ohnofeelstho | it is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Someone is in her room. She tries to care, her body wants her to care. She doesn't care. She's too tired to care.

She focuses on the candle first, like her eyes are drawn to the flickering, jumping flame. It doesn't help her rapid breaths that have her almost gasping for air or the way her heart is racing through her chest. She can't actually seem to concentrate on Cassian at all, eyes glassy and unfocused.

"Ca--" She hiccups, coughs, chokes on a sob she tries to push back when she realizes that it is actually Cassian standing at the door. Hastily she tries to push back her hair with shaking hands, which is when she realizes she's sticky with sweat and she can't really hold back the next sob. As much as she tries to fight the weakness, it's too hard and she is too tired and Cassian is already too familiar, and so she just crumples, fingers clutched against the bedclothes.

She doesn't seem too aware of her surroundings, her attention being pulled in several different directions. It's the start of what sounds like his name that has him stepping further into the room, his expression falling further.

He has never seen her like this, which isn't particularly a surprise given the air she tries to give off. But she's sobbing. He's seen it before, the after effects of a nightmare. He's been in similar states himself, which at least means he knows to tread carefully. He needs to draw her out of it, but not in a way that sets her off further, or sends her limbs flying at him.

Quietly he moves towards the bed, settling the candle on her nightstand. He sits down on the mattress about a foot away and in her line of vision, making sure his appearance won't spook her. "Jyn." His voice is calm and soothing and her name is another warning that he's there. "Can you look at me?"

The candle flutters next to her bed, he's next to her bed. She can feel the weight of him when he sits in front of her and even if she doesn't quite know what he said, she looks up automatically.

It is Cassian.

Is it Cassian?

Everyone looks the same through a haze of darkness and tears. She can't tell if it really is that dark or if it's her hair -- it's not -- so she tries to push it back again, struggling to swallow down another sob.

He locks onto her face when she looks at him, but there's still no focus. It's like she's trying but failing. She's a little more aware of him being there, but only in a very vague sense. "It's Cassian," he says firmly, but no less calm. "I'm right here."

She struggles again to push the hair out of her face, and Cassian swallows, lifting his hand slowly. He puts it on top of hers and helps her push her hair back with her own hand, a physical idle movement to give her something to concentrate on, albeit with a little aid.

His hand is warm over hers, warm and steady and she feels herself stilling under his touch like he is an anchor keeping her steady instead of drifting off to drown under the weight of her dreams. She blinks past the tears, tries to, until she can see him. It's Cassian, he's right there.

Eventually, slowly, her sobs quiet to occasional catch up breaths caught in the middle of her slowly normalizing breathing, shoulders still hunched but not heaving with her hyperventilation. It's Cassian, he's right there.

She swallows before drawing her hand back from under his, hastily wiping tears off her splotchy cheeks. When she tries to speak her voice is hoarse and scratchy and she stumbles, starting over. "Why-- What are you doing here?" It's doesn't seem to bother her, per se, but she seems very confused as to why he's in her room, in her bed.

Still, she doesn't care about the propriety, it's just confusing.

Human contact even when you don't like most humans is very useful, and he doesn't try to pull back when he sees his hand is helping her settle. It's strange to feel like a calming force for someone. With his other hand, he moves more of the hair out of her face, noticing just how much of it has fallen out of the usual braid. As her breathing slows, he repeats himself, whispering I'm right here now and then.

She blinks at him, finally recognizing his existence in her room, albeit with a lot of confusion. Now that they're married, he's not as concerned about propriety but at least she doesn't seem to be either, given he entered her room without knocking.

"I heard you wake up," he says gently, which is the kindest way to put he heard her screaming.

A wry frown flutters across her expression before it softens. No one has ever come to check on her, not since she was a little girl, not since her parents. Saw would notice, let her go extra long on hand to hand training so she could get all her energy out, but he'd never come to comfort her. In prison everyone was screaming.

The thought of prison is what makes her realize she isn't wearing a dressing gown and though she doesn't care about the modesty, it's been very purposeful that Cassian has only ever seen her in long sleeves -- they cover up the now visible scars on her arms; speckled burns from molten metal shavings, the rings that speak of restraints around her wrists, circles of rope burns. Her arms draw back to cross over her chest, hugging herself like she's cold.

"Thank you." It's a kindness she isn't used to, being comforted, she still doesn't know how to accept kindness with anything approaching ease.

It's only when she hugs her arms around herself that Cassian notices the scars all over her skin. It isn't something he'd normally miss, but the lights are dim and he was a little preoccupied. He frowns, but it's not like he isn't covered in his own scars, and he knows what her life was like until now. The strange part is that he realizes he's never seen her arms bare before. She's a pile of sweat, and now that she's awake, she is probably going to get cold soon.

"Of course." He should stand up now, or at least soon, but he can't bring himself to move yet. Asking her if she's okay is pointless. Instead he shrugs off his robe and drops it over her shoulders, leaving him in his nightshirt and trousers. "You should change your nightclothes. You're going to get cold if you stay like this."

He sounds like he's speaking from experience. "Do you want something to drink?"

Edited 2017-07-14 03:18 (UTC)

The robe is warm from his body heat and once it's over her shoulders, she gathers it around herself greedily. She knows he is right, she should change and she is going to get cold in her damp clothes, but at his question she shakes her head.

"I'm fine." She could do with a glass of water but what she wants is a full glass of alcohol and she knows she's already going to wake up dehydrated and feeling ill, there is no point in making it so much worse for herself. (Not that not asking for water isn't doing the exact same thing, but it seems less overtly destructive.)

She shifts to scoot off the bed but something occurs to her and she pauses with one leg dangling to the floor, toes not quite brushing the ground. "Will you stay?"

With her. Will he stay with her.

She is 100% not fine, but he's not going to counter her directly. He is going to furrow his brow over it, but it doesn't feel okay enough to push too hard. He thinks he'll sneak off to kitchens anyway and get her some water, especially if he's going to find someone to change her sheets too. As soon as she starts shifting towards the edge of the bed, Cassian stands up, and he's offering a hand out to help her up too when she makes her request.

It surprises him, so much so that it takes a second for him to respond. He hesitates, looking at her with mild uncertainty even though he's still holding his hand out. She wants him to stay, with her. "For the night?"

She takes his hand and finishes slipping off the bed, seeming all the more small and fragile in the flickering candlelight with her disheveled mane of long hair and practically drowning in his robe.

"Yes." She doesn't let go of his hand, stepping forward into his space. "Will you stay the night?"

She doesn't want to be alone. He'd cared enough to check on her, but maybe it's still too much to ask. She resigns herself to him saying no before he even gets a chance to answer, drawing her hand back, letting the long sleeves of the robe swallow her fingers up.

He shouldn't, is his first thought. But she asked him to, and Jyn is not the kind of person who would ask a favor like this so easily. His robe practically dwarfs her, and he knows immediately that he isn't going to turn her down. She just looks so small, and maybe a little lonely, and if she has another nightmare, maybe he can help. He just hopes he won't have any of his own tonight.

"Your sheets need to be changed," is what he says first. He pushes more hair from her face with concern, without thinking, then ducks his hand away apologetically. "Unless you would rather come stay with me instead, leave it until the morning."

It's logical!

"With you," she bleats immediately. She doesn't want him to find anyone to change her sheets because she doesn't want anyone to know how the sheets got in that state. She can change them herself in the morning when everyone else is busy and no one will notice.

If the sheets needed to be changed for any other reason, she wouldn't care. But this is just too much weakness.

"Will you wait while I change?" Even for that she doesn't want to be alone, as if the ghosts of her past will materialize the moment he leaves and she'll have to face this all on her own again.

It shouldn't make him feel nervous when she agrees to come with him barely seconds after he offers, but Cassian only nods at her to affirm it. He takes a step back out of her space.

"I can wait outside the door." He pauses, frowning a little because everything about her tone and body language suggests she doesn't want him out of her sight. "Or did you mean in here?"

"Outside is fine." It's not, but. She's struggling with asking for anything, piling it on is too hard. Instead she shrugs out of his robe, passing it back to him with a small, brief smile of thanks. She'll have her own dressing gown back in a moment, she won't need his.

Before he can tell her to keep it or ask again where she wants him, Jyn turns to the already open wardrobe, crossing the floor quickly and already undoing the buttons of her nightdress. The quicker she drags this one over her head the quicker she can yank another on in it's place.

It isn't fine. He doesn't know how he knows, but it's in her face. He accepts his robe back against the temptation to tell her to hold on to it, and when she steps away from him, he moves towards the door.

He'd left it open when he rushed in, so instead of waiting outside and closing it behind him, he just stands in the threshold of it, facing the hallway to give her privacy. It's the middle of the night; no one is going to come down their hallway, save an emergency. It feels like a good middle ground while he tries not to think about the fact that she is undressing behind him. He thinks instead about maybe summoning someone to bring water, but he also thinks she'd kill him if anyone saw her in this state, so he decides against it.

He is a smart man.

It doesn't take her very long to dress, literally just swapping one nightgown (a very pale blue) for another (a very pale periwinkle blue) and finally fetching her beautiful dressing gown and wrap around herself.

She takes a brief moment to scowl at her hair, tugging it out of the last grip of the braid and shaking it free around her shoulders. It sticks to the back of her neck but it's better than nothing.

Saw had given her a blanket, for a wedding present she had almost punched him over, but it is her second most prized possession and she drags it off the bed, gathering the thin, reddish orange blanket into her arms. (The blanket from Hoth Cassian had given her is the one she sleeps curled up in so it suffered the brunt of her nightmare.)

Tiptoeing up behind Cassian, she touches her hand to the small of his back. "I'm decent."

He can hear her rustling around, and he hears her approaching, but the hand on his back surprises him anyway. Not enough to show any sign of being startled, and he turns instantly to look at her, just to make sure she's still with him.

She's got her own robe on this time and the blanket from Saw, and he still can't believe how many blue clothes were given to her. Cassian takes a step back to let her out beside him, resisting the urge to usher her along with his own touch to her back as he starts to walk across the hall.

"The fire is still going. You should be quite warm." He'll have to toss another log or two on it, but it hadn't gone out like Jyn's.

"I haven't figured out how many logs to put on before I go to sleep, it's either been too many or too few." It's an experiment, especially since Jyn has been writing it down for her own benefit. It doesn't help that sometimes the temperature will just abruptly drop in the middle of the night and snuff out any small flames she has going.

Wrea was cold, but Fest is cold. She's sure she prefers it to Hoth, however.

"You worry too much about how cold I am."

"Unfortunately, it can still change in the middle of the night. Each room is different, and it depends on how warm someone wants to keep the room."

He'd left his own door open too, so he steps inside, suddenly feeling nervous again, but only because his room is so empty, and it's not even like she hasn't seen it before albeit in passing.

"I don't want you to freeze." And that's all he says about that.

The fire keeps the room in a dim glow, enough to make out the bed and some of the shadows of the rest of his furniture. It's bare for a prince, but at least it looks lived in despite the neatness. Really, he only sleeps in here - the next room over is where he works and spends more of his time. There's a small portrait of his parents above the fireplace, nestled on the mantle alongside a few other random knick-knacks and randomly, rocks. The bedside table has three books and an empty glass.

It is a very big bed though. Not that Jyn's is small, but his is clearly the bigger of the two, and the blankets are folded over like he scrambled out of them quickly.

Edited 2017-07-14 06:39 (UTC)

Jyn peers at the bed for a moment before she glances around. She has seen it in passing, they live across from one another after all, but it's different being inside the room. She doesn't seem hesitant or ill at ease as she trails her fingertips along the edges of the furniture while she makes her way across the room toward the bed.

She sets her blanket on it carefully, on the opposite side of where the crease in the blankets is, claiming this side in the name of Jyn, before milling around the rest of the room, taking it all in like a pilgrim visiting a holy land.

She lingers in front of the fireplace, caught by the picture. They're unmistakably his parents. The same dark hair and kind eyes. His father looks gentle, the kind of man that would sneak sweets behind his mother's back and shift the blame to the dog, and his mother, even in a portrait, has the same kind of intensity that Cassian does. Her fingers come up, of their own accord, to touch her mother's necklace and she can feel tears prickle behind her eyes again.

Saw had destroyed the homestead on Lah'mu, Jyn didn't have any pictures of her parents.

"You look like them. Your father's smile and your mother's seriousness." How disappointed they must be that their heroic rebel son is married to her. "She's beautiful."

She is so utterly curious a person that he isn't surprised she pokes around his room a little, even if he does fidget with it - which is dumb. She's his wife. The rest of the Alliance probably already thinks she's sleeping here anyway. But it's strange and he worries it'll fall short in her inspection, even though he doesn't really care if she hates it. He likes it, for what it is.

Jyn moves towards the picture of his parents and he can feel his chest tighten. It's the only one left of them, the rest destroyed when the Empire attacked the castle. He keeps it here because keeping it with himself is clearly the safest choice.

He watches the way she reaches for her necklace instead of looking at the portrait himself. "They say my father was very lucky to have her." There's a pause, like he's deliberating. "I don't remember much about them. Not as much as I would like."

He was six. His memories are patches and pieces, his father's laugh and his mother scooping him up to lift him in the air. "They were both born here, but Fest was her kingdom."

No wonder everyone here loves Cassian so much, he's all that's left of their beloved royal family. Her stomach twists uncomfortably and all at once it's too much as she turns away, clasping her hand together in front of her.

"Fest is lucky to have you." His father may have been the lucky one, but his entire people are lucky to have Cassian looking after their best interests.

Struggling to push down her own tangle of familial emotions and unwilling to self-centeredly turn the attention to herself, even if it is bred out of wanting to remind him that he's not alone, she instead points out: "You have a lot of rocks."

He wants to brush it off, because he loves Fest, and he always tries to do right by it, but he has given up a lot of himself in the process. When Jyn turns, he finally looks up at his parents' smiling faces and it makes him sad.

"I try," he says idly, awkward with the compliment. Her question about rocks doesn't make it any easier, because it feels a little silly to explain it aloud. He never has before, no one's ever asked. He answers because she probably needs the distraction.

"They're from the different places I've been." He reaches out to fix one of them, from Corellia. It must have gotten shuffled last time someone dusted.

"Oh." A beat. "Do you label them?" She turns back to peer at them because that's interesting and she's a nerd at heart. She points at one at random, fingers hovering over it like she wants to touch it but she isn't sure she's allowed.

"Where's that one from? It's obsidian. Have you been to a volcanic planet?" Her eyes get all wide as she babbles, a little nervously, about the make up of all the different rocks without once giving Cassian the chance to tell her where they're from or where he found them. She's also right on almost off of the rocks and what type of planet they're from, fouling up a couple of them because it's late and dark and she's tired. She's allowed to make mistakes.

She trails off in the middle of a sentence about outwash plains and glacial sediments... biting her lip. "Sorry. That was... I didn't let you answer."

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