Work Text:
The bed smelled like Cassian. Brasso knew the scent like he knew caf in the morning. Bitter and overwhelming, a shock to the senses and an indulgence he wasn’t sure he should be allowed every day.
He carded through the scraggly fur of Cassian’s little bantha. It was a wonder he’d kept something so sentimental. Cassian was a mess of secrets and bare truths. A well-loved childhood toy beside a stack of stolen motivators. A bed that still smelled like him. Bee’s lights pulsing faintly in the other room. Brasso curled his knees up so his feet stayed warm, and repeated Maarva’s message to himself again.
Tell him I love him.
He’d spoken it to himself every night, until he was sure he could honour everything Maarva needed to say. His lips moved all through the long final hours, counting the seconds as she dozed and unclenching his shoulders when he heard her snore. Her words never quite lost their meaning, but they rolled more like lyrics with each repetition. Everything worth remembering in Ferrix was a song sooner or later.
The grammar shifted around until he found the right register: She loves you. She said to tell you she loves you. I love you.
He couldn’t do it. These were Maarva’s parting gift for Cassian, and Brasso owed it to her to get them right. Verbatim, in third person: I love him.
Brasso could wait. He’d waited plenty long already. He’d been in love with Cassian forever: that wasn’t important. Everyone who met Cassian was at least a little bit in love with him, and Cassian never hesitated to leverage it either. Sometimes Brasso thought it hardly needed saying.
Loving Cassian, that was easy—almost too easy. Being in love with Cassian was a nightmare. Maybe Cassian thought Brasso had outgrown it, or he hadn’t noticed how deep it ran. Brasso was good with secrets: it was one of the reasons Cassian liked him so much.
At the end of all Cassian’s relationships, Brasso had been there. Watched Cassian grow, from the vitriolic first few where he’d spat unkind things he didn’t mean about the women who hadn’t realised that behind the big brown eyes was a live grenade. Later on, as he figured out the pattern, Cassian cursed his own need to test everyone’s limits, to bite before being bitten.
A few men at that stage, too. Big ones. Patterns they both tried not to notice.
Bix had been the hardest, of course. I loved her, Cassian had sobbed into Brasso’s shoulder, the first night and the next four as well.
‘Maybe you should’ve told her,’ Brasso murmured, because he liked Bix. He’d hoped that would work out. If he couldn’t—well, it hadn’t worked out.
‘I did tell her,’ Cassian sniffled. ‘She—she didn’t believe me.’
Brasso hummed thoughtfully. The sound made Cassian’s breathing even out, slowing down the soft hitches of grief. Thunder to quell the lightning.
‘What’d she say?’
‘She said I’m so good at lying it’s like I don’t know when I’m doing it to myself.’
Brasso raised his eyebrows. Bix was smart. ‘D’you think that’s true?’
‘I don’t know,’ Cassian murmured. His fingers dug into the quilting in Brasso’s jacket. ‘I wanted it to sound different. I don’t know how to say it right.’
Brasso hadn’t really understood what Cassian meant until that last day on Ferrix. Because after Maarva dictated her message, wringing sentences from her rattling lungs, she’d taken Brasso’s hand. He felt the papery slide of her skin, the creak of her bones as she gripped him.
‘You tell him.’
‘I will,’ he promised. “Everything you’ve said.’
‘Not that,’ she peered at him in her way that left no room for banthashit. Cassian had inherited that from her. ‘You tell him.’
Tell him I love him.
In the tunnel, Brasso caught a strange scent of salt in Cassian’s hair, so different from the pillow he’d slept on. He didn’t know how to say it right. That song had been stuck in his head so long that he found himself humming it. Maybe it didn’t need words. He hoped it didn’t need words.