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Jyn’s crashed practically arse-over-head into blade-scraped ice for what feels like the fifteen-millionth time, when Cassian makes The Sound. Jyn knows The Sound, is in fact depressingly well-acquainted with The Sound at this dubious point in their relationship. Jyn, loathe to admit as much, dreads The Sound, for reasons she’d rather not examine too carefully, thanks all the same. The Sound, born somewhere in the pit of Cassian’s horribly well-defined chest, is a sharp little huff, disappointed lovechild between an angry sigh and a gasp of shock – though what Cassian’s got to be so bloody shocked about, Jyn can’t fucking imagine.
“I told you,” she bites out miserably, arse practically frozen to the rink, “I can’t nail that extra quad, not in the second half of the program.”
At the word can’t, Cassian makes The Sound again, but louder. His dark brows, ever expressive, pinch into a frustrated little tent on his forehead. “You can,” he insists, replete with the same infuriating, bullheaded stubbornness that made him her coach in the first place, for all the good it’s doing them both now. “I’ve seen you pull off harder combinations than this.”
“What does it matter? I never land those in competition.”
“Just because you haven’t doesn’t mean you can’t. You have the potential,” he preempts, over the denial half-shaped on Jyn’s tongue. “You just refuse to believe it.”
“You think I’m not trying?” Jyn, who’s had enough of insult on top of injury for one training session, wobbles back to her feet. Sweat from the past fifteen-million failed quads stings her eyes. Her thighs scream. “You don’t think I spend every minute of every day trying to live up to my father’s legacy? Or Saw Gerrera’s? You aren’t my first coach, Cassian. If you wanted a perfect clone of Galen Erso and all his gold medals, you should have just left me to Saw’s ambitions.”
She didn’t notice her own feet carrying her back to the rink’s edge, but now she’s practically nose-to-nose with Cassian Andor, five-time Grand Prix champion, the miraculous Mexican phenom himself. There’s a sight for the tabloids: the living legend leaning halfway over the ice like one of the local Habs players, ready to go at it with the Leafs, only instead of a burly hockey roster, he’s facing off against this twiggy, washed-up twirl girl. “Do you really believe,” he says, very quietly, “that I would have agreed to coach you in Gerrera’s stead, if all I recognized in you was your father? I’ve been skating since I was six years old. I’m a World Champion. I had every opportunity to remain on the competitive circuit. I could have kept going, kept winning more medals for my people, made my own country proud. And did I?”
“None of that changes the situation.”
“You have the potential,” Cassian repeats. “The same potential that lives in every Grand Prix champion there ever was. I would know.” His mouth twists when he adds, “The only difference is, we all decided to do something with it.”
And that hurts. “You can’t talk your way into this,” says Jyn, lashing back as hard as she knows how. “You can’t talk a screw-up like me into a real chance at a Grand Prix win. Not after what happened last time I took the ice.”
Cassian’s so close, she can see the flecks of stadium lights in his night-dark gaze. Jyn, hot-eyed, wishes she’d stop noticing that sort of nonsense already. Especially when Cassian snarls, “I don’t have to.”
The moment crackles heat across the scant ice between them. Jyn can’t escape the sight of him: every inch, every nuance of the one-time wunderkind nobody from Mexico, thrown into sharp relief against the rink’s cold white expanse: apple-red rising dark in his cheeks, ocean-blue parka hugging his tension-strung shoulders, painting Cassian over in angry, primary colors. It’s enough to steal the oxygen from Jyn’s already thoroughly-worn lungs. Her fingers ball defiant into fists.
“We’re done here for today.” Her coach’s words shatter the tableau. “Go get yourself cleaned up. We’ll talk again when you’ve had time to collect yourself.”
He leaves her in the rink’s artificial cold without so much as another word.
*
“Did you have another fight with Cass With the Ass?” Bodhi’s weight plops unceremoniously onto the edge of Chirrut’s lumpy little couch, practically upending Jyn’s precariously-balanced tea mug, but she’s too tired to muster even a glare.
“I wish you wouldn’t call him that,” she informs the depths of the tea mug.
“What, ‘Cass With the Ass’?”
“Oh god, stop.”
“What?” Bodhi knocks his knee against hers, tugging off his trainers. “It’s what all the Americans called him back in his Captain Jailbait days, eh?”
Jyn wonders, absently, how hard it would be to drown yourself in your own tea. Very, probably. That’s the kind of day she’s had. “He’s my coach.” Her voice echoes pitifully inside the half-empty mug.
“Yeah, well, I hate to break it to you, darling, but he was the multiple championship-winning sex symbol of the figure skating world first.”
“I find this impossible to forget, no matter how hard I try.”
"The wet dream of every –”
“No matter how hard I try.”
“Look,” says Bodhi. He’s using that kind, measured tone that first won him her friendship, back when they were a pair of gawky, lonely Brit-born teenagers scrabbling their way on to their sport’s world stage, starved for companionship but unsure when to trust it. “You can’t dwell on the past forever. A legend like Cass With – like Cassian Andor, he’d never give up his competitive career for just anyone. He saw something in you.”
“Saw me fall on my arse in front of the entire world, you mean.”
“And saw you get back up again,” says Bodhi, who’s apparently determined to be an obnoxious bloody optimist. “That’s not something just anyone can do, yeah?”
“Your friend speaks correctly.” Jyn nearly drops the mug. Years after his retirement, Chirrut Imwe still moves with the soundless grace that once made him the Hong Kong Ballet’s most celebrated principal. If his fateful tour with an avant-garde modern dance troupe hadn’t brought him to North America, catapulting him head-over-heels into a history-making, headline-stealing marriage with Baze Malbus – the scowling, mainland Chinese-born, immigrant draftee to the Habs, a jaw-dropping defenseman who’d come seemingly out of nowhere and brought the entire NHL to its knees – Jyn bets anything Chirrut would still be performing to sold-out theatres across Asia.
Instead, he’s spent the past ten years teaching classical dance technique to young, up-and-coming figure skaters out of a little studio in downtown Montreal, an occupation that makes his hockey celebrity husband snort and roll his eyes, but hasn’t stopped Baze from swinging by the studio with gruff offerings of fresh-bought shaobing youtiao – “all you twirl girls and pretty boys, you’re too skinny” – every chance he gets.
Jyn trades in her tea for Baze’s latest offering, biting into the flaky, hearty bread. “He hates me,” she informs Chirrut around the dough’s warmth.
The dance teacher smiles his milky-eyed smile. “Cassian Andor does not hate you. He merely wishes that you would stop dwelling on your past long enough to build your future. He’d like to help you accomplish that, if you’ll let him.”
“All he does is yell at me,” says Jyn, who’s in a mood for self-pity. “He always has something to criticize. If he were here right now, he’d probably tell me to work harder and stop eating so much shaobing, never mind that it’s your husband who won’t quit enabling all the skaters.”
Bodhi, who’s snatched up the last piece of shaobing with long, greedy fingers, licks up a stray sesame seed from his wrist, and says, eyes very wide, “Well, don’t tell Baze to stop feeding us! I don’t know about Cass With – about Cassian, but my coach says positive reinforcement is good for me.”
Chirrut laughs. “I don’t think I could stop Baze fattening you up if I tried. The man has a mind of his own. He’s not unlike Cassian in that way – or you, Jyn. You and your coach are more alike than you think. Do you truly believe he’s not dealt with disappointments and failures of his own?”
It’s hard to imagine. Jyn, popping the last of the bread into her mouth, curls her knees up to her chest. She considers her support network – Bodhi, Chirrut, Baze, even Cassian himself – and faint shame curdles her heart. She’s not like them. From her first day on the ice, the gatekeepers of professional skating embraced this pale, nimble little wisp of a girl who bore her father’s famous name. She had the right looks, the right lineage, the finest training her father’s reputation could buy. And where had all those silver-platter advantages gotten her? Humiliated in her first major international competition, skating to a shameful last place, shattered at age sixteen beneath the weight of the world’s expectations. Saw Gerrera could barely look her in the eye, after, hardly said a word, but Jyn knew which ones he’d have chosen: Galen Erso’s legacy, destroyed.
And she – Jyn Erso – presumes to impress a man who singlehandedly put Mexico on the professional skating map? A man who blazed through the record-making competition scores of prodigies and reigning champions from Russia and Canada and the United States, who stood tall against ignorance and resistance, and proved his rightful place in this world five times over and counting?
Jyn jerks to her feet, and makes a show of dabbing invisible crumbs from her suddenly too-hot face. “It’s late. I should go.”
“Come on, Jyn –” Bodhi begins. Chirrut’s hand, soft on his shoulder, derails the remainder of her friend’s plea.
“Go home, then,” says Chirrut, milky eyes kind and knowing. “Take your time. You’ll know where to find us if you need us.”
*
Jyn does not walk home to her crappy rented bungalow, like she fully intended to when she left Chirrut’s. Her feet, ever mutinous, drag her to Cassian’s doorstep before she quite realizes what they’ve done. “Traitors,” she mutters, staring down at them. Her toes, still pinched from too many hours breaking in new skates, twinge back faintly in response. Stuffing half-gloved hands into her pockets, she scowls, looking at anything but Cassian’s door. This is beyond ridiculous.
Footsteps, some shuffling, a muttered mierda!, and the door clicks open to reveal Cassian in undershirt and dark blue sweats, squinting at her from beneath a crown of rumpled hair. She tries not to stare at the curve of his jawline, the way his Adam’s apple catches when he says, “Jyn. Dios, come inside, before we freeze to death out here.”
She follows, shoulders hunched. Cassian kicks the door shut behind her, and ushers her over to a couch, running restless fingers through his hair. She imagines he’s trying to make it lie flat, but he’s only succeeding in making it messier, like it’s bed-rumpled. She tries terribly hard not to have an opinion on that.
He’s watching her, careful eyes turned up at the corners, inscrutable. “Jyn –”
“I was sixteen,” she blurts out. Her tongue has gone the way of her feet, cleaving to the roof of her mouth one second, then running loose without her permission the next. “I was sixteen, and my father died, and I was supposed to skate anyway, because how better to honor his legacy, right? Why not? What choice did I have? It was all I’d done my entire life. I was Galen Erso’s daughter. I had no friends, no hobbies, no other ambitions, so when Papa died, what was I supposed to do, except skate?
“But I was sixteen, and when I hit the ice, all I could think about was the first time he took me out to a rink. I fell down – almost immediately, you know, right on my arse. Just like trying to land that quad today, only all I did was toddle out on to the ice like I owned the bloody rink, without any kind of technique, because that’s what children do, I guess. So I fell, and couldn’t get back up again, but that’s when Papa lifted me back to my feet, and called me stardust, and said that one day, when I was grown, I’d know how to pick myself up when I fell.
“But I couldn’t, could I? That day on the ice, all those years later, at sixteen, with Papa dead in the ground, and Saw Gerrera watching me from the stands like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Like I was a robot on skates, with a glitch. I fell, and I fell, and I fell, and I never – ”
She’s crying. She’s not sure when she started, but now she can’t stop, just weeping like an idiot in front of the man whose posters she used to hang up in her school locker for inspiration: strong jaw and dark eyes and such artistry, caught untouchable behind the photographer’s lens. Nothing could have brought the man in those posters down, not fear or shame or even grief.
Cassian’s puttering at his little kitchenette, back turned. His expression gives nothing away when he presses a steaming mug of cocoa between Jyn’s hands, wordless, and produces a handkerchief. Jyn accepts both offerings numbly – the cocoa smells good, and honestly, who carries a handkerchief anymore? Cassian, apparently – and tries not to imagine sinking through a hole in the floor as she wipes snot all over the nice clean linen. Cassian merely returns to the kitchenette, announcing offhand, “It’s suppertime. I’m making chilaquiles. I have enough for two, I think.”
“Um.” Jyn blinks wetly into Cassian’s handkerchief.
“Would you like to know,” he adds, bent over a frying pan, “what I was doing before you turned up on my doorstep?”
“I don’t know. Probably making chira – chila – ”
“Chilaquiles. Yes. But I was also watching an old video of a remarkable young skater.”
Jyn slumps. “Kei Tu.” The snide-tongued teenage upstart in the men’s juniors, who’d made a minor splash by refusing the attentions of any choreographers but Cassian last season. Jyn’s amazed Kei hasn’t murdered her in her sleep yet. “I know he wants you for his coach.”
Cassian glances up from his cooking, one side of his mouth curved. “No. Not Kei. A remarkable technician and a wonderful athlete with great potential in his own right, but he’s not the skater I’m talking about.”
“Then who?”
He picks up a remote, and flicks the living room TV screen on. “See for yourself.”
Jyn nearly snorts hot cocoa through her nose. The subject of the video is the surly side of eighteen? Nineteen? Jyn can’t recall, exactly. The girl’s trussed out in unflattering training kit, half scowling at the camera, but the routine she skates is flawless: her own perfect simulacrum, in fact, of the stunning program that won Cassian Andor gold in the men’s division Grand Prix earlier that same year. Jyn recognizes the video. She hadn’t realized anyone was recording until Bodhi sheepishly informed her the next morning that his video clip of Jyn’s training session had gone viral overnight.
“That wasn’t anything,” she babbles, before the footage cuts out. “That was a joke, blowing off steam after taking a year off the competitive circuit, it doesn’t mean – ”
“Eat.” Cassian deposits a plate of something divine-smelling into her lap.
“That wasn’t anything,” Jyn repeats. She forks a bite of whatever’s-on-the-plate into her mouth, and suppresses the near-orgasmic sound she makes. “Shit. This is amazing.”
“Mexican peasant food.” Cassian takes a seat beside her, his own plate in hand. “The most reliable sustenance for a hungry athlete. Go on, finish your supper,” he instructs, “but tell me. What did you see in that video?”
Jyn’s brow knits over her plate. She’s utterly, horribly aware of Cassian’s thigh pressed against hers, body heat through their clothes. “A nobody, making a game of being a somebody.”
“Ah.” Cassian grins around his fork. “How strange. I saw a promising young skater nailing one of the hardest routines I’ve ever choreographed. And I thought, perhaps there’s more to this girl than’s been said, no?”
“I didn’t know anyone was watching.”
“So why skate?” That night-dark gaze, a million times more intense in living color than a store-bought sports poster, snaps right through her. “You say you skate because you are Galen Erso’s daughter. You say you skate without choice. So why skate at all, when no one’s watching?”
“Because...” Her tongue is dry. She’s out of answers. “Because. I wanted to. That’s all. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, Jyn.” His grin, fuller now, transforms his entire face, bright as his eyes are dark. “Nothing at all. Just a choice you made. I meant what I said to you, at training today. I don’t have to talk you into a win. I cannot make you do anything, Jyn. No one on this earth can. You have to decide for yourself.” He taps the edge of the screen. “Just like you did, when you skated this routine.”
Time stretches between them. Cassian’s thigh slides against hers. His gaze, hooded beneath half-mast lashes, falls to her mouth. Her weight shifts toward him. If she wanted to, theoretically, she could –
A forkful of tortillas and pulled chicken enters her mouth. “I thought I told you,” says Cassian, eyebrows lifted over the fork he’s fed her, “to finish your supper.”
“Mmmmmrgh!” protests Jyn, cheeks flaming.
Cassian pulls the fork clean from her mouth. She could swear he’s laughing, the bastard. The chicken, which she chews and swallows with as much visible fury as she can muster, is fucking delicious. She hates everything.
“Tomorrow,” she snaps, stuffing another forkful into her mouth, this time of her own accord. “I’m going to give that quad another go.”
Cassian’s eyebrows, if possible, climb higher. “Will you, now? That is not what you said earlier today.”
Chewing angrily, she glares at him. “Well, it’s what I’m saying now, all right?”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
His hands fly up. “Okay! I believe you.”
“I’m just.” Her fork flails, spilling some cheese on to his couch, though he doesn’t seem to notice. “I’m not used to people sticking around, when things go bad.”
Cassian shrugs, offhand, but the smile he sends her, Jyn feels to her very roots. “Welcome home.”