realists | open ✧ the time to fight is now

My scars are all emotional, [ she parries offhandedly, however true it is. she's not really going to argue trauma though since the most recent of hers she shares with him and he did bear the brunt of the physical injury on top of that. but she finally admits defeat and gives in. ] Three.

[ as they come up in the compound, jyn gestures toward their little cluster of rooms. ] I'll get dinner if you want to... Now don't fuss, but you could use a bath. [ she echoes his nudge with her own, teasing but at the same time... not. he just exerted himself a lot!

and for his hard work she will have an entire fat cluster of grapes waiting just for him. ]

[ Cassian has no immediate response other than to give her a soft snort, like they're not both an emotional trainwreck going downhill without brakes. He's glad they aren't continuing that particular thread.] Thank you.

[ It's true that Cassian needs a bath, or at the very least, water that is not high in mineral content plus soap. ] This is me, not fussing. [ In part because it's sensible, in part because he's too tired to actually be that stubborn about much of anything.

So inside he goes, gingerly stripping out of his clothes in order to bathe. When he's done, towel wrapped around his hips and hair tousled but mostly dry, there she is.

With grapes.

A smirk on his face and he pops one into his mouth before rummaging around for pants to wear. Everything's soft and clean and very much the opposite of the kind of gear he's used to.

It's weird. But nice. But weird. ]

What's the genre for the evening?

They only had musicals. [ so expect the space opera version of singing in the rain. there is more food on a nearby table. as much as she would love to subsist only on grapes, they did make her take additional food back to their rooms. it's untouched by jyn's lack of appetite, but it's there.

while cassian is dressing, jyn slides off her bed and pads over to his. sure they have their own but like binary stars slowly orbiting each other, jyn refused to let him get even that far. showers are the longest time she can bear apart, chest growing tight and panic welling in her throat otherwise. she sweeps a blanket over her shoulders like a child playacting at wearing a jedi's cloak, pulling her legs up to sit stiff and cross legged while she tries not to look at all of his injuries. they're so much more apparent when he is clean and dry. ]

...what. [ Cassian sighs, glancing at her over his shoulder before he shakes his head and manages his way into a pair of loose-fitting pants. The shirt, he can do without; raising his arms over his head is the opposite of comfortable right now, and he can feel her gaze slide over him.

He hasn't seen his back in a while, but he knows he's an expanse of scars.

Pants on (and only a brief moment of flashing! look he doesn't feel like moving too quickly right now, okay?) and towel now over his shoulders, he makes his way to half sit, half recline next to her, taking a handful of grapes with him. ]

We should make a game of it. For every terrible stilted kiss, a strawberry.

Hopefully there will be no kisses on screen. [ however deliberate a qualification that was, she doesn't seem to put any emphasis on it, shifting her blanket in an attempt to drape it over him. in case he prefers something a little softer and drier.

she reads the holofilm slip with her other hand: ] Beyond the Crystaline Sea: a rolicking musical adventure featuring the exploits of dashing rogue -- [ she snorts ] -- Aldorh Coul and the zany cast of characters he meets along the way. [ a beat, a face, a sigh. ] Well, it sounds...

[ terrible. ]

There's a 'dashing rogue' if there's not a kiss on screen I'll be shocked. Shocked, I say. [ He knows how these stupid feel-good movies go, there's always a romance.

Cassian snorts at the synopsis, tucking himself beneath her blanket and shifting to lean against her a little. ]

Might as well fire her up.

[ There's a 50/50 chance he'll try and get her to eat something while they watch. ]

[ jyn shakes her head with restrainted laughter at his declaration of shock, welcoming into her blanket as she presses play on the horrible movie. ]

Here goes.

[ it may well be rubbish, we just don't know. after a bit her stiffness seems to fade, legs unfolding to curl to the side beneath her, fingers absently playing through cassian's hair. after the seventh strawberrry and about half way through the movie jyn complains in dramatic fashion, sinking down deeper into the bed until she becomes one with the blankets and can't see the film: ]

How has he got time for so many inappropriately timed... interludes? [ she rolls over to press her face into a pillow, curling around it. ] Horrible film.

[ Cassian gives a little snort, smoothing what he can see of her hair from her blanket-cuddle-pile. ] It could be worse, it could have a target audience of adults, not families.

[ Which would mean a lot worse than 'interludes', which have the grace, at least, to fade to black and show tousled hair and rumpled bedcovers as indicators. ]

We can turn it off.

[ the music wasn't even the most offensive part to her, which was a horrifying realization. if being a rogue -- dashing or not -- was that easy, jyn thinks she would have had a much more fulfilling life. also the acting was horrid.

muffled from the pillow: ] And do what?

Talk. Not sleep. [ Because they don't, not really, especially now that he's flat out refused sedatives. ] Write terrible poetry. Swap recipes. Fool around. Read. Whatever.

My poetry is transcendent, you just don't understand it. [ she's 100% teasing because any poetry from jyn would be akin to "roses are red, bantha milk is blue, fuck you". but one of the suggestions is enough to make her head pop up, disheveled. ]

You could read to me.

[ jyn erso may be a citizen of the universe -- a worlds traveler and a wily little criminal -- but she is not immune to cassian's beautiful accent. ]

I can read to you. [ He smiles; she looks a sight, and his chest constricts at it. ] What would you like me to read?

Edited 2016-12-20 21:56 (UTC)

[ his dimples will be her undoing, a breath of a smile touching her own lips, eyes brightening. she kicks out absently and just knocks the holodeck off the table, the automatic shut off plunging them into sudden brief silence that jyn breaks with a whisper. ]

Anything. [ she licks her lips and continues, no longer whispering, but voice still low. ] I haven't looked at many of the books here.

Alright. [ He's been reading off and on, randomly, whatever they have that isn't news reports, and so he reaches behind him for one of the datapads and opens to a page at random. ]

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish.

The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.

[ jyn settles in to listen, the kind of rapt attention that people had given to her when she was making her plea to action in finding the plans for the death star. her nose does crinkle up at only three days of rain being such a hardship for pelayo, three days is nothing, but she is otherwise easily engaged in the story. ]

Wings?

Wings. [ Casdian smiles, soft and fond. ]

Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar.

Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.

[ under her breath she tries to repeat elisenda with the same soft lilt of cassian's but her accent is straight outta coruscant nursery school still and she falls short.

as he reads, she slowly shifts until she's laying down with her head on his thigh, letting out a derisive sounding snort when he mentions a woman who knew everything about life and death. bullshit. ]

[ Cassian continues on through the next line, running his fingers gently across her shoulders. ] “He’s an angel,” she told them. “He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.”

See? Old women in small communities have power.

[ Taking a breath: ]

On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayo’s house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff’s club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas. But when they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal.

[ jyn looks more and more generally horrified. these people are awful people! they kept a celestial being in a chicken coop! and actually pondered clubbing him to death! like, shit, she's killed people with absolutely no regard or regret, but they were exclusively either trying to kill her first or in the way of her objective. she wouldn't just murder someone who rolled up on her doorstep half dead, especially if they're old as creation. ]

This is a terrible village. They deserve crabs.

[ insert canned laughter. ]

[ Insert Cassian giving a soft snort. ]

Father Gonzaga arrived before seven o’clock, alarmed at the strange news. By that time onlookers less frivolous than those at dawn had already arrived and they were making all kinds of conjectures concerning the captive’s future. The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he could be put to stud in order to implant the earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe. But Father Gonzaga, before becoming a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he reviewed his catechism in an instant and asked them to open the door so that he could take a close look at that pitiful man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens. He was lying in the corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels. Then he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief sermon warned the curious against the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element in determining the different between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter to his bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest courts.

Mmm, say impertinences again.

[ of course she picks out what she is often guilty of, fingers absently tracing circles against his leg. ]

Impertinences. [ How could he not? Cassian smiles at her, aware of her touch but also unwilling to draw attention to it lest she decide to stop. ]

His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel.

The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.

[ how does he make such a scolding word so appealing? how does he make a story about such terrible people so appealing is another question. as he reads, her little circles trace some of the words; a bird, a heart, a star. ]

They've kept him captive and now they're exploiting him? They sound like a Hutt. [ she doesn't trace that, fingers instead curling together only to splay out across his knee. ]

Those behaviors aren't isolated to Hutts.

The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the pentinents brought him, and they never found out whether it was because he was an angel or because he was an old man that in the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world. Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain, from then on they were careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a hero taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.

[ she tuts, but doesn't protest being corrected. she make another noise of protest at the mention of the angel being prodded with the hot iron, fingers clenching against his leg. she relaxes again at the last line because that's the most beautiful thing she's ever heard. ]

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