#writing: repcomm

[izzyovercoffee]

29. Surprises. I default to Eme/Mereel but also I would thrive with any ship.

I KNOW I’M MORE THAN A MONTH LATE BUT HERE IT IS

Prompt number: 29. “surprises” Fandom: Mass Effect, Republic Commando crossover Ship: Commander Emeline Shepard / Mereel Skirata Rating: PG words: 1100~ Warnings/Tags: none that I can tell, ask to tag if needed Summary: Twice he’s surprising, and once where he’s surprised. Notes: I really meant for this to be a short thing, but then it got away from me (as ... apparently everything I write tends to do lmao). I hope you like it, Eme/Mereel always holds a special place in my heart 😭💕

xxix. surprises

  He comes around the corner a touch too sharp and a hair too fast and he nearly collides with the Commander—or he would have, if he were a very different man, and she a very different woman. As it stands, she sidesteps him in a swerve to be remembered for the ages, and his steps falter as he's compelled to watch her go. 

He's been on the ship for only one day, but one day is more than enough time to field a first impression.   

*

  Training on the Normandy is a rote affair—but not for lack of trying to change things up. Space, and resources, and time—they're all desperately limited by need, and availability. The inevitable end of everything is coming, and unlike the Krogans—and the other expat Mandalorian refugees—everyone else seems to take that as a demotivator.

Right up until Mereel hashes together an Armax-Arena-friendly simulator out of pieces and parts everyone else swears shouldn't be able to work together. 

He catches a glimpse of a rare sight—Emeline Shepard's smile—and counts his lucky stars. 

Right before Vega blows a new hole through his holographic head, anyway.  

* 

  Night cycle on the ship is an interesting affair—different from the rotations in the galaxy he fled from. It’s a bitterness he usually keeps folded politely away, out of sight and out of mind of those who wouldn’t or couldn’t understand—and shares in the rare call to one of his vode. But here, in the dark recession of the Normandy’s mess hall, under warm if dim light to simulate nighttime, he holds a mug of behot in hand and scrolls through the feed as it updates periodically on his datapad. 

He isn’t as alert as he should be—hours of missed sleep and high anxiety does that to a man, no matter how jatnese be te jatnese he might be—so he doesn’t pick up the sounds of careful footsteps as she comes around the corner behind him. 

Mereel doesn’t jump, he doesn’t startle, he doesn’t even react—just tilts his head up in muted surprise as she places down a plate piled with cookies on the table in front of him. She takes another step to the side, and takes a seat to his right. 

It’s still dark, and the lights are still low, and the Mess is just as empty as it was before, with only one more person in it that wasn’t him, but the mood shifts in a way he can’t quite pin down. 

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says. She eyes the datapad beneath his graceful fingers sliding over its surface, settled flat on the table. Her brow arches as she looks back to him. “I’m guessing you can’t either.” 

He wants to say something clever. Uphold the charming, devil-may-care appearance he wears in the light. 

But he’s tired, and she just brought him cookies, unprompted—and she doesn’t, can’t, know what sweets means to him, specifically, but it’s… 

What can he do? 

“You know,” he says, in the way he does when he can’t be bothered with a segue into another topic bridged from the one before, as he taps the datapad to put it to sleep. He leans forward so his elbows meet the table, and his hand can raise to motion emptily at the ceiling, “where I come from, the lights don’t change on big ships between the day and night cycle.” 

There’s something in her gaze that says she’s equal parts annoyed as she is curious, which, really, is par for the course when anyone converses with him, so he’ll take that as approval. 

“Never noticed it was a thing could be done,” he continues, “until I got here.” 

“Here, the Milkyway, or here, the Normandy?” 

He smiles at her, soft, as he reaches for a cookie. It doesn’t quite crumble in his hand, but it flakes and comes apart if he holds it too hard. The crumbs gather on his fingertips as he tucks it away between his teeth, and chews silently beneath the dim light. 

It goes well with the behot, which is a surprise all on its own. 

“Me and my brothers,” he says, “are a very expensive, very high quality product. And, generally, most don’t quite care to concern themselves with the emotional state of an object.” 

There it was. That bitterness that had settled in his heart. The sharp bite of anger he couldn’t quite contain, though he could easily redirect it, now, to and fro. 

“Who do I have to kill to correct that?” she asks, and his brows jump high on his head. 

It appears she has as much difficulty as him to control her anger when she’s sleep deprived. 

He smiles wider, suddenly fond of this mysterious Commander and her wayward cookies, and her style. But, of course, it was her style that brought him here to begin with, wasn’t it?

“Careful, Commander.” His tone flirts warm as he takes a sip of behot to clear his throat. “Get anymore heated, and I’ll wonder if this is less about justice and more about impressing me.” 

“Please,” she snorts as she leans back in her chair, casual and arrogant and altogether put together in the way he didn’t feel so late in the day. “You’re already impressed.”

He laughs, then—warm, delighted, and echoing in his surprise; and so, so careful not to be too loud and risk waking anyone within earshot. 

“I am easy to please,” he says, when he really meant to say impress, but the way she stares at him across the table makes him forget to correct himself. 

He reaches for another cookie.

“Mereel—”

“They’re long gone, Emeline.” He taps the cookie against the mug that holds his herbal tea, and watches the crumbs fall to the saucer it rests upon. “And if not dead then far, far away—and soon to be.” 

He lifts the cookie to his mouth and takes another bite. It crumbles, and parts fall onto the table, but he figures he’ll just clean it up later. The sugary sweetness is an immediate comfort, soothing and healing all in one.

And then she reaches across the table, and gently grasps his chin in her hand. He holds still as her thumb comes up, and swipes away the crumbs caught on his lower lip. 

“Good,” she says, low, and oh. His heart dances in his chest. 

They’re both tired—sleep deprived—and she’d given him plenty of space in the week, but now he finds himself caught in her orbit, unable and unwilling to pull away. 

He gently kisses the pad of her thumb just as she pulls away. 

“Don’t tease me,” he says. 

“You like to be teased.” Her eyes twinkle with amusement in the dark. She stands up, deliberately slow, and he doesn’t look away. “Enjoy your cookies.” 

“I think I will,” he says, as he watches her go. 

She rounds the corner, and out of sight—taking the long way to leave—and he takes a steadying breath. Heart still rattling awake in his chest, he rolls his head back and closes his eyes. 

Now how is he going to fall asleep, after that?

[izzyovercoffee]

Thinking about it more though... what would that have actually looked like? For the Nulls to meet a ghost of Kal’s sordid past, a memory he worked hard to outrun only for her to haunt his present, alive and well? Fulfilled in a life worth living without him beside her? How would the Nulls have reacted to meeting Ilippi Skirata Jiro?

In an ideal world, in an actual scene or situation where they would’ve encountered each other, I wonder if Ilippi would have seen the wear under Ordo’s eyes---from exhaustion, from stress, from managing too much on too little---and seen a reflection of her younger self. Would the hurt and the isolation of her younger years speak to the same struggles that Ordo feels in his constant and endless management of Kal’s movements in and around his brothers? Could she have reached him in a way Kal couldn’t, and ease his anxiety, or soothe the weeping wound that whispered he would never be good enough, that somehow Kal will soon one day see it like Ordo knows it, buried under the formless anger and defiance of a child carted to the flames? 

Ilippi could not know where that insecurity stems from, but she would understand why it continues to live.

I wonder if Ilippi could have seen the very same charm in Mereel that was what drew her to Kal in the first place, and yet also see the sharpened edge hidden beneath it. To see the invisible rope pulled taut around his throat as time threatened to run out before he could finish out the path Kal put him on, if he could save his brothers before the war took him? Would she see right through the easy jokes and reflexive deflection and cut into the core of it all, and in doing so, untangle the noose of his desperation?

If she could outlive Kal’s expectations, and thrive beyond them, then so wouldn’t Mereel?

Would that Ilippi had lived and visited them during the war, what would she have shared with Prudii? Would she have bothered, would she have tried to correct him on that anger and that resentment he carried for Kal? How would that conversation have gone, when she instead reminded him he doesn’t need that added burden? He carries too much on his shoulders, as it is, and he’s long since passed his breaking point. 

Would she have told him of the bitter loneliness and the isolation she suffered as she struggled to raise her children alone---removed from all familial support and friendships broken by distance? Would she have related to him that bitter resentment and that biting loneliness that she undoubtedly sees in him---not the favorite son, not the oldest, and forbidden from ever making meaningful connections because his “job” demands it of him? How terrible it must be, that he can never stop moving, that he visits a different planet, a different system, a different sector, every week---and because of a demand of constant movement he never truly consented to, he’s condemned to a solitude he chafes under?

If Ilippi were to meet Jaing, would she flinch from his sharp-toothed grin and the violence he carries in his shoulders? Would she move away from the anger that fuels him, turn away from his attempt at charm---a facsimile, an echo of what his brother perfectly captures and what he can’t seem to emulate---or would she find that, in and of itself, charming? It is true that she once saw Kal’s dark sides and sharp edges attractive, alluring, charming---even if it lead her to emotional ruin and a heartbreak she never fully healed from. 

Older, and wiser now, she would see the hurt for what it was. She would see the knife behind his eyes and guide him to understanding that he doesn’t have to carry it in silence, that in silence that very blade cuts him deepest of all, and that she sees him for who he is as a whole, not for the parts that encompass the pain he’s done or that’s been done to him.

I like to imagine that Ilippi is charming, and that when she meets A’den---A’den who is deeply sociable, if bitingly sarcastic, and holds a humor as dry as sand---she would share with him the memories of Kal when he was young, and angry, and unfairly charming on the days when he was good? 

But A’den hates to be lied to, and I doubt Ilippi would have reason to lie, whether outright or by omission. Not all days were good, not all memories kind, and I wonder---would she have also shared with A’den the bad days, the days she could not bear, the days that mounted until they outnumbered the good and she realized to protect her children they would have to leave?

Worse, though---would A’den find someone in her that could see what he saw in Kal, that he dared not bring up nor say out loud, even when he worked to circumvent Kal at every turn? Would he realize, through brief connections and conversations, that no matter who Kal tied the metaphorical knot with, the brutal storm he carried unchanging within him would invariably hurt the people he’s closest to? Would he realize that no matter how hard he tried, finding someone to “take care of” Kal would inevitably lead to heartbreak?

And now, speaking of heartbreak, I wonder if through that thread, would Ilippi find a connection with Kom’rk? She chafed under isolation forced upon her when she agreed to marry Kal---but Kom’rk chose isolation, chooses it even still. Kom’rk has to be forced to return home, begged by his brothers and convinced to trade for something worthwhile, for something worth more than the cost of returning to the Core---and, by extension, Kal’s side. Is it a point of humor, even, or a sore point of pain that, when pressed, triggers laughter (or else it triggers tears), and in that connection understands why Kom’rk always chooses to stay far, far away?

Something relatable, in the pragmatism of it all---to avoid conflict entirely, too tired, or spent, or burned out, to face it with someone who would always remain a stone, for better or worse. 

If only Ilippi Jiro had lived, would the Nulls have been given an opportunity to peer into a past through the lens of another. They’ve always been so terribly curious, proclaimed deviant for their defiance and condemned to die early, would they have been able to resist that very same temptation, that very same curiosity, to learn something new?

I honestly don’t think so. 

[izzyovercoffee]

@thesummerstorms replied to your post:consider: Republic Commando: Order 66, rewrite...

The ‘he’ is a little ambiguous: Kal is protecting Etain and Ordo kills him (somehow related to the chip thing maybe although I know we all normally ignore it at least for the Nulls?) bc that would be a gut punch

yeah, that’s what I meant.

I mean... I’m just rethinking the repcomm series, and how could it be changed to fit current canon, and say we put aside the Nulls being that initial test run of an alternative to the chips ... what would have happened during Order 66? Who else was there, that knew Etain was there and what she was (ie, a Jedi)? 

Who would’ve immediately noticed something inherently wrong with Ordo, who knows his mannerisms very, very well? And who went fucking ham on that bridge? Kal did. 

And just ... idk. to me, it makes sense that, in trying to smuggle Etain out of danger, and having that call received by Ordo a little later, and having that switch flipped in the middle of the mayhem?

Kal doing what he thinks is best, which is being a self-sacrificing bastard for better or worse, and Etain getting thrown somewhere out of sight, using his body as a shield because he’s not as quick as he used to be, but he knows Ordo well enough to know what Ordo’s about to do, even when Ordo’s not telegraphing his intentions. 

and it’s enough for Ordo to snap out of it for a second, or a handful of seconds, or long enough for Etain to get away---or get scooped up by Bardan and transported to safety. 

Ordo holding Kal in his arms as his buir is bleeding out for something he did but had no control over, and Kal reaches up, hooks a hand behind his helmet and pulls him down to him. Their helmets clink, soft. 

“It wasn’t you, Ord’ika. It wasn’t you. It’s not your fault.” 

The sound of fighting, and screaming, in his ears. Panic setting in, and he distantly hears himself falling apart, beneath the cold focus inside his armor. 

Even dying, Kal’s trying, tries, tried to reassure Ordo. It’ll be okay. Or, I forgive you. Or, I love you. 

But, oh gods, there’s so much blood and nothing’s stopping the flow and he’s fading too fast.

And then he’s gone. 

[izzyovercoffee]

Prompt number: 5. “I might just kiss you.”  Fandom: Republic Commando Rating: These hands are E for Everyone Warnings/Tags: Depression, panic attacks, wrestling with deep-seated internalized homophobia Summary: Fi just wanted to watch the sunset in peace, but the problem with being alone is that it gives room for his mind to wander.

##. don’t know what I’m looking for

  There were few places, in the dense grasp of forest and the tight snap of early winter, that Fi could find a good place to watch the lingering vestiges of light claw at the sky in its last breath of day. Still, he’d made it a habit to walk the boundaries of Kyrimorut and tread out into the woods, and find a place where he could watch the sky change colors, and watch the red streaks of late afternoon light linger long after the retiring of the sun.

But the night always came. It's inevitable. 

Some part of him, deep and buried and very, very, tired, knew that that kind of thinking couldn't help him---wouldn't help him---move forward in coming to terms with his... his... 

With himself.

There was a word he searched for---the searching less, lately, but still ever present and made worse in the grips of panic every time he realized he searched a little longer than he used to, than he remembered doing before.

The cold of the snow under his bare palms, and the rough bark scraped against the underside of his fingers, helped to ground him in a way that the other exercises, other coping mechanism taught to him, didn't. 

Freedom. That's what he had. A freedom to look into the sky and see the streaks of the dying sunlight and linger as long as he wanted outside in the open air and brisk night and not have to answer for his ignoring curfew.

He didn't have a curfew---as far as he could be found, and that everyone knew where he was, and where he was going.

Even that sounded like something less than freedom---the bitter, angry, disappointed and grieving part of him wanted to call those limitations suffocating. The better part of him, the part he wanted to actually be but still couldn't quite reach, knew the difference. They wanted, needed, to know where he'd be and how to find him because they needed to be able to make sure he was okay.

Before, his location was branded into him so they could monitor where he went and why, and for how long, while under the exacting eyes of the Republic. He had to answer to, and for, something that owned him. 

Now, "undead" as Mereel liked to call it, Fi was free. Actually free.

But the weight of something unnamed and unknown still choked around his neck and threatened, constantly, to pull him back under the tide of his grief and sweep him away.

He lifted his hand off the half-frozen bark of the tree he stood beside, and stared at the indents left behind in his palm. 

Only a couple hours before, he'd held Parja's warm hands between his own. He'd done the things he'd seen Ordo do with Besany---affectionate touches, closeness imitated in old holos like hugging, or cuddling. Things that, honestly, weren't so different from what Omega fell to after hard missions---except there was an implied weight to it now, that wasn't there with his vode before.

And in the cold of the end of day, with the dying light slowly extinguished by the encroaching night, he admitted to himself that he expected things to feel different. He expected...

He didn't know what to expect, actually. He expected something. Anything. Some kind of illumination in his head, or his heart, or something else that would make sense and he'd go "aha" and understand he was in love. He'd spent so much time daydreaming about what Darman had with Etain, or Ordo with Besany, and how he'd cherish this thing that eluded him and that those two found with the kind of shabla good luck Fi could never even imagine happening to him---

He slammed a balled fist against the tree. 

It shook, and snow tumbled off the cold branches above him, and a lump of cold-and-wet snow plopped unceremoniously down on his head. Pieces dripped and escaped the clumps to fall under the edges of his poncho, and chilled down his back.

What was wrong with him?

He flailed, and slapped the snow off his head and the back of his neck.

Couldn't he appreciate how lucky he was? 

Shivers tensed painfully up his spine.

Gods. 

He couldn't breathe. 

Why couldn't he see what was right in front of him?

The itching collar of his sweater felt like a noose around his neck, cutting off air. He clawed at his throat, at his poncho. 

How could he be so selfish? So stupid?

He ripped off the offending clothes, still struggling to breathe.

Why couldn't he just---

A hand found his shoulder. 

"Fi," a soft, familiar voice cut through the haze of fury that clouded his vision. He blinked rapidly, and felt that same panic rise in his chest. Where? Where was---? "That's enough."

Though he tried for anger, for frustration---reached for it where it had burned so shabla brightly in his chest just a few minutes before, he only found exhaustion. It made shrugging off the gloved hand of Jusik especially difficult, but he still managed it. 

"Go away, Bard'ika." 

Fi pretended he wasn't cold, that he wasn't just mindlessly ripping off his clothes in the middle of nowhere right off the boundary of Kyrimorut completely surrounded by snow-laden trees and snow-covered ground, his back dotted in now-frozen streaks of once-snow and his hair a mess with snow sticking to the shabla strands.

Wow. He's in trouble.

"Sure, I can do that," Jusik replied, just as even-toned and right under the edge of pleasant that really fires Fi's nerves and he can't exactly identify why except he wanted to punch him for sounding so understanding in the face of yet another of his pointless breakdowns. "As soon as you talk to me." 

"Maybe I don't wanna talk?" Fi snapped, and cringed, and fought down the lump gathered in his throat. "Maybe I just wanna be alone." 

"Okay," Jusik said, and Fi easily heard the crunch of snow as the other man approached. It was something to focus on, beyond his frustration giving way to violent shivers. "Okay."

Fi had been through worse. Survived worse. The cold barely fazed him, in his heyday. 

He was a long, long way from those days.

"But..." Jusik trailed off. 

Fi finally looked at him. Saw him, dark skin and sun-bleached hair a bright, warm contrast to the cold and monotonous shadows and white of the landscape. He held up the clothes Fi was sure he'd thrown to the ground---and searching the snow, found no trace of disturbance where they should have landed.

How long was he out there, watching over him?

"But what?"

Oh, Fi sounded defeated. That wasn't good.

Something shifted behind Bardan's eyes, and his expression tensed around the eyes, the mouth, as he fixed on Fi's face. 

Moments like this, Fi wished he was more like Mereel. Or Kal'buir. They knew how to read expressions better than he'd ever even tried to do. Better than anyone else he knew. They could look at someone, and just ... know what they were thinking. Or hiding, if they were hiding something, from just a look. From just a sentence. 

But he wasn't like them. He was barely even like himself.

Oh. Oh no. 

Fi pressed his fists to his eyes. Hot tears spilled from the corners of his eyes, and he struggled to push them aside, or away, or stop them entirely. 

"Don't---" Fi snapped at another crunch of snow, but---

But Jusik ignored him this time. 

"But it's cold, Fi," Jusik insisted, too close for comfort, but Fi couldn't bear to back away. He couldn't bear to move. "Let me help you. Please." 

"I don't---" Fi grit out between his teeth, and pushed through the sting of his breakdown to look at Bardan. "I can't breathe with that shabla thing." His knuckles grazed the edge of the sweater Jusik held, and he shuddered. "Don't make me wear it." 

"Then at least put this back on---" Jusik tossed the sweater over his own shoulder, and moved to put the poncho back over Fi's head. 

Fi didn't resist, though he closed his eyes as the soft knitted fabric fell over his shoulders and draped down past his hips. Instantly, he felt some warmth return, some stability, some...

Something.

He felt something he couldn't name as Jusik's hands rested on either side of him, holding him by his arms in place. Steady. And sure.

And different. 

And all that grief bundled up inside him. All that anger, and that rage, and that frustration, and confusion, and, and, and---all of it came tumbling out of him with a shaky exhale on the edge of another sob. 

"Whatever you're dealing with," Bardan said, "Just know you don't have to do it alone." 

Fi couldn't respond, couldn't think. All he could focus on was the weight at either side of his arms, of the rubbing motion Jusik took in a way that should have been comforting, but pulled at that anxiety, and that fear, and that panic buried deep down just as much and as easily as it steadied, and calmed, him.

For so long, Fi always...

Kal'buir was always so focused on "his boys" finding "good girls" to take care of them. Fi had taken that to heart so thoroughly he didn't... he hadn't... 

It never occurred to him to look elsewhere. 

And he buried that traitorous thought back down, deep, as he thought of Parja and found his grief and his confusion double suddenly, painfully, sharp in his chest. 

"I know," Fi's voice cracked. 

He searched for a way to say, to express, to speak his mind and define the ways in which he didn't, couldn't, allow himself to be any more of a burden than he had been so far. He tried to find a way to say how he couldn't forgive himself for not getting better, faster. For getting back to his old self, now. Sure, he understood that these things took time. That he had to work at it. That he might never be the person he once was.

But he remembered what it felt like, and that was a torture no one prepared him for. He remembered what it felt like to look and find the words as easily as he could find the sky, the cold, the snow, and Bardan on this day. He could feel his limbs want to respond with the precision, and the accuracy, and the finesse he worked his whole life to perfect, right up to the day his life was nearly taken from him. He remembered what it was like to be himself, and now that he was trapped in this body that didn't work, didn't respond, with a broken brain that cut him down at the knees and took from him who he thought he actually was---

Who was he, really, without everything that he'd used to define himself, before? Who was he? 

Who was he?

"Just breathe, Fi."

Bardan's voice pulled him back into the present, into the weight on his arms and the little warmth draped over him that still, somehow, managed to chase out the chill of the night. 

"It'll pass. Just breathe." 

Fi didn't know how Bardan knew, but he assumed... he just assumed... Well, it didn't matter what he thought.

Bardan knew, somehow---felt, somehow---the very struggle that wrought Fi's insides and brought them into knots so tight they crippled him, and that? 

That, above all else, made him feel less alone. 

Made that fear, and that panic, and that dread that'd settled so deeply at the base of his skull every time he closed his eyes, every time he slept and dreamt of the person he once was and woke to the shadow of who he is, he knew, somehow, that Bardan was right there---nearby, even if not nearby---as steadfast and grounded as the tree Fi accosted a while ago.

"I'm sorry," Fi broke. Cracked. Felt the grief rise back and overwhelm him. He reached out, finding that warmth that Jusik always seemed to radiate, and grasped him at the shoulders, just shy of the juncture of where his collar met his neck. "I'm so sorry."

"It's okay." Bardan's voice, still so solid, and warm, and understanding, and no longer scraping at Fi's patience so much as soothing his hurt. "You have nothing to be sorry for. Not here, and not with me." 

I could kiss you, Fi thought, delirious and exhausted, and buried that thought as quickly as the shifting winds picked up the snow once more. 

He knocked foreheads with Bardan, instead, with eyes closed and hot, angry, tears gathered behind them, and focused on breathing. 

"It's okay," Bardan whispered between them. "It'll be okay."

Fi didn't believe that. He didn't believe it for a second, not when he could still feel the man he once was in his broken body.

But the way Bardan said it...

The way he said it made him want to think it might be. 

And that was enough for him.

[izzyovercoffee]

Prompt number: 31. “Scared, me?” Fandom: Mass Effect / Star Wars crossover Rating: PG Warnings/Tags: none that I can tell, ask to tag if need Summary: Mereel and Emeline have a brief conversation, and less is said than mutually understood. Notes: @clingy-ghost ‘s Emeline Shepard here, pls forgive me if I don’t get her characterization right, it’s been a while since I’ve written something for her ;; ... 

##. it wouldn’t be the first time 

   “Can I ask you a question?” 

The air lights up in scattered laser fire, red bolts pinging through the hologram fast enough to shiver the simulation in their passing. His back armor plates crack against a solid piece of cover, as the simulation breaks in scattered holographic chunks of the environment---exploding under rapid machine gun fire. 

“Of course,” he answers, cheeky, sparing only the barest of glances at her from across the armax arena. “I’m an open book.”

A break in fire is his signal to bear down, over the top edge of his cover with the business end of long-ranged sniper. 

He watches the telltale interference breaking the hold of gravity momentarily as Shepard breaks out and back in to view. Her shoulder cracks, loud, against the image of a behemoth, and sends it into the air. He angles up… 

And pops it out of its arc in the sky. 

They clean up the last of the wave, and huddle down in the break between. 

“You’re not really an open book,” she says, and even through the helmet he could hear her amusement. 

“But for you, I try,” he says with a smirk---unseen behind his own armor, hidden behind the T of his helmet. 

“Hmmm.” She doesn’t seem too convinced, but the start of the final round rings out across the air.

“Later, then,” he says, and she sighs. 

“Later,” she replies---the aura of a biotic shimming in a disruptive field around her---and goes to meet the next wave.  

*

  Mereel kicks his feet up on the edge of the banister separating them from a drop of certain death. A false wind---one supplied by the artificial atmosphere that keeps this arm of the Citadel stable---breezes past them. He takes a long sip of his iced drink---something sweet, and sour, and layered with a nutrient mix he didn’t feel too interested in looking at too closely when he ordered it.

Emeline, on the other hand, went with the safer, smarter route---and ordered an actual meal.

“So, why Illium?” she asks.

He tilts his head to look at her. 

“You’ll have to be more specific,” he says. 

She chews carefully, as if trying to savour the bite before she moves on to the next. 

“Why are you remaining there?” she asks. 

Mereel thinks about the answers he could give. The possibilities? Endless. 

He goes with the truth: “It reminds me of home.” 

That seems to surprise her. Brows raised, she gently places down her utensils to either side of her plate. 

On the breeze he can smell a steak cooked to perfection, with a side that nearly makes his mouth water---or would, if he hadn’t take a hit hard enough to shake up his insides, and he wasn’t quite sure he could handle solids just yet. 

“You read the reports,” she says. “They’re evacuating the system.” 

“I know,” he says. He’s well, and fully, aware. 

Over the cool breeze, the life of the citadel’s endless sprawling city hums in the distance. The fading lights of an artificial night enshroud Emeline in a soft, hazy glow that arrests his attention. 

Part of him knows he’d give anything to stay at her side.

But that’s the selfish, self-serving, self-centered beat of his heart that never, ever, won out against the tireless need to move, to act, to answer to a calling greater than himself. To meet his responsibilities, and to keep the people who depended on him safe.

And he knows, or he hopes, that she understands. 

She returns to her meal. “The Normandy is heading to Thessia, next,” she says. 

It’s almost a relief, if fighting in the thick of an endless, nearly-hopeless war side-by-side could be considered relieving. That she’ll also be in Asari space, just in case… in case he could be made to change his mind … in case …  

He doesn’t want to think about it, actually. Only focus on what’s directly in front of him.

“I hope you don’t mind me tagging along,” he says. “And drop me off on the way.”

For the first time that evening, she smiles. “Obviously, Mereel.” 

It weighs in his chest, both heavy and light and defying gravity. Like his nerves all light up under her presence, like a song that brings him forward and into the present, into the living, and out of the sinking past. 

He holds a hand across the table, and she reaches to meet him. Her hand grips his, tightly, and it’s all he can do to hold her gaze under the weight of fear for what comes tomorrow. 

But tomorrow’s not yet met them. They have time, still. 

They’ll just have to make the most of it.

[izzyovercoffee]

Prompt number: 14. “I can't come back.” Fandom: Republic Commando Rating: PG Warnings/Tags: none that I can tell, ask to tag if need Summary: Bardan keeps Parja company at the shop on a rainy day. Notes: if I get any details wrong... my bad. also if it wasn’t clear... a lot of my repcomm writing is set in an Etain-lives AU, mostly bc her death makes zero sense in the narrative 

  Bardan lies on an old, well-loved chaise stitched together with the itching fabric sourced from the local farmers. The lights overhead blink in periodic outages---in tandem with the crack of thunder outside and the brilliant flashes through a single window at the far end of the machine shop. One hand facing up, lazy, a device slowly rotates a few centimeters above his palm. 

It’s not what he meant when he offered to help, earlier, but Parja insists he helps by lying there and “holding” the device.

To be honest, he’s not really sure what it does---and he doesn’t ask. 

She stands about two arms’ length from the chaise, arms crossed over her chest. Her tightly braided hair falls over one shoulder, the braids adorned with polished, painted beads that match her usual armor. 

“It’s not doing it,” she says, at length, after another two cracks across the sky outside. “Damn.”

“What’s it supposed to do?” he asks, curious. 

“Shock you,” she says. 

He looks away from the swaying, blinking lights, to the not-quite-cubed device in his hands. 

“Ah,” he says. “Well, it’s definitely not doing that.” 

“Is it doing anything?” 

He frowns in the direction of the device, and raises his hand higher. A small effect on the force and it rotates a tad faster over his palm. He waits a few seconds, watching it spin, and turns his head to look at her. 

“No,” he says. 

“Damn,” she says again.

Parja moves forward to pluck the device from its rotation above his hand, and shakes it between two fingers as she walks back to her worktable. He watches her go, lowering his hand over his chest while he adjusts the one cradling behind his head. 

“Need me to do anything else?” he asks. 

“Just stay there,” she says, and sets the device down on the table. She reaches for something else---her toolbox---and appears to switch her attention to another project. “Maybe tell me a story.” 

He’s not very good at stories. Mereel’s better at that sort of thing, and he’s a long, long way from Mandalorian Space. 

“I don’t have any stories off the top of my head, Parja,” he says, and wonders at what else he could, should, be doing. 

It almost feels like a waste, to lie here and do nothing when he could be outside, doing something. Filling up the time. Helping someone else. Helping Fi. Helping Etain. Helping the other Bralor, under whose care he placed Arla in spite of Kal’s disapproval. 

She moves across the machine shop as the storm clouds outside finally open up, and the torrential downpour crackles over the metal roofing of the establishment. Parja stops at an old speeder, one in obvious and desperate need of TLC---as Mereel likes to put it, tender loving care---and kneels by the engine.

“Do you ever miss it?” 

“Parja,” he says, “You’re never this vague.” 

“Bard’ika,” she says, imitating the way he says her name, “I know this is a touchy subject for you. I’m trying to be tactful.” 

“Please don’t worry about my feelings.”

“Someone has to.”

He frowns, and tilts his head to look back towards the ceiling, to the source of the ungentle drumming of the rains.

The quiet drags on---broken only by the storm---as Parja begins her work on the speeder. 

Bardan thinks about what she could possibly mean. Miss it. Miss what? The Order? The War? The Core?

Someone has to. And what’s that supposed to mean, too?

“That’s not fair,” he says. “You’re not the only one who cares.” 

She sighs, and then sets down one of her tools noisily onto the open toolbox lying on the hard ground.

“I know,” she says. “But of the two of us in here, it feels like I’m the only one.” 

Alright. He can’t have this conversation lying down.

He shifts, to groaning tired muscles, and sits up. His legs swing over the edge of the chair, and his feet touch the floor with a soft, barely-there scuffle. His fingers loosely interlace, hanging with his elbows at either knee and hands between them. 

Parja reaches out, to gently tug a stool over to herself so she can sit, and face both him and the speeder. 

“I just want you to ask me plainly,” he says, “because the Order only ever talked in circles.” 

The look she gives him is… studying. Curious. He can feel the gentle tug of that curiosity, that need, that urge to take apart and piece things together. It’s the look she wears when she plans to work on and rebuild old broken things and restore them to new---or, as she often says to him, better than new. Different, not wanting to reach for the impossible---not aspiring to be unbroken---but to have that brokenness shine through in its new form. 

It’s in everything she does.

It sometimes reminds him of how things could be, should be, but not how things were---in the Jedi Order, that is. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, and means it. He knows she means it, even without the unintentional taste of it on the force. “I haven’t met many ex-Jedi. I don’t know what the Order was like.” 

He feels the shrug rise his shoulders even despite not intending to do so---a bad habit he’s picked up from Mereel, maybe. Or Jaing. 

“I do miss it,” Bardan admits. “In the same way I miss a place, or a memory, through the lens of nostalgia---and then I endeavor to remember what it actually was like, when I feel myself doing so.”

Parja hums in response, neither an interruption nor a comment but an acknowledgement she hears him as she returns her attention on the project. She’s still listening---he knows this, too, from experience rather than any crutch to lean on through the force. 

So he continues. “But the Order was… there was a very real pressure, there, to adhere to standards that many of us couldn’t keep, or couldn’t reach. A standard that the… Masters, themselves, did not keep. And the consequences…” 

He pauses, chewing on the thought, feeling the weight of the pain in his chest and focusing on that pain as it threatens to claw its way up his throat. He lets himself experience it, feels it consume him, and allows it to dissipate. 

Parja waits, reaching down for another tool as she works. 

“...they were severe,” he says. “They always spoke of support, of acceptance, of love. And yet, those who needed it the most---the ones who couldn’t grasp the force easily, or what they were asked to do---were denied it, and dismissed.”

Parja pauses in her ministrations to look at him. “Dismissed?”

“No longer able to become Jedi,” he answers, and then frowns. He corrects himself: “Sorry. No longer allowed to become Jedi. Instead, they were sent to work elsewhere, under the supervision of the Order.”

“Work?” she asks, tense. “They failed, and they weren’t sent home?” 

He feels a bitter smile infect his frown and doesn’t fight it. “Too dangerous, when touched by the force, to be let loose on the universe. And because we were all taken as young, young children---many didn’t know they could simply leave.”

He almost laughs. 

“Many,” he adds, “Even if they knew they could, had nothing to their name, and no way to contact the family they were taken from. We’re not allowed possessions, in the Order, and absolutely no contact with family. I still don’t know if mine are alive. I wouldn’t know how to contact them, if they were.”

A bitter anger runs under that thought. A hurt, like betrayal, in his heart---but he also understands. He wants to think, to believe, that his birth family had no choice---that they sent him to The Order for a better life. Many were taken because, no matter what, it guarantees a better life.

Or it did, before... before the end.

Parja sets down her tool, and shifts on her stool to look at him fully. 

“You have a family now,” she says. She looks down, to the ground, and back up at him as another crack of lightning, then thunder, booms outside. “But I’m sure if you asked Mereel…” 

“I don’t want to,” he says, firm. “I’ve thought about it. I don’t want to.” 

She purses her lips and nods, and doesn’t say whatever it is she’s thinking though he can see she’s thinking something. She’ll probably gnaw on it for a few days, and then blurt it out the next time he visits the shop, and…

And Bardan finds he’s perfectly happy with waiting until then. 

“I’m free of the manipulation,” he says, unable and unwilling to hold the bitterness from his tone. “Free from having the phantom of failure wielded as a whip. And free from simply accepting that the death of good men should not somehow weigh on my conscience.”

Free, he thinks, from having the threat of attachments being found out, used against him, to keep him isolated and placid and content. Complicit. 

Parja places a hand on the speeder beside her, and beckons him look at it. He rises from the chaise to join her. 

“This speeder,” she says as she gently pats the top edge of the dented, rusted metal, “once belonged to a well known racer in the underground circuits, in Nar Shaddaa.” 

“It’s a long way from Nar Shaddaa,” he says, surprised. 

She smiles at him. “This racer pushed this poor speeder beyond its limitations. Do you see this damage, here?” Her gloved hands trace the places where the metal curls outwards, as if burst from the inside out. “And here?” 

Bardan looks at the damage. “I do.”

“Sometimes,” she says, “when pushed too hard, too far, for too long---with no stops in between---the speeder will respond in any way it can to release the tension.” 

She doesn’t explain, and he doesn’t need her to. 

“The driver died,” she continues. “This speeder would have been left in a junk pile, if not for someone who saw its beauty, its real potential, under all its supposed failures, and rescued it. She brought it here, to me, and asked for me to restore it in whatever way I see fit.”

Parja, proud in her talents, in her ability, and her side projects, gently pats the speeder. “But I’m not fixing it up to race, because it was never meant to race. It was meant to ride, and to duck in and out between the trees.” 

And she looks at him. “And there are no trees on Nar Shaddaa.”

He looks at the speeder. 

There are no trees on Nar Shaddaa.

“Am I really helping,” he asks, “coming here, and lying on your couch while you work?”

“Yes. More than you know.” She reaches out, and gently takes his hand in hers. “More than you can know.” 

She squeezes his hand, and then lets him go.

He lingers, unsure, but stands after a moment passes and returns to the couch. He sits down, first, and watches her attention pull away from him to return to her project. He watches her begin her work, sensing it’ll be some time before she’ll want to talk again, and takes a moment to breathe. To think. To settle.

And then he lies back down, one hand behind his head and another on his chest, and watches the ceiling lights sway as the storm outside rages on.

[izzyovercoffee]

Prompt number: 30. “I’m with you, you know that.” Fandom: Republic Commando [kind of?] Rating: PG Warnings/Tags: grief, again. I’m predictable like that Summary: Jango and Tani share a quiet, vulnerable moment before the suns rise where not much is said, but it’s enough. Notes: this is in an AU where Jango survives/fakes his death and goes into hiding with Boba, and Tani Gilamar is the one who lived, as opposed to Mij Gilamar. gently tagging @scatteredgalaxywide, I hope I do Tani justice.

##. his people call it aay’han

  She’s in and out of his life like a ghost, there and gone and back again as the days pass with the suns overhead and the planet cradling the lower horizon every fortnight. 

It’s not his right to complain. Not even his right to say anything, given his choices and the decisions he’s made, and the wounds he’s left behind in the wake of his undeath. It’s certainly not something he’s willing to raise, to mention or talk about before the time is right or ready---before he is right, or ready. But when will that time ever come? 

Will it ever arrive?

He can’t say. 

But when she returns, it’s not to an empty shell of a home with the remains of someone come and lost in the night. It’s to a home, warm and full and a table of food meant to keep everyone within well fed. She comes on the arm of one of twelve of her favorites, with a smile she pretends she only reserves for her nephew, or her son, or whatever it is she calls Mereel, these days. 

Jango doesn’t think to ask Mereel about it---after all, it’s really none of his business. That’s between the boy, the young man, and her, and has nothing to do with him. 

What does have something to do with him is the way Boba brightens, just a small amount, just enough that it makes a difference in the day-to-day between when she’s there and when she’s gone. And though it’s been years, and months, and days, between when he first pulled her aside from her smithy and away from her life and into the cold, sea-drenched world of hell contained in smooth and unmarked architecture, he remembers.

He remembers, still, that the day approaches. 

Not the one where they met, but the one where her life began and ended, or ended and began, in single moment. Depending on who you ask, and who you believe, ends and beginnings go hand-in-hand, and rarely in the same order every time.

Jango liked to believe in cycles. In beginning and endings linked in a chain that loops, in the same way that time turns with the evolution of the galaxy, or the universe, or the end of days with their beginnings. The day mandalorians died out was the day they were born again. 

The day Tani’s heart died was the day she lived again---different, and changed, and wounded and angry. Vengeful and grieving.

Jango knew the story through other’s retellings. He hadn’t asked the Gilamar directly, it’d be impolite. And he hadn’t, at the time, wanted to attract her ire when he already had to manage the peace between seventy-odd mandalorians and twenty-even bastards who were almost good enough to be worth the place they were given. 

But the day approached and Jango hadn’t expected Tani to show up---had expected her to go home, to find the place she’d always went on the eve of her late husband’s passing, and remember. And grieve. And do whatever it was she did to preserve that memory of him---ten years, now, between them. 

And instead he found her there, in his home. Seated at his table, earlier than the dawn, with a cup of caf clutched between her reddened hands as steam wafted up from the dark liquid trapped in ceramic. Nothing to protect the skin of her hands from the heat of her caf, and her gaze somewhere far, far away---all while fixed on the caf-press. 

It occurred to him how different they were, in a lot of ways. Ways that had them sparking arguments as often as they’d put them out. But they were the same, in more, and in that moment he didn’t bother with the pleasantries, or the apologies, or the miite that didn’t matter.

He took a seat beside her at the table, laid his hands on the wood he’d carved himself, and brushed his knuckles against hers. He waited for her to return, to come home inside herself and blink glistening eyes and let out a shaky exhale.

Tears didn’t fall---and he figured they wouldn’t, but he never could tell, with her. He wondered if that’s where Mereel got it from---between Tani and Kal, it was a wonder Jango ever worried Mereel wouldn’t know how to express himself. That was, it seemed, an issue that was uniquely Jango’s own. 

“You’re almost out of caf,” she said, as she slowly loosened her death grip on the mug, and twined her fingers with his. 

Her hands were not soft, not smooth, not delicate in the ways many aruetiise from Coruscant expected traditional women’s hands to be. A blacksmith bore her life’s work in her hands, and her armor, and her heart---and he felt it here, in the quiet of early morning before the suns came around the planet in the sky. 

“Mereel was supposed to smuggle some in a few days ago,” Jango said. “He’s late.” 

“I take it that’s not unusual?” Tani asked, and moved her other hand from the mug. He watched as she pressed her thumb into her eyes, wiping away the evidence of her memories. 

“Not at all,” Jango said, and punctuated with a long-suffering sigh. “He’s too much like his namesake.” 

Tani smiled at that, eyes closed as she sighed. 

They remained there for a time---hands held with fingers intertwined, in the dark of his kitchen, the caf-maker keeping the caf warm as they let the seconds pass by.

Every minute Jango breathed, there, was a minute, a moment, stolen from the jaws of death. From what he knew, Tani likely felt the same, in her own way, for her own life. 

That was another thing they had in common, too. 

And they never talked about it. Their shared commonalities---the pain points in the arc of time’s passage that, when pressed, opened them up to a world of pain they never intended to share, with anyone. Yet here they were.

“I’m with you,” Jango said, breaking the quiet. Something in him said it wasn’t the right time, and they weren’t ready, but he knew---he knew there would never come a right, or a ready, to his liking. Nothing ever did. “Know that.” 

“I do,” Tani said, and squeezed his hand in hers. “I know.” 

And that? That felt right, enough.

[izzyovercoffee]

Prompt number: 28. “Enough! I heard enough.” Fandom: Republic Commando Rating: These hands are E for Everyone. Warnings/Tags: none that I can tell, ask to tag if need Summary: Things get a little hairy when a temper runs short. Notes: A sketchy attempt to get a feel of a scene in my head, but I think I’ve come up a little short and ooc. IDK. Idk. I imagine Bardan has a temper, when pushed too far, but he’s about as hard to write as I thought he’d be.

##. you’re welcome to try me

  Just a pin drop could shatter the silence.

All eyes on him. Arms raised in either direction, as if he tried to physically separate two people---but there’s no one at either palm.

“Udesii,” came the soothing voice of Kal’buir, eyes wide and face calm, pretending for disaffected. Bardan sensed differently. “Relax, Bard’ika. What’s gotten into you?”

Jusik heard the static under his words. Felt the encroaching storm of words, questions, implications jumbled together in a rising tide of things no one ever said aloud but started to poison in between the lines.

What’s gotten into him?

Etain was in a bacta tank, no better than a corpse.

The AWOL clone troopers chafed in that ‘safe haven’ daily from claustrophobia.

There was a woman---a woman he rescued, a woman he kidnapped---in more endless silent agony than Ordo had been when Bardan had first met him.

Everyone’s so loud, and Kyrimorut was so quiet and Jusik…

He'd had enough.

“What’s gotten into me?” he asked, lowering his arms with his focus on Kal.

Five sets of eyes on him in the central room, the karyai, all dead silent save for breathing.

Someone’s nervous. Someone’s tired. Someone’s anxious. Someone’s thinking really, really, hard, and it felt like not now or not here or not like this.

“Kal---”

“Hey, Bard’ika, can you---oh,” a voice interrupted from a door behind him. The frustration clouding Jusik’s attention parted under the warm, cheerful, endless humor of Mereel. “Sorry to interrupt, but I need Bardan.”

“Sorry, Mer’ika,” Kal said, voice delicate, like trying to soothe a wild, rabid animal. “We’re in the middle of something.”

“I’m afraid this can’t wait.” Mereel sounded honest, sincere, deeply apologetic. He felt…

He felt like honest laughter and an electric chord pulled taut and ready to burst, held in perfect stasis just waiting to snap.

“Now,” Mereel said, closer. Bardan flinched under Mereel’s hand on his arm, but didn't shrug him off. “Please.”

There was something Zey used to say to him when he was a young padawan. Something like, ‘When you’re given the opportunity to take a step back, take it. You never know what opportunity a little distance can grant you.’

Was that an opportunity, or a distraction?

It was only a distraction if he forgot what he’s so angry about.

So Jusik said nothing. He pushed his chair back the rest of the way from his half-stand of before, and walked out with Mereel. It was a short walk to the open door, and the brisk, cold air of late winter. The snow on the ground's less like snow and more like ice, and Jusik had just enough time to grab his coat before losing sight of Mereel around a corner.

“What is it?” he called out after the null.

“Tell you on the way,” Mereel said---once more sounding deadly serious, absolutely apologetic, while simultaneously feeling nothing of the sort.

Jusik knew Mereel. He knew what Mereel felt like, anxious and tense. Even more, he knew Mereel in emergencies.

“If you’re just---”

Mereel halted in the snow and held up a hand to Jusik, squaring a sharp glare over his shoulder in his direction. His eyes twitched to the right, as if to look past him, and to the left centered on him again. Twice.

Someone followed them.

“Kal’buir, I swear I’ll make it up to you,” Mereel started---

“I’d rather you didn’t, Mer’ika. You’re not the one scaring everyone.”

He sounded so reasonable. So understanding. So sympathetic.

Bardan almost forgot why he’s angry in the first place. Bardan felt the guilt, and the anxiety, the draw of something learned in the way he wanted to turn around and apologize.

He thought of Etain floating in the tank, not sure if she’ll ever open her eyes again, feeling the weight of something in that room with her, every time he entered it to see her... and he couldn't find it in himself to follow through with an apology.

“I know we’re all under a lot of stress, Bar---”

He gritted his teeth. “Where are we going, Mereel?”

“Gotta take my speeder. Sorry again, Kal’buir, only room for two.”

Mereel tapped his gauntlet, and it beeped in a soft melody Bardan recognized as the unique alarm he’d installed into his newest pet project about a week ago. Kal tried to say something, but it’s drowned out by the speeder arriving from overhead, engines blaring in an excess of noise. It took a second for Mereel to hop on before Bardan followed, and he held secure to Mereel as the engine roared. They set off---spraying snow and ice across the ground as they jetted away, in the direction of Keldabe. 

Later, Bardan would remember to thank Mereel. 

But for the time being, he only stewed in frustration, and relief. 

Everyone's tempers ran short, lately. He just hadn't expect his to come to an end so soon.