He pressed another kiss into her hair and murmured, "Good night, Jyn."
* * *
The night passed without further interruption. If Cassian dreamed, he woke without remembering it. What greeted him, waking, was the sight of Jyn beside him, with sunlight streaming in her hair.
For a while, Cassian just gazed at her.
Though he didn't want to compare, of course comparisons were inevitable. His last relationship had been with someone he'd known most of his life, with that level of the relationship on and off throughout. Yet he and Bix had never achieved the kind of seamless interreaction and interreliance that Cassian and Jyn had had almost from the start. How much of that was because he and Jyn were so fresh, and it would wear off? How much was because he and Jyn were so similar? That was a good thing in many ways—not least, they had incredible understanding walking together through the dark—but was it also a bad thing, not to have contrast?
He came to the conclusions he always had and always would. All of this was imaginary. What was real was her. Be with her. Walk beside her and work it through together.
Cassian was tempted to sneak out of bed and surprise Jyn with breakfast. …But never, don't ever leave while someone was still asleep to wake and find you gone. So instead, he leaned over to kiss her face until she stirred.
Then they began their day.
They remembered last night and decided to take their walk in the woods right away. It wasn't far, after clearing the Falcon's garden and surrounding field.
This was a deciduous forest, quite unlike the jungles of Yavin 4 and Kenari. They walked over pine needles and moss and didn't need a blade to hack their way between trees. There were constant sounds of birdsong and animals skittering out of their way, but lacking the ceaseless, blanketing din of insects, it seemed so quiet. Sunlight pierced through here and there, resulting in bursts of flowers. Without meaning to, purely on training, Cassian was following the moss and other signs to a water source, so they were also starting to hear the sounds of a brook or river.
"This is beautiful," he said as they walked side by side.
"Yeah, it is, isn't it?" Jyn agreed, something a little like wonder in her voice. She'd lived here so long, spent plenty of time in and around these woods, but seeing all of it with him for the first time, she felt a little like she was experiencing it anew herself, finally able once again to appreciate the natural beauty of Darrow's environment. Of all the places a person could wind up stuck, it was a lucky one — temperate climate, varied landscape, usually nothing too extreme in the different seasons. She'd lived worse places. That this one now, again, had him here made it that much better — made it a place she could want to be rather than one where she had reluctantly settled.
"I haven't been out here in a while. This was a good idea."
He looked over and gave her that smile of his: that nothing he could see was as wonderful as she was.
The ground beneath them turned a little rocky, then the trees opened up, revealing not only the river, but a small waterfall splashing into a large pool. Mist from the falls prismed full round rainbows.
Cassian actually caught his breath. He murmured in explanation, "I wish Maarva could see this."
Jyn loved that smile of his even more than she loved being the cause of it. She met it with one of her own, small and pleased, staying in step beside him. This time, there were no teasing attempts at playing tour guide. Partly it was because she didn't know the terrain out here as well as she knew the expanse of countryside they'd walked previously; partly it was because everything out here, the sunlight filtering through leaves and paths dotted with wildflowers, spoke for itself far better than she could speak for it.
The waterfall, when they came to it, was beautiful, but her focus was fixed more on him than their surroundings, taking in the way he took in everything around them. Relaxed and sun-kissed like this, looking quietly awestruck by the view, he was as breathtaking to her as anything around them.
"Yeah?" she asked in response to his statement, expression shifting slightly, bittersweet but hopeful. "What was she like? If you don't mind talking about her."
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.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2025-06-03 01:58 am (UTC)The night passed without further interruption. If Cassian dreamed, he woke without remembering it. What greeted him, waking, was the sight of Jyn beside him, with sunlight streaming in her hair.
For a while, Cassian just gazed at her.
Though he didn't want to compare, of course comparisons were inevitable. His last relationship had been with someone he'd known most of his life, with that level of the relationship on and off throughout. Yet he and Bix had never achieved the kind of seamless interreaction and interreliance that Cassian and Jyn had had almost from the start. How much of that was because he and Jyn were so fresh, and it would wear off? How much was because he and Jyn were so similar? That was a good thing in many ways—not least, they had incredible understanding walking together through the dark—but was it also a bad thing, not to have contrast?
He came to the conclusions he always had and always would. All of this was imaginary. What was real was her. Be with her. Walk beside her and work it through together.
Cassian was tempted to sneak out of bed and surprise Jyn with breakfast. …But never, don't ever leave while someone was still asleep to wake and find you gone. So instead, he leaned over to kiss her face until she stirred.
Then they began their day.
They remembered last night and decided to take their walk in the woods right away. It wasn't far, after clearing the Falcon's garden and surrounding field.
This was a deciduous forest, quite unlike the jungles of Yavin 4 and Kenari. They walked over pine needles and moss and didn't need a blade to hack their way between trees. There were constant sounds of birdsong and animals skittering out of their way, but lacking the ceaseless, blanketing din of insects, it seemed so quiet. Sunlight pierced through here and there, resulting in bursts of flowers. Without meaning to, purely on training, Cassian was following the moss and other signs to a water source, so they were also starting to hear the sounds of a brook or river.
"This is beautiful," he said as they walked side by side.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-03 02:42 am (UTC)"I haven't been out here in a while. This was a good idea."
no subject
Date: 2025-06-03 02:57 am (UTC)The ground beneath them turned a little rocky, then the trees opened up, revealing not only the river, but a small waterfall splashing into a large pool. Mist from the falls prismed full round rainbows.
Cassian actually caught his breath. He murmured in explanation, "I wish Maarva could see this."
no subject
Date: 2025-06-03 03:41 am (UTC)The waterfall, when they came to it, was beautiful, but her focus was fixed more on him than their surroundings, taking in the way he took in everything around them. Relaxed and sun-kissed like this, looking quietly awestruck by the view, he was as breathtaking to her as anything around them.
"Yeah?" she asked in response to his statement, expression shifting slightly, bittersweet but hopeful. "What was she like? If you don't mind talking about her."
no subject
Date: 2025-06-03 04:04 am (UTC)"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."
no subject
Date: 2025-06-03 04:35 am (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2025-06-03 04:50 am (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2025-06-03 05:31 am (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2025-06-03 06:14 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-03 06:43 am (UTC)"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.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-03 06:51 am (UTC)"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.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-03 07:46 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-03 09:45 pm (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2025-06-04 02:33 am (UTC)"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."
no subject
Date: 2025-06-04 02:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-04 03:22 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-04 03:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-04 04:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-04 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-04 05:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-04 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-05 12:09 am (UTC)"It's like that for me, too."
no subject
Date: 2025-06-05 12:30 am (UTC)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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Date: 2025-06-05 03:21 am (UTC)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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Date: 2025-06-05 06:21 pm (UTC)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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