The City posts

[fulcrum3]

[To be linked to the game comm]

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[nextchance]

"All right. Deal," Jyn replied, giving him a short nod of agreement. This, too, was likely a dangerous game, when she knew more about him than she should, but it had to be better than her awkwardly rambling on. She just had to be more careful than she was earlier, when she almost gave herself away. It wouldn't matter for too much longer — she was going to tell him, sooner rather than later — but it took some careful working up to, explanations that she hadn't quite reached yet.

"Which I guess makes it my turn." Mentally, she searched for a moment for a suitable fact. "I don't actually remember when I started living on the ship. At some point, I was just the only person left to take care of it."

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He wanted to ask follow-up questions, but that wasn’t the deal. If there were more, she would have said.

Time for him to say the things he never said.

“I don’t remember my birth parents. All the adults of my colony were killed in a, quote, ‘Natural Disaster’, that was really a Republic mining disaster, when I was six. The children had been evacuated and we survived on our own for three years.”

[nextchance]

Common sense be damned, Jyn did let her head lean against his shoulder then, curling just a little closer against his side. There was absolutely no way she wouldn't regret this in short order, but it also seemed like the only real response. She wanted to stop and ask more, grasping for any details he would give her; she wanted just as much to stop and pull him into her arms, apologize for all he'd lost. Both would have defeated the purpose of this exercise. Later, if he'd let her, she would circle back to it, but for now, she just had to hope that her proximity would say what there weren't words for.

"Cassian," she murmured, voice soft with sympathy and lilting like she meant to say more, though she bit it back. A fact for a fact, and she still had so many to tell him. "So... It gets stranger. People disappearing. And they really do just disappear." She paused, and bit her lower lip hard. "Like, for example. Here I was, living on the Falcon. Rey'd been gone for... probably a year or two by then. One day she shows up again. Like she'd never been here before. You talked about time and space being broken... and they are really, really broken."

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There was no comparing Jyn and Bix. They were so different, they couldn't exist in the same feeling. Just for a moment, though, the body language felt like it was Jyn that Cassian was guiding through the Rix massacre. He brought up his other hand to cover hers.

Again, he wanted to ask more. Should he, now? Or was this working?

This revelation was so chilling, his heart pounded in his throat. Again, Jyn would be able to feel it.

Okay. A deal was a deal. He forced himself to keep up his end of it: "I had a sister. I didn't mean to leave her. But doing so is probably the biggest regret of my life. I was taken offplanet when I was nine and I've never seen her again."

He couldn't move on from this one. "…'Like she'd never been here before'?"

[nextchance]

If what he'd said a moment before had been surprising, this was doubly so. However well Jyn felt like she knew him, a feeling that started well before they'd ever had a chance to tell each other about themselves, she had only ever gotten sparse scraps of information about his life before the Rebellion in the time they'd spent together here. Given how reticent she tended to be, that wasn't something that bothered her, even as she wanted — both then and now — to know as much as she could about him.

This fact was one entirely new, and yet, in a strange way, it made a sort of sense, pieces unexpectedly slotting together. Throughout their brief acquaintance, he had come back for her time and time again, on Jedha, on Eadu, on Scarif. Until he disappeared from here, he'd been the only person never to leave her behind. Knowing he'd left someone so important to him, however inadvertently... It at least seemed like it might explain a little of that determination.

Again, her heart ached for him. Idly, she thought that he'd come back for her once more — just very late this time.

"I don't think we're very good at this a fact for a fact thing," she said, quietly wry, still tucked against his side. "There's too much I want to ask." She had too much left to tell him, too. She was almost there, her stomach turning with the weight of what she was trying to work up to. "And, yeah. Like she'd never been here before. Fresh from... wherever she'd been, showing up again like new. It happens, sometimes. I'd heard about it, but never actually seen it before that."

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Multiple times, Jyn had already fulfilled her part of the mission, in fact become a liability to it, and leaving her would have fulfilled their part of 'see you go free'. Maybe going back for her was about Kerri… Cassian wouldn't think so. It could have been a sense of fairness or gratitude or morality (Luthen would argue, his downfall in the past), but really, Cassian just needed to keep Jyn Erso alive, in the universe; ideally, with him.

He could tell she was building to something. He could no longer tell if the trading structure was helping that or hurting. He decided to go with her words. Too much I want to ask. "Me, too," he said quietly. A fresh chill went down his spine. "Like she'd been… reset?"

[nextchance]

"I don't think so," Jyn answered, frowning thoughtfully. It wasn't necessarily unlike that, but phrasing it that way seemed to suggest something deliberate that she truly didn't believe was a factor here. Maybe it was just the result of some innate cynicism, but she was more inclined to think that this place was cruel in its randomness and random in its cruelty, rather than there being anything intentional or insidious at play. "It's more like..."

She huffed out a quiet breath. She really was not the right person for this job, and yet there was no one else she would have wanted to tell him what she was still clumsily trying to work up to. "If you think about this place as its own world, or universe, or something," she settled on. "Completely separate from anything. And then over here you have this massive jumble of everything else. Every world, every time. And every once in a while, someone gets pulled out of that giant heap of possibilities and dropped here. The odds of it being the same person more than once are low, but it's bound to happen from time to time."

[fulcrum3]

They'd reached the garden. Cassian stopped and, one more time, turned to face her.

Kaytoo had tried to explain a multiverse theory to him once. Cassian had dismissed it at the time, with I have enough to do in this universe. He was grateful for it, now. What Jyn just said actually, in some wordless way, landed.

That didn't mean Cassian had a clue as to how to respond.

At last, still holding her hands, Cassian said, "My childhood name was 'Kassa'."

[nextchance]

"Kassa," Jyn echoed, a quiet exhale between them, like a shared secret. She knew how much it had to mean, his telling her these facts about his early life now. A part of her wanted to thank him for it, but even in her head, it sounded ridiculous. Instead, she tucked that knowledge away, safe and treasured.

Besides, more than that, what she really wanted to say was I love you. A fact for a fact.

There was still something bigger, though, and she was so close, she couldn't back away from it now. Odds were, this would all be ruined in a moment's time, but he deserved to know, needed to know. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, her hands still clasping his.

"I've seen it happen one other time," she said, her pulse quickening with worry. "When you walked up to the ship earlier today."

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Cassian went so stone-still, the loth-cat story made perfect sense. No such softening of the moment here, though.

…
…
…


If Cassian had ever really believed in the Force, he would curse it.

I make my own choices.
I thought that was what we were fighting for.
Every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget…

I'm not used to people sticking around.

Oh god…

"I've been here before," he said at last, dumbly. Things said in the last hours, the looks on her face, the way she touched him, all fell into place. It went like thunder through his eyes, if not on his frozen face. "With you."

He didn't let go of her hands.

[nextchance]

"Yeah," Jyn breathed, looking up at him with wide, apologetic eyes. Pleading, really, although she didn't know for what. Maybe just for him not to hate her. It wasn't as if she'd had any more control over this than he did — he would never have been gone, otherwise — or as if there had been a good way for her to tell him sooner, but still, she couldn't have blamed him if this was too much, too awkward, if he never wanted to look at her again. That he was still holding her hands was a small reassurance, albeit one that could have simply been the result of shock. He wasn't otherwise moving, after all.

She didn't know what she wanted. That had been a constant of the last few hours. What she did know was that having been so long without him, she didn't want to lose him again, no matter what that entailed, no matter what a bad idea that was. Again, it had been a day for those.

"When I said the first thing I did when I got here was look for you..." Her vision had gone blurry, and when she blinked, hot tears rolled down her cheeks, a slight tremble in her jaw conveying just how hard this was. "I found you. We'd shown up at the same time. A couple years later, you were gone."

[fulcrum3]

What did we do? What did we build? How did we grow? He wanted everything… at the same time, he wanted to know nothing. Whoever that was wasn't him and he wanted to learn with her anew. But he also wanted her to tell him anything she needed to.

That would be later. This moment wasn't about him at all. It was about tremor in her and the pain in her stardust eyes, pouring down her cheeks.

That wasn't him… but it also was. However this worked, he had done to her what everyone else had.

He wasn't in his body and didn't know what to do with it.
He wanted to kneel before her and bury his face in her stomach. But that made it about him, asking her to comfort him. Abhorrent.
He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her close, but that was presuming consent that had been granted to someone else.

At last, Cassian moved his hands. He let go of hers but never removed their contact. They ran up her arms to gently hold her biceps, inviting her to step in to him, maintaining her freedom to move away. He bowed his head so their eyes completely met. The twin infinities sank into one another as they had in the elevator. He couldn't know what she'd been through, but his had their own… abject… grief.

"I'm sorry," he said hoarsely, with his whole body. "Jyn. I'm so, so sorry."

[nextchance]

For a moment, Jyn was frozen, too overwhelmed by everything that had happened in the last day — the last few years — to know how to move or to hold onto a coherent thought. After she'd first found him gone, so long ago, she had never really let herself feel it. Being angry was easier, and when she couldn't manage that, she told herself, as insistently as she could, that it didn't matter. That it was her mistake for opening herself up to that kind of connection, and that she should have seen it coming. Everyone left. It had been stupid to let herself believe that he would be different, especially in a place like this.

With him in front of her now, it was as if the last few years caught up to her all at once. The grief she'd so long held at bay bloomed wild and untameable; equally huge was her relief that he was here, her confusion about how to feel, how truly sorry she was that he'd wound up in the middle of a situation so far beyond either of their control. Being angry was easier, yes, but she couldn't be angry when he was here in front of her, looking at her like that.

Only a few seconds passed before she had to look away. She hated crying almost as much as she hated being seen crying, and even if it was only temporary, she wanted the comfort of his implicit offer. Ducking her chin, she leaned into him, inching close enough to rest her head against his collarbone. "I didn't think I'd ever see you again," she said, her voice quiet and tremulous, an echo of one of the first things she'd said to him earlier today. She thought now it would make a little more sense.

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Careful and gentle, he closed his arms around her, resting them together.

Yes, she'd said that. Yes, suddenly, the depth of it that he'd sensed but also missed was laid bare.

He felt both like an intruder and like the inflictor. There were questions he thought to ask but that was too much, yet; things he thought to say but they were imaginings, offers, promises, he was in no position yet to make. It was too soon for anything to have foundation.

So he just held her, defending her against… himself… and against the cruel or, worse, indifferent powers of this place (no one is listening), and keeping them both from falling off the planet. He rested his face in her hair and held her.

[nextchance]

Jyn didn't know how long she stood there, just letting him hold her. It couldn't have been fair of her and she knew it, seeking comfort from him for something he hadn't chosen to do or had any control over. In that moment, though, she felt more vulnerable than she had allowed herself to be in a long time, and safer in being so. That part, she couldn't explain, when everything about this was dangerous. Feeling the way she did about him, letting herself act on it in any way, was a liability, bound to only get her hurt again. It wouldn't have hurt any less to try to push him away, though, so if that was what she was facing either way, then she would rather hurt like this, remembering what it felt like to have his arms around her.

"Sorry," she mumbled against his shirt. Her own arms came up in turn, fingers clutching at the fabric over his back. Whether she was apologizing for her emotional state, or for what she'd just told him, or for not having told him sooner — well, it seemed like the best way to encompass all of it. There wasn't really much else to say, not least when her voice was still so unsteady, intermittent sniffles serving as proof that she hadn't yet manged to stop the tears from coming.

[fulcrum3]

For a flash, they were back on the beach, holding each other against the light.

Then it was gone and it was just them. This new city, world, universe, was nothing. There was only them.

Cassian helder her closer like he was staunching a wound. (Both of theirs.) His lips at her temple, his words stirred her hair as he breathed, "Never be. For this. Not ever."

[nextchance]

The closeness of his words and the warmth of his breath sent a shiver down Jyn's spine, although it bore no real distinction from the way she trembled anyway. She probably should have been moving back, trying to pull herself together, figuring out what to do next. At the very least, there were things she ought to have been saying — that she didn't expect anything from him, that she knew that wasn't him, except in the ways in which it was.

That whatever else she felt, she had never once, in all this time, stopped loving him.

It was too much, all of this was. While she stood here with him like this, she didn't have to deal with any of it yet, and she didn't particularly want to. "I am anyway," she murmured instead, huffing out a mirthless, watery laugh. "Can't help it."

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He ducked his head to her shoulder, one palm on her back, and exhaled, not exactly a laugh but understanding. "Okay. It's all okay." Or nothing was… as Kay would say, The proportions are the same.

After another long, long while, Cassian pulled back. He still kept contact of hands and arms, and craned his head until their eyes met. "I think we should have that bonfire. And you tell me absolutely anything you want to say without worrying if I'm going to leave. Because as long as I have any choice about it, I'm not going anywhere."

He heard himself a second later and could have bit his tongue off. That's the point, you don't have a choice…

[nextchance]

It was a terrifying thing, feeling so known, all of her defenses stripped away. Practically from the first moment they met, she'd felt like that with Cassian, like he was somehow able to see right through her, but there was so much more to that now. Jyn couldn't have known, then, what they would become to each other or how much she would come to care about him. That she'd wound up losing him too was, perhaps, more predictable, but even now that she was facing Cassian without that history between them, he seemed to know exactly what she was thinking.

Back before Scarif, she remembered having told him that she wasn't used to anyone staying when things got difficult, mostly because the accompanying memory of him saying welcome home was so indelibly seared into her. Even in doing so, though, she'd barely scratched the surface of how true that was and the effect it had on her. He still seemed to know what she was thinking now. It was horrible and wonderful.

"Burning things definitely sounds good right now," she agreed with another soft laugh. Her eyes, when they met his, were still red and watery, but at least there weren't actively tears falling anymore, even if she was sure she must have looked a mess. "I'll tell you anything you want to know. And you tell me, too. If anything is too... much. I know you didn't ask for this."

[fulcrum3]

"I did, though," said Cassian, feeling it so deep. "I wished you would live. Secondarily, I wished I could be with you." The corners of his eyes crinkled with an attempted smile. "I should have made some specifications."

[nextchance]

Jyn didn't know whether she should laugh or cry again. Still a part of her wanted to kiss him, too, but she at least had the sense to know that that would only have added yet another complication to an already difficult situation. For all that she could be reckless, and always found it easier to act than try to talk about her feelings, he deserved better than what would have been the product of confusion and emotions running high.

"I'm glad you're here now," she offered, and meant it entirely. In that regard, it didn't matter what happened next. He was alive. That ranked well above anything else in terms of importance. "Let's get those clothes. And... maybe you can keep telling me things, too. A fact for a fact?"

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The smile found its way to his face, if an aching one. "A fact for a fact. On that beach, in the moments before… I imagined a whole life with you.

"Thank you for telling me."

He ran his hands now the other way, down from her shoulders to her hands again; gave a quick squeeze, then reluctantly let go. He turned to the ship to take her suggestion. "Yeah. Let's burn some shavit."

[nextchance]

Jyn gave him a tiny smile at that, too, albeit one still laden with emotion. Hearing him say that — I imagined a whole life with you — hit like a punch in the gut, but there was a sweetness to the way it hurt. She'd imagined that, too, and they'd almost had it. Never once in all her life had she encountered anything fair about life or the universe or whatever forces might be at play there, but that fact struck her as especially unfair now.

Still, it wouldn't help to keep turning over the fact of that. Making her way into the ship, already missing the closeness of a few moments before, she headed toward the kitchen, both where he'd left his clothes and where she was pretty sure she had a lighter somewhere.

"You don't have to thank me," she said on the way. "Thank you. For listening." For not leaving.

[fulcrum3]

"Always." Head inclined— "I mean it." —obvious on his face, in his voice: he did.

If he could have kept holding her hand during this prep, he would have. One more reason to hasten through it. He picked up the pile of clothes where he'd left it and gathered some of the emptied food containers for kindling. For real fuel… "Can we gather branches somewhere nearby, or shall I temporarily steal the heating coils from the oven?" Stick that in a stack of rocks and you could heat anything enough to burn. A blaster could approximate the effect, but he'd ditched his on the data tower. Good riddance.

[nextchance]

"We should be able to find some branches," Jyn said. The ship wasn't terribly far from the woods, and there was usually something lying around somewhere. As much as she trusted him to know what he was doing with the oven, she didn't have the first idea how to take it apart and put it back together like that, and she suspected that, once they were finished burning the clothes, they were both likely to be exhausted.

"There ought to be some sort of fuel around here, too. Something flammable to help it along." If she'd been thinking earlier, she would have bought a canister of gasoline when she went out. Now, though, it didn't seem worth making a trip over.