sandbox

[seenitbefore]

OPEN POST

where good memes go bad

or, the home of miscellaneous threads / texts / prompts / AUs. let's play!

Comments

[seenitbefore]

Cassian looks a little spooked himself - he's walked Bodhi through plenty of bad days, but never this bad, never with that kind of absolute, lucid horror in his face. He tucks his hands back under his elbows, to hold in his own shaking, and also to keep from reaching out and hauling not-his-Bodhi into his arms. "I don't know. I don't know what. But I am sorry. I didn't-- I should have stopped to think. I wasn't trying to mess with you."

A deep breath. "I mean, this is pretty sci-fi anyway, we're in Starbase Whatever The Hell and K's a giant robot for some reason. There might as well be a mirror universe."

[callsign_rogueone]

"Wh-what's a robot?" the idea of K as anything other than an eight foot tall, spindle-limbed hulk is as alien as anything else Cassian's said so far. Bodhi doesn't quite grasp the whole meaning of terms like 'sci-fi' or 'mirror universe' either, but the overall intent carries: Cassian is somehow as unmoored from this reality as Bodhi fears finding himself.

"I might...might know someone we can ah-ask," he straightens, hands slowly lowering to his lap. Someone who can read Cassian in ways Bodhi can't. Someone who might know what's wrong outside of a med-scan. "C-come on, we need to find Chirrut."

[seenitbefore]

"Who's that?" and for the first time in the past hour there's something distinctly Cassian-like in his expression, a wary reserve. (He's quite positive he doesn't know a "Chirrut", and now that he's reminded of the K-thing, he's a little afraid to ask who - or what - Bodhi proposes dragging him in front of.) "What are they going to do?"

[callsign_rogueone]

How does it make any sense for Cassian to know Bodhi, and Jyn, and K-who-is-a-robot-now-whatever-that-means, but not Chirrut? He'd met Chirrut before Bodhi! Nothing about this makes sense.

"I don't kn-know," Bodhi admits, palming the door open. At least he can be reasonably sure that Chirrut and Baze will be in their quarters, with second-shift just ended. They wake early, as good as a chronometer set to Jedhan standard time, but not this early. "He knows things, sometimes. He can t-tell when something's not...not right."

This is not for Bodhi to decipher. His head's still askew with thoughts of sons and partners and uncles. No manual exists for this, but the Force? Chirrut would have it that all things are possible with the Force.

[seenitbefore]

He does have to laugh at that - sharp and sudden and finely edged with hysteria, but honest laughter all the same. "You think we need a second opinion on that?"

[callsign_rogueone]

A laugh? A laugh instead of a half-stifled huff? Bodhi redoubles his pace, spasmodically glancing over his shoulder to make sure Cassian's still following. "I th-think we need somewhere to st-st-start."

Chirrut makes a much more sensible first step than, oh, Jyn. Bodhi's imagination shies away from conjuring up her potential reaction to suggesting that Cassian might not be Cassian at all, and he's just fine with that. He has enough trouble sleeping at night as things stand.

[seenitbefore]

There not being much else he can do, Cassian gets up and picks his way back through the jumbled room in Bodhi's wake. "Okay. Sure. Let's start." Start what, he can't help thinking; he's not sure how much further reality can unravel on him, but he doesn't want to find out.

Out in the tunnel again he falters for a moment, and has to walk fast to catch up to Bodhi's long-legged, anxious progress. "You sure you're okay?"

[callsign_rogueone]

Base corridors are never truly empty, powered-down, or asleep. So long as an attack could come at any moment, there could be no real stillness or quiet. Other beings paced the halls, executing tasks or taking advantage of the post-shift lull to stretch their appendages.

"M-me?" Bodhi doubletakes over his shoulder as he edges around an Ithonian. Grek, he thinks that's their name. "You're the one who, who, who's had a sudden personality transpl-plant."

[seenitbefore]

But when he looks, Cassian isn't listening. He's just processed the fact that the big lumbering shape they just passed isn't another robot, isn't, as he initially told himself, some strangely bedizened beast of burden; he's registered the flare of what might be gills, and the faint, earthy, utterly foreign scent, and most importantly the cool curiosity of the glance it shot him out of one cocked... eyestalk...?

"Holy fuck," he breathes, when he can breathe at all (Grek, after the one quizzical look, has gone on their way unconcerned).

[callsign_rogueone]

As far as Bodhi's aware, Grek and Cassian don't know each other. He thinks the Ithonian's a structural engineer or something, only knows that much because they were both consulted about the charging stations at the rear docking bays when the Rebellion started hollowing out this moon. Cassian's area of expertise doesn't exactly overlap.

Not that it matters, since he wouldn't stare at a stranger like that. Nobody would. This slack-jawed, glassy-eyed balk reads more like a Core worlder stepping outside the Imperial bubble for the first time.

No space, no spies, no army.

"Hey, um," Bodhi clears his throat as Grek makes their ponderous way down the corridor. "Ey-eyes on me?"

[seenitbefore]

"Yeah," refocusing on him gratefully - he doesn't want to stare, he does know better than that, but it takes the sound of an almost-familiar voice to short-circuit his paralysis. "Sorry. I-- Coming."

Aliens among us! he can almost see Djem saying, along with the smug grin that accompanies the kid's worse jokes - but no, he's not thinking about that, no. He stumbles a little as he follows obediently after Bodhi, and tries to concentrate on not letting the shakes get the best of him.

[callsign_rogueone]

A million contingencies clamor for Bodhi's attention: what to tell Chirrut (and by extension, Baze), how to put K2 off without rousing suspicion, how to explain to Draven - a man who does not and never will like or trust Bodhi Rook - that his best and most reliable spy has had some sort of personality transplant, how to keep this from Jyn, how to plot a course through the base that will expose Cassian to the fewest possible nonhumans--

He never gets further than acknowledging the one issue before four more pop up, no time to actually push for a solution in any single direction. And then, there they are, outside the quarters of the other two surviving Jedhans.

(That's not a label Bodhi likes to think about, much. He's taken to defining himself in other ways. But with one of those metrics standing beside him at a loss, he falls back into bad habits.)

Bodhi knocks. "Chirrut? Baze?"

[forceofothers]

There is, beyond the door, some grumbling and miscellaneous night noises of the variety made by two people who have lived together for decades in circumstances where they are frequently rousted out of bed in the middle of their sleep cycle.

And then the door opens to reveal Chirrut, covering a yawn with one hand and leaning on the door control with the other. Baze is not immediately visible, which doesn't mean he isn't awake in there somewhere. Lurking. Keeping Chirrut covered.

Habits that kept you alive take a long time to fade.

"Bodhi," says Chirrut. "Good evening!"

[seenitbefore]

Cassian looks up cautiously. It's a moment before he registers that clouded gaze and realizes that Chirrut doesn't acknowledge him because Chirrut doesn't see him, and a little spark of relief he hadn't even known was there flickers out again. He draws in a slow, steadying breath, glancing at Bodhi again and then back. He's not sure what to make of this guy, but at least he's not unsettlingly familiar.

[callsign_rogueone]

"Good, um, yes," Bodhi is painfully aware it's well past evening, and less sure than he'd like to be that Chirrut's greeting isn't a sarcastic reminder of that fact. It can be hard to tell sometimes, when everything out of the monk's mouth ends in an exclamation point.

"S-sorry to dis--to bother you, both, but," he takes a short step to the side, revealing Cassian. Not that he makes much of a visual barrier, or that such things matter to Chirrut in general, but it's still only polite. Baze is still hovering somewhere, after all. "It's Cassian. He's."

How to put this? Can Chirrut already tell? What if there's nothing at all strange about Cassian in the Force, or whatever?

"He's not hi-himself?"

[forceofothers]

"Indeed?" says Chirrut. Headtilt. "And where is he? What does this 'not being himself' consist of?"

Mischief enters his face. "Are we going to break up an indecorous activity?"

[seenitbefore]

"I'm right here," Cassian says, a trifle nettled by both the remark and the muffled snort from inside the room. "And I am myself, it's everything else that's gone crazy."

(Though of course, to their ears, he doesn't even sound like himself, not exactly - he sounds paradoxically young, his voice more expressive and less precise. More than that: he's not a noisy presence, there at Bodhi's shoulder, but the controlled calm, the shell of stillness that's as much part of Cassian as the shape of his words and the weight of his footsteps, that's nowhere to be found.)

[callsign_rogueone]

Chirrut won't see it when Bodhi flings his arms out as if to say 'There!! You see?!', but Baze might appreciate it. Bodhi also hopes he's seeing the miffed crinkle to Cassian's face, because that's a first. He desperately needs someone else to acknowledge how alien the expression - all expressions, really - is, how out of place.

"Yes, he's, he's here," Bodhi sighs, almost apologetically. "But it's not--Chirrut, I don't. I don't th-think it's him."

He rakes a hand through his hair, goggles hanging loose and forgotten around his neck. "I thought, m-maybe, you could..." Do exactly what Chirrut had done, though indirectly: confirm that he doesn't recognize the man standing across from him.

[forceofothers]

Slow blink.

"Oh my."

He's just going to consider this one for a while. It requires some thought and some careful observation.

[seenitbefore]

Cassian exhales impatiently, shoving his hands in his pockets before they can change too obviously into fists. He is not panicking. "Do what, exactly? He's got a dimensional portal lying around, or what? --Sorry," catching himself. Being rude to the blind guy they've woken up in the middle of the night is hardly going to help anything, and neither is snapping at--

--at someone who's not his husband. He remembers that, belatedly, and flushes. "Sorry," he says again, more quietly. "I'm a little - I'm a little on edge here."

[callsign_rogueone]

"Right, yes, y-yes, of course you a--why, why wouldn't you be?" Bodhi pulls at his goggles, fumbling them over his chin and nose and shoving them back up his scalp. The tight pull at his hair helps, the way a shower and a clean set of clothes sometimes tricks his brain into thinking he can manage potshots from the universe. "Me too, I'm--I don't know, I just thought, see, Chirrut knows things sometimes."

Then, as though this is a universal concept that surely must apply even to bodyswapped aliens, Bodhi explains: "The Force sp-speaks to him. Sometimes he even, uh, shares with the, the rest of the class."

Baze's telltale snort echoes from the depths of their shared quarters like a blastershot.

[forceofothers]

"The Force is with me, I am one with the Force," Chirrut says, simply. Perhaps mostly in response to Baze, perhaps in prayer, which would still make it quite likely to be in response to Baze. Perhaps in acknowledgement of Bodhi. Disclaimer? Affirmation?

Impossible to tell from outside.

"So you are not at home," he says to Cassian.

[seenitbefore]

"I'm really not," Cassian says fervently. It's catching up with him now, the sheer scale of the strangeness, and he's starting to feel lightheaded. He plants his feet more firmly, before he can steady himself against not-Bodhi's shoulder out of reflex. "I'm only following about a third of this. I know Bodhi, sort of, I don't know you, I'm sorry. I don't-- I don't really get what's happening here."

God, now he's doing it. Maybe it's something in the air.

He focuses on Chirrut, to keep from thinking about any of the rest of it, on the rumpled robe and thoughtful expression. A stranger, a frankly kind of weird stranger, but a human one and not a doppelganger or a creature out of delirium. He can, he thinks, just about cope with Chirrut.

[callsign_rogueone]

Bodhi's mouth twitches in a bewildered smile, an expression he often wears around Chirrut. 'Not at home'. That's one way to put it. Earlier, when he'd tried to fill Cassian in on what he thought were the most pertinent details of their current situation, of his job, he'd simply shaken his head and said "No, that's not me."

Now, with Chirrut scalpling his way to the heart of the matter and Cassian stammering in confused agreement, Bodhi recalls what this sideways-Cassian had said next.

"We're p-partners, at his home," he blurts, a flush rising hot and dark in his cheeks and ears, visible past the stubble. Well, not to Chirrut. To Chirrut, it's probably a deafening gong or a bonfire flash, or however his uncanny Force perception works. "Jyn, too, and we have a--we've got a--a son."

Oh, yes. Still hung up on that.

[forceofothers]

Chirrut steps back and to the side, gesturing them into his and Baze's quarters and taking himself out of the way at the same time. It's showy, almost grandiose, and also partly lost in shadow because he forgets to hit the light plate until he's in the middle of doing it. “Clearly,” he says, “this is a matter to be discussed over tea. Baze!” Over his shoulder. “Would you mind putting on the kettle for our guests?”

“That you are not at home,” Chirrut says to Cassian, “does not mean you are not welcome. Please, come in. We secured a table and chairs week before last.”

This is true. Where exactly the table came from is uncertain – probably food service surplus – but it is just small enough to be shoved into the corner not occupied by a battered desk or two bunks shoved together as well. There are three chairs, an integrated heating element style kettle set pride of place on the tabletop, and a pretty painted tea tin beside it. (Cassian won't recognize the brand, but Bodhi might – it's Ithorian, packaged for export off planet but mostly bought by members of the Ithorian diaspora. A gift from Murr in Comms, whose cousin sent two tins in their most recent care package. He gave the Guardians the tin design he considers “the better one,” an aerial view of the Cathor Hills.)

And there's Baze, who doesn't actually sleep with his cannon. At least not on this particular base.

“You needn't apologize,” Chirrut says to Cassian, somewhere between a pronouncement and a confidence. “I myself am usually following at most two thirds of anything.”