the first thing he saw when he woke up was the blaring suns in his face – bright, blaring, hot. he felt the sand underneath his body and immediately knew it would take forever to get the tiny pieces out of his clothes.
he initially thought was back in scarif, hands move to cover his ears, just in case explosions and loud noises were going to go off. a knee-jerk reaction. sometimes, when cyrus first woke up on the resistance base, for a few small moments he thought he was somewhere else and would panic. he had been safe with the other rebels, but his brain wouldn’t always accept that as fact. nowhere was really safe, now, was it? his eyes shut tight as he attempted to remember his last moments – nothing. if only he were better trained in the force and understood it like his mother did. she’s long gone by now, and he knows it’s true. cyrus and his sister join the rebellion and never saw her again – she must’ve resented them so much.
finally, he pushes himself up to take a look around – he sees the suns, the beach for miles upon miles, the woods that ended where the beach began, and not a single soul. cyrus couldn’t even remember the way back ( though he could start walking and eventually find what he was looking for ), but he was terrible exhausted.
so he took a seat at the edge of the shoreline, removed his shoes and socks and stuck his legs in the cool water. he’d get back eventually.
in intense moments of hopelessness like these, leyla would turn to cyrus. he always knew how to make her happy, and vice versa. they fed off each other, perfectly compatible with no need for anything else in the galaxy. without him, she was lost. completely, utterly lost. and she wanted to be good – she wanted to be strong and stable and appear like she was getting over it, but she just couldn’t.
when she reached the beach, she looked around for a few minutes and tried not to let the phantom pains completely crush her. it was so hard – the memories of scarif were so painful and frightening. leyla sniffled and tried not to start outright screaming and sobbing. she kicked at the sand, watching it plop into the waves in tons of little pieces. she hated the world. she hated the galaxy. she hated living when cyrus should have been there instead of her.
she watched a man in the distance sit down on the shore, and she debated walking closer to see who it was. she was having a hard time, she didn’t want this person to see her. but when she looked in the other direction, there were far too many rocks and driftwood logs to try and scale, so her options for travel were limited in that direction. so, she started off towards him, keeping her head down.
