The City posts

[fulcrum3]

[To be linked to the game comm]

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[fulcrum3]

His thumb ran unconsciously along her hand, as he also failed to pull away.

"I thought we'd go into the city," he said, "but maybe I'm not ready for that. Maybe you could show me around here?" First know your own ground was a battle precept, but also, he just wanted to know more about how Jyn had been living.

One of those thoughts sat on him that he realized he should say aloud. It was one that felt more difficult than We want to volunteer. Which meant he absolutely should say it. "We only know each other at war. If you want… I want to start to learn… to meet you in peace."

[nextchance]

Oh, it was going to be an absolute kriffing miracle if she could get through this without crying.

It felt too good, all of it, from the way his thumb brushed the back of her hand to the words that followed. In that moment, so simple but so suffused with meaning, it suddenly mattered less that they once had known each other — built a life together — in peacetime than that he might want to get to know her now. Jyn couldn't explain it. Given the way things had progressed when she first arrived, it should have stood to reason that he might have some of those earliest feelings again in some form. Instead, it was breathtaking, as surreal as all the rest of it.

Words weren't her strongest suit even at the best or easiest of times, and nothing about this was easy, except in the ways that it was too much so. She didn't want to say nothing, though, or leave him waiting, so she nodded. "I'd like that," she said. It seemed painfully insufficient, but it was a start. "I'm still not very good at peace, but... yeah. I'd like that, too."

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They'd both built their own shields (their prisons) too strong and too high to vanish just like that. For a moment on the beach, they'd been gone. That meant it was possible. Cassian didn't try to hug Jyn now, but he squeezed her hand, and his eyes wholly smiled.

"So," he cleared his throat, and flashed a grin. "Show me around this garden?"

[nextchance]

"There's not much to show," Jyn said, her smile small and self-deprecating. She obliged easily, though, winding toward the little garden, her hand clasping Cassian's. "I started it... a couple of years ago, I think. Herbs, mostly. Something useful."

The garden at the house, their house, had been bigger. She hadn't been back since the night she burned it down, but she had no doubt that it had all long since withered and died. This one had been meant to be a fresh start for herself. There was probably some kind of metaphor there.

"I'd already been living here. On the ship, I mean. I honestly don't remember when that happened."

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’A couple of years’?!

Any thought of teasing her, or praising her, or asking about Galen’s farm (yes, that had been in her file), all vanished. Cassian looked at her with horror. “Jyn… how long have you been here?”

[nextchance]

"I told you, a long time," Jyn said, shrugging with an ease that she didn't actually feel. He would see through it, she was almost certain of that. She wasn't making very much effort to hide the truth of it anyway — how uncomfortably daunting it was to have been in any one place for so long. Before Darrow, the longest she had lived in any one place since her childhood was six months. Even going back further, they hadn't lived on Coruscant or Lah'mu half as long as she'd been here.

Sensing that the warmth of the moment was about to dissipate completely, she glanced at the ground, scuffed the toe of one shoe in the dirt. "I don't really keep count." She thought through the few figures she did know, a couple of years since she started the garden here, two years and change she was with him, a long stretch of time in between, and came up with a rough estimate. "More than five years, less than ten."

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Once again, his face went grey. Then he stopped to think it through.

There was a time when all he'd wanted was to get away from the war to somewhere peaceful and quiet. There was another time when he'd judged Jyn poorly for seeming to want nothing but that, after he'd grown to find it unimaginable to take it for himself when others couldn't have it. Maybe this place was that. And she'd surely earned it.

Just, the idea he'd gotten that she'd been here all alone. But no, she probably hadn't; there were others here. …The disconnect of timing… they'd both left from Scarif and somehow arrived so differently…

"We got so separated," he said at last.

[nextchance]

"Yeah," Jyn agreed, soft and rueful. "We did."

He didn't even know the half of it yet, a fact that made his saying so now that much more powerful. Before Scarif, they'd known each other for only a matter of days, and under the absolute worst of circumstances. She was all too aware of how she felt about him, despite all of her attempts to shut that off, and likewise could say with certainty that he once, in what amounted to a different lifetime, had felt the same about her in turn. Still it was difficult to wrap her head around the idea that their having been separated would matter to him now, maybe because it had never mattered to anyone else.

"I still can't believe you're really here."

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He turned to face her and took both of her hands.

"I'm really here." A slight smile. He hadn't smiled so much in a long time. With Jyn, since the data tower, it was becoming a rule. "The alternative is, I'm dying and this is a final delusion of dispersing neurons. But if so, you're not the real one. And I can't imagine that. I couldn't just invent you. …To be safe, why don't you tell me something I couldn't make up."

[nextchance]

"You mean you would have made up me being here for years, with the garden and the pets and the ship?" Jyn asked, brow arching in amused skepticism. Again, the expression and wry lilt in her voice lacked some of the bite she would normally have wanted them to have. His hands around hers were to thank for that. Stupid, so unforgivably kriffing stupid, for such a small gesture to so thoroughly get under her skin. "

"I can't tell if I should be insulted or flattered."

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He breathe-laughed, this one very nearly voiced. "You're right. I could never come up with the name 'Sprinkles'."

A hesitation. "For the rest… there could be some wish-fulfillment there. All I wanted on that beach was for you to live. If you've been happy."

[nextchance]

If you're happy, Jyn...

There was no way he could have known about that part of her father's message. His not having seen it had been a point of contention, all those years ago, one of those if onlys she'd rattled off in her head earlier. It was the part that most stuck with her, though, now twofold painful: first, because when she'd initially heard it, she had never once been happy, then, here, because she had found happiness for a little while and then lost it. The former, as it turned out, was infinitely preferable to the latter. At least then, she hadn't known what she was missing. At least she hadn't yet been foolish enough to let herself believe that was something a person like her could ever have.

It cut just as deeply now, not least because it was a statement that expected an answer rather than a recorded hologram. "You aim higher than I do," she settled on in response. She didn't know how to say if she had been happy or not. This, being true, seemed like the best way of handling it. "I'm here. I'm alive. And it's not a bad life. I never really thought I'd see what a world without war was like."

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Born in prison, early childhood on Lokori… (her file, again.) They'd both been in the war since first memories. Between the Clone Wars and the Rebellion there had supposedly been a period of peace, but those like Jyn and Cassian had lived the reality that unofficial actions never stopped and it was really all the same war.

"A city without war, at least," he said. They still didn't know why the city was cut off from everywhere else. To Cassian's mind, of course, the first suggestion would be planetary disaster. "I think I'm ready to see more of it now. If it's not too late to get started."

[nextchance]

"No, let's do that," Jyn agreed, letting go of one of his hands so she could start walking again, this time toward the path that led into the city proper. It was selfish, far too much so, to be drinking in whatever minor contact she could get. What was more, she would probably hate herself for it in short order. As she'd thought a few moments ago, having a thing and then losing it was infinitely harder than never having it at all, and she'd kept so many of these feelings buried for so long that she'd almost forgotten what they were like. She was only going to get herself hurt like this.

That still didn't stop her.

"You said to tell you something you couldn't make up," she added, mostly for the sake of not lapsing too much into silence. The last thing she needed right now was to be alone with her thoughts. "Want to hear a little about the ship? That's definitely couldn't make this up territory."

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"Yes, definitely." His fingers again curled with hers. It felt so natural to be touching her, health and reason restored, while not touching felt like the distraction, like too little air. They fell into easy pace with each other, joined hands gently in aid. "Why a YT-freighter, of all things?"

[nextchance]

"Well, there weren't exactly a lot of options," Jyn deadpanned, then shot him a wry smile. "As you may have noticed—" With her free hand, she gestured toward the empty sky above them. "—Not much air traffic here." That had been one of the strangest things about it, in her earliest days here. The resulting quiet was almost unnerving.

"So, the ship," she continued, "the Millennium Falcon, which is maybe the stupidest name for a ship I've ever heard. Apparently, some time after us, Leia got married, and the ship was her husband's? But that's still not how I wound up with it."

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"Leia was here?" Was this place predominantly populated with people from their Galaxy—people he knew? It was actually an alarming thought, because it went back to suggesting his own imagination or death. …Of course, someone from their Galaxy must have ridden the freighter in…

[nextchance]

"...Well, yes," Jyn said after a beat, brow furrowing slightly, as if surprised by the fact of it. She wasn't, of course. She'd been the one to find Leia when she first arrived; that was how she'd learned of Alderaan. It was just tangential to the story of the ship as she was telling it. But in the face of Cassian's reaction, she didn't want to move on too quickly, instead giving it a chance to sink in. "A while ago. And not for very long. Ship was already here by then."

[fulcrum3]

He wasn't sure if he needed to sit down or keep on walking. He decided anything else was negotiable as long as Jyn kept holding his hand. He kept walking but turned more to her as they went. "Please tell me everything."

[nextchance]

"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."

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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?"

[nextchance]

"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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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.

[nextchance]

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.

[fulcrum3]

"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."