Work Text:
Time keeps moving on
Friends, they turn away
I keep moving on
But I never found out why
I keep pushing so hard the dream
I keep trying to make it right
Through another lonely day
- Janis Joplin, Kozmic Blues -
“Shara, I’ve been meaning to ask you something… have I upset you in any way?”
Shara sighed, and gave Jyn a hard look.
“I suppose we have to talk this out.”
The abyss between them seemed to have grown a hundred times more during those seconds of waiting.
“Is this because of… of him? Because, Shara, we shouldn’t let this matter get in the way of our friendsh-“
“It already is” – Shara cut Jyn off, quite abruptly.
Jyn blinked in astonishment.
“Don’t pretend it isn’t going to affect us, because it is”, Shara argued, leading Jyn out to the hallway.
“But Shara-“
“I don’t want to compete over someone with you”, Shara spit, going straight to the point. She was staring at Jyn from head to toe.
Jyn mistook that for an offer of peace.
She foolishly smiled.
“Great! Now we can put all this behind us…”
“No, we can’t”, Shara countered, breaking Jyn’s heart. “He is not a toy for us to dispute... I can see why he likes you. You’re smart, kind, funny… pretty.”
Jyn knew that those were no compliments.
It was strange, how she had never been called pretty her entire life, and, now that she had, it wasn’t meant to praise or congratulate her.
“Shara, you’re also all these things”, Jyn said, exasperated.
“It’s easier to notice that in you. And it’s not your fault.”
Jyn wasn’t getting what Shara wanted to say.
Shara looked at Jyn, and perhaps there was some compassion in her cool gaze.
“Sit, Jyn.”
Jyn obeyed.
Shara moved to sit beside her.
“Look, Jyn, what I’m saying is… I think you don’t understand other people’s feelings, and sometimes I think that you don't understand your own as well. I see the way you look at Cassian, your big puppy eyes. Don’t try to pretend that you don’t have any feelings for him, because you do. You can lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to me.”
Jyn let Shara’s words sink in, but now that Shara had started, she wouldn’t stop.
“And Jyn… I appreciate the kindness you’ve shown me, all the support, all the laughs… but I’m afraid you have more feelings for me than I do for you.”
The bell rang, and Shara looked at Jyn apologetically.
“I have to go now”, she said, with a smile that Jyn couldn’t decipher anymore. “Take care.”
Just like that, she was gone.
Jyn picked up her stuff, tried to collect her feelings left on the ground. She breathed deep, summoning the bravery to go on, and went back to her day on the anatomy laboratory.
Her mind was not where it should be. Her scrubs were too tight, her study was mechanical. It was almost as if there was a second Jyn occupying her body, listing all the items in the neuroanatomy list.
There were other students listening to her listing, and the back of her faraway mind wondered if they knew what she was really thinking about.
“The mesencephalic duct is a sort of aqueduct within the mesencephalon. It connects the third ventricle, which is in the diencephalon, to the fourth ventricle, which is in the mesencephalon and also in the metencephalon, which is dorsal to the pons and ventral to the cerebellum. The mesencephalic duct contains cerebrospinal fluid, a clear, colourless fluid. Now, do you know its function? No? Okay, no worries. We’re here to help each other out. It’s supposed to provide mechanical and immunological protection to the brain, and also to support cerebral autoregulation of cerebral blood flow. Any questions?”
Reciting basic anatomy was therapeutic, but it could only last for so long. As soon as Jyn reached the bus stop, all thoughts of science were forgotten.
It was like receiving a blow. The pain didn’t come right away, when Shara spoke to her. It came bit by bit.
People always spoke of how this generation was different; of how they hoped that, this time, things would be better.
If someone mentioned two women fighting over a man, there would be allegations that it was a phenomenon endemic to the 50s. It was a popular belief that women should not degrade each other, or break each other’s hearts.
Jyn believed in those ideals. Not only did she believe those, she tried to live by them. She put on effort to befriend Leia and Shara, despite her introvert instincts. She brought them homemade cookies, got drunk with them, told jokes and sad tales, and, when something jeopardized their bond, Jyn sacrificed it, never mind what it cost her.
To realize that she had lost both people was awful. She repressed her feelings every day, believing that she was doing the right thing by being a loyal friend, when in reality the person meant to be happy with her choice did not even esteem her.
Why was Shara so complicated? Why couldn’t she appreciate her efforts? It didn’t matter if those consisted of cookies shared during classes or sacrificed relationships; Jyn still put her all in making friends.
Bodhi was wrong. She shouldn’t have tried so hard to get close to people. They only ever led her to disappointment.
People sucked.
Jyn had to sit down for a second. She put her hands in her head, like a broken-winged blackbird.
Someone stopped by her side.
“Are you okay?”
The voice was far too familiar.
She looked up and saw the person who had unconsciously started this whole mess.
She was tempted to brush him off and continue with the farce, but she did not feel like lying to him, especially when it felt like she had been awake for forty-eight hours straight. She was so tired that the disposition to keep pushing him away was quenched.
“It was a long day.”
Cassian tentatively looked at her. He peered at the other people standing at the bus stop, as if assessing different scenarios.
He finally decided to sit down by her side.
They were staring at anywhere but at each other.
“You can tell me to fuck off, but you’re well aware that telling other people about things that upset you is helpful. You don’t have to talk to me. Just find someone you can trust”, Cassian said, briefly glancing at her in expectation.
She knew deep down that he wanted her to talk to him. He just had a funny way of asking for it.
Why not indulge him? What good came out of not gathering roses?
Even if nothing …romantic bloomed between them, she would still make a friend out of him, and she was in no position of being too selective in that regard.
“I’m just tired, you see. It seems as if nothing is working out. I miss my family, college is not as rewarding as I’d thought it’d be, and I’m always fooling myself in believing that I’m important to other people.”
Cassian took in her answer, not immediately responding. Jyn figured that he was not the kind of person who would declaim a motivational speech out of the blue.
“What happened?” He asked instead.
Jyn recalled everything that had happened recently. Enunciating those things out loud would be dreadfully exhausting, so she just hung her head, feeling impossibly powerless.
People’s shadows were moving on the floor, and Jyn tried to pay attention to them instead of fixating her gaze on the man sitting next to her. Still, she ultimately caught him staring.
It wasn’t really shocking when Cassian hugged her. Jyn had a feeling that he would do that, and she was too weary to resist his care.
He cradled her head against his chest. Jyn had not been touched in a long time, and so she knew in advance that the memory of the warmth of his skin would still be printed in the back of her mind long after he was gone.
“Don’t be nervous”, he pleaded, and she noticed his low tone. He never spoke like that to other people.
“Why do you think I am?” She whispered.
“Your heart – it’s beating fast.”
Her cheeks flushed at her body’s betrayal.
Who was this guy, hugging her at the bus stop, making remarks on her heart’s pulsing rhythm and expecting her to be immune to his effects?
Jyn put her hand on his chest out of spite, to see if he was just as cool as he pretended to be.
He was not. Beneath her palm, the space between his lungs was thunderously pulsing.
“You’re one to talk.”
Cassian chuckled soundlessly and sarcastically, but his hold did not waver for one second.
“What is going on, Jyn?”
Jyn sighed. Questioning her in her most vulnerable state was almost unfair, but deep down she was not too bothered by it. She wanted him to decipher her.
“It’s Shara. She… she told me some things that I didn’t want to hear.”
He stroked her back.
“It’s difficult to hear criticism…”
“I’m not talking about criticism. She told me that I have more feelings for her than she has for me.”
She left out the part that concerned Shara’s affections for him. It wasn’t really her place to tell, even if Shara had shattered her heart in a million pieces and then tap danced on it.
“Shara is a closed-off person, Jyn. She doesn’t grow feelings easily. It doesn’t mean that she doesn’t like you; just that she’s not as attached as you are. And it’s not a flaw, it’s just the way she lives her life.”
Jyn considered Cassian’s words. Weirdly, his explanation soothed her pain. It was like listening to a scientific reasoning and killing the hurtful doubts that inundated her.
Jyn understood something new about Shara.
“People are not always who you think they are”, he concluded.
(She also understood something new about Cassian.)
“Do you think I ought to forgive her?”
“I don’t think she needs your forgiveness. She didn’t do it out of purpose to hurt you. And it’s not exactly a sin, is it?”
Jyn wondered if he would still say that if he knew about the rift that he had inadvertently caused and also about the way Shara had reacted to it.
“I’m not talking forgiveness as a form of absolution, just as like… letting go of the sadness she made me feel.”
Jyn also wanted to forgive herself. Desperately. If she had hurt Shara by getting close to Cassian, then she hurt herself twice as much. The guilt almost drowned her, and every self-deprecating thought about being a slut, a disloyal friend and a traitor chased her like a swarm of wasps.
“Then yes”, Cassian wisely replied.
Shara was not the real enemy.
The real enemy was herself.
“I think I’ll never be as close to her as I wanted to be… but maybe that’s okay.”
After all, she was the one always holding back from her own happiness. Shara’s actions had undoubtedly stung, but they were nothing compared to the abuse she did to herself.
The real violence came from within.
Repressing her feelings was like killing a part of her soul, and she found that she did not want to force herself to be numb and feel nothing. That would only lead to a path of misery, and by the age of forty she would be only half of what she had been at twenty.
Cassian was stroking her hair with a gentleness she wouldn’t have guessed he was capable of possessing, seemingly unaffected by the tempest inside her.
She was still in his arms, her forehead on his chin.
“That’s my bus”, Cassian announced, and Jyn immediately disentangled their bodies in order to let him go.
He squeezed her fingertips one last time and said his goodbyes.
Jyn walked away. She didn’t want to see his bus fading from view.
It was Cassian who went to the back of the bus and saw Jyn distancing herself. She had a black coat on, and she was so small, her steps so sad. She really looked like a blackbird, waiting for her moment to arise.
The passengers boarded the bus, and it turned around the corner, away from Jyn’s fading form. She vanished from his sight, although the thoughts of her were framed in his mind like portraits.
Jyn lied in her bed, staring at the ceiling. She had been having trouble sleeping lately.
With a groan, she rubbed her eyes, trying to evoke rest.
As predicted, Cassian hadn’t really left. She could smell his male deodorant in her hair, feel his arms around her, listen to his breathing and see his black eyes in the darkness.
That was not supposed to happen. It just did, not exactly accidentally but still very unexpectedly. Even after everything, Jyn could not bring herself to regret it. It had been a long time since she had felt this happy, and even the uneasiness around this new feeling could not weaken it. She discovered that she liked to feel this. It was like reading a full book after only getting small samples.
Maybe it was time to let things be as they were meant to be. This was not something to be feared. It was something to be honoured.
They were the last ones to exit the laboratory.
Cassian was carefully folding his scrubs, whereas Jyn just threw her wrinkled vestments on her backpack without thinking twice.
When Jyn glanced at Cassian, he was fulfilling his duties quite diligently behind Erlenmeyer flasks and pipettes, and his dark hair was almost covering his eyes when he concentrated on zipping his backpack. Jyn calmly realized that it had to come from her.
Cassian looked up when she was still watching him. She did not turn her eyes away. He picked up his stuff and they stepped out of the lab, making small conversation about work. She paid attention to the way the crepuscular lighting made his skin look a tone lost somewhere between blue and purple, but with hints of red sprinkled here and there. His eyes were profoundly dark, and Jyn blushed when she realized that she liked the way he looked at her – that was about it. She felt the words stuck in her throat, “I like the way you look at me”, and how easy it would be to just say it to him.
He had never looked more handsome. She was entirely aware of it, of how he was fully there with her. Most of the time, people were only half present, displaying only halves of themselves, but not him, not in that moment. Jyn could not pinpoint why it was him, it just was. Flesh and soul.
Jyn could not think of the reasons behind it, but she was not fully invested in it anyway. Some people left, some people stayed. It turned out that he was meant to be a part of her journey for that moment, and she embraced it.
“This report will have at least thirty-five pages”, Cassian complained. “I can’t believe it’s due next week.”
“It can’t be that hard”, Jyn tried to encourage him. “How many pages does it take to write about creatinine, anyway? The tests aren’t even conclusive.”
“They’re a good indicator of kidney failure. It would do us good to discuss the diagnosis.”
“That would deviate from the objectives, though. You don’t have to diagnose the patient’s condition; you only have to determine if creatinine levels are matching the patient’s weight. It’s rather simplistic, actually. So what if an abnormality leads to kidney failure?”
Cassian smirked, conceding the point.
Jyn found herself smiling, even though she did not mean it.
A brief moment of silence made way for a presentation of resilience.
“You hungry?” She asked him, unafraid.
She watched his face and saw how it lighted up at her invitation.
He, who was so poised and aloof.
“Yeah”, he replied, blinking at her in wonder and anticipation.
Jyn grinned and led the way out the door, and this time she did not pull away when he held her hand.