sixthiterationlogs | It's driven me before, and it seems to have a vague, haunting mass appeal

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It's driven me before, and it seems to have a vague, haunting mass appeal

WHO: Bodhi, household residents, OTA
WHERE: Within and around House 39, random streets and spots in town
WHEN: Before, during, and immediately after the earthquake
OPEN TO: All, mingling at House 39 welcome
WARNINGS: Panic attacks, PTSD symptoms

Bodhi does his best to be busy, but his lack of any real expertise and the heat prey on his industrious impulses until there isn't much left. He does his share of the housework, taking over chores he's determined Kira especially doesn't like, but if the house isn't falling down, he's pretty satisfied. He naps a bit more often, the heavy air carving through his reserves enough to chase off the niggling little nightmares, and he works his way through Credence's loan as quickly as he can. He finds Frankenstein utterly mystifying, the world foreign beyond all comprehension, the language strange and stilted, every character's motivation utterly inscrutable. But there is a story in there, which would be worth it even if he didn't owe the loan his attention. He feels faintly guilty every moment he isn't bringing it back, and he reads it everywhere, on the porch and in the woods and here and there in town, drifting for a bit between long, dense packages that really reinforce the theory that Credence is smarter than he is.

The quiet little rhythm holds for a while. It's what he's built his life around here, the life he's not supposed to have. Keep his head down, be useful, enjoy whatever seems to be enjoyable, drift. He's in no one's way.

Then there's an earthquake. It's over so quickly, does so little damage, compared to the roar and the rush of rubble in his memory, but it's enough, and all of his carefully cultivated quiet calm is gone. Not for long, but enough to shake the cage he built himself and leave him less than safe.

Then Credence is missing. Another faint guilt, being so much more hurt by it than Jyn or Cassian's disappearance, but much as the comrades fate threw at him matter, the friend he chose leaves a different ache behind entirely.

After the quake (and after Bodhi stops shaking, which admittedly takes a bit more time), he's frantically busy, even in the face of the dying heat. No surprise that he jumps at the chance when an opportunity to actually help, to really do something presents itself. He's no expert, but planetary science, mapping and recordkeeping, simple survival and first aid, all are pieces of an academy education. Or, sometimes, the one he built for himself out of public files and a desperate attempt to keep up when Galen talked. Packing, planning, just keeping in motion. Maybe it's all just a way to avoid the mess inside his head sneaking out again, but at least it might do someone else some good.

He leaves the half finished book with Kira when he leaves. In case.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

With his powers gone, it's a very different thing to read the people and animals around him. There are instincts and knowledge Kira didn't even know he had, green curls of leaves unfurling now that the heavy shade of his abilities have been trimmed away. He doesn't have flashes of insight, he doesn't blink himself free of memories and moods prompted by the people around him--but he can get a bad feeling, he can see if someone looks tired, he can read the way people carry themselves.

He can know it means something when he wakes up to his dog missing. He can know it means something when he finds her in the root cellar, pressed to the corner of the dirt wall and the unlit furnace, whining and shaking so hard she's drooling down her own neck.

What it means is anyone's guess, in the canyon: a wendigo, a storm, the earth changing its axis under their feet. Aurora's decided the cellar is safe, and he'd rather be the idiot who hid in a cellar for no reason than the idiot who ignored his terrified dog. He isn't sure Bodhi will care either way. "I need you to come downstairs with me," he says, as evenly as possible. He's leaning out the front door, finding Bodhi somewhere between rereading a passage in Credence's book and napping on the porch. "Aurora's upset, I think we should sit with her until she calms down."

Edited 2017-06-30 03:35 (UTC)

Pulled from the dozing reverie that was sort of letting him work through the language of Regency-era gothic romance, Bodhi blinks at him blankly a few times before he remembers, oh, any important context that belongs to reality. It's actually a rather soothing moment, a perfect vacancy between the place he was and the place he's going to end up when he's free from the efforts of his own brain.

Then he puts himself together. Perfect calm is itself pretty suspicious, and Bodhi's relationship to the dog is... Well, calm well-wishing at most. He always appreciates Aurora's company, but he's never been under any illusion that they've bonded much. His significance to Aurora is negligible at best if he doesn't have snacks in hand. He's been herded before.

Which isn't to say he resists. Bodhi takes orders well. He takes the time as he stands to carefully stow the borrowed book in his bag, but he moves to follow Kira immediately, all the instincts of a well-behaved cog in the Imperial machine triggered. Fortunately, despite everything, Bodhi has nothing against dark little spaces. Too many of his finest hours have been spent crammed into a tiny shuttle (or a roomier cockpit, but with the endlessly cold vacuum of space all around, a few extra meters don't count for much) to have anything against small spaces and bad lighting. There are plenty of triggers, but he's fairly fond of the cellar. They probably have the best maintained furnace in the village. He finds maintenance soothing. Wordlessly, he makes right for the steps.

Edited (I have no idea why that extremely incomplete tag posted) 2017-07-01 00:10 (UTC)

Bodhi's acquiescence is one of the small mercies of village life. Kira had moved out of his family home at first opportunity, even if he hadn't gone very far, and he hadn't succumbed to the financial pressure of the city, advertised for any sort of roommate. He'd maintained his own space, to bring people to and kick them out as he pleased, decorate as he liked. Bodhi, as much as he understands others' experience, really is the best roommate a person could hope for.

It just takes a little patience: to find him, to be in the house at the same time, to let Bodhi make all of his promises that he does or doesn't know how to do something before he'll go on and just do it. Kira nods and lets him gather himself up, no foreknowledge of what they're hiding from or when it will occur.

The sirens don't start until they're on the steps, already descending. "Go," Kira urges, resisting the instinct to look for the source or the reason. They've never had sirens before, but if there's any kind of shelter in this place, it's in this hole in the ground. "I'm not sure what's going on, but we're better off down here."

Leaving Bodhi on the stairs, he doubles back through the house for the bird, a jar of spring water, and a blanket, the shrill alarm cutting the air from every direction. The heavy door only muffles it when he drags it closed behind him. "Everyone alright," he asks in the ensuing dark.

Bodhi's been away from specific, planetary disaster plans for a long time, but it's a pretty standard form to go through as a pilot. Fires, collapse of artificial environments, mechanical failures... There are a lot of potential disasters in his life. He's good at responding to drills mechanically. Dispassionately. He winds up sitting down with the dog, offering her the kind of ear-scratching utility that seems to suggest to her that he is an acceptable biped to keep around. Sirens are a useful enough tool. If you panicked whenever you heard them, they wouldn't do the least bit of good.

"We're fine," he says, because Kira seems as concerned about the dog as either of them, and Bodhi doesn't see that impulse as wrong. "It's..." He trails off, which isn't an odd thing at all to happen when Bodhi is talking. He's not even sure yet why he's suddenly having trouble putting thoughts together and finding words to elucidate them. The world's simply blurring.

Asking again won't hurry Bodhi to finish the thought, and what matters is that they're both here. Kira can only hope that Credence is with Graves or Sonny, that there's sense enough in those he cares about to get them somewhere safe. It's been months since anyone died, but that doesn't mean anything. Every turn of the place since the lightning has been just as cruel, and perhaps they're simply overdue.

Bodhi trailing off just gives him something here, something now to latch onto. "Nothing's going to happen in here," he promises, despite the impossibility of seeing it through. Feeling his way along the walls, he finds the furnace, and the man and dog huddled beside it.

"Here," he says, using touch to fold the blanket around Bodhi's shoulders, a flap spared to lay over the shaking dog. Hoshi has only just clipped all of his talons through the collar of Kira's shirt, getting a steadfast hold, when Aurora's shaking seems to bleed into the earth, and the muffled sirens are replaced with a very present rumble.

Kira falls to his side, and for a long minute there is just the rumble of the quake, the flapping of Hoshi battering his head as he refuses to disengage, and an awful howl that might be man or dog.

If he'd been able to see, he might have been able to accept the gesture gracefully, little as he'd have appreciated it. He doesn't like being touched, but Credence proved he can tolerate it if he knows it's coming, if it's gentle and to a purpose. Without seeing Kira coming, though, he cringes away miserably, biting down a bit of a squeak that wants to escape. Keeping himself from whimpering because a friend touched him is literally the least he can do, necessary effort to keep from utterly despising himself. It's also the last conscious thought he has before the shaking begins.

He knows where he is--he's not that far gone--but that doesn't stop him from tasting the dust of an atomized NiJedha on his tongue. The difference between pitch darkness and a whirl of debris isn't so strong as one would hope, and when he squeezes his eyes shut in an irrational attempt to shut it out, the afterimage ghosts seem to look a lot like the flickers within that firestorm, the bursts of electrical energy that couldn't even resolve into lightening in all that chaos.

He curls up tight, taking up no space, meaning not to make a sound, though there is a high, shuddering little noise that slips out before he can cut it out. In seconds he's shaking and sweating, the physical effects of the attack coming on just as quickly and completely. Being perfectly still (so tense he shivers with the effort of locking up every muscle) is the only defense he has.

The world starts and stops, is shaking and stillness and even greater shaking. Aurora howls miserably, all the more helpless, shoving herself into Bodhi and the blanket while Kira scrabbles for some indication of an up or down, side to side.

He doesn't mean to grab Bodhi's ankle, but he doesn't much care for comfort in the moment. It's a cloth over a baby's mouth when the Cleaners sweep through, it's cutting rations when the retrieval team is compromised. Using his grip, he finds Aurora next, and pulls himself in with them while Hoshi screams in his ear and scratches up the side of his face.

Extrapolating the edge of the blanket from their bodies, Kira folds them in, a coccoon of shaking bodies in a shaking world. The noise is terrible, all consuming, the house above them creaking and dropping dirt and dust from above. The air under the blanket is hot and damp, rank with fear, but he presses Bodhi and the dog up against the wall and ignores their distress for the sense of taking up as little space as possible.

Time passes without measure, until the pause is longer, and the house starts to settle above. The loss of whatever has been hitting the floor can be assessed later. It's long minutes, waiting and listening, and still Kira hesitates to pull free.

"Bodhi," he asks carefully, a moment spared, finally feeling the tightly wound ball of him against his shoulder, under his clinging arm. "Are you here with me?"

It seems to Bodhi that the shaking ends too early. Earthquakes are pretty brief, however little they feel like it in the moment. It's not an earthquake he's focused on, though, but the slow, rolling wave that destroyed a city and the little world it sat on. He still sees the planet killer and its corruption of kyber crystals, the burst of horrible energy that tricked rock into thinking it was water and hurled a tidal wave in all directions. It only lasted minutes--minutes, to kill a city--but compared to an earthquake, that's still a lot.

And when the shaking is over there's nothing to distract him from Kira holding onto him. He hasn't had to endure it before, never questioned how he'd gotten even more jumpy. After all, he never liked being touched without warning, or by people he didn't trust. Even when Johanna grabbed him and he nearly lost himself to blind panic, it was over so fast. This, he feels even as the world tries to tear itself apart, every inch of his skin crawling, the revulsion so strong it becomes physical nausea, or maybe that's just more of the panic. Tentacles, strong as iron, slimy to the touch, locking him down and tearing into his mind. In the dark, in the grip of bone-deep terror, there's nothing to show him it's over, and it's not as though he can ever trust himself again. For all he knows, he's still there, thought and volition equally stripped away.

Kira's voice pulls him back to here and now. He desperately wants out again. He can't convince himself he's allowed to move--not because of unstable structures or aftershocks, but because he can feel Bor Gullet just as vividly as Kira. Just as overpowering as violating. He just whimpers, unable to even put together the words to beg to be released.

Reading people is another sense he's had to stretch and work out of atrophy, cues he learned to match with his other sense that still exist, but require his attention without the old context. He has to look and feel and remember--what did it feel like when a person tilted their head like this, what did that tight line of the shoulder mean? The remembering isn't so hard, but the attention is. He doesn't remember to pay it all of the time.

Or he's distracted by something far bigger than a man's fear. Bodhi's is obvious when the shaking fails to start again, and it doesn't lessen in the slightest for the crush of men and dog. "It's alright," Kira tries, waiting it out another moment before he loosens an arm, pulls himself out of the blanket.

Aurora is still whimpering, huddled up to Bodhi's hip. Hoshi has at least settled into a minutely shaking ball of feathers on his shoulder, tucked up to his throat and no longer clawing him. There's a mess of scratches and scrapes along his jaw, stinging and unimportant.

Pulling himself far enough away that none of him is touching the dark lump in the corner, he keeps blinking, like his eyes will ever adjust enough to see them in this kind of dark. "I'm still here," he says, now from a small distance. "I don't think any of us are hurt; can you tell me if you are?"

The dog doesn't help, but at least she doesn't make it worse. Finally sensing permission to move, Bodhi scrambles to throw off the blanket, needing desperately to throw off the restriction. Amazing how hard it is to throw off a bit of cloth totally blind. He wants to scream in frustration every time the blanket catches, but he gets it on the floor... well, it seems to take hours, but it's really only a few seconds. Time is completely unmoored. Or Bodhi is. Hard to say.

At least he can breathe a little with the blanket off. He can't imagine being able to do anything else, hit by a wave of dizzying weakness as he half uncoils. He broke his hand once (well, had it broken for him by the security from his favorite casino, technically). Less the pain, this feels a lot like that, the crushing exhaustion, the clammy, trembling mess he's been left in, the inability to push through the strain and command his limbs to do what he needs them to. So he slumps in place, head lolling against the wall, and tries to breathe quietly, to exist as unobtrusively as he can and hope the danger passes him over.

Kira's words reach him as though from a great distance, and they don't resolve into meaning on the way. He doesn't answer.

That's it--after the shaking stops, after the continuing shocks dwindle to something Kira can still stand in; after the flurry of movement and whimper and a blanket slapping him in the face--he moves for the door. The stairs don't wobble so much as the world does while he's on them, but it's tolerable, harder to even notice in the dark.

Whatever else happens, he just wants to see a few feet in front of him.

The world beyond the door isn't complete chaos: the back door is hanging by a single hinge; every bit of dust and wooden grain they never got off the rafters is now on the floor, floating through the air; pots are on the ground, chairs are overturned. He doesn't venture out to assess the state of Bodhi's tea set, but he doesn't see any parts of the ceiling but the dust on the ground, and he considers that a win.

Coming back down the stairs on legs that shake more than anything else, he can at least see where Bodhi is now, dropped against a different section of the wall with the blanket trailing away from his feet. He isn't moving, but he is breathing, and nothing seems immediately, physically wrong. Kira finds the shine of a jar, spring water left to cool under the stairs, and unscrews the cap as he wanders over to sit next to, but not against, Bodhi.

"Everything's fine," he says, another thing he can't know or promise. "The house is fine, I think. We can go look when you're ready. You can drink this, when you're ready." Bodhi can't be hurried, perhaps now more than ever. Kira will sit with him until it passes, speaking when something occurs to him to say, a vocal anchor if nothing else.

Leaving Bodhi alone in the dark was the best move Kira could have made. There's no damage to speak of, nowhere for the adrenaline rushing around his bloodstream to go except slowly away. It'll be a while before he's alright again, but with nothing to set off his broken alarm bells, he can reason his way toward behaving like a person again. Shame is the first thing to come back strong, a bitter, resigned disdain for his own weakness. Not comfortable, but it's a reason to get it together. His memory's a little fuzzy over the last few minutes, but it's all bad. Poor Kira doesn't deserve this shit.

He'd have appreciated it if he could have had, oh, the rest of the day to be alone, but he's hardly in a position to ask for more concessions when he's already been so useless. There was a real disaster going on while he did nothing but whimper. Knowing he couldn't trust himself was one thing. The evidence is so much worse.

He doesn't let himself lean away when Kira sits down. It's no one else's job to deal with how broken he is. The answer doesn't come right away--he has to struggle, dig deep into depleted reserves to fight through the sickly sensations of panic and leftover memories. His voice is lower than usual, faintly raspy from strain. "Sorry."

There are worse things to do in a disaster than sit quietly with someone, sipping cool spring water and patting it on his scratches while he waits for Bodhi to pull together. The house will have to be put together, people will have to be found and accounted for. Sitting in the dim light with his roommate and his dog gives Kira time to think ahead: they'll wait it out, they'll make sure the house isn't falling down, and they'll take what they can salvage and spare to the Town Hall or the Inn.

Stay busy. He isn't nursing a burn with a bottle of vodka, this time. He'll stay busy, and he'll let himself worry about the rest when he runs out of things to do.

When Bodhi finally speaks, Kira's mind is hours away, wondering if the spring will be compromised, if the river will drain further into a crack. He doesn't know enough about earthquakes, it's more fantasy than speculation. "What," he answers, turning his head, then, "Oh, no, don't be." Even without knowing--or being able to know--what it is, Bodhi is clearly struggling with something. Everyone has buttons, and most of them aren't good. "Drink some water, when you can," he repeats, setting the jar between them and scooting the extra few inches away.

He doesn't feel much better about himself, but Kira's cavalier dismissal of the apology does at least remove one tiny fraction of his worries. The logical part of his brain even backs it up. In the opposite place, after all, Bodhi wouldn't rush to be hard on someone after a shattering breakdown. But logic isn't that powerful a force right now.

It's not a sure thing, getting limbs to respond to their instructions. His hands shake enough that he uses both to pick up the jar and there's still a bit of sloshing, but a few careful swallows do clear his head a bit, chase off some of the queasy weakness. He puts it down again quickly, though he wouldn't mind draining the whole jar. His mind is moving in similar directions to his roommate's. There's probably damage, and both pipes and water sources could be compromised. It's easier to think about practical things. "Thanks." He should probably be saying more, but that's not happening yet.

It isn't the first time Kira's set a drink next to Bodhi and ignored the way his hands shake, and it won't be the last. The house was always meant to be a place to retreat to, a harbor to dock in when he pleases, or when he can't quite face the canyon outside. Talking Bodhi into watching the place during the fog had been his own idea, but keeping him after had been a thing he discussed with Casey, a mutual good and protective feeling.

With Casey gone, he hasn't felt that any less. Maybe Bodhi isn't a constant or even common companion, passing through when he pleases, but his existence gets Kira out of bed some days, gets him gathering plants and feeding the stove.

Maybe Mark is right: it doesn't matter if this is real or not, it's real to him. And if it isn't, it's real to Bodhi, and if he loses it, who's going to sit near him with water while he collects himself? "No problem."

Several beats later, when Aurora has calmed enough to slink over to his other side and bury her head in his lap, Kira settles a hand on her head and asks, "You weren't here for the last one, were you?"

It takes too long to turn the sentence into information and respond reasonably, but he gets there. He'll be in bad shape for a while, but Bodhi is resilient, if nothing else. He hasn't had any other choice. He's already starting to put his head back together, as much as it ever is. "This happened before? N-no, I wasn't here." He's still used to thinking of himself as new, but it's been months, hasn't it? Not as many months as he'd like there to be between major earthquakes, but then, maybe they're not usually so bad. The buildings aren't really built to withstand that kind of damage and most of them are in okay shape. He shifts a bit and finally sits up to face Kira, only shaking a little bit like a dry leaf before the monsoon.

"I was cooking last time," he says, gaze dragging to his left hand on Aurora's head. He got the scar before he got the dog, it was so close to his own arrival. "I'd never been in one before, but it wasn't nearly as bad as that."

Sure, the ground had shaken enough that he'd dumped boiling water on himself, and he hadn't been the only one hurt--but this had felt like a wave rolling through the ground, bucking off trees and buildings. He's not excited to go out and surveying the wreckage. If Ren's house is still standing, so much of it gutted to fortify this house instead, he'll suspect some kind of intervention on its behalf.

"I think is the third one since anyone arrived, we're lucky the dog knew what to do." He rubs her ears under his hand, grateful that someone in the house can predict disaster. "Keep drinking," he offers, "I just refilled all the jars and bottles, it's fine." Bodhi needs something to calm and hydrate him more than Kira needs not to take a ten minute walk.

Hey obeys because he wants to, though he still tries to be restrained as he sips from the jar. Now that he's feeling a little like himself again he's more aware of the dust in the air and the nasty effects of misfiring neurotransmitters. It soothes physically as well as psychologically. None spills when he sets the jar down this time, though that may just be because there's less in there. He doesn't want to be overly optimistic.

"M-maybe the damage won't be as bad as... Some, some of the construction must be designed to handle..." Puzzling through logistics definitely helps, silly as he must sound to Kira. "If it's--I thought it must be geologically active, if there really is a planet under our feet at all." He'd rather talk about this, anyway, and not whether he's been in an earthquake. The planet killer is not an earthquake.

"I didn't see any beams on the floor," Kira agrees, though there were limits of how much of the house one could see from the cellar doors. "The back door's hanging a bit, but that's an easy fix. Furniture's knocked around, probably some kitchenware littering the floors, but--it's standing. I'm sure plenty of the others are standing too."

Usually he's given to realism verging on pessimistic, but realistically it helps nothing to put down Bodhi's hope. "There's something under us for now," is his dry return to those roots, though he pushes his back against the wall and starts to lever himself up.

"I can go check, if you like. You can take your time down here, check the furnace to make sure it's--still connected to something, I guess?"

"I could do that." It's even a pretty legitimate job, not just a convenient way to keep him calm and out of Kira's hair. A lot of little things could have been badly jarred in the shake. He knows the furnace by heart by now, with nothing else mechanical to take up his tinkering energy. He can't think of anything more calming he could try to do, and if he can accomplish one thing, he can keep going. It's standing up in the first place that's hard. "I--I'll get this first, then come look at the door." Not that Kira couldn't. He just wants to have a bit of a list.

"Right," Kira says, nodding. Sometimes Bodhi needs breadcrumbs to follow, and a list of chores isn't very different from how he got him in the house to begin with. "We'll need the furnace if we're keeping the house at all. I'll check out the rest and figure out what needs doing."

Actually doing it, he'll leave for Bodhi or later. At some point he has to go out there and make sure the others are okay. "Do you want a hand up," he asks, rather than putting the hand in Bodhi's face. Backing off seems to be the right move, so far.

He hadn't thought about the damage being too extensive to salvage (especially with the depth of knowledge of carpentry he and Kira so unimpressively have between them). The idea hits him harder than he expects. He hasn't had a home as such since he left Jedha, living in dorms and out of ships and station housing after that. He sometimes forgets it's there, doesn't think to make much use of the space, but the idea of it being gone bothers him a lot. Frowning, he reaches out a hand to tap the furnace as though that could tell him if it's in one piece.

Distracted, he tries just shaking his head, then realizes it might not be all that visible in the darkness. "No, I... I've got it." He clings to the wall a bit pathetically and it's a fight to get his legs under him, but he forces himself to his feet before it gets really worrisome.

Coaxing the dog up when Bodhi refuses, Kira watches without quite looking at him. It isn't until Bodhi is on his feet that he can believe he's going to be alright, at least enough to leave him be.

"I don't know when Aurora will want to come up," he says. "Honestly it might be better for her down here, I don't know what state the floors are in. Will you be alright with her," he asks, still fussing his hands over flattened ears, though she's with them enough to keep licking his chin between wheezing breaths.

Bodhi's never really sure what to do with the dog, but that's a simple request. "I... I can watch her." He'll be fussing with the furnace, but she's not an uncooperative animal. He's good for supervision and even petting, as long as he isn't expected to exhibit much more skill than that.

And it's another task. The trail of breadcrumbs tends to work better the longer it goes on. Otherwise he wanders off again too easily. "Though, um, I'm sure she'll... Won't she want fresh air soon?" Dogs don't seem well equipped to sit in dark holes in the ground following a trauma that mostly happened in a dark hole, but what does he know.

"Probably," Kira answers with a shrug. His knowledge of dogs is very recent, and only slightly better than Bodhi's own. "But I don't want her getting any until I know what's up there. For all I know the ground will swallow her when she gets outside."

For all he knows, that's how everyone else disappeared, and he's not add Bodhi or the damn dog to that list. "Just--keep her down here until I come back, once I know how the house is we'll go to the Town Hall, if it's standing I can't imagine where else we'd all gather."

He feels a little silly for not having followed Kira's rather obvious train of thought. "Silly" is a normal, grounding way to feel and he's kind of glad of it, even if it means he's got a ways to go before he's back up to a modest normal. Thinking through things logically, thinking into the future, he'll... He'll get there. For now, furnace. "I, um, just... Shout if there's anything you need help with." Since everyone who lives in the house is intact(ish) and accounted for, there probably won't be an outright emergency, but he's trying to be prepared. "If a pipe's broken and the kitchen's flooding or something." Let it be nothing worse than that and he'll be fine.

Though Baze hasn't been to Bodhi's house before, at least he hasn't forgotten the directions for getting there, and it isn't long after the ground stops shaking-- long enough for him to verify there hasn't been too much damage, and no one seems terribly injured nearby to him-- that he shows up to pound on the door.

There are very few people he cares about in this town, so far, but Bodhi apparently is one of them, and he has to make sure the idiot pilot is all right. Besides, he can guess what that quake felt like to someone else who lived through the destruction of Jedha, and while he isn't the compassionate creature his partner was, he still has a heart in there somewhere.

A knock shouldn't startle, especially on a day like this one. If anyone survived, it was inevitable to be checked on, if only to search the house for livability and supplies. Kira pauses in righting a chair in the living room and slips to the window, as if there were someone in the canyon he wouldn't let in.

They haven't formally met, but he recognizes Baze from description and mutual gatherings. One of Bodhi's people, here to check on him. He doesn't know where the man lives, to tell him how far he's come, if he'll have news of neighbors Kira might be curious about.

He won't find out if he doesn't answer the door.

Opening it is a test of the structure itself, and he watches it with some caution as he cracks it open. The door holds, faring better than the back, and he situates himself in the gap. "He's downstairs," he says. "He seems like he needs some space, so you might want to let him come up on his own, but he's alright physically."

Baze eyes the stranger with a mix of irritation and skepticism. He, on the other hand, has no idea who Kira is, aside from "not Bodhi". He hasn't exactly made an effort to get to know people yet, and he has yet to be down this way. "Who are you?" he asks, rather than addressing the man's statement directly just yet.

"You mean he doesn't talk about me," Kira says, slipping easily, if wearily, into slanted shoulders and pouting. He's never met a form of aggression or irritation he didn't immediately go capricious for, and the context of Baze's visit does nothing to change that.

"I'm Kira." Shifting in the door, he leans his back to the frame, holding the door's edge and effectively blocking its path. "This is my house you're scowling at."

"We aren't friends, why would he?" Baze points out, not without continued irritation. Whether that irritation is at Kira, Bodhi, or the earthquake causing this discussion is entirely up in the air. It's probably all three. "I'm Baze. From his planet. I just wanted to check on him."

Resisting the laugh that wants to bubble out of him, a little hysterical in the stress of the day, Kira pushes off the frame and lets the door open with the weight of his body. It's good to know he isn't the only one who has spent time trying to slot Bodhi somewhere between are we friends and I hope he doesn't die in an emergency..

Honestly, that's a lot of people here, for him. "Like I said, he didn't deal with it very well, but he's unhurt. He's looking at the furnace downstairs, you can come in if you like, but you'll have to help me put the furniture back while you wait."

That's a reasonable request, and Baze nods agreeably. "I can handle furniture." Twitchy pilots, maybe not, but he's here regardless. Bodhi may or may not appreciate that.

"Good, the couch is a bitch to move." In no small part because parts of its frame are cracked and blistered, and he's hoping it doesn't crack apart in their hands. Moving away from the door to let Baze in, he doesn't have to gesture to their destination: the couch and short table are the first things to pass on the way in, the dining room in its own disarray deeper into the house.

"How did your own place fare?"

"I'm at the inn," Baze answers with a shrug, coming to push the short table out of the way first so they have a better angle for the couch. "Don't have much to fall over or get jostled." Even some of the random decorative crap that had been in the room at the inn he'd since moved elsewhere. He still likes his space uncluttered to the point of being spartan, even if he hasn't lived in the temple for years.

"I'd tell you to move out so the new arrivals have somewhere to go, but something tells me those rooms will be full again after this." It's an old conversation he's had, plans with Veronica to make a sort of halfway-house for the newest arrivals because so many people linger at the inn--but he'd spent months there himself, unable to believe he'd be stuck here this long, unable to set down roots.

Now those roots have been shaken in their foundation, and he's glad the stupid house held up. "Careful on the splinters," he warns needlessly. "I have some gloves if you prefer, though."

The thought of living in a whole house by himself is still extremely unappealing, and he doesn't really have friends at this point, so Baze shrugs. There haven't been that many new people coming into the inn-- that he's seen, anyway. He eyes the table (or couch, or both) with its supposed splinters. "How do you live with furniture that can give you splinters that easily? You should sand it down."

"It was polished wood before today," Kira points out, wondering if this is another space-thing, like Jyn's horrible description of dogs or Bodhi's evasive discussions of what must be television. "Just avoid the cracked parts, we'll have to fix them later."

He glances back over at Kira, a little surprised. "The earthquake did this?" He'd been outside when it happened, and he hasn't been back to his room yet, but he still hadn't imagined that a quake would actually crack wooden furniture. He eyes the table again. He could probably make something more solid than that, and he's not even great at making things. Still, he avoids said cracks when pushing it out of the way, and gets back to the couch.

"It's the worst one we've had," he points out, "at least since I've been here. Some of the damaged houses were from one before I arrived." They're probably lucky Aurora gave them a warning, hiding in the cellar, and that the house didn't collapse in on them while they were down there.

Even if it hadn't been long enough to ease the ire, even if Casey were still here--Kira can't be angry about the salvage of Ren's destroyed home for theirs. Reinforcing it after the storms is probably why it's relatively unharmed. "We'll figure out the cracks later, mostly I want it stood up for now. Make it as normal as possible for when Bodhi comes up." He doesn't know how much that will help with the episode he had in the cellar, but it couldn't hurt.

Stood up, Baze can do, even if he's still bemused by the damage this quake did. He rights the couch and shoves it with a shoulder up against the wall, hoping that's where it belongs. Kira can, of course, correct him if need be. "So there is probably more damage," he comments, mostly to himself. "To other houses, from this."

"I haven't been out to check yet," he admits. Granted, the nearest house was already in shambles when he moved in, and has only gotten more so over time and trials. "I mean, I assume the paths are clear enough, if you made it here, I'm just hoping to get this back in its general place before I go looking for more trouble."

Against the wall is less, not more, but Kira didn't decorate the place to begin with. Wall seating is fine, probably safer if there are aftershocks to worry about, and he places a chair similarly. "How long have you been here?"

"Thirty-five days. Give or take." He replaces the table now, as well, and crouches to examine the cracks in it for potential repair work. "Not long." Feels like longer, though. There's not much to keep the days separate, except for events like this, and it all seems to blur together a bit.

"I was notching a bedpost until the sun stopped going down," he says, and in part, it seemed to stop mattering. There is a space between catastrophe that seems to average out over time, but never exact, rarely the same peril twice. Guessing isn't his preferred kind f prediction, and he's sure the second he starts to anticipate a pattern, it will change.

Pretending not to know things is a lot easier when you know very little, apparently. "I'm guessing six months by now, Bodhi--maybe four? I didn't really mark moving in on my calendar."

"And still no idea why we're here, what they want from us." It's less a question and more a statement of the obvious. Baze straightens up again. "Anything else you need moved?" It's something he can do, and do fairly well, at least. Splinters or not.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's driven me before, and it seems to have a vague, haunting mass appeal

[Bodhi] House 39; Earthquake

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