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?"
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."
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.
"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.
"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.
Cassian made another survey of the kitchen and came up with a bottle of cooking oil. "This should do it." He stacked everything into his arms and followed her back outside.
Together, they stacked stones into a circle, arranged branches into a pyramid, and placed the kindling. It took a while to catch since the branches were still damp from the rain, but the oil helped that along.
As the fire was growing, Cassian took two more objects from his pockets: two sharp knives from the kitchen. He used one, with great and precise ardor, to cut the Imperial uniform trousers down the middle. He began to cut it into strips. He stopped, picked up the other knife and other half of the trousers, and offered them to Jyn.
"Your turn," he said as he held them out. "For a fact."
Even if it hadn't been for the purpose of burning part of an Imperial uniform, Jyn thought there would have been something calming about the fire. Maybe it was just the familiar, methodical means of starting it, or the crisp scent of burning wood. Maybe it was just the welcome stillness of it all, the way the growing flame seemed to let everything else rest, or the fact of it being both a sort of creation and destruction at the same time.
Or else it was just because it had been a really long day and she was emotionally wrung out.
She hadn't seen Cassian take the knives from the kitchen, but as soon as she saw them, blades glinting in the firelight, she smiled, knowing what they must have been for. Sure enough, as he began cutting the trousers, her smile only grew a little. That it was more symbolic than anything else didn't stop it from feeling damn good.
"Right, it is my turn, isn't it?" she said as she took the knife and the half of the trousers, contemplating her options. At least with the biggest, heaviest truth out of the way, she was freer in what she could say. And he'd told her anything, although now that she was somewhat more composed, it felt harder to trudge back into those weightier subjects. "Before I wound up with the ship, I lived in a house," she said as she began cutting, still not quite able to bring herself to replace that I with we. It wouldn't have been entirely accurate anyway, since it wasn't them, at least not as he was here with her now. "Burned it down... a while back."
His brow lifted. "Burned it down?" But follow-up questions were still not part of the game. That was the point of it: facts eased the way for more of them.
Cassian struck open a seam with the knife, and finished ripping it all the way open with his hands. The resistance, the sound, were fantastically satisfying. "I've lived in… five? I guess probably six houses in my life. Presumably there was a first I don't remember. Then there was a treehouse with my sister. Then on Ferrix with my mother. Adoptive. Then technically on Mina-Rau, but I was hardly there, between missions. Then an apartment on Coruscant that was an Alliance safehouse. Then finally a hut on Yavin 4. …I know it's stupid, having lost Alderaan, but I'm so glad we saved Yavin 4. I'm glad we saved that forest."
Gesturing toward the fire in front of them, Jyn said, "Hey, sometimes it's all you can do."
It wasn't entirely the same, but it wasn't not, either. In both instances, the symbolism and the satisfaction went a long way. Even after she'd abandoned the house, just the fact of its continued presence felt too much like an open wound — one that was better cauterized than left to fester. There was more she wanted to tell him about it now, how she'd lived there with him and, for a while, with Bodhi, the first place she'd ever been able to call home since her childhood on Lah'mu, but she didn't feel ready to venture into those details and the questions they might prompt yet.
She had questions of her own, too, about all of these facts she hadn't managed to learn before, but they'd said a fact for a fact, not a fact for a slew of questions. She made mental note of what to ask later instead. As complicated and confusing as everything might have been, it was strangely nice, getting to know him all over again, finding out things that were wholly new to her.
"I wish I'd seen more of that forest," she added, glancing over at him before turning her attention back to the fabric, which was quickly becoming no longer recognizable as a pant leg. "That's not my fact. I named Beany after a toy I had when I was young. That Beany didn't make it off Coruscant with us, when we left."
Sometimes it's all you can do. Cassian ripped the final pieces into strips and looked up at her, somberly nodding. A crinkle of a laugh for 'Beany'—mentally confirming the embedded fact: when we left Coruscant.
He threw the strips into a pile and doused them with oil. Unceremoniously, only with enough care not to smother the fire, Cassian threw the strips one at a time into the flames. They flared and changed color as the strips caught, crackling and curling. Flames in his eyes, Cassian wanted to reach for Jyn's hand… but what had become the only fact in his mind stayed his own.
"…I didn't live on Yavin alone," he said at last. Fair was fair. "I was sort of married. We were on-and-off-again for years. At last, she left me. That was for the best."
So far, everything he'd told her had been new information, or at least filling out context for the odd shred of background she had managed to coax from him before. She hadn't done anything like this fact-trading with him then. There wouldn't have been much of a point, when he already knew the details of her life and she hadn't wanted to press for his. Out of all she had learned over this past little while, though, this was the first thing to bring Jyn up short, leaving her suddenly grateful for the distance between them and the crackle of the fire masking the slight catch in her breath.
Why hadn't she known this? Why did it matter? It didn't change anything that had happened between them here, and it wasn't as if she cared that he'd had previous relationships. Something about it, I was sort of married, left her feeling unsteady anyway, even less sure of where they stood than she had been moments ago.
As usual, it was her instinct to mask vulnerability with a sharp retort. She had to physically bite her tongue to hold back the response that threatened to follow: You were married here, too. It wouldn't have been fair to take this out on him, for him to find out something so big in such a flippant way, when she hadn't even actually told him that they had been together.
"'Bout a year and a half ago, a train derailed out at the edge of the city," she said instead. "I was stuck inside. Piece of metal debris through my shoulder." She gestured toward the once-injured shoulder in question, then began adding her own scraps of fabric to the fire. "I still feel it sometimes, when it's damp like it was today."
The feeling of new distance between them at his fact made him wish, stabbingly, that he hadn't said it. But, again, fair was fair; all the more reason he had to. Get such things out of the way. If they were going to go anywhere he wanted to go, and hope she did too, it had to be honest and transparent. They were being very ambitious, though, doing this so fast. It was so hard not to.
He decided to step it back, be more of a mirror to her pace. This one was easy, even as he winced at the thought of her being so hurt—nightmare fuel, at how easily, again, she could have died.
"I was shot in the shoulder," he said, commiserating. "I also still feel it sometimes. It didn't heal on its own… a Force-healer helped me. Which drove me crazy because…" So much for mirroring, here came the real fact: "I was raised not to trust Force users. Or really believe in the Force. Not that it cared or took sides."
Jyn thought she remembered having seen a scar there, though it had been so long now that she wasn't sure if that was a product of her imagination and this new fact she had been given. That, too, made her somewhat uneasy, though less so than a moment before. She just didn't like not being certain of or able to trust her own memory. After years, though, of course some details were bound to have blurred around the edges, while others were as vivid as if they'd never been separated.
The important thing now was that, whether she actually recalled having seen any sign of that wound or not, the accompanying story was a new one. It was a tidy segue into a fact she could give, too, one that she knew wouldn't have been included in any Alliance dossier on her.
"The last words my mother said to me were 'Trust the Force,'" she replied, fingers idly brushing the cord at her neck. The kyber crystal that hung from it sat below her shirt; tied beside it was the ring she had been given the day she got married, as was custom here. "She believed in all of that. I never really did. Right after she said it, she went and got herself killed for no good reason, so."
Again, so much he wanted to ask, suspecting she wouldn't have even said this much without knowing he wouldn't.
One thing that fact did show was how even more heroic it had been for Jyn to tell the others, May the Force be with us. Cassian looked at her with a fire that wasn't reflection.
He thought he wouldn't mirror this time. A fact about Maarva might seem to be competing. But of course, now all he could think about was…
"My father—adopted father—was lynched by Stormtroopers," he said. "Also for no good reason. He'd been trying to calm down rioters, instead they blamed him for their actions. They hanged him in the town square. In my dreams, I keep him from getting involved. I keep him on the side street with me."
This fact, once again, stole the breath from Jyn, made her stomach lurch uneasily, though for entirely different reasons now. Maybe it was selfish, to hear something as weighty as that and think of herself. She knew from experience that an argument was nothing next to such a loss. She still didn't believe she was entirely wrong in the point she'd been making. That didn't change the fact that, wounded, she'd wanted to wound him too, turning words into a weapon and stabbing with them, not knowing exactly what she would be striking but that it would be likely to do a good amount of damage.
She hadn't known this, then. She hadn't even known it when they talked about it before. That conversation, like so, so many they'd had, was faded in her mind now, something that she remembered happening but in no detail. It didn't matter anyway when it wasn't one she'd had with him.
"I'm sorry," she said, fully turning toward him, her eyes glassy in the firelight. Saying so like this may have been a departure from the format of the game, but it was still true, a fact of a different sort. "For what I said to you. After Eadu. I didn't even really... I wanted to say the worst thing I could think of. I didn't know. About that."
Eyes locked with hers, Cassian leaned forward, elbows onto his knees, shaking his head and reaching out his hand. Past the uniform burning before them. "No… no… I understand. I'm so sorry for what I said to you. It still haunts me, things I said. So what you said…" He knew what she meant. You might as well be a— "Thank you, but I understand. I understand, Jyn."
Exhaling slowly, Jyn rested her hand in his offered one, fingers curling gently around his. "I don't think that about you," she said, still holding his gaze. She wasn't good at this, mostly because she'd never had much of a chance to get experience with it, but it was worth trying to find the words with him. "I didn't even think it then. I want you to know that."
She would have wanted him to know it anyway. This new information she'd been given about his past just made it that much more important. "I guess neither of us was at our best then."
Brown eyes fixed on green eyes, Cassian nodded with all the weight of agreement. Not letting go of her hand, he reached down with the other and picked up his own tunic, the one he'd lived in for much longer than their joint mission, stained with his blood and Krennic's blaster. He didn't tear this one apart. Hefting it once, he threw it in one piece, still folded, onto the flames. As an afterthought, he dumped some of the remaining oil after it.
"Fact," he said. "…Is it okay to talk about your father?"
With her hand still in his, Jyn turned her gaze toward the fire again, watching the fabric blacken and fray. Again, she thought that there was something oddly comforting about it, and not just because she knew the clothing to be what he'd died in, the trousers, now scraps, Imperial. She wasn't sure what that said about her, but at least they were doing this together. At least, no matter what came next, he was here at all.
"Yeah," she answered after a moment, nodding, the motion slight but sure. With him, there was nothing she could or felt the need to keep off-limits, least of all when he was being so open with her. "It's okay."
He felt the same way. He hoped he wasn't about to push it too far. But he felt she had a right to know what he'd seen.
"On Eadu. On that platform. When I had your father in my sights. I saw it all at once. How your story made sense and ours didn't. How you were right that extraction would be so much worse for them than assassination. …How you and he have the same eyes." Not that that should have been a factor, but it had been there.
"Then I saw the Man in White kill the rest of the science team and strike your father down. Why would he have done that, but to make your father's last moments filled with despair?"
(It was no comfort to Cassian that, between the Alliance bombers and Krennic's blaster, Galen Erso would have died then no matter what. The fact remained it had been the Alliance that killed him and Cassian hadn't been able to stop it.)
"I saw you and him at the last and saw the look on his face. You gave him hope.
"It doesn't make up for how it went down, how we betrayed you, but I know: you didn't fail him. You transformed his last minutes from despair to hope. That means so much. That can be everything. You saved him. I know because it's what you did for me."
Jyn listened as he spoke, taking in this information with as much care as she had anything else he'd told her thus far. The overall facts of it were less new this time; she'd been there, after all, on Eadu, saw the other bodies and the Man in White surely about to kill her father.
What she hadn't known was how close it had been when Cassian decided not to pull the trigger, that he had changed his mind before the Alliance ships dropped their bombs and rendered that decision null. For that matter, it was news to her that he'd seen the two of them in those last moments. She half-remembered Cassian dragging her away from her father's body, but she'd been out of her mind with grief and confusion then, unable to think clearly enough to connect those dots. A little while later, it had sunk in that he'd come back for her and taken such a risk in doing so, even after she was no longer strictly needed for the mission. In the haze of everything else, it had been hard to appreciate that in full.
"I didn't save anyone, Cas," she murmured, glancing over at him, taking in the way the light from the flames illuminated his features. "I didn't even know what hope was until you reminded me." At the time, she'd thought it sounded utterly ridiculous. That she learned otherwise in time to help anyone else was because of him. "And my father... Well, fact: I spent most of my life hating him. For leaving. For going with them. I had a whole list of things I'd call him in my head. Coward, bastard, traitor... I don't even know if those were wrong."
Cassian accepted the correction… and didn't, because he knew what he'd seen on Galen's face through the blastershots and bomb fire; but he wouldn't try to speak for anyone else any further. Definitely not for Jyn herself.
So, in acquiescence, Cassian went for: "Fact. …I'm just gonna call my adopted parents 'my parents'. They're the ones I knew. So: My parents had a droid with a stammer."
Jyn smiled a little at that, both for the thought of a droid with a stammer and the similarity between them inherent in his statement. She, at least, remembered her parents, for better or for worse, but she'd spent most of her life trying to distance herself from them, from the fact of her identity. It wasn't a one-to-one comparison, but there was some connective tissue there, something she could understand even if their lived experiences weren't quite the same.
"Fact: I can get that, sort of. Saw was more of a father to me than my actual father was. I thought of him as one. He called me his daughter. He wasn't exactly the nurturing sort, but... I do think he did the best he could, for a while."
Of course, then he'd left her, too. That was the only constant in her life: people leaving.
The first thought in Cassian's head, of course, was but he left you too…
But who was he to talk? He'd chosen to leave Maarva. Not once but many times. He'd chosen to leave Kerri—he just hadn't known it would be for good. He'd left Bee.
He'd apparently left Jyn…
A pain struck him and, somewhat against his better judgment, he couldn't stop himself from saying, "Is this a good game? Or do you know everything I'm telling you already?"
Whether it was rational or not, Jyn felt a stab of guilt at that. She should have told him as much outright instead of leaving him to wonder. None of this came with any sort of guidebook, though. The very idea of it — meeting someone again, starting from scratch after having known them before — ought to have been impossible. All she could do was fumble her way through it and hope she didn't do any irreparable damage.
He may have told her that she could tell him anything without worrying that he would leave over it, but it wasn't as if she could blame him if that changed.
"I don't," she answered, looking up to try to meet his eyes so he would know she was telling the truth. "I would tell you if I did. I never wanted to... to push you to tell me anything. This is new."
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"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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"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."
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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Together, they stacked stones into a circle, arranged branches into a pyramid, and placed the kindling. It took a while to catch since the branches were still damp from the rain, but the oil helped that along.
As the fire was growing, Cassian took two more objects from his pockets: two sharp knives from the kitchen. He used one, with great and precise ardor, to cut the Imperial uniform trousers down the middle. He began to cut it into strips. He stopped, picked up the other knife and other half of the trousers, and offered them to Jyn.
"Your turn," he said as he held them out. "For a fact."
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Or else it was just because it had been a really long day and she was emotionally wrung out.
She hadn't seen Cassian take the knives from the kitchen, but as soon as she saw them, blades glinting in the firelight, she smiled, knowing what they must have been for. Sure enough, as he began cutting the trousers, her smile only grew a little. That it was more symbolic than anything else didn't stop it from feeling damn good.
"Right, it is my turn, isn't it?" she said as she took the knife and the half of the trousers, contemplating her options. At least with the biggest, heaviest truth out of the way, she was freer in what she could say. And he'd told her anything, although now that she was somewhat more composed, it felt harder to trudge back into those weightier subjects. "Before I wound up with the ship, I lived in a house," she said as she began cutting, still not quite able to bring herself to replace that I with we. It wouldn't have been entirely accurate anyway, since it wasn't them, at least not as he was here with her now. "Burned it down... a while back."
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Cassian struck open a seam with the knife, and finished ripping it all the way open with his hands. The resistance, the sound, were fantastically satisfying. "I've lived in… five? I guess probably six houses in my life. Presumably there was a first I don't remember. Then there was a treehouse with my sister. Then on Ferrix with my mother. Adoptive. Then technically on Mina-Rau, but I was hardly there, between missions. Then an apartment on Coruscant that was an Alliance safehouse. Then finally a hut on Yavin 4. …I know it's stupid, having lost Alderaan, but I'm so glad we saved Yavin 4. I'm glad we saved that forest."
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It wasn't entirely the same, but it wasn't not, either. In both instances, the symbolism and the satisfaction went a long way. Even after she'd abandoned the house, just the fact of its continued presence felt too much like an open wound — one that was better cauterized than left to fester. There was more she wanted to tell him about it now, how she'd lived there with him and, for a while, with Bodhi, the first place she'd ever been able to call home since her childhood on Lah'mu, but she didn't feel ready to venture into those details and the questions they might prompt yet.
She had questions of her own, too, about all of these facts she hadn't managed to learn before, but they'd said a fact for a fact, not a fact for a slew of questions. She made mental note of what to ask later instead. As complicated and confusing as everything might have been, it was strangely nice, getting to know him all over again, finding out things that were wholly new to her.
"I wish I'd seen more of that forest," she added, glancing over at him before turning her attention back to the fabric, which was quickly becoming no longer recognizable as a pant leg. "That's not my fact. I named Beany after a toy I had when I was young. That Beany didn't make it off Coruscant with us, when we left."
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He threw the strips into a pile and doused them with oil. Unceremoniously, only with enough care not to smother the fire, Cassian threw the strips one at a time into the flames. They flared and changed color as the strips caught, crackling and curling. Flames in his eyes, Cassian wanted to reach for Jyn's hand… but what had become the only fact in his mind stayed his own.
"…I didn't live on Yavin alone," he said at last. Fair was fair. "I was sort of married. We were on-and-off-again for years. At last, she left me. That was for the best."
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Why hadn't she known this? Why did it matter? It didn't change anything that had happened between them here, and it wasn't as if she cared that he'd had previous relationships. Something about it, I was sort of married, left her feeling unsteady anyway, even less sure of where they stood than she had been moments ago.
As usual, it was her instinct to mask vulnerability with a sharp retort. She had to physically bite her tongue to hold back the response that threatened to follow: You were married here, too. It wouldn't have been fair to take this out on him, for him to find out something so big in such a flippant way, when she hadn't even actually told him that they had been together.
"'Bout a year and a half ago, a train derailed out at the edge of the city," she said instead. "I was stuck inside. Piece of metal debris through my shoulder." She gestured toward the once-injured shoulder in question, then began adding her own scraps of fabric to the fire. "I still feel it sometimes, when it's damp like it was today."
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He decided to step it back, be more of a mirror to her pace. This one was easy, even as he winced at the thought of her being so hurt—nightmare fuel, at how easily, again, she could have died.
"I was shot in the shoulder," he said, commiserating. "I also still feel it sometimes. It didn't heal on its own… a Force-healer helped me. Which drove me crazy because…" So much for mirroring, here came the real fact: "I was raised not to trust Force users. Or really believe in the Force. Not that it cared or took sides."
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The important thing now was that, whether she actually recalled having seen any sign of that wound or not, the accompanying story was a new one. It was a tidy segue into a fact she could give, too, one that she knew wouldn't have been included in any Alliance dossier on her.
"The last words my mother said to me were 'Trust the Force,'" she replied, fingers idly brushing the cord at her neck. The kyber crystal that hung from it sat below her shirt; tied beside it was the ring she had been given the day she got married, as was custom here. "She believed in all of that. I never really did. Right after she said it, she went and got herself killed for no good reason, so."
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One thing that fact did show was how even more heroic it had been for Jyn to tell the others, May the Force be with us. Cassian looked at her with a fire that wasn't reflection.
He thought he wouldn't mirror this time. A fact about Maarva might seem to be competing. But of course, now all he could think about was…
"My father—adopted father—was lynched by Stormtroopers," he said. "Also for no good reason. He'd been trying to calm down rioters, instead they blamed him for their actions. They hanged him in the town square. In my dreams, I keep him from getting involved. I keep him on the side street with me."
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She hadn't known this, then. She hadn't even known it when they talked about it before. That conversation, like so, so many they'd had, was faded in her mind now, something that she remembered happening but in no detail. It didn't matter anyway when it wasn't one she'd had with him.
"I'm sorry," she said, fully turning toward him, her eyes glassy in the firelight. Saying so like this may have been a departure from the format of the game, but it was still true, a fact of a different sort. "For what I said to you. After Eadu. I didn't even really... I wanted to say the worst thing I could think of. I didn't know. About that."
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She would have wanted him to know it anyway. This new information she'd been given about his past just made it that much more important. "I guess neither of us was at our best then."
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"Fact," he said. "…Is it okay to talk about your father?"
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"Yeah," she answered after a moment, nodding, the motion slight but sure. With him, there was nothing she could or felt the need to keep off-limits, least of all when he was being so open with her. "It's okay."
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"On Eadu. On that platform. When I had your father in my sights. I saw it all at once. How your story made sense and ours didn't. How you were right that extraction would be so much worse for them than assassination. …How you and he have the same eyes." Not that that should have been a factor, but it had been there.
"Then I saw the Man in White kill the rest of the science team and strike your father down. Why would he have done that, but to make your father's last moments filled with despair?"
(It was no comfort to Cassian that, between the Alliance bombers and Krennic's blaster, Galen Erso would have died then no matter what. The fact remained it had been the Alliance that killed him and Cassian hadn't been able to stop it.)
"I saw you and him at the last and saw the look on his face. You gave him hope.
"It doesn't make up for how it went down, how we betrayed you, but I know: you didn't fail him. You transformed his last minutes from despair to hope. That means so much. That can be everything. You saved him. I know because it's what you did for me."
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What she hadn't known was how close it had been when Cassian decided not to pull the trigger, that he had changed his mind before the Alliance ships dropped their bombs and rendered that decision null. For that matter, it was news to her that he'd seen the two of them in those last moments. She half-remembered Cassian dragging her away from her father's body, but she'd been out of her mind with grief and confusion then, unable to think clearly enough to connect those dots. A little while later, it had sunk in that he'd come back for her and taken such a risk in doing so, even after she was no longer strictly needed for the mission. In the haze of everything else, it had been hard to appreciate that in full.
"I didn't save anyone, Cas," she murmured, glancing over at him, taking in the way the light from the flames illuminated his features. "I didn't even know what hope was until you reminded me." At the time, she'd thought it sounded utterly ridiculous. That she learned otherwise in time to help anyone else was because of him. "And my father... Well, fact: I spent most of my life hating him. For leaving. For going with them. I had a whole list of things I'd call him in my head. Coward, bastard, traitor... I don't even know if those were wrong."
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So, in acquiescence, Cassian went for: "Fact. …I'm just gonna call my adopted parents 'my parents'. They're the ones I knew. So: My parents had a droid with a stammer."
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"Fact: I can get that, sort of. Saw was more of a father to me than my actual father was. I thought of him as one. He called me his daughter. He wasn't exactly the nurturing sort, but... I do think he did the best he could, for a while."
Of course, then he'd left her, too. That was the only constant in her life: people leaving.
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But who was he to talk? He'd chosen to leave Maarva. Not once but many times. He'd chosen to leave Kerri—he just hadn't known it would be for good. He'd left Bee.
He'd apparently left Jyn…
A pain struck him and, somewhat against his better judgment, he couldn't stop himself from saying, "Is this a good game? Or do you know everything I'm telling you already?"
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He may have told her that she could tell him anything without worrying that he would leave over it, but it wasn't as if she could blame him if that changed.
"I don't," she answered, looking up to try to meet his eyes so he would know she was telling the truth. "I would tell you if I did. I never wanted to... to push you to tell me anything. This is new."
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