Emboldened by his reciprocation, her arms twist around his shoulders, wet fabric of his clothes bunching between her fingers. These are not the gentle, tentative pecks of old; Jyn is chasing the taste of him like she could drown in it, heartbeat pounding against her ribs.
She's flushed when she finally drags herself away from his mouth, eyes closed a handful of moments longer before they flutter open, glassy and bright as she struggles to focus on him so close.
Her shoulders rise and fall with unsteady breaths, licking her lips before she can manage words. "I don't know about you," she starts, flippant tone softened by sheer affection and the way she looks at him with the same intensity that she looks at, well, grapes. "But I feel surprisingly enlightened."
His hands work at smoothing her hair back off her damp face while his heart is racing, lips heavy and tingling from kissing her, breath coming out in a huff that is almost a soft laugh but definitely more of a sigh.
"Enlightenment can happen at any moment, in any particular state of being," he points out, caught between wanting to kiss her and wanting out of rapidly chilling damp clothing. Porqué no los dos? Cassian kisses her again, for good measure, before wrapping his arms around her waist. "Come on, let's get out of here. I'd rather be enlightened and warm."
Part of her wonders if maybe it wasn't her father's love she was meant to be enlightened to, but her own.
She nods in answer but makes no move that she's actually going to get up for a moment, stealing another kiss as her arms release her death grip on his shoulders, thumb brushing across one cheek before her hands fall to settle against his chest. She breaks with a quiet laugh and shakes her head. If he thinks she is moving anytime soon...
"Shhh. Shut up." And then she is kissing him again, unwilling to let him go for even the couple of minutes it would take to get dry clothes. She's always been single-minded to a fault.
Why is she shaking her head, is she seriously...? Yes. Yes, apparently, because she's kissing him again, telling him to shut up, and he's actually listening.
Instead he's leaning against the cold wet tile, in cold, wet clothes, pulling her closer because if he's stuck in this shower with armfuls of Jyn she can just. Sit on him instead. That would be better, in his opinion.
She's more than inclined to clamber into his lap, not seeming to notice the chill even when she begins noticeably shivering. The overwhelming flood of emotions from her nightmare had ebbed, but they didn't go anywhere, shifting instead into less destructive and painful emotions. There's still enough to make her feel like her chest is going to explode but she's not sure she would mind.
Death by kissing wouldn't be too bad, after all. Especially with someone she--
Again she wrenches back, but only to breathlessly blurt out, stilted and awkward: "Yo también te amo."
The emphasis isn't all there; she isn't a linguist, she learned from reading instead of hearing, and she only half pays attention to learning while watching Cassian as he is trapped in physical therapy. But it's unmistakably his homeworld's native tongue that she is butchering with her uncertainty and inexperienced vowels. She happened to tuck that particular phrase away on the off chance it was ever relevant -- if Cassian met someone here and Jyn felt magnanimous enough to help them woo the rebel captain, perhaps. Instead it's her saying it and she really doesn't mind.
He notices, one arm remaining behind her back while the other pushes her hair out of her face. He notices and he worries and she pulls away and he's already frowning but leaning into her space before she opens her mouth and stops him dead.
Honestly, honestly, he expected to wait to hear it, if he heard it at all, but there was nothing to prepare him for hearing her terrible accent, or the way his chest constricts at the sound.
Cassian leans in quick and kisses her again just as he scoops her up off the floor and hauls them both up, until he's standing with his back against the shower wall and coaxing her legs around his waist. "We can't stay in here, we just can't." They're cold, they're wet, they'll try to fix that and this is not a secure sort of place, in his mind, for that kind of behavior.
"Don't fight me, please, let me at least get us off this tile."
She doesn't fight, but it's half out of shock and relief, lips lifting with a smile as she curls her arms around his neck again.
"Strong, I see." Admittedly, she is a small person and doesn't weigh all that much, especially with her lack of appetite making her thin frame thinner, but there was a time he could barely hold himself up, much less another person.
"I've been working on it." Getting stronger, possibly with this exact scenario in mind, or at least something like it. Cassian kisses her cheek and takes measured steps to get them out of the shower, opening the door by backing into it slowly until it pops open.
It's not that far to their shared room, with two beds where only one is ever used, and people clear more or less out of his way as they go down the hall. He doesn't put her down until he's reached said bed, kissing her again before pulling away. "Out of these wet clothes?"
"Mmm," she hums an impressed little noise and tries her best not to be too much of a dead weight as he carries her. She's perfectly capable of walking on her own, of course, but as that would involve not being gathered up in her arms she declines, tucking her forehead against the side of his neck.
Once in private, she suddenly realizes how cold she is when Cassian puts her down. "Yes. Feel free to start without me." And even though she is loath to leave his arms, she sprints over to the thermostat to pump the heat up.
Cassian chuckles a little as she goes dashing for the thermostat, stripping first out of his jacket and boots before casting his eyes back in her direction. He wants...he wants, and wants, and wants, and isn't that different than usual?
Mostly he wants her to be happy and secondly he wants to be a vehicle for that happiness, to bask in the moments she gets to smile and tease and poke at him. There's a moment's pain; he misses the others, wishes they were there to see the two of them smiling, but he can imagine they do, wherever they are.
Energy never truly dissipates, after all, it just changes form.
Realizing he's staring Cassian ducks into the bathroom to get them both large, fluffy towels, and tosses one at Jyn.
As the thrum of the heater kicks on, Jyn flings one of her layers off, still in the habit of wearing a handful, before turning to catch the towel. Well, she catches it with her face and a muffled laugh before it slips down into her arms. She attacks her hair with the towel first, wringing it free before shaking it out like a sodden dog after a bath.
Not one to be particularly shy about her body, Jyn loses the rest of her clothes quickly, wrapping the towel around herself like a cloak, gathering the towel in her fists and tucking her hands under her chin.
"We're taking these towels with us when we leave." Far better than the towels on Yavin IV, which were effectively sandpaper. There is nothing written that demands a rebellion must come equipped with shitty towels. She tiptoes over to him, chin tipping up to look at him. "All of them. The entire lot of them."
"All right." Cassian grins down at her, still in his own half-wet clothing, reaching down and rubbing her arms with his hands and the towel. He suspects if he tells her no she'll just do it anyway; might as well be prepared.
After a second he dips down to kiss her once more before pulling away to get his shirt off over his head. The lack of an ache in his shoulders is something he's grateful for, in this instance, and then there's the rest of his clothes to be done with. The towel ends up at his hips as he crowds Jyn's space. "Anything else we're squirreling off with?"
Jyn watches him undress like the unveiling of a marble Adonis, eyebrows arched and lips curved in a faint smirk, a promising invitation, green eyes sparkling with excitement. "Undecided. But I have decided that your clothes will no longer be necessary."
Ever again.
Still on her tiptoes, she presses forward as her hands fall, towel still gripped between her fingers. Her arms loop around his waist as usual, but the shock and newness of her very bare skin encountering his draws forth a teeny little gasp. This is a little different from her bare legs thrown haphazardly across his lap while they're talking or gingerly applying salve to his bare back with unsteady hands. The novelty of this is all very exciting.
This is, by Cassian's standards, very different than her touch associated with healing, associated with boredom; those touches are no less charged, for him, for all that they've become a part of his life recently, but then again he might be a little...weird, regarding touch.
Starved for it at times, maybe. He can't always decide.
"Good?" His hands are at her shoulders immediately. "Want to lay down?"
It takes her a second to nod, easily distracted by literally everything happening all at once. She's currently deciding if he smells like her or if she smells like him so when she answers her voice soft and thready. "Yeah, uh, yes."
Same answer to both questions, really, and she pushes forward a little to urge him in that direction.
He can't turn around that would just be...foolish, maybe, or at the least asking for trouble so he walks backwards until his legs hit the bed and sits down.
Cassian's hands find Jyn's and he pulls her towards him with every intention on laying next to her, possibly under the blankets, definitely without the towels.
As stubborn and obstinate as she can be, Jyn follows his every invitation. Part of her had always been willing to trust him despite the facts of her entire life telling her not to, but now it's impossible not to trust him. If he wants to lay down, she will happily lay down with him, swapping her towel cloak for the blanket and tossing the towel to the floor.
(She is, as ever, opposed to wet towels in bed.)
"I meant it, you know. What I said before." That she seems to struggle to say in her own language. It was so much easier to say it in Cassian's tongue, it's stuck in her throat now.
Wet towels in bed are an abomination under the stars, so Cassian understands. As it is he holds up one end of the blankets so she can curl in as much as she likes. For the most part he just wants to be near her, as always, but he also has the underlying drive towards contact. Usually he's fine being more passive about it, letting her dictate what sort of touch and what happens where.
Now, though. She calls her declaration of love 'it', and Cassian wraps his arms around her, pulling her in close.
You know, she is perfectly happy to go with the flow for once, chin resting against his chest so she can look at him. "And if you wanted to never stop saying your bit, I would be quite fine with that."
Jyn Erso's Guide to: asking your boyfriend to say he loves you again without asking your boyfriend to say he loves you again. She's about as terrible at romance as you'd imagine her father would be.
Cassian tilts his neck and head down in order to kiss her on the forehead, her nose, her lips. Chest warm where Jyn is pressed against him and it's if his body can't decide between aroused or comfortable and so heads toward this middle stage where his limbs tangle with hers instead.
To that point, he captures one of her legs between his own.
"I love you, Jyn Erso." She drives him a little crazy and steals his food, but he loves her, and isn't that something? He'd imagined that he would die without knowing what that really felt like.
She would apologize because he really got the short straw in this relationship, honestly. She's a terrible, selfish person, reckless and thoughtless, and her abandonment issues have their own abandonment issues. Maybe he was hit on the head one too many times. But Jyn is selfish enough that she will never remind him that he deserves far better than her.
Instead she curls against him, fingers tracing across the muscles of his chest, unmarked skin and scarring both, exploring rarely mapped skin like she's the first bold explorer to plant her flag and claim Cassian as her own. Is she? She doesn't ask.
She is not the first to touch but she is the first to touch and know his name, what he does, the first to have a glimpse into who he really is and how he came to be that way. She is the first he hasn't been lying to, on one level or another, and that is very important to him.
Perhaps he deserves better but he doesn't think his actions in his lifetime warrant that kind of thinking. Plus there's this one little detail: he's happy. Jyn Erso stirs happiness from the depths of a person who wasn't sure they were deserving of such a thing.
Still, he shudders a little under her touch but makes no move to stop her. That would be the opposite of what he wants, anyway.
"Te amo. I love you and I'm not letting go of that for anything."
"Elskede," she breathes, drawing the endearment out to make it sound like a complaint, flush turning her cheeks pink even though she asked for exactly this. Her hand flattens again his chest briefly, feeling warm all over, but after a moment of pause she continues her exploration.
Her forehead wrinkles when she encounters a particularly pronounced scar. "What happened here?"
He laughs, a little, at the endearment. 'Friend' indeed; but her blush is rather attractive and he watches that color spread across her skin and feels more than a little proud of that.
One arm stays wrapped around her, finger drawing circles against the skin on her back, while the other tucks under his head.
"Stabbed." A sigh. "In my sleep. Not a pleasant experience. It was before Kay was around."
She frowns. Intellectually, she knows that his life has been just as dangerous as hers, more so even, but his scars are so much worse than hers and it pains her that she can't do anything to erase those scars. Leaning over, she presses a kiss against the scar, breath warm and heavy against his skin. A trail of full, lingering kisses across his chest brings her back to settle in her original position. She looks up at him under her lashes, pressing one last kiss against his skin.
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She's flushed when she finally drags herself away from his mouth, eyes closed a handful of moments longer before they flutter open, glassy and bright as she struggles to focus on him so close.
Her shoulders rise and fall with unsteady breaths, licking her lips before she can manage words. "I don't know about you," she starts, flippant tone softened by sheer affection and the way she looks at him with the same intensity that she looks at, well, grapes. "But I feel surprisingly enlightened."
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"Enlightenment can happen at any moment, in any particular state of being," he points out, caught between wanting to kiss her and wanting out of rapidly chilling damp clothing. Porqué no los dos? Cassian kisses her again, for good measure, before wrapping his arms around her waist. "Come on, let's get out of here. I'd rather be enlightened and warm."
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She nods in answer but makes no move that she's actually going to get up for a moment, stealing another kiss as her arms release her death grip on his shoulders, thumb brushing across one cheek before her hands fall to settle against his chest. She breaks with a quiet laugh and shakes her head. If he thinks she is moving anytime soon...
"Shhh. Shut up." And then she is kissing him again, unwilling to let him go for even the couple of minutes it would take to get dry clothes. She's always been single-minded to a fault.
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Instead he's leaning against the cold wet tile, in cold, wet clothes, pulling her closer because if he's stuck in this shower with armfuls of Jyn she can just. Sit on him instead. That would be better, in his opinion.
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Death by kissing wouldn't be too bad, after all. Especially with someone she--
Again she wrenches back, but only to breathlessly blurt out, stilted and awkward: "Yo también te amo."
The emphasis isn't all there; she isn't a linguist, she learned from reading instead of hearing, and she only half pays attention to learning while watching Cassian as he is trapped in physical therapy. But it's unmistakably his homeworld's native tongue that she is butchering with her uncertainty and inexperienced vowels. She happened to tuck that particular phrase away on the off chance it was ever relevant -- if Cassian met someone here and Jyn felt magnanimous enough to help them woo the rebel captain, perhaps. Instead it's her saying it and she really doesn't mind.
"I should have said that before."
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Honestly, honestly, he expected to wait to hear it, if he heard it at all, but there was nothing to prepare him for hearing her terrible accent, or the way his chest constricts at the sound.
Cassian leans in quick and kisses her again just as he scoops her up off the floor and hauls them both up, until he's standing with his back against the shower wall and coaxing her legs around his waist. "We can't stay in here, we just can't." They're cold, they're wet, they'll try to fix that and this is not a secure sort of place, in his mind, for that kind of behavior.
"Don't fight me, please, let me at least get us off this tile."
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"Strong, I see." Admittedly, she is a small person and doesn't weigh all that much, especially with her lack of appetite making her thin frame thinner, but there was a time he could barely hold himself up, much less another person.
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It's not that far to their shared room, with two beds where only one is ever used, and people clear more or less out of his way as they go down the hall. He doesn't put her down until he's reached said bed, kissing her again before pulling away. "Out of these wet clothes?"
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Once in private, she suddenly realizes how cold she is when Cassian puts her down. "Yes. Feel free to start without me." And even though she is loath to leave his arms, she sprints over to the thermostat to pump the heat up.
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Mostly he wants her to be happy and secondly he wants to be a vehicle for that happiness, to bask in the moments she gets to smile and tease and poke at him. There's a moment's pain; he misses the others, wishes they were there to see the two of them smiling, but he can imagine they do, wherever they are.
Energy never truly dissipates, after all, it just changes form.
Realizing he's staring Cassian ducks into the bathroom to get them both large, fluffy towels, and tosses one at Jyn.
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Not one to be particularly shy about her body, Jyn loses the rest of her clothes quickly, wrapping the towel around herself like a cloak, gathering the towel in her fists and tucking her hands under her chin.
"We're taking these towels with us when we leave." Far better than the towels on Yavin IV, which were effectively sandpaper. There is nothing written that demands a rebellion must come equipped with shitty towels. She tiptoes over to him, chin tipping up to look at him. "All of them. The entire lot of them."
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After a second he dips down to kiss her once more before pulling away to get his shirt off over his head. The lack of an ache in his shoulders is something he's grateful for, in this instance, and then there's the rest of his clothes to be done with. The towel ends up at his hips as he crowds Jyn's space. "Anything else we're squirreling off with?"
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Ever again.
Still on her tiptoes, she presses forward as her hands fall, towel still gripped between her fingers. Her arms loop around his waist as usual, but the shock and newness of her very bare skin encountering his draws forth a teeny little gasp. This is a little different from her bare legs thrown haphazardly across his lap while they're talking or gingerly applying salve to his bare back with unsteady hands. The novelty of this is all very exciting.
And mildly nerve wracking.
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Starved for it at times, maybe. He can't always decide.
"Good?" His hands are at her shoulders immediately. "Want to lay down?"
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Same answer to both questions, really, and she pushes forward a little to urge him in that direction.
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Cassian's hands find Jyn's and he pulls her towards him with every intention on laying next to her, possibly under the blankets, definitely without the towels.
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(She is, as ever, opposed to wet towels in bed.)
"I meant it, you know. What I said before." That she seems to struggle to say in her own language. It was so much easier to say it in Cassian's tongue, it's stuck in her throat now.
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Now, though. She calls her declaration of love 'it', and Cassian wraps his arms around her, pulling her in close.
"I do know."
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Jyn Erso's Guide to: asking your boyfriend to say he loves you again without asking your boyfriend to say he loves you again. She's about as terrible at romance as you'd imagine her father would be.
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To that point, he captures one of her legs between his own.
"I love you, Jyn Erso." She drives him a little crazy and steals his food, but he loves her, and isn't that something? He'd imagined that he would die without knowing what that really felt like.
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Instead she curls against him, fingers tracing across the muscles of his chest, unmarked skin and scarring both, exploring rarely mapped skin like she's the first bold explorer to plant her flag and claim Cassian as her own. Is she? She doesn't ask.
"Thank you."
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Perhaps he deserves better but he doesn't think his actions in his lifetime warrant that kind of thinking. Plus there's this one little detail: he's happy. Jyn Erso stirs happiness from the depths of a person who wasn't sure they were deserving of such a thing.
Still, he shudders a little under her touch but makes no move to stop her. That would be the opposite of what he wants, anyway.
"Te amo. I love you and I'm not letting go of that for anything."
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Her forehead wrinkles when she encounters a particularly pronounced scar. "What happened here?"
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One arm stays wrapped around her, finger drawing circles against the skin on her back, while the other tucks under his head.
"Stabbed." A sigh. "In my sleep. Not a pleasant experience. It was before Kay was around."
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"How did you meet him?"
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