Since this drawing is beautiful and made me cry big tears it's only fair I do this:
For all they shared since they were kids, Bix and Cassian never lived together in a place they could call theirs.
On Ferrix, they chased each other and pushed each other away, always tethered even when they were apart – or wanted to be. Young and impulsive, feeling everything so intensely. They never stood still.
Cassian joined them a few weeks after they left Gangi Moon. She was a little more human by then, color had returned to her cheeks, she was eating again. Still fractured, still a jumpy, wounded thing.
The mobil-haus was small and overcrowded. At first, he took a cot outside. When she woke up gasping, with her throat on fire from screaming, he was beside her.
“I’ve got you. Breathe. You’re not there anymore.”
He sat next to her until she stopped shivering. When she let him touch her, he took her hand and traced patterns on her palm with the tips of his fingers. The stiffness faded. Her body relaxed.
“I’ll stay a little longer. Until you fall asleep,” he said after she lay down again.
When she woke up the next morning, he was asleep on the floor.
He started sleeping on a blanket by the bed. The first few nights, she didn’t say anything about it, because his presence made things a little more bearable. She was still terrified of closing her eyes. She’d still wake up screaming and choking. But he was also there, to pull her out of it, and reminding herself that she wasn’t in the hotel anymore was easier, if only barely so. She could hear his breathing in the dark – grounded, calming. It helped.
After a while, she was better enough to decide that the situation wasn’t just unfair to him. It was absurd.
“You can’t keep doing that.”
“Do what?” he asked, without looking up from whatever he was reading on a datapad.
She propped herself up on an elbow. “That. Sleeping on the floor. You’re going to mess up your back.”
“I’ve slept in worse places.”
“This is kinda comfortable, actually.” He glanced up at her. She saw a glint in his eyes, the hint of something mischievous curling his lips into a little smirk. “Better than the floor of your salyard.”
It caught her off-guard in a way only Cassian could do. She stared at him, mouth agape and stunned by the nonchalant, unapologetically insolent way in which he brought up that memory. A night from more than a decade ago, tearing at each other’s clothes, too hungry for each other to make it to Bix’s bedroom.
Heat crawled up her neck, a mix of frustration and something else she hadn’t felt in so long. She narrowed her eyes, huffing.
“You are the most insufferable person I know.”
Cassian’s grin widened. She threw a pillow at his face.
She didn’t dream that night.
The first time she asked him into the bed, her voice got caught in her throat.
She had woken up breathless, skin slick with sweat and her head feeling like it had split wide open. Cassian was there again. His tired, warm eyes such a stark contrast to the eyes in her nightmare. His hands stroked her face. Gentle, welcome.
When he tried to move away, after she had calmed down, she curled her hand around his wrist.
If he hesitated, it was only for a moment. Wordless, he climbed into bed beside her. She rested her head on his chest, and he wrapped his arms around her, neither having to ask.
It became a routine. She got used to the shape of his body against hers, how his warmth seeped into her and his arm curved protectively around her waist. Her breathing started syncing with the steady rise and fall of his chest. The sound of his heartbeat beneath her ear soothed her. It drowned out the horrors that existed in her head.
Her sleeping deepened. The nightmares receded. They didn’t vanish, but when she woke up with a scream stuck in her throat and her heart pounding against her ribcage, Cassian’s body anchored her back to reality.
“Come back to me,” he would say every time.
Sometimes it was quick, sometimes it still took her all night, but she always did.
She nestled against him, and let him surround her, and let him save her.
Their love returned slowly, but it was like breathing. Not like the first time. All the clashing was gone. It was like stoking embers. It was quiet, and it was earned.
“Are you sleeping?” she asked one night, even though she knew he wasn’t.
She turned to him in the dark and found his eyes open, looking at her. She trailed her fingers along his jaw, felt him swallow beneath her touch. She leaned in. He met her without hesitation. Their mouths found each other, careful, and deliberate. Every touch was its own small act of trust.
It was different, and it was the same. She remembered the shape of his lips, his hands stroking her skin, the sounds he made when she pushed her fingers through his hair and angled her hips to meet his. She remembered she was alive.
Afterwards, as they lay entangled, he kissed her hair and rested his fingers in the hollow of her throat, like he was trying to memorize her pulse. Her eyes closed, and she wasn’t afraid.
From then on, when he was with her, she didn’t wake up screaming.
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