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

[3ofswords]

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.

Comments

[3ofswords]

They're both nodding, until the movements match, they're rocking together in another kiss, and he lets his eyes slip shut. There are other senses to use. The sound of her breath, the click of her teeth. The soft and wet of her mouth, going firm when she presses forward, taking control of the kiss. He likes when she moves his head, catches his breath when it pries them apart, getting the angle she wants.

She's like coming home at five in the morning, the echo of train wheels on the rail, coming through the tunnels before the great rush of the thing.

When she hums again, when the train blasts a signal-horn of its approach, he slides his hands around her waist. There is so much to touch, to find new ways to touch. He's been undressed with her before, their hands have caught and held, but he rediscovers the size and shape of her, lifting with hands gripping her hips to coax her into his lap. He can wrap his arms around her waist there, hands reaching high enough to catch and marvel at the ends of her hair. "You're so warm," he murmurs, a short laugh bubbling up from the alcohol stewing in his guts.

[kestreldawn]

She melts easily onto the base of his lap, straddling him with one bent leg at either side of his hips. Her arms loosely drape and hang around his shoulders, circumnavigating his neck with a wide trajectory, as she murmurs soft sounds at the feeling of his hands rediscovering her layers of skin underneath the cloth.

She remembers when he'd seen her stripped down, wading her way into the warmth of the hot springs, the way they'd held hands like a datapad to a ship's navigational core, with neither and both assuming either role somehow. But that had been second-nature for Jyn. Although Saw had given her her own private room at his base on Wrea, and although she'd had her own space with Akshaya in her home on Skuhl, she'd gotten used to quick changes in cramped quarters with others while going on missions, dressing and undressing in front of cell mates and the prison at large right outside of the barred doorway.

This - this was entirely different.

This was intimacy, and vulnerability, and exposure.

"It's your fault," she teases, tugging the hem of her shirt up and over her head, the sudden burst of colder air immediately drawing out the goosebumps in her flesh.

[3ofswords]

When they'd met, when they'd dug the grave and gone to the spring, crawled hand-in-hand into the water to try to ease the pain of her arrival and Ren's departure from their bodies--he'd laid in the hole of his own making and been a sexless, harmless thing. He'd presented Casey as something more than he had been at the time, crawled into bed with him across from her on the first night, sincere and demonstrative: I don't want you, and I won't hurt you.

Now, only one of those things is true. Not simply because of Casey being gone, and the opportunity lost, and this somehow gained--he's slept with women before. He can want them, and have a good time with them, but it takes time. It takes connection, a spark within them that eventually matches something in himself. He doesn't know what it is, that lets him pick up men in clubs and beat his head against an emotional wall for the hours of their anonymous embrace--what it is beyond the pills and alcohol--and doesn't inspire him to even that playing field.

It has to be a friend. And here: it has to be Jyn, who he eases back into the thin pillows on top of her dropped shirt, hands drawing around from her back to slide up from her navel to cup her breasts through her thin, simple bra. "I don't hear either of us complaining," he responds in kind, still wrapped in her limbs, covering her from the air and kissing his way up her chest to her throat. One hand slips around to tuck her up against him at the waist, but the other remains, swiping confident circles around her nipple through the fabric.

Life might be too short to second-guess this, but he still means to take this slow enough for them both to enjoy it.

[kestreldawn]

Memories of Hadder flit into her mind as Kira's voice wraps itself around her like a second skin. She remembers the ebony of his hair, the darkness of his eyes, the rich complexion of his brown skin. She remembers the way he'd run his fingers back from his forehead, like tendrils through black fields, not unlike the blue-green grass that covered almost the entirety of Skuhl's surface.

She remembers the heat and press of his lips against hers that day in the field, belonging to each other and the stars overhead and the galaxy that threatened to collapse on them from above their heads. She remembers him with sadness, refusing to acknowledge the moment he'd been ripped from her life as so many others had, the way Cassian had.

She vaguely wonders, somewhere in the back of her mind, if there's a certain draw to the galaxies of their eyes - Hadder, Cassian, and now Kira - that lures her in and makes her knees buckle the more she tries to fight it. Dark and endless like the skies overhead, like the velvet expanse she'd spent her young life travelling, from one system to the next to the next; the sky she could only dream of through the haze and fog of Wobani on the rare days she'd gotten work detail outside of the factories.

It doesn't matter now, she supposes - coming back into herself, into her skin, into the teasing, tugging warmth pooling between her legs as Kira's finger teases her erect nipple. She exhales a quiet sigh, one swirled in with a moan of want, of desire, of need - her hand reaching up between their touching hips to press her palm against his growing hardness, her other hand raking up through the hair at the back of his head.

No, it doesn't matter now. What matters now is this - Kira, the sound of his voice, the touch of his hand, the feel of his skin, the feather of his lips. There's no Hadder and Cassian here, not anymore.

[3ofswords]

Nervous doesn't mean shy, and she's finding her footing, giving him a heat to echo back. Alcohol alone isn't enough to shut down the call and response of her feelings through each touch, but it helps to mute them a little more, make it feel like part of a lucid dream instead of too-real, too-present. When he rocks down against her hand it's his own want, the soft sound of it mournful when he tries to hide it in her mouth.

He kisses her back into the pillows, sighing with her sighs, matching her sound for sound as he pushes the fabric of her bra up, exposing more of her to the air. She's beautiful--clear eyed and compact, somehow precious to his hands. He has to lift up to look at her, warmth and a little drunken wonder for how she looks, thoroughly kissed and wanting.

Slipping a hand down her body, he tugs her hand from between them and puts it in the small of his back. His hands cup her thighs at his waist and he rolls his hips down again, rubbing himself against her mound through the seam of his jeans. Leaning over her, he kisses her again, then lower, sucking a mark to her chest before wrapping his mouth over an exposed nipple as if he means to do the same to even softer flesh.

[kestreldawn]

At the feeling of separation, Jyn sighs - her voice, the air, her breath vibrating with hunger and delight that she'd thought she'd long forgotten, as if the very fabric of her skin and rivulets of blood beneath the surface had been re-wired, spliced and shifted and re-connected, to make those feelings - those carnal, primal feelings - all but disappear from her cells.

Her hair, normally coiled into a small bun at the base of her neck with two palms framing either side of her face, has come undone - spreads around her skull like a chestnut halo;

her eyes, which have been muted and hollow and empty flicker up at him like an ember being breathed back into life, slowly at first and then in a rush and whoosh of flame;

her cheeks, having reclaimed some of their plumpness, blossom like flowers opening to a greedy drink of sunlight, puffing as her lips spread into a smile - secret, hidden, meant only for Kira as he hovers above her the way the ghosts of her past have done over the last few weeks, only solid, breathing, flesh-and-bone.

Her head tilts back at the friction of his body against hers in her most sensitive places, already feels the pulsating ache exacerbated by desire, a sudden gasp invading the cavern of her mouth, amplified and exalted by the feel of his mouth around her breast, her nipple - as her back arches away and lifts, a snake charmed by his touch.

[3ofswords]

The rag and bone of her over the last few weeks hasn't shed her of all softness--it's there under his hands, on her thighs, under her ass when he slides down and lifts her against the pressure of his own. He doesn't want to get worked up too fast, not when he's focused on her, remembering the rush of affecting someone so thoroughly. This is what he likes about sex: eliciting response, seeing people blur and pink and squirm, feeling them heat up under his hands until they burn too bright and fall like a comet.

He wants to see it, to get her off at least once before he even undoes the button of his jeans. The alcohol makes every shift and press of their bodies sweeter, warmer, and he uses it to his advantage, sucking at her skin and rubbing his palms firm against her ass until the sounds break out of her, until she lifts her own hips against the pinning anchor of his thigh. "It won't be long," he promises, though he likes that too in normal circumstances--dragging it out until they both lose their heads.

Denying himself right now is just part of the fun, his clothes rumpled and his shirt shoved half-off his shoulders but still intact, as he shifts up to slide a hand past the elastic of her faded red pants, curving his palm over her mound to press the first of his fingers inside. His other hand travels up her body, brushing up her stomach and chest to cup the back of her head and lift her into another kiss.

[kestreldawn]

Time is something she's seemingly had too much of, yet always hungered for. It seemed to slip through the cracks of her fingers like moonlight, yet pile up around her like fog and breath until she could barely empty her lungs.

It's been an eternity and a singular heartbeat since Cassian's disappearance, since she'd last been touched and had the altar of her body worshiped like this. Since she'd splayed herself open to the powers above and the flesh in front of her, allowed the fluids of her body to anoint another's hands, tongue, skin. The first time had been supernovas and nebulas and colliding of stars and giants - the light that had taken them both while they knelt, entangled and embracing, on the sands of Scarif. She'd thought it an experience exclusive to Cassian, to their molecular connection and symbiosis.

She realizes now, as the heat continues to burn between her legs and under his touch, as the whimpers and hungry murmured pleas rush from her mouth like exhaust, that it hadn't been about Cassian exclusively, but rather - connection.

Her lips vibrate against his, a bell of delight echoed into the cavern of his mouth from her own, at the feeling of his finger entering with ease. Her hand comes up to curl around the back of his neck, gripping onto the fabric of his shirt, the other rising to follow the sharp edge of his jaw.

[3ofswords]

He doesn't have enough hands, and neither does she--not enough to clutch or undress or reciprocate, much less all three. She takes care of holding on and he catches her hunger on his tongue, through her hands, groaning when she groans and the ache of it starts to sweat them both. Hangs him from his own spine and bites his teeth to her bottom lip, once, before he pulls back.

He can't do this; he can; he has to. His head wanders and his heart tries not to be here at all, but his body is happy enough, hungry enough, that he shifts to split her on two fingers, giving over to the fact of warm and wet and the tremors running up her body. With his freed hand, he starts to tug her pants down, give himself more room to see, more room to work, both fingers curved in and rubbing the upper wall experimentally before returning to driving into her steady and quick.

Hunger and want are edging into need, and he--follows, needing to see this through, needing to see and feel her go over, and fuck all the rest.

[kestreldawn]

Jyn exhales a breath trembling with sound - molecules and waves entwined and curled together until it's impossible to separate the two. Her eyes splay open as he pulls away - and she can see the hesitation in his gaze, in his movements, in the way the corner of his lip twitches.

His fingers threaten to steal her consciousness away - suffocated and drowning in the avalanche of endorphins and the stimulation of nerves firing into her brain like lightning. She's electricity and static and explosion underneath his touch, and although her body shivers on reflex, she reaches up and skims her fingertips along his cheek. A request for cessation, just for a breath.

"You don't have to," she breathes, excluding the rest, knowing he'll hear it in the murmured trail of her words: if you don't want to. For as deep as her hunger is, for as much as every cell in her body vibrates for, with, towards him - there is still no part of her that would demand obligation or obedience here.