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Mapping Your Body

Frankie Morales x Reader; 751 Words

Warnings: talk about injuries and scars

A/N: Thinking about Frankie being shy, and possibly self-conscious of his scars.

Your finger traces along the puckered, light pink line across his cheek bone. 

‘Just one more to memorize’ 

Frankie had a lot of scars. His limbs were littered with lines and marks. Monuments to his sacrifices, adventures, and even clumsiness. Some were new, some were from back way before you even knew him. Some had incredible stories attached to them, that made your side hurt from laughter. Some of them carried such close calls, you couldn’t deal with listening to them without feeling the floor fall from underneath you. 

There was a fairly large. yet faded splotch on his knee from when his cousin accidentally knocked him off a bike. Whether or not the bike was made for a 7 year old and he was 16 was immaterial to the story. It hurt, and he ended up nearly getting gangrene from it. And he will remind you of it over and over again. 

Keep reading

ghosts

—CHAPTER FOUR: sour guilty sickness

pairing: Javier Peña x f! reader

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a/n: well it took a while but here she is ! things are turning a bit of a brighter corner here but don’t worry, the angst will be back soon enough !! thanks for waiting yall, I’m so glad to finally get this out !! hope you enjoy !!

The version of him that you photographed was the man he wished he could be.

Unburdened. Happy. In love.

That man, that version of him, didn’t exist. Not really. Not for any longer than it took you to take the photo in the first place.

Reality was darker. Blurrier. Emptier.

The man in the photos was never suffocated in darkness or stalked in shadows, yet he spent his days drowning in the deepest depths of humanity’s darkest days. The water was at his head, every breath was a fight, and there never seemed to be a light at the end of the tunnel. Another day, another massacre. Another mission, another mistake, another man who didn’t get to go home, another family left with a hole that no rousing speech, commendation, or memorial could ever fill.

The man in the photos was never out of focus, yet Javier couldn’t remember a time when things had been clear, when the line between good and bad wasn’t an indiscernible mess he had no chance in hell of ever making sense of. There was blood everywhere he looked, it stained his hands and everything he touched, he could scrub for hours and he still felt wrong holding you close. The horrors he witnessed, the horrors he executed, all of it lined the uneven, narrow passageway that separated the good from the bad. It was grey, blurry and messy. Not sharp edges, no clean cuts.

And the man in the photo was never alone. That just wasn’t fair, because all Javier ever felt was alone.

The photos always captured him as a man of the world around him: gently examining tomatoes on your instruction as the two of you moved through the market overflowing with life, laughing shoulder to shoulder with Murphy in the packed booth of a bar with his fingers cradling the neck of his beer, holding your hand or touching you someway even if you were out of frame. The photos painted him as a man who was never alone, but he was, he was so painfully alone. In the darkness surrounding him, in the blurred alley that existed between the lines, even in bed as you slept beside him, he was alone, trapped in the horrors that haunted his lonely mind.

There were moments when he could forget, moments where the hot press of your mouth along the length of his neck lit a fire of warmth in his chest and kept him on fire for hours while his hands clung to your skin, moments where the soft hold of your hand found his, your linked grips swinging between the two of you as you walked through the humming streets as the golden glow of the setting sun settled over the two of you, moments where the two of you felt like the only two people in the world and he could never imagine ever being without you. There were moments, plenty of them, but it was never enough.

He felt empty in a way your photos could never capture, alone in a way he never shared with you. In a way he never shared with anyone.

The man you photographed was the man he wanted to be. The man you photographed was the man you deserved.

Waking up to that man staring back at him was plainly mocking and exactly what he deserved.

The photo had slipped from the mess of photographs stacked in your lap and found itself a place to rest against the flat of the bed between where you sat up, already awake, and where his head rested on the edge of his pillow as the morning finally woke him. It was a photo of him, unburdened, happy, and in love.

As aged as it felt, he knew it had only been a few months ago. A Sunday. A simple Sunday.

He had lost you in the street, or at least, he thought he had. Not intentionally, but in the excitement of the crowds pouring out of every church that lined the streets of the neighborhood, it was relatively easy to do. His attention was pulled one way and yours the other. A small cart of flowers had been his hook, catching him out of the crowd and reeling him over. Buckets and buckets of beautiful flowers bunched together in bountiful bouquets, the aroma itself could have kept him there for hours.

“For someone special?” The older woman sitting beside the cart asked, her accent thick, as soon as she spotted his interest and he had no chance in hell of hiding his smitten smirk, even as he replied with a short nod of his head. “A beautiful girl?”

“The most beautiful.” He conceded.

She gestured towards a particularly large bundle but he shook his head, pointing to a different collection, smaller but no less beautiful.

“Ah… simple, good choice.”

He handed over a few folded bills and she nodded graciously, wishing him luck as he pulled the bouquet from the cart.

For just a second, maybe even less than that, he lingered. He brought the flowers to his nose and took in a deep breath of beauty, the same smitten smile still sitting on his lips as he gave one last nod to the woman and moved back into the crowd. He hadn’t seen you through the crowd, just a few yards away, capturing the moment. You had caught back up with him seconds later, intertwining the fingers of one hand with his and accepting the flowers with the other, a surging smile stuck on your face as the two of you continued your walk.

It was a good picture of him. Not of Javier, but of the man he wanted to be. Unburdened. Happy. In love.

If only he could be. If only it were that simple.

You turned as you heard him rustling in the sheets beside you, a soft smile sitting on your lips as you watched him pick up the picture and admire it for a minute. “Good morning.”

“‘Morning baby…” He hummed back, returning the photo to your lap.

There were at least twenty photos there, a couple of him, a few of Connie and Steve, both separate and together, and a couple duplicates of photos you had taken for work, streets lined with people, small cultural centers and jaw-dropping landscapes of the gorgeous Colombian nature. This wasn’t exactly a regular routine of yours, but every month or so, you’d assemble a collection of your favorites and find a place for them among the pages of your worn leather journal. Your private worn leather journal.

That wasn’t to say he never saw inside it, but it was yours to let him see. If you weren’t there to open it, it was never opened, no matter how overwhelming the affliction of curiosity could be sometimes when you left it out on the counter, he knew better.

There were six or seven of them in total, but the oldest ones typically stayed tucked away. This was the one you had kept for as long as he had known you though, your affectionately termed Colombia edition. In between the photos and their detailed descriptions scrawled beneath in your unique script, you filled the journal with general descriptions of your life, of the culture around you, and everything you’re feeling. Part of him has always wondered what you had written about him, a separate part of him, the part that always won out, never wanted to know.

“You slept in…” your words trailed off once your stare moved back to the selection of slices of your life in your lap. “You haven’t done that in a while…”

“Yeah.” He huffed, rolling onto his back as he rubbed the last of the sleep from his eyes. Lulling to the side, his head turned and his eyes stayed on you, admiring every inch of your profile as you worked.

Your smile stayed soft. Gentle. Miraculous. “That’s good…”

You deserved better than him. You deserved the man in the photos and he wasn’t that.

He needed to talk to you, to tell you why life had been hell for the two of you for the past few months, to tell you why he was keeping you up at night tossing and turning, terrified of his own mind. There were things he didn’t know how to talk about, things he didn’t know how to tell you, but that just wasn’t fair. He loved you and that meant something. Day after day, you begged him to talk to you, and he owed you that. He owed you more than the fear of losing you.

He just wasn’t ready yet.

Rolling back over, he positioned his head by your lap, laying a gentle kiss to the skin of your thigh. “How long have you been up?”

“Just about an hour or two,” you bit the end of your pen cap off to write something on the back of a photo of Connie in her scrubs getting back from work, and continued on, your words garbled by the cap between your teeth. “Whenever the sun came up.”

By this time on any other day, you’d already be out, either exploring every corner of the city or out as far as the soldiers would let you get into the surrounding jungle on your own. It had been a long time since he woke up beside you. He pressed another lazy kiss to your thigh. He missed you.

Another kiss. And another kiss.

“Javi…”

Another kiss. He’d take as many as he could get before things came to a painfully inevitable head.

He wasn’t naive, he knew you had seen bad things before. Colombia was far from your first rodeo when it came to nations in disarray, be it war, genocide, drug trade or dictatorships, he knew that. You weren’t a photographer, you were a photojournalist. He knew that.

There were things you left out when you told your exciting stories at the bar, parts of your cultural escapades in South East Asia or the Middle East that didn’t come with chuckles and smiles. He saw the way your stare absconded when Steve pressed too hard in a direction you weren’t quite willing to go and the chuckle you offered as cover as you reached for your drink and changed the subject skillfully. He listened to the things you told him beneath the blanket of darkness in his bedroom, before it became your shared bedroom, hushed whispers covering for your voice cracks as the details caught you. And he had read more of your journals than anyone else, he read passages you didn’t typically share and he saw some of the photos folded between the pages while others were showcased openly.

One was just a little girl. The folded half of the photo had caught his undeniable curiosity when a phone call interrupted you while showing him some of your older work. He hadn’t asked, he had just opened it. It was a little girl. Big smile, beautiful brown eyes. Just a little girl. There were hundreds of photos filling your journals, many of them children, but this one was folded. Hidden.

And when you returned to the table, you folded the picture shut and he knew better than to ask.

Just like he knew better than to ask when he first noticed you shying away from his gun. He never thought twice about leaving it out openly before you first showed your hesitancy and he never thought twice about putting it in a drawer after you had. He knew it wasn’t a typical civilian gun-shyness, he knew there was a reason for it.

He knew you had seen bad things before, but this wasn’t just that. He hadn’t just seen bad things in his line of work, he had done bad things. Too many bad things.

Another kiss.

Eventually, you stopped writing and recapped your pen. “Javi…”

“I know, baby.” He laid yet another kiss along your skin, actively avoiding your stare as he felt you shift to look down at him. “I know.”

“You’re going to have to talk to me…”

A rough sigh escaped his tight chest as he pressed his forehead into the curve where your thigh met your hip. Muffled, his words vibrated against the fabric of your loose-hanging tee, baggy around your hips. “I know, baby.”

He did know. He really did. But that didn’t make it any easier.

As his eyes clenched shut, buried in the warmth of your side, he could feel you shuffling around, stacking up the photos and abandoning your work by the foot of the bed. He thought it was just so you could turn all your focus to him, but you kept moving, adjusting until you laid back against a carefully constructed mountain of pillows. He readjusted almost automatically, resting his head in your lap as your fingers wove themselves into his hair.

“I miss you, Javi…” your hand brushed the flattened mess of hair back out of his eyes, carding through all of it strand by strand. “You’ve been here this whole time but I… I miss you.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to leave Javi, that’s the last thing in the world that I want to do, but you’ve gotta work with me here. This is new for me too, alright, staying in one place is new for me…” he pressed a kiss to the indent your skin had made on itself while you were sat up for so long, urging you on as your voice grew weaker. “I want to stay here. With you.”

He could hear every word you weren’t saying just as clearly as the ones you were.

Don’t give me a reason to leave, you said. This is your last chance.

He owed you more than the fear of losing you. He owed you the truth.

“Things are bad here, baby. They’ve been bad for a while, I know, but they’re getting worse.” Still, he couldn’t find the words he needed to. Vague wasn’t what you deserved. You deserved answers. “I’m doing a lot of bad things. Bad things that I can’t… I can’t bring home to you.”

“But you do.”

He sucked in a sharp breath, dipping his stare from yours and instead settling his eyes on the stitched hem of your shirt where it rucked up across your stomach. “I don’t want to,” he corrected himself and you seemed to accept that for now as his breath released in a ragged cascade across your lap. “There are parts of me that I don’t want you to see.”

“You mean parts of your job.”

No. He didn’t.

He had grown too comfortable pulling a trigger to separate himself from his work anymore, the guilt never went away but he stopped hesitating. If a man pointed a gun at him with the intent to kill him, then he did the same. It didn’t matter that he was doing things for the right reason anymore, at some point, a line needed to be drawn. Doing bad things for good reasons sounded just in theory, but he was doing more and more bad and coming out with less and less good.

Carrillo. Los Pepes. How much was too much? When was he going to be able to look at himself in the mirror again?

“Javi…”

“I know that the guys I’m fighting are much worse than me, but the lines keep getting blurrier, and what I’m willing to do to stop them… at some point…” He lost his breath, and no amount of gentle strokes through his hair could get him to keep going.

“Baby…” you cooed, dragging your nails along his scalp as his eyes fell shut. “I’ve known my fair share of bad men, you aren’t one of them.”

With his eyes shut, his mind had free reign. Over and over again he watched Carrillo line the boys up in the alley, over and over again he watched the kids talk back to him. They didn’t think he would do anything. They were just kids. Over and over again he watched him level the gun to the kid’s head and pull the trigger. Over and over again.

Extracting your hand from his hair, your warm palm moved down to his cheek. “Bad men don’t think like that, Javi.”

His head shook but your touch remained constant.

“Javi, baby, what is it? What do you keep seeing?”

Your touch was too soft, your gentle hold bordering on suffocating. He couldn’t breathe. Over and over again, the trigger pulled, the gunshot echoed, and the kid dropped.

He left a numb, barely there kiss to the hem of your shorts where they laid on your thigh, and pulled himself up. It was a weak promise he made to you, to cut back on his smoking, you knew that when he made it, yet he still felt guilty rolling over and reaching for the half-empty pack he pulled from his pockets last night and left on the nightstand. He could feel your eyes lingering on the tension held taut between his shoulders, he could feel the concern smothering your stare, he could feel the weight of it chilling his spine.

“Javi…” he could hear you sitting up behind him but he didn’t stop, he threw his legs over his side of the bed and lit his cigarette with an effortless flick of the lighter. Your hand found his shoulder and he flinched. “Javi, I—”

“He was just a kid.”

He could feel the comforting confidence leave you, your grip losing all its strength where it lingered on his shoulder. You didn’t pull back, but you might as well have, your touch was numb. He inhaled a deep breath of smoke, but the warmth was nothing compared to the chill emanating from you the second the word ‘kid’ left his lips.

“Javi, what happened?” There was an edge to your tone, a careful cut.

“Carrillo he… he told me that he wanted to send a message. I didn’t ask what that meant… I trusted him so I didn’t ask…” He coughed out, wiping over his face with his hand as he folded even further in on himself. Again and again, he watched the kid drop. Again and again, the echo of the shot rang through the alley and became all he could hear. “Escobar, he uses kids as spotters, to keep an eye on the military. Just boys, maybe as old as fourteen, and young as seven, maybe eight. And Carrillo, he wanted to round them up, he wanted to send a message.”

This was as quiet as the room had ever been.

He could hear each of your stilted breaths, every rustle against the sheets as you shifted carefully behind him, every beat of your heart.

He sucked in another breath of smoke. “He lined them up in this alley, he was talking to them, he was trying to scare them but… but one of the kids wouldn't shut up. He didn’t think… I didn’t think…”

Your grip found itself again as you started pulling the rough puzzle pieces he choked out for you together.

“I just stood there watching when he pulled the trigger. Everytime I close my eyes, I see it again and I can’t…”

“Javi, baby—” Tighter and tighter, your grip grew as you held his shoulder, fingers digging in as he slipped further and further away. Each flash of memories in his mind took him deeper and deeper down, until the darkness of his guilt began to swallow him whole.

“I just stood there, I let it happen. I knew something was different with him, I knew and I just let him do it—”

Your other hand ran up his back, your body heat pressing closer in behind him as the chills settled in his spine grew constant, a cold wind swirling in his chest. “Javi—”

A violent breath of smoke fell from his lips as he scoffed, disgust bubbling up from deep within his gut. “I didn’t even try to stop him.”

“Could you have?”

The brutalized scene playing behind his mind froze. “What?”

“I only met him a few times but he wasn’t a man to compromise. If you had tried, do you honestly think you could have stopped him?” Your voice was closer now, right over his shoulder as you tentatively wrapped yourself around him from behind. Every inch of your touch was timid and hesitant, like you thought one wrong move would shatter him into a thousand pieces.

Maybe you were right.

He smashed the butt of his cigarette into the ashtray on the nightstand as his tone grew deeper, rough with a tone he never took with you. “I was standing right there.”

“You just said you didn’t know what he was planning to do, Javi—”

“I should have known.”

“Javi—”

“I watched his men march them into the alley, I stood there when they lined them up on their knees,” he cursed, rubbing rough over his face, incapable of looking back at you. “I should have stepped in before it ever got that far.”

Your lips pressed weakly to the back of his neck. “Okay.”

He shook his head and stubbornly fought, “I should have—”

“I’m not placating you, Javi, you’re right.” You sighed, leaning forward to rest your head between his shoulders. “It’s okay.”

“Things are bad here, baby… I do bad things and I don’t want to…” curse you with it.

One of your hands scaled up the treacherous landscape of his back, winding your fingers into the short bits of his hair hanging down his neck. “Hiding things from me isn’t going to keep me here. I don’t need you to protect me.”

Again, his head shook, with the last of the strength he could muster. “That doesn’t stop me from wanting to.”

No, you pressed a soft kiss between his shoulders again, you knew that.

Wrapping your hand from the back of his neck around to his cheek, pushing his face towards his shoulder where yours met him. “You’re not a bad man, Javi, it’s just a bad situation.”

His voice broke, weaker than you had ever heard him as his hand reached up to pull yours from his face. “Then why does it feel like this…”

“Because it does,” you sighed. “Because when bad things are happening and you can’t do enough, that kind of sour, guilty sickness is all you can feel.”

There was a knowing bite to your words, a telling drop of your stare from his.

“That and anger.” your chuckle broke through your solemn resolve. “I don’t know, I spend a lot of time as a bystander, I can’t speak to what you do. But I know about seeing a lot of bad and not being able to do enough good to make a difference, I know a lot about that anger.”

The years he had under his belt in Colombia were nothing compared to the years you had on him. Before moving here, before picking up this fight against the narcos as his own, he had been a low-level agent in the States. That wasn’t to say he didn’t see his fair share of violence, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t a day to day struggle for humanity. The same couldn’t have been said for you. He asked once, how long you had been traveling for, and you had answered mainly with the shrug of your shoulders.

When he pressed on for an actual answer, you shrugged again. “I don’t know, I was in school for journalism and bored out of my mind. A friend suggested a trip to Mexico and I didn’t ever really go back to the States after that.”

Whatever he was feeling, god, it must have been nothing compared to the years of compounded anger settled in your bones. And still, your touch remained the softest thing and your work the most beautiful. You could take the horrible city around you and find a way to highlight the glorious humanity afflicted by the shadows of reality. You could take the ghost of a man he was and capture the unburdened levity of his smile, the happy crinkle of his eye, and the loving center his job forced him to bury deep.

He loved you more than life itself, but more than that, he cherished you. Because for you, he wanted to be better. For you, he wanted to be the man you photographed.

At the very least, he owed you that.

The two of you stayed like that for a while, not knowing how to move from there, but when you finally got up and pressed a gentle kiss to his forehead, he at least knew Brazil was off the table.

For one day, one quiet morning, it was enough.

-

tags:  (let me know if you’d like to be tagged or untagged) @cinewhore @tiffdawg @gravegoth @xjaywritesx @leonieb @burnt-august @doodlingbreak @mistermiraclee @theocatkov @lovinglokiforever @friendscall-me-mom @lazybeeches @sesamepancakes @rogueonestan @videogamesandpoorlifechoices @paperbag33 @witchyavenger @littlevodika @hoodedbirdie @nominalnebula @seasonschange-butpeopledont @thehippiequilter @anu-simps @republicansithlord @mrschiltoncat @hnt-escape @frietiemeloen @mishasminion360 @melaniermblt @phoenixpascal @justanotherblonde23 @justrunamok @yooforia @gracie7209

Reblog if you’d be okay if your friend came out as transgender

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Hi,

It’s your friendly neighbor fanfic author here. In the light of this apparent new trend of people feeding unfinished fics to AI to get an “ending,” and some people even talking about “blanket permissions,” let me just say this:

I EXPLICITLY FORBID ANYONE TO FEED MY FICS TO AI. DUDE, THAT IS ABOUT THE LEAST RESPECTFUL THING YOU CAN DO. IF YOU DO IT, SHALL YOU BE EXCOMMUNICATED FROM YOUR FANDOM AND WALK ON LEGOS BAREFOOT TILL THE END OF DAYS.

That is my anti-permission.

Thank you for your attention.

We need a trending hashtag for Billy's injustice. The way they did for Barb. Some way to bring him back #GhostBilly? #BringBillyBack? #TheBillyFix-It? #FreeBillyHargrove? Reblog to make the Duffer Brothers see

Self Check-Out

Title: Self Check-Out

Pairing: Marcus Moreno x reader/you (no y/n) (f!reader)

Word Count: 1260

Rating: T

Warnings: Language.

A/N: For @brandyllyn for my Back To Action Prompt List the prompt was “Marcus Moreno: asking a stranger to hide you”

Marcus Moreno Masterlist – Author Masterlist – Taglist– Tip Jar

You knew she was following you.

Dammit.

Shit.

Fuck.

All the curses.

Turn right at the next aisle and — shit shit shit they were stocking, the whole fucking thing was just covered and you couldn’t get the cart out and you couldn’t….

You backed up fast, so fast the little boy in your cart said Wee and nearly dropped your phone onto the floor.

Your eyes were darting around and you nearly bowled into some very nice guy minding his own business and debating on a breakfast cereal.

“Shit! Sorry!”

He smiled and oh well hello.

“No worries.”

Now this wasn’t fair.

You were trying to escape and this man was hypnotizing, utterly unfair. Completely not ok.

Your mouth opened and closed like a dying fish and you fumbled with, “I’m sorry, I’m….escaping.”

Keep reading

RIP CURLS

High As The Stars

I do not own the GIF.

Word Count: 1239

This hasn't been the first time Din has returned with more wounds than you could count. With each lucky bounty that took less than one day stacked up the slow amount of karma waiting for Din the next time. And here you were, hovering over the Mandalorian as he bled out.

"Hey! Just keep your eyes open. Squeeze my hand."

You shout, one hand busily tearing the beskar from his torso as the other was faintly gripped in his bloody leather hand.

"C-Cyare."

You press a small kiss against the helmet, pulling out antiseptic wipes to clean the heavy gashes. You grimaced at his moan of pain, his grip becoming unbearable as you cleaned sand and other bits from the nasty wounds.

"Don't speak. Just... stay with me Din." He began to wrestle against you.

"Kriffing stop moving!" Din stills, his grasp a butterfly's touch on your hand as you pull it back. You needed both hands to administer the bacta shots. Another grunt followed the injection of the syringe, and you sighed in relief as you slowly watched the major wounds close together. Disposing of several wipes and bloodied rags, you turn back to face Din, who's out cold on the floor.

"What would you do without me." You muttered before completely striping him of his armour and weapons. It was a terrible idea to drag him up the ramp of the Razor Crest when he had stumbled outside, and you doubted you could do it again.

With what little strength you had, you pressed him against a makeshift bed. Soft blankets and pillows surrounded him as you tucked him in. He would need all his energy back once he woke up, no doubt wanting to jump straight back to Nevarro to collect the credits.

You sat by his side, smiling softly as you grasped his hand. At least he had come back to you in one piece. He was lucky that he had made it to the Crest, or you would've had no idea where he was.

A soft mumble escaped the modulator as Din slowly sat up, his body swaying from the sudden motion.

"Hey. Take it easy." You mutter, letting him lean his weight against your smaller form.

"How you feelin?" You ask, eyes shining with worry as Din blankly stared at you, his helmet tilting further to the side the longer he stared.

"You look fam-familiar." He slurred, wrapping his arm around your waist.

"Mhm. I am your only other crewmate. Been together for around a year." There was a moment of silence before his usually stoic and sarcastic voice had shifted to something akin to a love sick puppy.

"You look so pr-pretty mesh'la." You lay him back down with ease, squeezing his hand that was clutched to your side as you laid it down beside him.

"Is that the bacta talkin to me Din?" You tease, watching as he struggles to take off his helmet. With gentle hands, you release the Mandalorian from his beskar prison. His eyes were hazy as he stared off into the distance before looking back at you.

"You should get some rest. Sleep here. I'll be right beside you." He shoves you away with what little strength he had left in his muscles, but even wounded and delirious, he was still strong enough to push you back.

"S-Stop. I have a riduuuur." He drew out the foreign word, and you peck another kiss to his cheek. His face scrunched up as he pouted, his eyes glistening.

"I won't cheat on my riduur. Even if you look as pretty as them." A wide grin splashes over your face as you brush his messy hair out of his face.

"You think I'm pretty?" Din groans, trying to roll onto his side so he didn't have to look at you. But after the fourth attempt he huffed before flopping down on the soft blankets.

"The-The prettiest." Din nodded, his eyes roaming the features of your face as it came in and out of focus.

"Come on Din, go back to sleep." It took a few moments for the words to register in his brain before he was moaning in protest.

"Got to see my cyar'ika." His protests were firm as you sighed.

"Fine. I'll get them. Wait here." He diligently nodded his head as you disappeared from view. You chuckle to yourself. Din had always been so shy to flirt with you, but here he was, diligently keeping his promise to be with you forever. You exit the weapon lockers and smile happily as Din's face morphs into a goofy smile.

"Verd'ika!" He exclaimed, seeming to gain his strength in the short period of time you had pretended to get yourself. You coo at him as he embraces you in a clumsy hug.

"I've missed you. You so... so good to me." Din began to slowly tear up, and you gently rubbed his back as he began to sob into your shoulder. Despite being vulnerable and high as an X-Wing in the clouds, he still had a possessive grip.

"Mi-Missed you. Haven't seen you in y-years!" His words were choked and lazily pronounced.

"Love you too Din. Glad you came back to me." Din's cries began to recede as he pressed harsh kisses against the side of your neck.

"Din!" You scold, pushing him back. He gives you the sweetest puppy eyes, chocolate brown swirling at you.

"Cyare..." You roll your eyes, helping the warrior to his feet.

"You can get all the lovin' once you get cleaned up and back to our bunk." His weight wasn't as harsh in the beginning, and you were able to help him stumble his way over towards the refresher attached to the shared bunk.

Deeply inhaling the soap bar, Din gives you the softest smile.

"Aloan roses." He identifies, and you give him a small pat on the back in praise. "Come on you tin head. Let's get you cleaned up." He didn't hesitate to strip down, bare as the day he was born. Din gave you a cocky smile,

"Like what you see?" "Yeah I do. But first get clean. So I can admire you better than under all those layers of sand."

It was a hassel getting him cleaned up. He was distracting and happily pressing your body into the stream of warm water, effectively soaking you to the bone. But you couldn't be too mad. His delighted expression was too sweet for you to be mad.

Finally getting the two of you in dry clothing, you snuggled up besides Din as he pressed against you.

"Love you mesh'la." You giggle, gently brushing your finger against the curve of his jaw.

"Love you too Din."

There was another moment of silence before... "You wanna hear a joke." You wack him on his side. He had done this before. When the two of you were crunched on time to rest before bounding straight into another fight. And it had both annoyed you and sent you into a fit of chuckles when he tried to break the ice. It was endearing how he had tried to cheer you up that night. You were really grumpy, and in your defense Din drank the rest of the caf that morning.

"Go to sleep Din." There was a huff of protest before he pressed his face against the smooth skin of your neck and inhaled.

Din smiled to himself as he fell asleep. You smelled like home. His home.

Hi if anyone thinks racism or transphobia (or literally ANY kind or prejudice or discrimination) is okay get the fuck off my blog.