jannat al-ma'wa [OTA]

[candor1]

WHO: Cassian, Jyn, K-2SO, Revan, OTA
WHERE: Neojedha in Maurtia Falls
WHEN: huh? continuity? (your choice)
WHAT: The dojo opens (multithreads welcome)
WARNINGS: facepalmingly pompous mun!wish-fulfillment re: community service and indie start-ups; any of the reasons someone might need a shelter situation; PTSD sublimation; TL;DRing up the tauntaun. 1 and 2 are kinda infodumps. 3 (knowing us) could did get smutty. 4's accessibly friendly!

P.S. on taking cultural references from karking everywhere (title: Arabic, passcode: Sanskrit, setting: Americanization of Japanese, characters: none of these…) Cassian's trying to avoid cultural appropriation without even knowing the term; I'm stomping carelessly through the tulips. Hopefully not to conflate any of the cultures or schools of thought. Thinking more of The Cloisters: a museum Frankensteined from many different religious sites and relics, exploring the differences and finding underlying agreements, resulting in a space that feels secularly holy.


1. Neojedha: the dojo (attn. Jyn Erso, K-2SO, Revan, OTAnyone who wants to stop in while the place is active)
2. Haven: the safehouse (closed to Jyn, Kay, Revan)
3. The Bridge: between them (closed to Jyn Erso)
4. Outside: the street, the back alley, the fire escape, the roof, etc (OTA - WHAT a proper prompt)
5. The world: NPC neighbors and friends (if you ever come while they're closed and ask the neighbors about the dojo's staff, this is the info you'll get)



[+ image references: Colleen Wing's Chikara Dojo from "Iron Fist" …babeh]

Comments

[kestreldawn]

Jyn's body tenses in immediate reflex at his shift to defense. She isn't afraid of him hurting or attacking her - not by any stretch of the imagination - but the ingrained movement towards self-protection is a very hard thing to shatter. Almost as quickly, whatever tightness of muscle that might've lurked evaporates, rendering her into a puddle as soft as the light in her eyes at the sight of him. She has no preference as to whether he's clothed or not, so long as it's him and it's her in the same room.

Of course, she isn't going to be hurrying and urging him to toss on his clothes, either.

"Mm, thought about the latter," she replies, matching his teasing, but with a hint of seriousness in her voice. "Mostly to see how possible it would be and if it would be a security concern down the line. But since it's my first time to the flat," she explains as she flips onto her side and props herself up on a bent elbow, "I thought I should enter properly."

[candor1]

"Yes, that would be wonderful for you to check," Cassian agreed, reaching her. "Later." He knelt beside the bed, resting his arm on the mattress near hers.

It felt like he hadn't seen her in years. His own fault entirely. But… perhaps he'd managed to wear himself out enough with physical labor, or just scorched all shadows momentarily out of himself under the too-hot water, or perhaps because of the safety of the phantom guardians and fulfilling promise of this place, or… who cared what: for this moment he actually could feel like he was in the same room with her. Not separated by a cold, biting mist.

"Hello," he murmured redundantly. Not quite touching her, but charting the galaxies in her eyes like a pardoned exile. "I've lost track of time. Is your class about to start or already over?"

[kestreldawn]

It's strange, to be in a place without biometric security measures, so she isn't entirely sure how useful her lockpicking skills would be in this world - but if the flat was to be used for those who needed the very thing it'd been named after - Haven - then Jyn's certainly going to try her hardest to ensure that there's the utmost protection for whomever might be staying here in the future. This includes how easy it might be to bypass the code to gain entry into the space.

But he's right, she thinks. Later. There's plenty of time for that (and what an odd concept that is, even still).

Her fingers shift themselves, almost of their own volition, to barely brush against the skin of his forearm. They mostly run the outside of themselves against him, a silent confirmation of his physicality and solidity.

It does feel like years since she's seen him last, she agrees - and perhaps even longer since she's seen the warmth staring back at her from his eyes. They'd been so hauntingly barren and desolate since the night at the bar; the thought of it now could steal the air right out of her lungs if she lets it. But she doesn't; she focuses on the man that's in front of her, the one whose galaxies so perfectly align with her own.

"Hello," she replies, softness abound in face and voice. "Ended a bit ago. Was apparently more tired than I thought; seems I might've fallen asleep once my head hit the mattress." She could say something about how little she sleeps whenever he isn't beside her, how the nightmares terrify her so deeply that she often dreads the mere act of trying to fall asleep, how she spends more time staring at the ceiling than resting, but - doesn't. Instead lifts her hand enough to place it firmly and securely on the back of his forearm, palm pressing gently against him, fingers loosely curling around the circumference.

It doesn't matter, how little or much she's been sleeping. Not with him here, right underneath her touch.

c/w Cas doesn't know enough about mental healthcare options and should

[candor1]

He lifts his other hand. Hesitates a moment. Then brushes back her hair and traces the side of her face.

"I'm so sorry," he said quietly. "I keep doing this to you. …I don't even know if I'm out of it now or if this is just… remission."

…Of course… it could be said… any period of peace was always only going to be a remission.

…no, not "only". There was nothing "only" about that. It was still a miracle.

He didn't know how to tell her. He could barely formulate it for himself. I'm never alone. I'm always watched. I'm always judged. Anything I do that's not working as hard as I can to justify what I did to them feels like just too great an insult to bear…

Maybe she knows.

…He'd been free of it for a while. Did that mean it was possible to free himself again… or did something as dire have to happen externally as had happened to them on Scarif…

grim, sardonic: never thought of the Death Star as the cosmos's worst STERC machine


…which was an option that hadn't occurred to him to look at in this world. …He didn't think he wanted to. Try this—Neojedha—first.

[kestreldawn]

"You aren't doing anything to me," Jyn responds with a firmness in her tone, lying underneath the softness that covers it. "You're doing it to yourself more than anything." It feels like an observation with the weight of Kay-bluntness attached, but it's no less true. By extension, yes - his actions have affected her; case in point: barely coming back to the house and sleeping here instead, hardly looking at or touching her over the course of the preceding month, withdrawing into himself and into the project to prove -

What, exactly? And to whom?

She knows, even without the telepathy and the received signals in her mind like a comm tower, the expectation he's set for himself. The threshold he's created to somehow atone for his past misdeeds, the lives he'd taken, the things he'd done in the name of the Rebellion. She knows that he's been living underneath the shadow of his former life, never able to move quickly enough or efficiently enough to scurry out from under it. Never in its entirety, never to completion.

She leans into his touch, places her hand on top of his.

"I wish -" She hesitates, chewing her lip for a second before finishing, "I wish you'd treat yourself as kindly as you treat me. As you treat Kay. As you treat so many other people."

<- roles reversed

[candor1]

Other people haven't done—That's irrelevant… He's seen it… he's seen so much of it… it didn't matter what anyone's catalysts, they always thought they were worse or less deserving than anyone else… and if he did meet someone with a past like his—Like Kay? How closer could one get?—he wouldn't necessarily condemn them…It was different because of……things other than the events and actions themselves…?…Mightn't that serve either point…? Still spiralling. Stop.

Stop.




Ever since reprogramming Kay, Cassian's found it helpful, hopefully less in dissociation and more as an actionable model, to imagine his own mind as a positronic one.
New subroutine: try reasoning with self as if it was someone else
It wasn't even a new idea, but he… hadn't reached for it until Jyn said it.


Jyn. Stop me.




Cassian closed his eyes and lowered his face to their joined hands.



You can't wait to not be afraid, he'd said. Or someone had said to him. Or both. Mid-firefight. You can't wait to feel certain or steady or bold. You don't have to.

You just have to act.


GET


UP.





Muffled against the mattress and her skin, he said, "If you still want to sleep… can I join you?"

[kestreldawn]

As his head lowers, Jyn's other hand lifts to gently smooth down the damp hair at the back of his head. Through the coldness of the residual moisture, she can feel the heat radiating off of his scalp. Her hand slides down to his shoulder blades, resting gently but with purposeful weight, squarely between them. The grip of her other hand, the one still with his, tightens slightly. The reminder - I'm here; I'm still here; I haven't left; I haven't gone; you haven't lost me or pushed me away.

"You needn't ask," she replies softly, bending her head to kiss the back of his. "Whatever bed I'm in is always open to you."

[candor1]

He'll always ask… but he also is thankful to know and believe the answer.

Streamlining the motions, he slid the bedclothes out from between Jyn and the mattress, then moved forward to lay himself down beside her, refolding the sheet and blanket over them both. His hand ended on her hip, resting and moulding to its curve, anchoring and gently pulling their bodies together.

Through her clothes, could feel the slight vibration of his muscles—remaining tension—but the deeper, slow release of breath. Relief at the feel of her after too long an absence… not just from her presence but from being able to feel it.

[kestreldawn]

Jyn shifts her body over a bit to allow him space, left arm stretched out across the bed for him to rest his head, right arm up in beckoning acceptance and entry. It falls gently around his shoulders as he slips in and fits against her, and there's a quiet sigh of relief at the (silly, she knows) feeling of it all still falling into place so effortlessly and easily.

The hand belonging to the arm that wrapped around him finds the space between his shoulder blades again and rubs, gently and rhythmically. The other rests along his bicep.

"Not that I had any doubt," she whispers softly, "But this turned out to be a wonderful space. I can't imagine how thankful the community is for what you've done."

[candor1]

Before he'd started isolating himself this time around, there had been times she'd held him like this and he still hadn't been able to unlock.

(She and Kay could compare notes… the times Cassian would come back to the U-wing from a mission—not all of the ones he wouldn't take Kay on with him, but always such a one—and couldn't be reached no matter what Kay said or did; couldn't uncoil from crash position in the one safe place in the universe. The times he couldn't not bring the invaders in with him… or it didn't matter he'd return to the ship, he hadn't returned to himself.)

Now his body loosens and relaxes as it hasn't in weeks. His head sinks into the cradle she made for it, turning to lightly touch his forehead into the curve of her neck. The arm he left between his own body and the mattress shifts a little, so his hand slips under her waist there too, exerting gentle, caressing pressure in answer to her hand on his back. Both his hands, on either side of her, followed a soft gravity, connecting and drawing them by their cores.

His lips and breath moved on her skin as he answered. "I can't believe it turned out to… not just… be self-serving. A way to justify what we can do… keep myself busy. People acting like we're giving such a service. Not… them giving us—"

(By us he meant him—erred on the side of sharing credit rather than assuming blame.)

"—the gift of purpose."

(The one Jyn's given Cassian three times.)

[kestreldawn]

She feels the increasing fluidity of his muscles, of his body, of his bones. She swears she can feel it trickle out of the pores of his skin, bathing them both in its leave, pooling somewhere in or under the mattress. She thinks that if she tries hard enough, she could see it evaporating above their heads - fluttering and ascending like those colorful winged insects they'd seen at the swearing in ceremony they'd gone to the previous month.

Consciousness and limb and breath and beating blood blur into one another again, naturally and without hesitation and without urgency. The hard edges of her body bleed into his, blending them together seamlessly and effortlessly. A tiny shudder runs itself down the length of her spine, settling in her coccyx, before racing back up and out of the top of her skull. She had had patience; she had fought against every instinct in herself, the one that told her to run, so she could trust in him, trust in his eventual return to her arms and her heart.

But she'd be lying if she said he didn't feel some semblance of relief at feeling reunification like this and realizing it could still be done.

She tilts her head to the side to rest her cheek against the top of his head, allowing her eyes to close.

"I can," she says without a trace of doubt. "This place is obviously very meaningful for them, and I'm sure that if they had the means, they would've got it up and running themselves. But they didn't - and you provided them that. You each needed each other in your own ways, and I'm grateful that it's worked out this way, for both of you."

[candor1]

He brushed a smile against her skin. "All of us, I hope…"

After another moment, "I always think we should talk about the others. But I don't know what to say. You knew as much of them as I did."

[kestreldawn]

"Yes, all of us, eventually; it's okay to take this for yourself, just for now. Just this once. You put so much work into getting this place up and running," she replies, hand at his shoulder blade coming up to tousle with the strands of his hair. "Mm. For as tethered as we were, we .. really knew nothing of each other, did we?" Her eyes blink themselves open to stare at the ceiling in thought. "I'd wanted to ask Bodhi about my father, on the ship after Jedha. How they started talking, how my father had convinced him to defect from the Empire, all of it. I couldn't bring myself to do it, though; not after seeing the state he'd been in."

[candor1]

He starts to open his mouth in reflex to point out that she's the one continuing to fund the place and did work promoting it… but of course, she knows that (she was there!) so he closes it again and follows orders: smiling, sinking further into her.

One of his hands shifts gently to press the small of her back.

"Kay may have spoken more to him than we did," murmured Cassian. "I wish I'd told him… Kay actually complimented him. Twice. I don't know if he could have appreciated how exceedingly earned that had to be."

[kestreldawn]

She murmurs softly at the press of his hand, further melting into and onto it and him.

"I'd begun to think Kay was more or less incapable of giving compliments," she teases with a quiet rumbling of a laugh on the heels of her words. It isn't lost on her, at least, of how rare a thing it was and is for Kay to have bestowed kind words on a human at all, let alone twice. "No; I'm sure he didn't think he earned them, even if he had known." Bodhi Rook; Imperial pilot; defector; catalyst; rebel. "I'd always sort of wondered what Bodhi might've been like before Saw had gotten to him. Before he'd had his memories tampered with."

[candor1]

Cassian smiled again, the private suppressed smile that was always for Kay—who hadn't ever complimented Cassian as far as he could remember. He'd known that wasn't what Cassian needed from him.

Thinking about Bodhi…

Cassian's brow creased in thought. "I may have caught a glimpse…"

With the same hesitance with which he'd touched Jyn's face—the things he'd failed to do for or with her in so long feeling like they needed reestablishment and reacceptance, a new first time—he closed his eyes and offered up a quick sequence of memories to her.

He heard Bodhi's footsteps behind him as he trudged back out into the rain and the mud, his soles sucking noisily at the drenched soil.
"Do I need one, too?" Bodhi called. Cassian cast a look backward at the man as he crept down the slick boarding ramp. "A weapon?"
"You sound like my droid," Cassian said. Then he grunted, and shook his head. "We won't be long. You'll be fine."
It was probably true. And there was a fringe benefit: If Bodhi sided with Jyn over Cassian, it meant one fewer person who might shoot him in the back.

…
"If I hadn't started a conversation with Galen in the meal line, asked him which droid to grab a bite from, maybe I never would've wondered what was going on here. What they were working on…"
It sounded too much like a lie for Cassian to really believe it. But it also sounded like a lie for Bodhi's benefit, not Cassian's. If that was the story he wanted to tell about meeting Galen, so be it. If Bodhi was scared of Cassian, desperate to convince him his defection was genuine, that was fine with Cassian too.

…
"How long did Saw Gerrera's people hold you?" Cassian called.
Bodhi flinched but kept walking. …"A few days, maybe…"
Cassian thought back to the rumpled pile of a man he had found in the catacombs, malnourished and battered and deranged with trauma. Less than a day later, the man leading him through the canyons of Eadu was transparently terrified and far too eager to chat; but he was also doing his damndest to feign normalcy on what looked likely to be a suicide mission. He was even doing a decent job of it.
Cassian laughed. It was a brief, guttural sound that seemed drowned in the rain. Bodhi did look back now, surprised and a touch alarmed. "What?" he asked.
"Nothing," Cassian said. Then he added, blunt and almost humbled: "Must've been a hell of a few days."
Bodhi smiled—just a twitch of his lips—for the first time since Cassian had known him.

The memories disappated before they could go closer to… pain. Though, at least that was one wound they'd joined their hands together over to staunch.

"Imagine," he said. Because it was nearly impossible for either of them. "He had a normal life. And chose… all of it."

Whereas Jyn and Cassian had been chosen—been stolen—into it.

It made Bodhi one of the bravest and most heroic people Cassian had ever met.

He should have told him.

They were assuming Bodhi was dead, when if anyone had a chance of escaping, it would have been him… but they knew he wouldn't have. Even if they would have wished him to, he wouldn't have left without them.

[kestreldawn]

The memories that float through, like liquids seeping through a membrane, are bittersweet. Hearing Bodhi's voice, seeing his nervous twitches, the goodness of his heart and, much to her surprise, a possible explanation of how he and her father had started talking - they fill and swell her heart with adoration and softness. But she remembers the rains of Eadu; she remembers everything that came after the conversations between Cassian and Bodhi. And the thought of them steals the light straight out of her almost as quickly as it blossomed.

She warms again at the fact that he's cut the memories short, before .. all that transpired afterwards.

"None of it would've happened - from start to finish - if it hadn't been for him. If he hadn't chosen to show such bravery. Stands to reason I would've perished in Wobani; I'd already lost any reason or purpose for continuing on, so if the labor itself hadn't gotten me, I probably would've done it myself. .. Or Kennel would've done the job for me, as she said she was going to the day Kay threw me to the ground," she says with a hint of a smile in her voice. "Do you think anyone got out alive?"

[candor1]

Not that he hasn't thought it (over and over...) before: how pulverizingly close he'd come, repeatedly, to losing her--without ever knowing he had lost. It makes him turn from lying on his back to his side, slipping his arms around her fully, and pulling her close and tight.

Do you think anybody's listening?
I do.

Do you think anyone got out alive?

"No."

The other time he'd not taken in his surroundings.

He hadn't looked. On purpose.

It was over and they'd all fulfilled their choice and all that was left was to end it right. Not grieving the soldiers he knew and no one else would, the three Jedhans he hadn't properly known but others had, not succumb to the breaking pain of Kay. End it for the one and only time in the present, which was with Jyn. Only Jyn.

He's tried to recall it since. He can't. The pain and the light are too bright.

He just knows there were more bodies on that beach than had been in the shuttle. The Rebellion that had nearly turned its back on them to die had come back, come after them. Which meant though they had died, it would live. There would be a future for others to see.

"None of them were aiming to survive," he said. "So they wouldn't have."

[kestreldawn]

She remembers the bodies strewn across the beach. She remembers angling herself just so, so he wouldn't have see the crumbled body of a Rebel soldier nearby. She regretted and still regrets having never bothered to learn their names, but it was old habit by then. No attachments, no feelings, no emotions; knowing names, knowing stories, knowing lives complicates all of those things. She had to think of them in terms of numbers and battle tactics; she couldn't think of them as the people they really were.

And it's something she still wishes she could change. Maybe something to ask Cassian, some day in the future. When the pain of the loss has healed over some, scabbed and no longer tender and sore.

"Funny how that works: the goal of survival, how it affects everything."

[candor1]

Someone's survival. Yes. Doesn't have to be your own.

They'd been fighting for each other's. …Fighting for…

He changes thoughts before he can project the one he knows hurts her. No matter how much it had helped the rest of them.

Let alone, one hoped, the galaxy…

Though… even that he couldn't think about too much right now without beginning to spiral again… how the further and further from their own time the stories got… the less anything seemed to matter…
Because only the present matters. Only the present is real. We did what we had to in the moment. And if only for a moment, it did help people. Try to choose one's moments like that.
It wasn't how he'd lived his first life. …Or was it. It was so hard to tell—when he was being fair to himself. It wasn't just that he'd sacrificed the present for a hope of the future. Or rather, he did for himself but not necessarily for others… by choosing to be in situations where the present could be no-win.
One could argue that he'd saved Tivik…

Stop oh god please stop.

The present was Jyn. Only Jyn. He shut eyes against her, holding her, trying not to let himself fall away from her again. Be here. Stay here.

[kestreldawn]

Her grip slowly grows tighter and tighter as the thoughts flood her. She's long since stopped trying to filter out her own from his, instead allowing them to mingle and co-habitate as though it were the most natural thing they could do when forced into the same cranial space meant for one person. Somewhere in her consciousness, the part of her that doesn't detach while drowning in a sea of another's worries and fears and regrets, she makes a note that perhaps - perhaps it is still too soon to speak of the others. To speak of what they'd been through. They could speak of each other's histories with as much ease as could be expected given the events that had taken place because they'd had enough time to cover them in their guts as though with snow.

But Scarif - the others who'd perished with them on the shores of that otherwise paradisiacal planet - was perhaps still too raw, nerve endings severed and wounded.

"Stay with me," she whispers, coming back into herself. "I'm here."

[candor1]

He was modulating his breath. Even, slow. But his heart was pounding.

I can't. I can't.

He should go. I should… I have to…

it's your own fault you said it you raised it you filthy you hypocrite
theresnoway to explain i cant sayifit understand there isnt its not
nothowtheuniversegoes itwastooeasy idontgettohave
howcanistayidont

Rhythm broken with a groan or a sob.

Climb



…Behind his closed eyes, suddenly…

don't carry yours wherever you go
only way out of here
climb

He let out a low breath.

Called on a memory.

Not just to show her.

Recreated it. And put her into it.




They were standing at the foot of the Alliance's Yavin base. She'd never seen this part of it. Only been taken inside and left again straight to and from the landing pad.

This was where it sat in the endless forest. Where it had done so for millennia. Sitting here still long after those who built it and all their descendents were gone.

Massassi. She must have heard the word been thrown around. Would she have known what it meant.

As it stands in Cassian's mind, its meaning stands too. The people. The culture. So long ago, those who'd made it. Who'd vanished mysteriously and left wonders behind. The ancestors of the language and the people who'd spread through all the Yavin system. The writings on the walls almost indecipherable to Cassian but here and there, a word he could read, similar to its descendent language of Yaval. Like the lightest touch of a hand on his face from far, far away and deep below.

He stands before her, eyes closed, breathing with painstaking deliberation, keep it even, keep it slow. But here, he's not confined to his skull, himself, his mind. Here, they stand in the sunlight, in the wind, in the song of the trees, and the massive ancient temple, testament to time and the universe and all its worlds being bigger than any one awareness of it and any one war… and this time, unlike in life, he gets to be there with her: his favorite place with his favorite person…

He opens his eyes, at last finding the rhythm to breathe. Doesn't quite smile, but so glad she's there. Holds out his hand to her.

"The view up top," he said.

Climb.

[kestreldawn]

Jyn isn't sure if it's something that's changing inside of her or some side effect of the nanites at work, but she finds herself less and less inclined to fall back on old habits as the days wear on. Her toes don't twitch with the immediate reflex of wanting to dig into the earth below and push off with all of her might as she runs. The shadow that always threatens to consume and swallow her whole seems more and more faded with each new bathing, cleansing sunrise.

But his silent self-talk arguing sparks something of it in her again. She feels the twitch in the big toe of her right foot first, then the left. The sudden burst of movement coincides with the off-beat of her heart and the abrupt inhalation of air like a dart in her lungs. And then -

He stays. He opens up something she immediately knows is - more than meaningful, more than precious, more than treasured. It's transcended those trite explanations. It's ascended into a its own life force, one that he can call upon and draw from whenever his physical/mental/emotional one begins to wither. It's its own breathing, existing thing, this memory. And what a beautiful one it is, she thinks, as she stands and looks out over the leafy canopy in all of its verdant beauty. Inherits the understanding and knowledge second-hand of the temple's creators, their culture, their links through the millennia to present-day. Wishes, somewhere in her own mind, that she could have had the opportunity, the time, the chance, the option to have explored it more for herself.

Her hand lifts to meet his before she's had a chance to even deliberate - though what deliberation could there have really been? Palm slides against palm like shifting tectonic plates, heat sparking up her wrist and splitting into two to jolt up the bones in her forearm, only to be rejoined at the shoulder. Further up, along the collarbone, the neck, exploding in a vision of light and spark behind her eyes.

"Climb," she echoes, eyes soft and full of love.

[candor1]

He smiles like he kisses her and presses their joined hands together to the golden stones.

What had possessed him the first time to climb this thing
just needing
something not anything he already knew
a way out of everything else in his life

and unlike all the other ways he'd tried
this one worked

he'd found the sea above the forest
the swaying trees, the infinite canopy
real infinity looks flat, true infinity needs limits
and the sun warmed stones to hold his back
and the wind to smooth the furrows of his face
and the vast feel of everything connecting him up without being about himself
and he could simply stay there and be.

And he wants her with him for it now. Leaning himself back against the stones. Looking up at her, asking with his eyes if she will sit down against him so he can hold her against his chest and look at the trees with her hair tracing patterns in the wind and against his face.

"I know this is my mind," he said. "But I don't think I could be doing it without you."

[kestreldawn]

There's an odd sensation of the manifestation of the physicality of this memory, though - it isn't as intense as it would be if it were really happening, if they were really climbing up the ziggurat. But her chest feels tight and light and heavy all at once; her breath feels thick in her lungs yet as thin as smoke; her skin scrapes against phantom precipices until raw and red. Or, at least there's the phantom sensation of it, much like wind sweeping over a field - invisible, intangible, yet felt.

She nestles in against him as she's done so many times (still not enough times) and leans herself back to press against his chest, eyes sweeping out over the beauty in which he's suspended them.

It's a breath-taking sight, and to be able to see it through Cassian's eyes, tinted and bathed in nostalgia and warmth, is incredible.

She turns towards him, then taps her forehead against the side of his face.

"Thank you for bringing me here and for allowing me to come."