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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1szRnyH:
Dually inspired by Daisy Ridley’s post about PCOS and my own miserable condition on this fine day, I wrote a short piece to go between the current and next chapters of Can’t Go Home This Way.
2k, Rey POV, fixing up the ship and dealing with cramps. Poe’s an old married dude, he knows how this works.
(I’m going to collect all the weird little things I post here and put them on AO3 at some point, I’m just stumped as to how to structure it. Maybe I need to just make an Extras story. There might be a separate Prequel Extras story, LOL.)
Rey woke slowly, groggy. There were faint sounds, and her instincts dismissed them as expected and familiar, but it took her a long time to place them.
Right. The junkyard. The ship. They were trying to fix up the ship. Poe. Poe was helping. The little sounds were Poe moving around in the cockpit.
She smelled a faint hint of solder; he was fixing wiring. Good, his vision must be all right today. Tonight. Today?
He had refused to take the bed; he’d slept sitting up propped against the wall for a couple of hours in the afternoon while she worked, and when she’d found she couldn’t keep her eyes open, he’d told her he’d keep watch, and had sent her to bed.
She’d been unusually tired, so she’d agreed. By her internal sense of time, it had been a solid five or six hours since then, and was starting to get light out.
Her guts hurt like maybe she’d eaten something bad, and she curled into a ball and lay there for a little while, drifting and listening to Dameron scritching and shuffling around in the cockpit.
“Ow,” he said, sharp but quiet, and that was finally enough to make her raise her head.
“You ok?” she asked muzzily. He was sort of blurry, and she had to blink a couple of times.
He looked over at her. “Oh,” he said, “sorry, no, I’m fine, I just touched hot solder.”
“Burn yourself?” she asked, sitting up.
“No, it won’t even blister,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“I was awake,” she said, and oh wow her guts hurt, low and vicious, and her thigh muscles were weak with the strength of the pain. She doubled over, and let herself groan.
“You sound hung-over,” Dameron said.
“Tummy hurts,” she said. But even as she said it, she suddenly knew that it wasn’t something she’d eaten.
No, it was her goddamn reproductive system, which had never worked properly. This had happened once before. A month ago, in fact. Of course it had. She’d had menstrual periods before, but only irregularly. Now, the med droid had told her, as her nutrition levels improved, she was going to have them regularly, and they might be painful at first as her body’s hormone levels normalized.
“Did I feed you too much weird stuff?” Dameron asked.
“No,” she said, and made herself get out of bed and dig through the drawer for her bag, and find the supplies in there, and he’d definitely see but hopefully he wouldn’t recognize what they were because how would he know?
She staggered to the fresher with her little bag of supplies, and spent a horrified interlude being shocked at the whole process. It was so wasteful and dangerous to shed blood like that, and the blood was so weird and dark at first, the clots were so disconcerting, it was impossible to believe that she wasn’t dying, that this was somehow supposed to happen. It was so upsetting, it made her shake. She took a long time to get everything sorted, and a fresh pair of underpants, and she angrily scrubbed at the old ones, sure the stupid stain would never come out, how was this possibly normal. It was terrible. It was awful. It was the worst thing. There was no way that half of the galaxy’s human population put up with this every goddamn month.
She finally came out in a foul temper and got dressed. Dameron studiously kept his back turned; there was no privacy on this tiny ship, and she did the same for him when he changed his clothes, and it wasn’t awkward if they both pretended it wasn’t awkward, surely.
She fixed her hair, still angry, and came and slung herself into the co-pilot’s seat, since Dameron was sitting in the pilot’s seat working on the wiring.
He looked over at her. “Bad, huh?” he said.
“I’m fine,” she said, and called up the checklist he’d assembled for her, as she’d called out the various repair issues. Next on the docket were the stabilizers, and she would have to do those alone, because he couldn’t stand up well enough. Which was fine. Everything was fine and was going to be okay.
He bent very carefully and rummaged on the floor, then turned back and held out a container to her, and a spoon. “Breakfast,” he said, holding himself up with practiced ease as he rode out a bad dizzy spell.
She blinked at him, and took the container. It was a canister filled with some sort of lumpy goo, and as she opened it she sniffed tentatively at it. It smelled sweet. “What is this?”
“It’s a kind of grain thing,” he said, “and if you add water to it and let it sit it gets soft and gooey. Good substantial thing to start you off for the day. I put fruit preserves in it. I can find some plain if you don’t like that.”
“No no,” she said, and dug the spoon into it. “It smells good.”
“It’s good for you,” he said. “I could make caf too, I just didn’t.”
“I don’t really like caf,” she said. “So don’t worry about it.”
“Maybe we’ll have tea later then,” he said, smiling at her like this was some sort of secret he was telling her.
It took her a moment to realize she was smiling back. “Yeah,” she said, “maybe that’d be nice.”
She took her breakfast with her and finished it outside— it was sweet and savory and satisfying, and filled her stomach very nicely. Which helped with the gnawing pain down in her belly and thighs, somehow.
The muscle weakness in her thighs was really, really annoying. And it came and went a bit, but it never seemed to go far. “How do people live with this,” she asked the right stabilizer as she hung from the top of the craft to bang on it.
The stabilizer offered no answers.
Finally she slunk inside, exhausted even though she hadn’t worked that hard. It felt like her lower abdomen and legs and lower back were just all knots, and she wanted to cry with how much it hurt. It wasn’t like being injured at all, where you could focus and move past it; it was just too much of her body, and too constant, and too gnawing.
Dameron was lying under the dashboard when she came in. She dragged herself in and went to the ship’s tiny galley and put on a pot of water to make tea. Luke was really fond of tea, and she had gotten kind of a taste for it too.
Dameron backed out from under the dashboard after a moment, and she absently watched the muscles of the backs of his thighs and his rear end as he wriggled, then turned over and sat up. (He was very nicely-built, lean but not spare. Rey had never particularly noticed anyone’s rear end like that before.) He wobbled, and gave her a slightly-crosseyed look, his hair falling in his face as he steadied himself. “Hey,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“I figured I’d done enough work to deserve a tea break,” she said, and it hurt to stand, so she sat down on the floor as pain washed through her and left her thighs weak again.
He laughed. “Of course,” he said. He didn’t bother getting up, but just crawled across the small expanse of floor and planted his back against the cabinet next to her. “It’s a good time for a tea break. Hey, you look pretty peaky, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said, pulling her knees up to her chest and curling herself into the pain. It just. It just hurt, and it wasn’t fair, and how did people live like this.
He pulled himself to his feet and rummaged through things, getting the tea things ready, she realized. Good. Great. She didn’t have to move. She didn’t want to move. This was terrible.
He sat down again in a moment, and slid over very slightly to press his arm just barely against hers. Rey usually flinched when people touched her but this was different, it was just his arm, he wasn’t grabbing her at all and it wasn’t pushy, it was just kind of— supportive, maybe. She liked it. “Hey,” he said. “Is it period cramps?”
She looked over at him miserably. “How would you know about that?”
He laughed. “Just because I don’t personally own the equipment doesn’t mean I have no experience with it,” he said.
“I never used to have this problem,” she said.
He stared at her for a moment. “But now that you’re eating enough,” he said, with a soft grimness to his voice.
“Well,” she said, “yeah.” She raised her head and looked at him. “How do people live like this?”
“It gets better,” Dameron said. “Mostly. And also most people get a— there’s a shot you can get.”
“They wouldn’t give it to me,” she said. “Not until I’d. I guess. Normalized?”
He nodded slowly. “I guess that makes sense,” he said. “Sucks, though.” He shoved unsteadily to his feet again and went and rummaged in one of the cupboards set into the wall by the door. The water made the rumbling sound that indicated it was ready to boil, so she dragged herself upright, ascertained that it was steaming, and made the tea. He came back with a small handful of things from the medkit, and she brought the teacups with her as she sat down next to him.
“Take two of these,” he said, handing her a small packet, “under your tongue, and until they take effect you’ll want to hold this.” He broke one of the chemical heat packs and worked it between his hands, then shoved it into a conductive gel pack. They were usually used for cold, to ice injuries, according to the directions on the packet; Rey hadn’t realized they could be warm too.
“Hold it,” she repeated blankly, and took it between her hands, mystified.
He gently put his hand on it and shoved it down toward her groin, smiling very slightly. “Oh,” she said, and he took his hand away.
“Heat loosens muscle cramps,” he said, and she pressed it gingerly against her abdomen just above her pubic bone. “If your back is bothering you, shove it between your lower back and the wall for a couple minutes. Or if you want a second one you could put it in both places at once.”
The heat had instantly loosened some of the pain, and she stared at him in astonishment. “No,” she said, “this is good.”
He smiled, dazzlingly. “Good,” he said. “Now take the tabs.”
She obeyed. Once the tabs had dissolved, she said, “How do you know this?”
His smile went soft and a little sad. “Sometimes I know things,” he said.
They drank tea and he brought up the list again and they discussed it, and she noticed that he was really having trouble with his eyes, couldn’t read the list at all, and said, “Did you sleep?” and he put her off, but she persisted. Finally he agreed to lie down for a bit, but he still refused to take the bed. She eventually got him to curl up on the floor in a little pile of cushions, and tucked her heat pack in with him for safekeeping.
He looked like he was going to protest, but apparently thought better of it and pulled the heat pack in against his chest, curled around it, and passed out.
Dually inspired by Daisy Ridley’s post about PCOS and my own miserable condition on this fine day, I wrote a short piece to go between the current and next chapters of Can’t Go Home This Way.
2k, Rey POV, fixing up the ship and dealing with cramps. Poe’s an old married dude, he knows how this works.
(I’m going to collect all the weird little things I post here and put them on AO3 at some point, I’m just stumped as to how to structure it. Maybe I need to just make an Extras story. There might be a separate Prequel Extras story, LOL.)
Rey woke slowly, groggy. There were faint sounds, and her instincts dismissed them as expected and familiar, but it took her a long time to place them.
Right. The junkyard. The ship. They were trying to fix up the ship. Poe. Poe was helping. The little sounds were Poe moving around in the cockpit.
She smelled a faint hint of solder; he was fixing wiring. Good, his vision must be all right today. Tonight. Today?
He had refused to take the bed; he’d slept sitting up propped against the wall for a couple of hours in the afternoon while she worked, and when she’d found she couldn’t keep her eyes open, he’d told her he’d keep watch, and had sent her to bed.
She’d been unusually tired, so she’d agreed. By her internal sense of time, it had been a solid five or six hours since then, and was starting to get light out.
Her guts hurt like maybe she’d eaten something bad, and she curled into a ball and lay there for a little while, drifting and listening to Dameron scritching and shuffling around in the cockpit.
“Ow,” he said, sharp but quiet, and that was finally enough to make her raise her head.
“You ok?” she asked muzzily. He was sort of blurry, and she had to blink a couple of times.
He looked over at her. “Oh,” he said, “sorry, no, I’m fine, I just touched hot solder.”
“Burn yourself?” she asked, sitting up.
“No, it won’t even blister,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“I was awake,” she said, and oh wow her guts hurt, low and vicious, and her thigh muscles were weak with the strength of the pain. She doubled over, and let herself groan.
“You sound hung-over,” Dameron said.
“Tummy hurts,” she said. But even as she said it, she suddenly knew that it wasn’t something she’d eaten.
No, it was her goddamn reproductive system, which had never worked properly. This had happened once before. A month ago, in fact. Of course it had. She’d had menstrual periods before, but only irregularly. Now, the med droid had told her, as her nutrition levels improved, she was going to have them regularly, and they might be painful at first as her body’s hormone levels normalized.
“Did I feed you too much weird stuff?” Dameron asked.
“No,” she said, and made herself get out of bed and dig through the drawer for her bag, and find the supplies in there, and he’d definitely see but hopefully he wouldn’t recognize what they were because how would he know?
She staggered to the fresher with her little bag of supplies, and spent a horrified interlude being shocked at the whole process. It was so wasteful and dangerous to shed blood like that, and the blood was so weird and dark at first, the clots were so disconcerting, it was impossible to believe that she wasn’t dying, that this was somehow supposed to happen. It was so upsetting, it made her shake. She took a long time to get everything sorted, and a fresh pair of underpants, and she angrily scrubbed at the old ones, sure the stupid stain would never come out, how was this possibly normal. It was terrible. It was awful. It was the worst thing. There was no way that half of the galaxy’s human population put up with this every goddamn month.
She finally came out in a foul temper and got dressed. Dameron studiously kept his back turned; there was no privacy on this tiny ship, and she did the same for him when he changed his clothes, and it wasn’t awkward if they both pretended it wasn’t awkward, surely.
She fixed her hair, still angry, and came and slung herself into the co-pilot’s seat, since Dameron was sitting in the pilot’s seat working on the wiring.
He looked over at her. “Bad, huh?” he said.
“I’m fine,” she said, and called up the checklist he’d assembled for her, as she’d called out the various repair issues. Next on the docket were the stabilizers, and she would have to do those alone, because he couldn’t stand up well enough. Which was fine. Everything was fine and was going to be okay.
He bent very carefully and rummaged on the floor, then turned back and held out a container to her, and a spoon. “Breakfast,” he said, holding himself up with practiced ease as he rode out a bad dizzy spell.
She blinked at him, and took the container. It was a canister filled with some sort of lumpy goo, and as she opened it she sniffed tentatively at it. It smelled sweet. “What is this?”
“It’s a kind of grain thing,” he said, “and if you add water to it and let it sit it gets soft and gooey. Good substantial thing to start you off for the day. I put fruit preserves in it. I can find some plain if you don’t like that.”
“No no,” she said, and dug the spoon into it. “It smells good.”
“It’s good for you,” he said. “I could make caf too, I just didn’t.”
“I don’t really like caf,” she said. “So don’t worry about it.”
“Maybe we’ll have tea later then,” he said, smiling at her like this was some sort of secret he was telling her.
It took her a moment to realize she was smiling back. “Yeah,” she said, “maybe that’d be nice.”
She took her breakfast with her and finished it outside— it was sweet and savory and satisfying, and filled her stomach very nicely. Which helped with the gnawing pain down in her belly and thighs, somehow.
The muscle weakness in her thighs was really, really annoying. And it came and went a bit, but it never seemed to go far. “How do people live with this,” she asked the right stabilizer as she hung from the top of the craft to bang on it.
The stabilizer offered no answers.
Finally she slunk inside, exhausted even though she hadn’t worked that hard. It felt like her lower abdomen and legs and lower back were just all knots, and she wanted to cry with how much it hurt. It wasn’t like being injured at all, where you could focus and move past it; it was just too much of her body, and too constant, and too gnawing.
Dameron was lying under the dashboard when she came in. She dragged herself in and went to the ship’s tiny galley and put on a pot of water to make tea. Luke was really fond of tea, and she had gotten kind of a taste for it too.
Dameron backed out from under the dashboard after a moment, and she absently watched the muscles of the backs of his thighs and his rear end as he wriggled, then turned over and sat up. (He was very nicely-built, lean but not spare. Rey had never particularly noticed anyone’s rear end like that before.) He wobbled, and gave her a slightly-crosseyed look, his hair falling in his face as he steadied himself. “Hey,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“I figured I’d done enough work to deserve a tea break,” she said, and it hurt to stand, so she sat down on the floor as pain washed through her and left her thighs weak again.
He laughed. “Of course,” he said. He didn’t bother getting up, but just crawled across the small expanse of floor and planted his back against the cabinet next to her. “It’s a good time for a tea break. Hey, you look pretty peaky, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said, pulling her knees up to her chest and curling herself into the pain. It just. It just hurt, and it wasn’t fair, and how did people live like this.
He pulled himself to his feet and rummaged through things, getting the tea things ready, she realized. Good. Great. She didn’t have to move. She didn’t want to move. This was terrible.
He sat down again in a moment, and slid over very slightly to press his arm just barely against hers. Rey usually flinched when people touched her but this was different, it was just his arm, he wasn’t grabbing her at all and it wasn’t pushy, it was just kind of— supportive, maybe. She liked it. “Hey,” he said. “Is it period cramps?”
She looked over at him miserably. “How would you know about that?”
He laughed. “Just because I don’t personally own the equipment doesn’t mean I have no experience with it,” he said.
“I never used to have this problem,” she said.
He stared at her for a moment. “But now that you’re eating enough,” he said, with a soft grimness to his voice.
“Well,” she said, “yeah.” She raised her head and looked at him. “How do people live like this?”
“It gets better,” Dameron said. “Mostly. And also most people get a— there’s a shot you can get.”
“They wouldn’t give it to me,” she said. “Not until I’d. I guess. Normalized?”
He nodded slowly. “I guess that makes sense,” he said. “Sucks, though.” He shoved unsteadily to his feet again and went and rummaged in one of the cupboards set into the wall by the door. The water made the rumbling sound that indicated it was ready to boil, so she dragged herself upright, ascertained that it was steaming, and made the tea. He came back with a small handful of things from the medkit, and she brought the teacups with her as she sat down next to him.
“Take two of these,” he said, handing her a small packet, “under your tongue, and until they take effect you’ll want to hold this.” He broke one of the chemical heat packs and worked it between his hands, then shoved it into a conductive gel pack. They were usually used for cold, to ice injuries, according to the directions on the packet; Rey hadn’t realized they could be warm too.
“Hold it,” she repeated blankly, and took it between her hands, mystified.
He gently put his hand on it and shoved it down toward her groin, smiling very slightly. “Oh,” she said, and he took his hand away.
“Heat loosens muscle cramps,” he said, and she pressed it gingerly against her abdomen just above her pubic bone. “If your back is bothering you, shove it between your lower back and the wall for a couple minutes. Or if you want a second one you could put it in both places at once.”
The heat had instantly loosened some of the pain, and she stared at him in astonishment. “No,” she said, “this is good.”
He smiled, dazzlingly. “Good,” he said. “Now take the tabs.”
She obeyed. Once the tabs had dissolved, she said, “How do you know this?”
His smile went soft and a little sad. “Sometimes I know things,” he said.
They drank tea and he brought up the list again and they discussed it, and she noticed that he was really having trouble with his eyes, couldn’t read the list at all, and said, “Did you sleep?” and he put her off, but she persisted. Finally he agreed to lie down for a bit, but he still refused to take the bed. She eventually got him to curl up on the floor in a little pile of cushions, and tucked her heat pack in with him for safekeeping.
He looked like he was going to protest, but apparently thought better of it and pulled the heat pack in against his chest, curled around it, and passed out.
