Fic: Run Deep, Run Wild (Star Wars)
Title: Run Deep, Run Wild
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: T
Genres: het
Recipient: yappichick
Prompt: Star Wars, Delvin Sandwalker/Virina Moren, Triggerfinger - I Follow Rivers
Summary: It’s been a slow day. Slow days are never good for her. Slow days make shadows larger and havens smaller and the shadow of Delv’s loyalty is always the biggest shadow.
A/N: Holiday Fic Request Meme. This one is for yappichick who did the amazing art work for my 2011 Het Big Bang story, Not in Kansas Anymore, a Stargate/Star Wars crossover. I don't think having read it is a requirement for this story but I think it adds a little something. I do think, though, that this story can still stand on its own because the main info about the characters is actually given in the story. (it's all OC, though, so if that isn't your thing... everyone else, I'd love you to give this story a chance :))
Run Deep, Run Wild
"He's a message, I'm the runner
He's the rebel, I'm the daughter waiting for you
You're my river running high, run deep run wild
I, I follow, I follow you deep sea baby
I follow you
I, I follow, I follow you, dark boom honey
I follow you."
Triggerfinger, "I Follow Rivers"
There’s no night and day on a space ship, just shifts and off-time and shifts again so saying "she'd been lying awake the entire night" is basically bantha shit but that doesn't make it any less real that Virina Moren is lying awake when she's supposed to be sleeping according to piloting regulations of the great Alliance to Restore the Republic Navy.
Has been for at least four hours now, ever since Delv fell asleep squished next to her in her bunk after exhausting himself with trying to make it another night to remember. Didn't quite work out but that's not why she still can't sleep. (Virina knows how it is to come back from a mission all bruised and battered and filled with unrest that you need to shake off, only to find five minutes of shaking are enough to deplete the rest of your resources. It happened to her often enough ever since Carida.)
It’s been a slow day. Slow days are never good for her. Slow days make shadows larger and havens smaller and the shadow of Delv’s loyalty is always the biggest shadow.
It’s not that she doesn’t trust him, she does, with her life. It’s just that he’s been with the Empire for twelve years and twelve years are not nothing. Twelve years in the Empire’s service are a whole lotta bucket of brain washing. She’d left after four and it had taken her two more to start trusting herself again.
It’s been five months since they pulled him away from the Empire and two since they started resolving the tension that had probably always been there into something much more satisfying and she keeps wondering what’s going on his head. She should know it because she’s known him since her first week on Carida. They went through the same grueling training, the same indoctrination, the same pain and still she wonders what’s going on in his head now that he’s killing the people he’d been killing others together with just five months ago.
Shifting uncomfortably, she feels his arm around her midriff shift with it and hears a disgruntled little grunt from behind her. She’s sorry for disturbing the sleep he probably needs badly after coming back from a mission that cost him half his company but something makes her nervous, makes her restless.
Maybe it’s the stares he gets from people outside of his command, outside of the circle of people that seem to be devoted to him, hanging onto his lips and walking into their deaths happily because they know he’ll be the first to greet it. Stupid idiot always has to lead from the front and still people that don’t serve under him stare at him and whisper “Imperial stormtrooper” and “danger” and “killer” behind his back. As if Rebel pilots and soldiers have never killed a being themselves.
Maybe it’s that she can’t shut up the voice inside of her that whispers the same when she kisses Delv and invites him into her cabin and shoves him into the closed door with a needy groan because she can’t waste a minute as soon as they’re on the same ship. That voice snares and sneers and asks questions she doesn’t want to hear, doesn’t want to have answers to. It keeps snaring and sneering and asking all the time, never leaves her alone. Makes her life hell.
Behind her, she feels a subtle change in Delv’s body, a slight tension in his muscles that hadn’t been there a moment ago and she heaves a silent little sigh. She opens her eyes, abandoning the attempt at falling asleep and stares into the darkness that’s only alleviated partially by the red glowing numbers on the chrono on her desk. It occurs to her that even though she doesn’t want the answers to those questions, she probably has to ask them anyway. She swallows.
“Do you ever regret leaving the Empire?”
There’s no reaction from him, not at first anyway. Then there’s a dark, low growl, his voice raspy with sleep and weariness that makes her regret she opened her mouth in the first place. “Do you?”
It takes her by surprise because no one ever asked that of her but maybe that came with being drafted into ferrying special ops teams around pretty early. In special ops, no one ever asks questions like that. “I never had reason to,” is all she can think of and, “I only regret I didn’t leave earlier.”
He doesn’t answer, only tightens his arm around her midriff but she can feel that he hasn’t gone back to sleep yet. Which is only confirmed when he does growl, “What’s going on, Virina?”
It’s never Virina. It’s always Vir or Mor but never Virina with him. It’s been once, when she told him she would defect and there was nothing he could do about it. He’d looked at her, a strange mix of astonishment and disappointment on his face and he’d looked at her like that for a very long moment before saying, “Don’t get yourself killed, Virina.”
She’d been disappointed because she’d hoped he’d come with her and it took her all until she’d found herself on a rebel ship after a very risky defection in the middle of a space battle before she realized just how much she must have meant to him that he hadn’t shot her on the spot, not to mention betray her plan to anyone.
She’s pretty sure he knows exactly what this is about. And still she feels an urge to say, “Why did you leave, Delv? After twelve years why did you leave?”
It’s a good question, she thinks, and he must be thinking the same. It’s why it takes him so long to answer that she’d think he’s fallen asleep again if she didn’t feel him breathing slightly irregular in her back. “What does it matter?” That’s not an answer and he knows that.
“Delv.”
A low growl again, this time definitely out of frustration. She knows she should let this lie but there’s no way she can now. She’s already in too deep. “Some people are slower to see the light than others. You’re a Dug in a pod racer. I’m a space slug. Case closed.”
For some reason, something in his voice gives her pain, deep in her heart. It’s not his gruff tone or his curt manner; she’s used to that and he’s right to use it. Middle of the night is just not the best of times for this kind of conversation. It’s what he didn’t say, she thinks. It’s that pitch when he said that some people were slow to see what’s right and what’s wrong and the way how he said he was one of those. Because that just isn’t true.
In the dark, her hand searches for his and squeezes it. “You were trying to defy the system from within, weren’t you?” She wishes her voice hadn’t been so low, so broken because that’s a good thing to do. A good and a futile thing but it honors him that he tried to hold it up for so long.
“What does it matter, Vir?” He makes a move, probably tries to turn around to face the wall but she doesn’t let him. Because she’s not going to argue with him staring at a wall and trying to be all manly about it.
She sighs. “It matters a lot. You were trying to defy them and push your version of order and peace against theirs for twelve years. I…” She wants to tell him she’s sorry for never reading his short holonet messages closely enough to detect how much it took from him to be a good guy among bad ones and secretly thinking of him as a coward for not just doing the same she did.
He doesn’t let her, not yet, anyway. “Don’t, Virina.”
At some point in their conversation, she’d wanted to sit up, get away from his presence, at least a few centimeters. At this point in their conversation, she realizes it would have been the wrong thing to do. Instead of getting away from him, she turns around in his arm, to face him. “I’m sorry about never listening closely enough, Delvin Sandwalker, and I’m going to say so and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
She rather feels than hears him chuckle, his body still pressed closely to hers. In the faint light thrown from the chrono on her desk, she sees his outline, his face leaning over hers and if she didn’t know better she’d say he was trying to turn this around by grinning. But this really isn’t a grinning matter. “It’s not a bad thing to try and be a good guy, Delv. No matter where you are.”
There’s a low groan from him and she briefly considers abandoning this conversation and letting him go back to sleep but a part of her, the stubborn part that hadn’t rested until she’d defected, until he’d defected once and for all, makes her look at him with an unflinching gaze when he moves his fingers along her forehead to pull back a strand of hair. “There was exactly one reason why I defected, Vir.”
She swallows, is tempted to ask what that was but she knows better than to make him expose himself like that. Or herself. Instead, she offers, “That’s not true and you know it. Besides, if there was just one reason, why did you…”
“One reason why I defected. And one reason why I waited for twelve years.” One and the same, she thinks but the… raw look on his face tells her better than to say that out loud. She’d really like to blame it on the crappy lighting but the truth is, she knows him so well she’d know the look was there even if the room were pitch black dark.
Instead of replying, she reaches up to put her hand against his cheek. It’s an intimate gesture, something they don’t usually do, not even when they’re alone. Their gestures are the straight forward tomorrow we might die so let’s not waste tonight kind, the we wasted twelve years we need to catch up with kind. So it’s a kind of miracle she did this. It’s another kind of miracle that he doesn’t immediately brush her off and stomp out of the room.
Instead, he just grunts and roughly turns his head, first rough stubble and then rough, dry lips rasping against her palm. He takes her hand and pushes it away a lot gentler than she would have ever given him credit for and bends down to kiss her. She expected hunger and neediness, like he always gives her, the physical equivalent of this loss of words that seems to grip him whenever he looks at her like he wants to tell her something.
She gets something she can’t define. It’s deliberately slow, that much she can tell. It includes tongue and one hand braced on the pillow next to her head to support Delv’s weight and the other sliding along the side of her body, down and along her legs… oh good Gods, he’s moving to cover her body with his while keeping on kissing her, now neck and crook and shoulder and hitching up her leg, settling between her thighs.
Rhythm, now. Rhythm and rough hands and rough lips and painful desperation she feels like it were her own and then it is and she wishes this would be faster, they’d make it end, because it’s never been like this, should never have been like this, was never supposed to…
When it’s over, it doesn’t register for a long while, because her heart’s beating too loud and her breathing’s too erratic to hear her own thoughts. Or maybe it’s Delv’s heart and Delv’s breathing.
In the end, it doesn’t matter.
He’s lying next to her and she can hear him breathing, hear his heart beating. No one who ever knew her, Delv the most, would ever call her a sentimental person and she isn’t. But even she knows something changed. Nothing big, but she can somehow feel it in the way he tightens his hold on her just before falling asleep or how her head fits in the crook of his neck.
She forbids herself to ponder it. It’s late at night - hers, anyway - and she’s been awake long enough. She never really got an answer to her question but the thing that just happened told her clear enough that she really doesn’t want to know the answer. Or maybe that was the answer.
Either way, she’s suddenly very tired and Delv is solid and all engulfing. She feels save with him and she always has and maybe that should have been answer enough anyway. As she turns to face him, she puts a small kiss to his naked chest that’s answered by one of his hands being buried in her hair. That’s the only invitation she needs to finally, finally fall asleep and so she does.
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: T
Genres: het
Recipient: yappichick
Prompt: Star Wars, Delvin Sandwalker/Virina Moren, Triggerfinger - I Follow Rivers
Summary: It’s been a slow day. Slow days are never good for her. Slow days make shadows larger and havens smaller and the shadow of Delv’s loyalty is always the biggest shadow.
A/N: Holiday Fic Request Meme. This one is for yappichick who did the amazing art work for my 2011 Het Big Bang story, Not in Kansas Anymore, a Stargate/Star Wars crossover. I don't think having read it is a requirement for this story but I think it adds a little something. I do think, though, that this story can still stand on its own because the main info about the characters is actually given in the story. (it's all OC, though, so if that isn't your thing... everyone else, I'd love you to give this story a chance :))
Run Deep, Run Wild
"He's a message, I'm the runner
He's the rebel, I'm the daughter waiting for you
You're my river running high, run deep run wild
I, I follow, I follow you deep sea baby
I follow you
I, I follow, I follow you, dark boom honey
I follow you."
Triggerfinger, "I Follow Rivers"
There’s no night and day on a space ship, just shifts and off-time and shifts again so saying "she'd been lying awake the entire night" is basically bantha shit but that doesn't make it any less real that Virina Moren is lying awake when she's supposed to be sleeping according to piloting regulations of the great Alliance to Restore the Republic Navy.
Has been for at least four hours now, ever since Delv fell asleep squished next to her in her bunk after exhausting himself with trying to make it another night to remember. Didn't quite work out but that's not why she still can't sleep. (Virina knows how it is to come back from a mission all bruised and battered and filled with unrest that you need to shake off, only to find five minutes of shaking are enough to deplete the rest of your resources. It happened to her often enough ever since Carida.)
It’s been a slow day. Slow days are never good for her. Slow days make shadows larger and havens smaller and the shadow of Delv’s loyalty is always the biggest shadow.
It’s not that she doesn’t trust him, she does, with her life. It’s just that he’s been with the Empire for twelve years and twelve years are not nothing. Twelve years in the Empire’s service are a whole lotta bucket of brain washing. She’d left after four and it had taken her two more to start trusting herself again.
It’s been five months since they pulled him away from the Empire and two since they started resolving the tension that had probably always been there into something much more satisfying and she keeps wondering what’s going on his head. She should know it because she’s known him since her first week on Carida. They went through the same grueling training, the same indoctrination, the same pain and still she wonders what’s going on in his head now that he’s killing the people he’d been killing others together with just five months ago.
Shifting uncomfortably, she feels his arm around her midriff shift with it and hears a disgruntled little grunt from behind her. She’s sorry for disturbing the sleep he probably needs badly after coming back from a mission that cost him half his company but something makes her nervous, makes her restless.
Maybe it’s the stares he gets from people outside of his command, outside of the circle of people that seem to be devoted to him, hanging onto his lips and walking into their deaths happily because they know he’ll be the first to greet it. Stupid idiot always has to lead from the front and still people that don’t serve under him stare at him and whisper “Imperial stormtrooper” and “danger” and “killer” behind his back. As if Rebel pilots and soldiers have never killed a being themselves.
Maybe it’s that she can’t shut up the voice inside of her that whispers the same when she kisses Delv and invites him into her cabin and shoves him into the closed door with a needy groan because she can’t waste a minute as soon as they’re on the same ship. That voice snares and sneers and asks questions she doesn’t want to hear, doesn’t want to have answers to. It keeps snaring and sneering and asking all the time, never leaves her alone. Makes her life hell.
Behind her, she feels a subtle change in Delv’s body, a slight tension in his muscles that hadn’t been there a moment ago and she heaves a silent little sigh. She opens her eyes, abandoning the attempt at falling asleep and stares into the darkness that’s only alleviated partially by the red glowing numbers on the chrono on her desk. It occurs to her that even though she doesn’t want the answers to those questions, she probably has to ask them anyway. She swallows.
“Do you ever regret leaving the Empire?”
There’s no reaction from him, not at first anyway. Then there’s a dark, low growl, his voice raspy with sleep and weariness that makes her regret she opened her mouth in the first place. “Do you?”
It takes her by surprise because no one ever asked that of her but maybe that came with being drafted into ferrying special ops teams around pretty early. In special ops, no one ever asks questions like that. “I never had reason to,” is all she can think of and, “I only regret I didn’t leave earlier.”
He doesn’t answer, only tightens his arm around her midriff but she can feel that he hasn’t gone back to sleep yet. Which is only confirmed when he does growl, “What’s going on, Virina?”
It’s never Virina. It’s always Vir or Mor but never Virina with him. It’s been once, when she told him she would defect and there was nothing he could do about it. He’d looked at her, a strange mix of astonishment and disappointment on his face and he’d looked at her like that for a very long moment before saying, “Don’t get yourself killed, Virina.”
She’d been disappointed because she’d hoped he’d come with her and it took her all until she’d found herself on a rebel ship after a very risky defection in the middle of a space battle before she realized just how much she must have meant to him that he hadn’t shot her on the spot, not to mention betray her plan to anyone.
She’s pretty sure he knows exactly what this is about. And still she feels an urge to say, “Why did you leave, Delv? After twelve years why did you leave?”
It’s a good question, she thinks, and he must be thinking the same. It’s why it takes him so long to answer that she’d think he’s fallen asleep again if she didn’t feel him breathing slightly irregular in her back. “What does it matter?” That’s not an answer and he knows that.
“Delv.”
A low growl again, this time definitely out of frustration. She knows she should let this lie but there’s no way she can now. She’s already in too deep. “Some people are slower to see the light than others. You’re a Dug in a pod racer. I’m a space slug. Case closed.”
For some reason, something in his voice gives her pain, deep in her heart. It’s not his gruff tone or his curt manner; she’s used to that and he’s right to use it. Middle of the night is just not the best of times for this kind of conversation. It’s what he didn’t say, she thinks. It’s that pitch when he said that some people were slow to see what’s right and what’s wrong and the way how he said he was one of those. Because that just isn’t true.
In the dark, her hand searches for his and squeezes it. “You were trying to defy the system from within, weren’t you?” She wishes her voice hadn’t been so low, so broken because that’s a good thing to do. A good and a futile thing but it honors him that he tried to hold it up for so long.
“What does it matter, Vir?” He makes a move, probably tries to turn around to face the wall but she doesn’t let him. Because she’s not going to argue with him staring at a wall and trying to be all manly about it.
She sighs. “It matters a lot. You were trying to defy them and push your version of order and peace against theirs for twelve years. I…” She wants to tell him she’s sorry for never reading his short holonet messages closely enough to detect how much it took from him to be a good guy among bad ones and secretly thinking of him as a coward for not just doing the same she did.
He doesn’t let her, not yet, anyway. “Don’t, Virina.”
At some point in their conversation, she’d wanted to sit up, get away from his presence, at least a few centimeters. At this point in their conversation, she realizes it would have been the wrong thing to do. Instead of getting away from him, she turns around in his arm, to face him. “I’m sorry about never listening closely enough, Delvin Sandwalker, and I’m going to say so and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
She rather feels than hears him chuckle, his body still pressed closely to hers. In the faint light thrown from the chrono on her desk, she sees his outline, his face leaning over hers and if she didn’t know better she’d say he was trying to turn this around by grinning. But this really isn’t a grinning matter. “It’s not a bad thing to try and be a good guy, Delv. No matter where you are.”
There’s a low groan from him and she briefly considers abandoning this conversation and letting him go back to sleep but a part of her, the stubborn part that hadn’t rested until she’d defected, until he’d defected once and for all, makes her look at him with an unflinching gaze when he moves his fingers along her forehead to pull back a strand of hair. “There was exactly one reason why I defected, Vir.”
She swallows, is tempted to ask what that was but she knows better than to make him expose himself like that. Or herself. Instead, she offers, “That’s not true and you know it. Besides, if there was just one reason, why did you…”
“One reason why I defected. And one reason why I waited for twelve years.” One and the same, she thinks but the… raw look on his face tells her better than to say that out loud. She’d really like to blame it on the crappy lighting but the truth is, she knows him so well she’d know the look was there even if the room were pitch black dark.
Instead of replying, she reaches up to put her hand against his cheek. It’s an intimate gesture, something they don’t usually do, not even when they’re alone. Their gestures are the straight forward tomorrow we might die so let’s not waste tonight kind, the we wasted twelve years we need to catch up with kind. So it’s a kind of miracle she did this. It’s another kind of miracle that he doesn’t immediately brush her off and stomp out of the room.
Instead, he just grunts and roughly turns his head, first rough stubble and then rough, dry lips rasping against her palm. He takes her hand and pushes it away a lot gentler than she would have ever given him credit for and bends down to kiss her. She expected hunger and neediness, like he always gives her, the physical equivalent of this loss of words that seems to grip him whenever he looks at her like he wants to tell her something.
She gets something she can’t define. It’s deliberately slow, that much she can tell. It includes tongue and one hand braced on the pillow next to her head to support Delv’s weight and the other sliding along the side of her body, down and along her legs… oh good Gods, he’s moving to cover her body with his while keeping on kissing her, now neck and crook and shoulder and hitching up her leg, settling between her thighs.
Rhythm, now. Rhythm and rough hands and rough lips and painful desperation she feels like it were her own and then it is and she wishes this would be faster, they’d make it end, because it’s never been like this, should never have been like this, was never supposed to…
When it’s over, it doesn’t register for a long while, because her heart’s beating too loud and her breathing’s too erratic to hear her own thoughts. Or maybe it’s Delv’s heart and Delv’s breathing.
In the end, it doesn’t matter.
He’s lying next to her and she can hear him breathing, hear his heart beating. No one who ever knew her, Delv the most, would ever call her a sentimental person and she isn’t. But even she knows something changed. Nothing big, but she can somehow feel it in the way he tightens his hold on her just before falling asleep or how her head fits in the crook of his neck.
She forbids herself to ponder it. It’s late at night - hers, anyway - and she’s been awake long enough. She never really got an answer to her question but the thing that just happened told her clear enough that she really doesn’t want to know the answer. Or maybe that was the answer.
Either way, she’s suddenly very tired and Delv is solid and all engulfing. She feels save with him and she always has and maybe that should have been answer enough anyway. As she turns to face him, she puts a small kiss to his naked chest that’s answered by one of his hands being buried in her hair. That’s the only invitation she needs to finally, finally fall asleep and so she does.