Yeah.

Well, I'm not going anywhere.

A loving and entirely non-verbal expression of the same.

(He is so good! She loves him so much!)

He loves her too!

(He also, incidentally, loves crepes. And bacon.)

It is some pretty excellent bacon, yeah.

Eventually, breakfast is done, and she needs to get dressed. There isn't much in the way of decisions to be made about it, though; nearly everything in her wardrobe is black, with very little variance in cut or fabric - the Sith equivalent of jeans and tee shirts, with a few dresses and other fancy things tucked away in the back.

Getting dressed is good practice, right?

He'll just...take care of that. Maybe a little slower than he needs to.

She sees what he's doing there, and finds it amusing.

(She's not expecting him to get much practice today once her master shows up; maybe a little, but he needs to be familiar with how she reacts to things before he can take over very much.)

...oh, right. That part.

want me to stay for everything?

She gives their connection a wiggle and sends him the feedback: it's not going anywhere. I can undo it, but. That's going to be an effort, if and when it happens. For now, it's much easier to let him stay than to cut him off.

The feeling of happiness and relief when he realizes they're tied together like that is...maybe misplaced, but very present.

Yeah, she's pretty happy about it too.

They are on a little bit of a deadline, though - not much of one, but she suspects she doesn't want to know what happens if she's still dithering over clothing when her master shows up.

...okay, good reason to hurry up.

He hurries up.

And then they're dressed. They have a bit of time, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, if he wants to read some poetry or mess around in the gym again or something while they wait.

Might as well see for himself what's in those books.

They're neatly organized; it's mostly poetry and engineering - especially lightsaber design - with smaller collections of short stories, travelogues, philosophy, and miscellaneous Sithy skills.

He picks a book of poetry at random and opens it.

“How often”, she asked me the night before
“Do you think it’s okay to fall apart?”

We live in a “break it, you pay” kind of culture

A handle falls off of
A coffee mug and suddenly- the entire thing is useless. We lean to sweep evidence beneath the rug, throw broken pieces into a paper bag and never think about them again.

The Japanese knew another way. They mended their broken vases with gold, aggrandized the sharp corners and turned shards of broken pottery into basins that hold light
Together.

But here, there’s no room for mistakes.

We give up so easily- on broken toys, snapped piano legs, on each other- and we make believe that even our tongues are bulletproof, as if we are stronger than what these fragile bones can take.

We don’t forgive our broken bowls. We don’t learn to piece them back together. We trip over our own skeletons.

And sweep them back beneath our skin; collect the splattering of our sorrows and flush them down the toilet like

Secrets. Were so ashamed of that which fumbles and falls through our fingers that we forget that

There’s another way; another way instead of going through our days buying coffee at five A.M. And fucking above the covers while rattling and spilling over, our insides bleeding from all the damn glass.

We were never taught that
By the end our lives, we didn’t have to be made of a hundred million cracks. We were never taught that we could have it differently, that we could piece ourselves back together with light,

That our bodies could burn from the inside out.

[source]

He reads it over and over again.

The light spills over inside him.

(She loves him so much.)

(She is so glad that he's okay.)

He knows that no matter how much he cracks, she'll put him back together.

And...he'll do the same for her. He promises himself that he'll learn how. (He knows she can feel it, and that means he's promising her, too.)

He is so good she loves him so much. (It's a surprise, over and over again, to be seen as someone to be taken care of, to be valued that way.)

It's a surprise to feel like he can take care of someone. Especially someone like her.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's not even a conscious decision, to go curl up under her blanket and just be, all cozy, with him; it just sort of happens.

It's a good thing to have happened. They're warm and it feels safe here and it's good.

Yeah. Mmmmm.