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Even if Ferrix were warmer than the drool hanging off a wampa’s chin, Cassian can’t imagine the people less bundled and stiff than they are.
He’s pondering this while showering in Brasso’s flat, watching the foamy soap and water race down his legs as it rinses him of a heady amalgam of sweat, oil, smoke, and stale alcohol that seems to have plastered itself into every crevice of his body, even those that the grease-thick air of the hotel kitchens couldn’t have reasonably permeated.
Brasso himself has always been the warm sort; it’s not only what kept Cassian plastered to his side throughout his early years on Ferrix, but what brought him orbiting back after all he’d endured on Sipo and Mimban. Sturdy is what the older generation always calls him; it’s high praise, though not without a great deal of expectation, coming from a culture of people who know they’ll all be bricks one day.
Cassian never earned such an epithet in the eyes of the general public. Even as an adult, he’s “The Andor’s boy” to most (“girl” to a small handful of folks who Cassian might’ve made regret their choice of words had he not finally begun to grow into a face that made those particular offenders seem like they’d lost their grasp of the Basic language as a whole), Cassian to others, Kassa to even fewer. Nobody that he wants to speak to right now, especially.
A biting itch in his underarm pulls him out of deep thoughts to attend to it, as well as to realize that the water has started to cool down degrees below an acceptable temperature. He speeds through the rest of his bathing and flips the water off with his thumb.
He’s glad that he doesn’t have to fumble around searching for the right switch on the panel like he did the other night at Sondreen’s. She’d laughed at his plight, offering no help, but his consolation had come in the way she’d let him plaster his sopping wet frame onto hers in revenge, play-fighting until they came to a mutual agreement— terms decided mostly by her— that his back would be getting better acquainted with the ‘fresher floor.
Again, he’s called away. This time, it’s a dull knock on the door that interrupts his recollection of how Sondreen last had her way with him. He whips a towel around his hips, obscuring a good half of the round bruises that paint a map of where she ventured. He relaxes when the door stays firmly in place and the steam is given no entry into the hall. Brasso would never cross that boundary, he remembers, not unless the building was about to come down on them.
“Don’t come in,” he says anyway. Can never be too careful.
From the hall, Brasso snorts loud enough for Cassian to hear it over the thrumming of the extractor fan. “Wasn’t planning on it,” he says, “would you just hand me my toothbrush?”
Once Cassian is assured that the towel is going to remain secure around his hips, he pushes the fogged mirror aside to snatch up a blue toothbrush from amidst med bottles and shaving cream and a bottle of clear fluid with the label half peeled off that he notes with a double take. He picks up a crumpled tube of toothpaste as an afterthought, as he figures Brasso won’t get much use out of the frayed blue and white bristles alone. He cracks the sliding door and passes Brasso’s toiletries through, keeping his torso pressed to the panel and hidden from view although he knows Brasso would never look.
It’s that very attitude that still feels alien to whatever long shadow of his still reaches itself back through the mid-rim to Kenari. More specifically, whichever part stretches back far enough to touch the Kenari he knew for a few tender years before the off-worlders came; before their mines choked his world in smog. There aren’t many memories, but he’s fought over the years to try and excavate those buried under the rubble, and through the haze of early childhood he can recall sitting in the bathhouse with his ear pressed close enough to hear Tita’s heartbeat under her breast.
He remembers chasing after Kerri, his baby sister hardly a toddler back then, both of them slipping and stumbling as they trailed water all across the warm stone floors surrounding the shared baths. He remembers shrieking with laughter as Papa scooped them both up in arms that had once seemed big and strong enough to carry mountains. They’d been scolded for running, but Mami was laughing near tears when Papa finally wrangled them back into the bath and plodded back to the steam room he’d been called out of to sort out his disruptive children.
She’d sat Kassa at her side while Tita held onto Kerri, keeping them apart to ensure that at least some part of the evening would be peaceful. Mami wove braids into Kassa’s wet curls, like she did whenever she had the time. All these years later and Kassa never got the hang of making those neat, efficient braids.
Memories of the forest camp are stronger than those from before the smog, and he remembers multiple instances of Kerri asking him to put her hair in braids, where she’d sit cross-legged in front of him with her back straight in a posture filled with hope, where she’d always be a little disappointed with his best attempts, but she’d hug him anyway, thumping his back with the doll that she kept permanently grasped in a grip too tight for a hand so small.
He doesn’t know when he sat down, but in the present he’s curled in on himself, the towel feeling somewhat lacking as his only armor. He knows that even big, wonderful, warm Brasso is a stranger to those mundane things that Kassa once held dear.
If he told Sondreen or Karlah (but not Bix, his mind supplies quite unhelpfully) that his earliest concrete memory was of getting dressed for The Longest Night with Mami and Tita and asking Tita why her breasts hung lower than Mami's, of her beaming until her eyes became one with the wrinkles around them, joking that all her wisdom weighed down on her and made her sag, they’d probably wrinkle their noses. He knows they'd ignore the sentiment of the story for the sake of making it clear they were perturbed by the thought of an elderly woman's breasts.
He said to Bix once that the problem most Ferrixians of their shared generation seemed to have in their view of sex was that they’d never gone to a public bathhouse with their grandmothers, and she’d laughed, stating that maybe “granny boobs”, as she’d said, were the cure all along to Ferrix’s constipated social attitude regarding anything even resembling nudity. He still agrees; the older generations seem to flag down the barest hint of a body as inherently sexual, and his peers have only followed suit as they’ve grown older. As much as he’s attracted to Sondreen, he feels a little swell of pity knowing that between him and her there won’t ever just be casual, comfortable coexistence in the nude.
With the girls he’s had, and the boys, and even with a few nonconforming hotel patrons who’s names or gender identity he never had the time to learn before they were off-world again, nudity seems to be an invitation to them rather than just another state of being. He’s spent more than his fair share of time wondering if that’s why a certain selection of neighbors he resents the Andor home’s proximity to still refuse to consider him a man, that they only know the body as a fragile and static piece of stone, a brick to be buried under too many layers to count, not as an ever-changing part of nature.
“We change every day,” Tita said to him once when he was small enough to fit in her lap. Her voice is gone from his mind, replaced by the silent echo of his own internal monologue trying to imitate her words in Kenar and stitch Basic over top of them. “The river doesn’t flow quite the same way it did when I was your age, and one day you’ll be as old as me, and maybe it will have carved its way just a little closer to the village than you remember it.”
He wonders what she would think of him now. He’s certainly changed. Observing a pink-red bruise the shape of Sondreen’s mouth marked into the inside of his thigh, just above his knee, he wonders how the man who’s sitting on the ‘fresher floor in the aptly-named grapplers’ district could be made of the same skin and bones as the child that Tita loved and taught and looked at like he was made of starlight. If she could see him now, would she be more appalled by the haircut or the black bars on his calf, courtesy of Sipo?
Another knock.
“I pay rent for this flat, you know,” Brasso complains through the door, “I should at least have the right to use my own ‘fresher.”
Cassian scratches at the grout between the floor tiles. The pattern is identical to that of the brick walls and roads that span across the city like a stone and mortar exoskeleton, but beneath him the tiles are smooth like river rocks.
“... Cass, you alright?” Brasso’s voice is worlds away from wherever Cassian’s gone.
Tita’s spirit is of the forest and the river, now, as are those of his parents and the countless friends, cousins, and neighbors who were claimed by the mines. Had Maarva never taken him, he assumes he may have joined the forest as well.
Clem’s body is stone; a fact which Cassian is reminded of daily even though he and Maarva both take the long way around the square at Rix Road when they walk through town. The memory lurks in the pitying gaze of elderly neighbors, and the way they dance on eggshells around the topic only makes it more obvious what hangs in the air like a toxic cloud. Stone and Sky, the chant goes, but neither one could hope to imitate his home when both are so cold.
A dull thud that sounds like a forehead butting the door reminds him that at least something is warm on this planet. He aims a soap puck and hits the switch for the door head-on.
Brasso grunts as the door slides open, jostling him from where he was leaning on it. His heavy frame stalls on the threshold, wavering much in the way he might if Cassian were a particularly bitey tooka he was trying not to frighten. His mouth opens, then closes without a word. He’s not the silent type that Cassian has been since before he ever set foot on Ferrix, quite the opposite around the scrapyards, but the early years of their friendship were forged in a crucible of quiet understanding.
Sturdy isn’t a bad way to describe the man walking on gentle footsteps to stand at the sink above Cassian’s head. He listens to the tinny sound of tap water flowing, splashing against the basin as Brasso washes his hands and face, and he resolves to focus on a colorful bruise blooming over Brasso’s shin. He’d ask, but he can assume it came from work. Rather than pry verbally, some long-ignored impulse flares up, so rapid and intense that he doesn’t process it until he’s prodding a finger at the center where the skin is purple. Above him, Brasso hisses, and the water shuts off.
He watches the floor again, in all its stagnant glory, while the rustle of a towel tells him Brasso is done with washing up. If it were anyone else beside him, he’d try to force himself not to tighten his posture, to not show them the places where he’s weakest. He huddles in on himself like a child as Brasso crouches down to his level, though, and there’s some comfort to be found in curling into a ball when he knows he can trust the person watching it happen. If he trusted Brasso even a fraction less than he does, then the windowsills of this flat and Brasso’s old family home would have a fraction of the scuffs and scratches his boots have left behind over the years.
“Listen,” sighs Brasso, “whatever your mother said…”
“She loves me, I know,” Cassian grumbles into the crux of his elbow, head tilted away from Brasso, whose retort comes in the form of a familiar cuff to the back of his head.
“Not what I was gonna say. She does love you, and you know it, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be wrong.”
That one surprises him enough to look up into Brasso’s eyes, finding them soft and earnest in a way that makes him all too aware of his own vulnerability in this moment. Say it again, some part of his mind dares to plead in silence, I can’t hear it enough. He slumps against Brasso’s side instead, and Brasso, in all his irritatingly well-timed wisdom, knows not to touch back.
From the day Brasso took him to see Clem’s stone on Rix Road, Cassian, who knew only that his future was uncertain and grim, knew one thing about his fate for certain; He would never be a brick. To the very vocal minority of Ferrix who insisted they would never accept him into the community, it would seem a rightful punishment for the crime of being born somewhere brighter. To Maarva, it would seem a rejection of all she’d tried to do to make him feel at home here.
To him, though, it’s a way of clinging white-knuckled onto the last shreds of his homeworld that haven’t fallen through his hands, like fine sand on the riverbed where he and two of the older children, the only cousins of his who’d been declared too young to be taken to the mines, had pushed Tita’s funeral shroud out into the current just days before the disaster. There weren’t enough lir’yo flowers in the whole forest to memorialize everyone they lost to the mines, but unlike the ones who had died under stone and rubble, at least Tita’s spirit had gone back to the forest where it belonged.
When he dies—which despite his twenty-one odd years he figures he might any day, be it by blaster or the flu that plagues Ferrix each year or some freak salvage yard accident—he's determined not to end up trapped in a wall on a cold damp street. Let him be dust on the wind that blows across the golden bears’ fur, that rustles in the trees. He can only hope that some fragment of him will find its way into the current of the Kenar Kas. He doesn’t want to be memorialized in stone, to become a memory in a wall, a name that was never his carved into the face of a planet that didn’t make him.
When all is said and done, he wants to go home , and if it’s the only way he sees Kerri again... Well, then maybe by that time he’ll have sorted out all the ways he wants to say he’s sorry. Maybe by then all the scattered particles of him will have joined back together to make something new. Something that deserves her forgiveness.