"I'm working on it," Jyn replied, the words meant as reassurance rather than a retort. With anyone else, it probably would have been the other way around. All of this was a lot to begin mentally sorting through even without adding her years of history into it. She was likely overcomplicating things by getting into it now, but having started, she couldn't very well back away. She would just have to push her way through it, however clumsily.
"The ship got here with a girl named Rey. From maybe... I don't know, thirty-some years ahead of us. Still not how I got it. When I told you it passed through a lot of hands, I wasn't kidding."
He nodded, intently listening. When she paused like she needed his help to sort through the chaos, he said, "So it's not just us. Time is… not a factor. I suppose that only makes sense when space isn't. You can't break one without breaking the other. Rey have any relationship to Leia?"
"Time is very much not a factor," Jyn agreed with an emphatic nod, grateful
-- unsurprised -- that he'd managed to put it more succinctly than she
could. "And... sort of? But not when she got the ship." Around here was
where her knowledge of everything got fuzzy. Whatever information she'd
managed to collect was all scattered, and nothing she ever expected she
would have to recount to someone else. She especially wouldn't have
expected to tell him.
"From there, it went to a few others. Leia's... future husband? He was here
for a while, too. I didn't really know him. Back to Rey. When she
disappeared, to her friend, Poe. And after him, to me."
Jyn was speaking as if this was all so casual, but gigantic things peeked out from behind the short words. Things that made the hairs stand up on Cassian's neck.
"Hang on." This time, he stopped walking. He turned to her fully. Like her, he strove to seem calm, but Jyn would be able to feel the pulse quicken in his wrist. "'When she disappeared…'? And where was Rey while Leia's future husband had the ship?" It would be nice to think, in the interim, she'd just gotten an apartment in the city… but as someone, himself, who'd made a secret hideout in the ship that had kidnapped saved him, long after it was spaceworthy… you don't just give that away.
Again, Jyn mentally swore. She was getting this all wrong, and while that,
too, wasn't surprising in the slightest, she was still frustrated with
herself for it. He deserved a proper explanation, someone to go over all of
this with him in a way that made sense, at least as much as something like
this could.
"It's... a thing," she said, mouth twisting into a frown, her expression
apologetic as she looked up at him. "The way people show up here, seemingly
out of nowhere? Sometimes... not very often, but sometimes... they vanish
the same way, too. Nothing sinister, just..."
Just awful. There was no other word for it, really. And, still, never did
it hurt as much as when it was him.
"Nothing sinister?!" Something of the Rebel captain came back into his spine, his shoulders, his expression, as he faced her—but his grip on her hand didn't overtighten. Just held on. "Jyn… we're at the mercy of something here… something…"
Cassian had become an adult at the age of six, a stranger in a new world at nine, a soldier at eleven, a prisoner at thirteen, and the rest of his life just got more like that. After the Ghorman massacre, he'd gone straight to Coruscant to extract Senator Mothma and not eaten or slept until he got back to Yavin 4—and not right away for either. He didn't think there was anything left in any universe that would be too much for him.
This was too much. It was too big, too unknown, too all at once, too apparently supernatural, too utterly divorced from every shred of his whole life working and sacrificing to get a grip on anything, and coming too on the heels of the most world-overturning mission of his existence. He took a step backward and pressed his palm to his head.
"I can't risk that," he muttered. "I won't allow it. I'll start working on the ship. We'll make it fly again. If the Empire's really gone, we'll get back there. That's too high a price for this."
"Cassian. I know," Jyn said, and this time, some steel did creep
into her voice. It wasn't ill-tempered, though, so much as needing to make
sure he heard her. She could hardly blame him for the reaction; it was one
she'd shared, all those years ago when she first learned about it. However
much she might have fucked this up, though, she couldn't help wanting to
reassure him now. To make it a little easier, in any way she could, even if
nothing she had to say would fit that description.
She reached for his other hand again, trying to stop him, or at least slow
him down. This time, it wasn't about her and savoring the feeling. Selfish
as she might have been, she could put that away for the moment.
"I know," she said again, softer this time. "Years, remember? If that would
work, don't you think I would have done it by now?" Under everything else,
the question was a quiet plea. Know that I would have come back to you.
Know that I wouldn't have just taken the out.
No one but her. He yielded to her, both hands in hers again, grateful for her strength. He heard everything she said and heavily nodded. There was no better option. But also: it was her.
Anyway, Maarva's voice came wryly into his thoughts, you dreamed for so long to find somewhere quiet and at peace. Now you want to get away from it back to where you started?
"I guess we never know how much time we have," he murmured. "It's just… one fights so hard to have a choice. Even if it's just a dream of one."
"I know," Jyn repeated once more, quiet now, not much more than a
whisper. This time, it was her own fault that the moment felt too close,
too intimate, the words hanging in the air between them. It would have been
too easy to close the distance, kiss him to take his mind off it, or at
least help keep him grounded in the here and now. For all of half a second,
she considered it; instead, she just bent her head toward his, still
clasping his hands in her own.
She'd never, in all her life, had much of a choice in anything, only the
desperate instinct to survive. All those years ago, she'd told him that,
too. Now, she nearly did so again, the words poised on the tip of her
tongue, then swallowed back. He probably already knew, or at least could
guess as much.
Cassian shook his head over their clasped hands. "No. I'm sorry. I say, 'Tell me everything,' then I keep getting upset at what you tell me.
"It's all brand new. It's like…" He did one of his exhalation-laughs and raised his eyes to her. "I never talk about this. Well. It's like my first time going to a new planet, as a child. Then, I had no one I trusted or who spoke my language. I'm so glad, now, I'm with you."
Straightening up, he released one hand and readjusted his grip with the other. "Maybe the city will wait for tomorrow after all. When I can look around for myself and compare what I see with what you tell me." Which wasn't distrust of her, he considered it his due diligence.
"For now… I know, when I'm sitting down I want to be walking, when I'm walking I need to stop… Is there a good place to stop and talk out of doors? Best of both worlds."
Selfishly, again, Jyn was grateful for it, too. Without a doubt, plenty of
people here could have done a better job of explaining all of this to him
than she could. The idea of him being here and her not knowing about it,
though, was almost unbearable, especially when he was saying things like
that. Glad hardly seemed like the right word for it. She was a dozen other
things, not the least of which was confused. Still, she wouldn't
have had it any other way. She just hoped she could salvage her awkward
attempt at an explanation somehow.
"We can go back and sit by the garden, if you want," she suggested, lifting
one shoulder. It wasn't much, but it was the best she could think of that
didn't involve walking entirely into the city. Willing as she had been to
show him around if that was what he wanted, she preferred this anyway --
the chance to keep this moment theirs, to tell him the things she needed to
without other input. To take in the pieces of information he gave her, too,
his statement of I never talk about this prompting a small smile
from her.
"And it's okay if you keep getting upset. I get it. It still bothers me,
too."
Yet one more bad idea in a long list of them, Jyn took his arm when offered, the gesture causing her smile to pull just a little wider. He couldn't have known how torturous it was, being so close, reminded of so many instincts she'd long since buried. It was worth enduring, though, to have just a few moments of this, especially when she knew what else was still hanging overhead. There was every chance he wouldn't want to look at her, speak to her, never mind stay on her ship after she told him the rest of it. That was a risk she going to have to take, but until then, she would let herself just be grateful for his presence.
"I'll show you around for real tomorrow," she promised, leading them back toward the Falcon and her garden. In her head, she added, if you still want me to. "This, all of it's a lot to take in."
"We can do as much of that as you need," Jyn promised, easily falling into step beside him. The night was a warm enough one, spring having already arrived in full force, and yet there was comfort in the warmth of him at her side. She resisted the impulse to rest her head on his shoulder, instead lifting her chin to look up at him.
"I'm not very good at explaining it. All the time I've been here, and there's just... no good way to put it in words."
“How about we trade?” said Cassian. “Take turns. A fact for a fact, or a memory for a memory.” It was a technique he’d used very sparingly with recruits, because he had to choose his turns carefully—not too autobiographical for himself, while making a point he wanted to prove about the Rebellion—but it was very good at easing communication as well as building rapport. It kept being worth remembering how little he and Jyn knew each other. Now, it turned out, even less than he’d supposed.
"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."
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.”
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."
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'?"
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."
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?"
"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."
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'."
"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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"The ship got here with a girl named Rey. From maybe... I don't know, thirty-some years ahead of us. Still not how I got it. When I told you it passed through a lot of hands, I wasn't kidding."
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"Time is very much not a factor," Jyn agreed with an emphatic nod, grateful -- unsurprised -- that he'd managed to put it more succinctly than she could. "And... sort of? But not when she got the ship." Around here was where her knowledge of everything got fuzzy. Whatever information she'd managed to collect was all scattered, and nothing she ever expected she would have to recount to someone else. She especially wouldn't have expected to tell him.
"From there, it went to a few others. Leia's... future husband? He was here for a while, too. I didn't really know him. Back to Rey. When she disappeared, to her friend, Poe. And after him, to me."
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"Hang on." This time, he stopped walking. He turned to her fully. Like her, he strove to seem calm, but Jyn would be able to feel the pulse quicken in his wrist. "'When she disappeared…'? And where was Rey while Leia's future husband had the ship?" It would be nice to think, in the interim, she'd just gotten an apartment in the city… but as someone, himself, who'd made a secret hideout in the ship that had
kidnappedsaved him, long after it was spaceworthy… you don't just give that away.no subject
Again, Jyn mentally swore. She was getting this all wrong, and while that, too, wasn't surprising in the slightest, she was still frustrated with herself for it. He deserved a proper explanation, someone to go over all of this with him in a way that made sense, at least as much as something like this could.
"It's... a thing," she said, mouth twisting into a frown, her expression apologetic as she looked up at him. "The way people show up here, seemingly out of nowhere? Sometimes... not very often, but sometimes... they vanish the same way, too. Nothing sinister, just..."
Just awful. There was no other word for it, really. And, still, never did it hurt as much as when it was him.
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Cassian had become an adult at the age of six, a stranger in a new world at nine, a soldier at eleven, a prisoner at thirteen, and the rest of his life just got more like that. After the Ghorman massacre, he'd gone straight to Coruscant to extract Senator Mothma and not eaten or slept until he got back to Yavin 4—and not right away for either. He didn't think there was anything left in any universe that would be too much for him.
This was too much. It was too big, too unknown, too all at once, too apparently supernatural, too utterly divorced from every shred of his whole life working and sacrificing to get a grip on anything, and coming too on the heels of the most world-overturning mission of his existence. He took a step backward and pressed his palm to his head.
"I can't risk that," he muttered. "I won't allow it. I'll start working on the ship. We'll make it fly again. If the Empire's really gone, we'll get back there. That's too high a price for this."
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"Cassian. I know," Jyn said, and this time, some steel did creep into her voice. It wasn't ill-tempered, though, so much as needing to make sure he heard her. She could hardly blame him for the reaction; it was one she'd shared, all those years ago when she first learned about it. However much she might have fucked this up, though, she couldn't help wanting to reassure him now. To make it a little easier, in any way she could, even if nothing she had to say would fit that description.
She reached for his other hand again, trying to stop him, or at least slow him down. This time, it wasn't about her and savoring the feeling. Selfish as she might have been, she could put that away for the moment.
"I know," she said again, softer this time. "Years, remember? If that would work, don't you think I would have done it by now?" Under everything else, the question was a quiet plea. Know that I would have come back to you. Know that I wouldn't have just taken the out.
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Anyway, Maarva's voice came wryly into his thoughts, you dreamed for so long to find somewhere quiet and at peace. Now you want to get away from it back to where you started?
"I guess we never know how much time we have," he murmured. "It's just… one fights so hard to have a choice. Even if it's just a dream of one."
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"I know," Jyn repeated once more, quiet now, not much more than a whisper. This time, it was her own fault that the moment felt too close, too intimate, the words hanging in the air between them. It would have been too easy to close the distance, kiss him to take his mind off it, or at least help keep him grounded in the here and now. For all of half a second, she considered it; instead, she just bent her head toward his, still clasping his hands in her own.
She'd never, in all her life, had much of a choice in anything, only the desperate instinct to survive. All those years ago, she'd told him that, too. Now, she nearly did so again, the words poised on the tip of her tongue, then swallowed back. He probably already knew, or at least could guess as much.
"It's not kriffing fair. I'm sorry."
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"It's all brand new. It's like…" He did one of his exhalation-laughs and raised his eyes to her. "I never talk about this. Well. It's like my first time going to a new planet, as a child. Then, I had no one I trusted or who spoke my language. I'm so glad, now, I'm with you."
Straightening up, he released one hand and readjusted his grip with the other. "Maybe the city will wait for tomorrow after all. When I can look around for myself and compare what I see with what you tell me." Which wasn't distrust of her, he considered it his due diligence.
"For now… I know, when I'm sitting down I want to be walking, when I'm walking I need to stop… Is there a good place to stop and talk out of doors? Best of both worlds."
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Selfishly, again, Jyn was grateful for it, too. Without a doubt, plenty of people here could have done a better job of explaining all of this to him than she could. The idea of him being here and her not knowing about it, though, was almost unbearable, especially when he was saying things like that. Glad hardly seemed like the right word for it. She was a dozen other things, not the least of which was confused. Still, she wouldn't have had it any other way. She just hoped she could salvage her awkward attempt at an explanation somehow.
"We can go back and sit by the garden, if you want," she suggested, lifting one shoulder. It wasn't much, but it was the best she could think of that didn't involve walking entirely into the city. Willing as she had been to show him around if that was what he wanted, she preferred this anyway -- the chance to keep this moment theirs, to tell him the things she needed to without other input. To take in the pieces of information he gave her, too, his statement of I never talk about this prompting a small smile from her.
"And it's okay if you keep getting upset. I get it. It still bothers me, too."
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It was something of a relief to hear her say it still bothered her. He was sorry it did, but it was also a kind of confirmation.
To mock himself for the shortness of this excursion, he turned aboutface and offered her his arm.
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"I'll show you around for real tomorrow," she promised, leading them back toward the Falcon and her garden. In her head, she added, if you still want me to. "This, all of it's a lot to take in."
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“‘Know your own ground first’,” Cassian murmured aloud now. “I guess the talking is the ground I need to cover before I go anywhere else.”
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"I'm not very good at explaining it. All the time I've been here, and there's just... no good way to put it in words."
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"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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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.”
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"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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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'?"
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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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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?"
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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."
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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'."
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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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