoken secrets of your family’s business. You had an inkling that crime would one day touch your family, yet you hadn’t expected it to be already seeping into the foundations around you. How long had your father been mixed up with the Pyke’s? Had this been the reason for the junkyard's business to decline? Either way, you were seeing the truth come to light, but you wouldn’t back away from a fight.

Not when it came to family.

“She does not concern you,” he was firm, words gritted through clenched teeth.

Jissard smiled again, dipping his hat towards you as a gesture of hello.

“Kesi Jissard,” he smiled, “ I’m a friend of your father's here.”

“I wouldn’t exactly label us friends,” your father sneered.

He cocked the rifle back, the sound of it echoing around you. He was done playing Kesi’s games, yet Kesi hadn’t had his fill. The men behind him drew their blasters, your father becoming the target for every weapon. You exposed the blade behind your back, a minor threat you knew wouldn’t do much. Kesi noticed the slight reflection of metal in the fading suns, a small smirk pointed in your direction. It made your stomach churn, seeing the way he welcomed the threat. He wasn’t afraid of you, and you had yet to understand why you were so afraid of him.

You just were.

“I’m not here to collect bodies,” Kesi tossed his attention back to your father, “I would like to settle this as civil as possible. Unless you force my hand, Kono.”

“I don’t think you people know what civil means,” your father bit.

Kessi stepped forward, cocking his head to the side to gesture his men forward. The look of ‘civility’ shot past his eyes, replaced by something far more menacing. His hand grazed over his own blaster, eyes flickering between you and your father. In the distance, you could hear a familiar voice shouting, this one of your mother.

“Ah, Mana,” Kesi smiled, rotting teeth exposed across dirtied skin, “So kind of you to join us. We were just discussing some matters of business.”

Your mother joined your father, her hands twisting together in an anxious manner. There was an expression of fear on her face…yet she held her breath as if she anticipated the worst.

“We have no business with you traders,” she spewed.

It was the first time you had ever seen your mother speak in such a violent manner. She was always coolheaded, kind, and extremely closed off to strangers. She made no part of any business deals the junkyard had and kept herself in the shadows where she felt safest. But now, it was your family against him, his men, and ultimately… the Pykes.

Kesi slanted his head to the side, watching your mother and father with silent regard. The men behind him were growing agitated as they swayed from side to side, their weapons still raised towards your parents. The knife you bared down in your grip was feeling all too heavy; the concept of having to defend yourself grew more likely. You silently begged your father just to comply, to give Kesi whatever he wanted, and to move on as usual. If they were to go broke, they would still be alive.

Maybe.

“Listen, Kono,” Kesi sighed heavily, tightening the brim of his hat over his eyes, “I don’t like wasting my time. So, either you pay up, or we can take payment in a different form.”

His gaze shot to you, shadowed eyes tracing the outline of your body until your skin crawled from disgust. Every vile and unnameable thing washed over your mind– the countless things he could do to you. You pleaded internally to your father, hoping he would just give in and do as Kesi asked.

But your father, like you, was stubborn to the end.

“Fuck you,” your father spat.

Without another word, his gun was aimed at Kesi’s head, the rifle shooting forward yet somehow suspending itself in time. The sequence of events grew hazy as you watched from the ground on which you fell. You didn’t register that your father had pushed you back or that Kesi’s men struck down your mom in several shots; her body lay lifeless on the sands of Tatooine. The sound of your father's cries delayed in your mind as you watched him crumple over, a gaping shot tearing apart his chest. They were gone. Both of them. And you had been too dazed to react, the knife having been lost from your hand in the midst of the attack.

All you could see were the remnants of your parents in the wreckage of brutality Kesi had left them in. Broken sobs erupted from your chest, screams that did not make it past your lips, and yet the world continued moving. Kesi’s men grabbed you, yanking you to your feet as you struggled to breathe. Your eyes couldn’t tear away from your parents, their eyes staring absently at the sky as it faded to darkness. Everything in your world had gone dark.

Everything was gone.

“I guess I’ll settle for you as my payment,” Kesi smirked.

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Eyes slamming open, the nightmare jarred you enough to catapult you upwards from your sleeping position. This had been the third night in a row you had dreamt of that night, the third night you were reminded of all you had lost. Rubbing your eyes aggressively, you felt the start of tears pooling over your knuckles as you dug into the skin of your eyelids. Sounds of airspeeders and taxis whizzed by in hushed vibrations, the windows of your hotel room shaking ever so slightly. It wouldn’t be very noticeable to anyone else, but you were acutely aware of every sound around you. You were always holding your breath as if the past lurked in the shadows, waiting for the moment to strike and kill.

It had been four standard months since you arrived in the lower levels of Coruscant– four months since you had found an escape route from Kesi. It had taken nearly a year to arrange a meticulous plan that stripped you from his grasp, and you had pulled it off. Gathering—stealing—enough credits to buy your way off world, you took refuge in a hidden identity and made a new life in the capital. The hotel room was temporary, at least until you ran out of credits—or luck. But getting credits was easy now that you learned the ways of the underground. Rich men traveled to the lower levels looking for drugs or prostitutes, and you knew the best spots in the city to track them down. Some small talk, maybe a few drinks, and it was easy for you to card your hand into their pockets and stash away credits while they remained distracted.

Eager to leave the darkness— and the past— you gathered yourself and threw on your heavy jacket, tossing the hood over your head. Strapped to your thigh, you kept your vibroblade, the last thing you kept from all the years under Kesi’s hold. It had been your protection against aggressive clients, yet you never had the courage to use it. They were aggressive, but there was never enough strength or freedom to fight back. Freedom was something you never knew.

Finding your way through the streets, you ventured into one of the run-down playrooms in the center of town. Through a cloud of smoke, you found small groups of men hunched over drinks as they played sabacc fervently. Some turned to scrutinize you as you walked in, but you kept your head low, finding your way toward the bar. Nerves didn’t get to you, but a drink could help suffocate the lingering memories. Nursing your drink, you felt the warmth of someone sliding beside you, their hand tracing your arm. It was enough to tense all the muscles in your body, your free hand coasting down to graze the blade on your thigh.

“Are you the entertainment for the night?” The voice asked.

Concealing your amusement, you turned to him, pushing down the hood of your coat. The man had a devilish grin that was both unwelcoming and horrendous. You had no interest in entertaining him. Downing the rest of your drink, you shoved away from the bar, walking towards an open booth to watch the games.

And he followed.

“C’mon princess,” he crooned, sitting across from you, “Don’t gotta be stubborn.”

“I suggest you leave me alone before I slice open your stomach.” You spat.

He leaned back, clearly alarmed, and stood without another word. But it was as he left something else caught your eye.

A shadow, but reflective, tore your focus away from the games. Whatever it was, the shine alone was enough to stall every player, their motions slowing as they observed the stranger. Walking in the entrance was a bounty hunter clad in shiny armor, his helmet trained on you.

Your initial reaction was to run, but as you took in his silhouette, you narrowed your gaze on the blaster at his hip. Returning your gaze back to his helmet, he cocked his head to the side and slid a hand down to rest on the handle of the blaster.

An invitation to run.

A warning if you did.

Neither sounded appealing.

You sunk further into the cushions of the booth, pulling your hood up over your head. It wasn’t lost on you that he had already scoped you out, but to your wishful thinking, you hoped he was in the playroom looking for a bounty. Why would he be looking for you? A better question: who wanted you? A chill ran up your spine as you considered all the possibilities of why he’d be after you: theft, assault, spice smuggling. Worse of them all… Kesi had placed a high price on your head.

But you would never return to him.

You would fight for freedom, even if it cost you everything.

The bounty hunter stalked towards you, his steps calculated and slow as if he expected you to run. Your fingers twitched against the blade on your thigh, assessing your options.

You could run, fight, or die, and none of them sounded appealing as he grew closer, but you had to make a decision.

And option one it was.

You shoved out of the booth, booking past the game tables and towards the back door. The hood on your coat fell down onto your shoulders as you pushed your body into a full sprint, weaving through the smoke and crowds. The back door opened into a hazy alleyway, and you took off to the left. People stared at you strangely as you belined through the throng of citygoers, shoving through the crowds with curses falling off your lips.

“Fucking move!” You huffed, your feet padding against the asphalt.

Distance sounds of running caught your attention, and you made the mistake of looking back to see the hunter closing the gap between crowded bodies. You pushed yourself harder, your body aching but persistent from the adrenaline rush. You’d had your fair share of spice before, but nothing compared to the rush of being hunted down. Never did you think your freedom would come to this.

A wall of bodies formed before you, onlookers enraptured in a daze of street performers. Their blissful unawareness would cost you your life, and you reached for your blade at the same moment a gloved hand wound around your bicep in a vice. You swiveled to meet the hunter face to face—well, face to helmet— and slashed the blade against the armor. It did nothing to the metal, not even a single scrape. The bounty hunter huffed, amused, and caught your wrist with his free hand. Your skin pinched between his leathered fingers, and you winced as his grip tightened.

“Let me fucking go!” You yelled, jostling against his hold.

But he was firm, and the sounds of the crowd began to flood your ears as you attempted to break away.

“…a Mandalorian…”

“Look at the beskar…”

“Have you ever… seen one?”

A Mandalorian?

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

This wasn’t just an average bounty hunter. This was a skilled and deadly one, and you just happened to be in his grasp. You had heard stories of them while under Kesi’s control; some spice traders talked about how ruthless and dangerous they were. They were sworn to Mandalore, and they had no moral duty to anything but.

The Mandalorian drew your body closer, his helmet dipping close to your ear.

“I can bring you in warm, or I can bring you in cold.” His voice was warm and smooth and threatened to buckle your legs under you. “Your choice.”

Reeling back, you slammed a foot into the center of his boot, only for him to spin you around and pin you against his body.

“Wrong choice,” he growled.

He twisted your arms back, clasping cold binders around your wrists. Shoving you forward, he guided you through the crowds of bodies, his hand tight around your elbow. You twisted your head to look back, seeing his helmet set in a firm line and his fingers wrapped around the handle of your blade.

Fuck, this wasn’t how you expected your night to go.

The Mandalorian’s gunship sat on the city's outskirts, parked in a docking bay surrounded by other speeders and racers. A few docking employees strolled about the platforms, barely paying attention to your struggle against the beskar-clad body behind you. You had attempted several times to rip yourself from his grasp, only to be met by a hard shove forward and a few sharp words.

(Words that flooded your bloodstream like a liquid drug.)

The ramp lowered with a hiss, and your feet stumbled up the metal flooring as the Mandalorian pushed you into the dark cargo hold of his ship. You barely had time to register your surroundings as he led you toward a carbonite chamber. Your heart sputtered erratically the closer you got, and you fought against him harder.

“Please,” you begged, dragging your feet as far as he’d let you.

“Enough,” he barked.

Pressing you against the wall with one hand, the Mandalorian used the other to punch in a code to the freezing chamber. The metal doors opened with an expulsion of cold gas, the air sending shockwaves over your skin. As he reached for your shirt to drag you towards the chamber, you let out a series of pleas in hopes of stopping him.

“You can’t!” You cried, tears stinging your eyes as you pulled away from his grasp. “Please, I swear I’ll do anything! Just don’t put me in there. Maker, please.”

He hesitated a moment, his helmet assessing you.

“I’ll do anything, okay?” You heaved in a breath. “I don’t know who wants me, but please!”

A beat of silence passed as he considered your confession. Tears flowed freely over your face, the shiny beskar blurring as you tried to blink them away. Everything was becoming too hazy, too much. Maker, how did you end up here?

Your body ached from the chase, your wrists burned under the friction of the binders, and the cold air from the chamber beside you was enough to fog your mind. You were teetering on the edge of passing out or dropping dead. It was becoming all too hard to breathe, and you began to gasp for air, sucking lung-fulls in to help ease the pain vibrating through your nerves.

“Just…” You panted. “…Please.”

Your body slumped against the wall, your head hitting the metal sharply, and the world around you blackened.

Mando had his fair share of interesting bounties, but an unconscious girl on the floor of his ship had never been one of them. Her head lulled to the side; her body crumpled against the metal ground. He had checked for a pulse, thankful there was one, and let her lay comfortably on the ground. He couldn’t just toss her into the carbonite chamber when she was unconscious. The gas would be all too powerful on weak lungs, and she would die instantly once the metal encased her. And it wasn’t a part of the bounty to bring her in dead. Nor did he particularly relish in killing women— beautiful ones at that.

It had struck him curious that someone as beautiful as her would wind up in the hands of a bounty hunter. Her face on the holopuck had initially been a shock, and he wondered if he had received the right bounty to begin with. But Greef Karga had assured him it was correct, and the bounty price on her head was high. Too high not to pass it up.

Mando wasn't ‘soft’ by any means. He was used to the brutality and violence that surrounded his lifestyle. He welcomed the silence after a kill and the isolation of the Razor Crest between hunts. Alone. That’s all he had ever known, and nothing would make him give that up.

But, maker, her soft breathing wasn’t helping his cause.

He forfeited all options and made the decision to leave her sleeping on the floor. He’d set the nav to Tatooine and reassess later. Once in hyperspace, she would have nowhere to go, and when she finally woke up, then he’d put her into the chamber. That was his plan.

At least for now.

Mando sat in the cockpit alone, his hand flipping her blade in fluid motions. She was a fighter, he knew that much, and cunning. Her first instinct was to run, but she put up just as much of a fight. Usually, he’d be annoyed by a bounty that fought, but for her to fight that hard… It gave him a pause. And her pleading for help? Maker, he wondered what made her into a big enough criminal for a bounty puck. But she had to have done something to catch the eye of a hunter, let alone a hunter like him.

He tossed her blade up in the air, catching it and flipping it back up for several minutes. Her face danced around his mind the longer he thought about her, and he gave in to climbing down into the cargo hold to check on her.

As he climbed the ladder, he heard rustling between the cargo crates in the corner. She had tucked herself between them, making her body look smaller and more frail than before. She looked utterly helpless— like a scared child— and something in his chest tightened.

“Are you going to kill me?” She whispered, her eyes barely visible in the dim lighting.

His helmet moved side to side slowly as he approached her. Her arms were still bound behind her back, tightly cuffed in bindings, but her small frame fit snugly into the corner against the metal walls. Crouching down, Mando held out a hand to her.

“I’ll take the restraints off,” he offered. “But only if you promise not to cause a problem. I’m not opposed to putting you in carbonite for the rest of the flight.”

She nodded fiercely, twisting her body so that her hands were toward him. Rough hands clicked the lock open on the bindings, and Mando watched as she rubbed the skin of her wrists fervently. Still, she shrunk away from him, pulling her knees to her chest. Her slender arms wrapped around her legs, tucking them closer to her body as she shivered against the bitter cold from traveling hyperspace.

She stared at him wide-eyed and afraid. Every bounty feared him; his beskar was a telltale sign of danger. But something about her fear didn’t sit quite right with him.

Only a few more hours, he told himself. Then she’d be off his hands, and he’d be a few credits richer.

“Do you know who put the bounty on me?” She asked, her voice small. She had been so fierce and loud earlier, but it was apparent she had accepted defeat.

“No,” he said truthfully. He didn’t offer much, but it was enough.

She exhaled, eyes floating around the cargo hold and avoiding the heavy stare from behind his visor.

“I’m afraid,” she whispered.

Fuck. He didn’t want to hear that.

Mando had nothing to respond with, nothing that could console her. He turned from her crouched body and turned back towards the cockpit. The further a distance he could put between them, the better.

She was dangerous.

“No.”

His statement was final, not allowing you to seek answers that you could cling to. The unknown was worse than knowing because there were endless outcomes you could face. You had wronged so many people, a trace of your selfishness scattered across the galaxy. You allowed yourself to lose control of the greed– finding comfort in taking from those undeserving. Too many people had taken what they wanted from you, leaving an emptiness inside you that was insatiable and never fulfilled; you only wanted to do the same to them in return. You could spend eternity trying to find ways to fill the void within you, but you wondered if it was ever enough.

“I’m afraid,” you muttered, more to yourself than to him.

The Mandalorian remained motionless and then turned suddenly back towards the cockpit, silence filling the space between you. A sigh left your lips, and you closed your eyes, hoping to slip away from the moments that pulled you closer to an unknown fate.

You awoke to a distant beeping from the cockpit; you were nearing the coordinates the Mandalorian had punched in hours ago. Unsure of your actions, you climbed the ladder up, peeking into the cockpit to see where he was taking you. It wasn’t until your eyes adjusted to the dimness around you that you realized what planet you were flying towards. Tatooine.

The last place you expected to be taken to, and certainly the worst possible outcome of being captured. You knew exactly what– no, who– awaited you on Tatooine. If you had given up on pleading before, you regained the strength now, taking this as your last chance to save yourself.

“I can’t go back to Tatooine,” you blurted out. The Mandalorian whipped his head around, glaring at you through the visor of his helmet.

Without a response, he leaned forward in the chair, guiding the ship into a descent into the atmosphere of the desert planet. The lower it descended, the higher fear crept up inside you until it clouded all senses. He wouldn’t care what became of you; you were a pile of credits waiting to be collected. If he knew your name, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the reward and the allegiance to his creed. You may not know him well, but you knew enough about the Mandalorian creed to know everything now was hopeless.

The endless expanse of beige sand came into view, the winds drawing it into waves amongst the dunes. The ship flew further into the terrain, coming to a halt on the outskirts of Mos Eisley. It had been only a few standard years since you had been taken from your home, vowing never to return. Now you were back, existing among the ghosts and regrets of the past.

The gunship touched down onto the rolling sands of Mos Eisley, the ramp opening slowly, giving way to the heat from outside. It flooded through the ship, a light sweat breaking out on the nape of your neck. The Mandalorian rose to his feet, his armored body turning your way. He reached down, grabbing your wrists, easing your body down the ladder. There was no inclination of emotions from his body, the rise and fall of his breastplate the only evidence that he was indeed a living creature.

Creature he was as he pulled you down the stairs, leading you through the cargo hold that was littered with mindless tokens he had picked up along his trails of bounties. The ramp exposed you to the brightness of the sand, your eyes quickly squinting against the landscape. You drug your feet against the metal, hoping to stall your exile from all human existence. If you were certain of anything, your fate was not too far off.

Below the binary suns stood two dark figures, their faces hidden by brimmed hats. The hats were enough of a giveaway to know who they were… and exactly why you dreaded stepping foot on the planet. Your body halted, feet firmly set against the sand, body paralyzed. The Mandalorian slid his hand under the crook of your elbow, urging you forward in silence. He didn’t flinch when you tried to hit him, wrists falling against hard beskar.

“Please,” you begged, tears brimming your eyes. “You can’t give me to them.”

He remained wordless, only nudging your body forward once more. You mustered up enough energy to fight his hold, spinning to face him fully. His helmet slowly rolled to the side, studying your face as tears fell onto your cheeks. Desperation kicked in, your mind reeling with any offer you could give him.

“Please,” your voice was weak, “Kill me.”

He made no reaction to your words, so you tried again.

“Keep me. I’ll do anything you ask. Just keep me from them. You can have me!”

The Mandalorian hesitated a moment, a beat passing before he reacted. The reaction was the exact opposite of what you had hoped; your body pulled further away from the ship… and closer to the figures standing firm within the sand. Tears dried against your cheeks as the warmth of the air burned your skin, leaving your eyes red and dry. The faces of the men came into view as they lifted their heads and exposed their dirtied faces.

“Mando!” One exclaimed. He was the taller of the two, yellow skin nearly blending into the background behind him, purple eyes piercing you below his hat. You knew him as Jado, an employee of your former employer. “Your efficiency is commendable. She is precious cargo for our boss, and he thanks you for your work.”

The other man, whom you knew as Gaff, tossed a satchel of credits at the Mandalorian’s feet. He didn’t break his gaze from the two men, caring very little of the reward now in his possession.

“Please,” you spoke once more. His helmet turned to you slowly, and you hoped he could see life fading from your irises.

“Alright, come on,” Jado spit out your name, ripping you from the Mandalorian’s hold. The bounty hunter freed your wrists from his grasp, only for them to be tugged forward by Jado’s dirt-covered hands. His hands were caked in dirt, traces of spice crusted under his fingernails. The metal restraints you had worn only a few hours ago were now replaced by their own bindings, ones made from rough rope that scratched your skin enough to bleed.

“Kesi will be very happy to see you,” Jado said sarcastically.

Your head turned back to watch the Mandalorian– now understood as Mando– fade into the distance. The shine of his beskar glinted in the harsh sun, splintering into fractures of metal and weapons. The nerves within your body sparked in anger, anger from knowing he brought you to your ultimate fate. You knew it was his job; you were merely a bounty fit for a large reward, but you wanted to believe he was still a man under the layers of armor. A man who battled empathy far beyond the bounds of his creed.

Jado situated your body on the speeder, hauling his own body behind yours. You were all too aware of his body pressed against your back. The heat radiating from his mouth and onto your neck began to nauseate you. Glancing over, you saw Gaff straddle his own speeder, nodding once at Jado– an urge to begin moving. Gaff followed behind Jado’s speeder, the sound of its engine muffling your ears until they grew deaf. Mos Eisley was exactly as you had left it: crawling with slimy criminals and reeking of sour booze. As your heart pounded heavier against your ribs, you watched as each cantina and spaceport drifted out of view. With each passing moment, you grew dreadfully close to Kesi’s junkyard and closer to your death.

The junkyard was littered with newer ship parts; bolts and metal plates scattered the ground. The familiar workstation that sat vacant in the corner caught your eye. It had been your workstation, at least back when your family owned the yard. Now, it was in the possession of Kesi Jissard, one of the most feared spice traders in the galaxy. The same man that forced you into the trading world, baiting you to sell and trade on the promise of freedom. But freedom never came. Not until you found a way to buy it.

The slow rhythm of hands clapping echoed around the empty ship hanger. Your head was on a swivel, eyes wildly searching for the origin of the sound. Emerging from the shadows, Kesi continued to clap, an evil smirk creasing his yellow-tinted skin.

Kesi spoke your name, his thick accent cutting the silence. “I’ve missed you.”

You bit your tongue, suppressing the urge to talk back, knowing it would only lead to more suffering. Kesi had a short temper, usually satiated by bruising skin and smoking blasters. But when you didn’t respond, he stepped forward, reaching for your jaw. His grip was bruising as he wagged your head back and forth.

“You’ve caused me a lot of damage,” he spoke slowly as if every syllable was a drop of poison on your skin. “I’m in debt for thousands of credits, and because you decided to run, I had to spend even more just to hunt you down.”

“You could have let me keep running,” you said, words muffled from his hold on your chin.

Kesi’s dark eyes widened, glistening with premeditated thoughts of harm. He squeezed your chin and pulled away with such force that it left your head falling backward.

“You’ve missed out on a lot of work,” he mused, pacing between you and the workstation aside from you. “There will be a lot of clients happy to see your return.”

“I’d rather die,” you spat, stepping forward. Where you found the courage, you don’t know.

“Trust me,” Kesi chuckled, “I would love to kill you. But you’re far more valuable alive than dead. You’re of more use to me when you’re breathing and working.”

Kesi turned away from you, searching through the remnants of the workstation. With his large body blocking the view of what he found, your heart lurched with uncertainty. He clicked his tongue in satisfaction, holding a black bag up to the dim light of the station lamp. Your heart plummeted into your stomach, nausea coursing up through your esophagus. Turning to you, Kesi donned a broad grin, evil basking in the stretch of his lips against his cheeks.

“We’ve got a new product on the market now,” he began, walking towards you again.

You stumbled as you took a step back, knowing you wouldn’t be able to go much further without someone snatching you and dragging you right back.

Kesi continued, “Since you’re going to sell it for me, you might as well try it.”

You watched as he unraveled the string of the bag, a smaller wrapped bag falling into his hands. The spice was an unusual color compared to the rest; its pigment was closer to black than the usual beige-brown you had been used to selling. Your pulse was rising alarmingly, and you wondered if Kesi could see the fear seeping from your eyes. The fear fell in waves of quiet tears, your lips wavering but never making a noise.

“Why don’t you sit?” he insisted, yanking you by the elbow to the workman's chair by the desk.

All you could do was comply, regardless of the nagging that pricked your brain in sharp pinpoints. You wished you had the strength to fight him. You wished you had the words to beg for a different outcome.

You wished the Mandalorian had listened to your pleas.

But the Mandalorian was gone and a richer man now, too. And here you were, helpless once more and three steps back from freedom.

The second your ass hit the seat of the chair, Kesi was wrapping a hand around your wrists, pinning you against the wooden material. With the free hand he had, Kesi dipped a finger into the powdered substance, lifting it to your lips.

“C’mon princess,” he hissed, “Open that pretty mouth of yours.”

You made no effort to open your mouth, your jaw locked and refusing to fall slack. Kesi’s mood changed into a slow-burning anger, his fingers bruising your skin. You squirmed against the seat, looking around the workstation for anything capable of substantial harm. The desk was nearly clean, sans a few miscellaneous tokens and scrap spice containers.

“Open. Your. Mouth.”

Kesi’s removed his hand from your wrists, only to deliver the most jarring slap across your cheek. It sent your head reeling, leaving you little time to recover. Your mouth fell open, groaning at the severity of the hit, and the surmounting pain replaced every emotion stirring within you. He took your vulnerability as an opportunity, his spice-covered finger slipping onto your tongue.

You hadn’t tasted spice in years. It was not something you enjoyed recreationally, nor did you enjoy selling. In a professional setting, spice was seen as a delicacy for some of the richer citizens in the lower rim. Spice was well sought out, and if you had access to the right employers, spice production would be endless.

But as the product dissolved on your tongue, it didn’t take long for the effects to begin to form. Words from Kesi’s lips grew into jumbles, falling on deaf ears. Your vision began blurring, too, and soon enough, all of your senses were paralyzed. It was as if you were watching from the furthest part of your brain, floating away from the controls inside your body. Becoming all too aware of the heaviness of your body, you slowly felt your shoulders slump over, your body weight no longer supported in the chair. Eyes fluttering shut, you wondered if another side effect of the spice was hallucinations.

Because you could have sworn you saw a glimpse of shiny metal walking into the junkyard.

#mando #mando x reader #the mandalorian #mandalorian fanfic #din djarin #star wars fanfiction

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theoi-crow · 1 year

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In honor of the new Barbie movie I decided to heal my inner child and get a barbie I can pose and dress!

I put her on Aphrodite's altar for Aphrodite to bless her since she's the one, along with my spouse, that gave me the idea to get her (because I'm a part of the trans community, I put her in the flag colors!):

When I was a kid I wasn't allowed to play with Barbie dolls despite being AFAB because my mother HATED Barbie and would force me to play with those baby dolls that make kids pretend to be mothers even though I never wanted to have kids and couldn't see myself ever being a mother because my mom was trying to "train me" to be a good house wife for a future husband™️.

For Christmas because of my very poor economic status, I was given a barbie doll by the local fire fighters toy donation drive. She was my first barbie doll, and she meant the world to me. While I know there are a lot of people who have problems with Barbie for various reasons, to me she was very accepting and incredibly kind. To me she represented potential and because barbie herself was never a mother, to someone like me who was constantly being trained to be a mother and used for free baby sitting labor (I've taken care of over 80 kids from almost every stage of life from toddler to 13 year olds) she represented freedom! The freedom to be who I wanted to be and not what my mother expected.

I only had her for three months before my mother threw her away. I was devastated and after that I never got another doll again but I started doodling Barbie and would make my own cut outs of her so I could dress her with outfit cutouts. I read barbie books and would watch her movies because I still kept her in my heart.

I tried to ignore my feelings regarding the first Barbie trailer but after the latest one and watching Barbie cry I broke down and cried for my childhood and missing my doll and getting good at drawing because I drew her so often. Sky and Aphrodite convinced me to get a Barbie doll to heal my inner child and I finally did and it feels like I'm finally healing. So I'm really happy to look at her and say:

#Greek gods #Aphrodite #Barbie #barbie movie #tw childhood abuse #childhood trauma

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the-far-bright-center · 9 months

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'I had a mother who loved me'

(aka, the Jedi Order is NOT Anakin's family)

This is a topic that I've seen discussed elsewhere and I felt compelled to add my own thoughts. I've seen some takes I vehemently disagree with, especially regarding Shmi and Little Ani in TPM, and Anakin's 'decision' to leave with Qui-Gon. It's crazy how some people will blame little Ani for 'wanting' to be a Jedi, yet apparently Luke in ANH is allowed to want this, even though Luke likewise barely knows anything about what being a Jedi entails, and even though it's much more risky (and, frankly, far more unrealistic) to dream of becoming a Jedi in the Dark Times era?? As if a nine-year-old slave-boy wanting to take part in his new-found freedom by learning to be something he associates with heroism means he somehow 'should have known' he wasn’t going to be a ‘good fit’ for the Order. My argument is that there was nothing wrong with Anakin, and there was in fact no legitimate reason for him or ANYONE ELSE to believe he'd not be good at using the Force to help others (which is what the Jedi are supposed to do), especially when he had literally just done so in the pod-race. The whole reason Qui-Gon noticed Anakin was because of how strong in the Force he already was, even untrained. Qui-Gon has faith in him, it's just the Jedi Council that doubts him. Because, unlike Qui-Gon who perceives Anakin's positive qualities and potential, Yoda and the Jedi Council are afraid of him. Because Anakin is basically an 'unknown' (read: uncontrollable) entity suddenly in their midst.

While the Prequels film-canon stands on its own in this regard, we can also look to the novelizations for even more emphasis on this topic. In the TPM novelization, several things are noteable: first of all, even before Qui-Gon arrives, Anakin has had prophetic dreams about becoming a Jedi. And since Shmi is aware that Ani's dreams and visions do often come to pass, when Qui-Gon appears and offers to take him away to be trained, why wouldn't she think that maybe this was somehow Force (or Fate) ordained? And that therefore it was the right thing to do to let him go? And the second thing, is while it's also clear that Little Ani (like Luke!) has a romanticised view of what being a Jedi might be like, his actual motivation for becoming a Jedi is not simply because he 'selfishly' wants to embark on some fun adventure without his mom. On the contrary, every. single. time. little Ani thinks about the possibility of becoming a Jedi or leaving Tatooine, it's directly in relation to eventually returning to FREE his mother and the rest of the slaves:

He was several things in the course of his dreams. Once he was a Jedi Knight, fighting against things so dark and insubstantial he could not identify them. Once he was a pilot of a star cruiser, taking the ship into hyperspace, spanning whole star systems on his voyage. Once he was a great and feared commander of an army, and he came back to Tatooine with ships and troops at his command to free the planet’s slaves. His mother was waiting for him, smiling, arms outstretched.

and

He gazed skyward, his mother's hand resting lightly on his arm, and thought about what it would be like to be out there, flying battle cruisers and fighters, traveling to far worlds and strange places. He didn't care what Wald said, he wouldn't be a slave all his life. Just as he wouldn't always be a boy. He would find a way to leave Tatooine. He would find a way to take his mother with him. His dreams whirled through his head as he watched the stars, a kaleidoscope of bright images. He imagined how it would be. He saw it clearly in his mind, and it made him smile.

Anakin wants to escape slavery and train as a Jedi so he can come back and continue helping his friends and family on Tatooine. So he can return to free the slaves. Little does he know that he won't be allowed to do that... :'(

It's important to note as well that at this point, Anakin *also* has no idea that, as a Jedi, he won't be allowed to get married and have a family. Even though he is already naively imagining himself someday marrying Padme. So he doesn't know that not only will he not be permitted to return for his mother as he'd always hoped, but he will also technically not be allowed to even have a family of his own even when he's old enough to do so.

And what of Shmi's thoughts on Anakin becoming a Jedi? At the start of the AotC novelization, she is trying to be happy with the thought of it, but ONLY because she believes he must be living his best life as a Jedi. She has no idea that he had to go through rejection first before being accepted into the Order. The AotC novelization shows that as Shmi is being held captive and tortured by the Tusken Raiders, she tries to comfort herself by holding onto her imagination of what Anakin's time as Jedi is like:

All those times staring up at the night sky, she had thought of him, had imagined him soaring across the galaxy, rescuing the downtrodden, saving planets from ravaging monsters and evil tyrants. But she had always expected to see [Ani] again, had always expected him to walk onto the moisture farm one day, that impish smile of his, the one that could light up a room, greeting her as if they had never been apart.

Heartbreakingly, as Shmi is being brutalised to death, she clings to the hope that her beloved Ani's life is now better than it was before, and that it was worth saying farewell to him all those years ago, even while simultaneously desperately longing to see him again.

As an aside, it aggravates me to no end that *cough* certain parts of this fandom perpetuate the idea that Shmi is just some blank, wholly selfless entity with no wants or desires of her own. That she's the ‘perfect’ example of a Jedi with no 'attachments' (aka an Old Order Jedi), and that somehow Anakin is a just a 'failure' compared to her. Yes, it could be argued that Shmi is shown to be a better or truer 'Jedi' than most of the other Jedi in the story (aside from Luke in RotJ), but guess what that would mean in that case? (Hint: it has to do with love and family.) Because first and foremost, Shmi is a MOTHER who is trying to do the best for her son, even though a piece of her heart is always missing while he is gone. The AotC novelization shows repeatedly that she tries to assure herself that she did the right thing by letting Ani go, but the human mother side of herself also cries out for him and misses him desperately. She might have let him go in TPM, but in AoTC she wants to see him again. In fact, she believes strongly that she will see him again (because she loves him and he’s her hero because she’s his mom and she trusts he will eventually come back to find her), which is the only thing keeping her holding on until he arrives. How can Shmi be a perfect example of an Old Order Jedi when the motivating factor for even her most selfless actions is her personal FAMILIAL attachment to and unconditional LOVE for Anakin?? Also, how insulting is it to claim that Anakin is a 'failure' in comparison to his 'wonderful, perfect mother', and then proceed to place all the blame on him for being said 'failure'....when he was shown on-screen to be doing just fine in taking after his mother prior to his time in the Jedi Order????

As another poster noted elsewhere, Shmi Skywalker is the only person responsible for the truly good person Anakin Skywalker was.

This is the heart of the entire saga. Anakin's True Self is good because of his mother. Because of how she raised him (to be selfless and to want to help others) and because of the unconditional LOVE she had for him. It was the Jedi Order that failed to provide that for Anakin, and Sidious who manipulated the situation to his advantage.

(And if Shmi was the only person who truly solidified Anakin's inner goodness, then Qui-Gon was the only Jedi who was presented as being equipped to bring out the best in Anakin when Shmi wasn't around. The only one who was prepared to act as an openly warm and compassionate parental figure to Anakin, the only one who could have properly mentored Anakin and helped him navigate both his Force powers as well as the Jedi Code, and the only one who was shown to be willing to stand up to the Council on Anakin's behalf. The tragedy is not that Qui-Gon found Anakin or even that he offered to take him to train in the Force. Rather, the tragedy is that Qui-Gon is slain in the Duel of the Fates, which leaves Anakin without a true protector and advocate in the Order, and allows Sidious an 'in'.)

So the idea that the Jedi Order is Anakin's ‘replacement family' is simply not true—certainly not in the way the story actually pans out. It's telling that, in the original Prequels-era EU, Anakin ran away from the Jedi Temple multiple times. That is NOT the behaviour of a happy child. (It is, however, typical behaviour for children who are struggling in institutionalised care.)

And indeed, the very first paragraph of the AotC novelization opens with Anakin dreaming that he is part of a warm, loving family:

His mind absorbed the scene before him, so quiet and calm and...normal. It was the life he had always wanted, a gathering of family and friends—he knew that they were just that, though the only one he recognized was his dear mother. This was the way it was supposed to be. The warmth and the love, the laughter and the quiet times. This was how he had always dreamed it would be, how he had always prayed it would be. The warm, inviting smiles. The pleasant conversation. The gentle pats on the shoulders. But most of all there was the smile of his beloved mother, so happy now, no more a slave. When she looked at him, he saw all of that and more, saw how proud she was him, how joyful her life had become.

Why would Anakin be dreaming longingly of being part of an openly loving, happy family if he already had that at the Jedi Temple? (Tellingly, he notes that this seems like something normal, as if he's aware that it ought to be commonplace despite the fact that it's currently missing from his own life.)

And later on, when he's visiting Padme's parents' house for dinner, he sees this exact type of scene he's been longing for play out right in front of him, and he wishes that his mother could be there to enjoy it, too:

Anakin took a good helping of several different dishes. The food was all unfamiliar, but the smells told him that he wouldn’t be disappointed. He sat quietly as he ate, listening with half an ear to the chatter all about him. He was thinking of his mom again, of how he wished he could bring her here, a free woman, to live the life she so deserved.

Note that Anakin is thinking about his mother, and putting her first in his mind. He can barely enjoy the meal while he believes his mother could be out there, suffering.

Later on as he and Padme are heading to Tatooine to search for Shmi, they bond over the fact that both their mothers told them the same nursery rhyme ('home again to rest'). It means a lot to Anakin that he can bond with Padme over this similar childhood memory. (No doubt something he would not have had in common with his peers in the Temple, since their only childhood memories would have been within the Jedi Order, rather than in a true home. And certainly not with a mother.)

Finally, we get to the RotS novelization. Yes, THAT one. The one in which we see that Anakin was perfectly willing to walk away from the Order the minute he returned from the war and discovered Padme was pregnant. Willing to walk away to start their FAMILY together. But then his nightmares began, and he reluctantly stayed just a little longer, thinking the Jedi (whom he originally joined with the express intent of wanting to help his loved ones) could offer him some solution to the horror his nightmares were showing him:

If not for his dreams, he’d withdraw from the Order today. Now. ...Let the scandal come; it wouldn’t destroy their lives. Not their real lives. It would destroy only the lives they’d had before each other: those separate years that now meant nothing at all.

To drive the point home, we also have the pivotal scene where Obi-Wan—speaking on the Council's behalf—tries to convince Anakin to spy on the Chancellor. Their exchange says it all:

"He's my friend, Obi-Wan." "I know." "If he asked me to spy on you, do you think I would do it? You know how kind he's been to me. You now how he's looked after me, how he's done everything he could to help me. He's like family." "The Jedi are your family." "No. No, the Jedi are your family. The only one you've ever known. I had a mother who loved me."

Anakin's story breaks my heart because all he wants—all he has ever wanted—is a family. Not to just to 'have' one in a vague sense, but to be PART OF ONE. He wants this, because even when he was slave living an unfree life, at least he had his mother. At least he could feel his mother's love, and could openly demonstrate his love to her in return. For Anakin Skywalker, being a Jedi was never the goal in and of itself. In his mind, it was always primarily a means to save those he loved. To save his family. This is simultaneously the most tragic and the most beautiful thing about his character. It is both his fall AND his redemption.

And those who insist on ignoring Anakin’s deep-seated longing for a family and want to act as though he should just be content with the Jedi Order instead are willfully missing the entire point of his story.

#Anakin Skywalker #Shmi Skywalker #mother and son #the jedi order #jedi discourse #the prequels #tpm novelization #aotc novelization #rots novelization #the skywalkers #skywalker family #the skywalker saga #the real skywalker saga #love and family #love can ignite the stars #the barest flicker of persistent light

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ae-neon · 7 months

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"You're queer and you support Palestine? Well Hamas is homophobic and the vast majority of Palestinians support Hamas so-"

Putting aside that you have no way of knowing what most Palestinian people think, AND THAT YOUR BOMBS ARE KILLING QUEER PALESTINIANS TOO - and also putting aside the very white tendency to group others when I'm sure in your own country many people are also homophobic - why do you think that matters?

This is a very different situation from countries that are not under an oppressive apartheid regime by illegal settlers like Saudi Arabia, the west's genocidal best friend. The Palestinians are fighting for their lives???

Like I'm sorry but in the very real reality of being bombed daily, I don't think people are backing resistance fighters on their party policies?? I think if there's a guy shooting back at the people who killed my father and mother, then of course I support that guy??

Like think about the luxury you're living in where you think that there're options besides stay alive

Pre-2015 gay marriage was not recognised as a right in the USA, so was the vast majority of people homophobic and therefore undeserving of freedom of movement or even the right to life??

My country (in Africa!) had legalised same-sex marriage ten years before you did so by your own logic I have the moral high ground to tell you to shut the fuck up

#isreal #blocked that lunatic #free Palestine til its backwards #and Palestine is Free #palestine #free palestine

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burst-of-iridescent · 3 months

Text

atla live action thoughts: episodes 3 & 4

SPOILERS AHEAD

tw: opinions

things i liked:

jet, you beautiful, beautiful man. had me twirling my hair and kicking my feet fr i NEED this show to get a season 2 just so i can see more of him in the ba sing se arc please netflix

but looks aside, sebastian amoruso DELIVERED on the performance. the softness, the vulnerability, the charm, the intelligence, yet also the ruthlessness beneath it all? KILLED IT.

the moment between him and katara where he tells her to remember her mother as she was alive and not just her death was absolutely lovely. “remember the sunrise” made me very emotional

on that note, can’t believe jetara fake marriage is canon now lmao

i am SO here for desi omashu. i love the vibe and aesthetic of the city and again the visuals are STUNNING. live action repping the south asians better than the original ever did i’ll be honest

shameless fan service but “MY CABBAGES” being so fucking dramatic had me dying

of all the things i expected from the atla live action, secret tunnel and omashu being lesbians wasn’t even on the list but i’m not mad. hilarious that they turned the cave of two lovers into the cave of two platonic siblings though

jet, omashu and northern air temple arcs actually meshed together better than i thought. the NAT episode never sat well with me in the original so i’m glad they moved them to omashu instead.

the freedom fighters were RIGHT OUT OF THE ANIMATION. casting directors absolutely killed

love that they showed resistance movements within the fire nation and azula being part of rooting them out. it’s a nice nod to the deserter, since i’m guessing they’re not including that episode

really glad to see that the atla live action is following the tradition of having weirdly unnecessary zutara crumbs in every iteration of the story because what in the om shanti om was that zutara scarf moment. 10/10 no notes

having one of the earthbenders transporting iroh be angry over losing a loved one because of iroh’s siege of ba sing se was a really great change. i’ve always thought the original glossed over the true extent of the damage iroh did, so having him come face to face with what he’d done in the past was a great way to add some complexity

“how dare you beat up that child!” everyone go home seeing zuko being beat up by a random old lady is the highlight of this series. really love that they were just running around throwing things at each other that was major book 1 zuko/aang fight energy lmao

SECRET TUNNELLLLLLLL

leaves from the vine instrumental was 100% to inflict emotional damage and it fucking worked. the scene between zuko and iroh at lu ten’s funeral was so beautiful & then to have it flipped around at the end when iroh says “everything i need is on this boat”… fuck you for this netflix i didn’t need these tears today

things i disliked/am conflicted about:

not a fan of what they’re doing with katara’s character. they’re toning down a lot of her rage and fierceness, and boiling her down to “trauma over mother’s death.” in the original katara didn’t freeze jet and splash water at him because he tried to fight her, she did it because she was hurt and pissed off! there’s no way animated katara would’ve just run away from jet without sending a water whip at his face first. i’m concerned for how the pakku fight is gonna go tbh

bumi my guy, what did they do to you 💀 this series seems hellbent on having everyone remind aang that he ran away which doesn’t work when a) you already changed aang actively running away to him just going off for a break and b) you’ve made that point! the original omashu episode was about bumi teaching aang to look at the world differently, here it just weirdly feels as though he’s punishing aang by venting all his anger and despair on him?? that’s NOT what animated bumi was like & they didn’t even have the two of them go sliding down the delivery system in the flashbacks so adding it in at the end felt very out of nowhere. they didn’t even genuinely seem to be FRIENDS

having aang immediately figure out it was bumi was… sigh. can we please not do the thing where characters already know everything it’s giving me trauma flashbacks to the percy jackson show

jet’s plan feels more reasonable here than it did in the original. i get they’re trying to show that he didn’t care about the collateral damage to innocent people and that’s bad, but idk him wiping out an entire town unilaterally felt more extreme than a few bombings.

heavily dislike what they’ve done with zhao. i know they’re trying to show him clawing his way to power but that’s more of a long feng move than a ZHAO move. it’s important that zhao always holds more power than zuko and that he has an overinflated sense of ego from the start for him to fulfil his narrative purpose of serving as a warning to zuko of what he might become.

i like seeing mailee but why are they in this show? it feels as though they’re cardboard cutouts there for fan service instead of being actual characters

overall i liked these episodes better than the previous two & i do enjoy how action-packed and visually pleasing the show has been so far.

overall rating: 8/10 for episode 3, 7/10 for episode 4

#atla live action #zutara #i put these two episodes together since they felt like a two parter #also yes i gave into the urge to binge

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casuallyawkardd · 9 months

Text

Dating Hobie Brown

Pairing: Hobie Brown x GN!Reader

Summary: My personal headcannon of what it would be like dating Hobie Brown. Includes how you met, got together and etc.

Warnings: fluff, angst, hurt/comfort, death and violence

A/N: Idk how old Hobie actually is, but I always pictured he was like nineteen so don’t @ me when the NSFW comes out. Also I didn’t mean for it to come out as sad as it did?? So sorry I guess

Meeting

Your mother is the captain of the police force. Growing up, it was just the two of you and because of this your mother made sure to raise you right. Making sure you said your ‘please’s and ‘thank you’s, got good grades in school, didn’t get involved with the wrong crowd, etc. etc. As you got older, you learned just how hard your mom worked to make sure you had a good childhood, a good life, and so you made sure to do as you were told. To be her perfect, little baby.

However, it was hard to make sure you grew up in a ‘good’ environment the older you got. Especially when you began to understand that not everyone saw your mom as the hero you saw her as. The political environment of London was unstable, protests and riots becoming more and more frequent. Sure, you agreed that the government was corrupted and people abused the power they were given, but when you started seeing signs that trash talked the captain of the police force, you couldn’t help but take it personally. Yeah, there were some bad people out there, but your mother was not one of them.

Being the kid of the police captain makes you a walking target and you find that out the hard way. One night, as you’re walking home from one of your uni’s night classes, some extremists decide to back you into the nearest alley. They weren’t like the usual protestors who would shout at you while you walked down the street, these were the kind that were in it for the rioting. More about making a scene than supporting a cause, practically looking for an excuse to do some damage.

You have no intention of making it easy for them, mama didn’t raise no bitch. They shove you and you shove back even harder. They get in your face to spit insults, you scream some right back. It’s a back and forth that goes downhill quickly, four against one being painfully unfair odds.

Before you get your ass kicked, your savior arrives. You recognize him immediately; the ripped jeans, leather jacket, the red mask with a spiked mohawk, you’re taken aback as you watch Spider-Man pummel your antagonizers and yell at them to ‘fuck off!’ Now it’s just the two of you in the dark alley and you don’t know how to feel. On one hand, he did just save you from getting your teeth knocked in. On the other, the guy was the bane of your mother’s existence, practically the ringmaster of every protest and riot in London that makes her lose sleep at night.

”You’re the captain’s kid, ain’tcha?”

“Can’t let a lovely face like yours get broken, eh?”

He’s...charming, his fingers gently grasping your chin as he assesses the damage. Even offers to take you home, which he doesn’t even give you the chance to say yes or no to as he’s already walking you down the street. While there’s a certain allure to him, he’s also a thorn in your side. Teasing you, making up antagonizing nicknames, by the time you make it to your apartment building you’re sure he’s just doing it to spite you. For once, you go against what your mother taught you and don’t thank him as you slam the window shut.

“What? No kiss goodnight?”

Meeting...Again

When you two cross paths again, it’s not when he’s Spider-Man. One of your friends from your creative writing class drags you out to the pub. Saying it was a crime you had been eighteen years old for six months and had yet to have your first drink. The bar is loud, filled with the type of people your mother would kill you for hanging out with. It seems your friend had neglected to tell you this particular venue was a dive bar. A dive bar that was frequented by bikers and freedom fighters.

You don’t notice him, but Hobie recognizes you instantly; a smirk making its way onto his face as he strolls over. You’re tucked into the corner of the bar quietly sipping on some drinks, your friend having long since ditched you to talk to someone who caught her eye.

“Hiding away are you, love?”

The voice is familiar, making you turn to face him instantly. Where you’ve heard it is a little trickier to place. One quick up and down of the man now leaning against the bar has you stiffening. He’s practically the definition of what your mother has tried to protect you from for years, telling you that people that looked like him were bad news. Yet it seems your attempts to dissuade him are futile, in fact Hobie almost seems to enjoy the banter. He says one thing, you turn your nose up at it. He responds to your insults with vaguely flirty comments and chuckles when you go hot under the collar.

He finally gets you to crack when he brings up music. It’s your passion, your life, hell it’s what got you a scholarship to even get into uni in the first place; tuition being well out of your budget. While it’s no surprise your tastes in music differ, it’s more about how he talks about music. You learn he’s a musician too, that he believes it’s not just about ‘finding a good beat’; how music can touch the soul if done just right. That it’s something that can unite the unlikeliest people.

It surprises you, in a good way. Has you thinking there’s maybe more to him than meets the eye. You say as much, Hobie teasing you about how ‘you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover’, which has you rolling your eyes. He’s not wrong though, the more he talks the more you want to listen. Not just about music, but the little details of his past, his beliefs, ideals and even his little quirks that he brings up organically in the conversation. What’s even better is how he matches your interest with his own, pulling out every little detail about yourself he can.

You don’t realize it’s gotten late, a quick glance at your phone showing you had missed a concerning amount of calls and texts from your mum. Drunkenly, you stand and stagger, the drinks you had been sipping on, that Hobie so generously kept buying you, starting to pack a punch. Large hands hold you steady, Hobie offering to walk you home. You tell him no, the slur of the word causing him to guide you out of the pub regardless.

You never thought walking home from a bar could be this fun. The fuzzy feeling in your head making you giggle and stumble down the path, Hobie following along and indulging you and your drunken bantering. When you do finally get home, you dread the idea of encountering your mother in your intoxicated state. Not to mention the fact you were accompanied with a ‘ ‘delinquent’ ’, your mother’s words not yours, like Hobie. The final decision is to crawl through your bedroom window, demanding Hobie give you a lift. The suggestion has him grinning ear to ear, tall stature lowering into a crouch and longer finger intertwining to give you a step.

“So there’s a little rebel in you after all, eh?”

Getting Together + “Dating”

The two of you becoming an item happens before you even realize it. You had been going about things under the guise of friendship, that is until one of his friends brings it up. A harmless little comment really, telling you that your ‘little boy toy’ was causing a ruckus yet again and might need someone to reel him in. It perplexes you, said friend beginning to tease you for playing coy. When you finally do fetch Hobie and apologize on his behalf, they give you a knowing look as you and your ‘boy toy’ head out for the evening.

Suddenly you’re very aware of the way he grabs your hand when guiding you through a crowded room. Fingers laced with yours for a better grip and using his body to shove people aside to give you a clear path. The gentle kisses on your forehead when he tells you goodnight or on your knuckles when he’s trying to apologize for something. How his forehead touches yours when you listen to one of his favorite cassette tapes, your eyes closed to focus on the music while he watches you softly mouth the words to the song. The proud look he gets on his face whenever you do something out of your comfort zone, followed by him saying ‘I told you so’ when you end up liking it.

“Nah mate, I don’t do labels.”

Is his response when someone flat out calls him your boyfriend. He says it simply, bluntly and you try to deny the sting in your chest when he does. And yet you hold your tongue, suppressing your comments with the bitter taste of beer. The routine you’ve begun now feels full of falsehoods. Spending the day between home and uni classes to keep up appearances as the ‘perfect child’; evenings at small pubs and Hobie’s flat where you finally get to unwind and take a break. What were his intentions? Was he like this with other people? Is what the two of you have not as special as you had thought?

The thoughts swirl through your head as you begin your walk home from the pub, yet another part of your new routine. Although this time, rather than Hobie and you walking side by side, air filled with chatter and quieted laughter, tonight he’s a few paces behind you. Not by choice, rather you seem to be refusing to speak to him, picking up the pace whenever he tries to match your stride. Could he easily close the distance with his long stride? Sure, but he knows when to not push your boundaries.

He’s had enough by the time you arrive at your apartment building, a familiar, large hand wrapping around your forearm and pulling you to him. He’s not mad, barely even upset, just confused why you’re acting so differently. Usually you liked his calm demeanor, it seemed to balance out your high strung one, but right now it infuriates you. How does he not get it? Swerving the goodnight kiss, you head up to your flat to put this night behind you.

After about a week of you declining invites and giving him the cold shoulder, Hobie decides to come to you. He tries to be respectful, giving you space for reasons he has yet to understand, but that doesn’t mean he can’t watch you. It’s not creepy...he’s just making sure you get home safe, watching from the building across the street from your usual route home...it’s not weird, right? Right?

He can’t stand it, shooting a web and swinging to land gracefully in front of you. Or he tries to, his boot got caught on the concrete and he had to stumble to a stop. Since when has he been this clumsy? You stand dumbfounded, not recognizing him when he’s in his Spider-Man suit. He doesn’t even remember he’s in the stupid thing until he’s halfway through his rantings; talking about how ‘uncool’ it is to be avoiding him and how he thought of you as more mature than this. That he can’t fix the problem unless you tell him the problem.

After a moment of awkward silence, the look of recognition flashes across your face and he’s ushering you into the nearest alley before you can blurt out his secret identity. Stuck between Hobie and the brick wall, you’re forced to fess up to why you’ve been so distant, Hobie refusing to budge until you do. You can’t even look him in the eye as you spill every thought you’ve had over the last week. Talking about how you have feelings for him, but hate him for making you like him. How you don’t care if he feels the same, but you do care that he acts like he feels the same. That it’s not fair he gets to decide what can and can’t be a label and if he’s not your boyfriend then what is he? That it-

Hobie cuts you off as he leans in, lips pressing tenderly against yours. You hesitate before leaning into it, his warmth surrounds you as his arms move to wrap around your back. You realize you missed his touch, the contrast between the coolness of his piercing and the comfort of his lips on your skin. When he pulls away, he continues to hold you close, hand coming up to hold your face, a calloused thumb stroking your cheekbone.

“I’m not into putting a label on things, but I’m into....this. I like what this is. I don’t need a stupid label to tell everyone I like you and you like me cuz the only people who need to know are you and me. Innit that right, love?”

You point out that while it’s touching he feels that way, there might be a hole or two in his idea. The two of you decide to compromise so the next time someone asks, you tell people you’re ‘exclusive’. It’s not a label, it’s an adjective, totally different.

Future

You two met before the spiderverse, before Hobie even knew what a canon event was. If he had, he might’ve prevented his next one. Your mother’s death came during a flurry of incidents. For you, it was her finding out about Hobie. As expected, she was furious when she found the two of you saying your goodbyes through your bedroom window. The fight that ensued between you and her was monstrous . You’d always been a good kid, her perfect, little angel. You’d grown to hate that word. Perfect. What’s the point in being perfect if you can’t live your life? Have a little fun?

She blames Hobie for your change in tune, forbidding you from ever seeing him again. The bubble of anger swelling in your chest bursts and you tell her ‘no’ for the first time. Scream it at her actually. That you’d done everything she asked for your whole life and that you weren’t going to give up the one thing you did for yourself. That it wasn’t a crime to like someone like Hobie, that there was more to him if she would just give him a chance. Your mother refuses to listen, dismissing you to go to your room. Reluctantly you comply, but not without shouting a final ‘I hate you!’ as you slam the door.

Hobie, while frazzled by the little bit of the argument he’d witnessed, has his own problems brewing. He’s caught wind of Kingpin, the rumor being that he’s working with Osborn once again. This time, he’s gotten his slimy hands on some illegal weapons that’ll give the police force the upper hand against the freedom fighters. He’s on the scene, but so is your mother, who had left after your fight when she got tipped off. Hobie can see she’s alone, most likely being too impatient for backup like she usually is.

Everything happens too quickly, hissing whispers between him and her as he tries to tell her to ‘bugger off’, her saying she’s not going to let some kid get hurt while playing hero. Huh, she’s never called him a hero before. Hobie doesn’t get to dwell on the thought before they’re spotted, bullets and gun powder filling the night air. Some webbing takes care of Kingpin’s goons, but the bastard is able to get away as usual, but not without delivering the final shot.

The eyes of Hobie’s spidersuit widen when he sees the blood leaking down the front of your mother’s uniform, instincts drawing him to her side to help her lie down. Emotions stir uncomfortably inside his chest, this is a cop; not just any cop, but the leader of the swine that call themselves the defenders of the people. And yet he’s applying pressure to the wound, holding off the inevitable because right now she isn’t the captain of the police force, she’s a mother. Your mother.

Her last words are ingrained in his mind, ‘My baby...I can’t leave my baby.’

You’re confused when you see him in your living room, quietly but urgently saying that he has to go before your mother catches him, unaware she’s not even home. That she wouldn’t be coming back home. Routine and structure is embedded in your being, the idea of your mother’s death coming ‘too soon’ or that ‘you wouldn’t get to say goodbye’ have never crossed your mind. And yet it’s your reality. Your mother doesn’t get to retire and die of old age and the last words you said to her were ‘I hate you.’

“She knows you don’t.”

Hobie tries to comfort you, holding you close despite your resistance. In all honesty, you don’t know if you want to be left alone or never want him to let you go, so you settle for what he has to offer. Hobie doesn’t say much else, partly because he doesn’t know what to say and partly because he thinks all he can do right now is hold you and let your tears soak the front of his suit.

As morbid as it may sound, your mother’s death came at a convenient time. Your first year of uni had wrapped up the week before, so it hurts less to withdraw. At least you were able to wrap up one year. Whether or not you’ll go back isn’t on your mind, but deep down you know you will. It’s what your mother would’ve wanted.

You’re grateful for the support system you have, a few uni friends who still keep in touch after you leave and the friends you made through Hobie. While their ‘I’m sorry for your loss’s and ‘I’m here for you’s are comforting, Hobie is the one who’s truly there for you.

Hobie’s the one who lets you move in with him when you can’t stand being at home, everything there reminding you of her. Hobie’s the one who brings you your meals when you forget to eat, the water you have yet to drink. Hobie’s the one who asks you to play a song he likes, his excuse being that he likes it better when you play it, but you both know it’s his way of making sure you don’t abandon your passions. Hobie’s the one who carries you to bed when you fall asleep to home videos, tucking you in and placing the baby blanket your mother made you on top. Hobie’s the one that heals you, even if it’s only a little. Even if there’s still more of you to make better.

In terms of marriage and kids, they aren’t things either of you talk about. You’re young, you have a lot more ahead of you. Hobie reminded you of that. That sometimes life doesn’t follow a ‘routine’, that sometimes it’s better to live day by day with the ones you love.

Tags:

@khaleesihavilliard @graysonshaven @qiaipia @3zae-zae3 @thedevax @erissco

#hobie brown #spiderpunk x reader #spiderpunk #across the spiderverse #hobie brown headcanons #reader insert #hobie brown x reader

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httpskuzuu · 5 months

Note

if your not busy then can you make more yandere chuuya l'm down bad for him lol!😭

The best gift

can we give reader a therapy session? thanks

Yandere!Chuuya x Reader

English is not my mother tongue, sorry for the mistakes

summary: Chuuya just wants to make you happy (I love that man)

tw: failed escape attempt, mention of punishment, broken leg, feelings of abandonment? idk

He couldn't be more fed up with you.

I mean, he loves you, but the fact that you are always unwilling to correspond to him is something that really hurts him deeply.

He even thought of locking you up in complete darkness, no light, no food. He wanted you to crawl to him afterward and ask him to get you out. He wanted to make you say you loved him.

He never got around to putting that plan into action, obviously. He's not that horrible! He's not a monster. He really loves you.

Sure anyone would put you through the most grotesque tortures to make you submissive. But he was different, you should appreciate him more.

As much as he knows you have reasons, he still finds it completely overkill because, come on, you have everything you want just by asking nicely! Everything but freedom, of course.

You want expensive clothes? Okay. You want diamond jewelry? In less than five seconds, you'll have them in your hands. Want to travel to exotic destinations? He's taking you, just don't leave his side.

All he asks is a little obedience from you, it's not that hard, is it? He's looking out for your happiness too, the more submission from you, the better quality of life. It's a win-win.

But you didn't seem to understand that.

You were in bed, lying there, not wanting to move an inch of your body. Chuuya broke your leg just two days ago. The pain was unbearable.

You didn't talk to him since that, well, except for the moment he broke it. You cried to him and begged him, as silly as it sounds, to make the pain stop.

You wished Chuuya was some mythical God so he could fulfill your earlier request.

The pain didn't make you think well, so you were crying to Chuuya, talking about your cat and how much you missed him. Chuuya was by your side, stroking your hair, listening to you attentively.

You always mentioned your cat, how you wanted him with you now, how much you loved him. In fact, most of the time when an argument happened, it was because you mentioned that you wanted to go home with your cat!

Was an animal really that important to you? Well, if it made you happy, Chuuya would bring it home. Maybe then you'd stop crying randomly throughout the day, or fighting him. Imagining you, a fighter, turning into someone with a more passive behavior just because of a cat, drove him crazy.

Chuuya warned you that he was leaving, but that he would be back quickly, he left you a pain pill along with a glass of water. He hoped you would notice that he was not so cruel, after all, he could have left you lying on the floor, with two broken legs instead of just one, as was his idea at the beginning.

You were left alone in the house. You had never felt more lonely and bad in your life. Your friends, your family, your pet, what will become of them?

You feel miserable, left to your own devices. Why didn't they come for you? Did they care about you in the first place? You were sure there should have been an investigation into your disappearance by now, but what if there wasn't? What if you weren't important enough to them?

Were you that hard to love? But Chuuya loved you, in an obsessive way, but he did. Wouldn't that be the purest kind of love?

You don't know why you keep fighting, but it's something normal in you, like something wrapped in your DNA. You feel attacked, helpless, by something bigger that can't be stopped, so you grit your teeth trying to feel safe. It's not working the same for you anymore.

You didn't try to escape because this life was bad. You tried to escape because you didn't want to be forgotten by others. What kind of life is one in which you are a ghost trapped?

But you are not selfish, you hope they are doing well. You hope they have the happiness you can't seem to achieve.

You cried until you heard the door open. You hadn't noticed that Chuuya had come home.

You looked at him for a few seconds, he had with him a black gift box, tied with a ribbon. You didn't want gifts, you didn't want jewelry that could buy you.

Sure, that was until you heard a meow come out of the box. You stopped crying almost automatically and looked at it in surprise. You could even feel the glint settling in your eyes.

Chuuya pretended not to hear the meowing. "Why didn't you take the pill? You can't complain about the pain and then be stubborn enough not to take it."

"What's in the box?"

"A present for you. I thought it might make you happier." He sat on the edge of the bed, resting the box on his legs. "You know, I don't like to see you cry."

His gloved hand reaches to your cheek and wipes away the tears. There is an impulse in your body to fight, to refuse to be touched, but you stayed still.

Chuuya put the box on the bed next to you. You struggle and manage to sit up in bed, your leg throbbing with pain, but you ignore it. You have more important things to do now.

You don't even look at Chuuya for approval to open the box, you just open it. And there it is, your faithful friend who always stood by your side. Your cat.

You cry again.

Your cat seems happy to see you again, he nuzzles his head against your hand affectionately and meows at you. You take him in your arms and hug him.

"Do you like the present?" Chuuya's voice comes through in the place only ruled by your sobs. Of course you like it, how could you not? You missed this kitten so much, it had been so long since you hadn't seen him.

You nod your head. "Very much, I like it very much. Thank you Chuuya." Your voice shakes from the sobs, but that doesn't matter anymore.

You don't have to keep staying defensive when you have a friend with you.

"I thought maybe your cat could help you to be calmer, to stop fighting."

There was always something hidden. Chuuya wanted to see you happy, of course, but if he could gain some of that happiness from you, he would gladly do so.

You nod again. "Yes, it will help me." You wipe the tears from your cheeks as you smile.

It looks like you're both happy for once.

#bsd x reader #bsd x you #yandere bsd #bsd chuuya #chuuya x reader #chuuya x y/n #chuuya x you #yandere chuuya #chuuya #chuuya nakahara

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demaparbat-hp · 4 months

Note

It's interesting that in ATLA we don't meet any mixed characters until the comics when one tries to assassinate Firelord Zuko. With the war going on, I'm sure nationalism was at an all time high. The only ones who seemed to venture out were soldiers, mainly men. (Fire Nation men. I'm sure the SWT navy wasn't that big) Also, the only people we've seen not wear national colors were those outside society like the river pirates, hippies, and Freedom Fighters.

Halfblood AU makes me wonder how an orphan girl with Water Tribe features would have been treated in a small EK village canon wise.

I know, right? The potential for storytelling is huge.

War Children are a reality, and they have always been. It would have been so interesting to explore what being a half-blooded child would mean in a world like ATLA's, where nationality is so important, especially in the middle of a war. I absolutely adore fics where Zuko is mistaken as a War Child while he's travelling through the Earth Kingdom, and he's forced to deal with the reality that such things happen the way they do.

I tend to use this idea in most of my AUs. War Children (Fire half-children especially) is such a complex social dynamic to explore. How would their treatment change depending on whether they were born in the colonies or in the rest of the struggling Earth Kingdom? What about the Southern Water Tribe, after the raids? How much worse would being an ashmaker make things?

This is a world in war, and it's easy to forget someone is a child when they have the same face as your enemy.

Maybe my fics speak better than I ever could.

Song had met enough War Children during her travels to be able to recognize them easily. They all shared the same amber eyes, black hair and pale skin. Sometimes, if they were unfortunate enough, they were even born ashmakers.

She had heard stories of the pale demons—proud sons and daughters of Agni within the colonies, but worth less than dust in the rest of the Kingdom. Murdered by their own unwilling mothers, treated as pests because, to most people, that's exactly what they were.

But Song had seen toddlers with amber eyes and sunken cheeks perish from dehydration and famine. She knew better.

[Katara] heard the screams of her Tribe’s women during the raids, the high pitch of the newborns’ throats as they were drowned in freezing water, for there was no place for ashmakers in the South Pole, no place at all.

And it makes you think, what about the other nations? What about Water half-children?

It's easier to blend in with the crowd when you pretend there's nothing different about you in the first place. And though they may not have it as rough as the Fire children, they're still less than second class citizens. Neither Earth nor Water. Never enough, no matter where they go.

There are so many different, complex dynamics to explore with this concept. What do you think about it?

#dema answers #atla #halfblood au #katara #zuko #zutara #atla meta #Sorry I made this so long #I don't know if I get my point across. I'm not the best at writing media analysis lol #I'd love for someone who knows what they're doing to step in and explore this concept #It really is a gold mine #And such a deep and complicated dynamic

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spacebarbarianweird · 4 months

Note

Hi friend! Dropping by to ask about HC for my fighter Tav!

She’s a human born to a guild family, and ran away from them because they wanted to marry her off.

As a fighter she’s strong and muscular, but feels rather unattractive and masculine.

She also does crafts (guild artisan background) but doesn’t really tell anyone because it doesn’t really fit her fighter persona.

Ok, behold! Hope you won't be dissapointed!

Astarion x f!Fighter!Tav

Your family doesn't come from the Swords Coast.

You come from the Border Kingdoms, a country with much stricter rules.

According to local customs, a woman is a woman. Obedient, submissive, stupid.

Just a commodity to be sold and bought.

Your father, a wealthy merchant, dreams of marrying you off to a noble.

Instead of learning to fight, you learn to dance. Instead of magic, you are taught manners.

And you are punished for not being feminine enough.

But you see the different life in Baldur's Gate.

You see women who are warriors, fighters, sorceresses, pirates.

Everything you dream to be!

Noticing your interest, your mother locks you in the house, forbidding you to go out alone.

And you decide to run away.

You plan it carefully. The Swords Coast is big, you just need to leave Baldur's Gate and disappear among the adventurers.

You find a way to learn how to fight, disguising it as another dance lesson, and how to shoot arrows by lying to your parents that noble women in the Border Kingdoms love casual archery.

You are ready to escape, but on the very day you plan to leave, your father receives news. The royal family has agreed to marry off their youngest son to you.

Your family will also become nobles and be given their own lands.

But your mothers sees your preparations - a travel suit and a sword. She punishes you severely, forcing a wizard to paralyze you till they day you and your family sail back home.

You realize that your life is over. You will be locked in a castle, and you will never be able to walk the roads freely.

Because running away from a rich family is one thing. Running away from a prince is quite another. He will find you.

Worse, he'll get you pregnant, and your life will be over.

You decide it's better to end it al.

You jump into the sea and let the waters take you.

But your will to live proves to be much stronger than you expected, and you manage to stay afloat.

But once you reach the coast, the mindflayers kidnap you.

The tadpole in your brain is creepy and weird, but after meeting the first mercenary who seeks you out, you begin to appreciate this unexpected ally.

You feel strong and free - you can stand for yourself.

You and Astarion have similar fears. And desires.

As soon as you get to Baldur's Gate, your family knows of your arrival.

And so does your "husband."

Powerful mages come after you and, taking advantage of your weakness after removing the tadpole, kidnap you.

Astarion won't let them take you.

Even if he has to start a war against the kingdom to do so.

He goes to the Undedark, begging spawns to help him.

A whole year passes, but he is finally there, ready to enter the castle.

That's where the battle takes place - between the vampires and the knights.

Astarion finds you, tired, beaten, and drugged. He carries you to the dungeons to the darkness and freedom.

But...

The prince, realizing he can't have you, kills you.

Astarion kills him on the spot, but by the time he carries you to safety, it's too late.

You've lost too much blood. You're dying.

Nothing can help you.

Astarion begs and cries, but there is nothing he can do.

You ask him to drain you. You want to die in his hands.

Astarion agrees.

A masterless spawn, what can he do?

He holds you for a day in his hands before letting you rest in your grave.

But there's something Astarion doesn't know about himself, or vampires in general.

When the master dies, vampires cease to be spawns.

They become true vampires. Very capable of creating their own spawns.

You wake up in your grave, mad with pain and hunger.

You crawl out with a dead heart in your chest, a permament bite mark, a hunger you've never known, and a pair of fangs.

An invisible thread pulls you away, forcing you to face your master.

To obey his commands.

Several days pass as you reach him - you cannot hunt because your master has not allowed it, you cannot rest before you face him.

Astarion wakes up and sees you - confused, tired, and hungry.

A slave to his will.

And he realizes that he has unleashed 7,000 full-fledged vampires with the same ability to turn mortals into the undead.

He immediately gives you his blood, freeing you.

You belong to him. Forever. And he belongs to you.

It takes you a while to get used to that. You miss the sun, you can't hunt, and the empty mirrors drive you crazy.

Hunger and cold torment you, and sometimes you curse Astarion for not letting you die (as if it were his fault).

You even try to walk into the sunlight to die, but Astarion manages to drag you back.

You finally make peace with yourself and your condition.

Immortal! Able to crawl on the ceiling! Strong! Eerily beautiful! Immune to necrotic damage!

And through you, Astarion makes peace with himself.

Why bother looking for the cure if you can create a vampire guild and force a "protection racket" on the people of Faerun?

You, a terrible vampire woman, strike fear in some distant village!

Him, a dangerous undead, bothering a rich merchant!

Someone needs to rescue these people. It shouldn't bother them a vampire saves them from another vampire.

Sometimes Astarion "hunts" you, sometimes you "hunt" him.

You have the immortality to share with each other, and you are looking forward into the future.

Tag list

@tugoslovenka @marcynomercy @wintersire @vixstarria @not-so-lost-after-all @ashiro20 @theearthsfinalconfession @herstxrgirl @starlight-ipomoea @micropoe10 @astarion-imagine-archive @veillsar @elora-the-slutty-songstress @fayeriess @lumienyx @tallymonster @caitlincat-95 @tragedybunny @valeprati @lynnlovesthestars @marina-and-the-memes @waking-electric @ayselluna @connorsui @asterordinary @darkarchangel96 @locallegume

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senualothbrok · 5 months

Text

Rest

Summary: You have defeated the Netherbrain and survived. But when Gale asks you to marry him, you find that you cannot accept his offer.

Word count: 2.8k

Disclaimers: Non-18+. Gale x female Tav. Hurt/comfort.

World state: Gale did not sacrifice himself or claim the Crown of Karsus, which remains in the Chionthar.

AO3 link

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His words wind you. You do not expect them. Had they been an upper cut, or perhaps a cross, you would have seen it coming. You would have tensed for impact, like you have thousands of times before. You would have barely felt the blow when it landed.

But these words – you do not anticipate them. They blindside you.

“I wondered if you might consider accompanying me back to Waterdeep as a new member of the Dekarios clan?”

His soft eyes shine, brimming with hope. Love.

You feel like you are suspended. It is not unlike the numbness after a fight. The empty shock and silence, the world bustling around you while you listen in a stupor to your laboured breaths. You cannot even feel the aching of your limbs. You mouth makes your question without your consent.

“Are you asking me to marry you?”

Such warmth and light, such gentleness in his smile. It would speak volumes, even if he were silent.

“I suppose I am. Tara would be delighted, not to mention my mother. But I’d be just as happy without such ceremony, as long as we’re together.”

You flinch. You do not know why. And you do not know why the sounds stick in your throat as you turn from him, as if defending against a punch to your gut.

“I’m sorry, Gale,” you manage to force out.

You cannot bring yourself to look back at him as you retreat.

-----

You never expected to fall in love with this man.

You were not surprised to find an instant friendship with Lae’zel, disciplined and fuelled by combat, instinctively aware of how the battle could swallow you up until nothing of you remained. Even Wyll, his life rewritten by tales of glory, and Shadowheart, reduced to the pinprick of a divine mission shrouded in secrets. They were fast and easy companions, in whose presence some things did not need to be spoken to be understood.

But Gale. This man spoke as though reading from a textbook, and carried himself with an awkwardness that suggested he had never thrown a punch in his life. You had few dealings with wizards, much less ones of skill and renown. You had no education or scholarly insight, no aptitude or experience with magic. You were sure you had nothing in common with him, pleasant enough as he was.

The only time you had encountered anyone like Gale had been when your coach had tried to sell you to wealthy sponsors and patrons. They would stand there in their spotless robes and finery, appraising your bruised and bloody body after each fight, grimacing and finding you wanting. You had won a handful of fights but lost more. Outside of a small circle in Baldur’s Gate, you were little known in the boxing circuits. Human females, much less ones as slight of stature as you, generally did not fare well.

But you had fought your way out of that flophouse, and every day was a fight to keep surviving. You could not remember a time before you had been recruited as a boxer, a time before fighting was what you lived and breathed and dreamt of. A fighter was all you were, all you had ever been.

No, you did not expect to grow close to this man. You had never known anyone like him.

The first time you had felt it was when he spoke to you of the Weave. No wizard or sorcerer had ever bothered to really speak to you before, let alone share this most intimate of secrets. Gale had felt held and cradled by the Weave, cocooned in its embrace, and it had transformed him, even in the telling of it. And you had known, then, that he would understand. You knew you could tell him how it felt in the midst of a fight, when the battle became a spirit that carried you like a wave, a surge of freedom and ecstasy that possessed you, until you became the fight. You were one with it. Without it, you felt lost, like you were nothing.

He had understood it. Much later, when he told you of Mystra, you realised that he understood it more acutely than anyone else could.

When you learned he was from Waterdeep, you told him about the fight you had lost there about a year before you had found yourself on the Nautiloid. The two of you had revelled in the realisation that you had walked the streets beneath his tower, looked across the sea that he had gazed at from his balcony. If you had looked up, you may even have seen him sitting there, reading or bickering with Tara. In Gale’s unbridled excitement, you could feel an agonised yearning for home. But you could not tell him you had been to all the taverns and libraries he recounted with longing. You could not tell him that you had enjoyed all the specialties of Waterdeep that he wished so intensely to cook and share now. You felt disappointment, and even some shame, in this.

“I didn’t have the pleasure of any of that,” you told him. “The second that I was awake, I was training for the fight. And after the fight, I had to leave to start training for the next one.”

He grimaced. “And I had locked myself away, and couldn’t have seen you fight. Another regret I can add to my ever growing list – that I didn’t have the privilege of crossing paths with you then.”

The thought of Gale pinched into the jeering crowds that loomed around you while you bled and battered the daylights out of an orc seemed so ridiculous that you could not help but laugh.

“I don’t think that would have been your scene, Gale. Even if you had left your tower.”

He chuckled. “I might have met you at a tavern after the fight.”

You arched an eyebrow. “I doubt you would have given me the time of day. Boxers like me don’t generally have any enlightening insights about the arcane arts.”

At that time, you did not tell him the truth – that you never would have gone to a tavern. Your coach would not have permitted you, even if you had wanted to. The temptation to drink and feast and choose pleasure over sleep would have been too great. Everything in your fighter’s life was measured and rationed out like water in a desert. You could not have a morsel without your coach’s approval, and even with it, warning bells would signal in your head whenever any rule was broken, any restriction disregarded. A tavern may not have been Gale’s scene, but it was not yours either.

You did not tell him that long before he had been trapped in his tower, you had been trapped in that boxing ring. It was the only home you knew. Yet you still yearned for it, even as he did.

He looked at you then, in a way no one had ever done before. There was a fullness in his gaze, a tenderness, but his eyes were unflinching. It stirred something inside you that you had forgotten was there. A warmth tingled through you like trailing fingers.

“I would have relished a conversation with you,” he said. “Just as I do now.”

Desire was not something alien to you. Sex was not frowned on in the training camps you had been sent to time after time. It was a way to remove distractions, ease tension, improve performance. You had even benefited from it with competitors. “Judicious bloodletting helps to resolve disputes,” Lae’zel was fond of saying, and you found sex to be the same.

When Lae’zel had made you an offer, though, you had declined. Though it was years ago, you could almost feel the aches from your last dalliance with a Githyanki fighter. The mere thought of it exhausted you now. To your relief, Lae’zel was pleased when you suggested regular sparring instead. You would go on late into the evenings, your companions watching enthusiastically at first, Karlach and Astarion even taking bets. But when one by one, their interest waned and they retired to their tents, Gale remained, wide eyed in wonder. There was no disaffected judgment, no wry appraisal in his stare.

You could see that it aroused him. You recognised that look well. He had even told you so, deep in the recesses of the Shadow-cursed lands, with your jaw clenched, muscles taut and slick with sweat. You were surprised and amused, and it had aroused you too, to know his feelings while he watched you doing what you did best. And it was familiar to you, to have to earn your keep and prove yourself worthy.

Everything in life had always been a fight to you. You were used to pushing your body to its limits and your mind beyond what it could endure. The battles you fought on your journey to the Netherbrain had not been so different than what you were used to, absent the looming threat of death. You were used to the gruelling, endless cycle, training and harrowing yourself before each fight. But you had never been accustomed to success and victory. The shame of defeat suffocated you, the fury and resentment of your coach more painful than any knock out. And even when you won, when you attained the glory which you had tortured yourself for so long to achieve, you would be overwhelmed by a crippling emptiness. It was an emptiness that could only be filled momentarily by the promise of another fight, a semblance of another purpose. Yet always, you would lie awake in the dead of night, muscles throbbing and torn, bruises purpling and bones broken, exhausted but unable to sleep or rest.

But you did not feel that emptiness anymore. Each victory on this great struggle did not disappear once you had reached it. Instead, every trace of goodness and kindness, every life saved, however fragile, was a light cast into the hole inside you that you thought could never be filled. For the first time in your life, you found that you could sleep, though rest still seemed to elude you.

And when he came to love you, it sometimes felt that that hole was not there at all.

The first time he showed you the Weave, it was like nothing you had ever felt before. There was no pain, no exertion. No gritting of teeth, no agony of toil. It felt like floating in warm water. It felt like your mother holding you in the cradle of her arms, the gentle rhythm of her heart beat, when you were small and she was healthy and you were still together. It felt like rest. And so it was, all the times when he touched you, every kiss he left on your skin which lingered inside you like a flame. He was rest.

He looked at you like you had saved him. But you could not understand it. How could anyone help but love a man like him? There was no malice or cruelty in him. If there was any shadow of Mystra, any inkling of hubris, it was not difficult to steer him from it, or to speak to the fear that lay underneath. To love him was like breathing. It was not a skill you had to master, a performance you had to train for, a habit you had to beat into yourself. It felt easy. And that terrified you.

His love for you terrified you even more. It did not demand from you, always pushing for more than you thought you could give. Ever sharpening and honing you like a blade, chipping away at you until you were more, enough, worthy. It was like being buoyed by the Weave. You did not need to struggle to stay afloat. You did not have to swim against it to survive. You could just be.

No one had ever looked at you, or touched you, or loved you like that. So you had explained it away to yourself. Perhaps he was simply grateful. Thankful to be seen and loved for the man he was, a person to be cherished rather than a life to be used. Flattered that you would fight for him. Enamoured with your prowess in combat. Driven by the threat of imminent death. You had not truly thought it would last, if you both survived the Netherbrain. You were prepared to let him go.

But he did not go. Instead, he said, “I love you, more than I’ve ever loved anyone.” And he asked you to marry him.

You do not know what to do with that.

-----

You can hear him shuffling outside the door. There is a long pause, then the smallest of knocks.

“Are you alright?” He waits, coughs. “I didn’t mean to upset you. If my words have distressed you-”

You want to hide, but the trembling in his voice is too much. You rise to your feet. As the door opens you see that his eyes are glistening and his features have fallen, as though he is on the cusp of collapse. And though the thought that you have hurt him claws at your heart, there is a wall that has sprung up inside you that you do not know how to break.

“I’m sorry.” Your words come out flat, hollow.

He steps towards you hesitantly. You can feel in the lurch of his body that he wants to embrace you, but he does not. Even in this moment, he is thinking of what you want.

“If you wish to end this, I understand. I’ll cherish everything we shared, and I’ll always love you-”

He stops, breathes in sharply, turns away. His chest heaves.

Without warning, you feel a tear roll down your cheek. One begets another, and another, until you are drowning in a flood of the hottest tears that you have ever shed. Hotter than the anguished tears you sobbed through so many nights of gnawing hunger and cramps, when you told yourself that the fight was all that mattered, that the sacrifice was all there was. That you were nothing without them.

You are almost doubled over now. You cover your face with your hands. By instinct, in shame, or in fear - you are not sure which.

“Please, go,” you choke.

“If that’s what you want. If this is the end.” His voice breaks. “I suppose this is goodbye. I always knew it was a colossal stroke of luck, to have been loved by someone like you.”

You find that you are shaking your head, over and over again, as though in a frenzy. Because you cannot lie, but you do not know what the truth is.

“No one has ever…”

He holds you with his gaze, whirling with agony, infused with love.

“I haven’t earned…” You struggle to breathe. “I’m not…”

There is a sudden flicker in his eyes. Is it recognition? When he speaks, there is longing, and the fire of resolution. He cups your face with his hands.

“I love you completely. I love everything about you, every single part of you. You never needed to earn it. You don’t need to fight for it. My love is forever yours, if you want it.”

“Gale-”

He traces his thumb over your cheek, caressing a tear away. “You love me, not for the magic I command, just as I love you, not for the fights you can win.”

You take hold of his hands. You can feel the wall crumbling now, but you are afraid of what is behind it.

“And if I lose? If I fail? If I stop training, fighting, if my muscles sag and I lose my strength? When I am nothing-”

You had not quite realised, until you spoke the words, all of the things you feared.

“You were never nothing.” His words are so firm, so kind, that they reverberate through you. “You were always everything. And I will love you until I breathe my last, until nothing remains of me but ashes. I will never stop loving you.”

At first, you cannot be convinced of his words. How can they be true? All these years you have fought, all the times you have fallen short. Love must be a fight to be won, a standard to which you cannot measure.

But Gale’s face is bright with the sincerity that illuminates his eyes whenever he looks at you. And in that moment, you let yourself believe him. You let yourself dissolve into him, like a river flowing back into the sea, and you do not fight the current. You lose yourself in his warmth as he wraps himself around you, the smell of sandalwood and smoke, the bittersweet taste of his musk and sweat, the vibrations of his skin against yours. The stars that burst and expand inside you with every surge of his being. You are home.

“I’ll marry you,” you whisper afterwards.

And with his arms around you, you rest.

----

Liked this fic? You can find more of my work here.

#baldur's gate 3 #baldurs gate 3 fanfiction #bg3 #bg3 fanfiction #gale dekarios #gale of waterdeep #gale x tav #gale romance #gale fanfic #gale fic

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illyrian-dreamer · 1 year

Text

Changing Shadows (Part 1)

Azriel x Reader

Image by koike9023

Part 1 summary:

You’ve caught the Illyrian flu, but are trying to hide it from the rest of the Inner Circle.

Lots of fluff, a bit of angst. Fluff fight with brother Rhys.

----------

Series summary:

Summary: You have a new role in the Inner Circle — Heard Guard of Velaris. And as Rhys’s younger sister, you feel you have a lot to prove.

You and the Shadowsinger are also growing closer, and tension builds as your relationship changes from friendship to something else…

How will you juggle your feelings for Azriel and the dangers that come with your new role, without disappointing the rest of the Inner Circle and the Night Court?

----------

Warnings: Mentions of violence

Word count: 1,709

AN: This is my first time writing, I really hope you like it! So far this story is working out to be about 10+ parts… would love to hear what you think! <3

∇

You swiped a sharp hook from your right hand before snapping your left shin to blast the sparring mitt held by Azriel. The blow made a cracking sound on contact, but Shadowsinger didn’t falter.

You let out a frustrated laugh, throwing your head back as sweat stung your eyes.

“C’mon!” You threw your hands up. “One day I’ll make you move,” you toyed, pointing a finger directly at him as you tussled your wings.

He let out a light chuckle as his circled his shoulders, getting back into his defensive stance. “You can try,” he countered in a low voice, shadows swirling playfully over his wings. Something in you stirred.

You’d been training alongside Cassian and Azriel for many years. As Rhys’s younger sister, you had grown up alongside the trio, training from a young age to prepare you for a role in the Inner Circle.

Which is where you had recently been appointed Head Guard of Velaris. It was your duty to protect the borders and it’s people, especially since the war against Hybern had increased strain on the wards, and secrecy of the location now under threat.

Due to an attack on your wings at a young age, your previous role in the Inner Circle was to manage relations across Prythian, which kept you safely hidden from Amarantha’s rule. But now your training was complete and your wings were healed and working in every way they needed, you offered a new set of skills.

It was the perfect role for you, protecting the city you knew by heart and people you loved. Velaris had served as a sanction and dear home since the murder of your mother — when Rhys had taken you under his wing.

You had memories of the first time you flew, a small 10-year-old Illyrian awkwardly flapping your wings over the Sidra as you ran your hands through the water, Rhys laughing and cheering as he soared beside you.

Cassian and Azriel had swooped in too, both just as excited as you found your new freedom in the sky. You had cheekily splashed all of them with water from the river, as they chased you into the clouds. It was the best memory you had.

And here you were many years later — a grown woman, skilled fighter and trained weapon of the Inner Circle, working in the most important role of your life.

Refocusing on the mitts Azriel held before you, you prepared to enter your last set of punches and high kicks for the session. You could see Cassian and the Valkyries already begin their cool down on the other side of the ring.

As you were about to crack into a punch, your head spun and you lost your footing.

Azriel dropped the mitts and steadied you, his cool hands gripping your shoulders. His brows furrowed into his hair, hazel eyes concerned.

“Hey hey, are you alright?”

A slight ring in your ears came about as you blinked a few times. You coughed and felt a pain in your throat, which you had been ignoring for a couple days now. You knew you felt a lot warmer than usual too.

You steadied yourself and the ringing disappeared. “Um yeah, I’m fine. Just a head spin.” You wiped your brow on your forearm.

“Grab some water and let’s cool down,” Azriel suggested, eyeing you down as if he wasn’t convinced.

You didn’t have a moment to respond before your brother winnowed into the training pit.

Cassian dismissed the Valkaryies, jogging over and clapping Rhys on the shoulder. “What’s up boss?” He grinned.

“Cass, Az,” Rhys greeted his brothers with a smile. “Is ‘Y/N giving you hell?”

You grinned. “Trying my best” you replied. You swore you felt a shadow tickle your ankle.

“What brings you to training?” Azriel asked cooly, his shadows twisting.

“Impromptu meeting,” Rhys answered. “Many of us will be working long distance over the next week, I’ve called a group meeting before we head off in different directions.”

“Better wash the stink of me first,” Cassian joked, pulling his long hair behind his ears.

“I second that,” you smirked, Cassian returning a vulgar gesture.

“You’ll all have time to freshen up, we’re convening in an hour,” Rhys smild at your banter.

You grabbed your belongings while trying to stifle another cough, refusing to acknowledge the obvious signs of sickness. It was just a cold, you wouldn’t let it weigh you down.

You noticed Azriel’s shadows at your feet. “Don’t snitch,” you murmured to them, head still woozy as you made your way to your room in the House of Wind.

——

Your head pounded and your brow was sheen with sweat. Oh Mother, what timing to get a cold.

You gathered around the table in Rhy’s office as he directed movements for the entire Inner Circle.

Feyre sat at the table, hands resting on her baby bump. Rhys leaned beside her, as Mor, Nesta and Cassian hovered over the maps, Amren leaning against a book shelf picking her nails, and Azriel planted in his usual stance closer to the door. On account of your sickness, you kept your distance as much as possible.

Rhys explained there were troubles flaring up across the Illyrian camps — conflicts between the different bases over losses from the war. He and Cassian would see to it.

Feyre and Nesta would be travelling beyond the wall to assist with human rehabilitation, a timely manner that would be Feyre’s last piece of work before she rested during pregnancy. Mor and Amren would attend celebrations and meetings in Dawn as part of managing good relations with the court.

Your head pounded and you swayed slightly on your feet, but with a quick shake of your head you stood strong. It was obvious the team was stretched thin right now, you were not going to let your court down all because of a cold.

“Cassian and I will be gone for three nights,” Rhys said, hands laced together in his lap. “With Mor and Amren away in Dawn, Az you’ll need to be on high alert across our borders should word get out that less than half the Inner Circle remain in Velaris. I’ve checked our wards, but night patrol will be necessary.”

Azriel simply nodded, his shadows pooling at his feet. You frowned. That was your domain of work.

You looked around the room, waiting for your instruction. Suppressing your need to sniff or cough was becoming harder by the second.

“We’ll be leaving after dinner, you all have your orders. Stay safe.” Rhys tapped the table with his palm as a form of dismissal.

You blinked, confused. Was he ignoring you?

As the others began to leave for the dining room, you interjected Rhys’s path.

“Excuse me brother,” you huffed. “I haven’t received my order yet.”

You wondered if your clammy face was as obvious as it felt, but held his gaze. A tickle formed in your throat, and you quieted a cough.

“What was that?” Rhys looked down at you, cocking an eyebrow.

“She’s sick,” Azriel’s smooth voice answered from behind. You hadn’t noticed he was still in the room.

You whipped around for a quick glare, before turning to face your brother.

“I am not sick,” you said cooly, tightening your wings. You could play Rhys at his own game any day of the week. “And if I was, I don’t think a minor cold should hold me back from my duties to the -” Rhys cut you off by placing the back of his hand to your forehead.

“A fever and a cough,” he murmured to himself. “This could be the Illyrian flu.”

Rhys pulled his hand back, arms sliding into his pockets. “You’ve been sick for days now sis, try all you might to hide it. Your order is to stay home and rest.” He offered a tight smile.

“You are not seriously grounding me?” you fought, folding your arms across your chest.

“Three days grounded at the House of Wind or until you feel better,” he waved his hand, passing by you as he made for the door. “The house will accomodate your needs, and Az will be here should you need anything too.”

You threw another glare to Az as he hid a smirk, looking down at his feet. Traitor.

You took a deep breath to calm your frustration. “Brother, be smart. We’re stretched thin as it is, and Azriel has his work during the day to attend to already. I’ve got no demand in my domain, let me at least cover night patrol.” You hated feeling like a burden to the team, especially Az. You needed to hold your own.

“So I can have you faint mid-flight and plummet to your death?” Rhys countered, placing a hand on your shoulder. “Not a chance, you need rest.”

You frowned and shrugged him off.

Overprotective control freak, you thought.

I beg your pardon? He replied in your head, brows raised with a half grin on his face.

You slammed your walls up, unable to hide your scowl. When had you dropped your mental shields? What kind of cold was this?

He chuckled, narrowing his gaze on you. His eyes lit up with magic as he cocked his head sideways. “Besides, wouldn’t you say you’re feeling particularly sleepy?”

Your eyelids drooped and you swayed, your wings spreading slightly to try and steady yourself. That bastard had spiked your brain with sleep.

“Your walls are as penetrable as jelly,” Rhys answered the question you never said out loud. “Anyone in my team that unwell is required to rest.”

You sighed, defeated and now sluggish.

Rhys gave you a quick kiss on the cheek. “Feel better sis, I’ll see you in a few days.” He headed for the door.

You made a mental note — in a few days you would argue about his overbearing cautiousness and babying of you. But for now, the unwelcome sleep lingered.

Azriel slid up beside you, gently offering his arm for support. “Shall I carry you to your room?” He asked simply, eyes scanning you.

Yes, your heart leapt.

“No thanks, traitor,” you replied.

You heard his soft chuckle as you stumbled away, his shadows guiding the path to your room.

——

Part 2 >>>

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morallyinept · 2 months

Text

Shoot: The Rake Magazine, October 2016, Issue 48

Photographer: Anders Overgaard

Interviewer: Tom Chamberlin

Grooming: Jessica Ortiz

Full interview, behind the scenes, outtakes & shoot photographs below. 👇🏻

Jett's Pedro's Shoots Masterlist

• Cover shot and original images used in the magazine

• Outtakes and behind the scenes images.

• Full Interview

As a stickler for timing, it was a tad disconcerting for me that half an hour into an hour-long interview, Pedro Pascal was still barely a year old. The family history of this actor is a story in itself, one that Pedro intends to write one day.

Happily, Pedro was very generous with his time, and, as with our photoshoot at The Carlyle Hotel in New York, and with every role he has played, he understands the difference between a hash-job and a job well done. Perhaps this is why Pedro will be on screen pretty much non-stop for the next year and is fast building an enviable C.V.

His roles as a protagonist span big-budget Hollywood movies and the finer works of subscription television, namely Game of Thrones and Narcos, whose second series is currently available on Netflix. It turns out he is also the epitome of America: an immigrant who has taken his talent and ambition and made a success of himself in a country that takes people in and gives them a chance to succeed. And The Rake was given the opportunity of an in-depth discussion with this star player.

I should firstly elaborate on the extraordinary tale of his early life. His family name is Balmaceda, his father is a doctor, and his late mother (whose maiden name was Pascal) welcomed José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal into the world on April 2, 1975 in Santiago, Chile. Those of you familiar with the South American governments of the time will know that this was not a simple epoch in which to be born in Chile. It was less than two years since Augusto Pinochet had deposed Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected head of state in Chile, in a coup d’état. Allende killed himself in the coup but his supporters remained a thorn in the junta’s side. So, as any self-respecting dictator would, Pinochet found opposition members, rounded them up, and tortured them for information on other dissenters who could be found, rounded up, and so on.

One such occasion was some years later, when our cover star enters the fray. A cousin of Pascal’s mother was Andrés Pascal Allende, a powerful revolutionary and supporter of his uncle. One day, during a gunfight, this freedom fighter would be given medical aid and shelter chez Balmaceda, and it would be this gesture that put the family on the ‘list’. Pedro recalls (through no memory of his own but that of his father’s) that, “the Pascal family wasn’t particularly safe." He adds: “There was a priest who was brought [Andrés], who had been shot in the leg, to my mum and dad’s house. My father took him in, hid them for a few days, and patched up his leg. I was a baby, my sister was just three, and she says she has a vague memory of being really angry that our parents had put strangers’shit in her bedroom, including guns and stuff.”

The innocence of youth! But the story becomes more and more like a Bourne movie: “The priest was taken into custody and tortured; he gave names, and they went looking for my father at the hospital he worked at. By chance it got to him that they were downstairs, asking where to find Dr. José Balmaceda. My father sneaks out the back and gets my mum, his sister gets my sister and me. They work out that their only option is to go into hiding, which they do for about six months, and they end up sneaking into the Venezuelan embassy and sought asylum.”

You can see why we spent so long on the subject. His light-hearted approach to talking about this may be because he was too young (about nine months old when they came out of hiding) to have been affected by the process, but there is pride in his parents’ actions, the way in which they carried him and his sister to safety in a climate in which even children were not safe. The solution wasn’t ‘doing an Assange’ and locking themselves in the embassy - they had to leave.

Though they would ultimately settle in the United States, it was Denmark that took them in first. Pascal was still too young to recall a great deal; after a year his father was contacted by a Chilean professor in San Antonio, Texas, and was offered a job. San Antonio was a great place for South American immigrants. With a large Spanish-speaking population, it wasn’t as much of a departure, or culture shock, for the family as Denmark had been.

They lived there until 1986, and it was during this time that he developed a love of movies and the desire to become an actor. He says of that time: “Strangely it was my father’s fault, because he was a huge moviegoer and he would take us to the movies a few times a week throughout my childhood. Of course, we got cable television and HBO came into the fold. Uncensored, uninterrupted movies in your living room: it was some kind of fucking miracle. I remember sitting there and it feeling like absolute magic to me. I remember perfectly watching my first movie on HBO and thinking it was magic.”

While television was developing its appeal, cinema was the family craze, and his father was the most zealous disciple. Pascal adds: “I am telling you, we would go several times a week. And it wouldn’t matter, if my dad wanted to see a movie, and there wasn’t a babysitter, we would go with him or he’d just want to take us. It is my father and Steven Spielberg’s fault - Spielberg being the ruling aesthetic of Hollywood at that time. Throw MTV and Nickelodeon into the mix, and public school systems in San Antonio and very cool parents - these were socialising us and forming us. It is in such stark contrast to what it would be in Chile. In Chile I have 34 first cousins. And in Texas it was just us.”

Though he is a self-confessed “dork”, his hinting at loneliness, and his circumstances as an immigrant in a poor neighbourhood in San Antonio being a psychological burden, is an interesting passage through which he developed his sense of imagination, fantasy and the requisite skills as an actor. “I spent so much time alone and I wasn’t allowed to watch cable from morning into night, so my options were me and my imagination and it was all so completely ruled by the idea of being on these movie adventures,” he says. “I remember seeing Rambo and The Big Chill. I was fascinated by [The Big Chill], as JoBeth Williams was the mother in Poltergeist, which I had seen seven times already in the movie theatre, and I was shouting, ‘That’s the mum from Poltergeist, this movie is amazing!’ I was a big reader as well. I read Stephen King from a very young age.” He tellingly concludes that movies “ruled my imagination and to an extent my identity."

His isolation grew when his father moved the family to California when Pedro was 11. His father was part of a team of fertility experts that had pioneered an advanced form of I.V.F. called gamete intra-fallopian transfer, or GIFT. But this move took him away from a Spanish-speaking neighbourhood and into Newport Beach, Orange County, “which is about a 99.9 per cent white town." He found it hard to fit in, though not because of how he looked. “It was more a matter of me being a nerd and a movie geek and not a good surfer and interested in art,” he says. “I already knew I wanted to be an actor.” His determination had been made manifest by spending his free time reading plays and going to see Search and Destroy by Howard Korder at the South Coast Repertory, which left him “fucking floored."

This problematic period in his youth might explain why he decided to move to the other side of the country, to New York City, to study theatre, where his inclination to academia was compromised by metropolitan life. He says: “Once I made it to New York I wasn’t reading the things I was supposed to read. I was a terrible student.” The Tisch School of the Arts, a school with an impressive list of alumni, including Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin and Billy Crystal, nevertheless provided a stable platform for him to pursue his acting ambitions. He could break out from being the little child in a strange town and muck in with like-minded people in a city founded on immigration and pluralism.

This time in his life ushered in the beginning of a long-standing friendship with American Horror Story and (gravely underappreciated) Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip star Sarah Paulson. Pedro’s charisma made it very easy to become friends with him, Paulson tells The Rake, explaining that it was a “just-add-water friendship." What drew her to Pedro, she adds, was that “he had an enormous amount of gravitas and at the same time a great deal of levity. He would be the first person to fall on the floor laughing.”

After Tisch he found himself working plenty in theatre, too. One particular play, Beauty of the Father, at the Manhattan Theatre Club would begin another friendship with an acting luminary, Star Wars and Ex Machina star Oscar Isaac. Isaac told The Rake, in regards to both of them achieving recognition around the same time and at similar ages: “We started off-Broadway, so for both of us it has been a parallel path where we have been treading the boards together and facing a lot of uphill climbing and rejection and trying to make a living here in New York. To be able to go on that journey together and for me to be able to see him explode on to the scene, I couldn’t be prouder of him.” He says of Pedro: “He is someone who has a very profound depth to him. He wears his heart on his sleeve and he has a great mind and incredible empathy, and he is also incredibly sharp-witted and fun to be around.”

Pascal would find that achieving the kind of success he had imagined was to be parked while he worked solely to support himself. He did the rounds, doing irregular slots on long-running U.S. television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, NYPD Blue, Law & Order, Without a Trace and CSI. He says: “The idea of experiencing exposure or being on the cover of a magazine like The Rake was totally abandoned at a certain point well into my thirties, once I’d learnt how to live and support myself as an actor and be unknown outside a small community. I had come to terms with the idea of just hoping to work.” This is the fate of 90 per cent of actors who graduate from drama schools, and frankly the realisation and acceptance of living a life in which you support yourself with work speaks to a very grounded, grateful and pragmatic individual.

Fortunately for us, his prospects soon changed.

In 2014 he appeared in the world’s biggest T.V. show since Friends, Game of Thrones. It was the fourth series that saw the arrival of a new kind of Alpha male in a series with no shortage of them. Pascal played Oberyn Martell, the Prince of Dorne. However, where Charles Dance’s anti-hero ne plus ultra Tywin Lannister commanded the ‘patriarchy’ side of masculinity, and there was the brutish, drinking and farting muscle mass that was Rory McCann as The Hound, Pascal’s Oberyn was a more complex and interesting personification of masculinity and sexuality. Oberyn was affecting from the start, and even before we see Pascal’s incarnation he is described as “not a man for welcome parties” who is famous for “fucking half of Westeros."

His demeanour was a refreshing change to the grimy, armour-clad male leads that were a mainstay of the storyline: colourful, well-groomed, softly spoken yet threatening. You get an idea of the nature of the character from Tyrion Lannister’s face (threatened, anxious) when he discovers who had come from Dorne for the royal wedding. Then, when we meet Oberyn, in long, elegant robes of mustard and gold, there is a menace and intent; the audience salivates as it waits to find out what he is capable of. And we are kept waiting. What is most interesting about Oberyn is that his lust is not limited to the fairer sex. Oberyn is a sexual omnivore: he has what he describes as his paramour, Ellaria Sand (played by Indira Varma), who acts as both angel and devil on his shoulders, reminding him that he can take whatever he wants.

His fluid sexuality is culturally under-represented in film, television and certainly music. The co-creators of the show, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, have used the fantastical setting of Westeros to curate a fascinating experiment into what a ‘man’ really is and how audiences react to sexual behaviour. It is not controversial to say that even hinting at homosexual tendencies can put off a chunk of the male audience, sad as that may be. The fact that Oberyn is convincing as masculine, strong and fierce, without any suggestion that his sexuality will undermine his masculinity for the audience, is a real feat in developing cultural norms. It is a benchmark for progressive leading men, and considering the success of this one, we hope there is more to follow.

Not only is Oberyn bisexual, he is openly so. His arrogance and comfort with himself means that he needn’t hide it like many other characters in the series do. Pascal says: “It’s fucking hilarious because straight guys fucking love Oberyn. In talking to D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, I was really surprised to hear that through the audition process there were takes on Oberyn that, because in the audition scene it is revealed that he includes a man in the mix of his orgy and reveals himself to be bisexual, they would immediately interpret him as more effeminate and add that quality to the character. What had been so right for them was my not having done that. It is interesting because it never even occurred to me that he wouldn’t be so completely male and have the quality of something Alpha and archetypically masculine. It made complete sense that the world was his and every part of it was his, and everything he wanted to partake of, it is very much in the writing.”

Benioff took the time to speak to The Rake to lend some words of praise to Pascal. He says: “It was a very difficult part to cast because [Oberyn] encompasses so many contradictions: he is charismatic, he is ferocious, he is sexy, but also he can be quiet and intimate. It can be very hard to find someone who can do everything. He can be hard to pin down because he is so multi- faceted. A big problem was that no one felt quite sexy enough.”

And then along comes our cover star, who “did a very cheap video on his iPhone. It couldn’t have been more low-rent, but it was incredibly compelling. It’s interesting, as it’s not that we had a particular look at the time. We didn’t know what we wanted until we saw it, and with Pedro it was pretty clear.” He adds of Pedro’s interpretation: “He brought a sense of humour to the part. There’s something fun about someone with a sense of humour who is utterly fearless. There is also something a little insane about that.”

Pedro enjoyed the rakish side of his character; the costume designer Michele Clapton helped him tap into the character’s braggadocio. He says: “Stylistically, what Michele did, I’m never going to look that good again. I mean, that fucking mustard robe with the leather belt and sometimes a sash. These are all feminine garbs that could not have been more masculine. It made me feel so powerful and male.”

Pedro waxes lyrical about his employers on Game of Thrones: “To be honest with you, my take on the part had everything to do with what was on the page. I looked up Oberyn in the books and it’s all told through the perspective of Tyrion Lannister - it’s a very cool character, but the way David and Dan [Weiss] fleshed him out on the show was a pure set-up for success for me. I give all credit to them: it was their idea to create a progressive, radical badass that two straight married men have a crush on. You could tell they loved this guy. That was why it ended up being so good, and I understand that it could have gone in the wrong direction by being interpreted differently, but I didn’t see it in any other way.”

The demise of Oberyn was the first time in four years I wanted to pack in watching the series. There was a sense of having had enough with the show for not giving me enough of this character. They held back on how exciting Oberyn could be, with his athleticism and the insouciant cool of fighting a man wielding a sword that was, as Pedro puts it, “quite literally my height” - and, of course, the way in which he ‘dispatched’ him. Going from that high of poetic justice - from being everyone’s favourite spear-wielding hero - to the crushing low of the red-porridge mess of his head crushed on the floor in the space of five minutes was genius television making; never was an audience so crushed as well.

Even Pedro hated it.

When I shared with him my frustration, he related by saying: “Yes, because it feels terrible. Why should I go to bed with this horrific feeling in my heart? I love that people felt that way about Oberyn because I had felt that way about the Red Wedding (a shocking scene in which several major characters were killed off at a wedding feast). I almost stopped. I was in the process of auditioning for Oberyn and I had already had my heart crushed. I remember thinking very specifically, ‘Soon it’s time for bed and I’m in a place of such darkness because of watching television - this isn’t good for me’.”

Fortunately, Pascal’s particular brand of bravura masculinity returned in 2015 with Narcos, Netflix’s true events epic about Pablo Escobar and the rise of the Colombian drug trade. It is a show The Economist describes as “doing a better job than most narco-dramas in getting across the brutal seediness of the drugs business.” Pascal plays Javier Peña, a man who isn’t afraid to break a few eggs to make his omelette, a man very much part of the aforementioned brutal seediness.

In an era in which scrutiny of our institutions is critical, a show set in a time when there was plenty brushed under the carpet conducts an interesting moral waltz with the audience’s empathy. Pedro says: “I don’t see him as moral. I see him as pragmatic and work obsessed. It is all due credit to the creators of the show, who allow me to interpret the character in the most interesting way possible. I love that Peña and the writers of Narcos and Netflix are totally game for him being a character who exists more ambiguously and represents the greyer elements of this drugs war that the U.S. gets involved with. I think he, as a character, is definitely wanting to get the job done however he sees fit, and this is a guy who never got married, who never had attachments, who could easily disappear into this world with nothing to lose, and I think that’s what makes him good at it and helps him achieve some of his objectives - because he can assimilate, he can participate, he can get on the inside culturally and psychologically, and be totally badass, of course.”

He has plenty more to do in the second series, so the challenge for Pascal is to elevate the performance and not leave it still and stagnant, a challenge he revels in. He says: “I feel like, in a way, the first season is, in terms of the character, somewhat of an introduction and opens up the opportunity to see more in the second season. When you meet him he’s already on the inside, he’s having sex with a gorgeous prostitute who he has this strange relationship to: they are lovers, she’s his informant, they are friends, and we don’t get that many private adventures of Peña in the first season. I would say in the second series there is more opportunity to spend a little more time with that character, so it almost feels like season one and season two is a two-act play, and in the second act Peña has more to do.”

Now, as expected, momentum is very much in Pedro’s favour. Next year will be a big year for him. We have seen a trailer for his first feature film, The Great Wall, the first attempt by anyone at joining the forces of eastern and western cinema. He teams up with Matt Damon in this cross-cultural epic directed by Zhang Yimou. He says of the film that, “We shot it in China for five months. When I was just graduating from college, Matt Damon turned into a comet as an actor, and rightly so, so he has been very famous for most of my adult life. It was a big deal to go work alongside someone as famous and talented as he is. From my perspective he has always been much more an actor than a celebrity.”

When he began talking about Zhang Yimou, his unashamed inner nerd came to the fore: “When I expanded my curiosities as I got older, I was reading plays but I was also getting into independent and foreign cinema. I saw Raise the Red Lantern in 1991, and saw The Story of Qiu Ju by myself because I was that much of a fucking dork - I walked by myself to see the Chinese movie that was playing - and I saw Shanghai Triad four times at the Angelika [in New York] while I was at college. I saw it early and said to friends, ‘Have you seen this?’ I took two friends and I took my mom when she visited New York to go see Zhang Yimou’s films. I had a period in the nineties when I was really quite obsessed with his movies. He showed what he could do with Hero and House of Flying Daggers, which were very different from his arthouse films he made in the nineties, which are all brilliant, and now this is taking it a step further because it is a big Hollywood ‘creature-feature’ that meets epic Chinese cinema. So for me it was very surreal, because I had admired him as a filmmaker and one I never expected to meet or work with - and then in my first film. I was working with him alongside Matt Damon and Willem Dafoe and Andy Lau and an amazing Chinese crew and brilliant Chinese actors. I had no idea how it would turn out but it was a very surreal experience.”

Damon was able to talk to The Rake about having Pedro as a teammate on the movie. It may be obvious as to why Damon, one of the most respected and loved men in Hollywood, would have been picked for the part, but why the relative newcomer Pascal? Damon without hesitation answers: “He was picked because he was the best actor available for the part; he is a fantastic actor.” He cited Pedro’s time acting in the theatre in New York as the way in which he developed his craft. He says: “He came out of [Tisch] 20 years ago and just started doing theatre. If you can last into your forties doing that - he had his 10,000 hours a decade and a half ago. He’s really mastered his craft and you can see that with the level of technique and how agile he is as an actor, he can really do anything. I’d say he can dial up or dial down whatever the director needs. When you are that versatile, it is a real boon to a director because they can temper the piece exactly how they like. It’s really fun to play off him because he does different things, he has a lot of fun and there is a lot of joy in his work, and we laughed a lot. I have always said about great actors that they are good enough for both of you - they’re so overwhelming that they pull you right into the scene. Personally I end up not having to work because I am being taken, like you board a train and you go along for the ride. That’s what it is like working with Pedro, he is a really uniquely talented guy, but that comes from years of theatre in New York. It is not just the raw talent, he has honed his technique over the last couple of years.”

Pedro feels his rise to fame in his early forties comes as a double-edged sword. On the one hand fame at a young age “fucks you up. I don’t think that as a rule, but it can fuck you up.” On the other hand, “in my experience I feel quite naïve. I was doing plays and guest spots and some bullshit indie films that no one will ever see. It is interesting to be completely grown up and feel like a freshman.”

Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which is due out next year, was the same for him. He says: “I was just in some kind of strange candy shop doing Kingsman 2, finding myself in a scene with Jeff Bridges and Colin Firth and Halle Berry and Channing Tatum and getting to meet Julianne Moore. It was really kind of a movie experience on crack." And reveals that Jack Daniels, is the biggest badass of them all.

This is all to say that Pedro Pascal, the political refugee who employed all of his talent, all of his ambition and passion to create a success of the opportunity given to him in the land of the free, is very much Mr. America. His old friend Sarah Paulson says that, “It is a very sweet thing - watching him land where I always thought he should land. Proud doesn’t begin to cover it; it feels righteous.”

America is built on the type of tolerance, kindness, humility and skill that Pedro Pascal embodies. And his rise to prominence comes at a time when there is a narrative - one that is extremely close to executive power - suggesting walling off Central and South American immigrants, a suggestion Pedro says is “revealing some of the ugliest things of which we are capable as a nation”. Damon agrees with The Rake, saying, “I’ve often thought, especially listening to Donald Trump do his thing, that Pedro’s is the quintessential American story, and that’s why we don’t build walls.”

Perhaps it is the responsibility of magazines like ours to make clear that no one is more American than Pedro Pascal. And it is only fitting that, as America continues to seek progress - the repealing of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’, its first black president, perhaps its first female president, a fairer medical system - Pedro embodies everything beautiful about a beautiful country, and it feels righteous.

Jett's Pedro's Shoots Masterlist

#pedro pascal #pedro pascal photoshoot #pedro pascal the rake #pedro pascal interview #jose pedro balmaceda pascal #pedro pascal photos #pedro pascal words #pedro pascal magazine

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