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."
He wondered what that said about the other him.…No, no, don't start thinking that way. That way lay madness. He tried to put it out of mind.
"Okay," he said, running his thumb over hers in the flickering light. "Thank you."
So, it was his turn again. He tried to think of something and not worry about it being something the other him would or wouldn't have already told. Just be in the moment. Here and now, in front of the fire, holding her hand. The trousers were proving recalcitrant but were blackened and curling. The tunic had all-but burned away.
"There was a short time when Kaytoo became fascinated by organic humor and insisted I tell him jokes."
"Of course," Jyn murmured, easy and almost without thought, focusing more on the way his thumb brushed against her skin than what she was saying. As far as she was concerned, there was no reason for him to thank her anyway. It was the only thing that made sense. Anything else would have been too dishonest, too unfair. Lying wasn't generally something that caused her discomfort, but as so much else, it was different with him. She had never wanted so much for someone to know her, and never been so afraid of being known.
She smiled faintly at this new fact, tucking it away with the others. It was one more thing she hadn't heard before, and yet, brief as her acquaintance with the droid had been, she could easily imagine that of Kay.
"You know now I'm going to want to hear some of those jokes," she pointed out, although that wasn't a fact in keeping with the game. Between this one and the mention of his parents' droid with a stutter, she had what seemed like a decent one in mind, a detail that seemed unlikely to have made it into any file. "When I was really little — mostly before I can remember — we had a nanny droid, Mac-Vee. I think I spent more time with him than either of my parents. He didn't make it off Coruscant with us, either."
And I didn't even try to bring Bee with us off Mina-Rau. He didn't want that to be his fact.
A nanny droid was a fascinating choice, after the event in Jyn's file with Separatist droids. Maybe Galen and Lyra Erso had been trying to override the bad memory of droids with a good one. On the other hand, it was just common practice on Coruscant. It could go either way. Cassian was glad he wasn't called upon to judge the Ersos. (As he had before and fouled it up.)
He'd been trying to think of something light-hearted, and abruptly failed. He bit his lip, trying to resist, then gave up. Honesty.
"I've been in prison twice. The first time, when I was thirteen to when I turned sixteen. The second time, it was an Imperial facility. I was there much shorter because we broke out. They would have never let us go."
Perhaps there was some irony in Jyn, who had been in prison more than twice, being so struck by this fact. Thirteen was so young, though, younger even than the approximately sixteen she'd been during her first stint in prison, and three years was such a long time. Her heart ached for the boy he must have been, the childhoods that were stolen from both of them. With as emotional as the day had been and as raw as she felt, she had no doubt it was written all over her face when she looked at him.
"I have so many things I want to ask you," she admitted. That wasn't the game, though, and in spite of every instinct that told her to do otherwise, she let herself hope that they would have time to eventually circle back and discuss some of these subjects in further depth.
"I'm not actually sure how many times I've been in prison. I do know that I would have died there, if the Alliance hadn't broken me out." Six months into a twenty-year sentence, in a place where people didn't tend to live more than two years. That was easy math.
Their joined hands threw dancing shadows in the firelight.
"We can change the rules whenever we want," said Cassian with a small smile. To prove it, he cleared his throat and started on—"Kay's favorite joke.
"A crew's separated from their ship and make camp in a field. The captain wakes them in the middle of the night. She says, 'Look up at the stars. What do they tell you?' "The navigator says, 'We are currently near the equator.' "The ambassador says, 'Their constellations reflect a matriarchal mythology.' "The pilot says, 'The universe is larger than one being could ever explore.' "The mechanic frowns at all of them and says, 'That somebody stole our tent.' "
After a pair of matched facts that were so heavy, the joke and its levity were a welcome change of pace. Jyn didn't try to hide her smile, or the soft fondness in her eyes that no one but him had ever brought out of her so effectively. If it weren't for everything else — how absurdly complicated this all was, how utterly draining the day had been — she thought it might well have been a romantic moment, trading deep personal truths and jokes while holding hands by the fire. She couldn't let herself go down that road, though. Just this was enough, and so much more than she ever thought she would get to have again.
"I can see why that's his favorite," she said, laughing quietly. "It's a good one." She wished she had a joke she could offer him in turn, but she couldn't think of any. "Does that count as a fact? Is it my turn or yours?"
Rules or lack thereof be damned, she wanted to hear whatever he saw fit to tell her.
It was so good to see her laugh. She looked so wonderful, here in the firelight, free and safe and smiling. I wish you the universe.
"It was my job," he said, (Fact,) "before Melshi and Kay extracted you from Wobani, to build a profile on you. Even though we had all your files, some physical details had got lost.
"When I finally saw you in person, most details were right but I felt in some intangible way I'd gotten you completely wrong. And one tangible thing. From the amount of damage you've caused others, we assumed you'd be tall. I loved that you were short."
Belatedly, his face flushed. "I don't know if that really counts either."
"That I'm short?" Jyn echoed, laughing again, soft and amused in her incredulity. With practically each moment that passed and each word exchanged, it felt as if the odds of her surviving this without getting her heart broken again diminished substantially. Not for the first time today, and probably not for the last, either, she told herself that the smart thing would be to give herself some distance, to sever this attachment before it could take root again. She had forgotten how good it felt to be around him, though, easy and right.
In a way, it felt like coming home. It shouldn't, and yet she savored it, warmth suffusing through her.
"When I was young," she said, another fact of her own, "right around the time I realized I wouldn't be getting much if any taller, I hated being so short. Hated that people would look at me and just see a scrawny little girl. Saw taught me that being underestimated could be a strength, and how to use it to my advantage."
"I had that," said Cassian, the same warmth in his eyes, "for being scrawny. I was never going to bulk up, be broad and muscular like my friend Brasso. But Saw's right. I thought fewer people would mess with me if I looked intimidating, but some people mess with you because of that. It helped to be secretly…"
His voice died because the real end to that sentence
"Yeah," Jyn agreed, little more than an exhale between them. She didn't need to know how he was going to finish that sentence, if he even had a specific end for it, to get the general idea of what he meant. It was one of the survival tactics she'd had in those years on her own: knowing that people would dismiss her based on her size and stature, and knowing that, if she couldn't just skate by under the radar, she would be able to make them regret it. "It did. It does."
Her thumb brushed against the back of his hand again, an idle, thoughtless gesture.
"All right. Fact. Sprinkles was actually yours, before. I think that's why she went running to you like she did. She must remember you."
That felt nice, the movement of her thumb on his hand; in sensation and even more, because it seemed natural.
The fact she gave numbed his hand. He’d almost managed to forget, because it was so unimaginable. But he shouldn’t, because she couldn’t. Or should he, because if he focused on it, he would second-guess everything until he tormented her and drove himself mad…
They’d find a balance. He was determined to.
So, it wasn’t a fact, but he felt pretty okay with replying, “How the Force did you let me name her ‘Sprinkles’?”
"You didn't," Jyn replied with a shake of her head, the slant of her smile turning apologetic. Even venturing back into his having been here before felt awkward and wrong, but keeping it from him felt even more so. He didn't need to know all of it. Details about their actual relationship were firmly off-limits, at least for now. She couldn't even figure out how to say that they'd had a relationship, never mind the extent or any specifics of it. At least something like this seemed safer, nothing that directly involved her.
"She was a stray. A former owner'd named her. Trust me, I would not have let you name her Sprinkles."
It was a big deal that she'd chosen to share this with him. He needed to get outside his own head and acknowledge that. Maybe best to think of it as her having been bereaved (she had) and sharing about that. Take himself out of it.
Because it wasn't him. Even if the nose of a small dog said otherwise.
He hadn't figured it out, but he knew enough to close his other hand around hers and hold them close. For a long moment he just looked into the fire.
"On Lothal," he said at last. "I knew better than to name any of the loth-cats. But of course, my favorite one, I started to think of as 'Ziggy'."
Even with his hands clasping hers, Jyn couldn't help wondering, as he lapsed into silence, if she shouldn't have said that after all. At the very least, there was probably more she should offer along with it — that she didn't expect anything from him, that she knew he wasn't just going to slot back into a life he hadn't lived.
Had this reunion of sorts happened years earlier, that might have been more difficult for her to wrap her head around. She was so far removed from that life she'd shared with him now, though, having been without him longer than she was ever with him several times over. Most likely, if he had shown up and remembered all of it, it would have been equally as complicated, just in a different sort of way.
When he did finally speak again, she cracked a small smile, watching the flames flicker in the darkness. "Ziggy," she repeated. "Good name." She was running out of facts, she thought, at least ones that he wasn't likely to know already and that didn't involve that past life here. After a moment, she settled instead on details to supplement something he doubtless knew. The subject was an uncomfortable one, but given all he'd shared with her, it felt warranted.
"On Lah'mu, after they came for my father... I hid in a cave underground. We were all supposed to go. We used to practice sometimes, like it was a game." Then they'd changed the plan, left her alone, the beginning of a recurring pattern in her life. "I don't know how long I waited there. Days, maybe. Long enough the lantern I had burned out. I've never really liked small, dark spaces since then."
Maybe they'd someday get to have the conversation: that his difficulty with the 'alternate self' thing was… fundamentally not yet believing that he'd had no choice in leaving. Wondering what kind of man he really was if he'd done that. Wondering in whose shadow he walked, how he compared, and hoping it actually wasn't him. Hoping he still had choices. Knowing that kind of thinking was pointless and not being able to help it.
He hoped, also, he could tell her that she could never run out of facts; the more he learned, the greedier he was for more. Including things he only knew the outlines of. That couldn't compare to hearing her versions.
The idea of a child version of her alone in the dark made his heart contract with pain. He lifted their hands to his face. His lips didn't make contact with her skin, but he rested their fists against his mouth.
The best he could say in support, they seemed to have decided, was a kindred fact.
"I still get nervous when I'm barefoot," he said. "In the prison on Narkina 5, we couldn't wear shoes because they electrified the floors to punish us and keep us in line."
Of course, he'd managed it earlier today, and on the metallic floors of the ship, no less. He felt safer in Jyn's space.
"Narkina?" Jyn echoed without meaning to, brow shooting up as she turned to him. "Kriff." She'd never been there herself, but she had spent enough time in enough other Imperial prisons to have heard stories, all of them horrific. It hurt to think about him in a place like that and still dealing with the effects of it now, even if there was plenty she could say the same about, even having known for a long time that their lives had been more alike than not.
Maybe that was part of why she had never pressed him for information about himself. There wasn't much of a need to, when she felt on some intrinsic level that they knew and understood each other already. He'd all but said as much, albeit in anger: You're not the only one who lost everything.
With him opening up to her now, though, she wanted to learn as much as she could, even when it was hard, or maybe especially then. It was easier, anyway, than thinking about the proximity of her hand to his mouth, the warmth of his breath on her skin sending a shiver through her.
Her voice quieted again before she offered her next fact — a continuation, really, of the one that had preceded it. This, she had never told anyone before, not even him. "Sometimes I feel like I'm still there," she admitted. "Like I never left, and I'm still just that girl alone in the dark, waiting for someone to come find her."
There's more than one kind of prison… I sense you carry yours wherever you go
The firelight danced in his eyes, bright like tears. The look on his face was of such heartbreaking tenderness; not surprised she had that, wishing she didn't.
"I get that," he said softly. He bit the inside of his lip then said, "Fact: for a while I was a recruitment officer. Recruitment isn't about getting people to join the fight. It's arming them, physically and mentally, against the one they're already in. …If you were one of my recruits, I might suggest you try to envision you as an adult finding you as a child. You being big enough now to find yourself."
It was deeply, painfully unfair, having him look at her like that while so close in the dim firelight, listening as she told him some of her most closely-held truths. Jyn almost felt like she couldn't breathe, watching him. That look seemed to say almost as much as the words themselves did, though she took those in, too, oddly touched by the sentiment. Simply the fact that he understood meant more than she would ever be able to tell him.
There were, of course, other ways of trying to convey as much, ones that she once wouldn't have thought twice about with him. Near as he was, it would have been too easy to close the rest of the distance between them. She knew, though, that it would be a mistake, too liable to ruin whatever tenuous understanding they'd settled into here. She wasn't sure she could bear that.
So, instead, she would have to try to find words, and not flippant ones about how she thought he'd already recruited her. She considered for a moment, quiet and thoughtful, then finally found a way to phrase it in another truth.
"Fact," she murmured. "If we'd lived, I would have stayed."
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 07:10 pm (UTC)"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."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 07:20 pm (UTC)"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."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 08:24 pm (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 08:36 pm (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 08:51 pm (UTC)"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.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 08:57 pm (UTC)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?"
no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 09:12 pm (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 09:25 pm (UTC)"Okay," he said, running his thumb over hers in the flickering light. "Thank you."
So, it was his turn again. He tried to think of something and not worry about it being something
the other himwould or wouldn't have already told. Just be in the moment. Here and now, in front of the fire, holding her hand. The trousers were proving recalcitrant but were blackened and curling. The tunic had all-but burned away."There was a short time when Kaytoo became fascinated by organic humor and insisted I tell him jokes."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 10:06 pm (UTC)She smiled faintly at this new fact, tucking it away with the others. It was one more thing she hadn't heard before, and yet, brief as her acquaintance with the droid had been, she could easily imagine that of Kay.
"You know now I'm going to want to hear some of those jokes," she pointed out, although that wasn't a fact in keeping with the game. Between this one and the mention of his parents' droid with a stutter, she had what seemed like a decent one in mind, a detail that seemed unlikely to have made it into any file. "When I was really little — mostly before I can remember — we had a nanny droid, Mac-Vee. I think I spent more time with him than either of my parents. He didn't make it off Coruscant with us, either."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 10:24 pm (UTC)A nanny droid was a fascinating choice, after the event in Jyn's file with Separatist droids. Maybe Galen and Lyra Erso had been trying to override the bad memory of droids with a good one. On the other hand, it was just common practice on Coruscant. It could go either way. Cassian was glad he wasn't called upon to judge the Ersos. (As he had before and fouled it up.)
He'd been trying to think of something light-hearted, and abruptly failed. He bit his lip, trying to resist, then gave up. Honesty.
"I've been in prison twice. The first time, when I was thirteen to when I turned sixteen. The second time, it was an Imperial facility. I was there much shorter because we broke out. They would have never let us go."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 11:06 pm (UTC)"I have so many things I want to ask you," she admitted. That wasn't the game, though, and in spite of every instinct that told her to do otherwise, she let herself hope that they would have time to eventually circle back and discuss some of these subjects in further depth.
"I'm not actually sure how many times I've been in prison. I do know that I would have died there, if the Alliance hadn't broken me out." Six months into a twenty-year sentence, in a place where people didn't tend to live more than two years. That was easy math.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-13 12:05 am (UTC)"We can change the rules whenever we want," said Cassian with a small smile. To prove it, he cleared his throat and started on—"Kay's favorite joke.
"A crew's separated from their ship and make camp in a field. The captain wakes them in the middle of the night. She says, 'Look up at the stars. What do they tell you?'
"The navigator says, 'We are currently near the equator.'
"The ambassador says, 'Their constellations reflect a matriarchal mythology.'
"The pilot says, 'The universe is larger than one being could ever explore.'
"The mechanic frowns at all of them and says, 'That somebody stole our tent.' "
no subject
Date: 2025-05-13 01:07 am (UTC)"I can see why that's his favorite," she said, laughing quietly. "It's a good one." She wished she had a joke she could offer him in turn, but she couldn't think of any. "Does that count as a fact? Is it my turn or yours?"
Rules or lack thereof be damned, she wanted to hear whatever he saw fit to tell her.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-13 01:35 am (UTC)"It was my job," he said, (Fact,) "before Melshi and Kay extracted you from Wobani, to build a profile on you. Even though we had all your files, some physical details had got lost.
"When I finally saw you in person, most details were right but I felt in some intangible way I'd gotten you completely wrong. And one tangible thing. From the amount of damage you've caused others, we assumed you'd be tall. I loved that you were short."
Belatedly, his face flushed. "I don't know if that really counts either."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-13 02:05 am (UTC)In a way, it felt like coming home. It shouldn't, and yet she savored it, warmth suffusing through her.
"When I was young," she said, another fact of her own, "right around the time I realized I wouldn't be getting much if any taller, I hated being so short. Hated that people would look at me and just see a scrawny little girl. Saw taught me that being underestimated could be a strength, and how to use it to my advantage."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-13 02:20 am (UTC)His voice died because the real end to that sentence
(Morlana One)
was …deadly.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-13 03:07 am (UTC)Her thumb brushed against the back of his hand again, an idle, thoughtless gesture.
"All right. Fact. Sprinkles was actually yours, before. I think that's why she went running to you like she did. She must remember you."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-13 03:20 am (UTC)The fact she gave numbed his hand. He’d almost managed to forget, because it was so unimaginable. But he shouldn’t, because she couldn’t. Or should he, because if he focused on it, he would second-guess everything until he tormented her and drove himself mad…
They’d find a balance. He was determined to.
So, it wasn’t a fact, but he felt pretty okay with replying, “How the Force did you let me name her ‘Sprinkles’?”
no subject
Date: 2025-05-13 03:31 am (UTC)"She was a stray. A former owner'd named her. Trust me, I would not have let you name her Sprinkles."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-13 02:38 pm (UTC)Because it wasn't him. Even if the nose of a small dog said otherwise.
He hadn't figured it out, but he knew enough to close his other hand around hers and hold them close. For a long moment he just looked into the fire.
"On Lothal," he said at last. "I knew better than to name any of the loth-cats. But of course, my favorite one, I started to think of as 'Ziggy'."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-13 05:27 pm (UTC)Had this reunion of sorts happened years earlier, that might have been more difficult for her to wrap her head around. She was so far removed from that life she'd shared with him now, though, having been without him longer than she was ever with him several times over. Most likely, if he had shown up and remembered all of it, it would have been equally as complicated, just in a different sort of way.
When he did finally speak again, she cracked a small smile, watching the flames flicker in the darkness. "Ziggy," she repeated. "Good name." She was running out of facts, she thought, at least ones that he wasn't likely to know already and that didn't involve that past life here. After a moment, she settled instead on details to supplement something he doubtless knew. The subject was an uncomfortable one, but given all he'd shared with her, it felt warranted.
"On Lah'mu, after they came for my father... I hid in a cave underground. We were all supposed to go. We used to practice sometimes, like it was a game." Then they'd changed the plan, left her alone, the beginning of a recurring pattern in her life. "I don't know how long I waited there. Days, maybe. Long enough the lantern I had burned out. I've never really liked small, dark spaces since then."
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Date: 2025-05-13 05:40 pm (UTC)He hoped, also, he could tell her that she could never run out of facts; the more he learned, the greedier he was for more. Including things he only knew the outlines of. That couldn't compare to hearing her versions.
The idea of a child version of her alone in the dark made his heart contract with pain. He lifted their hands to his face. His lips didn't make contact with her skin, but he rested their fists against his mouth.
The best he could say in support, they seemed to have decided, was a kindred fact.
"I still get nervous when I'm barefoot," he said. "In the prison on Narkina 5, we couldn't wear shoes because they electrified the floors to punish us and keep us in line."
Of course, he'd managed it earlier today, and on the metallic floors of the ship, no less. He felt safer in Jyn's space.
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Date: 2025-05-13 06:38 pm (UTC)Maybe that was part of why she had never pressed him for information about himself. There wasn't much of a need to, when she felt on some intrinsic level that they knew and understood each other already. He'd all but said as much, albeit in anger: You're not the only one who lost everything.
With him opening up to her now, though, she wanted to learn as much as she could, even when it was hard, or maybe especially then. It was easier, anyway, than thinking about the proximity of her hand to his mouth, the warmth of his breath on her skin sending a shiver through her.
Her voice quieted again before she offered her next fact — a continuation, really, of the one that had preceded it. This, she had never told anyone before, not even him. "Sometimes I feel like I'm still there," she admitted. "Like I never left, and I'm still just that girl alone in the dark, waiting for someone to come find her."
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Date: 2025-05-13 09:17 pm (UTC)The firelight danced in his eyes, bright like tears. The look on his face was of such heartbreaking tenderness; not surprised she had that, wishing she didn't.
"I get that," he said softly. He bit the inside of his lip then said, "Fact: for a while I was a recruitment officer. Recruitment isn't about getting people to join the fight. It's arming them, physically and mentally, against the one they're already in. …If you were one of my recruits, I might suggest you try to envision you as an adult finding you as a child. You being big enough now to find yourself."
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Date: 2025-05-13 10:33 pm (UTC)There were, of course, other ways of trying to convey as much, ones that she once wouldn't have thought twice about with him. Near as he was, it would have been too easy to close the rest of the distance between them. She knew, though, that it would be a mistake, too liable to ruin whatever tenuous understanding they'd settled into here. She wasn't sure she could bear that.
So, instead, she would have to try to find words, and not flippant ones about how she thought he'd already recruited her. She considered for a moment, quiet and thoughtful, then finally found a way to phrase it in another truth.
"Fact," she murmured. "If we'd lived, I would have stayed."
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