"I thought it was just some pipe dream of his. Some empty ambition. But then I saw her—sitting there, looking right at me. And it was like seeing a star come to life. It was hard to be a skeptic after that." / Writing & inspiration blog.
CONTENT WARNINGS: Mentions of blood and violence. Burns. Injury. Cuteness???
NOTE: This is just a little post-second Corisdor arc scene, from Rosalie’s third-person narrative, I’ve had in mind for a long time/had little bits of written down in various documents. I finally decided to flesh it out today! I just adore these two more than words can say.
“Time to change your bandages.”
Rosalie jumped slightly, a gentle jerk of her shoulders in involuntary response to the sudden sound of Asrai'ev's voice. Seeing him approach the bed slowed her heart's fluttering beats. She smiled softly, the red-purple bruise at the corner of her mouth aching with the movement of the muscles surrounding it. Rosalie propped herself up on the heels of her hands, pushing them against the softness of the mattress. She could only get so far before the skin along her side lit up.
Asra's hands found her shoulders as she seethed, catching her before she fell back, their warm, sturdy grasp guiding her backward to lean against a couple of pillows propped against the headrest. She bit down hard on the soft inside of her cheek, watching silently as he sat on a free space beside her and lifted the hem of her off-white shirt to expose the bacta patches. It was a clinical motion, swift and gentle yet firmly efficient, but made affectionate by the resonant bloom in the Force between them.
“You feeling any better?” he asked, briefly glancing up at her as he peeled away the medicinal patches.
Rosalie nodded and gave a soft mm-hm. It still stung to talk. It didn't hurt anymore—the bruises around her throat had faded the quickest out of everything—but she had grown used to choosing her words carefully.
Typically, the healers would take care of things like this. For many of the injuries Rosalie had come home with, they had her stay in a therapy room within the Halls of Healing, but she could only stand to be secluded alone for so long. She could never fall asleep there, as was encouraged, much less close her eyes for longer than it took to blink; every time she did, she anxiously anticipated hard, unkind hands rousing her awake, the wetness of blood sticking her clothes to her raw, red skin. Worse, whenever a healer entered the therapy room to check on her progress, the sound of the door alone would make her start and jump in a panic, apologizing profusely to whomever had entered through her deep, shaken breaths. Once her bones had mended and headway had been made on the lengthy, deep burn down her side, Rosalie refused to stay there any longer.
It was the opinion of everyone involved that she would be better off finishing the healing process outside of the confines of the Halls of Healing.
“Shouldn't have to change these too many more times,” Asra said, meeting her eyes as he reached for fresh supplies, encouraging.
She smiled. “Hope so,” she replied, peaking just over the line of whispering.
“You've always been a fast healer,” he said, gently touching her arm, communicating for her to turn just slightly to the side.
As he worked, Rosalie could feel the concern resonate from him. She had assured him countless times—she's fine, she feels fine, she will be fine—but her apprehension to talk about the events that had placed her in such a state of disrepair failed, she imagined, to lend outward credulity to her statements. Asrai'ev was the last person to try and pry the details from her. Everybody else—Tylan, Ixchel, the whole lot of them, goodhearted in their prodding as they were—asked countless questions, proceeding tentatively yet inquiring unabashedly, their tones verging on hushed and secretive or crossing over into heated vitriol, depending on the subject. In contrast, the comforting aura of silent understanding she found in Asrai'ev's quarters was where she most often found herself.
In reality, he likely knew more than any of them did, save for Rein. Whatever she didn't—couldn't—say, communicated itself through a wordless language only they knew, spoken between their skin, their eyes, and their minds in complex, nebulous strands of perception.
Rosalie clenched her teeth hard, the damaged skin flaring with every minute movement of her body or Asrai'ev's hands. With each flash of pain, images of gray plasma harshly grated her mind's eye. She had learned how to shut out the memories of her own screams, but the glint of that carbon composite hilt still lingered and gnawed.
She forced her eyes to stay open, and filled her field of vision with the man sitting beside her, using the sight of him—in the present, here, now—as a bastion against the intrusive thoughts that threatened to unsteady her stomach. She watched his hands move, strong and practiced, scattered with small scars she caught glimpses of in the light. A piece of night-dark hair fell away from the rest as he stooped over her, smoothing out a bandage, and brushed against brow, which was creased with focus. As the urge introduced itself to her to reach out and replace it, Asrai'ev sat up again, pulling her shirt back down to cover the dressed burn.
Rosalie exhaled at the cooling relief of bacta, placing her hand protectively over the spot by rote. “Thank you,” she said. “I would—” She paused, rubbing gently at the hollow of her throat and extending her touch in the Force to the affected tissue, easing the abrasiveness of speaking. “I would do it myself, but—”
“Don't worry about it,” Asrai'ev interjected, closing the lid of the medkit. “I'm happy to.” He met her eyes for an extended moment, amber hues reassuring. “You sure you're okay?” he asked at length, his sharply slanted accent punctuated with specks of gravel, his voice like grains of sand when he spoke lowly.
Rosalie blinked at him, taken aback for a moment. “Yeah,” she answered. She swallowed past the scratchiness in her throat. “I'll be fine, I promise.” She looked at him with optimism. For once, she wasn't hard-pressed to feel that way; it came easily, the newfound lightness in the Force lifting her heart with a buoyancy with which she was only then becoming familiar. But the emotion like steel webbing she felt as she reached out to him made her brows cinch at the center. “I mean it.”
A small, hard breath escaped him, half of his mouth quirking up just enough for Rosalie to notice. “I know.”
Asrai'ev shifted closer to her and leaned forward, touching his forehead to hers. Warmth spread like a wave through Rosalie's chest and extremities, relaxing her muscles and loosening the hold of stress she hadn't noticed until his touch released it. She instinctively touched his arm with her hand, lightly gripping the lean muscle.
He kissed her, carefully, cautious of her muddled bruise. Pulling back, he pushed a misplaced strand of silver out of her face. “I love you.”
Rosalie looked at him for a long moment, brushing the edge of his jaw with the backs of her knuckles. “I love you, too,” she said.
He stood, leaving the medkit on a table to the side of the room and putting the chair back where he had found it. “Try and get some rest, yeah?”
She nodded, slight smile persisting through subtle winces as she pulled the blankets over her lower half. Before Asra reached the door, she said his name, almost beyond her own volition. He turned and faced her again, his eyes softening inquisitively. Rosalie was reluctant to stay in a bed any longer as it was, but the constant protest from her body when she attempted otherwise, along with her heavy-lidded need for a full night's sleep, her mind having gone fuzzy around the edges, kept her barred from standing.
“Can you stay with me?” she asked. She found that her tone had shifted to one side, tentative and shaky at the last couple syllables. A small lump formed somewhere at the top of her chest. She didn't want Asra to leave her alone. She needed to feel him there, his sense and skin, an anchor to assure her that she wasn't back there. That the bed she lay on was his, familiar and with no harsh metal around her wrists, and that she had never been hurt there. That she was home, and she was safe.
She felt a little ridiculous, and slightly selfish. But Rosalie also knew, in equal measure, that he would chide her for willfully staying awake in the presence of only herself and the ceaseless memories of the dead. If she thought hard enough, she could feel the blade emitter shroud of Enric's lightsaber hit his chest as they both fell to their knees, hard stone jarring them both as the potent, acrid smell of burnt flesh and charred bone filled the air between them. Thinking of it brought an odd mixture of sensations to the space surrounding Rosalie's heart, as well as in-between the chambers of the hard-pounding muscle itself. Alleviation and loss blended together in the transparency of crisp water and the billowing opacity of blood.
She shoved the thoughts away, eyes startled back into focus by the movement across from her.
“Yeah,” Asrai'ev said, with little more hesitation than a short pause to feel the nearly physical pull of her, “of course,” and rounded the bed to the other side.
He lay on top of the blankets beside her, propping up a pillow behind his back and pulling Rosalie into his arms. Almost greedily, she settled into his embrace and burrowed her face against his chest. Moments like these, regrettably few in the wake of the war still waging beyond Coruscant's atmosphere, this single one filled the holes left by every second in the last month she ached for him, to feel, if nothing else, the knowledge of him, to take a hold of the priceless pinprick light in the Force that told her his heart was still beating. She felt like she had regained a foothold, steady in her stance.
He stroked her hair in long, steady movements. As she calmed, and her breathing grew more even against his rib cage, he brushed his fingers through the silver tresses, stopping when he got to a knot and starting over. Rosalie's fingers splayed over the right side of his chest, and she let her eyes drift closed. She felt his heart beat against her chest, and in that moment she couldn't have recalled ever feeling something so wonderful.
“NT is one of those rather rare examples of buildings where the exterior perfectly matches the interior. The compact minimalism you can observe from outside, permeates into the rooms and hallways creating a much fuller, more impactful experience. The sounds that the windows made when you adjusted them utterly surpassed any horrific sound in existence. Those blades had to be oiled often but tenants sometimes decided against that.”
Shot by Damjan Cvetkov Dimitrov and Nina Geometrieva
Indonesian Volcano With Beautiful Blue Rivers of Molten Sulphor Photographed by Reuben Wu
Chicago-based photographer Reuben Wu’s August trip to the Ijen and Bromo Tengger Semeru volcanoes in East Java gave him the opportunity to capture an unusual and beautiful sight. Although the area is always populated with a high influx of tourists, he waited after sunset to capture its rare molten sulphur spectacle and its surrounding beauty. The neon blue beauty flows from fumaroles at the base of the Blue Fire Crater at Ijen. The night time setting and the iridescent sight allowed Wu to captured otherworldly photographs.
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