sixthiterationlogs

Entry tags:

01.

WHO: Cassian Andor
WHERE: The Fountain, The Inn, and around the village
WHEN: April 22-24 (Arrival and first few days)
OPEN TO: Arrival closed to Moana, everything else OTA!
WARNINGS: General warnings for this character/canon apply — mentions of war, trauma, death, all that cheerful stuff in the narrative
STATUS: Open

ARRIVAL (APRIL 22) — CLOSED

Cassian hasn't put much time into speculating about how he'd die, just lived with the knowledge that he would, sooner rather than later. If pressed, the scenario he'd come up with might be something like this: his luck running out somewhere behind enemy lines, without resources and his comlink gone dark, left to bleed out quietly, no one aware. (Ideal, if he's done his job well enough.) The presence of another person has never entered into the equation, nor has the feeling of a steady hand reaching for his, of holding onto something real and being held in return, of the warmth that comes with knowing that, for the rest of his life, he isn't alone.

In the end, he thinks, it's a good death. Better than he could've asked for, and, frankly, better than he deserves.

And then — it isn't.

He can't say with certainty what it feels like to be obliterated, just like Jedha, but he's sure this isn't it. There's only time to register that something isn't quite right before the wall of water hits him, knocks him backward with the force of an explosion. Reflex kicks in then, guiding him to push toward the light until his fingers grasp onto something solid and his head breaks the surface.

When he climbs out of the fountain, he finds no trace of Scarif — his feet stand on stone rather than sink into sand, the air is balmy and pleasant rather than hot and oppressive, the horizon is clear. There's no sound in his general vicinity other than the gentle bubbling of water behind him; blaster fire is as distant as memory. With a panic that starts in his chest and quickly spreads through the rest of him, he realizes that he's alone.

But panic, he knows, will do him no good. Even if it's difficult, almost impossible, because one name (Jyn) beats around his brain over and over again, he forces the next logical sequence of steps into focus. Take a breath. Regroup. Get a lay of the land. Keep moving forward.

He has no other choice.

RECONNAISSANCE (APRIL 22-24) — OPEN

Over the next few days, he does just that — he keeps moving forward, directs his efforts toward learning whatever he can about this place. Being idle has never suited him; that's still true now. A job is a job, even one that's self-imposed, and a job keeps his body moving and his mind occupied, keeps him from dwelling on what he can't afford to.

If there's a hub in this village, the Inn seems to be it. People continually filter in and out of the pub on the ground floor, and it's as good a spot as any to establish a base of operations, so to speak. As of right now, the locals are his best resource, one he knows how to tap into. He finds a strategic table in clear view of the front door, and employs various means of catching the attention of whoever happens to pass by — sometimes a nod, other times a polite smile, a conversational "What would you suggest?" for those who stop.

One location won't provide a complete picture, however, so he can be found out and about as well. He walks the streets, building a mental map as he goes, taking stock of apparent resource availability. Anyone in his vicinity may receive the same treatment as those who'd passed by him in the pub. He may not know who or what he can trust, if anything at all, but information is information.

He has to start somewhere.

[ooc: if you'd like a starter with another scenario in the timeline of these first few days, feel free to hit me up via PM or plurk, and we can hash something out! c: i'll add it as a top-level comment within this log]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Day by day, Jyn has been learning to readapt to life without Cassian. She still lingers in bed for far too long, especially in the early mornings hours when she instinctively reaches out for him only to be met with the cold, unfeeling mattress, and she is still learning how to eat proper portions of solid food after going so long without barely a thing inside of her. But thoughts of the traps, of fishing, of providing for the Inn and the others, is what ultimately drives her from under the weight of her sheets in the morning. She's found something of a routine, the end of which is always to stop by the rules they'd created together, still tacked to the wall of the living room, and remembering the memory with painful vividness:

Sitting together, curled under a blanket that was far too small for the both of them (though they didn't mind, being wrapped up so impossibly close), piece of paper pressed to the ground, inkpot at the top, quill in Cassian's hand. Agreeing to try to adapt to and not take this second chance at life for granted. Jyn's left hand holding the paper steady while Cassian scribbled with his right, their free hands joined together - not wanting to be separate, not wanting any gap between them. The feel of his shoulder underneath her cheek as she leaned her head over, eyes heavy-lidded and groggy with the sleep that was threatening to steal her away. Giggling and laughing over how difficult it was to remember how to spell the word 'equilibrium.' Hanging it together with a rusty nail they'd found lying in the dirt outside of the cabin.

She always lingers here for far too long, letting her eyes trace the scratched and jagged curves and lines of Cassian's penmanship, remembering the sound the tip of the quill made against the fabric of the paper. She reaches out, lets her fingertips trace over the words, and whispers a quiet apology for having driven him away.

Eventually, her feet drag themselves away from the list, the wall, the cabin and out of the door with a rope and spear in-hand. Muscle memory alone aims her trajectory towards the forest to the west and then along the edge of the river, where she checks the traps Cassian had originally laid out for anything that might've had the unfortunate luck of being lured into them. Once those've been dealt with, she spends some time trying to remember how to fish with her spear. Some days, she's successful and is able to bring back quite a few to the Inn (whatever she doesn't need), while others only leave her with a couple.

As she's leaving the riverbank to head back towards the Inn with five fishes and a couple of rabbits tied to the rope flung over her shoulder, she catches sight of something moving in the gaps of the trees. Muscles tense, breathing shallows and speeds. She adjusts the spear in her hand to be less of a walking stick and more of the weapon that it is - raised above her shoulder, pointed end staring out towards whatever's lurking nearby.

She takes one step, then another, careful of the sound of her feet against the fallen twigs and renewing grass. She gets close enough to see the figure of a man, and it's -

In an instant, she's dropped all of the things from her body, knees crashing to the ground with a bright shock of pain against the jutting bones. It must be a ghost, a tormented apparition sent only to torture her, sent only to remind her of what she did, what she lost, how she drove him away. But he's moving - he's moving and he's breathing and he's - alive? There is no conceivable way for him to have been in the forest this whole time. She and half the damn town had been out looking for him the day she realized he had gone missing.

An oasis in the desert, a mirage brought about by grief and loss and sadness. Surely, that's the explanation. Surely, it couldn't be -

"C - Cassian?" her voice is barely a whisper, barely an exhalation of air as she feels everything inside of her about to explode.

Edited 2017-04-23 00:02 (UTC)

There's one name that's impossible for him to compartmentalize, no matter his skill and practice. If he's honest with himself (as he often isn't), it's been this way since the eyes belonging to its owner had met his across the table in the war room at Base One, since the vibrancy and need in them had ignited something in him he couldn't quite extinguish. It's the name that had crept into his thoughts on Jedha and stayed there, that'd had him considering things other than the pure good of the mission. It's the one that'd left his mouth just before the light had come for them, and as far as last words go, he'd been content with the way his tongue had wrapped around it, never to release it again.

It's the one the girl had mentioned just after she'd found him at the fountain — a terrible joke at best, an attempt to lure him into a trap at worst. Either way, it's deeply unsettling, more than anything else that's happened to him in recent memory. The ground still feels as though it shifts under his feet as he walks, but he keeps going, because he has to know. Even if logic says he's wasting his time, that there are other potentially more pertinent questions to be answered as quickly as possible, he refuses to stop.

He refuses to stop until he verifies this piece of the truth with his own eyes.

An answer comes when he's among the trees, past the main buildings where the houses become more scattered, and in the relative quiet, it's the sound of a clutter of things hitting the ground that catches his attention. As his steps come to a halt, he turns toward the noise — and breath threatens to be sucked straight out of his lungs. The sight before his eyes should be impossible, but that something inside him that had been ignited, that had rediscovered the meaning of hope, knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it's real.

She's here. She's here, she's speaking, and she's alive.

He — doesn't know what happens next. There's a new word in his mind now, in everything he is, pulsing in time with his heart (alivealivealive), capturing almost all the focus he has. If someone were to attack him right now, he'd be utterly unaware and defenseless, but the thought is parsecs away. Time passes (ten seconds, ten years), before, finally —

"Jyn," he breathes.

The sound of her name leaving his lips forces a whimper out of her throat, like an animal who's accepting its fate while its killer's teeth sink into its airway. She wonders if this is what it feels like, to be a dying animal - staring its hunter in the face, gasping for air, losing feeling in its limbs. She wonders if it dreams before it all goes black, the way she had back on the sands of Scarif -

Their hearts anchored to each other,
Acceptance and something like peace,
Something like serenity.

Do dying animals ask for forgiveness when they know it's the end? Do they plead to whatever beings may be listening, may be watching, and seek absolution for the sins they committed?

The rest of Jyn crumples to the ground, her torso lurching forward as she feels a wave of nausea hit her with resounding force. Her face falls parallel to the ground as she steadies herself on the heels of her palms, clenching her jaw and willing the bile, her breakfast, the acid always harbored inside of her to stay where it should.

"You disappeared," she spits out in between gulps of air and through gritted teeth. "I woke up - I woke up after the fever, and you were gone." There's a venomous edge to her words, dripping from the tone of her voice. "I thought - This whole time, I thought - it was my fault. I thought I drove you away. I thought - because I -" Another series of convulsions overtakes her, one hand pressing to her stomach. "Have you been out here? This whole time?"

He has no precedent for a situation like this. For all his plans and contingencies, for even all his improvisation that's ensured he would make it out of a number of tight corners and complete a mission, how to proceed right now eludes him. Does he go to her like he has half a mind to? Does he confirm that his eyes and his ears aren't lying to him with the most overwhelmingly honest sense he has? Or does he stay here, keep his distance, because his feet can't seem to take him the rest of the way?

Even if he'd had precedent, though, he expects it wouldn't have helped much, because the scene in front of him shifts rapidly into something he doesn't understand.

He's been on the receiving end of her anger before ("You might as well be a stormtrooper"), but this time, he doesn't feel a need to rise up and meet it. Because this time, it's different; she isn't standing him down, defiant, fire burning so bright it'd threatened to consume everything in its path. There's no fire to this anger at all, and the realization seizes something in his chest, twists his heart until it aches. She resembles the shell of a person he'd found on the floor with Saw Gerrera more than the grieving daughter who'd confronted him as the rain had continued to beat against the exterior of the stolen cargo shuttle.

Each word makes even less sense than the last. It's hard for him to keep up, hard for him to process what they actually mean, because each one feels like a blaster bolt against his skin. The only thought running through his head that he can cling to is that he can't stand to see her like this.

That's what moves him, in the end. He crosses the distance between them, tentatively, as if he's approaching a wounded animal, until he's only a foot or so away from her, and kneels so he's at her eye level.

"No," he says a moment later, in the same gentle tone he'd used when he'd found her once before, crumpled to the floor. "I've never seen any of this. Never been here before. I would tell you if I had."

Could he have left, come back, had his memories stolen? Had all of those hushed whispers, intertwined limbs, mingling breaths and heated skin - all of those secrets she'd ripped out of the very fibers of her muscles, the marrow of her bones, and laid at his feet, where he didn't tread on them with a heavy step but rather knelt and gathered them like gems of the earth - could they have vaporized, vanished, disintegrated into nothing like he had?

Could his molecules have scattered and rendered him non-existent, only to be moved and pulled by magnetic frequencies and vibrating quantum strings and coagulated into being again?

Could this place, its Seers or whatever the kriff they are, be so cruel as to place him back in her life, let her bathe in the light of his eyes and the flame of his touch, only to take it away? Strip her of everything she ever was in the twitch of a muscle and let him fall again in front of her, unaware, unknowing, unassuming?

Could they be this heartless? (Did they have hearts to begin with?)

She hears the shifting of grass underfoot, the bristling of dirt and blades as he draws nearer, kneels down beside her - a familiar sight, she thinks, she remembers. The first night she'd arrived, nearly hypothermic and descending into shock. How he'd knelt at her alter then, too - wrapped her close and sought his absolution from the salt of her skin and the push of her lungs.

If not so consumed by grief, she would laugh - hysterically, unabashedly, until all sound had been stolen from her body.

"How could you - how could you have not seen it? How could you not remember it?" Her voice trembles and shrieks with the last moans of a dying animal. "You were here, with me," she continues, letting her forehead fall to the ground beneath her, her cheeks flushed and hot with emotion. "I gave you the necklace, you got seeds in the box. You wanted me to teach you how to farm. We -" She bleats out another whimper. "We had so many plans, we .. we had a life. Together."

He wants to reassure her, he thinks. Wants to tell her that everything will be all right; he's alive, somehow, they're alive, somehow, and everything will be all right.

But he can't do that. He'd decided once before, as the fallout of their argument had followed them through hyperspace all the way back to Yavin IV, that he'd never lie to her again; here, now, he'd rather say nothing at all than break that resolve.

He wants to reach for her. Wants to pull her close against him until her breath steadies and her trembling stops, until the peace that had surrounded them at the end, one he'd never known but now can't forget, makes its return.

But he keeps his feet firmly planted where they are, keeps his hands by his sides at a safe distance, because that's where they always need to be. Anything else is for one moment on a beach, when two people had taken their last chance to grab onto a base but rare, remarkable human comfort before it'd been spent.

(Life, the word echoes in his mind. Together, is what joins it, creating a cacophony that's impossible to ignore. He'd thought of it, maybe, allowed himself the single indulgence of imagining a flash of it before shifting his focus in his last moments toward the only thing left, the present.

Just a flash. Nothing more.)

"I'm sorry." When he finally speaks, his voice is quiet, barely audible. "It's not that I don't believe you. I do." This is where he'd chosen to put his trust, and where he chooses to again. Understanding this place and the intentions of whoever's involved with it is beyond what two decades in a war can provide, but he doesn't doubt Jyn; that's the one thing he knows he can count on. A reaffirmation — "I believe you." — and then silence falls again.

His gaze falls, settles aimlessly on a clump of grass. Lying is a skill, honed to precision just like anything else, but the truth is where he stumbles. "But I have no memory of that."

She eventually crumples too far in on herself, losing what little balance she might have had (no longer having the muscle strength to support herself as she once did), and rolling over onto her side. She feels the poke and prod of rocks and pebbles underneath her, pressing like tiny daggers in what feels like the hundreds against every bone in her body from shoulder to ankle. She lifts and bends her knees into her chest, easily done now given the slightness of her frame, then curls her arms around them.

Once upon a time, Jyn would have taken a blaster bolt to the chest before letting Cassian see her like this - utterly completely totally broken. The apparition of the woman he'd known in their previous life. A carefully constructed collection of bones and pile or organs and innards, all draped underneath a translucent sheet of skin.

But now -

Now, she doesn't have the strength to worry, wonder, fear for what he might think of her. She hears their whispers in the dark, the messages of love and trust and faith and promise that swirled around their head like smoke and light and stardust. She feels the ferocity of his lips against hers, the abrasive touch of his seedling hairs against her face, the weight of his arm on top of her stomach as he slept. She remembers when she woke to find him gone, ran out in a panic screaming his name, only to find he'd gone out to cut down felled boughs for their furnace, to keep her and him and them warm, as though the heat of their bodies and friction of their hearts wouldn't be enough. She remembers the way he'd brush her hair from her eyes before pressing his lips to her forehead, to her brow, to her eyelashes with such delicacy she quivered underneath his touch.

Yet here he is, kneeling - cautious, unsure, frightened - without a hint of those memories slithering around his skull.

"What do you remember?" she asks, turning her face towards the dirt, feeling the grit in her teeth.

She doesn't look well. As lifts his gaze and studies her, he takes note of this in earnest, logs every detail he observes into his brain. Her frame is even more gaunt than he remembers — skin almost barely covering bones, muscles thin, legs appearing to strain under the weight of her, until they finally do.

The thought that he's the cause of this, somehow, is among the worst he's ever attempted to bear. Guilt, a familiar companion, taps him on the shoulder, sends ice through his whole body. Without a clear purpose in front of him, without an objective to fulfill and a report to deliver in a timely manner, he could easily lose himself to it, fall prey to the thing he's spent years engaging in painstaking efforts to avoid.

But she speaks then, brings him back to reality before that spiral has a chance to appear, at least for the moment. He takes pressure off his knees and sits; the motion edges him closer to her ever so slightly. The rocks prod into him as well, but he ignores them.

"I remember Scarif," he begins, doing his best to keep his voice steady. To try to provide a source of calm (of comfort), in whatever paltry way he can offer. "We transmitted the plans." Or, well, there'd been no way to actually confirm that — just a hope that someone had been listening on the other end. It'd been enough for him. It still is. "There was a turbolift we rode down the communications tower to the beach. My leg couldn't carry me far, but we didn't have long. You —"

— reached for my hand. He doesn't finish that train of thought.

"Scarif," she breathes, releasing it like a moth into the sky - hoping it will have the strength, the stamina to flutter its wings, find its way home. She wonders if the planet still exists, or if the skies overhead are littered with its scattered remains - shrapnel transcending gravity and cohesion, wandering as aimlessly as she has for the past few weeks.

She remembers shielding the fallen rebel soldier from his line of view. She remembers the weight of his body - though slight on its own, heavier with each life-stealing step - and how she'd eventually collapsed onto the sand with him. She remembers the stretch of her arm, her hand as it trailed across his leg in search of his - how tightly she'd gripped it then, how warm it felt even as the life within it faded.

"I arrived here right after the light on Scarif, too," she whispers, eyes closed and lips trembling. "I remembered light and then there was nothing but darkness, the water around me. You'd - you'd already been here about a month, when I arrived." A pause. "Or some form of you. Some version of you arrived before I did." She tugs her knees in tighter to her chest. "I'd been so panicked when I came through, realizing I wasn't still holding you."

Kira never misses the full use of his powers so much as the cooling down period after adversity strikes: if he'd known he'd appear in this god forsaken canyon, if he'd known Ren would be struck down by lightning, if he'd known Casey was set to disappear the day of the feast.

If he'd known he'd find Cassian Andor wandering outside of his house, weeks after his own disappearance, he would--

Probably still have taken Jyn by the hand and taken everything he could get, probably still have had the drinks, probably still have used her loss to find some short antidote to his own. This is who he is, powers or none: selfish, and base, and their captors have seen fit to prove that the years of good behavior haven't amounted to much.

He's sitting on the roof, ignoring the last of the alcohol he'd stowed away, still conscious of the real emergencies it might lessen. The sun is just starting to slant the shadows longer in the trees, and he's staring again at the medusa head scorched into the opposite roof, racking his brain for tales of the gorgons, what it might literally or figuratively mean to see one writ by the sky. When he glances down from the shifting glare of the sun, he spots him, that unmistakable bearing, always assessing, always noticing--

If he lays down quiet enough, he might be able to escape it. Ren hadn't remembered anything the second time he'd arrived, or Natasha--logic dictates Cassian won't even remember the water they had to let go under the bridge.

But it feels wrong, to be so close to those the man knew, and leave him to wander alone. Standing up and walking to where the roof slopes over the porch, Kira lifts a hand in greeting. "There isn't much of a path beyond here," he calls out, "I don't know if you want to head into the woods this soon, or this late in the day."

Getting a lay of the land doesn't mean purely sticking to the main buildings and places where the majority of people seem to gather; it also means skirting the edges, coming to know them just as well. It means knowing what's beyond them, too, in whatever capacity he's able. The best shot at finding real answers, he thinks, will probably come from somewhere out there.

The sun is starting to lower in the afternoon sky when he reaches the end of the road he's currently on, the one that had taken him to the southwest corner of the village. It's to the point that he has to periodically raise a hand to shield his eyes just to obtain adequate visibility, and there's a thought, half-formed, that his viable time for the day is dwindling. A little further, he decides, when —

A voice calls out to him. For an instant, it's somewhat startling, but he recovers before there's so much of a visible flinch. By the time he turns, takes a few steps to allow the shade from a tree above him to remove some of the glare from his eyes, the friendly mask that's practically second nature to him is fully engaged.

"What's out there?" he calls back.

His understanding of Cassian's movements is enough that he drops loose into a seat at the edge of his own roof, legs dangling over the edge of the porch adjacent to the steps. When he climbs down, the rail will provide a midpoint before the drop straight to the ground, the effort enough like traversing fire escapes and rooftops back home that it doesn't feel like muscle he's built here.

Even in small ways, he doesn't like to think about this place changing him, for all he's seen it change others, for all he's perfectly aware of how stupid it is to put on his list of worries.

Apparently he needs the space for boyfriends of people I've slept with coming around, and he thought he'd shelved that one a couple of years ago. From what he knows of the man, it's less a worry of swaggering violence than that he'll try to use it to ingratiate himself, always painfully obvious in the swill of Kira's abilities, oil that rose to the top and left a bad taste in his mouth.

But maybe this time will be different: maybe Cassian won't want anything more from him than information, and he owes that much to him. He'd already decided with Peggy, and Sonny, to make a better effort with the people he doesn't so easily get-on with.

Kicking his feet, he looks out to the field that extends from the path, the copses of trees that eventually open into tall grass, and at the edge of it Ren's grave under the tallest pine. "There's a natural hot spring with some lush vegetation, but mostly trees and rocks. Eventually you hit the edge of the canyon, and that can be dangerous if you try to push beyond. I've been chased by insects, personally."

As is usually the case with these things, some people prove more useful than others. Chatter is most of what occurs around the pub, and through it, he's now heard some of the same things more times than he can count. Basics about the village that he could ascertain simply by walking around, general white noise.

But this may be the most pertinent information he's been able to gather so far. That can be dangerous if you try to push beyond — he takes a moment to allow that statement to sink in, to process its implications. Even if there are certain things he can verify, he hasn't ruled out a trap; what better way to discourage people from leaving than to threaten any attempt to do so?

Cassian, though, does his best not to appear too interested. Even though the distance between them and his status on ground level would make it difficult for the other to see the nuances of facial expressions, he schools his features into his best version of neutral. When he speaks next, he tries to make his tone conversational, rather than interrogating.

"I take it insects are not all that have been found at the canyon?"

Maybe in the slow avalanche of loss, his powers have weakened, been overridden by other concerns--or maybe he's correct, and in this meeting, Cassian has no reason to push him too hard, to play his hand so obviously as he did before. If Kira's honest about the whole thing, that probably only started because he took his first impression of the man and tried to walk such a hard line away from it, to spare himself.

Now there's no doing that, and he lowers himself to the post, then hops backward into the weeds and ferns shoring up around his porch like the waves of a lake against their shore.

This time, Cassian is dry and amicable enough, or giving his best impression of amicable. Kira finds he doesn't care so much: he has his own things to hide, and there doesn't seem to be any threat in coming down to the man's level. "No," he says, wiping paint chips and roof grit onto his hips. "Sometimes it's birds, sometimes rocks that seemed sturdy enough for your weight give out just before you reach the top. The spring actually has healing properties, if you spend enough time in it, or drink the water. I thought the fountain might be similar, but it's just--a place to toss us once we're cleaned and geared up, I guess."

She shouldn't be startled by familiar faces. It's becoming regular for Peggy to note that when some people vanish for a period of time, they often pop up again. It had happened with Bucky and Kylo Ren. When Peggy goes out to do her daily walk around the village, she stops frozen in her place when she sees the man. He'd introduced himself as Jeron, but had later admitted to being Cassian Andor.

Could it possibly be the same man? More pertinent, does he remember how to escape? Peggy stops what she's doing and trails after him with more speed in her step, making noise on purpose to let him know that she's following. "Pardon me," she calls after him. "Sorry, hold just a moment," she says, filling her words with warmth as she briskly jogs to his side.

When he reaches this part of the village, it isn't his explicit intent to engage in conversation — not right now, at any rate. This is a corner he hasn't tread previously, a missing piece to the map he's slowly, but steadily, trying to construct for himself. It's an exercise he prefers eyes to ears on; he can gather data and verify it at the same time.

But a woman calls out to him, and for the moment, that thought is abandoned.

As she jogs up to his side, he stops, a polite response to her request. "Of course," is what he says in an equally polite tone a beat later, letting his mouth form the approximation of a small smile. "What can I do for you?"

He won't pass up an opportunity when one presents itself.

Peggy searches his face for recognition or perhaps even some glimmer that might tell her that this is a different man. She finds neither. With Natasha, she at least felt she could directly ask questions about where she had gone, but she had never grown that close with this man. "You look a great deal like someone I thought I'd met before, here," she says, putting an emphasis on that last word. "I know it might sound mad, but do you remember this place?"

She feels she ought to simply make the deduction, but the trouble with that is that she feels she might constantly second-guess herself. It's best to simply ask the question directly. If nothing else, it will afford her the chance to try and see if he's lying (and oh, how that old power would've come in handy about now).

Moana had been passing by the fountain. It was very close to the inn and unavoidable when she went about her day to day activities. Today she had a basket held to her chest, filled with fish that wriggled and writhed unhappily. Her long wavy dark hair was pulled back into a bun on the top of her head while her sleeves have been rolled up past her elbows. Her pants were rolled up to her knees and she was walking barefoot as she made her way to the inn doors.

Her dark eyes would occasionally flick around her though she mostly kept her gaze in front of her. It took her a moment to realize who was standing next to the fountain, soaking wet from head to toe, with the same bag that all new arrivals had.

It didn’t even cross her mind that he wouldn’t remember her.

"Cassian!" She exclaimed, dropping her basket on the ground. Only one of the fishes managed to escape but it was soon stuck on the pavement with nowhere else to go. Moana ignored the fish and stepped closer to the man who wasn’t all that much older than she was. He always seemed older, Moana thought as she looked at him again. He always seemed withered to her.

"Is it really you?" Her first reaction was to go get Jyn but she didn’t want to if it ended up being someone with the same face. That, she thought miserably, would be worse.

Moana chewed on her lower lip, her dark gaze studying him cautiously. Jyn was like a sister to her, at least, the closest thing to family that she had here. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to her again and seeing Cassian was just that. It was bad. What if he left again? Would Jyn really be okay? Moana wasn’t going to have Cassian hurt her again.

It's the sound of his name that catches his attention first.

Not — as instantaneously as it should for someone who depends so heavily on an ability to detect subtle changes in his environment and do it quickly, because there's a whole conglomerate of things it has to push through. A haze of general disorientation. Efforts to push down a wild series of thoughts that prove hard to control (Jyn). Attempts to file through a mental database to find something, anything that might check with the complete unfamiliarity that surrounds him now.

On a delay of approximately twenty-five seconds, though, and when it does, a series of events unfolds. He freezes for another five as the shock of it cuts straight through him. A thought manages to surface at the forefront of his mind, reminding him that doing so puts him at a disadvantage, so he forces himself to turn, tensing his muscles on the way. Without a weapon in hand, he feels much more vulnerable than he'd like, but he can throw a punch if he has to. He assesses the sight in front him — the girl, the basket, the fish flapping on the pavement — and comes up empty.

In an unfamiliar place, his identity is only known on his own terms. Even most of his contacts, ones he's spoken with more than several times, know him by an alias; there's much more at stake in those instances than his own life. To say that someone he doesn't recognize greeting him by name is deeply unsettling would be an understatement.

"Who are you?" is the question that finally leaves his mouth. He means for it to sound neutral, controlled, but he doesn't quite succeed. Instead, his voice betrays a certain tenseness that could cost him, if he isn't lucky.

He often isn't.

Edited (html....) 2017-04-27 22:10 (UTC)

Moana's jaw parted and then quickly snapped closed. That was a very stupid thing to do, he clearly didn't remember her but she had no idea why he didn't. Her thoughts quickly went through the events and she decided, from what little she knew about Cassian and what she knew about Jyn, calling for him had been stupid.

She lowered herself to pick up her basket and the fish that had tried to wriggle away. The fish slipped through her fingers a few times but she was able to get it into the basket without falling flat on her face.

"Ah. You don't remember." She was stating the obvious to help herself think. "You were here once before. You taught me to dance but that's not important." She shook her head and stared at him with the basket in her arms. "I'm a friend of Jyn's. You disappeared a few weeks ago. We thought you were gone."

Moana frowned a bit. She wondered if he was going to stay. She couldn't stop worrying abotu Jyn.

Bodhi's still feeling the overindulgence from the feast a little, but no one gets to spend more than a day having a hangover, so back to chores. That's how he thinks of the myriad dull tasks that seem to fall to everyone and no one in this backwards little trap. Nothing really feels like a job, just a box to check off. Today he was mainly helping with the gardening efforts, which tends to result in being both unreasonably muddy (he trips a lot) and a little more shaky and off than mere tiredness usually justifies.

All of which culminates in managing to knock himself off the porch of the little house on the edge of town while he tries to toss out the dishwashing water. It's not a particularly bad landing for Bodhi. This happens a lot, and it was just two steps. He's better at landings than staying upright, though it doesn't exactly look good. So of course there's someone on the path. "I'm fine!" he says loudly, muffled a bit by the arm that kept his face from grinding into the dirt--he's got a lot of nose to protect. Hopefully it's just Kira coming home. His housemate's pretty used to Bodhi incidents at this point.

One instant, there's nothing, and the next, there's a crash coming from somewhere nearby, just out of his line of sight, which, for an instant, makes him start. He swerves toward the sound, finds a man sprawled on the ground, an arm shielding his face from impact. A man who, for a time, appears to be staying down. After a quick survey, Cassian strides forward, covers the small amount of distance between them on the path.

When he approaches, he reaches a hand toward the man's free arm with the intent to help him up, but jumps back a step or two at the sudden loud exclamation.

"Easy, I'm —" he begins, but then cuts off with a pause. With the voice muffled a little by the arm, it had taken a moment to place it, but then the recognition comes in a flash. Out of all the things he's run into over the past twenty-four hours, strange at worst and unsettling at best, this is one of the few that's allowed him to exhale relief. "Bodhi?"

"Me," he agrees amiably. Not Kira, but familiar. He isn't really any better with voices than names or faces, but he's pretty sure he knows that one. Pushing himself up, his first thought is simply that Jyn should be happy. His own nerves and uncertainty surrounding the captain quite aside and irrelevant, this is good news for her. "Good, um, good, you're back," he says indistinctly as he pushes himself clumsily back to his feet. He's not even that surprised. This place does stranger things all the time, and as Cassian was the first person he's been at all close to to disappear, there's nothing that suggests to him that an equally mysterious and unmarked reappearance would be strange.

Clint's out in the fields when Cassian passes by, putting up the new trellis he'd managed to cobble together from scrap pieces. So many things in this village are pieced together from remnants of other things, people surviving and re-purposing what they can find, but they're managing to get by. They'll have crops to feed themselves, at least, or they will once they're ready to harvest. As long as everybody pitches in, they should be all right.

But that's for the future. Clint pauses in the middle of his work, peering out from under the baseball cap he's wearing to keep the sun out of his eyes, because the figure coming up the lane is familiar. He'd never gotten to know the other man well, but they'd talked a few times, and hadn't he heard something about him disappearing? Maybe this was like Nat, and he'd returned with no memory of having been there before. (Like himself, too, even though he didn't want to think about that.) For now, he waits to see what Cassian will do.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

01.

whoo boy - reconn

sad trombone

/lays down and waits for death

i welcome it tbh

pls jesus take the wheel

take it from my hands because i wash them of this (by which i mean i don't)

there's no escape from The Suffering.

but what if i have a receipt, can i return it

sorry, refunds only given within the first 24 hours. you don't even get store credit now.

reconn - southwest village/canyon, by house 39

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reconn

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Arrival

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Recon, 4/23

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Recon, 23rd