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Cassian can barely keep his eyes open amidst the pain in his side, the pounding in his head, the thoughts he has barely begun to process. He wants to fall asleep but there’s a creature in front of him telling him not to, asking him if it hurts when he presses down on a rib.
There’s a flash of light that blinds briefly through the cockpit, yells of shock and indignation from the pilots, from other passengers he can’t identify. And then they’re gone, hitting hyperspace and the clouds turn into stars which turn into a blur of more light and Scarif falls away. Cassian knows it’s still there, somewhere behind them, and then he knows, somehow, the instant it’s gone, swallowed by an energy and a weapon he still can’t comprehend. The feeling aches in him, more painful than any of his injuries, and he looks to her, looks to the blurred outline of Jyn, and he feels confused. Moments ago Cassian Andor had been expecting death, had even wanted it, and now he’s being flown to safety and it doesn’t seem right or fair. All those left behind to die and the two of them here. Jyn finally looks back at him and her eyes are wide, incomprehensible with fear. Cassian feels sick and has to turn away.
***
A week passes back at Yavin, Cassian drifting in and out of awareness, of caring. His senses are usually so hyper tuned, always ready to fight or run, to survive in all the ways he’s been trained to. But he finds himself sluggish, more often confused than cognizant of what’s happening. They keep attempting to send him updates on missions -- to tell him what has transpired with the Death Star plans -- and for the first time since he’s been in the Rebellion, he finds he doesn’t care.
He knows Jyn is somewhere. He’s heard whispers of her here and there, noticed the looks that people give him. K-2 has told him she’s all right, that her health is in working order, that she’s been complaining about why that means she can’t go back out and fight. Cassian smiles when he thinks of it, how he can see her so clearly in his mind, always doing what she’s being told not to, just to prove she can.
If she’s been looking for him Cassian isn’t aware of it.
***
There had been whispers that turned into comms that had turned into glares and direct orders whenever Cassian would step outside of his quarters. Apparently he needs to debrief them on everything but whenever he tries to think of what happened, all of it, his mind is black. It’s only when he’s trying to sleep at night that it comes to him, in flashes and cold sweats.
It’s in those moments he’s most afraid but it’s after them that he begins to scrape together the strength to do what he thinks he should. The decision hangs over him like everything else has, just as heavy as the deaths caused at his hands, the lies he’s told that have ended up amounting to the same.
When he can no longer rely on his recovery as an excuse, he heads to a briefing room on hesitant feet, too tired and weary to fight any longer. He had been expecting his Major, perhaps the Corporal at most. A fear that he has to instantly hide strikes through him when he walks into the room and only Mon Mothma and General Draven are waiting for him there. Cassian sees Draven indicate his head toward a chair but he’s worried his legs might shake on the way over.
“What is all this about?” Cassian asks. If it sounds too much like an accusation of his superiors, that is something Cassian would have worried about a lifetime ago, before planet destroyers and lost friends.
“Hello, Captain,” Mothma says, pleasant enough. She smiles and asks him to sit, and her gentle reassurance is enough to make Cassian calm for the moment. “We’re sorry to have bothered you so much this past week, but we’ve needed you to fill in some gaps in the events of your last mission.”
Cassian nods curtly, cautiously. Draven is silent while she goes over what they know, all of it routine, all of it things that had been communicated multiple times already. Cassian knows it’s out of place for her to be doing this, wonders if she was roped in for another reason. Everything that could have been reported by someone else is all there, it all checks out. The only parts left are things only Cassian saw, either by himself or with someone who is now dead.
“I can give a written report if that would be easier, more thorough,” he says. Feigning helpfulness. He can see Draven bite his cheek.
“This will be fine, Captain. We’re simply asking for a brief overview,” Mothma says, straining patience now herself.
Cassian can tell they are exasperated with him, had gone in expecting him to be on the defensive and he’s suddenly all the more annoyed that he is.
There doesn’t seem to be an easy way out, an obvious excuse. Cassian nods but his mouth feels weighed down when he begins to speak. Going through the events once more seems tedious but, more than that, painful, unnecessary. He’s seeing through his scope again as clearly as he did when he was there, on the mountain side, doesn’t have to close his eyes to relive it. It’s so vivid he thinks he can feel raindrops trickling down his face, into his eyes. There’s Galen ahead, green in the rifle’s vision, blurred but clear enough to know, clear enough to confirm.
This is where Cassian pauses in his story, an involuntary stutter in his recap of the events. Mothma and Draven glance at each other discreetly but Cassian sees, panics. He tries to gather his footing again, quickly speaks of a tale that he hadn’t even realised he’d been practicing in his mind amidst all the recent chaos, but it spins of out him easily and quickly, the seamless thread of a practiced spy. He thinks it might be all right, he might be able to master this interrogation as he has so many before, but he’s in the middle of a sentence about the wind and the rain and stormtroopers moving on the platform when Draven cuts him off abruptly.
“Did you have a shot lined up? Did you knowingly avoid your assassination orders when you had a shot ready?”
There’s no pretence at all, no gentle guidance to where he wants Cassian to land. This isn’t a mission report at all, but a trial.
And Cassian wants to yell at them, wants to beg wondering why it matters. He died anyway, didn’t he? Minutes later, still on the wet cold landing pad and Jyn there cradling him, desperate. Cassian is very aware that Galen Erso died that day, and if it was at his hand or another seems nonsense to him now.
“Am I being charged with something?” he asks, and if is voice is too low and dangerous to be appropriate, he doesn’t give a damn.
“Of course not,” Mothma says. She at least sounds genuinely affronted, seems slightly uncomfortable with where the conversation has gone.
Cassian looks to Draven and doesn’t see the same apprehension but instead a shrewdness that crawls under his skin.
“Then I would like to be excused.”
Draven continues to stare at him for a long, cold moment, then finally looks away, towards Mothma. She nods curtly and Cassian moves before either of them can say anything, dashes from the room as quickly as he can while still maintaining his composure. His breathing picks up as he races through the hallway; his skin gets tight, his mind fuzzy. He wants to be alone and he wants to see her. He wonders how she would feel about what just transpired in that room. In the end, Cassian decides it’s best to be alone.
***
Another day passes without event, without anyone speaking to him at all. Cassian agonizes over what they know, what they think they know, but he feels that in the end, it doesn’t matter. There’s a resignation sitting on his desk, half written and in need of a signature. When he can’t stand to look at it any longer, he decides to go eat supper in the hall with everyone else, the people he’s served with his entire adult life. He wonders if seeing them will change his mind one way or another.
Halfway through a meal of discussion and jokes that Cassian pretended to laugh at, his chair is suddenly pulled back and he’s being yanked up from the neck of his jacket.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” an angry voice says behind him. He’s got a handful of food on the way to his mouth that he drops, everyone at the table turning to look at him, at them.
“Hello, Jyn,” he says because he’s not sure where else to start.
She’s so rude, he thinks, right before he’s spun around and looking at her for the first time since the ship, since the escape. Since he pulled her away from the man who took her family from her. There’s bruising on her face and a wildness to her eyes but she’s there, whole and healthy as everyone told him she was. Cassian hadn’t realised he didn’t fully believe it to be true until now.
They make their way to her quarters. Cassian wasn’t even aware of where she had been staying. The walls are bare, the bed made. It’s a place of impermanence. He wonders how long Jyn Erso has stayed in any one area since her mother’s death.
She sits on a chair, looks up at him accusingly. Another person impatient with his desire to be alone in his pity.
“What’s going on?”
He scoffs, can’t believe she thinks he has an answer for her. “I have no idea.”
“Oh, come on. I know you’ve been talking to the General. What’s happening with the plans?”
“Jyn, I have no idea.” Cassian’s brain works quickly to gauge threats, decide on courses of action that will lead to the least problems down the road. “I’ve requested to be off duty for now,” he tells her, not sure if he should. She’s the only person other than K-2 that he’s told. “For, ah, the indefinite future.”
He can tell Jyn is shocked by the news. She looks momentarily like she doesn’t believe him, and then like she understands completely. Cassian worries that she might.
“Then what were they asking you about?” She has the decency to sound weary, to sound defensive on his behalf. He feels sick with it, with her undeserved support.
“About your father,” he says.
“Oh.”
Jyn looks stricken, unable to hide the face of someone whose thoughts are gone far away, who is in pain. And Cassian had thought maybe, maybe they could work through all of this. Move past his mission and what happened after, move past the things they saw, but he had disregarded his ability to make someone despise him in only one brief moment. He decides it’s best to let her be.
***
They fall into a routine for the next three days. Cassian comes to visit her at lunch, bringing her food and a silence that she can talk over if she wishes to. Most of the time she doesn’t.
They chew their food and look out at things only each of them can see. Sometimes Cassian remembers them in the elevator, remembers the way she looked at him when they both thought they were going to die. Once his hand brushes her arm in parting, an unplanned gesture before he goes, and when she closes her eyes to it her lashes are long and dark against her skin.
On the fourth day she finally asks him. It’s hung like a cloud over their entire relationship, whatever it started out as and whatever it is now. Perhaps it’s finally time for to know who he is, what he is, but Cassian finds he isn’t ready. Their time together has been his only moments of peace in so long.
“What did you tell them?”
He chews for a long time, drinks water that doesn’t seem to hydrate. “That I couldn’t get a shot,” he says simply, waits for her reaction. Cassian thinks Jyn has been spending too much time with spies because he can’t read her now, not like he used to. When they first met she was wild, reckless.
“Go on.”
“That it was rainy. Too rainy. I told them that there was too much movement and that, from my angle, he was being blocked by others. That I was going to move to another vantage point and try again when Krennic arrived.”
It’s quiet for a long moment, too long. Cassian can hear the sound of dripping water, perhaps a broken pipe somewhere far off. Everything around here is falling apart. When it’s clear neither of them can look at each other, have nothing more to say, Cassian moves to leave, stopping briefly in the doorway at the sound of Jyn’s voice.
“You never told me. Why you really didn’t,” she whispers.
Cassian has to pause and deliberately take his mask down, so automatic after years of people trying to trick him, trying to figure out his real intentions. It feels sluggish to him to tell the truth for once, an impulse he’s forgotten but feels himself straining to welcome back. He’s not even sure if Jyn can hear when he tells her, “I saw the resemblance to you.”
***
He doesn’t take a meal to Jyn’s room the next day, but instead looms over his desk with his still half-finished resignation and a new paper, one that reads INQUIRY. Cassian closes his eyes, breathes, tries to think once of his future and not his past. All he’s known is wrapped up in this place and this position, in blaster flashes he sees in his nightmares, distrustful looks he can’t escape during the day.
***
“So. I’ve been thinking.”
Cassian is, frankly, flabbergasted to see Jyn standing in his doorway. He thought, perhaps, she might show up with a weapon pointed his direction, but certainly not like this, not with a grin and a swing to her step.
“Never a good idea,” he says, and can’t help but smile when she winks. He feels like a different person immediately, open and playful and so many other things he never is. She saunters in without an invitation and Cassian has the decency to feign indignation.
“There’s only one other person who can really say what happened that night, isn’t there?”
Cassian almost trips on his way over to her, about to ask if she needs a drink. He thinks they may both in a moment. “What do you mean?”
“I’m the only one who’s still alive, who was on that platform. I know how crowded it was.” When he doesn’t respond, Jyn prompts him again, pushier. “Come on. Right? If all they have to judge you by is your own account then another eyewitness can’t hurt.”
If she’s implying what he thinks she is, Cassian doesn’t know what to say, how to react. “I can’t ask you to lie.”
She tilts her head to the side, looking at him curiously. “You didn’t. And don’t say that word again, I don’t trust these walls.” She looks around to illustrate her point and Cassian thinks, for some absurd reason, she’s trying to make him laugh. Her eyes skim over his desk for a moment, too long, and he knows she’s seen. “Hmmmm. Thinking of getting out of here soon?”
Cassian licks his lips, nervous. “I shouldn’t have that out. You shouldn’t have seen that, I’m sorry.”
“I haven’t,” she says, and then she’s walking toward him, passing by him with a quick glance, and when their eyes meet he sees the same passion and determination in hers as the first time they met.
***
In the end, Cassian resigns. Twenty years of service over and not much idea what to do next. He’d been surprised to see Draven’s lack of reaction, neither refusing nor encouraging Cassian’s choice. The man had leaned across his desk, appraised Cassian for a long moment, and said, “Jyn Erso came to see me.”
“Is that right?” Cassian had asked, and his surprise wasn’t all acting. He really didn’t know if she would follow through.
“Yes. It seems you’ve got a friend on your side.” Before Cassian could panic or begin to formulate a defense, Draven leaned back, unclasped his hands. “I’ll accept your resignation, Captain. You’ll have to see Marcus to get everything sorted.”
“Sir.”
“Thank you for all your service, Cassian,” he’d said, and this last statement seemed truthful at least. In that moment Cassian thought that they understand each other, respected each other. Then he’d nodded and left the room, left to find Jyn and a new life.
When he locates her it’s in a hangar, and she’s got a duffel of things strapped to her back. Cassian panics as he rushes over, anxiety coursing through him, wondering if she’s leaving for the dangers of battle, for something else. Leaving him. When he reaches her though, when she turns from the tablet she’d been looking at, Cassian sees that determination again, and he knows.
“You defended me,” he says, a question and an accusation.
“Of course I did.” Jyn sounds as fierce and sure as she ever does. It settles something in Cassian, not quite enough but a start. He can’t understand why, why she would bother with the strength it takes to lie, to fight, to even be here amongst these people who decided to use her to get to what they wanted. She’s looking at him intently now, her brows furrowed, chewing a lip. Cassian always wants to know what she’s thinking. “You don’t think I should have? You’d rather have been punished?”
Yes, he thinks. Yes. Finally, a punishment for this and for every other crime he has committed for the Rebellion. Isn’t it time someone fought back instead of praising him for his work? Jyn fought him once, pushed against his excuses and pitiless sense of duty, and he felt perhaps he had finally reached the natural conclusion to this all. But now?
“You would have done it for me. For any of us. After what happened, I know you would have.”
Cassian isn’t sure, can’t find the warmth inside of himself that he feels when he looks at her. He thinks he might be beyond salvage.
“Listen to me. It’s over now. You’re not him anymore.”
He knows it’s not forgiveness, knows there’s so much they have yet to discuss. But she helped him without reason to, and here she is in front of him, bright and adventurous and making him want for something that had been closed off to him for a long time. If there is anyone in this world he wishes to believe, trusts he actually can believe anymore, it’s Jyn Erso.
“If you want to be done with this, I’m coming with you.” It’s not a question or even a request. He doesn’t know why, or what their future can hold.
“Everything I know about you I read in a file,” he whispers. Another confession to make her unsure, to make her finally pull away from him but Jyn just leans closer, her heat moving into his.
“We’ll have time now, to learn more.”
“Why have you been so kind to me?” he asks harshly, embarrassed to feel his throat constrict, a burning behind his eyes. These few weeks of knowing her have felt like a lifetime. Years of conflict and pain but always her giving him the benefit of the doubt, always her on his side, by his side. The neverending coiling in his gut when she looks at him, when she smiles. After everything he has done, after all those he has killed. After who he almost took from her.
Again she surprises him, not with the snappy retort he is used to, or the barrier she so easily puts up, but with another gentle smile. It’s sweet and nurturing and when Jyn leans in and puts a hand to his face, he pushes into it shamelessly, needing this comfort, finally.
“Because I see you,” she says, and her nose is close, covered with freckles he had never seen before. They have so much of each other still left to discover. They’ve barely started. Cassian still can’t quite let himself believe he’ll have the chance. “I see who you are.”
He doesn’t know who he is. “What do you see?” Cassian asks, terrified and thrilled of the answer.
Jyn laughs, soft and kind, a breathless sound he wants to take with him forever. When she leans forward that little bit more, he bends down to her eagerly, kisses her and lets himself be kissed. Her lips are soft on his, her hands gentle on his neck, brushing across his shoulders. Cassian feels safe, feels worthwhile, like someone who deserves something good. The world around the two of them fades, not with the molten heat of a planet burning, but with the gentle sound of waves on the shore, and Cassian knows that as long as he can see Jyn looking back, they’ll be all right.