Around fourteen years ago, I was a young (and rather sheltered) History student. My friends and I used to lie down in mattresses on the floor in the tiny room in the student housing building one of them lived in, slightly high and giddy, and we’d ponder what we thought was unthinkable. This was 2004 and we’d been involved with rememberance activities (lectures, seminars, classes), since it was 40 years since the military coup that saw thousands killed in our country. Some of them were students like us, some of them were grabbed by police from the very building we were in.
What we pondered was “what would we do if-” and the end of that sentence, unspoken was “if it happened again”. That was hilariously unthinkable to us because we were born in the last throes of that same regime. Its end was a messy, mostly peaceful negotiation that involved the signing in 1979 of an amnesty law that cleared both those who had fought against it and those who had killed and tortured in its name… And I don’t need to tell you how that in itself is problematic. My friends usually laughed at my answer: “I’d go into exile, because I faint when I see blood” (I still do).
I didn’t even know of Bolsonaro’s existence then. The people we saw denying or justifying the dictatorship’s crimes were old military men or elderly people who we thought didn’t know any better. Newspapers usually treated the period as a stain in our past, when they themselves had been censored and used to publish cake recipes in the place of the stories that were struck down. We didn’t know that people who might miss this time or had weird misconceptions about it (“it was safer to walk in the streets”, “the economy was a lot better”) were living right next door to us or were, in some cases, our own parents.
Tonight is especially hard because I miss being that girl. I miss laughing about how I faint when I see blood (I still do), I miss having a future as an academic without any fear of saying, reading and writing what I want. I miss not being afraid for my friends who were LGBTQ+ or people of color or involved in party politics. Today I had to buy clothes softner while a couple milled around me with t-shirts on which there was the face of a man who said I deserve to be shut up, if not jailed (or worse), and that some of my friends aren’t deserving of being alive. Mostly through the measures of the democratic governments that preceeded this mess, I became a researcher and then a professor at a freshly created university. Now all that is at risk and then some (the Amazon, what is left of our indigenous peoples, Afro-Brazilian communities, workers’ rights, children’s rights, years of a people trying to learn how to make democratic choices).
We’re not a dictatorship yet, but the man who was elected our president tonight (through the popular vote, not some incomprehensible electoral college system) is a former army captain who has repeatedly said he would support the return of a similar regime and that the only mistake it made was torturing instead of killing its opponents.
oh god, i agree, nonny. he’s absolutely fascinated by her and has to remind himself to actually say something. it’s a cute little moment — not just for them staring at each other, but him having her back and supporting her through her entire speech. i love it. ♥
y’all are liking this because you want to write a fic for this, right? because i‘d wholeheartedly support this idea.
it wouldn’t be on their way to scarif, of course, or at least it would be that version of scarif where everyone lives. but someone will write this, right? just a sweet little cassian introspection — where he can’t take his eyes off her and her lips and has to keep his composure in front of the crew.
someone write this, please. ❤️
At first he told himself he was watching her, just as he did any other asset or mark.
He pretended he did not file away the set of her jaw in determination, the shade her eyes took in the greens of the command room. Pretended they were just little things. Trivial, meaningless little things, which he didn’t have time for.
On Jedha he tried watching out for her, for them, in a city that felt like its streets were not veins pumping with life, but rather ducts charged with firepower. He told her as much and then felt his silent words bite him in return when he watched her save a child, disable ‘troopers with the sheer force of her body, look valiantly into the eyes of Saw’s men and declare things she had been hiding for a long time, eyes blown wide and dark, cheeks flushed, saving them. Saving him.
Cassian saw no alternative other than saving her in turn, when Jedha turned into dust, when the Alliance showered bombs on a Force-forsaken planet and killed her father. Her eyes were dark again, the color of the angry storm outside, her nose red, her chin wobbling, and angry, so angry. And that was when he found himself having to admit that he was no longer watching anymore. He was looking. He was angry as well, but he couldn’t not look.
There was the moment, later, when he noticed that she was looking, too, eyes almost turquoise in the hangar, a little bit wet and bright, staring up at him as he leaned over and said words that he had never said to anyone – he had never had anyone to welcome anywhere, after all. They were all going to die, probably, and he didn’t care, because there were her eyes and down below an open shield gate, and then her hand on his arm.
That was when he had started admitting that he was staring. At dark hair the color of the murky ground on Yavin IV curling around pale skin, at her mouth, forcing out words that made men like Melshi look up, sit a bit straighter. He had to tear himself away, remind himself there was no time, but yes, when he fell down and it took him strength he didn’t have to get back up and go to her, every time he thought of the plans, something treacherously whispered in his head that he was really doing this so he could look at her again. That was the sum of his moment of self-indulgence when they went down that turbolift.
Force knew if they were getting out of that planet, but Cassian was content just to stand next to her and learn her ways: watch her dance (well, not quite dance – his mind scoffed, as he remembered white armor crunching under her truncheons), look into green-grey eyes (or were they hazel?), stare at chapped lips (what did they taste like?).
Cassian was content.
(His vision was dimming when he heard her – a sudden laugh and “Force, Bodhi! Help me – he’s really hurt!”
And his chest did a funny thing. He told himself it was hope.)
This is the last of the prompts and the one I struggled the most with, because I wanted to keep these in universe, so decided to write vaguely around it. Here you go anon and thanks.
55. “I buy my own things, I pay my own bills!”
–
It wasn’t easy, this being together. They had seamlessly fallen into step with each other since Jedha, really, but that was something that she couldn’t really explain and about which Chirrut usually smiled at her in a way that made her want to punch him (well, not actually punch him). The fact that they almost died together accounted, of course, for the terror that clawed at her chest for an entire fortnight as she lay in the medbay, for the unexplainable need to put her palm to his heart and feel it beating or tuck herself into his side when she was well enough to leave her bed. She knew it was the same for him, because the med droids all spoke of how he woke up screaming for her and her alone and she noticed how his hands usually stopped shaking whenever she laced her fingers through his clammy ones.
It didn’t mean that Jyn and Cassian would one day recover and walk out of the medward on Yavin IV hand in hand, ready to face the Empire.
It definitely didn’t. And it started showing even before they attempted to.
Thank you for the prompt! Caretaking is my jam and I was inspired by what I was eating for dessert. Hope you like it. 🙂
–
Jyn dragged the metal chair towards his bed with a purposeful screech, aware that he was actually awake. She knew by now the pattern of his breaths and the loose curve of his jaw whenever he was sleeping. He knew she knew. So he didn’t even bother pretending and just turned his eyes towards her, like this was just another boring afternoon in the Yavin IV medward.
She was fine. Two weeks of bonesetters and bacta had healed cracked ribs and smoothed over burned skin. He, of course, had almost died.
And he wasn’t eating.
So she brought the bundle she had dragged in with her to her lap and spread the cloth apart, showing the bright orange fruits she had found in crates in a corner of the hangar. The citric smell filled her nostrils and made her mouth water as she took one in her hand and started peeling it using her blunt nails. Cassian watched her, silently, nostrils flaring whenever he caught a whiff of their fragrance.
“These were my favorite,” she started saying, “whenever Saw brought me here as a kid.”
She had already admitted to him that her being brought over from Wobani hadn’t been her first time at the Massassi Great Temple. He had been shocked, had wracked his brain for any memory of her but not found any.
“I like them, too,” he offered, voice still raspy from the tubes that had been shoved down his throat so he could breathe in those hazy days before the Death Star was destroyed.
She used her legs to bring the chair closer, to make sure he smelled the oil that would spray minutely into the air every time she ripped into the fruit’s skin. She tossed the peels aside and pulled apart a small section, shoving it into her mouth.
“Force, it’s been ages since I’ve had them,” Jyn sighed, chewing around the words as she spoke them.
She let juice dribble onto her chin on purpose and made quick work of the first one of the Yavin tangerines. Cassian’s eyes were on her mouth and she felt just a teensy bit smug, nails digging into the peel of the second fruit. She ate it in silence, spitting out whatever seeds there were, rubbing her hands together, making sure the smell lingered in the air.
He huffed a laugh. And then winced because it hurt his ribs.
“I know what you’re doing.”
“I never thought you didn’t.”
The corner of his mouth lifted, a fleeting thing.
“Come here,” he said.
Jyn got up, holding on to the tangerines, and sat on the bed. She reached out and brushed his hair away from his forehead, feeling for his temperature in a way that made him roll his eyes. He stopped her hand, took it in his and tugged her down to him.
His lips tasted like bacta. Hers, of tangerine juice.
“I’ll have one if you’ll take the seeds out,” he whispered against her mouth.
Thank you for the prompt and for the kind message. I’m not in any real pain, thankfully, which always sounds weird to the doctors I’ve seen, ‘cause from the MRI that really shouldn’t be the case. And well… Siento que no estamos tan distantes así, por lo menos linguisticamente, ¿no? 😉
I’m not really secure in writing from Luke’s POV, but I’m always fascinated by him coming into the Rebellion in ANH and just, you know, being him. I went with something that reminded me of when I was a teenager. Hope you like it!
–
It took a while for Jyn to convince Bodhi that she and Cassian weren’t a couple. The bizarre way they both had fallen into step together since Jedha had left, it turns out, a lot of people with that impression. Bodhi seemed torn and he explained it to her, albeit a little confusedly, why it was so: on the one hand he didn’t feel as left out in the middle of what seemed so many little units – Jyn and Cassian, Cassian and K-2, Chirrut and Baze. On the other, he felt slightly betrayed by the mere notion that two people so in sync and so obviously smitten with each other weren’t actually a couple.
“You should be together,” he said a bit drunkenly, one night when they were having another revelry in the aftermath of their victory while packing up to evacuate Yavin IV, “just do something about it.”
Jyn scoffed, but said by way of appeasing him that she was working on it, all the while turning starving eyes on the lithe profile of their subject-matter as he picked up drinks for the three of them.
Cassian still had a slight limp and when he sat down next to her, she felt warm without even having tried the Corellian whisky yet. She wished Bodhi could feel the same about someone.
Awkward Teenage Luke is my JAM! ¡Muchísimas gracias, @estherlyon, me encantó! (Y me alegro saber que no te duele tanto – ¿es posible que tienes un superpoder, y por eso no sientes dolor?)
Jyn stepped off the ‘fresher feeling slightly relieved. She felt clean for the first time after three whole days and she was wearing fresh underwear under the clothes she just put through the sonic. If there was any reason she regretted not joining the Alliance sooner it was this.
As the particular thought – the relief of feeling fresh and clean synthcotton against her skin – intruded her mind, she caught sight of another reason behind her staying with the Rebellion, slumped over the bench in the main hold of the freighter Bodhi had picked them up with, which was hurtling through a hyperspace lane and getting them the hell away from the Albarrio sector as fast as possible. He was buried under his parka like it was a blanket, curled in a way that was probably wreaking havoc on his back. She sat down next to him in what little space there was left. Like her, he slept lightly and when startled, would wake up with a blaster in his hand. And Cassian had very good aim, one that had admittedly saved her life more than once.
“Cassian,” she whispered softly, running a careful hand over the furred edge of the heavy coat.
His eyes opened, sharp as always, but he moved his mouth slowly, getting rid of the dryness, the only tell that he was actually deep asleep and one she knew he allowed because she was the one waking him up.
“What?” he grunted, moving a bit in his seat and not disguising his discomfort.
“You’re lying there all crooked,” she scrunched up her nose to keep how worried she actually was at bay.
He sat up, more or less, and shoved the parka down. He had used the ‘fresher already, as a trade-off for her putting a bacta patch on the blaster wound that had glanced off her right arm. His hair was falling over his eyes, mussed, and she had to steel herself not to reach out and run her fingers through it.
“Don’t you want to lie down in one of the cabins?” she asked instead.
He swallowed, ran a hand over his face, “I have to write my report.”
She rolled her eyes, “you can do that tomorrow. You can’t be comfortable here.”
“Bodhi might need me,” he argued.
Stubborn, stubborn man.
“All right,” she said, resolutely, “we’ll stay here, then.”
Without waiting for his response, she marched off in the direction of the crew quarters, opened the door to the first one and grabbed what she could in the way of pillows and blankets. When she got back to the main hold, he was leaning back in the bench, his eyes nodding off even as he had a datapad in front of him. She unceremoniously plucked it out of his hands.
“I was reading that,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, I can see that. Get up.”
“Jyn.”
She glared at him hard enough that he finally acquiesced. She sat down with a pillow on her back, perched her legs on a small crate that was lingering nearby that she magnetized to the ship’s floor, and put a pillow on her lap.
“Come on,” she said, patting the pillow.
It was really telling of how tired he was that he silently did as he was told, grunting when he bent his legs in a ninety degree position on the bench, so his back was elongated and comfortable.
“Is your arm all right?” he asked, as she covered him up with the blanket.
“It’s fine,” she said and finally allowed herself to wind her fingers through his hair. She had no choice, it was right there on her lap.
He reached up and grabbed her free arm, bringing it close to his chest and she swore the gesture didn’t overwhelm her.
“Just a quick nap,” he mumbled, seemingly already out of it.
“Sure,” Jyn replied, feeling the day’s exhaustion finally catch up to her, “just a quick a nap.”
There are three of these now, and they are adorable. @writinredhead
Rebellions are built on hope 