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sixthiterationlogs2017-04-21 06:01 pm
3ofswords) wrote in sixthiterationlogs2017-04-21 06:01 pm
Entry tags:
[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.
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.
no subject
"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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
"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.