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[seenitbefore]

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in space, no one can hear your parrot demanding breakfast.

[seenitbefore]

He wakes up in the dark, which isn't remarkable; he's usually up at least once in the night, ever since he was a kid. But he wakes up somewhere dank and stuffy, in a basement room, maybe, and he wakes up alone.

For a confused second or two his groggy brain tries to work it out - is he at Granddad's? Did he pass out doing the laundry? - and then registers the shape of the dark around him, the wholly unfamiliar echoes, the ambient noise muffled by the walls: distant voices, footsteps, electronic warbles, occasional dull clangs. Like a hospital, or an airport, or--

Panic hits him like a bullet from behind. He flails upright, groping for a light switch, for anything recognizable. His hand meets empty air, but the lights flare on anyway, a sullen glow illuminating a small, spartan, windowless room. Featureless furnishings. A small screen set into the wall, and a door with no handle.

"Jesus." His own voice sounds small and stifled, a frightened wheeze. Cassian knots his hands in the weirdly-textured bedclothes beside him and breathes in deep. Breathes out, deliberately. And again. On the third breath he manages to say aloud: "Jyn? Bodhi?"

No answer.

"Jyn?" he tries again, louder. Djem, is his next natural thought, but no, no no no, he's not going to think about the kids right now, whatever's happening can't touch them, even inside his head, no. No. "Hello?"

The door shoots open and someone - something - looms in the doorway, a huge distorted figure like an armored insect, easily eight feet high. It cranes toward him, and he flinches backward but there's nowhere to go, just the bunk behind him and the wall behind that--

"Oh," it says. "You are conscious."

The voice is crisp, resonant, but not quite human, and he'd know that put-upon note anywhere.

"K," he says blankly, and without missing a beat the thing - the robot - fires back: "Who were you expecting?"

He's dreaming, then. Clearer and more detailed than any nightmare he's ever imagined, but still. Cassian scrubs a hand across his face, trying to believe it.

The K-thing draws itself up a little, whirring, and demands, "Are you all right?"

Which is a good question. "I don't know where Bodhi and Jyn are," he tells it with the simplicity of dream-logic.

"High probability that they are in their own quarters." The smooth head cocks at a familiar angle. "And that comms are functioning normally."

He almost laughs. Looks the K-thing in its cold-glowing eyes. What the hell. "Can we go there?"

in space you don't have parrots, you have Hondo Ohnaka's weird monkeybird thing

[callsign_rogueone]

The dim glow of the hallway runninglights draw Bodhi back to his quarters. He's on second shift for the next eight rotations, barring mission deployment, and he doesn't much mind; breakfast, lunch, and dinner are interchangeable anyway - reconstituted protein blocks supplemented by whatever edible forage the quartermaster's staff can scare up - and he likes the muted activity level of the late afternoon and deep night. If there's any downside, it's that Jyn and Cassian both have first shift: Jyn to run the new recruits through drills (occasionally aided by Chirrut, who keeps to no schedule but his own) and Cassian to sift through piles of intel for useful nuggets. Their days only overlap for the few hours before Bodhi's due in the hangar, and he'd be lying if he said he didn't feel the isolation.

Color him surprised to round the final corner to his quarters and find K and Cassian approaching the door from the other end of the hall. Bodhi raises a hand in puzzled greeting. This planet has a 34 hour solar cycle, and it's well into hour 28. Shouldn't they both be asleep? Or, well, charging, he supposes.

"Cassian, Kuh-K," he nods, "I was j, just--just getting--just finishing up."

[seenitbefore]

Bodhi is Bodhi - looking exhausted and worried, not to mention nonplussed, but wearing his own face above that institutional-looking jumpsuit - and the flood of relief is so strong that it threatens to knock Cassian's feet from under him. He lets it carry him forward instead, out of robot-K's shadow to his husband's side, reaching for his arms - God, he's thin; how long have they been here, what have they been doing to him? "Are you okay?"

[callsign_rogueone]

Cassian touches people, sometimes. Bodhi's even been on the receiving end once or twice. But outside of tense moments, skin-of-their-teeth-survival, Cassian always has a reason for reaching out to others. This is a thing Bodhi knows, without really having to think about it.

What, then, is Cassian's reason for taking him by the forearms and stepping right up in his space? The careful clasp of his fingers immediately sets Bodhi looking around for flashing alert lights, canting his head to catch any distant alarms.

Nothing.

"I'm--yes?" he blinks. "Is. Is something wr-wrong? You should be as-asl-asleep, it's late, you've got fir-firs--early shift."

He casts over to K for insight before he can dig this babble pit any deeper. If they've been given a sudden assignment, or if Bodhi had somehow forgotten that he wasn't okay (oh, stars, was he not supposed to go on shift? Has he been put on enforced leave again?) K will know. K will chime in.

[seenitbefore]

At the back of the house there's a garden, fenced off with wooden palings. It's not large enough to get lost in, even, he suspects, in high summer, which this evidently isn't. But there's room to stand and breathe the cool, moving air, where he doesn't have to look anyone in the eye for a while.

The kids - the girl he does/doesn't recognize, and a gangly boy who vaguely resembles Bodhi - have been bustled off somewhere, out of the house, off the premises. Out of his reach, clearly, which is a sensible precaution on the part of their parents. He'd probably do the same, if he were -

Cassian shies off from that thought again. Focuses on the slight chill of the breeze, the faded green of the shrubs directly in front of him, the back of the outbuilding in his peripheral vision. There's a path between it and the house proper, leading back toward the street, the rows of similar houses, blocks of them he remembers glimpsing from the kitchen window without consciously registering them.

He has nowhere to go, and they know it: Jyn-who-isn't-Jyn, Bodhi-but-not-Bodhi. But he's grateful for the breathing room.

[thenextchance]

The garden is Jyn's, and she still has work to do in it today. Left that work, in fact, to check on her husband, who turned out not to be her husband, precisely, despite being her husband.

A different kind of dilemma than she used to encounter with her dad, who was always himself, it was only that his perception of the world. Sometimes. Was not the same as it was other times.

She doesn't want to crowd the stranger Cassian. That would be counterproductive. But she also simply refuses to give away her plans for her garden entirely, simply because of some incredibly weird twist in reality.

So out she goes again, in her gardening clogs and a worn through sweatshirt, back to her bucket of bulbs and her trowel. "Got to get these in the ground," she announces, to the garden at large and Cassian if he chooses to listen.

[seenitbefore]

"Sorry, I can--" He breaks off, partly because the irony of I can go is too bitter, and partly from another wave of disorientation.

She's Jyn: small and scruffy and brusque, shouldering her way into a place as though she's settling in for a siege; she even sounds like herself, which Bodhi doesn't, quite. But this woman has threads of gray in her hair, and something soft about her eyes. On some level he recognized Jyn the moment he saw her, before she ever knew his name, before they'd exchanged a word or a good long look; and on that level he can't recognize this other, motherly Jyn at all.

He breathes in. Breathes out, slowly. Watches her push up her sleeves, with a strange pang.

[seenitbefore]

When he hears the girl and the boy come clattering through the front door, Cassian lets himself quietly out the back.

He stays there in the garden, the rest of the evening. It's not unpleasant. The breeze is a little chilly, but he's got a jacket, and he listens to the quiet noise from the kitchen while the little family sits down to eat. Shakes his head and smiles a little at - at the father, when he looks out to check on him; later, I'll be fine, go on.

Eventually the kids vanish upstairs. After a long, long while, the parents do too. He watches the lights go out in the upper windows, and then slips back inside. In the front room the cage is covered, silent, and the chrono reads 1.42; there's no outcry when he lets himself down, carefully, on the sofa.

It snows, in his dreams: that steady, almost lazy fall, out of a sky so darkly clouded it might be almost any time. His hands are bare, chilled. The shutters are closed behind him, and his father urges him gently into the house. His father's face is Bodhi Rook's face, and the shape of the rooms is wrong, but Cassian is six or seven or eight years old and he says nothing, he's too grateful for the warmth, for the hand on his shoulder. We're home? he asks, and the hand on his shoulder comes up to ruffle his hair and a man's flat-accented voice says, Yes, we're home now, this is my brother, and he's tired, he's cold, he curls up in the corner where he knows K is, although he can't see him, and he signs with his small skinny fingers I dreamed you were gone and

[callsign_rogueone]

"What if he doesn't come back," Bodhi's the one who gives voice to the fear, though Jyn must be thinking it. They lay side by side, only just touching at the knees, as if any tighter contact might encourage a total loss of control on one or both their parts.

"He will," the pillow crinkles as she lifts a hand and sets it beside his cheek, knuckles brushing beneath his eye. Jyn has always had enough conviction to reshape the universe to her will. Bodhi closes his eyes against the dark and lets the strength of her belief buoy him up.

"This is worse than that time you were on assignment in Botswana," he mumbles. Jyn makes a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sniffle, turning over to tuck herself close.

"I get it now," she says, "Why you were so stressed when I got home. Why you sometimes still are."

"It's the not knowing," Bodhi agrees. They've told her so before, he and Cassian, but this may be the first time she's gone through something similar (with either of them, at least; the rest of her family is constantly revolving through some permutation of at-risk or enemy-the-state). He lets her pull his face against her shoulder, and tells himself he's not taking advantage, that it's okay to feel small and uncertain in their emptier bed.

If he ever had the soldier's knack for sleeping on command, it's long since abandoned him. Jyn, who regularly kips in hardscrabble hotel rooms around the globe, does eventually nod off. Bodhi counts her breaths until he loses track, starts over again, repeats this cycle until the grit behind his eyes migrates down the back of his neck, his spine, his arms and legs, everywhere skin stretches over muscle. He flexes his fingers and toes to keep from going mad with it, but soon that's not enough to suppress to urge to vibrate right out of his bones.

Jyn's half-turned away in sleep, and Bodhi finishes the job. He sits on the edge of their bed for a minute, running blunt nails up and down his arms, trying to chase away the spiderfeet feeling of being too much, too little, too tight all at once. When he stands, it's because every ligament in his body has been strung taut for half an hour now.

Downstairs. Not-Cassian's decision to sleep on the couch was as obvious as it was unspoken. Bodhi...hasn't allowed himself to think about that, yet. He hadn't expected the man to crawl in with him, but he doesn't like not knowing where he is, what he's doing, how he's coping, if he's taking good care of his borrowed body. He lets those surface concerns tug him downstairs, half-formed thoughts of making sure he found a pillow and blanket guiding his steps in the dark.

For the better part of a week now, he's haunted his own home at night. Or been haunted in turn by this phenomenon. Bodhi knuckles at his eyes, fetches a blanket from the hall closet, and murmurs a quiet "calm, calm," to K, the way he so often does on his walkabouts.

He does pause for a moment, considering his odds of being flipped into the coffee table by a disgruntled spy, but 3am is closing in fast once again, and Bodhi is all out of fucks to give. He shakes the blanket open and drapes it over the man stretched out on his couch.

[seenitbefore]

The warmth, the weight, the texture of the throw against his skin, pull him out of sleep. He's still curled up, tucked into a narrow space that might as easily be a moonbase bunk as his old hideout in the corner by Rex's couch. It's quiet, he hears someone breathing -

Cassian blinks and stirs, and then his heart swoops dizzyingly. His own house. His own living room, the familiar crocheted zigzag afghan tickling his nose, and his husband - he doesn't bother finishing the thought, just grabs for Bodhi's hands, getting tangled in the blanket in the process.

"Hey," he says, breathless as if he's been running, "hey, hi, c'mere--"

TFLN

[seenitbefore]

that sounds like religion

also like a big job for one person

Re: TFLN

[thespaewife]

that's a good word. yes. also 'practice'.

yes. but I'm never all alone.

Re: TFLN

[seenitbefore]

what would you do if you were?

[seenitbefore]

[ He’s been by the shop a time or three, sometimes to trade for parts, once or twice just to inquire after the second-shift guy with the tentacles, always soft-spoken and polite, and always paying with hard currency, no transfers, no ID. None of that’s out of the ordinary, except maybe the polite part. Youngish, cute-ish, not particularly memorable. He never has given a name.

But that’s definitely him, down the other end of the bar, and that was almost definitely a possible smile, in the second or two that Kaylee caught his eye.

So there’s that. ]

[imshinycaptain]

[Kaylee spends most of her time in the mechanic's shop-slash-junkyard that's been her family's occupation since before the Clone Wars. She repairs vehicles and makes recommendations and argues good-naturedly with grizzled old pilots twice her age about this or that make or model, and she's even nice to the droids. She sees a lot of people, and so it takes her a minute to place the dark-eyed man leaning on the other end of the bar. But he's definitely been in the shop.

She excuses herself from the conversation with the other regular and migrates down to the edge of the bar where he stands. He's pretty attractive, and it's not the first time Kaylee's noticed. She approaches him with a smile.]

Were you goin' to say hi or just enjoy the view?

[seenitbefore]

I hadn't decided. [ The answering smile is quick, easygoing, a little rueful. ] You have a preference?

@livesfree

[seenitbefore]

Cassian turns up, this time, in full boy-next-door guise: clean shirt, clean shave, hair trimmed so it has a chance in hell of staying out of his eyes, everything about him broadcasting I have nothing to hide, and also am a comfort to my widowed mother. To anyone who’s actually acquainted with him, it’s either hilarious or mildly sickening, depending.

His good humor’s not even entirely manufactured. He’s had his hands full, and it’s been a while since he’s seen DJ, who is - not his friend, definitely not his boyfriend, not even really his ally, but - someone he likes seeing. Whom he - doesn’t rely on, knows he can’t trust, but who’s been a relative constant over the past few years, when very little else has. Who’s not only easy for him to work with, but also - yeah, okay - fun.

So it’s a little, genuine grin that he greets him with, along with a civil “Hey.”

[livesfree]

Somewhere along the line, Cassian and DJ become friends, or the closest equivalent of friends that DJ can actually have. So much so (and absolutely not because he stumbled upon it by accident), Cassian knows a few pockets of hideouts that DJ uses on top of his usual haunts.

Right now, it's a dingy cantina, the kind that you have to watch your credits in. DJ's a regular (until he decides to move on, of course, or until he decides to swingle the whole place just because he can) and at the bar he's got a rather expensive looking drink.

It's not like he's actually paid for it. He never does, not with how easy it is to slice into their droids and computers. He happens to be glancing around when he sees him--cleanshaven, looking strange, but still good (far better than DJ ever has). Attractive, even, and when DJ smiles he feels a weird twinge of jealousy.

"Look what the cat d-d-dragged in," He greets, and flourishes a ringed hand to the empty seat next to him. He's in need of a shave, and his hair is mussed underneath his favourite hat, but for the most part he's pretty clean. He's come into wealth, recently.

[seenitbefore]

Just for that, Cassian flashes him the smile that goes with the rest of it, ingenuously sweet and a little shy. It disappears the second he slides into the proffered seat. "We can't all be fashion icons like you," he says, mildly. (Which is to say, in the particular idiom of wary not-quite-boys, you're not looking half bad yourself.) "That hat's a classic."

Part of him, the part that's still a stupid kid despite his best efforts, wants to just... skip all this. Lean in to press himself against DJ's rangy height, make him laugh, get out of this dive and find somewhere to kiss that smirk off his face, and just... leave business till later. Just for now.

Which is pathetic. What is he, fifteen? Cassian shuts those thoughts down firmly, crosses thin arms on the bar. "Break anything interesting lately?"

[seenitbefore]

[ continued from tfln ]

It might if you gave it a chance.

Helpful for whom, exactly?

ohhh i will meditate on how to translate him entirely to this canon, rest assured

[helmut]

Helpful for you. Or me. I know now where you draw the line, captain.

*chinhands*

[seenitbefore]

You think so?

TFLN

[seenitbefore]

[ >> ]

I should never have let you meet each other.

[ramikadyc]

As if I gave you much choice. I would have found him regardless.

[seenitbefore]

Sure.

Just give me some room. If this goes right, it should only be a couple of days.