Headcanons: toys for Grogu. He loves that silver ball, but we never see him with anything else! Has Din bought him anything? Is there something else in the ship he likes to play with? Did Din... MAKE him some toys?
Oh, Din 100% makes him toys!
Did you notice Din’s cape got a little shorter after Season 1? Yep, there’s a li’l soft froggie, dark grey, hand-sewn, that Grogu likes to carry around the Razor Crest. Well, it’s supposed to look like a froggie. The stitches are neat and even, because Din is used to having to sew things up after they’ve been sliced or torn by various weapons. But an artist, he’s not. Grogu loves it anyway.
Other toys are more transient. When Din’s fixing something on the ship, there are usually things he has to take apart, and there’s some time while he tinkers with the ship’s innards before he has to put the outer pieces back again. He’ll put together a little creature out of nuts and bolts and other small bits and hand it to Grogu to play with while he works.
You’d think he’d figure out a better option actually, because half the time Din gets so absorbed in what he’s doing that he doesn’t notice Grogu wandering off, and then it’s a treasure hunt while he tries to find what the child did with the thing. Grogu usually leads him to a few different places around the ship, making it into a game, before finally relenting and showing him. Din goes along with it, reminding himself to be patient, because he knows Grogu just needs some attention.
Grogu also has a small wooden figure of a fish, modeled after the krill on Sorgan. Winta gave it to him. It’s not cuddly at all, but Grogu keeps it in his little hammock and the one time it got misplaced--because Din was doing laundry and didn’t realize it had gotten caught in the blankets--he did not sleep well at all until he had it back again.
I think that’s about it for toys, because mostly he’ll play with whatever’s available, climbing around on crates or messing around with Din’s tools. They probably play tag sometimes? And sometimes Grogu just likes to hang out and watch whatever Din’s up to, and listen to him talk.
Hey, Old Guard Meta Person, what are your thoughts on the changing of their names? I started wondering about this because Nicolo did not become Nick or Nicholas to "update" and fit the times, he became Nicky. Why the diminutive? Why did Andromache become Andy instead of Andrea or something else? Yusef into Joe makes him fit in more easily in the Western world, but why, how? And what about Booker, which is sort of a pun on his original name, if I remember correctly? I know you have Thoughts!
I do have Thoughts! So like, in general, I think there may have been many times in the past when they used different names for anonymity reasons. And Andromache is definitely not Andy’s original name because she’s way older than ancient Greece. But, as we get closer to the present, things like IDs and passports and various written documents become more essential for getting places and not arousing suspicion, so if you have to remember a name for yourself or someone else that’s written on a piece of paper, it makes sense to pick more long-lasting aliases, and if you want calling someone their pseudonym to become automatic, even in stressful situations, using that name all the time in daily life makes sense as a way to build that habit.
Once tracking people by name becomes a thing, you want a generic, common name that won’t catch the attention of the powers that be, and as the powers that be become increasingly Anglophone over the 19th and 20th centuries, that comes to mean picking boring whitebread Anglo names that won’t give the authorities a reason to look twice at you.
As for the individual names:
- Andy: makes sense that she would have a gender-neutral name because she probably had to pass as a man in certain combat situations (we see this in at least one photo on Copley’s wall but I’m sure it happened a bunch of times). Andy/Andi could easily be a nickname for Andrea or Andrew or Andrei or other versions of what’s a fairly common name in a wide range of places.
- Nicky: I’ve seen a few different headcanons about why his name became Nicky and not Nico which would be the diminutive in Italian. I’ve seen a fic where Yusuf gives him the nickname and it’s written Niki. I’ve seen a post where Booker gives him the name and it sticks as kind of a joke. Room for many cute headcanons on this one. I think his English-language ID documents probably say Nicholas.
- Joe: To be clear, we all know this is the same name, right? Yusuf = Joseph. But I think this one is definitely about making him appear less “ethnic,” or at least more ethnically ambiguous, in the Anglophone world. Someone named José or Yossef of Guiseppe could have just as easily Anglicized their name to Joe and that gives him a lot of options when being perceived as a certain ethnicity/nationality is going to lead to more questions at the border than it’s worth. (I have a lot of thoughts about how Joe would be perceived in different parts of the world where people weren’t so used to seeing North African/Middle Eastern people, particularly the Americas, but you can easily imagine a host of situations in the modern era in which it’s a lot less hassle if your ID documents make you look like a Different Kind of Brown Person.)
- Booker: tbh probably the least in need of an alias, but Sebastién le Livre is not the most forgettable name and hey we want to include him in the group project.
I mean, I’m pretty sure they all have a bunch of different IDs and passports at this point which may have different surnames on them, but picking a consistent and generic nickname that could match a few different surnames would be useful for a lot of reasons.
What fandom is the Quarantine WIP? Any details you care to share?
Quarantine is yet another of my Doctor Who WIPs, lol. I do have a bunch of unfinished stories in other fandoms too, but for this ask game I only listed out my DW fics, since that’s all I’ve been working on for the last year and a half or so.
Despite the name, I actually started Quarantine in early 2019, long before any of the pandemic stuff, so it’s unrelated to that. The set up is that sometime late s9-ish, Clara and the Doctor go to visit a planet populated by a race who look human but aren’t, and who are highly telepathic. Within five minutes of arriving, they run afoul of some local law or other and are promptly arrested and imprisoned together in a sealed room.
I have the first bit of this written, with the banter turned up to 11 12, so I’m just going to put a few hundred words of it under the cut, for anyone who is curious to hear more about this one. Thank you for the ask!
Ask me anything about my WIP fics!
Quarantine excerpt:
“So, bit of a ‘good news, bad news’ situation,” the Doctor said, removing his sonicglasses. “Good news: the replicator works and doesn’t seem intent on poisoning us. Bad news: the door isn’t just hidden, it appears to have never existed in the first place.”
“Meaning we’re stuck,” Clara said.
“It would seem so.”
“Could the wall be telepathic, like the replicator?” she asked, setting the glass of water on the table and returning to the Doctor’s side.
He raised his eyebrows, his expression telling her that the thought hadn’t occurred to him. Pocketing his sonicglasses, he reached out and pressed the pads to his fingers to the blank wall. He closed his eyes and leaned in, concentrating. Unconsciously, Clara leaned in as well, only to snap to standing when the Doctor yelped and leapt backwards from the wall.
“What happened?” she asked, concerned.
“It bit me,” he said, shaking out his hands and glowering at the wall.
“Seriously?”
“Telepathically. Kind of like touching a cattle fence, a quick jolt meant to scare.”
“Right, so, negotiating with the wall seems like a no-go.”
“Except that there was a message embedded in there...” He trailed off thoughtfully, raising one hand to press against the wall.
“Doctor—” Clara started, but didn’t get any further than that before the wall once again shocked him and the Doctor recoiled.
“Stop that!” he snapped at the wall, annoyed.
“Why would you go for seconds on the electrified wall?” she sighed.
“It’s not electrified, it’s tetchy. But more importantly, it’s trying to tell me something.”
Curious, Clara reached out towards the wall, but the Doctor smacked the back of her hand and she jerked it back towards herself instinctively. “Hey, ow!” she said, turning to him.
“And why are you trying to touch the electrified wall?” he demanded.
“You said it wasn’t electrified! And besides, I got the food replicator to work. Maybe the wall just doesn’t mesh well with all your alien weirdness.”
“My what?”
She waved vaguely at him. “Touch-telepath meets telepathic field not calibrated for touch-telepaths,” she reasoned. “Maybe it’s just information overload.”
“As far as the Nari are concerned, we’re both aliens,” the Doctor pointed out.
“And yet: food replicator success. I’m going to try it.”
“What if my superior Time Lord biology is protecting me from a much worse shock?” he countered. “What if it zaps you worse than it zapped me?”
Clara shrugged, undeterred. “If it knocks me out, try to catch me before I hit my head on the floor. And you know how to perform CPR, if it comes to that — my heart’s on the left, don’t forget.”
He sighed loudly. “Clara, we’ve talked about you going native.”
“And your duty of care, yes, I know. But we’re locked in this room with no way out, and the wall that used to be a door seems to want to tell us something. So unless you have a better idea...?”
The Doctor rolled his eyes and nodded, and then, inexplicably, began to hum Another One Bites The Dust.
She paused in the act of turning towards the wall and looked back at him. “What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Humming.”
“Yes, but why? Why that song?”
“It’s a hundred beats per minute, which is the optimal rhythm for CPR for humans. Just trying to make sure I have it in my head before the adrenaline kicks in and throws off my ability to sense the passage of time.”
Clara bit her tongue to keep from saying the first snarky thing that came to mind, and instead said, “Stayin’ Alive is generally the suggested song, I thought.”
He shrugged. “That’s a debate that’ll still be going on centuries from now. Listen, are you going to touch the tetchy wall or not?”
“I was about to! Just hush!” she said, and reached out and placed her hand flat against the blank wall, steeling herself for a shock.
There was a faint buzzing beneath her palm, but nothing uncomfortable.
“Well?” the Doctor demanded. She shushed him again and put her other hand on the wall, trying to concentrate.
Hello and welcome! the wall said cheerfully inside her head.
“Clara—”
“Shh!”
You have been arrested! the wall went on. You have been found guilty of violating Societal Placidity Codes 338561.2 and 338561.3, and have been sentenced to indefinite quarantine. Details of your crime, your sentence, and the conditions of your potential release can be found in the dossier in the desk drawer.
“Check the desk drawer,” she told the Doctor, not moving from her spot as the wall’s message continued.
Sentences cannot be appealed or commuted, and quarantine will only be lifted once the terms of your release are fulfilled. It is society’s belief that you will benefit from this sentence, as will all those around you. We hope you enjoy your stay!
“That was some Hitchhiker’s Guide level weirdness,” Clara said as the message started again from the beginning, stepping away from the wall and turning to the Doctor. “What was in the desk drawer?”
“Papers detailing our arrest,” he replied, flipping through a folder thick with stacked papers.
“Right, that’s what the wall said, for violating some code or other. It said ‘indefinite quarantine’ but it also mentioned ‘conditions of your potential release’, so I’m hoping there’s something in all that paperwork that tells us how we get out of this.”
The Doctor continued to read, his scowl deepening.
“Well, what’s it say?” she demanded after half a minute more of silence. “What law did we break? And how did we manage to break a law that quickly in the first place?”
He glanced up at her, expression guarded and worried. “Like I said, the Nari are telepaths.”
“Right. We’ve established that, with the wall and the replicator and all.”
“But not just for interacting with technology. It’s something they can immediately sense about anyone in the nearby vicinity, like being able to smell someone’s overly strong perfume. We were in violation of code three-three-eight-whatever pretty much the moment we set foot on the planet, probably offended the first dozen people we passed on the street. Enough so that some sort of telepathic pulse must have gone through the local population, alerted the authorities, and here we are in legally-mandated isolation.”
“For the benefit of all those around us,” Clara said grimly, paraphrasing what the wall had told her. “What was the law, exactly?”
“Um.”
“Doctor,” she said in a warning tone.
“It’s, uhh...” He looked back down at the papers in his hands rather than meet her gaze. “There’s two, technically. Code 338561.2 is— the TARDIS is translating the exact phrasing here as ‘unresolved romantic tension,’” he said, voice crisp and quick. “And ‘61.3 is ‘unresolved sexual tension.’ Both of which I gather the Nari consider to be a sort of environmental pollutant, not infectious but detrimental to anyone forced to witness it. To the point that they believe the best way to address it is to quarantine the offenders together, away from the rest of society.”
“What,” she demanded, her voice flat.
The Doctor winced. “Clara, please don’t make me explain this in more specific terms.”
“No, please don’t,” she said quickly. “But how do we— What’s it say about the conditions of release?”
“Well, we have to, erm. Resolve it. To the satisfaction of our cell’s built-in telepathic sensors.”
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“Afraid not,” he said, still not meeting her gaze.
“Indefinite quarantine.”
“Yep.”
“Until we satisfy the conditions of our release.”
“It would seem so.”
Clara bit her tongue to keep from saying a great litany of utterly unhelpful things, finally settling on, “I’m going to go into the loo, close the door, and yell very loudly. Once I’m done with that, we can brainstorm ways to get out of this mess.”
There's something different about Din when he comes home that day on Sanbra. He's in some kind of strange mood and hands her a neatly wrapped package. Inside are a set of robes like a lot of women here wear, and—
It's a very fancy box, and the contents are nestled in individual little hollows, spaced wide apart. It looks incredibly expensive. "A box of chocolates?"
For a moment she thinks—let's be real, wishes— they are a gift from him, even though she gave up the hope that something might develop between them weeks ago. But he seems as surprised as she is.
"Must have been a gift from Miss Loysia."
He tells her about his beautiful, famous dancer client, sounding thoroughly charmed by her. Yala feels a prickle of jealousy, but then he tells her that he told his client about her, and how Yala hadn't been able to go out. Miss Loysia hads passed along this set of fancy robes for Yala so that she can see something of the city.
Okay, that's fair. She does sound really charming.
Yala opens the box and picks out a random chocolate, tiny and delicate, to pop into her mouth.
...Holy space whales. How is it even possible for something to taste THAT good? Din must not have tried one yet, or he would be singing Miss Loysia's praises a lot louder.
She gets him to take his helmet off behind the curtain and passes him a chocolate around the curtain. Damn, how expensive were these things? Miss Loysia must have really liked him.
Instead of taking it from her like a normal person, she suddenly feels soft, slick heat envelop the fingertips holding the chocolate. There's a tickle she abruptly realises is his facial hair, what the actual fuck, he is taking the chocolate with his mouth. And he is moaning.
She makes a noise that could reasonably be considered a squeak and yanks back her hand, mind full of static.
Because—
what
why
He comes out from behind the curtain, helmet back on, and stares at her, and this. What. She doesn't— he doesn't—
His hands are balled into fists. She thinks she can hear his breathing. Her stomach clenches.
A wall of beskar staring at her with no indication of mood would always have made her nervous, but her extreme confusion about what just happened only makes it worse. And when Yala is nervous, she babbles; pouring words in between herself and whatever is unnerving her until she's better able to handle it.
"Did you sleep with her?" is the first thing to come out of her mouth, because extremely expensive chocolates and a client who apparently likes him a lot, well. She wouldn't blame him, either. "Because I'd understand if you slept with her—" He's shaking his head, this isn't helping with the confusion at all. About the only thing she knows for sure right now is that those chocolates are amazing and her fingers are still tingling. "Fuck, I'd sleep with her for these chocolates, do you think she's into women?"
Din looks away.
Well, whatever weird tension was making her nervous has now been thoroughly dispelled, so that's... good...?
He goes over to the pilot seat and lets himself drop into it with a groan."No. I did not sleep with her," he declares with unexpected emphasis. "How'd things go here?"
All your Egypt posts made me think of these historical fiction books I read a while ago. Jo Graham's Numinous World books. It's not a series; if you squint and tilt your head just right, the same handful of characters are reincarnated into different people through these stories; I never looked that hard at them. I've read a few, and I found the author from when I used to read her Pirates of the Caribbean fanfic on LJ a million years ago! Check them out if you want! 1-3 are ancient world.
Ooh, that sounds really interesting, I will definitely have to look those up! Very much in line with other things that have been on my mind lately. Thank you for the recommendation!
“I’ve been rewatching Good Omens because, well, I can, and because with...”
I've also been pondering a little Aziraphale and Crowley quarantine fic.... Hmmm.... I'm sure there are lots of books and cups of tea involved, and snuggling. Maybe wing grooming, if that's what floats your boat. And probably a fair amount of bickering.
Gosh yes these could definitely be the things. But don’t you think also...
They would be immune, right?
So maybe... they would be out in the world.
Is Aziraphale delivering groceries? Is Crowley drinking coffee in an empty cafe?
calluna-cuprea replied to your post: Sensation [1/? | The Mandalorian | rating Mature]
*Screaming* I read all of this last night and then died a happy death. NEED MOAR. – Can you rec any other similar Mandalorian fics? I got a little overwhelmed looking on Ao3. Since you write stuff I like, maybe you also read stuff I like?
Did you also read its companion piece Inspiration?
I’m bad at recs, but you’re always welcome to look through my bookmarks
