Chapter Text
He wasn’t sure what woke him. It wasn’t daylight, moonlight still danced across the stone floor. Cassian started mentally cataloguing the sensations in his body. His mouth was dry and someone was tapping an anvil in his skull. The dull ache in his back was as sharper than it had been the last couple of days. A dull ache had settled in his lower abs and thighs as if he had exerted muscles that had been disused. Then he realized he was naked. He turned his head slowly and found Jyn Erso in the bed next to him. She had curled in on herself under the covers. Even in sleep, her face didn’t soften. Even in sleep, she hadn’t found peace.
Well…fuck.
Cassian couldn’t remember making the decision to pull Jyn into his room. The revnog cast a haze over everything, and it came back in fragments. He remembered sinking his fingers into her heat. He could recall the stunned look of awe as she came on his hand. He body still bore the marks from her nails as they scraped along his chest when he spilled into her, her walls spasming squeezing every drop from him.
He felt like the worst shit in the galaxy.
He slowly pushed the covers away and swung his feet to the floor. He’d hoped for cold stone to shock his system into useful wakefulness, but Maz Kanata’s castle had been build over an ancient hot spring and the floor was pleasantly warm. He found his pants and shirt a few feet apart and pulled them on as quietly as he could. Jyn stirred on the bed and he froze. The moment passed. He fastened his trousers and pulled the covers over her bare shoulders, watching how she burrowed further into their warmth in response. He was grateful the door was manually operated as he stepped in the torch-lit corridor.
He hadn’t exactly been a monk since Bix had left him. But the few beings he’d gone to bed with knew exactly what he wanted: a quick fuck and nothing more. His memory was hazy, but he knew he hadn’t been clear with Jyn before before she kissed him and he pressed her against a wall and let his hands find their way under her shirt. He hadn’t been clear with Jyn because he was not at all clear what he wanted himself.
You’re better than this, Cassian.
Maarva’s voice shattered across his wounded spine. He started walking hoping to escape the sad and disappointed face forming in his mind’s eye. It wasn’t long before he realized he was lost. Maz’s castle didn’t exactly have what one might call a logical layout. He wasn’t sure how long he walked before he found her makeshift med bay and the bacta tank he had been in two or three days earlier. Having gathered a semblance of his bearings, he headed to where he seemed to remember a kitchen where he could make himself some caf. As he peered in each door in search of the kitchen, he found a closet full of various dismantled comm units. A distraction would be better than caf anyway.
A pulse code was still the best way to send a coded message across long distances. The Death Star was in pieces. The ISB’s command structure had to be in shambles. From what he could glean, the base on Yavin IV had survived its encounter with the Death Star unscathed. Wilmon, Kleya, or even Vel would be able to translate for whatever officer was working the comms. Presuming they were all alright. Presuming anyone was listening.
Rebellions are built on hope.
Cassian supposed there were worse sentences he could have built the foundation of his life around. He gathered the familiar components on an empty space on a shelf and started to reassemble them. Most of the pieces snapped together with his hands, but he had to root around for a spanner in the messy, poorly lit room for some of them. Kleya would have completed the task sooner, but if the transmitter was successful, she wouldn’t argue with the results.
Not seeing an adequate power supply in the closet, Cassian took his cobbled-together transmitter down the hall to where he thought the kitchen might be. He turned on the lights and found an unoccupied outlet. He searched a couple of drawers for a dull knife and used it to pry off the cover. Carefully, he twisted the transmitter’s wires into the power source and listened as it buzzed to life.
It was almost hypnotic tapping his identity code and then a request for help into the transmitter. He didn’t know how long he was at it before his stomach started grumbling. Acquiescing to his own hunger, he started the caf machine and opened the preserver to find something to eat. He found some bantha milk and strips of salted fat back of some sort of creature. Further examination of the cupboards uncovered some grain and a ripe meiloorun. Another short search and he found a pot and set it on the range. The kitchen had a cooker like the safe house on Coruscant and he laid a few strips of the meat on it to cook before pouring the milk into the pot and turning the range to a low heat.
He tapped his code and request into the transmitter and then added the grain to the pot. It became a cycle: tap, stir, tap, check, tap, add sweetener, tap, cut fruit, tap, take the bacon off the fryer.
“Cass?”
He was startled to see Melshi in the kitchen with red-rimmed eyes and an open shirt that revealed three vivid scratch marks across his chest above the bandage around his abdomen where shrapnel had been removed. Cassian couldn’t help but smirk at his friend’s appearance. “Have fun?”
Melshi looked down at the scratches on his chest and then groaned as if the motion caused him considerable pain. “Too much,” he replied. “Caf?”
Cassian motioned with his head as he stirred the porridge and Melshi trudged over and poured himself a cup. “There’s bacon. You should eat something.”
“Thank you, Mum,” Melshi grumbled before taking a piece of bacon anyway. “So, how’s Erso?”
Cassian flinched at the question and turned around to his friend. The bastard was smirking at him. “I…she,” he hesitated, a part of him unwilling to answer the question. “She was asleep when I left.”
“So whose room you wind up in?”
“Why the hell does that matter?”
“Just does,” Melshi replied, his voice smug as he finished off his bacon.
Cassian sighed and replied, “Mine.”
Melshi raised en eyebrow at him. “So, you just left her there in your bed?”
“Leave it,” Cassian growled spooning some porridge into a bowl.
“You don’t have anything to feel guilty about,” Melshi said, ignoring Cassian as he picked up another slice of bacon. “She left you over a year ago.”
Cassian was glad his back was to his friend as he lost control of his expression while trying to eat. “I…that’s not what I feel guilty about,” he admitted.
“But you do feel guilty.”
Cassian put a large spoonful of porridge in his mouth to put off answering. He could feel Melshi’s eye boring holes into his back. He swallowed thickly and said, “It’s just…she deserves better,” he explained lamely.
Melshi’s laugh actually startled him. “That’s the dumbest kriffing shit I’ve ever heard, Cass. Pretty sure Erso’s capable of deciding what she deserves for herself.”
Cassian shook his head. “It’s just…I don’t think I wanted it to happen that way.”
“You don’t think?” Melshi asked dubiously.
“Could you just…drop it? Please?”
He and Melshi simply stared at one another for interminable moments before Melshi finally cracked and drank the rest of his caf.
“That looks like Kleya’s transmitter from Coruscant.”
“That’s the idea,” Cassian confirmed, grateful his friend was willing to change the subject. “I’m not sure it’s working, but I can’t think of another alternative.”
Melshi’s eyes narrowed as he munched on another slice of bacon. “You worried about our safety here? After the celebration last night?”
Cassian shook his head. “I doubt Maz Kanata would ever betray us. She had Saw Gerrera’s confidence and he didn’t trust his own shadow. The smugglers and pirates that come through here might not have any love for the Empire, but their only loyalty is to their credit stores. No, if we want to get back to the Alliance, we’ll need to call for an extraction.”
“And that’s what you want? To go back to the Alliance?”
Cassian all but gaped at his friend. “Why would you even ask that?”
Melshi shrugged. “Well, if you wanted to disappear, this would be a good time to do it. Anybody who knows us probably thinks we died on Scarif. You could just…disappear.”
“I might have wanted that once,” Cassian admitted quietly. “How well did that work out for you the last time?”
Melshi chuckled. “Not well.”
“The job’s not done, Melshi,” Cassian reminded him. “The Death Star might be destroyed, but the emperor is still alive, the fleet is still in full force, and the infrastructure for expansion is still intact. I’ve seen how the Empire responds to resistance. This isn’t the end.”
“You’re a beacon of positivity,” Melshi groaned, crossing back over to refill his cup of caf. “Teach me the pattern.”
“What?”
“The clicking, beeping pattern. Teach it to me.”
“Why?”
“Because the sun’s coming up and you should probably take Erso some breakfast before she wakes up alone and thinks you’re a bigger asshole than you already think you are.”
“What?”
“Just show me the pattern.”
Cassian huffed, but relented and demonstrated the pattern. Melshi, a quick study, had it down after a couple of tries and tapped the keys with one hand while munching the last of the bacon with the other. Their conversation having effectively killed Cassian’s appetite, he found another bowl and spooned some porridge into it before topping it with the slices of meiloorun. He poured a cup of caf and headed toward the doorway.
“Tell Erso I said, ‘hi.’”
Cassian rolled his eyes and refused to respond further. It was easier to find his way back to his room than it had been to find the kitchen in the first place. He stood in front of the door unsure of what he wanted to find inside. He wouldn’t be surprised to find Jyn gone. He was surprised, however, to find that something like hope had settled in his chest. He wanted her to be there, even though he wasn’t sure why he wanted it.
He tucked the coffee cup in to his arm and reached for the door.