Queer AU, Part 3: Cassia and Jyn
Sep. 7th, 2018 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghrainetitle: whatever we deny or embrace
verse: queer Rogue One/f!Cassian AU (4/6)
characters: Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso; Jyn/Cassian
stuff that happens: For Cassia and Jyn, touch carries a weight of its own.
previous sections: prologue, part one, part two
Cassia disliked physical contact.
That didn’t stop her from performing it, of course. She was a spy, and no matter the species, sentient beings communicated through touch, in part or in whole. She couldn’t afford to stand out, couldn’t afford to alienate people, and certainly couldn’t afford to restrict information from herself.
Sometimes she needed to be approachable, sometimes menacing, sometimes charming, or forgettably present, or something else. Regardless, each required contact or proximity in some fashion or another—a clap on the shoulder, a warm handshake, a step into someone’s space with a hand on her holster, a casual brush of arms.
Assassinations and other murders didn’t often require it, thank the Force. Cassia would shoot an enemy from a foot away before stabbing or bludgeoning or otherwise breaking them. But some killings, the kindlier ones, required a reassuring touch before the end.
—No. They didn’t require anything but a blaster bolt through the back. Touch just helped ease the way, a little. A very little.
Those times were the worst. Selfishly, the second-worst was tolerating—with a smile—the sort of contact that, among Rebels, would have had her stunning the offender and turning them over to Draven’s tender graces. In the field, she could sometimes prove herself with a satisfyingly violent response. More often, she had to lean into the touch, infuse her face and body with warmth and welcome. Rarely more than that, but to someone who had to repress a jolt of raw loathing when someone bumped into her on the street, it felt … unpleasant. Profoundly so.
Distance, she always thought, was a privilege.
Jyn Erso did not alter her opinion on that point. Distance and detachment were privileges. No, Jyn only altered Cassia’s lifelong longing for them.
It was one thing to stay near enough to maintain a guard on a reluctant ally who might run at any moment, and who kept trying to a) maul or b) befriend strangers in the middle of Jedha. Any time Cassia relaxed her vigilance, she almost immediately found herself facing Jyn-shaped problems, forced to fall back on apologetic smiles or brusque demands just to get them through the marketplace. But she wasn’t altogether sure how or why she kept ending up close enough to feel the warmth of Jyn’s body.
Jyn kept her distance, without keeping much distance at all.
Even on the flight from Eadu, as Cassia curled her mouth into a cold smile, they somehow ended up so near that she felt Jyn’s breath on her face. And it happened again at the Massassi Base, when some inexorable pull had Cassia curving her path towards Jyn like one star to another, Cassia’s downtilted head half-eclipsing Jyn’s face. She didn’t like touch, yet she drew near over and over and over again, close enough that a nudge or dip of her head would have them touching in earnest. Cassia found herself smiling down at Jyn, too, slight, easy smiles that she didn’t even intend.
She didn’t smile in the turbolift on Scarif, too ground down by exhaustion and fear and the pain piercing through every part of her body. But Jyn’s grip on her softened the anguish rather than worsening it—Jyn herself did, in her survival and her being—and Cassia readily sank into her embrace.
She sank into Jyn’s kiss, too.
It was a cautious, hesitant thing, gentler than she’d imagined they could be, pleasure prickling over the roar of pain. Cassia’s mouth pressed back against Jyn’s, Jyn’s against hers, their lips warm and clinging. More than ever before, Cassia wanted this. She wanted this touch, this intimacy, this … Jyn. She wanted Jyn.
She might well be dying, inching closer to the end with each kiss. But Force, she wanted to live.
Jyn had nightmares long before she went to Scarif. She had them during the long days when Cassia hung between life and death: some unfamiliar and vivid, others worn stale but never easy. And she had them afterwards, old and new swimming together, though less often.
That, she suspected, had something to do with Cassia’s soft(ish) bed. Of course, she’d slept in it before, while Cassia floated in bacta: no point in making do with a square of ground or the miserable barracks when she knew a perfectly fine bunk was available. It hadn’t done much for her then.
Sleeping near other people didn’t generally improve things. Jyn avoided it whenever she could, and slept with a hand on her blaster when she couldn’t. But she hadn’t trusted any of those people. She hadn’t trusted anyone since Saw left her, and hardly anyone before that. Cassia, though—Cassia who had Jyn’s back without need, who showed up with naked vulnerability and a strike team, who climbed after her with cracked vertebrae and torn knees and fire in her side—Cassia was different. And when Jyn fumbled through an explanation for the rumpled bed, Cassia hurriedly replied that she didn’t mind, the barracks were awful, Jyn could stay whenever she wanted, keep staying if she’d rather.
As it happened, Jyn would very much rather. Her inarticulate mutter of assent probably gave the opposite impression of the one she intended, but it was assent. She’d carved out space for herself in far less palatable circumstances. Jyn readily marched into Cassia’s quarters with everything she owned, namely the clothes on her back, her mother’s crystal, and Cassia’s blaster.
Mine now.
Cassia herself looked startled when Jyn showed up. Between one instant and the next, though, her look of surprise melted into tentative pleasure. Another moment smoothed that over, too, but Jyn had caught enough glimpses of it in their time together to recognize the expression at full blast. Relief swept through her—not that she’d worried that the offer might be only words, that Cassia would withdraw her welcome, but—but it was good to know for sure.
Reassured further by Cassia’s offer of her clothes, Jyn immediately took her up on it. They fit her better than Cassia herself, in fact, though she had to roll up the ankles of the sleep-pants to keep from tripping on them. Whatever Cassia had been doing before they met, it must have involved fewer meals than Jyn got in Imperial captivity. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
Jyn wasn’t sure she wanted to leave the fresher, either, wearing nothing but thin cotton before a woman she’d kissed. Just once, in the turbolift, and she could have marked it down to the wild blur of victory and loss, to desperation, to giving or taking something before very probable death. She could have, except she knew it would be a lie.
Almost from the first, they pulled at each other like stars. By the time she admitted to uncertainty in the hangar, she could feel them swinging into orbit about each other (“welcome home,” Cassia murmured, dark eyes alight, and Jyn—wanted). A shared smile had them both shaken from the impact, shocks jolting through her body at a brush of Cassia’s arm, and … and she couldn’t even think of it all. The details didn’t matter. Only the simple truth that she’d kissed Cassia because she wanted to. She still wanted to.
Maybe. Probably. Force, she didn’t know. Everything was more complicated now, even if she hadn’t decided to take up residence in Cassia’s quarters. Cassia’s bed.
Jyn stared at the door and told herself not to be a fool. This was Cassia, not some attractive stranger in a cantina. She didn’t want to snap any bridges, anyway.
Thankfully, Cassia had turned down the lights and climbed onto the far side of her bunk by the time Jyn emerged. Despite the inescapably humid heat, she lay under a thin blanket. Jyn just shook her head as she sat on the edge of the bed, trying to look unconcerned as she calculated how far she could sprawl without touching Cassia.
Jyn tugged up her side of the blanket and pushed the whole thing towards Cassia. “You don’t need to share. I’m already melting.”
With a sleepily grateful sound, Cassia pulled the rest of the blanket around herself, ducking even her head into the layers. Jyn could see nothing of her beyond the distortion of the blanket and the spill of her hair over her pillow. Altogether, she looked silly enough that Jyn managed to lie down with only moderate nervousness.
“You’re still not warm?”
“I’m never warm”—came from the Cassia-shaped lump. Sounding a little more alert, she added, “I should have told you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Jyn, meaning it. She’d been perfectly comfortable on Jedha with nothing but a scarf added to her usual clothes. Cassia, of course, had buried herself in a fur-lined coat that could have contained two of her. “I’m a furnace, anyway.”
Cassia’s fringe and upper face emerged, eyes heavy and blinking. “Good.”
“Right,” said Jyn inanely. “Good.”
She almost laughed as Cassia withdrew into her cocoon, her breaths evening out within a few minutes. It could be a trick, or at least a deception, but Jyn didn’t see any purpose in that. She chose to believe her asleep, and chose to lie there in the quiet, letting her mind drift from the urgency of the last month to this small, peaceful corner she could call home. Not in itself, of course. They might well be gone in a month. The person, though, sleeping with easy trust beside her—
Well.
Jyn had no nightmares that first night, probably because residual nerves kept her awake for most of it. On the second, she slept in longer fits and starts, lulled by Cassia’s slow, steady breaths and occasional murmur. She kept waking in a sweat, since her body seemed to move from the edge of the bed every time she fell unconscious, tangling with the side of Cassia’s blanket. But she slept.
On the third night, she dreamed.
She didn’t remember most of the dreams; perhaps they were even innocuous. But she remembered the usual return to Eadu, water drenching her as fire rained from above, her father dying in her arms. He knew her, and that seemed her only consolation—she couldn’t leave him, but Cassia was there, pulling her away like she’d pulled her from Saw’s bunker. Cassia had talked her into that first escape by promising that she’d found Galen, that she’d bring her to her father, and now! She’d say, she’d say that she had done it, that this was … oh, some wriggling Rebellion lie, like Saw always said.
Always, except at the last. Save the Rebellion! save the dream, he’d cried, but this was the Rebellion, and she couldn’t think of Saw with her father here, struggling for breath, the smell of his blood in her nose. Her father who had only left when forced, only—Cassia was still tugging her, Cassia who never left her at all, but who had used and betrayed her, and she wouldn’t run, she’d been the Alliance’s pawn long enough.
Another bomb exploded, near enough that Jyn threw herself back. Cassia didn’t.
In some perversion of irony, the explosion flung her body towards Galen, sprawling in a lifeless heap beside him. Jyn’s rage sank into horror as she stared down, grey-brown and near-black hair plastered to dead skin, blood soaking through Imperial coat and Rebel jacket alike.
That wasn’t right, she thought dimly—it hadn’t been—but the cool intrusion vanished as Jyn screamed for them, not even knowing if the water rolling down her face came from the sky or her own eyes. Who cared? Cassia—Papa—no, no, not—
Jyn wanted to climb down after them, but she couldn’t. She had to get the plans out. She had to, they’d understand, but she couldn’t turn her gaze from the broken bodies below her, limp on the sterile Citadel platform. Couldn’t, except someone was grasping at her, jostling her grip where she’d climbed, and she had to get out, she had to, or none of it mattered.
“Get off,” she snarled, somehow already at the top of the tower, still dogged by her hanger-on. She didn’t have time for this. Jyn leapt forward and tackled the stranger, the—
She blinked down at the woman beneath her. “Cassia!”
Dazed, she said, “Jyn?”
“I …” At some point, Jyn had leveraged her entire body against Cassia, holding her down with her weight and clenched thighs, her hands gripping Cassia’s wrists and pressing them to the mattress. Quite evidently, Jyn had won the fight, but she didn’t understand why it existed. Even at their most antagonistic, she’d never dreamed of attacking Cassia. Yet here she lay, yielding and defeated under her.
The vibrant light of Scarif had vanished, the dark of night brightened only to a paler dimness. Shadows flickered over the bed, over Cassia’s face, obscuring and illuminating her as Jyn remembered from … from the lift? But that didn’t … that …
Oh.
“Sorry,” Jyn muttered. “Nightmare.”
“I guessed,” said Cassia, dry even now, pinned to the mattress. But her eyes were wide, or seemed like it. Jyn couldn’t be sure in this lighting, the way it heightened the dramatic lines of her face. Even her hair spilled into monotones, fanning black about her head. Softer darkness shaded over her left jaw and traced the line of her throat, deepened where her pulse beat.
Jyn neither knew nor cared what she looked like at the moment, yanked out of a nightmare after hours of sleep, still un-threading her confusion. But Cassia, Cassia was beautiful.
Wildly, Jyn wondered what would happen if she let go of Cassia’s wrists and leaned down, if she followed the impulse to drag her mouth over the shadows of her throat, to scrape her teeth over the dark hollow of it. Would Cassia push her away, or—? She almost shivered, a heady mix of guilt and desire and lingering adrenaline running through her. Not that she should feel guilt over anything. Apart from attacking Cassia in her own bed.
Fuck. She hadn’t slept enough for this.
Cassia, meanwhile, remained calm and relaxed, her skin pleasantly cool. Jyn half-envied that and half-resented it. She’d felt no resistance from her, not for a moment. Which meant Jyn hadn’t really won.
“You can fight better than that,” she said, disappointed. “You didn’t even try.”
“I don’t get into fights I can’t win,” said Cassia. Her voice was hoarse with sleep; Jyn usually stayed silent through nightmares, but she might have woken her this time.
In fairness, she doubted it took much. Either way, Cassia must have been trying to help.
“You’re a Rebel,” Jyn pointed out.
Cassia just blinked up at her. “We can win. You know that.”
She sounded a little breathless, probably because she had a hundred-odd pounds of Jyn on her. Belatedly, Jyn realized that it must seem strange that she’d just stayed there, holding Cassia down. And she could think of about a dozen ways it might turn infinitely more awkward.
Jyn released her and climbed off, cheeks so hot that she spared a moment’s gratitude for the poor lighting. Since one apology more than filled her week’s quota, she confined herself to a skeptical,
“I’m more formidable than the Empire?”
Cassia rubbed her wrists, neither concealing nor making a production of it. “Only in hand-to-hand.”
Smiling in the dark, Jyn laid herself back down. “I’ll take it.”
It didn’t take long for her to fall asleep again, or to see more horrors through the night, variously real or magnified or spawned by her mind. Less of them, though. And once or twice, they slipped into something altogether different: Cassia, soft and pliant beneath her again, her pulse thrumming against Jyn’s teeth.
verse: queer Rogue One/f!Cassian AU (4/6)
characters: Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso; Jyn/Cassian
stuff that happens: For Cassia and Jyn, touch carries a weight of its own.
previous sections: prologue, part one, part two
Almost from the first, they pulled at each other like stars. By the time she admitted to uncertainty in the hangar, she could feel them swinging into orbit about each other (“welcome home,” Cassia murmured, dark eyes alight, and Jyn—wanted). A shared smile had them both shaken from the impact, shocks jolting through her body at a brush of Cassia’s arm, and … and she couldn’t even think of it all. The details didn’t matter. Only the simple truth that she’d kissed Cassia because she wanted to. She still wanted to.
Maybe. Probably.
Maybe. Probably.
Cassia disliked physical contact.
That didn’t stop her from performing it, of course. She was a spy, and no matter the species, sentient beings communicated through touch, in part or in whole. She couldn’t afford to stand out, couldn’t afford to alienate people, and certainly couldn’t afford to restrict information from herself.
Sometimes she needed to be approachable, sometimes menacing, sometimes charming, or forgettably present, or something else. Regardless, each required contact or proximity in some fashion or another—a clap on the shoulder, a warm handshake, a step into someone’s space with a hand on her holster, a casual brush of arms.
Assassinations and other murders didn’t often require it, thank the Force. Cassia would shoot an enemy from a foot away before stabbing or bludgeoning or otherwise breaking them. But some killings, the kindlier ones, required a reassuring touch before the end.
—No. They didn’t require anything but a blaster bolt through the back. Touch just helped ease the way, a little. A very little.
Those times were the worst. Selfishly, the second-worst was tolerating—with a smile—the sort of contact that, among Rebels, would have had her stunning the offender and turning them over to Draven’s tender graces. In the field, she could sometimes prove herself with a satisfyingly violent response. More often, she had to lean into the touch, infuse her face and body with warmth and welcome. Rarely more than that, but to someone who had to repress a jolt of raw loathing when someone bumped into her on the street, it felt … unpleasant. Profoundly so.
Distance, she always thought, was a privilege.
Jyn Erso did not alter her opinion on that point. Distance and detachment were privileges. No, Jyn only altered Cassia’s lifelong longing for them.
It was one thing to stay near enough to maintain a guard on a reluctant ally who might run at any moment, and who kept trying to a) maul or b) befriend strangers in the middle of Jedha. Any time Cassia relaxed her vigilance, she almost immediately found herself facing Jyn-shaped problems, forced to fall back on apologetic smiles or brusque demands just to get them through the marketplace. But she wasn’t altogether sure how or why she kept ending up close enough to feel the warmth of Jyn’s body.
Jyn kept her distance, without keeping much distance at all.
Even on the flight from Eadu, as Cassia curled her mouth into a cold smile, they somehow ended up so near that she felt Jyn’s breath on her face. And it happened again at the Massassi Base, when some inexorable pull had Cassia curving her path towards Jyn like one star to another, Cassia’s downtilted head half-eclipsing Jyn’s face. She didn’t like touch, yet she drew near over and over and over again, close enough that a nudge or dip of her head would have them touching in earnest. Cassia found herself smiling down at Jyn, too, slight, easy smiles that she didn’t even intend.
She didn’t smile in the turbolift on Scarif, too ground down by exhaustion and fear and the pain piercing through every part of her body. But Jyn’s grip on her softened the anguish rather than worsening it—Jyn herself did, in her survival and her being—and Cassia readily sank into her embrace.
She sank into Jyn’s kiss, too.
It was a cautious, hesitant thing, gentler than she’d imagined they could be, pleasure prickling over the roar of pain. Cassia’s mouth pressed back against Jyn’s, Jyn’s against hers, their lips warm and clinging. More than ever before, Cassia wanted this. She wanted this touch, this intimacy, this … Jyn. She wanted Jyn.
She might well be dying, inching closer to the end with each kiss. But Force, she wanted to live.
Jyn had nightmares long before she went to Scarif. She had them during the long days when Cassia hung between life and death: some unfamiliar and vivid, others worn stale but never easy. And she had them afterwards, old and new swimming together, though less often.
That, she suspected, had something to do with Cassia’s soft(ish) bed. Of course, she’d slept in it before, while Cassia floated in bacta: no point in making do with a square of ground or the miserable barracks when she knew a perfectly fine bunk was available. It hadn’t done much for her then.
Sleeping near other people didn’t generally improve things. Jyn avoided it whenever she could, and slept with a hand on her blaster when she couldn’t. But she hadn’t trusted any of those people. She hadn’t trusted anyone since Saw left her, and hardly anyone before that. Cassia, though—Cassia who had Jyn’s back without need, who showed up with naked vulnerability and a strike team, who climbed after her with cracked vertebrae and torn knees and fire in her side—Cassia was different. And when Jyn fumbled through an explanation for the rumpled bed, Cassia hurriedly replied that she didn’t mind, the barracks were awful, Jyn could stay whenever she wanted, keep staying if she’d rather.
As it happened, Jyn would very much rather. Her inarticulate mutter of assent probably gave the opposite impression of the one she intended, but it was assent. She’d carved out space for herself in far less palatable circumstances. Jyn readily marched into Cassia’s quarters with everything she owned, namely the clothes on her back, her mother’s crystal, and Cassia’s blaster.
Mine now.
Cassia herself looked startled when Jyn showed up. Between one instant and the next, though, her look of surprise melted into tentative pleasure. Another moment smoothed that over, too, but Jyn had caught enough glimpses of it in their time together to recognize the expression at full blast. Relief swept through her—not that she’d worried that the offer might be only words, that Cassia would withdraw her welcome, but—but it was good to know for sure.
Reassured further by Cassia’s offer of her clothes, Jyn immediately took her up on it. They fit her better than Cassia herself, in fact, though she had to roll up the ankles of the sleep-pants to keep from tripping on them. Whatever Cassia had been doing before they met, it must have involved fewer meals than Jyn got in Imperial captivity. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
Jyn wasn’t sure she wanted to leave the fresher, either, wearing nothing but thin cotton before a woman she’d kissed. Just once, in the turbolift, and she could have marked it down to the wild blur of victory and loss, to desperation, to giving or taking something before very probable death. She could have, except she knew it would be a lie.
Almost from the first, they pulled at each other like stars. By the time she admitted to uncertainty in the hangar, she could feel them swinging into orbit about each other (“welcome home,” Cassia murmured, dark eyes alight, and Jyn—wanted). A shared smile had them both shaken from the impact, shocks jolting through her body at a brush of Cassia’s arm, and … and she couldn’t even think of it all. The details didn’t matter. Only the simple truth that she’d kissed Cassia because she wanted to. She still wanted to.
Maybe. Probably. Force, she didn’t know. Everything was more complicated now, even if she hadn’t decided to take up residence in Cassia’s quarters. Cassia’s bed.
Jyn stared at the door and told herself not to be a fool. This was Cassia, not some attractive stranger in a cantina. She didn’t want to snap any bridges, anyway.
Thankfully, Cassia had turned down the lights and climbed onto the far side of her bunk by the time Jyn emerged. Despite the inescapably humid heat, she lay under a thin blanket. Jyn just shook her head as she sat on the edge of the bed, trying to look unconcerned as she calculated how far she could sprawl without touching Cassia.
Jyn tugged up her side of the blanket and pushed the whole thing towards Cassia. “You don’t need to share. I’m already melting.”
With a sleepily grateful sound, Cassia pulled the rest of the blanket around herself, ducking even her head into the layers. Jyn could see nothing of her beyond the distortion of the blanket and the spill of her hair over her pillow. Altogether, she looked silly enough that Jyn managed to lie down with only moderate nervousness.
“You’re still not warm?”
“I’m never warm”—came from the Cassia-shaped lump. Sounding a little more alert, she added, “I should have told you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Jyn, meaning it. She’d been perfectly comfortable on Jedha with nothing but a scarf added to her usual clothes. Cassia, of course, had buried herself in a fur-lined coat that could have contained two of her. “I’m a furnace, anyway.”
Cassia’s fringe and upper face emerged, eyes heavy and blinking. “Good.”
“Right,” said Jyn inanely. “Good.”
She almost laughed as Cassia withdrew into her cocoon, her breaths evening out within a few minutes. It could be a trick, or at least a deception, but Jyn didn’t see any purpose in that. She chose to believe her asleep, and chose to lie there in the quiet, letting her mind drift from the urgency of the last month to this small, peaceful corner she could call home. Not in itself, of course. They might well be gone in a month. The person, though, sleeping with easy trust beside her—
Well.
Jyn had no nightmares that first night, probably because residual nerves kept her awake for most of it. On the second, she slept in longer fits and starts, lulled by Cassia’s slow, steady breaths and occasional murmur. She kept waking in a sweat, since her body seemed to move from the edge of the bed every time she fell unconscious, tangling with the side of Cassia’s blanket. But she slept.
On the third night, she dreamed.
She didn’t remember most of the dreams; perhaps they were even innocuous. But she remembered the usual return to Eadu, water drenching her as fire rained from above, her father dying in her arms. He knew her, and that seemed her only consolation—she couldn’t leave him, but Cassia was there, pulling her away like she’d pulled her from Saw’s bunker. Cassia had talked her into that first escape by promising that she’d found Galen, that she’d bring her to her father, and now! She’d say, she’d say that she had done it, that this was … oh, some wriggling Rebellion lie, like Saw always said.
Always, except at the last. Save the Rebellion! save the dream, he’d cried, but this was the Rebellion, and she couldn’t think of Saw with her father here, struggling for breath, the smell of his blood in her nose. Her father who had only left when forced, only—Cassia was still tugging her, Cassia who never left her at all, but who had used and betrayed her, and she wouldn’t run, she’d been the Alliance’s pawn long enough.
Another bomb exploded, near enough that Jyn threw herself back. Cassia didn’t.
In some perversion of irony, the explosion flung her body towards Galen, sprawling in a lifeless heap beside him. Jyn’s rage sank into horror as she stared down, grey-brown and near-black hair plastered to dead skin, blood soaking through Imperial coat and Rebel jacket alike.
That wasn’t right, she thought dimly—it hadn’t been—but the cool intrusion vanished as Jyn screamed for them, not even knowing if the water rolling down her face came from the sky or her own eyes. Who cared? Cassia—Papa—no, no, not—
Jyn wanted to climb down after them, but she couldn’t. She had to get the plans out. She had to, they’d understand, but she couldn’t turn her gaze from the broken bodies below her, limp on the sterile Citadel platform. Couldn’t, except someone was grasping at her, jostling her grip where she’d climbed, and she had to get out, she had to, or none of it mattered.
“Get off,” she snarled, somehow already at the top of the tower, still dogged by her hanger-on. She didn’t have time for this. Jyn leapt forward and tackled the stranger, the—
She blinked down at the woman beneath her. “Cassia!”
Dazed, she said, “Jyn?”
“I …” At some point, Jyn had leveraged her entire body against Cassia, holding her down with her weight and clenched thighs, her hands gripping Cassia’s wrists and pressing them to the mattress. Quite evidently, Jyn had won the fight, but she didn’t understand why it existed. Even at their most antagonistic, she’d never dreamed of attacking Cassia. Yet here she lay, yielding and defeated under her.
The vibrant light of Scarif had vanished, the dark of night brightened only to a paler dimness. Shadows flickered over the bed, over Cassia’s face, obscuring and illuminating her as Jyn remembered from … from the lift? But that didn’t … that …
Oh.
“Sorry,” Jyn muttered. “Nightmare.”
“I guessed,” said Cassia, dry even now, pinned to the mattress. But her eyes were wide, or seemed like it. Jyn couldn’t be sure in this lighting, the way it heightened the dramatic lines of her face. Even her hair spilled into monotones, fanning black about her head. Softer darkness shaded over her left jaw and traced the line of her throat, deepened where her pulse beat.
Jyn neither knew nor cared what she looked like at the moment, yanked out of a nightmare after hours of sleep, still un-threading her confusion. But Cassia, Cassia was beautiful.
Wildly, Jyn wondered what would happen if she let go of Cassia’s wrists and leaned down, if she followed the impulse to drag her mouth over the shadows of her throat, to scrape her teeth over the dark hollow of it. Would Cassia push her away, or—? She almost shivered, a heady mix of guilt and desire and lingering adrenaline running through her. Not that she should feel guilt over anything. Apart from attacking Cassia in her own bed.
Fuck. She hadn’t slept enough for this.
Cassia, meanwhile, remained calm and relaxed, her skin pleasantly cool. Jyn half-envied that and half-resented it. She’d felt no resistance from her, not for a moment. Which meant Jyn hadn’t really won.
“You can fight better than that,” she said, disappointed. “You didn’t even try.”
“I don’t get into fights I can’t win,” said Cassia. Her voice was hoarse with sleep; Jyn usually stayed silent through nightmares, but she might have woken her this time.
In fairness, she doubted it took much. Either way, Cassia must have been trying to help.
“You’re a Rebel,” Jyn pointed out.
Cassia just blinked up at her. “We can win. You know that.”
She sounded a little breathless, probably because she had a hundred-odd pounds of Jyn on her. Belatedly, Jyn realized that it must seem strange that she’d just stayed there, holding Cassia down. And she could think of about a dozen ways it might turn infinitely more awkward.
Jyn released her and climbed off, cheeks so hot that she spared a moment’s gratitude for the poor lighting. Since one apology more than filled her week’s quota, she confined herself to a skeptical,
“I’m more formidable than the Empire?”
Cassia rubbed her wrists, neither concealing nor making a production of it. “Only in hand-to-hand.”
Smiling in the dark, Jyn laid herself back down. “I’ll take it.”
It didn’t take long for her to fall asleep again, or to see more horrors through the night, variously real or magnified or spawned by her mind. Less of them, though. And once or twice, they slipped into something altogether different: Cassia, soft and pliant beneath her again, her pulse thrumming against Jyn’s teeth.