Work Text:
The Esk Line is practically dead at this time of night, and that may be the first less-bad thing Jyn’s discovered in the last six hours. It means there are very few other beings on the platform where they wait for the subrail, no one close enough to hear how laboured Cassian’s breathing is as he fights to keep himself upright for just a few more minutes. He’s leaning heavily on her, his body trembling, left arm limp at his side.
“This is the one,” he slurs as the gravtrain finally pulls into the station, doors sliding open with a creaky groan.
He lurches clumsily onboard, and it’s all Jyn can do to make his descent into a mercifully empty seat more of a controlled drop than total collapse. He’s breathing like he’s just finished a sparring match, his skin pale, eyes unfocused. She touches a hand to the fabric of his shirt just above his elbow, somewhat relieved to find the material cool to the touch - still soaked through with red-tinged rainwater, but not the heat of fresh blood. Not yet.
Jyn coaxes him into one more movement, shifting him a seat over to the window so she can put herself between him and the rest of the train car. Not that the occupants pay them much mind; their fellow passengers in these cold pre-dawn hours all seem to keep their eyes down, staring either into personal devices or out into space in silence, the screeching of the rails and the next station announcements the only sounds as they hurtle through the underground. Still, it feels like the very least Jyn can do, considering… all of it.
Beside her, Cassian shivers, calling her attention from her scan of their surroundings back to him. He feels cold against her, terrifyingly so. The rainwater that saturates his black shirt may have served to disguise the soak of blood but it’s also keeping him freezing, the heat from the vent above them unable to settle into his skin. His head lolls like it’s simply too much effort to keep it upright, his iron-strong composure breaking piece by piece in front of her eyes. She drapes her arm over the back of his seat, guiding him to lay his head on her shoulder in the hopes that it will stick out less than any alternative. They’re just a tired couple dragging themselves home from a very, very long night. That’s not so weird, right? It’s fine. It’s all fine.
As long as no one identifies the dark patch of blood staining what remains of Cassian’s left sleeve and splattered across Jyn’s shirt.
As long as no one looks long enough at the scarf wrapped around his upper arm to wonder what it’s there for.
It’s all fucking fantastic.
He mutters something unintelligible into her neck, his voice nearly a whine. His eyes are closed like they’re too heavy to keep open, his movements sluggish and struggling. Jyn feels something cold and spiny grow larger in her stomach, threatening to pierce holes in her abdomen.
“Shh,” she murmurs, fighting to keep the panic out of her voice and landing somewhere near anger, instead. “Just hang on. We’re almost home.”
“Home…” he says blearily, “But we’re — you’re— isn’t…?”
She shushes him again, stroking her fingers through his hair just for something unremarkable to do with her hands. Cassian’s far enough gone that he sighs into the touch, leaning in closer like he thinks he can rely on her.
(The sneer on their contact’s face flashes unbidden through her mind, distorted by Jyn’s own rage. The knife appearing in her hand. I don’t care much for liars, she’d snarled, the blade aimed for Cassian’s chest.
Jyn’s first shot only distracted her enough to slice into Cassian’s arm, instead. It took her the second bolt to put her on the ground.
A lifetime of practice with a blaster, but she always found a way to miss when it counted.)
Leaning in, like she isn’t the reason he’s dizzy and dying of blood loss in the subrail of an Imperial occupied city.
(If she’d been three seconds faster. Three centimetres to the right. Three steps closer when the blade was pulled — )
No, she snarls at herself, not dying. Not. Dying.
He’s not dying here. He cannot be dying here.
She won’t let him.
(He’d stumbled into the alley on his own strength when she failed him, the stubborn bastard. Dragging himself out of sight before he dropped to the soaked pavement, the grey jacket he wore already turning crimson by the time she fell to her knees beside him.
She’d destroyed it much further using it to keep pressure on the sickening rush of blood, left it in a gruesome heap behind the dumpster once her belt was tightened around his arm with a strength she’d feared she didn’t have and her scarf wrapped hastily over the wound itself.
Cassian had liked that jacket.)
She stopped the bleeding, but Jyn isn’t stupid. She knows survival, and she knows death. She knows how much he lost in the moments she wasted. What she doesn’t know is how many moments she has left to fix this. As much as she wants to tune out the voices in her head whispering too slow too little too late she can’t erase the knowledge of how right they may be. How badly she’s fucked it all up.
(“I can handle the drop-off,” he’d insisted in hyperspace this morning. “You just focus on avoiding any surprises.”
He said it like it was simple. Something he was confident she could do.
He’s paying for that confidence in her now.)
“S’cold,” he slurs right by her ear.
Jyn squeezes her eyes shut in a moment of weakness, tamping down the panic rising anew in her throat.
“I know,” she says, nearly growling to stop it from coming as a scream.
Because it’s really, really not.
Above ground, the city streets are cold. The pouring rain is cold
The train compartment, climate control system buzzing from a vent at their backs, is uncomfortably warm.
Well. It would be, if he had enough blood left in his body.
They pull into yet another station. The groan of the doors opening masks Cassian’s at the jerking motion of the stop. Jyn hushes him again, gritting her teeth, muttering hang on, fuck, just hang on as the train waits useless at the platform.
No one gets on. No one gets off. Jyn wants to break something. Anything.
Instead, she counts.
Counts sleepy, apathetic passengers. Counts the wasted seconds at every stop as the man beside her shivers. Counts stations on the glitching map above the door, counts how many to the end of the line.
Counts Cassian’s breaths, breaths that come shallow and laboured, but don’t stop.
The ride seems inconceivably long and Jyn feels every dragging second like acid on her skin, until finally the next station is the end of the line. This train terminates at: Shosi Square-Lakefront, the mechanical voice announces pleasantly in Basic, Could all passengers please leave the train at: Shosi Square-Lakefront, before repeating the message in Falere.
“Tha’s’us,” Cassian says, trying to push himself out of the seat only to fall right back into it with a wince. Jyn hauls him back upright, biting back childish tears as he sways on his feet. She has no energy to spare on being gentle, all but dragging him to the escalator toward street level. He doesn’t resist, barely tries to help. He stumbles on nothing as they come out into the square, leaning on her like a crutch to keep from collapsing She wants to scream. At him. At the city. At herself.
“You’re ok,” she grits out instead. Like she can make either of them believe it.
He’s going to be ok. She’s going to make him be ok.
He has to be ok.
The rain has slowed in the time it took to get across the city. It’s a fine mist now, visible only in the direct light of the street lamps, rather than the downpour from the alleyway. Still, it seeps back into Jyn’s clothes and hair in moments. Cassian’s shivers grow more violent. Jyn is painfully aware of just how out of place they look here, ragged and dripping and filthy as they pass quaint little storefronts and chic little restaurants all dark for the night. She can only hope the very few people she sees along their way are too drunk at this time of night to remember anything in the morning.
(There’s a sense memory nagging at the back of Jyn’s mind, triggered by the weight of his arm across her shoulders, by their slow, stumbling pace. Another time, another planet, the same man weak and hurting beside her. They made it out, that time and place.
K-2 may not be here but Jyn can’t imagine he’d find the odds of their doing it again encouraging.
She forces the thought, and the memory, away.)
On the way to the first station, when he’d been more lucid, Cassian promised that the safehouse was within sight of the station’s exit. He squints at the buildings they pass now through glassy eyes, far too disoriented to be of any use. His breathing quickens with the effort of their slow, shuffling pace.
Jyn ignores him as she scans the opulent buildings around them frantically for the purple-orange flag he’d told her earlier to look. When she finally finds it, the only flag she's seen not Imperial grey in at least a block, she feels there’s no way it could be right.
She drags them both toward it anyway. It hardly matters now what they find inside; they’re out of time. She can see the blood beginning to seep back through the fabric around Cassian’s arm despite the crude tourniquet. He can’t get much farther than this.
The double doors they come to below the flag look like crystal, just translucent enough to see vague shapes in the brightly-lit room beyond. The doors slide open as they approach, revealing an interior just as showy as the facade. A hotel lobby, Jyn realized suddenly, finally putting the pieces together. A nice hotel. Way too nice.
Right. Just fucking terrific.
“Foun’it,” Cassian breathes, leaning even heavier against her, “Good."
His words are reassuring, even if the state of his voice isn’t. Maybe he knows something she doesn’t. Maybe it’s the delirium talking. Either way, it’s too late to get anywhere else now.
Jyn gathers all the scraps of faux-confidence she has left, and drags him through the crystal doors into the lobby.
“Good evening!” A voice calls instantly, and Jyn whips her head around, startled to see a young woman hurrying out from behind a massive hardwood desk, looking more and more agitated as she takes in more and more detail of the pair of them. It doesn’t take her more than a few seconds to know the same thing Jyn does: they absolutely do not belong here.
“How can I help you?” Her smile is bright and utterly unconvincing.
The doors slide shut behind them as the woman stops a few meters away, eyeing the filthy strangers invading her lobby with distaste. Jyn meets her eye stubbornly, refusing to shrink. She should probably smile, probably pretend. It’s what Cassian would do if she hadn’t failed at her one and only job and gotten him stabbed. Cassian would smooth everything over, would convince the skittish receptionist there was nothing out of the ordinary happening here tonight.
She isn’t Cassian.
“Ruza sent us,” Jyn says flatly, not bothering with any of the pleasantries that should probably come first. Not like it would work anyway; she’s never had Cassian’s skill at putting people at ease. Either the woman in front of them will understand and respond to the code carried in the words, or she won’t. “She said to ask for Eris.”
There it is. Their last chance.
Jyn doesn’t breathe until she sees the woman’s expression change at the words. Nervous recognition joins the discomfort, naked on her face. Jyn can only hope their security here will never be reliant on this woman’s ability to lie.
“Right!” She squeaks, casting her eyes around the otherwise empty lobby, entirely unsubtle. “Of course, Eris! She was just — I mean, she was here just last Centaxday!”
Jyn feels Cassian’s grip on her shoulder tighten twice in confirmation. It’s the correct answer to the established code, if poorly memorized, and she nods in acknowledgement, face blank.
“Right,” the woman repeats, “Of course. Do you…will you two be needing a room, then? Or is there someone I can call for you, maybe?”
Jyn blinks incredulously, the short moment of relief she’d felt when the code was correct fading. She finds herself at a loss.
“Fuck,” Cassian says.
Jyn’s sentiment exactly.
“Is he, uh…” The woman’s attention is drawn back to Cassian by the rough sound of his voice. Her eyes widen as they catch on his arm, on the blood slowly starting to saturate the scarf.
“We don’t have time for this,” Jyn hisses, her meagre patience long gone, “I need a medkit.”
“Yes. Of course, yes.” She doesn’t move, despite her words, and stars, if Jyn were able to move without leaving Cassian to collapse on the gaudy carpet… “But your partner, he’s, um…”
“He’s dying,” Jyn says. She’s aiming for a flat tone and misses by a mile. She isn’t sure if it’s her words or her voice that makes the other woman flinch. “He needs a medkit right now. I don’t care where you put us, anywhere we won’t be bothered but it needs to be right now.”
“M’not dying,” Cassian mutters, liar that he is. Jyn ignores him.
The other woman seems finally to be shaken out of her stillness, darting back behind her desk to rummage inside it, pulling out a sleek, compact package. But once she has it she stops again, hesitating.
Cassian’s breath hitches.
It takes every ounce of Jyn’s threadbare restraint not to jump over the desk.
“I’m so sorry, it’s just, I don’t remember exactly what I’m supposed to do for the Eris protocol, and I’m afraid—”
“Fuck your protocol,” Jyn snarls. Cassian makes an unhappy sound at her volume. Protesting the scene she’s making, no doubt, even if there’s no one else around. The mistakes she keeps making, piling on top of every other one that’s gotten them here. No doubt he’d do a better job of this like he does everything else. No doubt if it was her blood drying in both of their clothes the way it should have been, her hanging half-conscious off of him—
She doesn’t have time for this.
“Give me the medkit. Give me somewhere safe to use it. Now.” She can hear the hysteria creeping into her voice. She doesn’t try to stop it. “If he dies here, I swear—”
She doesn’t finish the threat.
Doesn’t know how to.
If he dies here, what?
(Somewhere deep in her chest lives something that believes that if his breathing stops, hers will too. And maybe it’s right.)
It doesn’t matter.
He doesn’t have time for this.
Finally seeming to grasp the mortal urgency, the receptionist stops arguing. Suddenly purposeful, she leads them toward the set of liftcars in the wall behind them, medkit in hand, and watches Jyn manhandle Cassian inside after her. Her fingerprint reveals two more rows of buttons below the lift’s initial options. She presses one on the bottom row.
Silence falls as the doors slide shut and the lift starts down, broken only by Cassian’s laboured breathing as they pass one floor, then two.
“Only the staff has access to the wine cellar,” she says, words rushed, staring straight ahead. In the mirrored doors Jyn can see the anxious concern in the other woman’s expression, and finally notices the name tag pinned to her blouse, reading Thera. “No cameras. When the owner arrives she’ll complete the Eris protocol. You’ll be - You won’t be discovered.”
The floor indicator changes again in silence.
“…Thank you,” Jyn mumbles awkwardly, for lack of a better idea.
“Of course,” Thera says, a clearly automatic response. Then, “Are you two… you’re really rebels?”
The lift feels suddenly five degrees colder. Cassian flinches, as much as his weak muscles will allow. .
“I mean, I knew Madam Laine promised to help you, because Eris, and all of that.” Thera doesn’t seem to notice the sudden tension. “But to think— actual rebels on Falriv!”
Jyn casts her eyes frantically around the small space, searching for bugs, cameras. There’s nothing that she can see but everything in this building is expensive and it only tracks that their security would be too
“Jyn—” Cassian slurs suddenly. “Ah—”
It’s all the warning he gives her.
“Really, I’m the one who should be thanking you,” Thera says.
Jyn scrambles for a reaction, a response. Any response. To any of it.
“Here we are,” Thera says.
The liftcar door slides open to reveal a shadowy, cavernous room.
Cassian passes out.
For the first time in thirty-six hours, Jyn’s mind stills.
It isn’t that the terror goes quiet, exactly, so much as that it raises so high in pitch that it’s suddenly above the register she can hear. Everything else vanishes, melting from the peripherals of her consciousness until she’s left with nothing but purpose.
There’s no space now for racing thoughts and whispering voices.
It’s almost a relief.
She catches Cassian’s full weight with a detached sort of calm, aware of Thera’s sudden alarm only as background noise. It certainly isn’t easy, dragging his limp form out of the liftcar, but adrenaline is a hell of a drug. Jyn hardly notices the difficulty as she hauls him into the alcove Thera points out between breathless, panicked whimpers.
As soon as Cassian is supine on the concrete floor, Jyn tears the medkit from Thera’s grasp and sinks to her knees beside him. The kit unfolds to lay flat, revealing a stunning variety of meds and supplies, well-organized and clearly labeled.
Lightyears more expensive than anything she’s ever used, she notes dispassionately as she tears a sanitizing wipe from its packaging.
Thera lingers uncomfortably for a few moments, shifting anxiously on her feet and giving advice Jyn neither hears nor needs until she Jyn sharply suggests she might be needed back in the lobby. Thera is eager to agree, scurrying quickly back into the liftcar.
Left alone with the medkit and work to be done, Jyn unwraps her scarf from around Cassian’s arm.
When she surfaces from her task, it’s without any concept of how much time has passed.
Jyn sinks back in the silence and suffocates.
Cassian’s left arm is clean, the wound clotted over and covered carefully in flexible bacta dressing. His right arm is connected to hers by a thin tube, a green light flashing on the tiny filtering apparatus halfway down the line to indicate optimal blood flow. The medscanner beside her beeps intermittently in approval as his blood pressure slowly rises.
It’s promising, all of it. All of his vitals are improving or steady, the red warning flashes cleared from the scanner’s display. She’s done it all right. She’s done everything she can. Nothing left to do now but wait.
So she waits.
Exhaustion creeps back in as the adrenaline fades. Everything feels so heavy.
Her back to the cold stone wall, her knees folded to her chest and the arm not linking her artery to Cassian’s vein wrapped around them, she waits.
She doesn’t know what comes next. The first part, the getting to a safehouse when things went bad, had been emphasized time and time again in her brief so-called training. But no one ever got around to telling her what’s supposed to happen after. Maybe it didn’t occur to anyone they’d have to, didn’t occur to anyone that she’d fuck up this badly on only her second-ever assignment as Captain Andor’s partner. His backup.
Force, the thought is almost laughable.
The rebels should have known it would end like this, if not so much worse. She should have known. Should have remembered that it doesn’t matter how long she’s survived this galaxy, that the same skillset has never translated to protecting the ones closest to her. She can keep herself alive, maybe, but she’s never been strong enough to do the same for anyone else.
Jyn squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, willing away traitorous tears.
As she opens them again, the lights go out.
Panic spikes sharp and overwhelming for a split second before a memory of lights flickering on along their path on the way in catch up to it. Of course. The lights are motion-activated and tucked in the space between a shelf of bottles and the wall, they’re likely nowhere near the sensors.
Right.
That’s… good. Safer. They’re better hidden this way, and she doesn’t need the light just to sit here.
This is fine.
The glowing indicators on the med equipment are the only things visible in the cellar, casting just enough light to make out part of Cassian’s silhouette. When she listens, she can just make out the sound of his breathing. Beyond him, there is only darkness.
Jyn feels the walls closing in on her. In the light the room around them was cavernous but without it she feels the darkness push in, feels the space shrink and tighten. Her breath quickens. Her chest goes tight. The cave shrinks smaller.
She sits in silence and darkness, and suffocates.
She’s wrenched out of her implosion sometime later by a sharp intake of breath, the only indication Cassian gives of snapping back into consciousness. He keeps completely still, and in the dark, she can’t tell if he even opens his eyes. She knows, though, that the gears are turning frantically in his head, cataloguing sensations and surroundings and patchy memory to decide just how fucked he is.
“You’re ok, we’re ok,” she murmurs before panic can set all the way in. The truth of the statement is irrelevant. Knowing the next thing she’d notice in his place she adds for good measure, “There’s a needle in your arm. Do not touch it.”
A moment of silence as her words settle with him.
“Jyn?” He rasps, more air than sound. “Where—? What—?”
“Safehouse. On Falriv. What do you remember?”
“I—” he clears his throat. “The drop-off, I got… I got knifed. And then the train? And the hotel?”
“Sounds like you’re all caught up, then,” she says. “We’re six floors down. Wine cellar. You blacked out in the lift.”
“Supplies?”
“Plenty.” She huffs, something that might have been a laugh if she had the strength for it. “Fanciest fucking medkit I’ve ever seen.”
His attention goes to the tube coming out of his arm at the reminder, groping for it with his good hand despite her extremely clear instructions against touching it. There isn’t nearly enough light to see the colour running through it, much less where it’s coming from, but she knows better to think that will stop him, the perceptive bastard.
“Blood?”
“Mm.”
“Never heard of a medkit with whole human blood.”
“First time for everything.”
His hand pauses over the line. His silhouette shifts as he turns his head, as if to look at her despite the impossibility of it in the dark. She doesn’t understand why he’s decided this of all things is so important. Why he won’t just drop it.
Why she’s suddenly so desperate for him to.
They’re both quiet for a long moment, but his fingers stay at the needle in his arm. She swears she can feel his gaze through the impenetrable dark between them, heavy and challenging. She glares uselessly back at his silhouette. Stubborn fucker.
“Jyn.”
“Yes?”
“It’s your blood?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I have plenty to spare. Because you were fucking dying.”
He goes quiet again and Jyn wants to scream at the silence. At him. At the dark for hiding his expression when he finally speaks up again and his voice is thick with something she can’t identify.
“You… you didn’t have to do that. I would have been ok without it.”
Of course. Of course. Just one more mistake. One more way today has proven what he must have known from the start; she was never enough for this, not smart enough, not quick enough, not good enough and she thought she was helping but fuck that, right? Of course he doesn’t need her blood, just like he doesn’t need her help, just like he doesn’t need her here.
Something in Jyn snaps.
“Fuck off,” she grits out, but to her horror, her voice nearly breaks on the brief syllables.
“What? No, Jyn, I mean—”
“Fuck off.” She repeats, and finds she can’t stop. “I know, ok? I know. You can save it all for the mission report. I don’t need to hear it.”
“I don’t—”
“Just shut up!”
He stuns her by obeying, and the silence grows between them like mould. It sucks the air from the cellar around them, brings the walls closing in and Jyn’s breathing is loud, too loud, it’s all she can hear and she needs to get the needle he clearly hates so much out of his arm and she needs to keep the foolish tears behind her eyes from brimming over and she needs to pull herself together because they aren’t out of this yet but there’s a hole broken in her chest and despite her every effort, the words spill out, desperate.
“I’ll do better. Next time. I’ll be better.”
A beat of silence. Then, “…What?”
Jyn clenches her fist and does not growl. Does not sob.
“I’m sorry,” she grits out “ok?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t act dumb with me.”
“I’m not, I swear I’m not.”
“I know I fucked up!” she finally cries. “I know I made it worse. I know it would all be simpler without me. So you can stop...” She grasps desperately for the right word. Doesn’t find it. “Just… stop.”
There’s silence as Cassian flounders, the kind of silence that means he’s digging through the fucking filing cabinet he has in his brain, trying to get a read on her.
“Jyn, where… where is this coming from?” He moves to sit up, grunting with the effort. Jyn stops him with a hand to his chest, pushing him down. He sprawls back without a fight. “You can’t actually believe I could have gotten all the way here alone?”
She glares into the nothingness between them, refusing to dignify it with an answer. Cursing the way he can read her silence.
“You do. Don’t you. Fuck, I couldn’t have gotten out of the damned alley alone, you have to know that!”
“You don’t—”
“No.” He cuts her off sharply, before she’s even sure what she meant to say. “My turn. I know you’re not stupid. You saw the blood. You know how this works. I would have bled out in a few more minutes alone and you know it.”
He’s genuinely angry now and it’s for all the wrong reasons. She fucked up and he must know it. She didn’t have his back. She didn’t know what to do. She nearly let him die in a filthy alley and a subrail car and a flashy hotel lobby. He deserves to be furious with her, but not like this.
“You said it yourself,” he continues, “I was dying! You saved my life.”
“I shouldn’t have had to! I wouldn’t have had to, but I screwed it all up.”
“How could you possibly think—”
“I missed!” she cries. There’s a gaping hole in her chest now and everything pours out of it. She wants to run, needs to get far away, but the transfusion line between their arms tethers her to him. “I was supposed to stay close. I was supposed to have your back. If I was good enough she wouldn’t have even— you wouldn’t be—”
The shadows move in front of her as Cassian pulls himself up again, shoving her hand away this time when she tries to push him back down. It’s uncoordinated but relentless, and he presses forward until she can almost make out his face in the faint green light cast by the transfusion device.
“If you weren’t good enough,” he says, voice hard and cold as the stone at her back, “I’d be dead.”
Her breath hitches. She opens her mouth to protest, but he doesn’t give her the chance.
“You’re right. If your first shot landed she wouldn’t have gotten me at all.”
It shouldn’t hurt to hear him say it, not after she all but begged him to. It does.
“And if you weren’t there,” he continues, flat, “she would have put that blade between my ribs and dumped my body in the river.”
The image plays terrifyingly clear in Jyn’s mind. The tears she’s been fighting tooth and nail all night spill over.
“I didn’t see the knife. She would have killed me. And if she hadn’t? Then I would have bled out in that alley, or else collapsed onto the subrail tracks.”
Jyn can’t suppress a whimper. Cassian pauses at the sound. His voice softens.
“You kept me alive, Jyn. You stopped the bleeding. Dragged me all the way across this Force-damned city to get somewhere safe.” He follows the tube from the crook of his elbow until he lands at her arm, thumb stroking back and forth across the skin above the draw site. Jyn shudders despite herself. “You gave me your blood.”
Jyn is grateful he can’t see her tears, though she has the uncomfortable impression he’s still seeing far more of her than anyone has in a long time.
“I wasn’t supposed to let it come to that,” she repeats weakly. “I was supposed to have your back. That’s all they sent me for.”
“And you did.”
She’s not sure she can believe that, but she can feel the fight draining out of her regardless, her defences fading. Force of others, she’s just so tired.
She feels Cassian moving, shuffling to join her with his back to the wall. He’s just close enough to feel the warmth of his body beside her, reassuring in the stifling dark. This silence is far gentler than the last.
Her tears are beginning to dry when the device between them gives a tone indicating the end of the transfusion, automatically closing the connection between them. Jyn withdraws the needle from her arm while Cassian does the same, the tube discarded with the rest of the medkit for now. Jyn gropes for the canteen she set aside earlier, pushing the water into his hand and listening to ensure he drinks dutifully.
“I think we’ll be here a while,” Cassian says softly after another long moment passes between them, “You should try to get some rest.”
“I should take first watch,” she argues, even as her body begs to sleep.
“You already did. I’m awake now, it’s your turn.”
“You lost two litres of blood.”
“Then took half that from you.”
“But—”
“Go the fuck to sleep, Jyn.”
He drapes his arm around her shoulders as he interrupts her, inviting her wordlessly to lean into the heat of his body. Jyn doesn’t think she could resist if she tried, falling into his side like gravity. She tries to remember how many hours it’s been since she last slept, but the math goes fuzzy at the edges.
“You did well,” he murmurs as she settles, and she refuses to look too closely at the fluttering feeling in her chest at the words. The rise and fall of his chest grounds her, lulls her into drowsiness faster than she thought possible.
“You got us this far. You got us safe. Let me take it from here.”
Jyn gives in, and does.