La paz llegará, el amor siempre vivirá—No me ames, mas quedate otro dia

[candor1]

WHO: Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor, Bodhi Rook, Finnick Odair (independent threads)
WHERE: Cabin 56, the woods, the spring, wherever else happens
WHEN: Feb 6 through now. "Ten days in the [new] life".
OPEN TO: Jyn, Cassian, Bodhi and Finnick
Quick apology for what a first-love middleschooler I've been being IC and OOC, with me neglecting and Cassian unable to gear shift at all away from Jyn! (Turns out we're super OTP, quelle surprise) Thanks for forebearance, and sorry, guys…!
This might help with moving back into the rest of the game from that first obsessed flush of her arrival. Mainly prompts for kestreldawn and I to multithread several CR developments in a single post, rather than a slew of logs.
WARNINGS: PTSD (both helping and triggering one another—and worrying about that), exchanging war/life/traumatic stories, issues they haven't thought about in decades resurfacing 'cause this is so new and everything's getting unlocked, smut (though surprisingly happy/healthy), treating physical injury (possible self-harm convo), reproductive choices, panic attacks
STATUS: Open

1. the next moment (Jyn and Cassian in their cabin)

2. that night (same)

3. in the next few days (Finnick and Cassian at the spring)

4. in days following (Bodhi, Jyn and Cassian TBD)

5. today (Jyn and Cassian, cabin and forest)

Comments

[candor1]

He wants to take that lingering panic and new self-rebuke out of her voice. The tactical brain is already setting to work figuring out how. But the rest of him… 

He really does understand. He doesn't blame her for anything. And despite her doubt, he really does think he possibly could have reacted worse—and knows how much worse "worse" could be. She at least hadn't taken it out on anyone else. He might have gone into town, found anyone there, start demanding… start threatening… start doing…

His eyes squeeze shut.

He had been so good at keeping it together and reacting instantly and identifying his options and taking them… when what he'd been fighting had been external. Tangible. Real.

All these internal intangibles… all this metaphysical, imaginary… render him… utterly…

Not for the first time, he shifts his grasp on her, moving himself too, so he can rest his head lower on her body, press into her and close his eyes. Listen to her blood in her veins and her breathing and her heartbeat. And hold on to that physical tangibility. The realness of her.


[ooc: this can go fluffier but he needs another minute and a little more help from her, I think…!]

[kestreldawn]

Jyn shifts with him as he moves, their bodies fluid and synchronized in ways she couldn't have ever imagined. It isn't the mere act of having each other's backs, reading each other's cues to keep the enemies at bay - though that skill in itself wasn't terribly common, it certainly wasn't rare, either.

This?

This mirroring of breaths, and heartbeats, and limbs - the way their muscles, their bones seem to anticipate, intrinsically know and mimic the other's - the way they seamlessly fit and glide and rest against and with one another ..

She knows the significance of it, can feel it in her chest.

Hands come up to gently brush away the strands of hair from his face, letting fingernails drag lightly over the skin of his scalp. Something her mother used to do, when she was small, to almost instantly soothe her child to sleep. Calm the spirits raging inside of her tiny body. Jyn doesn't make the connection - doesn't remember where she's learnt to do this or why it comes to her without thought. Doesn't remember her mother's voice (doesn't realize it's her own now) when she begins to hum a song she'd heard once, many years ago.

[candor1]

He closed his eyes into the touch, letting himself sinkinto her arms and into the song.

After it had faded away, he murmured, "Tell me something." An invocation of another item on the list: Something about you.

[kestreldawn]

Jyn rests her head back against the trunk of the tree, hands continuing their sowing of his hair. She's realizing that so many of her stories - so many of the tales of her life - had been forced from her mind, forced to lay low and fade in order for the more important things to take root. Namely, staying alive. It feels like she has to dig through layers and layers of rubble and dirt and sand in order to get what lies underneath.

"When we lived on Coruscant, my father wasn't - really around, very often. I was mostly in the care of Mac-Vee," her voice goes soft at the name, "My nanny droid. But of course - I wanted my parents more than I wanted the droid, though I ended up loving him as much as a child could, back then." She pauses, knowing (too late) that this might stir up memories of K2, knowing it was a topic she and Cassian had yet to breach. She opens her mouth, wanting to continue the story as they'd promised to do - stops. Exhales. "It's a stupid story, I shouldn't have -" she mutters quickly.

[candor1]

"It isn't," he murmured. "Go on. Por favor." (Which was among the words and short phrases he'd been gradually teaching her.) Far from seeming triggered, he seemed, gratefully, to be relaxing at the tale.

[kestreldawn]

Jyn searches for the sincerity of his tone, whether he's merely agreeing in an attempt to prevent embarrassment or to placate her, or whether he's actually interested - after a few moments of silence and consideration, she decides it sounds more like the latter (or, at least, hopes it does). Takes a breath, continues.

"I used to - dress him up, or try to, in my father's clothes. It was all Imperial uniforms, at the time, but I'd put the hat on - try to wrap the jacket around him, though it didn't usually close all the way. I could never convince Mac-Vee to put the trousers on, for some reason. But he liked the boots." The absurdity of the memory, the vision of the droid attempting to wear her father's clothing to make her happy, elicits a laugh out of her - bright, and clear. "My father caught us once, when he'd come home earlier than we thought. He said he'd wondered why his uniforms were always stretched out and ill-fitting." She closes her eyes, remembers. "He let us use one uniform to our heart's content; but we weren't allowed to use the others."

[candor1]

It's a nice image of Galen Erso as a father and Jyn as a daughter. As well as a droid (who, since Cassian had only vague mental reference for an MV, of course resembled Kay) being so ridiculously situated and being sporting about it.

"Kay once offered to undergo a memory wipe for me," murmured Cassian. It was the first time he'd spoken of Kay since arriving. But he says it as if it were the easy response to an ongoing conversation. "He saw me crying and volunteered 'in case' my 'continued dignity demanded it'."

(Actually it had been in case his continued dignity and service demanded it. But what had precipitated those tears was less important to Cassian right not, and not a tone he wanted to add to this moment with Jyn, than Kay's response to it.)

[kestreldawn]

It feels like another lifetime - and, for all intents and purposes, Jyn supposes that it is. Or was. Not only for the fact that it had happened so many years ago but for the fact that they'd been transported here, with no definite proof of its location, in the same galaxy or otherwise. The memories feel more like some distant fever dream, and for a moment, she questions whether they happened at all.

Cassian's voice lulls her eyes open, fluttering at the rush of air against the thin membranes.

She thinks to when she'd first met K2 - Congratulations, you're being rescued - the way his forceful slam made her think he'd broken every bone in her body, evacuated all the air from her lungs. Shooting the Imperial Droid without knowing it was K2 or not, playing it off as though it had been on purpose. She knew Cassian had reprogrammed him, kept him as his only friend for many years. She remembers the sound of his voice when K2 had locked the vault doors, but how he'd pulled himself out of his grief and his mourning to continue with the mission - to help her.

"Will you tell me? About him?"

[candor1]

"I'm not sure what I could add to what you already know," said Cassian. "Kay was very consistent." Which had been the original point. If Draven was going to insist Cassian stop remaining so isolated, accept some companionship and backup, it was going to be someone who did not add chaos, unpredictability, and lessened situation control…

He supposes that's a place to start. "Draven had been on me to work more with others." Again. "That isolation was impeding my work and was an unnecessary level of practical risk." Having to get his injured self to med aid unassisted that time had been the excuse but not the cause. "I kept refusing. Then there was a mission to collect and neutralize a KX security droid, which succeeded; and after we'd achieved what we needed to with the droid, I requested custody of it. I didn't have much programming skill but I worked with some of my network's slicers to figure it out… though I guess I did all the direct work on Kay myself. When we were able to verify that the reprogramming had been successful, that Kay was safely operational and had switched his loyalty to us—mostly to me—it was the perfect compromise. I had the backup and assistance Draven insisted on; I got it without the… chaos or liability of another BLF. —Biological life form," he added; since it was only the techies who bothered with a category in opposition to TLF (technological life forms, like droids and AI). Everyone else just singled out "droids" as the other, with organic organisms as the rule. "I found him… actually… a relief. Easier to get along with than more… I mean… his literalness and lack of social graces could be trying. But everyone else, no matter how honest and straightforward a person, is inevitably more duplicitous and inconstant than a droid. Even most other droids. Whatever Kay said, I could believe without interpreting. It was… a respite. From the rest of my work."

…And, as Jyn could connect up, having heard his account of Spectrum… well, no, not "his past" or "his life" because those were encompassed by "work".

[kestreldawn]

Jyn wonders if that's what had made her seek out solace in Mac-Vee, as a child. Of course, this had been before Krennic, before Lah'mu, before Saw, before forced independence. She'd wanted her parents, underneath the attachment to Mac-Vee, her father in particular. He had gone from doting, loving figure to ghost, apparition who only seemed to show up at odd hours of the night, shrouded in darkness, silent and fleeting. Mac-Vee didn't behave such a way. He was consistent, he was rather cold and unfeeling in the literal sense, but he was there. He played games with young Jyn, told her stories, did things she wanted her father to do. And there was no ambiguity in him. No "later" when he meant "never," no "maybe" when he meant "no."

Given the (cherished) glimpses into Cassian's past that she's received, she can understand his connection to - love of, even - K2. She thinks she understands, a bit better, why K2 was so willing to sacrifice himself for them and their mission. She wonders if, in his own way, K2 had loved Cassian in return.

She thinks he did.

She repositions them, encourages him to sit up so she can see him. Touches the side of his face, presses a kiss to the other. The faint pink of his cheeks from the cold makes her eyes crinkle with a smile that tugs at her lips.

"We'd had a rough start, he and I .. I mean, he grabbed me by the shirt and threw me down on the ground so hard I thought I'd made a crater," she gently teases, "But I'm glad you had him. - I'm glad he had you. Even if - the circumstances of it all were less than ideal." Her other hand had casually fallen back to the snow beneath them, and in an attempt - perhaps a silent need - to invoke something lighter, she adds, "It's unfortunate there are no droids here now, to protect you -" as her fingers crush around the powder, compacting it into a cylinder, which she promptly lifts and brings down with a splat on the top of Cassian's head.

She knows K2 will come up again - and she knows the pain will resurface (if it ever fades to begin with). But for now, for this briefest of moments, her lungs ache to be released of their tension - not in screaming, not in fear, not in the hysterical sobs she'd been wracked with earlier that morning. But instead, with the release of laughter.

[candor1]

He'd been worried they were about to go where he still wasn't ready to…

…and nope, Jyn didn't.

Hoth, he loved her.

Sputtering with protest, Cassian rolled away from her into an extremely (deliberately) sloppy combat crouch. "Hostile confirmed," he said as if over a comm, scooping up a fistful of snow to throw back, then ducking for the nearest source of cover.

[kestreldawn]

Jyn lets out a shriek of laughter as she attempts to duck his projectile. It grazes the back of her thigh as she pulls an awkward wobble to avoid it, then races for a nearby boulder. She promptly dives behind it, realizing that there isn't nearly as much snow behind it as she'd hoped. Bad scouting.

"One hostile!" she shouts into her invisible comm, gathering up the paltry snow that's still settled behind the boulder, then peeks her head up from behind it. Eyes scan for movement, looking to where he'd managed to run to. "This is call sign Stardust, requesting immediate back up for hostile located in northeast sector. Target is considered to be armed and dangerous," she speaks back into the trees behind her, an attempt to throw the sound of her voice.

[candor1]

Somehow… his tactical brain didn't activate. (It was there, rattling off options in the background, but it didn't take over.) Perhaps because he didn't want to hunt or defeat her. This was like…

…he hadn't played enough as a child (that he remembered) to call upon his own experience. But as Joreth Sward, he had once been called on to divert a politician's children away from a meeting with Admiral Grendreef. And though the last thing he'd wanted to do with them was, as they of course insisted, war games—anything resembling the training/indoctrination/reality he knew too well—he found that the less actual skill he used… if the endgame was for the child to beat him… there was something freeing about it.

Not that Jyn needed to be let win. He and Jyn had never tested their skills against one another, and he never wanted to. (Based on Jedha, her close combat skills probably put his to shame, but his tactical knowledge… no, actually. Really not interested.)

So perhaps the goal was not to really find out.

…But then… if an opportunity arose that was too good to pass…

Cassian let her get a clear shot by standing to aim a snowball, not at Jyn, but at the low-hanging, snow-laden boughs above her.

[kestreldawn]

When Cassian pops up from behind his cover to give her a clear shot, her gut reaction is to launch a snowball at him - but she doesn't; she knows he's too intelligent, too quick-witted for that behavior. So, she knows, there's a secondary plan in place. Her eyes watch his projectile go soaring across the brightness of the sky, and his intended target becomes clear.

She's going to be buried.

"Kriff," she mutters as she feels the first tingles of snow down the back of her jacket. She motions to propel herself from behind the boulder so as to avoid the onslaught of snow, landing roughly on her hip as she does so. There's a quick bolt of pain up her side and into her stomach, which elicits a quiet groan, but she rolls back onto her feet quickly enough to recover.

She's suddenly reminded of the pretend battles she'd constructed in her head, playing with her Stormtrooper dolls in the rolling fields of Lah'mu.

"Is she digging again? I swear she didn't learn the words strip-mining from me, but we're going hungry next year if she keeps this up."

"The agricultural droids will repair the damage. Let her be," Papa had said.

"Oh, I never planned to do anything. That girl is all yours."

How little she'd known, back then. Creating fantastical battles without having the foresight to know that it'd end up being her life.

She rubs her hip as she uses her other hand to grab a large handful of snow and hurls it in the direction she'd seen Cassian moments before, fighting against the dull ache in her chest at the onslaught of memories.

[candor1]

The "fight" went a little longer, but neither wanted to really activate any combat or hunting muscle memory… and in the end it was just best for one to tackle the other and both to fall over, with an oof and plume of crystals, into a snowbank.

[kestreldawn]

For all of its cold, there was something warm and insulating about the snow. It feels soft underneath them, like a moulded foam that changed and undulated with each movement of their body, their limbs. She likes the way it crunches, compacting with a tiny groan, every time she moves.

"Safe to assume I won, then," she teases, a laugh quick on its heels. There's no score, invisible or otherwise. But her lungs feel - renewed, fresh - circulating the colder, crisper air in exchange for the stale breath hovering inside of her. Her cheeks are flushed and chilled, two perfectly rosy circles on the mounds of her skin, the color matching the tip of her nose. She glances over from where she lies on her back, half-heartedly tossing another small fistful of snow his direction.

[candor1]

He uselessly ducks his head, which does absolutely nothing to prevent the loose clump from hitting his jacket. Shaking his head more in faux-indignation, shakes the snowdust off his glove over her hair in retribution.

[kestreldawn]

Jyn allows herself to laugh - a bright, clear bell of sound that echoes off of and around and amidst the trees surrounding them. Brushes the hair from her hair lazily, lets herself roll over onto her side, loosely hang her arm across his torso. She folds her other arm and rests it under her head, eyes hiking the slope of his nose and the mountains of his lips. Allows herself to exist - purely, solely - in this singular moment, corralling the shadows that followed them here. Just for now.

She clears her throat quietly, steadies herself, inhales and whispers (in her first attempt in his presence):

"Te amo." Her Basic accent leaves perhaps a little to be desired in her pronunciation, but the gravity of it is there - the weight of it is there.

[candor1]

…The effect of her speaking Yaval to him, perfectly or not, is… immediately obvious. (Winter clothes notwithstanding.) He looks at her, snow-bedraggled and -reddened, with eyes that clearly find her the sexiest and most adorable creature they've ever seen. Rolling over, half onto her, he kisses her. And murmurs in a moment of their lips parting, this time deliberately balancing with Basic, "I love you too."

The words could come so naturally, so frequently, after a lifetime of no practice saying them at all.

ugh my heart that icon

[kestreldawn]

Perhaps it's making up for lost time, she thinks. The way the words constantly seem to be swirling on her tongue, always at the ready, always aching to be freed. The way something in her chest aches in the most delightful way - it isn't heartache, it isn't sadness - it's something like bursting, explosions, starlight. A heart feeling so incredibly full that it has no choice but to erupt inside of her chest, in a brilliant display of spark and ember and flame. She takes his hand in hers, gathers it to her heart with her own. Lips smile against his, the side of her thigh feeling the effect her words have had on him. She squeezes his hand, kisses him again.

"Apparently I should say that more often," she murmurs teasingly against his mouth.

[candor1]

He smiles against her lips; then grazes his own across her cheek, around the shell of her ear, along her hair, down her jaw, her neck—just as teasingly, using breath and soundwaves to tingle her skin, whispering a full paragraph he doesn't remember how he knows and doesn't expect her to understand. Podrá nublarse el sol eternamente; podrá secarse en un instante el mar; podrá romperse el eje de la tierra como un débil cristal. ¡Todo sucederá! Podrá la muerte cubrirme con su fúnebre crespón; pero jamás en mí podrá apagarse la llama de tu amor.*

Almost as lightly, his hands smooth in time along her ribs and breasts and back, though leaving more tangible trails in clothes and snowdust in their wake.

[kestreldawn]

The trail of his lips leave embers, flames in their wake - her skin positively aflame with each pass, each graze. She inhales a sharp breath as the words come tumbling out of his mouth like nectar. The words are cloaked, disguised - and yet, her own heart calls out to him, to those words - somehow knowing, feeling what it is they mean. She feels the fluttering of her stomach, eyes flickering closed as the pinkness of her cheeks intensifies. She murmurs approving, hungry sounds.

Her back arches up against his touch, hands tangling and threading themselves in his dark strands of hair, clutching and tugging as they move. She can feel the warmth radiating out from the center of her body, the heat that only he seems to be able to produce inside of her. She exhales a soft sigh, content to exist like this - forgetting about the fear that's always gnawing at the back of her mind, forgetting everything they'd left behind them -

She comes alive under his touch, like a creature who sloughs off their rigid exterior - reborn, renewed.

[candor1]

He centers his body on hers, pushing them together as she arcs; like finding like—mouth and pulse and core—which assert their spacious tide.

Such abandon out in the open… they could be on Ttaz. Nothing else alive on the surface of the world. The difference is, he knows, here, they're not. And doesn't care. The emptiness of that world had created safety. Here, their safety in each other empties the world.

surrounds us and penetrates us and binds us together… He's never placed his faith in anything to protect him. Barely even things he could actually wield. Something he couldn't was exponentially useless. But if the Force is made by living things… why not feel as if they were forging it now, pushing out to surround them, generating a field where nothing could cause them harm.

Why not. They've become one with the Force before.

The white light that breaks his nightmares, every cyclic flashback to Scarif, doesn't jar him as it expands him now. It feels… transcendent, not to destroy but to fill, dissolving his form so his molecules can contain the whole of existence. Merging them utterly with the whole, and together.

The snow around them has become a basin, holding them even as it melts beneath them, especially where they've parted their clothes—careful to keep a barrier between her back and the cold ground—to fuse themselves together.

[kestreldawn]

Jyn wishes she knew more in his mother tongue to pour onto him the way he does for her, wishes she could conform and twist and curl her tongue the way he does to create such beauty. He sculpts and forms and breathes life into the world around them - the worlds inside of them - the heat of his breath enough to melt the snow of the eternal winter inside of her, the warmth of his gaze enough to force shoots of grass and colorful leaves through the barren, hardened earth of her core. The stars of her universe align with his, their lights both sources and reflections, both moons and suns, powerful on their own - more complete together.

She inhales sharply at being filled, though it doesn't surprise her the way it had the first time. Then, it had been an expression of the unknown, of the uncertain - now, it's release of the anticipation, the excitement. The exquisite bridging between two bodies so they can melt into one, even if more in theory than in physicality - the delight of friction and warmth and pleasure.

One palm presses to his back, the other lost in the fields of his hair as lip drags under teeth to contain the sounds within. There's only a vague part of her that's alert enough - separate enough - to remember their publicity. But it's enough to keep her stifled sighs and blissful murmurs prisoner in her mouth -

"Por favor," she whispers, lips brushing against the curl of his ear, voice heady as her scrambled mind tries to remember the words he's taught her, "Te quiero."

[candor1]

He lets out a sound—a gasp or a groan or her name; lowers his face into her neck. He works in her and feels the sky resting above them, the planet traveling below them, trees bowing around them; trees like he used to gaze across the canopy of for hours, sitting with his back against the sun-warmed stones of the Massassi temple, his face in the breeze, the Rebellion somewhere buried deep below, the Empire spinning somewhere far above, whatever he'd done last or would have to do next as far remote as whoever had built this place eons ago; nothing like the rockiness of Fest or artifice of Carida or scorches of the Fringe or angles of cities or overflow of space; just murmur and waves of an ocean of leaves, air, life, and light. The snow could be cloud cover. And Jyn… could be absolutely no one else.

Nothing in the universe but herself.

Kissing her throat, holding her tight, moving up-in-against her, he again murmurs her name.