Chapter Text
I want something
That's purer than the water
Like we were
It's not there now
Ineloquence and anger
Are all we have
It’s Beginning To Get To Me, Snow Patrol
Jyn Lyra Erso is dreadfully familiar with cemeteries. She feels like she was born in a place like this, or at least, she was reborn several times among tombstones, in her twenty eight years of life. She always tries to begin anew anyway.
It's all she has been given to deal with, death and loss and grief. She lost her mother at eight, her father left her and finally died when she was twenty three. Saw, her surrogate father, had died a few weeks earlier, in an earthquake from which they found no body to bury. All she had after that was her makeshift family: Bodhi Rook, Baze Malbus, Chirrut Îmwe, even James Kay, after a fashion, since he was wherever Cassian Andor chose to be.
Cassian. Cassian wasn't just a member of her newfound family unit, he was her home.
But when she had to bury Chirrut, Baze and Kay, this home she had built around Cassian crumbled. She'd seen Saw Gererra being buried alive before — first under his obsessions and paranoia, then in his own body and finally in the old catacombs of a city lost in the Himalayas.
She'd promised him to survive, no matter what, and since she couldn't stay there, among the ghosts of their friends, with a despondent Cassian and a shaken Bodhi, she had fled. She didn't think she would have to do it alone, though.
But Cassian let her go too easily and as soon as she got in New York, Bodhi has been called away. She was on her own, again. She found a job to make ends meet somewhat, she ate (every so often), she slept (when she could not avoid it anymore) and the days passed, even if she wasn't sure which day, which month it was.
Until this Friday in December when Cassian came to her, in Kyber Café. She had hugged him, because she couldn't help it, after six long months. Then she caved almost instantly, Saw would be appalled if he could have seen that… her jaw clenches reflexively and Cassian’s regular breathing next to her is momentarily masked as her mind replays the first words he’d said to her in more than half a year:
Jyn, please. We’ve been alone long enough.
She had tried to protest at first, out of pride and self-preservation, but as she had feared, not a single day had passed before she was pulled in his gravity, again.
“Don’t cry,” Cassian whispers hoarsely, freeing a hand from under the comforter to touch her face.
She didn't realize she was crying, but she feels the wetness now that his warm fingers try to wipe her tears. He sleeps on his side, facing her always, but his face is almost completely hidden in the pillow. She likes asleep Cassian better.
Actually, he wouldn't be here if only she had a couch for him to sleep on. But they were exhausted and she didn't want to send him back to his hotel when he was so reluctant. She had no mat either, so eventually they had built a pillow separation on her bed, and still in their tee-shirts, fell asleep beside each other deceivingly quickly.
She swallows, not wanting to meet his eyes — but forcing herself to. They are still the familiar eyes she remembers looking so reassuringly into hers, when they smashingly met five years before. Yet, something changed now that Jyn is looking into them: Cassian isn't the only one staring back, as if he carries some of the grief they are sharing in his very soul, their late friends are still present just behind his irises for anyone to poke at.
He brought Kay and Chirrut and Baze along with him, and now Jyn is engulfed by a steam of sorrow, right there in her bed, and neither she nor Cassian know how to stop it. He doesn’t speak, and it takes everything she has just to focus on her own breathing.
She gets up though, and he follows her to the kitchen area. She doesn't need to look back to make sure. She hears him almost breathing down her neck. Besides the only bottle of sherry she has, she finds her pack and lighter.
She hesitates a second, but reasons that a cig is actually a better option than booze, because it might help her nerves and it has the merit of pissing Cassian off. He was the one smoking in his rebel teens with Kes Dameron, but didn't indulge since — Draven had a strict anti-smoking policy, the bastard — whereas she'd been too much of a goody two shoes at the time. To be honest, she began in jail, around eighteen, but remains an occasional smoker. Cassian frowns when she lights it up, but stays silent otherwise, not even stepping back as the grey-blue smoke reaches his nostrils. Instead he closes his eyes and breathe it in.
Her fingers struggle to hold the cig, trembling, yet she wants to expel the smoke right in his lungs, so that he'd have a trace of her in his system. Fitting, as they burned and crashed, became toxic to each other and —
“I hear your mind running wild from where I stand Jyn, talk to me. I’m here.”
Outside, echoes of the city and the cars and sirens replace the sound of the waves hitting the shore, back near the house he left. She lets these noises and the smoke and the smell of it fill the emptiness, for a few seconds more, knowing she’s too angry at him. She is not even sure of what she should say, what she feels, what he needs to hear. She’s not the one that came barging in, anyway.
“Now, now you want to talk?!” she seethes, perhaps too loudly, too viciously, but she’s unable to restrain herself, even as she sees him flinch.
She pleaded, she flinched, she cajoled once, and he didn’t even acknowledge her. He is physically at arms length, but she’s the one entitled to keep him there mentally now. A vindictive part of her, ironed by Saw, cannot help but rejoice at how the tables have turned.
“We are back together,” he asserts again, “we fell asleep and now that we’re awake you're freaking out. I get it.”
“You don't get shit Cassian, we're not back together, it's… one kiss and a bit of fondling and bed sharing don't erase…”
“I'm not saying it's erasing anything,” he interrupts hotly, eyes flashing finally, “but don't act like it's meaningless, because we know better.”
His hands tremble too, now, flexing reflexively like he wants to wring her neck or shake her silly. She almost wishes he would. Talk about toxic indeed. It has always been so much easier to ground her emotions on his whenever they were touching. Yet as co-dependent and touch starved as she is, she merely points out:
“Of course it matters! You gave up on me, just like I've let you down, but we’re still aching for each other, that's all.”
“That's all, you say. Mothma all but babysat me, Draven gave me vacations, so yes I'm aching for you, just a bit,” he mocks in a drawl tainted by desperation he doesn’t try to downplay.
“Better late than never, I guess,” she replies with flaming cheeks, because, yeah, heartache is the thing to be addressed here, and hers is just about to crack. “And yet I know more of the stars and sea than I do of what's in your head.”
Her father had studied the various types of stars, so she was quite knowledgeable about Space from an early age, but her passion — despite her poor waitress job — has always been oceanography. She only wishes Cassian's thoughts weren't as mysterious as the depths of oceans, despite his words.
“So talk to me! I can't know what you want me to share if you're not asking.”
“I tried! I tried for days, for weeks, for months and you never listened, never acknowledged whether I was there or not!”
“It's not true, you chose to leave me, destroying everything I held on to, so it’s why I’m meeting you in fucking New York City to get you back, to show you I am here this time, with you.”
Despite the earnest tone of his declaration, his face remains annoyingly placid, his stance much too laid back and Jyn almost wants to hurt him somehow, just to see if that could get a reaction out of him — perhaps seeing his blood under her nails would prove to be satisfying? But because she's not that far gone as to voice these thoughts aloud, she sneers:
“You call this being here with me? Come on, we were barely touching in our cold bed.”
“You said our,” he smiles maddeningly, disregarding the argument altogether.
“Don't read too much into that Cassian, I sleep here, you did it too, just the once. It's all there's to it, don't miss the point here!”
“And what point is it exactly Jyn?”
He tried to sound reasonable but it came out as plain exhausted. He stands far closer than she expected as well, almost swaying on his feet, she registers suddenly. Once again, she reaches out to grip his arms firmly before she can rationalize it.
“You’re dead on your feet,” she tuts reproachfully, trying to ignore the way his eyes are almost crossing with the effort to zoom on her face.
“Not quite, not enough to see any of them anyway,” he mumbles in Spanish, signaling that it wasn’t meant for her ears — or perhaps he cannot stick to English anymore?
It seems unlikely of him to switch languages unexpectedly, and slightly rude, but what does she knows of the man he is since she left? Whom is he supposed to see exactly? What does he mean by that? His reappearance brings up so many questions and she feels too many contradicting emotions to come up with answers on her own.
She should have been stronger and he should not be in New York, he in her grip, she within his grasp.
But nonetheless, they are breathing in her dusty flat silently because the words that need to be said get choked by anger and resentment and tiredness and grief. She’s never been eloquent besides, he was the smooth one in the pairing they had once formed. The awkward task of stating the obvious falls on her again as she leads him slowly back to her bed:
“It’s the middle of the night, we should sleep some more.”
“Okay,” he agrees passively, resuming his former place against the wall while she struggles to put back the pillow separating her from his arms, loosely extended in her direction.
“Like Saturn's rings, there's an icy loop around me,” she warns, because it’s the best analogy she finds without resorting back to accusations.
“Surely it’s what makes you too hard to hold,” Cassian declares sardonic. “But you know I'm used to the cold, Jyn, it doesn't bother me.”
She rolls her eyes, because it's so like him to par with her clumsy words effortlessly, but ultimately she smiles a bit, because she knows what he means by reminding her of the cold winters he had known in Mexico, growing up. It's not about any temperature, extraterrestrial or not, it's about letting him in, again. But it's obvious they are not ready for that yet, not after their aborted conversation.
“I don’t expect instant forgiveness, you know? I’m aware that your typical reaction has always been to lash out first,” he mumbles back into his pillow neutrally.
“And you to neglect all the things you don't like or understand in favor of getting the big picture.”
They don't need to say that there's no big picture, no greater good in the tragedy that had robbed their friends from them. Chirrut could have found a platitude to that effect, she's sure, but Jyn and Cassian doesn't believe in any kind of higher power. Bodhi does, but he's not here to play referee, and for once she is glad he's on active duty at the moment. At least, he's spared them arguing.
“Sleep Cassian, I don’t want to talk anymore.”
“Will you be here in the morning?”
“Of course, I live here.”
“I mean, will I see you once I wake up?”
His insistence is slightly weird, but she guesses they’re probably laying thick on mixed signals since they met earlier, so Jyn shrugs sleepily.
“I won’t disappear on you if you don’t either.”
“Deal.”