The Dark Trio

I know Kara's usually compared to a puppy or a golden retriever but I always think of her as a particularly kind and gregarious big cat (like a v tame lion or tiger) and now I can't let go of the hc that Kryptonians purr

The first time Kara spends the night is a bit of an accident. She's waiting on the couch while Lena fixes them a drink, and Lena returns to find her head draped over the backrest, mouth gaping open and glasses askew, completely conked out. 

Between the options of getting her to her apartment with a forklift and waking her up, Lena decides to let it lie. In the case of a midnight emergency, she has a secret backup super suit in the office anyway. 

She gently picks the glasses off Kara's face and grabs a pillow from the bedroom. She tucks it beneath Kara's head, and Kara turns her face into it and gives it a good sniff. With dawning horror, Lena realizes she forgot to change the pillowcase. 

Trying to wrest a very soft and teareable item from a slumbering Kryptoinian’s grip is a lost cause, and Lena can do nothing but watch, mortified, as Kara makes a face in her sleep and drags the possibly very stinky pillow from underneath her head to hold it in her arms, and lets out a relieved little sigh. 

Lena is ready to turn away and nurse her embarrassment in private when she hears a strange noise, a sort of soft, interrupted breathing. Does Kara snore? Oh, Lena is going to use this. 

She turns halfway in Kara's direction, closing her eyes and concentrating on the sound. It's quiet and regular with a distinct rise and fall, a low frequency warbling, and it has a strangely soothing quality to it; the more Lena listens, the more she wants to hear, almost like a---

---a purr. Kara, on her couch, clutching Lena's used pillow to her chest, purring. 

Lena flees to her office, filled with a sudden inexplicable energy, face flaming with something that feels, unfortunately, like more than embarrassment.

. 

. 

The second time Kara spends the night is a bit more intentional. 

"Never ever ever?" Kara asks in horror. 

"Well, unless you count boarding school."  

"Obviously I don’t! Mandatory sleep arrangements are not a sleepover, Lena!" 

And so Kara shows up Friday evening at Lena's apartment, equipped with snacks, board games, and two sleeping bags. 

They camp out on the living room floor after many harrowing but obligatory sleepover activities as per Kara’s direction. Kara snuggles into her sleeping bag until only her head is visible, and barely that in its entirety. She smiles at Lena. Over the hum of the fridge and the occasional traffic outside, Lena can hear her start to purr.

Lena wants to ask, wants to reach, wants to touch, but Kara closes her and is out like a light, rolling onto her side, her back to Lena, even as the purring continues.

Lena wonders what it would be like to feel it, to simply reach out and press her hand to Kara’s back, let those powerful vibrations travel up her arm, sense the corporeal manifestation of Kara’s contentment and comfort and ease.

Fuck. How invasive would that be? Lena’s in her own little sleeping bag, Kara in hers, a clear delineation between them. Kara had rolled onto her side, showing Lena her back. She trusts Lena enough to fall asleep in her presence, to---to purr about it.

Lena turns over, curling her hand to her chest, and allows that addictive, peaceful sound to lull her to sleep.

.

.

The seventh time Kara spends the night, Lena just invites her to bed. 

"Come on," she says. "My couch is sick of you. Give the poor thing some space." 

Kara doesn’t always seem entirely at ease in her body, but she sprawls all over Lena’s mattress, linking her arms behind her head, filling Lena’s space with her presence as naturally as if this bed has always been hers. Lena watches her from the corner of her eye as she wriggles a little in the sheets, hugging her pillow in one arm, luxuriating in the simple comfort. She’s magnetic.

Lena debates her options before picking her satin pyjama set and climbing in beside her.

Kara immediately flops onto her side, head propped on her arm, grinning. “Fancy seeing you here.”

Lena has left barely an inch between her body and the edge of the bed. She touches it, a reassurance, a promise. “Oh?” she asks. “Come here often, then?”

Kara leans closer. “I wish,” she says, voice low.

Lena stares at her for a fraction too long, laughs awkwardly to compensate, turns away to turn off the light. “Goodnight, you flirt.”

Kara reaches out and squeezes Lena’s hand in the dark. “Goodnight, Lena.”

.

They fall asleep on opposite sides of the bed. Lena knows this for certain; she checked. She can remember touching the edge of the bed just before falling asleep. But she wakes up---she wakes up with her arm wound around Kara’s belly, Kara’s butt tucked into her groin, Kara’s body vibrating palpably against her own.

Sleep foggy and enamored, Lena reaches an unthinking hand to press directly over Kara’s purring chest.

“Hey,” a muggy voice greets her. Kara turns over onto her back, shoots her a blurry smile.

“Shit.” Lena tries to snatch away her hand only for Kara to grab her arm, keeping her hand against Kara’s chest. The vibrations intensify. “Sorry,” Lena mutters, eyes fixed on her own hand.

Kara grips tighter. “You like it?” she asks, her voice sleep-rough.

Lena swallows. Nods. Denial would be absurd at this point.

“It’s for you,” Kara rasps.

Lena feels her heart in her throat. Her eyes find Kara’s.

“I like your bed,” Kara says, words plain and eyes intense. “I like you.”

Kara’s purring swells and dips with her breath, loud in Lena’s ears, tangible against her skin. Lena puts her weight on the palm braced on Kara’s chest; Kara strains upward in an impressive show of core strength. They meet somewhere in the middle.

Kara kisses sweet and simple, a little sluggish with sleep, still gripping Lena’s forearm. The purring deepens, a low, insistent hum between them; a reassurance, a confession, a gift. Lena turns her head away, overwhelmed. Takes the hand off too.

“What?” Kara sits up further, hand sliding up to grip Lena’s wrist, thumb against her palm. The purring quiets. “What’s wrong?”

I just feel really loved right now, is a thought Lena could never verbally express in a million years.

“Gosh, Lena, are you crying?” Kara digs her thumb into the heel of Lena’s palm. “I’m that bad, huh?”

“The worst,” Lena agrees. Sniffs.

Kara smiles. “Okay. Let me try again? I’m a very good student.” 

Lena wipes a knuckle under her eye. “A real teacher’s cat,” she says.

Kara doesn’t dignify that with a laugh, but she does dignify it with another kiss. Lena slumps forward into her until Kara's back flops back on the bed and her arms come around Lena, physically cocooned within every tactile expression of Kara’s affection.  

Lena has no particular physiological mechanism to showcase her appreciation, so she pours it into the kiss instead.

the impulse to hide what I’m doing at my computer still sits so deep even tho I’m literally never looking at anything objectionable , the door will open and I’ll hurry to close the page like oh fuck no one can know I’m looking at the Wikipedia page for the Balkans

I think, therefore I am (exhausted)

AU: Anakin turns on Palpatine when he reveals himself as a Sith so Palpatine tells him that Anakin will be the cause of his wife's death. Anakin, because he's in a terrible state, feels this is true and so after he kills the Chancellor he runs away to Tatooine because he's convinced he should suffer.

He becomes Beru Whitesun's problem, when she finds him crying at his mothers grave one morning.

Meanwhile - by the time Obi-Wan comes back from Utapau the Chancellor is dead, Padme is in labor and Anakin is in the wind.

Both the Jedi and the Senate still have to finish and clean up the war( since the Separatist leadership is still alive) deal with the Clones rights and roles post-war, and basically try and put the huge mess of the Republic back together.

Plus Obi-Wan has to help Padme with her suspiciously powerful Force-Sensative twins while the Senator refuses to stop trying to work while in a state of Force Exhaustion from giving birth to said babies as a non-Force-Sensitive (because why not?)

Beru Whitesun, meanwhile, has a highly skilled and very miserable Jedi Knight on her hands, and she decides that she may as well put him to Work.

Anakin had a dream once, that he came back and freed all the slaves.

And he tends to solve a lot of his problems with his lightsaber. So. Anakin goes on a very swift and violent rampage and the slaves overthrow Tatooine and make a treaty with the Tuskens over their ancestral lands and in a way this is how Anakin makes reparations for the slaughter of that Tusken village. Now, Anakin is not suited to lead a government, so his job after - when he's not moping on Owen and Beru's farm, is fending off attempts by the Hutts to retaliate or reclaim Tatooine.

Anakin learns things about the sheer span of his power, fighting alone, not all of them good. He learns things about himself too, kneeling at his mothers grave. It becomes a sort of meditation, sitting there in the sands, confessing everything to Shmi Skywalker's ghost.

Obi-Wan, deputy Head of the Order, semi-co-parent to Luke and Leia Nabberrie, eventually tracks reports of conflicts near Hutt Space to his Padawan and finds Anakin on Tatooine, alive if not entirely well.

It takes months of trips back and forth to Tatooine to convince Anakin to at least come to the Temple.

Anakin refuses to meet Padme, still terrified and convinced that he will be the cause of her death.

He has no choice about meeting the Twins, who heard Obi-Wan found their father and snuck across Coruscant to see him.

Luke is very shy, actually meeting him. Leia beats him with a couch pillow for making her mother sad.

Anakin just cries, which makes Leia very awkward and Luke tries to console him.

Anakin feels too far from what a jedi should be to stay, but Obi-Wan convinces him to at least call Padme - which Anakin does, once he's half the galaxy away again.

They have to get to know each other again, and this is different than the first time, harder and slower and so much more real than their frantic, desperate feelings at the start of the war.

Ahsoka eventually returns to the Order and rises to Knighthood. She spends most of her career thereafter specializing in rescue operations and finds a little bit of passion for teaching classes at the temple.

By the time the Twins are ten, Leia's favorite Jedi is Master Windu, who knows very little peace because of this. Luke is definitely his mothers son, and while he finds a great deal of peace in the temple when they visit Uncle Obi-Wan, and he's good at meditation, he spends most of his time in Senator Amidala's office, and shadowing her in diplomacy.

They work a lot with Senator Fox (who knows over half the Senates dirty secrets, not that anyone dare accuse him of blackmail) on Clone Rights and Resettlement, and Luke's unofficial occupation is to be very cute and innocent and hold Senator Fox's hand when it seems like there might be a murder to prevent.

It's a devastatingly effective tactic.

Tatooine is a free, established world, and there isn't much trouble there now - especially not with Trooper Town just beyond Mos Espa, ready and willing to defend their little bit of peace.

Tatooine needs a Representative, and Beru makes Anakin do it. He's still not entirely sure how, by the time he's landing on Coruscant and there is Padme, welcoming "Ambassador Skywalker" and there is a little of that fear, still, but he also feels so, so foolish for ever running away from her.

Anyhow, Leia becomes a Jedi (apprenticed to Master Windu) and spends a good deal of her adolescence and early adulthood trying to beat the snot out of her father with her lightsaber. By the time she's good enough to actually win, the desire has largely gone away.

Luke succeeds his mother as Senator Amidala of Naboo, with special permission from the current queen to borrow his mothers royal title.

Anakin and Padme re-wed, this time with all their friends in attendance, this time knowing really what love is, and what it takes to make something of it.

Anakin eventually follows his wife into Retirement, though in truth neither of them really settle. They're barely middle aged and there has always been a bit of fire burning in both of them.

It's not ever trule easy, life after war, but it is good.

Obi-Wan visits their home in the Lake Country at least once a year. He trains a new padawan every decade and there isn't a single one of them that Anakin didn't save from a spot of trouble at least once, in spite of insisting he didn't like any of them for one reason or another. There also isn't a single one of them that doesn't inform him that Obi-Wan always talks about him, and there isn't a single one of them Anakin doesn't provide with "secret" advice on how to handle being Obi-Wan's padawan.

Ahhh!!! Anxiety and add nervous energy from this quarantine and not wanting to actually go into work tomorrow (my boss still isn’t letting me work from home yet) all leads to insomnia!!

Deep Pressure (Meredith/Lexie Grey)

The nature of Lexie and Meredith's relationship can be up for interpretation in this one, there's no overtly sexual or romantic things happening, but because I was imagining them as together I've tagged it as such, do with that what you will.

When Lexie has her breakdown after the shooting incident Meredith helps her be able to relax and fall asleep. Also Lexie is autistic

Read on ao3

When Meredith stepped into the room she heard soothing melancholy music pouring from the tinny speaker of Lexie's phone, Jenny Owen Youngs, the same albums Meredith had heard her listen to on repeat after she and Mark broke up. Meredith bent down towards the hospital bed to see if Lexie's eyes were open.

"Lex, hey, how you holding up?" Meredith's gentle voice added to the floaty sensation of the drugs in Lexie's system.

Lexie gave a small sad smile and looked down. She didn't need to say the words out loud, they'd both been a hell of a lot better.

"I heard you had a rough morning." Meredith took a seat on the bed next to her. Lexie nodded looking up at her sister with brown shining doe eyes. "Can I touch you?" Meredith's hand hovered near Lexie's face, waiting for another nod before smoothing it over blond locks.

Lexie put her hand on Meredith's leg, giving an appreciative squeeze. Now more than ever she was relieved to have someone who knew how to be comfortable in silence, and who understood that sometimes when things were too much Lexie couldn't even figure out how to form the words with her mouth, in this case the drugs made it even worse. Her big sister was the only one she could even bear to have around her in this state. Lexie whimpered as Meredith removed her hand and pulled away.

"Hey, don't worry I'm not going anywhere, I'm just going to look at your chart." Meredith grabbed Lexie's hand off her thigh, rubbing her thumb over the back of it as she flipped open the chart with her free hand. "Discussion with patient suggests sleep deprivation may have been a catalyzing factor or possible primary cause of the incident. Well, I could've told them that much."

Lexie raised an eyebrow.

"I can hear you puttering around at all hours, you're not as light on your feet as you think." The teasing comment brought a smile to both their lips. "Though I might not be sleeping so deeply myself these days." The moment of joy melted back into the coldness of their reality. "Want help?" Meredith crossed her arms in an x over her chest, the sign they developed for Lexie to non-verbally ask for deep pressure. Something Lexie had looked into after a somewhat surprising tip from Cristina.

Lexie nodded emphatically. Meredith's heart warmed and broke for the precious creature before her all at once.

"OK, straighten out, like a log." Meredith ordered. "Don't give me that look, just do it. I have an idea." Meredith quickly slipped into the hall to grab a fresh warm blanket, once it was draped over Lexie she started wrapping it around Lexie's legs and tucking it under her torso. Seeing her little sister sigh with relief before she even took her place spooning her, drew a chuckle from Meredith. Once she had Lexie wrapped in her arms, hugged tight against her chest, leg wrapping to rest over Lexie's hip, she found herself letting out her own tense lungful of air, demonstrating just how elevated her own parasympathetic nervous system was despite her even keel.

"Psst Meredith." Cristina's whisper roused a glaring Meredith from heavy slumber. "Hey wake up, it's time to go home, I'm driving."

"I can't just leave her!" Meredith whispered angrily.

"Mer if you don't keep it together and take care of yourself you're gonna punch your own ticket to the psych wing." Cristina slipped into a more normal volume in order to be heard over the truck engine caliber snoring now coming from Lexie. "Then who's she gonna have to take care of her? Just me."

"I'm not sure if that's a threat or a sweet show of support." Meredith raised an eyebrow mockingly.

"Yeah well if you end up in psych you'll take just as long as sleeping beauty here to get cleared for surgery, so let's go, chop chop."

"She doesn't even have her weighted blanket. What if she freaks out and can't calm down?"

"Wait here." Cristina slipped out of the room and returned a bit later with one of the lead aprons used to protect against xrays. "Heavy as balls." Cristina handed it to Meredith to drape over Lexie's legs within reach in case she wanted to pull it further up. Meredith printed a clear note:

Had to go home so I could be ready for work. Text me at any hour and I'll be there in a flash, will check in with you as soon as I get in.

Love, Mer

Then she folded like a card so it could be propped up in Lexie's field of view, before leaning down to plant a kiss on her forehead.

"I hate to leave her like this." Meredith watched her thoroughly sedated sister snoring and dead to the world.

"I know." Cristina grabbed Meredith's hand to say what she couldn't with words before guiding the still groggy Meredith to the car.

He looked incredibly…handsome, masculine and 100% authentic

Cursed mostly crack au nonsense.

The real reason Palpatine hates Obi-wan so much is Not because he's the Master of the Chosen One™ and therefore in the way of his plans. Oh no.

Sheev Palpatine hates Obi-wan because Obi-wan turned him down when he asked him on a date. Sheev was like 'cute redhead that can hold an intelligent and scathing conversation. Score'. He thinks they'll go on a few dates and as a bonus he can convince Obi-wan to go Dark.

But Obi-wan always gets 'weird old man' vibes from him and politely declines.

Of course Palpatine is offended that Obi-wan turned him down. Hes a catch. Anyone would be flattered to go on a date with him. How dare he! What do you mean he's fucked the Organas?? What do they have that i dont?!

So starts the long passive aggressive murder attempts.

Except. Every once in a while Palpatine tries to shoot his shot again. Its a matter of pride. He hints that maybe these assassins will go away if Obi-wan agrees to go on a date with him.

Obi-wan is like 'ah. Youre one of Those types' and doubles down on declining Palpatines date invites. Not once does it occur to him to Tell Anybody what Palpatine is doing.

This continues for a Long time. Then, midway through the war Padme pulls Anakin to the side and asks very politely if Anakin would talk to his good friend Palpatine about leaving Obi-wan alone. Anakin, having had no idea anything was going on, asks wtf shes talking about. So padme explains that during one of her and Obi-wans friendly bitching Tea dates that Obi-wan let slip that the Chancellor was trying to pressure him into a relationship by using his position of power over the republic, the Jedi, and Anakin himself. Obi-wan usually wouldnt have said anything but one of the assassins shot at one of his men instead of him and thats 'a step too far' and Obi-wan is a sleep deprived irritated mess.

Anakin of course goes a little unhinged at this information. No one threatens his brother-dad like that. So he goes to confront Palpatine, because maybe it's been a misunderstanding, but maybe it hasn't been.

So he confronts Palpatine, who doesn't deny it and instead makes his biggest mistake. He asks anakin to convince Obi-wan to agree. The 'Or Else' isn't said, it isn't even really implied, but Anakin hears it anyway. And he remembers what that kind of thing means on Tatooine.

Anakin goes even more unhinged. Theres a misunderstanding between Anakin and Palpatine where Palpatine thinks Anakin has figured him out as a sith but Anakin just thinks he's a predator. It turns into a fight.

There are explosions and saber duels and lightening.

When the dust clears Palpatine is dead and Anakin has curled himself around Obi-wan like 'its okay, he's dead now. He can't threaten you ever again'. Obi-wan is like 'thank you. I love you. But wut?'.

Both are sent off on a long vacation. Anakin because he was being groomed by a Sith lord and because the stress from the war has clearly caused something to snap. Obi-wan because he was being romantically pursued by a Sith Lord, the stress from the war, and because Anakin wont let him out of his sight.

Of course Ahsoka and the 212th and 501st go with them. Padme stays behind to help girlboss the Senate into getting their shit together.

Cody is a little salty he didn't get a chance to kick Palpatine in the dick (Its also a codywan au), but he claps Anakin on the shoulder and goes 'Good job son'. Anakin cries.