" I think he's buying it, but ah you should say something just in case. " it's a light whisper, face portrayed as an endearing smile of a loving boyfriend and the words don't match the features.

      “ you enjoy the taste of the unattainable, don’t you? ” voice raises only a fraction above a whisper where he stands near sabine. outside, there are stars drifting by ( no --- it’s them that are drifting past above six-hundred seventy one million miles per hour ( he imagines light as something so easily bended and his hands itch beneath his gloves ) the speed of light something twisted in this world like wire, he wonders if everything else should bend so easy ) he doesn’t look at sabine. it’s too easy to see how to twist them in their eyes.

      what does it mean, that i can recreate their expression in thought alone? an answer he’s lost, one he doesn’t want to know. it’s not fear but the copper on his tongue reminds him of the edge of a cliff.

SHE STILL HASN’T CHANGED FROM THE NUMBERED JUMPSUIT they’d put her in sometime before she awoke in the imperial facility. ( hera can still remember the itchiness on her skin and in her cell makeup when she’d woken and seen the new clothing on her back. the violation in being changed while she was unconscious. ) there’s singed marks on the clothing where pryce had shocked her, letting the chill in, but she pays no mind to it now. she’s endured worse; she’s enduring worse, than a bit of a BREEZE. her knees pull closer to her chest, her mother’s kalikori locked between her fingers, gathered between the tops of her thighs and the swell of her chest, like in giving it back to her, kanan had locked himself inside of it somehow. like if she lets it out of her sight, out of her grip, away from the steady thrumming hummingbird heartbeat in her chest, she will lose him a second time. 

HIS EYES ARE BURNED INTO HER OWN RETINAS, she can’t blink without seeing that brilliant aquamarine she’d loved so much, that color she’d been so sure she’d never see again, and the complete and utter despairing peace in them as he’d shoved her away. i love you too. he hadn’t said it. hadn’t needed to. it was still echoing in her ears with perfect clarity, his voice low and deep and sweet. i love you too. hera’s grip tightens on the kalikori so violently she’s belatedly terrified she’ll crack it, and loosens her grip quickly in fear. that’s when she hears it, the soft scrape of shoes against gravel, and she knows that they need her to be THE FEARLESS GENERAL, they need her to come up with some sort of a plan, their next move, their next play, but . . . hera doesn’t have it in her. not yet. 

WHEN SHE LOOKS UP, SHE’S MORE THAN A LITTLE RELIEVED to see it’s sabine, and not ezra. for some reason, this is easier. it’s not a competition of closeness, who was most devastated, because the bond kanan shared with each of them was unique in each and every way. maybe it’s because of the way ezra came to be with them; maybe it’s because, for all that hera tends to try and treat sabine like her daughter, she knows, deep down, that they are not her child, and never have been. with ezra, the line is too blurry, sometimes, and she fears if she sees ezra now she’ll collapse in on herself and do them both more harm than good. sabine is . . . easier. 

SABINE, SHE KNOWS, WILL UNDERSTAND that she is not feeling like the feared rebellion leader general syndulla right now, and will understand that, perhaps, it will be a long time before she does again, no matter what she projects to the public when she leaves this cave. she catches sight of her clothing in sabine’s hands and dips her head in a barely perceptible nod of thanks, wonders idly and distractedly who managed to retrieve them from where they were probably headed to an incinerator. she wonders, with a nauseatingly hopeful jolt, if it was kanan, and if it was, if the clothing might still smell like him. a sharp, hollow pain seizes through her, and she swallows, thickly, willing herself desperately not to cry. sabine has never seen her cry, not once in the years they’ve known one another, and she doesn’t want to make today the first. ( no one would blame her, least of all them, but it’s the principle of the thing. ) 

✧ SEVEN STAGES OF GRIEF.

      words cause a smile to be pulled like dawn across her face. steady , rosy light through the windows and to their bed where tangled limbs stretch. there’s a kiss to sabine’s cheek / jaw / shoulder. soft lips to warm skin , lunafreya pulls them closer. “ did we? ”

     memory is of bodies pressed together. a hesitant laugh, a flushed chest exposed. the awkward rhythm of exploration / of love spoken without words. and beneath it the desperation that comes from memorizing the edges of a burning map. trying to remember the shape of a home that one day will no longer be left standing.

      ( she knows the gods and their steady hands of fate too well )

     a kiss to their collarbone / sternum / stomach. sunlight smile and shaking hands lace through sabine’s. a map unfinished, mouth travels further down. speaks around the nerves, around the smell of fire.