crash sites keep me up at night

[nextchance]

In the dream — and it was a dream, although she didn't know that —

Jyn was a little girl in the cave on Lah'mu, not knowing when it was or how long she had been there, only that she was waiting, always waiting, always left alone. The lantern was burned out, the small space dark and damp, somehow seeming to get smaller still, a grave and a prison cell and the only home she had. When, at last, the door swung open overhead, it was an unfamiliar figure overhead (a new variation on an old theme), a young boy with dark hair and eyes, and Jyn didn't really know him except that she felt like she did anyway. Wordless, he held out a hand, and she began to climb.

She climbed, and climbed, and climbed, until her bad shoulder ached and her hands slipped on the ladder's rungs, but she had to keep going, even as she got nowhere, the cave getting deeper now, except it wasn't a cave at all. It was the data tower, getting taller, not deeper, and no longer a little girl, she kept climbing, desperate to reach the top where no one was waiting for her anymore, because when she looked down — so far down, it hadn't really been that far, had it? — Cassian's body lay bent and broken at the bottom, and she knew he wasn't getting back up. Stupid, to think she could reach him, that she might be able to hold onto him this time.

Finally she stepped up and out of the cave that was also the data tower and onto the beach, alone again, except for all of the dead. It had been a while since she'd dreamed of Scarif, and somehow there were more bodies now, her father's weapon overhead, her inescapable legacy. Past the shoreline was forest, and she knew it to be Yavin 4's even though she had barely seen it while she was there, and knew that it held the house she'd once lived in. The house burned — the fire she'd set — and the forest burned with it. The world glowed green with the Death Star's kyber-light, only it wasn't coming from the sky above but from her. Surrounded by bodies, she sat on the sand and waited for a death that didn't come, one which would have been, she supposed, too kind. Hard as she'd always fought to survive, a death that meant something in the arms of someone who cared about her was worlds better than surviving alone, left to bear the weight of so much destruction.

She looked up at the weapon that shared her name, a grim mirror in the sky, and with the fire and the dead around her, she knew that they were one and the same, and this was always going to be where she wound up.

— With a sharp gasp, Jyn lurched awake in the dark, her limbs clammy with sweat and her face damp with tears. Nightmares were nothing new to her, but it had been a long time since one had rattled her this badly. In her addled state, trying and mostly failing to get air into her lungs, she couldn't think of what might have caused it... Until the sound of breath that wasn't her own reminded her that she wasn't alone in the room. Through the haze of everything else, the events of the last day began coming back to her.

It should have been reassuring to remember that Cassian was here and alive and safe. At any other time, it would have been. Instead, in the moment, her panic intensified, her chest painfully tight. It was a good thing, not being alone anymore, except that she still felt like she was and knew she would be again. Close as he was, he felt impossibly far away, and yet he was too close, too. The last thing she wanted was to be seen like this, a panic-stricken, crying mess, unable to calm herself down after just a stupid dream. All she could do — one of the only coherent thoughts she could hold onto — was try to stay as quiet as possible, pressing a fistful of blanket against her mouth to try to stifle any gasps or sobs, and hope she hadn't made enough noise to wake him. He needed the rest. She needed to pull herself together, shoulders shaking in the dark as she tried to breathe.

Comments

[fulcrum3]

Giving Beany an affirming scritch with one hand, Cassian used the other to flip to a blank page. He picked up the stylus pencil and wrote out, in a column, the Aurebesh alphabet, then beside each letter, its corresponding English letter, and slid the page to her. “How’d I do?”

[nextchance]

"Looks good to me," Jyn said, giving him an approving nod as she looked over his written alphabets. "You're a quick study. I'm sure you'll have the hang of it in no time." She wasn't surprised by that. Given his previous line of work, it seemed to make sense that he would pick such things up without much trouble. She had different context for that now, too, idly thinking back to something he'd said yesterday — about his first time on a new planet, not knowing the language or having anyone who knew his. She wanted to ask more about it now; she wasn't sure if she should broach the subject.

Instead, she went back to something else from yesterday, leading with a fact rather than a question. "I started learning different languages pretty early. I don't know if it was the people I was around, or too much time with just a datapad, or both. But I always liked that." Languages made sense to her. Using words in any language to express herself was far more difficult.

[fulcrum3]

"Thanks." He took the book back, sliding it beside another book he'd picked up. Next he'd try reading from that. (Perhaps aloud, with Jyn?) "Not having to do it in a stone hut all in one night is nice." And it wasn't a different language, essentially just a textual code.

(The fact that this supposedly different Galaxy still spoke Galactic Basic Standard was another question he was storing up for some other time. For now, he was just grateful to be with Jyn.)

The image of little Jyn with a datapad was both a sweet and bittersweet one. He knew her family had moved often and been solitary, so maybe she hadn't had a chance— "Did you have friends your age?"

Maybe Jyn's childhood had only been populated with adults, as opposed to Cassian's childhood which had been utterly devoid of them.

[nextchance]

"Never," Jyn answered, shaking her head. Of all the myriad, probably objectively sad facts about her early life, this one didn't particularly bother her. Maybe it was just that she didn't know what she was missing, or that by the time it would have mattered to her, she had already effectively closed herself off. Letting people in was too dangerous. Before that, when she was younger, it would just have been one more loss after her life was uprooted. With a wry slant to her mouth, she added, "I never really had friends, full stop. That didn't change until I wound up here."

It still was something that didn't come easily to her, too, an underdeveloped muscle from a skill she'd never had a chance to learn. She cared about people fiercely and intensely, even when she tried not to, but showing it — being actively engaged in friendship — remained an adjustment.

Tucking a stray, damp strand of hair behind her ear, she shrugged. "Did you? After you left your home planet?"

[fulcrum3]

"Yes," he said, with new appreciation for how amazing that was—and how "They somehow stuck with me despite my… absences. Every time I ran away, sometimes for years, they greeted me when I came home. Wil, Brasso, and Bix."

He didn't mean for his expression to change at all, but the fact that it went a little blanker on each of them was probably telling.

[nextchance]

Jyn wanted to ask about them, rendered more curious by the shifts in his expression. That was the same reason she didn't. There was clearly some kind of a story there, and she hoped he knew he could tell her anything, but it wouldn't have felt right to press at something too sensitive.

"Was that something that happened a lot?" she asked instead, equal parts gentle and interested. "You running away?"

[fulcrum3]

His expression cleared—kinda ridiculous since this was, in its way, a worse subject. But one he had more successfully dealt with.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "My first years with my parents… the adopted ones… I hadn't figured out if they'd saved me from my homeworld or kidnapped me. Not speaking the same language at first… I didn't know there was a Republic corsair coming down that would have killed me if they'd left me there. I did know I left my sister and others behind without telling them goodbye. I know now, it probably killed them. It was complicated. So I kept running away and joining different groups, to fight the Republic, then the Empire. Or winding up in jail. But my parents kept finding me or saving me… or just taking me back. That meant everything."

[nextchance]

It was a horrible, ugly thing, the way Jyn felt something like jealousy well up inside her. Of course, she had no intention of saying so, or resenting him for it in the slightest. There were different ways to struggle, and the circumstances were far from enviable. Still, there was some small part of her, the little girl still sitting in a dark cave, that ached at the thought of these people who'd chosen him, cared for him, loved him coming back over and over again.

He deserved that. She was so relieved that, if he'd had to lose so much else, he had people like that in his life. It just never stopped hurting, the way she'd been so easily cast aside by anyone who cared about her.

"Makes sense," she said quietly. "And I'm sure it still is complicated. But... It sounds like they were good people. I'm glad you had that."

[fulcrum3]

Whether he read it on her now, in her file, or throughout their time together, Cassian said softly, "I'm sorry you didn't. …I'm sorry I took it for granted. I wasted so much time with them, until they both were gone."

[nextchance]

Jyn shrugged again, although the gesture was more forced this time, an old defense mechanism. She didn't want it to matter that she hadn't had anyone like that in her life, but it did — always had and always would, a wound she'd learned to live with but that never fully healed. For a moment, she wondered if she should say more about it, then decided against it. Between what he might have already read about her and figured out on his own, there probably wasn't much need.

It would just have circled back to the fact that she'd ultimately even lost him, too, and that was ground she didn't want to tread.

"I'm sorry you didn't have more time with them," she offered instead. That that tended to be the way of everything didn't make it less painful. That he'd at least been loved for a while didn't either. "You told me what happened to your father... Can I ask what happened to your mother? You can say no."

[fulcrum3]

He felt a fresh pang of guilt for…

“Just age,” he said. “The kind of death we fight for everyone to have, really. I just should have been with her. And our last words to each other shouldn’t have been a fight.” This guilt wasn’t a pang but an everlasting ache. Brasso’s recounting of Maarva’s message to him both soothed and deepened that. “I told her I was coming back but I didn’t make it.”

…the pang returned and he had to say, “I know we said not to, but I’m sorry, again, for what I said to you over Eadu. There’s no comparing.”

[nextchance]

Jyn shook her head, expression softening a little. "It's all right," she said. Given how wholly meant her own apology for that fight had been, she didn't want to tell him again not to be sorry. She appreciated that he was. It just wasn't something she felt she needed to hear. She'd known it, in some respect, since he came to her on Yavin 4, and it was impossibly long ago for her now anyway, nothing she held against him in the slightest. She had to remind herself that it was still fresh for him in a way it wasn't for her, and that maybe he needed to say it for himself, too.

"I think... Maybe we both weren't entirely fair to each other. And we both had our reasons. We were just coming at it from opposite sides of things."

She didn't want to ignore the rest of what he said, especially having been the one to ask. After a moment, she added, "I'm sorry about your mother. That you couldn't be there."

[fulcrum3]

“Thank you.” For both things—for everything—she’d just said.

Cassian tried to remember how they’d gotten onto this subject. His hand ran onto the primer book and he glanced down at it. “So which languages do you know? In case we ever need to communicate in secret.”

[nextchance]

Jyn gave a slight nod in response to his thanks, and didn't press the subject anymore. They'd both said what they needed to, she thought. It wasn't something that required dwelling on for the moment. There were enough other subjects to move onto. After all, they were — something else she had to remind herself of — still just getting to know each other, even if she was doing so for the second time.

"Twi'leki, at least the verbal parts, since, obviously—" She gestured toward her head and the very obvious lack of lekku present there. "Bocce, Rodian, Alarin. I can understand some Shyriiwook and Tognath. Bits of Lasat, but mostly just cursing."

[fulcrum3]

“The curses are all I remember of my childhood language,” agreed Cassian with a faint smile. If he’d known it was use it or lose it he would have tried to keep speaking. But without anyone to speak it to…

To Jyn, Cassian said in Alarin, “We have this one in common.”

—On the other hand, it had been a surprising comfort that Alarin had similarities to Kenari. It was a strange universe.

[nextchance]

"Good to know," Jyn replied, giving him a little smile again, like they were sharing a secret. It wasn't altogether surprising, the subject having come up before, but in the interest of maintaining that distinction in her head, she didn't want to let those conversations guide this one. It seemed better, more comfortable, to learn things from him, not fall back on what she knew of former-him.

Anyway, it was good to have another language in common. Switching back to Basic, she added by means of explanation, "I mostly picked up what I heard from Saw's people. There was a Lasat with us for a long time. Tended to curse in his language. So it stuck with me."

[fulcrum3]

He loved her little smiles. People tended to think that the bigger the smile, the more sincere; Cassian knew it could be the opposite.

“That’s a trick I used undercover,” he said. “If I was supposed to be from a particular place, I’d learn the local swear words. Nothing gives a stronger impression of being from a place than what you say like it’s involuntary.”

Speaking of which, Cassian again shifted the contents of the table to bring forward the welcome packet. He’d also been matching words in both texts from it. “This doesn’t talk much about the people of this place, just about us imports. Do they have their own language?”

[nextchance]

"Not really," Jyn answered, shaking her head. How language worked here was one of those things that seemed perpetually mysterious, and that she'd long since given up on trying to comprehend. She had a feeling it might be more of a sticking point for him, at least at first.

"Apparently it's English — the language — but that's really just the same as Basic. You'll probably hear bits and pieces of others that are familiar, too. For such a different world, there's a lot that seems to overlap."

[fulcrum3]

Not for the first time, he wondered how this could be another galaxy… and why stop at language? The class-M planet, there being mostly Humans, the architecture, having all his information, having people in common. Too many commonalities started to make it more fantastical, not less. And whoever was behind it so powerful that since they hadn’t already taken over everything… or maybe this was an experiment in advance of that…

For a moment, Cassian just put his head in his hands. “Sorry,” he muttered. And exhaled one of those Kenari cursewords.

[nextchance]

Jyn was hardly about to assume that she knew what he was thinking, but she suspected she at least had the basic idea. Given that, she couldn't tell what might be helpful, curbing the instincts both to reach for him and to offer some kind of reassurance. There wasn't really any way to make sense of any of it. She certainly couldn't ask him to trust it, when he had no reason to do so and every reason to be suspicious.

All she could really do was hope that he trusted her enough to balance some of that suspicion.

"Don't be," she replied. Watching him for another moment, she asked, "Tell me what you're thinking?"

[fulcrum3]

He did trust her. More than anyone. He raised his head slowly but without hesitation.

"Part of me thinks I owe it to… someone… to figure this place out," he said. "And part of me just wants to accept the gift."

[nextchance]

"Could you do both?" Jyn suggested, the question an earnest one. "Take the chance for what it is, but try to figure out what you can? If you do want to, I'll do whatever I can to help you."

She doubted that would be very much, but she would try, for him. Again, she hoped — not that he knew her well enough, because he'd only known her now for a matter of days, but that he trusted her enough to believe that she wouldn't have just gone complacent and taken all of this in stride. If there were answers to be found, she thought she would have done so long ago, but she wouldn't try to dissuade him from trying and would assist in whatever way she could.

[fulcrum3]

That hadn't been meant as a test, but he realized that if she'd answered any other way, he would have wondered if she were really Jyn Erso. That answer was right. Take the chance… and the next. But no, not complacent.

"I'm not exactly starting from an objective place," he said softly. "I really want this to be…" He sought for the word. At last, he reached for her hand and said, "…rest."

[nextchance]

Easily, gratefully, she let her hand curl around his. The contact was becoming familiar again, second-nature, and she both dreaded and savored that. She didn't want to feel about him the way she did, or to find such a simple gesture so meaningful. Once taken hold, though, the effect he had on her was a difficult thing to turn off.

It was also entirely irrelevant at the moment. This wasn't about her — or, if it was, only to the extent that she had been thinking a moment before, him trusting what she had to say about all of it. If he did, just that alone would be something she appreciated more than she could say.

"It can be," she told him, her voice matching his in softness. "You should get to have that." He'd given his life to the Rebellion and then for the Rebellion. If anyone deserved a chance to rest, she believed it was him. "But I know believing that isn't so easy."

[fulcrum3]

Maybe the word was 'believing'… maybe the time would come when they could walk through the city and he wouldn't keep seeing Luthen's store in every fresh window, or pass a radio and not expect it to start emitting pulse code at him. Maybe he'd stop looking for every point of ingress and egress, every possible shelter and every weaponizable object, in every fresh room; maybe he'd stop gauging every person in his view, snap-profiling those who caught his attention, and looking hardest for those unseen; maybe he'd stop seeing the dead in his periphery.

(He knew better on that last.)

Maybe the word wasn't 'should get' but 'could get'. Was he still capable?

Looking at Jyn, he sure hoped so. Because he felt the same way about her. She deserved it.

He squeezed her hand in gratitude and that same wish

I wish you peace
I wish you to live
I wish you the universe

then let go so he could sweep his study materials into a pile. "I think I'll get ready for bed."