For the Made-up Fic titles game, how about “Working my way back to you”? Or “That was the river, this is the sea”?

imsfire2:

skitzofreak:

That was the river, this is the sea:

Once upon a time, Jyn Erso understands love. She is eight, and love is Mama’s hands combing through her rain-wild hair and tucking the braids in neat with an extra pat to her cheek for being good. Love is cuddling up to Papa’s side and solving his little number puzzles in the picture-books full of gears and energy lines. Love is SE-2′s patient mechanized voice grinding out “Erso, Jyn. This unit requests that you experience a pleasant birthday celebration.” Love is her parents chasing her through the mud with bath towels and silly fake scowls, love is lumpy stew that makes Mama’s mouth turn down in disappointment but Papa kisses her hand and eats it anyway. Love is rain and grass and the quiet evenings with only whir of SE-2′s servos to break the silence of their thoughts. Love is soft and peaceful and vast as the empty fields, a thing that grows like a flower in her cupped hands. 

Once upon a time, Cassian Andor understands love. He is six, and love is Papa picking him up and throwing him into the air high, higher, even when he has been bent over his desk working hard all day. He has an uncle with the same name (’Big Cassian,’ they all call him, and Cassian is ‘little Cassian,’ or ‘the short Cassian’ or sometimes, ‘baby Cassian’), and love is when Uncle Cassian lets him climb up on the workbench and use his big tools to help rebuild all the droids that got smashed up by the Jedi. Love is his big brother calling him over to play

fútbol with all his cousins, even though he is smallest and slowest and so, so clumsy. Love is Auntie Sophie making that strange sweet pie from her home planet and letting him eat a piece while Papa isn’t looking, and then dramatically claiming that some ghost must have crept into the house and stolen her pie when Papa starts to ask where it has gone. Love is loud and bright and bellowing like a crowd at a game match, a thing that wraps around his shoulders like a warm blanket against the winter chill.

Once upon a time, Jyn and Cassian understand love as any child does – simple and unquestionable, as permanent as the stars. 

It does not last, of course it cannot; they are children in the midst of a war, and war is not kind to children. Jyn’s flower is torn from the fields is sprouted, carried far away and nourished not with water but with blood. Cassian’s blanket burns with the rest of his home, and he replaces the riotous laughter with the steady whine of the blaster. Jyn learns that love can also be the rough hand of her commander throwing her over his hip and then demanding that she copy the motion back on him, over and over until she is covered in bruises but never likely to be grabbed from behind again. Cassian learns that love can be the brief notation on the bottom of his briefing report: Exercise Caution, written in the neat uncompromising hand of his taciturn superior. As they grow and suffer and survive anyway, their understanding of love grows and suffers and survives with them. Love is giving up a spot at the local shelter to a kid that looks even more starved than Jyn. Love is carrying a suicide pill next to his throat so that he can never be forced to betray the people who rely on him.

And then, at last, at long, long last, love is his warm arm around her waist when the crowds push in too close and raises all her hackles. Love is her truncheon in the eye of the bastard trying to capture him. Love is a new scarf draped carefully around her shoulders by cautious, gentle hands. Love is a thick pair of sturdy gloves shoved into his pocket without a word. Love is an argument about the best way to handle an objective, it is finding their way back to one another in a rioting city, it is teaching each other their favorite curses and their best fighting moves, it is laughing at the people who are convinced they would be amazing together if they would just stop being so professional all the time (and then sneaking a kiss when those people walk off irritated with their stubbornness). Love is in the wild, desperate moments when their lives and their cause all hang on the line and they cling to each other with desperation and wordless promises. Love is in the long stretches of boring grunt work where they have to remember to stop whatever paperwork they are caught up in to talk to one another for awhile. 

Once upon a time, Jyn and Cassian understand love as any person does – complex and demanding, and less a permanent fixture as it was a continuous cycle, sunrise rather than stars. 

It doesn’t last, of course, it cannot; nothing is immortal and all things must eventually flow back to the Force. 

But for Jyn and Cassian, at least, it lasts a long, long time.

Love it!