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Jyn remembers with far too much clarity the first time someone put their hands on her body without her consent. That person left the interaction with two broken hands and a black eye to boot, but he wasn’t the one who had to remember that feeling for the rest of his life. Bruises, broken bones, they heal. One forgets they even happened, especially if they happen often enough.
It was a tragedy it didn’t happen while she was still with the Partisans. She knows that Saw would have killed anybody who dared to touch her like that, to violate her. No, it was after, sometime between then and now, between the Partisans and the Alliance, that she finally realized nobody thought of her body as belonging to her. Saw looked at her body and knew it as a weapon; the Empire saw her body as a burden, a threat, an expense. The Alliance… well, perhaps they saw her body as an asset. They were certainly, in comparison to others, the least demanding of it.
She remembers, but she doesn’t often think about it. There’s no time to reminisce in the midst of survival, when every moment might as well be borrowed time. It only occurs to her, only permeates her every thought, when some of the rebels start to look at her as a fixture in their movement. As if rebelling against the rebellion idk’t enough, as if surviving the unsurvivable isn’t bloody enough, they look at her and see a folk hero. She itches with the discomfort of it, of fame or whatever it is that keeps their hawkish eyes on her.
There’s only one set of eyes she trusts to look at her and see the honest truth. When he looks at her, her heartbeat slows from its lightspeed pace; the tension in her shoulders unravels. Sometimes, he’ll tilt his head with curiosity, and the fact that he does lets her know that she can look back at him, the glimmer of a smile in her eyes if not on her lips, and tell him wordlessly that she’s alright. That they’re both alright.
She remembers every second of Scarif, every touch of his hand as he pulled her away from a hopeless quarry, every breath taken in each other’s arms, every callous on his hands. It’s the last time she can remember where she felt truly at peace with her life. Now, she lives with the anticipation of the other shoe waiting to drop, and it only abates when their shoulders brush against each other in passing, when his hand slides past the small of her back as he moves around her to his place of semi-honor during briefings.
He’s busy, though. He is a highly respected and skilled intelligence officer, and she is a thorn in the Alliance’s side. It’s only because Scarif was, in generous terms, a success that she’s able to stay. They don’t give her a room. She has no access, no clearance. They let her eat in the mess, and sometimes a good sport will ask her for help slicing, but she isn’t truly one of them. She’s just… around.
There’s a sort of lofty area in the hangar bay where she sleeps most nights, if one could really call it sleeping. Cassian often returns from missions in the middle of the night, missions that she’ll never get to hear about because they simply has nothing to do with her, and Draven will never allow her the clearance. She can’t take it personally, though. She knows that. She is a haphazardly known-but-unknown quantity. With what little she’s given them, and what little they’ve been able to learn, they simply can’t calculate her level of risk.
It’s a surprise when he steps out of a small shuttle and makes eye contact with her from her hiding place, her little bird’s nest. He’s considerate, though, and gives it some time before sneaking up to her space, trying not to hit his head on the durasteel beams above him.
“What happens when someone else finds you up here?” Cassian asks quietly, sitting crosslegged and facing her, elbows resting on his turned out knees.
Jyn shrugs. “I’ll find somewhere else.”
He furrows his brow. “This is where you’ve been sleeping, then?”
“People who can’t follow orders don’t get beds.”
Cassian smirks, but his eyes brim with exhaustion, melancholy. “You only have to ask, Jyn.”
“Quarters are hard to come by as it is, they’re not going to assign me a bunk—”
“That’s not what I meant.”
There isn’t anyone in the entire galaxy who could get away with cutting her off mid-sentence, nobody but him. Near-death experiences will do that, she supposes, make you harsher toward some, gentler with others. “What did you mean, Cassian?” she asks. For his sake, she hopes she isn’t being too obtuse. She’s certainly not trying to be.
“My quarters aren’t much,” he explains softly, hesitantly, as if she might run, and that sad look is still in his eyes, “but there’s room enough for two.”
She doesn’t mean to bristle at him—she really doesn’t. But she’s heard words like that before, and she knows what they typically mean. Cassian, though—he’s not like that—he can’t mean it like that. Still, her discomfort is something she’s gotten worse and worse at hiding from him. Everyone else gets to see her raw and angry. He’s the only one who gets to see her like this, whatever this is.
His brow knits together with worry, and his voice becomes very small. “I said something to make you upset.”
She shakes her head. “You didn’t—”
“But you are upset. Or—something else. Kriff, I can’t find the word for it.”
His mind shouldn’t fail him when it comes to speaking Basic at this point, but it softens the edges of her that still can’t soften with anyone else. He’s flustered, and he’s vulnerable, and he never gets like that when he’s undercover. When he’s working, when he’s someone else, he has everything under control. She’s glad she gets to see him search for the words, glad she gets to see him. Him.
“You don’t make me upset,” she tells him, picking at her cuticles recklessly. “I trust you.” Trust goes both ways. And for them, it does.
Something in her words has the realization dawning on him. “I can sleep on the floor,” he blurts out, the words tumbling forth without thought.
She laughs, but there’s a question in it. “Why would you sleep on the floor?”
He blushes, and she decides she likes the way it makes him seem younger, in spirit. “You should be sleeping in a bed, but if you didn’t want me there—”
“I want you there,” she says, and though she had no intention of saying those words, they feel right. She does want him there, every morning when she wakes up, every night when she goes to sleep. She doesn’t want to be alone anymore, and Sith hells, if that doesn’t scare her more than the Empire ever has.
“I want you there,” she repeats, “but I… I know you wouldn’t—you would never, I know—”
His face nearly turns green. “Force, Jyn—I didn’t even—”
“I know,” she sighs. Takes a deep breath—sighs again. “I know, Cassian. I told you, I trust you.” Not sure I trust myself, though. “I don’t know if I can be more than I am.” Even if I want to, for you.
“I wouldn’t ask you to,” he promises, and she can tell, it really is a promise.
He keeps his promise—he always does. More than half the nights, Cassian isn’t even on base, but is instead off on some mission that Jyn, finally, gets to hear a little bit about. It’s only because she sleeps in his bed, only because she's the only one he talks to, outside of briefings and medbay visits. Still, she takes the crumbs she can get. It’s her way of being a part of things, without being a part of things.
It’s nearly dawn when he returns from a mission that, when she sees him, has clearly left him haggard and half-alive. She doesn’t bother asking what happens; he’ll tell her what he wants to, what he can, when he can. But the state of him rouses her from sleep, and she forces him into the tiny ‘fresher. He sits on the seat of the toilet, still fully dressed, and lets her tend to him without complaint.
After she cleans his face, she strips him down to his underclothes, methodically, purposefully. She knows he’s likely already been inspected up and down in the medbay, but they wouldn’t have done anything to clean him up, to make him more comfortable, not anywhere the bacta patches didn’t need to go. At the very least, she can help with that.
She tilts his chin up to get a better look at his face, his eyes closing as her thumbs brush along his overgrown beard. She tsks, and he chuckles. “You don’t like it?” he asks tiredly.
“Do you?” she asks in return, only a little sour.
“Doesn’t feel quite right, like this,” he sighs. “Will you—”
“Of course,” she mutters, as if he has to ask. She pulls the little shaving kit issued to all Alliance members from the cabinet on the wall. With nimble fingers, she rubs the clean-smelling cream in circles over his jaw and chin. She warns him softly not to move as she brings the razor to his skin, the cool scratching of it a sound she hasn’t heard in a very long time. Every so often, she brings a little towel up to wipe his face, admiring the smooth skin that was hiding beneath the unkempt beard. By the time she’s done, he’s nearly clean-shaven, though his shadow comes in fast and thick. He looks so young like this, so vulnerable. She doesn’t know what to do with the way that feeling makes her body tense.
“Thank you,” he says once he opens his eyes, a soft smile on his lips. He strokes his face, familiarizing himself once again with the feeling of his own bare skin. “Do I look like a new recruit again?”
Jyn steps back from him, surprising herself with how shy she suddenly feels, and nods toward the mirror. “Why don't you take a look, decide for yourself?”
She watches as he looks at himself in the mirror, admiring her handiwork. “You could have been a barber, I think, in another life,” he muses. Then, he turns to look at her. “I’m sorry I woke you.”
“It’s fine,” she dismisses him, shaking her head. It’s always fine when it’s you. “Are they making you go out again?”
He snorts. “Not today. Even Draven thought I deserved a break after this one.”
She pushes herself off the frame of the door. “You should get some sleep, then. I’ll just—”
“Will you stay?”
She freezes. “What?”
“I’d like it,” he says, ducking his head as if he’s embarrassed himself, “if you’d stay. I miss the sound of you breathing next to me, whenever I’m gone. So it would be nice if you would stay. If—if that’s alright with you.”
It shouldn’t be a difficult question, either to ask or to answer. And it shouldn’t be so particularly exciting, she thinks, but it is. They’ve slept in the same room together for months now, even if most of that time he’s not even there. They switch off who sleeps on the floor, because she doesn’t think it’s fair for him to give up the bed all the time when he has actual work to do. But they’ve never—shared.
She wants to share.
“I’ll stay,” she tells him, quietly pleased with the way his shoulders sag with relief. “But you’re the little spoon.”
His eyebrows shoot up questioningly, but he doesn’t ask for clarification. Instead, he follows her to the bed, follows her lead. She curls herself against his back, feeding off his warmth, sliding her arm around his stomach. “This alright?” she asks, though she can tell he wants to be the one asking that.
“Yeah,” he breathes, already halfway to sleep. “It’s—nice. It’s good.”
It’s less than a minute before his breaths are the slow and shallow ones of deep slumber, and Jyn finds it hard not to drift off as quickly as he does. But she wants to stay awake a little longer, listen to his breathing and feel the way his chest rises and falls, expands and contracts. This version of Cassian, at peace and safe in her arms, isn’t something she knew she needed. But he’s right—it’s good. It’s so, so good.
By the time she wakes up again, he’s gone; when she looks at the chrono on the wall, it’s only been a couple of hours, and she frowns to herself. He should still be asleep, damnit. But the spot next to her is still warm, and then she realizes the light is on the ‘fresher, and maybe he’s not quite as gone as she thought.
The durasteel floor is cold on her bare feet as she shuffles to the ‘fresher. She gives the door a soft knock and it slides open, Cassian standing there with his lower half wrapped in a towel. His face scrunches up in concern. “What's wrong?”
“You were gone,” she says matter-of-factly, shrugging. “Worried you didn't get enough sleep.”
The muscles in his jaw and forehead relax, just a bit, and he manages a smile. “Woke up and realized how much I smelled,” he responds. “I’m surprised you could even stand it.”
“Didn’t notice.” She cocks her head to the side, inhales. “Not so bad now, though.”
His cheeks flush red, and his uncovered chest does too. “Glad you think so.”
She takes a step closer, crowding him against the sink. His sharp intake of breath emboldens her, and she places her hand over his heart. “Jyn—”
“I just—” she lays her head where her was, pushing past through the self-deprecation that comes so naturally to her, “—want to be near you. Okay?”
After a moment, he wraps his arms around her. “Okay,” he breathes, “okay.”
Jyn thinks, just maybe, she could be at home in his arms. It’s the safest place she’s been since her mother was alive. She tries to step closer, tries to morph herself against his every plane and surface. She hears the noise he makes before she registers the feeling of something hard against her stomach, and it takes her another moment before it occurs to her what it is.
She pulls her head back slightly. “Do you want me to go?”
A vein in his throat throbs. “Do you want to go?”
Experimentally, she rolls her hips against his and can’t help but smile at the sound he makes. “Not really.”
His eyes flutter shut. “Jyn… do you even know—”
“Can I kiss you, Cassian?”
His eyes snap open. “What?”
“I want to kiss you,” she repeats. “I don’t usually want to kiss people, but I want to kiss you. Can I?”
She watches him process the request, his face unreadable, his eyes only showing a bit of his reticence. His hand slowly trails up the length of her arm, gliding over her collarbone, coming to cup her face. His lips hover so close to hers when he breathes, “Are you sure?”
Instead of answering, she pushes up on her toes and presses her lips to his, and when he starts to kiss her back, she’s pleasantly surprised to find how easy it is to do. In theory, she’s always liked kissing, but she’s never initiated it herself, never wanted it the way she wants Cassian. If the laws of the universe allowed it, she’d want to defy everything to force her body to occupy the same space as his. She’d be worried that what she’s feeling is something akin to love, except that a large part of her wants it to be.
His lips are soft, and she can just tell that he wants more, and she does, too, but she’s not sure—is she ready for it, ready for more? She doesn’t know. What she feels in her heart doesn’t scare her; what she feels in her body does, a little bit.
He pulls back and presses his forehead against hers, sensing her uncertainty. “Jyn?”
She rakes her fingers lightly down his chest. “I’m okay,” she reassures him. “Thank you, for… that.”
A low chuckle escapes his throat. “You’re very welcome. You can’t imagine how long I’ve thought about doing that.”
She nuzzles her face against him. “Really?”
“Will you be upset if I tell you I think about doing many different things with you?”
She pushes through discomfort once again, trying for once in her life to be honest. “I don’t mind if you think about me, but I don’t know what I can give you right now.”
He frowns; she feels the downturn of his lips against her hair. “You don’t have to give me anything, Jyn. Not now, not ever.”
“But you want—”
“I want for you to be happy. I want you to want whatever we do together, even if that’s just sharing a bed, or eating in silence in the mess. I would die for you, you know, but I would live for you, too, however you’ll have me.”
It’s too much. She can’t breathe, but she can’t move; she can’t leave, but she can’t stay. But she wants it, all of it, with him. Someday. Maybe. When things aren’t the way they are all around them.
He kisses her forehead and walks out of the ‘fresher, as if he senses that she can’t take anymore. It isn’t fresh air, it isn’t Yavin, but it’s quiet. It’s solitude. It aches, but she needs the space, for now. There’s nothing she’s better at than being alone.
Except she doesn’t want to, anymore.
Sometimes, she just kisses him when they’re both in his bed together, and they spend a long, languid hour moving against each other with no destination in mind. She kisses his neck a lot, and the ridge of his spine. He kisses her hands—her palm, her knuckles, each fingertip. They’re on their way to more. She wants more. She doesn’t want to be alone ever again.
When she angles her body on top of his, he makes a noise that’s too desperate to be anything but sincere. When she grinds her pelvis against his thigh, he growls and curses in a language that he uses often but that she still doesn’t know.
“Jyn,” he sighs, his head thrown back against the pillow. “Force, I want—wanna make you feel good—use me, kriffing use me, Jyn—get yourself off—”
In theory—in theory, that’s what so much of her adult life has felt like its been—she knows he means to grind on his thigh until she orgasms, though the thought forms awkwardly, clinically in her head. She likes the sound of his voice, but she doesn’t want words just now. Sensation is a far more attractive quarry.
Still. The more she thinks about it, the more questions she has.
“How many people have you had sex with?” she asks.
His breath hitches and he stills. “I don’t—ah, more than a couple of dozen, at least? Why—why do you ask?”
“Curiosity. I’ve never had sex,” she tells him. It’s an easy, meaningless confession to her, but his face colors with shame and she smooths her hand over his chest. “You don’t have to worry about me, Cassian. You’re not taking advantage of me.”
He laughs, but it’s the laugh of someone coming to a negative conclusion regarding their own sanity. “You don’t know—”
“I know what sex is, bantha brains,” she interrupts, squirreling for a fight. “I’ve seen people do it. I’ve done other things, just not—sex. Sex-sex, I mean.”
Cassian groans and covers his face with his hands. “Yes, Jyn. I know what you mean. I am just suddenly a man of my years.”
She doesn’t quite know what he means with that, so she continues on. “I’ve had the chance. But I never really—I don’t trust easy, Cass.”
“I know you don’t.” He moves his hands away from his face to look down at her, and while she doesn’t like the glimmer of pity-adjacent emotion she sees, he does reach to brush a lock of hair behind her ear, and it makes her feel safer again. “But you trust me.”
“Always,” she breathes, and the air tickles across his hand. She can only tell because he smiles the slightest, tiniest bit, but she can tell. “I trust you, and—I’ve never wanted anyone. ’Til I met you, and I trusted you, and—”
He pulls her up his torso just enough to kiss her softly on the lips, the full weight of his affection lingering in the contact. “I want you, too,” he says when he finally pulls away, pulls her with him. “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to force you into anything.”
It’s all she can do not to scream at him. You’re not forcing me into anything, you’re not hurting me, just touch me because I can’t be without the feel of you for much longer without going insane.
“I want you,” she says emphatically. “All of you. I trust you. I want to trust you with this. I—I love you, Cassian. Please trust me enough to believe me.” Trust goes both ways. Please. How many times have we said it? How many times do I have to say it?
He kisses her again, and it’s softer, more real. Nervous, but committed. “I do, Jyn,” he whispers. “I do believe you. And I love you so much, it could destroy me.”
Jyn moves her body over his completely until she’s straddling his hips, unsure but enthusiastic, her hands planted on his chest for balance. She shivers when he places his hands on her hips and draws little circles there with his fingers. “I won’t let it destroy you,” she promises. “I’m here. With you.” We go down together, or not at all.
Together.
He undresses her one piece of clothing at a time, waiting for her to take something off of him before he touches her again. She’s shaking by the time they’re in their underclothes; he’s running his hands up and down her sides and back. “Nervous?” he asks.
“No,” she answers too quickly. “Yes. But—excited, mostly—I don’t know what I’m doing.”
He sits up somewhat, shifting her in his lap, and brushes his lips against the underside of her jaw. It makes her heart beat faster, but she understands what he’s doing. She knows he’s getting her to soft and pliant in his arms. “I can help you, if you want,” he breathes between kisses down her neck. “I can touch you.”
Her whispered yes is enough permission for him as his hand slides between them, hooking into her underwear. He smiles against her lips as he begins to slide them off. “Out of these.”
She pushes herself up on her knees and helps him the best she can, and suddenly she’s bare as the day she was born, and she feels strange and needy and like she might strangle him if he doesn’t touch her—
“Cassian,” she gasps as he slides a finger against her slit, and it’s only then that she realizes how wet she is. For him, she thinks. It’s all for him.
He curls his finger and drags his knuckle back and forth, circling the part of her she knows the name of but doesn’t particularly care at this moment what it is, dipping into her center. As if this is where it starts, when they’ve barely begun.
The way he breathes, so headily, so particularly, makes her want to be entirely consumed by him. He thinks that she’ll destroy him, that loving her will be so violent and aching and wretchedly perfect that he’ll die for it? He thinks all that, while she knows that his love is a wildfire, and putting it out would just be disrupting the natural order of things. She wants to burn with him. She wants to burn in him.
She grips the back of his neck tightly as he presses first one, then two fingers inside her, the stretch both obscene and, she knows in theory, nothing at all. He grins when she whines, when her hips roll against his hand, but it’s not self-satisfied as much as it’s satisfied for her sake. “That’s it, Gods, Jyn, fuck yourself on my fingers,” he pleads, curling them up against a spot inside her she’s never even bothered to reach for. When she clenches around his fingers on instinct, he kisses her again, slowly, barely touching his lips to hers. “You’re doing so well, so perfect, estrellita, you’re so good, Jyn, Sith hells—”
Something coils inside her, takes her by surprise. Is it supposed to feel like this, from the inside? She buries her face in his neck as pleasure shimmers through her blood from her core outward, and then he’s petting her, shushing her like she’s a feeble creature, which she supposes she is, right now.
With rather careful movements, he divests himself of his underwear, finally, and she can feel the hard length of him against her damp center. They both gasp at the feeling, and his arms tighten around her waist.
“Take your time—don’t force it, estrellita, mi cielo, it doesn’t have to hurt—”
They adjust themselves so that she can slowly sink down on him, spear herself through and through in an agonizing game of taking what she can, waiting for the rest. But he’s right—it doesn’t hurt, not like she thought it would. It’s profound, and it’s unfamiliar, but other than a little sting as the length of him pushes past something inside her, she just feels full. She feels…
Home.
Her legs, though—her thighs, specifically—are beginning to ache, to vibrate with effort. “Need help,” she manages to get out in the midst of it all.
He smiles at her, tells her he loves her again before starting to roll his hips so, so gently. For a few moments, she appreciates that he’s so careful with her, but something along the way fills her with a harried need to feel all of him, harder, fuller, more.
Not quite as feral as could choose to be, she sinks her nails into his shoulders, dragging out a delighted sort of hiss from him as he thrusts up with more force. “Kriff, that’s—” she exhales before rolling her hips against him again. “It feels—”
“Good?”
“So good—so—good, Cassian—please—”
“More?”
She nods furiously. “More, more—I need—”
“I’ve got you.” He leans back on his elbows with his feet flat on the bed, and his thrusts speed up, become a little more unbalanced, a little more unpredictable. It’s like having the wind knocked out of her in the best way. One of his hands finds that nice part of her again, presses against the hard little bit of flesh and nerves, moves around it like it’s his karking job. “Always try—always want to make it good for you, cielo, amor, mi vida—”
For a moment, she sees nothing but him.
That feeling again—different this time, because she almost doesn’t register that he’s there anymore, almost doesn’t take care to feel the way he spills inside her, filling her. The part of her brain that can’t stop planning, can’t stop thinking ahead, knows it will be a mess. The rest of her doesn’t care.
He keeps his thumb at her center until suddenly she climaxes again, weaker this time but still good. He slows his motions until he finally withdraws, having worked her through all that he can. He collapses back on the bed, and she collapses on top of him.
There’s only the sound of two lovers panting, catching their breath, in the air between them. After a moment, she says against the sweat-dampened skin of his chest, “I would live and die for you, too,” and she knows that it’s enough for him. Enough for them. She’ll say the other words he wants to hear someday, maybe even soon, but not now. This moment is just for this.
He spends so much time making love to her when he returns from missions that Draven threatens a court martial if he’s late for another debriefing. After Cassian returns from a long and droning session with the Alliance’s finest, Jyn is waiting for him on their bed, curled up over the covers like she was just biding her time until he got home to hold her.
It takes him almost dying three times for her to say the three words she knows he wants to hear the most. But maybe that’s just what she needed—someone to live for, die for. Someone to love.
Together, or not at all.