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

Entry tags:

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

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

// 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.

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Every day, he would wake up, notch his bedpost at the inn, and slot the new number into his mind. There's a semblance of control in keeping track of the days, in knowing how long he's been here, even if it's not entirely accurate.

Their second day in the forest, he'd found and peeled the twigs from a decent branch, something to hold onto in the fog, something to test the path ahead with, pretend he might use to fend some one or some thing off. He should have taken the bat, should have taken the time for a lot of things--a note for Credence, a second search for Jyn--but his face had been throbbing, his throat aching, and Casey had been afraid.

Even after the fireflies, he'd only nodded and packed the rest of his things up from their room at the inn. If there was some delusional fever going around, he wasn't equipped to deal with it, and he knew holing up away from people was the only way to wait it out. At least with Casey and the dog, he felt safer out in the trees.

The branch is behind him, within easy reach, four notches at the top to add to the rest when they go back. And they will go back, he thinks, if things don't seem to be getting worse. It's too damp out, too cold at night, and the spring is a poor replacement for indoor plumbing.

It's also a bit strange, spending so much time with Casey. Every day, every night, feeling the double edged blade of his anxiety and relief. The forest seems to make sense to him, the edge of fear a familiar blanket he draws around them both. Kira's indulging it, glad to at least narrow his focus to one person, but he's stolen a bit of time for himself this morning, slipping south to the spring from their last camp. He takes the time to wash his face and sit for a bit, acclimating to a sense of the space, before he strips down to his underwear to get in. The heat of it helps combat the damp chill of sleep in a foggy wood, and getting in is the only relief for the lingering ache of his jaw, the bruising gone deep purple with green edges by now.

Touching it gingerly, after he's slid into the water and swum out from the shallow edge, he hopes wherever Jyn found to hide, she's alright. That the fever didn't burn her out, that she didn't lose her memories or sense permanently. There's guilt in staying away, but his ego isn't great enough to imagine he'd contribute much to the recovery. If she's gone or going, right now, he'd rather stay ignorant of it for as long as he's able.

Fog. She remembers fog. She remembers the crag, the scrape of her fingertips against its jagged face, the strain of bone and muscle as she hoisted herself up the side of it. She remembers the curiosity driving her forward - or rather, driving her up. She remembers jolts of pain, like tiny needles pinpricking her skin from all different sides, the way the pelting rain on Eadu had bruised her flesh. Only sharper, localized. She remembers the twinkle of lightning bugs, streaks of light spelling out unknown glyphs in front of her face and on her body as they'd swallowed her whole.

And then - running. Sprinting. Sprinting the way she had on Lah'mu, trying to get to the bunker before the Man in White's soldiers had found her. The same misery in her lungs, lungs now larger but no more capable of taking in the air she needed to force her feet onward. Then -

Nothing.

Waking up in her bed.

She attempted to shift herself to slide out of the blankets and almost let out a scream at the agony in her body, like she'd been turned into shattered glass, all jagged edges and piercing shards. But she'd managed. The cabin was empty. She'd had no recollection of Cassian waking her to tell her he was leaving (a promise they'd made soon after she arrived), but - in the heavy mist of her brain, it didn't mean much. He probably had, she probably even mumbled something in reply.

The air felt stagnant and stale, the cabin like a hermetically sealed container never once opened. Suffocating. She'd fumbled her way towards the door, stopping to somewhat erratically scribble a note that she'd only gone to the spring to the south of town and would be back shortly, before letting herself shuffle outside - body moving, behaving like a newly reanimated corpse, lethargic limbs trying to remember how to move.

The trip there reveals bits and pieces of what she thinks are memories. Can't be certain. The sight of the fountain makes her instinctively glance down to her hand, still swollen and purpled and sore. She recognizes the injury, knows it's because of forceful contact. But against what? What did she do?

She comes through the clearing rather ungracefully, feet shuffling loudly against the mossy undergrowth, twigs snapping under her clumsy gait. She's only half alive, and therefore half alert, not noticing there's already someone in the water.

Edited 2017-03-14 05:13 (UTC)

Ears and eyes still above water, ears still trained for a change in the ambient noise--cracking brush, birds going silent, the crackle of a cloud of fireflies--he hears the scrape of her feet and the swat of her arm against a branch. Swimming immediately to the other side of the rocky pool, he dips until he's just a pair of dark eyes watching from beside a mossy stone, wet hair trailing its uncut tips in the water.

They narrow to see her, assessing her clumsiness and exhaustion for similarities to four days prior--when she'd been stumbling, weaving, a raving thing with ragged edges that set fire to whatever they touched. And she'd touched his jaw rather forcefully, when he'd tried to reach for her.

That was his mistake: he'd accepted it at the time, continued to accept it even as Casey lit up with fear for the threat of violence and sickness both.

Pretending their escape is placating on his part let him swim above the guilt of leaving people behind to deal with everything. He could have stayed, herding the sick to the safety of the inn, making cold compresses and stretching broth from the meat stores to see people through it. Seeing her here, alive, defied his helplessness, his own familiar blanket to pull around his shoulders, and tell himself someone else would come along and do it better.

When her intent seems entirely on the stream, not the searching alertness of before, and her movements seem more tired than desperate, Kira lifts himself with an arm slung over the stone, moss rubbing green to his arm, water splashing away louder than before. The livid bruise is neither displayed nor hidden, just a feature of his cheek and throat, everything from his shoulders up exposed with droplets forming in the wake of his movement. "Jyn," is all he says, voice hoarse with the early hour and days of little use.

For a moment, she thinks the sound of breaking water is a creature. A fish? A serpent? Uncertain as to whether it's friend or foe, ally or enemy - muscles somehow remember to freeze. The tingle at the back of her skull curses her brash, obnoxious shuffling - she's drawn too much attention to herself. She's blown her cover. The hallucinations of the days prior still linger, like phantom images projected onto the landscape around her. The waves of heat rising from the surface of the water remind her of the grotto on Onderon. The lush, verdant vegetation reminds her of its jungles, though the scent of it all is different - that much is obvious.

The sight of a man in the spring begins to dissipate those translucent images, eyes blinking rapidly to try to focus on where she is, rather than where she was. Sputtering, misfiring electrical charges in the brain move at glacial speeds, trying their hardest to make the leap of faith from one end to the other, clinging on the way she had on the platform at Eadu -

No, focus. Who is -

"Kira," she finally manages, the name tumbling out of her mouth like a stone. Vision comes into focus, trails the exhaustion in his face - the dark circles sleeping beneath his eyes, the dark of his gaze blacker and bleaker than she's seen, a nebula splattered across the side of his jaw. As if finding its missing piece, her hand reminds her of its existence with a throb. She raises it, finds it with her gaze, stretches and clenches her aching fingers. "Did -" she begins, the green of her eyes glittering and trembling with horror and fear, "Did I -?" Her other hand gestures vaguely towards his jaw, then reaches to touch her own.

She remembers him, at least, even if she doesn't seem to remember the last few days. He can't blame her--he's had fevers like that, dreams of demons on his chest, much heavier than the blankets his mother had piled there while he slept. Dreams that didn't even come true, fevers that burned him closer to normal, where the mind could be a thing that just held you down for no reason, raked leaves and mulch over, left you choking in the dark.

He hasn't had the kind of dream that came true since the morning Ty left, and he hopes he never does again. If he could just stop sensing people, get some kind of shield back, he'd mind this place much less.

Lifting his other hand from the water, he touches the tip of a nail to the bruise's edge, as if remembering it's there. Her reaction says she remembers something, the feeling running down in her shadow and spilling into the water from her feet. "You didn't remember who I was," he says, excusing her even as he confirms. "You were in some kind of panic, you only did it once." The nail becomes the tip of his finger, testing once before he drops it back under the water. "Don't do it again and we're square?"

Jyn crumbles like a rotting tower, body tumbling down onto the plush moss underfoot with a dull thud. Her gaze lingers not on Kira but on the would at his jaw - the gentle swelling of it, the hues of damage and healing, the epicenter where her fist had been and its radiating shockwaves.

"You aren't going to hurt me, Jyn," she encouraged, placated. "I'm much larger than you, and I'm much faster than you. When I'm an enemy who's looking to end your life, you can't hold back. You know what happens if you do?"

Jyn knew. But stubborn tongues refuse to move. She stayed silent. A disgruntled sigh at lack of cooperation and response.

"You die, that's what happens. And do you want to die?"

She managed to at least shake her head, more out of obligation than out of self-conviction.

"Right. So, let's try it again. Attack me."

It'd taken Jyn months to be able to spar properly, consistently held back by the shadow at her elbow with each raised fist. They were comrades, they were family (or the closest she'd had, at least). But even the most resilient of minds and hearts can be reprogrammed, can be desensitized. Then, there were few who willingly volunteered to spar with her - her hands too nimble, her footing too steady. Still, the night of her first successful match, she'd promised herself - never a civilian.

And now, muted eyes soaking in the sight of a man who'd shown her nothing but kindness and generosity, she knows she's betrayed everything that had kept her human all those years. The one thing that kept her from being what she'd accused Cassian of being, after Eadu (you're no better than a Stormtrooper). She'd done the very thing she'd promised she'd never do.

She feels something in her shatter - even as he absolves her of her sins, even as he forgives her before she needs to ask - the damage for Jyn is irreparable. She scrambles back away from the edge of the water, fumbling to get back to her feet. Traces the shape at the cliff of his jaw and wilts under his gaze. Turns on her heel and flounders on the unsteadiness of her gait as she attempts to move forward - away from Kira, away from the spring, away from what she's done.

An apology is needed, she knows - she demands it of herself, even if he won't - but how could two words exonerate her from what she's done? Not just the punch, not just the delirious result of the fever - but all of it, all the back back to that night on Onderon, promising herself - never a civilian.

Edited 2017-03-15 18:58 (UTC)

At first, he moves toward her, kicking away from the far edge to paddle toward her fallen form. And every foot closer, the waste of her guilt, her grief, her self-pity, seeps into the water that remains between them. If he reaches her, what will he do? Will he risk reaching for her hand again; will he sit there in his underwear and pour his own energy into making her forgive herself?

He remembers digging that hole, and sitting in the bottom of it while Casey attacked its edges, took over the work so Kira would take a moment for himself. When he sat just as numb in the bath, and told Casey he knew--he knew if he went back out he'd lay down in the dirt and never get back up.

More than a punch to the face, that's why he's out here. That's why Casey dragged him away. He couldn't look at a person and not take responsibility. He couldn't pretend they were someone else, or make them not matter. Every toxic thing leaked into him, and he was wandering alone anyway, losing himself in the trees and inviting the wrath of a flying, buzzing border patrol just to get away from them all.

He has to stop. He has to save the energy to get back up, every night he lays down.

When she gets up, when she stumbles away into the trees, Kira holds his place in the middle of the spring and watches her go. She has friends, she has people who will look for and find her, people who will bring her home. His only responsibility is to himself, and maybe to the person who brought him out here to teach him that.

The weight of what Jyn's done has taken its toll on her. Barely speaking, hardly venturing out of the cabin (partially out of embarrassment, partially out of fear that she might have a beast within her, constantly lurking beneath the paper of her skin), often meandering like a corpse who's suddenly remembered it could move. Even Cassian, for all of his soothing whispers and adoring encouragements, has been only moderately successful in drawing her out of the exoskeleton she's created - hard, protective, unrelenting.

But even the most withered minds need to flex their muscles sometimes, and so she's decided to venture out, peeking her head through the crack between door and frame, sliding her body out like the sun between the branches of a tree. Wanders somewhere around the Inn, the fountain - eyes glazed over, barely focused. Alert enough to avoid collision, avoid injury - but only just.

Limbs heavy and heart heavier, she sits at the edge of the fountain - gaze swimming in its brackish depths, fingers gripped to the sides to mitigate the lure of letting herself fall forward, letting her mouth and nostrils flood with the smothering waters.

His bruises have started to yellow by the time he rejoins the village, slipping in and out of the kitchen through its side door in the mornings, taking tea back to the house. It feels better to walk the distance, to really wake up, to feel like he's actually rested. He sleeps better, away from the inn. He feels better.

Kira knows he can't avoid everyone forever. It isn't fair, to hole up in a house and contribute nothing, back to square one looking for a reason to get up--but the break has been good to him, and he isn't quite ready to give that up.

Isn't ready to take on the sinking that starts in his stomach, drags on his higher functions the closer he gets to the fountain. But there she is, leaning herself over the edge to stare, presumably at her own reflection. The water is usually clear enough to make out the shadows of the fountain's solid bottom, and it makes sense--to find her by water, to have two mugs of tea in his hands.

He can't make her feel better about what happened, but he can at least show her that he doesn't care. That he isn't afraid of her, any more than he's afraid of the fountain anymore. There's nothing magical to it at all, he's decided, having been in it twice, having dipped his burned hand in its waters and come up unchanged. It's just a piece of concrete with some water in it, and she's just a woman who had a very bad week. "Here," he says, walking up and offering over Casey's mug. "It's still cold, especially this early."

The interruption of a voice - soft, delicate, still lingering in the world of newly shed sleep - snaps Jyn's attention from the waters. She's grateful for it, the pull of it like a magnet against which she was quickly loosing her footing. But - for as quick as the gratitude for distraction floods her like lighting, guilt and shame are rush in after, trailing behind like thunder. She feels like a tempest, a gale unwilling, unable to be tamed. Which is appropriate for Jyn Erso (or had it be Liana Hallik? Or Tanith Pontha? Or Kestrel Dawn?), isn't it? Had she ever been anything but a destructive cyclone, blaster forced into her child-sized hand, sense of innocent and wonder snuffed out like her mother's life at the end of a blaster bolt?

Fingers reach out to curl themselves around the chilled mug he's offering, but the jade of her eyes will not rise to meet the sincerity of his. She murmurs a sound akin to a thank you, though it sounds more like the golden drop of a pebble breaking water than gratitude. The water of the fountain is replaced with the tea in the mug for her gaze, remembering how he'd offered her some of his personal stash when she'd arrived, cooked her food to help her regain her strength.

The tip of a finger curled around the cavernous part of the mug (the other clinging tightly to the handle) taps against the porcelain lightly, sending invisible, non-sensical messages to a far off ears in a far off place.

"How's your jaw?" she asks, voice sounding wholly unlike her own - no conviction, no fire, no strength behind it.

"Not broken," he concedes, careful with his body as he sets it next to hers. They're back in that hole, the one he went away to climb out of. Maybe he should have tried harder to find her, to bring her with him. Maybe he needed to trust Casey's advice, that he needs to leave people in them sometimes, that he needs to get himself out and do what he can for him, to even have the strength to help someone else.

He isn't sure he has it now, so soon after coming back, still trying to gauge how it feels to even walk through the village while others sleep.

All he can do is fold one hand under his legs, hold the mug to his chest, and perch on the stone at her hip. He's wearing the red jacket he found when he and Veronica had helped Casey rummage through the stores of abandoned items, and they make a bit of a pair. Most of his clothing is still black, but it's good to have anything else, any other color to pull on. Like he isn't just in mourning, anymore.

Taking a long sip from his tea, he studies the side of her face, turned away from him, just the curvature of her skull under the skin. "People punch each other for any stupid reason," he says. "I've had it happen plenty back home. Someone wants your wallet, someone wants you to go somewhere you don't want to go. I'm really alright, Jyn."

Not broken. The words ricochet against the walls of her skull, sending violent vibrations through her body with every bang. There's something to be thankful for in that statement, she knows, but it's muddied and clouded by the forceful undercurrent of guilt and shame - raging, destructive waters deafening her ears and pulling her below the surface. There are beams of light shining through, displaced and altered by the water's peaks, but for as much as she tries to reach out - take hold - her fingers can never capture them.

Jaw clenches, eyes close, fingers squeeze, chest tightens. There's no crying in war, Erso. Pull yourself together, get up, and try again, Staven scolds somewhere in the back of her mind. Slow inhale. Slower exhale. Eyes open lazily, half-lidded and out of focus on the ground at her feet.

"It isn't just that," she squeaks, voice hoarse and thick. "I know I wasn't in my right mind, when it happened." Memories are still fluttering in like petals on a breeze, haphazard and one-at-a-time. There are many hours of those last few days which are unaccounted for. She turns towards him, haunted eyes seeking out his - looking for the trust she wants to see, the betrayal she expects to see. Finds no hint of the latter, sighs, and continues.

"My mother was killed, when I was young. My father taken by the Empire for his genius and research. They tried to find me, but I'd hid in a bunker my father had made in case they'd caught up to us. I was seven. Or eight. I can't remember." Eyes fall back to the liquid of her mug. "I was taken in by a man named Saw Gerrera. An insurgent. He brought me to his planet, trained me to fight for him, turned me into a child soldier." Knuckles bleed white under the tension of her grip. "The first time they tried to teach me to spar, I wouldn't do it. I'd never hurt anything or anyone before. I did it eventually, didn't have a choice. But I promised myself I'd never hurt a civilian, not if I could help it." Her head turns back towards him, muted eyes now brimming with tears she won't set free. "I betrayed that promise the moment I hurt you, Kira."

She's in the grave again. He's sitting at the edge, listening to her dig herself deeper, bloody her own hands on her tools. Guilt and grief, the edges still serrated. His own have dulled enough, it stings against his new skin, makes him wonder if he really is better, if he really can extend a hand to her without being pulled back in.

The tears he sits aside and lets her swallow. The story he listens to in pieces, lifting the mug to his mouth, finishing the tea as she speaks. He hears the words, but he doesn't focus on them, because they don't matter. He hears enough to know it isn't an apology, it's just a handful of switches, and she's flogging herself with them.

Crossing one leg over the other, he angles away, giving them both some space, turning himself to hide the bruise from her view, should she seek it out to prod the bruise in her--ego? He isn't sure what to call it. He isn't sure when she'll turn the serrated edge of her grief on herself, trying to cut the past out, or just trying to punish herself enough to match the hate. She's all conviction, self-loathing. It doesn't feel like a performance, quite, like she's doing it for his benefit. He's already forgiven her.

Kira breathes deep, runs a nail over the rim of his mug, staring down into it. "You're not a soldier here," he says, choosing the words carefully. "And you're not some kind of monster. But you are dangerous, and you won't get any better for anyone if you don't start to forgive yourself.

"You broke a promise. You hit me. It fucking hurt, and instead of getting to be scared for me, or getting to be angry with you, I'm just--sitting here. We're not at war. You're not a soldier and I'm not a civilian." Looking up, he tries to punctuate his calm by lifting the mug one more time, tipping back the last sip of his tea as he looks at her, like it's just another conversation. "Make a new promise, keep it. And when you can't, try again."

Not a soldier. A concept so foreign, so ludicrous that Jyn has to bite the tip of her tongue to suffocate the bitter snort lurking at the back of her throat. Eyes deflect back down to the mug in her hand, fingertip gently skimming around and around the precarious edge of it like a pathetically slow cyclone, mind focused on the regulation of her breathing. She knows there's truth in his words, as there always seems to be, though the acknowledgement of said truth doesn't necessarily lessen the penetration of their sharp edges.

"Asking me to not be a soldier is asking me to stop being myself," she finally murmurs in reply, shame-ridden gaze lost in the murky depths of the tea she's barely touched. How can she explain that to him? How can she explain that the pig-tailed girl who'd fantasize about far-off battles galaxies far, far away, who'd imagine herself waltzing in luxurious, lavish clothing at the balls her father so often frequented with the Empire, who'd had no friends outside of the inanimate toys Papa had brought her each week while she slept didn't exist anymore? That she'd been murdered with her mother's last breath, with her father's retreating footsteps, with Saw's first words? That she'd been shed like an exoskeleton grown too small the second they'd placed a blaster in her hand (how it had been too large for her, how she'd needed both hands to even raise it to her shoulders)?

Even if she could explain, how could she expect him to understand?

"I've been - trying, to learn how to be a civilian. To exist as an entity outside of war. I suppose - that's a promise in itself, to continue to try?"

That word--from Nicky, from Ty, now Jyn. You're a civilian, your safety is paramount. How many times did he insist he could take care of himself, how many times did he want to punch Ty in the kidney for not treating his own life with the same care? Ty had been more than they'd tried to make him after he came home from training, had been more even with bullets flying in the streets. Maybe it mattered, that he'd had a life to grow in before he learned to protect, serve, kill--but he'd been someone after that, too. He'd still been someone, stripping supplies off a body and handing them over.

"I am asking you to be yourself," he argues. "Not a civilian, just--throw out the words. I'm not a civilian, I don't live here, I'm trapped, or I just exist. We keep calling this place things like we really know, and it just stops us from seeing the bigger picture. It's not a prison, it's not a game. It's a canyon, the rest is yet to be proven. And you're Jyn, and I'm Kira, and that's all."

Setting the mug down at his hip, some spark of conviction sits him halfway to straight, something grown a little stronger in his time away. "If you're not yourself, you can't take responsibility for what you do. If you don't think I'm just me, and we're on equal footing, why bother with me at all? I can forgive more than a punch, but don't pull that shit on me, not after everything."

"That's just it, Kira," Jyn replies, matching the tenor of his tone with a slow-burning ferocity in hers, seeking out the darkness of his eyes again. "I don't know what it means to be myself outside of being a soldier. I was a child when I'd first been given a blaster. Everything I did, everything I was taught, everything I knew was about how to disarm enemies with my hands, where to shoot to disarm and where to shoot to kill, offensive and defensive tactics in the jungle or in the desert or on a tundra. That's all I've ever known." She feels the tremble in her fingertips as she speaks, as the misplaced anger begins to froth and bubble at her lips. It isn't Kira's fault she'd had her childhood stripped away from her.

She drags her gaze away, closes her eyes, attempts to steady herself with a slow breath. Counting, as she'd been taught to do, to stay calm, stay patient.

"Asking me to be myself is asking me to be a soldier. They're one-and-the-same now." Eyes flicker open, find her bone-white knuckles clenching the mug in her hands. "But I can try. To separate them." She pauses, stealing a furtive glance out of the corner of her eye. "I want to separate them."

"Yeah? When was the last time you used any of it, in all the times we spoke before? You know how to be a person, Jyn, I've seen you do it for hours at a time. You aren't being a soldier right now, you're just being an asshole."

Maybe those things were one and the same, he thinks. Often as not, Ty and Nicky were soldiers when being something else meant being vulnerable or wrong.

Pushing up from the fountain, he stands, far from towering over her but giving some vent to the temper rising in his gut. "Here's a tip about us helpless civilians: when you hit us for no reason, the thing to do is apologize and work on not doing it again. Not wallowing in your reaction to fucking up and acting like you're a monster who can't change--"

Biting his lip, he cuts the words off, hollows his cheek until the tenderness of his jaw begs him to continue. "I've been in a fucking crisis or two, Jyn. I've had guns put in my hand. After you disappeared from the inn I ran around looking for you, trying to make sure you were safe. Stop telling me what I am, or what I understand, or what you want. Just tell me you're fucking sorry, like any person would be."

"I use it all the kriffing time," Jyn bites back, gritting her teeth. "Discerning who might be a threat? Knowing how to trap and hunt and fish? Knowing how to approach an animal without frightening it away only to kill it? Ignoring the pleading looks and struggling breath and gaping mouths of a dying creature? Digging that grave beyond the point of exhaustion in order to try and get it done? Promising to keep you from drowning in the spring? All of that is being a soldier. All of that comes from being a soldier."

She thinks she might shatter the mug in her hands. She wants to turn them into fists, wants to resort to them being weapons instead of the fumbling, clumsy things they are. Thinks of smashing the porcelain down onto the concrete of the fountain beneath her, letting the shards pierce the flesh and bone, letting her blood mix in with the water that had brought her here. That had brought them all here.

Cassian wanted them to have the lives they'd never had back home. Dancing lessons, snowball fights, planting seeds and sowing life. But maybe, she thinks, she simply isn't made for it. Maybe her hands, her soul, her existence aren't meant for nurturing or creation. Maybe she'd used up whatever reservoirs she might've had those last moments in the cargo hold going to Scarif, rousing and inspiring troops who were never going to go home ever again, troops who were going to take their last breaths on the sands of a foreign planet. Maybe all she can do is kill. Maybe all she can do is destroy.

She stands, pressing her fingertips against the side of the mug until she can no longer feel the pulsating pain spreading up her hand and into her wrist. Finally flicks her eyes over to his, the flame in hers reduced to pathetic, doused embers.

"I'm sorry."

The temper keeps rising, fed by the flames of her own. Standing in front of her, he raises one hand in a fit of pique, flapping fingers to thumb in a gesture for all her talk, all her blowing hot air. He's so tired, of these feelings, of not being listened to.

People have died ignoring my advice, he wants to scream it at times, wail it back in their faces so they will shut up, for two minutes, and hear him. It still hurts to clench his jaw, and the apology is little balm for it, tacked on after he dragged it from her.

The way it feels around her, fire rising, dark rains falling to put it out, Jyn sitting in a hole awaiting the flood no matter the hands extended to pull her out--he wouldn't be surprised if she hit him again. It would be a relief, a hard line to draw in the sand, and at least she wouldn't think him a fragile thing.

"Who started that grave? Who pulled the body from a burning house hours before you even showed up? Fuck you," he spits wrestling with the wound of it all, trying to spit instead of burst into pathetic tears. "I guess soldiers don't ever get tired, especially of their own bullshit. Well I fucking do."

Leaving her with her reflection and the
two mugs, he lets the shiver under his skin move him, walking around its edge to head for home on heavy feet.

Edited 2017-03-24 13:57 (UTC)

"As though you shared any of that with me?" Jyn seethes in return. "As though you explained a thing about what it was for or who it was for? What, was I supposed to magically know? I didn't ask because I didn't need those answers; I didn't need to know why or who or when because all I cared about was helping you." She exhales something like a laugh, but the tenor of it is far too bitter for humor or amusement.

"You think you're so high and mighty, that you're able to dole out advice and make demands on people when you've no idea what their lives have been like? So you pulled a body from a burning house. Do you know how many people I've had to pull from burning wreckages? How many people I had to dig graves for, only to scatter in ashes of what we had hoped were them? How many people I had no time to say goodbye to, or mourn, to even dig a grave for in the first place? Don't talk to me about Poor Kira, pulling a body from a burning building. Talk to me when you've lost track of the names of the people you've lost. Talk to me when you can no longer remember their names or their faces or their voices because there have been too many."

The familiar adrenaline of anger has found its way into her fingers, and she empties the mug of the rest of the liquid gone cold, carelessly tossing it next to the other. Part of her wants it to break, part of her is grateful it doesn't.

She thinks to go after him, thinks to stop him from leaving - but thinks, he'll be just another one. Just another person who's walked away. Just another person who's been so caught up in their own whirlwind of feeling and righteousness, trying to mold her into who they think she should be. Her father had done it. Saw had done it. Cassian's done it. Why not another? It only makes sense, for it to go down like this.

She should be good at this by now, watching others walk away.

Wheeling on a heel, there is no heat or scent on the breeze to tell him to stop. Nothing to distract him from her anger, becoming his own, and tell him that going home or turning back to her is the right answer. There are no answers anymore, but what he digs his hands into and takes. There is no blocking her out, just horns fitting together and heads butting in the thin fog of early morning.

The mug hitting the other, the pair of them rolling into the water with a clack of resin to resin should be the warning. Her anger can spark and kindle his own, but there is violence built into her that he's avoided. There are entirely different responses knit to their bones, and maybe that's her point.

His feet don't care, marching him back into her space just as she's written him into a distance. "I get to demand," he says, voice going hoarse in his aching throat. "You attacked me. You forgot who I was and you could have killed me, hitting me like that in a place like this. Do you get that? I'm not fragile and you're not a monster but fuck, Jyn, I'm a person. You did that, and after that you ran away from me, and made excuses, and now it's my fault not accepting that as a real apology because obviously I just didn't understand them."

He could shove her, he thinks. He could shake her. It's in his hands to do that much, but it wouldn't help. It would just force him to feel her being shoved, and her anger, and her response. He never gets to forget what people are, or their excuses. He was going to let a man shoot him because the man was scared, and resentful, and he could understand want of a coat and a corpse at your back instead of another mouth to feed. "I don't have to tell you who I am, or fill a quota of fucking loss to have some boundaries. And I'm not some sniveling wounded lowlife for trying to explain them."

His throat closes up all the tighter, and he swallows, feels a burn in his sinuses and wrists, as he refuses the emotion trying to spill over.

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."

It's a strange thing, to watch the other person boil over first. He wonders how much of his own stake in this was hers, and not for the first time--what is him, in how quickly his anger bleeds away for the words.

As far as apologies go, being shouted at while she falls and quivers is hardly expected, but he can't pretend she isn't being genuine. He can't pretend he hasn't been trying to find himself just as much, in his walks through the trees, in his separate from everyone else and their reactions. Was there so much difference, for all their splintering reasons, when they both could look at themselves and not quite name, not quite engage, what they feel?

A question for someone smarter than he, with even just a full fucking diploma to hold over his GED.

"It's alright," he says, same as before. That much is him, she certainly isn't in a forgiving mood. Whatever she is, he might need her--to hold him up in the water, or trade off in an ugly task. To argue with, until they both know what the limits of it feel like, until they both know they can without anyone breaking. "Hey," he adds, his footsteps careful again, coming to kneel at her feet and look up at her from the ground. "Even if I walk away, I'm not going very far, okay? You tell Kate why we're short two mugs and I'll call it even."

It isn't all right, not by any means, not at the core of Jyn's being. Whatever part of her that might still be a soldier - the essence of who she's been since the Man in White had located them on Lah'mu - it still exists. No matter how hard she tries to shed it, leave it behind like a creature molting what no longer fits, what no longer serves a purpose, still it stays. But perhaps that isn't the point. Perhaps the point isn't what she thinks or what she was or what she might be.

Perhaps the point is that she's here, now. Able and free to be whatever, whomever she wants. With time, and with patience - but still, freedom.

Tentative eyes crawl towards his, fearful of what they might find; but instead of the fury, instead of the blaze she expects - she finds softness, and kindness. She turns her hand over in her lap, extends it towards him just enough - allowing him to decide to move the rest of the way, if he wants.

"I can do that," she offers, words colored with an exhale of a laugh. "Perhaps I should take up ceramics, replace them myself."

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

3/20/17 | The Spring

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