He never wanted to drink to the point of passing out, simply because of his compulsive need to be in control. But he kind of wants to now, because he wants to stop feeling everything, and it's not like he can fall asleep with any ease anymore. Blacking out seems absolutely perfect, no flaws at all in this plan. Go big and go nowhere because home doesn't exist.
Cassian lets the question hang in the air for a few long seconds, trying to figure out the best answer he can give her without telling her he briefly wanted to die.
"A lot of things," he says quietly. "Things I should have paid more attention to months and months ago. Maybe even years ago."
Things like wondering if maybe he should just stop existing and realizing the war had really done the worst to him at that point. It would kill him if he didn't kill himself in the process, unless he stopped. He takes another sip of his drink, pauses, then just pours the rest down his throat. "I missed you. I missed everyone. I always did, but none of that mattered if I was not someone who was missed in return."
"We did miss you." If it was meant to sound comforting, it misses the mark entirely because Jyn finds herself furious again and it comes out like a jagged hiss. He'd left! He'd left her and all of them and they missed him every single day and worried about him every single day and he just keeps acting like they didn't want him.
"You never gave us a god damn choice, all we could do was miss you since you were never fucking around."
It's kind of nice to feel angry after so long feeling nothing at all and it floods through her like fire, pushing her back to her feet. Some part of her broke when she handed Javi over to Baze and Chirrut but what else was she supposed to do? Cassian left her no choice, she couldn't do it on her own. She wants to scream, to kick him out, but she's frozen by the terror that he'd leave.
Overwhelmed, she walks to the tiny window and sweeps back the dusty grey curtain so she can look outside, letting light into the room for the first time probably ever. The sleepy planet is still moving, even if Jyn feels like her world is falling apart again.
He doesn't argue with her, but he does flinch at her anger. There is very little he would do to defend himself right now. He would accept virtually any anger she has to throw at him, he almost wants her to keep snapping at him, because he probably deserves it, because it's better than seeing her so emotionless.
Reaching out, he grabs the rum again and refills his glass, this time to the brim.
"I never said I was correct." He sips at it, just enough so it won't spill from simple movements. Once he can, he gulps down another big taste. He doesn't know if he wants to feel angry about Javi or if he wants to feel nothing, so he supposes he can let the alcohol decide for him. "I am not healthy. It took me too long, but I came back because I was tired of feeling like I did not matter. It might not be good enough for you or anyone else and maybe not even for my son, but everyone has to start somewhere. Maybe it will be good enough for me."
As soon as he realizes he says the word son aloud for the first time, he practically inhales half his glass. Maybe he should just grab the bottle. It has to be good enough for him, he's still alive.
He says "my son" and Jyn has to cover her mouth to stifle a sob. She shouldn't have kept Javi from Cassian, but how... how was she supposed to tell him. Baze had promised that he would tell Cassian when Cassian was ready to hear it, he'd promised, but it turned out that Jyn wasn't ready to hear it either.
She stares out the window until she feels like she can breathe without crying. There should be some kind of whiplash going from anger to sadness and regret so quickly but it's just a hollow ache in her chest.
"You've always mattered." She knows that she is repeating herself, saying the same things she's always said. Maybe there is no point, but maybe Cassian is ready to hear it finally. "Anything you do will be good enough for him. As long as you try. As long as you're there."
They're words Jyn told him all the time. It just got difficult to believe her, no matter how much she reassured him, no matter how much she promised him, it was like there was a block on accepting it. He almost accepts it now, simply because Jyn is rightfully angry with him and still tries to reassure him he matters. But he matters to K2. The moment his droid stole the pill from him, he realized it was irrefutable that he was important to at least one being in the universe. But he's too distracted by the thought of being good enough for Javi to be ready to hear it.
"I almost wasn't," he says quietly. He almost wasn't there. He wants to look at Jyn but instead he just stares at his glass and drains the rest of it. It's too much too quickly but he finds it hard to care.
"I touched him. He was with Baze and I touched his head, and I had no idea." He was so small. He hadn't thought much of the baby at all, only thinking it made sense for Baze and Chirrut to look after an infant.
He stares into the empty glass, but he's not really looking at it. He's not looking at anything, unfocused and unsteady while he thinks about why he's here, what made him come back, and the fact that he has a child he almost never met. "What if I had never known?"
The hollow feeling in her spreads like cold air flooding through an open door and she slowly turns to Cassian, finding him staring into the glass.
"What do you mean you almost weren't?" Her voice is calm, steady, low. Everything he taught her about how to keep an emotional situation from escalating. It's all that is keeping her emotions currently in check so she supposes she can thank him for that.
She doesn't give him time to answer her question, striding over to stand in front of him, holding out her hand. "Give it to me," she tries to demand, but her voice wobbles dangerously.
She does not mean his glass, as much as he wishes she did.
It doesn't even occur to him that she might be keeping her voice calm on purpose, but he draws steadiness from it anyway, just like he'd once taught her it could do. He's already buzzed from how swiftly he'd drank and he finds he still wants more.
So he reaches out for the bottle again, not looking at her even if she's right in front of him, ignoring her first question.
"I don't have it. You can search me, if you do not believe me. I am not very believable."
Maybe they simply took it back because he really did retire and they need to keep track of them or there is a limited supply. Maybe it has gone for completely innocent reasons, as innocent as anything surrounding a suicide pill can be. Maybe he dropped it and accidentally stepped on it and never got a new one. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Instead of answering her, he pours himself more rum. It is the opposite of what he should be doing, but he's just tired and doesn't know what else to do. He didn't come back here to cry on Jyn about his lowest points, he just wanted to apologize and try to start getting better. But - Javi.
"I don't know. You will have to ask K2. He either turned it in or disposed of it when we returned, I never asked."
Like he's not sure she is going to trust him, he puts the bottle down and idly tugs open the little flap in his jacket where the lullaby is supposed to go, accessible with a simple bite of his teeth if his fingers can't reach it. "It has been empty for months."
Jyn snatches the glass out of his hand, drinks it before he can even think about it. The bottle is still right next to him but she doesn't think it's fair that she doesn't have the same glassiness in her eyes that he does.
"Why don't you have it?"
She doesn't want to know. She does not. But she needs to know so badly it's like a physical pain, a pressure building in her chest that feels like it is going to burst. She has to know.
Cassian frowns. He wasn't done with that! At least the bottle is right there, if she won't give him the glass back eventually.
He still can't look at her and she stole his focal point, so instead he just turns his head and stares at the wall. If he wasn't already full of alcohol, he doesn't think he'd be as blasé about it, but he feels sufficiently numb enough, or maybe he's just pretending to be.
"Because K2 refused to give it back to me after I almost took it. It was in my mouth. He made me spit it out. I never asked for it back." A beat. "You know they wanted me to change core parts of his personality? I wonder if I would be here if I had. I wondered that a lot."
Jyn has dealt with people wanting to end it all before, she'd watched as one of her cellmates killed herself. She'd had to climb down and retrieve the tools so productivity wouldn't slow down. She's seen suicide by direct or indirect action, suicide by Storm Trooper, people starving themselves as protest or to feed their children even though it left their children with no one to look after them, more in a seemingly never-ending cavalcade of war orphans.
It's a reality of this hard life.
But there's nothing that could prepare her for the reality of Cassian casually offering that he'd nearly done it himself, that he would have done it if K2 wasn't there. She simultaneously grief-stricken and furious. For a woman so intimate with loss and heartache, so used to compartmentalizing her grief to deal with never, this obliterates any walls she fantasized she would be able to keep up.
For the second time in as many hours, Jyn sinks to her knees, the sting of her bruised knees hitting the concrete drowned out by emptiness. She wants to be so angry, she wants to scream at him, condemn him for a choice that almost took him completely from her, by choice! But her hands lift and her fingers twist with his like it is second nature, breathing out a slow breath.
"You used to tell me that it was okay to not be okay." And that is all she can offer him right now in return.
He startles when he feels her touch, feels her fingers wind with his, and he blinks at her like he can't believe she is offering him this. You don't deserve it something whispers in his head, and his only response is to tighten his grip like he doesn't want her to let go. It's like a switch flips.
He's expecting her to yell at him again, not quietly offer him the advice he used to promise her all the time. He doesn't know what to do with the comfort like he would anger.
"I could not see myself getting better. I could not see... anything, not for myself. I wanted it all to stop, and for those few moments, in the middle of a mission I could not leave with nothing waiting for me on the other side, it seemed like the only way. Spies do not last as long as I have."
He squeezes his eyes shut, because he didn't want to tell her any of this. It wasn't fair to put any of it on her now, but it spills out of him, loose lipped from inebriation and her warm hands.
"I did not want it back. I did not want the temptation again. I am never keeping one again. I meant it, when I said I was done. I don't want to die."
And it will kill him, if he doesn't walk away. That much he is sure of. He might not matter much in the grand scheme of the universe, but he wants to carve himself a tiny place in it anyway. His only regret is that it took nearly killing himself to hold on to that.
She bites back the urge to tell him that she was waiting for him on the other side, but he'd stopped coming back. That's not the point.
"You can't." She sits up on her knees, lifting her hands to draws his toward her, pressing their clasped hands to her chest. "You don't get to come back and tell me this and ever think that you could leave me again. You're not a spy anymore, Cassian. You don't have to give any more to this war, you've given more than your fair share."
One hand snakes free, lifting to flatten against his cheek. "Stay. Your family needs you as much as you need us."
She's not thinking clearly; she can't turn off the past year, she can't erase the mistrust he sowed in her heart, but she can't bear he ever have the idea that he doesn't have anything, sick with the idea. He has her and Bodhi and Baze and Chirrut and K2, always K2. He has the soldiers he trained, people he practically grew up with even if he kept them at arm's length. He has a home still.
He has their son.
"Don't be a footnote in Javi's history. Help him write his story."
He starts to cry. He's not even aware of it at first, until he realizes there's a wetness on his cheeks that he just ignores because he can't bring himself to look away from her, can't bring himself to pull his hands back to wipe it clean.
"I want to stay." It falls out of him desperately as he almost chokes on it. "I always wanted to, even when I was running away. It was never you. I wasn't -"
He squeezes her hands and breathes in sharply to catch his breath. His eyes snap up to her again when she gently touches his face and his mouth drops open in a little 'o' of surprise.
"I know I do not deserve it, but I don't want to leave. I was not going to ask but I want it more than anything, even if you do not believe me anymore. I know I have given you no reason to trust me and that I have hurt you too many times."
He knows he cannot just pretend the last year didn't happen, he knows he has to prove himself again, but that's why he's here. That's what he's come to do, he wants to stay and work on himself and maybe get another chance at a family with Jyn.
And their son, apparently.
"I just keep thinking how I might have missed him. How I could have died without knowing he existed. I do not want to miss him, and I do not want to come that close to losing you again either. I want to be better."
Her thumb brushes against tears, so uncommon between them. The hollow feeling is still there, like so much loss has simply carved out her insides like a melon and it isn't being filled in. That doesn't change when Cassian admits he wants to stay. She hasn't heard it in so long, not since back when they would good and she could convince him to linger in bed with her a little longer.
She tries to think of the right thing to say but her mouth is dry and she doesn't know what the right thing to say is, she can't channel Chirrut's natural wisdom for this.
"You already are better." He's here, for one thing. She should tell him to go back to base, to find his son, to let his friends and family reconnect with him. But she doesn't want him to leave and she is too scared and guilty and shamed to follow.
Her touch is so familiar, but he is not unawares of the space that's grown between them, the strange air that constantly reminds him he left, again and again, breaking them more and more each time. They are still a little broken, even if they still know all there is about one another.
"I am not," he says, but it isn't self-deprecating, it's matter of fact. "I might not be for a while."
He has three decades of war in his head and in his bones. His life after the war is going to involve dealing with that, and he suspects it's going to be a lifelong process - but he wants that life to do it.
It's a little bit of progress to even acknowledge it, but he has a long way to go. "I have to try."
Maybe he simply doesn't see it. He is better. He shut Jyn out for so long she'd been pregnant and given birth and he was none the wiser. Now he is here and it hurts so much but this is the most he has spoken to her in probably a full year. Not just the number of words but the content, she knows how he is feeling again, he is telling her things he is scared and ashamed of again.
Maybe he can't see it but she was on the receiving end of his silence for too long not to mark the difference.
Maybe it's not her though, maybe it's just the rum. She doesn't want to think it but after nearly a year of physical distance and even longer of emotional distance, she can't say for sure it isn't simply the candid nature of alcohol at work. Maybe the reason doesn't matter, he's talking. She should take what she can get.
Maybe that is what makes her push forward to kiss his somber mouth. She doesn't know what to say anymore, she is the last person capable of helping him since she isn't exactly emotionally stable in her own right. But Cassian is in pain and hurting and she doesn't know how to fix anything and once upon a time she would kiss him and he would breathe her in like she was the only clean oxygen on the planet. Sometimes it helped then, maybe it will help now.
He's so surprised he doesn't even react at first, just sits there like an idiot while her mouth finds his. He feels like he's melting under it, and even though there's a part of his brain that's telling him he should pull away, he finds himself kissing her back.
It just reminds him of how much he missed her. He breathes her in just like he used to, drawing in the comfort and familiarity of Jyn Erso. He still loves her, he always has, and he thinks he always will.
Everything else continues to linger in the back of his mind, the same dull ache the alcohol hadn't managed to temper, and he wants this kiss to help - not just him, but her too. Maybe it's something she needs as well, and he knows he'd give Jyn just about anything.
Her hand disentangles from his, reaching up to curl her arm around his shoulders while the hand on his cheek slides into his hair. It's still the most natural thing in the world to her, to melt into him, to drink in the taste of him like it is an antidote to their lives.
He tastes like rum and Jyn thinks that they should probably stop because neither of them are of a clear mind.
She doesn't stop, pressing her toes into the floor even as she leans in further, keeping hold of him like she is afraid he will slip away from her again.
His own hands now free, they instinctively find their way to her waist. He pulls her up and in closer, against all rationale telling him otherwise. It shouldn't be this easy, but it is; it's so natural and they mold together like nothing has changed.
But things have changed.
He doesn't want to think about how. He just wants to kiss her and pretend they're simply being reunited after a mission, not trying to swallow up their emotions or lack thereof.
His mouth opens up under hers anyway, drinking her in like he's parched, like he hasn't just downed three glasses of alcohol. He just wants to feel warm and cared for again under her touch.
She's half off her knees now and honestly it is exceptionally uncomfortable so she leans in more, using her grip on his shoulder to guide him back until he is laying back against her thin, shitty mattress and she can scramble on top of him, still kissing him because she can't bear to stop.
She does pull back enough to shake her head, pepper kisses across his jaw, whispering with firm determination: "Please don't ask me to stop."
There is no time for his conscience and good heart when her own is finally pounding in her chest like her body has just realized again that she is alive and well, living and breathing. Her body reacting to Cassian's presence alone, like she's come alive at his touch. It's pathetic but she doesn't care about anything else anymore. This feeling has been so far from her for so long... she needs to keep feeling alive.
He falls back easily under her guidance, hands winding more tightly around her as she climbs up and keeps him flat on the mattress.
Oh what a comfortable, warm weight on top of him. He closes his eyes when her lips move over his jaw, fingers digging in very gently at her hips. Please don't ask me to stop. Cassian knows they should, he knows this is almost the same thing that happened the last time they saw each other, but Jyn says she doesn't want to stop and his brain takes her words at face value.
He already noted he would do almost anything she wanted, anything she asked, and this feels easy. She's kissing him and he doesn't fight it, tilts his head to make it easier for her; he's missed everything about her, this included, even if the logical side of his brain is hazy. It makes him feel wanted and he forgot how much that mattered. "Okay."
This is exactly how Javi came to be, an emotional interlude. This one wasn't fueled by a fight, but the same grief still hangs heavy around them like a curtain. They should stop, but Jyn wants...
Him.
All she wants is to have Cassian again, to have her home back.
"Talk to me. I want to know you're really here." Force, maybe it is some elaborate dream, but it can't be because even in Jyn's nightmares of Cassian dying it isn't at his own hand. Cut down in battle, in a crash, murder; she's imagined all sorts of horrifying scenarios where he died and left her, but never that.
She noses against his throat, kissing the hollow behind his ear.
He doesn't know what to say, or more specifically what she wants to hear. He runs one hand up her back, fingers idly along her spine, resisting every temptation to just... hold her tightly against him.
"I am here," he assures her. He feels like it's a fever dream, that maybe he's not actually here, because even though the separation and his almost suicide are still hanging in the air, she's still kissing him like she wants nothing more than that.
Nothing more than him.
"I am here and I do not want to go anywhere else, not unless you tell me," it's her mouth on his skin and the rum in his blood that draws out the honesty. "I am here because I want to be."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
realists) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ohnofeelstho2018-09-24 07:35 pm
no subject
Cassian lets the question hang in the air for a few long seconds, trying to figure out the best answer he can give her without telling her he briefly wanted to die.
"A lot of things," he says quietly. "Things I should have paid more attention to months and months ago. Maybe even years ago."
Things like wondering if maybe he should just stop existing and realizing the war had really done the worst to him at that point. It would kill him if he didn't kill himself in the process, unless he stopped. He takes another sip of his drink, pauses, then just pours the rest down his throat. "I missed you. I missed everyone. I always did, but none of that mattered if I was not someone who was missed in return."
no subject
"You never gave us a god damn choice, all we could do was miss you since you were never fucking around."
It's kind of nice to feel angry after so long feeling nothing at all and it floods through her like fire, pushing her back to her feet. Some part of her broke when she handed Javi over to Baze and Chirrut but what else was she supposed to do? Cassian left her no choice, she couldn't do it on her own. She wants to scream, to kick him out, but she's frozen by the terror that he'd leave.
Overwhelmed, she walks to the tiny window and sweeps back the dusty grey curtain so she can look outside, letting light into the room for the first time probably ever. The sleepy planet is still moving, even if Jyn feels like her world is falling apart again.
no subject
Reaching out, he grabs the rum again and refills his glass, this time to the brim.
"I never said I was correct." He sips at it, just enough so it won't spill from simple movements. Once he can, he gulps down another big taste. He doesn't know if he wants to feel angry about Javi or if he wants to feel nothing, so he supposes he can let the alcohol decide for him. "I am not healthy. It took me too long, but I came back because I was tired of feeling like I did not matter. It might not be good enough for you or anyone else and maybe not even for my son, but everyone has to start somewhere. Maybe it will be good enough for me."
As soon as he realizes he says the word son aloud for the first time, he practically inhales half his glass. Maybe he should just grab the bottle. It has to be good enough for him, he's still alive.
no subject
She stares out the window until she feels like she can breathe without crying. There should be some kind of whiplash going from anger to sadness and regret so quickly but it's just a hollow ache in her chest.
"You've always mattered." She knows that she is repeating herself, saying the same things she's always said. Maybe there is no point, but maybe Cassian is ready to hear it finally. "Anything you do will be good enough for him. As long as you try. As long as you're there."
no subject
"I almost wasn't," he says quietly. He almost wasn't there. He wants to look at Jyn but instead he just stares at his glass and drains the rest of it. It's too much too quickly but he finds it hard to care.
"I touched him. He was with Baze and I touched his head, and I had no idea." He was so small. He hadn't thought much of the baby at all, only thinking it made sense for Baze and Chirrut to look after an infant.
He stares into the empty glass, but he's not really looking at it. He's not looking at anything, unfocused and unsteady while he thinks about why he's here, what made him come back, and the fact that he has a child he almost never met. "What if I had never known?"
no subject
"What do you mean you almost weren't?" Her voice is calm, steady, low. Everything he taught her about how to keep an emotional situation from escalating. It's all that is keeping her emotions currently in check so she supposes she can thank him for that.
She doesn't give him time to answer her question, striding over to stand in front of him, holding out her hand. "Give it to me," she tries to demand, but her voice wobbles dangerously.
no subject
It doesn't even occur to him that she might be keeping her voice calm on purpose, but he draws steadiness from it anyway, just like he'd once taught her it could do. He's already buzzed from how swiftly he'd drank and he finds he still wants more.
So he reaches out for the bottle again, not looking at her even if she's right in front of him, ignoring her first question.
"I don't have it. You can search me, if you do not believe me. I am not very believable."
Not anymore, not with her.
no subject
Maybe they simply took it back because he really did retire and they need to keep track of them or there is a limited supply. Maybe it has gone for completely innocent reasons, as innocent as anything surrounding a suicide pill can be. Maybe he dropped it and accidentally stepped on it and never got a new one. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Maybe it is anything but what it could be.
no subject
"I don't know. You will have to ask K2. He either turned it in or disposed of it when we returned, I never asked."
Like he's not sure she is going to trust him, he puts the bottle down and idly tugs open the little flap in his jacket where the lullaby is supposed to go, accessible with a simple bite of his teeth if his fingers can't reach it. "It has been empty for months."
no subject
"Why don't you have it?"
She doesn't want to know. She does not. But she needs to know so badly it's like a physical pain, a pressure building in her chest that feels like it is going to burst. She has to know.
no subject
He still can't look at her and she stole his focal point, so instead he just turns his head and stares at the wall. If he wasn't already full of alcohol, he doesn't think he'd be as blasé about it, but he feels sufficiently numb enough, or maybe he's just pretending to be.
"Because K2 refused to give it back to me after I almost took it. It was in my mouth. He made me spit it out. I never asked for it back." A beat. "You know they wanted me to change core parts of his personality? I wonder if I would be here if I had. I wondered that a lot."
no subject
It's a reality of this hard life.
But there's nothing that could prepare her for the reality of Cassian casually offering that he'd nearly done it himself, that he would have done it if K2 wasn't there. She simultaneously grief-stricken and furious. For a woman so intimate with loss and heartache, so used to compartmentalizing her grief to deal with never, this obliterates any walls she fantasized she would be able to keep up.
For the second time in as many hours, Jyn sinks to her knees, the sting of her bruised knees hitting the concrete drowned out by emptiness. She wants to be so angry, she wants to scream at him, condemn him for a choice that almost took him completely from her, by choice! But her hands lift and her fingers twist with his like it is second nature, breathing out a slow breath.
"You used to tell me that it was okay to not be okay." And that is all she can offer him right now in return.
no subject
He's expecting her to yell at him again, not quietly offer him the advice he used to promise her all the time. He doesn't know what to do with the comfort like he would anger.
"I could not see myself getting better. I could not see... anything, not for myself. I wanted it all to stop, and for those few moments, in the middle of a mission I could not leave with nothing waiting for me on the other side, it seemed like the only way. Spies do not last as long as I have."
He squeezes his eyes shut, because he didn't want to tell her any of this. It wasn't fair to put any of it on her now, but it spills out of him, loose lipped from inebriation and her warm hands.
"I did not want it back. I did not want the temptation again. I am never keeping one again. I meant it, when I said I was done. I don't want to die."
And it will kill him, if he doesn't walk away. That much he is sure of. He might not matter much in the grand scheme of the universe, but he wants to carve himself a tiny place in it anyway. His only regret is that it took nearly killing himself to hold on to that.
no subject
"You can't." She sits up on her knees, lifting her hands to draws his toward her, pressing their clasped hands to her chest. "You don't get to come back and tell me this and ever think that you could leave me again. You're not a spy anymore, Cassian. You don't have to give any more to this war, you've given more than your fair share."
One hand snakes free, lifting to flatten against his cheek. "Stay. Your family needs you as much as you need us."
She's not thinking clearly; she can't turn off the past year, she can't erase the mistrust he sowed in her heart, but she can't bear he ever have the idea that he doesn't have anything, sick with the idea. He has her and Bodhi and Baze and Chirrut and K2, always K2. He has the soldiers he trained, people he practically grew up with even if he kept them at arm's length. He has a home still.
He has their son.
"Don't be a footnote in Javi's history. Help him write his story."
no subject
"I want to stay." It falls out of him desperately as he almost chokes on it. "I always wanted to, even when I was running away. It was never you. I wasn't -"
He squeezes her hands and breathes in sharply to catch his breath. His eyes snap up to her again when she gently touches his face and his mouth drops open in a little 'o' of surprise.
"I know I do not deserve it, but I don't want to leave. I was not going to ask but I want it more than anything, even if you do not believe me anymore. I know I have given you no reason to trust me and that I have hurt you too many times."
He knows he cannot just pretend the last year didn't happen, he knows he has to prove himself again, but that's why he's here. That's what he's come to do, he wants to stay and work on himself and maybe get another chance at a family with Jyn.
And their son, apparently.
"I just keep thinking how I might have missed him. How I could have died without knowing he existed. I do not want to miss him, and I do not want to come that close to losing you again either. I want to be better."
no subject
She tries to think of the right thing to say but her mouth is dry and she doesn't know what the right thing to say is, she can't channel Chirrut's natural wisdom for this.
"You already are better." He's here, for one thing. She should tell him to go back to base, to find his son, to let his friends and family reconnect with him. But she doesn't want him to leave and she is too scared and guilty and shamed to follow.
no subject
"I am not," he says, but it isn't self-deprecating, it's matter of fact. "I might not be for a while."
He has three decades of war in his head and in his bones. His life after the war is going to involve dealing with that, and he suspects it's going to be a lifelong process - but he wants that life to do it.
It's a little bit of progress to even acknowledge it, but he has a long way to go. "I have to try."
no subject
Maybe he can't see it but she was on the receiving end of his silence for too long not to mark the difference.
Maybe it's not her though, maybe it's just the rum. She doesn't want to think it but after nearly a year of physical distance and even longer of emotional distance, she can't say for sure it isn't simply the candid nature of alcohol at work. Maybe the reason doesn't matter, he's talking. She should take what she can get.
Maybe that is what makes her push forward to kiss his somber mouth. She doesn't know what to say anymore, she is the last person capable of helping him since she isn't exactly emotionally stable in her own right. But Cassian is in pain and hurting and she doesn't know how to fix anything and once upon a time she would kiss him and he would breathe her in like she was the only clean oxygen on the planet. Sometimes it helped then, maybe it will help now.
Maybe.
no subject
He's so surprised he doesn't even react at first, just sits there like an idiot while her mouth finds his. He feels like he's melting under it, and even though there's a part of his brain that's telling him he should pull away, he finds himself kissing her back.
It just reminds him of how much he missed her. He breathes her in just like he used to, drawing in the comfort and familiarity of Jyn Erso. He still loves her, he always has, and he thinks he always will.
Everything else continues to linger in the back of his mind, the same dull ache the alcohol hadn't managed to temper, and he wants this kiss to help - not just him, but her too. Maybe it's something she needs as well, and he knows he'd give Jyn just about anything.
He wouldn't before. But he wants to now.
no subject
He tastes like rum and Jyn thinks that they should probably stop because neither of them are of a clear mind.
She doesn't stop, pressing her toes into the floor even as she leans in further, keeping hold of him like she is afraid he will slip away from her again.
no subject
But things have changed.
He doesn't want to think about how. He just wants to kiss her and pretend they're simply being reunited after a mission, not trying to swallow up their emotions or lack thereof.
His mouth opens up under hers anyway, drinking her in like he's parched, like he hasn't just downed three glasses of alcohol. He just wants to feel warm and cared for again under her touch.
no subject
She does pull back enough to shake her head, pepper kisses across his jaw, whispering with firm determination: "Please don't ask me to stop."
There is no time for his conscience and good heart when her own is finally pounding in her chest like her body has just realized again that she is alive and well, living and breathing. Her body reacting to Cassian's presence alone, like she's come alive at his touch. It's pathetic but she doesn't care about anything else anymore. This feeling has been so far from her for so long... she needs to keep feeling alive.
no subject
Oh what a comfortable, warm weight on top of him. He closes his eyes when her lips move over his jaw, fingers digging in very gently at her hips. Please don't ask me to stop. Cassian knows they should, he knows this is almost the same thing that happened the last time they saw each other, but Jyn says she doesn't want to stop and his brain takes her words at face value.
He already noted he would do almost anything she wanted, anything she asked, and this feels easy. She's kissing him and he doesn't fight it, tilts his head to make it easier for her; he's missed everything about her, this included, even if the logical side of his brain is hazy. It makes him feel wanted and he forgot how much that mattered. "Okay."
no subject
Him.
All she wants is to have Cassian again, to have her home back.
"Talk to me. I want to know you're really here." Force, maybe it is some elaborate dream, but it can't be because even in Jyn's nightmares of Cassian dying it isn't at his own hand. Cut down in battle, in a crash, murder; she's imagined all sorts of horrifying scenarios where he died and left her, but never that.
She noses against his throat, kissing the hollow behind his ear.
no subject
"I am here," he assures her. He feels like it's a fever dream, that maybe he's not actually here, because even though the separation and his almost suicide are still hanging in the air, she's still kissing him like she wants nothing more than that.
Nothing more than him.
"I am here and I do not want to go anywhere else, not unless you tell me," it's her mouth on his skin and the rum in his blood that draws out the honesty. "I am here because I want to be."
(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)