sixthiterationlogs | [closed] think of me and burn, and let me hold your hand

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[closed] think of me and burn, and let me hold your hand

WHO: Kira
WHERE: House 39 + 40
WHEN: April 21, during/after the feast
OPEN TO: Jyn
WARNINGS: Dealing with old grief and the loss of Casey, possible NSFW content
STATUS: N/A

Somewhere between his second plate of food and his last sip of scotch, a pit had started growing in Kira's gut. His attention had drawn over and over to the dog, as if to make sure she was still there, and finally he'd wondered--why was he watching her alone? Why was he eating alone, was Casey's aversion to the crowd so great he'd resisted the food? Was this like the first day, offering him a second helping of bread and feeling him panic?

Kira had put his hands in his pockets, drawn a card. Not even pulled it free to look at the three spades, hear the crunch and sift of the shovel in the dirt. He'd felt for the die in his other pocket, linked to the others, and found the three side with a scratch through the dots.

Hands shaking, he'd taken several more sips of the scotch and lifted a second bottle--clear, dry gin--before slipping away entirely.

He's wrong. His powers barely work, Casey's been running around the village doing chores, was probably crafting new chairs to replace the missing. Kira would find him and march him to the feast, make him experience real coffee and herb-crusted pheasant and more of the chocolate he seems so fond of. They could fix plates and climb up to the roof like before the move, watch the sun set, watch Aurora turn circles and bark at them from the clearing below. Kira would look at him with the light going gold and amber all around, and he wouldn't keep wasting time, he'd reach across, he'd coax Casey in, he promises--he swears, if Casey can just be at the house--

It's full of shadows when he makes it all the way back, feet sloppy, boots knocking his own ankles as he abandons the party and the dog in a tipsy haze of fear.

He stumbles through the house, throat closing for every empty room, until he finally finds the bathroom door shut and no sound from behind. "You don't have to open that," he murmurs, resting his head on the door, closing his eyes, the bottles still gripped in his hand. "You can fucking walk away." But it's only moments before he pushes inside, eyes already cut in a hot line across his face and his throat choking on nothing.

Casey's shirts are on the sink, Kira's green flannel the focal point of the space. Next to the basin sit the other die, the casings, the harmonica. Like he'd finished a task and actually thought to scrub off before coming to find them, a hundred exchanges of wash your hands and the unsaid make me. His pants and boots are missing, and Kira imagines him half-undressed, the lines of him filling out, the scars below his shoulders and ribs. He stands where he imagines Casey stood, until he didn't anymore, and looks in the mirror, wondering what Casey saw as he disappeared.

Lifting the shirt, he tucks the worn fabric up against his throat. There's a rank but familiar smell to it, the clothing well-worn, happily shared. The bed doesn't smell quite as strong, the way he made Casey wash up before climbing in. This is what he has. A shirt, a grave. Nothing from Ty but the first of three swords in his heart, and he chokes once, bends his head once into the folds, before he drags it all back and tries to put the cork in it.

He's not going to do this here. He's not going to do this period, if he can help it, but he's not going to lose it in the last place Casey stood, where Bodhi could find him and feel obligated.

It's no one's job to fix this, or fix him.

Bottles hanging from one hand and shirt hanging from the other, Kira walks back out of the house, down the steps. His feet keep moving, and he's not going to the grave this time: he's walking across the path, shoving his way into the ruins across the way. Maybe he'll carry all the way through, into the woods, out to the wall. Maybe he'll use the shirt for kindling and set the place alight, finish what the world started and fulfill the fucking prophecy of his end.

Or maybe he'll just crawl under the remnants of the dining table, feeling terrible and small, and curl up around the shirt and bottles both.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The sound of his voice - like concrete trying to slip through a sieve, full of gravel and the weight of what it'll become - immediately alarms her. Sure, they've exchanged somber thoughts and reflections of the world, have existed in darkened smog that seemed to enshroud them like a pair of arms. She remembers the hot spring, she remembers the grave, she remembers the fountain and the galaxy of purple and green she'd created at his jaw.

This - what she sees, what she hears - is unlike those things.

At the sight of his tear-streaked face, flushed and glistening in the dim light from the hole overhead, she shifts herself forward, crawls towards him on her hands and knees and sits alongside him underneath the table. She sits close enough to let her whole right side line up, touch, mirror his left - hesitating for a second before looping her arm under his, resting her head on his shoulder.

She knows this feeling. Kriff, does she knows this feeling. She knows there's nothing she could possibly say to make the searing, blinding pain subside in his chest, knows there's no amount of insisting of better days and hopeful promises than can fill the void growing at his core.

Jyn tries to think of what it was she had wanted to hear, when Cassian had disappeared. She feels the own backs of her eyes sting - not with her own sadness, but rather, with the infecting feeling of Kira's - feeling, perhaps for the first time in her young life, the closest thing to empathy she's ever known.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, closing her eyes. "I'm sorry."

It feels like permission, and he's always needed that--someone to pull him in, hide his face for him, coo at him like it's alright if he slides back in time and bawls like a child. Pain shared isn't pain halved, in his experience--it's doubled, and spread, and he's been taking it on for years without giving any back.

Last time he cried, he was alone in the early hours of the morning, wandered away from the camp by the spring. He'd written Ty's name with his family's in Casey's notebook, he'd called him a friend--and he'd woken before the sun from a dream of his fingers in thick hair, and familiar green eyes full of laughter. He'd crawled away without even the dog to hold onto, crawled up at the base of a tree and sobbed himself sick. The last past reaches into the present, is his only guide now for the future, and he blusters another breath before sinking his face into her hair, reaching around her to clutch the shirt to her side and keep her close as long as he can.

"It's my fault," he whines, coughing at the end of the words as everything since New York reaches forward to choke him. He doesn't know, logically, how anything but Ty can be linked to him, but it feels pointed, it feels personal, three men in a row. They make him feel safe, for weeks at a time, and then they die.

Or worse. "He's gone," he says again, "his whole world is ashes and he's gone," the sob shaking out of him for the cruelty of it, that the one person who most wanted to be here was refused.

It seems strange yet only natural that their displays of physical (affection?) touch would increase, the more they've become accustomed to each other. Jyn has splayed herself open and let Kira fiddle around with innards and organs and shards of hearts before, which is more than she's ever done with almost anyone. Even Cassian, who had been in every essence of the word her mirror, her counterpart, had only begun to hear the outpouring of misplaced and confused emotion she'd willingly share.

But she and Kira had been bonded in sadness and loss from the moment of her arrival. The wounded had found the wounded, and with it - or perhaps because of it - shown her kindness.

So when he grips her close and clings to her like he's afraid of her vaporizing into smoke in his arms, she lets him. She echoes the gesture, only with a different purpose - let him feel the solidity of her bones, the ebb and flow of her lungs, the thudding percussion of her heart. Let him be reminded with each passing breath and each strike in her chest that she's still here, that she hasn't left, that she's with him.

"Are you with me?"
"All the way."

How strange to hear her exchange with Cassian back in their galaxy whisper now, in the ruins of this home, in the arms of someone else.

"Do you want to look for him? I'll help you."

He shifts with her, as she turns his clinging into an embrace; they're both small people, rendered smaller by loss, their limbs fitting over-under and chapped hands finding folds to grip in their fists. Today they're both in red, the green of Casey's shirt stood out even in the dim light, like he was lost because he somehow didn't belong.

The card he pulled from Kira's deck, the card that echoes back and likely forward in his life, proved otherwise.

Loss, over and over. Loneliness, an ocean he existed in that sometimes tossed him onto a shore, then flooded and swept him back out again. "No," he answers quietly, the wound of it burning new tears across his eyes. "No, no, he's gone."

Releasing her, he tugs the shirt into his lap, stuffs it safe before digging out the contents of his pockets and letting them fall on the dusty floor. The deck of cards, the three of spades plain in their sprawl; the dice, the third of which bears the scar through its third side. "The cards say he's gone and the dice say he's gone and the house and I just know--"

It's probably as much as he's ever said since Ren, about the things he can do, and it can't make much sense without context. But there's only the tremor in his voice, and the casings on the bathroom sink, and the feeling that pulled him away from the party at all. "I know things, Jyn. I know when people hurt, and when they lie, and I know he isn't out there anymore."

Jyn wants to ask how he could be so sure, but - it's a feeling she already knows. Even though she'd torn through the town, enlisted the help of anyone who'd been willing, when she'd found Cassian's half of the bed bitterly cold and disgustingly empty, she'd known. Something inside of her, something at her core, had simply felt his absence. The light, the softness, the security he'd provided had been eaten away, decimated like Scarif had been in the beam of the Death Star.

It's no surprise that Kira can feel the same with someone like Casey, given what little she knew about their relationship and utter closeness to each other.

She adjusts with his movements with ease (surprising even her) as he pulls away, shivers slightly at the sudden loss of warmth against her. Watches him with interest and curiosity, yet remembers to keep her gaze from being intrusive. She'll accept whatever it is he wants to show her, but she will not pry into what he's sealed up, what he would rather keep hidden.

The collection of seemingly random items on the ground confuse her, his words compounding the sensation even more. Her brows gather at the center, eyes flitting between each of the things he's sprawled out at the floor like lint and dust, before rising to meet his gaze.

"What do you mean, you 'know things?'"

Alcohol or circumstances: if he starts, he doesn't think he'll stop. It had been easy to talk to Ren about, after Ren had tried to pry into his own mind. Maybe that's what these people were: he'd been able to talk to Ty about anything; he'd been able to talk to Ren about his gifts; he's able to talk to Jyn about the grief.

He hadn't needed to talk to Casey at all, most of the time. He'd been known, as close to the way he knows others as he's ever gotten, and nothing to it but months of quiet observation.

Months of letting himself be observed.

At first, he doesn't know how to explain it to her, how she'd possibly understand--but that's what he does. He stops digging into his own feelings, stops dredging up another wave of tears for his own loss, and he looks her in her clear, bright eyes, fingers catching tip to tip to give the connection the necessary strength. It's been awhile since he did this on purpose, but the way it seems to wax and wane--and mostly wane--the effort might be required.

Looking at her, Kira softens more than he squints, relying more on opening himself than concentration. He knows the answer won't be direct, and he doesn't do more than blink the moments each to each as it comes to him: the blue of her veins in her wrist, and the pulse therein; two crows fighting over a pretzel in the park, their wings hitting the other, black feathers falling with white salt; a memory, Bodhi picking up the wookiee plush with bemusement; Ren calling him a kriffing idiot.

"Ren said I might be force-sensitive," he says, dropping his gaze to feel out the words in his mouth. "It sounded similar, when he explained it."

Jyn rubs the tip of her tongue along the ridges and bumps of the roof of her mouth at the back of her teeth, letting them exist in the silence. She sees the churning storm behind the darkness of Kira's eyes, though she can't quite decipher its meaning outside of the maelstrom of grief, and loss, and emptiness. She wonders if perhaps all he wants, all he needs is simply for her to be here with him, just existing - like when she'd kept her hands underneath his floating body in the warmth of the springs. Not to say anything in particular, not to fill the space with sound and empty words, but rather - as a reminder of life.

Mention of the Force widens her eyes and lifts her brows towards her hairline. Her mother's voice comes rushing back into her mind's eye, echoing and twisting like smoke. Trust the Force. She can't quite remember the exact sound of her mother's voice, the gentle lilts and curves of her words, the sound of her laughter (the real kind, not the kind she'd made while the Man in White talked about order in the galaxy). Her mother's face - blurred and hazy after years of absence and thousands of faces since - floats like a hologram somewhere in her consciousness.

"Force-sensitive," she repeats. "Did he explain what that meant? What The Force is?" She remembers the crystal pendant at her neck - not the exact one her mother had given to her on Lah'mu, her eyes drenched in sadness and full of silent goodbyes - but a very close replica. One meant to echo the one she'd lost when she'd come through the fountain. She'd given it to Cassian originally, had found it on the dresser the morning she knew he was gone. She reaches up, lets her fingertips trail its edges before removing it from her neck. She holds it out towards him: an offering.

"My mother gave me one like this the last time I saw her. It was a kyber crystal that she'd taken from somewhere. They are force-attuned, and the Jedi and Sith used them to power their lightsabers." Her gaze falls down to it, resting on her palm. "They resonate with the Force, my mother said. My father's research about them said that they - exhibited some sort of "collective consciousness," to the point of almost being sentient, and were able to communicate with each other and living beings somehow."

It's a flicker of a thing--the light refracting soft through the crystal, but also his interest in the topic. A distraction from the gnaw in his gut that is ash and acid and calm brown eyes gone panicked at the return. For all that he knows things, he doesn't know where people go when they disappear. Casey could be above the walls, back in whatever place they clean and heal people before they tuck them into the fountain.

He could come back--

Kira rolls in his lips and focuses on the pendant, watching the light filter out against her fingers, catch below her eyes. Green, and it's not the same shade but of course it's green.

"Like ley lines," he says, one syllable at a time, as if finding the will again to speak. To speak of this, instead of sinking back into other, older thoughts. "Ren said the force was in all living beings, that it connected us to the universe. Back home, I could--read people, and things like cards. I knew when things would happen, I could see ghosts.

"This place..." he closes his red-rimmed eyes, breathes once through his nose, swallows. "It's different here. Everything's muted, and I don't know what's around the corner anymore. But I know the difference between a person gone out in the woods and a person gone." Maybe because, as she's put it, they're no longer part of the collective, her and Ren's force moving through the village and viable only to a few.

When it occurs to him, moments late, that she intends him to take the necklace, he reaches again into his pocket to retrieve his own. "Don't worry, Ren already left me one. There are things I can use it for, but, it doesn't make me any stronger."

"That is what the Force is, in a simple definition, yes. At least according to my mother, who was a rather big believer in it." Jyn's tone easily indicates she's of a more skeptical school of thought; she has never had reason to believe or disbelieve its existence, and as a child, she'd mostly gone along with it to make her mother happy. She'd loved to see the way Lyra's eyes would glitter at the mention of it, the way her lips would curl and twitch and plateau as she spoke of Galen's research of kyber crystals, their connection to the Force, the legends of the Jedi and the Sith. She'd always thought the latter to be the stuff of make-believe and her mother's over-active imagination, but she loved the stories all the same.

His rejection of her offer stings, and she won't deny it. Her fingers curl around the thing, hand quickly scurrying back in towards herself, feeling flustered and embarrassed to have even offered such a thing. Perhaps it's only right, that he'd refused to take it; how could she have thought to give it away after having given it to Cassian the moment she'd received it?

"Is it a relief, to have those abilities more muted here?"

He chases the hand, not so much the offered necklace: Ren's means enough to him that he wouldn't deprive her of what it might mean to her, even if she thinks to give it away. His fingers close over her own, and he pushes it the rest of the way against her chest, as if to tell her exactly where to keep it--close, and precious.

It isn't a dismissal, and he needs her to know that.

"Not really," he answers, hand still over hers, knuckles still pressed to her sternum and the crows' wings beat behind it. "I'm used to being able to predict things, and being able to shut off people's feelings. Now they're all I ever sense, and it's exhausting. It's--why I had to leave--"

New tears glaze over his eyes, and his face is hot again, the pain of trying not to cry compounding the pain that makes him want to, and he loses that fight again: "It's why Casey made me leave, for awhile. I don't think he knew, just that I needed to get away." Trying to suck it all back, he chokes, and his voice grates again in his throat.

"He really tried to take care of me."

The touch of his hand draws her out of herself, just enough to pry her eyes from the floor and towards his face. She seems, even in the silence, to understand his unspoken messages and tries to lick the wound that's apparently more self-inflicted than anything else. His skin is warm against hers, the tips of her fingers having chilled themselves in the rush of blood to her cheeks from the lingering embarrassment.

The harsh edges of her expression soften as she listens to his voice, lets it wrap them up together.

When new tears begin to form, she moves away from his hand only to empty her palm of the crystal, then lets her fingers curl around the width of his palm, lets it rest lightly in her lap.

"I'm glad he did," she says softly, eyes intent on his face. "I'm glad he took care of you."

Losing the hold of her hand, his fingers clutch the folds of her shirt, like she's less real without his hand over her heart. Like he's less real if he's not holding on to something--someone, and isn't that the problem? People leave, Casey always said he'd leave, though he'd seemed to want to take Kira with him as much as Kira wanted to get him to a New York that wasn't covered in ash.

"Nobody should have to," he says, the choke coming back to his voice. He can't sit under a table in a husk of a house and not feel a little like a child, not feel the same instinct to curl around his own wounds and hide them.

They're older than this place, and the wear and tear of him is older too. Four months of quarantine and fighting. "There's always someone else to fight, or scavenge, or make sense of what's going on. It's my turn, that's--that's probably why he's gone." He knows, on some level, he's stopped talking sense. He isn't even speaking some deeper truth, the feeling anything but grief, gripping at reasons even if they're cruel.

"Maybe that's why Ren died," he says, and really does choke, face closing up as he succumbs again to the tears.

The tug of fabric away from her chest draws her eyes towards him with urgency and concern , forces a tiny gasp to suck in through her lips. It's an action that carries far more weight than the simple request for attention - she feels his desperation, feels his fear, feels his need. After the initial concern wears off, her expressions softens all the further, until there isn't a single jagged, sharpened edge on her.

"No one has to do anything," she replies, adding only enough conviction to her voice to show she men's what she says. "No one has to take of someone else. No one has to kill someone else. But those things happen. He made a choice to take care of you." Whatever strength she had when she first started speaking has slowly begun to wane, and something in her realizes how much she's projecting her own loss of Cassian onto what Kira is feeling.

"I've lost more people than I've given a number to. They all died in the line of fire, killed by someone or something else." She tilts her head, wraps his hand up against her chest with both of hers. "Starting with my parents, on and on until the last moment before I came here. I joined that group, before I showed up here. Killed by something else, as the result of someone else's hand pulling a trigger or flipping a switch or what have you." She pauses, considering him. "I don't know if there's a reason to be given for it, to explain it beyond the fact that .. they died. I died. That's it. I don't know if there's some bigger reason."

He feels it wane, feels the tremor of her pinky on his knuckles, a tap-tap-tap of something slipping under her feet. It doesn't feel right to lean on her, knowing how she hurts just the same, but it makes her understand. All he wants, is for someone to understand, the way he does. All he wants is what he always wants: someone to take care of it.

But how can she, how can they, their hands tangled and shaking, mirrors pointed one to the other and an imbalance in thew world between. She thinks of Cassian and it twists the knives in his side. He thinks of any of them and he bursts into tears.

What he wants to say feels like a fortune-cookie answer, wrung more desperate than dismissive by his inability to choose: there's never a reason, there's always a reason. Instead, his next few breaths louder but steady, he swallows, says, "You aren't dead now," and leans in with his hand tugging her forward by the shirt. He doesn't think about kissing her before he does it, less about Casey or Cassian and just stealing a moment for them both. A moment to forget, without being able to forget at all.

I'm attached to you; we're still here.

The silence that nestles around and against and between them this time feels - different, somehow. Heavier, thicker - like a transition from water to sludge, from sand to turbulent sea. She isn't sure what it means, nor does she have the mental capacity to begin to wax poetic about the possibilities - even if only to herself.

She allows her gaze to more intimately follow the gentle topography of his face - slopes and curves and precipices and valleys, all coming together to create the unique crag around his skull. She catches a glimpse of tiny gold flecks, swirled and encircled by his pupil like a galaxy. She sees the soft pink hue of his lips and - before she can respond to what finally fills the air with sound, the soft pink hue is coming closer until -

Collision.

Contact.

Mind reels, contracts, expands, electrifies as it attempts to re-orient and re-navigate. Muscle memory sparks into existence, and it's only a breath more until her own lips move and push and pull against, with his - allowing herself to be consumed by their softness, willing a hand to trace delicately along the sharp edge of his jaw. A quiet murmur, laced with surprise and acceptance, floats out of her nostrils.

He just wanted her to stop being sad; he just wanted to stop being sad, and his limbs were molten inside with saline and alcohol, his body so ready to be touched that his other hand has been rubbing up and down the arm he'd extended toward her, the old echo of what he wants but won't ask for.

When he gets it, when she responds the way he'd hoped, the way that says she still gets it, he realizes: he also just wanted to. Cassian and Casey, for moments at a time, stop being the excuse not to, become the excuse to.

But it's just an excuse. With her mouth moving against his, and her hand on his jaw, his own sliding down his arm to splay over her throat and hold her close, she isn't a substitute or a warm body. She's Jyn. She's a fierce light smoldering in the dark; she's not the warm spring but the reason it boils. Kira just wants to kiss her, while she's still here, still burning with anything at all. He can't keep waiting for the right time, for the grief to lift, for the right feeling behind it. People disappear, including himself. He spent the last year of what he thought was his life saying what he could to his family--he's only just started to say those things here.

Still, he eases back from the first crush of this feeling, forehead to forehead, brushing his lips up and down against hers in a soft, soothing break from stealing the other's air. "You don't have to," he says in a hush, for all he can feel the ease of it pressing right back against him. People can feel one thing and say another, rationalize it away, and that's just as important to know.

For as hard as she tries to prevent it, Cassian flickers in her mind's eye like a holovid from home: the black depths of his eyes, rivaling the skies overhead, the skies they'd seen and watched together through the viewports; how similar and all together different they are from Kira's, as though they are two sets of parallel galaxies created out of the same birthing explosion and cosmic shift, yet weathered and expanded differently over time; comparisons of Cassian's lips to the ones pushed so desperately against hers now, where Kira's are more present, more supple, more substantial in their physicality and, in some ways, the delicacy of their movements and the hunger driving them;

and before the thoughts memories guilt can consume her and pull her away, Kira pries them apart, and Jyn sucks in a sharp, sudden breath, as though breaking the surface of the water in the fountain for the first time all over again.

Lungs and chest rise and fall like the tide she remembers on Scarif, eyes fluttering but refusing to part. The hand at his jaw slithers its way towards the back of his head, fingers curling delicately at the base of his neck. She exhales a huff of a laugh - though it sounds more like an expulsion of air than a verbalization of humor or amusement.

"No one has to do anything," she repeats, echoing her statement from only moments before, though it might as well be another life - the crushing of lips and friction of skin creating enough heat in her and in the battered room around them to spark engines and propel them from one planet to another, without ever leaving the ground.

Her eyes flicker open for only a moment before she once again banishes the space from her to him, from lip to lip, and makes contact for a second time.

Edited 2017-04-28 06:34 (UTC)

It is exactly what it has to be, impulsive but still important. The house groans around them in the breeze, shrinking as the sun touches the tops of the trees outside. They can't stay here, or: he won't make them. She holds the back of his neck and he presses his fingers to the line of her jaw, thumb stilled curled around to the front of her throat, a gesture more possessive than entrapping.

He can just as easily push her away with it, if the contact becomes too much. No one has to do anything, but it doesn't feel so different from the brush of their hands together, or her grip on his arms as he followed her exhausted into the water.

They can still do that. They can slink across the path and have a bath in the tub, but he'd almost rather go to the spring, not have to clean up the rest of Casey's things and feel like he was carrying on momentum from the moment before he was lost. His other hand finally uncurls from her shirt, just to lay flat, palm and wrist set between her breasts and fingers carrying up her sternum, just barely touching the dip of her collar. It's been awhile since he last kissed a woman, but it isn't strange, or any different from how he'd kiss a man. He kisses how he kisses: steady, and searching, pulling back when she pushes and pushing when she pulls back.

On one such push, he kisses her head back, chin up enough for him to tilt and press the next just under her jaw, murmuring as he trails them back along its line to kiss more of her throat: "We don't have to do this in here." This had been his best idea of a place to grieve alone: it's a terrible place to do it with someone else.

Whereas the gnawing hunger she'd felt with Cassian had been all-consuming - a monstrous thing, a shadow that curled up in her belly and devoured everything whole - as though it could never be filled, never be satiated, never know peace or completeness - the kind she feels with Kira is softer, like morning light slipping in through the slats against the window, slowly expanding more and more until all it touches is warmed, illuminated, kissed. It feels like salty mist being licked off of soft lips while facing an endless expanse of cerulean seas. It feels like stolen whispers and skating touches, like cream and honey. Where Cassian had been fire, Kira is air - soothing against heated skin, yet capable of uprooting the mightiest of trees.

And that is what it feels like: Kira's hand against her sternum, his lips at the sensitive flesh of her neck - being torn out of the ground, being ripped away from all that has shadowed her days, and being lifted, blown away to some other place, some other planet, some other world - where hopefully things will be better, lighter, softer.

She's so tired of the dagger in her side, the way it cuts and bleeds and splits her in two.

"Your place?" she murmurs in reply, mouth lifted to the sky as though in prayer to whatever might be floating above, words rushing out like greedy breaths.

It's time to the put her dagger aside with his knives, even if it's just on the bedside table, even if it's just for one night. They can sheath them where they belong in the morning, they can look for better ways to carry them.

"It is nearby," he answers, voice finally drying. There are tear tracks to wipe away when he pulls back, and he uses the hand at her throat to do it. The other lingers, palm soaking up heat, feeling the wings beat in her chest. She's nerves and memories, she's--almost girlish, in how little she's done this and all she wants it to be.

He's had that before, he knows what to do with it. Tears leak without the feeling when he swipes his thumb over the soft skin under his eyes, catch on his fingers and trail down them instead. He wipes them on his thigh and gives her the smile he can manage, tries to make it about her: eyes taking their time on the edges of her face, finding her eyes, trying all the harder like her face is the reason. When he takes his hand from her chest he slides it up, cups her cheek like he's cupping the parts of her that want to cry too, and he leans in for one more kiss before he picks up the shirt in his lap, the bottle at his hip, and crawls out from under the table.

When he's done, he transfers his crutches to the same hand, and reaches a hand down to the one he left under the table.

"It's closer than mine," she replies, voice heavy and thick with the tightness of breath and its rapid ebbs and flows. Seas seeks out the skies reflected back at her, quickly noting the moisture that trickles down the lengths of his fingers. She offers something like a smile to mirror his own, and she vaguely wonders when the last time she'd even managed to endeavor such a thing had been. Everything preceding the feast feels like smoke - acrid, blinding, suffocating.

She belly-crawls her way out from underneath it, just a little - just enough to suck in clean air and let it begin to chip away at the soot in her chest.

Her eyes flinch at the tender touch of her cheek, so rarely having been shown such softness, such care in her young life. There's a quiet breath of nervous air that leaks out of her then, quickly stifled by the rejoining of mouths. She slides herself against and along the floor, ducking her head to avoid from hitting the edge of the table as she comes out from underneath, and reaches up for his hand, allowing them both to hoist her to her feet.

He can't imagine she wants to do this in that bed any more than he wants to go back into his bathroom; at least the bed he's shared with Casey, nothing ever happened. At least with this, he might stave off having to sleep in it alone for another night, just a shirt stuffed under the pillow and the dog wondering where the other body went.

Aurora: he left her at the party, but there are plenty of people she'd make a substitute of. Bodhi was there, and he trusts the people Aurora likes enough to follow around with her safety.

Jyn's grip in his hand brings him back, and he squeezes it once before picking his way back out of the derelict house. His feet stumble less, but only for his renewed concentration on the task. Back in the waning sunlight, standing together at the top of Ren's steps, he passes the bottle over to her. "Have some, if you like. God knows I have."

Jyn lets her eyes flit over the skeletal structure left behind, and it feels a little like walking out of the belly of a beast. She arrived too late to know the inhabitant who once called the structure home, but she's learned about him through the others of the village. She helped to dig his grave. So she offers the bare bones a bit of a respectful, parting glance before bringing her attention back to the warm flesh, beating heart, contracting muscle at her side - so starkly contrasted against the felled beams around them.

She nods, gripping the bottle's neck in her fingers. She'd had some at the feast, the first sip of alcohol since she'd been 12, and it had left her skull aching. Still, she thinks, might as well.

"What is it?" she asks, bringing the opening to her nose. "Guess it doesn't matter, so long as it works, right?" She doesn't wait for an answer, instead bringing the bottle to her lips and allowing the liquid to rush in, flood her mouth like a canyon.

"It's actually called gin," he admits, the first smile since he left the party playing at his mouth, though it's a flat thing, just acknowledging the irony. "I have scotch if that makes it weird," and he gestures with the other bottle, though he keeps her hand in his. He doesn't want to let it go right now, he doesn't want to let whatever this is go.

Though she'd balked at the affectionate touch on her cheek, he doesn't think it was out of--fear. She isn't used to it. Maybe Cassian was a first, and he wasn't here long enough, or he wasn't affectionate, or--Kira doesn't know.

He isn't trying to think about that, or be that. He just lifts her hand and kisses the knuckles, before starting down the steps. He'll lead her across on the tether, and no one will get lost, and no one will have to think too much with a bottle in each of their free hands doors to close against the rest of the world.

A memory flashes in her mind, eyes widening and glittering with remembrance.

"This is the drink Credence asked about!" The connection and utter irony of it all makes a burst of laughter rush forth through her lips, which she quickly covers with the back of the wrist attached to the hand still clutching the bottle. She shakes her head. "He asked me if I'd been named after the drink, but I hadn't an idea of what he was talking about. It's rather good, I think." She holds the bottle up, swirls it around in front of her face. "I'm not sure watch scotch is, though," she adds on, flicking her eyes over to his other hand.

The press of his lips to her knuckles almost demands a quiet sob from her gut, but she manages to stifle it down. Such a simple gesture, one she'd seen her Papa do a thousand times with her Mama's hand, and sometimes even with her own - so small and tiny in his, so strong and commanding - but the mere act of it sucks the breath out of her lungs. She manages to command her feet to move, follow him across the street, but her mind's focused on the lingering warmth against the mountains at the back of her hand.

Whatever this is, whatever it turns out to be - she'll remember this, and there'll be no bitterness, no sadness, no wishing for it to have been different.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[closed] think of me and burn, and let me hold your hand

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