She makes no motion to go after him, instead flinching in the direction of her cabin - but the sound of sole scraping against earth keeps her rooted, her heels digging into the ground beneath her - not just the dirt, not just the creatures that might be living beneath the outercrust, but her ground. The one she's exposed and made vulnerable to a virtual stranger, the one she's never truly revealed to almost anyone. Cassian had been the exception, had been the only one to have forced himself through the fissures of her fortifications, but he'd died with her on the beaches of Scarif. The price he'd had to pay was clinging to her body, holding her close, while the light and heat swallowed them whole.
This vulnerability - with Kira, with allowing glimpses into her past - is new and foreign and strange.
Terrifying.
She presses molar to molar as he comes back, words swinging and sharp as a blade, as hot as a blaster bolt. His aim is sure and true, and she wonders how long it will take before the wounds have bled out - before she's more hole than substance. Her hands clench at her sides, the right one still aching, still enshrouded by the ghosts of her actions. How many people had she hit? How many people had she hurt in her delirium?
She knows he's right. She recognizes the truth in his pain, in his words, in his accusations. She knows that one loss isn't less than a hundred. She knows that the ache of absence knows no quantity. She knows that, in all of the losses she's suffered in her life, her father had been the worst; just one, a singular man, and yet his loss had been the one she'd never been able to completely repair. Even when she forgave him as he lay dying in her arms, even as his mind wandered to his work and its need to be destroyed instead of the years they'd had stolen, even as recognition and sadness flickered across his fading gaze when he saw her for the first time in 15 years. She forgave him, she did - but the wound was no less raw than it was before.
"I'm sorry!" she finally shouts, hurling the words like a proton torpedo towards the bruise at his jaw. The bruise she made. Her weight collapses back onto the lip of the fountain, her limbs and appendages a collection of quivering blades of grass. "I'm sorry. For what I did. For hurting you. I'm - I'm just - I'm sorry."
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This vulnerability - with Kira, with allowing glimpses into her past - is new and foreign and strange.
Terrifying.
She presses molar to molar as he comes back, words swinging and sharp as a blade, as hot as a blaster bolt. His aim is sure and true, and she wonders how long it will take before the wounds have bled out - before she's more hole than substance. Her hands clench at her sides, the right one still aching, still enshrouded by the ghosts of her actions. How many people had she hit? How many people had she hurt in her delirium?
She knows he's right. She recognizes the truth in his pain, in his words, in his accusations. She knows that one loss isn't less than a hundred. She knows that the ache of absence knows no quantity. She knows that, in all of the losses she's suffered in her life, her father had been the worst; just one, a singular man, and yet his loss had been the one she'd never been able to completely repair. Even when she forgave him as he lay dying in her arms, even as his mind wandered to his work and its need to be destroyed instead of the years they'd had stolen, even as recognition and sadness flickered across his fading gaze when he saw her for the first time in 15 years. She forgave him, she did - but the wound was no less raw than it was before.
"I'm sorry!" she finally shouts, hurling the words like a proton torpedo towards the bruise at his jaw. The bruise she made. Her weight collapses back onto the lip of the fountain, her limbs and appendages a collection of quivering blades of grass. "I'm sorry. For what I did. For hurting you. I'm - I'm just - I'm sorry."