One of those AUs where Jaster survives long enough that it's technically possible for him to show up on Melida/Daan during Book Events.
Jaster, as such fics are liable to have happen, adopts Obi-Wan, who is suspicious of him and everything else. This is partly because of Jedi v Mando stuff, and partly because Jaster isn't great at Basic, and explained what he was doing very poorly. Just general 'add you to my family' but he doesn't know the word 'adopt' in Basic. It's not part of Mercenary Contract Vocabulary so he didn't learn that one.
They get to Mandalore. Meet Jango.
Obi-Wan adds 2 plus 2 and gets 17. He is here to be raised as Jango's future consort. He understands. They seem proper enough that they won't touch him in a questionable manner until he's an adult, so that's... something. Obi-Wan is going to study so hard to be a great Mandalorian consort. He's going to be the best spouse a ruler could ask for. Jango's going to do great with Obi-Wan's help, which he's clearly going to need.
Nobody communicates well enough to get this misunderstanding across to each other. Obi-Wan generally assumes that people are being very polite and not mentioning that he's being trained to act as a royal consort because someone in the royal family needs to know how to greet visiting heads of state properly.
Obi-Wan interprets every "teasing my new baby brother" action from Jango as "teasing my future bride," and that every time Jango calls him brother that it's actually mocking Obi-Wan for being from the Core, or he'd just call Obi-Wan vod like he does everyone else!
Age sixteen or seventeen, Obi-Wan meets Satine. New bestie. Mentions the Jango situation offhand. She is reasonably alarmed and tells her dad, who brings it up to Jaster, and the accidental house of cards finally collapses.
Obi-Wan is offended that nobody seems to think he'd be a good consort. Jango is desperately trying to convince him that he views Obi-Wan as a baby brother and not like That, especially because they met when Obi-Wan was thirteen.
"Fine, I suppose I'll have to take my skills elsewhere then! Satine, do you need a consort?"
Satine agrees in the moment to fuck with Jango... but then a few hours later realizes it's not a bad plan. Plus, the Jedi-Mando kid is cute.
I'm not 100% sure how the misunderstanding could last a minimum of three to four years, but language barriers and stubborn determination to be a devastatingly effective consort can work wonders.
Obi-Wan is so mad. He made himself PERFECT for the job, he is SO QUALIFIED, how dare his resume not even be in the pile!!!
He was so ready to host the spouses of visiting delegations and run events and dictate Jango's wardrobe! He was going to be so good at smoothing things over with the politicians Jango inevitably punched! He was gearing up to be pretty and charming and hide knives in his fancy boots!
Jango, desperately: You can do almost all of that as my ambassador, the job I thought you were angling for!
Obi-Wan: I can't believe you're doing this to me!
Satine: Should we... intervene?
Duke Kryze: I don't think so... it's not our business, and they're not throwing punches yet.
Jaster, face in his hands: This is all my fault.
In my head, Jango is near tears for this entire conversation. Man's DISTRESSED.
Hi, I've got an affiliate storefront on bookshop.org. Here's some of the stuff on sale for the holidays that I'm sure tumblr will be a fan of:
Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (link)
- because if I know anything about my followers, it's that we skew towards a Kinsey X
The Essential Atlas: Star Wars by Daniel Wallace (Author) , Jason Fry (Author) (link)
- people have explicitly asked me about this one so it feels mandatory
Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America by Robert B. Reich (link)
- yes, that Robert Reich
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green (link)
- John Green! Him! Tumblr's own!
Baking Yesteryear and Baking Across America by B. Dylan Hollis (link and link)
- you may know him as 'that baking twink' who plays the accordion
Chronicles of Old New York by James Roman (link)
- I just reference this one a lot
Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games) by Suzanne Collins (link)
- big book of the season
Sincerely, Your Autistic Child: What People on the Autism Spectrum Wish Their Parents Knew About Growing Up, Acceptance, and Identity from the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network (Author), Emily Paige Ballou (Edited by), Sharon daVanport (Edited by), et al. (link)
- this is after all the autism website
Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckert (link)
- IDK if you follow me then you're probably into this
Atlas of the World (Thirty-Second Edition) from Oxford (link)
- I'm enough of a maps person that I feel you guys might want this
The Activist's Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century by Randy Shaw (link)
- Viva la revolución, etc.
The Book of Yokai, Expanded Second Edition by Michael Dylan Foster, Shinonome Kijin (link)
- for my anime buds
The Iliad and the Odyssey Boxed Set by Homer, Peter Green (link)
- you know who you are
The Tarot Book by Jana Riley (link)
- I like this one because it's less about the spirituality and more about the history/psychology and sociological elements.
Also, here's my collection of all the books that the site is suggesting for the holidays, most of which seem to be on some kind of sale:
2025 Holiday Gift Guide - Suggested by the Site - this is stupidly long and I don't expect you to use it
However, if you find any book you like, you can honestly just edit the URL, adding "&next=t&affiliate=93636" to the end. The final portion of the URL goes from looking like this:
?ean=9781438495743&next=t
to this:
?ean=9781438495743&next=t&next=t&affiliate=93636
And if you do that I get like two dollars. Which is nice.
Heya, folks! So, if you aren't familiar with bookshop.org, it's an online book retailer. Generally, any purchase you make there goes towards independent booksellers (you can pick one!) and the author. Sometimes, you can buy through an affiliate, and the bookseller commission goes to them.
I have an affiliate code! I would like some spending money myself, and purchasing via my code does not cost you extra. I've imported the 2025 holiday gift guide to my own 'storefront,' and will continue to do so as they release more guides. I also have some older lists on my storefront, so that's fun!
You can also go through their genre lists and then come back to my affiliate storefront to actually purchase. Or you can pick a local bookshop to shop from instead of me, I'm not your mom.
From the site itself:
We’re offering 15% off the entire gift guide with the code Gift25 until Tuesday, November 18!
2025 Holiday Gift Guide - Suggested by the Site
and other lists on my storefront.
Aaaaaaand the ones I personally curated:
Nonfiction - Fashion
Nonfiction - City History and Planning
Nonfiction - Other
Fiction
Trade Paperbacks
Remember to use Gift25 on anything you can, and please shop via my storefront if you feel like supporting me in my endeavors to move out of my parents' house.
I want to put Karin in situations. I want the Jedi to hire her to find someone for them. She's not even from this galaxy, she just showed up on a random planet and when the droids attacked the town she was working in, she took it down with her chains before the Republic got on the ground, and then they were like Well. Uh. Let's See What's Up Here.
Chakra and the Force are NOT the same but one will cause echoes in the other. Traceable. And you know what Karin is great at?
So, rumors abound that Ventress is on Coruscant. Nobody knows if Karin can do what she claims to do (especially since her grasp on Galactic Basic is not great), but they're like Let's Test it.
There are a trillion people on Coruscant. She is unimpressed by their lack of information.
Would a picture help? No.
Scent? Ew, no, she's not a dog.
Well what the fuck DO you need? Unique signature elements.
The Jedi don't know what that is. What are some unique signature elements that she can feel from them? She offers a few notes. Says that she can feel that they're more powerful than the average person, but there are enough More Powerful Than Average on Coruscant that it doesn't help much. Says that their lightsabers are like tiny stars. Someone figures out that the way she's grouping them actually matches up to kyber color, after Mace gets separated out into his own little corner.
Okay, cool! Ventress has red sabers, they tell her. That means she made them bleed. In the Force, they sound like they're screaming.
She asks if they mean that the magic rocks are in pain. That is in fact what they said, but Threepio is doing some pretty hard computations trying to clear up translations, so nobody's too upset to repeat themselves in new words.
Karin tells them she can feel a few spots in her range that have the Tiny Bright Spots of kyber that also feel weird and painful and cold.
Great! Where's the nearest one? That way, the big round thing.
Nobody quite panics, but they bring her to the Senate pretty quickly (with several Jedi playing guard in case she's actually an enemy that was trying to get into the Senate to kill someone), and she navigates them to...
Palpatine's office.
They enter. Explain that they have this contractor for a security sweep. She tells them that the whole place feels gross, but in a manner that don't fully explain what's going on; she uses a word that doesn't make sense, but it's a mistake she also made earlier, so guess who Doesn't realize she's saying that the entire office is weirdly Sith-y.
(The Jedi know what she means, because she said the same thing earlier and has clearly forgotten the correction and is just relying on them to remember for her.)
(Sidious has no idea what she just said.)
Palpatine is protesting her presence as politely as he can. Anakin is trying to explain that they think Ventress might be here, so please allow for the security sweep, just in case--
Karin points to a random desk drawer and announces that there's the bad rock in there.
Awkwardness. The Jedi try to convince Palpatine to just show them the damn drawer. Does he have illegal weapons? If he has a collector's license to own sith antique sabers then they should have been informed of that. These things need to be declared to customs and accredited by the Temple.
Karin is very bored. The politics is all in a language she doesn't understand, and this important guy is very slimy. Makes her skin crawl, way more than Orochimaru did. Ugh.
The conversations keep escalating. Karin is sitting on the ceiling because nobody's talking to her anymore. She has a datapad someone gave her. There are video noises coming from it. She might be watching thirst traps.
She wasn't actually informed of why the red kyber is such a big deal; she's just there to do some tracking and since this guy clearly isn't the bald lady they showed her a picture of, Karin's probably going to have to lead the monks to the next Evil Rock once they're done arguing. This means that she cannot leave to just grab a snack or something, much as she'd like to.
I'm trying to figure out how to make Palpatine snap and attack people but unfortunately the Jedi are too controlled (except Anakin, who is on his side), and Karin doesn't give a fuck.
I think maybe Fox is there and when Palpatine gets up to argue in the Jedi's faces a bit, Fox himself just steps forward and unlocks the drawer because this argument is getting on his nerves so just LOOK at the collectible antiques or whatever and get the hell out. Fox thinks he's cutting the knot and speeding things up. It's not like they're going to arrest the Chancellor for violating some museum law or whatever. Maybe a fine.
Someone notices that Karin keeps making faces whenever Palpatine certain things (not every sentence, but often enough), and drifts over to ask her what's going on. She explains that he also feels slimy, like the rocks and the room.
Palpatine can hide himself in the Force, but not from a chakra sensor.
It's like camouflaging yourself in the visible spectrum but the person you're hiding from brought an infrared camera. She's just working on an unfamiliar frequency.
So that's all... bad. If the Chancellor isn't a Sith, he sure is suspicious. Not just on Karin's word, either: they found the sabers.
Accusations are made, Palpatine lights up his sabers, ready to kill the Jedi (blaming Ventress, who actually IS on the planet, a few hours away), and tells Fox to Kill The redhead.
Fox fails to do so. Karin is pretty good at dodging shit, and she has ninja superpowers. Palpatine decides to kill her himself.
Karin gets stabbed. Right through the heart. Quick kill blow.
Palpatine turns his back on her to focus on the Jedi.
Karin does as Karin will do and bites herself, then gets to her feet, grabs a nearby Sith vase from a display pedestal, and hits him on the head with it.
The vase is very heavy and Palpatine dies a few hours later at the hospital from intracranial bleed.
Karin still doesn't know what a Sith is but she's demanding hazard pay for getting stabbed.
She doesn't even go here.
Unfortunately (for Palpatine), she is nigh-unkillable. Should've gone for the head, my dude.
She finds this man very annoying and then he STABS her. This is now the third time she's been fully punctured through the upper torso, at least. First by lightning, then by a giant tree root, and now by laser sword.
Like come the fuck on
Somewhere out there is an essay about superhero movies where villains co-opt, misuse, or even just misunderstand the language of the left to push methods and goals that are incompatible with the actual theory of the left, but that sound Right And Good to viewers who aren't thinking it through entirely. And the essay is not just about how they compare to each other, but how they are a litmus test for viewers to know how susceptible they are to propaganda.
Co-opt: Most obvious example and the inspiration for this post is the Riddler in Batman (2020, the one with RPatt). The Riddler recites leftist rhetoric about corruption, wealth hoarding, and redistribution, but his actual actions and goals are unrelated. He's an accelerationist who's more interested in tearing down a system that didn't benefit HIM than in actually rectifying the problems, and who cares if a few kids get traumatized or even killed along the way?
Misuse: Easy mode, this one's Thanos. He talks about ensuring there's enough for everyone to eat, but like. Bro.
Misunderstand: Erik Killmonger, who has the benefit of both some incredibly legitimate grievances and a pretty face, but also kind of fails at the idea of intersectionality, proportionality, or Start With Words Before You Escalate. He's the easiest to sympathize with, because he has some really good points and ultimately does appear to be legitimately pursuing those goals... but he's also a misogynist, jumped to international terrorism before "call up my cousin who doesn't know I exist," and there's something in there about the role played by his time in the US military, which gave him emotional trauma, head trauma, and a sincere belief in the validity of US-style insurgency operations based on hostile takeovers of inconvenient countries. He's charming and pretty and sincere... he's just also, in many ways, wrong. And the parts where he's right makes it easy to try to ignore the bits where he's wrong if you're predisposed to like him and prefer some absolutism.
Anyway, yeah, there are definitely other examples, but the ones that were suggested to me didn't quite vibe with the base idea (Mysterio and Vulture both had disgruntled union moments in the MCU, but they left those roots so quickly that I don't think the concept of using leftist rhetoric as cover/justification for the crimes really applies since, they very quickly shift gears into revenge and greed respectively).
Concept: Anakin circa year 2.5 of the war wakes up in a post-war setting (good ending) where he is raising his kids in a throuple with Padmé and Rex.
Anakin starts off confused about some scars he doesn't remember, and his hair being too long, and having the wrong clothes at hand, and then wanders into the kitchen to see Rex and Padmé flirting as they make breakfast. He gets very angry and very confused, very fast, but then Padmé notices him and is Happy, and so is Rex, and that brings confusion forward because he clearly saw them kissing, but they're not? Hiding it? Panicking?
There's an exchange that has Padmé misinterpreting Anakin's "I saw you kissing Rex" as jealousy that Anakin has not also gotten a morning kiss from Rex.
A baby starts crying.
Anakin is so confused and distracted by the crying baby that he doesn't even stop Rex from kissing him. Partly because Rex is just radiating fondness/affection/amusement at what he interprets as Anakin being kinda groggy.
Anakin plays along for a few minutes, and then spots Threepio and goes "hey, I need to talk to my droid right now. In private."
R2 bullies his way in but Anakin lets it happen.
Threepio can keep secrets, including Anakin's, and so there's the perfect person to ask about what the hell is going on. Anakin gets the date, a basic timeline of when the hell Rex showed up in their lives as a romance thing, when the babies were born, is he even a Jedi anymore, is he still on good TERMS with the Jedi, etc. They somehow manage to avoid the topic of the Chancellor and how the war ended.
Comes out of the room and bluntly tells Padmé "I don't remember inviting Rex to our relationship." And they're all a bit confused and the stress is rising because Rex suddenly thinks they were maybe lying about having talked over inviting him to be part of the relationship like a YEAR ago, and Padme's thinking but inviting him was your idea, and then Anakin continues with,
"I don't remember the babies being born. I don't remember the pregnancy. I don't remember the war ending. I don't remember Ahsoka leaving or coming back. I think someone needs to get Obi-Wan and a mind healer, because Threepio is saying it's a head injury and honestly I don't have any better ideas."
So obviously. It's Obi-Wan time.
He brings Anakin back to the Temple. That is where some Topics are covered (they know about the Tuskens, Palpatine was a Sith, Anakin spent three months under a forced psych hold after some Stuff) and they can't immediately fix what's going on. Anakin gets sent home to Padme's as an outpatient with plans to come back regularly until they figure out possible treatments.
The rest of the fic is Anakin and Padmé and Rex trying to find a balance between "Rex was finally comfortable and settled in our lives" and "Anakin isn't used to having a larger, denser body in the bed with them and woke up in a panic last night because of it."
Slight implications throughout that make it unclear if this is actually amnesia, some kind of temporary time travel, or an alternate universe swap with an Anakin whose life made it through the RotS woodchipper mostly intact.
(It's probably a head injury that interacted with the existing brain damage.)
IDK if you folks were ever MEGA into crossovers but did you ever engage with the kind that can more or less be summarized as "isekai but the person 'hit by truck-kun' is a character from a different canon?"
Because that's what this is.
Tony Stark isekai'd into Star Wars (random planet) after dying in Endgame. He knows the movies, but not the supplemental material, as even by the time TPM came out, he was thirty and fucked up and making a name for himself in war. Bad times.
Tony wakes up sixteen and with Nothing to his name but his skills. He does not speak the language. Mostly gets by doing shit like skinning potatoes for a kitchen and pulling weeds and whatnot while he catches up on Basic. (He is apparently fluent, or at least conversational, in French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and Dari. So Basic would be his Seventh language, and while four of those can be lumped into 'if you learn one, the next will be easier,' Dari is wildly unrelated, so I'd say he could pick up Basic a bit faster than average, especially with 16yo brain elasticity.)
A toddler, two years old with intensely red hair, runs into his shins one day and yells his name very clearly. He looks down, is a little confused, and then a nearby carer from an orphanage jogs up yelling "Nat!" The toddler is Natasha Romanoff. She remembers everything, including dying, but is about twenty-five pounds soaking wet and NOBODY will take her seriously.
It takes some… effort, to explain the situation to the carer. Yes, Tony knows Nat. He worked with uh…. her 'older brother, a man named Clint.' Tony does not currently have the resources for anyone to legally give him custody of a toddler but he's got some motivation to secure housing and a stable income.
He does that. Gets Natasha with him because of course he has to do that. It's the one person he knows. It's Nat.
Turns out she's Force Sensitive, though. A 'natural extension' of her more skillgrinding abilities to read/manipulate people. Tony is not Force Sensitive but he DID recently have a medical episode that took him to a thankfully-government-funded clinic that informed him he has a Bad Heart and will require a pacemaker despite being seventeen.
A Jedi finds Nat while passing through and they Discuss Their Options. This is when Nat is about four. There is a heavy discussion about how her mind is older than her body, so the Jedi would need to be ready for that, but also Tony needs to discuss this with Nat, who was like thirty-nine(?) when she died and thus more than capable of making her own decisions.
Despite fandom generally painting Tony as the most selfish of the Avengers and Natasha as the most coldly practical, they are still heroes who put in some Fucking Effort to become better people, and they come to the conclusion that Natasha would do much more to help this galaxy as a Jedi than as some kid in poverty on a no-name planet. So off she goes!
She's like five years younger than Obi-Wan, the story reveals.
Tony is a bit aimless and the work he's BEEN doing (probably laying down electrical lines or something at this point, IDK, he got into construction or something) gets sideswept by Damage To A Tool. He knows how to fix the tool, but he does not have a forge.
There is a forge in town. He goes to it and says that he can't afford to ask to have it fixed, but he knows how to do it himself, so could he borrow access for a small fee?
This is a Mandalorian armorer. They say no. In fact, they tell him, that would be significantly more expensive than just getting it fixed.
Buuuuuuuuuut for Reasons, the armorer decides that Tony (now 18-19 physically) can do it so long as the Armorer supervises. Tony is competent Enough that the Armorer gives him a datapad and tells him to read it and come back in a week to discuss the topic. Tony warns that Basic is far from his first language and he doesn't have a whole lot of free time, so he probably won't have read it by then. That's fine, they'll just discuss what he has read.
It's about Mando culture, in a mildly propaganda-y way, and Tony comes back to Argue About Religion more than anything. He thinks the Armorer is proselytizing, which they kind of are, but they are also more than happy to discuss the lines between the Mando culture as ethnicity and culture and religion and so on.
This becomes a regular occurence. Tony has made A Friend who has started offering him a side gig doing Basic Village Blacksmith Work that the Armorer deems too menial, like "horse"shoes.
Tony is offered an apprenticeship that he did not expect, on the condition of Becoming Mandalorian.
This is. A heavy decision.
However. Tony is a guy who is at least partly defined by his cool armor. Mandalorians are defined by their cool armor. He has been told, several times, that there are multiple ways to be a Mandalorian. So he accepts, because he decides it's worth for the chance to be somebody who can make a difference in a way he currently can't.
Ten years later, 'Initiate Romanova' goes up to Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon as they prepare to leave, and neatly informs them that she has a feeling they are going to have a Bad Time on their mission in Mandalore, and that if they need emergency shelter from enemies, to go to an Armorer by the name of Tony Stark, because that's her brother so she knows that he's going to be friendly to Jedi. (Tony has sent her a small handful of messages, through channels both official and not, about big life events.)
Of course, shit hits the fan and the two plus Satine end up finding Tony's forge and he hides them in his Underground Bunker, which actually has a tunnel to a cave system that is safer than the bunker itself. Because reasons. (IN A CAVE. WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS.)
He has helper droids! They are named indirectly after friends from the Past Life, things like Spangles.
On their way back after the mission they swing by to say hi and he asks them to bring something to Natasha and it's a matryoshka doll set he made based on the Avengers (it goes based on age so the outermost is Thor, followed by I think Bruce, Rhodey, Tony, Clint, Natasha, Steve, Sam, Wanda, Vision), as well as a plushie he had custom made by somebody in town of a Bird With Archery Gear, even though she's too old for that stuff.
Even among the Jedi, Natasha is WEIRD and SERIOUS and everyone's pretty damn sure she's going to be a Shadow, or at least do a HECK of a lot of undercover work.
IDK how this plays out but Tony is definitely keeping an eye on politics so he can figure out the Palpatine rise to power and remind Natasha in case she's forgotten because when they first split they didn't, either of them, know what to expect in regards to her memory given the whole Baby Brain issue.
"Why is Tony an Armorer"
Okay some more thoughts!
I think Tony's aggressively atheist and consistently watching whoever claims to be Mand'alor with a critical eye in case he has to step in, and does not take any references to ka'ra with any real seriousness.
That said. He's an Armorer now. A weird one who refuses like half his clients for Ethics Reasons, but technically a cultural authority figure who's allowed to argue with the Mand’alor.
@penpalpixie:
fsr the initial meeting scenario with the armorer bugs me,like would they really just let him"
but tbf Tony knows how to steamroll people and could probably dissect the forge in an instant.
Which, yeah, in my defense, I put this together in about two hours so some of it's a bit wonk? BUT. @threebea had a good suggestion for how/why the Armorer had Tony actually do things in the forge instead of telling him to scram:
Maybe Tony has been doing some 'crafting' on the side maybe droid repairs or modifications which is how the Armorer first sort of hears about him and then one day there's the kid that people have been mentioning the Stars aligned here's a pamphlet.
He can't make a living off gizmos in his situation since most of what Star wars has is advanced tech and to do anything impressive he would need more resources and more of an understanding of the mathematics of this universe (Stares at ceiling one night trying to figure out if the law of relativity would be a thing here).
That might slow him down just like… his math doesn't actually work here so on top of language he would have to learn things to do complicated stuff that he could already buy for a credit. But with armory it's concepts he knows well and adding weapons to armor especially no lethal ones is something he also knows.
Mandalorian armor with UNI BEAM
When it comes to canon, he knows THE big thing (Palpatine is Sidious) and basically nothing else.
He thinks he remembers the clones being Mando? but he's honestly not even sure he remembers the original Fett's first name correctly.
He knows the guy is a Fett, because Boba was a cultural mainstay for Tony's childhood, so like, it was nice to have some backstory, but he's honestly not sure how likely "that baby Mand'alor that went missing" is to being Boba's plot-relevant dad.
Could be an uncle for all he knows, or just a guy with the same last name.
@firebirdeternal:
I feel like to keep things fair Tony should be able to scale up a little harder than the average Mandalorian. Yeah all his tech knowledge is a bit out-dated and he isn't likely to get an arc reactor running in a way that'll be more powerful than anything locally available, but I feel like he'd adapt pretty darn quickly to available tech and start Improving Things
Nat's skills all translate extremely well, once she's not got stumpy toddler body she's basically back to her old level PLUS telekinesis and wibbly force nonsense
although I understand if that's also not the focus of the fic, being less "And now there's some Avengers Here (Powerset)" and more "And now there's some Avengers Here (Attitudes and Characters)"
Nat is very excited to Break Into Tony's Cave.
NGL this was initially going to be a Tony Raises Nat thing but I couldn't ultimately justify her NOT going the Jedi route after I realized I wanted her to be Sensitive.
There was also a discarded plot idea about her being a little older and having gone undercover in death watch, because Tony got kidnapped to work for them and got through to her, where she gets to use her Bites as a teen but I scrapped it.
I do think she successfully argues to her Master to visit him at 14 to get light armor though.
Nat's the sneakiest little initiate and also. Very, very controlled in the scary way during spars.
Bea:
Natasha as a Jedi is so good. Like, she would probably have a bit of dissonance between Jedi training and the training she received as a child, and it might help her work through some things.
Nat: I've known Yoda for three days but if anything happened to him I would kil-- wait uh (pivots) I would be very sad.
She would try to sneak up on council members. It is like a kitten stalking a cat on the outside, but also she's a grown woman and wants to be that good.
(AU of this If Quinlan ever saw this he'd adopt her:
Quinlan: Tholme I found a new padawan sister. Get training
Tholme: [literally just finished with Quinlan. Had planned to take a vacation. Meditate. Drink. He loves his kid but needs literally a moment here]
Tholme: She's seven.
Quinlan: I was four.
Tholme: …
Quinlan: She has a secret tragic background toooo I know you like that 😄
Tholme: [Sigh]
Nat: …wait is he supposed to be Sherlock Holmes. I think he's space Sherlock Holmes. Need to ask Tony if Star Wars had Sherlock Holmes?
lol yeah Tholme just feels like he could blend well with an avengers story, and a Black Widow story in particular)
Not joking when I say I considered if I could squeeze Tholme into the timeline.
Tony sends her music files that he thinks sounds Particularly Ballet to her because he remembers how much she liked dancing, as the main or even only positive thing from her Red Room training, and how she once said that if she hadn't become a spy, she thinks she'd have liked to be a ballerina.
The first time they see each other in person in years is her visiting for baby armor at 14 and is hesitant to hug him because like. Yeah he's her "brother" and there were a few years where they were acting as such and he was helping her with Basic Tasks that she doesn't like to think about too much because it's embarrassing, and they cuddled THEN, because she was Physically Baby, but they're just coworkers in reality, right? Should she hug him? If only to sell the bit to her Jedi Master?
Tony is also not the most huggy person and isn't sure if HE should hug Nat because he remembers jokey stabbing threats from when they were Avengers and like. Does she still feel that way, now that she's not a bumbling like tot?
They are both unsure of if hugging is on the table and it's the Jedi Master who says "you know, you're allowed to hug, if you want" under the impression that they aren't sure if the Jedi would allow it. And then the hug is very tight and loving because at least subconsciously they DID both want that.
The Jedi Master takes a pic.
Bea:
Jedi master: (aw)
It's one of those "we've been in life or death situations together and also grew up together kinda sorta and also we're trauma bonded," and the first opportunity to solidify Family as their dynamic they both jump in feet first.
And both of them were like. Extremely lonely children probably.
In different ways but still.
(It's why the Hawkeye plushie didn't make her CRY, per se, but she does start keeping it in her bed even though she's Too Old for these things.)
When it comes to hugging, Nat is understandably concerned about overstepping and like. "Taking" Morgan's place.
(I'm going with Tony and Nat being friends (or at least friendly) from A1 to A2, and during the blip she stopped by for dinner once in a while. Nat doing her best to bring Child Appropriate Gifts for Morgan (she misses being Aunt Nat for the Barton kids).)
Or as Bea put it:
Tony: Are you spying on me or are we doing people things?
Nat: Can't it be both?
Anyway, their dynamic is a weird little midpoint once they're in Star Wars but then they get to a point in the armor making where Tony takes a break on a bench and she slips in under his arm to cuddle and it's just Nice (even though he's kinda sweaty and gross from the blacksmithing).
Bea:
Tony: ….. so……. is Yoda… does he look like… is he….
Nat: …????
Tony: You saw the Muppets right? Is he still a Muppet?
Nat: [totally has seen the Muppets] what's a Muppet?
Tony: You're killing your brother, Nat ;A;
Also the comedy of having MULTIPLE "secret languages" that nobody can translate.
It's handy, too. Between her and Tony, but also lots of languages to give different uses to. Can teach one to a specific faction for communication.
OH, the poor Threepio units! She got stuck in a room with one once, and don't get my wrong, they can pick up a language fast, but they need to hear long enough sampling of it.
Nat: I'm not teaching you stop asking
I do agree too that Tony and Nat no matter their circumstances would be working towards stopping Palpatine.
Like is this a real space is this a dream is this another dimension that just happens to be like a movie in ours? Doesn't matter the dictator is going down.
The Jedi Master is somewhat aware of the whole 'used to be an adult, sort of' thing. I don't know that they believe she's linearly matured but probably they think it's something like what I did in Jedi Babies It's definitely more explicit with a mind healer she got assigned soon after arrival.
She didn't decide whether to play it straight and "get help" or just try to game the system until she was actually sitting down.
But she'd been having screaming night terrors about things she experienced in her first life, so.
Pixie:
She meets Anakin after TPM (if it's not avoided) when Obi-Wan's trying to settle him in and goes "ah, I know how to handle this kid."
At some point Anakin and Tony end up sending each other various schematics.
