#comlink.

meme  //  accepting!  //  @spacepiratemaz 

      Rey’s knees have found the floor, her body desperate for the steadying influence of packed earth under her boots. Some parts of her even long for the more familiar balancing act of trudging through the loose sand on Jakku, where every other step felt like the world falling away beneath her feet. At least that is a challenge she knows how to overcome, but this… This is gravity itself shifting with her every move, and realizing the RULES will always change faster than she can learn them. 

                                            …if she can learn them. 

        Fingers twist into handfuls of cloth to hide the faintest hint of trembling, and Rey’s jaw sets with a twitch beneath her skin. She’s not accustomed to vulnerability. To trusting anyone with the things that could hurt her the harshest. She prefers to keep her doubts inside her head where they belong, so they cannot be spoken back to her, confirmation stinging like sand as it burrows deep inside an uncovered wound. 

       “What if it’s too much?” Rey whispers at last, and there is something rusty about her voice. As if asking anything of anyone requires parts she hasn’t cared for in years. “What if I’m not strong enough for this?”  What if there’s been a mistake, and I truly belong back on Jakku, scrubbing sand out of ship scraps to sell for half a meal, if I’m lucky?  Somehow, it feels both good and agonizing to speak some of her doubts aloud. A blast of cold, clear water to cleanse away the blood and the sand. “How can I be sure—?” 

In reference to this headcanon post. This is a really long one. The short of it is:

Kal, it happens over Kal’s decision to destroy the cure. It estranges all of the Nulls, including ultimately Ordo, because it puts on very clear display just how harmful Kal’s self-centeredness and disregard for the choices of others is. It forces Ordo to take another look at his entire relationship with Kal, and he finds it wanting. He doesn’t come back.

Besany, it’s a long process, one that happens as she and Ordo struggle with the very way they’ve approached the relationship. It gets burdened with misplaced idealism, the idea that the only normal life Ordo will have is connected to this relationship, the controlling environment in which they formed this relationship which has negatively affected an otherwise surprisingly healthy one, and generally various needs to step away from the relationship and be alone for a while. Eventually, after they’ve squared everything with themselves, they do get the opportunity to try again—and they do with success.

I’m not actually too sure. I do know she doesn’t go into the business of bounty hunting and mercenary work. Both of her parents worked hard to prevent her from ever soldiering and to ensure she had broader options than that.

At the moment, after the Civil War, her parents both end up holding administrative positions. Besany is again in the Treasury office for the Republic. Ordo, at the moment, works acquisitions at a cultural institution, later spends his time trying to establish a museum and works as director for that. Perhaps their work trying to keep the Republic accountable in service of the people will have an affect on her decision.

Part of my uncertainty is that Mirja is nineteen when the Civil War finally ends. Her life up to that point is spent being tangentially related to anti-Imperial activity on the supply side of things and, later in her late teens, providing support from the base—all things her parents work very hard to keep her out of as long as they can.

“One of the communications officers stationed at headquarters, Ciryl Vai. A sweet-faced Mirialan with a soothing drawl tailored for the comms. The kind of voice one wanted to fall asleep too, and I did many times. He often joked he was meant to be a broadcast jockey. Insisted he would’ve made in a different era, even been a star. I indulged him. Said he was right. Said he could still make it once we settled the galaxy to rights. We were at war. What else was I supposed to say? You find the good things where you can, and you make them if you have to.

“He kissed me in an empty backroom at headquarters because there’s nothing more romantic than dusty crates and stolen inventory. It all happened quickly after that— or, it felt quick next to how slow things with Besany went. But it was fast, and it was brief.

“Often, I hesitate to say he was my boyfriend. Looking back, it was almost more several weeks of a fling than a proper commitment. We almost did. We started looking at the long-term. He was transferring to a unit in the field who needed help setting up a clandestine communications broadcast in the Mid Rim. My team and I were going on longer and longer jaunts away from home base. We didn’t know how, if at all, we were going to navigate this.

“We never faced that question head on.

“He was born and raised on Mirial. Unhappy with the deeply stratified social classes there, built on the bones of its most treasured and honored traditions, he left home and never thought once of going back. He abandoned it all, the culture, the traditions. I couldn’t— I still don’t understand how he could manage it. Just as well: he couldn’t understand how much the Mandalorian traditions meant to me or why I navigated everything I understood about myself by my people’s customs. He couldn’t understand why I chose to “trap” myself in them.

“We argued about all that instead. Not a shouting match, no. Just a long conversation refused to end, rankled in each of us, and then grew more frustrating each time one of us revived it again.

“I left base with my team the next morning, and I thought about it on the jump through hyperspace. I couldn’t give an indeterminate length of my life to a man who didn’t understand why I could not do as he does and reshape my identity independent of the traditions I hold dear. I wrote him a message, and I told him I couldn’t commit to him. I thought it wiser to end things there. I didn’t hear back.

“By the time I returned to headquarters, he already left for the Mid Rim. I knew where he was, who he was with, but I never tried to contact him. It didn’t really matter to me anymore. I’d already moved on, cold as that sounds.

;muse development questions

8. how many friends does your character have?9. how many friends does your character want?

Ordo is a man of few friends and likes it that way. Given that his family is big, he doesn’t often feel the need to seek very many friends beyond them—at first, anyway. And, well, for a significant portion of his life, he was isolated from others by Kal and prevented from forming close relationships outside this family circle. It takes a long time after he breaks from Kal’s influence that he begins to understand the importance of close non-familial relationships and feels comfortable actively seeking them. He just isn’t used to reaching out to others outside his family, especially Kal. Even given this, however, he’s a natural introvert, and he’s satisfied with having a small but close circle of friends around him.

Etain is one of Ordo’s closest friends. I’d consider Maze to be one of his oldest friends, even if their relationship is a strained one much of the time. I typically describe their relationship as “friends who wouldn’t go out for a drink after work but will call each other out on their shit because they expected better from the other and actually want the other to do better—vitriolic best friends”. He has a confidante and friend in his rebel cell, whom I’ve yet to name, but they’ve known and worked with each other for almost twenty years by the end of the Civil War. Although Ordo is guarded around her, I want to say Shara Bey (@lieutenantbae) is a friend.

He doesn’t have very many, and he’s content with that.

13. what does your character pretend or try to care about?

Your feelings. I’d joke “the Republic” but Ordo makes absolutely no effort to pretend or try to care about it. Even though he does his job in service to it, he openly doesn’t give a damn.

The mercenary, bounty on your head, always looking over your shoulder, friends like these lifestyle commonly expected of and lived by many Mandalorians? In the novels, Ordo is discontent upon realizing this is the kind of life he’s potentially saddled with for the rest of his life but resolves to force himself to be happy with it:

[Kal said,] “I know things are a mess at the moment, but it’s going to work out. I promise.”

It was a lie, because Ordo knew they’d probably spend the rest of their lives on the run with bounties on their heads, never able to drop their guard. Kal’buir had lost count of the number of death warrants out on him. Now they all had one. But a lot of Mandalorians—and others—lived their lives that way, and seemed happy enough. Ordo decided he would be happy with it, too.

THANKS MOM.

;silence of the lambs

“There’s always something I’m not telling you.” He glanced at her over his shoulder—physically looked, as being out of armor necessitated. “I would’ve thought you’d have figured that by now.”

He hopped over a fallen trunk taking its time to decompose and threaded his way through the trees. Decade and a half, more, since he was here. Grayer now. Visibly older, much like the forest, though neither of them changed as much as expected.

He still recognized the trees, the rocky outcrops, the fog. The fearful and awed in him said the fog recognized him too.

“I didn’t tell you I fought in the Clone Wars. And when I did, finally, I didn’t tell you the Clone Wars are named after me. I didn’t tell you I married, then I left out the part that I’m arguably divorced—and even then, I still left out that my technically-ex-wife is my unit co-commander.”

The forest was thinning. They weren’t far now.

“If there isn’t an operational need to tell you, I don’t. It’s how I do things.”

The timberline broke, and the trees bowed to a basin. Over the years, the copious rainstorms this planet saw collected in the basin until together they formed a ghostly reservoir. At this distance, through the fog, the spires rising from the waters looked like rock towers. He knew the towers weren’t rock at all. It was all sharp metal, twisted into vengeful knives as the city collapsed under its own weight, weight which created the basin to begin with.