For a moment, Cassian felt ten years old and his grasp of Basic utterly failed.
"She was… great. When she was younger, she was this pirate. Swaggering through the Galaxy, totally free. I didn't appreciate it at the time… I got it from peoples' stories about her. Because she also… changed to… dedicate some of herself to me. But she always had that attitude. And she kind of… carried that freedom inside her, even when it got frustrated by our world getting smaller from the Empire, her life getting smaller from her health. At the end, she… refused to be limited."
His brow furrowed and he looked out at the falls. As if confessing, he said, "It was my mission. But she never knew it. My first mission with the Rebellion that succeeded, that she heard about and inspired her to rise up again. I never told her because I didn't consider it a success. Too many people had died. And I didn't care yet what it was for. But she did. She was always way ahead of me. Showing me the way. She did that for a lot of people."
Jyn listened as raptly as she had to anything else he'd told her, the same bittersweet, fond look on her face for the assortment of conflicting thoughts in her head. First, that she was, as she'd said before, so unbelievably glad that he'd had someone like that in his life, even if the circumstances that brought the connection into being were complicated to say the least. Second, perhaps nonsensically, that she wished she could've met this woman who'd raised Cassian like her own, absently wondering how that might have played out. And third, more spiteful, that she wished she could've had a mother like that.
For so long, she'd held the memory of Lyra as something like sacred in her mind, maybe because of the last words said to her or the way she then watched her mother die, maybe because her anger at her father was too big for there to be room for much else. That had since changed, leaving her to wonder now what the point of any of it was, or how different her life might have been if Lyra had made a different choice that day.
Right now, none of that was the point. "She sounds wonderful," she murmured over the sound of the falls, meaning it entirely. Thoughtful for a moment, she weighed her words, debating whether or not what came to mind would be too much. Then she decided to hell with it. "Back on Scarif, you... you said that my father would be proud of me," she said, and reached over to slip her hand into his. "I think your mother would be proud of you, Cassian."
Comparisons were inevitable. But now it was between Jyn and himself.
He knew Jyn would protest his assessment, on both counts… but when a thought came so clearly, not saying it was a lie. And he'd promised.
"To me…
"You're praiseworthy in spite of everything you've been through, including your parents, because of yourself. "If I'm praiseworthy, it's because of everything I've been through, including my parents, in spite of myself.
"I know you won't like my saying that. I'm not looking for… to be defended or… I think…
"I think that's what was behind what I said after Eadu. Where we mirror. It hurt.
"It hurt then. Now… I'm just grateful. Where we understand."
Of course she wanted to defend him; of course he knew she would. Jyn bit back the impulse to do so, knowing they would be likely to just talk themselves in circles, and instead focused on what he had said and on letting those words sink in. While she may not have agreed with the entirety of his assessments of them both, the overall point seemed... right. They were opposites in some ways, but so alike. It was why they'd been so at odds early on, and yet why she had felt so seen by him even then.
They'd both said awful things to each other during that argument, and she didn't hold them against him now just as she hoped he didn't hold them against her. But it wasn't as if he'd been wrong, entirely; he'd just had the wrong context, a mirror image of where she was coming from.
And once they had both gotten their anger out, they'd wound up in the same place.
"I think that was behind a lot of what I said, too," she said quietly. "I got it, and that... made me even angrier. Now..." She gave a helpless little shrug and a crooked smile, meant to express her own agreement and gratitude. "Just so you know, the only reason I'm not defending you is because I'm not looking for you to try to change my mind."
He needed a moment to process that. Once he did, his smile was slow, eyes bright, and he leaned over to kiss her.
Sitting back, he deftly swiped his eyes and his smile became lopsided. "I promised you a doll. Let's see if I can…"
Kenari had vines and longer leaves to hold them together, but Kassa had gotten to the point of interweaving the twigs themselves that using ties felt like cheating. The thing then was that the twigs had to be very bendable. Cassian reached up past Jyn's head to a branch and tested flexibility, found it suitable, and picked off the outermost, thinnest sprigs.
His fingers picked up speed as he worked, remembering what he was doing. He delicately stripped the twigs of their leaves and bark until he was left with pale strips. These were woven and knotted together until shapes began to form. The body of the doll was like a knotted loaf of bread you'd buy in a Coruscant bakery, plaits turned into spheres. The arms were one long braid fed through the torso's knots with tasseled ends for hands. The skirt (not legs) was a loose waffle-looking weave, with one long strip of a belt again fed through the main knots.
The head was the wonder. It was just another knot, like the ones comprising the body, but Cassian took a rigid twig and… not carved… indented a face. It was so subtle, no coloration, but if you looked at the correct angle, the face was so clearly there, and so clearly sweet. That twig then became the neck and spine that fed through the rest of the doll to hold it all together.
Finished, Cassian handed her to Jyn. She was just big enough to sit in Jyn's palm.
The night before, when Cassian told her about being able to make dolls from twigs, Jyn had immediately thought of her own childhood makeshift toys, carved or stitched and clearly rough work. She hadn't had a clear mental image, but had assumed it might be something along the lines of a drawn stick figure, which would still, in her estimation, have been deeply impressive. As she watched him weave sticks together now, though — and watch she did, intently focused on the movements of his hands — it became clear within a matter of moments that she'd been completely off-base. This was something far more intricate, mesmerizing to observe, the finished product lovely when he set it in her hand.
"You really weren't exaggerating," she said, lifting the doll to study its miniature features, a smile on her own face all the while. She never smiled half as much anywhere or with anyone else as she did with him. "Cassian, this is beautiful."
Over the last few years, Jyn had amassed a very, very small collection of things she didn't want to let go of. The ring she wore alongside her kyber crystal, a sketch that Lincoln once did of her, the hologram of her father's message. This would now be added to it.
His eyes, meanwhile, were entirely for Jyn's smile.
"Our colony on Kenari was divided between the older kids and the younger ones. I was right in the middle, not big enough to be an 'adult', too big to be one of the 'children'. I was always left behind on hunts. It drove me crazy. I wanted to be one of the big ones. So I found ways to set myself apart from the little ones. This was one of them. One of the biggest kids taught us all how to do things with sticks, mostly make hunting traps and baskets, but once she showed us how to make basic dolls. I taught myself how to get really good at them, to make them for my sister."
The expedition to the crashed ship had been the first that Kassa had been allowed on with the 'adults'. He'd never imagined it would be the last.
He must have really loved her, Jyn thought, though she knew better than to say so. It was the sort of thing that ought to have been self-explanatory, for one, and besides, she didn't know how raw a wound it might be. If he wanted to talk about her, she would always, always listen, but it didn't seem right to press. Maybe it was just that the thought of that sort of affection was hard to wrap her head around after a lifetime of people who were supposed to love her ultimately leaving her.
Even that might not have been entirely fair. She knew, rationally, that her parents had loved her — all three of them, Saw included. Whatever that love was, though, it had never amounted to more than leaving her behind, never been enough to keep her around. That was all the more reason not to say what she was thinking, not wanting to draw any inadvertent comparison between her being left behind and Cassian being separated from his sister, which she knew he wouldn't have chosen.
"She must have loved them," she said instead, which seemed safer. "It was like that for me, with the toys I had." Although, she supposed, that was different, too." They had, after all, been her only friends.
He said by way of answer, "She gave them the funniest names."
So many more thoughts swirled through his mind—things he'd come to understand as an adult that he hadn't as a child, like why the youngest ones adapted to the life so much more easily than the oldest ones; how the leader of the colony seemed so hard and infallible but once he saw her crying on her own, thought now how constantly terrifying it must have been for her; how his amazement at how Kerri's mind worked must be like what parents feel about their children, but he wouldn't credit himself as having 'raised' her because he hadn't; and, of course, wondering how they all died—but he felt suddenly finished talking about it. And sick of talking about himself.
Instead, he shot a wan smile at Jyn. "I'm sure your toys had only dignified names."
"Oh, not even close," Jyn said with a short laugh, shaking her head. She didn't even remember all of their names now, but based on what she did recall, dignified would very much not have been the word to describe any of them. That made sense, though. She'd been so young, her childhood cut so short, something that she knew he of all people would understand. This far removed from all of it now, it was nearly impossible to imagine herself with a child's fanciful imagination. Her memories of that time were more fact than feeling, like something observed rather than lived. She knew it had happened, she remembered aspects of it, but whoever that little girl was, she hadn't existed for a long, long time.
"Beany, the one I named the cat after, was probably the only dignified name in the bunch. And I don't even know if I picked the name. The others, definitely no dignity there."
Cassian had picked up the leftover branch and was absently, delicately stripping its bark with his thumb. He huffed a laugh. "Let me guess. There'd have to be a tooka named 'Tookie', right?"
"Not that I remember," Jyn replied, clearly amused, "but it would've fit with the others if there had been. I'm trying to think. I know there was... some sort of long-necked animal. 'Longee,' obviously. 'Starrie' might've been a tooka, actually. Didn't look like one. It was more just a flat star shape. Thus the name. Points where the ears and limbs would be."
She hadn't thought about any of this in ages. It was a better feeling than she'd have expected to be reminiscing now, probably only because of whose company she was in.
"Grendreef's kids would have had the actual animals. As well as roomfuls of toys. And never have named or played with any of them. If that's one end of the spectrum, and nothing but a cudgel on the other end, your way sounds like the winner."
"It probably is," Jyn allowed, expression just this side of sheepish. "They weren't much, but I didn't know that then. At least while I had them, they were well-loved." She almost wished they had been more so. Had she been aware of just how short-lived her childhood would wind up being, she might have tried to savor it, or at least remember more.
“I didn’t mean…” This was difficult territory. “I shouldn’t compare. On the whole, I was probably the luckier. I think I meant, credit to your parents for what they were able to do. But what do I know… this is definitely not my area of expertise.”
"No, I know," Jyn assured him, shaking her head. She was no mindreader, of course, and couldn't actually assume that she knew his meaning, but she hadn't taken it as a comparison or a contest. It was just that, having lost so much so many times over, it was difficult sometimes to remember things in terms of what she had gotten to have or ways she'd been fortunate. "I didn't think you were comparing. I just never really thought about it that way. I haven't really thought about any of this in a long time."
“Neither have I,” and it was true. He didn’t think about it as a survival technique and he definitely didn’t talk about it as a security measure. Yet here… “Feels like throwing up in a good way. Does that make sense?”
"It does, yeah," Jyn agreed. "Like... something you feel better for getting out." It was counter to all of her instincts, everything that had kept her alive for years. She hadn't wanted to think about these things, never mind discuss them. With Cassian, though — again, always — it was different. She wanted him to know her, even if, and when, it involved unearthing her most painful memories.
With a small smile, he reached for her hand. "And all it took was leaving the Galaxy."
Which, if he thought about it, made sense. As long as they weren't living too much in the past at the expense of the present. Hopefully it was helping them fortify it. (Though still maybe too much to think of 'future'.)
He turned his face contemplatively to the pool. Hefting the tree bough, Cassian stood and controlledly tossed the bough into the churning water just at the base of the waterfall. The bough quickly bobbed to the surface and drifted into the wider pool. Good. Not too much air to water for a solid to be too dense. He began to undo his collar. "Want to swim?"
Of course that was what it took, Jyn thought. Her past wasn't a liability to her here, which she suspected was also true for him, in a different way. Even if that hadn't been the case, though—
She didn't spend much time on what ifs, mostly because that tended to be an exercise in misery. Things happened the way they happened, and she was who she was as a result of it. Every once in a while, though, there was an exception, and this was one. If they had somehow survived that mission, if they had limped back from Scarif together, if she had stayed, if he'd have wanted her to... Had that all been the case, she tended to believe that she would have felt the same way then. It probably would have all been that much harder to talk about, but for him, with him, she would have.
For a moment, she considered saying as much, but quickly decided against it. They hadn't survived, and they were here now, which was more important.
So, too, was his suggestion, drawing a smile from her. "Why not?" she agreed, staying seated so she could untie her boots, then peel off her socks. "We're here, no one else is. Might as well."
There should be a catalog of his smiles; the ones so small yet so subtly different. This was the one from the Scarif vault, of admiration and appreciation.
He left his clothes in a neatly folded pile atop one of the flatter rocks. He slipped into the water, causing a nearby pair of waterfowl to take wing. The water was so clear that the bottom was visible where it was still, it smelled clean, and nothing came out of hiding to try and bite him. (Don't tell Jyn, but though he'd been pretty confident it was safe, he'd gone in first to triple check.) Emerging up to his chest, he swam-walked back to Jyn and unnecessarily offered his hand.
Jyn finished undressing as Cassian slid into the water, her own clothes left more haphazardly on the rock where she'd been sitting. This wasn't the sort of thing she was prone to doing, and had they been anywhere less secluded, she might have had more reservations. Even with the ambient noise of the woods around them, though, she felt sure that she would hear if anyone were approaching, and it wasn't as if she was overly shy or modest. She just tended to avoid excessive vulnerability, which included taking her clothes off to go swimming.
With just Cassian, of course, she didn't think twice about it. For all that she had previously deemed it too awkward to get changed in front of him, she probably wouldn't have even if they hadn't already slept together. Cassian was safe. It was a thought she came back to time and again. Although the way she felt about him was anything but, he himself was the first safety she had known in a long time.
Taking his hand, she slid into the water, shivering a little at the change in temperature. She smiled at him, though, warm and unreserved. "Hey."
He returned her smile, so much in his eyes. "Hey." He drew them closer in the water and joined their other hands, like they were dancing. "Thanks for joining me."
"What was I gonna do, just sit back and let you have all the fun?" Jyn replied, one corner of her mouth curling higher, a good-natured smirk. She'd have had no problem doing exactly that if she hadn't wanted to get into the water with him, but this was too nice to resist. Even with the heavier subjects that had just been at hand, it was a welcome counterpoint to the beach being so full of people and bad memories. "Not a chance."
His smile continued to mirror hers. He sank himself down in the water so their heads were at the same level and stepped in to kiss her.
"I'm trying to remember," he murmured, arms weightless around her, "I know I had follow-up questions to some of your facts. It's hard to get them now. I think one was: what was your tattoo?"
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"She was… great. When she was younger, she was this pirate. Swaggering through the Galaxy, totally free. I didn't appreciate it at the time… I got it from peoples' stories about her. Because she also… changed to… dedicate some of herself to me. But she always had that attitude. And she kind of… carried that freedom inside her, even when it got frustrated by our world getting smaller from the Empire, her life getting smaller from her health. At the end, she… refused to be limited."
His brow furrowed and he looked out at the falls. As if confessing, he said, "It was my mission. But she never knew it. My first mission with the Rebellion that succeeded, that she heard about and inspired her to rise up again. I never told her because I didn't consider it a success. Too many people had died. And I didn't care yet what it was for. But she did. She was always way ahead of me. Showing me the way. She did that for a lot of people."
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For so long, she'd held the memory of Lyra as something like sacred in her mind, maybe because of the last words said to her or the way she then watched her mother die, maybe because her anger at her father was too big for there to be room for much else. That had since changed, leaving her to wonder now what the point of any of it was, or how different her life might have been if Lyra had made a different choice that day.
Right now, none of that was the point. "She sounds wonderful," she murmured over the sound of the falls, meaning it entirely. Thoughtful for a moment, she weighed her words, debating whether or not what came to mind would be too much. Then she decided to hell with it. "Back on Scarif, you... you said that my father would be proud of me," she said, and reached over to slip her hand into his. "I think your mother would be proud of you, Cassian."
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He knew Jyn would protest his assessment, on both counts… but when a thought came so clearly, not saying it was a lie. And he'd promised.
"To me…
"You're praiseworthy in spite of everything you've been through, including your parents, because of yourself.
"If I'm praiseworthy, it's because of everything I've been through, including my parents, in spite of myself.
"I know you won't like my saying that. I'm not looking for… to be defended or… I think…
"I think that's what was behind what I said after Eadu. Where we mirror. It hurt.
"It hurt then. Now… I'm just grateful. Where we understand."
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They'd both said awful things to each other during that argument, and she didn't hold them against him now just as she hoped he didn't hold them against her. But it wasn't as if he'd been wrong, entirely; he'd just had the wrong context, a mirror image of where she was coming from.
And once they had both gotten their anger out, they'd wound up in the same place.
"I think that was behind a lot of what I said, too," she said quietly. "I got it, and that... made me even angrier. Now..." She gave a helpless little shrug and a crooked smile, meant to express her own agreement and gratitude. "Just so you know, the only reason I'm not defending you is because I'm not looking for you to try to change my mind."
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Sitting back, he deftly swiped his eyes and his smile became lopsided. "I promised you a doll. Let's see if I can…"
Kenari had vines and longer leaves to hold them together, but Kassa had gotten to the point of interweaving the twigs themselves that using ties felt like cheating. The thing then was that the twigs had to be very bendable. Cassian reached up past Jyn's head to a branch and tested flexibility, found it suitable, and picked off the outermost, thinnest sprigs.
His fingers picked up speed as he worked, remembering what he was doing. He delicately stripped the twigs of their leaves and bark until he was left with pale strips. These were woven and knotted together until shapes began to form. The body of the doll was like a knotted loaf of bread you'd buy in a Coruscant bakery, plaits turned into spheres. The arms were one long braid fed through the torso's knots with tasseled ends for hands. The skirt (not legs) was a loose waffle-looking weave, with one long strip of a belt again fed through the main knots.
The head was the wonder. It was just another knot, like the ones comprising the body, but Cassian took a rigid twig and… not carved… indented a face. It was so subtle, no coloration, but if you looked at the correct angle, the face was so clearly there, and so clearly sweet. That twig then became the neck and spine that fed through the rest of the doll to hold it all together.
Finished, Cassian handed her to Jyn. She was just big enough to sit in Jyn's palm.
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"You really weren't exaggerating," she said, lifting the doll to study its miniature features, a smile on her own face all the while. She never smiled half as much anywhere or with anyone else as she did with him. "Cassian, this is beautiful."
Over the last few years, Jyn had amassed a very, very small collection of things she didn't want to let go of. The ring she wore alongside her kyber crystal, a sketch that Lincoln once did of her, the hologram of her father's message. This would now be added to it.
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"Our colony on Kenari was divided between the older kids and the younger ones. I was right in the middle, not big enough to be an 'adult', too big to be one of the 'children'. I was always left behind on hunts. It drove me crazy. I wanted to be one of the big ones. So I found ways to set myself apart from the little ones. This was one of them. One of the biggest kids taught us all how to do things with sticks, mostly make hunting traps and baskets, but once she showed us how to make basic dolls. I taught myself how to get really good at them, to make them for my sister."
The expedition to the crashed ship had been the first that Kassa had been allowed on with the 'adults'. He'd never imagined it would be the last.
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Even that might not have been entirely fair. She knew, rationally, that her parents had loved her — all three of them, Saw included. Whatever that love was, though, it had never amounted to more than leaving her behind, never been enough to keep her around. That was all the more reason not to say what she was thinking, not wanting to draw any inadvertent comparison between her being left behind and Cassian being separated from his sister, which she knew he wouldn't have chosen.
"She must have loved them," she said instead, which seemed safer. "It was like that for me, with the toys I had." Although, she supposed, that was different, too." They had, after all, been her only friends.
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So many more thoughts swirled through his mind—things he'd come to understand as an adult that he hadn't as a child, like why the youngest ones adapted to the life so much more easily than the oldest ones; how the leader of the colony seemed so hard and infallible but once he saw her crying on her own, thought now how constantly terrifying it must have been for her; how his amazement at how Kerri's mind worked must be like what parents feel about their children, but he wouldn't credit himself as having 'raised' her because he hadn't; and, of course, wondering how they all died—but he felt suddenly finished talking about it. And sick of talking about himself.
Instead, he shot a wan smile at Jyn. "I'm sure your toys had only dignified names."
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"Beany, the one I named the cat after, was probably the only dignified name in the bunch. And I don't even know if I picked the name. The others, definitely no dignity there."
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She hadn't thought about any of this in ages. It was a better feeling than she'd have expected to be reminiscing now, probably only because of whose company she was in.
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"It's like that for me, too."
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Which, if he thought about it, made sense. As long as they weren't living too much in the past at the expense of the present. Hopefully it was helping them fortify it. (Though still maybe too much to think of 'future'.)
He turned his face contemplatively to the pool. Hefting the tree bough, Cassian stood and controlledly tossed the bough into the churning water just at the base of the waterfall. The bough quickly bobbed to the surface and drifted into the wider pool. Good. Not too much air to water for a solid to be too dense. He began to undo his collar. "Want to swim?"
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She didn't spend much time on what ifs, mostly because that tended to be an exercise in misery. Things happened the way they happened, and she was who she was as a result of it. Every once in a while, though, there was an exception, and this was one. If they had somehow survived that mission, if they had limped back from Scarif together, if she had stayed, if he'd have wanted her to... Had that all been the case, she tended to believe that she would have felt the same way then. It probably would have all been that much harder to talk about, but for him, with him, she would have.
For a moment, she considered saying as much, but quickly decided against it. They hadn't survived, and they were here now, which was more important.
So, too, was his suggestion, drawing a smile from her. "Why not?" she agreed, staying seated so she could untie her boots, then peel off her socks. "We're here, no one else is. Might as well."
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He left his clothes in a neatly folded pile atop one of the flatter rocks. He slipped into the water, causing a nearby pair of waterfowl to take wing. The water was so clear that the bottom was visible where it was still, it smelled clean, and nothing came out of hiding to try and bite him. (Don't tell Jyn, but though he'd been pretty confident it was safe, he'd gone in first to triple check.) Emerging up to his chest, he swam-walked back to Jyn and unnecessarily offered his hand.
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With just Cassian, of course, she didn't think twice about it. For all that she had previously deemed it too awkward to get changed in front of him, she probably wouldn't have even if they hadn't already slept together. Cassian was safe. It was a thought she came back to time and again. Although the way she felt about him was anything but, he himself was the first safety she had known in a long time.
Taking his hand, she slid into the water, shivering a little at the change in temperature. She smiled at him, though, warm and unreserved. "Hey."
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"I'm trying to remember," he murmured, arms weightless around her, "I know I had follow-up questions to some of your facts. It's hard to get them now. I think one was: what was your tattoo?"
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