pineslog | open ✧ i was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars

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open ✧ i was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars

Who: Jyn & Elsa & you lot
Where: 4106, Casa de Disney (not actual) Princess
When: June 10-12
What: Jyn & Elsa's backyard has become a refuge for wildlife and thus an impromptu petting zoo
Warnings: There's innocent smooching, it's gross.

[Open]

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✧ ᴛʜᴇ ᴍᴇɴᴀɢᴇʀɪᴇ

Jyn and Elsa's house is on the very edge of the residential district -- a nice concession from whatever set up this whole place to give Jyn only one neighbor. This means, though, that when the creeping doom of the wall surrounding the woods makes the predators a little more bold, Jyn and Elsa find themselves with a small collection of woodland creatures seeking refuge in the backyard.

The first day, Elsa is still recovering from the camping trip from hell which Jyn completely understands, so she says nothing, going out to the bookstore to grab an armful of books about the native wildlife (birds, trees, small forest animals). When Elsa is feeling better, Jyn shows her the flock of deer that have taken up residence in the backyard along with a family of rabbits making a warren of their back deck and a family of groundhogs ruining the begonias lining the edge of the yard.

That's happening.

Jyn has always been something of a naturalist, thanks to her mother, but a lifetime of fighting and running from the Empire had left her little time to actually study the nature around her and no one to encourage her to do so after her mother died. Now she has more time than she knows what to do with, which is almost stifling, and the town she's found herself in seems determined to remind her of her mother's roots, shoving a petting zoo full of animals into her backyard. Well, okay, she gets the point. No need to hit her over the head with it.

Whether it's feeding fruit to the deer or scooping up wayward baby bunnies who have gotten caught in the lattice work under the deck, Jyn finds herself spending the majority of her time outside again, sun turning her shoulders and cheeks pink. More than once she can be found in the front yard with her hands on her hips, having a staring contest with a deer that thinks it can eat the flowers by the front door.

Usually however, she has her head in one of her books, trying to figure out how to deal with these animals making themselves at home in their backyard. The upside is that the deer are eating the grass so no one needs to mow the lawn.

( find elsa in a top level below )

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❆ for jyn.

Elsa sleeps like the dead.

This is rather unusual for someone who takes that early to bed early to rise saying very seriously, but the camping trip had completely thrown her for a loop and she would rather not face the world for a while. Regain her energy. Collect herself again and try to get to the bottom of why she had fallen so ill in the first place.

Why did it happen?

Her head buzzes with suspicion but Elsa has not yet spoken a word about it to anyone yet. It takes her a full day of rest before she emerges to get acquainted with the strangeness in her backyard. This change, she can take. Energy sap = bad. Animals = good.

When nighttime comes, she has pulled two chairs out for the two of them – roommates who have since bonded somewhat over the short time she has returned – with a Holland lop bunny in her lap, nestled in the fabric of her shirt dress. The crickets chirp slowly tonight as the temperature cools, or maybe that's just how things are around Elsa.

❆ ota.

For some reason, she feels an inclination to chat with the deer who are bold enough to stick around. Elsa may be especially self-possessed and slow moving around animals but they do seem to enjoy her presence. The foxes playfully nip at her heels on her way to work

In the afternoon, she might be attempting to play fetch with that same Holland lop from before, but he seems more keen to to eat the dandelion instead of bringing it back to her. Ah well, she tried. The front yard is at least weed free now.

Do watch for the baby fox scurrying around, though. She's always up to no good.

Jyn pads out barefoot, book and flashlight tucked under her arm and a mug of tea in each hand. Elsa is an excellent roommate, quiet and neat and as unobtrusive as Jyn tries to be. The organization of the cabinets had been a marvel Jyn had made Cassian skive off work in the middle of his shift to look at and she doesn't really mind the very slow brightening up of the house.

Sinking down in the chair, Jyn sets the book and flashlight on the grass next to her, passes the second mug to Elsa, bringing her own tea to her lips and settling before she says anything.

"Are you feeling better?"

She doesn't know what happened, not really, but Jyn herself has been through some stuff, she can maybe relate to whatever had happened just from her wealth of shit experiences alone. But maybe Elsa just really doesn't like camping.

While she is reckless and impetuous, Jyn is fairly predictable in her habits and some things she just does every day, regardless of how she is feeling. Running is one of those things. Injured, ill, she will run anyway and the weird happenings at the camping trip have done nothing to change her loop around the city and through the national park.

Or so she thinks.

She gets dizzy the closer she gets to the trees but she keeps going, used to fighting through all kinds of pain and exhaustion and this is nothing new, even if she knows better enough to keep skirting the tree line. She should know better than to be near the woods at all, but while Jyn's tiny ember of hope had kept her alive when she wanted to give up, it didn't make her any less reckless. The dizziness increases, seemingly exponentially, as she feels the strength pulling at her limbs, but she keeps stubbornly moving until her knees give out underneath her. Shit.

Pushing back to her feet she tries to keep going but her legs give out again and she can feel the sting of pain from her skinned palms and knees. Shit, again.

Ever obstinate, Jyn forces herself back to her feet, pain from the effort shooting sparks behind her eyes. This is stubborn on a level she would only apply to Poe, but it seems she can't even let him win at that. Regardless, her blurred, tunnel vision finds her walking deeper into the woods when she collapses for the third time.

Well, fuck.

Edited 2017-06-12 02:02 (UTC)

Cassian knows Jyn; as well as just about anyone other than Jyn can claim to, he supposes.

It's something he prides himself on, if he's being honest. He knows her habits, her patterns, he has a familiarity with the types of things she enjoys. Food and tea are easy, for sure, but that doesn't mean he doesn't feel a rush of positive feelings when he has a hand in bringing her some sliver of enjoyment.

So he knows that she'll go running despite any pain she's in, any sickness or discomfort. That doesn't mean he doesn't worry. Worrying subconsciously for roughly the amount of time it would take Jyn to detour to, say, Poe's residence, before worry becomes anxiety becomes Cassian armed and grabbing a jacket before he starts off to retrace Jyn's steps.

It takes him a little while (and Cassian refuses to call out her name until he actually spots her) - when he does find her, however, he's struggling not to throw up. The wall, he presumes, is to blame for this; Jyn's stubbornness is to blame for the fact that she's not facing the opposite direction back towards town.

The panic is currently fighting over the desire to throw up but Cassian is used to ignoring both, so instead he swallows it down as he crouches next to her. "Jyn. Jyn?!" Please wake up, please be responsive, please...

At some point, Jyn had tried to heave herself up using a tree as her ladder but it did not work and she'd slumped next to it instead, feeling weaker than she'd had after one of the beatings in Wobani.

Cassian's warm fingers on her cheek stir her more than his voice and her eyes flutter open, glassy and heavy with exhaustion. It's Cassian. Automatically she breathes into a weak smile. She assumes she is hallucinating because he hadn't even been with her, she's imagining him here, coming back for her again.

Her mouth works to explain what happened, but all she manages to spit out is: "Fell."

Obviously. Regardless, her fingers lift to curl weakly around his arm. "Go away." If she's struggling, he must be too, he has to leave and the only way she knows how to say that is telling him to go away. Leave!

He manages to muster enough energy to frown at her deeply, leaning back and taking a breath before steeling himself to put one arm beneath Jyn's knees. "Not leaving you." If he sounds pissy about it, well. She can blame the fact that the wall is trying to literally steal the air out of his lungs right now and he's decided to try carrying her away from this disaster. "Can you hold on?"

To his neck, preferably, but shoulders or even just his jacket will do. Cassian will wait until she manages to grip before taking a breath and using the tree at their side to help him stand up; the moment he does he realizes that any stalling in momentum and all will be lost, so he staggers in the direction of the next nearest tree immediately.

Can she hold on?

Some breath sounds like a yes and Jyn certainly curls her arms around his neck to try her very best but once he stands up, one arm falls limply behind his back and the other sort of slides down his chest to puddle in her lap. Jyn's a dead weight, simply too weak from prolonged exposure to whatever is happening in the woods to do anything but breathe.

Maybe she'll just take a nap in his arms, good plan.

She's breathing, at least, and Cassian takes some comfort in that plus the presumption that if getting people away from the wall improved their state before, it will probably happen again. (If it doesn't, if she shows signs of struggling to breathe, if she doesn't rouse, he'll deal with it as it comes - he has no room, no time for his imagination to run wild with the myriad of ways that this could go wrong.) Which means stumbling, staggering through the trees until it gets easier, until he isn't struggling quite as badly and he can manage not to have to ricochet in various directions to keep going.

Breathing gets easier, and he's able to adjust his hold on her without the real fear that he'll lose his grip entirely.

"Jyn?" He shifts so that her weight is against his chest, and he keeps walking.

Sometimes, Jyn wishes that this town was more like the literal war they'd left. At least there they knew what they were fighting. On the upside, this experience has finally illuminated her to how dangerous this fence really is.

"'m fine," she murmurs, still sounding exhausted, but with enough energy to lift her arm from his chest and twist is around his shoulders. She sighs, unhappy, and pries open her eyes.

"You can put me down."

"I don't need to." Unless she says that he should, which is different from he can and...look. Eventually his heart will stop beating so hard that his chest actually hurts but he doubts that letting go of her right now would help that along.

So instead Cassian swallows, frowning at nothing, still walking. "I don't want to," he says after a moment, "but I will put you down if you want me to."

There are a few things that Elsa has not quite forgotten and one of them is her knack for organization. The house is a little more put together, with decorative themes emerging as she slowly works in pillows and couch covers, decorating her own room and spreading outward.

It may just feel like a home.

The animals are temporary, she understands, and doesn't turn up her nose at the right of them. It is the least she can do after seeming to barge in on Jyn's life here. She smiles faintly, stroking her fingers through soft brown fur. "A bit," she tells her honestly, "still rather worse for wear but I don't think I've recovered entirely from my first injuries. I should be fine in the morning."

"Please put me down," Jyn requests quietly. The hand limp behind his back lifts slightly once he does so, curling her fingers against his sleeve while she waits for her legs to remember how to work again. No wonder Elsa slept for something close to a full day, the idea of walking home makes her want to throw up, but the idea of appearing weak enough that she needs to be carried is a far more uncomfortable idea.

Hell to the no, basically.

Still, once she feels steady enough, the hand clutching his sleeve releases, sliding down to catch his hand in hers, winding their fingers together automatically. She may not want to be carried, but she will gladly take the support. "I'm fine."

He doesn't keep his hands around her so much as nearby in case they're needed, which means he sort of stands there, leaning in her direction like a statue built around a smaller viewer until she lets go of his arm. He straightens, then, more than happy to entwine his fingers with hers.

There are a lot of thoughts in his head currently warring for attention, but most of them are summarily dismissed before he quietly admits: "I'm not."

She can leave it there, and he would not hold it against her; as it is, he winches immediately after the words leave his mouth because his obsession with her safety is not actually her fault or responsibility when it comes right down to it. "Physically I am." For the record.

But most of his brain is still making loud white noise in his conscious direction after seeing her passed out in the woods.

She nods slowly, letting the tea warm her fingers, ignoring the phantom twinge in her shoulder at the mention of injuries. Elsa's so new still, it hasn't even been a fortnight since she arrived on Jyn's doorstep and she is clearly not the kind of person made for constant injuries the way some people are.

Her mouth slants down in a frown.

"Aside from that, how was the camping trip?" Also why would you willingly chaperone teenagers, but Jyn doesn't ask that.

"I'm fine," she repeats, firm but soft. She doesn't want to think she was in any real danger, aside from being pick-pocketed by raccoons, but the feeling of weakness lingers in her limbs like a reminder that she isn't invulnerable. No matter how much she thinks I'm already dead in response to any danger.

She squeezes his hand, but that same weakness is in her grip.

"It's fine, Cassian." Nothing happened. She would have been fine! Probably... most likely.

Poe is in a good mood, which he knows runs counter to everything going on right now. The expanded suppression field, the animals pouring into town (he has his own congregation of skunks living under the back porch. Rey is out, or he would be sharing these with her and telling Jyn and Cassian to come over before he eats them all.

There's also the temptation to invite the General, but he's still. Mildly weirded out by the thought of being within her social circle, instead of just ("just") under her command.

Jyn's is his first stop, because he knows she likes fruit. They have this in common.

He catches her out front having one of those deer-based staredowns and covers his mouth to hide a grin not particularly well.

"She blinked. I think you win."

Some of the wood's predators are more bold than others. Or, in Tobias' case, it's a rather calculated combination of the fact that with the forest in a disarray the rest of the predator bird population has gotten mean and desperate enough that he'd honestly rather avoid them if he can, as well as that there were a rather unfortunate number of people in this unfamiliar town that he'd gotten to know in his last two weeks here well enough to be at least mildly concerned about their well-being after everything that's been happening.

What that means here and now though is that Tobias is being forced to hunt for food in town now, as opposed to his natural habitat, something he's not terribly thrilled with for a number of reasons.

First and foremost being? The type of animals he eats are the type of animal people are usually the quickest to protect, and if he's forced to hunt in town people are far more likely to catch him in the act and take offense to it. But you know, he's gotta eat. He woke up this morning with the mortifying memory of Rachel catching him eating roadkill once and it's not a memory he's keen to revisit.

So when he sees a whole line of baby rabbits toddling slowly after their mother in the yard of one of the houses in town? He doesn't spare much time for second thoughts, just falls into a dive for the littlest one at the back of the line.

It isn't fine, he thinks, it's fucking light years from fine but he knows himself to be a coward when it comes to certain things regarding Jyn Erso so he lets it go. Breathes in, out, runs his thumb along the the knobs her knuckles make beneath her skin and reminds himself that while it is definitely not fine?

She's alive.

It's better than the other option, here.

Another breath, with his nostrils flaring just a little, and he gives a brief, sharp nod. "Okay." It's not okay.

He will fail at pretending but that'll have to be okay too.

There is, in fact, a small fox that attempts to untie Cassian's shoe laces while he observes Jyn's roommate trying to teach a rabbit to fetch; said rabbit seems much more interested in eating the weed flower she'd helpfully pointed out, and Cassian shifts the grocery bag in his left arm while his bemused expression goes from this to the fox chomping at the laces of his boots.

This is like. Some kind of weird fairytale nonsense. Now Cassian just has to wait for the big bad to come snaking out of the woods like a giant miasma and it'll all make sense.

"Hey," says Cassian. "You must be Elsa."

One day Cassian will feel far enough from his prior life of a lying liar who lies to introduce himself in the first round of a conversation, but today is not that day.

Jyn looks briefly stricken by the fact that Cassian is clearly not okay. She knows why, she imagines the scared expression that her eyes had fluttered open to find matched the terror that flooded her own expression when he had fallen in the data vault.

She steps forward to curl her free hand around his bicep, squeezing as hard as she can which is barely anything at all, but it's pressure.

"When you found me on the tower..." Her voice is soft, quiet in a resigned way, but earnest. This is just how their lives are meant to go. A series of unending losses and near misses. "I'd thought you died when you fell. And then I saw you there and you were so--" Breathing out a laugh, Jyn looks down at their locked hands for a moment before her gaze travels back up. "It was like the sun coming out."

She understands the fear, she'd seen him fall and held him as they died, but she doesn't want to be the cause of that fear.

There's no immediate response, just Cassian having followed her gaze to their joined hands and not looking back up right away. He knows that his eyes give him away, that when he doesn't speak it all just rests there in the corners and the stresses of his face. He knows she can read it, read him, and he sighs before he manages eye contact again.

"I will do a lot of things you ask of me," he starts thickly, swallowing. Her confession deserves one in return, doesn't it? Isn't that how people tell each other the truth? He doesn't want to tell her how much pain he was in. He doesn't want to say how much he's regretting things he didn't say or do in the elevator, when there had seemed to be a chance, when the risk was being captured above being annihilated. "I don't think that leaving is one of those things."

His brow furrows. What they have is not perfect, not by far; yet it exists, blatantly ignored at times and refusing to be addressed in any comfortable space. He bites his tongue around her all the time to stop from saying things he doesn't think she wants him to admit and he doesn't know how to express how much her being here means when he'd spent those first few months wondering if he wasn't in some form of otherworldly punishment, or just living a bubble nonsensical life while his synapses fired for the last time.

It's not better, exactly. He still doesn't understand how it came to happen, or what exists beyond the wall, but Jyn is also here and he can't deny the importance of it to him even if he can't hope to explain it properly either.

"I would say I am sorry but I'm not." He shakes his head. "I just can't. Te amo."

He says it the way someone might say 'sorry' and it's a coward's move, but he squeezes her fingers. "I am better for knowing you. I won't walk away, if I think you're in danger."

"And people think I am the stubborn one," Jyn murmurs in response to his entire confession, knowing full well he isn't apologizing because lo siento was the first thing she asked to be translated, as if she would ever apologize. She could ask for clarification, ask Poe to translate, she could pretend she doesn't know exactly what he is saying in that apologetic tone.

Instead she calls him stubborn and nods, accepting whatever he won't tell her in Basic.

He climbed twelve stories half dead and she'd seen it etched into the lines of exertion etched into his face when they had clung to each other in the lift. She already knows, even if she is too terrified to admit it or return the sentiment. Caring about people turns them into a liability and into leverage, she can't lose anyone else.

"I'll get used to you sticking around." That is a promise. "Let's go home."

Well, he isn't off in regards to the fairytale nonsense.

"Hello!" Elsa smiles and sits up on her knees, brushing her hands over the front of her dress. The lop, though weed-lses, still hops back over to her because they are Friends, at least, and he is maybe hoping for another thing to munch on since she looks like the woman who knows where to find it.

"You must be – Cassian?" That seems like the correct assumption to make, going from what Jyn has told her in recently. She pushes herself to her feet after another pet of the rabbit's head before extending her hand to him. "Do you need help with your things?"

"I –"

Forgive her, she her smile just got to be a little too big and she has to duck her head because she means to be composed and also in recovery after such a strange and traumatic event. There are a few reasons why the first half was, at least, good and she hesitates to divulge them right away, still figuring out her comfort level here.

"It was fun," Elsa says simply. "Really, it was fun. It feels like something I used to do when I was younger – I believe I did. Roading marshmallows with friends around a fire..." A sigh.

"I think I've regained some important memories."

Jyn loves the bunnies. They're so cute and fluffy and she likes the way their little noses wriggle around and they remind her of the bulbas on Skuhl, tiny and fragile and light. But Jyn is, beyond anything else, the daughter of a woman who loved and revered nature.

When the beautiful hawk swoops down and dives for the tiniest bunny, Jyn doesn't move a muscle from her spot sitting in the grass, leaning back against the deck stairs as she eats half a bagel.

She does, however, grade the bird, in a fashion. "Oh well done!"

What? It was a good dive, nice form, aimed for the weak one. She is self-aware enough to know that she is often considered the weak one so she has a little judgment that he couldn't aim for better prey but also, easy target. You go birdie, get your dinner, be your best self.

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open ✧ i was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars

✧ ᴛʜᴇ ᴍᴇɴᴀɢᴇʀɪᴇ

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closed ✧ only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars

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June 11th

feel free to stop him from getting his meal tbh

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june 12th

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