RebelCap Prompt Fill!
So, I tried to answer using ALL three prompts for your request, because it was fun. Enjoy trying to spot them! (and thank you for being such an awesome fic friend, @cassandor)
----------** All Things New and Bright **---------
“Do you ever have nightmares?” Jyn asks, her head pillowed on his chest. Outside of this cot, the chill of Hoth awaits them, and she sees no reason at all to move.
“No,” Cassian replies, his voice soft, just like the snow that must be falling outside. It’s hs nighttime voice, as she thinks of it. Private, intimate, a part of him he keeps away from the rest of the universe.
“None at all?” She shifts a little to look up at him, which accidentally sends her elbow straight into his gut. There’s the tiniest exhale from him, a faint wince. “Sorry.”
“I’m fine,” he says. “It’s the occupational hazard of sleeping with you.”
“Hey, kriff off.” Her lips narrow, but only for a second, because he’s leaning in to kiss her forehead. The forehead kiss, Jyn thinks, is a decidedly unfair tactic, one that completely negates whatever glare she was delivering.
“Kriff off? As in, go somewhere else? And leave you all cold in this cot?”
“Do it. I dare you.”
He just answers by tugging the three layers of blankets around her a little tighter. Two of them are their standard issue ones, a faded green-brown like so much else in the Rebellion. Another is bright, bright blue, and nearly brand-new. She’d seen it on a mission that for once, hadn’t required stealth or speed, and bought it with her new officer’s salary, a concept that still baffles her. Jyn knows Cassian surrenders his pay, that it goes to those more in need, but she can’t bring herself to do the same. Not yet. Not when, for the first time in years, she can buy things that are bright, soft, new.
“You know I won’t leave,” Cassian whispers. Ah. To him the joke hadn’t been funny, not like it had been to her. Because Jyn knows that, by now. He’s stuck by her side for two years, seen her at her worst and helped her be her best. Why the hell would he leave her now when she’s just started being a bright, new, type of person?
“Unless you asked,” he adds. Something sharper than a shard of glass, sharper than a razor-edged vibroblade twists in between her ribs. Her hand fumbles for his under the blankets, their callused fingers tangling. Jyn has never held a hand that doesn’t have the calluses from a blaster’s grip, and she doesn’t think she ever will.
“Well, I won’t. Unless you start hogging blankets, and we know you don’t do that.” Jyn keeps the mood light, has to. She can’t surrender to the pain inside of her, the ache of knowing that as much as she is new and bright and focused now, Cassian is still worn and tired and broken. She’s tried to mend him as best she can. But it’s hard when she doesn’t know how to fix, only to destroy, and harder yet when it is the very thing he loves, his Rebellion, that keeps shattering him, tearing him apart at all the ragged seams Jyn has welded back together with kisses and promises.
“Maybe I’ll hog blankets on another base. You never know.” He says her slang word with carefulness, as if it’s a new language to him. Cassian, she’s learned speaks seven languages fluently, and can converse in four more.
“Oh yeah? What kind of a planet would make you, Captain Cold, want a blanket?”
There. A flash of humor sparks in his eyes, the way she’s seen Skywalker’s lightsaber ignite. Both lightsaber and Cassian’s smile, she thinks, are the light of hope.
But the light fades as he ponders the question, finally admits, “Rain.”
If she hadn’t been looking at him, she might have teased him about that. Might have asked if Fest called particularly wet snow their rainy season. Might have asked if he disliked rain because it might mess up his hair.
But her gaze has been locked on his, so she knows not to. Because even the thought of rain on his hair, of rain at all, takes her back to a planet she tries to forget, a moment she can never forget. And given the coldness like a wall of ice in his eyes, Cassian is thinking the same thing.
“You know what we should do?” she asks, her voice casual still, but so light. Her own bedroom voice, one she is just learning. “Next leave? Let’s go somewhere it rains.”
“What?”
Her free hand slides up to brush the hair from his eyes, to stroke the little crease between his brows. To touch him in all the intimate, soft, new ways she’s learning. “I mean it.”
“Trust me, I have learned many times you do not say things you do not mean.”
That quirk of his lips, neither smile nor frown, she soothes with a kiss. “Good. So. Rainy planet. Or moon. Whatever. Let’s go, yeah? Let’s go and make some new memories.” It’s a wild, bold idea, one that she can’t even believe she’s suggestion. It might be the most luxurious thing she’s ever suggested to him, beyond the time she tried to convince him they had time to take a bubblebath in the mansion they’d snuck into for a recon mission. Because even then, that had been spur of the moment, a joke, admittedly laced with desire, but an impulsive joke.
This? To make plans for the future in the middle of the war? To plan for good memories when all of their best so far have been snatched out of darkness and shadows, moments of joy as much as survival. It’s an impossible thing, she’s asking for, she thinks, but one she wants to give him. “I want to kiss you in the rain,” she admits. “I want… I want to catch raindrops in my hands, and smell the wet mud. It’s got… there’s a smell to good mud, you know? It’s bright and warm and full of potential.”
“Mud-smelling is not exactly something I’ve had much experience with.” Cassian replies. But he’s talking. That’s good. Even better is when he admits, “we did… we had a greenhouse though, and my sisters and I… we’d, you know, try to build with it. Made a mess.”
“I’d make mud houses and try to chase down a Tur-Toad to stick in it. Always collapsed by the time I got one.”
The corner of his eyes crinkle. “You should build with snow. Much more stable.”
“And where am I gonna find a Tur-Toad in the snow, huh?” Really, where would she find one anywhere but Lah'mu, anywhere but a planet she didn’t want to go back to. Which meant, perhaps, one day, she should.
“Are Tur-Toads really that important to this diorama?”
“Absolutely.” she shifts in the blanket nest again, her cold feet brushing over his calf. She has a bad habit of kicking her socks off.
“Shavit!” he curses, one of the words he’s picked up from her. “Those are like ice, Jyn. You didn’t tell me you’re cold.”
“I’m not,” she promises. Smiling, because he is too. Because they managed to get past the pain of the past, to even find some small joy in stories of their long-ago past. It would baffle the others, people like Leia, who asked what Jyn and Cassian talk about. No one would believe the two so-called heroes spend a good deal of time arguing over Tur-Toads and cold feet.
“Mm.” he fusses more with the blankets, holds her closer. “So, a rainy planet. Full of mud and tur-toads.”
“One with a spring,”Jyn insists. If they're going to build this dream that may never come true, then she wants it to be the best possible of all options. “I like spring.” Likes its potential, the light, the longer days.
“I do, too.” This time, it’s Cassian who leans forward, who kisses her, shy at first, like he always is (except when they’re kissing after an argument), warming to her the way snow melts, slow, then all in a rush. She tucks her head in the crook of his shoulder after. They should both sleep. Soon. Tomorrow will come and there will be no spring, not on Hoth, and they will have work to do.
It’s just…
She sighs. “I still have nightmares.” There. The topic that had woke her, the topic that she’d hoped he would share.
“You do?” his voice is a low rumble now, protective. “You haven’t… you never told me.”
Because he sleeps so rarely. Because once he falls asleep she’s terrified to wake him. Because oftentimes, reaching out and feeling he still has a pulse is enough to send the nightmare away. Because… she doesn’t want to admit this. Hates admitting anything. He won’t leave her, he’d said, but a lifetime of being left points to the opposite, and she’s scared to trust in a future that might be different. “They’re worse when you’re gone.”
He’s silent. Thinking. There’s nothing to be thought of, though. He can’t comm her, not when he’s allowed no communication back to base. Can’t send her flirty holomessages the way Solo does to Commander Organa, because even if he was permitted to, both of them would die of mutual embarrassment before finishing a recording. And he absolutely can’t start skipping missions. Not for her.
Sleep tugs at her. She yawns. “It’s fine, Cass.”
“No, I…” he starts, but is cut off by another yawn. This time, one of his. He kisses the top of her head now, since it’s all he can reach with her clinging to him like a mynock. “Boordii has nice rain,” he says. “Spent a few months there as Aach a few years ago. No Imps, no bases. Just a bunch of smugglers and some cigara greenhouses.”
“That where Aach got his bad habit?”
“Maybe.” He lets out a deep breath. “Nice planet. Lots of places to play Sabaac, so that’ll keep you happy. Good food. You’ll have to let me know about the mud.”
“Boordii, huh?” her eyes slide closed again. “Tell me more.” She falls asleep listening to him describe the remote planet, and then, what they might do on leave there.
Four nights later, he wakes her with that same gentle nighttime voice, but this time, it’s to tell her he’s headed out. They never say goodbye. Not to each other. But he does let her know when he leaves, and she does command the Force to be with him, making the well-wish sound more like a one-woman threat against the greatest power in the universe.
When she wakes, she finds three things on the stack of crates that serve as their dresser. An old, handwoven blue blanket, with a note on top of it. It’s his handwriting, because no one else has writing that looks as if each letter is personally attacking the next one after it. “Stay warm.” her fingers skim the blanket, feel the soft wool. There’s what looks like a burn singe in the top corner. The lines of color are sharp peaked stripes, and suddenly, she remembers Fest used to be famous for such weavings.
Under the blanket is, impossibly, delightfully, a stuffed toy, small, with little bits of scrap duraplast for eyes, and the exact same faded green-brown as the Alliance fatigues it must have been sewn from. The same green-brown of all Tur-Toads.
When she lifts it, she sees there’s something attached, a tiny datachip. Toad and blanket in hand, she pads back to the cot, and plugs in the datachip to the pad that she’s claimed as half-hers, since the ALliance is short on new ones. It has multiple files. Leave paperwork. Fake IDs for both Aach and a lady smuggler named Raine Tur. The name makes her smile, though she does wish he hadn’t used that picture of her mid-sneeze from that day he’d made stuffed hot peppers. Kay had taken the holo, though, and it’s a good enough memory to forgive the depiction... which is probably why he picked it in the damn first place. Clearance for them to head to Boordi.
It has, she realizes, all she needs to hope for the spring that will come someday, making everything soft and bright and new.
