i'm pinned down by the dark; makes my head pirouette

[kestreldawn]

WHO: Jyn Erso
WHERE: By the fountain/Jyn and Cassian's Cabin
WHEN: Future-dated to March 16, late afternoon/evening
OPEN TO: OTA/Cassian (Separate thread posted for Kira)
WARNINGS: Mention of war, blood (sort of self-harmy?), violence (Will update as needed)
STATUS: Open

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// OTA - By the Fountain //

It had been a mistake, realized too late: attempting to climb the precipice in the northern part of town. She hadn't been doing it for any reason other than pure curiosity - wanting to know first-hand whether the stories she'd been told held any truth ("no one can leave," "everyone who tries is struck down," "the only way out is by death").

Even more foolish had been her attempting to do it alone.

She'd reached about ten feet up when the first floating orb wafted by. She hadn't thought much of it until another one showed, then another, then another - until they practically congealed around her in a brilliant, blinding burst of light - and for a moment she thought, the air sucked out of her lungs -

Scarif. The Death Star. It's happening again.

And in her panic, she'd begun to flail her arms while trying to maintain her grip on the rock's surface, not realizing that this would agitate the insects - or that they would retaliate against her.

It had been one sting - a little zap of pain on the side of her neck. She swatted, bringing palm to skin with a resounding slap. Then it was another, on her left arm - then four more through the fabric of her shirt on the expanse of her back. She leapt down from the crag, covering the back of her neck as she tried to run away, tried to escape the incessant daggers masquerading as flying insects.

It's when she reaches the fountain that the hallucinations and paranoia begin to set in.

She is back at war, back in the jungles of Onderon. She reaches for the blaster at her thigh only to discover it's been lost - or worse, taken. She ducks for cover in a small patch of trees, heartbeat thudding loudly in her ears, breathing short and furious. She trembles, petrified of an unknown enemy, wondering where the kriff her comrades have gone off to; have they left her behind?

// Cassian - The Cabin //

She hadn't told anyone where she was going that morning - not even Cassian. Part of it was because she didn't wholeheartedly believe in the danger, despite the warnings she'd received. Part of it was because she knew the reprimanding sort of look he would give her if she had told him - the silent worry glittering like a galaxy behind the blackness of his eyes. She couldn't stand to see it. So, she'd ventured out alone - didn't lie or come up with an alternative excuse, just said she would be back later.

After the attack, she eventually finds her way back to the cabin - some dull, weak part of her brain remembers it - knows it's familiar. She still sees the jungle, still feels the oppressive heat and the stink of rotting vegetation, but there's something in her, underneath the layers of fever and projected surroundings, that knows this place is safe. Or safer than the rest.

She's crouching, hiding underneath their porch - taking cover from imagined enemy fire that feels more real than the dirt pressing against her belly. Mutters and curses to herself that she's lost her weapon and has been left defenseless, not realizing the volume at which she speaks.

Comments

[kestreldawn]

Shouting? Had she been shouting? She can't seem to remember. Time seems to pitch forward and back or stop all together, and she's unable to determine the boundary between what's taken place and what she's imagined. Or worse, what she's conjured up from years past.

"No, no, no, no," she repeats, tongue unable to conform and twist itself to make any other sound. Hand to her forehead, skin on fire - though relative to herself, she's unable to feel the inferno blazing behind it. "No, no, no," she continues, now resorting to pacing back and forth - three steps left, three steps right. Eyes drag on the ground with each thud of her foot against the ground. "This isn't right, this isn't right, it doesn't make sense, none of it makes sense." Hands wringing onto one another, thumbnail to the opposite palm, digging into the flesh hard enough to draw blood. "Onderon. I should be on Onderon."

The sound of his moving away from her diverts her rabid, chaotic attention towards him.

"No, this isn't right," she mutters again, driving herself forward to push past him.

[3ofswords]

Kira lets her go, but doesn't stop or use her momentum to turn himself in the opposite direction. Her hands moving him out of her way also push to keep her upright, her trajectory serpentine without the expertise. She seems drunk, blindingly so, but her hands are hot on his skin, sinking fevered paranoia in their prints. He has to blink, shake his head to clear it--and his hands just miss catching her elbows to steady her.

Instead he follows, staying a straight line down the path as she meanders. If she'd been drinking out here, her hands should be cold. If she'd drank enough to forget the last month and a half, well--she shouldn't be breathing.

"It certainly isn't," Kira agrees, pausing almost curiously as she stumbles back into his space, weaving the edges of the dirt path in front of him. "Do you not remember anything," he asks, finally chancing a hold at her hand, waving from her side like a wet shirt hung from a line. "Tea in the kitchen, the grave--the spring?"

He doesn't think a few moments of closeness will penetrate whatever's taken hold of her, but he's seeking the extent of it, symptoms to give one of the medical types after she's stowed in a room.

[kestreldawn]

Why does nothing look like Onderon? she questions, eyes lazily, fuzzily trying to soak up the environment around her. Where's the oppressive heat? The humidity? The stinking, rotting vegetation? Where are the other insurgents? Saw? Where the kriff am I? The thoughts bleed out of her mouth like non-sensical rambles, a shoddy patchwork of some words, others skipped, volume varying with each expulsion. She feels a dull ache in her palm where she'd pierced her skin, glances down to it - can't remember how it got there. Wonders if it's a burn from the end of a blaster just fired.

Would she be foolish enough to do that?

"Onderon. Inner Rim. Japrael sector. Onderon. Inner Rim. Japrael sector. Onderon. Inner Rim. Japrael sector." Like reciting factoids from the primary school she'd never attended, the words spill through her lips in rapid succession, faster and faster until -

They stop.

A tug at her shirt. Words, distant and obscured from someone else. Someone who isn't Saw. Someone who isn't Maia, or Staven.

Unfocused eyes peer up at him. Trying to decipher his words, trying to find the meaning underneath their outer crust. Coming up empty.

Suddenly - panic - unfamiliar being, possibly hostile, preventing her from moving, preventing her from escaping, taking her captive, taking her to be tortured, taking her to end her life.

She attempts to tug herself away, stumbling over her feet and their uncoordinated, haphazard movements. Gathers herself quickly enough to clench her fist. Calculates and manages to predict its trajectory as her arm rears back, muscles and bone driving it forward along its predetermined route until it lands, squarely and firmly in an explosion of skin and bone and pain, against Kira's jaw.

"Let me go!" she screams, readying herself for a second blow should it prove to be necessary.

[3ofswords]

Just before she throws the punch, his grip tightens, and he holds tighter still in the moment just to have an anchor when the blow pushes him back. His head moves where she moves it, flips on the arc and his body carries, until he's tugged by the link of his hand clutching her sleeve.

When she screams, his fingers loosen, numb things to be shaken off as she takes her stance. His dark eyes are narrowed between suspicion and overt concern, all of him alarmed but his next move far from obvious. I'm trying to help you shapes his lips, but the words don't follow, blood welling from where he bit the inside of his own cheek.

Training with Ren was the last time he'd been in anything like a fight, and it was nothing like this--this was the streets of Manhattan, crawling with the sick, the desperate, the violent. You didn't worry about getting hit, there. You worried about getting shot. You worried about rough coughs and bad fevers and starving to death for want of something to open a can. Taking a deep breath, he spits the blood at his feet instead, licks his lips a brighter color.

There's hurt, under the physical, that she'd strike him in spite of it all. But it's certainly an answer, and there are very few of those between them right now. Should he pretend she's just arrived, the way she can't recall where she is? Should he herd her into the inn at his own peril, and hope someone like Benedict is nearby to hold her?

"Alright," he starts again, hands back up, palms out, his heels marking his path back from her. "You don't know me and you don't know where you are. Do you want to know either of those things?" It hurts to speak, but he finds he can, swallowing periodically against the pain in his jaw, flaring up through his sinus and into his ear when he does. He'll deal with it later: at least he knows where the fuck he is.

[kestreldawn]

Her knuckles throb, pulsate and radiate pain in every bone, every joint, all the way up to her shoulder. The shock of the impact might've shattered something, though she lacks the ability to recognize the familiar sting of a broken bone or a torn ligament. Her intended outcome is birthed - he's let go.

Retreating.

Surrendering.

The fist is still raised, level with her bicep, on guard and alert like a second soldier. That's her back up. The others aren't coming.

Something in the rational part of Jyn's mind, the sliver not awash and delirious with fever and toxicity, sees the flash of hurt in the darkness of the man's eyes - Kira's eyes. It screams, it pleads, it begs - STOP! You know him! You know him! - but as quickly as the voice rears itself into existence, the fever snuffs it out.

"I know where I am!" she shouts, indignant that he'd even suggest it. "I'm on Onderon! I'm on Onderon!"

[3ofswords]

He stands torn, her feverish temper raking the cold ashes of his own. There's no violence in it, even with violence done upon him--he's more worried than vengeful, more frustrated than angry. She needs help, he needs to be sure his jaw hasn't been shoved out of place in a setting where no one's ready to wire it shut and feed him soup for weeks.

But his temper exists, a sullen thing that makes him stubborn, contrary. It isn't always a temper that does things, it stands still. Digs his heels in and makes him stare at her, wanting to meet her where she batters at his sense of self with her voice and her scattered, ugly insides.

Except she can't mean it, and she might punch him again if he shouts at her. Exhaling deeply through his nose, he spits out another well of blood, hoping it's the last. "If you're so sure of that, then I have no idea where I am. Are you going to punch me in the face and leave me to fend for myself, or can you show me somewhere safe?"

Maybe if she does, he can slip away and look for help, knowing she might stay there.

[kestreldawn]

In the silence that enshrouds them, covers them, she sees. She sees the rumbling quake beneath the swelling of his jaw, the echoing ache in her hand. She sees the blackened, coagulation of the blades of her words jutting out of him at sickening angles.

She sees a corpse in the twilight of his eyes. Sees the lifeless form, withered and shriveled and nothing like it used to be. Skin as thin and stretched and dull as paper, crags and protruding bones that should never be seen, verdigris pools emptied and hollowed.

She sees herself.

And it's enough to scatter - even for a moment - the venom tearing through her body. Lucidity, in an instant - her mind grasps it like a vice, pleading for it to stay as her gaze flickers, like a dying bulb, looking to the discoloration on his jaw, then down to the trembling purple of her hand. Had she done that? Did she -

No, she couldn't have -

There's recognition in her eyes for a breath, until it's blackened out - extinguished, with nothing but coils of smoke left behind.

She's never killed a civilian. She'd made that pact with herself long ago. This wasn't their fight, they didn't need to be dragged into a conflict between forces larger than themselves. Was this man simply one of them? Not an enemy, not a hostile, not intending to drag her off to a shallow grave and bury her alive?

She flicks her head in the direction of the inn, turns on her heel without uttering a word - a surge of guilt choking her - as she walks towards the building.

[3ofswords]

She still associates the inn with safety, even not knowing where she truly is. Maybe it was a similar setting, with cold earth and thick, dark trees. Maybe they still had houses made of wood on distant planets. He hopes it's a crack of lucidity in whatever's taken hold of her, though it's too his advantage that she takes herself in without looking to see if he follows.

Kira doesn't follow.

Instead he turns off the path in a line toward the house Ravi took him to--Helen, he thinks--where either or both of them might be. Memory lapses, hallucinations--he didn't know anything about those, but her touch was feverish, and maybe that was the cause of everything. Maybe she'd caught something earlier and this was just the ugly dream before the fever broke.

The pain in his jaw responds to the impact of his feet against the dirt, urging him to hurry--it hurts, but his jaw still moves, and he's hoping that's a good sign. He'd done what Ren had shown him, to moving his head with the impact instead of trying to brace against it, but he's been punched in the face surprisingly few times.