#do you find delight in possibly triggering not only everyone's fight or flight response | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

glimmerglanger · 4 years

Text

Quiet Evenings

Written for Day #5 of @codywanweek: Fluff. Established relationship, somewhere during the Clone Wars. I don’t usually do fluff but oooooh, went teeth-rotting on this one.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I don’t know, General, I have a hard time believing Grievous came through here,” Cody said, drawing to a stop as they reached an… intersection in the strange recreation area they’d come upon.

Obi-Wan sighed, gazing out across the crowds. He wasn’t entirely sure of the function of the event they were attending. It appeared to be some kind of festival, perhaps for the harvest. Most of the residents of the local towns had come out to wander through hastily set up tents and booths.

People were selling sweet foods and alcoholic beverages. There were… games of chance and skill, here and there. And there were mechanical contraptions that Obi-Wan did not understand. They seemed designed to either go very quickly or fling people up into the air.

The locals all seemed intent to ride them, though they looked like death traps to Obi-Wan and brought back memories of Anakin’s flying.

Still, none of these locals - of a very primitive sort - looked as though they’d just seen a monstrosity like General Grievous. He would have been… wildly out of place. “I think you’re right,” Obi-Wan said, feeling a headache build in the back of his skull. He’d been so sure they’d managed to track Grievous. Running into another dead end was--

“But look,” Cody said, and Obi-Wan had a moment of rising hope along with a surge of adrenaline. He waited for screams, looking for Grievous, and Cody continued, gesturing, “it’s some kind of shooting game.”

He gestured at one of the game stalls lining the road. A very tall, very purple man was gesturing people forward, attempting to convince someone to take up the little toy gun lying on the counter. There were an array of targets within the stall.

Obi-Wan arched an eyebrow. “A shooting game,” he said, dry, and Cody looked over, straight-faced.

“We should take every opportunity to practice,” he said, mouth only just quirking, revealing the amusement Obi-Wan felt from him through the Force, that Obi-Wan had grown used to picking up through just his expressions, as they grew closer and closer.

“Oh, well, in that case,” Obi-Wan said, gesturing at the game stall, daring just a bit of flirting, since the threat of immediate danger seemed past. “You must sharper your skills. Grievous isn’t here anyway.”

The stall owner was happy enough to take a few credits, rattling off instructions as Cody looked over the weapon, making a few adjustments to it as he went. Obi-Wan scanned the crowd once more and then turned his attention to Cody, lifting the gun to sight down the barrel. He looked intent and calm, and Obi-Wan couldn’t help a smile, suddenly glad they hadn’t found Grievous.

It would be nice to just… spend five clicks watching Cody play this foolish game. They barely got any time just to themselves.

The stall owner was saying, “And don’t feel bad if you don’t hit anything on the first go, it’s very--” when Cody pulled the trigger for the first time. One of the targets tinged and fell over. The stall owner’s mouth fell open. Cody radiated pleased satisfaction, shifting his aim carefully, moving through targets with easy skill.

The last one he hit square on, but for a moment it only wobbled, snagging Obi-Wan’s attention. It was… weighted somehow. Oddly. Obi-Wan arched an eyebrow at such blatant cheating, leaned a hip against the stall, and pushed out with the Force, just a little.

Cody made a little sound in the back of his throat, pleased, setting down his weapon, and Obi-Wan turned his face to the side to hide a smile. “Excellent job,” he said, nodding at the still gaping stall owner. “Do you think we should--”

“Excuse me,” the stall owner said, as they made to step away. Obi-Wan looked back, wondering if there was going to be a protest about his… slight usage of the Force. It appeared not. The shop keeper had only collected himself. He gestured up at the large stuffed toys hanging around his stall and said, “You get to pick whatever you want, for winning.”

“Oh?” Cody asked, looking from the stall owner to the toys to Obi-Wan, a question in his expression. Obi-Wan shrugged, and watched Cody take a step forward, leaning against the counter and looking over his options.

He settled, finally, on something that appeared to be a very large loth-cat. He tucked his prize under one arm and his emotions shifted, moving to something like joy and pleasure, emotions he got to experience so rarely that it brought Obi-Wan up short. He watched Cody glance around the fair, could almost feel the movement of his thoughts and the slow consideration when he glanced back and said, “You know, maybe we should look for Grievous a little more. Possible over by the food.”

Obi-Wan snorted, a grin curving the corners of his mouth. He gestured Cody forward, finding he did not mind the idea of spending more time wandering around, not with Cody at his side, and said, “By all means, lead the way.”

They ate fruit covered in some kind of hard candy coating. They had some type of spun sugar that looked like clouds and melted on the tongue. They shared a plate of some type of vegetable cut into strips and fried, so hot that it burned the tips of Obi-Wan’s fingers.

Somewhere in their sojourn through the food stalls, Cody put a hand on Obi-Wan’s back. It was startling, for a moment. They were forced to maintain their distance so often. Obi-Wan sometimes thought there were two versions of each of them. The General and the Commander could not walk down the halls of the Negotiator so close to one another. Touching.

But Obi-Wan and Cody could touch. And did. It was simply that they usually kept it behind closed doors.

Still. Grievous was not at this fair. Obi-Wan doubted, truly, that he’d ever been on this world. There was no immediate danger. He was not acting in his role as General or even Jedi, he was just…

Just eating food so sweet that it dissolved on his tongue, leaning his weight back against Cody’s hand, just a little. Cody tugged him a little closer, in response, and said, leaning his mouth close to Obi-Wan’s ear, “Should we go see what’s down that way?”

Obi-Wan grinned, swallowed the last of the food and reaching up, folding his fingers into the front of Cody’s armor and tugging him forward. “In a moment,” he said, quietly, just for Cody, and pressed the briefest of kisses to his mouth.

The second kiss was nowhere near so brief, but, then, it didn’t seem that the fair was going anywhere.

There were more games down the way Cody suggested. They played a few, spending their credits as they saw fit. One involved some type of unbalanced rope ladder, stretched from the ground to the top of a nearby wall.

Obi-Wan watched people attempt to scale it, striving to hit a bell at the top. All of them ended up tumbled down onto the mats below, many of them less than halfway to the summit. That was all fine, except that the gentleman running the stall seemed incapable of keeping his mouth shut, ribbing everyone who fell.

Obi-Wan drew to a stop in front of it, frowning, and Cody nudged his shoulder. “Well, show them,” he said.

Obi-Wan snorted and would have moved on, had not a child slipped and the proprietor laughed. Cody snorted at the look on Obi-Wan’s face and stepped forward, exchanging payment with the proprietor as Obi-Wan walked to the base of the ladder, shrugged, and put his hands behind his back.

Using the Force would be, he thought, cheating. So he didn’t. He didn’t need it. Decades of katas and lightsaber practice and fighting for his life had given him balance and strength to spare. He walked up the ladder, rang the bell with one foot, turned, and walked back down.

The proprietor stared at him the entire way. Obi-Wan smiled at him, selected the largest, shiniest prize on offer for the winners, and gave it to the child who had last fallen off of the ladder. She gazed up at him with four wide eyes, her mouth partially agape, and Obi-Wan winked.

“Very nicely done,” Cody said, curling an arm around him, leaning close enough to brush a kiss against his cheek.

“Yes, well,” Obi-Wan said, with a shrug that aimed to seem unconcerned. “Let’s go see what all the delighted screaming coming from over there is all about.”

The delighted screaming, as it turned out, was from some crude mechanical structures. People were in lines to board them, typically climbing into little carts or enclosures. They were then, alternatively, flung up into the air or hurled around a track at some measure of speed.

Cody looked up at them, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Want to try?”

“They certainly don’t look very structurally sound,” Obi-Wan said, thinking of far too many flights with Anakin that ended in spirals and loops. Maybe Anakin had actually designed some of these machines, though, if he had, Obi-Wan felt certain they’d look safer.

Anakin might not have been able to fly in a straight line, but at least he knew how to construct things. These machines all had a slapped together look. He swore some of the braces were wobbling. Cody glanced over and said, “We could just do one.”

Obi-Wan listened to a cart of screaming people go by, and shrugged. “What would one hurt?” he said.

They ended up riding every one of the machines down the path, ending up, somehow, on one shaped like a giant ring standing upright. They were in a cart all of their own, open to the stars and sky above, with only a metal bar over their laps to keep them from leaping out.

The ring turned slowly, lifting them into the sky, with none of the spinning or jerking or flinging of the other rides. They just… rose above the entirety of the strange festival, until they were able to look out and view all the places they’d been before.

The ring stopped for a long moment when they reached the top. Their cart swung gently back and forth. The night had grown cool around him, and Obi-Wan, feeling strangely at peace, the way he usually felt after meditating, leaned sideways against Cody, who made a small, pleased sound and took his hand.

“This was nice,” Obi-Wan said, leaning his head to the side, until it rested against Cody’s, looking out across the people, the games, the food stalls. It was hard to imagine such a place existing, with the war raging so close by, but these people - this place - seemed almost untouched.

“Yes,” Cody said, turned to brush a kiss to Obi-Wan’s temple. He radiated contentment out into the Force, easy and open with it, and Obi-Wan closed his eyes. The breeze blew across them. The stars shown overhead. Cody’s fingers fitted so perfectly between his.

“We should come back here,” he said, quietly, not wanting to disturb the moment. “Someday. When… everything is done.”

“Mm,” Cody hummed, touching Obi-Wan’s cheek with his other hand, shifting and causing their little cart to wobble. Obi-Wan barely noticed, not with the soft slide of his mouth and the glow of Cody’s joy all around them.

They kissed there, under the stars. Obi-Wan barely noticed when the ring started turning again.

#codywanweek #codywanweek2020 #codywan #established relationship #my fic #FLUFF FLUFF FLUFF #SO MUCH FLUFF

86 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 7 years

Text

Human Debris Masterpost (8/?)

So in the wake of the series ending, I have several other meta posts I want to write eventually (another one on Gaelio, one for my sparkly new ship, one on spirituality in the setting...), and I am still working on some fic stuff, though the second half of that Gaelio+Rustal fic is on temporary hold pending verification of some information circulating on Japanese Twitter about Gaelio in the epilogue.

But in and around that, there’s still no shortage of red-stripe watch to document. I actually went over the word limit on Tumblr for this post (at least, that’s what I’m assuming by the fact that Tumblr won’t let me post the damn thing), so I’m going to do a two posts back to back. Sorry for any inconvenience, but the first two episodes’ worth of material are too short to post on their own, and I worked too long on Episode Thirty’s post to let it sit another two weeks. Lets get on to it, with...

EPISODE TWENTY-EIGHT — Battle Before Dawn

We go a little while with no sightings, but Shino’s unit is on the advance patrol in the hunt for the Dawn Horizon, meaning we get their reaction to the bad intel.

The complaining Dante we only see from the back (you can spot his red hair), but they show Derma’s face as he reacts to the rather more ships then they had been expecting.

As the battle gets properly underway, Akihiro gets launched in the newly remodeled Gusion (Full City, a coffee roasting term?), proving much more capable of speaking up and giving his men orders out on the battlefield than he is in the cafeteria. He tells his boys to go dance with death (or so the subtitles claim; I am a tad skeptical of this), providing a marvelous example for Ride in going all out.

Shino, being Shino, gets distracted admiring Akihiro’s sweet ride and gets caught by surprise by an opponent who wasn’t as K.O.ed as he thought, but gets rescued by his underlings. Derma lays down some covering fire to fend off a new enemy trying to close in, and Dante swoops in to finish off the opponent Shino was engaged with. He tells Shino not to go charging in alone, to which Shino replies that he trusts them to have his back.

I‘ve talked a bit before about how I’d like to see more interaction between these two, but I wonder how much time they really have clocked together? If Dante is a habitual back-up for Shino (as seen here, but also in the Brewers arc, and even as far back as the very first episode), it’d suggest they’ve been paired at work for quite some time. Perhaps that influence helps explain Dante’s unusually chipper attitude compared to Akihiro and Chad in season one?

Akihiro being a little unnervingly excited about The Clamps that Seisei mechanic (who has a grisly imagination for weapons and a quirky difficulty with naming themes, it would seem) has equipped Gusion with. He’s actually a little annoyed by the surrender signal he gets in response to this, the latest in a long string of them, which definitely draws some attention to all the hot-bloodedness boiling beneath that straight-faced surface of his. I suppose he’s not actually used to surrender signals—the Brewers never went in for them, nor Gjallarhorn. It’s probably the first time he’s had to take personal surrenders since the CGS days, and I suspect he wasn’t in a position to be doing much of that back then anyway.

He wants to stay out on the field, not considering being completely out of ammo reason enough to go back and resupply when he still has The Clamps, but Lafter points out that Ride is not fine (Ride has, in fact, been getting kind of nervy and desperate as his first true space battle wore on), and Akihiro is his captain. He accepts the rebuke without further debate, painting as true what he will be awkwardly telling Lafter considerably later—that he trusts her wholly on the battlefield.

Sandoval’s ship, we find, is largely defended by Human Debris—like Akihiro back in season one, they don’t seem to wear the stripe on their flight suits—who won’t surrender because they don’t have that option. Sandoval finds them convenient in this regard, but unlike Kudal Kudan, does not seem to take a tremendous amount of pleasure in it. Mikazuki goes through them like wet paper.

Shino’s group comes in to relieve Mika just in time for Sandoval’s personal goons to come out, and Dante shoves Derma away in favor of drawing attention to himself, leading him to get tangled up by the first proper showing of the nonsense the Hexa frames can get up to—not just the wires, which we see Gjallarhorn using periodically, but the grappling hooks. He takes Shino’s order to jettison the arm they’ve caught, and the trio retreat.

This could all start to get a little bad, as Tekkadan is getting worn down, falling behind in repairs, save that Arianrhod takes this opportunity to show up and start attacking just everybody, starting with Derma, who has no idea why this is happening to him.

The show is not entirely clear on this itself—I assume Arianrhod’s claim is that they’re here to break up the squabbling, and that means putting down both sides, which means some attacks dished out to Tekkadan while there’s still plausible deniability about their alliance with Gjallarhorn-via-Isurugi.

In any case, Orga and Isurugi both know who the big prize is here, that being Sandoval himself, and command their pilots to focus on capturing him. And here comes a bit I mentioned way back during the introduction of the Turbines—the reason you would ever even consider putting your one hacker in a mobile suit.

And it’s so he can hack into the systems of defeated mobile suits and get you data from the enemy side! It’s seriously gutsy, too—you’ll notice he’s just floating there in his flight suit, hatches open, easy victim to any stray shots fired his way—though I assume Shino and Derma were covering for him here. In any case, good job, Dante! Seriously, this is really cool—the long engagements, the pit stops for repairs and snacks, the electronic warfare, just the whole nine yards. I’m hardly a connoisseur of robot anime, but it’s the first time I’ve ever seen anything with this particular touch of realism, and I very much enjoyed it.

And that brings us to the end of this episode, as Iok and Juliette enter the field.

EPISODE TWENTY-NINE — The Trigger of Success

There is a lone snippet of Akihiro at the beginning of the episode as the fight wraps up, with Akihiro suggesting they need to go fight Arianrhod as well to claim their prize, being told by Lafter and Azee (much as they did when the boys were ready to take Carta up on her 3v3 challenge) that doing that would be the stupidest possible decision and they should definitely not do that.

Later on, though, we get a bit more material, as Hush corners Mikazuki in the cafeteria hoping for some personal mentoring. Akihiro bails out the door immediately, saying that he’s going on ahead.

It would seem to suggest that they were eating together, though we weren’t shown that directly. It wouldn’t be much of a surprise, though; they’ve been exercise buddies for goodness knows how long. Akihiro was not the only red-stripe in the cafeteria, though!

As Eugene and Shino do some mild heckling from the sidelines about Hush asking Mika to intervene with Orga re: him being able to pilot a mobile suit, the conversation is getting some very close attention in the background courtesy of Dante and Derma.

This was, I think, the second I fell in love with Derma on my first watch-through; I adore him and Dante hanging out and watching this conversation with the intensity of people who know they aren’t at the top of the pecking order around here and have a particular interest in how newbies trying to jump the chain on seniority is going to affect them personally. It’s also the first confirmation we have that they’re actually hanging out together outside of deployments and man, I’m so curious as to how that relationship looks.

I generally get the feeling most of the Human Debris cast don’t really hold grudges (other than poor Vito, anyway), focused mostly on just trying to stay alive, and expecting much the same from everyone else. Also, it’s easy to imagine the Human Debris kids with the Brewers were largely sorted by squad and didn’t socialize much with other kids outside of that unit. You wouldn’t want too much communication going on; after all, all indications are that they actually outnumbered the non-slave Brewers pretty considerably. Not a situation in which you want dissension bubbling under the surface.

That is to say, I doubt Derma holds all those dead kids against Dante in particular, but I wonder how they first started bonding. Under Shino? Some kind of common interests? Dante making a particular effort to extend a wing after Aston (the only surviving member of Derma’s group) went with Chad to Earth?

Anyway, Dante and Derma’s stink-eye here delights me to no end.

We move onward to Allium Gyojan’s office, where Orga is having the single most Mafia Shakedown style scene he will ever get, a task for which he has, hilariously, brought along Akihiro’s team to assist, giving us this great bit of Akihiro getting to menace Allium over the phone line.

(Ride. Ride, please.)

I checked, but Shino and company to not appear to be in with the crowd on the street. On the other hand, I can imagine Dante’s computer abilities being put to good use as they were moving in, so perhaps they’re elsewhere.

And that’s it for this one! Not a huge amount of activity here, but we’ll be getting loads of it as we move forward into the next arc, so lets get at least a start on it, with the next post.

#mobile suit gundam: iron-blooded orphans #gundam ibo #g tekketsu #human debris #akihiro altland #dante mogro #derma altland #human debris project #my writing #ibo meta

8 notes · View notes