iffff you are so inclined, for the character/song lyric drabble, jyn erso (or rebelcaptain), any lyrics from "take me away" by gabrielle aplin? i know you wrote some rogue one fic back in the day
send me a ship/char + a song lyric and i’ll write you a drabble
I was alone, I was taken with the tide, but I knew that I was home, when I looked into your eyes and said I'm done
Rogue One exists in one shining wisp of glory, before the survivors are given perfunctory disciplinary actions and medical clearances, and are summarily ushered back into their assigned units.
Except for Jyn, who does not have an assigned unit.
Until she wakes up, and discovers someone has corrected that for her, never mind a formal enlistment.
Jyn contemplates the rank and division that someone sorted her into while she spent three weeks unconscious in bacta. Jyn Erso. Sergeant. SpecForce Pathfinders. Almost an entirely new unit, a member of medical personnel tells her. Since most of them volunteered, and died on the beaches of Scarif. Jyn wonders if she has been claimed as one of their own, or claimed to do penance.
On her first day out of bed, she sees Bodhi off on a mission to oversee supply lines into Imperial controlled zones. Baze and Chirruit, she hears later, are sequestered with Luke Skywalker, the Rebellion’s own bona fide Jedi. And Cassian is... gone, back into the ether.
Back to his classified existence.
They don’t see each other for nearly a year, after Scarif.
Not that she sees the others - but on occasion, they can message. Bodhi most regularly, when his team hasn’t gone dark to hide from Imperial spacecraft. Baze is also reliable, when he isn’t too busy keeping Chirruit and Luke out of scrapes. Luke, who sometimes even sends a message to her, who is hungry for friends after a lifetime on a desert planet. She copies him on a message to Bodhi, who she thinks can relate. She even has friends, she thinks, amongst the soldiers she’s eating and sleeping and fighting with. Not many, because she doesn’t speak much, to anyone, but some. Some who even were even on Scarif. It’s the closest thing to real connection, since Saw abandoned her. The closest thing to family, since...
Well, since.
Every day, she waits for it to be taken away.
All her messages to Cassian are met with an auto-reply. Sometimes she lets herself believe that he set it for her, for who else would talk to a spy in wartime?
Jyn does a decent job of convincing herself she’s fine. And she manages, mostly, until the Pathfinders are assigned to securing the construction of Echo Base on Hoth. Any semblance of a sleep cycle and natural rhythms that military life had tried to beat into her - and with the Pathfinders and Commandos, there weren’t many, just more than she’d had in her life thus far - slip away into the pervading darkness that never seems to ebb during Hoth winter. The base, constructed out of the moon’s natural materials hovers between just below freezing and just above freezing. There are mornings she wakes up with her blankets frozen to her body, teeth chattering, fingertips purple in her gloves.
There are nights she looks at her datapad, at the messages in her inbox, but cannot see them. Her eyes blur, and she hides it away. She is essential Rebellion personnel, she tells herself, avoiding her reflection in the tiny mirror above the sink in her quarters.
She is essential.
Her tears turn to chalk on her skin.
She is so, so tired of darkness, and the nightmares that chase her in her sleep, and now in her waking hours too.
The day that Echo Base is deemed operational, there is the closest thing the rebels can scrounge up to resemble a party. Jyn steals a bottle of rotgut that tastes like it was brewed inside of a boot, and takes it back to her room with her. Curled up inside all of her hoarded blankets, she sips at it slowly, letting it burn the back of her throat.
If she was counting, she would know she hadn’t looked at her datapad in sixteen days. If she looked at her datapad, wedged in between the foot of her bed and her storage locker, she would know she had twenty-two unread messages.
If she looked at those messages, she would know that one was from Cassian.
---
Cassian returns from his year of punishment, assigned to Echo Base.
(His disciplinary action for the Scarif operation was, on paper, perfunctory. In reality, General Draven is a very creative man, with many punitive resources and very little oversight over his flank of the Rebel Army.)
Every nerve ending in his body is alight, every sense heightened, as he scans the hanger bay for Jyn. She’s not there, he’s able to deduce almost immediately, his stomach plunking down to his feet. If Jyn is not there, then where is she? He has read a year’s worth of missives about her fellow Pathfinders, about Kes Dameron and Han Solo and Melshi. About where they traveled, and their close calls and too many scrapes to count. She should be here, with her fellow soldiers, drinking and laughing.
He hoped she would be here, looking for his transport.
One of her Pathfinders takes pity on him, and it is not a feeling he would like to repeat. The man claps him on the back, and looks down at him with a sad grin. “Andor, right?”
---
It takes her a moment to recognize that the sound assailing her ears is, in fact, someone knocking at her door. A sigh rattling her whole body, she wonders if she continues to lie incredibly still in the dark, if she’ll be left alone.
The answer is no.
She wonders if she threw this bottle at the door and yelled, if whoever is knocking on the hatch will go away. Possibly yes, her internal monologue answers, but is the resulting gossip worth it?
No, not really.
Steeling herself, she practices what she’s going to say to whoever has come to try to cajole her into returning to the party. I have duty in six hours, and I haven’t been feeling well. I’m just tired, and my stomach isn’t feeling right. Don’t you know that getting drunk is a good way to not realize when you’re getting hypothermic? I don’t need to listen to Kes cry and show me the same five holos of his son right now.
The concept of speaking is detestable to her, her voice a hard ball in the back of her throat.
She rests her forehead against the cold hatch.
“Jyn?”
Her heart stops. stutters, and then kicks back to life. Thoughtlessly, she undoes the lock and throws open the hatch. Nothing has ever been so urgent as seeing Cassian’s face.
“You’re here,” she whispers like a collapsing star.
He looks her over, up and down, before lifting his eyes and his hand to her face. “Oh, sweetheart.”
Yeah, it started out kinda fun in spite of the dodgy bits, but ultimately... yeah, yikes. I feel like if it crawls out of its own ass and just goes full camp it could be a Zooesque source of fun, but that would require a second season, so I’m torn. The finale did seemingly lean into some of the dumber aspects of it in more of a fun way, at least (the surprise incest twist, the main character just spitefully murdering EVERYBODY to a musical montage of suffering, Frances Conroy getting her life sucked out her boob), but idk man.
As for the movie, yeah, it wasn’t great, but it gave me almost all of the things I actually want from a Mist adaptation in a perfectly competent manner, so I couldn’t complain until that damn ending. I don’t mind bleak for bleak’s sake endings, or even cartoonishly mean-spirited ones, the problem for me was that it’s only horribly depressing for Thomas Jane’s character? Otherwise, it’s actually a really pat happy ending, all things considered? And I ain’t here for that.
eyyyyy acoa party~~~ i'm similarly very very careful and set rules for myself when i drink. i don't tend to feel VERY at risk — i really hate feeling uninhibited, so i don't drink to get drunk, and my BIGGEST rule for myself is that if i feel like i "need" a drink, that is when i do. not. drink. — but i'm also pretty sure i got the gene, since it's... everyone on both sides of my family, and i do have addictive tendencies, just ones that primarily manifest differently (eating disorder, whoooo).
oh yes, all the rules. I try to split hairs between when I WANT to drink and when I feel like I NEED to drink and try to interrogate why it's a need, versus what else I could be doing to try to manage my stress or emotions. I definitely have more dissociative tendencies than outright addictive ones -- though those made it VERY easy for me to stumble into nascent alcoholism in my early 20s because I just wanted to feel numb
anyway, this is all vaguely tmi, but you're cool, so. apologies for the word vomit!!
omg never apologize, I treat my tumblr like the back porch at a party where we've all gone to smoke and get away from everyone else so we can hear each other talk
since there's baby talk on my dash, i am... gonna talk babies at you! i want them so, so badly — i've always felt like my calling, my "dream job" as it were, is to be a mother, which has only intensified in the years since i lost MY mother, even though it breaks my heart that she'll never know my future kids. i've had names picked out for years (Johanna Ruby and Olivia Joy). but i'm also terrified of my Mental Health Issues and how can i take care of kids when i can barely take care of myself?
oh god I feel this so hard, even when I was little I always was playing with baby dolls and pretending to be a mother and always wanted to be one, so badly that I locked it away and told myself I didn't want it because it was so big and so scary and having things you want is TERRIFYING when you're carrying trauma into it
also those names are absolutely beautiful, they flow off the tongue so well and are both so classic and timeless
Stuck in Love. It’s on Netflix and it’s sooooo bad. Some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen.
8. Which book you would like to see adapted into a film?
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. The internet says there was some talk about a movie adaption around 2011/2012 but it hasn’t happened. This story would translate beautifully on the screen and if it was adapted and casted well, could totally be Oscar worthy.
12. A movie that holds a special place in your heart?
Oh my god this is such a hard question. There are so many!! If I have to pick just one I would say The Social Network, because it was the movie that got me interested in both film and in being a part of fandoms.
16. A film you love that everyone hates?
I’m using rotten tomatoes as my meter of hate for this one: 27 Dresses. One of my favorite rom coms. On the site the critic consensus is: The filmmakers perfectly follow the well-worn romantic comedy formula, rendering 27 Dresses clichéd and mostly forgettable.
