Chapter Text
"Surviving is the only glory in war."
-- Samuel Fuller
“I just don’t want to think for a while,” Jyn says, turning to him. Her green eyes look like burnished sea glass–cloudy and smooth and full of an unnamed sorrow. In her hand is a framed image of her mother as a child under cracked glass. Lyra has the same dark hair, the same defiant eyes.
They are on Aria Prime–her mother’s homeworld–and this is the first time she has touched down on the soil and smelled the salty sea air near her dead grandmother’s collapsed homestead. They are able to recover a few weathered artifacts, but time and nature have returned Jyn’s family heirlooms to the soil.
She leads him a cave by the beach, her hand twined with his, and undresses him carefully in the shadow and away from the encroaching sunshine. Jyn takes her time, her fingers tracing scars or wrapped tight around his bicep as though to take the measurement to memory. Cassian returns the favor, taking care at undoing her tunic and revealing her pale shoulders, kissing his way down her collarbone until she shivers over and over again in anticipation, the warmth of his lips too fleeting.
Their love knows pain, knows grief, knows silence. They know each other, and he knows what she needs right now without her having to ask. They listen to the ocean wave crash into the shoals; they make love as though they have all the time left in the world.
“Sometimes I don’t know if I’ve fully processed everything that has happened,” she says when she’s wrapped up in his parka, her feet still bare and dug into the sand. “Not just Scarif, but my mother. My father. I feel as though I should be plagued by nightmares, but I’m not. Sometimes I think that maybe it’s because we survived, and I was so relieved to have made it–to have made it with you, that it overrode everything else.” She shakes her head, and gives him a private smile. “But other times, I think I must be a monster.”
“You’re not a monster,” he says. “You’re the strongest person I know.” He tips her chin up so that she can look up at him. “And I know Leia Organa.”
She laughs before growing quiet again. “It’s hard to think about it so much.”
“Do you not want to think about it again for a while?” he suggests.
Her laugh is a quiet little hum. “I think that’s a good idea.”
Cassian folds her in his arms and buries his head in her shoulder. “Good,” he says quietly.
“Good,” she repeats.
She falls asleep in his arms, listening to the sound of the ocean. They waves beat in, a steady rhythm; the heartbeat of a world.