sixthiterationlogs | [closed] separate from the rest, where i like you the best

He shouldn't have left Jyn unattended. The search for any kind of doctor had turned up fruitless, and when he returned to the inn, she was gone, thankfully without a trail of injuries in her wake. The canyon was only so large, though he wondered how large a party could be roused over a single person, delirious and wandering.

The edge of his jaw has already rounded with swelling, started to darken from red to purple, and the pain is greater now than the point of impact. His throat aches too, and he thinks she caught him in the thin meat of it as much as the jaw--it might be the reason his teeth don't feel loose and he can still feel his tongue. His panic comes delayed: not fear for being hit, not scanning the path and the halls of the inn for threats, but sent outward. Is she alright? Is anyone else hurt, is anyone else sick?

When he checks Credence's room, he finds it empty, but he reminds himself that Credence is often shadowing Graves, and the man has proven himself protective and proactive of their mutual friend in an emergency. Fumbling the dice in his pocket with trembling fingers, the wood feels smooth, warm from its proximity to his hip, and nothing more. Fine. They're all fine.

Casey, when he sets his other hand fidget-jitter-tapping against the frame of their door, is still figuring out how to fit the last of their things into a pair of backpacks. It had taken awhile for him to voice the idea of slipping away, and longer still for Kira to agree, but they had been separating supplies from possessions for a few days before Kira ran afoul of the fireflies, and it seems Casey hasn't been put off by it. The most Kira's agreed to at this point is moving the non-essentials into the house nearest Ren's grave, his point of entry and exit when he wanders the trees.

Right now, keyed up and digging his nails into the wood to stop his hand from shaking, he ignores the tarp and animal traps laid out on their bed. "Have you seen Jyn anywhere," he asks, voice hoarser than he expected, sounding all the more urgent for it.

Casey had never been a particularly social character. His life had been spent surviving by avoiding constant contact with other humans, and living in the inn had never exactly been easy for him. When an inkling of possibility showed that living in the inn might also not be best for Kira, he had finally slipped out of his usual lack of pressing anything to make the suggestion of moving.

He had not really been certain Kira would agree, given how deeply he seemed entrenched in helping out around the inn, but the compromise had suited Casey well enough as a temporary 'solution'.

He tilts his head to the sound of Kira's voice before he really looks up, and the tone and rasp is enough that his eyes quickly follow the movement. As much as he's been waiting for the violence to erupt, the sight of the blossoming bruise freezes him in his packing, the lines on his forehead reemerging in unguarded concern.

He drops the extra clothing halfway to the bag and slips around the edge of the bed, a dog on his heels as he closes the distance between them, not touching Kira, but very close to falling to the pull to do so.

"Is the camp under attack?"

"What," Kira asks, dragged out of the track his thoughts have dug by Casey's urgent tone, his sudden proximity. He's still holding the door frame, still finding the fact of his own body in the rush of adrenaline and concern. There are still cuts and scrapes on his cheeks from his dash through the woods, already explained, and his dark eyes dart above them, taking in the room behind Casey as if he'll find some clue to Jyn's plight there.

When they settle on Casey's face, near enough to be in real focus, Kira unlatches his grip from the wood and tries to lift his bearing, affect some semblance of his usual presence. Tilting his chin up hurts the tensed muscles of his throat, but he forces it for the sake of addressing Casey.

"No, the camp is fine. Jyn just thinks it is, or--she thinks she's somewhere else. I made a mistake of grabbing her when she wanted to run, she felt feverish, she kept raving about some other planet." Lifting his hand, he gingerly touches the skin below his ear, above the darkening bruise. "She calmed down when I let go and talked to her, but she ran off before I could get Ravi or Helen. I'm fine."

This is just all the more reason to get out of the inn, in his mind. It doesn't matter that this likely didn't even happen in the walls of it. Casey thinks he would have heard it, for all the sense it makes to hear a punch through walls and distance, but he thinks it all the same. His fingers hover just shy of touching the darkening skin, a mix of fear, concern, and that dangerous undercurrent of anger slipping in unwanted but not unexpected.

The camp wasn't under attack, but the violence he had been waiting for and the familiar clash of humans smacking together over and over again until it occurred somewhere in the mess, had finally reared up in the village.

'Paradise' marred by the first real warning sign since the call to power meeting held by, and eventual death of, one of its members.

"I haven't seen anyone." Which one had been Jyn? Not the too gentle girl from the ocean, and certainly not the woman who seemed to haunt the inn and hutches. He drops his hand, his fingers curling inward, not in a fist, but a pulling together of his thoughts with a physical connection.

"You're hurt." Obvious though the observation is, and as dangerous as an admission of concern could be there was more to it than stating facts they both knew.

"She hurt you." It's a question, but it's not the one it sounds like. It's a question of why. Why was Kira racing around in search of help presumably for someone he should now be avoiding. His hand itches for the knife in his belt. Not to hurt Kira's assailant, but as a need to guard him, them, from the threat of the ever unpredictable nature of people.

So she hasn't come upstairs: Casey's panic is a scaled thing, trying to climb the walls of his own. He is hurt, she did hurt him, but he can't sit and feel that until--

Until she's safe in a room with something for her fever, until Casey is calm again, and not looking at him like that. Until he knows Credence is with Graves or Stella, unharmed, unaffected. "She's sick," he insists again, the words heavy on his tongue, so many months spent afraid of having to say those words. Afraid it would be his parents, afraid it would be a neighbor, or Ty, or his mother.

He dodged one pandemic, he isn't afraid of what Jyn has, only what it might do to her. "She might hurt someone else," is the best answer he can give him, meeting his eyes, pressing the point with his gaze. "She'll probably hurt herself," is the crux of it, remembering her stumbling across the path. As he speaks, he does so softly, urgency undercut by how little he'd prefer to move his mouth.

"You're not the leader of the camp, Kira." The name rolls off his tongue, possibly only the third time he's ever used it, and his tone dips to something heavy. Not stern, not even commanding, but the rasp comes into it far more than it has in a month.

"You can't keep trying to make sure everyone is okay all the time. You're not okay." He could say he was fine or wave off the hurt, but Casey isn't blind and he's seen and felt enough violence in his life to note the severity of the darkening bruise, and the change in Kira's voice from a potentially damaged throat or jaw.

"She can look out for herself. They all can."

"What else do you want me to do," he asks, the question urgent and earnest, for all that he whispers it against the throb under his ear. "Crawl back in bed and sleep through it, cook something for it?" If he wasn't looking out for them, what good was he doing? When he wandered the trees, when he ran from danger, what was he contributing?

"There is no leader, but she listened to me. I can do this," he presses, even as the pain mingles with the fear that he can't, meets and clasps the hands of his delayed reaction to the attack. His eyes and throat burn with the threat of tears, and he knows he's losing this argument, he knows he isn't on the ground he needs to push Casey into it. Lifting a hand to cup his own cheek, he tilts his head down into it to hide his eyes, and gently shield the bruise. The pressure hurts, but in a counter to the rest of the pain.

He shouldn't have given Taylor the rest of the vodka, when he'd been saving it for something like this.

"I want you to survive." It's a dangerous admission. It's more than just a counter argument, and there's vulnerability in the knowledge and the words. There's a larger ball of fluff watching them from the bed now, awake from the sound of their discussion, but Casey ignores her movement, and the sleepy tilt and rise of her head. Kira is hurt, and there's violence in the village. He knows he can take Kira at his word that Jyn listened to him, but it doesn't matter.

There's violence in the village, and Kira is a danger to himself in his need to help as much as Casey was when he stopped on the road to take on a fight that wasn't his. To save someone he didn't know who looked like they had fallen into violent troubles. Survival versus human nature, however buried it could sometimes be. Ultimately that intrinsic drive of group survival won out. For all he was a quiet and sometimes unsocialised creature, he had too much empathy to fall into sociopathic tendencies.

But he knew the difference between a battle that could be won, and one that called for a retreat. Standing directly in front of Kira, his hand moves to cover Kira's, his head tilting, trying to catch Kira's ducked down gaze.

"You're too deep into it. All of it." He's so rarely one to talk, but he's done enough negotiating in his time to know how to use his words when he has to. "You need to step back and take care of yourself for a while or you're not going to be any fucking use to anyone. And you can't do that here, surrounded by people who always need something."

The dog is easier to look at, too close to irrational, burning tears to let Casey hold his eyes with his own. Too much closer for Casey's hand over his, and the sincerity of it, and none of the inebriated vitriol of before to push him away with. He's talking sense, reflecting a calmer version of Kira back at him to hold him in place.

Yes, he could pull away, could keep hunting. But Casey might chase him down, Casey might--be disappointed.

Casey was good at taking care of himself, had done it in far worse circumstances than this. But it isn't all he does, even if it's all Kira's ever needed from him. Just be steady, just be easy to manage, just don't need me--but he's given every gesture back, and carried him when he couldn't walk. He'll do it again, if Kira goes out there and gets himself in over his head.

That decides it, more than anything. It had been humiliating to be carried down the hall, broken through the nothing in him in the ugliest way. If letting this go is what he has to do to prove he can handle himself, so be it.

"That hurts," he says, though Casey's hand isn't the one on his cheek. He uses it to push Casey's away, put a sullen distance back up between them. "What do you want to do instead," he asks, using his other shoulder to push into the room, get a better look at the packs sitting in their remaining supplies on the bed, Aurora rising between them to greet him.

"Leave." Permanently was more his style, but even if they could leave, he doesn't think Kira would come with him, and Aurora is too small, too young, and too dependent on them to survive the kind of lifestyle Casey was used to.

"Just for a while." He clarifies, trying to assuage any thoughts or concerns before they bubble to the surface, but only half able to anticipate what Kira might think or say.

He watched Kira's movements, dropping his hands, but too fidgety and restless to just stand still and wait. He grabbed a bag, giving the false impression of a calmer state of mind than his head obviously was in, and began putting more of their supplies into the backpack, packing it with items acquired and liberated over time.

"Put some distance between us and the rest of them. Let wounds heal." Physical and otherwise. He wasn't great at this, but he was trying, and he slipped a hand over to soothe and reassure Aurora with a single stroke of her neck. His pockets shifted with the clink of glass, metal and wood as he moved around the room, shifting packs and items without real purpose, moving just for the sake of it.

Kira puts his hand on the other pack, knowing it was his from the scrap of blue folded in the top layer. It was one of the shirts they'd found in the house, when they'd started moving things into it. Soft, too-big clothes, his name on the card and no other writing. He doesn't need a note to understand the ugly facsimile of a comfort item, a baby blanket that doesn't smell like him or anyone he knows.

He's already wearing the red one, Casey borrowing the green. It's some kind of joke, stop and go. Casey's already packed, and he can see from the tarp under the shirt, and the coil of climbing rope still left on the bed, they aren't going to stop in the house and carry no further.

The fog hasn't really bothered him, giving him a shroud to hide in the last couple of weeks. There's a bigger gash in the bed frame, nearer the bottom of the line, for the day it started.

His fingers dig in, then release, the top layer of fabric and plastic. He eyes Casey's hand on Aurora's head, her ears flipping with his fingers, tracking the pair of them. "If I say no," he asks carefully, like prodding a different bruise, "Are you going without me?"

Casey hesitates when Kira asks the question and takes a moment to really consider his response. It would be easy to do it on his own. He always had. Really, doing it with someone else would be the actual unknown in the situation, and meant more ration gathering and another extra body to look out for. It didn't feel like a burden, despite that. The prospect of someone to exist near seemed far less daunting, even if it was no less dangerous than it ever had been.

"No." Is the response he finally comes up with. Not looking at Kira, but no less honest as his hand slips away from Aurora and she gets up to explore the bed on her own. He wouldn't leave Kira there alone, and would do so even less knowing that violence had finally clawed its way into the camp. It wasn't his job to keep Kira alive and safe any more than it was Kira's to do so for anyone else. It wasn't about obligation.

He didn't want to leave without Kira, and one outburst wasn't going to make him try to force Kira to do so. He would stay if he had to, in spite of the panic it would build in him. He would stay, and he would try to help Kira defuse the situation. But it wasn't their job, and Kira, for all his endless efforts, couldn't keep doing this forever.

"But I would want to."

Casey is one of the rare people from whom Kira expects honesty, and maybe that's why he's fit so well into the room, into Kira's proximity. It was too easy to know when someone was holding back with him, and while he's grown up enough from his teens that he doesn't throw a shit-fit over it anymore, it still grates. It still forces him to live with the slippage of words against action against feeling.

When Casey speaks at all, those three things move in tandem. When he's pissed he acts pissed, when he's worried he does a poor job pretending to be anything else.

Aurora noses into his bag, puts her head in his hands and there's nothing to do but take up her ears and rub the soft fur. She's grown plenty from the ball of fur Casey had been so protective of, another warm body in the bed that changed her mind night to night and hour to hour if she preferred to curl in the comma of Casey's body or stretch her legs against the wall and push into Kira's back.

Kira sits down on the edge of the bed, letting her spill across his lap and laying a hand to the whorl of fur on her chest. He can't decide which is worse to hear Casey say aloud, and for which of them. He wouldn't leave. He wouldn't walk away from Kira, even after he had to carry him, even if Kira dug his heels in and made demands for the sake of his own conscience. And Kira would have to feel it build in him, the desire to pull away and run. He'd have to live with that same slippage, between action and intent.

Still looking down at Aurora, he curls his fingers in her fur. "Alright. We can do it your way."

The spring's lush, green surroundings proved to be more than a small marvel for Casey. They had set up camp too late for him to really appreciate the sheer volume of green around them the first night. Tensions had been high and the night had been a long, weary one with conversation only where needed.

Aurora had seemed to enjoy rolling about and, to Casey's relief did not seem inclined to take off in a random direction away from them. The tarp made a decent enough tent to keep the damp away from where they would be sleeping, though the fog and over-all wet of the woods made collecting and storing firewood just a bit more difficult.

In the morning he had been awake before the sun, and the daylight of dawn found him running his fingers through the soft, dew covered grass and over moss covered rocks. There was so much green, lush vegetation, and while grass blades and green had started to fight its way around the village with the warming weather, it was nothing compared to the greenery around the spring.

He played with Aurora in the grass for a while, and used Kira's gear to catch them a few fish they could roast on sticks by the fire to eat later that day. Casey was meticulous in removing every bone before allowing Aurora to have her share. By the time sunset had started to come back around, Casey was more relaxed than he had been since arriving in the village.

Out in the woods, away from the constant surrounding of other humans, he was in his element, at his most comfortable. Kira was trusted enough not to register, and the only threats were the animals in the woods, and nature itself. Or one of the other villagers coming across them, but he had pushed that to only the back running thoughts of his mind that were always on alert for sounds of approach or threat.

While the rest of the fish was cooking, he had tugged a fallen log over to their campfire, burning low, but warm enough to chase some of the wet chill away. He sat with his feet sprawled out towards the fire, Aurora curled between them in front of the log, turned faintly orange and red with the glow of the flames wavering across her form true to the colorful wavering lights of her name.

He has a pencil and a notebook, the stick he's been using to poke at the fire propped against the log to the opposite side of him from Kira, and he's carefully forming the letters of her name by the light of the fire for what must be the 100th time since naming her a little over a month ago. The lowercase 'o's and 'a's still give him trouble at times, but much like their names, it's too familiar now to ever fully forget.

Sleeping with his cheek touching anything hadn't been an option, but keeping off it hadn't spared him an aching neck or jaw in the morning. There's probably no good way to sleep, his muscles tense and sore to his shoulder, taking their time relaxing from the attack. Kira had spent their first night out taking and giving basic instructions, moving where he was told to move, trying to operate through a mounting headache as his body wound itself tight around the worry in the pit of his stomach.

It felt like running away, without even leaving a note. What if someone was hurt, what if Credence--

And every time, he would swallow the razors of needs me and look at Casey's back. He was right, and he'd pressed the issue in the most effective way. This was something Casey needed, as much as he believes Kira does. None of the tension he felt in the dark forest was from Casey, who took to each task like turning to face a refreshing breeze. Eventually, in the glow of the first fire, with Casey's thigh for a pillow, Kira had done what he does best: he'd slept it off.

Tonight, he's let the tension run off. He'd eased some of the ache out of his neck and shoulders in the spring, soaking until he felt warm and agreeable again. He'd watched from the water as Casey laid in a rare patch of sun and turned his head, marveling at what moss was up close, Aurora rolling herself in it alongside him. It wasn't bad. Keeping up the camp gave him something to do, without a dozen people pressing against his sense of self in attempts to help do it. The fireflies glimpsed through the fog were singular, dancing to the damp edge and fleeing the dark smoke that rose from their damp fires.

He's never cooked at an open fire before, but the principle seems the same. Periodically he reaches for the thin branches staked in the earth between him and the flames, and turns it to give another side of the meat time to sear. There's salt in one of the canning jars he gave Kate his first week here, borrowed from the kitchens on their way out. They'd agreed not to take more than last night's dinner's worth of actual food, and even that had wound up going to the dog, neither of them keen on making her wait for them to catch something to get her breakfast.

Sitting back from the fire, he watches the light of it shift against Casey's face, his brows drawn in concentration as he works the pencil over the page. "Can I see," Kira asks, breaking an hour's silence.

Casey offers over the notebook without much of a word, leaning over to poke at the fire with a stick and stir the flames back to a livelier flicker while Kira looks at his handiwork. The sound of a log splitting has Aurora lifting her head momentarily, ears and eyes alert from the sound. Casey helps settle her back, switching hands with the stick and rubbing her fur behind an ear until the tensions slips away and she curls back up.

It's nice, being out and away from the village. He feels less on edge, less pressed to do until the light to do things by is gone and less surrounded at every moment. The relief of the distance has made his silences longer, but his overall mood and existence more alive and awake. More refreshing than any amount of sleep could be for Casey.

He stares over at the notebook and Kira when he's done. The 'a' so common in all three of their names has made ending the 'o's on a perfect loop harder, and almost every o has a tail of varying sizes where he cut it off before it could become an a, but only where he caught himself in time. He stretches and flexes his fingers, waiting for Kira's verdict as he slides his other hand into his pocket, smoothing his fingers over the cool metal of the harmonica tucked away there.

Of course it's the dog. He wonders if Casey has to write a name down to remember it, if having known to write his own would have let him carry it here. It's the kind of memory that makes him all the more forgiving, remembering what a feat it is for Casey to want to take care of him at all, even if it means a few nights of sleeping on the ground and skipping--whatever the canyon's latest danger might be. This part of the day isn't so different from the others, sitting and writing by firelight after dark.

"Come here," he says, noticing the strange trail of his lines, repeated through the columns and rows of attempts. As he speaks, he renders the words meaningless by scooting into Casey's space, hip and shoulder aligned and the notebook laid across their angled thighs.

The pencil he fits back into Casey's fingers, but he keeps hold of pencil and hand both, shifting the way Casey holds it until it feels more natural to his own practiced hands. Turning to a fresh page, he pushes the pencil down to touch the paper and starts guiding him into the shapes. "The a stops at three o'clock, here," he says, ending the loop at the right side of the lopsided circle, "then comes down with a tail." Adjusting their hands down, he starts another loop and closes it decisively at the top: "The o stops at midnight, and just stops. Or just on the right and on the top, if you didn't have clocks."

One thing that could be said for Casey was that when it came to learning something he valued he was an excellent student. His focus and attention narrowed almost exclusively to the task at hand, and he would practice and try at it until he was satisfied or could get no further.

"We used clocks to count." He knew what a clock was in theory, and where on the face of it the numbers were. But it had always just been a face plate with numbers. The hands could be moved, but only manually, and he had never bothered to try to tell time beyond day and night.

He told time by the weariness in his legs or the chill in the air - the depth of the shadows, and the darkness of the ash choked sky.

Not pulling his hand free, he slid it over just slightly and repeated the action, trying to keep his mind on Kira's explanations. O was a circle, and that should have been easy, but he always lost track of it partway through, falling back to the familiarity of the a.

He moves the pencil further and scrapes out John's name as well. Another O he had had difficulty with. When he's done he sets the pencil down, flattening his hand out under Kira's.

"People must have strong hands where you come from." The position and tight grip of his hand with a pencil in it made his fingers and the back of his hand ache after a while.

Kira huffs a laugh, needing a moment to follow the logic, to focus beyond his hand laid over Casey's. Pressed together his calm radiates outward, and Kira has a flash of birds: a wide V going south over the city, or a flock of pigeons leaping into a gust of wind and taking off together. Being out here is thoughtless, familiar. There are entire sets of instincts that Kira's lost or never developed, that mean a lot more to their situation than penmanship.

"Strong enough," he answers mildly, picking the pencil up from Casey's fingers and shifting to the side of his hand. Under John he writes his own name, then Casey's. Then he lifts and puts Etsuko, Daichi next to Casey's father, and Chiyo, Tycho below theirs.

Closing the final o, he stares at the name for a long moment. He still hasn't spoken it aloud, like a very small flame kept in the shelter of his ribs. It survived the fountain, and the winter, and now it floats in the fog, letting him wander but never letting him be lost, unable to come back to it anymore. "What other names do you remember," he asks, lifting his gaze from the careful lines of it. "Or I guess, whose names do you want to learn?"

Casey traces the names with his eyes, his fingertips sliding along under them across the paper when Kira stops writing. He knows all the letters now, even if he can't always sound out the combinations properly. He tries in his head, the names amorphous and meaningless to him, but clearly not so to Kira. And he's sure they must be names and not things, or Kira would have read them aloud and explained them to him.

"I don't remember any. Just John." You are the son of John. The whisper in his mind is almost unfamiliar in how long it has been. Mere months but his mind had started to let it slip in favor of the name he had been given and it made him sick in the stomach. But having a name gave him a different feeling. Like maybe he mattered on his own and not just as a continuation of skills and paths moving endlessly forward.

It was hard to explain, but he could be still with a name. He could stop moving for a while and exist, because there was something to be.

"These are names that matter to you." It's a soft comment, not quite a question, but with a softly questioning tone.

"Yeah," he admits, because Casey's there on the list, one of the first written down. Because it's obvious, because he knows by now that Casey can read. Letters and windfall and moods, different from birds casting shadows in Kira's mind, or the image of sunlight through blinds on a wall. Orange and sliding lower, lower.

But they aren't in the city, waiting for dinner on Kira's bed with Ty's head in his lap. There is no green-eyed boy with thick hair laughing as Kira lays a spread of cards on his stomach, harder when Kira asks imperiously if he can take his own future seriously. The little gas light in his ribs has a warm center, a hundred happy memories with the bad, but he sucks the air through his teeth in a slow, slow breath, careful of feeding the flame.

It isn't like the other names don't carry their own weights, and it's easier to point them out with the pencil than speak any of them aloud. "These are my parents," he says, idling at the line with Casey's father. Then, lower: "My sister, and, a friend."

Siblings isn't a concept lost on Casey, even if he never had one of his own. He knew the word. He could roll family over in his mind and place the words. Mother, Father, Daughter, Son, Brother, Sister. Only two had been a part of his life. Father and Son. He mouths the names, not trying to give sound to them yet. In his mind he tries them out. Kira, Son of Etsuko and Daichi. Two parents, and a sibling.

Did they fill Kira with a purpose? Did he have their voices in his mind, pushing him along when he lost his way? Expressing disappointment or insistence if he tried to lay down and give up?

"A friend." He repeats the word, considering it. A friend was a bit like an ally. He had never had either before the village. He thought maybe he had one of the two now. Maybe both. It was hard to say. He focuses on it for the sake of the unfamiliarity. What did it mean, to have a friend? It had only ever been used in terms of threats or manipulation around him.

You would rather have us as friends than enemies.
Where's your little furry friend.
Be a pal, friend. Give us a bite..

He frowns, curling his fingers in his pocket, the ones on the paper resting just below Tycho.

He takes the pencil, carefully writing one of the newer words he had learned and the last name that mattered just under the name. With a capital D, slowly wrote Dog, the o stopping at the top like Kira showed him.

A friend.

From anyone else, it should be insulting. Ty should be infinitely more than a dog, worth more, a deeper hurt, a thing that Casey can't possibly understand if this is his point of reference. But Kira remembers the first few days, when Casey went door to door, when he looked between houses and in abandoned buildings, when he watched the fountain as much as Kira had.

He remembers the three of swords in Casey's hand, and the peace Aurora brings him. Maybe he does understand, and Kira doesn't even have to say it. No dog that old could survive the world Casey describes without him. No dog at any age, Kira imagines.

"Yeah," he says again, dry-mouthed and his voice dropped near a whisper. "Just like that, I guess."

Taking his hands back into his lap, he leans a bit into his propped up thighs and stares over his knees into the fire.

The silence that settles after is heavy. There's a somber depression to it. A sinking feeling like snow thawed too soft by a nearby fire, not holding their weight. It isn't the usual silence that they share, and Casey finds his mind drifting down a slope backwards into the early days of his time in the village. And then even further, to a boy sitting in the ash on a road, holding a gun and a dead man's hand.

He slides the harmonica free from his pocket, turning it over in his hands and watching the firelight flicker off the metal. A lot of the songs he knew were too somber and slow to fill the silence with without dragging it deeper. The more uptempo ones felt misplaced. He rolled it between his hands and stared at the fire.

Do you miss them? He thinks. But that's a stupid question, and he knows it is. Thank you evades his vocabulary almost entirely. Your welcome is an unfamiliar set of words for his mouth to put together. But a different set rests on the edge of his tongue. I'm sorry. It feels like he owes those words to Kira for something, but he can't place what so he keeps them to himself.

"It hurts." It's all he offers. An almost sympathy. Emotions were dangerous and difficult. He didn't like to focus on them or talk about them. He didn't want to drag them both down further into the quiet pit sinking them deeper into the earth.

He brought the harmonica to his lips, testing a few notes, letting them drag out through the air, watching Aurora's ears perk and flick with the notes. He searches for a rhythm and starts the harmonica off with with a few solid notes, finding his beat. As soon as he gets one set, the notes cut off, broken up with bursts of air and short noises made with his lips and his tongue against his teeth.

It had been a while since he had given it a try. Not since the time another person at a camp had joined in with his own sound, and no instrument beyond his hands and mouth. Casey had spent the months following trying to recreate it and learn how to do it on his own and mixing the two, but he had never done so around anyone else.

It was a ridiculous affair. A beatbox harmonica breakdown, upbeat and uptempo, Casey moving with the beat and his foot thumping in time on the ground enough to disturb Aurora's lazy rest.

They needed a distraction and this was the best he could provide.

The sadness is oil in the gears, a slick and dangerous thing that Kira didn't always indulge, but his secret was that he liked to. Just once in awhile, when his energy was low, and he didn't have to be there for anyone else--he could sink into it like a too-hot bath and burn himself all over, could wallow in it until it was lukewarm, then chilly, his body adjusting to it until it was easiest to just stay down.

Those were the days Casey left him early, the dog unable to wait for anything but her own needs. Those were the days Credence lurked in a corner, not even intentionally dangling himself like a rope to climb back out. It hurts is much like the dog, as tone-deaf as it is true. But maybe tone-deaf is what he needs, because the oil made it hard to get a grip on anything, and eventually Kira would let himself sink into a black place that didn't feel like anything at all.

At some point the little flame is going to catch that pitch, and he doesn't know what that's going to look like on the outside. That will hurt. That might raze him down to nothing.

But the two are separated, and Kira separated from them both, by the first dry and honking sound of Casey's fucking harmonica. There are different feelings to find in his slick hands: surprise, then embarrassment just as oily down the back of his neck, then a blustering and short laugh. "Where the fuck did you learn that," he asks, rolling at the hip to get out of the way of Casey's feet, seeking refuge with the waking dog to watch the absurdity of it, Casey's whole body lit up in the act. "You're fucking ridiculous," he calls over the sound, but the mood has lifted with the sparks of their fire, and he sits with an arm slung around Aurora, her tail thumping against his side as they listen.

[closed] separate from the rest, where i like you the best

March 16, Afternoon-Evening

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17th - Evening

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