Snips and Skyguy: Return of the One Shots

Markings

anxiety_banana's new chapter put me in a mood.... A SELF INDULGENT CUDDLES MOOOOOOOD (well more like self indulgent head massage but YEAH)

She's already asleep, so really, he can stop now. But he doesn't want to. 

It's hard to notice the little things from a distance; the brightness of her eyes, the slight shrug of her shoulders when she smiles, the way that she curls her top lip up to playfully bare her fangs at him while his hair falls into his eyes as he looks down at her head in his lap. But tonight, he had been able to see that all.

"Headache?"

"Yeah."

"Well I was planning on staying up to watch this program anyways, so you can lie here for awhile if you'd like. Do you want a massage?"

She had, awkwardly stumbling up onto his mattress, warm from the unnecessary amount of blankets and pillows that he always slept with. She'd let him move her head onto the thighs of his outstretched legs, eyes shutting the moment that he'd begun tracing her forehead markings with the tip of his finger.

Now, she's fully asleep on him, the holo humming quietly on the wall by the foot of the bed, the podracing show over, a news program taking its place.

He shuts it off with a flick of his hand and lets his head fall back against the wall behind himself, just for a moment, just to rest his eyes.

But a moment seems to turn into two, and two to three, and suddenly it's much darker than before and something is shifting, making the mattress rise slightly in the absence of its weight.

"Snips, no," he says, patting the spot on his lap where she just had been lying, seconds ago. He opens his eyes, tilts his head to the side and sees her creeping across the floor, on her way to her own quarters, he thinks. 

She freezes at the sound of his voice.

His eyes travel to the chrono on his nightstand.

An hour. He's slept for an hour, Ahsoka for just about two.

He's going to ask if she's feeling any better—offer for her to stay—but she's already crawling back beneath his covers, just as he slides down the wall and lets his head hit one of the pillows.

She takes hold of the hand that he still has above the blankets and places it on her forehead, a somewhat-delirious look in her eyes just before she closes them. He smiles and begins the same pattern from earlier, dragging his index and middle fingers down, out, and then back in again as he traces the lines at the top of her head, interrupted by the half-diamonds in the middle. Then, he uses his pinky and thumb to apply pressure to the white, full diamonds on either side, pressing a kiss to the space between when he's finished.

He pulls back and cups her cheek with one hand, letting his thumb brush around the edges of the winged marking facing the ceiling, and then urging her head off of the pillow to do the same to the one on the other side.

They look like butterflies, he thinks, spreading their wings and flying—thriving and growing, just like his little padawan.

He wants to keep her safe, protected in a locked place that only he has the key to, but he knows that he can't because, though she's his padawan, she isn't his property. And no matter how much he loves her, no matter how much he wants to hold her and keep her out of harm's way forever, butterflies are born to fly.

Fly away, sometimes, that is.

He pulls her head to his chest with one arm and kisses the valley between her montrals. Maybe he can't keep her safe on the battlefield, but he can keep her safe here, in their most quiet of moments, where everything feels warm and fuzzy, like a tight hug.

One day, she'll fly away from him, to a place where he can't protect her at every moment. But that day is not today.

"If you love something, let it go free. If it doesn't come back, you never had it. If it comes back, love it forever." — Douglas Horton

BESTIES WE ARE HAVING REVELATIONS THERAPY WAS AMAZING TODAY AND I HAVE BEEN EDUCATED ON THIS THING CALLED ATTACHMENT STYLES AND APPARENTLY MINE IS "ANXIOUS ATTACHMENT STYLE" ALSO IM A GRYFFINDOR AND I HAVE MOMMY ISSUES AND ITS A PROBLEM