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Summary: What happens after you, a Mandalorian, use the Force to save an unconscious Din Djarin?
Pairing: Din Djarin x Mandalorian!Force-Sensitve!Reader
Words: 5,477
Warning(s): Mention of injuries to Din (like broken bones/concussions)
Notes: I tried my best to keep this consistent with the lore of Star Wars! Clan Ordo is actually really cool!! I kept the Razor Crest for the sake of the story. This isn't beta read, so sorry if this isn't like the rest of my works!
The first time you realized Din Djarin had stopped asking where you learned to move so quietly, you were already three systems past the last honest answer you had given him.
By then, the habit of omission had settled into your bones so deeply it barely felt like deception anymore. Just survival. Another layer of armor beneath the beskar.
The Razor Crest groaned softly around you as it cut through hyperspace, every loose panel and aging bolt singing its familiar complaints through the hull. Blue light from the cockpit washed faintly down the corridor, catching against scratched metal walls and the polished edges of Dinâs armor where he sat forward in the pilotâs chair, silent as always. Grogu slept in his pram nearby, wrapped in a blanket that smelled faintly of engine oil and the sweet broth Din always managed to find for him no matter how poor the planet.
And somewhere along the journey, Din had stopped asking questions.
He never pried. That was one of the things that made traveling with him easier than it should have been.
Din was the kind of man who let silence do the work of a conversation. He asked only what he needed to know.Â
You noticed it in the way his helmet would angle slightly toward you whenever your instincts reacted before his scanners did. The tiny shift of black visor tracking you after you paused outside a corridor seconds before an ambush emerged from it. The way his hand sometimes drifted nearer to his blaster when you suddenly went still, because he had learned that your stillness usually meant danger. If he caught the strange rhythm of your awareness- the way you seemed to feel ships before they docked, violence before it erupted, fear before it reached someoneâs face- he buried the observation beneath the same quiet restraint he buried everything else under.
Then there was Grogu.
The child watched you differently.
Not suspiciously. Not even curiously.
Knowingly.
Sometimes you would look up and find those enormous dark eyes fixed on you with unnerving focus, his little head tilted slightly to one side as if he were listening to something beyond sound. Those moments always made heat crawl beneath your plating. It felt less like being observed and more like being recognized.
As though some part of him already knew.
Every time it happened, Din would simply reach down and adjust Groguâs blanket or rest a gloved hand briefly against the edge of the pram, patient and calm, seemingly unaware of the tension tightening in your shoulders.
Or maybe aware of it, and choosing not to corner you with it.
So you kept your silence. It was not a lie exactly, not entirely, just a door left shut. A hand braced firmly against the frame whenever anyone came too close to opening it.
You told Din enough to make the shape of your life believable.
You were Mandalorian. That much required no explanation. It lived in everything you did.
In the way you entered a room already cataloguing exits.
In the instinctive checks of your vambraces before sleep.
In the habitual awareness of weight at your hips where weapons rested.
In the economy of your movements: efficient, deliberate, never wasting energy where precision would suffice.
Armor was another language to you. You understood beskar the way mechanics understood engines or smugglers understood hyperspace lanes. Every dent told a story. Every scorch mark carried memory. You knew how to tighten weakened straps by touch alone, how to recognize imbalance in a chest plate before it restricted movement, and how to hear when a jetpackâs ignition cycle sounded wrong.
That part of yourself was easy to share. People saw beskar and blasters and the steady discipline in your movements, and they knew where to place you in their minds. Mandalorian. Warrior. Survivor. The galaxy understood those things. It knew what boxes to put them in.
It was the rest of yourself that stayed buried beneath layers of steel and silence.
Because Mandalorians had long memories.
And so did the Jedi.
History lingered in both cultures like old scar tissue- never fully healed, only endured. Stories of wars fought centuries ago still lived in training chants and cautionary tales. Children on both sides were raised hearing different versions of the same battles. Different villains. Different martyrs.
The Jedi spoke of Mandalorians as fierce, dangerous, stubborn people forever flirting with violence.
Mandalorians spoke of Jedi as arrogant mystics who thought the Force gave them the right to decide the fate of everyone around them.
And somewhere between those histories sat your family, Clan Ordo.
Even now, the name still existed in old archives and older grudges. Buried in war records. Mentioned in fading stories traded between surviving clans around campfires and ship holds. A bloodline remembered not for conquering Jedi, but for standing beside them when the rest of Mandalore sharpened blades for war.
A clan that had once looked at centuries of hatred and decided alliance was not weakness.
To some Mandalorians, that history made your family honorable. Proof that strength meant choosing your own path instead of inheriting old hatred unquestioned. Your clanâs name was spoken with rough respect in certain circles, especially among older warriors tired of endless wars that only left more ghosts behind.
But to others, Ordo was a stain. A family that had allowed outsiders too close to the heart of Mandalore.
You remembered the looks sometimes. The subtle shift in posture when someone learned what blood ran through your veins. The slight narrowing of eyes behind helmets. Questions that sounded polite but carried sharpened edges underneath.
Your father was a Jedi?
As if the word itself explained something dangerous about you.
And the Jedi had not been much different.
Some had viewed your Mandalorian heritage with fascination, others with quiet concern. Your armor, your training, your anger- they looked at those things as if waiting for them to prove an old fear correct. As though violence lived in your bones more naturally than peace ever could.
You had learned very young that people loved contradictions only when they remained distant enough to feel poetic. But stories became far less comforting when they turned into a living person standing directly in front of them.
You learned quickly how uncomfortable that made people: too Jedi for some Mandalorians, too Mandalorian for some Jedi. It lived in hesitation more than hatred. In the tiny pauses between words. In the way conversations subtly shifted around you once someone understood what you were. The realization settling into their expression like a door quietly locking.
You could feel the divide every time a Mandalorianâs posture stiffened after hearing your family name, every time the word Jedi entered the conversation and eyes flicked instinctively toward you afterward.
As though they were checking for signs of corruption.
Or betrayal.
Or weakness.
You remembered one old warrior staring at you across a fire when you were young, helmet resting beside his boots while sparks drifted into the dark between you.
âCanât serve two creeds,â he had said flatly.
Then there were the Jedi who watched your hands too carefully whenever you got emotional. The ones who noticed how naturally your stance shifted toward defense. The ones who spoke gently, but always with the faint concern of people handling something unstable.
And so you became careful. You learned to ration pieces of yourself out in ways people could digest without recoiling from them.
The Mandalorian side was easier. The galaxy understood armor. Understood blasters and discipline and scars. People trusted visible danger more than invisible power, so you leaned into that, let others see the warrior first.
And then there was the thing you never said at all.
You were Force-sensitive.
Even thinking the words sometimes made something tighten painfully in your chest.Â
Not because you hated that part of yourself, but because of what the galaxy had taught you those words meant. People heard Force-sensitive and imagined legends. They imagined towering Jedi in flowing robes deflecting blaster fire without effort. Sith with burning eyes tearing ships from the sky. Holovid dramatizations filled with screaming lightning, impossible acrobatics, and destinies so large they crushed everything around them.
That was never what it felt like for you.
For you, the Force had always been quieter. It lived in small things.
A pressure at the back of your thoughts moments before someone spoke your name. A strange pull in your chest before a door opened. The instinctive certainty that a room had changed somehow before anyone else noticed the shift in atmosphere.
Sometimes it felt like standing in shallow water and sensing distant movement before the wave actually reached you. Other times it was almost unbearable- an invisible static humming constantly beneath the surface of the world, brushing against your nerves until sleep became difficult.
You noticed things other people missed.
The tremor in someoneâs breathing before they reached for a hidden weapon. The emotional shape of a crowd before panic spread through it. The subtle wrongness in places where violence had happened recently, as if suffering left fingerprints on the air.
The Force did not make you feel larger than other people.
It made you feel open.
Too open.
As though the galaxy was always speaking just beneath hearing range and your mind could never fully tune it out. Like existing with a second pulse layered beneath your own heartbeat: something ancient and immense brushing constantly against the edges of your awareness.
Some days it was beautiful.
You remembered sitting beside your father as a child aboard a quiet transport drifting through hyperspace, eyes closed while he taught you how to listen instead of resist. The Force had flowed around you then like warm current through dark water. Vast. Alive. Connected.
You remembered feeling the life aboard the ship all at once- the steady concentration of the pilot, the restless dreams of sleeping passengers, your motherâs calm presence nearby sharpening a blade with rhythmic precision. For one brief moment, the entire galaxy had felt impossibly close.
And then there were the other days.
Days where crowded cities became suffocating because emotion pressed against your senses from every direction. Fear. Rage. Hunger. Grief. Desperation. So many people carrying pain through the galaxy that sometimes it felt impossible to breathe beneath the weight of it.
And then there was the day you learned the worst part of betrayal was how ordinary the moment looked right before it happened. Just another evening beneath the cold iron sky of Kalevala Station while fuel lines hissed overhead and half-drunk warriors traded stories around burn barrels in the loading district. Armor gleamed orange in the firelight. Someone nearby was sharpening a beskar blade against stone with slow metallic strokes. The air smelled like engine smoke, rain, and overheated circuitry.
You had been younger then. Younger enough to still believe honesty could earn understanding if it was offered carefully.
Your father had warned you otherwise.
âSome truths,â he told you once, âchange shape after they leave your mouth. You may speak them with peace and still watch them become weapons in someone elseâs hands.â
At the time, you thought he sounded paranoid. Now you understood he had simply survived longer than you had.
The warrior who attacked you had eaten beside your family before.
That was the part your memory returned to most often.
Not the fight itself.
Not even the blood.
It was the memory of him laughing hours earlier beside the fire. The kind of Mandalorian children naturally gravitated toward because he told loud stories and exaggerated victories until everyone around him laughed.
The friendly warmth in his posture was gone now, replaced by something harder. Older.
âYou hid this.â
Your father answered before you could.
âTheyâre still Mandalorian.â
Ravâs helmet tilted slightly.
âThatâs exactly the problem.â
The next few seconds lived in your memory with brutal clarity.
Your father stepping forward, your mother reaching for her weapon. And then Rav drew his blaster. Fast.
The Force surged through you violently, raw and uncontrolled, and the blaster bolt twisted sideways in midair with a scream of displaced heat. It slammed into metal behind you instead. The entire station suddenly felt alive with danger. You could feel adrenaline surging through every body nearby. Fear spreading. Rage igniting. Ancient history clawing its way into the present through the simple reality of what they had just witnessed.
Your mother slammed into Rav before he could fire again, driving him backward into the barrel fire hard enough to scatter sparks into the night. And your family fled.
The memory still followed you sometimes when Grogu stared too knowingly at your face from inside his pram. Or when Dinâs visor lingered on you a second too long after your instincts reacted before his scanners. So you learned to bury your connection to the Force beneath competence and caution. Learned to pass unusual instincts off as experience, impossible timing as sharp reflexes. Learned to keep your hands still when fear threatened to move objects around you unintentionally.
Tonight, Din stayed in the pilotâs seat a moment longer than necessary, one gloved hand steady on the controls. Grogu stirred in his pram at the change, blinking sleep from his eyes and making a small, questioning sound.
You turned toward the cockpit.Â
âAre we here?â
Dinâs helmet angled, a curt acknowledgment.Â
âNear enough.â
Always near enough with him. Never a word wasted.
You moved closer, your boots quiet on the worn deck. Beyond the viewport, the planet below looked dry and broken, its surface marked by pale ridges and deep scars where old riverbeds had once cut through the earth. Not a place that welcomed anyone. That made it sound, in your experience, exactly like the sort of place someone had a reason to choose.
Dinâs voice came after a pause.Â
âLocal contact says a cache was moved through the settlement two days ago. Could be Imperial. Could be raiders. Could be both.â
âCould be trouble,â you said.
âThat is usually what it means.â
Grogu gave a soft little chirp, lifting both hands as if in agreement. Din reached back without looking and touched the edge of the pram with two fingers, an absent gesture so familiar now it made something in your chest ache.
You watched the two of them in the reflection of the viewport glass. The Mandalorian in his armor, all hard lines and silence. The foundling in his floating crib, round-eared and wide-eyed and too perceptive for his own good. There were moments when traveling with them felt strangely like standing at the edge of something safe and impossible at the same time. A place where you could almost imagine being ordinary.
Almost.
The settlement was smaller than the last three you had passed through with them, a scatter of low buildings pressed into red dust and wind-carved stone. No dome. No grand landing pad. Just a rough field cleared of rocks and marked by old fire pits, and a handful of villagers watching the Razor Crest touch down with the exhausted caution of people who had already learned to expect the worst.
Din had not even removed his gloved hands from the controls before one of them approached.
The woman was broad-shouldered, sun-worn, and tired in a way that seemed older than her face. Her eyes flicked to Dinâs armor, then to you, then to Grogu, lingering on the Child with a look that was careful and frightened all at once.
âYouâre late,â she said.
Din gave her the sort of stare that made lesser people apologize for things they had not done.
âWe were told we were expected.â
âWe expected someone less obvious.â
You almost smiled at that, almost. Din most likely did not.
He only said, âThen you were given poor information.â
The woman looked at you again.Â
âYou the one they said was quiet?â
Your instincts went still. âDepends whoâs asking.â
She exhaled through her nose, which might have been amusement if her shoulders were not so tight.Â
âNameâs Sera. Weâve got a problem in the western cisterns. Something took up residence there two nights ago. Took two workers already. Maybe more.â
âTook?â you repeated.
She nodded once.Â
âNobody saw it clearly. Just shadows. Screaming. A smell like burned metal.â
Dinâs helmet turned toward the distant ridge line.Â
âAnd the cache?â
âStill down there.â
That was when you felt it. Not the smell she described, not the worry in her voice, not even the tension that spread through the gathered villagers like a slow crack in ice.
The wrongness.
It touched the back of your neck first, then settled deeper, a cold seam opening in the air itself. Your breath caught before you could stop it. The world did that sometimes- shifted, sharpened, as if some unseen hand had tilted it just slightly off balance.
You looked toward the western side of the settlement.
A cistern opening half-hidden between jagged rocks.
Dark.
Too dark.
The feeling pressed harder.
Din noticed your stillness immediately. He always did.Â
âWhat?â
You could have lied. Could have said nothing. Could have let the instinct pass as unease over a dangerous mission.
Instead you heard yourself say, quiet and certain, âWe should not go down there first.â
Sera frowned.Â
âWhy not?â
You stared at the cistern entrance, every muscle in your body braced against the pull of what waited below.Â
âBecause it knows weâre here.â
Din was silent. That silence was worse than any question.
Grogu made a low, worried sound from the pram as his little fingers curled against the blanket. Then, slowly, he turned his head toward the cistern too, as if he had heard the same thing you had.
That made your stomach drop.
Dinâs posture changed almost imperceptibly.Â
âYou sensed something.â
It was not a question.
You looked away before he could read too much in your face, despite it being concealed under your helmet.Â
âOld instinct.â
âFrom what?â
You should have had an answer ready. You had spent your entire life making answers ready. But the air seemed to press tighter around your ribs, and Grogu was still watching you with that unnerving, knowing stillness, and Din had gone very, very quiet in the way he always did when he had already begun to piece something together.
So you said nothing.
That was answer enough.
The descent into the cistern was a narrow stair of cut stone, damp at the edges, the air growing colder with each step. Din took point, blaster low, armor barely making a sound despite the tight confines. You followed close behind, one hand near your sidearm, the other hovering in unconscious readiness. Grogu stayed at the top with Sera until Din ordered otherwise, which did nothing to ease the pressure in your chest.
Below, the tunnel widened into a chamber lined with old water channels. Most of them were dry now, cracked and lined with mineral crust. The flashlight mounted on Dinâs vambrace cut through the dark in a narrow beam, revealing broken crates, torn cloth, and dragged marks in the dust.
Signs of a struggle.
Signs of something much larger than a person.
The Force pressed against your awareness in uneven pulses, brushing the inside of your skull hard enough to make your jaw tighten beneath your helmet. You focused on your breathing instead. On the sound of Dinâs boots against stone. On the weight of your blaster at your hip.
The tunnel finally widened into a massive underground reservoir, the ceiling vanishing high above into darkness. Ancient support pillars rose from black water below like the trunks of petrified trees, their reflections trembling faintly across the surface. Most of the cistern had dried long ago, leaving only scattered pools and deep channels winding through cracked stone.
The Force screamed at you.
âDin-â
The water of the closest pool exploded upward.
The creature emerged so suddenly and violently that your mind refused to understand its scale at first. Black water crashed across the stone floor as something enormous unfolded itself from the reservoir depths, towering high enough that its back nearly scraped the ceiling above.
It was massive.
Long-limbed and malformed, covered in slick armored hide that reflected Dinâs flashlight in fractured glints. Its front limbs ended in hooked claws the size of vibroblades, while its lower body dragged through the water with terrible weight. Its head was eyeless, split open down the center by a circular maw lined with rotating teeth that flexed and churned as it roared.
Din fired instantly.
Blaster bolts slammed into the creatureâs chest in bursts of red light, but the thing barely recoiled. One blast scorched its hide. Another disappeared into layers of armor-like flesh.
Then it moved. Far too fast for something that size.
One enormous limb crashed sideways into a support pillar, shattering stone apart like brittle glass. The next swing came directly toward you both.
âMove!â
You threw yourself sideways as Din fired his grappling line toward a higher ledge. The claw smashed into the ground where you had stood a heartbeat earlier, the impact splitting stone and sending debris exploding through the chamber.
The entire cistern trembled.
Din landed hard atop the ledge and kept firing, drawing the creatureâs attention upward while you scrambled for cover below. Red bolts lit the darkness in rapid flashes, illuminating glimpses of the monsterâs body twisting through the chamber. You barely had time to shout before one gigantic claw slammed directly into the ledge beneath Din.
Stone ruptured, and the platform collapsed.
Din hit the ground hard enough to crack duracrete. His helmet struck stone with a sharp metallic crack that echoed through the chamber.
Then he stopped moving.
Everything inside you went cold.
âDin!â
The creature turned toward him, toward the still shape sprawled beneath broken stone.
Your thoughts vanished.
Not strategically. Not calmly. Every lesson about restraint and concealment and survival disappeared in one instant beneath a single overwhelming certainty: if it reached him, he would die.
The Force crashed through your senses in a sudden brutal waveâflashes of movement, claws, blood against beskar, Din hitting the floor hard enough not to get back up afterward. Not prophecy. Not certainty. Just possibility screaming loud enough to drown thought beneath it.
And underneath all of that, him.
The shape of his presence in the Force had become painfully familiar to you over time. Steady. Controlled. Quiet in a way that hid exhaustion instead of peace. You had learned the emotional rhythm of him without meaning to. The constant vigilance. The buried grief. The stubborn refusal to let himself break even when every part of him was splintering beneath pressure.
You knew the sound of his footsteps on the Crest.
Knew the slight tilt of his helmet when he was listening instead of speaking.
Knew the tiny pauses before he answered difficult questions.
Knew the warmth of his gloved hand against your shoulder after nightmares he pretended not to notice.
And somewhere along the way, without permission and without safety and without any tactical wisdom whatsoever, your entire nervous system had begun treating Din Djarinâs continued existence as something essential.
The Force erupted through you before you could stop it.
Loose debris lifted from the ground around your boots as invisible pressure exploded outward from your body in a violent wave. The creature roared as something unseen seized it mid-motion.
For one impossible second, the gigantic beast actually stopped moving.
Then it lifted.
Stone cracked beneath its weight as the Force hauled the creature sideways across the chamber with catastrophic force. The monster slammed into one of the massive support pillars hard enough to splinter ancient rock apart.
The creature screamed in rage, claws tearing through stone as it fought against the invisible pressure crushing it backward. You could feel its weight straining against your mind like trying to hold a crashing ship in place with your bare hands.
Pain ripped behind your eyes.
Your knees nearly buckled.
But the creature was still moving.
Still trying to reach Din.
âNo,â you heard yourself snarl.
You raised one shaking hand instinctively.
The Force answered. The broken remains of the shattered pillar tore free from the ceiling above and crashed downward onto the creature in a thunderous avalanche of stone.
Din.
You turned instantly and dropped beside him.
He still lay motionless where he had fallen, partially buried beneath broken stone. Panic clawed up your throat as you reached for him, hands trembling despite every effort to steady them.
âDin-â
Your voice sounded wrong. Thin. Fractured.
You pressed gloved fingers against the side of his neck beneath the helmet seal, desperately searching for a pulse.
There. Weak, but there.
Relief nearly made your vision blur.
âYou idiot,â you whispered shakily, though your chest ached so hard with fear the words barely held together. âYou absolute idiotâŚâ
Your hands hovered uncertainly over him, checking for injuries you could not fully see beneath the armor. The cracked stone around his body suggested bruised ribs at minimum. Possibly worse.
The creature remained buried beneath the collapsed pillar across the chamber, though every instinct in your body warned you not to trust that stillness. Something that large did not die easily. You could still feel it faintly through the Force: a dim, furious pulse buried beneath rubble and broken stone.
You looked down at Din again. The sight of him lying there unnaturally still sent another cold spike of fear through your chest. The crack of his helmet against the stone replayed viciously in your memory. You had seen armored warriors die from impacts like that before. Beskar protected against many things, but bodies inside armor were still flesh.
You hooked one arm beneath his shoulders and hauled him upright with effort. Din was heavy even without the armor damage. With it, dragging him through collapsing tunnels felt nearly impossible.
âYou owe me for this,â you muttered breathlessly.
No response.
You tried not to think about that.
The climb back toward the surface became a blur of strain and noise. Several times you had to stop to brace Dinâs weight against the wall while dizziness clawed behind your eyes. Using the Force like that had drained you more than you wanted to admit.
Not just physically.
Emotionally.
You could still feel the echo of it roaring through your nervous system. The terrible instinctive release of power after years spent locking every door inside yourself shut as tightly as possible.
You reached the surface level just as another deep tremor shook the settlement. Villagers shouted nearby. Somewhere behind you, deeper underground, part of the cistern collapsed with a thunderous roar.
Sera turned sharply the moment she saw you emerge carrying Din.
âWhat happened?â
âNo time,â you snapped.
The words came harsher than intended. Fear was making everything sharp-edged.
âShip. Now.â
Her eyes widened at the condition of the armor. âIs he-â
âHeâs alive.â
You hoped.
Grogu was already racing toward you before you fully crossed the landing field, tiny hands gripping the edge of his pram so hard the fabric bunched beneath his claws. The child made a distressed noise the moment he saw Din hanging unconscious against your side.
âI know,â you said quietly.
Grogu looked up at you then.
Really looked.
And for the first time since you had met him, there was no uncertainty left in his expression at all.
Only recognition.
The Force brushed softly against your awareness from him, warm and worried and heartbreakingly gentle. You swallowed hard and looked away first.
The Razor Crest lifted from the settlement only minutes later, engines screaming against the storm of dust now rolling across the desert. You strapped Din into one of the rear bunks as carefully as you could manage, removing damaged sections of armor where the impact had warped the beskar inward.
Bruised ribs.
A dislocated shoulder.
Possibly a concussion.
Your chest loosened slightly once you confirmed he was breathing steadily beneath the helmet.
Grogu sat beside the bunk the entire time, tiny ears lowered anxiously while you worked. He watched your hands with intense focus, following every movement as you adjusted medical patches and tightened stabilizers around Dinâs side.
The trip to Tatooine took longer than you liked.
Din regained consciousness exactly once during the journey. You were in the cockpit trying to keep the Crest together through another wave of turbulence when you heard movement behind you. You turned instantly, hand already near your blaster out of instinct.
Din sat partially upright on the bunk, one gloved hand pressed against his ribs.
âYou should be unconscious,â you said.
âTried.â his voice came out rough through the modulator.Â
You exhaled shakily before you could stop yourself. His visor tilted toward you.
âTatooine?â he asked.
âFigured your friend owed you enough favors not to ask questions.â
âBoba Fett asks many questions.â
The Razor Crest touched down outside the palace near dusk beneath Tatooineâs endless burning sky. Heat rolled across the sand in visible waves while the old fortress loomed above the dunes like the skeleton of something ancient and territorial.
Before the ramp had fully lowered, you heard blaster safeties disengaging outside.
Reasonable, honestly.
You stepped carefully down the ramp first with your hands visible.
Immediately, a rifle pointed directly at your chest.
âYou look terrible,â said Fennec Shand from beneath the shade of the palace entrance.
âYou should see the other guy,â you answered.
Her gaze flicked past you toward the ship interior.Â
âDjarin alive?â
âCurrently.â
That earned the faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth. Heavy footsteps sounded behind her a moment later as Boba Fett emerged into the sunlight wearing his weathered green armor.
His attention landed on you first.
Then on Din being half-carried down the ramp moments later.
Then finally on Grogu hovering anxiously nearby in his pram.
Boba sighed deeply through his helmet.
âWhat happened now?â
For a moment, nobody answered him.
Hot desert wind rolled through the landing platform, tugging faintly at cloaks and carrying sand against metal with a dry hiss. The palace loomed behind Boba Fett like something watching the exchange with ancient patience.
You adjusted Dinâs weight slightly against your shoulder.
âHe got hit hard in a cistern collapse,â you said. âThere was a creature.â
âThat explains the damage.â Bobaâs helmet tilted toward the dented beskar plating along Dinâs side.
Before you could answer, Din shifted slightly beside you with a low sound of restrained pain. Instantly, Grogu chirped anxiously and floated closer in his pram.
âIâm fine,â Din muttered.
âYou are absolutely not fine,â you shot back automatically.
Fennec snorted softly somewhere to your right.
You swallowed once. Then slowly lowered Dinâs arm from your shoulder as Boba stepped forward to take his weight instead.Â
Din stiffened slightly from the movement but didnât resist.
The sudden absence of him beside you felt strangely cold.
âI need a favor.â Your voice came quieter than intended.
Boba crossed his arms as best he could under Dinâs weight.Â
âThat depends heavily on the favor.â
âA ship.â
âHangar three,â Boba Fett said gruffly. âOld Firespray patrol craft. Needs work, but it flies.â
Fennec turned toward him. âYouâre just giving them a ship?â
âThey saved Djarin.â
You stared for a second before nodding once.Â
âThank you.â
Then you moved. Fast.
Because if you stopped long enough to think about this, you were not sure you would actually go through with it.
Grogu chirped sharply behind you.
Your boots rang against metal walkways as you crossed deeper into the palace hangars. The sounds behind you blurred together beneath the pounding of your pulse. Someone called your name once- Din, maybe- but you kept moving anyway.
This was the right choice.
It had to be.
You had seen the way people looked at you your entire life once they learned what you were. Eventually there was always distance afterward. Carefulness. Hesitation. Even among good people. Especially among good people.
Because good people tried to reconcile compassion with fear, and sometimes that process hurt more than outright hatred ever did.
You couldnât do that to Din.
Not after everything he had already survived.
Not after the covert.
Not after Mandalore.
Not after a lifetime spent inheriting stories about Jedi and wars and betrayal.
Your hands shook while entering the launch sequence.
Not from fear. From grief.
Because somewhere along the way, the Razor Crest had started feeling like home.
And Din Djarin and Grogu had started feeling dangerously close to family.
The realization hollowed your chest out from the inside. Because you spent your entire life being the contradiction that made people uncomfortable and you could not survive watching that realization settle into Dinâs silence too.
A moment later, the stars stretched into hyperspace lines with the familiar violent lurch that always made your stomach tighten no matter how many years you spent traveling between systems.
Summary: Youâre a Vampire bounty hunter, hiding your secret from Din Djarin
Warning(s): Blood, needles
Words: 3,339
Note(s): I like Vampires and I like The Mandalorian⌠so this is what you get when I combine the two. Space Vampires
You are not here to punish him.Â
The galaxy is full of people who deserve punishment. Slavers who sell children across Outer Rim trade routes. Imperial remnants clinging to dead symbols while entire settlements starve beneath them. Cartel enforcers who laugh while pulling triggers. Men like the one at your feet, who leave trails of bodies and stolen credits behind them and call it survival.
If justice truly mattered in bounty hunting, the Guild would have collapsed years ago beneath the weight of hypocrisy.
No- he was wanted, and that was what mattered.
Wanted meant his face had appeared on a chain code somewhere. Wanted meant someone with enough authority or enough money had decided the galaxy would improve with him dragged back in binders or dumped at their doorstep unconscious. Sometimes those people were law enforcement. Sometimes they were crime syndicates pretending to be legitimate. Sometimes they were grieving families. Sometimes they were worse than the people they hired you to hunt.
Credits erased the difference more often than most hunters liked to admit.
And credits were survival. So you learned a long time ago not to ask questions unless the answers would keep you alive.
Your work does not require righteousness. No shining creed. No illusion that you are one of the heroes from old Republic stories. Only a target, a trail, and a steady hand.
The target goes down harder than you meant him to.
The sound of it cracks through the alley a half second after your fist connects- a sharp impact of bone, armor plating, and duracrete that echoes briefly beneath the distant hum of Nevarroâs night traffic. His body slams shoulder-first into the wall hard enough to rattle a hanging pipe loose before gravity tears him downward. One knee buckles awkwardly beneath him. His head strikes the ground next.
Then stillness.
The target lies sprawled at your feet in mismatched stolen armor: cheap plates strapped over an older flight jacket stained with oil and sweat. One glove is missing. His fingers twitch faintly against the pavement before falling still again. You kneel beside him carefully, one gloved hand braced against the cold duracrete while the other instinctively moves toward the syringe housed along your gauntlet.
You flex your hand once, slowly, and feel the remnants of the blood still burning through your system. The sensation crawls beneath your skin like live current trapped inside your veins. Your knuckles ache from the impact, not from injury, but from restrained strength pressing against the limits of your own control.
Blood catches in your body like dry tinder meeting flame. Immediate. Violent. Your muscles tighten with unnatural responsiveness. Reflexes sharpen until every movement around you feels delayed by comparison. Your hearing stretches outward into impossible detail- the buzz of failing neon, the distant roar of engines overhead, the uneven heartbeat of the man at your feet hammering weakly against the alley floor.
And underneath all of it comes the hunger. Not just thirst, but a razor-edged awareness buried deep in your bones. The hunger is never elegant.
It is not a noble craving or a tragic poem. It is a blunt force in your ribs, a tightening in your throat, a pull so old it feels older than language. Even through armor and filters and layers of discipline, your body knows what it wants.
You let it have only what you planned.
Your gauntlet hums softly when you press your thumb against the hidden latch embedded beneath the plating. The syringe slides free with a faint metallic whisper.
Slim. Reinforced. Custom-made.
Not medical grade anymore, not after all the modifications you made to it over the years. The chamber is thicker now, insulated against temperature fluctuations and impact damage. Tiny filters line the injection system to keep contaminants out. The micro-pump near the base emits a low electronic murmur as it powers on, ready to draw blood quickly and quietly enough that most targets never fully realize what is happening to them.
You lean over the unconscious man and turn his head carefully to the side, exposing the line of his throat beneath the edge of his collar. Heat radiates from his skin in slow waves. Alive. Frightened, even unconscious. Your enhanced hearing catches the unsteady rhythm of blood moving through him, the pulse in his neck fluttering rapidly beneath the surface.
Hunger tightens through your chest with enough force to make your jaw lock.
The syringe settles against his throat with practiced precision, your hand perfectly steady despite the ache spreading through your veins. You have done this hundreds of times across dozens of systems: cramped ship corridors, freezing alleys on backwater moons, Imperial safehouses- a tiny puncture, barely enough to bleed.
Dark red immediately begins to rise through the transparent chamber in smooth, steady pulses, each one synchronized to the weak beat of his heart.
Syringes are better than biting.
You have never liked biting. Too personal. Too messy. Too much of the other person left behind in your mouth and under your nails and in the memory of your hunger.
Syringes turn the act into procedure instead of indulgence. A transaction instead of surrender. Blood drawn. Blood stored. Blood measured carefully in milliliters and sealed chambers instead of torn flesh and ruined self-control.Â
The chamber fills by slow degrees.
One measured line at a time.
Enough to sustain the changes already burning through your body. Enough to keep your enhanced strength from fading completely. Enough to sharpen your senses through the coming night without pushing you into the dangerous edge of overfeeding.
You watch the dark red level climb steadily higher while forcing yourself to breathe slowly through the helmetâs filters. The scent still reaches you anyway, metallic and rich even through the purifier systems woven into your mask. Your fingers tighten once around the syringe as another pulse of heat rolls through your body. Your senses sharpen further with every passing second, the alley becoming painfully vivid around you. Every crack in the wall. Every drifting plume of steam. Every distant footstep somewhere beyond the alley mouth.
The syringe clicks softly when the chamber reaches its preset mark.
The micro-pump powers down with a faint descending whine, and for a second the blood inside the chamber continues to tremble from the rhythm of the manâs heartbeat before settling into stillness. Dark red fills the reinforced transparisteel nearly to the line you measured out for yourself long ago, the exact amount needed to sustain your abilities without pushing the hunger into something harder to control.
Your thumb presses the release mechanism.
The needle retracts with a sharp metallic snap before you pull the syringe carefully away from his throat. A single drop of blood wells briefly at the puncture site, sliding slowly across pale skin before disappearing into the collar of his jacket.
The insulated pouch at your belt opens with a magnetic hiss. Cold vapor spills briefly from inside.
The storage compartment is compact but heavily modified: refrigeration coils, shock padding, temperature stabilizers, and enough protection to preserve blood samples during long flights or firefights. You slot the syringe carefully into one of several secured brackets already housed inside. Others wait there beside it.
The pouch seals shut again with a heavy click, locking the blood safely away from you.
Only then do you finally look back at the man on the ground.
The orange neon above flickers across his face in uneven pulses, washing his features in alternating shadow and rust-colored light. Sweat glistens faintly along his forehead. His breathing remains shallow but steady, chest rising unevenly beneath battered armor plates that no longer look intimidating now that he is unconscious and bleeding onto cold duracrete.
His skin has gone noticeably pale. Just drained enough that the color has abandoned his lips and settled into a sickly gray beneath his eyes. He will wake dizzy. Nauseous. Head pounding hard enough to make light feel like a weapon driven straight through his skull.
He will only have the memory of a shadow in armor.
You slide one arm beneath the targetâs shoulders and haul him upright. The man groans faintly as his head lolls against your armored shoulder, boots dragging across the alley floor while you pull him to his feet. His body sags immediately, unable to support itself. Whatever fight had been left in him vanished somewhere between your fist and the syringe.
Steam drifts low around your boots as you begin moving toward the street, guiding the unconscious man carefully enough to avoid drawing attention but quickly enough that nobody has time to study either of you too closely.
The target slips slightly in your grip once. You tighten your hold instinctively, catching him before his knees buckle fully beneath him. Your fingers dent the cheap armor at his shoulder without meaning to.
You loosen your grip immediately and continue forward.
The spaceport waits near the edge of the district, looming ahead in stacked towers of durasteel and landing lights. Ships crowd the platforms in uneven rows- freighters, starfighters, patched-up transports barely held together by hope and illegal modifications.
You move through the edge of the port with the unconscious bounty hanging heavily against your shoulder, keeping to the darker paths between floodlights while workers and travelers pass around you without looking too closely. Most assume you are transporting a drunk, an injured crewman, or another bounty in rough condition.
Your ship waits near the outer edge of the port where the lighting becomes thinner and the security scanners stop functioning quite as reliably. Smaller landing platforms stretch outward into darker sections of the spaceport where older vessels sit in varying states of repair and legality.
A narrow silhouette rests there between two much larger freighters.
The hull absorbs most of the surrounding light instead of reflecting it, matte black plating broken only by faint navigation strips running low along the body in dim white lines. The ship is long and lean rather than bulky, built with the profile of something meant to move quickly and disappear faster. The ship looks less like a military craft and more like something rebuilt too many times to belong to any single manufacturer anymore.
Which is true. The cockpit carries the angular structure of an old Republic patrol craft. The engine assembly was salvaged from a decommissioned Imperial transport years ago after you found it half-buried in a scrapyard on Corellia. The landing gear came from a mining shuttle. The forward cannons were purchased illegally from an arms dealer who later tried to kill you for a higher offer.
You kept the cannons.
A faint mechanical groan echoes from the hull as cooling systems cycle beneath the plating. The navigation lights flicker once, recognizing your approach signal through the transmitter embedded in your gauntlet.
You reach the loading ramp and pause as the unconscious man stirs weakly against you.
A strained noise escapes his throat. His fingers twitch once near his belt as though instinct still remembers reaching for a weapon even while the rest of him remains trapped somewhere below consciousness.
Your helmet angles downward toward him.
âDonât,â you murmur quietly.
The ramp seals shut behind you with a heavy hydraulic thud that cuts the noise of the spaceport away almost instantly.
The unconscious bounty groans weakly as you secure him against the restraint bench. Magnetic binders snap tight around his wrists and ankles with sharp metallic clacks, locking him in place before he can wake fully enough to become a problem. His head lolls sideways afterward, bloodless face illuminated by sterile overhead lighting.
Your boots ring dully against the metal floor as you move toward the cockpit, peeling one glove halfway off along the way. The exposed skin beneath reveals veins faintly visible near your wrist where the recent feeding still burns through your system.
You flex your fingers once, watching the veins move under the shipâs lighting.
You slide into the pilotâs chair and wake the console with a touch. Old systems flicker sluggishly to life across the cockpit in uneven waves of blue holographic light. Navigation readouts bloom across the canopy glass. Sensor data scrolls slowly down one side of the display. A proximity alert continues blinking steadily near the edge of the radar screen.
One ship nearby, holding position.
You lean back slightly in the chair and stare at the signal for a moment, before opening your comms. Static crackles softly through the cockpit before the transmission stabilizes.
âThis is a secure line,â you say evenly, voice distorted low through the helmet modulator. âSo if youâre planning to pretend you arenât following me, nowâs probably the wrong time.â
For a second, there is only the faint hiss of background interference.
Then his voice comes through.
Flat. Calm. Recognizable immediately.
âI wasnât hiding.â
Of course he wasnât.
You glance out through the cockpit canopy toward the distant shape of his ship resting across the neighboring platform. Even from here, the silhouette of the Razor Crest is unmistakable.
âI got the target,â you tell him.
Din does not respond immediately.
You have noticed that about him over time. Most bounty hunters fill silence with threats, posturing, or useless commentary. Din Djarin lets silence sit exactly where it wants to. Lets other people grow uncomfortable enough to start talking more than they should.
It is an irritating habit.
Especially around someone with secrets.
âThe clientâs waiting in the north district,â he says. âPrivate transfer. No Guild involvement.â
You nod automatically before remembering he cannot see it through the comm.
âFine by me.â
âYou still want the split?â
âDepends,â you answer dryly. âYou planning to suddenly develop a conscience and donate your half to charity?â
âNo.â
The blunt honesty almost earns a real laugh from you. Instead you reach up and tap two fingers lightly against the edge of your mask, staring out through the cockpit canopy at the distant glow of the city beyond the docks.
Working with Din Djarin was never supposed to become a habit.
The first time had been an accident born from bad timing and worse odds.
A backwater moon somewhere beyond the Outer Rim trade routes- dust storms, failing moisture farms, and a settlement so small it barely deserved the name. The kind of place where people disappeared quietly and nobody paid enough attention to ask why. You had tracked the target there after a three-week pursuit across multiple systems only to discover another ship already waiting at the landing pad when you arrived. At the time, you considered turning around immediately.
Then the blaster fire started.
You still remember the sound of it echoing through the settlement streets while the sun beat mercilessly against your armor plating hard enough to make the seals at your neck ache. The target had hired extra muscle, mercenaries, heavily armed, desperate enough to fight to the death over a payout they were never going to live long enough to spend.
And right in the middle of the firefight stood a Mandalorian in battered beskar armor firing with calm, brutal efficiency.
At first you assumed he would become another obstacle.
Most bounty hunters were.
Territorial. Greedy. Trigger-happy enough to shoot first rather than risk splitting a reward.
But halfway through the fight, after you crushed one mercenary hard enough to crack the wall behind him and Din silently blasted another before they could shoot you in the spine, both of you arrived at the same conclusion without ever needing to say it aloud: cooperation was more efficient than killing each other.
You watched each otherâs blind spots through the rest of the hunt. Shared ammunition once. Exchanged exactly fourteen words total before dragging the target back through the sand toward the settlement landing pad.
After that came another job. Then another. Then another.
A pirate captain hiding in an asteroid refinery. A failed Imperial scientist trying to disappear into the Mid Rim. A gang operating out of a derelict cruiser where the lights failed every seventeen seconds, forcing both of you to fight half-blind through the dark.
Every time, the arrangement remained temporary. You never called yourselves partners.
Partners implied permanence. Loyalty. The kind of emotional attachment that eventually got people killed in your line of work.
But over time, something quieter formed anyway.
A pattern.
If a hunt looked ugly enough, one of you contacted the other, no discussion necessary.
The strange thing was how naturally the rhythm developed between you despite the silence that usually filled the space between conversations. Din rarely asked unnecessary questions. You avoided giving answers that mattered. Somewhere along the way, that became its own form of understanding.
Din lifts off first, and you wait exactly ninety seconds before following. Enough distance to avoid looking coordinated to anyone monitoring outgoing traffic. Not enough to lose each other entirely.
The atmosphere shudders violently against the hull during ascent. Clouds streak past the cockpit glass in blurred gray bands before suddenly giving way to open space: cold, endless, black beyond comprehension. The stars spread endlessly ahead in dense rivers of white light. Nevarro turns slowly beneath the ship, wrapped in thin atmospheric blue while freighters crawl across orbit like insects around a dying fire.
Your hands settle automatically against the controls.Â
The familiar rhythm calms something inside you. Piloting requires focus, precision, constant adjustment. It leaves less room for hunger to creep into the edges of your thoughts.
The comm crackles softly.
âYouâre drifting left.â
You glance at the proximity display where Dinâs ship moves several klicks ahead of your position.
âI know.â
The navigation system projects the route ahead in pale blue lines across the canopy. A quiet run, around a two hour flight, with drop-off in a private docking bay on the far side of the sector.
Which means, naturally, the universe decides to ruin it. The cockpit erupts in sharp red light as alarms begin flashing across the console.
âContact!â you snap into the comm at the exact same moment Din says: âI see them.â
Three ships burst from behind a nearby debris cluster ahead- fast-moving interceptors dropping their stealth signatures all at once. Angular hulls painted matte black, old Imperial designs modified for Outer Rim piracy.
The first laser fire streaks across space almost immediately.
Brilliant green bolts rip past your cockpit hard enough to light the interior of the ship in violent flashes. One shot clips your port stabilizer with a deafening impact that rattles the entire hull.
âWonderful,â you mutter.
Another volley tears toward you.
You slam the controls hard right.
The stars spin violently across the canopy as your ship rolls beneath incoming fire by less than a meter. Heat scorches across the outer hull. Your engines howl in protest while inertia crushes briefly against your ribs.
Ahead, the Razor Crest banks hard beneath incoming fire.
The gunship moves differently than smaller starfighters- less graceful, more brutal. Where sleek fighters evade, the Crest endures. Din angles the ship sharply through the laser barrage while the ventral cannons answer back in heavy bursts of red fire.
Another barrage hammers your rear shields. The cockpit shakes violently enough to blur your vision for half a second.
And the blood inside your system answers instantly. The world sharpens.
Every warning light becomes painfully vivid. Your reflexes accelerate beneath the surge of unnatural strength still lingering in your veins. The interceptor behind you suddenly feels easier to predict- its movements slowing fractionally in your perception as predatory instinct floods hot through your chest.
Ahead, the Razor Crest rolls directly into the path of another pirate ship, and the Crestâs forward cannons erupt in a deafening barrage. The pirate interceptor explodes into burning fragments so close that debris scrapes across the Razor Crestâs shields in bright showers of sparks.
Your hunter swings wide behind you again.
You kill your engines instantly, and the interceptor overshoots in confusion.
You slam power back into the thrusters and swing hard behind him, firing before the pirate can recover. The ship detonates in a bloom of white fire.
Summary: Being the youngest on the Z Team means sometimes you get overlooked, but how far would you go to prove yourself?
Pairing: Z Team x Teen!Reader
Warning(s): Blood, guns, implied human trafficking, unconscious narrator at the end
Words: 6,217
Note(s): This might be one of the longest things Iâve ever written
At this hour, the streets above felt abandoned.
Rainwater pooled in the fractures of the pavement, turning the broken asphalt into sheets of smeared orange beneath the flickering glow of old streetlights. Every few seconds one of the lamps buzzed violently, dimmed, then steadied again, bathing the block in a sickly, uneven haze. Somewhere deeper in the city, far below your feet, a train groaned through underground rails. The sound rolled upward through the concrete like distant thunder, low and hollow and endless.
The rest of the city still lived somewhere beyond this district. You could feel it faintly in the distance- sirens wailing several blocks over, the muted hum of traffic, music leaking from apartment windows- but none of it seemed able to reach this place. This section of the city felt stripped bare. Forgotten. Like the world had moved on and left these streets behind to rot quietly in the dark.
Cold drizzle misted through the air, fine enough to cling instead of fall. It gathered along the edges of your hood, dampened your sleeves, slid icy beneath your collar. Rusted chain-link fencing pressed against your shoulder as you crouched low behind it, staring toward the maintenance entrance across the alley.
The door looked older than the surrounding buildings.
Metal warped with rust. Paint peeled away in curling strips. Half the thing had been swallowed by shadow beneath a sagging overhang, and the weak security light mounted above it flickered just enough to make the darkness underneath seem alive.
Your heartbeat thudded hard beneath your ribs. This was a terrible idea.
Not âquestionable judgmentâ terrible. Not âprobably going to get yelled at laterâ terrible.
This was career-ending, hospital-visit, Invisigal-actually-strangling-you terrible.
You could already picture the look sheâd give you if she found out. Arms crossed. One eyebrow raised. That exhausted older-sister disappointment that somehow hit harder than actual anger ever could.
And the worst part?
The thought of her being furious with you somehow still felt easier to stomach than the possibility of disappointing her.Â
Which was probably something you should unpack at some point. Preferably at a time when you werenât illegally preparing to infiltrate a smugglersâ tunnel alone in the middle of the night.
You exhaled carefully, forcing the breath out slow enough to stop your nerves from spiraling, and pressed two fingers against the inside of your wrist. Your power answered almost immediately.
A low vibration spread beneath your skin, subtle at first before sharpening into awareness. Threads of movement began sketching themselves into your mind- not sight exactly, but presence. Pressure shifts. Vibrations through concrete. Heat dispersal patterns bending unnaturally through enclosed space.
Nothing immediately nearby. Good.
You slipped through the broken section of fencing and crossed toward the maintenance door, boots splashing softly through shallow puddles. Rust groaned under your grip as you forced the door open just enough to slide inside.
Darkness swallowed you the moment the door groaned shut behind you.
Not ordinary darkness, either. This was the kind that felt heavy. Suffocating. Thick enough that it seemed to press against your eyes the longer you stood in it. The faint glow from the street above vanished almost instantly, leaving the tunnel ahead as nothing more than an endless throat of black concrete stretching deeper beneath the city.
The air hit you next.
Cold.
Damp.
Dense with the smell of mildew and rusted metal and years of stagnant water trapped where sunlight never reached. Moisture clung to the walls in uneven patches, slicking the concrete with a thin reflective sheen. Somewhere nearby, water dripped steadily into a shallow puddle with hollow metallic taps that echoed far longer than they should have.
Deeper below, old drainage pipes groaned behind the walls.
A slow rattle passed through them every few seconds, like the city itself shifting in its sleep overhead. The sound carried strangely underground- sometimes distant, sometimes unbearably close- making it impossible to tell how deep the tunnel system truly went.
Your hand brushed the flashlight clipped to your belt out of instinct, but you stopped yourself before pulling it free.
Too bright.
Too obvious.
Light would travel too far down here.
Instead, you closed your eyes for half a second and let your power unfurl quietly outward.
The sensation spread through your mind like cold water slipping through cracks. Awareness stretched ahead of you in invisible currents, gliding through the underground maze faster than your body ever could. Edges sharpened. Distances unfolded. Empty corridors bloomed into rough shapes inside your head as your senses threaded through the darkness.
Your footsteps echoed softly through the narrow maintenance corridor, bouncing off concrete in thin overlapping layers that made the tunnel feel larger than it was. The flood system beneath the city sprawled endlessly beneath your awareness, ancient infrastructure tangled beneath newer construction in uneven layers. Old maintenance routes intersected with modern storm drains. Rusted service tunnels disappeared beneath reinforced concrete expansions added decades later. Like veins beneath skin.
Voices drifted faintly through the tunnels ahead. Fragments of conversation slipped through the darkness in uneven pieces, carried strangely by the echoing corridors.
â...last transport already moved-â
âBoss said one more pickup-â
âAfter tonight we reroute south-â
Your stomach tightened so suddenly it almost hurt. You were right.
The realization hit like a jolt straight through your bloodstream. Adrenaline flooded hot through your chest and limbs so fast it left you briefly lightheaded, your pulse kicking hard enough to feel in your throat. For half a second your mind raced ahead of itself- every bad outcome arriving all at once. Invisigal was going to kill you, if the smugglers didnât first.
You swallowed hard and moved forward anyway.
Carefully.
Slowly.
Keeping yourself close to the darker side of the tunnel where the weak overhead lighting couldnât quite reach. Water dripped steadily from exposed pipes above, cold droplets splashing against the concrete near your boots in soft rhythmic taps. The farther forward you crept, the louder the sounds became- boots scraping concrete, muffled voices, the hollow slam of metal against metal.
The corridor gradually widened ahead into an old junction chamber.
Massive support pillars rose from shallow runoff channels like the ribs of something buried underground. Weak maintenance lights buzzed overhead with a constant electrical hum, several flickering badly enough that the room seemed to pulse between light and shadow every few seconds.
And there they were.
Six people.
Armed.
Your breath caught silently in your throat as you ducked behind one of the support columns, peering carefully around the edge.
The smugglers moved with the casual confidence of people who thought they were alone. Heavy jackets. Waterproof boots. Guns hanging loose at their sides like theyâd been carrying them long enough for the weight to feel natural. Two unmarked vans sat backed against the old drainage platform nearby, engines still ticking softly from recent use.
Crates were stacked beside them in uneven rows.
Large enough to hold equipment.
Or people.
One of the crates shifted suddenly, just once. A small movement from inside.
Your entire body went cold.Â
The realization hit harder than you expected. Something sharp twisted beneath your ribs, anger slicing clean through the fear that had been clawing at you since you entered the tunnels. The panic didnât disappear, but it steadied. Focused. Burned hotter now.
You slipped farther behind the nearest support column, pressing yourself into the cold concrete until the dampness soaked through the shoulder of your jacket. The pillar was massive up close, thick with years of grime and mineral streaks left behind by leaking water. Rust-colored stains crawled down its surface like old dried blood beneath the flickering maintenance lights.
Slowly, carefully, you reached beneath your jacket and slid your tablet free.
The screenâs dim glow immediately felt too bright in the darkness.
You angled it downward fast, shielding most of the light against your chest before cautiously raising it just enough for the camera to see past the edge of the pillar. Your fingers adjusted the focus automatically despite the tension knotting your hands.
Record.
Timestamp.
Faces.
Vehicles.
Crates.
Proof.
That was all this was supposed to be.
Get evidence, and get out.
Across the chamber, one of the smugglers barked out a rough laugh that echoed harshly through the tunnels, the sound bouncing off the concrete walls in distorted layers. Another man grabbed one of the crates and dragged it toward the loading ramp beside the van.
The crate scraped loudly across the ground, metal against concrete.
And from inside, a faint thud answered back.
Your jaw clenched so hard it hurt.
The tablet camera trembled almost imperceptibly in your grip before you forced your hands steady again. You swallowed carefully, trying to keep your breathing silent as adrenaline surged hotter beneath your skin.
Somewhere inside one of the crates near the loading platform, something shifted again, followed by a weak, frightened cry quickly cut off like whoever was inside had tried desperately to silence themselves afterward. The sound barely lasted a moment. But the second it reached you, your entire body locked up.
A child.
The smugglers kept moving like it was nothing. One of them laughed while shoving paperwork into another manâs chest. Another kicked the side of a crate impatiently hard enough to make the metal rattle.
You felt something hot twist violently in your stomach.Â
Your thoughts crashed together all at once. You were alone, outnumbered. Robert would probably suspend you. You could get hurt, you could get someone else hurt.
But underneath all of that was one unbearable truth: if you walked away right now, you were leaving a terrified kid inside a box.
Your power surged before fear could smother it. One second you were crouched in darkness, pulse hammering wildly beneath your ribs.
The next, the tunnel exploded open inside your mind.
Awareness tore outward through the underground system in violent waves, racing through concrete, metal, and waterlogged infrastructure faster than thought. Vibrations flooded your senses all at once. Every shifting bootstep rang through the floor like struck drums. Every voice became a pattern of pressure and resonance bouncing through enclosed corridors. The groaning pipes behind the walls, the dripping water overhead, the rumble of distant machinery several tunnels away- suddenly all of it existed inside your awareness simultaneously.
The smugglers lit up inside your perception like moving fractures in the dark. Six distinct pressure points mapped themselves through the chamber with terrifying clarity, their positions constantly shifting as they moved between the vans and crates. One leaned against the loading ramp. Another paced near the tunnel entrance with restless, uneven footsteps. A third carried something metallic that clinked softly against his belt every few seconds.
Adrenaline no longer felt scattered. It narrowed instead, sharpening every instinct down into something cold and frighteningly efficient. The fear was still there- hot and vicious beneath your skin- but now it moved in the same direction as your thoughts instead of against them.
You slid the tablet silently back into your bag, careful not to let the zipper scrape too loudly, then lowered yourself deeper behind the support column.
Your eyes drifted upward.
The ceiling overhead was ancient.
Corroded support beams disappeared into darkness above the junction chamber, several warped from decades of water damage. Thick maintenance pipes snaked across the ceiling in tangled clusters, some vibrating softly with pressure while others leaked steady streams of water down the walls. Rust spread across metal joints in ugly reddish blooms, and one of the larger brackets overhead hung slightly crooked, bolts barely holding it in place.
Old infrastructure.
Neglected infrastructure.
Fragile infrastructure.
Your mind started assembling possibilities almost instantly.
A ruptured pipe would create noise, steam, and confusion. Collapsed debris near the loading platform could separate the smugglers from the vans.
Maybe enough time to get the crates open.
Maybe enough time to get people out.
The plan formed with alarming speed.
You spotted a rusted emergency valve mounted along the wall near the upper junction line. The old flood system connected directly to the lower runoff chambers beneath the platform.
If you ruptured the pressure lineâŚ
You slipped from behind the support column and sprinted low across the dark maintenance ledge toward the emergency valve. Cold air tore past your face as you ran, thick with rust and damp concrete dust. Your breath came hard and shallow, pulled tight in your chest but never allowed to break rhythm.
Boots struck shallow water pooled across the path, each step exploding into sharp, wet impacts that echoed violently through the tunnel system. The sound felt too loud- too exposed- like the entire underground world had suddenly been given your location in clear, unmistakable detail.
Immediately, someone shouted.
âHey-!â
You slammed your hand against the corroded valve wheel and forced your power through the metal infrastructure around it. The tunnel screamed.
A deafening burst of pressure exploded through the old pipes overhead as rusted joints ruptured all at once. Water blasted downward in violent torrents from the ceiling, hammering the loading platform hard enough to send multiple smugglers stumbling backward with startled shouts.
Lights flickered violently overhead, and one shattered completely. Darkness swallowed half the chamber.
âWhat the hell?!â
âPressure breach!â
âGrab the crates!â
You vaulted down from the ledge before your survival instincts could talk you out of it, landing hard against the slick concrete below. Pain shot through your knees immediately, but adrenaline drowned most of it out.
One of the smugglers spotted you instantly.
âThere!â
You ran anyway.
Your power pulsed violently through the enclosed tunnels, feeding you movement patterns faster than conscious thought. You ducked beneath a swinging pipe before it crashed overhead, grabbed a loose metal cart with both hands, and shoved it directly into another man rushing toward you.
The cart slammed into his legs hard enough to send him crashing sideways into the flooded concrete.
You reached the nearest crate and dropped beside it, fingers fumbling violently at the external latch. Locked. Of course it was locked.
Gunfire cracked behind you like a whip snapping through the air. Concrete erupted near your shoulder in a violent burst of gray dust and shattered grit. The wall didnât just chip- it blew out, spitting fragments the size of gravel and razor-edged flecks that rattled against your jacket and stung your exposed skin.
A hot sting traced along your arm where something grazed close enough to feel like a warning rather than a miss.
Another shout echoed through the chamber.
âDonât let them get out!â
Your hands trembled once- just a brief, involuntary betrayal of nerves- before you forced them still. Your eyes began scanning the tunnel floor in sharp, searching snaps as your awareness flickered outward again, involuntary at first, your power brushing the environment like an extended sense being dragged across rough terrain.
Metal debris.
Your gaze locked onto it immediately.
A length of reinforcement rod torn free from the wall, jagged at both ends where it had snapped rather than cut. Rust bloomed along its surface in flaking orange-brown scales, and one end was bent into a rough hook from whatever force had ripped it loose. It lay half-concealed beneath scattered rubble near the base of a support column, as if the tunnel itself had tried to forget it existed.Â
You moved fast.
Boots splashed through shallow runoff water as you grabbed it, fingers closing around cold, rough metal. The moment your grip tightened, pain bit into your palm from the rusted edges, but you didnât let go.
The smugglers were repositioning. Shifting like trained weight across the chamber, boots scraping and splashing through shallow runoff as they began to re-establish angles, sightlines, control. Their voices carried in clipped bursts- short commands, irritated confirmations, the rough edge of people trying to force order back into a situation that had just been violently disrupted.
They werenât panicking yet.
That was the worst part.
They were responding.
Coordinating.
Trying to seal the cracks you had just blown through their operation in a matter of seconds, like the entire room hadnât just turned against them.
Your breath caught halfway in your throat as the realization sharpened into something colder: freeing the crate wasnât the end.
If you opened it now- if you forced the lock, wrenched it free, and let whoever was inside spill out into the tunnelâŚ
They wouldnât organize. They wouldnât understand what was happening. There would be no moment of recognition, no breath to steady themselves, no direction to follow.
Only motion, raw, panicked motion. They would run.
Blind bodies stumbling into darkness they couldnât see, pouring out into a narrow underground corridor that was already a choke point by design. Disoriented. Terrified. Cramped together in a space that turned every direction into a trap and every sound into something louder than it should be.
Straight into gunfire. Straight into shifting lines of sight. Straight into the hands of men who were already losing patience, already tightening their grips on their weapons, already looking for anything that moved wrong.
Your stomach lurched violently, as if something deep inside you had been yanked out of alignment and twisted into a new shape. For a split second it felt hard to tell where panic ended and instinct began, like your body had stopped agreeing with itself.
Your grip tightened around the rod until your knuckles whitened, as the weight of it grounded you, solid and unforgiving.
Your power surged outward again, more controlled this time: less searching, more mapping. Angles. Distances. Blind spots between support columns. The rhythm of footsteps. The timing of reloads. The brief, telling pauses where attention flicked elsewhere- seconds where someone checked a crate, adjusted a grip, glanced toward a sound that wasnât there.
Slowly, carefully, you lowered your stance behind the column, keeping the rod angled at your side.
âOkay,â you whispered under your breath, barely audible even to yourself.
Youâd been trained by people who treated the impossible like bad weather-annoying, sometimes dangerous, but ultimately something you just moved through.
Phenomaman, who could level buildings if he sneezed wrong. Coupe, who could end someoneâs life in so many ways you couldnât count them all. Punch Up, who could suplex a fridge. Waterboy, a literal human geyser.
And youâd stood next to them anyway. You'd trained beside them. Shared the same drills, the same impossible standards, the same suffocating silence before everything went wrong on purpose just to see if you could survive it. Youâd failed beside them too- repeatedly, embarrassingly, in ways that left bruises on your pride long after the physical ones faded.
Youâd been corrected mid-motion. Yelled at mid-thought. Dragged through simulations that broke your sense of time, your sense of direction, your sense of self, until everything blurred into collapsing scenarios and impossible choices made under pressure that felt too sharp to be real.
You werenât them, you never were. But youâd been forged in the same fire anyway.
A smuggler drifted into your peripheral vision near the next support column- too close, too exposed. Half-turned, distracted.
He was shouting something toward the loading platform, voice sharp and irritated, trying to wrestle control back out of the chaos youâd already cracked open. His rifle hung loose across his chest, strap slack, muzzle pointed nowhere useful. Not ready. Not even thinking about you. His attention was fully forward- locked on movement that wasnât you, on problems that werenât about to end him.
The smugglerâs awareness resolved in your mind like a cone of blind focus, a forward-facing tunnel of attention so narrow it might as well have been a straight line. He wasnât scanning. Wasnât listening. Wasnât even braced. Every ounce of his perception was pointed away from you, absorbed by the loading ramp, the crates, the noise of his own collapsing operation.
He had left a gap in reality.
And you stepped directly into it.
Three controlled steps. Close enough now to see the moisture on his jacket, the tension in his jaw, the way his finger hovered nowhere near his trigger because it had never occurred to him he needed it there yet.
Then you swung.
The reinforcement rod cut through the air with a low, brutal whistle.
Impact landed with a sickening, dense thud, metal meeting bone, not sharp enough to be clean, not soft enough to be anything but final. The sound didnât echo so much as die in the space between the pillars.
His body reacted a fraction too late.
Then everything shut off.
His legs buckled without ceremony, knees giving out like theyâd been unplugged from reality. He dropped straight into the shallow water with a heavy, uncontrolled splash, sending a ripple outward across the puddled concrete as his rifle slid off his shoulder and clattered uselessly beside him.
You were already moving before the body finished hitting the water.
No pause. No hesitation. No space for doubt to catch up.
The world narrowed into motion lines and angles as you cut across the edge of the chamber, slipping along the stacked crate line where the light broke unevenly between flickering fixtures overhead. Two smugglers stood there- too focused, too comfortable in their own system to realize it was already collapsing around them.
One of them was kneeling.
Hands buried in restraints, checking bindings with mechanical indifference, like this was just inventory and not human weight he was handling. The other stood a few feet away, scanning the tunnel with visible irritation rather than caution: jaw tight, rifle hanging in a lazy half-ready position, attention bouncing between noises instead of locking onto threats.
Your boots barely whispered against the damp concrete as you slid behind the crate stack, staying low enough that your silhouette never fully rose above the jagged edge of the cargo. The air here was thicker- metal, dust, old water trapped in wood and rust- but even that couldnât mask the faint, involuntary scrape of the reinforcement rod against your leg as you moved.
But neither of them reacted.
Not yet.
Their attention was still lagging behind reality, still trying to assemble a coherent picture out of chaos that was already moving past them.
The kneeling smuggler first.
You came in from behind him without announcing yourself to anything in the room. The rod hooked into the side of his shoulder with a jarring impact that twisted his upper body sideways, yanking him off balance before he even understood heâd been hit. The sound he made was small- more surprise than pain- cut off immediately as you followed through.
A second strike.
It landed against the back of his helmet with a dull, collapsing force that drove his head forward and erased whatever control heâd had left in his posture. His hands spasmed once against the restraints heâd been holding, then stopped.
The second smuggler reacted a heartbeat later.
Too late to matter.
He turned, weapon rising, trying to force aim into a situation that had already moved past the point where aiming was useful.
You stepped inside his line of fire.
Close enough that the barrel couldnât fully track you without dragging his whole body with it. Close enough that distance stopped being his advantage and became yours instead.
The rod came up fast.
It met his wrist with a sharp, ugly crack that echoed through bone and metal alike.
His grip broke instantly.
The gun dropped from his fingers, hitting the concrete with a hollow clatter that felt louder than it should have.
He stumbled back half a step, trying to recover, trying to reorient, trying to turn panic into action.
You didnât give him the chance.
One strike.
Then another.
Controlled. Efficient. Finalizing.
His shoulders hit the crate stack behind him with enough force to rattle the contents, and then he slid down slowly, as if the strength had been drained out of him in pieces rather than all at once.
Silence rushed in behind them- abrupt, unnatural, almost violent in how complete it was. For half a second, the tunnel felt like it had forgotten how to produce sound at all.
Your chest rose too fast.
Then fell too fast.
Air dragged in sharp and shallow, scraping its way through your throat like it didnât quite belong to you yet. Your heart hammered hard enough that it felt less like a rhythm and more like something trying to force its way out through your ribs.
Okay.
Okay.
Still breathing.
Still upright.
Still in one piece.
Still not dead.
The thought landed strangely- too simple for how loud everything inside you felt.
A laugh tried to surface anyway. Half disbelief, half pure adrenaline release, the kind that threatened to spill out without permission because your body had nowhere else to put the pressure. It rose in your throat before you could stop it, sharp and slightly hysterical in the back of your mind.
You swallowed it down hard.
Forced it back into silence where it belonged.
Your jaw tightened instead, muscles locking as you dragged the breath back under control one painful inhale at a time, holding yourself steady in the aftermath of motion that hadnât quite finished echoing through your system yet.
Then your earpiece exploded into life- static tearing through the silence like a whip crack directly against your skull.
âKid.â
One word.
That was all it took.
Your entire nervous system reacted like it had been yanked by a wire. Your breath locked mid-inhale, muscles jolting so hard you nearly lost your footing. The reinforcement rod dipped in your grip for a fraction of a second, and only pure reflex kept it from clattering against the concrete.
Invisigal.
Her voice came through again, threading itself through the static like a blade wrapped in silk. Low, furious, and terrifyingly calm all at once.
ââŚPlease tell me you are not currently inside the tunnels.â
A gunshot cracked from deeper in the tunnel.
This one was closer than the others, too close.
Concrete detonated near your feet in a violent spray of dust and chipped stone, the impact punching a shockwave through the floor that rattled up your legs. The tunnel didnât just echo it- it multiplied it, turning a single shot into something that felt like it had come from everywhere at once.
You flinched hard this time. Your body dropped low without permission, shoulders hunching as another shot followed- then another- ripping through the space where your head had been half a second earlier. The air itself seemed to snap and tear as rounds stitched across the wall behind you, carving bright, sparking impacts into old concrete.
Dust filled your vision instantly, thick and choking, turning the flickering overhead lights into smeared halos of orange and white.
Your pulse spiked so hard it blurred your hearing.
Another shot cracked, and you rolled behind the nearest support pillar, ears ringing as rounds slammed into it with dull, violent impacts that vibrated straight through your bones.
âKid.â
Invisigalâs voice cut through the chaos again, sharper now. The calm was still there, but it had thinned, like glass under pressure.
âWhat is happening?â
âContact- multiple armed hostiles,â you said, forcing the words through the pounding in your chest. Another shot punctuated the sentence, forcing you to duck lower instinctively. âIâm in the lower tunnel system. Theyâre engaging-â
A burst of gunfire cut across the corridor, forcing you further into cover as debris rained down in a stinging cascade.
You swallowed hard, then added the part that mattered most.
â-I need backup.â
A heartbeat of static passed.
Then Invisigal, quieter, dead serious now.
âStay alive,â she said. âIâm coming to you.â
âCopy-â
The word barely made it out clean, you didnât even get the chance to feel relief.
A gunshot cracked through the tunnel like a hammer hitting bone.
Your body moved before thought ever had a chance to form direction- pure reflex taking over, snapping you sideways on instinct alone.
A fraction too slow.
The shot found you anyway.
The impact didnât feel like a single point of contact. It felt like something entering you, not hitting you- an abrupt, merciless violation of space and flesh that detonated through your shoulder and rewrote every signal your nervous system was trying to send at once.
Then the pain arrived:hot, immediate, and violently alive.
Not a clean line of injury, not something your mind could neatly place or categorize. It was force translated into biology: heat blooming outward in jagged pulses, raw pressure spreading through tendon and bone like something had driven itself through your body and kept pushing just long enough to remind you it could.
Your jacket didnât matter. Your skin didnât matter. Even the sense of âshoulderâ stopped feeling like a coherent concept and became a collapsing point of sensation, overloaded and screaming.
âKid?! Talk to me.â
Your body tried to fold around it, to cut through the pain with unconsciousness.
You didnât let it.
A sharp inhale ripped through your teeth as you forced yourself back upright, vision still stuttering at the edges. The tunnel swayed slightly- lights smearing into warped streaks of orange and white- but you anchored yourself on instinct alone. Boot soles scraped against wet concrete as you dragged your weight into something resembling balance.
Another smuggler was already moving.
He came in from the right side of the tunnel, stepping over debris with a rifle raised higher now- no more hesitation, no more confusion. His posture had shifted completely: shoulders tight, weapon leveled, eyes locked on where you shouldnât have been standing anymore.
He corrected for you mid-step. You corrected faster.
Your power snapped outward again, ragged this time, threaded through pain instead of precision. The tunnel flickered in your perception: angles, distance, motion paths- all of it filtered through a haze of screaming nerves and forced focus.
He was aiming center mass, but you werenât there anymore.
You staggered forward instead of back- closing distance on purpose, turning his advantage into a constraint. The shot went wide, cracking past your shoulder.
Your good hand came up fast. The rod didnât feel like an object anymore, it became an extension of the momentum already carrying you forward, pulled along by instinct and pain and the desperate clarity of survival. Your body didnât pause to refine the motion. It simply completed it.
The smuggler barely had time to register the movement before you were already inside his space again. His eyes flicked toward you- too late, too wide, realization lagging behind action by a fraction of a second that suddenly mattered more than everything that came before it.
The rod connected with the side of his head.
Bone met reinforced metal with a heavy, sickening impact that traveled up your arm and rang through your shoulder even over the pain already there. The sound was dull and final, swallowed quickly by the tunnel like the environment itself refused to hold onto it.
His weapon slipped from his grip mid-collapse, clattering uselessly against the concrete as his shoulder hit the support pillar and failed to hold him upright. He slid down it in a loose, uncoordinated descent, leaving a faint smear of damp fabric against rusted metal before dropping fully into the shallow water at your feet.
For a moment, there was nothing but the tunnelâs damp breathing. Then, footsteps.
Fleeing.
They came from deeper in the chamber, beyond the stacked crates and overturned debris- fast, uneven impacts against wet concrete, splashing through shallow runoff with no attempt at silence. Whoever it was had stopped trying to control the situation entirely.
The rhythm was wrong for confidence, wrong for coordination.
It was the sound of someone who had decided that staying was no longer an option.
A crate shifted somewhere behind them as they shoved past it. Metal scraped loudly against metal in a panicked collision, followed by a sharp curse swallowed immediately by distance.
Then more running.
Harder now.
Faster.
The pattern angled away from you instead of toward you, retreating deeper into the tunnel system, boots hammering a desperate path through branching corridors you couldnât see but could feel through your power, fractured awareness slipping past your grip as the figure widened the gap with every second. The sound grew thinner as it moved farther down the maintenance artery, footsteps bouncing off concrete in increasingly distorted echoes until they started to blur into the tunnelâs natural noise again.
The silence after the running footsteps didnât feel like relief.
It felt like a vacuum.
Your grip tightened on the rod again without thinking, knuckles still white, shoulder screaming in dull, delayed waves that came and went like the tide. Your vision kept trying to tilt sideways, but you forced it back into place each time, blinking hard against the haze creeping in at the edges.
The crates were still there. Stacked along the drainage platform, half-lit by the flickering overhead maintenance lights. Some were marked. Some werenât. All of them looked identical now: metal shells, dented corners, industrial locks bolted on like afterthoughts.
Each step felt heavier than the last, boots dragging slightly through shallow water that had started to feel too cold, too far away, like it belonged to someone elseâs body. The rod hung in your hand, no longer a weapon so much as a tool you were too exhausted to put down.
The first lock came into view, and you swung. The impact rang out sharp and ugly in the enclosed space, metal screaming under force as the lock bent inward but didnât fully give. Your arm recoiled on instinct, pain flaring hot through your shoulder, but you forced it again anyway.
Second strike, harder this time. The lock snapped.
A sharp metallic pop echoed through the crate as the mechanism failed and went slack, hanging crooked from the latch.
You didnât pause to process it, you couldnât.
You moved to the next one. Another crate, another lock, another swing, another strike.
Metal buckling under repeated blows, each impact vibrating up your arm and straight into your ribs. The sound of it started to blur together- metal-on-metal, dull cracks, the groan of forced failure- until the tunnel itself felt like it was made of breaking things.
Another crate, then another.
Each one a fight against metal, against pain, against the growing tremor in your legs that had nothing to do with fear anymore and everything to do with how long your body had been running on nothing but adrenaline and stubborn refusal.
The tunnel filled with sound in pieces: whispers, coughing, shaky breaths, the soft scrape of people trying to understand where they were without immediately understanding why theyâd been there in the first place.
Your vision blurred.
You forced yourself toward the last crate you could see, dragging your feet through shallow water that suddenly felt like it was pulling you down instead of supporting you.
One more.
Just one more.
Your shoulder burned white-hot, then strangely distant, like it belonged to someone standing a few steps away instead of attached to you. Your fingers loosened slightly on the rod, then tightened again as if confused about their job.
You hit the lock anyway, it cracked open on the first swing.
Your knees gave out without warning. Just a sudden, total failure- like the signal between your brain and your body had been cut mid-sentence. Your weight dropped hard into the cold concrete, impact jolting up through your legs in a dull, distant shock that didnât fully register as pain anymore.
The rod slipped from your fingers.
It hit the floor a beat later with a hollow metallic clang that echoed through the tunnel like it belonged to someone else entirely, someone standing farther away, in a different moment, in a body that still made sense. The sound rolled out into the chamber, bounced off wet walls, and faded too quickly to feel real.
You tried to inhale.
Your lungs didnât cooperate.
Air caught halfway in, stuttering like it had to force its way through something thick and unresponsive inside your chest. The attempt left you suspended between breaths, stuck in the gap where breathing was supposed to be automatic and suddenly wasnât.
The tunnel started to lose its shape.
Light smeared into long, trembling streaks. Maintenance bulbs flickered into broken halos. Concrete lost its edges, turning soft and uneven at the corners of your vision. Water on the floor stopped looking like water and became shifting reflections of everything and nothing at once.
Sound fractured next.
Footsteps, dripping pipes, distant movement, all of it collapsing inward and layering on top of itself until you couldnât tell what was close and what was far anymore. Even your own heartbeat felt detached, like it was happening somewhere outside your body instead of inside it.
Somewhere distant, very distant, you thought you heard voices calling.
The ground met you fully a moment later, your body dropping the rest of the way down with a heavy, final weight that sent a faint ripple through the shallow water around you. Cold concrete pressed into your cheek. Dampness crept in from the floor, seeping through fabric, grounding you in a way that felt less like sensation and more like surrender.
The last thing you registered was the faint, scattered sound of children still inside the open crates- confused, alive, real- spilling into the tunnel air as everything else slowly went dark around you.Â
Summary: Retrieving the data package is supposed to be easy, but instead you discover there's an unconscious Mandalorian in this supposedly deserted station
Pairing: Din x teen!Reader
Words: 2,564
Warning(s): Fighting, blaster fire, electricity
The first guard through the corridor door dies before his boots fully cross the threshold.
The blast door has barely finished retracting when movement erupts from the cell. The Mandalorian moves with terrifying speed.
One second he is standing inside the holding cell, shoulders drawn tight beneath battered beskar still streaked with grime and scoring from whatever fight brought him here. The harsh crimson emergency lights slide across the curves of his armor, red restraint marks still burn raw around his wrists where the mag-cuffs had bitten into the skin.
The next second, he is already in motion.
The guard does not even have time to raise his weapon properly.
His hand snaps out like a striking animal, armored fingers seizing the front of the trooperâs chest rig hard enough to jerk him violently off balance. The man makes a startled sound- half shout, half inhale- and then the Mandalorian twists.
Fast.
Brutal.
The guard slams shoulder-first into the cell frame with a crack of plastoid armor against durasteel. The blaster rifle slips from numb fingers.
The Mandalorian catches it before it can even fall.
Then it barks once.
The shot detonates through the corridor in a burst of violent red light.
The lead trooper at the doorway takes the bolt directly in the chest plate. For a split second the armor glows white-hot around the point of impact, the plastoid warping inward from the heat before the force of the blast physically hurls him backward. His body slams into the partially opened blast door hard enough to rattle the entire frame.
âMove!â you shout instinctively.
The Mandalorian does not need the advice.
Bolts hammer toward him in a screaming wave of red light, illuminating the detention wing in violent flashes. The Mandalorian throws himself sideways into cover with brutal efficiency, one armored shoulder colliding against the corner of the cell entrance while blaster fire tears molten scars across the wall behind him.
The guards spread immediately.
Professional.
Two kneel, three advance. Another peels off toward the side corridor, trying to flank.
Your stomach drops.
âOh, come on.â
You dive behind the exposed access terminal as blaster fire detonates against the console above your head. Sparks burst downward in a shower hot enough to sting your neck.
The Mandalorian fires twice in controlled succession.
One guard drops. Another spins hard into the wall clutching his leg.
âContain him!â someone shouts down the corridor.
Contain him. Not kill.
That tiny detail lodges in your brain immediately.
They are still trying to take him alive. Which means they are willing to destroy everything around him to make it happen.
A heavy weapon powers up somewhere in the back line with a rising mechanical whine.
Your eyes widen.
âOh, that is definitely not good.â
The Mandalorian hears it too. He pivots sharply just as the repeating blaster opens fire.
The corridor becomes chaos.
Bolts slam into the walls fast enough to blur together into solid red streaks. Durasteel erupts in showers of sparks. The cell beside you explodes outward under the barrage, fragments screaming through the air like shrapnel.
The Mandalorian takes three hits directly to the chest plate while crossing the hallway.
The impacts sound horrific.
Heavy. Violent. Enough to pulp a normal person.
He barely slows down.
You stare despite yourself.
Right, Beskar.
The Mandalorian reaches the wounded guard before the others realize what he is doing. One armored hand seizes the trooper by the chest rig and physically drags him upright into the line of fire. The repeating blaster immediately stops shooting.
Friendly fire hesitation.
That is all the Mandalorian needs.
He fires point-blank into the heavy gunnerâs visor. The trooper collapses backward.
Another pair of guards rushes the side corridor trying to pin him between angles.
You spot them first.
Your gaze snaps toward the exposed security panel still hanging open beside the cell block.
An idea hits you.
You scramble toward the sparking terminal while blaster fire screams overhead. The panel is still partially connected to the detention wing systems, emergency controls flickering in fragmented windows across the damaged display.
Come on. Come on...
Your fingers fly across the interface: door controls, lighting, security protocols. The system fights you viciously, alarms stacking across the screen faster than you can clear them, but you wedge yourself deeper anyway, forcing commands through cracks in the authorization layers.
The side corridor doors slam shut. Hard.
One of the flanking guards barely manages to throw himself backward before the blast door crushes into the wall where his torso was a second earlier. The other is not fast enough.
The sound of screaming cuts off abruptly beneath shrieking metal, and you grimace in sympathy.
âSorry!â
The Mandalorian glances toward you briefly through the black T-visor. Then he turns and shoots another advancing trooper directly in the throat.
He surges through the thinning haze like a shadow wrapped in blaster fire, cape whipping violently behind him as bolts flash across the corridor. One guard tries to raise a stun baton.
The Mandalorian catches the wrist and breaks it. Then he drives the trooper into the wall hard enough to dent the plating.
Another lunges from behind cover.
You see it half a second before the Mandalorian does.
âLeft!â
The Mandalorian turns sharply. The attacker barely gets one shot off before he fires first.
The bolt reflects off beskar at an angle, ricocheting into the ceiling in a spray of sparks while the guard collapses forward onto the floor.
For one sharp heartbeat, the detention wing falls into a strange kind of silence beneath the screaming alarms. Smoke drifts through the flashing crimson light in slow, curling waves. Burned wiring spits sparks from the ruined terminal beside you. Somewhere nearby, something mechanical groans under damage.
Then more footsteps thunder from deeper in the station. Your stomach sinks to your feet.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me!"
The Mandalorian does not answer. The stolen rifle snaps upward in his hands as another squad rounds the far end of the corridor. Four this time. Heavier armor. Riot shields unfolding with sharp hydraulic hisses while a pair of troopers behind them level carbines over their shoulders.
One of them shouts something you do not fully catch over the alarms, but the meaning is obvious enough from the way they advance in tight formation.
The Mandalorian fires first.
The red bolt slams into the lead shield and bursts into molten sparks across the surface without penetrating. The troopers keep advancing anyway, boots pounding against the durasteel floor in synchronized rhythm.
The Mandalorian shifts his stance slightly beside the ruined wall plating, reading the formation the same way you can practically see him reading everything: angles, timing, weaknesses, kill zones.
Another barrage erupts down the corridor.
Bolts streak overhead so close you physically feel the heat pass near your face. One smashes into the terminal beside you and detonates the upper panel in a spray of flaming circuitry.
You flinch backward hard. The Mandalorian does not.
He leans out from cover long enough to fire twice more in rapid succession, forcing the shield line to slow, but they keep coming. Patient. Relentless.
One trooper suddenly breaks formation and rushes the side angle.
Fast.
Too fast.
He is almost on the Mandalorian before either of you fully react, stun baton crackling violently blue-white as he lunges for the exposed gap beneath the beskar shoulder plate.
Your hand moves before your brain catches up.
The blaster is suddenly in your grip.
You barely remember drawing it.
Your fingers tighten around the worn handle as the world narrows into fragments: flashing red alarms, armored bodies, the sharp metallic stink of blaster fire coating the air.
The trooper raises the baton, you fire.
The recoil punches into your palm hard enough to sting. The bolt catches the guard directly beneath the jawline where the helmet seal meets the chest armor.
For a split second, the entire underside of the visor glows red.
Then the trooper jerks violently sideways.
The baton flies from numb fingers, clattering wildly across the floor while the guard collapses hard into the wall with a choking sound.
The Mandalorian turns toward you sharply at the sound of the shot. The black visor locks onto you for half a second, assessment again.
You duck hard behind cover, breathing fast, mind racing.
The fallen stun baton still crackles weakly on the floor near the dead trooper you shot earlier. Blue-white electricity spits intermittently from the damaged emitter forks, casting nervous flashes across the smoke-covered corridor.
Your eyes lock onto it.
Then toward the half-destroyed security terminal.
Then toward the blast doors lining the detention wing.
You shove your blaster back into its holster.
The Mandalorian notices immediately.
Even in the middle of a firefight, his helmet turns sharply toward you like he cannot quite believe what he is seeing.
âYouâre putting the weapon away now?â he asks, voice distorted beneath the modulator.
âIn my defense,â you say while scrambling across the floor toward the baton, âIâm improvising.â
Another barrage tears overhead.
The Mandalorian rises from cover just long enough to return fire. Red bolts streak through the corridor with brutal precision, forcing the advancing guards to slow as one of the shield troopers crumples backward.
You seize the fallen baton. Electricity snaps violently up your arm the second your fingers close around the handle.
âAh- kriff!â
The weapon sparks angrily, but the charge stabilizes after a second with a low electrical hum vibrating through your grip.
Good enough.
You throw yourself beside the ruined terminal again while the Mandalorian keeps the corridor occupied almost single-handedly. Blaster fire flashes so rapidly now that the detention wing strobes between darkness and violent red light.
You jam the baton directly into the exposed wiring.
The effect is immediate.
The entire panel convulses in a burst of sparks as raw power floods into the system. Error messages explode across the screen faster than you can read them. Warning sirens spike louder. Somewhere deep in the station, overloaded circuits pop like distant blaster fire.
The baton whines in your grip.
Smoke begins curling from the handle.
âCome on,â you mutter through clenched teeth. âCome on, you awful little machineâŚâ
The system fights you viciously.
Security protocols slam shut one after another as the station tries to isolate the breach. Your fingers fly across the damaged controls anyway, forcing manual commands through corrupted pathways while the baton brute-forces power into sections of the terminal that should already be dead.
The blast door controls flicker onto the screen. There.
You slam your hand against the override sequence. Massive durasteel blast doors hidden inside the walls suddenly begin dropping throughout the detention wing with deafening mechanical roars.
The guards notice immediately.
âFall back!â
Too late.
One blast door slams downward between you and the nearest squad hard enough to shake the floor beneath your boots. Another crashes shut farther down the hall, sealing off reinforcements mid-charge.
You stare at the terminal.
Then slowly grin.
âOh, that is deeply satisfying.â
On the other side of the nearest blast door, muffled voices begin yelling furious orders while fists hammer uselessly against the sealed metal.
The Mandalorian lowers his rifle slightly.
Smoke drifts around him in curling waves beneath the crimson emergency lights, beskar blackened with fresh scorch marks from repeated hits. The stolen blaster hangs steady in his grip despite everything.
For the first time since this started, the corridor is almost quiet. Your pulse is still hammering.
The baton in your hand finally gives one last angry spark before dying completely with a pathetic hiss of smoke.
You glance down at it for a brief second.
ââŚthank you for your service.â
âYou hacked the security system with a stun baton.â
You shrug weakly.
âIt felt rude not to try.â
On the far side of the sealed blast doors, muffled shouting continues- angry, disorganized now. Someone is pounding on durasteel. Someone else is issuing orders that donât matter anymore. The system is locked against them in ways brute force wonât fix quickly.
For the moment, youâve bought time.
Time is good. Time means youâre not dead yet.
You lean against the scorched terminal, exhale once, and immediately regret it because your lungs still taste like burned circuitry and blaster residue. Your hand is shaking slightly. You ignore it.
The Mandalorian stands a few steps away, motionless again in that way he has- like even stillness is chosen, not given. His rifle is lowered, but not relaxed. Nothing about him ever looks fully relaxed.
You look at him, then at the sealed corridor, then at the ceiling.
Your brain catches up with something you pulled up earlier. Schematics.
They flash back into place with unpleasant clarity.
The station layout unfolding in layers behind your eyes: detention wing, sublevels, service tunnels, maintenance shafts. Narrow arteries running through the stationâs skeleton. Forgotten routes designed for repairs, not people running for their lives.
Ventilation access.
Old industrial model. Big enough to service full corridor circulation units. Big enough, if you remember correctly, to... there.
âOkay,â you say, more to yourself than him.
The Mandalorianâs helmet tilts slightly, and you point upward.
âWe go that way.â
ââŚthrough the ceiling,â he says.
Even through the modulator, you can hear the skepticism.
Another distant thud echoes through the sealed doors, like someone trying to remind you they exist.
You rub a hand across your face, then glance back up at the vent again.
âThe vents connect to maintenance tunnels,â you continue, already mentally tracing the route. âMaintenance tunnels connect to service lifts. Service lifts connect to cargo spine. Cargo spine gets us to docking ring C.â
You gesture vaguely, as if this is all very normal and not a rapidly collapsing plan built out of stolen data and desperation.
âAnd from there,â you finish, âwe get off this station.â
The Mandalorian finally steps closer to the wall beneath the vent. He tilts his head up, assessing it in a single motion, like heâs already calculating weight tolerances, exit angles, and whether he can break it in one move.
He probably can.
âYou donât have cutting tools,â he says.
âI had a cutting tool. It had opinions.â
That earns nothing. Which, honestly, is fair.
The Mandalorian raises one armored hand.
The movement is controlled, precise. He tests the seam of the vent cover with two fingers, then shifts his weight slightly.
You step back.
A dull metallic screech tears through the corridor as he rips the grille free in one motion. He catches it before it clatters, then sets it aside with care that feels almost insulting given how violently it was just extracted.
The Mandalorian looks into the vent opening, then back at you.
âYou first,â he says.
You blink.
âOf course Iâm first,â you reply automatically. âWhy would I- yeah, okay, that makes sense, actually.â
You plant a boot on the wall, grab the edge of the shaft, and haul yourself up. Metal scrapes under your gloves. The inside is narrow, exactly as unpleasant as vents always are: tight, dark, and full of the kind of dust that feels like itâs been there since the station was built.
Behind you, you hear him move.
No grunting. No wasted effort.
Just weight shifting as the Mandalorian follows, pulling himself into the vent space like it was designed for him out of spite.
Summary: Retrieving the data package is supposed to be easy, but instead you discover there's an unconscious Mandalorian in this supposedly deserted station
Pairing: Din x teen!Reader
Words: 2,640
Warning(s): None!
Note(s): Part Two is here!
The data package is supposed to be easy. That is what Ro said.
In and out before anyone notices the corridor you slipped through, the maintenance grate you eased aside one rusted screw at a time, the security lock you coaxed open with a half-functional bypass spike and the kind of luck usually reserved for gamblers and fools. Easy.
Nothing in the Outer Rim is ever easy.
Especially not on a station like this.
The terminal is old enough to feel offended by your presence. Its casing is scarred durasteel, pitted by blaster marks and stained with dust that has settled into every seam. A thin strip of green light runs down the side of the console like a tired pulse, blinking once, then twice, then going dim for a breath before flaring again. Someone scratched a faded shipping code into the casing years ago, half the lettering worn away beneath grease and time.
Somewhere deeper in the station, a ventilation fan rattles with the uneven persistence of a dying droid.
You crouch in front of the access panel, the joints in your knees protesting after hours spent crawling through service tunnels barely wide enough to breathe in. Your gloves creak as you flex your fingers once, rolling stiffness from your knuckles. You slot the connector into the access port.
A sharp chirp answers you. Then a warning tone. Then a field of symbols blooms across the screen in Aurebesh, stacked in neat blocks of white and amber, each line bristling with lock icons and access denials.
âOf course,â you mutter under your breath.
Your left hand stays braced against the cable, fingers curled tightly enough to feel the faint vibration of data trying- and failing- to move through the line. Your right reaches into the pouch at your belt and comes back with a slim splice tool, a wafer-thin chip, and a strip of scavenged bypass wire wrapped around two of your fingers like jewelry that had learned how to do a job.
The terminal hums faintly against your fingertips, and beneath that hum you can feel the system trying to decide what you are. Authorized technician. Maintenance crew. Casual intruder. Problem.
A pair of indicator lights near the lower console flick from red to yellow as you start speaking to the machine in the language it expects. You reroute a tiny current, lie about a checksum, then lie again with cleaner handwriting. The display stutters. One section blanks. Another reloads with a new access tree, deeper than the last and meaner in its structure.
There it is.
The real lock.
You lean closer. Your reflection hovers faintly in the polished edge of the panel: only a blur of face, a shoulder, the bend of concentration.
You push the chip into the slot.
The terminal emits an ugly grinding whine, like a blaster bolt being dragged through metal. For a second, the whole system resists. Then the lock shivers. A cascade of symbols tumbles across the screen. A warning flashes. Access attempt detected.
Your pulse jumps once, hard enough to feel in your throat.
A final barrier snaps into view, heavier than the others. Your brows draw together. This one is live. Actively watched. The kind of protection that means someone cared enough to defend it, which makes you care more.
You swap to the bypass wire.
For a heartbeat, all you hear is your own breathing and the faint buzz of the panel against your skin. Then you bridge two points on the board, and the terminal gives a tiny, offended squeal. Light washes over the screen in a fresh wave of blue-white text. The lock disappears.
A new set of files resolves into view- transfers, route maps, encrypted cargo manifests, names, dates, destinations. Enough to matter. Enough to hurt somebody. Enough to explain why three separate people had been too eager to keep you away from this console. Exactly the kind of information Ro can hawk to the highest bidder if you can get it loose and into the right hands.
This is why you are here.
Not for pride. Not for the thrill. Not because you enjoy crawling through other peopleâs secrets with the lights off and your pulse in your throat.
Because credits buy food. Credits buy fuel. Credits buy time. Credits buy a few more days before the galaxy decides to grind you into the floor and keep going.
The archive opens in a burst of thumbnails and timestamped clips, each one tagged with the hard little efficiency of a system meant to record things nobody was supposed to see. Most of them are blanked out, damaged, or heavily restricted. You almost move past them.
Almost.
Then one file catches your eye. You frown and tap it open.
The screen stutters. For a moment, all you get is static, washed-out black-and-white interference crawling across the display like sand in a windstorm. Then the feed resolves.
A narrow room.
Metal walls.
A durasteel table bolted to the floor.
And on the floor beside it, half in shadow, lies a Mandalorian.
Your hand goes still.
Not a thought, not a reaction, just a hard physical pause as your brain catches up to what your eyes are telling it. The figure is fully armored, but motionless. Crumpled in a way that feels wrong for someone who is supposed to look carved out of iron and stubbornness. Helm still on. Cape splayed. One gauntlet twisted under his side as though he fell and never quite managed to finish getting up again.
The feed is time-stamped.
Old. Not live.
That should help. It should make this feel distant, irrelevant, just another ugly piece of information in a galaxy full of ugly pieces of information. Something to sell, maybe. Something to note and move on.
Below the feed window, more metadata spills across the monitor in neat, indifferent rows. Facility designation. Transfer log. Holding location. Sublevel access. A name attached to the capture team.
Your pulse stutters.
This is bigger than a random security recording. Bigger than a lucky accident. Whoever is running this place is handling something important enough to hide behind locked footage and layered permissions.
Your mind starts moving immediately, already counting the angles. A live prisoner, a captured bounty, an armored mystery with enough value to make several people stupid at once. The kind of thing a bidder might pay obscene amounts for, depending on who wants him alive, who wants him dead, and who wants whatever is hidden behind that helmet.
You stare at the frozen image of the unconscious Mandalorian and begin making calculations you do not want to make.
Two guards in the escort footage, four visible rifles, military formation.
Not station thugs. Not pirates improvising authority with stolen armor and loud voices. These people moved with discipline. Efficient spacing. Controlled weapon angles. They handled a Mandalorian the way professionals handle something dangerous: carefully, and with enough force to make absolutely certain it stayed down.
Your eyes narrow.
The room around you suddenly feels much smaller.
Because if security here is strong enough to drop one of them- what exactly are your chances?
The answer comes immediately, terrible.
You lean back from the terminal slightly, pulse beginning to thud harder in your throat as your brain rewinds the last fifteen minutes. The sliced door. The bypassed lock. The access trail you definitely did not erase cleanly enough because you rushed the second encryption layer. You curse quietly under your breath.
The terminal hums softly beneath your fingertips, blissfully unaware that it may have just signed your death warrant. Lines of data continue scrolling across the monitor while you force yourself to think clearly.
Your gaze flicks back to the holding location listed beneath the footage: Sublevel Three, guard rotation every fifteen minutes.
You minimize the feed immediately and kill several windows in rapid succession, fingers moving automatically while your mind races ahead. Exit routes. Vent access. Docking bays. You pull up the station schematics you stole earlier and your heart sinks almost instantly.
Limited hangar exits.
Security checkpoints between sectors.
Blast doors.
Internal surveillance coverage across nearly every major corridor.
You actually laugh once under your breath, humorless and sharp.
Of course. Of course the one time you agree to a âsimpleâ extraction job, you somehow manage to crawl headfirst into a fortified prison buried inside a half-dead Imperial-era station. Because apparently the galaxy heard you were overdue for a terrible decision.
Your spine slowly straightens as the realization settles into place.
The distant engine vibrations beneath your boots no longer blend into background noise. Now they feel immense, like the breathing of something sleeping beneath the deck plating. Electrical current buzzes faintly through the ceiling conduits overhead, uneven and sharp. Ventilation ducts hidden behind the walls hiss as stale recycled air cycles through the station in dry mechanical breaths that suddenly sound far too much like whispers. Every sound now carries the awful possibility that it is attached to someone looking for you.
You look back toward the paused security image glowing on the terminal screen.
Your brain resists the conclusion immediately.
Absolutely not.
Terrible idea.
Possibly the kind of suicidal decision people only make moments before ending up as cautionary stories told in cantinas.
But the thought keeps forming anyway. Because if security here can lock down an entire station and knock out a Mandalorian, then escaping alone starts sounding less like confidence and more like assisted self-destruction.
You need a distraction. You need muscle. You need somebody the guards are already afraid of.
If you leave alone, you are one slicer with a stolen file trying to outrun a security force capable of dropping warriors raised for combat since childhood.
If you leave with a Mandalorian?
Your odds improve dramatically.
Assuming he does not shoot you first.
The terminal suddenly flashes amber. Not the passive flicker of outdated machinery struggling to keep pace with your intrusion.
ACCESS REVIEW INITIATED.
For one horrible second, your body forgets how to move. Your blood turns cold so fast it feels physical, like ice water dumped straight down your spine.
âNo,â you whisper instinctively.
Then another line appears beneath it.
UNAUTHORIZED FILE INTERACTION DETECTED.
âOh, youâve got to be kidding me.â
The words leave your mouth under your breath, half hissed, half prayed.
Somewhere deeper in the station, alarms begin to rise.
A low electronic pulse echoes faintly through the corridors, distant and measured, like the station itself inhaling before it screams. Red warning lights flicker somewhere beyond the walls, their glow briefly spilling through the narrow seams around the blast door at the end of the corridor.
You rip the data chip free from the terminal hard enough to nearly snap it between your fingers and shove it deep into your pocket. The connector cable follows a heartbeat later, yanked violently from the access port with a shower of bright blue sparks that spit across the floor and vanish against the durasteel grating.
You glance toward the nearest escape route marked on the stolen schematics stored in your memory- maintenance corridor, ladder shaft, access tunnel leading back toward Dock Ring East. Fastest way out. Cleanest way out.
Then your gaze shifts toward the detainment wing information still glowing faintly on the screen.
Your jaw tightens.
âFine,â you mutter bitterly to nobody.
Then you start running toward Sublevel Three.
The corridor lights smear overhead as your boots slam against the metal decking, echoes chasing you through the station while the alarm finally begins to scream.
-------------------------------------------------
Consciousness, for Din, returns like violence.
One moment there is nothing. The next, pain crashes through Din Djarinâs skull hard enough to make his teeth clench beneath the helmet.
Thereâs pressure behind his eyes and inside his lungs, thick and chemical, like his body is still trying to claw whatever was pumped into the air out of his bloodstream. His muscles feel slow. Weighted. Armor pressing against him with unfamiliar exhaustion. Filtered air drags through the modulator with a rasp that sounds too loud inside the enclosed dark of the helmet, and for one disorienting second instinct takes over completely. His body jerks upright with trained aggression, muscles tightening for a fight that is not there yet.Â
A voice drifts through the haze next, talking quickly.
â-okay, listen, before you wake up completely, I need to establish something very important-â
Dinâs head turns sharply toward the cell door. There is a figure crouched beside the external access panel, half-hidden by the angle of the corridor lighting. Not armored. Not one of the guards. Their hands move rapidly across an exposed wiring bundle hanging from the terminal while sparks spit intermittently onto the floor.
âBecause statistically speaking, you probably kill a lot of people, and I just want it officially stated that I am trying to help you.â
The young stranger glances up the second they notice movement inside the cell.
âWhen this door opens, I would strongly prefer if you did not kill me.â
Dinâs vision begins sharpening inside the helmet display in faint increments. Diagnostics crawl sluggishly across the lower edge of his HUD. Environmental readings. Internal suit status. Minor oxygen irregularities still stabilizing. His right shoulder protests as he pushes himself slightly upright against the wall.
âI know that look.â
Din doubts that.
âYouâre doing the Mandalorian stare thing.â
The panel sparks violently. The stranger curses and jerks their hand back before immediately diving back into the wiring again. They mutter under their breath while reconnecting something inside the access port.
âWhoever designed this system deserves to be launched into a star.â
An alarm begins blaring faintly somewhere deeper in the station.
âOkay,â the stranger says carefully, âgood news: youâre alive.â
Din says nothing. The modulated silence from the helmet fills the corridor like another physical presence.
The stranger swallows visibly.
âBad news,â they continue, voice tightening, âI may have accidentally triggered a station-wide security review while stealing data, and now we both potentially have a problem.â
Dinâs voice is rough from disuse when he finally speaks.
âWho are you?â
The stranger nearly jumps out of their skin.
âYou talk!â
âAnswer the question.â
They glance back toward him, eyes sharp despite the obvious panic trying to climb its way into their expression.
âI am opening your cell, again, please do not kill me.â
Bootsteps echo faintly somewhere above them. The teen swears under their breath and rips a side panel completely free from the lock mechanism.
Din studies the stranger carefully. Young. Exhausted. No immediate weapons beyond a holdout blaster at the hip and several improvised tools that could become weapons if necessary. Nervous hands. Fast eyes.
âYouâre not with them,â Din says.
The stranger snorts once without humor.
âIf I was with them, I would not currently be elbow-deep in a prison door begging a heavily armed Mandalorian not to murder me.â
Fair.
The lock gives a heavy thunk.
Both of them look toward the cell door instantly.
âOh.â
Another mechanical clank echoes through the corridor as the magnetic seal disengages in stages.
Din rises to his feet. The full height of the armor seems to fill the small holding area all at once, cape shifting softly behind him as he stands. The young stranger instinctively takes one step backward before catching themself.
The stranger raises both hands slightly.
âBefore this becomes a violence situation,â they say quickly, âin my defense, I did not put you in here.â
âYou broke into a secure detention wing,â Dinâs voice was roughened slightly by lingering gas exposure.
The stranger hesitates.
ââŚyes.â
âTo steal data.â
A pause.
ââŚalso yes.â
Another alarm begins sounding deeper in the station now, louder than before.
Din glances once toward the corridor intersection beyond them. Multiple approaching movement signatures.
The stranger notices the subtle shift of his helmet.
âOh good,â they mutter weakly. âThe consequences have arrived.â
Summary: You, a Mandalorian, want to meet the other notorious Mandalorian you've heard about
Pairing: Din x Mandalorian!Reader
Words: 1,151
Warning(s): None!
The ship shudders as it settles into the docking cradle, the hull giving one long, tired groan before the engines begin to wind down in uneven, dying pulses. The vibration rolls up through the deck plating and into the soles of your boots, a final aftertaste of motion before stillness takes hold.
You remain in the cockpit a moment longer, gloved fingers resting against the controls as the cooling systems hiss and click around you, metal ticking softly as it sheds the heat of the journey. Through the viewport, the station sprawls in layers of corroded durasteel and exposed piping, a jagged maze of patched-together corridors and shadowed overhead bridges. Amber maintenance lights flicker weakly along its spine, too sparse and too tired to push back the haze that clings to every surface.Â
It is the kind of port that exists because law does not. The sort of place where smugglers came to vanish, where bounty hunters came to trade names they did not ask for, where pirates drank hard and slept lighter than they should have. A forgotten knot of metal at the edge of civilization, half-lit and half-broken.
The sort of place a Mandalorian could disappear inside.
Which is exactly why you came.
The station beyond the cockpit churns with constant motion and noise. Cargo lifters drift overhead on whining repulsors, dragging massive freight containers through the haze while chains rattle somewhere above the docking lanes. Dock workers bark at one another in clipped bursts of Basic and half a dozen other languages you recognize only in fragments- harsh Rodian chatter, the low growl of Trandoshan, the rapid mechanical stutter of binary from overworked service droids weaving between moving shipments.
Somewhere off to your left, a voice rises loud enough to cut through the industrial noise. Angry. Drunk, maybe. Another voice answers just as sharp. Metal scrapes against metal.
The kind of argument that usually ended with somebody reaching for a blaster.
Normal.
Your helmet display scrolls silently across the edge of your vision, filtering local transmissions and heat signatures automatically. Exit routes illuminate in faint overlays across the station interior. Movement patterns. Weapons pings. Structural weak points. Your visor processes the station faster than any ordinary pair of eyes could hope to.
Nothing immediate.
No active threats.
Still, your hand brushes the blaster holstered against your thigh before you rise from the pilotâs seat, thumb grazing the worn grip for half a second.
The boarding ramp lowers with a deep hydraulic growl, chains clunking somewhere beneath the hull as locking mechanisms disengage. Warm air floods into the ship immediately, thick with the scents of fuel exhaust, machine oil, overheated wiring, and the sour trace of stale alcohol drifting from somewhere deeper within the station.
Your cape shifts lightly behind you as you descend the ramp. Boots strike the docking platform with a heavy metallic clang that echoes through the bay.
Several nearby workers glance at your direction immediately. Then glance away just as fast.
Even now, after the Empireâs collapse, after the glassing fires of the Purge, after Mandalorians were reduced to rumors traded in bounty dens and scattered across sealed Imperial reports, the armor still means something. Beskar carries a reputation heavier than its weight. Entire worlds remember what Mandalorians once were: warriors descending from the sky in burning drop packs, clans marching through blaster fire without slowing, helmets staring emotionlessly through smoke and flame while armies broke around them.Â
The Empire tried to erase that history.
Instead, it turned it into myth.
And myths survive longer than empires do.
You move through the dockyard at an unhurried pace, cape trailing softly behind you while the station swallows the sound beneath machinery and distant engines. Your helmet remains angled just enough to catch reflections in darkened transparisteel windows and polished cargo containers as you pass. Distorted shapes slide across the edges of your vision: workers, drifters, armed guards, scavengers.
A pair of dockhands fall silent as you pass. A gambler near an open doorway subtly shifts his blaster farther beneath his coat. Two Nikto standing near a freight lift glance toward you once, then immediately decide they have somewhere else to look.
One mutters quietly to the other.
âAnother one.â
Another one. As if Mandalorians are suddenly multiplying from the cracks in the galaxy.
Then notorious Mandalorian is supposedly here.
That is all you know.
You descend deeper into the station until the cleaner docking levels give way to older corridors where the walls sweat condensation and exposed wires hang from ceilings like vines. Neon signs buzz overhead in mismatched colors. Music rattles faintly through thin walls.
The cantina waits at the far end of the corridor beneath a sputtering blue neon sign missing half its letters, the remaining symbols flickering erratically enough to paint the walls in uneven pulses of electric light. The doorway breathes noise into the station- bursts of laughter, shouted arguments, the sharp clink of glasses against metal tables.
You slow as you approach, stopping just outside the doorway. The corridor suddenly feels quieter here, as though the station itself is waiting to see whether you walk inside.
To your right, dark transparisteel lines the wall beside the entrance, scratched and clouded by age. Your reflection stares back at you through the haze.
Scarred beskar dulled by years of hard travel and harder fights.
A weather-worn cape hanging heavy from your shoulders.
A helmet marked by old blaster scoring near the brow line, the metal warped slightly where a shot once came close enough to kill.
Not ceremonial armor. Not polished clan-forged pride displayed for glory or honor. For a brief moment, your hand tightens slightly at your side.
You almost turn back.
Because this is foolish.
Not the meeting itself. Mandalorians sought one another out sometimes, especially now, scattered like fragments after the Purge. But coming alone? Walking willingly into a place full of strangers because of rumors and half-spoken stories?
That feels less like strategy and more like the beginning of a cautionary tale told over drinks by bounty hunters who survived when someone else did not.
And then the cantina door slides open.
Conversation inside drops immediately. Not fully silent. But enough.
Your helmet turns slowly as you scan your new environment.
At the far end of the room, seated alone beside the wall with clear sightlines to every exit, sits another Mandalorian in unpainted beskar armor. And beside him, small green ears peek over the edge of the booth.
The foundling looks directly at you, then makes a curious little noise.
The other Mandalorian turns his head afterward, visor settling on you with unreadable stillness. For several long seconds, neither of you moves.
The armor is real. Not imitation plating hammered together by scavengers pretending to be something they are not. Beskar.
Then the man finally speaks, voice low beneath the helmet.
Notes: This is the story connected to the headcanons Blonde Blazer x Shy!Shadow Power Reader Headcanons! I am so sorry in advance about the love note contents being cringe, I tried my best to be romantic
The note had already been rewritten fourteen times.
Some of the failed versions lay scattered beside your bed in little ruined heaps, paper crushed so tightly the edges had split. Thin ribbons of living shadow still coiled lazily around them, reluctant to let go even now, as though your embarrassment had seeped into the darkness itself.Â
Others had been spared destruction entirely.
Those ones were folded with almost painful care and hidden away inside drawers, tucked beneath books or beneath stacks of old receipts where no one would accidentally find them. You told yourself you kept them only because throwing them out felt wasteful, but the truth sat heavier than that. Even the worst versions still contained pieces of things you had almost been brave enough to say.
This newest draft rested in your hands now.
The paper had grown soft at the edges from constant handling, corners bent slightly inward beneath the repetitive sweep of your thumbs. You had read the same lines so many times the words practically lived behind your eyes now, memorized against your will. Every pause, every sentence, every scratch of ink had become something dissected and doubted a hundred separate times.
Dim amber light spilled from the lone lamp in your apartment, catching across the dark ink in uneven glints. The handwriting shimmered faintly against the page where the pen had pressed harder during moments of hesitation, the fresh black strokes reflecting like wet oil.
If I were braver, I think I would say these words aloud instead of hiding them inside paper and ink. But courage has always rested more naturally in your hands than it ever has in mine. You step into the world so easily, like you were born already knowing it would welcome you. I have only ever known how to linger at the edges of things.
Still, there are truths too large to remain silent forever.
You are the sun to me.
Not merely because you are bright, though there are moments I could swear heaven itself shaped you from warm gold and gentle light. It is more than beauty. More than the way your smile softens rooms without effort, or how your laughter seems capable of pulling people out of the darkest corners of themselves.
It is the way you endure.
The way you remain warm even after difficult days. The way people turn toward you instinctively, like flowers bending toward dawn, without fully realizing they are doing it. You make this city feel less cruel simply by existing within it. People do not love the sunrise because it demands worship. They love it because, after surviving the long and lonely hours of night, its arrival feels like mercy.
That is what you are to me.
Mercy.
And I think perhaps that is why loving you frightens me so deeply.
Because I am not a thing of sunlight.
I have always belonged to quieter hours. To dim hallways and sleepless apartments where shadows gather thick beneath doorframes. I know how to vanish far more easily than I know how to be seen. Where you blaze bright enough to warm the world around you, I drift farther away- distant and pale, like a lonely moon wandering blackened skies with borrowed light upon its face.
Yet still the moon yearns for the sun, though it knows such longing foolish.
So I want to ask you one selfish question: if youâre the sun, and Iâm the moon- could we make an eclipse together?
Your entire body locked up with mortification so sudden and intense it felt almost violent. Heat flooded straight to your face. Your shoulders hunched instinctively inward like you could physically curl yourself away from the words sitting on the page in front of you.
âNope,â you muttered under your breath immediately, voice strained with horror. âAbsolutely not. Horrifying.â
The shadows beneath your desk reacted before you could even finish the sentence.
Blackness spilled outward in thin, nervous tendrils, slithering across the hardwood floor in quick uncertain movements. A few curled around the legs of your chair, climbing upward in twitchy little spirals like anxious cats trying to comfort a distressed owner. Another crept toward the edge of the desk before recoiling dramatically the second your gaze snapped toward it, as though even your powers were embarrassed on your behalf.
You let out a long, suffering groan and dropped forward until your forehead thunked softly against the desk.
âThatâs too much,â you mumbled into the wood. âThat is way too much.â
The shadows quivered sympathetically around you.
One patted weakly against your sleeve.
Outside your apartment window, evening rain washed the city in smeared gold and electric blue. Neon signs reflected across wet pavement below in distorted ribbons of color, trembling every time passing cars cut through puddles. High above the streets, illuminated billboards flickered against low storm clouds while distant skyscraper windows glowed like scattered constellations.
Somewhere far off, sirens wailed through the rain- softened by distance until they became part of the cityâs heartbeat instead of a disruption to it. Traffic hissed against soaked roads. Thunder rolled faintly overhead.
Normally, you loved nights like this. Darkness made sense to you.
Rain muffled the world into something smaller, quieter, easier to breathe inside. Shadows stretched longer after sunset, gathering comfortably beneath furniture and in corners like familiar companions. Night never demanded too much from you. It never asked you to stand in the center of attention or bare your heart open where someone could hurt it.
Darkness was easy. Darkness did not require confessing romantic feelings to one of the most beloved heroes in the entire goddamned city.
Your mind conjured her instantly without permission, every detail vivid enough to ache.
The bright blonde hair that somehow always survived battles looking windswept and cinematic instead of sweat-soaked or singed like everyone elseâs. The rich blue mask around her eyes somehow only making her expressions more earnest instead of less readable. The little cape she wore with complete sincerity despite the fact half the younger heroes teased her for it relentlessly.
God, and the dorkiness.
The painfully corporate-approved thumbs-ups after successful missions. The finger guns. The motivational speeches that should have sounded cheesy but somehow never did because she meant every single word with embarrassing, wholehearted sincerity. The way she checked on civilians twice.
The way she remembered your name.
Not your codename, your actual name. Your chest tightened dangerously at the memory of her saying it so casually, so warmly, like it mattered.
The shadows beneath your desk stirred again.
Thin wisps of darkness crept across the surface of the desk toward the folded note sitting near your elbow, nudging at the edge of the paper with hesitant encouragement while you stared at it like it might personally ruin your life.
Your phone rang. Not the familiar, idle chime you were used to hearing in the quiet hours between everything important and everything forgettable.
This was different.
Sharp. Immediate. Unforgiving.
Robert.
The sound seemed to cut through the apartment itself, as if the signal didnât just travel through air but through the very stillness clinging to the room. Even the rain outside, still tracing slow golden-blue rivers down the window, felt suddenly distant- muted, like the world had been pushed behind glass. The phoneâs vibration hammered against the desk in tight, insistent bursts, each one vibrating up through your bones like a warning you already understood before your mind could fully catch up to it.
Your body snapped upright so fast it almost felt detached from thought entirely- muscle memory forged in moments youâd rather not remember asserting itself before embarrassment, hesitation, or doubt could even begin to form.
The rain-lit calm that had been draped over your apartment shattered in an instant.
âGood evening,â Robert said, like this was a perfectly normal time for anything good or evening to exist together. âI need the paperwork you have.â
You blinked once.
ââŚThe emergency line just lit up like a war zone,â you said slowly, still half-standing, shadows coiled tight around your feet like restless smoke. âAnd you called me for paperwork.â
âYes,â Robert replied without hesitation.
A distant shuffling sounded through the line, like he was flipping through files or, more likely, reorganizing chaos into labeled folders out of sheer spite. Paperwork rustled- too calm, too mundane for the tension still ringing in your veins.
âItâs the incident report from last weekâs containment,â he continued. âThe original draft. Not the redacted one. The actual one.â
âI wrote that at three in the morning after getting stabbed in the shoulder,â you muttered.
âYes,â Robert said. âIt was still technically accurate. That is part of the problem.â
Your shadows, still half-alert from the emergency line, slowly loosened their tight coils around the room. The tension didnât vanish so much as it deflated, like something important had been misfired and everyone involved was pretending that was normal.
You exhaled through your nose.
ââŚThere is no emergency emergency, rightâ you asked.
âI did consider emailing you, but my job is on the line.â
The call ended before you could decide whether to hang up or simply dissolve into the floor out of spite. You stood there for a moment anyway, phone still warm in your hand, listening to the lingering silence where Robert Robertsonâs voice had been far too calm for a man requesting paperwork during what had absolutely felt like the beginning of a city-ending catastrophe.
âFine,â you said under your breath. âFine. You win.â
Your hands swept across the desk in one practiced motion, gathering the stack before it could become a moral dilemma. Pages slid together with soft, papery friction- incident reports, annotations, redlines, the dreaded original draft Robert had specifically requested like it was a sacred relic instead of a confession of administrative sins.
A few sheets threatened to escape.
They did not get the chance.
The shadows moved first.
They slid up from beneath the desk in smooth, obedient waves, catching loose pages mid-drift and folding them back into alignment with unsettling precision. One tendril wrapped around the stack like a strap, securing it in place. Another curled into a makeshift handle, as if offering you a better way to carry your own bureaucratic burden.
SDN rose ahead of you like it always did- an unassuming building from the outside, too clean to look dangerous, too ordinary to advertise what actually happened inside. The signage was minimal. The security even more so, which was its own kind of statement: if you were supposed to be here, youâd already know how to get in.
Robert looked up from his desk immediately, as if he had been waiting for the exact second youâd arrive and resented the universe for making him wait even that long.
âAh, thank you.â he said.
âHere,â you said flatly. âYour sacred artifact. Try not to lose sleep over it.â
Robert ignored the comment entirely, which was also his version of humor. He flipped the top page open with care, eyes scanning with practiced speed.Â
âIâll give this to Blazer, she needs to see it too.â
Something in your body went abruptly, catastrophically still.
It wasnât dramatic at first. Just a small internal hitch, like your thoughts had tripped over something invisible and hadnât quite decided whether to recover.
ââŚBlazer,â you repeated carefully.
Robert hummed in acknowledgment, already flipping to the next page.
You forced your voice to stay level. âShe⌠sheâs reading it?â
You pictured her without meaning to, and the thought arrived so cleanly it felt less like memory and more like intrusion. The blue mask framing her face in that unmistakable, almost painfully sincere way, then her eyes, steady and sincere.
Then her posture- always just a fraction too upright, shoulders squared as if she were consciously negotiating her place in every room she entered. Not stiff, not unnatural⌠just careful. Like she was constantly aware that she took up space, and was determined to make sure she deserved it.
And then the image shifted, you saw her holding your work.
Eyes scanning your handwriting, your phrasing, the small tells you never intended anyone to notice: the way you hesitated mid-sentence, the way you overcorrected when you felt uncertain, the places where professionalism gave way, however briefly, to something more human than youâd meant to expose.
The version of you that existed in ink instead of silence.
Your stomach tightened sharply, like something inside had been pulled too fast in the wrong direction. Heat rose at the back of your neck before you could stop it. Your fingers flexed once at your side, as if you could physically dislodge the thought by force.
She stepped in like she always did- without hesitation, without noise that felt unnecessary. The kind of entrance that didnât demand attention but somehow received it anyway.
Blue mask. Bright blonde hair still faintly damp at the edges from the rain outside. The faint gold trim of her suit catching the office light in soft, warm reflections that made everything else in the room feel slightly dull by comparison.
Robert looked up the moment she entered, as though the timing had been quietly prewritten somewhere in his mind and the world had simply arrived to fulfill it on cue.
There was no surprise in his expression. No shift, no adjustment, only the calm, practiced recognition of someone who had already accounted for this variable in his internal schedule.
âBlazer,â he said evenly, as if greeting the arrival of a scheduled document rather than a person. âYouâre on time.â
âTrying to be,â she replied.
Her voice carried easily through the room: light in tone, but anchored by focus, like it never fully lost sight of why it had entered the space in the first place. She stepped closer without hesitation, boots quiet against the floor, movement controlled in that effortless way that suggested she was always aware of where she was in relation to everything else.
And then she was closer to you.
You became intensely, almost absurdly aware of yourself in a way that felt unfair- like someone had turned up the volume on every minor detail you usually managed to ignore. The angle of your shoulders. The fact that your hands were hanging there, doing nothing useful. The unmistakable reality that you were, in fact, standing in the middle of a room pretending to be a functional human being while she moved through it with composed purpose.
She passed within your field of view like gravity had briefly decided to take a different shape.
Her eyes flicked toward you, and a faint smile formed on her face.
âIâve seen your work before,â she said, tone easy but sincere as she adjusted the file in her hands. âYouâre⌠really good at noticing things other people miss.â
Your mind stalled so hard it nearly became audible. Your throat tried to produce words and failed on principle.
âSeriously,â Blonde Blazer added, like she was confirming something she already considered obvious. âIt makes a difference.â
And just like that, she moved again- back into motion, back into purpose- carrying the file as if the moment had been completely natural and not something that had just rearranged your internal organs.
Blonde Blazer disappeared down the corridor with the file tucked under her arm, footsteps fading into the soft, bureaucratic hum of SDNâs interior life. Only then did Robert look up again.
âYouâre red.â
ââŚIâm not,â you said automatically.
You made a noise that was meant to be a protest and accidentally came out as a strained exhale instead.
âIâm going home,â you said quickly.
âYou are still on duty until-â
âIâm going home,â you repeated, more firmly this time, already backing toward the door.
Then, almost absentmindedly, Robert added, âTry not to combust on the way out. It would be inefficient.â
Behind you, SDN receded into the night- quiet, indifferent, and entirely unconcerned with the fact that you were currently fleeing emotional consequences faster than any actual threat youâd faced all evening. The apartment had settled into something almost gentle by the time you got home.
Rain still traced faint lines down the window, but it had lost its urgency. The city outside was reduced to a softened glow- neon bleeding into wet pavement, headlights stretching into slow-moving ribbons of light. Everything felt distant enough to pretend it hadnât happened.
The microwave hummed as you leaned against the counter, arms folded, watching the little paper bag of popcorn slowly inflate like it was becoming something more important than it had any right to be.
Your phone lit up. You froze so completely the popcorn nearly became secondary to your survival instincts.
Unknown number.
For a brief, irrational second, your brain supplied every possible worst-case scenario it could think of, most of them involving Robert Robertson and paperwork-related vengeance.
Then it rang again.
You answered.
ââŚHello?â
A pause.
Then her voice.
Not on speaker. Not broadcast. Just direct, close, unmistakably real.
âHi,â Blonde Blazer said.
Your grip tightened on the phone immediately.
ââŚHi,â you managed.
There was a small pause on the line, not awkward, just careful.
âI wanted to ask you something,â she said.
Your stomach did something profoundly unhelpful.
You glanced toward your shadows. They were, traitorously, very still.
âOkay,â you said, voice slightly too cautious. âSure.â
Another pause.
Then her tone shifted- just a fraction softer, like she was stepping closer without actually moving.
âThat letter,â she said.
Everything in your apartment went quiet in a way that felt impossible for a space that still had a running microwave. Your brain attempted to evacuate the situation.
âI read it,â she continued gently. âOr⌠I started reading it. Robert handed it to me earlier, it was in the file.â
Your stomach dropped so fast it felt like it left the room ahead of you. Your mind, meanwhile, did what it always did when confronted with emotional danger: it attempted to reconstruct the entire last twenty-four hours in excruciating detail until it found the exact moment everything had gone wrong.
ââŚin the file,â you repeated, carefully, like repeating it might change the meaning.
âYeah,â she said. âThe top pages were the incident report, but there was another sheet tucked in behind it. I think it fell in accidentally when everything was stapled together.â
No.
No, no, no.
That was a separate document. That was not supposed to be anywhere near official SDN circulation. That was supposed to be hidden. Destroyed. Possibly exiled to another dimension if you had your way.Â
âAnd I just⌠needed to know,â Blonde Blazer added, voice still calm, but now threaded with something more careful than before, âdid you mean what you wrote?â
âOh my god,â you whispered.
âIâm sorry,â she said immediately, and you could hear the smile now- small, genuine, trying not to make it worse. âI probably shouldnât have mentioned it like that.â
âNo,â you said quickly, too quickly. âNo, itâs- no, itâs fine. Itâs not- I just-â
You stared at the microwave light reflecting off the counter. At the rain on the window. At your shadows, which were very deliberately pretending not to exist.
Blonde Blazer x Shy!Shadow Power Reader Headcanons
Note(s): Thank you for your request anon! I decided to make both a story and some headcanons, I hope that's ok! There's a section for platonic and romantic, so you can imagine any kind of pairing you want!
Platonic
Your relationship with Blonde Blazer would immediately stand out to other people because visually and emotionally, the two of you look like complete opposites standing next to each other- her bright colors, confident posture, easy smile, and open charisma contrasted against your quieter demeanor, darker aesthetic, and tendency to physically shrink into yourself whenever attention lands on you
Where Blonde Blazer naturally fills a room without trying, you instinctively try to avoid being perceived at all; conversations with strangers drain you, crowds overwhelm you, and when uncomfortable, your shadow powers unconsciously deepen around you- lights dimming slightly, corners darkening, your silhouette almost blending into the environment
She notices this immediately, but instead of trying to âfixâ it, she adjusts around it
When she introduces you to people, she naturally keeps herself slightly closer to your side, subtly redirecting attention away from you when she notices you getting overwhelmed
Sheâd become very good at noticing the small signs of your discomfort- your shadows thickening unconsciously, your avoidance of eye contact, the way you linger near exits or darker corners- and sheâd quietly intervene before things get overwhelming
If someone talks over you or ignores you because youâre quiet, Blonde Blazer immediately redirects the conversation back toward you with calm confidence: âHold on, they were talking,â not aggressive, just firm enough that people listen
Sheâd openly defend you against other people and their assumptions, especially from corporate hero types or civilians who see your abilities as âvillain-codedâ
Her response would always be calm but unwavering: âTheir powers donât determine who they are.â
Because youâre a bit shy and observant, youâd notice things other people miss: when her smile becomes strained, when sheâs mentally exhausted, when sheâs slipping into âprofessional modeâ instead of being herself, when she needs support but doesnât know how to ask for it
Your quieter nature would make her feel less pressured to constantly be âonâ; with you, she wouldnât have to fill every silence or maintain the perfect heroic image all the time, because you naturally create calmer spaces around her
Meanwhile, sheâd become one of the few people capable of pulling you out of your isolation gently instead of forcefully; not dragging you into crowds, but reminding you that you donât always have to disappear to feel safe
Romantic
Dates between you and Blonde Blazer would start with her realizing very quickly that traditional romantic gestures overwhelm you if there are too many people involved, like loud restaurants, crowded events, or places where everyone recognizes her
They make you visibly tense, shadows curling tighter around your body while you try not to draw attention to yourself
Instead of getting frustrated by that, she quietly adapts; your dates become softer, more private, more intentional- late-night diners with barely anyone inside, rooftops overlooking the city, quiet walks after patrol when the streets are mostly empty and the lights reflect off puddles around your feet
Youâd probably apologize a lot early in the relationship for being âbadâ at dates- worried youâre too quiet, too awkward, too uncomfortable around people- and Blonde Blazer would immediately shut that down with gentle sincerity: âYou know dates arenât performances, right?â because she already spends enough of her own life performing for others
Sheâd actually prefer the quietness of your dates because with you, she doesnât have to maintain the polished celebrity-hero version of herself all the time; she can just exist in comfortable silence without feeling like she needs to entertain anyone
One of the most romantic things about your relationship would be how safe it feels emotionally despite your differences; neither of you actually wants perfection: sheâs tired of always being âonâ, youâre tired of feeling like you should disappear
Together, you create a space where neither of those things are required
Eventually, your shadows would become something she actively seeks comfort in; after exhausting missions or stressful public events, sheâd intentionally step closer into the cool darkness surrounding you with this quiet little sigh of relief like she can finally breathe again. Likewise, her light would become one of the few things that doesnât make you want to hide; instead of feeling exposed beneath it, you feel warm- seen in a way that doesnât hurt
Dates at home would become especially meaningful because they remove the pressure both of you deal with publicly: sitting together on the couch while your shadows dim the room naturally, her lying against you while watching movies, quiet conversations at ridiculous hours of the night, her tracing shapes absentmindedly through the shadows curling around your hands
I was just wondering: for those of you who read vampire stories, do you prefer the reveal that a character is a vampire to happen immediately, or do you like a slower, more drawn-out reveal?
Do you enjoy knowing from the beginning, with maybe some of the characters already knowing too, and getting to watch the tension build from there? Or do you prefer discovering it alongside the rest of the characters?
I'm trying to improve my writing skills a bit, so I figured I would ask you all lovely folk! Please do not hesitate to answer with reblogs or comments!
I was just wondering: for those of you who read vampire stories, do you prefer the reveal that a character is a vampire to happen immediately, or do you like a slower, more drawn-out reveal?
Do you enjoy knowing from the beginning, with maybe some of the characters already knowing too, and getting to watch the tension build from there? Or do you prefer discovering it alongside the rest of the characters?
I'm trying to improve my writing skills a bit, so I figured I would ask you all lovely folk! Please do not hesitate to answer with reblogs or comments!
Summary: While most people panic in stressful situations, you just become sarcastic. The only question is, will Alucard take offense?
Pairing: Alucard (Hellsing Ultimate) x Reader (can be read as platonic or romantic)
Words: 2,217
Warning(s): Mention of blood/gunfire/violence, but nothing explicit
Note(s): This is my first time writing for Hellsing, so I hope I got this right!
Rain battered the manor windows with relentless force, each strike sharp enough to sound like distant gunfire echoing through the estate. Which, frankly, did absolutely nothing for your nerves.
The entire Hellsing manor already carried the suffocating atmosphere of a place built more for burial than living. Vast stone corridors swallowed sound whole beneath their vaulted ceilings. Dark mahogany paneling climbed the walls like old dried blood, polished to a shine that reflected only warped shadows back at you. Portraits of long-dead Hellsings stared down from gilded frames with expressions so severe it felt less like decoration and more like active judgment. Even the air smelled old: candle wax, dust, rain-soaked stone, and something faintly metallic lingering beneath it all.
Storms somehow made the estate worse.
The lightning turned every corridor into a stuttering nightmare of light and darkness. Shadows stretched unnaturally long across the floor, warping around corners like living things retreating just out of sight. Thunder rolled through the manorâs bones with a low rumble that vibrated beneath your shoes. Between each crash came stretches of silence so complete they felt oppressive, the kind that made you suddenly aware of every tiny sound you made- the rustle of paper beneath your arm, the soft creak of your shoes against polished flooring, the quiet pull of your own breathing.
You adjusted the stack of mission reports tucked under your arm, fingers tightening slightly against the folders.
And tried very hard not to think about him.
Somewhere in this labyrinth of halls lurked a centuries-old vampire with the manners of a smug aristocrat and the sense of humor of a sadistic cat playing with wounded prey. A creature powerful enough to level armies who, for reasons known only to himself, seemed to derive genuine joy from psychologically tormenting anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path. Alucard.
Youâd seen enough working for Hellsing to understand exactly what Alucard was capable of. Fear made sense around him. Terror made sense. Most people either froze up entirely or avoided eye contact like looking directly at him might somehow shorten their lifespan.
Meanwhile, your brain apparently coped with stress by becoming sarcastic. Not the useful kind of sarcasm, either. Not the sharp, controlled edge you could actually deploy in conversation when it mattered. This was more like your thoughts tripping over themselves and deciding, halfway through panic, that everything was mildly ridiculous.
Because that was definitely what your life had become- just an ongoing series of extremely normal events, like being chased, being yelled at, or watching reality quietly fall apart in the corner while nobody else seemed to notice.
It was a dangerous habit to have around an ancient predator.
Because every single interaction with him felt like balancing on the edge of a knife. Alucard would make some ominous comment about death or mutilation or the insignificance of humanity, and before your common sense could intervene, your mouth immediately wanted to respond with something deeply unwise like, âWow, dramatic tonight, arenât we?â
You hadnât actually said anything that reckless.
Yet.
But there had already been close calls.
Unfortunately, Sir Integra Hellsing had specifically requested the files be delivered personally. Which would have been fine if Walter had not apparently vanished into the infinite labyrinth of the manor like some kind of impeccably dressed cryptid.
So now the responsibility had fallen to you.
You tightened your grip on the folders and continued down the corridor, your footsteps echoing softly against polished stone. The hall seemed even longer at night, stretched thin. Rainwater streaked the towering windows in crooked rivers, and every flash of lightning painted the manor bone-white for half a second before plunging it back into shadow.
Somewhere deeper in the estate, old pipes groaned.
Your footsteps slowed. Something feltâŚoff.
Not dangerous,youâd worked for the Hellsing Organization long enough to understand the distinction. Danger was sharp and immediate, like a knife suddenly pressed against your throat. Danger made your instincts scream.
This wasnât that.
This was presence.
The suffocating, unnatural awareness that something ancient had entered the room.
The atmosphere shifted with horrifying subtlety. The hallway seemed quieter now, the storm outside muffled as though the manor itself were holding its breath. The hairs along the back of your neck lifted. Even the air felt different- heavier somehow, thick enough that each inhale dragged slower into your lungs.
âWell,â a voice drawled from the darkness ahead, smooth as spilled wine, âyou smell nervous.â
Tall enough to dominate the hallway without effort, red coat spilling around him like fresh blood across the dark. His tinted glasses caught the dim light in brief crimson flashes, hiding his eyes but somehow making his stare feel even heavier. Shadows curled around him unnaturally, shifting against the walls like living things reluctant to stray too far from their master.
Alucard smiled.
Well, you smell expensive and vaguely homicidal, but I was trying to be polite.
You stopped the thought before it could even think about becoming words. Your mouth pressed into a painfully tight line instead while your grip on the reports tightened hard enough to crinkle paper.
âGood evening,â you managed carefully.
His grin widened immediately, as though he could somehow sense the terrible decision your brain had almost made- and you had the deeply unsettling suspicion that he would find that funny.
âOh, how professional.â He tilted his head. âYou sound as though youâre trying not to scream.â
You opened your mouth with every intention of saying something measured. Respectful. Safe. Instead, what came out was:
âWell, you did appear out of the darkness like a haunted tax collector.â
The words hit the air and immediately your soul attempted to evacuate your body.
Your body went cold as your eyes widened a fraction.
No.
No, no, no.
Because this wasnât some irritated coworker youâd accidentally mouthed off to.
This was Alucard.
You had seen what happened when he stopped pretending to be civilized.
Youâd seen blood painted across concrete walls in sheets thick enough to drip. Seen bodies torn apart so violently they barely looked human afterward. Seen him walk through gunfire smiling, shadows and teeth and screaming things pouring out around him while enemy forces broke apart in pure animal panic. You still remembered the sound of it sometimes- bones snapping beneath impossible strength, hysterical shouting cut off mid-scream, the wet crack of something monstrous feeding in the dark.
You had watched hardened soldiers lose their nerve just because he looked at them.
And you- you had just compared him to a haunted tax collector.
A tiny, deeply horrified part of your brain briefly wondered if this was how you died. Not in some heroic firefight against ghouls or vampires, but because your survival instincts were apparently being held together with cheap tape and sarcasm.
The storm outside faded beneath the roaring of your pulse in your ears. Every instinct suddenly screamed at you to backpedal. Apologize. Maybe fake your own death and flee the country.
Alucard stared at you from beneath the shadow of his hat.
Then his grin slowly widened into something genuinely delighted.
âOh,â he said softly, almost reverently, âthere it is.â
You resisted the overwhelming urge to throw yourself directly out the nearest window.
âI-â You cleared your throat. âThat wasnât supposed to be out loud.â
âNo?â His voice practically purred with amusement now. âAnd here I was beginning to think you disliked me.â
âDislike is a strong word,â you said carefully.
Your brain immediately followed with: Actively intimidated by your commitment to theatrics? Absolutely.
You strangled the thought before it could escape and focused very hard on maintaining what you hoped resembled professional composure. Unfortunately, judging by the slight twitch at the corner of his mouth, Alucard noticed that too.
His shoulders shifted with what looked dangerously close to silent laughter.
âOh, this is delightful,â he murmured. âYou keep stopping yourself.âÂ
The pressure in the hallway felt almost physical now, thick with something ancient and predatory lurking just beneath his amusement. It would have been easier if heâd looked angry. Easier if heâd threatened you outright.
Instead, he looked entertained.
âI am exercising self-preservation,â you informed him.
âA shame.â He took another soundless step closer, crimson coat shifting around him like flowing blood. âI was enjoying the honesty.â
Your pulse kicked unpleasantly. He was close enough now that you could see the sharp edges of his grin beneath the shadow of his hat, close enough that the air carried the faint scent of gunpowder and old smoke clinging to him beneath the rain-damp stone of the manor.
And because your survival instincts had apparently abandoned their post entirely, another thought surfaced: You say that now, but eventually Iâm going to say something that gets me dismembered.
Your mouth twitched.
Alucard noticed instantly.
âOh?â he drawled. âWhat was that one?â
âNothing.â
âMm. Liar.â
The word rolled off his tongue lazily, almost affectionate in the worst possible way. You tightened your grip on the reports.Â
âWith respect, I think maintaining plausible deniability is currently in both of our best interests.â
That actually made him laugh.
Not the low chuckle from before, a real laugh.
Warm, rich, openly amused, echoing through the corridor so unexpectedly that it sent a brief shiver down your spine.
Which was deeply unfair, honestly.
Because you had seen this man rip apart armed mercenaries without slowing his stride. You had watched shadows crawl across walls slick with blood while he smiled like the violence was art to him. There were still nights where certain sounds from missions came back to you in flashes- screaming, gunfire, the wet crack of something inhuman moving through a crowd too fast to follow.
That same creature was now standing in front of you looking genuinely entertained because your internal filter was failing catastrophically.
âYou think I would kill you over an insult?â Alucard asked, still smiling.
ââŚI think,â you said slowly, choosing every word with extreme care, âthat you are an ancient, absurdly powerful predator with a very specific sense of humor, and I genuinely cannot predict where your limits are.â
Alucardâs grin sharpened.
âBut,â you added quickly, before your survival instincts could fail again, âIâm not actually trying to insult you.â
That seemed to catch his attention more than the sarcasm had. The amusement on his face softened into something more curious. You sighed quietly, shifting the reports under your arm.Â
âItâs justâŚâ You grimaced faintly. âStress response.â
âOne involving mockery?â
âOne involving poor decision-making.â
His laugh rumbled low in his chest again.
You pressed on before you lost your nerve. âI know what you are capable of.â Your voice came quieter now, more honest than you intended. âIâve seen what happens during missions. Iâve seen what happens when you stop holding back.â
âAnd despite this,â Alucard mused, âyou continue speaking to me as though we are two coworkers trapped in an inconvenient conversation.â
âThatâs because if I fully process what you are,â you admitted, âI think my fight-or-flight response would permanently activate. And fleeing seems difficult when you keep appearing in hallways like a gothic sleep paralysis demon.â
The silence lasted exactly half a second before Alucard threw his head back and laughed. The sound filled the corridor, rich and genuinely delighted, echoing off the walls while lightning flashed behind him through the towering windows.
And somewhere beneath your lingering nerves and self-preserving horror, a small, deeply reluctant realization surfaced: he really did find this funny.
Rain hammered against the manor windows behind him, lightning briefly illuminating the sharp angles of his silhouette in stark white flashes. For an instant, he looked less like a man and more like something carved directly out of shadow and old blood. Then his gaze settled fully back onto you
âYou restrain yourself too much,â he said at last.
âThat sentence has never once led to a good outcome in human history.â
His smile twitched wider.
âThere.â He pointed at you lazily with one gloved hand. âThat.â His voice dropped into something warm with amusement. âStop swallowing those thoughts before they reach your mouth.â
You stared at him like heâd lost what remained of his mind.
âWith respect,â you said carefully, âthat feels like a trap.â
âA trap?â He sounded almost offended.
âYou are a centuries-old vampire who could kill me faster than my nervous system could process it.â You shifted the reports under your arm. âI feel like caution is reasonable.â
Alucard took another slow step closer. The shadows beneath his coat curled unnaturally across the floorboards, moving like living things around his boots. Up close, his presence felt enormous- not physically, but existentially. Like standing too near the edge of something ancient and bottomless.
âYou have seen what humans sound like around me,â he murmured. âFear. Worship. Empty obedience.â His grin sharpened faintly. âBoring things.â
The words rolled off his tongue with genuine disdain. Another flash of lightning lit the corridor, catching briefly on the crimson lenses hiding his eyes.
âYou,â Alucard continued, âlook at a monster and think sarcastic thoughts.â
Your eyes narrowed slightly.Â
âYouâre enjoying this far too much.â
âImmensely.â
At least he was honest.
The vampire leaned just slightly closer, enough that the pressure of his presence seemed to swallow the entire hallway around you.
âCome now,â he purred. âSay what you are thinking.â
Summary: Being the youngest on the Z Team means sometimes you get overlooked, but how far would you go to prove yourself?
Pairing: Z Team x Teen!Reader
Warning(s): None
Words: 3,397
Note(s): There is definitely going to be a part two to this! Thank you for the request anon!
You sat near the far end of the long conference table, just outside the center of the room where everyone else seemed to naturally gravitate. The overhead lights reflected off the polished brown surface in pale streaks, sharp enough to sting your eyes if you looked too long. Beneath the table, your hands were locked together so tightly your knuckles ached, your thumb dragging restlessly over the same patch of skin again and again until it felt raw.
Your tablet sat untouched in front of you, the screen dimmed after minutes of inactivity. Fingerprints smeared the glass from where youâd been scrolling through satellite feeds, patrol logs, intercepted comm traffic- anything that might force this disaster of a meeting into something productive.
You had an idea.
Not just an idea, either.
A good one.
The kind that actually fits the evidence instead of the ego contest currently happening around the table.
You knew it was solid because youâd spent the last hour combing through timestamp discrepancies and overlaying patrol routes until your eyes burned. While everyone else argued over each other loud enough to shake the room, youâd been doing the actual work. Cross-referencing blind spots. Comparing heat signatures. Tracking vehicle movement patterns nobody else had even noticed.
The docks werenât the target.
They were bait.
You knew that with near painful certainty.
But every single time you tried to speak, somebody louder crashed over your voice before it fully existed.
A fist slammed against the table somewhere to your left.
âThe timing doesnât line up-â Sonar argued.
âThatâs because youâre assuming they came by water-â Prism interrupted.
âNo, youâre missing the point entirely-â Flambae cut in.
The room folded over itself in overlapping voices.
You leaned forward just enough to gather your nerves.
âActually, if-â
âLook, Iâm just saying the docks are a distraction-â Robert insisted.
The words hit like a door slamming in your face.
Your jaw clicked shut hard enough to hurt.
Heat crawled up the back of your neck as your sentence collapsed unfinished in your throat for what felt like the fifth time tonight. You stared down at your tablet instead, pretending to reread information you already had memorized, while the argument kept raging around you without pause.Â
You were the youngest person in the room by almost a decade, and sometimes, it felt like everyone could tell. Not because anyone outright said it. But because every time you opened your mouth, the room somehow moved around you instead of toward you. Conversations redirected. Louder voices took priority. Decisions got made while you were still trying to find space to finish a sentence.
Your fingers tightened slightly around the edge of the tablet.
You hated that it still got to you.
Hated that some part of you kept shrinking every time it happened, no matter how many successful missions youâd gone on or how many times your intel turned out to be right. You worked twice as hard as everyone else just to avoid giving them a reason to look at you like a liability. Triple-checking reports. Memorizing patrol routes. Staying later than everyone else after briefings ended.
And still, moments like this made you feel like a baby again instead of a full-fledged Z Team member sitting at the same table as everyone else.
Across the table, you swore you could feel Invisigal notice.
She lounged sideways in her chair like meetings physically offended her existence. One combat boot rested against the table leg while the other tapped lazily against the floor. Her cropped pink jacket hung open over the black shirt beneath it, dark violet hair sticking out in uneven spikes like sheâd cut it herself with a knife and boredom.
At first glance, she looked half-asleep, like she would rather literally be anywhere else. But her brown eyes moved constantly.
Invisigal acted detached from almost everything around her, throwing out dry remarks and cynical observations like armor plating, but somehow she still noticed things nobody else did. Who skipped lunch. Who was exhausted. Who was pretending not to shake after missions. Who kept trying to speak and kept getting ignored.
A pen suddenly flicked across the table from her direction. It skidded over scattered papers before striking a coffee mug with a loud, sharp clack that cracked through the room.
A few heads twitched slightly.
Nobody actually stopped talking.
Invisigal let out a long, theatrical sigh like humanity had personally exhausted her. Then, without warning, she planted one boot onto the lower rung of her chair and stood halfway up on it, balanced carelessly like she was about to deliver either a speech or a threat.
âHey,â she said flatly.
The room barely reacted.
Invisigalâs expression deadened, then her eyes narrowed into something dangerous.
âHEY!â
The second shout hit the room like a stun round, voices stumbling apart mid-sentence.
âYou people ever get tired of hearing yourselves talk?â she asked. âOr is this like a competitive hobby?âÂ
A couple annoyed looks got thrown her way, mainly from Robert and Sonar, but she ignored all of them. Then she jerked her chin toward you.Â
âThe kidâs been trying to talk for like five minutes.â
The silence stretched long enough that Punch Up finally muttered, âRight. Sorry.â
Your pulse hammered stupidly hard, but this time nobody interrupted.
âThe warehouse isnât the actual meeting point,â you said, forcing your voice steady. âItâs a relay location.â
Sonar and Waterboy tilted their heads in unison.
You reached forward and tapped your tablet awake, bringing up the route map.
âThe trucks only stay there an average of eight minutes. But every route loops through the old flood tunnels beneath the financial district.â You zoomed in. âIf they were distributing weapons, the warehouse would make sense. But theyâre moving people.â
Flambae nodded along as you were speaking, and Prism mimicked him. You kept going.
âThe flood tunnels bypass most city surveillance because the sensors were damaged during the blackout two years ago. If we intercept there instead, we cut off every exit point simultaneously.â
Across the room, Invisigal smirked like sheâd expected this outcome from the beginning.
âWow,â she deadpanned. âCrazy. Itâs almost like listening to people improves meetings.â
A few groans answered her.
She sat back down.
The discussion shifted after that. Focused. Productive. The Z Team started building around your idea instead of shouting over each other, and you tried not to stare too hard at the screen in front of you while warmth settled strangely in your chest.
The meeting finally unraveled nearly forty minutes later. Voices slowly peeled apart into smaller conversations as the Z Team pushed themselves away from the table in waves. Invisigal and Robert argued over vehicle assignments near the far wall while Flambae tried unsuccessfully to fix the coffee machine by hitting it.
You stayed where you were.
Seated near the end of the table with your tablet still in front of you, fingers moving uselessly across the screen as you pretended to organize files that were already organized. Opening folders. Closing them again. Scrolling without reading.
Mostly just giving yourself a reason not to stand up yet.
Because your brain kept circling back to the same moment over and over again no matter how hard you tried to focus on anything else.
Invisigal was chronically unimpressed with humanity as a species, but she also kept showing up.
The first week you joined the Z Team, sheâd silently appeared beside you in the hallway after a disastrous training session and dropped a candy bar onto your paperwork without explanation before vanishing around the corner.
The third week, you skipped dinner without realizing it. You were buried in mission reports at one of the long after most people had gone home, eyes burning from staring at surveillance footage for hours straight.
At some point, a plastic container slid silently into your peripheral vision.
You looked up, and Invisigal was already halfway down the hallway.
âThereâs actual vegetables in that,â she called without turning around. âTry not to look so betrayed.â
During your first field mission with the team, Robert handed out comm assignments too quickly and forgot to pair you with anybody. You noticed immediately.
And somehow that made it worse when you realized nobody else seemed to notice at all.
Not intentionally, nobody was being cruel. They were just experienced enough to fall into old habits automatically, and you were still new enough to slip through the cracks between them.
Before you could awkwardly point it out, Invisigalâs voice crackled through your earpiece.Â
âKidâs with me.âÂ
You were still staring blankly at your tablet when movement stopped beside your chair.
Invisigal leaned against the table, one hand in her jacket pocket.
âYou alive over there?â she asked.
Her voice was lighter now without the edge sheâd used earlier to shut everyone up.
You looked up too quickly. âYeah.â
âHm.â
Her eyes narrowed just slightly, not suspicious exactly- more like she was trying to see through the walls you kept instinctively building around yourself.
âYou do that thing where you disappear into your own skull when youâre overthinking.â
Your brow furrowed immediately.
âI do not.â
âYou absolutely do.â
Heat crept faintly into your face before you looked back down at your tablet again, fingers hovering awkwardly over the screen without actually touching it. The corner of Invisigalâs mouth twitched upward slightly, not quite a smile but close enough to count.Â
A second passed, then she reached out and patted your shoulder twice.
âThere you go again,â she said. âRelax, kid. You did good.â
You looked at her standing there with her tired eyes and sarcastic mouth and battered combat boots and realized, with startling clarity, that somewhere along the line your brain had started placing her in the shape of something dangerously close to family.Â
An older sister.
The kind who acted annoyed while helping you anyway. The kind who complained the entire time she was covering your back but never once considered not doing it. The kind who noticed when you went quiet.
You stared at her for half a second too long. And Invisigal noticed immediately.
Her eyes narrowed with instant suspicion while one eyebrow lifted sharply upward.
ââŚWhy are you looking at me like that?â
âNo reason.â
âThatâs a lie.â
âItâs not.â
âIt absolutely is.â
She squinted harder.
Then pointed at you accusingly.
âYouâre about to say something emotionally devastating, arenât you?â
Despite yourself, a laugh escaped your throat. Beside you, Invisigal stared another second longer before groaning quietly like sheâd just developed a migraine.
âOh no. That confirms it.â
âYouâre impossible.â
âCorrect. But deflecting isnât gonna save you now.â
You shook your head, smiling despite yourself.
âGood,â she said quietly.
You frowned. âGood what?â
âYou smiled.â She shrugged one shoulder. âYou donât do that enough.â
Then, before you could respond, Invisigal suddenly drew in a sharp breath. Her shoulders lifted slightly with the inhale, and she vanished.
Even after seeing her ability countless times during training exercises and missions, it still made something instinctive in your brain recoil every single time. Your eyes kept trying to find a shape that no longer existed. Your mind kept insisting a person couldnât simply stop being visible that completely.
A second later, her voice drifted through the room from somewhere behind you.
âDonât let the others bulldoze you next meeting either, by the way.â
Invisible fingers flicked the side of your head lightly. You jerked in surprise, one hand immediately flying toward the spot.
Behind you, Invisigal snorted.
âYouâve got good instincts, kid.â
Something in your chest tightened painfully at the praise. Not because she said it loudly, not because she made a big deal out of it. The opposite, actually. Invisigal said it like it was obvious.
Like your instincts being good was already an established fact in her head.
You wanted her to keep looking at you like that.
Invisigal looked at you like you were capable of handling yourself. Like your words had weight. Like you werenât just some nervous extra standing at the edge of a team far bigger and louder than you. Like you belonged here.
Like, somehow, sheâd already decided there was a place for you beside her.
The realization hit hard enough to make you stare blankly at the table for a second. You wanted to impress her.Â
The same way younger siblings wanted older siblings to think they were cool. Competent. Worth bragging about when talking to other people. You wanted to walk into meetings and have Invisigal lean back in her chair with that smug little told you so smirk curling at the corner of her mouth because of something you figured out before everyone else did. The kind of expression that said sheâd been right about you from the beginning. You could practically picture it- her boots kicked up against the table leg, arms crossed loosely over her chest, eyes sliding toward the rest of the team like she was waiting for them to finally catch up.
You wanted her to glance around the room with poorly-hidden satisfaction, like sheâd known all along you were smarter than people gave you credit for. Like every dismissive comment, every interruption, every moment someone overlooked you only made her more stubbornly certain that they were wrong.
And God, you wanted to survive missions cleanly enough that she stopped drifting subtly toward your side during firefights.
Stopped unconsciously placing herself between you and open doorways.
Stopped lingering half a step behind whenever the hallway ahead looked too dark or too quiet.
Youâd noticed it weeks ago. The way she always seemed to appear at your flank the second things got dangerous, moving with casual precision like she wasnât doing anything unusual at all. Like she wasnât quietly preparing herself to intercept whatever came at you first.
You just wanted her to feel like she didnât have to anymore.
You wanted her to watch you hold your own against collapsing buildings, screaming civilians, ricocheting gunfire, and whatever impossible horror the city decided to unleash that week- and look relieved instead of worried afterward.
You wanted to see the tension leave her shoulders.
Wanted her to stop checking whether you were hurt before checking herself.
And somehow, worst of all, you wanted her sarcastic approval like it was a measurable resource your body had decided it needed to survive.
Every offhand ânice work, kid.â
Every quick grin she tried to hide behind sarcasm.
Every casual shove against your shoulder after a mission.
Every absentminded moment where she chose the seat beside you without thinking about it.
That was the problem.
Because Invisigal wasnât easy to impress.
She treated almost everything with the same detached amusement or bone-deep sarcasm, like the world had simply run out of new ways to surprise her years ago. Explosions. Supervillains. Building collapses. Near death experiences. Team arguments loud enough to shake the briefing room walls.
None of it ever seemed to rattle her for long.
Sheâd brush ash off her jacket after a firefight with the same energy someone else might use to complain about bad traffic. Youâd seen her walk out of a collapsing parking structure with blood running down one arm and still crack a joke before medical even reached her.
How were you supposed to impress someone like that?
Someone who could literally vanish whenever she wanted?
She felt larger than life in a way you werenât sure you ever would.Â
Because your power- your power wasnât flashy. No invisibility, no super strength, no crackling energy blasts ripping through concrete walls. You couldnât fly above the skyline with your cape snapping dramatically behind you. Couldnât punch through armored vehicles or dodge sniper fire like your nervous system existed several seconds ahead of reality.
Nobody looked at you and immediately thought superhero.
Your ability worked quietly.
You saw patterns, literally.
The moment your focus locked onto something, the world stopped feeling random. Your brain began processing movement, behavior, architecture, timing, probability, and spatial relationships at speeds that bordered on inhuman. Fast enough that ordinary people sometimes stared at you afterward like youâd cheated somehow.
You could watch pedestrians moving through an intersection and instinctively know who was about to collide, who was armed, who was nervous, who was lying, who was watching exits instead of storefronts. Youâd look at a room and somehow know which object someone would reach for in a panic. You could memorize building layouts after one glance. You noticed weaknesses in security routes, blind spots in surveillance systems, inconsistencies in witness testimony, structural stress fractures in walls, escape patterns, timing windows.
Conversations unfolded like branching diagrams in your head. Tiny facial twitches. Delayed responses. Eye movement. Breathing patterns. Weight shifts.
Once, during a bank robbery, you identified the exact support column a panicking gunman was most likely to shoot through based purely on his angle, stance, and tunnel vision under stress. You warned the Z Team before it happened, which was enough to save a civilian who wouldâve died otherwise.Â
.
Another time, you tracked a serial arsonist across six city blocks because you noticed the burn patterns subtly favored buildings with older copper piping and east-facing maintenance access.
When your power fully engaged, connections stopped feeling abstract. They became instinctive. Immediate. Like invisible threads suddenly stretched between objects, people, movements, and decisions.
The Z Team joked that you had âconspiracy board vision.â
Invisigal once upgraded that description to âcreepy little Rain Man Batmanâ after you correctly predicted where a getaway driver would reroute during a hostage situation. Youâd laughed way harder at Invisigalâs nickname than you probably should have.
Mostly because sheâd sounded so annoyingly impressed when she said it.
Your gaze drifted slowly back toward the tactical map still glowing across your tablet screen, pale blue lines cutting through the darkness of the display like exposed veins beneath skin.
The flood tunnels.
The relay routes.
The maintenance corridors threading beneath the financial district, the smugglers moving people.
Your eyes traced the highlighted warehouse from tonightâs raid, then followed the surrounding tunnel branches outward. Instantly, your mind started building movement paths faster than you could consciously articulate them.
If the warehouse was compromised, the nearest routes became liabilities. Too obvious, too exposed: meaning theyâd relocate deeper first before resurfacing elsewhere. Except the deeper eastbound tunnel access bottlenecked near the river overflow junction-
Your eyes flicked sharply to another route.
There.
Three separate street exits, heavy nighttime foot traffic above ground, enough ambient noise to hide transport movement.
Your pulse kicked slightly harder. The realization settled into your chest with the sharp, dangerous clarity of a puzzle piece finally snapping into place.
The others would probably wait until tomorrow morning to move, the kind of plan people were supposed to make. But if your read on the routes was correct, the smugglers were likely already relocating after the warehouse got exposed tonight. Criminal groups adapted fast when operations got compromised.
You stood before your common sense could fully catch up and stop you, the legs of your chair scraping harshly against the floor in the otherwise quiet briefing room. Your tablet was already in your hands before the decision fully felt real.
You slid it beneath your arm and started toward the exit with quick, controlled steps, forcing yourself not to move fast enough to attract attention.
Your mind was racing far ahead of your body now.
The east maintenance sector entrance sat three blocks from the financial district perimeter. Locked officially, but the municipal access panel had outdated security hardware you already knew how to bypass. From there, the lower drainage corridor connected directly to the secondary junction network beneath Blackwater Avenue.
Close quarters amplified your power in ways people didnât fully understand. Most teammates thought you were just âgood at noticing stuff,â but underground environments turned your ability into something almost surgical.
Tunnels restricted movement.
Restricted options.
Which meant patterns emerged faster.
And if you brought back hard proof tonightâŚ
Not theories.
Not projections.
Not another carefully explained possibility everyone politely nodded at before talking over you anyway.
Evidence.
Photos.
Routes.
Hostages.
Confirmed movement.
Maybe the team would finally stop treating your conclusions like educated guesses.
Maybe theyâd stop speaking over you during briefings like your input was optional background noise.
Maybe Invisigal would look at you with that sharp, impressed little smile again.
Summary: You have the power to absorb the life force from any living being, but the Z Team seem to be fond of physical contact
Words: 3,133
Warning(s): Slight aversion to physical touch from the reader
Pairing: Z Team x Teen!Reader
Note(s): I'm sorry this took me so long to write @thisuserneedsmentalintervention, I hope it lives up to your expectations!
Blonde Blazer walks a half-step ahead of you.
Even without the radiant glow sheâs known for in the field, she carries herself like sheâs still mid-flight- upright posture, purposeful stride, the kind of confidence that makes people unconsciously move out of her way without realizing theyâve done it. Her blonde hair catches the office light as she turns her head slightly, checking over her shoulder to make sure youâre still with her.
âYouâre going to like him,â she says.
Thereâs warmth in her voice, casual and certain. Like itâs not a question, just a fact sheâs already decided on your behalf.
You donât answer immediately- you rarely do when introductions are framed like predictions. Instead, you follow her into the archive-adjacent workspace where the air feels even quieter, like sound itself has been filed away for later use.
And thatâs where you see him.
Robert Robertson III is standing near a desk cluttered with half-sorted reports and an abandoned coffee cup that looks like itâs been forgotten twice over. He doesnât look like the kind of person who belongs in a clean, corporate superhero facility. He looks like someone who got dragged into one by necessity and never quite learned where to put his hands afterward.
He glances up when you enter.
âRobert,â she says, âthis is the newest addition to the Z team.â
Then, to you, with that same easy confidence: âAnd this is Robert Robertson III. Donât let the name repetition confuse you. Itâs worse in paperwork.â
Robertâs eyes narrow slightly, not suspicious- just curious.
âRight,â he says slowly. âWeâve started collecting them, apparently.â
Blazer lets out a small, amused exhale, like she approves of the humor more than she wants to admit.
Your gloves catch the light first. Theyâre matte black, close-fitted, smooth in a way that suggests purpose rather than fashion. They drink in the overhead light instead of reflecting it, only giving back the faintest dull sheen when you move your hands.
Robertâs eyes flick down, quick and involuntary, like a trained reflex he doesnât bother to hide or correct. He follows the line of your sleeves with quiet precision, taking in the continuity: fabric over fabric, no interruption, no exposed wrist, no skin at all where there usually would be a break between person and clothing.
He doesnât comment right away. Instead, he leans slightly back against the edge of the desk, like heâs giving himself time to think before he speaks.
Robertâs gaze comes back up to your face.
Then down again.
Then, finally, he speaks.
ââŚAre those standard issue?â he asks.
Blazer opens her mouth like sheâs about to answer for you, but Robert lifts a hand slightly without looking at her.
Not dismissive. Just⌠asking for the answer from the source.
His eyes flick back to your hands again.
âThe gloves,â he clarifies. âYou always wear them, or is this a first-day thing?â
âWhen I make contact with bare skin, I donât just⌠touch people.â you say. âLife force. Energy. Whatever you want to call it. It doesnât matter much to the people it happens to.â
You flex your fingers once inside the gloves, barely noticeable.
âThatâs why I donât take them off.â
That earns a quiet whistle of understanding from Robert- soft, almost involuntary.
His palm settles on your shoulder. Thereâs no hesitation in it once it happens, like heâs decided that whatever your condition is, it doesnât change the fact that youâre standing here, in front of him, part of the team now.
For a fraction of a second, your body reacts before your mind can correct it.
A subtle flinch.
Just a sharp, instinctive tightening in your posture- like something inside you expects consequence on contact even when there shouldnât be any. Your shoulders tense under his hand, breath catching at the edges of your control.
Robert notices immediately. His brow furrows slightly, concern edging into his expression in a way thatâs less analytical and more human than before.
âWeâve had worse,â he says. Then, after a beat, adds, âNot in terms of powers. In terms of paperwork.â
Robertâs hand lifts off your shoulder a second later as Punch Up walks in like he owns momentum itself, shoulders rolling with casual confidence, eyes already scanning the room the way someone scans for either a fight or something funny enough to make one worth it.
âOh- there ye are,â he says, voice carrying that rough, amused edge like heâs already halfway into a joke.
His gaze drops: first to Robert, then Blazer, then settles on you.
âWell now,â he says, strolling closer without hesitation. âNew recruit, yeah?â
He lifts a hand and brings it down in a firm, friendly pat against your upper back.
The kind of gesture thatâs meant to be reassuring. Familiar. Casual in the way people try to be when they want to signal youâre safe here without actually saying it.
âWelcome to the Z-Team-â
His sentence doesnât get to finish.
The moment his palm makes contact, your body reacts before your mind has even had time to register whatâs happening. Your shoulders tense on instinct, muscles tightening in a clean, defensive snap that pulls you slightly forward and away from the pressure at your back.
For a fraction of a second, everything feels too close.
The contact. The weight. The simple fact of another personâs hand on you.
Then itâs gone.
His hand lifts off you instantly, like itâs been burned off a hot surface he didnât realize was there.
The grin fades a notch.
ââŚAh,â he says, quieter now.
Punch Up looks at his own hand for a second like itâs personally betrayed him, then back at you.
âDidnât mean to startle ye,â he adds, a little more carefully. âJust⌠habit. I forget not everyoneâs built like a brick wall with opinions.â
You exhale once- careful, controlled- like youâre making sure the reaction doesnât linger longer than it has to.
âNo-â you start, then pause, correcting the tone before it becomes something heavier than it needs to be. âItâs fine. Iâm not mad.â
Your hands stay still at your sides, deliberately so. Even through the gloves, youâre aware of them in a way you wouldnât be if nothing had happened. The faint pressure where contact almost was still feels like itâs echoing, like your body is waiting for a second impact that isnât coming.
You shift your weight slightly, grounding yourself back into the room.
âIâm just⌠not used to it,â you admit.
Your gaze flicks down for a moment, then back up- not avoiding them, just organizing your thoughts before they leave your mouth.
âPhysical contact, I mean. Once people hear what happens, they usually stop doing it altogether. Shaking hands turns into nods. Patting someone on the back turns into standing slightly too far away to pretend it used to be normal.â
Your fingers flex once inside the gloves again, subtle enough to be mistaken for nothing at all.
âI donât really get touched anymore unless someone forgets,â you add, a little quieter. âOr doesnât know yet.â
Thereâs a brief stretch of quiet after you finish. Not the kind that feels awkward- no oneâs scrambling to fill it- but the kind that settles in because somethingâs been said that needs a second to land properly.
Punch Upâs posture shifts just a fraction as his gaze flicks to Robert.
âThey absorb the life force of anything living they touch.â
Punch Upâs brows lift just slightly, and he lets out a low breath through his teeth.
âWell, thatâs-â he starts, then cuts himself off with a short huff of disbelief, one hand dragging briefly over the back of his neck like heâs trying to reorganize his reaction into something more appropriate and failing. âThatâs actually brilliant.â
He steps forward half a pace- still outside your space, still careful now in a way he wasnât before- but thereâs an energy to him again, contained but very much alive.
âLike, donât get me wrong,â he adds quickly, glancing between you and Robert, âI hear the âdangerous, potentially catastrophicâ part, I do-â he gestures loosely, like heâs checking a box in the air, â-but from a practical standpoint? Thatâs unreal.â
He lifts his hand.
Thereâs nothing guarded about it. No flinch, no second-guessing built into the gesture. If anything, it carries the same easy confidence he had before.
âCâmon,â he says, a grin pulling back into place, softer now but no less genuine. âHigh-five.â
The grin sharpens just a touch at one corner, something a little more playful slipping back in.
âGloveâs on,â he adds, like itâs the simplest equation in the world. Like the answer is obvious. âIâll live.â
You draw in a breath, shallow but controlled, and let it out just as carefully. Your fingers twitch once at your side, then still again, like theyâre checking in with the rest of you before committing.
Slowly, deliberately, you lift your hand.
It feels heavier than it should.
Not physically, but in the way your awareness sharpens around it. Every inch of movement is tracked, measured. The fabric of the glove shifts faintly against your skin as your fingers spread, the material a thin, necessary barrier between what you are and what you do.
You hesitate just before the space between your palms closes.
Your gloved hand meets his with a soft, controlled clap- muted by fabric, contact dulled but unmistakable. You pull your hand back almost immediately, the motion smooth but quick, like your body is eager to reestablish the space it understands.
âDid you see that?â Punch Up says, turning his head slightly toward Robert without actually looking away from you for long. âNo vaporization, no dramatic collapse, Iâm still devastatingly handsome- this is a win across the board.â
Punch Up rolls his wrist once, like heâs sealing the moment into muscle memory, then drops his hand back to his side with a satisfied little nod- decision made, conclusion reached.
âRight,â he says, like heâs arriving somewhere. âWelcome to the team,â
He gestures loosely around the room with one hand, like heâs indicating more than just the walls.
âZ-Teamâs a bit of a mess,â he adds, a hint of humor threading back in, softer this time. âWeâve got strong personalities, questionable decision-making skills, and at least one ongoing argument about who keeps stealing snacks from the breakroom.â
His hands hover at his sides for a second, like heâs deciding what to do with them now that the introduction is over.
Then one hooks casually into his pocket as the other lifts in a loose, almost absent wave- half farewell, half punctuation. Punch Up pushes off his back foot and turns, threading past the edge of the desk with the same casual confidence he walked in with.
Before the quiet Punch Up leaves behind can fully settle, it fractures.
Light bends first.
A shimmer at the edge of your vision- subtle at a glance, but wrong in a way your brain canât immediately categorize. Colors split where they shouldnât, reflections appearing without surfaces, like the air itself has decided to refract instead of behave.
Then sheâs just, there.
Prism doesnât enter the room so much as arrive in it, like sheâs been standing just outside perception and finally allowed herself to be seen. Her visor glints as she tilts her head, already looking at you like youâre something interesting sheâs decided to claim.
One second thereâs space between you, the next her arm is sliding around your shoulders with effortless confidence, light but possessive in that distinctly Prism way, like proximity is something she grants rather than negotiates.
Itâs quick.
Too quick for your instincts to fully catch up.
Her glove brushes your sleeve- fabric on fabric- and even that minimal contact sends a flicker of tension through your shoulders before you can stop it. Not a full flinch this time, but close.
âOooh, hold-â she murmurs, already angling the phone up, turning it slightly.
Her arm tightens just slightly: not squeezing, just placing you where she wants you in the frame.
âNew recruit, first day, this is content,â she adds, half to herself, half to an invisible audience that may or may not exist yet.
The camera clicks. A soft, artificial shutter sound that somehow feels louder than it should.
She pulls the phone back immediately, already looking at the result, her arm slipping off your shoulders as quickly as it arrived- contact gone almost before your body can decide what to do with it.
âWait! No, thatâs cute,â she says, pleased, tilting the screen slightly as she inspects it. âYou look mysterious. I look incredible. This works.â
Robert doesnât interrupt the moment immediately.
He watches it the way he watches most things- quietly, like heâs letting the data finish presenting itself before he decides where to place it in his mind. His gaze tracks the tiny aftershock in your shoulders, the way it resolves itself before it becomes anything visible enough to comment on.
Then, as Prism finishes settling into her satisfaction and the roomâs attention begins to drift again, he speaks.
âPrism,â Robert says evenly, as if continuing a conversation that had briefly paused for unrelated noise, âfor clarity- his ability is life-force absorption through direct skin contact.â
Prism processes it instantly.
Thereâs a beat where her expression goes still: not confused, not alarmed, just interested, like something in her head has clicked into a new category labeled useful / fascinating / worth revisiting later.
Then her face brightens.
âOh,â she says, like that explains something she didnât realize she needed explained. âThatâs actually kind of insane.â
Her head tilts slightly as she looks at you again, visor catching the light and throwing a thin flare across the room.
âGood design choice, by the way. Very responsible. Very âI donât accidentally end friendships by existingâ aesthetic.â
âOkay,â she says brightly, like sheâs closing a topic. âWeâre doing another one.â
Before thereâs room to respond, sheâs already stepping in beside you.
Her arm slides around your shoulders again- light contact, but undeniably there, settling with practiced ease like sheâs done this enough times that hesitation isnât part of the process. The fabric of her sleeve brushes your side, and your awareness spikes immediately, your body registering proximity before anything worse can happen.
But nothing does.
Her phone comes up quickly.
Too quickly for the moment to become anything else.
You can feel her attention split: one part focused on framing, the other already anticipating the result. Her arm tightens just slightly around your shoulders, not restrictive, but positioning you where she wants you in the shot with effortless confidence.
Prism pulls the phone back immediately, her arm slipping off you just as quickly as it arrived, leaving a faint ghost of contact that your nervous system notices even after itâs gone.
âPerfect,â she says, already looking at the screen. A small, satisfied hum escapes her as she tilts it slightly. âOkay, this oneâs definitely going up.â
Her eyes flick up to you again, bright and approving.
âYouâre getting good at this,â she adds, like youâve been participating in something you can actually practice.
Prism doesnât really âexitâ so much as she releases the space she was occupying.
One moment sheâs there- phone still in hand, posture angled like the room is an extension of her composition- and the next, sheâs already halfway gone, as if staying in one place for too long simply stops being part of her plan.
âYo, Prismâs gone already? She get her selfie quota in or what?â
Flambae
crosses the remaining distance with an easy stride, boots heavy against the floor, shoulders loose like nothing in this building could possibly be a threat worth adjusting for.
And then, he bumps you.
A shoulder nudge.
Quick, friendly, deliberately non-delicate.
The contact is brief, but your body reacts instantly anyway- because it always does now. That same reflexive tightening flickers through you, a split-second internal alarm system firing before you can even decide whether itâs needed.
âPunch Up already do the welcome speech?â he asks, tilting his head slightly, like heâs checking a schedule. Then his eyes flick over you again, slower this time, sizing you up less clinically and more like heâs deciding whether youâre fun.
âAlright,â he adds, as if concluding a thought. âYouâll fit in.â
Flambae is still grinning from his shoulder bump when Robert speaks.
âFlambae,â Robert says evenly. âTheir ability is life-force absorption through direct skin contact.â
Flambae blinks once. Then again- but slower this time, like the information is hitting a mental wall and taking a second to bounce off it properly.
âOkay,â he says, dragging the word out slightly. âSo thatâs why youâre doing the whole âfashionably covered head-to-toeâ thing.â
He nods once, as if that explanation slots neatly into place.
He shifts his weight onto one leg, rolling his shoulders once as if loosening up for impact that isnât actually coming, then looks back at you with a half-amused squint.
âMan,â he says, dragging the word out, âso youâre basically the most dangerous handshake in the building.â
His shoulder bumps into yours again.
A quick, friendly nudge.
âRelax,â he adds, like heâs continuing the same thought without breaking stride. âIf I can survive burning half the furniture in this place, I think I can handle âgloves personâ over here.â
He exhales once through his nose- short, amused- and rolls his shoulders back as if resetting himself into something more familiar than conversation. The heat around him shifts with that motion, not flaring, not diminishing, but reorganizing, like a contained fire adjusting its shape inside a furnace.
âYeah, alright,â he says, half to himself, half to the room. âIâve got stuff to do.â
The floor sounds heavier under his steps than it did under Prism, each one grounded, deliberate in a way that suggests heâs always aware of where his weight lands- even when heâs not thinking about it. The air behind him carries a faint residual warmth, like the room is slowly cooling down from his presence rather than losing him outright.
The hallway swallows him quickly.
For a moment, itâs just the soft hum of the building and Robertâs steady presence against the edge of the desk.
âWhy does everyone keep trying to touch me?â you ask.
âItâs the Z-Team,â he says simply. âPeople here are⌠physical.â
His gaze lifts back to you.
âNot in the sense of disregard for boundaries,â he clarifies. âIn the sense that this group tends to express familiarity through contact. Shoulder bumps. Patting someone on the back. Leaning into space instead of verbally filling it.â
His eyes stay on you for a moment longer than necessary- not scrutinizing, just steady.
âAnd over time,â Robert says, âthey will adjust. Theyâre not careless people. Just⌠used to a different baseline for what âsafeâ looks like.â
Summary: You, an Avatar of Hermes, and Steven Grant, Avatar of Khonshu, bump into each other. This, unfortunately, makes you late for your shift at SDN
Warning(s): None!
Words: 3,025
Note(s): Apparently, my Moon Knight era has found me. If it's not clear in the story, you have the ability to teleport!
You know, Hermes says, voice slipping into your mind easy as breath, most people use their phones.
You donât look up.
Your fingers stay where they are- steady, deliberate- turning the focus ring in slow, careful increments. The world inside the viewfinder swims at first, a wash of soft shapes and indistinct color, until it begins to tighten, to pull itself together. Lines emerge. Edges sharpen. Intention settles in.
A fire escape cuts across the frame, all harsh angles and quiet geometry, slicing diagonally through the weathered face of the building. The brick is uneven, sun-faded in places, darkened in others, like itâs been holding onto years it doesnât quite know how to let go of. Light catches along the metal railing- thin, fractured glints against chipped black paint, each one fleeting, each one just slightly different depending on how you tilt.
You adjust again. Just a touch.
There.
âI like this better,â you reply.
You breathe in, slow, steady, letting the moment settle into your chest the same way the image settles into focus.
Click.
The sound is small, mechanical, but it feels solid. Final. Like pressing something into permanence before it has the chance to slip away.
You hold the camera there for a second longer, as if the world might rearrange itself again if you move too quickly.
Then you lower it, just enough.
Your gaze drifts to the stretch of sidewalk beside you: cracked concrete, uneven seams running through it like old fault lines, sun pooling in shallow patches between shadows cast by things just out of sight.
Empty.
The light tilts- slow, deliberate- warming as it goes, turning everything it touches a softened gold. It stretches the world just a little past its natural proportions. Shadows grow longer than they should be, slipping loose from the objects that cast them. They slide across the pavement in thin, reaching shapes, snagging on the edges of curbs, spilling into the seams of the street, gathering in the shallow dips like something that prefers to linger rather than leave.
You lift the camera halfway, the strap brushing lightly against your wrist.
Hm Hermes hums, like heâs tasting the moment. Okay, stop.
You freeze instinctively, caught mid-motion, the camera hovering between your chest and your eye.
Turn a little to your left. No, your other left- yes, that one, congratulations.
Thereâs a faint smile tugging at his voice, easy and amused, like heâs leaning over your shoulder even though thereâs nothing there. You shift your stance, pivoting just enough, your shoes scraping softly against the grit of the sidewalk.
There. He says, and something about it changes- quieter now, more intent. See the shadow of that street sign? The way it cuts across the crosswalk lines?
You narrow your eyes at first, trying to catch it without the lens, trying to see what heâs seeing. Itâs just a street: white painted stripes, a sign, the usual geometry of intersections.
But then- you bring the viewfinder up.
And the world narrows.
Everything outside the frame falls away, dissolving into blur and suggestion, until all thatâs left is what youâve chosen.
The crosswalk sharpens into clean, deliberate bands of white- though not as clean as they pretend to be. Up close, the paint is worn thin in places, roughened by time and tires, its surface cracked and peeling in quiet defiance. A single fracture runs through one of the stripes, thin but insistent, like a line drawn with purpose rather than damage.
And cutting across it, the shadow.
Sharp-edged and angled, the silhouette of the street sign falls diagonally through the frame, slicing through the neat parallel lines like it doesnât belong to them. It interrupts the pattern, breaks the rhythm, turns something ordinary into something that feels⌠arranged. Intentional. Like the world paused just long enough to compose itself.
âOh,â you breathe, the sound barely there, caught somewhere between surprise and recognition.
I know, right? Hermes says immediately, bright with satisfaction. It looks like itâs trying to say something. I love when things look like theyâre trying to say something.
Click.
Your phone buzzes.
Itâs abrupt. Jarring in a way the camera never is. Too sharp, too immediate- pulling you out of the careful, narrowed world of the viewfinder and back into everything else.
You lower the camera, letting it hang against your chest, and fish your phone out of your pocket. The screen lights your face in cooler tones, cutting through the gold.
A text, from Invisgal.
You hesitate for half a second, not because you donât want to open it, but because you already have a sense of the energy waiting on the other side of the screen.
Then you tap it anyway.
Invisigal: you at work yet or still doing your âmysterious photography protagonistâ thing
A second bubble appears almost immediately.
Invisigal: because if you are late again Iâm telling them you got abducted by vibes
Your thumb hovers over the screen.
Wow, Hermes says, dry and delighted all at once. Zero hesitation. Straight to harassment. Thatâs a real friend.
You exhale through your nose, something soft and almost amused, and glance back up at the street. The shadows have shifted again, stretching further, the moment already gone and replaced by something new.
Your fingers move before you overthink it.
On my way.
You pause, then add: And itâs called having hobbies.
You step forward without really looking.
Itâs a small shift. A half-second lapse. Your attention still caught somewhere between the message on your screen and the echo of that last photograph, the way the shadow had cut so cleanly through the light.
Itâs enough.
You collide with something solid.
Not hard- not enough to hurt- but enough to jolt you out of your own head. Your shoulder bumps into fabric and bone, the impact sending a quick, sharp ripple through your body. Your phone slips slightly in your grip, your other hand instinctively catching the camera before it can swing too far forward.
âOh- sorry,â you say immediately, the words automatic, already stepping back.
The man in front of you has already turned toward you.
Up close, he looks a little like he was pulled out of a different moment entirely. Dark, slightly tousled hair that doesnât quite sit the way itâs supposed to, like heâs run his hands through it one too many times. Thereâs a tension in his face: not dramatic, not obvious, but present in the way his eyes move first, quick and searching, before the rest of him follows.
For a split second, he looks like heâs expecting something worse than a stranger bumping into him.
Then the moment catches up.
His shoulders loosen- just a fraction.
âItâs- yeah, itâs okay,â he says, a beat late, like he had to recalibrate before answering.
âWasnât looking,â you add, lifting your phone slightly in explanation before lowering it again, like that somehow accounts for it.
âThat was partly me too. I wasnât really⌠looking either.â
His gaze flicks briefly to the camera hanging against your chest, then back to your face. Thereâs a flicker of recognition thereânot of you, but of the object. The kind of recognition that lingers a second too long to be casual.
âFilm?â he asks.
âYeah.â
âUm- Iâm Steven. With a V.â
He offers the name a little awkwardly, like it might not land properly if he doesnât set it down carefully.
Oh, heâs adorable. Hermes says immediately
You ignore that.
âNice to meet you.â you say instead, giving a small nod.
âYeah. You too. Sorry again about the-â he gestures between the two of you, a loose, uncertain motion â-collision. Not my best work, spatially speaking.â
Thereâs a faint, self-conscious smile there now. It sits a little unevenly, like heâs not entirely convinced it belongs, but itâs trying.
Your eyes flick briefly to the camera as it shifts against your chest, then back to him.
âIt happens.â
Stevenâs gaze flicks, not to your camera this time.
It slides past the lens, past your hands, past the ordinary point of focus a person is supposed to land on when theyâre talking to someone.
To your side.
To the space just over your shoulder.
The nervousness doesnât vanish, exactly. It reconfigures. Tightens. Becomes something sharper, more alert, like heâs just noticed something he wasnât supposed to see- but isnât surprised that he can.
ââŚRight,â he says slowly.
Oh, Hermes murmurs, tone shifting, curiosity threading into something more cautious. Thatâs new.
Steven inhales, shallow, like heâs steadying himself.
âOkay,â he says, mostly to himself. âEither Iâm-â He cuts that off. Tries again. âYou hear him, yeah?â
You turn, and see him.
Heâs wrapped in pale, layered fabric that hangs in deliberate folds, each layer slightly misaligned with the one beneath it, like it has been draped and redraped across countless versions of the same moment. It shifts faintly despite the lack of wind, just the smallest suggestion of movement.
Beneath the fabric, his frame is lean, edges too defined in a way that makes flesh feel like an assumption rather than a certainty.
And then your attention reaches his head.
A long, bleached skull- avian in structure, elongated and precise, every curve too intentional to feel accidental. The bone is smooth in some places, pitted in others, as though it has been weathered by forces that donât belong to any recognizable climate. The hollow eye sockets are deep enough to swallow detail, yet they donât feel empty.
Well, Hermes says, quieter now, but not afraid- if anything, intrigued. Thatâs not one of mine.
âThatâs Khonshu,â Steven adds, almost apologetically, like he knows how this sounds and has accepted it anyway.
Oh, Iâve heard of him, Hermes says, suddenly bright again. Bit intense. Big on dramatic entrances. Loves a bird motif.
Steven exhales a quiet, shaky breath- then glances back at you.
âYou- uh,â he starts, then falters, recalibrates. âYouâve got one too.â
You glance at Hermes.
He stands just off to your side like he always has been- like he could have been leaning there for hours, or like he only exists in the narrow seams between seconds when youâre not directly looking at him.
He looks young.
Too young, at first glance, to carry anything ancient at all. His face has that kind of unburdened sharpness that should belong to someone whoâs still half a step out of adolescence, features still settling into themselves, expression loose with an ease that feels almost careless. And yet the air around him refuses to agree. It presses in with something older than time as you understand it, like age doesnât apply in his vicinity unless he allows it to.
His form is lean, almost casual at first glance. The kind of posture youâd see on someone leaning against a city wall, waiting for a friend who is running late.
His brown hair shifts slightly as if caught in a breeze that never reaches you. Not messy, not styled- just⌠alive in a way that suggests motion even when he is still. Strands fall forward near his face, framing him in something almost ordinary, almost human.
Almost.
Thatâs me. Hermes says, lightly, like Steven just pointed out a coffee stain on his shirt instead of revealing a metaphysical structure of existence. Hi!
Behind Steven, Khonshu does not move. But the space around him tightens anyway.
The light thins where he stands, as though itâs being reconsidered. The street sounds dull slightly at the edges, like the world is politely lowering its voice in his presence.
When he speaks, it isnât with sound first.
Itâs with pressure.
A sensation that forms in your mind like a word being pressed into shape from something too large to translate cleanly.
THIEF.
Steven flinches at nothing visible.
âOkay,â he says quickly, half to Khonshu, half to Hermes, half to the universe in general. âWeâre not doing this here.â
Hermes reacts immediately- too quickly to be real surprise, too theatrically to be genuine offense. A soft gasp slips out of him, almost delicate, like heâs been personally wounded by the accusation in the most inconveniently dramatic way possible.
His hand even lifts a fraction, hovering near his chest as though heâs considering clutching at invisible pearls.
Rude! he says, and the complaint is warm rather than sharp, softened at the edges by amusement that refuses to be hidden. I prefer âselectively honest.â
Your phone buzzes again.
Oh! Hermes says. New character entering the narrative. I like this part.
Robert (Boss): Where are you?
Khonshu shifts.
Not physically.
But the concept of his attention seems to angle toward the phone, as if the idea of text messaging during divine confrontation is something he is actively evaluating as either blasphemy or innovation.
COWARDLY MEDIUM.
The words press into your mind like dry wind over stone.
Hermes makes a sound that is almost laughter.
He disapproves of your communication method!
Steven whispers, âHe disapproves of everything.â
Robert (Boss): Iâm serious, you were supposed to be here 12 minutes ago
Steven glances at your phone again, visibly relieved to have something in the universe he can understand.
âThatâs⌠your friend?â he asks.
âBoss,â you mutter automatically.
You: Iâm on my way. Got delayed.
You pause.
Your eyes flick up without meaning to.
Khonshu stands exactly where he was before: impossible, still. The air around him is heavier than it should be, like the world is subtly bracing its shoulders around his presence.
Steven looks like heâs actively trying not to acknowledge that.
Hermes, meanwhile, is watching you like youâve just done something mildly interesting.
Youâre not telling Robert. Hermes observes.
âItâll just confuse him,â you say.
Oh, I think heâd adapt! Hermes replies cheerfully.
Robert (Boss): Is this the kind of delayed where you mean traffic or the kind where I should start preparing a statement for HR?
Hermes leans slightly closer again, peering at the screen.
I could fix the traffic part, Hermes offers.
Khonshuâs head tilts.
This is interference. You overstep boundaries, Messenger.
Hermes, by contrast, doesnât move at all.
If anything, he looks faintly pleased.
Oh, come on, Hermes says, easy, almost conversational. Weâre having a moment. Let the mortal have their morning.
Your phone buzzes again.
Malevola: If you are too much later, they are planning on sending Coupe to get you
Hermes leans in- not physically, but in presence, attention narrowing like heâs reading over your shoulder through implication alone.
Steven runs a hand over his face.
âYeah, no, you should definitely go if someone named Malevola is threatening to send someone after you,â he says. âThat feels like a situation you donât want escalating.â
Your thumb hovers over the screen again.
Then you type:
You: Iâm on my way. Donât send Coupe.
Malevola: They decided you have five minutes
Youâll make it. Hermes says casually. Probably.
Steven lets out a small, incredulous laugh.
âProbably?â
Hermes tilts his head, considering.
Okay, fine. I could make it guaranteed, but apparently thatâs âinterference,â he adds, glancing toward Khonshu with a faint grin.
Khonshu does not respond.
âOkay,â you say, more to yourself than anyone else. âYeah. I really need to go.â
Steven nods immediately, like heâs been waiting for you to reach that conclusion.
âDo you- do you want to⌠exchange numbers?â
It comes out a little rushed, like heâs trying to get it out before the moment decides to move on without him.
âIn case-â he gestures vaguely, not toward Hermes, not toward where Khonshu was, but toward the space where all of that just happened. â-you know. In case.â
Hermes makes a soft, approving sound.
âYeah,â you say. âThatâs probably a good idea.â
Thereâs a brief, almost comically normal moment where both of you fumble slightly, phones coming back out, screens lighting up, the world shrinking down to contact fields and typing cursors. Your fingers move quickly this time, typing in your number, handing the phone over, taking his in return.
âGood luck,â Steven adds.
âYeah,â you reply. âYou too.â
Then you turn. Your steps pick up immediately, rhythm snapping into place with purpose. The city folds back around you- cars, voices, movement- all of it reclaiming the space like nothing impossible just stood there moments ago.
Hermes keeps pace easily, hands in his pockets, like this is just a casual stroll.
Your foot comes down, and the ground doesnât quite meet you where it should. The space between where you were and where you are about to be tightens, like itâs being pulled inward from both ends. As if the world has quietly agreed that the stretch of pavement you were about to cross is unnecessary.
Your step lands farther ahead than your body had any right to carry you. No push-off. No extra force. Just a clean, seamless relocation- like your movement took a shortcut no one else was offered. Your balance adjusts instantly, your body already used to correcting for it before your mind fully registers what happened.
The next step comes easier.
Your foot lifts, and the space ahead of you offers itself up.
You take it.
Another compression. Cleaner this time. Less of a lurch, more of a glide. The distance folds neatly, like a crease pressed into paper, and you slip across it without resistance.
A parked car blurs at the edge of your vision- not because it moved, but because you were beside it and then past it before your brain finished tracking it.
The building is already in sight. It doesnât rise into view the way it should: gradual, expected, earned by distance. Itâs just there, as if the space between you and it quietly gave up trying to exist.
The glass doors stretch tall and clean at the front, their surface catching the world and holding it in perfect, obedient reflection. The street behind you is laid out across them in crisp detail- cars gliding past in smooth, uninterrupted lines, pedestrians moving at a pace that now feels almost slow, almost deliberate.
You take two more controlled steps, and your hand reaches the door just as your phone buzzes again.
Dispatch Characters x Reader with Insomnia Headcanons
(Includes Waterboy, Blonde Blazer, Phenomaman, Chase, and Royd)
Waterboy
His reaction is immediate, anxious, and deeply concerned, he doesnât hide it well at all
His posture stiffens, hands fidgeting slightly, and he blurts out something like, âWait- y-you mean you just⌠donât sleep?â stumbling over his words because heâs trying to process it quickly while also worrying about you
When he tries to help, itâs gentle and a little awkward, but very sincere. He doesnât come in with a plan, he just wants to make things even slightly better for you
His first instinct is small, practical comfort: âUm- do you want water?â which sounds simple (and a little ironic), but for him itâs a genuine attempt to help in the easiest way he knows how- meeting basic needs first
If youâre awake late, heâll often end up staying with you, even if he didnât plan to
He might sit nearby, fidgeting with something, occasionally talking in a soft, slightly rambling way, because he doesnât want you to be alone but also doesnât want to overwhelm you
Heâs surprisingly good at soft distractions: talking about small, mundane things, asking harmless questions, sharing little thoughts. His natural awkwardness actually makes the conversations low-pressure instead of overstimulating
He might even try to learn ways to help you better: asking others for advice, or remembering things that worked before
Blonde Blazer
When you explain it- how your brain wonât shut off, how exhausting it is- she listens fully, no interruptions, no rushing to solutions, just present
When you finish, she nods slowly and says, âThat sounds really hard,â with complete sincerity, because her empathy isnât performative
When she starts helping, her approach is balanced- not forceful like Flambae, not purely analytical like Sonar, not detached like Robert; she blends care with structure, starting with something simple: âOkay⌠letâs not try to fix everything tonight. Letâs just make it a little easier,â immediately lowering the pressure
Sheâs very intentional about creating a safe, calm environment: adjusting lighting, lowering noise, guiding you somewhere more comfortable, all while talking you through it in a steady voice
âYour brainâs already doing a lot. Letâs not give it more to fight againstâ because she understands that environment affects how people feel, even if she doesnât phrase it clinically
She might suggest small, manageable steps- routine, consistency, winding down- but always as options, never commands: âMaybe we try something simple tonight. Just see if it helpsâ because she respects your autonomy and doesnât believe in forcing solutions
If youâre awake late, sheâll often stay with you, not out of obligation, but because she genuinely doesnât want you to be alone
Phenomaman
If you explain how it feels- your brain not shutting off- he listens very intently, almost too intently, like heâs trying to memorize every detail
Then he responds with something unintentionally heavy like, âI, too, have experienced a mind that refuses to quiet. It is⌠unpleasantâ
He initially suggests extreme or impractical solutions without realizing it, like âOn my world, one might enter a low-energy state through environmental deprivation. Perhaps we could simulate that?â which sounds intense, but he genuinely thinks reducing input could help
He may also try to share what he does during emotional overload, saying something like, âWhen my mind becomes unstable, I focus on singular tasks. It reduces internal noiseâ offering you a method without fully framing it as advice
If your thoughts are racing, his way of helping is⌠unconventional
He tries to interrupt them with statements, not questions: âThat thought is not productive. You may discard it,â which sounds blunt, but is his attempt at helping you disengage from spiraling
If you actually fall asleep, even briefly, his reaction is almost comically still: he freezes in place, barely moving, because he understands that he is capable of causing disruption and refuses to risk it
Chase
The first thing out of his mouth is something blunt like, âYou look like you havenât slept in days,â because he doesnât sugarcoat observations, especially when theyâre obvious
When you explain that itâs not something you can just fix, that your mind wonât shut off, thereâs a brief moment where he looks almost⌠conflicted- like he wants to say something harsher, but stops himself
He settles instead on, ââŚThatâs rough,â which, coming from him, is about as close to open sympathy as he gets
He doesnât ask many questions, but the ones he does are direct and purposeful: âHow long?â âIs it constant?â
The first thing he does is cut out the guesswork
Instead of asking what youâve tried, he tells you what works, in short, direct statements: âDonât stay in bed if youâre awake too long. Youâll train your brain to stay alert thereâ delivered like a rule he expects to be followed, because heâs seen the consequences of not doing it
He borrows directly from what heâs used with Robert- structured, repeatable habits- and applies them to you without overexplaining: âSame routine every night. Even if it doesnât work right away. Consistency matters more than results at firstâ
There are rare moments where his tone softens just slightly- usually when youâre clearly struggling- where heâll say something like, ââŚItâs manageable. Doesnât feel like it, but it isâ
Royd
When you explain it- how your brain wonât shut off, how exhausting it is- he listens fully, nodding along, occasionally murmuring things like âYeah⌠yeah, that sounds roughâ
Thereâs a moment where his usual easygoing demeanor dips into something more sincere
His smile fades just a bit, and he says quietly, ââŚThatâs gotta wear you down,â not dramatic, just honest, because he genuinely doesnât like seeing people struggle
His first instinct is to slow things down for you, but in a way that feels natural: âAlright, hey- sit with me for a secondâ
His humor becomes a tool, not a distraction- just enough to ease tension without overwhelming you: âAlright, new rule- no solving life problems after midnight. Thatâs illegal nowâ said with a small grin, helping you step out of that mental loop
Over time, he becomes really good at reading you- when youâre more exhausted than usual, when youâre doing okay- and adjusts naturally, checking in more when you need it, backing off when you donât