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Shoulder to shoulder, they stand in the doorway to her room.
“You know, I wasn’t even gone for that long,” she points out.
“I admit, I overreacted. Although it was Bodhi who started with keeping things in here.”
“Hey do not…do not blame this on me!” Bodhi’s head appears around the corner of the hallway to the crew cabins. “I put one, two things on her bed. K’s the one who moved the toolchest in there. And then you went mad and moved half the cargo bay!”
“I didn’t do that.” Cassian looks at Jyn, a bit sheepishly. “I might have drunkenly moved a few things closer to the front of the ship. For convenience.”
“Might have,” Bodhi says, one eyebrow quirking. He looks over at Jyn, shaking his head. She ignores the sad thump of her heart to think of Cassian pining for her, and she keeps her smile mocking and bright. “Thought I’d tell you we’re almost to orbit. So if you’re gonna get this out of her room, you might want to start now. I’m dead tired, and I’ll fall asleep the second we’re safe.”
“I’m not moving anything,” Cassian points out, gesturing to his hip, his bandaged chest, reminding the pilot that though he is very good at pretending not to be a mess, that does not mean he isn’t one. “I’ll get K to do it in the morning. She can sleep in my room.”
Bodhi lets out a monstrous sigh.
“What?” Jyn asks defensively. “We’ve done it before.”
“Yeah, and that worked out really well for both of you,” Bodhi stage whispers. A little bold, for him, but Jyn understands. He saw the aftermath of it on both of them, after all. Even if he doesn’t know the whole story – Jyn has not, and has no current plans, to tell any of them about any of she and Cassian’s business – he knows that they were both hurt by it.
“There is a perfectly adequate couch in the main hold,” K-2SO reminds them, walking by to the cargo bay. “And I will not be cleaning Jyn’s room for her.”
“K,” Cassian says warningly.
K-2SO looks over his shoulder, and Jyn is pretty sure he’s actually glaring.
“We’re pirates now, aren’t we? Rebelling against the Rebellion? I’m practicing my defiance.”
“Oh, this is going to be terrible,” Bodhi crows, delighted.
Cassian’s room has ghosts attached to it.
It makes her think of plunging temperatures and the uncertainty of a thing when it’s brand new and delicate. Whisper-soft touches, the flush on her face when she looked up at him and said body heat, an excuse they both had to know wasn’t quite the whole of it.
It’s not the same as it was, and she doesn’t linger too long in the doorway, dwelling on it. But there’s a moment during which she steps into the room and feels how long it’s been.
Safe, she remembers. I felt safe.
She feels safe again now, standing in Rogue One. Floating around this planet, drifting in orbit in this empty system so they can take some time to recharge.
And her family. They’re here. For the first time in a month, they’re all here and in the same place.
It isn’t the same as it was before, and she knows that. But there are things that it’s going to take a little while to get used to, and this is one of them.
She turns to face Cassian when he enters behind her, when he closes the door, tapping the button firmly. Words were easy back on Kazadu. They came out of her with a strange clarity, her heart swelling with every syllable, letting her continue to deliver the truth she had felt for so long but could never seem to express before. But now she stutters when she opens her mouth, has to swallow and start again, and she’s nervous the way she was back in the beginning.
Maybe it’s this room. Maybe it’s this ship. Maybe it’s just because there’s only so much bravery a girl can force herself to have in one day before she’s too tired to attempt it anymore. Fighting in the mines, leading a guerilla force into battle, that’s nothing. She could do that and still have the energy for a few rounds of sparring. But him, this, coming back here and seeing everyone again, running off with a Rebellion ship. It’s all taken quite a toll on her.
When she finally does speak, it’s to say, “I don’t know if I’ve ever been this tired.”
His laugh sounds more like an involuntarily sharp exhale. But he seems relieved. Not every moment has to be weighed down, she remembers. She already told him that she wants him. He already told her that she saved him. She can take in a deep breath, shove the sad softness to the corner of her heart, and she can face him. There’s always been this tension between them, since even before Scarif. The pull of two objects orbiting each other through space. They became friends around the magnetism, came to enjoy each other despite the feelings that clogged both their perceptions. Not everything has to change.
“When’s the last time you slept?” he asks. She places her hands on her hips, thinking back.
“Couple of days? I think?”
“Seriously?”
“Not all of us had the benefit of passing out after the battle, you know.”
“Okay…”
“And one of us had to hold the other up because the other was too stubborn to admit he needed help.”
“I think I was trying to be romantic.”
“Romance, was it? For future reference, I wasn’t very impressed.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
She laughs at that, disbelieving, because as much time as they’ve spent together, Cassian saying anything with a joking inflection continues to be a rare and surprising thing.
“All right. I’ll admit to that. But don’t think it’ll work next time.”
“Ugh, let’s not talk about next time. This time was bad enough.”
“There’s always a next time,” Jyn points out. But that’s not right, that’s a bit too heavy. She says, “If I tell you it’s not the only way to get my attention, will you be more careful?”
“Maybe,” Cassian says. There’s a fondness to it. An appreciation for how skillfully she has avoided the inevitable: there will always be a next time. There will always be another battle. There will always be another war.
In this room, that manages to feel less tragic, less exhausting than it is.
Or maybe she really is just that tired.
But it’s the elevator again. It’s her room on Kazadu. It’s the small space containing just the two of them, just their expressions as they gaze at one another. It’s safety, at least for a little while. It’s a place where they can pretend that the rest of the galaxy doesn’t exist.
“You need a shower,” Jyn points out.
“I…yes. Probably.”
“I’ll wrap your ribs after.”
Cassian swallows, clearly doing his best not to picture it.
“Right.”
“Do you need help? Getting undressed?”
“No,” Cassian says quickly, firmly. He moves so quickly to the door, heading for the hallway, that he clearly tugs at his ribs, hisses gently. She hides a laugh.
“It would be perfectly innocent,” she says. He glares at her over his shoulder, his meaning clear: sure it would be.
Despite the insistence that he’s fine, he does poke his head back in, not too long later, and sheepishly asks her to help him remove his jacket. She does so with a patronizing smile that he obviously hates, but before he goes, she stops him, kisses him.
“What was that for?” he asks.
“I wasn’t under the impression that I needed a reason.”
That gets a smile out of him, and he hums under his breath.
“If my ribs weren’t broken,” he says, pointedly. “This would have a very different ending.”
“I’m exhausted, and you smell,” she says. “Besides. Broken ribs aren’t insurmountable, Captain. If that was all it was, we’d find a way.” Cassian’s gaze goes entirely blank at that, and Jyn can’t help the small smile that comes to her lips, challenging. Filed away for later use: directness, boldness, flusters him. He looks like a droid rebooting.
Also, she has a sneaking suspicion that he likes it when she calls him Captain.
But she is tired, and he is injured, and this is exactly the pace she wants things to run at, anyway. She’s half asleep in his bed when he comes back from the refresher, his hair wet and smelling fresh. She sits up, dragging the new bandages across the blankets, stifling a yawn with the back of her hand.
“I could have asked K to do this, you know,” he points out, concern furrowing his brow as he takes in just how sleepily she’s blinking at him. She smiles, shrugs, pushes herself up onto her knees, gesturing for him to sit. His expression does that funny blanking thing again when the blankets fall away. “That’s my shirt,” he says.
“I needed something to wear.”
“Did you have to wear my shirt?” he asks, looking pained. “You are making this difficult on purpose, aren’t you?”
She doesn’t tell him yes. She doesn’t tell him how good it feels, to be wanted like this. She doesn’t tell him that she’s never felt quite like she does when he looks at her the way he does sometimes, especially now that she knows why he’s looking at her like that. Like she’s important, like she’s special, like she’s something he can’t get enough of.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she whispers hoarsely to him. “Now take off your shirt.”
He growls a bit, runs his fingers through his hair, complies with only a little pain. And then the game is forgotten as Jyn’s flirty purr of a response dies on her tongue.
“Oh, shit, Cassian!” she gasps, wincing as she inches across the narrow bunk towards him. She reaches her hand out to trail her fingertips along his chest, following the blue and purple mottling that covers most of the front of him. “Doctor Pala wasn’t kidding. She said you were more bruise than man. Is this from the tank?”
“This is from a Stormtrooper’s boot pinning me to the tank,” Cassian says. Jyn cringes again, looking up at him with her face pulled down into a mighty frown. Cassian chuckles, fond. “Don’t look at me like that. You’ve given me your own share of heart attacks.”
Humming quietly because that’s true, but lowly because it’s a rude point to make, Jyn maneuvers him so he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, his back to her. She feels rather than hears his sigh, with her hand pressed to the back of his neck. It’s not much better on the back of him, though the bruising here is more spread out. Deeper in some places than the others.
The scar on his back that she noticed after their first night together stands out white and sharp against the purple on his spine, and she gives in to that long-ago temptation to touch it.
“That’s old,” he says.
“Believe it or not, I know what an old scar looks like,” Jyn laughs quietly. She bites her lip, glances at the back of his head.
She wouldn’t be brave enough to do this, normally. But this is the room where she is safe, this is the elevator on Scarif, this is their temporarily shared quarters on Hoth. She’s safe. She bends her face towards him and presses a kiss to the knob at the top of his spine.
She is not imagining the quiet, shaky inhale.
“You are making this difficult on purpose,” he decides, his voice quiet, and she smirks against his skin.
“I’m not,” she says, and it’s honest. She isn’t trying to make anything difficult. She just wants to touch him. She just wants to run her fingertips along every part of him. She wants to kiss along every scar and bruise and blaster burn.
Jyn has so rarely had the opportunity to use touch as a gentle thing. And something buzzes inside her to get to do it now.
And she isn’t the only one. She knows she isn’t, because she can feel it in the way the tension in his muscles melts into something soft, the way hesitation turns to want.
They are both such lonely, frightened creatures, fumbling towards affection that comes naturally to others. People like Baze and Chirrut. Kes Dameron and Shara Bey. Who can so easily become a part of each other, reaching out and accepting the other into themselves. Cassian has been fighting since he was six years old, and Jyn hardly remembers a life before the hatch on Lah’mu. They are solitary, harsh, shattered things. And now? They no longer have to be.
She leans over his shoulder, chin balancing on it, her hands wrapping around his waist only briefly, to pass the bandage around him. Cassian sighs, relieved, nudging his head against hers. In thanks, she thinks, for not pushing it farther than she has.
“Let me know if it’s too tight,” she says.
Jyn has never been particularly good at field medicine – her hands too clumsy, better suited to shooting a blaster and wielding a truncheon, or maybe it’s just a lack of patience, like Saw always said – but she can wrap cracked ribs well enough. It was one of the only things she was trusted to do when she was younger. It feels like second nature now. Easier when he’s conscious and sitting up, too. Easier when she isn’t half-panicked and Doctor Pala isn’t refusing to let her look.
Half-exhausted, though. That’s still true. She doesn’t drag it out too long, although there’s something to savor in the aimless intimacy of it, in the way Cassian’s breath eases out of him, the way he seems to slump forward more, soothed by her in some way. The unspoken, unquestioned trust in the way he lets her do this.
“There,” she says. “How does that feel?”
“Better,” Cassian replies, and he turns over his shoulder to look at her. She sits back on her knees, and she smiles, waiting. Gets impatient, as she usually does, when he does nothing for a moment but stare.
“What?”
“I haven’t slept well since we’ve been apart,” he admits. “I never spent a night with someone before, the way I did with you. Going back to sleeping alone…I don’t know how I ever did it.”
She smiles immediately. Partly it’s to put him at ease. Partly it’s just surprised reflex. The pleasure of hearing your own thoughts spoken aloud by the person about whom you are having them.
“I always wondered how people could do it,” she says, biting her lip, trying to think of how to word it. “Trust someone enough, I mean. I always slept with one hand on a blaster. Slept lightly, so if anyone came close, I’d be ready. I didn’t think I was lonely. Thought I was being smart. Keeping people away. But after I left, I…I missed all of you. But going back to that, going back to not trusting people. I didn’t realize how much I’d miss that specifically. How much I’d miss you. Being able to turn my back on you, knowing you’d never do anything to hurt me.”
He reaches out for her, and she lets her eyes flutter closed. Proving her own words, she thinks. Trust. His fingers trail along her jawline, and she lets them.
“Trust,” he says. Agreement. Revelation. “That’s what it is.”
Seems a small word for such a large, impossible set of feelings, but she nods against his hand and opens her eyes to meet his. She tugs him gently backward, pulling back the covers with her other hand and maneuvering under them. He follows, moving slowly, groaning.
She missed this part, too: the quiet sound of relief as he gets closer to sleep. It’s the opposite of the restraint he usually shows in his every waking moment. It’s open, unreserved, almost vulnerable. Trust. He trusts her, too.
He settles on his back, relaxing into the thin mattress. The ship has never had the most comfortable beds, but Jyn is a new level of tired, and this might be the most comfort she’s ever felt. She curls around him, and he rests his head against her shoulder. She lays her arm across his chest, feather-light, careful not to jostle him. Their legs tangle together almost unthinkingly, like a puzzle that’s been waiting to be solved.
“You’re back,” he says, and he looks up and over at her, eyes crinkled at the corners. Worried, she thinks. That’s the face he makes when he’s worried.
“I’m back,” she confirms. She lowers her lips to his. It’s not a kiss with purpose, with promise, even with the pointed sort of teasing she was doing earlier. It doesn’t have to be any of those things. It can just be. “And Draven’ll have to try a lot harder to drive me away this time.”
He smiles at her, his hand curling around her hip. Possessive. Centering. Like he needs a reminder. And she’ll prove it to him. Again and again. I’m not going anywhere.