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Cassian, as a rule, does not drink very often, and he does not drink to get drunk around people he doesn’t know. His coworkers are included in that mass, because as far as he’s concerned the fact that they know he is A) 26 years old B) lives in the bottom floor of an apartment building and C) has a cat is already too much information. The only person who even knows his cat’s name is Jyn, and that’s only because she walked in on him having a conversation with his roommate about taking Jabba to the vet and expressed concern. Animals transcend human boundaries. It was the same conversation he learned she had a dog named Pablo, and she had to awkwardly explain yes, his full name was Pablo Escodog, and yes, he was an Eskimo dog.
It was the only conversation he can remember having with her that didn’t end in eye rolls or sighs because their approach to work is remarkably different.
Except the one last night, which he’s not sure she remembers at all.
She slomps into work and immediately puts her head down on the desk. “Whose bright idea was it to have that party on a Thursday?”
Normally he would have some bright cheery reply out of spite because he’s not the one hungover, but it is not the first time she whined about the date choices of management. Suddenly his throat closes up and he is grateful her head is down.
-
“Whose bright idea was it to have this party on a Thursday?” she slurred, glaring at everyone over the rim of her glass. The glass is her wall.
“You did not have to come,” he reminds her from their little spot in the corner, where they have gravitated towards each other because if there is one thing they can agree upon, it’s that being social is stupid. He would rather sit in silence with Jyn than have a conversation about nothing with Chad from accounting.
“Well, you’re here, and it would be cruel to let you sulk off in the corner by yourself.”
“I am not sulking.”
Jyn laughs, and it’s not a sardonic snort. She’s definitely tipsy, if not edging towards drunk. He thinks she might have pregamed to be this gone this fast. “You’re not obvious about it, but you sulk so much, Cassian Andor. This is the sulker’s corner. We are the sulkiest. Our ugly sweaters should have the grinch on them. Tell me your middle name.”
She is constantly trying to catch him off guard on that one. He doesn’t miss a beat. “Pablo.”
“You’re full of shit,” she says easily, lifting her glass too high to drink from in a gesture meant to hide the grin on her face. He finds himself grinning too, biting down on his cheek to subdue it. He’ll never admit how much he wants to laugh at her dog’s name.
He used to think he hated her. On some level he did at the start, as Jyn Erso strolled in literally fresh out of jail and landed a job he spent months working towards too, and suddenly they were constantly thrown into working as a team, or part of a bigger team. It’s how her desk ended up right near his. She threw old straw wrappers at him at random during the day. She hummed under her breath. She tapped a pen against the desk. She scrolled her phone on breaks and got visibly and vocally mad at the news. He tried to ignore it all at first, because clearly he was above it all, but one day he threw her straw wrapper back at her, and before he knew it she was sharing terrible news with him on the daily. It was easy to be mad together, because they were both people generally ready to be mad.
“That’s the only reason I’m here you know,” she says about fifteen minutes later, another drink later, and a conversation about hippos later.
“Hippopotamuses for Christmas?” He is maybe a little buzzed. Not enough to lose all of his wits - he’s only had one glass the entire night - but enough that he cannot figure out what she is talking about and that is so frustrating because he’s usually the best at reading conversations. It’s what lets him keep everything a secret.
“A hippopotamus would be a great Christmas gift, I’m done having this argument,” she reiterates firmly before taking another swig. “But. No. I hate that song, honestly. It’s you.”
“Are you calling me a hippopotamus?” He looks down at his cup, wondering if somehow he got something stronger, or it was spiked without his knowledge, both of which are impossible, but there is no other explanation as to how Jyn is throwing him for this whirlwind. She has him stuck on hippos.
“You’re smart, but you’re an idiot. I came here because I wanted to spend time with you even though I hate everyone else, but you’re okay, I guess.”
He looks over at her, admittedly surprised, but he’s doing his best to hide it. Apparently he is doing a much better job at hiding his confusion than feeling it, because her eyebrows are wrinkling in annoyance. That’s familiar enough because they’re always annoyed at each other. She’s annoyed at him right now! Even though she came here to spend time with him. He’s trying to make sense of it.
“But you are drunk,” is what he offers, because she’s got him at a loss for words.
“Yeah, because I’m an idiot too. This is stupid. I shouldn’t have said anything about your stupid face.”
“You didn’t.”
“Well I was thinking about it!” she huffs, sloshing her cup in his face and spilling some of it out over his shirt. She doesn’t seem to notice, she’s too busy getting mad at him. “I think about your face a lot, and that’s stupid.”
“My face? Or thinking about it?” He does not tack on his third question, which is: what is happening?
“Both!” she hisses, draining the rest of her drink. She slams it on the table and glares at him. “I like your face and sometimes I wanna kiss it, and that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever wanted to do.”
And then she storms off, which is more or less when his night ends, because how is supposed to do anything after that?
-
“Someone far above us with actual plans on the weekend, I presume,” he offers at last, long enough after the Thursday question that she lifts her head and squints like she forgot what she’d asked in the first place.
“People with lives are gross,” she huffs, then hides her face again in her arms.
“Not wrong,” he says, and her response this time is only to groan.
They fall into silence after that, which in itself is not unusual. They don’t talk for the sake of talking, at least he never thought so. They are, and he quotes, the “sulkiest,” but their little hostile tiffs have turned more into playful ones, their latest an ongoing saga involving the proper linguistics of the word ‘herb.’ But he doesn’t even know how to bring that up now! He can’t just say herb the right way and throw her ‘h’ in the garbage when he can’t stop thinking about the fact that she admitted she wants to kiss him.
Because he has realized in the last twelve hours that he is pretty sure he wants to kiss her too. The problem is she might not remember, and he doesn’t have enough knowledge of how to springboard off the ‘so when you were drunk -’ conversation. It’s not a situation he finds himself in often, or ever.
Any conversation is sort of dead for the whole day, and he blames it on her hangover. Clearly he just doesn’t want to agitate her pounding head further, which doesn’t actually help much, because this situation would be prime time to annoy Jyn and get a win. He slips out for lunch and calls Kay, though he neglected to tell his roommate anything about the party the night before, so it’s another conversation that goes nowhere. His friend is even worse with emotions than he is, and Kay’s current opinions of Jyn are still a reflection of when Cassian first met her, largely wrapped up in annoyance.
Cassian is overthinking, which is probably one of his biggest flaws.
She finds him later at the Christmas tree in the hallway, kicking idly at his shin while he sips his coffee and scrolls through his phone on break. He almost drops both cup and technology, a testament to how truly scattered she’s got him today. It’s terrible.
“You’re being weird.”
“I have lost count of how often you tell me I am being weird, even when I am being perfectly normal. I think your perspective of weird is off.”
She huffs. There’s a familiar cadance to their chatter: the extended arguments and evasive replies he’s so good at versus the way she dismisses them with a monosyllabic noise. Maybe that’s how she got the name of his cat, plowing through all his usual maneuvers one after one until she was in close enough to like his face. Until she was close enough that he discovered he really likes her face too.
“Stop. I know why you’re being weird. I don’t want to talk about it, but if it’ll get you to stop being weird, I’ll suffer.”
He makes a face. “You make it sound like I am forcing you into torture.”
“Maybe it is!”
It’s his turn to huff, though it’s not as loud, not as obvious. He’s mastered a quieter indignation. It’s not his problem if she doesn’t want to talk about her own actions! It is definitely his problem, because it affects him so directly. “Maybe I did not want to make it weird for you. Maybe I still do not know how to have this conversation when I am not even sure what you remember.”
She crosses her arms, like she’s closing in on herself. “I was pretending I couldn’t remember anything about last night,” she says with a grimace.
He pauses. “But you do.”
“More than I want to admit.” She looks like she wants to crawl into a hole, and it’s not his favorite guise. He prefers her smiling, laughing, even prefers her nose scrunching up when she’s irritated. She’s got freckles on her cheeks, a stubborn set in her jaw, and the dark circles under her eyes are the worst on Tuesdays. She yawns with abandon, she glowers by default, and his favorite smile is the tiny grin from the right that brings out the tiny dimple in her cheek.
“I think about your face a lot too.”
She opens her mouth like she’s ready to argue, then it drops, like she can’t believe what she just heard. Cassian swallows nervously, but the next thing he knows, she’s standing up on her toes, grabbing his shoulders to haul him down, and pressing her lips to his. He is prepared for most things in his life, with full anticipation and awareness towards existence, but despite the fact that she literally told him last night that she wanted to kiss him, he is still surprised when she actually does it.
Jyn hops back down and looks up at him; it’s more reserved than shy, like she’s dancing on her heels and ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. Her face is pink, the skin on her neck flushed. “You can pretend I’m still drunk if you don’t wanna kiss me back.”
There’s only one follow up to that, and it’s kissing her. He sets his coffee cup on the nearby table, sweeping in to kiss her a little recklessly for being on the clock, but the peppermint on her tongue reminds him of the party and he wants to pretend it’s time to go home. He can feel her smiling against his mouth as he settles his hands at her waist, her own hands curled tight into his shirt. After a few moments he pulls away, not far, keeping his forehead to hers. But he has something important to say. “Jeron.”
She blinks at him, still caught up in a daze. “What?”
“My middle name.”
It takes about three seconds, then her face lights up. She looks like she’s committing it to memory, then she leaps up and kisses him all over again. “I should have kissed you sooner.”
He laughs because he agrees and she swallows up the sound, nearly knocking him over into the nearby tree. He always did like Christmas. Maybe Thursday was the best night for a party, because he’s never been happier to be at work the next day, and he’s already looking forward to making gross life plans for the weekend.