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They come back from a mission on Anadeen and all Jyn wants to do is sleep.
The problem is her ankle, bad after Scarif, sore in the wrong atmospheric conditions, once again twisted the wrong way dodging a grenade.
She wants to insist it’s fine, but the coloring is a disturbing mixture of purple and yellow and the medical droid in the Rebellion’s Medbay fervently insists that it is not fine, therefore proving Cassian right in his initial assessment. It’s just a sprain that will keep her from the next mission or two, but it’s still wrapped in a bandage and shoved back into her boot with a clipped warning about not touching it for the week if not the next two.
(Cassian gives her a look that implies he’ll enforce the orders if she doesn’t follow them. She’s unimpressed.)
She does however allow Cassian to wrap his arm around her shorter frame, giving her the autonomy to walk but the support to not fall down the ice-coated hallways of Echo Base.
She knows instantly that the route is going to his quarters, not her own.
Cassian enters his code into the keypad, the one she’s tapped in a hundred times and memorized backward and forward—just in case. The door opens with a familiar hum and she thinks her eyes water at the thought of his mattress, hard like concrete but warm and inviting despite it. Instead he turns her body toward the desk wedged into the corner and pulls out the stool.
She sits, leveling him with a questioning glance as he removes his jacket, gingerly rolling it off his shoulders and throwing it onto the desk.
He doesn’t seem to notice her look, simply gives her one of his own and says “Jyn,” like that’s a hint.
At her non-response he pulls his over-shirt off and tilts his head at the refresher.
“Cassian,” she starts, tries not to whine.
Instead she looks at her boot, foot underneath wrapped and a reminder of unwanted limitations and how tired she is.
She doesn’t want to say ‘I can’t.’ The Death Star wouldn’t have been destroyed if she had said ‘I can’t.’ They wouldn’t have made it off of Scarif if she had said ‘I can’t.’ Saw had screamed, scolded, punished ‘I can’t’ out of her before she was twelve. Her father looked at her and called her stardust and believed she could do anything.
So instead she hedges with, “I’m exhausted.”
“Jyn,” Cassian says her name again but it’s different, him looking her head to toe and then himself.
They’re covered in dried sand and mud and sweat and she knows if she breathes in too deep the smell would revolt even the most weather-worn bantha shit scooper.
“Come on.”
“Only if it’s fair,” she concedes with a sigh, and he raises an eyebrow. “I’ll help you too.”
Jyn's eyes drift to the shoulder he’s been avoiding putting pressure on since they went off-planet.
Cassian rolls his eyes just a bit as he removes his thigh holster and throws it onto the table next to her, but doesn’t argue.
It should be more awkward, watching Cassian quietly strip articles of clothing off in front of her before throwing them into a pile. The fact is Rebellion missions can involve more costume changes than a cantina performance and it’s not much she hasn’t seen before in bits and pieces.
(Not to say she’s never caught a glimpse of his abdominal muscles when his shirt pulls over his head. How his arms are muscular and lean when he’s not wearing so many layers. The array of scars traveling up his back: a gunshot wound, a vibroblade burn, a possible cluster of grenade shrapnel. It’s just…part of the mission. Part of being on his team. Part of being his partner. Part of surviving Scarif together and unsure what the next step should be, taking it a small gesture at a time.)
The more awkward feat is trying to shimmy out of her pants without putting weight on her bad ankle. Cassian, standing there in his own underwear and nothing else, takes pity on her by pulling the offending clothing off piece by piece with a series of gentle tugs. He then brings the stool into the refresher, leaving her to stand on one foot before returning to wrap her arm around his torso.
Cassian positions the stool underneath her and Jyn slows into it, his hands on her wrists and his eyes nowhere near what little is exposed by the military issued sports bra. Cassian starts towards the red-tinted knob but stops briefly, nodding to her foot.
“Bandage.”
Jyn lets out a low growl at the offending article. She’d rather get it wet than stick her foot out of the glass door the entire time. The medical droid can piss off for all she cares.
“It’s not bacta,” Cassian says at her pinched facial expression. “You can take it off. Here.”
He unwraps the bandage in 3 quick twists, the last one sticking enough to make her gasp. He locks eyes with her for a moment, questioning, but she shakes her head. He throws the bandage into the other room and turns on the refresher as the pipes groan.
The spray on base is real water, filtered and recycled, rather than sonic. It’s always hotter than she expects, her body used to the 5 minute time limit of Wobani’s bathing system and the bone-chilling cold of Hoth that never seems to fully shed from their skins until they’re off-world.
Jyn closes her eyes at Cassian's first touches, his fingers working the tie loose from the knotted mess of what was once the bun at the back of her head. This, she thinks, is more intimate than the touches of their skin, than the partial nakedness of their bodies.
(She remembers her mother’s hands, smaller and more delicate, tutting as she brushed back Jyn’s puddle-muddied hair. How Jyn had tried to clean herself and was abruptly turned back around to the refresher for round two. She remembers her father’s laugh, then, and it’s warm and bright in a way that his memory hasn’t been in months.)
The only thing that breaks her from the trance of memory is the smell assaulting her along with his rhythmic motions. The soap here always smells of innocuous powder, never perfume but something that lingers on the skin a little longer for the benefit of those that can’t afford time for bathing like this.
She has the ability to clean herself and she tells him so even as he holds the soap bar over her head as if to challenge her. His furrowed brow does nothing to intimidate her, but the ache in her arms that signifies possible bruising is enough to dissuade her from arguing.
“I’ve got it,” Cassian sighs as he scrubs the dirt from her back, the inflection almost right into her ear.
I’ve got you is what she hears, what she knows to be true.
“I know,” she mumbles, feeling a heat unrelated to the water rise to her cheeks.
She really could do all of this alone. She could figure it out, at least. Both of them know they could’ve parted after their exit from the Medbay and gone their separate ways and this wouldn’t be happening. She doesn’t need his help, but she does appreciate it despite her nature—the old thing clawing inside her that she’s been fighting, the part of her scarred from losing Saw and her father so close together, that little girl still on Lah’mu watching everyone leave her behind—telling her to run away and get on the next ship towards the Outer Rim.
When Cassian works his way to her front, he puts the withering bar in her open palm and leans against the wall as she works the grit from her arms, neck, and chest by herself. He avoids watching her, for the most part focusing his gaze on the pale blue tile pattern and something far off in his own head.
In contrast, she scans his form briefly when she looks up and feels as if she’s openly ogling him. The scars she’s used to almost seem commonplace now, the scratch from an unknown creature over his ribs, the blaster burn on his shoulder.
The one that catches her attention enough to make him catch her gaze and meet it is on his left thigh. It’s another blaster wound, long healed over and white against his skin. She breaks from his eyes, moving the bar of soap to her legs. Her own scar, lower on her thigh, is a pinkish color, not last-mission fresh, but still healing without bacta patches and slowly returning to normal.
It had been just her and Bodhi on that run. Her pants had been cut open to treat the way it burned long before they were able to land on base.
“We match,” she says, almost giggling at the ridiculousness of the idea.
His scars and her own overlapping, merging, bringing them together all over again. He smiles at her in response, wet hair dripping into his eyes and so, so bright.
“Yes,” he chuckles, seemingly agreeing that this lightness between them is foreign but welcome. “We do. Here, close your eyes.”
She watches him bend down, some part of him making a small pop as he takes the soap again and begins to work on her face. The pads of his fingers are warm and familiar, almost soft from the hot water instead of callused and beaten to hell and back. The dirt and blaster residue come off with a few quick scrubs before she turns her face into the spray and for the first time in months she feels lighter. Clean.
It’s not just about the physical shower and she’s too far gone to deny it, now.
She thinks of kissing Cassian, of sharing this feeling under the spray of water and drowning in his embrace.
When she pries her eyes open Cassian’s standing, quickly running the shampoo through his hair and washing it out before she can say “Not fair,” which she does.
There’s no need to return this favor for him, but there is a want: to show him she’s capable of this trust, this care, this softness she’s rarely known.
He turns to her, this quirk to his lip that she only sees when they’re teasing and he can’t seem to hold back some sort of reaction to her. It peeks through his layers of careful movements and disguise and personality construction and cuts to his core, to the person he might be in a world without need of a Rebellion.
Cassian goes to his knees next to her, playfully tapping his forehead against hers. Jyn decides she likes him like this, laughing softly and pressed against her skin.
She takes the conditioner from the floor next to her chair and takes her time working it through. His hair is a shiny black from the moisture, darker and shorter than her own.
She makes a note to run her fingers through it dry. Some part of her thinks it would be blissfully soft against her skin and wonders why she hasn’t before.
It’s a quicker procedure than her wash, mostly to spare his knees from the floor. He stands with a grunt, washing out his hair before diverting his gaze to her.
“Satisfied?”
She nods, brushing their palms quickly and allowing the water to rush over her as he scrubs his body down and leans down again with the bar of soap. She washes his face delicately, resisting the urge to brush her thumb on the split section of his lip and unsure how to navigate with his facial hair but somehow managing.
When she finishes, Cassian shuts the water off with a sharp clang, the pipes creaking again at the moving pressure. He grabs towels for each of them, wrapping hers like a cape around her shoulders to adjust as she likes.
When they’re dry, enough that she feels comfortable trying to move without either of them slipping on the tile, Cassian takes her hands and pulls.
She gravitates into him, at least, that’s what it feels like; her head coming to rest against his chest, her towel now damp and cold around her shoulders. It’s not a hug, but it’s a close thing, more so when his hand finds its way to her back. It’s warm and heady listening to his heartbeat and the dull thrum of the base echoing around them.
When she tilts her head up his eyes are closed. She thinks about kissing him again. This time she does.
It’s not the heat she expected, a recreation of Scarif burning through her, the need and yearning that's ached against her chest for so long consuming them.
Instead it's a quiet, soft warmth, like the sun of Yavin IV against her cheeks their first day out of medbay, a mixture of surviving and after and against-all-of-K2’s-statistical-odds alive.
It’s his forehead against hers, the stroke of his fingers against her back. The simple act of being close again, holding and being held, the contact of skin and the lack.
His lips, she finds, are soft but for the split, which she somehow avoids or he ignores.
Then it's over, his dark eyes bright, hair drying quickly and a little long at the ends around his face, a smile with the smallest showing of teeth.
“Are you staying?” Cassian asks, and she thinks of his arm around her waist, of the nightmares that wake him with screams, how parts of her quarters are covered in a film of dust from disuse. She started this, typing in his code in the middle of the night and drifting to him in the darkness, but she has no doubts that it’s harder to sleep apart for him too.
“Yes,” Jyn breathes out, leaning in as he cups her face between his palms for a longer, more lingering kiss.
The pressure within asking her to cut and run softens, morphs into welcome home, offered again and again with his continued returns to her side.
“Yes.”