Anakin has spent most of the night having to mingle with rich and pompous people, from senators to celebrities. Officially, him and his troops are here to provide security for the event, which has several important people in attendance that the Separatists might try targeting.
Unofficially, he’s here for the local celebrities and politicians to gawk at, most of them having never seen a Jedi before.
The event’s dinner is a long affair, lasting for what feels like years but is probably only an hour or two. Anakin would be overjoyed by the wide selection of delicacies and desserts available, if it wasn’t for the questions and stares – and occasional uninvited touches – he has to put up with.
There are 501st troopers posted at each entrance to the room, and Anakin occasionally shoots them a glance and mouths a desperate “help me”. Their Force signatures sparkle in amusement, but they never make any move to assist him. Bastards.
When the host announces they should move their socialising to the ballroom, Anakin senses his opportunity to make a break for it. “You go ahead,” he politely tells the famous singer trying to drag him to the ballroom, “I’m not much of a dancer.”
“Nonsense,” she scoffs, “all that grace and coordination? You’ll be a fine dancer. Come along.”
“No, really, I’m a terrible dancer. Besides, I should check in with the perimeter guard to make sure everything’s still secure.”
The singer grumbles and complains, but eventually follows the herd of rich people on their migration to the ballroom. Anakin is left seated all by himself at the table meant for thirty people.
Even with Orn Free Taa having been in attendance, there’s still plenty of food left. Enough to feed a village of starving Rylothian refugees, Anakin notes grimly. And it’ll all be thrown out.
He glances around the quiet room, noting that the doors to the ballroom have been pulled most of the way shut. The troopers are still waiting silently by the doors.
“Guys,” he says to them, jumping up from his seat, “help me with this.”
“Sir?” they ask, approaching warily.
Anakin has grabbed a deep bowl containing some sort of finger food, and is emptying the contents of other plates into it. “They don’t need it. And I’m not just gonna let it go to waste. Now start filling bowls.”
“Sir, I don’t think-”
“The servants are gonna be here soon to clean up. So shut up and grab a bowl.”
The four troopers exchange long looks with each other, then eventually resign themselves to assisting in his food theft. They start grabbing plates of whatever looks edible, tossing them into bowls together like Anakin is doing.
Anakin turns on his comm while he works. “Rex, gather all the troops in the front courtyard and load them into the gunships.”
“Sir, has something gone wrong?”
“Oh, and tell the pilots to start up the engines already. We’re leaving as soon as we can.”
“But sir, the mission-”
Anakin switches him comm off before Rex can begin reciting one of Obi-Wan’s speeches about “the mission comes first”.
Crumbs are flying as the troopers hurry to fill bowls. The white tablecloth has been stained brown and green and red. Anakin can feel the servants getting closer, can feel their time running out. He’s stuffing food-filled napkins into the pockets of his robes. A trooper is pouring candied eggs into his utility belt.
They’ve almost cleaned the entire table now. The conversations in the ballroom are growing louder. The servants are getting closer. Too close.
Anakin decides to call a retreat. “Go,” he says, shoving the four-bowl high stacks into his troopers’ arms and ushering them toward the exit. “Go, go, go. To the front courtyard.”
The troopers rush clumsily for the doors, blinded by the bowl stacks in their arms. Anakin grabs his own stack and starts after them. “Wait, no, kriff,” he mutters, turning back to grab a bottle from the table, “can’t forget the alcohol.”
He’s almost to the door. The servants’ footsteps enter the room behind him. “Hey!” one of them shouts.
The trooper in front of him is moving too slowly, so Anakin picks him up with an arm around his midsection. “Karking run!” he shouts to the troopers ahead, despite them already fleeing for their lives.
The labyrinth halls of the fancy mansion flash past them in a blur. Anakin’s bowl stack wobbles precariously in his left arm, kept from falling by the Force. The trooper he’s carrying is still clutching to his bowls for dear life.
Footsteps are pounding through the halls after them. “Come back! You can’t take that!”
Anakin takes a corner too sharply and the trooper he’s carrying grunts as he hits the wall. The troopers ahead have stopped, struggling to open the front door. “Move aside!”
The troopers part, and a second later the door is thrown off its hinges by a Force push. “To the ships!”
They rush out into the courtyard. The two gunships they arrived in are hovering just above the ground, fully loaded and ready to lift off.
“The Chancellor will hear of this!” someone shouts.
The first troopers make it the gunships. Rex and the other troopers aboard help them get up. Anakin jumps up with help from the Force.
Rex slaps the side of the gunship, shouting to the pilots over the roaring engines. “We’re clear. Go!”
The gunships take off, kicking up dust and gravel. In the courtyard below, the estate owner and his servants scowl up at them. “You’ll pay for that, Jedi!” the owner shouts. “You’ll all pay for that!”
Then the gunship’s doors slide closed, and they’re flying away.
Anakin breathes a sigh of relief, shoulders slumping. His accomplices in crime are passing around their bowls, proudly showing everyone the spoils of their daring escapade.
“Uhh… sir?” the trooper hanging from his arm like a floppy tooka says, sounding dazed. “I think you can put me down now.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.” Anakin gently lowers the trooper to his feet, where he wavers on unsteady legs for a moment. His brothers soon support him, and begin rifling through the food bowls he somehow, miraculously, kept a hold of during the mad dash.
“General,” Rex says, in a distinctly Obi-Wan-like tone of voice, “might I ask why you stole food from the man we were supposed to protect?”
Anakin grins winningly at him. “Because I could. Besides…” He gestures around the gunship at the troopers, who are excitedly wolfing down delicacies they’ve never seen before, let alone tasted. “They could use the break from rations.”
Rex’s face softens as he watches his brothers chatter over the food. “I… suppose it will boost morale, sir.”
Anakin smiles and claps Rex on the shoulder. “Atta boy. Oh, and, by the way…” He leans in close, lowering his voice. “Obi-Wan doesn’t need to hear about any of this, right?”
Rex raises an eyebrow. “It’d be hard to exclude something like this from the mission reports, sir.”
Anakin passes over the bottle of alcohol he’d snatched at the last minute. Rex turns it over in his hands, reading the label. “But…” he says, eyeing the bottle consideringly. “I suppose I could keep the report vague.”
Satine finds, to her surprise, a moment alone with Obi-Wan's Jedi companion. Anakin Skywalker, she thinks his name is, though she hasn't exchanged more than a scarce sentence with him since Obi-Wan introduced him.
He, like Obi-Wan, is wearing armour on his arms and shoulders, placed over the top of his Jedi robes. Satine doesn’t miss the significance of that; the armour of war covering up the robes of a peacekeeper. Yet another sign of how this war has changed the Jedi.
There are Republic troopers lining up along the hall she and Skywalker are standing in. They stand with identical stiff postures, in their identical armour, with their blasters held in identical positions. None of them talk as they line up, nor so much as exchange a look between the dark visors of their helmets.
Satine wonders what the people of the Republic see when they look at those troopers. Do they see glory? The spirit of the Republic, marching off to achieve them victory? How do they not see the face of the war itself, the symptoms of the plague worming its way into the galaxy? How can none of them see the Senate’s cold indifference in those blank visors, the Chancellor’s cruel fist in those gloved hands wrapped around blasters?
"Your thoughts are in turmoil," Skywalker remarks, quite out of the blue. "Is something wrong, Duchess?"
She huffs, glancing at him. "Nothing is wrong. And please don't look into my mind."
"I wasn't." He holds up his hands, much like a gesture of peace. What an irony. "You're just broadcasting your emotions quite loudly. I couldn't help but notice." He pauses, side-eyeing her. "Is it something I can help with?"
Satine looks back at the rows of Republic troopers, the white sentinels posted at even spaces down the hall. Like the columns that hold the ship up, though five times as dangerous.
"What do you see," she asks before she can think better of it, "when you look at them?"
Skywalker frowns, glancing between her and the Republic troopers. "I'm sorry?"
"Most Republic citizens, they see the face of victory and glory. They see their defenders, their noble warriors on the front line." She pauses, taking a calming breath. "When I look at them, I can only see how low the Republic has fallen. How much this war has changed it.” She shakes her head sadly. "But what do you see, when you look at them?"
Skywalker looks at the troopers for a long moment, face pulled tight.
"I'm sorry, Duchess," he says, looking back at her, "but I don't see any of that. I don’t see anything.”
"You have to see something," she insists.
Skywalker looks back at the troopers, a frown on his face. “I don’t know, Duchess. I see… Rex, I guess. And Click, and Trip, and Cable. Trip and Cable are talking on the internal comms together. Rudder is… dozing off. Brine is trying to hide an injury on his shoulder, before the medic notices it. Daze is trying to scratch an itch without breaking stance.”
Skywalker stops talking, but his eyes keep running down the line of troopers in the hall.
"Hmm," Satine murmurs, clasping her hands together as she looks back at the troopers. "I see."
"Excuse me, Duchess," Skywalker says rather suddenly, offering her a quick bow.
She barely has time to get out an "of course," before he's marching off down the hall.
"Slug!" he shouts, and every trooper's helmet turns in his direction. "You're not supposed to be back on active duty yet; your leg hasn't healed."
The trooper he's addressing shrinks back against the wall, like a child caught out past bedtime, and Satine can't help the amused smile that comes to her mouth.
"You're going to see the medic right now,” she hears Skywalker's voice say as she leaves, echoing down the halls of the Coronet behind her, "and Brine is going too. Don’t think I didn’t notice that shoulder injury!”
Fanart for my all time favourite Hal Jordan fic by @panam1c ‘Justice League's most wanted fugitive: Hal Jordan’ on AO3
Four chapters out and one to go!
This fandom has a criminal lack of Hal Jordan-centric fanfics that aren’t ship-based, but this fic is so good it almost makes me forgive it.
It’s an AU where Hal never joined the Justice League bc he was out on space business at the time of their first fight together, and so the JL is just some cool superhero group he sees on TV, and he sticks to Coast City and the rest of the sector.
Then one day, he comes home to find ‘The Watchtower’ in Earth’s orbit. Hal, in his infinite, sleep deprived wisdom, breaks in to see what it’s all about. He then has to deal with the consequences.
This fic is funny, well written and is overall just really interesting to read. It switches between the POVs of Hal and members of the JL and i
Alternate version of today's chapter, where Boba was present when Jango and Anakin talked. Removed because Boba absolutely refused to let any serious emotional development happen.
“I’ve got a lot of things that need to be done; can I trust you two on your own?”
“I’m over fifty” Anakin mutters, and tries not to sound petulant. “I can be trusted.”
“I, too, am over fifty and completely trustworthy.” Boba blinks up at Jango with wide eyes, looking entirely un-trustworthy.
Jango reaches out and ruffles Boba’s hair. “Will I need to get a babysitter for you?”
“Absolutely not.” Boba gives Jango’s hand a half-hearted slap, then gives up and lets it stay in his hair. “I’ll be fine. I’ll probably just follow this di’kut around” –he jabs a thumb in Anakin’s direction- “and see if he does anything fun.”
Jango raises an inquisitive eyebrow at Anakin, to which he reluctantly nods. “Alright then.” Jango withdraws his hand from Boba’s hair and stands up. “I’ll see you both later.” He slides his buy’ce on and steps through the door, shutting it behind him.
“So…” Boba slouches deeper into the couch. “What are you gonna be doing?”
Anakin scrapes his teeth over his upper lip, looking at the far wall instead of Boba. “I… was thinking of talking to Kenobi and Vos.”
“Just be careful not to walk in on them making out.”
Of all the reactions Boba could have had, that was one Anakin was not expecting. “I’m sorry, what? Why would they be… making out?”
“I checked the security cameras on their cell earlier and found them making out. Who makes out when they’re in prison? Seriously.”
Anakin’s brow is so furrowed he can barely see past it. “Why would Kenobi and Vos be making out at all? They’re not together.”
“Obviously they are.”
“But they aren-“
“Like you said” Boba interrupts him. “These versions of people might be different.”
“Different enough that Kenobi and Vos are together?” Anakin throws his hands up. “What even brought that on? I saw no sign of a relationship between them in the past timeline, and I find it hard to believe they’d get together just because I kriffed around with them a bit seven years ago.”
“Maybe Palpatine did something that accidentally caused it.”
Anakin’s face twists. “How? He- actually, I don’t want to know.”
Every now and then I get bored and give myself the option of either finding a new long fic to read or re-reading EIDVWTTII. Anyways I'm on my 5th read of it and it never gets any less funny
Omg... I was having a bad night but this made it 10x better, tysm! Aghfjj, I can't express in words how much I love hearing that! I didn't know Deja Vu was somebody's comfort fic, and I'm so honoured that my writing is interesting enough that someone rereads it?? I'm... ahghdj I'm melting on the inside.
Update! ObiQuin is back on track. I won't be needing to break them up after all. I'm just going to shove a bunch of over-used tropes in and hope it makes up for my utter lack of romance writing experience. You guys'll be fine with that, right?
On a completely unrelated note: This week's chapter will be titled; "Side effects of the Dark side include: terrible flirting"
No teasers for next chapter, unfortunately. I'm too busy struggling to write action scenes that DON'T read like they're straight from a video game (I'm not being very successful) and I'm panicking about ObiQuin because I REALLY CAN'T WRITE ROMANCE. I may need to break them up.
In other news; Anakin is going to be The Ultimate Boss Battle, but who should be The Penultimate Boss Battle? Rex? Maze? Can I... can I kill them? I need to kill at least one Mando, right? An eye for an eye and all that. A Mando for a Jedi.
Defective clones are decommissioned, Howzer knows. Failure to follow orders or meet expectations will result in decommissioning. Defects in designs and physical mutations will result in decommissioning.
Howzer has never been worried about this though. He’s not defective, after all. He follows his superior’s orders and meets their expectations. He has no defects or physical mutations. He isn’t defective.
Until he is.
The Grand Army of the Republic is ordered to ‘execute order 66’, without any explanation for what the order entails. Every trooper in Howzer’s company stiffens upon hearing it, smiles and laughter disappearing from faces. They know what it is. They’re prepared to act on it if it applies to them.
But Howzer doesn’t know if it applies to them or not. He doesn’t know what it is. This wasn’t covered in his training on Kamino, and there’s no mention of it in the regulations.
He only finds out what it is when he hears reports from other captains and commanders of ‘successfully eliminated Jedi traitors’. The Jedi are traitors to the Republic, apparently. Howzer’s troopers knew that with three words, but Howzer didn’t. They knew what to do when issued ‘order 66’. Howzer didn’t.
Howzer couldn’t follow that order. Howzer couldn’t meet that expectation. Howzer is… is defective.
He keeps his face blank and professional when on duty. He doesn’t let any of what he’s feeling or thinking show through. He follows orders promptly and does his best to perform as well as he always has. Maybe it will make up for the one slip. Maybe it will cover up for that one defect.
But no matter how blank he is and how obedient he is, his troopers are always more blank and more obedient than him. Even in the mess hall and the barracks, away from the eyes of the natborns. They don’t smile and laugh anymore. They don’t joke and argue and tease. They follow orders and meet expectations. And that seems to be all they do.
Howzer watches them work, the pictures of perfect soldiers, with blank-eyes and hard faces, and he has to wonder… is he really the defective one?
More funny things that didn't make it into the story!
1. Somedays, Jango feels less like a Mand'alor and more like the single parent of a few hundred thousand Mandalorians. Although, those are really the same thing, aren't they?
2. Vhonte laughs hollowly. "Oh ka'ra, I thought we were in a tight spot seven years ago, but this has got to take the cake."
Ordo's brow furrows. "There was cake? Why didn't I get any?"
That's all I can share without spoiling future plot points, unfortunately.
But here's a fun fact!
In the original version of the story, Anakin had two baby Ysalamiri pets, which he used to protect his own kyber crystal from being Bled while on Ilum. They got removed for plot reasons tho, unfortunately...
On another note, I have decided to make the fic turn dark. Why? Not even I know.
While this has several benefits, such as villain speeches and intimidation tactics, it also has several downsides, first and foremost being the sheer number of jokes I've had to remove to stop the scene from being too lighthearted.
Just recently I had to remove;
'I'm a Force user; I don't take fall damage.'
Which will forever make me sad because I want somebody to say that in-universe at least once, but alas.
There were several other jokes removed, but half of them I don't remember and the other half don't make sense out of context.
There was also an entire conversation that was nothing but cracky plot development and utter confusion, but I didn't save that and it was too long to memorize.
From now on though, I'll probably start dumping all those jokes here, to help me recover from the pain of removing them.
So expect my posts to devolve into more nonsense than they already were.
So here, my two favourite quotes from next chapter:
"What will there be, when existence stops existing? What is a book without words, without pages, without a cover or a back, without a spine? What is a book without a name or without concept? What is a book with no one to write it?"
and
“People don’t find me. I find them.” A figure peels from the shadows, outline distorted by the cloak that flaps around them in the wind. “Have you strayed from the path of the Sith, assassin?”
Deleted clip from 'Deja vu', in apology for not posting last Wednesday
Anakin has never been one to make it to meetings on time. When he was a Jedi, this would result in him arriving to council hearings to see an irritated Kenobi and a borderline angry council (except Windu, whose anger couldn’t be described as anywhere vaguely near a border, but rather as deep inside hostile territory).
When he was Supreme Commander of the Empire, he was quite disgruntled to find that Tarkin also shared that habit. They would often arrive late to meetings at the same time, and would enter together. That, of course, started several rumours about the exact nature of their relationship.
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