Work Text:
The galley on Yavin IV is equipped with the basics for the preparation of soldiers’ rations: nutritious slop as unappetizing and unappealing as anything the cooks called “slop” could be. It has little to nothing as far as pots and pans for baking other than dented baking sheets meant for hard rolls—nothing like a cake pan. But Jyn’s never had anything she needed when she needed it, and so she does what she does best: she improvises.
“I didn’t know you cooked,” Cassian says from the doorway. It’s well past midnight and he should have been asleep, but he’s not. She hadn’t told him that she would be here—she hadn’t told anyone—but he had an uncanny way of always finding her.
“I don’t,” she says, “not much. But I do bake, and,” she says lifting up a handful of dusty pink and yellow fruit, “I have these.”
“Where’d you get Bakuran cloudberries?” he asks, stepping into her personal space, curiosity making his face look younger and softer, the hard lines of war melting into his skin. She can smell him when he’s this close: earthy and clean and warm as the leather jacket on his shoulders.
“Trade secret,” she says, hoarsely. “And I have sugar, too.”
“You’re going to cause a riot,” he says softly, “if people find out you’re making cake.”
“Then it’s our secret,” she says, turning her back to him and putting the fruit on the counter. He places a hand on the small of her back, and thoughts of cake flee her mind.
“Do you want to help me?” she asks, turning to look at him over her shoulder. “Or do you just want to watch?”
His brown eyes spark, and a smile plays at the corner of his lips. “Where’s my apron?”
+
The cake is simple: flour, sugar, powder, milk, egg, butter, and berries. Jyn sours the blue bantha milk with a teaspoon of citrus as Cassian measures out the flour and sugar and the oven warms. He watches her then mix the liquid and dry ingredients together and pour them into a heavy frying pan greased with the butter. Pressing each precious berry into the top of the batter, Jyn sprinkles it with a final coat of sugar and pops it into the oven.
“And now we wait,” she tells Cassian, leaning against the counter. She gazes at him, at the flour dusted into his neat beard, at his permanently sleepy eyes, and her heart does a leap. “Come here,” she says, crooking her finger at him. He walks over without a word and comes within six inches of her face.
“You’re covered in flour,” she says simply, reaching up and gently brushing his beard. He catches her hand and she catches her breath.
“Jyn?” he says, and there’s wonder there.
He’s been saying her name since the moment they met—calling her the name she was born with and that she thought she’d die without, buried or left rotting under one of her aliases—and it’s made her want to be Jyn again after running from it for so many years. She wants to ask him what she can do for him, to give back, but the way he looks at her now—she already knows.
She kisses him first, dirty hands threading through his hair. She can feel him breathe, the rise and fall of his chest against hers, and her own heart hammers hard in her chest and she thinks that he must feel it too. After all, they have almost always been in rhythm with one another since the start. Cassian lifts her off her feet, mouth still searching hers, and places her on the counter, pressing her against the wall. There’s a clatter of measuring spoons and bowls, but they are otherwise silent save for soft gasps and the crinkle of his jacket as he moves with her.
She has flour in her hair, but now she has sugar on her lips, too, and anyway, Jyn has hardly ever cared about being clean or dirty.
The air fills with the sweet smell of cake, buttery and aromatic, but when it begins to burn, it’s Cassian who pulls away from her, startled. His lips are swollen with kisses--a look that suits him, she thinks--and Jyn’s stomach swoops with something like triumph that it was she who did it.
“Should we take that out?” he asks.
She sighs, gives him a wry look, and hops off the counter to grab the mitts. Pulling out the cake, she tosses it on the counter and shuts off the oven. Cassian looks at her expectantly, and she can only ask, “What? Did you want some cake now?”
He laughs, and the sound is music and magic and the calm of a bubbling brook. “No. That’s not what I want now.”
There’s something else on his lips, she thinks as she sees his mouth twitch, something else he wants to say, but nothing comes and she thinks that it’s okay. She knows. And the time will come for the both to put words to it. But now she merely kisses him, takes him by the hand, and leads him out of the galley and back to his quarters, their steps quickening into a run until the doors to his room whoosh shut.
Someone else could have her cake, Jyn thought. She had a far sweeter thing for herself now.