Jyn/Cassian week, redux
Jul. 14th, 2018 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineThe prompts for the last two were "trust" and "yearn"; this chapter was my response to "tender" and "survive." Lots of fun with this part—including returning to bi!Jyn and grey-ace!Cassian. :)
title: like a storm in the desert (3/4?)
verse: everybody lives!
characters: Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso; vague OCs; Jyn/Cassian
stuff that happens: After Cassian's recovery and Jyn's official enlistment in the Alliance, they head off on their first new mission.
chapters: one, two
Zara Lannan was a poised, attractive, professional woman, married to a pleasant and respectable officer.
She’d spent the day talking over security codes with another Imperial programmer, smothering all trace of Jyn Erso—even as she silently thanked the Partisan who’d taught her slicing. Danna? Jyn thought the woman had been Danna, but she couldn’t remember all the names of the people who passed through the Partisans back then. Some got siphoned off into the Alliance; most died.
Zara, at any rate, was the sort of narrowly good-natured woman who disliked death and suffering, but talked vaguely about the rule of law and dismissed the rest as Rebel propaganda. Major Lannan, meanwhile, prided himself on the precision of his conduct while happily remote from actual warfare; he served on a quiet backwater planet that had seen no real change between the Republic and the Empire.
Lieutenant Erso and Commander Andor of the Rebellion heartily disliked them both. But the higher officers of Major Lannan’s sector had been summoned to a gathering (aka five-day party) with the local brass. Normally, the Rebellion took little interest in such a peaceful region, but the gathered happened to be taking place at Elis Place, which incidentally stored the sector’s personnel records. Draven wanted them for unknowable Draven reasons, so Jyn and Cassian buried themselves into Zara and Lannan, and endured.
On top of that, the Lannans were, obviously, married. The Alliance operatives stuck inside them were, back in the Rebellion, just as obviously lovers. But packed inside them were Jyn and Cassian, and they were nothing of the kind.
Well, maybe something of the kind. But certainly not—not—
Jyn opened her eyes in the near-dark, letting her gaze drift down the line of Cassian’s sleeping (maybe sleeping) body. The Lannans’ bed was easily twice the size of their own; where Jyn had considered Cassian’s commander’s quarters palatial, by her standards, these apartments were the real deal. Yet sleeping in this one, a good foot apart, felt more intimate, more dangerous.
Not that they ever woke a foot apart. Solidarity, she told herself. Partnership.
After all, partnership could mean many things.
Sometimes she let herself imagine what it’d be like as the real (“real”) Zara and Lannan. They’d been married for nine months. Zara might still thrill at pressing kisses to Lannan’s mouth and throat, at the taste and texture of his skin under her tongue and teeth. Lannan might greedily run his hands up from her waist, cup her breasts and bury his face in them, beard scraping over the soft skin and jagged scar. They might—
Not helping, Jyn.
And the worst part—all right. She was an adult woman with a healthy interest in all humanoid genders, and Cassian was a good-looking man. A very good-looking man. Most people had fantasies, fine. But she didn’t … it felt strange, all jumbled up with loyalty and partnership and just general affection. She never imagined it casual, a one-time thing or friendly convenience.
Not rough, either. It was slight brushes and cautious smiles that electrified her brain, his voice softening over her name, their usual ready glances turned shy and intense. An odd companionate gentleness seemed to fill her alongside the hunger, or threaded through it, or something, and—
Jyn couldn’t separate craving and caring, and somehow the mixture burned more than either alone. She’d never felt anything like this, never.
Jyn and Cassian spent three days establishing their bona fides. One day would have been enough for Jyn, but—better safe than dead. Or captured.
“Definitely better than being captured,” Jyn said, and Cassian gave a sympathetic nod, though he said nothing about how and where the Rebellion had snatched her up. They both knew her history perfectly well.
Their succession of easy agreements felt nearly as odd as the wistful longing that meandered through her. It never left, but it didn’t—it didn’t hurt, except as a pleasant ache, like sore muscles after a good bout.
On the fourth day, they maneuvered their way into a group of particularly obnoxious officers, trophy spouses, and a few more restrained others. The Lannans dutifully carried on their end of the conversation, Zara with barely (not at all) concealed irritation at every condescending question and smug dismissal of the war consuming most of the galaxy. When she excused herself, the more sensible of the others looked either sympathetic or at least comprehending.
She didn’t look back to check on Cassian; he could handle himself. But she heard a burst of laughter.
“Newlyweds, eh?”
“No,” he said evenly, “we’ve been married almost a year.”
“Heh, when Jorit and I—”
Jyn did actually slip into the washroom and repair infinitesimal smearing of the kohl around her eyes. Luckily, she even chatted briefly with another woman.
“I just needed some space to breathe, you know?” she said.
The other woman smiled.
“I do! But my partner will be missing me. Should I let your husband know you didn’t tumble into the abyss?”
“Thanks,” said Jyn. “It’s Major Lannan. I adore him, but I think I might murder some of his friends if I stick with him the whole night.”
The woman laughed and headed back.
To her surprise, the rest went off without a hitch. Jyn slipped away, found an unguarded terminal, and readily broke through what went for security while doing her best to look lost and confused. Copying the files over, she slipped them into Zara’s purse and wandered around with even more bewilderment until a guard directed her back to the ballroom.
Zara returned to find her husband still holding forth with his “friends,” several of whom looked increasingly desperate, but unable to think of a polite way to flee. Particularly, she suspected, because he outranked the bulk of them.
“There you are, sweetheart,” said Major Lannan (not Cassian, Jyn told herself), with a warm smile. She flushed. “What became of you?”
“I got lost,” Zara said sheepishly.
The men grinned at her. Her arrival, however, broke Lannan’s attention, and most of the others managed to make their escape not long afterwards. Predictably, the Lannans mumbled excuses for another departure, and slipped away together.
Making their way down the hall, they encountered no obstacles beyond an unexpected lieutenant. As they heard his footsteps on the way to their rooms, Cassian slipped an arm about Jyn’s waist, heat flaring along her skin even as she followed suit. For a brief instant, it reminded her of Scarif, half-carrying him out and knowing it would probably make no difference. But Cassian stood upright, his breath even and his knuckles tracing aimless little patterns.
If the lieutenant had meant to redirect them, he changed his mind as soon as he saw Cassian’s rank. Lannan’s. It was Lannan stroking her—Zara’s—waist, Lannan’s low laugh, Lannan flashing his insignia to sneak away with his pretty wife.
“I—I beg your pardon, sir,” the lieutenant said, as Cassian turned around.
“It’s my fault,” said Zara. “I, ah, needed my husband’s help with … something. We’ll be rejoining the others shortly.”
He repressed a look of amusement with little success. “Yes, ma’am. Well, I don’t want to get in your way.”
And that was that.
Laughing, they walked over to the lift and stumbled inside. Standing there in each other’s arms, making nonsense conversation she couldn’t even remember for any onlookers, she did think of Scarif. They’d stood almost like this as Jyn braced him with her body, the arm about his waist then at the back of his neck, in his hair. She’d kissed him then, in fear and desperation and the sheer force of emotion at his survival, his return, just how badly he was hurt. She imagined doing it again, his mouth warm instead of cold, eyes closed instead of pained. Zara would. Hell, the Rebels' idea of Lieutenant Erso would—why not?
Jyn’s gaze flickered to his mouth, lingered; Cassian’s mirrored hers, trailed down the same path. She could feel his breath against her, in his body and against her face; he must feel hers, and maybe it was her imagination, but she thought she could hear it, too, that bit heavier as he babbled on about some colonel.
But they were Jyn and Cassian, tender behind their double shells, and easily victorious rather than desperately so. They did nothing except look, and pretend to more.
In their quarters, they immediately released each other. In tandem, but Jyn felt a little colder nonetheless.
“Do you have it?” said Cassian, after they searched the apartment for bugs.
Jyn extracted the file from the purse, and held it between her fingers. “Got all the files, no problem. Draven should be happy.”
“Draven?”
They both grinned at each other, shyness gone.
For Jyn, for now, it was enough.
Neither Jyn nor Cassian cared for undercover missions, even quick sabotage operations, but they took as many as they could. Jyn, in particular, pressed Draven for them.
Everyone else gave her knowing looks that, all things considered, she found remarkably grating. Draven just sighed. But as long as they returned successful, he let them have their way. Or rather, he let Cassian have his way, and grudgingly accepted Jyn as a sort of appendage to him. She didn’t care for it, but she cared less for Kay’s gaping absence, and vacant KX droids didn’t go around finding themselves.
While they encountered the occasional sentient KX unit, they weren’t about to rip out those ones’ existences except in desperate circumstances. They needed a deactivated or unprogrammed one, which meant they needed access to Imperial storage, which meant going undercover.
They didn’t talk about it much. But now and then Cassian would remark, “Kay always says—said …” and flinch from himself.
(She suspected that he often flinched from himself, invisibly. Visibly, though: that was different. Jyn remembered the first year after her mother died, then the one after Saw abandoned her, and ached for Cassian and herself. They’d spent their lives in vicious harmony, the two of them.)
Now and then Jyn would say, “We’ll manage it,” or something equally uninspired. But Cassian required little for hope, however tentative. They fell back on their usual obstinacy with every success-coated failure, even the narrowest.
It took three months to find an acceptable posting with acceptable access to acceptable parts. A particularly long three months, in Jyn’s estimation.
In part, it was the always-uncertain thing between them, both nervously aware, neither quite willing to risk the foundation beneath. Jyn’s imagination ran wild, but only her imagination.
She’d encountered no previous lovers, no rumours, no anything. At first she assumed any others had transferred to another base or died, but it didn’t seem to be the case. To all appearances, until she took up residence in his quarters (less expansive now, because they were operating out of fucking Hoth), people who a) knew of his existence and b) hadn’t directly served under him looked on him as a sort of organic droid. Some of them still did, because they thought of Jyn that way, too. Not that she cared. She liked droids better than most organics, anyway.
But she did, sometimes, wonder if he just didn’t … feel anything, that way. Not shyness, not caution, but real disinterest. At other times, they found themselves gazing at each other or drifting into smiling synchrony, and—well, she didn’t wonder, then. Much.
The other thing that stretched out those first months, though, was far more of a strain. Draven wanted the personnel records because, in his words, they now had a prime recruiting opportunity.
Alderaan.
Not many Alderaanians had ever joined the Empire outright. But some. At least twelve or fifteen thousand of them had to be scattered across the galaxy; a good number had already defected. Others wavered. Jyn and Cassian passed from tracking down records to tracking down individuals, quietly laying groundwork, one by one by one.
She’d bludgeoned people to death, blown up factories, dirtied and bloodied her hands countless ways. Cassian, too. But hunting down and exploiting the survivors of planetary genocide remained one of the most distasteful things either had ever done.
They didn’t talk about that, either. But they let their faces speak for them, afterwards—and if their heads leaned a little closer, their arms brushed a little more, that was their business. They had their own channels of communication.
Then, after those three months, they simply found a security droid sitting in a dusty store room. Jyn could hardly believe their luck, and believed it still less when they checked and found it free of all data. But she couldn’t seriously believe it a trap; even if they were suspected of being Rebel spies, the amount of information required to identify Cassian specifically, and Cassian as the “owner” of a stolen security droid, searching for a replacement, seemed still more beyond belief.
She proved to be right. While they could hardly walk out with the thing, they cautiously disassembled it piece by piece, smuggling the individual components out to a decidedly perturbed Bodhi. The torso was the hardest; they finally just brazened it out and carted it away in full sight, claiming to be melting it down for ship parts.
Imperials could really be astoundingly stupid.
Then came the weeks of labour: Cassian worked on finishing the disassembly of the head to retrieve the datachip, while Jyn repaired and re-wired the legs and torso.
It wasn’t Kay. It wasn’t anything, just a vacant shell. But someday—
“It’s going to work,” she said, after a good two hours of companionate silence. She rubbed at her grimy face, achieving nothing; her hands and uniform were streaked with oil and grease and occasional chipped paint. Cassian, unfairly, was almost pristine, despite sitting nearby as he copied the long strings of code that comprised Kay’s sentience. “He’s survived, you’ll see.”
“Jyn,” he said quietly, and she turned to look at him, carefully keeping her filthy hands away from his clothes.
“Yes?”
He was gazing at her in the soft, dark way he did sometimes, his smile at once barely present and brilliant. Jyn’s pulse thudded in her throat, her gaze skittering down to his mouth, throat, chest, and back again. She knew she must look the same as he did.
It had happened before. In lifts, hangars, shuttles, in icy Rebel halls and colder Imperial ones. But this felt different, somehow, Cassian with his clean hands and glossy hair staring at her like an astronomer watching the stars.
He swallowed. “Thank you. I never … I can’t … Jyn, thank you.”
It seemed to encompass more than Kay. And more than Kay was a very great deal. But then, they both owed each other a very great deal.
Now, now. This time was different. And she was filthy, but—her gaze dropped to his mouth again.
“It’s nothing,” she said, her voice low and distant. “I want him back, too.”
And she couldn’t help herself. She let her grimy hand drop onto his knee, and through the layers of their snowsuits, let an answering shiver tremble through her. Then she leaned closer, with intent as well as the attraction that always drew them together.
“Jyn,” he said, and he always had something to say, but nobody said her name like that, not ever. There was nobody—
Cassian tilted his head down, hesitating centimeters away. But they’d hesitated long enough; Jyn made up the difference, pressing her lips to his, ready to back away if he wanted.
He kissed her back, lips dry and cracked and warm. So Jyn leaned closer, slanted her mouth against his with a leaky droid leg in her lap, shuddered again at his hands reaching for her shoulders, sliding up to her cheeks, catching in her half-fallen hair. When she licked at his mouth, even though her tongue stuck a little, his lips parted beneath hers, so readily that her mind spun. She felt drunk, or something beyond drunk, lost in some dazzling fog that left her breathless and muddled and shining.
“Jyn,” he murmured into her mouth, helplessly, and she bit into his lip.
Cassian made a low, hungry noise in his throat that burned through all thought but longing to hear it again. More, she needed more, finally, finally, finally—
The leg dropped out of her lap, hitting the floor with a loud clunk. They both jolted away, then smiled uncertainly.
I love you, she thought, easy and painless. It wasn’t a revelation, exactly; she’d understood it for a long time—before the Alderaanian missions, probably before Scarif, however improbably.
What everyone else had seen, it was wrong. But it also wasn’t wrong, and she hadn’t understood that.
“You know,” he whispered, one hand cupping her cheek again. “Don’t you?”
Jyn brushed his hair from his face, triumph radiating through her at the streaks she’d left over his face, at the heavy gaze reflected back at her.
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
title: like a storm in the desert (3/4?)
verse: everybody lives!
characters: Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso; vague OCs; Jyn/Cassian
stuff that happens: After Cassian's recovery and Jyn's official enlistment in the Alliance, they head off on their first new mission.
chapters: one, two
If the lieutenant had meant to redirect them, he changed his mind as soon as he saw Cassian’s rank. Lannan’s. It was Lannan stroking her—Zara’s—waist, Lannan’s low laugh, Lannan flashing his insignia to sneak away with his pretty wife.
“I—I beg your pardon, sir,” the lieutenant said, as Cassian turned around.
“It’s my fault,” said Zara. “I, ah, needed my husband’s help with … something. We’ll be rejoining the others shortly.”
He repressed a look of amusement with little success. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I—I beg your pardon, sir,” the lieutenant said, as Cassian turned around.
“It’s my fault,” said Zara. “I, ah, needed my husband’s help with … something. We’ll be rejoining the others shortly.”
He repressed a look of amusement with little success. “Yes, ma’am.”
Zara Lannan was a poised, attractive, professional woman, married to a pleasant and respectable officer.
She’d spent the day talking over security codes with another Imperial programmer, smothering all trace of Jyn Erso—even as she silently thanked the Partisan who’d taught her slicing. Danna? Jyn thought the woman had been Danna, but she couldn’t remember all the names of the people who passed through the Partisans back then. Some got siphoned off into the Alliance; most died.
Zara, at any rate, was the sort of narrowly good-natured woman who disliked death and suffering, but talked vaguely about the rule of law and dismissed the rest as Rebel propaganda. Major Lannan, meanwhile, prided himself on the precision of his conduct while happily remote from actual warfare; he served on a quiet backwater planet that had seen no real change between the Republic and the Empire.
Lieutenant Erso and Commander Andor of the Rebellion heartily disliked them both. But the higher officers of Major Lannan’s sector had been summoned to a gathering (aka five-day party) with the local brass. Normally, the Rebellion took little interest in such a peaceful region, but the gathered happened to be taking place at Elis Place, which incidentally stored the sector’s personnel records. Draven wanted them for unknowable Draven reasons, so Jyn and Cassian buried themselves into Zara and Lannan, and endured.
On top of that, the Lannans were, obviously, married. The Alliance operatives stuck inside them were, back in the Rebellion, just as obviously lovers. But packed inside them were Jyn and Cassian, and they were nothing of the kind.
Well, maybe something of the kind. But certainly not—not—
Jyn opened her eyes in the near-dark, letting her gaze drift down the line of Cassian’s sleeping (maybe sleeping) body. The Lannans’ bed was easily twice the size of their own; where Jyn had considered Cassian’s commander’s quarters palatial, by her standards, these apartments were the real deal. Yet sleeping in this one, a good foot apart, felt more intimate, more dangerous.
Not that they ever woke a foot apart. Solidarity, she told herself. Partnership.
After all, partnership could mean many things.
Sometimes she let herself imagine what it’d be like as the real (“real”) Zara and Lannan. They’d been married for nine months. Zara might still thrill at pressing kisses to Lannan’s mouth and throat, at the taste and texture of his skin under her tongue and teeth. Lannan might greedily run his hands up from her waist, cup her breasts and bury his face in them, beard scraping over the soft skin and jagged scar. They might—
Not helping, Jyn.
And the worst part—all right. She was an adult woman with a healthy interest in all humanoid genders, and Cassian was a good-looking man. A very good-looking man. Most people had fantasies, fine. But she didn’t … it felt strange, all jumbled up with loyalty and partnership and just general affection. She never imagined it casual, a one-time thing or friendly convenience.
Not rough, either. It was slight brushes and cautious smiles that electrified her brain, his voice softening over her name, their usual ready glances turned shy and intense. An odd companionate gentleness seemed to fill her alongside the hunger, or threaded through it, or something, and—
Jyn couldn’t separate craving and caring, and somehow the mixture burned more than either alone. She’d never felt anything like this, never.
Jyn and Cassian spent three days establishing their bona fides. One day would have been enough for Jyn, but—better safe than dead. Or captured.
“Definitely better than being captured,” Jyn said, and Cassian gave a sympathetic nod, though he said nothing about how and where the Rebellion had snatched her up. They both knew her history perfectly well.
Their succession of easy agreements felt nearly as odd as the wistful longing that meandered through her. It never left, but it didn’t—it didn’t hurt, except as a pleasant ache, like sore muscles after a good bout.
On the fourth day, they maneuvered their way into a group of particularly obnoxious officers, trophy spouses, and a few more restrained others. The Lannans dutifully carried on their end of the conversation, Zara with barely (not at all) concealed irritation at every condescending question and smug dismissal of the war consuming most of the galaxy. When she excused herself, the more sensible of the others looked either sympathetic or at least comprehending.
She didn’t look back to check on Cassian; he could handle himself. But she heard a burst of laughter.
“Newlyweds, eh?”
“No,” he said evenly, “we’ve been married almost a year.”
“Heh, when Jorit and I—”
Jyn did actually slip into the washroom and repair infinitesimal smearing of the kohl around her eyes. Luckily, she even chatted briefly with another woman.
“I just needed some space to breathe, you know?” she said.
The other woman smiled.
“I do! But my partner will be missing me. Should I let your husband know you didn’t tumble into the abyss?”
“Thanks,” said Jyn. “It’s Major Lannan. I adore him, but I think I might murder some of his friends if I stick with him the whole night.”
The woman laughed and headed back.
To her surprise, the rest went off without a hitch. Jyn slipped away, found an unguarded terminal, and readily broke through what went for security while doing her best to look lost and confused. Copying the files over, she slipped them into Zara’s purse and wandered around with even more bewilderment until a guard directed her back to the ballroom.
Zara returned to find her husband still holding forth with his “friends,” several of whom looked increasingly desperate, but unable to think of a polite way to flee. Particularly, she suspected, because he outranked the bulk of them.
“There you are, sweetheart,” said Major Lannan (not Cassian, Jyn told herself), with a warm smile. She flushed. “What became of you?”
“I got lost,” Zara said sheepishly.
The men grinned at her. Her arrival, however, broke Lannan’s attention, and most of the others managed to make their escape not long afterwards. Predictably, the Lannans mumbled excuses for another departure, and slipped away together.
Making their way down the hall, they encountered no obstacles beyond an unexpected lieutenant. As they heard his footsteps on the way to their rooms, Cassian slipped an arm about Jyn’s waist, heat flaring along her skin even as she followed suit. For a brief instant, it reminded her of Scarif, half-carrying him out and knowing it would probably make no difference. But Cassian stood upright, his breath even and his knuckles tracing aimless little patterns.
If the lieutenant had meant to redirect them, he changed his mind as soon as he saw Cassian’s rank. Lannan’s. It was Lannan stroking her—Zara’s—waist, Lannan’s low laugh, Lannan flashing his insignia to sneak away with his pretty wife.
“I—I beg your pardon, sir,” the lieutenant said, as Cassian turned around.
“It’s my fault,” said Zara. “I, ah, needed my husband’s help with … something. We’ll be rejoining the others shortly.”
He repressed a look of amusement with little success. “Yes, ma’am. Well, I don’t want to get in your way.”
And that was that.
Laughing, they walked over to the lift and stumbled inside. Standing there in each other’s arms, making nonsense conversation she couldn’t even remember for any onlookers, she did think of Scarif. They’d stood almost like this as Jyn braced him with her body, the arm about his waist then at the back of his neck, in his hair. She’d kissed him then, in fear and desperation and the sheer force of emotion at his survival, his return, just how badly he was hurt. She imagined doing it again, his mouth warm instead of cold, eyes closed instead of pained. Zara would. Hell, the Rebels' idea of Lieutenant Erso would—why not?
Jyn’s gaze flickered to his mouth, lingered; Cassian’s mirrored hers, trailed down the same path. She could feel his breath against her, in his body and against her face; he must feel hers, and maybe it was her imagination, but she thought she could hear it, too, that bit heavier as he babbled on about some colonel.
But they were Jyn and Cassian, tender behind their double shells, and easily victorious rather than desperately so. They did nothing except look, and pretend to more.
In their quarters, they immediately released each other. In tandem, but Jyn felt a little colder nonetheless.
“Do you have it?” said Cassian, after they searched the apartment for bugs.
Jyn extracted the file from the purse, and held it between her fingers. “Got all the files, no problem. Draven should be happy.”
“Draven?”
They both grinned at each other, shyness gone.
For Jyn, for now, it was enough.
Neither Jyn nor Cassian cared for undercover missions, even quick sabotage operations, but they took as many as they could. Jyn, in particular, pressed Draven for them.
Everyone else gave her knowing looks that, all things considered, she found remarkably grating. Draven just sighed. But as long as they returned successful, he let them have their way. Or rather, he let Cassian have his way, and grudgingly accepted Jyn as a sort of appendage to him. She didn’t care for it, but she cared less for Kay’s gaping absence, and vacant KX droids didn’t go around finding themselves.
While they encountered the occasional sentient KX unit, they weren’t about to rip out those ones’ existences except in desperate circumstances. They needed a deactivated or unprogrammed one, which meant they needed access to Imperial storage, which meant going undercover.
They didn’t talk about it much. But now and then Cassian would remark, “Kay always says—said …” and flinch from himself.
(She suspected that he often flinched from himself, invisibly. Visibly, though: that was different. Jyn remembered the first year after her mother died, then the one after Saw abandoned her, and ached for Cassian and herself. They’d spent their lives in vicious harmony, the two of them.)
Now and then Jyn would say, “We’ll manage it,” or something equally uninspired. But Cassian required little for hope, however tentative. They fell back on their usual obstinacy with every success-coated failure, even the narrowest.
It took three months to find an acceptable posting with acceptable access to acceptable parts. A particularly long three months, in Jyn’s estimation.
In part, it was the always-uncertain thing between them, both nervously aware, neither quite willing to risk the foundation beneath. Jyn’s imagination ran wild, but only her imagination.
She’d encountered no previous lovers, no rumours, no anything. At first she assumed any others had transferred to another base or died, but it didn’t seem to be the case. To all appearances, until she took up residence in his quarters (less expansive now, because they were operating out of fucking Hoth), people who a) knew of his existence and b) hadn’t directly served under him looked on him as a sort of organic droid. Some of them still did, because they thought of Jyn that way, too. Not that she cared. She liked droids better than most organics, anyway.
But she did, sometimes, wonder if he just didn’t … feel anything, that way. Not shyness, not caution, but real disinterest. At other times, they found themselves gazing at each other or drifting into smiling synchrony, and—well, she didn’t wonder, then. Much.
The other thing that stretched out those first months, though, was far more of a strain. Draven wanted the personnel records because, in his words, they now had a prime recruiting opportunity.
Alderaan.
Not many Alderaanians had ever joined the Empire outright. But some. At least twelve or fifteen thousand of them had to be scattered across the galaxy; a good number had already defected. Others wavered. Jyn and Cassian passed from tracking down records to tracking down individuals, quietly laying groundwork, one by one by one.
She’d bludgeoned people to death, blown up factories, dirtied and bloodied her hands countless ways. Cassian, too. But hunting down and exploiting the survivors of planetary genocide remained one of the most distasteful things either had ever done.
They didn’t talk about that, either. But they let their faces speak for them, afterwards—and if their heads leaned a little closer, their arms brushed a little more, that was their business. They had their own channels of communication.
Then, after those three months, they simply found a security droid sitting in a dusty store room. Jyn could hardly believe their luck, and believed it still less when they checked and found it free of all data. But she couldn’t seriously believe it a trap; even if they were suspected of being Rebel spies, the amount of information required to identify Cassian specifically, and Cassian as the “owner” of a stolen security droid, searching for a replacement, seemed still more beyond belief.
She proved to be right. While they could hardly walk out with the thing, they cautiously disassembled it piece by piece, smuggling the individual components out to a decidedly perturbed Bodhi. The torso was the hardest; they finally just brazened it out and carted it away in full sight, claiming to be melting it down for ship parts.
Imperials could really be astoundingly stupid.
Then came the weeks of labour: Cassian worked on finishing the disassembly of the head to retrieve the datachip, while Jyn repaired and re-wired the legs and torso.
It wasn’t Kay. It wasn’t anything, just a vacant shell. But someday—
“It’s going to work,” she said, after a good two hours of companionate silence. She rubbed at her grimy face, achieving nothing; her hands and uniform were streaked with oil and grease and occasional chipped paint. Cassian, unfairly, was almost pristine, despite sitting nearby as he copied the long strings of code that comprised Kay’s sentience. “He’s survived, you’ll see.”
“Jyn,” he said quietly, and she turned to look at him, carefully keeping her filthy hands away from his clothes.
“Yes?”
He was gazing at her in the soft, dark way he did sometimes, his smile at once barely present and brilliant. Jyn’s pulse thudded in her throat, her gaze skittering down to his mouth, throat, chest, and back again. She knew she must look the same as he did.
It had happened before. In lifts, hangars, shuttles, in icy Rebel halls and colder Imperial ones. But this felt different, somehow, Cassian with his clean hands and glossy hair staring at her like an astronomer watching the stars.
He swallowed. “Thank you. I never … I can’t … Jyn, thank you.”
It seemed to encompass more than Kay. And more than Kay was a very great deal. But then, they both owed each other a very great deal.
Now, now. This time was different. And she was filthy, but—her gaze dropped to his mouth again.
“It’s nothing,” she said, her voice low and distant. “I want him back, too.”
And she couldn’t help herself. She let her grimy hand drop onto his knee, and through the layers of their snowsuits, let an answering shiver tremble through her. Then she leaned closer, with intent as well as the attraction that always drew them together.
“Jyn,” he said, and he always had something to say, but nobody said her name like that, not ever. There was nobody—
Cassian tilted his head down, hesitating centimeters away. But they’d hesitated long enough; Jyn made up the difference, pressing her lips to his, ready to back away if he wanted.
He kissed her back, lips dry and cracked and warm. So Jyn leaned closer, slanted her mouth against his with a leaky droid leg in her lap, shuddered again at his hands reaching for her shoulders, sliding up to her cheeks, catching in her half-fallen hair. When she licked at his mouth, even though her tongue stuck a little, his lips parted beneath hers, so readily that her mind spun. She felt drunk, or something beyond drunk, lost in some dazzling fog that left her breathless and muddled and shining.
“Jyn,” he murmured into her mouth, helplessly, and she bit into his lip.
Cassian made a low, hungry noise in his throat that burned through all thought but longing to hear it again. More, she needed more, finally, finally, finally—
The leg dropped out of her lap, hitting the floor with a loud clunk. They both jolted away, then smiled uncertainly.
I love you, she thought, easy and painless. It wasn’t a revelation, exactly; she’d understood it for a long time—before the Alderaanian missions, probably before Scarif, however improbably.
What everyone else had seen, it was wrong. But it also wasn’t wrong, and she hadn’t understood that.
“You know,” he whispered, one hand cupping her cheek again. “Don’t you?”
Jyn brushed his hair from his face, triumph radiating through her at the streaks she’d left over his face, at the heavy gaze reflected back at her.
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
