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[seenitbefore]

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[seenitbefore]

"Easy, easy, careful," distractedly. This is a terrible idea, really, they're both going to be stiff in the morning even if they don't wake up the bird. But he's so warm.

No one touches his other self, he's already learning, not even in passing, not even the damn robot. He didn't realize how much it was getting to him until just now. Bodhi's wiry weight pins him in his own body, sane and familiar, the way they've always fit together, all three of them, interlocking, perfect, and Bodhi's mouth tastes faintly of Jyn's weird fruity toothpaste and somehow that's the thing that sets Cassian shuddering in his turn. He curls his hand tight in the back of Bodhi's shirt and presses him closer, closer. Kisses him like a plea.

[callsign_rogueone]

No longer being allowed to touch has wound Bodhi tighter with every passing hour. Not that he's been pining for this - hands skating under Cassian's shirt, thumbing over the dips of his ribs and the ridges of tensing muscle - specifically, but checking himself before brushing shoulders, handing off dishes, or hipchecking for space at the bathroom sink, he's had to be mindful of all of it.

It makes him want to disappear. He might, if he didn't have Jyn, and the kids. If he were trying to make sense of this alone, to hold it together without help or purpose...

"I've got you, I've got you," he murmurs between kisses, rucking Cassian's shirt up as far as he can without physically detaching to pull it over his head. His hands roam Cassian's sides, restless, doublechecking all the sure spots they've mapped over the years. "You're here, not going anywhere."

He's always had a bit of trouble with the brain-to-mouth filter in the heat of the moment.

[seenitbefore]

He had some vague notion of restraint, to begin with. The slide of Bodhi's knowledgeable hands under his shirt blows that resolution all to hell; skin contact cannot wait. Cassian fumbles a bit, fingers shaking in his rush to return the favor, and then his palm slots into place against the base of Bodhi's spine and it's like closing a circuit: everything lights up. For a second he can't breathe, can't see, can't do anything but need.

Another kiss buoys him up, unlocks his lungs. He sighs into it, drags his hand gently up the ridge of Bodhi's back, working the hairtie out of his straggling ponytail with the other.

>>

[callsign_rogueone]

Once, in an after-hours barracks debate, Bodhi'd cited couch sex as the only plausible evidence for intelligent design. All those hormones and endorphins and oxytocin swimming around in the brain and blood, and for what purpose? So two human beings can ignore one another's elbows and knees and ribs and chins long enough to share space on a narrow strip of cushions, that's what.

Been a while since he'd thought about that particular conversation. Been almost as long since he's been in a position to think about it - life with kids and pets doesn't facilitate a lot of freeform sex - but it drifts to mind now, as he tugs the scratchy afghan over his and Cassian's shoulders and wedges his calf a little more firmly between Cassian's knees.

"Ow," he chuckles, somewhere in the negative space between his husband's neck and ear and tickling hair. "Too old for this."

[seenitbefore]

"Yeah," on a contented sigh. "Probably."

His hands haven't stilled for a moment, except those few weightless, endless heartbeats before he settled back into his own skin, and he has no intention of starting now. Partly it's a nagging, irrational urge to make sure Bodhi's still there, still in one piece, himself and nobody else, but partly he's just luxuriating. "I missed you."

Which is also irrational; but God...

[callsign_rogueone]

Stillness would be bad. It could mean sleep, which has so far been the trigger behind this displacement problem. The 24 hour routine has held so far, but two exchanges doesn't make a pattern. Bodhi palms circles against Cassian's lower back, other hand carding clumsily through his hair; it's late and the feeling hasn't quite come back to his legs yet.

"I miss you," Bodhi sighs, stressing the tense. "You've just come back, and I already--"

[seenitbefore]

"I'm here. I'm right here." Though a yawn sneaks up on him even so; he feels simultaneously as though he's slept for days and as though he's barely slept at all. He stifles it against Bodhi's shoulder, follows up with a kiss. "It's okay. We're okay."

[callsign_rogueone]

"I know we are." That much isn't in doubt. The 'we' is stable, Bodhi's worried about Cassian in the singular. Waking up without them, in alien surroundings. Holding the fear and bewilderment in on his own.

Bodhi has Jyn, here with him. If the ledge he's clinging to in all this gets too thin, she'll be here to haul him up to the next handhold. And vice versa. But Cassian...

He sits up on his elbows and leans over Cassian, a blur of shadows and eyeshine beneath him. "But we need to think this through. For when...if you're not here. I just don't know where to start with any of it."

[seenitbefore]

Cassian sobers, the afterglow ebbing into a faint chill like an echo of snowfall, like the breath of a cave gaping at his back, ready to swallow him again. "I don't either," he says quietly, and reaches up to loop both arms around Bodhi's ribs, anchoring himself. "I don't - I can't do anything, that's the shitty part, I don't get a choice or any warning or--"

[callsign_rogueone]

"I know," Bodhi says, again, uselessly, "And we don't know why. Or for how long."

He trails off, lowers himself down so most of his weight pins Cassian against their (defiled!!! a voice that might be Neph's or might be K's screams) couch, rests his forehead against the bridge of Cassian's nose. "I keep thinking, on this side of things you're safe. Even if it's not you, we can keep the rest of you safe. But when you're over--out--there, in that fight..."

[seenitbefore]

This maneuver leaves him ideally placed for Cassian to kiss his nose. "So far I just sit in my room all day. Pretend to be practicing my ciphers or whatever. It's not like I'm out there with the Klingons shooting lasers at me."

[callsign_rogueone]

A grumble works its way from Bodhi's throat, creases his brows and scrunches his nose beneath the kiss. "You joke, but that's exactly what I keep thinking." he says. "This other person - shit, god, we need to come up with something to call him - he's dangerous. I don't see him hanging back if this goes on forever. "

And if Other Cassian puts himself in a situation where their Cassian wakes up under fire, where the unthinkable happens, there's no assurance the right consciousnesses will be shuffled back to their appropriate bodies.

It's possible Bodhi's thought this through a couple thousand times.

[seenitbefore]

"Yeah, see." His voice sharpens, comes into focus. "You wonder why I'm worried about you guys the whole time, stuck with Creepy Space Me." You're never sorry, Bodhi's halting voice says in his memory, soft and sour.

I need to think them through. Orders, I mean. You, you let me.

God.

He tightens his arms around his Bodhi, solid and reassuringly steady on top of him. "He's scared of him - the guy, the - the other you..."

[callsign_rogueone]

Bodhi presses a kiss to the bridge of Cassian's nose. "Not that kind of dangerous. Erm. Well, yes, that kind, but I'm not worried there. Jyn and I can handle it, and if this keeps up, we can...call your dad?" He squeezes at the back of Cassian's neck, working his thumb in beside the stiff tendon. "I asked Creepy Space You about any triggers, because of the kids. I think he understood."

Some of the assurance he'd felt after that strange (and awkward, can't ever forget the awkwardness of spooning some other man in his husband's body. That's going to be one of those intrusive thoughts that keeps him awake at night several decades from now) conversation the other night fades away. Cassian's squeeze is just shy of bruising, and the things he chooses to share about that other reality are chilling. "Oh. I--other me--he's young, though. There was a time you were intimidating to me, too."

[seenitbefore]

"I know you can, I just--" He squirms at the pressure, but some of the tension in him shudders loose again. "Mmh." And laughs, reluctantly, because this is never not funny to him. "Yeah, big tough me with all my shit together, no wonder."

(He knows Bodhi is right in this - they do need to face this, discuss it, be smart about it - but that doesn't make it any less daunting.)

[callsign_rogueone]

"Your resting bitchface was a force to be reckoned with," Bodhi smirks. He wishes the term had existed back then, not that his 24 year old self would have had the guts to use it, at first.

"Although, I don't know, everything I'm hearing about that place is...grim." he allows himself to settle back down fully, weight half pressing into Cassian and half digging into the couch cushions at his back. He lets his head rest on Cassian's shoulder and keeps on dragging fingers through his hair, frowning pensively. "He told me Neph's there, too. Not Djem, thank god, but I--I don't want any of what I'm hearing to be real."

[seenitbefore]

"Neph?" incredulously. "Neph and not Djem, that's - I don't know what to make of that." His magpie child, in all those endless tunnels. A shiver creeps up his spine.

He blots out that image deliberately, focusing for a moment on Bodhi's hand in his hair, the space of warm breath between them. Here. Safe. "What--" He forces it past the sudden clench in his throat. "What else did he say? This time?" He centers his palm between Bodhi's shoulder blades, digs his fingers in gently, and tries to ignore the crawling in his stomach. "If he's been trying to scare you, I'll - I don't know. Give him the mother of all hangovers."

[callsign_rogueone]

Make no mistake, Bodhi doesn't want Djem anywhere near any of this bullshit, but the thought of one child out there in the universe somewhere without the other is...wrong. Everything about this is wrong.

He makes an incoherent noise, something meant to be comforting, apologetic. Maybe he shouldn't have said anything at all, but what if Cassian ran into this Other Nephele at some point? Better to be braced for it, right?

"No, no, I don't think he was," he shushes, sweeping his touch from the crown of Cassian's head to the knob between his shoulderblades and back again. "The opposite, almost. I think he knows he's--that we're scared."

"He admitted we were all there with him. The other us'es. I knew that, but he didn't know that I knew, right, so that was a nice piece of truth." There's that noise again, the soft apologetic one. "He mostly asked about us, the kids, K. To keep from having to answer questions about himself, I'd guess, but we worked on some sign language. He...doesn't seem to want to scare the kids, if we can help it."

Then, hushed, "I don't think he was ever a kid. I think this war he's in has been going on a very long time." Bodhi pulls Cassian to him by all points of contact, digs knobby fingers in a little too hard, as if to wring away the might-have-beens of his own childhood and the realities that apparently exist somewhere out there in an infinite multiverse.

[seenitbefore]

Cassian is quiet for a minute or two, digesting this. Despite the evidence he's been picturing the other, the stranger, as a stranger: a tall menacing shadow to match his K-bot, a faceless invader from that other, nightmare world.

Easier, less threatening, than the image Bodhi builds for him now of a too-old twentysomething, a scared, scarred kid unwilling to hurt kids even younger. A human being open to reason, capable of compassion. Defensive among strangers.

And therefore not, perhaps, a stranger at all.

I'm afraid, he wants to say. Afraid I really have gone crazy and I'm dragging you both with me. That this has been inside my head all along, that I'm making it all up, that I'm lying to myself and I don't even know it. I don't want this to be real and I'm terrified that it's not.

"I love you," is what he says aloud, abruptly, against his husband's neck.

[callsign_rogueone]

"I love you," Bodhi replies instantly. Then he has to detour to seal a fierce kiss to Cassian's mouth, one that may give away his own fears about what is and isn't happening. When he pulls back, it's to rasp, "We will be okay."

That sits between them, resting on the spare pillow they'd pulled out of a closet for Other Cssian's use. It's lumpy and smells like Jyn's herb garden, old dry scents tucked in a sachet and tossed in the linen closet summers and summers ago.

"Let's start small," Bodhi says as he shuffles his knees for a better fit. "Are there any clients you can put off? Any appointments we need to cancel?"

[seenitbefore]

"Yeah," he murmurs back, and swallows, and says it more firmly: "Yeah, we will." If they just keep reassuring each other of it, it might wind up being true. Right?

Right. Sure.

Cassian digs his toes into the snug space behind the edge of the end cushion, and considers the question. Almost at once he realizes the essential problem. "That depends, though. On when it's - on whether I can count on being here ahead of time. How do you plan around--?" He breaks off, exhaling sharply. "This is nuts."

[callsign_rogueone]

Bodhi would much rather focus on something he can affect (dentist appointments and PTA conferences and track meets and deadlines) than things he can't (his own shitty coping mechanisms and sometimes-slippery grasp on reality). So he tightens his arms around Cassian's shoulders and taps points between his shoulderblades.

"Yes, but so far, it's been every other day," his ring finger strikes between vertebrae, "If that keeps up, you'll be with us, um, Wednesday and Friday and Sunday," his middle finger drops just inside the wing of a scapula, "Was there anything due by Friday that you can't get done in, um, two days?" index finger to the little wispy hairs at the nape of Cassian's neck, "What kind of bug lasts for a week that we can lie about you having?"

His voice peters out, thumb sliding up the rise of bone behind Cassian's ear. This next part is...not something he wants to pick at, much, but it's the question that rings loudest and most often. "And if it goes on longer than that, how do we tell the kids?"

[seenitbefore]

"If--" Cassian echoes, and sighs, trying to relax into the touch. "No, I don't think so. Just minor stuff. Djem's got cute art guy on Friday. Rex will probably call when he gets back from Florida, but I don't know if that's Saturday or Sunday..." all this evenly enough. But the last question makes him flinch despite himself, voice cracking finally. "God, I don't know, I don't wanna think about it. 'Hey guys, I'm losing my mind but don't worry, we think it's on a schedule...' Fuck. I don't know."