#*considers*

Eeeee ty! 💖 Hehe Kaufmo sounds like such a silly name X3

Whimsy ringmaster decides to play with his guests after finding out what tkling is, absolutely adores their laughter ✨💖

1) Jyn and Cassia’s brief estrangement has been part of how I imagined the AU since almost the beginning; I’m not sure why it’s such a fundamental piece of it, just that it was always floating around the background of my mind. The final version of the separation, however, was definitely influenced by fics I read in the meanwhile. I couldn’t begin to remember all of them, but I do recall feeling inspired by @leralynne’s run to me in the rising dawn and a study in communication, and of course @incognitajones’s burned before I’m free.

2) In general, Jyn and Cassia’s perceptions (whether the same or not) aren’t necessarily true (or false). They’re just theirs.

3) I know the official timeline is different. This AU is my happy place, so I’m sailing even more determinedly than usual in my “movies > scripts > interviews/commentary > anything I find interesting or probable > varying Lucasfilm dictates” boat.

4) I’ve never hidden that Cassian is my ultimate fave, and like I said, this wasn’t written for Jyn Appreciation Week as such. But I also love Jyn a lot, and definitely intended it to include major Jyn Appreciation Content in honour of the week.

5) This was both very difficult and very fun to write.

I scrapped two other versions of it and multiple tangents. I switched “Cassia” to “Cassian” every time I was uncertain about a passage, to see if I’d write it any differently. And once I gave up on the delusion of a quick summary of their relationship + proposal, I went “fuck it” and brought in scraps from WIPs I couldn’t make work and fused about four fics together. 

And while I’ve written snapshots of the AU as individual fics, and sketchy headcanon posts, I’d never done something that gets into the AU ’verse as a whole, and esp Jyn/Cassia as an established relationship. So I was also trying to pull together a lot of different pieces that I’d thought about it into a whole, including things I wanted Just Because.

...and I love challenges. :D

Once I figured out what I was doing, I had a ton of fun with it. It took ... like, a week to start? And then I steamrollered through the rest in a couple of days.

6) The thing that made it really AGHHH+YAAAY to write, though, was the fic as f/f. Although a) I’ve written f/f before and b) I’m personally something like a Kinsey 7, to borrow @brynnmclean’s phrase (:D), I’d never written it in this kind of detail, at this length (iirc), and certainly had never written a f/f proposal of marriage. 

7) On top of that, manyyyy people in my family and their religions are deeply homophobic, and from the beginning, the outlet of writing something where I can be ‘lol now everyone is queer’ has been the main function of the AU. 

Merely writing this fic in particular would be sinful by the standards I grew up with— a queer relationship(forbidden!!) between a bisexual(huh?) and a lesbian(*gasp*) involving premarital sex(!!!!) and ending with the prospect of happy queer marriage (!!!!!!!!!!!!!)? HOW DARE. My initial doc was literally called ‘revenge! lesbians’. 

tl;dr—I was simultaneously pleased, grateful, and vindictive at the opportunity to write this :)

7b) So. Anyway. It felt both personally important and great to write about a lesbian/bisexual couple with character-specific struggles who nonetheless have a fire-forged relationship that becomes fundamentally happy and solid, and culminates in marriage.

Not unrelatedly, the title comes not from a song or a canon quote, but from my queer feelings the description of queer marriage by Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves.

And I’m easily 4000 words in

And I’m JUST getting to start the first kiss scene

And YOU CANNOT STOP ME