cassian andor (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
enlisting) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
sixthiterationlogs2017-04-22 03:03 pm
enlisting) wrote in sixthiterationlogs2017-04-22 03:03 pm
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]
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]
whoo boy - reconn
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.
sad trombone
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.
/lays down and waits for death
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?"
i welcome it tbh
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."
pls jesus take the wheel
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."
take it from my hands because i wash them of this (by which i mean i don't)
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."
there's no escape from The Suffering.
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.
but what if i have a receipt, can i return it
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.
sorry, refunds only given within the first 24 hours. you don't even get store credit now.
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."