lazaefair posted: Cyberpunk Baze x Chirrut not!fic

adigeon asked:

I SAW YOUR "#cyberpunk baze x chirrut?" TAG AND NOW I'M THINKING -- chirrut as the badass techno-monk still loyal to his destroyed order, baze as a Bodyguard For Hire With A Big Gun, ughhhhh i can see it so clearly in my head and i love it

Star Wars is basically one step away from cyberpunk anyway, just add more neon and stick everyone on one planet instead of a billion, et voilà.

Chirrut works as a technomancer, able to communicate with and manipulate computers directly without needing code or terminals or cybernetic implants. He came by his abilities not through the self-taught survival-of-the-fittest lessons of the street, nor through sinister experimentation by one of the Megacorps, but through good old-fashioned techno-religion. His bond with the very web of cyberspace becomes the stuff of legends on both the mainstream and shadow ‘nets. This flickering presence known as The Monk, who slips through firewalls and cyber sentries like so much tissue paper, who runs his digital fingers through classified archives and top-security files pretty much whenever and however he pleases, whose reported exploits far exceed the number of places he’s actually been in.

Even glimpsing his avatar requires feats of hacking accessible only to the top tiers of hackers, the legends say, and a confirmed Monk sighting goes onto a person’s net profile like an elite badge of honor, good for both reputations and credit accounts. The legends have also embroidered the description of Chirrut’s avatar way beyond the actual mask of bits and bytes that he assumes when he goes into cyberspace - he particularly enjoys the fanfics that feature flames, or improbably giant swords, or improbably glowing armor, or all three at once - but most of them eventually boil down to a few common threads: a beautiful man with Chinese features, wearing traditional robes, disarming your defenses in a single glance of his eerie, blank white eyes.

But as invincible as The Monk may be in cyberspace, commanding the very hardware of its machinery to bend to his will, he has a weakness. Which is simply the weakness of any hacker, down to the most ordinary - when he’s plugged in, he can’t defend his own body.

Company enforcers know that. Rival hackers know that. Anyone Chirrut has ever crossed, from the Megacorp that bought out and razed his religious order, to the most recent two-bit mob boss he humiliated and laid bare to the sharks of the underworld, and continuing on down the list, knows that.

So that’s where Baze comes in.

>(Read more at my journal)

“Are you going to tell me it was an accident? What, you tripped and fell on a pair of fangs? Didn’t know what you were doing? Got taken in by seduction? You, the most devoted Guardian of them all?”

Chirrut can’t seem to get enough air, has to get up and pace back and forth in his cell, five steps to the far wall, sharp turn on his heel, five steps back. His cell, with its sparse furnishings ordered just so, unchanged from its configuration for twenty years since he was promoted from apprentice to junior and then to full Guardian, the better for him to pace like this without fear of sharp edges and unexpected corners.

Five steps to his bed, where Baze had slept for ten of those twenty years. Five steps to his desk, where Baze had sat and researched their latest assignments, or devised new ways for Chirrut to hunt without sight, or cleaned his weapons, or debated the finer points of theology. Five steps to his weapons rack, which still holds Baze’s sword. There had been another cell in this wing, one which was assigned to Baze. By their third year together, everyone had known how much time he spent sleeping in it, which is to say, nearly none. The two of them turned it into a study of sorts instead.

The temple reassigned it a year after his disappearance.

>(cut goes to journal)

So, the Rogue One Urban Fantasy Vampire Hunting AU. (Or, how often can I type the word “vampire” before it stops having any meaning.)

Father (Padre?) Cassian Andor is a soldier in a quasi-religious, quasi-military order - branched off from the ancient Church years ago - founded in order to fight the international confederation of vampire covens loosely known as “The Empire.” It was vampires who orphaned Cassian at age 6, of course, and it was Rebellionis that took him in, put a meal in his belly and a stake in his hand.

(Is this truly the Lord’s will? he wonders as he looks down on the squalling infant on the altar, tiny face red and scrunched. A vampire infant, of course, an abomination. He waits a moment, looking for a sign that it’s the harbinger of doom that the omens said it was. Seeing none, he stakes it anyway, and his hands don’t shake. Orders, after all.

And still, sometimes in the quiet afternoons, he wonders. Was all this really in the divine plan?)

>(cut goes to journal)