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Carlin
Cassian Andor tries to act tough around the other new Rebel recruits. He wants them to think he’s not afraid of anything, and that he doesn’t need anyone.
He’s only fifteen, which makes him the youngest here by at least two years. Even though he looks like a grown man already and has years of guerilla fighting experience, he knows that acting like a grown man is the only way he’ll get to see official military action anytime soon.
But no matter how tough he tries to act, and no matter how much he tries to deny it to himself, he still misses Carlin desperately.
His brother was only four when he died. He can’t remember much of what happened that night, though he’s replayed the flashes of memory still left to him over and over again in the years since.
Enraged by its mounting losses throughout the galaxy, the Empire had begun attacking civilian and Rebellion targets in Fest’s system indiscriminately. With no warning save at all the bombs began to fall on his small, peaceful farming village for days on end.
Cassian – only ten at the time – had been alone in their hut with Carlin during the siege. Their parents left them behind only six months earlier to join the fight in the outer rim. They’d made Cassian promise to look after his brother, and he had sworn to them that he would.
But by the time Cassian was able to dig his brother from the rubble that had once been their home it was too late. The following morning, he discovered his entire village had been flattened and he was the only one spared.
Carlin Andor had had curly, blonde hair and was an achingly beautiful child. Nearly five years Cassian’s junior, Carlin had been the most important thing to Cassian in the entire universe.
He still is.
Cassian lets himself think about Carlin sometimes, when everyone else in his regiment is asleep. But only then. Everyone here has their own reasons for fighting, of course, but as the youngest recruit Cassian needs to show them he’s also the strongest. He can’t let them know that at core, he’s just as soft as any other boy of fifteen.
When Cassian can’t sleep at night he clings to the few precious memories he still has of his brother. Holding his beautiful face in his mind’s eye, Cassian vows his death will not be in vain.
Jyn
When Cassian learns the prisoner they’re planning to spring is Galen Erso’s daughter, he’s furious.
“No way,” he says, shaking his head. He paces back and forth in his commanding officer’s war room, hands on his hips, trying to calm down. “Absolutely not.”
“Why not, Andor?” the officer asks. He doesn’t even bother to look up from his comm as he asks the question, which tells Cassian in no uncertain terms that this discussion is just a formality and will change nothing. “What better tool is there for getting what we want than Erso’s own daughter?”
“His daughter will be emotionally compromised by her ties to him,” Cassian insists. “Far too compromised to view the mission objectively. And by all reports she’s extremely volatile. A loose cannon. Sir, with all due respect, this is a terrible idea.”
But there’s nothing to be done for it. Cassian has his orders, and while he’s frustrated by them he knows better than to disobey.
oOoOo
To his surprise, Cassian quickly learns he was dead wrong about Jyn Erso.
Jyn is a fahdha, as they might have said back in his village. That is to say: she’s a mess. She’s caustic as hell, and would sooner punch a person in the face than have a real conversation. The second day she’s with them she steals his blaster from his duffel, and then lies to him about it a minute later, throwing his earlier question of trust right back in his face.
But despite all that it’s quickly obvious to Cassian that although Jyn’s small, she’s strong. Very strong. She’s also better in a fight than anyone he’s met in a very long time. All told she’ll be a good asset to the Rebellion, he decides.
And then Jyn shocks him to the core when she pulls that little girl out of harm’s way in Jedha. Jyn had never met the girl before, and yet she risked her life to save her from certain death. Cassian thinks of Jyn Erso in an entirely different way after that, realizing there’s more to the girl than a loose tongue, good aim, and a fast punch.
oOoOo
To her face, Cassian calls her Erso. Everyone calls her Erso.
This is war, and they are soldiers. There are no first names in the Rebellion.
But one night, when everyone else is asleep and he is alone in his bunk, Cassian whispers her given name in the darkness. Just to test it out. To see what it feels like to say her name out loud.
“Jyn,” he says to himself, thinking about that defiant look in her eye when she swiped his blaster.
His voice is barely above a whisper, but the single syllable feels oddly silken in his mouth. Almost like honey on his tongue.
Cassian says her name again, a little more loudly. Then a third time.
He smiles, deciding her name suits her.
No !
Cassian wakes in a blind panic, his heart racing in his chest and his hands futilely scrabbling for purchase in the empty air above his cot.
It takes him a long moment to calm down enough to realize that neither he nor Jyn are presently in any danger. When his vision clears a bit and he sees the star chart hanging on the far wall of his bunk, his flight suit hanging neatly in his closet – and Jyn, curled up beside him, facing away from him and sleeping peacefully – Cassian’s breathing and heartbeat finally begin to slow to rates more closely resembling normal.
It was a nightmare, he thinks, trying to calm himself further. Only a nightmare.
Just because he has the same one almost every night doesn’t make it real.
oOoOo
They’re always back on Scarif in these dreams, clinging for dear life to that ledge. In reality, of course, they’d successfully retrieved the Stardust file the Rebellion needed and lived to tell the story. In his dreams, however, Jyn’s grip on that ledge falters, and she falls down, down, down. Night after night, Cassian is forced to watch helplessly, in slow, technicolor motion, as Jyn plummets to her death – kicking, screaming, crying out for him. Lost to her friends, lost to the Rebellion, and lost to him. Forever. All because of his infallible idiocy and slow reflexes.
He’s not certain, yet, what she wants from him. He’s afraid to put a name to what it is he feels for her. All the same, they haven’t spent a single night apart since the horrible day they both nearly died. His nightmares are bad enough when Jyn is the first thing he sees upon waking. Without her near him while he sleeps he’s not sure he’d ever sleep again.
I love you
Cassian tells himself he never means for these things to happen.
Those times they find themselves inching closer to one another on the bench inside the cockpit. Those times they tumble together onto Jyn’s narrow cot on nights everyone else is out on patrol, his mouth hot on her neck, her hand palming him roughly, desperately through the thick fabric of his jeans.
All of it can be chalked up to a string of accidents, really. Accidents between two people who’ve been through hell together and who’ve known each other for what feels like years.
Somehow, though – and for reasons Cassian won’t think about – these accidents between them keep on happening. He is drawn to her, irresistibly. Helplessly. Like a moth to a flame.
And so when they find themselves alone one night, drinking lousy beer and sitting cross-legged on the floor of her tent, the sounds of the night thrumming around them and the steady beat of his heart coursing through his veins, the words just slip out.
“I think I love you,” he admits quietly. He’d like to tell himself it’s just the beer talking. But that would be a lie, and he knows it.
The look Jyn gives him by way of response is full of smoldering desire. Giving in to it isn’t even a question.
He swallows thickly, and then Jyn’s lips are hot on his neck almost before he realizes it’s happening. Her mouth trails lower, her greedy fingers pushing up his thin cotton shirt so her tongue can lick a path down, down, down. He runs his hands over her narrow shoulders as she hastily, deftly undoes his belt buckle, pops the button on his jeans, pulls down the zipper, and then takes him into her mouth, wet and warm and humming around him.
“Fuck” he grunts quietly, and then his eyes drift shut as he surrenders to the headiness of it all; to the scent of her and to the sounds of the night. She’s in a little summer dress for once, pure and white, which is such a hilarious thing given who she is and everything they’ve done that he’d laugh out loud if her tongue weren’t swirling around him, hot and heavy and slow, and if that weren’t the only thing in the universe that mattered to him right now.
Cassian grazes his fingers along the thin straps of her dress, and then ducks beneath it until his fingers skim the lacy outer shell of her bra. He opens his eyes to watch her, then, to stare at her with open-mouthed reverence as she takes him deeper into her mouth, stunned as he sees where white and pure meets with lace and this.
He is so distracted by the sight of her mouth on him, of the feel of her cheeks hollowing out around him, that he moans, loudly, unable to help himself, before he can remind himself that he cannot make any noise right now. Their friends are just outside this tent, laughing and drinking on their first night off duty in ages. If they’re overheard, they’ll finally know the truth about them. If that happens the Rebellion might, at last, split them up and assign them to different bases.
Having to say goodbye to her like that would destroy him.
If Jyn can read his turbulent thoughts she shows no sign of it. Instead, she simply pulls back from him, her lips glistening, her eyes unreadable.
She looks at him a long moment. When still she says nothing Cassian has a moment of panic that this, finally, is the line he was never supposed to cross.
“I’m… I’m sorry,” he stammers, his words tripping over each other as they tumble from his mouth. “I shouldn’t have – I’ll be quieter – ”
“Shhhh,” Jyn says, cutting him off by pressing a delicate finger to his lips. She quirks an eyebrow up at him mischievously.
Wordlessly, without warning, she takes him in her hand, and pumps him up and down with deliberate purpose, until she wrenches another helpless whimper from his throat and his eyes roll back in his head.
“You can’t always be in control, Cassian,” she purrs into his ear. Her words are little puffs of warm air against his skin as she works him, and he whimpers again, helplessly, literal putty in her hands. “And… I love you too.”
Her words are nearly his undoing, and he bites his fist to keep from crying out. She takes him into her mouth again with a dismissive hum, claiming him definitively as hers, the Rebellion and their friends be damned, and cutting off the rest of his words with a merciless sweep of her tongue.
One day, all of this could disappear. Jyn could be captured by the Empire, or killed. He could die too. Cassian knows better than most how fleeting and ephemeral life can be. But as Jyn touches and loves him here, in this tent, faint rays of moonlight spilling into the little room and illuminating her beautiful body, he has never felt true happiness more within reach.
Home
Cassian has wanted to show Jyn his home – his real home; the place where he was a small, carefree child, back before his world and everyone else’s was torn apart – ever since he realized what she meant to him. She never really had a proper home, of course, and so every night, in their bunk, as they lay in each other’s arms, he would whisper little stories about his village to her in her ear, waiting for her reaction and making her smile.
But duty called for years on end for both of them. The Rebellion needed them. And so it isn’t until after Vader is defeated and the Empire destroyed that Cassian is finally able to take her back to the small, backward planet of his youth.
“It wasn’t much, Fest,” he tells her, by way of explanation and apology, once they land. They hold hands as they walk together through the ruined streets and shattered buildings, Cassian scanning the horizon for anything that might look familiar. He swallows thickly; nothing here looks the same. “I suppose it’s even less than that now, after decades of war.”
She gives his hand a gentle squeeze. “But you still love it,” she says quietly. It isn’t a question.
He nods. “Yeah,” he says, trying to swallow the lump in his throat. “I guess I do. It’s where… well. It’s where I was born. Where my brother was born. And my parents.”
She kisses him gently, then, and smiles against his cheek. “Then I’ll come to love it too,” she tells him quietly.
It’ll be years before this planet is habitable again. He knows that. He also knows that after everything they’ve been through he doesn’t have it in him to assist in the rebuilding. But one day – perhaps someday far in the future; or perhaps one day as soon as next year – he hopes he will get to settle here with Jyn. Perhaps even start a family here.
In the meantime, they have each other. For now, that’s the only home either of them need.