oh, and this
Jul. 2nd, 2018 11:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineI still haven't quite caught up with my ad astra cross-posts, so ... the next:
title: per ardua ad astra (19/?)
verse: Death Star
characters: Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor, others; Jyn/Cassian
stuff that happens: Jyn and Cassian deal with the fallout of Zekheret's murder.
previous chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen
Cassian stayed quiet for a good minute. Jyn, more comfortable with silence than speech, had no difficulty waiting him out.
At last, he said, “Disposing of a corpse is not the way I would have chosen to be … useful to you.”
“Not the way I would have chosen to fight, either,” returned Jyn. She lifted her eyes, unsurprised to find him earnest and somber. He looked very much as he had those weeks (days?) ago in the hangar, saying every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget—
“I’ve never done that before,” she added.
“Killed someone?” said Cassian, understandably taken aback.
She almost laughed. “No. I don’t know how many people I’ve killed. But not like that, never. I don’t … I knew him.”
His fingers tightened on hers, painlessly. In a very quiet voice, he said, “I understand.”
Her eyes burned worse than ever. She had to hold them wide open, breathe through the choking tightness in her throat.
“I know. I know you do.”
Jyn looked at Cassian, wearier than she had been since the terror of that first day. The dependency that had unsettled her a day ago seemed nothing now, the palest triviality. What did it matter? By day, their unwavering partnership carried them from one breath to the next. By night, it cocooned them in comfort and something like intimacy. They were dependent on each other, for now. Why pretend otherwise?
Cassian seemed to feel the same, or near enough to pass for the same. For a time that Jyn couldn’t have measured had she cared about its length, they relapsed back into easy silence. Or—of course it wasn’t easy at all, not after today, and Alderaan. Natural silence, both scarcely moving but for the occasional exchanged glance or stroke of hands. Zekheret’s final idiocies rolled through her head, and the splash of his body, and how she’d never liked him because he was such an arse, but utterly human in it. She still didn’t like him, he’d just been …
Useful. Jyn tolerated his entitlement and callousness and raw stupidity because he was talkative. All the more with a pretty girl, and Efrah looking on. She used him, then discarded him when he became a liability.
A laugh bubbled up in her throat. Saw would be proud.
Your father would be proud of you—
She acknowledged the thought, and pushed it away, because she could think of nothing else to do. Long ago, her mother had taught her that, or tried. Probably it was warped beyond recognition, filtered by that ragged childhood. Nevertheless, she focused on the faint sounds around her, the white noise of machinery and electricity, the shifts in their bodies and low, matched breaths. The cold metal of the table, the warmth of Cassian’s hands, the catch of her scars against his smooth skin, yet matched in the familiar calluses along the palms. A spy’s hands above, a sniper’s beneath.
Jyn opened her eyes to grey, and darker grey, and the occasional white. Cassian’s shirt, the edges of their blankets. Near black for his dresser and his hair, brown in the fringe falling about her face and his eyes and the lid of the laundry chute.
At some point, sleep seemed a possibility. Jyn disentangled herself and went looking for her sleep-clothes. Only after she draped them over her arm did she realize that Cassian might think—something. But when she glanced his way, he was just pulling out his own clothes.
With a sense of distant relief, she went to the fresher, changed, then sat blankly on her bed and waited for Cassian. She didn’t want to be alone. After last night, though, maybe—not that she’d pushed him away, she just slept in her own bed, a perfectly normal thing to do. And the shower would hardly swallow him up. It was only that she found it easier to rest when she could see him or hear him or touch him, or all at once. Dependency be damned: she had lost enough.
When Cassian emerged, Jyn blinked up at him, her mind still blank. She didn’t mind; she’d rather it turned off altogether.
He headed over to her, then hesitated.
“Do you need”—a shrug encompassed the galaxy—“anything?”
“Probably,” said Jyn.
Cassian considered her for a long moment, then turned away so sharply that she recoiled despite herself. It even cut through her haze, up until he headed back to her, one hand closed over something she couldn’t see, the other carrying a nutrient milk.
He sat down beside her and opened his hand, tipping some pills into hers. The sedatives?
Jyn frowned. “I don’t need …”
“Just for tonight,” said Cassian. “You’ll need your rest for tomorrow, all right? There are going to be questions.”
Right. Tomorrow. She gazed at the little tablets in her hand.
His voice went tight. “Jyn, you can trust me.”
That sliced through the fog of her thoughts, too.
“What?” She lifted her eyes to his, incredulity flaring in her, all the more at the frozen stillness of his face. “Of course I trust you. It’s … I don’t like …”
Cassian’s expression relaxed and he passed over the nutrient milk. “Yes, well, neither did I.”
Graciously ignoring that, Jyn popped the pills into her mouth and gulped them down with the milk. By the time that their tang faded from her tongue, her thoughts had already drifted back to the—the event.
“Do you think they’ll find the body?” she asked, staring straight ahead. “I suppose it depends on how often they check the compactors. And how recognizable it would be after compaction.”
He drew a deep breath. “Jyn—”
“I don’t imagine the stink will give it away. The trash smelled worse, and that disappeared when it closed back up. Maybe he’ll just decompose down there.”
“Jyn,” said Cassian, his hand grasping her shoulder, “don’t.”
She glanced at him, then looked quickly away. “I can’t help it.”
“You need to lie down,” he told her. “Find something else to think about until the sedatives start to work, or talk about, if that’s easier.”
“Talking is never easy,” muttered Jyn, but she scooted a few inches back. Cassian, however, only shifted slightly, one hand half-curled, half-splayed beside his leg. Every line of his body seemed rigid, while somehow giving the impression that he might bolt at any moment.
She waited a beat, and sure enough, he wet his lower lip. The lights had started to dim with their quadrant’s manufactured evening, but Jyn thought she saw his colour rise.
“What?” she demanded, somewhere between puzzled and impatient.
“Nothing,” said Cassian hastily, drawing back and setting his hand on his thigh. It clenched into a fist, his breath going harsh.
“Obviously,” Jyn said. Alderaan? Something else?
He twitched, then caught his lip between his teeth. “I, uh …” His fingers spread out again. “You don’t have to … I mean, if you mind, then I … I’ll understand, but I … ”
She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him so viscerally uncomfortable. He avoided her eyes, his own glance slanted away, fixing on the blanket spread beyond her rather than her face, flicking aimlessly to the wall, her pillow, back to his own lap, the folded-up table, laundry chute, fresher drawer. What the hell did he want from her? It couldn’t be trivial, to leave him fumbling the request so badly, plainly expecting refusal yet asking anyway, at a moment like this—
Oh.
“I don’t mind,” Jyn said, not quite willing to acknowledge the relief that swam through her. She pulled down the corner of the blanket nearest the wall and crawled beneath, flopping onto her back. “It’s fine, just”—she tugged at the blanket—“hurry up. I’m cold.”
Cassian closed his eyes and exhaled, then managed a faint smile. “Thank you.”
After turning the lights the rest of the way down, he slid beneath her blanket ,and they adjusted themselves on her small cot. It had been awkward, those first few nights, finding ways to arrange limbs and bodies without too much. But they’d fallen into a little ritual of it by now, familiarity in the shifts they made about each other. Jyn dragged herself down, far enough that her arms—bent above her head—wouldn’t jab his face, while Cassian stretched himself out in a narrow line, hands folded on his stomach.
It felt almost too familiar, beyond what a couple days of greater ease could account for, reminding her of something altogether different. Not them at all. After seconds of fumbling through memories, she managed to grasp the right one: her parents, lying side-by-side on a blanket, watching the stars. Galen had started to point out the constellations to Jyn, explain but Lyra hushed him. Leave it, just let her look.
Cassian had said that, too, breathed leave it into her ear and propelled her into escape. Not at all the same, but it drew the memories together, the people: Galen and Lyra, Jyn and Cassian. In another life, perhaps they would be lying just like this, staring into a sky lit by stars, instead of the artificial nothingness of the Death Star’s nights.
“Do you ever imagine it?” she asked abruptly.
The darker darkness of Cassian’s head tilted her way. “Imagine what?”
“What we—what you’d be like, if things were different.” Jyn had to concentrate to bridge her thoughts. “Without the war, or … or if the Empire weren’t as bad.”
“No,” said Cassian. Hesitation rather than withdrawal coloured his silence, for all that she could hardly see him. He didn’t need to say that he knew no other life than this. “Do you?”
“Not much,” she admitted. “Not just me, anyway. But it’s different for you.”
His voice stayed even. “How?”
With sleep creeping on her, it was difficult—more difficult than usual—to frame it in words. “I was a soldier, and I liked it. It’s other things that were so, so … hard. But you’re not a soldier.”
Jyn stopped, but found no easier speech in the silence. Cassian didn’t help; he just waited, his breaths uninterrupted.
“I didn’t mean—of course you’re actually a soldier, sort of, it just—it’s not right. Not for you.”
That did manage to extract a response. “You can’t know that, Jyn.”
“Yes, I can,” she insisted. “I’ve seen it before. People like you.” Jyn scowled in the general direction of his head. “If you say there’s no one like you, I’ll punch you.”
There wasn’t, as far as she’d known, not in an overall way. She didn’t imagine he’d known people like her, either. It was just obnoxious to say so.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” he said gravely.
She gave an unsteady nod. “All right. I mean people who … not personality, but, like you with Zekheret. Most people can get used to anything, but some, they … they’re not made for war.”
“I am,” said Cassian. “I chose this. I’m—this is who I am.”
“But you’d never have chosen it without the Empire,” she replied. “Right?”
The next silence fell heavier.
“Neither would you,” he said. “You hate letting individual wrongs pass when you could be doing something about them. It’s brawling you like, not war. If we didn’t need to fight for the whole galaxy, you’d be … I don’t know, mauling kidnappers.”
Jyn nearly giggled, which was definitely the sedative. But the idea of fighting people like that did appeal to something in the roots of her being. She’d much prefer it to maneuvering around Imperials, and even more to the life she’d lived with Saw. Maybe this didn’t fuck her up the way that betrayal and faithlessness did, or the same way as Cassian, but she supposed she wasn’t all that suited to this life, either.
“That’d be nice,” said Jyn. “But it’s still … I bet you wouldn’t have anything to do with mauling anyone at all. Maybe couldn’t even shoot a blaster.”
“Force forbid,” he murmured.
“You’d have to be fighting things, though. Like me. You’re like me, aren’t you?”
“In some ways.” Cassian cleared his throat. “Most of them.”
Warmed by muddled satisfaction, she swept on, “But you’re more about ... about big fuzzy ... things. More than ones right here. Right there. A cause and all that. You’d always have one. And rules, you’d fight with rules.”
After a pause, he asked, “Are you insulting me or complimenting me?”
Jyn didn’t deign to answer. “A lawyer,” she decided. “Sentient rights or something. You’d like that much better.”
A much longer pause followed her.
“Yes,” Cassian said at last, sounding surprised. “I would.”
Obscurely satisfied, Jyn yawned and stretched her arms above her.
“Maybe,” she mumbled, “someday, we’ll …”
Another wave of dazed exhaustion swept over her, and Jyn curled up, burying her head in his shoulder without much thinking about it. Closing her eyes, she slept.
For hours more, Cassian did not.
Jyn woke without the pleasant haze of Cassian’s sedatives, but with the rather more pleasant haze of Cassian’s body. She was half-sprawled over him, face pressed into him, with her arm folded over his chest and the centre of his sleeping-shirt grasped in her fist. Cassian himself must have been awake long enough to notice; his arm lay over her back, his hand against her neck.
With someone else, she would have been surprised, furious, knowing what the tangle of their bodies must mean. With Cassian, she felt only a moment’s curiosity, wondering how it had happened. He wouldn’t have taken advantage; after a month, she knew that. Beyond trust, his part in the half-embrace was tentative rather than intrusive, his arm slung up to her shoulder and hand cupping her head. He seemed positioned to brace her more than anything else; Jyn had a strong suspicion that he hadn’t wanted her to wake up.
Someday—after—
She dared not follow the thought. Hope was one thing, expectation quite another. But it reminded her of something she couldn’t quite pin down. Had someone said … she had a good memory, but she couldn’t recall. It must have been last night; she remembered staring up at the vacant ceiling, something about soldiers, then nothing.
Jyn set that aside, focusing on the present. If she had to face this horrible day, there were worse ways to begin it than intertwined with a person she loved, and his hand in her hair. It would be the easiest thing in the world to kiss him awake.
Jyn considered his sleeping face, then jabbed him in the chest.
“What the—”
She sprang out of bed and headed for her drawers. “Time to face the music.”
“The music?” he said, rubbing his eyes. He still looked tired. “What music?”
“Consequences,” said Jyn. She glanced back, then immediately repressed the image of Cassian in her bed, hair and clothes rumpled. “Do you need the fresher before I shower?”
“No, go ahead.”
They did sound like her parents. Again, she shoved the thought away. It wasn’t all that difficult; she just narrowed her attention to Zekheret’s body, that last fraction of a moment before Cassian shot him, the smell of the trash compactor.
As Jyn washed her hair, her mind flicked through eventualities. Nobody had come for them, and the Empire was not slow to act; she had experience to attest to that. They must not have found the body, or at least not associated it with Jyn and Cassian.
Good, she supposed.
After Cassian dressed, they checked the time and discussed scenarios and alternatives until they left for breakfast. Jyn rather hoped to miss Efrah, but instead, found her hunched at the usual table, alone.
“Morning,” said Jyn.
Efrah gave a bare nod to Jyn and scarcely more to Cassian. “Lyr. Captain Willix. Have you seen Zek? Apparently he didn’t report last night.”
“No,” Jyn replied, bile in her throat. She didn’t look at Cassian, and didn’t imagine his face would reveal anything right now.
“If I recall correctly,” he said calmly, “some other guards mentioned that he left before the end of his shift. I didn’t see a need to go out of my way for correction; we had some trouble with the camera systems at the time.”
Efrah tapped her fingers against the table. “It wouldn’t be all that unusual for him to leave his shift early. I’m sure you’ve noticed that discipline is not exactly severe here.”
“We’re used to it,” Cassian said.
Reluctantly, Jyn stirred herself to take up her share of the burden. “The Citadel was hardly better. The Rebels didn’t have much of a problem sneaking in, I’m afraid.”
With a disinterested nod, Efrah said, “But he’s never failed the final check-in. For all I know, he went exploring deeper in the Star and got lost—I wouldn’t put something like that past him. It just seems strange.”
“Very strange,” Jyn acknowledged.
“And he had that stinger in his cap about some plot or another,” said Efrah. “I don’t know. Usually, he waits around to pester me.”
By force of will, Jyn managed not to grimace.
“I can believe it.”
“I’ll order a search if he doesn’t appear for his shift today,” Cassian said.
Just as firmly, Jyn refused the gulp that itched at her throat. “We’ll discover the truth then.”
Imperials turned out to be about as good at searching as they were at mini-blaster manufacture. The scouts summoned to drag Zekheret to the brig—nobody but Efrah seemed to doubt that he’d wandered off on his own—scanned the halls, fanned out into the deeper corridors, but turned up nothing. They detected a life form in the compactor, but apparently expected to find it, and didn’t bother searching further.
“What the hell is down there?” Cassian muttered, once they dragged themselves back to their quarters. She’d never seen him so baffled.
“No idea,” said Jyn, peeling her jacket off. Now, the decent-quality wool itched at her, every moment of every hour. Only force of will kept her from burning the whole thing up. But she did remember wondering at the slurp in the compactor as they’d tossed Zekheret into it. “Think it ate him?”
They glanced up at each other, equally grim.
“No idea,” Cassian replied.
Neither tried to shield each other from the raw repugnance of the whole thing, or water it down. Nor did they risk telling Bodhi. They could only endure, together.
And they did. They talked over possible suspicions together, how they might respond to enquiry, to accusation and capture. Jyn’s thin identity would not bear close examination. They carefully did not talk about Alderaan, though Jyn dreamed of it by night, more than of Zekheret. Cassian, she suspected, dreamed of it by day, too; when they relaxed as far as they could in their quarters, he sometimes went vacant and staring. Jyn just cleaned her blasters and waited for it to pass, then moved onto another discussion, spoken or unspoken.
Without exchanging another word on the subject, they slept curled in Jyn’s bed each night.
Officially, Zekheret was classified as away without leave. Unofficially, those few with an interest in him assumed he’d ventured too far into the labyrinthine halls of the outermost layer of the interior shell, and either starved, suffocated, burned, or fallen to his death, depending on the location. It wasn’t unprecedented, apparently. Another one of her father’s legacies.
On the second day, Jyn had forced herself to touch Efrah’s shaking hand, as sympathetically as she could. She did feel it, as far as she felt for anyone except Cassian and Bodhi, and of course for herself. But during those first few days, everything outside their quarters seemed alternately surreal and terrifying.
By the fourth, her fog started to clear. They’d escaped their worst danger so far; they might escape yet. She felt almost cheerful as Cassian started running through Kay’s data chip on their terminal, searching for damage to the code.
“How is it?” she muttered, smoothing her gloved hands over her trousers. It wasn’t suspect, she told herself. Nobody would be surprised at a supposed robotics expert—maybe a real one—evaluating the code for a valuable droid.
“Some damage,” said Cassian, and disappointment burned from throat to gut. “But it’s base code.”
Jyn dredged up what little she knew of droid workings. Slicing hadn’t exactly prepared her for the restoration of one of the Empire’s most deeply encrypted models.
“You can find that in any KX unit?” she asked.
He nodded. “And my notes at home.”
Home. It seemed very far away, right now. But Yavin 4 had never been home, anyway. Jyn had no idea if the Rebellion would even welcome her; the plans, as far as she could tell, were still lost. Bodhi, at the least, would have known about an attack, and never mentioned it in his regular updates. Perhaps Princess Leia knew. But with Zekheret’s disappearance, and tighter security than ever, they dared not risk it.
As long as the plans remained lost, they would live—and how many would die? But she didn’t let that linger long, fixing her attention on here, now. It was enough to see Efrah withdrawing into herself, hollow-eyed; to see Cassian combing through Kay’s code, nothing yet irreparable; to gather as much information as she could observe, and bury it on the datapad, ciphered to Scarif and back.
Jyn didn’t think Efrah had returned Zekheret’s feelings. Still, there were many kinds of love. When Efrah told them that she was being reassigned to Admiral Motti’s flagship, it came rather as a relief. A danger, too, of course, but almost worth it to escape her grief, and her suspicion of something worse than the search had uncovered.
Sometimes she thought of turning to Cassian as they lay together, of scraping her teeth over his skin, pressing herself to him, finding some comfort in his body. She didn’t think he would turn her away. Even by day, he drew as unconsciously near as she did, clasped her hand whenever she reached for his, seemed as anxious at separation and jolted by unexpected touch as Jyn herself.
But she dared no disruption to what peace she had, if something went wrong. And in her more honest moments, she admitted that she didn’t want that. Not right now, not because they were afraid and desperate and had little else, not because of what they’d seen and done and escaped together. Not like this.
On the fifth day from Zekheret’s death—no, murder—Jyn and Cassian stood at the main terminal, somewhat restored to their usual mix of boredom and terror. She idly looked through the datapad’s encyclopedia, periodically questioning Cassian about his progress with Kay and delivering commands into the speakers.
They lifted their heads without much interest when the doors opened. But immediately, their attention sharpened.
Two stormtroopers led a Wookiee—a Wookiee—into the detention area. Oddly, the stormtroopers seemed of noticeably different heights: one quite tall, the other barely regulation height, if that.
“Prisoner transfer from Block One-One-Three-Eight,” said the smaller stormtrooper, sounding distinctly nervous even through the helmet.
The princess’s block. Had the Rebellion come at last? For Princess Leia, of course, not them, but it didn’t matter. She just would have thought they’d send people more … competent, unless Cassian was parsecs better than the entirety of Rebel Intelligence. Not impossible.
Jyn turned to Cassian, but he was staring fixedly at the Wookiee, then flicking his glance to the cameras.
The Wookiee was the Rebel?
Both the stormtroopers had tensed up, but the Wookiee growled something, and the taller one shook his head at the other. Jyn nearly rolled her eyes.
“There is only one prisoner in Block One-One-Three-Eight,” said Cassian, voice edged with Willix’s distinct blend of pleasantness and pomposity. “Lyr, fetch her.”
“Yes, sir,” Jyn replied. Maybe, if they were very lucky, she would never call him that again. She allowed Lyr a glower at his back, at which the Wookiee gave a sound that she suspected was amusement, and allowed herself a scattered appeal to the Force.
After staring at the princess’s cell number more times she could count, Jyn needed no reminding of the code. Heart racing, she punched it into the cell’s panel.
The door slid open, revealing a girl in white, curled up on what went for a bed—more like a bench. Immediately, she sat up, and eyed Jyn with contempt.
Jyn nearly returned it. She scarcely believed that this girl in impractical robes, even more impractical coils of dark hair over her ears, and a face still rounded with baby fat, could possibly be Cassian’s protégée.
“Who are you?” demanded Princess Leia.
The princess had received the plans, hopefully knew where they might be relocated, and withstood the destruction of her homeworld and probable torture. Nothing else mattered, Jyn decided.
She took off her cap.
“I’m Jyn Erso,” she said, “and I’m here to rescue you.”
title: per ardua ad astra (19/?)
verse: Death Star
characters: Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor, others; Jyn/Cassian
stuff that happens: Jyn and Cassian deal with the fallout of Zekheret's murder.
previous chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen
With a sense of distant relief, she went to the fresher, changed, then sat blankly on her bed and waited for Cassian. She didn’t want to be alone. After last night, though, maybe—not that she’d pushed him away, she just slept in her own bed, a perfectly normal thing to do. And the shower would hardly swallow him up. It was only that she found it easier to rest when she could see him or hear him or touch him, or all at once. Dependency be damned: she had lost enough.
Cassian stayed quiet for a good minute. Jyn, more comfortable with silence than speech, had no difficulty waiting him out.
At last, he said, “Disposing of a corpse is not the way I would have chosen to be … useful to you.”
“Not the way I would have chosen to fight, either,” returned Jyn. She lifted her eyes, unsurprised to find him earnest and somber. He looked very much as he had those weeks (days?) ago in the hangar, saying every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget—
“I’ve never done that before,” she added.
“Killed someone?” said Cassian, understandably taken aback.
She almost laughed. “No. I don’t know how many people I’ve killed. But not like that, never. I don’t … I knew him.”
His fingers tightened on hers, painlessly. In a very quiet voice, he said, “I understand.”
Her eyes burned worse than ever. She had to hold them wide open, breathe through the choking tightness in her throat.
“I know. I know you do.”
Jyn looked at Cassian, wearier than she had been since the terror of that first day. The dependency that had unsettled her a day ago seemed nothing now, the palest triviality. What did it matter? By day, their unwavering partnership carried them from one breath to the next. By night, it cocooned them in comfort and something like intimacy. They were dependent on each other, for now. Why pretend otherwise?
Cassian seemed to feel the same, or near enough to pass for the same. For a time that Jyn couldn’t have measured had she cared about its length, they relapsed back into easy silence. Or—of course it wasn’t easy at all, not after today, and Alderaan. Natural silence, both scarcely moving but for the occasional exchanged glance or stroke of hands. Zekheret’s final idiocies rolled through her head, and the splash of his body, and how she’d never liked him because he was such an arse, but utterly human in it. She still didn’t like him, he’d just been …
Useful. Jyn tolerated his entitlement and callousness and raw stupidity because he was talkative. All the more with a pretty girl, and Efrah looking on. She used him, then discarded him when he became a liability.
A laugh bubbled up in her throat. Saw would be proud.
Your father would be proud of you—
She acknowledged the thought, and pushed it away, because she could think of nothing else to do. Long ago, her mother had taught her that, or tried. Probably it was warped beyond recognition, filtered by that ragged childhood. Nevertheless, she focused on the faint sounds around her, the white noise of machinery and electricity, the shifts in their bodies and low, matched breaths. The cold metal of the table, the warmth of Cassian’s hands, the catch of her scars against his smooth skin, yet matched in the familiar calluses along the palms. A spy’s hands above, a sniper’s beneath.
Jyn opened her eyes to grey, and darker grey, and the occasional white. Cassian’s shirt, the edges of their blankets. Near black for his dresser and his hair, brown in the fringe falling about her face and his eyes and the lid of the laundry chute.
At some point, sleep seemed a possibility. Jyn disentangled herself and went looking for her sleep-clothes. Only after she draped them over her arm did she realize that Cassian might think—something. But when she glanced his way, he was just pulling out his own clothes.
With a sense of distant relief, she went to the fresher, changed, then sat blankly on her bed and waited for Cassian. She didn’t want to be alone. After last night, though, maybe—not that she’d pushed him away, she just slept in her own bed, a perfectly normal thing to do. And the shower would hardly swallow him up. It was only that she found it easier to rest when she could see him or hear him or touch him, or all at once. Dependency be damned: she had lost enough.
When Cassian emerged, Jyn blinked up at him, her mind still blank. She didn’t mind; she’d rather it turned off altogether.
He headed over to her, then hesitated.
“Do you need”—a shrug encompassed the galaxy—“anything?”
“Probably,” said Jyn.
Cassian considered her for a long moment, then turned away so sharply that she recoiled despite herself. It even cut through her haze, up until he headed back to her, one hand closed over something she couldn’t see, the other carrying a nutrient milk.
He sat down beside her and opened his hand, tipping some pills into hers. The sedatives?
Jyn frowned. “I don’t need …”
“Just for tonight,” said Cassian. “You’ll need your rest for tomorrow, all right? There are going to be questions.”
Right. Tomorrow. She gazed at the little tablets in her hand.
His voice went tight. “Jyn, you can trust me.”
That sliced through the fog of her thoughts, too.
“What?” She lifted her eyes to his, incredulity flaring in her, all the more at the frozen stillness of his face. “Of course I trust you. It’s … I don’t like …”
Cassian’s expression relaxed and he passed over the nutrient milk. “Yes, well, neither did I.”
Graciously ignoring that, Jyn popped the pills into her mouth and gulped them down with the milk. By the time that their tang faded from her tongue, her thoughts had already drifted back to the—the event.
“Do you think they’ll find the body?” she asked, staring straight ahead. “I suppose it depends on how often they check the compactors. And how recognizable it would be after compaction.”
He drew a deep breath. “Jyn—”
“I don’t imagine the stink will give it away. The trash smelled worse, and that disappeared when it closed back up. Maybe he’ll just decompose down there.”
“Jyn,” said Cassian, his hand grasping her shoulder, “don’t.”
She glanced at him, then looked quickly away. “I can’t help it.”
“You need to lie down,” he told her. “Find something else to think about until the sedatives start to work, or talk about, if that’s easier.”
“Talking is never easy,” muttered Jyn, but she scooted a few inches back. Cassian, however, only shifted slightly, one hand half-curled, half-splayed beside his leg. Every line of his body seemed rigid, while somehow giving the impression that he might bolt at any moment.
She waited a beat, and sure enough, he wet his lower lip. The lights had started to dim with their quadrant’s manufactured evening, but Jyn thought she saw his colour rise.
“What?” she demanded, somewhere between puzzled and impatient.
“Nothing,” said Cassian hastily, drawing back and setting his hand on his thigh. It clenched into a fist, his breath going harsh.
“Obviously,” Jyn said. Alderaan? Something else?
He twitched, then caught his lip between his teeth. “I, uh …” His fingers spread out again. “You don’t have to … I mean, if you mind, then I … I’ll understand, but I … ”
She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him so viscerally uncomfortable. He avoided her eyes, his own glance slanted away, fixing on the blanket spread beyond her rather than her face, flicking aimlessly to the wall, her pillow, back to his own lap, the folded-up table, laundry chute, fresher drawer. What the hell did he want from her? It couldn’t be trivial, to leave him fumbling the request so badly, plainly expecting refusal yet asking anyway, at a moment like this—
Oh.
“I don’t mind,” Jyn said, not quite willing to acknowledge the relief that swam through her. She pulled down the corner of the blanket nearest the wall and crawled beneath, flopping onto her back. “It’s fine, just”—she tugged at the blanket—“hurry up. I’m cold.”
Cassian closed his eyes and exhaled, then managed a faint smile. “Thank you.”
After turning the lights the rest of the way down, he slid beneath her blanket ,and they adjusted themselves on her small cot. It had been awkward, those first few nights, finding ways to arrange limbs and bodies without too much. But they’d fallen into a little ritual of it by now, familiarity in the shifts they made about each other. Jyn dragged herself down, far enough that her arms—bent above her head—wouldn’t jab his face, while Cassian stretched himself out in a narrow line, hands folded on his stomach.
It felt almost too familiar, beyond what a couple days of greater ease could account for, reminding her of something altogether different. Not them at all. After seconds of fumbling through memories, she managed to grasp the right one: her parents, lying side-by-side on a blanket, watching the stars. Galen had started to point out the constellations to Jyn, explain but Lyra hushed him. Leave it, just let her look.
Cassian had said that, too, breathed leave it into her ear and propelled her into escape. Not at all the same, but it drew the memories together, the people: Galen and Lyra, Jyn and Cassian. In another life, perhaps they would be lying just like this, staring into a sky lit by stars, instead of the artificial nothingness of the Death Star’s nights.
“Do you ever imagine it?” she asked abruptly.
The darker darkness of Cassian’s head tilted her way. “Imagine what?”
“What we—what you’d be like, if things were different.” Jyn had to concentrate to bridge her thoughts. “Without the war, or … or if the Empire weren’t as bad.”
“No,” said Cassian. Hesitation rather than withdrawal coloured his silence, for all that she could hardly see him. He didn’t need to say that he knew no other life than this. “Do you?”
“Not much,” she admitted. “Not just me, anyway. But it’s different for you.”
His voice stayed even. “How?”
With sleep creeping on her, it was difficult—more difficult than usual—to frame it in words. “I was a soldier, and I liked it. It’s other things that were so, so … hard. But you’re not a soldier.”
Jyn stopped, but found no easier speech in the silence. Cassian didn’t help; he just waited, his breaths uninterrupted.
“I didn’t mean—of course you’re actually a soldier, sort of, it just—it’s not right. Not for you.”
That did manage to extract a response. “You can’t know that, Jyn.”
“Yes, I can,” she insisted. “I’ve seen it before. People like you.” Jyn scowled in the general direction of his head. “If you say there’s no one like you, I’ll punch you.”
There wasn’t, as far as she’d known, not in an overall way. She didn’t imagine he’d known people like her, either. It was just obnoxious to say so.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” he said gravely.
She gave an unsteady nod. “All right. I mean people who … not personality, but, like you with Zekheret. Most people can get used to anything, but some, they … they’re not made for war.”
“I am,” said Cassian. “I chose this. I’m—this is who I am.”
“But you’d never have chosen it without the Empire,” she replied. “Right?”
The next silence fell heavier.
“Neither would you,” he said. “You hate letting individual wrongs pass when you could be doing something about them. It’s brawling you like, not war. If we didn’t need to fight for the whole galaxy, you’d be … I don’t know, mauling kidnappers.”
Jyn nearly giggled, which was definitely the sedative. But the idea of fighting people like that did appeal to something in the roots of her being. She’d much prefer it to maneuvering around Imperials, and even more to the life she’d lived with Saw. Maybe this didn’t fuck her up the way that betrayal and faithlessness did, or the same way as Cassian, but she supposed she wasn’t all that suited to this life, either.
“That’d be nice,” said Jyn. “But it’s still … I bet you wouldn’t have anything to do with mauling anyone at all. Maybe couldn’t even shoot a blaster.”
“Force forbid,” he murmured.
“You’d have to be fighting things, though. Like me. You’re like me, aren’t you?”
“In some ways.” Cassian cleared his throat. “Most of them.”
Warmed by muddled satisfaction, she swept on, “But you’re more about ... about big fuzzy ... things. More than ones right here. Right there. A cause and all that. You’d always have one. And rules, you’d fight with rules.”
After a pause, he asked, “Are you insulting me or complimenting me?”
Jyn didn’t deign to answer. “A lawyer,” she decided. “Sentient rights or something. You’d like that much better.”
A much longer pause followed her.
“Yes,” Cassian said at last, sounding surprised. “I would.”
Obscurely satisfied, Jyn yawned and stretched her arms above her.
“Maybe,” she mumbled, “someday, we’ll …”
Another wave of dazed exhaustion swept over her, and Jyn curled up, burying her head in his shoulder without much thinking about it. Closing her eyes, she slept.
For hours more, Cassian did not.
Jyn woke without the pleasant haze of Cassian’s sedatives, but with the rather more pleasant haze of Cassian’s body. She was half-sprawled over him, face pressed into him, with her arm folded over his chest and the centre of his sleeping-shirt grasped in her fist. Cassian himself must have been awake long enough to notice; his arm lay over her back, his hand against her neck.
With someone else, she would have been surprised, furious, knowing what the tangle of their bodies must mean. With Cassian, she felt only a moment’s curiosity, wondering how it had happened. He wouldn’t have taken advantage; after a month, she knew that. Beyond trust, his part in the half-embrace was tentative rather than intrusive, his arm slung up to her shoulder and hand cupping her head. He seemed positioned to brace her more than anything else; Jyn had a strong suspicion that he hadn’t wanted her to wake up.
Someday—after—
She dared not follow the thought. Hope was one thing, expectation quite another. But it reminded her of something she couldn’t quite pin down. Had someone said … she had a good memory, but she couldn’t recall. It must have been last night; she remembered staring up at the vacant ceiling, something about soldiers, then nothing.
Jyn set that aside, focusing on the present. If she had to face this horrible day, there were worse ways to begin it than intertwined with a person she loved, and his hand in her hair. It would be the easiest thing in the world to kiss him awake.
Jyn considered his sleeping face, then jabbed him in the chest.
“What the—”
She sprang out of bed and headed for her drawers. “Time to face the music.”
“The music?” he said, rubbing his eyes. He still looked tired. “What music?”
“Consequences,” said Jyn. She glanced back, then immediately repressed the image of Cassian in her bed, hair and clothes rumpled. “Do you need the fresher before I shower?”
“No, go ahead.”
They did sound like her parents. Again, she shoved the thought away. It wasn’t all that difficult; she just narrowed her attention to Zekheret’s body, that last fraction of a moment before Cassian shot him, the smell of the trash compactor.
As Jyn washed her hair, her mind flicked through eventualities. Nobody had come for them, and the Empire was not slow to act; she had experience to attest to that. They must not have found the body, or at least not associated it with Jyn and Cassian.
Good, she supposed.
After Cassian dressed, they checked the time and discussed scenarios and alternatives until they left for breakfast. Jyn rather hoped to miss Efrah, but instead, found her hunched at the usual table, alone.
“Morning,” said Jyn.
Efrah gave a bare nod to Jyn and scarcely more to Cassian. “Lyr. Captain Willix. Have you seen Zek? Apparently he didn’t report last night.”
“No,” Jyn replied, bile in her throat. She didn’t look at Cassian, and didn’t imagine his face would reveal anything right now.
“If I recall correctly,” he said calmly, “some other guards mentioned that he left before the end of his shift. I didn’t see a need to go out of my way for correction; we had some trouble with the camera systems at the time.”
Efrah tapped her fingers against the table. “It wouldn’t be all that unusual for him to leave his shift early. I’m sure you’ve noticed that discipline is not exactly severe here.”
“We’re used to it,” Cassian said.
Reluctantly, Jyn stirred herself to take up her share of the burden. “The Citadel was hardly better. The Rebels didn’t have much of a problem sneaking in, I’m afraid.”
With a disinterested nod, Efrah said, “But he’s never failed the final check-in. For all I know, he went exploring deeper in the Star and got lost—I wouldn’t put something like that past him. It just seems strange.”
“Very strange,” Jyn acknowledged.
“And he had that stinger in his cap about some plot or another,” said Efrah. “I don’t know. Usually, he waits around to pester me.”
By force of will, Jyn managed not to grimace.
“I can believe it.”
“I’ll order a search if he doesn’t appear for his shift today,” Cassian said.
Just as firmly, Jyn refused the gulp that itched at her throat. “We’ll discover the truth then.”
Imperials turned out to be about as good at searching as they were at mini-blaster manufacture. The scouts summoned to drag Zekheret to the brig—nobody but Efrah seemed to doubt that he’d wandered off on his own—scanned the halls, fanned out into the deeper corridors, but turned up nothing. They detected a life form in the compactor, but apparently expected to find it, and didn’t bother searching further.
“What the hell is down there?” Cassian muttered, once they dragged themselves back to their quarters. She’d never seen him so baffled.
“No idea,” said Jyn, peeling her jacket off. Now, the decent-quality wool itched at her, every moment of every hour. Only force of will kept her from burning the whole thing up. But she did remember wondering at the slurp in the compactor as they’d tossed Zekheret into it. “Think it ate him?”
They glanced up at each other, equally grim.
“No idea,” Cassian replied.
Neither tried to shield each other from the raw repugnance of the whole thing, or water it down. Nor did they risk telling Bodhi. They could only endure, together.
And they did. They talked over possible suspicions together, how they might respond to enquiry, to accusation and capture. Jyn’s thin identity would not bear close examination. They carefully did not talk about Alderaan, though Jyn dreamed of it by night, more than of Zekheret. Cassian, she suspected, dreamed of it by day, too; when they relaxed as far as they could in their quarters, he sometimes went vacant and staring. Jyn just cleaned her blasters and waited for it to pass, then moved onto another discussion, spoken or unspoken.
Without exchanging another word on the subject, they slept curled in Jyn’s bed each night.
Officially, Zekheret was classified as away without leave. Unofficially, those few with an interest in him assumed he’d ventured too far into the labyrinthine halls of the outermost layer of the interior shell, and either starved, suffocated, burned, or fallen to his death, depending on the location. It wasn’t unprecedented, apparently. Another one of her father’s legacies.
On the second day, Jyn had forced herself to touch Efrah’s shaking hand, as sympathetically as she could. She did feel it, as far as she felt for anyone except Cassian and Bodhi, and of course for herself. But during those first few days, everything outside their quarters seemed alternately surreal and terrifying.
By the fourth, her fog started to clear. They’d escaped their worst danger so far; they might escape yet. She felt almost cheerful as Cassian started running through Kay’s data chip on their terminal, searching for damage to the code.
“How is it?” she muttered, smoothing her gloved hands over her trousers. It wasn’t suspect, she told herself. Nobody would be surprised at a supposed robotics expert—maybe a real one—evaluating the code for a valuable droid.
“Some damage,” said Cassian, and disappointment burned from throat to gut. “But it’s base code.”
Jyn dredged up what little she knew of droid workings. Slicing hadn’t exactly prepared her for the restoration of one of the Empire’s most deeply encrypted models.
“You can find that in any KX unit?” she asked.
He nodded. “And my notes at home.”
Home. It seemed very far away, right now. But Yavin 4 had never been home, anyway. Jyn had no idea if the Rebellion would even welcome her; the plans, as far as she could tell, were still lost. Bodhi, at the least, would have known about an attack, and never mentioned it in his regular updates. Perhaps Princess Leia knew. But with Zekheret’s disappearance, and tighter security than ever, they dared not risk it.
As long as the plans remained lost, they would live—and how many would die? But she didn’t let that linger long, fixing her attention on here, now. It was enough to see Efrah withdrawing into herself, hollow-eyed; to see Cassian combing through Kay’s code, nothing yet irreparable; to gather as much information as she could observe, and bury it on the datapad, ciphered to Scarif and back.
Jyn didn’t think Efrah had returned Zekheret’s feelings. Still, there were many kinds of love. When Efrah told them that she was being reassigned to Admiral Motti’s flagship, it came rather as a relief. A danger, too, of course, but almost worth it to escape her grief, and her suspicion of something worse than the search had uncovered.
Sometimes she thought of turning to Cassian as they lay together, of scraping her teeth over his skin, pressing herself to him, finding some comfort in his body. She didn’t think he would turn her away. Even by day, he drew as unconsciously near as she did, clasped her hand whenever she reached for his, seemed as anxious at separation and jolted by unexpected touch as Jyn herself.
But she dared no disruption to what peace she had, if something went wrong. And in her more honest moments, she admitted that she didn’t want that. Not right now, not because they were afraid and desperate and had little else, not because of what they’d seen and done and escaped together. Not like this.
On the fifth day from Zekheret’s death—no, murder—Jyn and Cassian stood at the main terminal, somewhat restored to their usual mix of boredom and terror. She idly looked through the datapad’s encyclopedia, periodically questioning Cassian about his progress with Kay and delivering commands into the speakers.
They lifted their heads without much interest when the doors opened. But immediately, their attention sharpened.
Two stormtroopers led a Wookiee—a Wookiee—into the detention area. Oddly, the stormtroopers seemed of noticeably different heights: one quite tall, the other barely regulation height, if that.
“Prisoner transfer from Block One-One-Three-Eight,” said the smaller stormtrooper, sounding distinctly nervous even through the helmet.
The princess’s block. Had the Rebellion come at last? For Princess Leia, of course, not them, but it didn’t matter. She just would have thought they’d send people more … competent, unless Cassian was parsecs better than the entirety of Rebel Intelligence. Not impossible.
Jyn turned to Cassian, but he was staring fixedly at the Wookiee, then flicking his glance to the cameras.
The Wookiee was the Rebel?
Both the stormtroopers had tensed up, but the Wookiee growled something, and the taller one shook his head at the other. Jyn nearly rolled her eyes.
“There is only one prisoner in Block One-One-Three-Eight,” said Cassian, voice edged with Willix’s distinct blend of pleasantness and pomposity. “Lyr, fetch her.”
“Yes, sir,” Jyn replied. Maybe, if they were very lucky, she would never call him that again. She allowed Lyr a glower at his back, at which the Wookiee gave a sound that she suspected was amusement, and allowed herself a scattered appeal to the Force.
After staring at the princess’s cell number more times she could count, Jyn needed no reminding of the code. Heart racing, she punched it into the cell’s panel.
The door slid open, revealing a girl in white, curled up on what went for a bed—more like a bench. Immediately, she sat up, and eyed Jyn with contempt.
Jyn nearly returned it. She scarcely believed that this girl in impractical robes, even more impractical coils of dark hair over her ears, and a face still rounded with baby fat, could possibly be Cassian’s protégée.
“Who are you?” demanded Princess Leia.
The princess had received the plans, hopefully knew where they might be relocated, and withstood the destruction of her homeworld and probable torture. Nothing else mattered, Jyn decided.
She took off her cap.
“I’m Jyn Erso,” she said, “and I’m here to rescue you.”
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on 2018-07-03 12:53 am (UTC)no subject
on 2018-07-03 02:30 pm (UTC)