ohnofeelstho | hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable

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.

"Where is the ship?"

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.

"Yes. To the ship."

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.

"Nearly two months."

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!

"Do you keep Baze updated, where you are?"

"Obviously, since he told you how to find me."

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.

Edited 2018-09-27 03:40 (UTC)

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.

"I do not want to keep suffering over it."

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."

What?

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."

"Why? What peace are you going to find here?"

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.

"It is not about the place."

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."

"You want to stay."

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.

Edited 2018-09-30 05:33 (UTC)

Oh.

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.

She shakes her head, opening her mouth to say something, but all that escapes is a sob, crackling and broken, before she manages to spit out, "You won't come back again!"

That was not at all what she meant to say, what she wanted to say. Even if she did want to say it, she would have wanted to say it as a rebuke, not as a broken sob. It should be an accusation, but instead it's fear, pure and simple. She sucks in a deep breath, forces her tears back.

"I'm not a mission. Why would you come back?"

The sound of her voice cuts straight through him like her anger had a thousand times before. It's different this time though, the desperate broken fear. She has no evidence to the contrary. Of course it's what she would assume. He did leave, over and over. There isn't much he can say to reassure her, because he already knows she won't believe him otherwise.

"Because I want to. Because... I made a lot of mistakes and I want to prove to you that I want to stay."

He can feel his own eyes threatening to tear up, uncertain how to go forward. He wants to wrap her up in his arms simply because she looks so miserable, but she's miserable because of him.

He shakes his head. "I have no mission. I have nowhere to go except where I choose. I want to stay here, I want to stay with you. It might be too late, I might have ruined too much, but I just want -"

Without thinking, he reaches out and brushes his fingers against hers. "I want you."

Her head shakes again, expression crumbling. "You won't, you won't want--" Her mouth snaps shut before she lets anything else slip out. She can't tell him.

But then he touches her hand and for a moment it feels like she's been shocked, it feels like the world flips over but maybe that is just the way her knees give out and oh look, she's on the ground. She feels that, knees hitting the dirt path hard and painfully, but Jyn's too busy trying not to hyperventilate to notice the scrapes on her knees.

She's too busy trying not to hyperventilate to even realize she's having this breakdown in public.

Cool.

Something is really wrong. He was being far too self-centered about it, but whatever is happening to Jyn right now goes beyond a scope he can imagine. She collapses on the ground in front of him and he stops fighting that instinct to go to her.

He follows her down, dropping to his knees and gathering her up in his arms despite their year apart, despite concerns she doesn't want to be touched. The least he can do is shield her sobbing from any passersby, although the street is currently and mercifully empty.

"Jyn," he says softly.

It's been pent up for so long with no outlet because Jyn wouldn't let it out, but Cassian has always been able to pull from her emotions she would rather keep tucked very far away. It was nice when it was emotions that made everything brighter.

These are not those emotions and she cannot seem to control them anymore, it's like a flood.

"I can't tell you," she whimpers, feeling crushed by the weight of keeping from him the one thing she shouldn't be keeping from him. "I don't want you to hate me."

She accepts it, which is more than he might have thought possible for finding her today, but it doesn't stop him from winding his arms around her. He wants to be able to help ground her again, he wants to be able to help her make sense of her emotions. All the things he walked away from and fucked up, things he's not sure he's still capable of, but he wants to try.

"There is nothing you can say that could possibly make me hate you more than I already hate myself." He says it so matter of factly. He loves Jyn. He does not love himself. "You do not have to tell me anything you do not want to."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject