Cassian hasn't seen Jyn in about a year. Eleven months and seventeen days, to be exact. He hasn't been counting. They've been broken up for longer than a year though, and while he's had a lot of terrible years in his three decades of life, this past one has been one of the worst. He completely fell apart as a human being and disengaged from all the people who had helped him step away from that in the first place. He lost track of good decisions, made bad ones. He supposes it's a good thing Rogue One had its influence on his droid, because sometimes he thinks the only reason he's still standing here alive is because K-2SO intervened in situations he might not have ten years ago.
He comes back two weeks after the second death star blows up to find Jyn, and what he finds instead is a baby. Or rather, he finds no Jyn, no Bodhi because he's still off piloting, and only Baze holding a tiny infant in his very large arms while Chirrut idly mixes a formula. The only information he gets out of them both is that the boy's name is Javi and they're looking after him for now.
Cassian isn't very good with babies. There is something almost... familiar about this one, but the most he does is awkwardly touch the boy's head. The next day, he asks if either Baze or Chirrut know where Jyn is, because he's exhausted his resources trying to find her to no avail (he doesn't tell them that last part). It's a surprise when Baze tells him the planet almost immediately, and Cassian begins to prepare to take the trip the next morning.
He wants to find her. He wants to... talk to her. Apologize and maybe cry and maybe he'll just be turned away, which would be fair and he probably deserves it because maybe it is too late now, but he finds he has to try. And he hasn't been able to hold himself together enough in a long time to try. Even now he still doesn't feel like a person, but he misses her. The war is over and there are still things he could do. There are still imperials out there who can and should be killed.
But he is done. Regardless of whether or not Jyn wants to see him. He knows he's done now. Step one, probably too late but a very long time coming.
He lands with K2 on the planet and starts to put out feelers as to where she might be living. A woman takes him to a comm center, briefly explaining that she's been working on codes for them for the last four months or so. A lot of codes. Almost too many, she whispers with mild concern, and she takes Cassian to a little back corner, where he sees her hunched over a desk.
He would recognize Jyn anywhere, even if there are minor differences in her frame he doesn't begin to analyze yet, because he's too taken aback by seeing her again, and he hasn't even seen her face yet.
"Jyn, somebody is here to see you?" the woman pipes up, sounding a little nervous, very clear from the way she even steps back to put Cassian in the line of fire first.
"I'm busy," Jyn snaps, voice cackling from disuse because she doesn't speak to people while she's working and she works such long hours that sometimes she doesn't see either of the suns during the day, in when it's dark still and out when it's darker. No one bothers her in her little corner.
No one until now.
Baze and Chirrut wouldn't be coming to visit, she told Baze not to, Draven would have sent a message, and Bodhi is out on a run so it can't be him. There is no one else that would bother to find her, no reason for anyone else to find her. For a moment, she wonders... maybe... but then she shoves it out of her mind because he'd left, he'd left her, and he wouldn't come looking for her because why? He'd made it clear he didn't want her every time he left her and it's been too long now. It's over.
She shifts slightly to look up and half turn so she can dismiss whomever is here. "I don't have ti..." She trails off, mouth stuck open in shock. He... He's alone and Jyn abruptly stands, pale from lack of sunlight and sleep, looking exhausted and suddenly nervous. "Is someone hurt? Where is K2?"
Her voice sounds so annoyed, if a little unused, but he can feel his chest tighten from the sound of it. He memorized it of course, like he memorized most things about her, but he hasn't heard her in person for so long.
She turns around and Cassian stiffens, already nervous too despite telling himself not to be. She is shocked to see him, and he can't say he's surprised. She looks so tired and more pale than he remembers, but she's on her feet so quickly and she's so close. Her clothes are rumpled and loose, her hair bun a mess, but he can't get over how utterly tired she looks. Not that he thinks he's fairing much better, the circles under his eyes probably worse than they've ever been, and he's lost some weight.
He's a little ashamed suddenly that it took him so long to get to here, but he doesn't move away, even if his guide has already fled the moment Jyn spoke up.
"Everyone is... safe, as far as I know. K2 is with the ship." He almost sent his droid out to find lodgings, but he wasn't sure Jyn would want him to stay. "I should not have interrupted your work. But I wanted... to talk to you. If you would let me."
She deflates a little in relief. The droid is safe, and here, the rest are safe. He's not here to tell her anyone died. He's here... to talk. She sits down again, still facing him.
After a long moment, she stands back up and nods, moving toward and then past him, back the way he came, toward the exit. "Fine. We can talk outside."
Jyn doesn't want to do this in front of people. If they're going to fight -- because that was all they did at the end, fight and fight and fight -- she doesn't want to fight in an open comm center. She doesn't want to fight at all, but it seems inevitable. She waits until she hears him following her, hears his pace quicken to keep up with her fast stride, to say anything.
He is very still while he waits for her decision, and he can't deny the relief he feels when she agrees to talk. Maybe it won't go well. Maybe they'll fight again. But he already knows he wants to open with an apology, and he never did that before, at least not when it started getting really bad.
When she starts to walk - swiftly - out of the building, Cassian doesn't hesitate to follow. She walks like she wants to run, and with each step he wonders if she will.
"I tried to look myself, but your trail disappeared. Baze told me."
"You saw Baze?" There's a trembled in her voice that sounds concerned or anxious, it's hard to tell. Baze was not supposed to tell him anything. Baze wasn't even allowed to tell Bodhi, though she'd relented to comm access so she could wish their pilot a happy birthday. Baze wasn't supposed to tell anyone anything ever.
If he saw Baze he might have... no. No, he doesn't know.
She swallows down her nerves, pushing them away as she shoves the door open and steps outside, almost flinching at the sun hidden behind wispy pink clouds that reminded her of the candy floss she used to eat on Coruscant when she was very, very small. Maybe Baze will bring-- No! Stop thinking about him!
He doesn't like the tremble in her voice. It makes him stumble, face scrunching up because it makes no sense why it would concern her, other than the fact that he hasn't seen any of his family in so long. He hurries after Jyn as she rushes outside, trying to study her face to gauge her reaction to Baze, but she's moving too fast and too skittishly for him to really get a feel.
"He and Chirrut, yes. Not Bodhi. He is still being a hero." He squints a little in the sunlight, resisting the urge to stare at Jyn, even though he keeps stealing glances. "When I could not find you, I asked them if they knew, and Baze told me. Do not be mad at him for it, please."
Once outside Jyn realizes she has no idea where... to take him to talk. This planet is lush and green with a pink coastline for days but she doesn't want to go to a park to have a fight, they might interrupt children playing, and she doesn't want to go to a beach because she is still crippled by the anxiety of the what ifs.
What if they didn't make it off Scarif, what if Cassian's back never healed, what if they spent every chance they had.
She jerks to a stop, suddenly unsure and indecisive. She can't bring him back to her room either; what if he opens up her small freezer and finds bags and bags of milk. No. It has to be some where else.
He stops immediately when she does, but he's patient and doesn't ask what's going on. He can only imagine that his showing up out of the blue is throwing her off in all the wort ways, he can handle a little jerky and unsure movements.
"It's still in the port." He tells her the landing site he used. It's about a fifteen minute walk, maybe a little longer because he definitely moved quickly from there to here. "Is that where you want to go?"
It makes sense. She might not want him invading any of the spaces she's already carved out for herself here.
Since it is in the port she simply adjusts course to head that way, no longer speed walking. Still squinting into the pale light as her poor eyes readjust to sunlight again.
"You can talk, while we walk." She doesn't know if she has anything to say yet. She has A Lot To Say but nothing she particularly wants to air out again. They'd fought and fought and let their love die and she isn't sure it can be saved anymore. Isn't sure she is brave enough to tell Cassian the truth so they could try.
Besides, he left her. Why would be want to try again?
He nods, matching his pace to hers once more as he follows after her to the ship. He warned K2 not to say anything that might jeopardize his apology, hopefully his droid is just using the opportunity to charge up.
Jyn tells him he can talk, and he knows how he wants to start this whole thing, but he wonders if walking isn't going to make it weird. He wants to see her face, he wants to judge her physical reaction as well as... whatever verbal response she might give.
He just wants to apologize, and maybe it's better to do it in motion instead of dramatically sitting before her on the ship.
"How long have you been here?"
Great, excellent start, not what we wanted at all.
She hadn't wanted to stay on the tiny planet she was on before, she didn't want to deal with the questions, so she had asked Draven to send her elsewhere. She's been continually surprised at how readily he moved her around, how respectful he was of her wishes. She never thought he'd outright hated her, but she knew she wasn't his favorite soldier. It was nice to know he still supported her wishes, even if he might not have supported her choices.
Her shoulders lift in a shrug. "I've moved around some, but they needed a slicer here so here I am."
That checks out. When he was first looking into her location, there was a lot of bouncing around before it petered out. Draven must have hid it, classified it, and Cassian knows he could have dug for it, bypassed the clearance codes, but it felt... safer to ask Baze first instead. He can't invade her privacy if he wants to apologize, that's just another thing he'd have to say sorry for.
"You have always been good at that."
This is dumb. He did not fly all this way to make idle conversation!
Cassian is bad at idle conversation. Jyn frowns, both at the compliment and the question. He doesn't have any right to her answers or even to be nice to her. No right to compliments. It's not true, he can do anything he wants, but it irritates her, to still feel some shiver of pride that he thinks she's good at something she's been doing since she was ten.
She stops again, turns to look at him. "Why are you here?"
He is so bad at it, even when it's not layered with the awkwardness of a break up and a crumbled relationship. He stops when she does again, not because he's trying to bend at the knee so to speak, but he's here to talk, not keep walking away from her.
He wishes he had something to do with his hands. It would be easy to put up some kind of mask, but he decided he was done with the war, and that includes all the faces he wore. Jyn never deserved any of them anyway. She gets all his nerves and anxiety and the tiny little twitch in his fingers.
"I am sorry." It fumbles out of him but it doesn't make it any less genuine. He looks down at his feet for a second, because now that he spilt that first part, his nerves have exploded ten fold. He take a deep breath, then looks back up at her face, because he refuses to hide his face, even if she's looking at him like she's angry and he's terrified out of his mind. "That is why I am here. I know it is far too late coming, but you still deserved to hear it."
She doesn't look angry, but perhaps that would have been better than the miserable, despairing look at floods her face. She'd wished for him to come back, to come back for her, to find her again and they could start over. But then it was too long, too late, and she knew he wasn't coming back for her, he'd finally had enough and it destroyed her.
Seeming to realize she'd bared everything for a moment, Jyn forces her expression into brittle neutrality.
"I don't deserve it, but I forgive you. I had long ago." She'd thought it would be better, without her, maybe he could be better without her so she hadn't begrudged his choice to leave her, not after a while. After a while she started thinking it was probably a smart idea for him. She was reckless and undisciplined, facts Draven had flung at her when they'd first taken her from Wobani, facts she had proudly wore like armour. It was better, for Cassian, she's sure, without that influence. He could be better, do better, without her.
He'd made the right choice. Jyn's heart had simply been another casualty of this war.
He shakes his head immediately. "You do deserve it. I made a lot of bad choices, and you suffered for it."
Not that he didn't. The last year has basically been a stream of endless suffering that still isn't over, because even though the war is over, Cassian is still waking up with panic attacks and struggling to exist in a world where he doesn't have to be a soldier. Just because he stopped running from it doesn't mean he's not a disaster of a person.
"I hurt myself and I hurt you, and I do not have anything to show for it."
Continuing to fight just made things worse, and it cost him the only stability and family he'd had since he was a child. Only this time he can't even blame the war - it's just himself.
He does have something to show for it, thought. A tiny baby with a name like his father's and eyes like stardust and Jyn gave him up. She deserves nothing from Cassian.
"Stop. Stop apologizing. We both made bad choices and we were terrible to each other, but it's over now. It's masochistic to keep suffering over it." She doesn't want to talk about it anymore! She doesn't what to think about it anymore. And she most certainly does not want to listen to him making her blameless when she's done far worse than he ever had.
He doesn't want to suffer over anything, but that's a very long and lonely journey ahead. He doesn't want to fight right now either, keeping his tone quiet and calm because he refuses to get hostile, but he's not even sure he could anymore. He left the fight and part of his own was left behind too.
"That is why I wanted to apologize. We were not smart and not kind, but if I want to... get better, I need to do better too. If I want to keep living after the war, I cannot ignore all that it means anymore."
And part of that involves owning up to his own fuck ups! Maybe it wasn't all on him, but he left, repeatedly. He left a woman who spent her whole life being abandoned, he's the worst.
He was better with Jyn. But he might have ruined that long ago.
"I don't deserve your apologies, Cassian. Please stop." She practically begs, voice full of a fragility she hates.
She can't tell him. She can't tell him that he had a baby out there and she gave it away like a piece of leftovers. She can't tell him that everything he thinks he's done wrong pales in comparison to taking away the only family he has left. She can't. She can't because she couldn't bear for him to look at her the way she looks at herself.
"You're a good man, what you've done doesn't take away from that. You can build a life after the war. You're smart, you'll learn to adapt to peace."
He doesn't understand what's happening here, why she's being so defensive about him. The last time he saw Jyn they tried to talk, and it just exploded into another argument and they took out their frustrations on each other with sex instead of anything else. She had nothing kind to say in his direction.
Something is wrong. A different wrong from before. His instincts even now want him to comfort her, but he doesn't know what for, and he is still probably the cause.
She'd told him he was good before, of course, but there is a strange desperation to it now. Like she wants to end this conversation even though it's barely begun. None of it feels true to him, he still does not think himself good, but that is not why he's here. He did not come to get Jyn's reassurances.
"Why are you..." being nice to him. Rejecting his apologies. "You are not going to convince me you do not deserve to hear it. I owed it to you, and so many other things. I should never have left. I was afraid of peace. That is part of why I have come here too."
Admittedly, it's a fairly peaceful place. They don't have scuffles, it's more of a brief stopping point before ships jet off somewhere else and that's fine with her. She could leave any time she wanted, hitch a ride with some Alliance ship and get dropped off at the next planet.
She should, probably. Leave entirely so Cassian (and Baze and Bodhi and Chirrut and K2) can't find her, can't follow her again. Rip herself away like a band-aid.
He is sure this planet is nice enough. It's warm, pleasant, the people seem cheerful though that could be because the war has essentially ended.
"And I am not at peace. I don't know if I ever will be. But I have to stop being afraid to try. That is why... that is why I kept running. The war was familiar, but it is not for me anymore. I know I should have come to you to work that out, or figured it out sooner, but I was afraid."
It's a very brief outpouring, because he wants to talk to her into infinity again, but there are bridges to mend first, even if construction takes a while. He would leave if she wanted him to, but it's important to him that she know at the very least he has walked away from the war for good.
"I am here because of you. To talk, to explain, to apologize - whatever comes out of today, I know I could not make even a step forward without telling you I am done fighting and I am sorry."
Not in this place, but with her. That is what he is saying, underneath it all. After nearly a year apart he's decided he wants to stop running away from her but she isn't the angry woman he left over and over again. No, the galaxy had broken her finally.
Her eyes close, squeezed shut against the desperate desire to run as far away as she possibly can.
"I--" Her chest hurts, her breasts hurt, she wants to throw up or pass out or both. She wants to cry. If she tells him, he will leave. He'll leave and find his child and make a better life for himself now that the war is ending and she'll fade into obscurity, a fairy tale. Maybe she should.
She'd deserve it, his anger, far more than his apologies. Maybe... She shakes her head. She can't do this, whatever Baze thought he was going to accomplish sending Cassian here, he was wrong.
She doesn't want him to stay. He's not entirely sure that's it, that it's the whole thing, but she looks like she's about two seconds from a breakdown and logic follows he's the only changed factor. His presence is unexpected, he doesn't know what she's been through the last year - if he's made things worse by appearing again in her life, he just has more things to apologize for.
It doesn't stop him from tumbling three steps towards her, stopping only when he realizes his touch might not be welcome. That urge to comfort her is still there, despite believing himself the cause.
"I don't have to," he says quietly. No questions asked, he would leave right now if she told him to. "I - I should have given you warning that I was coming, but I was afraid you would not see me at all. I can leave, or we can reconvene later. I... Jyn..."
He wants to ask her what's wrong, he wants her to confide in him like she used to, but maybe it's too late. He would understand, but it doesn't make it any less terrifying.
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ohnofeelstho2018-09-24 07:35 pm
sometimes life has a cruel sense of humor, giving you the thing you always wanted at the worst time.
He comes back two weeks after the second death star blows up to find Jyn, and what he finds instead is a baby. Or rather, he finds no Jyn, no Bodhi because he's still off piloting, and only Baze holding a tiny infant in his very large arms while Chirrut idly mixes a formula. The only information he gets out of them both is that the boy's name is Javi and they're looking after him for now.
Cassian isn't very good with babies. There is something almost... familiar about this one, but the most he does is awkwardly touch the boy's head. The next day, he asks if either Baze or Chirrut know where Jyn is, because he's exhausted his resources trying to find her to no avail (he doesn't tell them that last part). It's a surprise when Baze tells him the planet almost immediately, and Cassian begins to prepare to take the trip the next morning.
He wants to find her. He wants to... talk to her. Apologize and maybe cry and maybe he'll just be turned away, which would be fair and he probably deserves it because maybe it is too late now, but he finds he has to try. And he hasn't been able to hold himself together enough in a long time to try. Even now he still doesn't feel like a person, but he misses her. The war is over and there are still things he could do. There are still imperials out there who can and should be killed.
But he is done. Regardless of whether or not Jyn wants to see him. He knows he's done now. Step one, probably too late but a very long time coming.
He lands with K2 on the planet and starts to put out feelers as to where she might be living. A woman takes him to a comm center, briefly explaining that she's been working on codes for them for the last four months or so. A lot of codes. Almost too many, she whispers with mild concern, and she takes Cassian to a little back corner, where he sees her hunched over a desk.
He would recognize Jyn anywhere, even if there are minor differences in her frame he doesn't begin to analyze yet, because he's too taken aback by seeing her again, and he hasn't even seen her face yet.
"Jyn, somebody is here to see you?" the woman pipes up, sounding a little nervous, very clear from the way she even steps back to put Cassian in the line of fire first.
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No one until now.
Baze and Chirrut wouldn't be coming to visit, she told Baze not to, Draven would have sent a message, and Bodhi is out on a run so it can't be him. There is no one else that would bother to find her, no reason for anyone else to find her. For a moment, she wonders... maybe... but then she shoves it out of her mind because he'd left, he'd left her, and he wouldn't come looking for her because why? He'd made it clear he didn't want her every time he left her and it's been too long now. It's over.
She shifts slightly to look up and half turn so she can dismiss whomever is here. "I don't have ti..." She trails off, mouth stuck open in shock. He... He's alone and Jyn abruptly stands, pale from lack of sunlight and sleep, looking exhausted and suddenly nervous. "Is someone hurt? Where is K2?"
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She turns around and Cassian stiffens, already nervous too despite telling himself not to be. She is shocked to see him, and he can't say he's surprised. She looks so tired and more pale than he remembers, but she's on her feet so quickly and she's so close. Her clothes are rumpled and loose, her hair bun a mess, but he can't get over how utterly tired she looks. Not that he thinks he's fairing much better, the circles under his eyes probably worse than they've ever been, and he's lost some weight.
He's a little ashamed suddenly that it took him so long to get to here, but he doesn't move away, even if his guide has already fled the moment Jyn spoke up.
"Everyone is... safe, as far as I know. K2 is with the ship." He almost sent his droid out to find lodgings, but he wasn't sure Jyn would want him to stay. "I should not have interrupted your work. But I wanted... to talk to you. If you would let me."
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After a long moment, she stands back up and nods, moving toward and then past him, back the way he came, toward the exit. "Fine. We can talk outside."
Jyn doesn't want to do this in front of people. If they're going to fight -- because that was all they did at the end, fight and fight and fight -- she doesn't want to fight in an open comm center. She doesn't want to fight at all, but it seems inevitable. She waits until she hears him following her, hears his pace quicken to keep up with her fast stride, to say anything.
"How did you find me?"
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When she starts to walk - swiftly - out of the building, Cassian doesn't hesitate to follow. She walks like she wants to run, and with each step he wonders if she will.
"I tried to look myself, but your trail disappeared. Baze told me."
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If he saw Baze he might have... no. No, he doesn't know.
She swallows down her nerves, pushing them away as she shoves the door open and steps outside, almost flinching at the sun hidden behind wispy pink clouds that reminded her of the candy floss she used to eat on Coruscant when she was very, very small. Maybe Baze will bring-- No! Stop thinking about him!
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"He and Chirrut, yes. Not Bodhi. He is still being a hero." He squints a little in the sunlight, resisting the urge to stare at Jyn, even though he keeps stealing glances. "When I could not find you, I asked them if they knew, and Baze told me. Do not be mad at him for it, please."
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What if they didn't make it off Scarif, what if Cassian's back never healed, what if they spent every chance they had.
She jerks to a stop, suddenly unsure and indecisive. She can't bring him back to her room either; what if he opens up her small freezer and finds bags and bags of milk. No. It has to be some where else.
"Where is the ship?"
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"It's still in the port." He tells her the landing site he used. It's about a fifteen minute walk, maybe a little longer because he definitely moved quickly from there to here. "Is that where you want to go?"
It makes sense. She might not want him invading any of the spaces she's already carved out for herself here.
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Since it is in the port she simply adjusts course to head that way, no longer speed walking. Still squinting into the pale light as her poor eyes readjust to sunlight again.
"You can talk, while we walk." She doesn't know if she has anything to say yet. She has A Lot To Say but nothing she particularly wants to air out again. They'd fought and fought and let their love die and she isn't sure it can be saved anymore. Isn't sure she is brave enough to tell Cassian the truth so they could try.
Besides, he left her. Why would be want to try again?
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Jyn tells him he can talk, and he knows how he wants to start this whole thing, but he wonders if walking isn't going to make it weird. He wants to see her face, he wants to judge her physical reaction as well as... whatever verbal response she might give.
He just wants to apologize, and maybe it's better to do it in motion instead of dramatically sitting before her on the ship.
"How long have you been here?"
Great, excellent start, not what we wanted at all.
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She hadn't wanted to stay on the tiny planet she was on before, she didn't want to deal with the questions, so she had asked Draven to send her elsewhere. She's been continually surprised at how readily he moved her around, how respectful he was of her wishes. She never thought he'd outright hated her, but she knew she wasn't his favorite soldier. It was nice to know he still supported her wishes, even if he might not have supported her choices.
Her shoulders lift in a shrug. "I've moved around some, but they needed a slicer here so here I am."
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"You have always been good at that."
This is dumb. He did not fly all this way to make idle conversation!
"Do you keep Baze updated, where you are?"
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Cassian is bad at idle conversation. Jyn frowns, both at the compliment and the question. He doesn't have any right to her answers or even to be nice to her. No right to compliments. It's not true, he can do anything he wants, but it irritates her, to still feel some shiver of pride that he thinks she's good at something she's been doing since she was ten.
She stops again, turns to look at him. "Why are you here?"
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He wishes he had something to do with his hands. It would be easy to put up some kind of mask, but he decided he was done with the war, and that includes all the faces he wore. Jyn never deserved any of them anyway. She gets all his nerves and anxiety and the tiny little twitch in his fingers.
"I am sorry." It fumbles out of him but it doesn't make it any less genuine. He looks down at his feet for a second, because now that he spilt that first part, his nerves have exploded ten fold. He take a deep breath, then looks back up at her face, because he refuses to hide his face, even if she's looking at him like she's angry and he's terrified out of his mind. "That is why I am here. I know it is far too late coming, but you still deserved to hear it."
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Seeming to realize she'd bared everything for a moment, Jyn forces her expression into brittle neutrality.
"I don't deserve it, but I forgive you. I had long ago." She'd thought it would be better, without her, maybe he could be better without her so she hadn't begrudged his choice to leave her, not after a while. After a while she started thinking it was probably a smart idea for him. She was reckless and undisciplined, facts Draven had flung at her when they'd first taken her from Wobani, facts she had proudly wore like armour. It was better, for Cassian, she's sure, without that influence. He could be better, do better, without her.
He'd made the right choice. Jyn's heart had simply been another casualty of this war.
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Not that he didn't. The last year has basically been a stream of endless suffering that still isn't over, because even though the war is over, Cassian is still waking up with panic attacks and struggling to exist in a world where he doesn't have to be a soldier. Just because he stopped running from it doesn't mean he's not a disaster of a person.
"I hurt myself and I hurt you, and I do not have anything to show for it."
Continuing to fight just made things worse, and it cost him the only stability and family he'd had since he was a child. Only this time he can't even blame the war - it's just himself.
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"Stop. Stop apologizing. We both made bad choices and we were terrible to each other, but it's over now. It's masochistic to keep suffering over it." She doesn't want to talk about it anymore! She doesn't what to think about it anymore. And she most certainly does not want to listen to him making her blameless when she's done far worse than he ever had.
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He doesn't want to suffer over anything, but that's a very long and lonely journey ahead. He doesn't want to fight right now either, keeping his tone quiet and calm because he refuses to get hostile, but he's not even sure he could anymore. He left the fight and part of his own was left behind too.
"That is why I wanted to apologize. We were not smart and not kind, but if I want to... get better, I need to do better too. If I want to keep living after the war, I cannot ignore all that it means anymore."
And part of that involves owning up to his own fuck ups! Maybe it wasn't all on him, but he left, repeatedly. He left a woman who spent her whole life being abandoned, he's the worst.
He was better with Jyn. But he might have ruined that long ago.
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She can't tell him. She can't tell him that he had a baby out there and she gave it away like a piece of leftovers. She can't tell him that everything he thinks he's done wrong pales in comparison to taking away the only family he has left. She can't. She can't because she couldn't bear for him to look at her the way she looks at herself.
"You're a good man, what you've done doesn't take away from that. You can build a life after the war. You're smart, you'll learn to adapt to peace."
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He doesn't understand what's happening here, why she's being so defensive about him. The last time he saw Jyn they tried to talk, and it just exploded into another argument and they took out their frustrations on each other with sex instead of anything else. She had nothing kind to say in his direction.
Something is wrong. A different wrong from before. His instincts even now want him to comfort her, but he doesn't know what for, and he is still probably the cause.
She'd told him he was good before, of course, but there is a strange desperation to it now. Like she wants to end this conversation even though it's barely begun. None of it feels true to him, he still does not think himself good, but that is not why he's here. He did not come to get Jyn's reassurances.
"Why are you..." being nice to him. Rejecting his apologies. "You are not going to convince me you do not deserve to hear it. I owed it to you, and so many other things. I should never have left. I was afraid of peace. That is part of why I have come here too."
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Admittedly, it's a fairly peaceful place. They don't have scuffles, it's more of a brief stopping point before ships jet off somewhere else and that's fine with her. She could leave any time she wanted, hitch a ride with some Alliance ship and get dropped off at the next planet.
She should, probably. Leave entirely so Cassian (and Baze and Bodhi and Chirrut and K2) can't find her, can't follow her again. Rip herself away like a band-aid.
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He is sure this planet is nice enough. It's warm, pleasant, the people seem cheerful though that could be because the war has essentially ended.
"And I am not at peace. I don't know if I ever will be. But I have to stop being afraid to try. That is why... that is why I kept running. The war was familiar, but it is not for me anymore. I know I should have come to you to work that out, or figured it out sooner, but I was afraid."
It's a very brief outpouring, because he wants to talk to her into infinity again, but there are bridges to mend first, even if construction takes a while. He would leave if she wanted him to, but it's important to him that she know at the very least he has walked away from the war for good.
"I am here because of you. To talk, to explain, to apologize - whatever comes out of today, I know I could not make even a step forward without telling you I am done fighting and I am sorry."
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Not in this place, but with her. That is what he is saying, underneath it all. After nearly a year apart he's decided he wants to stop running away from her but she isn't the angry woman he left over and over again. No, the galaxy had broken her finally.
Her eyes close, squeezed shut against the desperate desire to run as far away as she possibly can.
"I--" Her chest hurts, her breasts hurt, she wants to throw up or pass out or both. She wants to cry. If she tells him, he will leave. He'll leave and find his child and make a better life for himself now that the war is ending and she'll fade into obscurity, a fairy tale. Maybe she should.
She'd deserve it, his anger, far more than his apologies. Maybe... She shakes her head. She can't do this, whatever Baze thought he was going to accomplish sending Cassian here, he was wrong.
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She doesn't want him to stay. He's not entirely sure that's it, that it's the whole thing, but she looks like she's about two seconds from a breakdown and logic follows he's the only changed factor. His presence is unexpected, he doesn't know what she's been through the last year - if he's made things worse by appearing again in her life, he just has more things to apologize for.
It doesn't stop him from tumbling three steps towards her, stopping only when he realizes his touch might not be welcome. That urge to comfort her is still there, despite believing himself the cause.
"I don't have to," he says quietly. No questions asked, he would leave right now if she told him to. "I - I should have given you warning that I was coming, but I was afraid you would not see me at all. I can leave, or we can reconvene later. I... Jyn..."
He wants to ask her what's wrong, he wants her to confide in him like she used to, but maybe it's too late. He would understand, but it doesn't make it any less terrifying.
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