nextchance | (no subject)

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cassian andor

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Though Jyn doesn't think, at first, that she'll be able to sleep at all, after what was apparently days of it, it turns out that that part comes easily enough. It's what comes after that that doesn't. When she sleeps, she dreams, and when she dreams, she's back on Scarif, Cassian growing weaker beside her, the bodies on the ground now those of their comrades, their friends. In person, she never actually saw them die to get confirmation of it, but their silence over the comms had spoken for itself. She sees them now, Bodhi and Chirrut and Baze, bloody and burned and broken because they were stupid enough to follow her, because her father built a monstrosity for the Empire, because all those years ago, he tried to run and they found him again.

She's sitting in a bunker, waiting and waiting, but light shines through the hatch, splits it into pieces, and she knows it's the Death Star, that they've found her, too. This time, there's no peace in it, no warm body against hers, because Cassian is already dead. All of them, gone because of her. Everyone she's ever cared about and plenty more besides. Galen Erso built a planet killer, but what is she?

Her father's creation swallows her whole, and this time, every inch of her is on fire, burning her to ashes. My Stardust, she hears in her head. It's me, she'd told Cassian, the two things her father made inextricably intertwined, she and the Death Star both causing nothing but destruction.

She wakes with a start, remembering that she isn't alone before she's even processed where she is. In one swift, sudden movement, she tugs the pillow out from under her head and presses it to her face instead, using it to muffle the gasps of air she has to force into her lungs. The instinct is an old childhood one, going back to her days with Saw and not wanting to admit to the weakness of nightmares among his company of soldiers.

Only when her breathing levels out and her pulse slows does she move the pillow again, letting it rest against her abdomen as she lies flat on her back on the thin mattress, staring up at the ceiling and taking everything in all over again. The room is still dark, the hallway outside nearly silent. If she had to guess, she'd say it's still probably the middle of the night, no light coming in from behind the re-closed shades. It's a relief and it isn't. She doesn't want to face any doctors or nurses, but the dark and the quiet are about as oppressive as her own thoughts, and she can't stop trembling. There won't be any getting back to sleep tonight, not for her. Even if she thought she could manage it, she'd be too afraid of what she would see this time.

When she speaks, it's on a whim, the impulse acted on before she can try to talk herself out of it, which she too easily could. Even then, she's cautious, her voice not rising above a whisper so she doesn't wake him up, in case he is asleep. If he can get the rest she couldn't, he deserves it. "Cassian?" she asks, still staring straight up, not sparing so much as a glance in his direction. "Are you awake?"

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He takes in a soft, quick breath as she inspects him by touch. It's not the most intimately they've touched, not after the beach on Scarif and the way she'd nearly flung herself at him earlier, but the darkness fills the space with implication and impossibility. For a second, Cassian closes his eyes and pretends that the touch is under different circumstances. They aren't hurting and broken and he's not someone who's lied to her. In the dark, they can be better people.

"Might have," he says, sounding doubtful.

Cassian doesn't make any mention of it but he moves himself as far to one side of the narrow bed as he can, making room just big enough for the small body of a girl who's eighteen centimeters shorter and slighter. It's a space big enough to pretend that they're better people, more whole.

"I can't remember the last time I was so injured I didn't want to eat." It's not a good joke because he'd always lived somewhere just above subsistence and likely so had she.

Something in her chest twists when he moves to the side, like he's answered a question she hasn't been able to work up the nerve to ask. Jyn isn't sure she ever would have, either, though seeing the slim, empty stretch of bed, she thinks it's what she really wanted when she walked over here. That, too, seems nothing but foolish, unnecessary, but she isn't going to fight him now. At least this way, she can pretend that it's for his sake, something he wanted, and not just a way of slowing her racing heart, of re-convincing herself that he's alright, alive and whole.

She can't speak for him, but she's beginning to think that, in her case, it isn't the damage done physically that she's going to have to worry about.

"If I ever reach that point, you should just put me out of my misery," she says wryly, tone a little too light for a joke about him killing her, though it's probably true. She'd have to be damn close to death to be able to pass up food anyway. "You'd be doing me a favor." Not waiting for a response, she pushes back the blankets to crawl in beside him. There isn’t much room on the narrow hospital bed, but she takes up as little of it as she can, lying down at the very edge of the mattress, curled up on her side and facing him, close enough to feel the warmth coming from his skin but very deliberately not quite close enough to touch. Earlier, it hadn’t stopped her — nothing could have — but there is, in her mind, a very clear line between embracing him when she hadn’t known if she would see him again and presumptuously settling against him in bed at night, a boundary that she won’t cross. He’s hurt, anyway, and she doesn’t want to aggravate any injuries, make anything that happened to him — on her account — worse. This is enough. She still doubts she’ll sleep, but at least she’ll know he’s safe, and at least she won’t be alone.

Jyn doesn't ask and Cassian doesn't have to explain himself, a situation ideal for them both, but he does drape his arm over her shoulders. It's not about pushing their boundaries, just trying to find some measure of the serenity, the completion he'd felt when everything was finally over. She'd touched him and he touches her now, he thinks, for the same reasons. They both have to believe that they're more than shadows in the dark and that they're not alone.

"I'll try," he says, rearranging his face into something that's supposed to be a smile. The joke was too close to the gallows to really manage it, even for someone who's lived in its shadow. If Jyn were ever so weak that she'd turn down food, Cassian would probably take whatever medicine he might have and stuff it all into her veins. Anything to keep her alive. It's better than ever having to be the sole survivor. It's better than losing Jyn.

"Turn the viewscreen on. I don't want to sleep."

As if he can order her to do anything.

Jyn isn't sure why it's so unexpected, the arm over her shoulders, but for just a moment, she goes stock-still, not even letting out the breath she'd taken. It isn't much of anything, really; he'd held her closer than this as they waited to die on Scarif, and she'd all but thrown herself at him when she first found him here, running on too much adrenaline to try to keep a distance. Then, though, it had been light in here and she'd still been on her feet, barely able to hold her as they might have been. Lying in bed together seems like something else entirely, though she knows it couldn't be. Maybe he just needs this — an assurance of their safety — as much as she does. Maybe she needs to stop thinking and try to relax.

Exhaling slowly, she inches carefully closer to him, just enough to let her head rest on his shoulder. If nothing else, after dying in his arms, she feels better being near him like this, a reminder of the peace she'd finally felt at the end. Jyn thinks he might have had something to do with that, though she doesn't see how she could ever say so. They're both here already. She doesn't need to.

"I don't either," she admits, reaching over without pulling away for where she set down the remote, careful of her IV line as she does. It takes her a moment to find the button to power it on; the screen blinks to life once she does, casting dim blue light into the dark room, the sound already thankfully turned low. "Maybe we'll get lucky and there'll be something halfway decent."

She tenses but so did he. In the darkness, he feels and hears her shift closer to him more than he really sees it and the head on his shoulder is a surprise. It's a softer, less weighty version of their embrace on Scarif, less tightly-held because there's too much between them and no oncoming fate. Without finality, he isn't sure who to be with Jyn.

Better to let the vidscreen cover them in background noise and color and other people's problems.

"There won't be anything good," he says, letting himself nose into her hair a little. That, at least, is a constant. No matter what planet he's on, no matter the seedy cantina or flophouse, there is never, ever anything good to watch late at night. The banal inconvenience is almost comforting.

It's probably counterintuitive, when she's the one with the remote in her hand who's meant to be finding them something to watch, but Jyn lets her eyes fall shut for a moment when she feels his nose against her hair, breathing him in deep. She still isn't as close as she'd been this afternoon, when she'd buried her face in the curve of his neck when she first reached his side, but even so, she's close enough that past the cold, sharp scent of chemicals and antiseptic, there's something she can make out as familiar, distinctly him. The beach aside, she can't remember, really, the last time anyone held her like this. One of her parents, it must have been, before she'd known it would be the last time, and she couldn't really compare lying with Cassian to that at all, except in the way that it makes her feel safe.

"Should we look for the least or the most awful thing we can find, then?" she asks, half spoken into his hospital gown where she's rested her head. It probably won't make much difference when it isn't as if she could identify any of these programs anyway, but at least in her experience, the truly terrible things are usually pretty easily spotted. That's got to be just as true here as anywhere else.

Edited 2017-02-25 07:28 (UTC)

It's not as if he has any input on what she chooses, knowing about as much as she does about this strange new place they've been confined to. The noise of someone else's fictional problems is enough to drown out his own thoughts for a little while, letting him hold Jyn close and anchor himself to her stability.

"You're in charge, Sergeant," he says, letting her enjoy the humor that comes with her rank, both in that it had been given to her en route to Scarif and that he still outranks her. "I'll defer." Really, it's what he's been doing since Yavin 4.

As long as she's here, he can close his eyes and feel the warmth of her body, her life.

"Whatever you say, Captain," Jyn replies, somewhere between tired and teasing, rolling her eyes at the use of her own rank. It's not like there's any real meaning to be derived from it. Even before this, there wasn't, at least not as far as she could see; it was a matter of convenience, mostly, a short-term necessity. Now, with no Alliance here, it's worth that much less. It's nice, though, being able to exchange an easy banter like this, a brief distraction from everything else. There's a moment where she thinks she could actually doze off again here in his arms, only she doesn't really want to, too afraid of what she'd see if she did.

She thought she lost Cassian back on Scarif, and thought she might have when she woke up here. She's already seen him die in a dream once tonight. She doesn't want to risk that happening again.

Flipping past a few channels, only half-paying attention as she does, she tilts her chin just enough to glance up at him without pulling away. "You think they'll try to kick me out when they find me here in the morning?"

Even in the dark, even without eye contact, Cassian can hear her roll her eyes and it makes him smile too. Even Sefla must have known that conferring the rank on her just to give her a rank was a shallow gesture on a ship full of people who'd known as well as he had that Jyn was an outlier. Was. She owes the Rebels very little but Cassian thinks, at heart, she's still and truly one of them.

"I think if we hear someone coming, we're clever enough to sneak you back." They're not at full capacity but for a pair of trained soldiers, sneaking someone over the space of two meters shouldn't present much difficulty. God help them if it ever does. "We can claim you sleepwalk."

"I'm not sure they'd buy sleepwalking after the way I ran off earlier," Jyn points out, though he's not wrong. She's not in the best shape, albeit less injured than he is, but she should still be able to make it back across to the other bed easily enough, without anyone else being the wiser. The only problem she can foresee is that, now that she's here, she doesn't particularly want to move again, but that's a ridiculous, childish thought, one that can easily be ignored when the time comes, that will probably fade anyway once the sun comes up.

Even if she did stay put, she wouldn't let them take her away from him anyway. Talk her into moving back to her own bed, sure, but nothing beyond that. It isn't even just stubbornness on her part; he's the one who asked for her to be here, and maybe they haven't talked about it, but she thinks there has to be a reason for it, that their close proximity makes a difference for him, too. After he came back for her so many times, the least she can do is be here for him now.

A few more channels skipped, and she finds something that seems satisfactory: some sort of medical drama, what seems like a very tense conversation about a relationship happening in an operating room, the music in the background just dramatic enough that she couldn't possibly take it seriously. "This looks promising."

"You are a very determined sleepwalker," Cassian says in a voice so flat, he might be standing in front of Draven for a debrief. The absolute and dedicated seriousness of his remark is where he couches the humor. Outright making a joke to Jyn still feels forbidden; they're comrades and they shared a vision, a hope that was bigger than them. That doesn't mean he gets to crack wise with her.

Turning his head, Cassian observes two human surgeons making steady eye contact while a third surgeon looks on. He hopes, for everyone's sake, that General Raddus never sees this because the third surgeon looks as if a human has attempted to create a costume of a Mon Calamari without ever having met one. It's grotesque and bizarre and the overwrought music makes it all that much worse.

It's perfect.

"It's a relief to know that there are always shows like this," he says.

Jyn can't help herself, then; she laughs, a surprisingly light sound even to her, one she wouldn't be able to explain if she tried. It's leftover adrenaline, maybe, from her dream, or exhaustion or nerves, or maybe it's just that, lying here, she feels better than she has since they were waiting for their deaths, even with the shadow of all those other lives lost hanging overhead, even with all the uncertainty.

She can hear it still, has caught herself on more than one occasion mentally picking at the words like a scab on a newly-healing wound, Cassian telling her welcome home before they left for Scarif. They're a long way from Yavin 4, and there's no Alliance here, but she thinks for the first time in such a long time, hopeful and fearful and self-admonishing all at once, that she really is.

"I guess some things never change," she says, twisting to set the remote back down on the bedside table. When she settles against him again, she lets her hand rest, feather-light, on his chest, palm over his beating heart. Her own pulse flutters a little — adrenaline again; he'd been dead in her dream, and he isn't now — but she doesn't move, and doesn't give in to the temptation to look up at him and ask if this is okay. Drawing attention to it is only likely to make it seem that much more strange. "No matter what world you're in."

Cassian tries to recall if he's heard Jyn laugh before this and realizes he doesn't think he has. Certainly, he's never heard a startled, unfettered laugh like this one from her before. It's a good, clear sound and lacks the weight of her usual hurts and sarcasm. He thinks that if he closes his eyes, he might actually be able to forget the reality of who they are for just a second and just be.

Jyn's hand is light on his chest, folded between them, and his arm still lays across her bodies. They face each other and keep their backs to the world, to outsiders who cannot possibly comprehend what it means to be them. But she's here and she understands and that means enough for the time being.

In the background, he hears the patient go into cardiac arrest, presumably because the doctors' passions have gotten the best of them and they are consummating their love on top of the poor fellow's unconscious body. "Those don't seem like good doctors."

"Even worse than ours," Jyn says, only half a joke. She's been less than impressed so far, but she would have been by anyone, probably. The fact remains that they kept Cassian alive against what must have been all possible odds, and for that, she can spare them a little appreciation. Had she woken up and learned the worst, that he'd gotten here with her but he hadn't made it, she would never have kept still or quiet about it, would have tracked down anyone who'd had a hand in failing to save him and made them pay for it. A small, not fully awake part of her nearly says something to that effect, but she has enough sense not to. Already this seems so fragile, something warm and safe that could vanish with any slight wrong word or movement, just like everything else good she's ever had, and she doesn't want to be the one to drive that spike into it. Not yet, at least.

What she does say is nearly lost, anyway, with her head tucked against his chest, words spoken all of an inch from his skin, her hand not moving when he doesn't seem to mind its presence. There's a part of her that wants to do more, to find and run her fingers over every bruise and line of stitches that she knows he must wear, unseen in the dark, just to prove to herself that he's alive, that he survived, even if somewhere else, he didn't. The pain, the injuries, they make this real; the ache in her leg and shoulders keeps her centered somehow. She hadn't minded the thought of dying, but it's hard not to question everything about this, save for that one fact. "Very unprofessional. That poor third doctor."

"If it's to be believed," he agrees. Whatever system or planet they're on, it's clearly centuries behind even the most basic kit at Yavin. Cassian's a little in awe of how they've kept him so neatly alive despite it all but it's just another incredulous fact of his survival at all. At least they'd kept Jyn alive too. Seeing her in the hall had felt like a miracle. Cassian hugs her a little tighter without meaning to and hopes he hasn't jarred her i nthe process.

"But I'm alive," he says to her half-mumbled threat. Or...what he thinks is a half-mumbled threat to the hospital staff. Better not to think on it too much.

When he looks back to the screen, it's cut to another pair of doctors in a board room, coping with...some issue or another. The man is crying into his arms and the woman, he thinks, is supposed to look sympathetic but she mostly looks bewildered. "I hate to tell you this," he says, deliberately stepping away from her words, "but I don't think we found the quality programming."

But he's alive. Everything, it seems, comes down to that, for reasons Jyn can't and doesn't want to put a name to, due in part to all of the bodies left in their wake, the members of their team who weren't half as lucky as they were and whom they wouldn't be here without, and in part — maybe that much more so — because behind her eyelids, he never, ever is. He hits the railings and doesn't get back up, or falls against her before they can make it out to the shore together, a million what ifs playing out in her imagination, distorted into something even more horrific than what they actually endured. She's awake now, not dreaming anymore, but she still can hardly stand to close her eyes for what she might see behind them.

So she keeps them open, studies the line of his jaw and his throat instead, the thin sliver of a view that the position she's tucked herself into allows, and nods, forehead brushing his chin. She doesn't need to look at the screen to know what's happening, or that he's right about it. The sound alone is practically atrocious, and perfect for it.

She would watch nothing else for the rest of her life, no matter how long or short her borrowed time might prove to be, if it meant him staying alive. She'd die herself, probably, before saying so, when there's no rational explanation for such a thought.

"Don't tell me you're surprised," she replies, wry. "You're the one who said there'd be nothing good." She almost leaves it at that, almost lets herself be lulled into a sort of half-sleep by the sound of the ridiculous dramatics in the background, but she can still feel his heart beating under her hand, still picture him dead in her dream and nearly dead on Scarif, and the rest spills out of her before she can try to stop it. "I'm glad, you know," she says, shifting a little after letting him hold her closer, because apparent as it might have been, she's not sure that she ever actually put it into words earlier. "That you're alright."

The thought occurs to him then that he could kiss her. They're curled up together, her head resting against his chest and shoulder. It's a pose of shared tenderness, love maybe, or it would be on two people not them. It's hard not to think about the closeness, the possibility of it. All it would take is for her to tilt up her head or him to tip down his chin. That's all. So simple but not for them.

The music turns dramatic, someone on the screen gasps, and there's the sound of fighting and a table breaking and Cassian is grateful for the sudden change in mood, the reminder of where they are. He chuckles at the absurdity and turns his head just a little, so he can watch the show over the crown of Jyn's head.

"So I did," he says, realizing he's making small talk for the sake of it rather than as some intelligence officer's ploy, trying to make the mark comfortable. The banality is a strange and nearly foreign thing and he's almost so lost in it that he misses what Jyn says. Heart tightening, he nods against her hair.

"When I saw you in the hallway, I thought I must be dreaming."

Jyn tips her head up a little at that, surprised, though she doesn't know why. Seeing him had too clearly prompted a reaction in her that she couldn't have hidden then or attempted to deny now if she wanted to. She might be a good liar, has had to learn to be, but being this close now, it would be useless to try. She'd give herself away before she even started to speak. The fact that she's here at all probably does, anyway, when it isn't as if she just climbed into his bed because she had nowhere better to be. Just as there was earlier, there's a strange, welcome comfort in being close to him, and in the dark, with the faint noise of whatever show they've stumbled upon in the background, she can almost, almost shut out everything else, the world narrowed down to the two of them.

They're the only survivors, now, and they weren't meant to be. At least, it seems like it would be foolishly naïve to let herself believe otherwise, all the evidence pointing to the contrary, and she's already being foolish enough for one night just in being here beside him.

"So did I," she says, what doesn't seem like too much to admit given what he's just said. It makes sense, anyway. All of this is so surreal, so unpredictable, and she hates that about it, not being able to get a read on the situation at all, but at least for the first time in a long time, she isn't alone. "I wasn't sure — I knew I had to try to find you, but I didn't know if you were even here, or..." She still can't say dead, but it seems to hang heavy in the air anyway, the closest she's come to the subject in words yet. Instead, she shrugs, not much of a movement with the way she's curled against him, but clear enough even so. "And then you were right there." It had seemed almost too good to be true. It still does.

Edited 2017-02-27 07:18 (UTC)

"I didn't want to be alone, not in this place," he says, giving her the simplest and most obvious truths because he's certain they share them, as well as the reasons he can't give a voice to. There have been missions where Cassian is the sole survivor–Kafrene comes to mind–and he knows firsthand the way it can were a person down. And those are the more ordinary missions. To be the only one left in a mission like theirs? Survival would be a curse instead of a gift.

But not being alone, having Jyn here who's seen him through to the end? That helps.

"I don't want to think of what you'd do to this place if you were the only one here." He's seen Jyn desperate, that burning need in her eyes. It's as compelling as it is terrifying and he has little pity for the poor doctors.

Flexing a hand eases a cramp out of his fingers and Cassian shifts his arm. This time it curls around her, hand at the base of her neck and fingers lightly in her hair. It hasn't been washed since Yavin and they could both use a chance to freshen up but he doesn't care. It just makes Jyn more real and believable.

It's nice, the way he touches her, and though it occurs to Jyn briefly that she probably ought to apologize for the fact that she can't remember the last time she washed her hair or how long it's been, she lets it go. She didn't make him put his hand there, and she's too unaccustomed to this — to simple, easy affection, even if she can't understand his directing it at her now — to want to give him a reason to change his mind. Instead, she closes her eyes for a moment, breathing in deep, trying to commit this to memory. She can still feel his arms around her on the beach on Scarif, still picture with sickening clarity the way his body looked as it fell down the vault. This, she wants to remember just as vividly, something to remember after it's gone, to counter what her imagination can conjure up.

"I hadn't really thought that far yet," she says, though there's a certainty in her voice that suggests that she would have come up with something suitable. If nothing else, she'd have fought every possible doctor and nurse and whoever else to get herself out of here, though after that, it's a blank. "I didn't want to be, either."

For years now, she's been alone — or she was, before Cassian told her welcome home and gave her one for the first time since she was with Saw, a gravitational pull in the words that she's not sure even she could have fought against — but this is different. Being the only one to survive the mission and the reason all of them were there in the first place is more than she can bear the thought of shouldering. Dying, she was fine with, but living with all of that on her conscience?

Again, she thinks that she and the Death Star might just be more alike than not, both with kyber at their hearts, both destroying everything in their paths, designed for nothing more.

Head ducked again, unable to bring herself to meet his gaze for this, she falls silent for a few seconds, working up the will to ask what she already knows the answer to. She needs confirmation, though, and he's the only one who can give it. "It's just us, isn't it?" she asks, her voice a little softer. "None of the others... They couldn't have made it."

Edited 2017-02-27 08:06 (UTC)

Even if she had, Cassian's not much better. Clearly, he'd been scrubbed with antiseptic where his injuries were concerned, but no one had thought to douse him while he was out. His beard, likely, is verging on disastrous and he hopes he'll get a razor for the next time he has to look himself in a mirror. They're both tired and dirty and not at their best but at least they don't have to suffer the indignities alone.

He can hear the soft exhale of Jyn's breath and count the seconds until the next one, as if she's trying to take all of this in and Cassian breathes too. Inhaling so deeply expands his lungs and chest and pulls at some sore spots on his bodybut it's a dull, manageable ache. It reminds him that he's alive and Jyn can hear his heart under her ear just as he can hear her breath and feel her warmth. They're alive. They're hopelessly lost and uncertain but damn it they're alive and they're here together.

Welcome home, he'd told her. He wants to say it again but he's not sure right now what that means for either of them.

"No," he says, taking a long time to acknowledge the truth. There's no way any of the Rebel forces had the time to evacuate. The ships in orbit must have escaped but Baze? Chirrut? Bodhi? The two dozen or so brave men and women they'd gathered? K2SO? They're gone as surely as they should be. Their presence here is a miracle and Cassian knows better than to hope for more miracles.

"We're the only ones, I think."

She hadn't expected anything else, really, and Jyn nods again, a slight little movement, still not yet able to look up at him again. Of course they're the only ones. She didn't see it or hear it, but the silence over their comms spoke volumes, and she'd have been surprised if Cassian had suggested any alternatives. There was never going to be any rescue. Try as she might to remind herself that they all knew the risks when they came along, though, and that there was always every chance that they'd be walking into their own deaths, it's hard to reconcile. As a girl, she lost her parents, and a few years later, she lost Saw, and now, despite having only known Bodhi and Chirrut and Baze for a matter of days, if that, it's hard not to feel like she's lost another family all over again.

Stupid, she thinks. This is where caring about people gets her. This is always what happens, in one way or another. Anything important to her gets snatched away.

Cassian is still here, though, and she curls her fingers slightly in his hospital gown where her hand is splayed out in lieu of clutching at the necklace that hasn't yet been returned to her. "I thought so," she mumbles. "I saw them. Before I woke up just now, I mean." She doesn't add that she'd seen him, too, and doesn't stop to consider that a few minutes ago, she'd said only that she couldn't sleep, not that she had already tried it. There was probably never any way he was going to believe that, anyway.

"They don't go away," Cassian says, meaning the good and the bad. Saying May the Force be with us as a token sort of salute is the closest he's ever come to believing in unseen powers but after days of listening to Chirrut's quiet chanting and absolute surety of belief, it hurts a little less to tell himself that they really are one with something larger. It's better than just being dust without meaning on a broken world that none of them called home.

But he also means the nightmares, something he thinks Jyn already knows. The losses of that day are just new fodder for his brain to grind out behind his eyes when he tries to sleep, reminders of the ways he failed and the people he's hurt. He wishes he didn't care. He'd regret getting Jyn to care if not for the way it had lit her up for what seemed like the first in a long time.

It will be a long time before he sleeps easily. A long time that might turn into forever.

It's a relief when he doesn't say much or ask about it, though not entirely surprising that he seems to be speaking from experience of his own. Jyn still remembers, as much as she tries not to, what he'd looked like on the shuttle back from Eadu when she confronted him. She'd been too angry, at the time, to make much sense of it or even care, but that haunted, hollow look is burned into her memory now as much as anything else, and the words that later followed. After nearly all of his life in this fight, she can only imagine how many orders he didn't disobey, how many people like her father he followed through with pulling the trigger on.

Somewhere in the back of her head, she thinks that she should still hate him for what he almost did, but it's something else, something that she refuses to classify as need but is probably close to it, that sparks in her chest when she turns her face up towards him. If she doesn't have him, she has no one, and she's used to that, but he'd said it himself — she doesn't want to be alone here, not after what they've been through. Besides, she can't abandon the one person who's never abandoned her, even if it's bound to be only a matter of time before he leaves her like all the rest.

"I didn't think they would," she says ruefully, and she means both, too, the memories of the friends they've lost and the nightmares that leave her gasping for air upon waking. "That would be too easy, wouldn't it?"

There are things he could say that, in another situation, might be comforting. You'll get used to it. You'll figure out how to cope. In the lives they've led, it's just a fact and it's probably one that Jyn has already heard and told herself as many times as Cassian has. By now, it wouldn't be advice or help, just harsh reality, and despite living that for twenty years, Cassian finds he doesn't have the stomach to follow through on it now.

"I don't think we've ever had anything easy," he says, not thinking until he says it that maybe they aren't still a 'we,' no matter how much he'd meant it when he'd told her welcome home. There had never been time to discover what that could mean, how there were places and people in the Alliance that took care of their own. He doesn't think she'd have believed it.