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“If you keep running your mouth like that, I can think of a few ways of shutting you up!”
Her threat echoed through the hangar, and more than a few fellow rebels stopped what they were doing to look. But when they realized it was Jyn Erso screaming at Cassian Andor again, they resumed their work, hydrospanners clanking against metal, the sound of fuel gurgling into X-Wings. This–the yelling–had become an increasingly common experience over the past two months, and the drama between the captain and the the firestorm he had picked up on Wobani had lost its luster and their interest.
Cassian said nothing and cast a wary look in her direction.
“What?” she snapped, but Jyn felt her cheeks burn, and she was overcome with both self-consciousness and embarrassment, though she would be dead before she’d let anyone know it.
“We can talk later,” Cassian said curtly, and turned to leave.
Jyn punched the wall out of frustration and regretted it immediately. She sucked at her hand, but it did little to ease the throbbing in her knuckles or the split skin that bled red.
“Do you know what it looks like when you displace your true feelings, Jyn?” Chirrut had said this to her a few days earlier before in that way that he did and that tone that he had when he was all knowing and smiling and yet still kind.
“No,” she had said and waited for him to spring the trap.
“You only need to look in the mirror to see.” And ah, she thought, there it was.
+
Now that she had decided to stick around with the Rebellion, Jyn had fallen into some of her old patterns from her days with the Partisans. She worked harder than almost anyone else, fought harder, cared harder, even when she wanted not to.
But Cassian was increasingly getting in the way of the goals she had set for herself, and Jyn wasn’t sure what to do with it. Because even though she hadn’t experienced before, she wasn’t so blind to deny that what she felt for him–what burned so hot and bright whenever he was near and even when it wasn’t–was love. She loved him. It was simple as it was complicated.
But for so long, Jyn had thought of love as this: as a distraction; as weakness, and she did not like to be weak.
It was Saw who had helped her understand this and drilled her with the idea. Camaraderie and loyalty were fine, and fellowship, yes. Even desire was acceptable because it as urge that could be filled and left behind once your body had cooled. But love? It burned like a never-ending candle at both ends, a flame that could not be extinguished. And love for anything but the cause of peace and justice in the universe was a waste of time, he had said, even if sometimes his old chest rattled with affection for her that made her think of her father, gone so long.
So what to do about Cassian? About how in the middle of a siege on a weapons factory, Kes Dameron screaming at her side, she would think unbidden of him and feel the panic rise in her chest that if she didn’t make it out she’d never see him again?
She heard Chirrut’s voice again in her head, and there it was, the answer: You only need to look in the mirror to see.
+
The door to his quarters whooshed shut, and she found him on his cot undoing his boots. When he saw her, his hands stilled, and he left the laces undone but kept the boots on. His lights were dim, the room almost completely dark.
“I’m ready to talk,” she said, her voice stiff and flat to hide the hammering of her heart.
He raised an eyebrow, and she noted the tiredness in his eyes, the dark circles from his constant state of sleep deprivation. His beard was thicker, even a little unkempt, and she wondered if he had been sleeping at all, and if he wasn’t, if any of it was her fault.
Cassian rose and took a step toward her. “I’m listening.”
“I’ve come to realize some things,” she started, picking up her feet and pacing as though walking helped generate the energy that she needed to keep talking. “I’ve been angry at you.”
“Yes,” he said wryly, “that much has been obvious.”
“But it’s not your fault. It’s mine.”
“Well,” he said, genuinely surprised. “Well,” and then had no more words that that.
“I’ve been angry at you because you’ve been … distracting me. When I’m working, when I”m on a mission, I find myself … thinking about you at the most inconvenient times, and it’s been a source of frustration. And I thought for a while that you were distracting me from the things I needed to do, but I’ve been thinking, and I’ve come to realize something. You’re not a distraction. Everything else is a distraction.” She turned her eyes to him then, stepped closer, her heart nearly beating out of her rib cage. “Everything else is a distraction–-from you.” It came out as a rush, but she felt the weight lift from her body.
Cassian swallowed, and she wondered if anyone had ever confessed to him like this before, if this was old or new, if this was the right thing to do or a mistake. She’d always been reckless–in the way she acted in the way she spoke–but she’d never been reckless with her heart, except for now, but she trusted him, whatever his reply, to be kind.
His words came out quiet; hoarse. “I think about you all the time, too, Jyn.” He ran a hand through his hair and came closer to her. “Every day since we met. I haven’t stopped.”
She smiled at him, and she felt looser and freer than she had since she was a child running on the black sand beaches of Lah’mu, the last place that was truly home until she met him. “If you keep running your mouth like that,” she said softly, “I can think of a few ways of shutting you up.”
“I wish you would,” he said, low and private, and so she did, as he wanted; as she wanted. Pressing him back until they both stumbled into the wall, her mouth found his in the darkness, guided only by the light of the candle that burned at both ends.