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rxbxlcaptain · 7 years

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Once Upon A Disaster

I wrote this for @therebelcaptainnetwork‘s secret Valentine exchange. They originally required these stories be at least 1,000 words, but, as always, I got carried away with these two, so my story is six times that. The prompt “modern AU or a school/college AU” was given to me by @mamushkababuska. Needless to say, that gave me plenty of room to improvise and take this plot where I wanted it to go. As they say, write what you know, and what I know is the struggles of a pre-med major in college, so I forced poor Cassian to suffer in similar ways to myself.

That being said, I’ve worked plenty of science terms, including CRISPR technology. Like I don’t own Star Wars or any of these characters (or even e.e. cummings), I do not own the ideas behind CRISPR, nor did Galen Erso discover that amazing science. I encourage you all to look up the fascinating topic that is CRISPR and marvel at the truly talented scientists that are changing the way we approach medicine.

Without further ado, here’s the story… Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!

Words: 6129

FF.Net / AO3 / Below the Cut!

Cassian Andor didn’t do love or relationships or even one-night stands. Flirting, drawing up romantic dinner plans, enticing a girl to come back to his apartment: the romance process took up way too much money and time. If there was one thing Cassian Andor didn’t have enough of, it was time.

No, he needed to fit the course load of a biochemistry/anthropology double major into his semester. He needed to take a couple more shifts washing dishes at the diner this weekend so that the rent could get paid. (He flatly refused for Kay to insist on covering him again.) He needed to type up the meeting minutes from his pre-med club. He needed to decide on his spring break plans: building homes in an impoverished town outside of New Orleans with Habitat for Humanity or vaccinating children in the Dominican Republic with Doctors Without Borders? He needed to keep up his 4.0 GPA so he could get a coveted summer internship at the cancer hospital in the city. He needed to land that internship so that Johns Hopkins medical school would look at his application.

The number one thing Cassian Andor did not need was a distraction.

And if Cassian had to describe Jyn Erso in two words, that’s what it would be. A Distraction.

She began by distracting their lab supervisor for organic chemistry. Ten minutes after the lab’s scheduled beginning, long after the introductory video for the lab had been shown, Jyn walked into the class.

No, “walked” was far too anticlimactic of a word. Jyn shoved her way into the lab, banging the door against the nearest wall and forcing the instructor to stop his lecture on safety.

The students stared, stunned past the point of mobility, at the latecomer. She wore, not the mandatory white lab coats and safety goggles like the other twenty-four students already sitting at their desks, but a Beatles tank top and flip flops. A half-hearted bun contained most of her hair, but much of it rebelled against its prison, falling into her eyes instead. She at least seemed to recognized that the cup of coffee in her hand violated some form of protocol, if her quiet “oops” and subsequent chugging of the liquid was any indication.

“You must be Miss Erso,” the instructor sighed, sounding resigned to the girl’s rule breaking rather than irritated, as Cassian expected. Longed for any other seat in the room, because next to his was the only unoccupied spot in the entire room.

Jyn gave a sloppy salute before heading towards Cassian, giving him a nod as she sat down.

At the front of the room, the instructor continued his lecture. “If you turn to your left,” Cassian flatly refused to look at the girl, “you’ll see your lab partner for the semester. Spend the next few minutes introducing yourself.”

In lieu of an introduction, Jyn asked, “Do you have a pen I could borrow? I forgot to bring one.” Without waiting for a response, she reached into his bag to find one, emerging with Cassian’s favorite pen, which she promptly dropped on the floor. “Oops.”

Cassian resisted the urge to groan.

As if her entrance to class wasn’t bad enough, she managed to take Cassian’s pen—who doesn’t bring a pen to the first day of class? —and leave her syllabus behind in her exit. Luckily, her flip flops made enough noise down the hallway that Cassian could follow her.

“Hey! Jyn!”

She paused, looking up from her smartphone.

Cassian shoved the syllabus at her. “You forgot this.” He tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice when he added, “And you took my pen.”

“I knew I was forgetting something.”

For Christ’s sake, was everything about this woman so apathetic? Surely, surely, Cassian thought, she has some kind of drive, some kind of motivation.

“Listen,” Cassian stopped her before she could walk away again, “This class is extremely important to me.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “So you need me to be a good little lab partner for you? So as to not screw you over?”

“Basically.”

She gave him a calculating look. “You’re trying to get into med school, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I am.”

She snorted.

“What?” Cassian growled, suddenly defensive. “Why are you taking organic chemistry then?”

She shrugged. “Thought it looked interesting.”

Cassian watched her walk away for a few seconds, his mouth hanging open in confusion. She was two blocks down the street before Cassian realized he hadn’t gotten his pen back from her.

“She’s taking organic chemistry for the hell of it, Kay. What kind of person does that?”

“That increases her chances of being a psychopath by at least thirty-two percent.”

Cassian had first met Kaden Sage Ogden the Second his first night in the dorm. Kay—as he insisted on being called, rather than actually using the “horrid name” his father insisted on passing onto him—had a tremendously high IQ and a tendency to say whatever he wanted around people, especially, it seemed, if the comment was better left unsaid. Cassian hadn’t managed to shed his awkward skin from youth, his impoverished background insisting that he did not belong among the preppy eighteen year olds who came to college equipped with shiny smartphones and daddy’s credit card. Both boys were labeled as “social outcasts” within their life day. Cassian had begun resigning himself to social isolation until Kay approached him and, as was his style, began saying whatever he wanted, starting with, “Bets on how many of these idiots need to get their stomachs pumped tonight?”

Add in that they had the same career plans—turns out Kay wanted to go to med school, as well—and there began the longest, and best, friendship Cassian Andor ever had.

Two years later and the pair now lived together. Where Cassian declared biochemistry as his major, Kay had decided on psychology. Unfortunately, rather than helping him understand how people worked, it only helped Kay prove what was wrong with them. Hence deducing Jyn Erso’s probability of being a psychopath.

“Remind me why you’re attracted to her?” Kay turned the page of his neuroscience book, the question casually curious.

“I’m—what?! Kay, I’m not attracted to her. Christ, why would you even say that?”

Kay stared over the top of his book, one eyebrow cocked high. “Something to do with how approximately sixty-five percent of our conversations now include mentions of Jyn Erso.”

Cassian bristled, defensive. “Because she happens to be my partner in organic chemistry, a class I need an A in to get into med school someday. This is my future she’s fucking with. Of course I’m always thinking about her.”

“You managed to connect a ketchup bottle to Jyn Erso.”

Cassian didn’t have an excuse for that one.

“Personally, I suggest you just sleep with her and get it over with. Then our lives can go back to normal.”

“I’m not attracted to her.” But he sounded petulant, even to his own ears.

“And here I thought of denial as a stage of grief, not of love.”

“Move that beaker farther away from the flame,” Jyn ordered.

Cassian tossed the lab manual at her. “Temperature should be at ninety-five degrees Celsius. That’s what the thermometer says it is, so I think I’m leaving it there.”

“You’ll speed up the metabolic rate too much and we’ll never be able to see the reaction properly.” Her words were confident in the face of the contradictory instructions.

He gave her a long stare. “Are you honestly attempting to tell me that you know better than the Ph.Ds. who wrote this?”

She seemed offended that he would ask. Without waiting for his opinion, Jyn adjusted the height of the beaker and continued with the experiment. Cassian would never admit it out loud, but the change in temperature, less than three degrees Celsius, led to what the lab instructor praised as the best example of hydroboration in the lab.

“Captain,” Jyn announced as they cleaned their station. “I think that’s what I’ll call you, since you’ve got such a hard on for the rules.”

A week later, Jyn marched into lab with what she deemed a compromise. Cassian had never been so suspicious of anything in his life.

“Since you’re such a fan of following the rules, I edited the lab manual.” Indeed, her copy of the book had edits made throughout the text, white out covering the original text and new temperatures and mass amounts written over it in black ink. “This way, I know it’ll work and you’ll feel like you’re following instructions, rather than going rogue with me.”

“I don’t think this counts as following instructions.”

Jyn inclined her head, clearly saying Maybe, maybe not.

Glancing over his shoulder to ensure the lab instructor wouldn’t see their insubordination, Cassian followed her instructions. When, just like last week, their results were better than the rest of the lab, Jyn gave Cassian a significant look, as if expecting praise for her superior ways, which Cassian blatantly ignored.

Labs continued this way: Jyn providing superior instructions, Cassian following reluctantly. Every week, the question of how she always knew a better method danced on his tongue, but he never asked and Jyn never offered the information.

Of their three lectures a week, Jyn always skipped one and attended another. Cassian surmised that she must toss a coin in the air to decide if she the third lecture was worth her attention. Heads I go bother Cassian for an hour. Tails I give him a reprieve.

At the beginning of the semester, Cassian had worried this would mean she would demand his notes on a regular basis. She never once asked, though she must have been getting the information somewhere because she never seemed behind in the next lecture she graced with her presence. If anything, Cassian was forced to admit several weeks into the course, she remained ahead of even the most diligent students. It wasn’t enough for her to know that dienes could be formed from halides under basic conditions and alcohol under acidic conditions; she wanted to debate with the professor about the ideal conditions for the transition.

More times than Cassian cared to admit, she ended up winning those debates.

What he hated to admit even more was how often he turned to her for help in studying for the midterm. If his notes needed clarification, if he just couldn’t understand the difference between enantiomers and diastereomers, Jyn knew the answer. Asking her for help was just as useful as attending the professor’s office hours. The only thing Cassian could never figure out was how she knew all the information so easily. Maybe she had taken the class before and was repeating it; maybe she was secretly a TA infiltrating the class, like on Undercover Boss. Unfortunately for Cassian’s curiosity, Jyn tended to be just as tight lipped about her past as he was with his, so his questions remained unanswered.

The day of the exam, Jyn beat Cassian to class. She gave him half a smile as he sat down, though he barely noticed. Half his mind screamed in a panic while the other half desperately attempted to remember that panic did nothing for his ability to focus. The battle was turning to all out civil war, and Cassian worried that the only loser would be his exam grade.

“I lost at least three nights of sleep for this exam,” Cassian grumbled, unsure if he was talking to Jyn or if he was just lamenting his loss.

“That’s… dedicated,” Jyn said slowly. Somehow, Cassian got the feeling that wasn’t the word she wanted to use.

“How long did you spend studying then, Miss Know-it-all?”

She shrugged, nonchalant. “I flipped through my notes a few times.”

Cassian choked on his coffee. “You what?! Jyn, this exam is worth a third our grade.”

She merely hummed in response, flipping the page in her notebook with one hand. Taking advantage of his shock, she reached out to steal the coffee out of Cassian’s hand. Her face contorted upon tasting it. “Would you like a little coffee to go with your sugar there, Captain?”

“No one said you had to drink it,” Cassian said sullenly, moving the cup further from Jyn.

“Won’t make that mistake again.”

Rather than last second reviewing, as the exams were passed out, Cassian’s brain wondered just how strong Jyn Erso must take her coffee if a singular pack of sugar and a splash of milk counted as more sugar than coffee.

Eighty-five percent. Cassian scored an eighty-five percent on his midterm. Assuming this was before the curve—the main god that pre-med students worshipped—Cassian could finally exhale, letting out a little of his stress.

Until, of course, he saw the blue exam booklet sitting on his lab partner’s desk.

“A ninety-two?” Cassian exclaimed, grabbing the exam away from Jyn’s uninterested face. “You said you barely studied!”

“I didn’t.”

Cassian stared at her, an obvious What the fuck? expression on his face. “I call bull. No one gets a ninety-two on an o-chem exam without studying.”

“Surely you’ve taken a microbiology course, right?”

“Obviously.” What did this have to do with her acing an o-chem exam without studying?

She stared at him for a second, and spoke slowly, how one would speak to a toddler. “My father is Galen Erso.”

A few moments passed before the name clicked into place.

“Galen Erso? As in, the man who invented CRISPR, Galen Erso?”

“That would be the one.”

Only this girl, Cassian thought, would calmly proclaim her father as a world renounced scientist with that air of flippancy. CRISPR could change everything about the world of science, completely rework medical research, by giving people the ability to edit entire genomes.

“That’s amazing,” Cassian breathed, trying to remember more details of her father’s work. “I read one of his papers from a few years ago, the improvements— “

“Listen,” Jyn cut him off, “I’ve heard the whole speech before, okay? Jyn, your father is amazing! Jyn, you must be so proud! I don’t need to hear it again. Just take it as an explanation for the grade.”

Jyn stared him down for a moment as if challenging Cassian to continue his praise of her father’s work. Luckily—or maybe it was unluckily, Cassian wasn’t sure—the instructor called them to attention after a moment and Jyn took the chance to look away. Cassian, however, continued to stare at her, slack-jawed. He began to believe that, no matter what he did, he would never understand Jyn Erso.

A quick Google search that afternoon pulled up more information on Galen Erso for Cassian. As he remembered, Dr. Erso had been the original microbiologist to discover CRISPR’s ability to cut through double stranded DNA. His work had since been taken over by a Dr. Orson Krennic two years previous. The next page told him the reason.

Galen Erso had died of pancreatic cancer.

All at once, Jyn’s harsh reaction to discussing her father made sense.

Cassian Andor had a table in the library. He was there from the time his data analysis lecture let out at 2:30 until his shift at the diner began at 6, every weekday.

Cassian wouldn’t call himself superstitious. He didn’t need to sit at this table, per se, but it was his favorite table. He wanted to sit there. Far enough from the café that the incessant chatter and strong coffee smell were present but kept to a minimum, right by a window so he could see the outside world when his nose stayed in a book for hours: if they gave Academy Awards in the library, “Best Table” would be presented to his table every year.

Luckily, Cassian had only said this out loud once. Kay had been the only one listening, and he thankfully let the whole conversation bury itself and never resurface.

If there was anyone in the universe Cassian did not want to explain his love of this table to, it was Jyn Erso. The woman currently using his favorite seat at his favorite table.

“You are sitting at my table.”

She snorted without looking up from her books. “Are there assigned seats in the library I wasn’t aware of? A signup sheet I missed?”

“I always sit here.”

“Bully for you. I’m sitting here now.”

“Not anymore you’re not. Move.”

“Captain,” she sighed, finally looking up at him. “There are three more seats at this table. For Pete’s sake, sit in one.”

Huffing, Cassian took a seat and pulled out his physics textbook. For the first few minutes of work, Cassian firmly ignored Jyn’s presence at the table, forcing all his energy into three-dimensional vectors. Jyn, however, was not as dedicated to Cassian’s ideal of silence. He knew from lab that Jyn was an external processor: she would repeat measurements to herself or mutter under her breath almost constantly while they wrote observations. If she wasn’t talking, she fidgeted in some way, clicking her pen or doodling in the margins of her notes. What Cassian wasn’t accustomed to was seeing Jyn frustrated, which she definitely was now. She made several angry sounding exhales before Cassian raised his head to question what could possibly frustrate the great Jyn Erso this badly.

Jyn didn’t seem to notice him at all. Her left hand fisted the hair that traditionally fell in her face while her right hand held a pen—was that his pen? —so tightly her knuckles had turned white. In front of her sat a book of poetry and a notebook whose only notes had been harshly scribbled out. Her pen jabbed at the poem a few times, as if Jyn could stab the words away.

Cassian cleared his throat. “Having difficulties?”

Jyn glared at him with the same acidity she gave her book. “This isn’t in English,” she complained, her voice a strange mix between a growl and a whine.

Cassian pulled the book to him. E.E. Cumming’s “a connotation of infinity” stared back at him; no wonder she didn’t understand a lick of what it said. No capitalization, strange punctuation, illogical sentence structure: poetry didn’t have a clear answer like science did. It spoke to the soul, to raw emotions Cassian guessed that Jyn had shoved away years ago.

“I can assure you it’s not in Spanish,” Cassian offered. “Poetry has a language all to itself.”

“It’s a stupid language.” Jyn’s head landed on the table, her arms forming a protective cage around it.

Cassian read the poem she was struggling with:

connotation of infinity

sharpens the temporal splendor of this night

when souls which have forgot frivolity

in lowliness, noting the fatal flight

of world whereto this earth’s a hurled dream

down eager avenues of lifelessness

“Souls which have forgot frivolity…” Cassian murmured, running his fingers along the words. His stomach clenched, an involuntary reflection of his childhood days without food. Visions of his parents, gone when he was just a child, flowed through his mind. These past traumas were etched deep into his soul and, traditionally, Cassian believed them to be indescribable. Apparently his brain and not the English language limited him, because E. E. Cummings understood.

Jyn, Cassian knew, had not spent her life away from tragedy. She knew the deep pain E.E. Cummings described, if only she would let herself feel it.

“Read it out loud,” Cassian urged her. “Maybe it’ll help.”

Jyn glared, but complied.

…When what’s in velvet beyond doomed thought…

“None of this is logical,” Jyn concluded at the end.

“It’s not about logic. It’s about feeling. He’s found a way to bring emotions into words.”

“I’m sorry, I thought you were a biochemistry major, not a lit major,” Jyn quipped.

Cassian shrugged. “Doesn’t mean I don’t have emotions.”

She stared at him slowly for a moment, her eyes softening. “Me neither, I suppose.”

Jyn pulled the book back to her half of the table, picking up her pen with more confidence than before. Cassian tried to turn his attention back to his physics textbook, but his eyes wandered to her movements frequently. Notes remained in her notebook without being scratched out and the tension drained out of her face.

Cassian had been in awe of her during organic; the way she floated through one of the most difficult courses at the university gave even the professors, not to mention Cassian, pause. But, in a moment of sheer surprise, Cassian found himself more taken by Jyn Erso in her moment of struggle, watching her fight beyond the difficulty and emerge victorious. As Jyn put her finishing touches on her annotations and smiled, proud of her work, Cassian knew he was in trouble.

like a woman amorous to be known;

and man, whose here is always worse than naught,

feels the tremendous yonder for his own—

Of all the people Cassian expected knocking on his door at 10 o’clock on a Friday night—not that many people frequented his and Kay’s place—Jyn Erso definitely wasn’t one of them.

“I come bearing a peace offering,” she stated when Cassian opened the door, holding a bottle of vodka in her left hand and a Chinese takeout bag in her right.

“There better be orange chicken in there,” Cassian threatened in a way of greeting, leaving the door open as an invitation.

“Kay,” Cassian addressed his lounging roommate, “this is Jyn.”

This piqued Kay’s interest enough to glance away from the crime show on the television. “Ah, the infamous lab partner.”

“Glad to know my reputation precedes me,” Jyn called from the door where she kicked off her shoes.

“Trust me,” Kay snorted, “Cassian has mentioned you.”

“Only bad things I hope.”

God forbid, but she smiled, and Cassian wanted to laugh. He wanted to throw his arm around her shoulder and pull her close, maybe even press his lips to her hairline. She looked at him, her eyes still glowing with the smile, and Cassian thought she might have been the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

He moved himself away from those thoughts quickly, offering to grab glasses and plates instead. Small as the apartment was, he could easily hear Kay’s insensitive “Cassian doesn’t trust you, which means neither do I.”

“Charming,” Jyn replied, apparently unfazed.

Cassian hurried to Jyn’s side before Kay had the chance to throw any other backhanded comments.

Kay didn’t seem too interested in continuing to insult Jyn, however. Instead, he glanced between the Jyn and Cassian quickly, no doubt analyzing their body language and movements. “Think I’ll retire early, kids,” he concluded, getting up from the couch. “Don’t drink that entire bottle tonight, or there’s a good chance you won’t be awake for work in the morning, Cassian.”

Jyn snorted as he walked away. “So is he your roommate or your house mother?”

Cassian shrugged, reaching for the food as a distraction.

Ignoring Kay’s advice, the bottle of vodka neared empty by the time the fried rice was gone and they had finished fighting over the last piece of orange chicken. Turns out the casual drinking, the characters on TV providing background noises, was the key to unlocking the story of how Jyn grew into the laziest, smartest, most standoffish pain in the ass Cassian had ever met.

“The science, well, it was my father’s whole life. He practically lived at the lab, only coming home to sleep and shower and maybe eat. It drove my mother insane for years before she left. But,” Jyn paused, giving a small snort. “She wasn’t much the parenting type herself, so I was shoved off onto my father in the custody hearings. Nothing was important enough to stop his work, though, so I joined him in the lab. I grew up playing with centrifuges and memorizing Hess’s Law. For a fifteenth birthday present, I became a full member of his lab.” Another swig of vodka. “I could have gotten my bachelor’s degree years ago, maybe even my master’s.”

Cassian shook his head. “See, that’s what I don’t understand. You’re wasting your time around us peasants and our poorly calibrated machines. Why? Is this some form of rebellion for you?”

Jyn stayed quiet for a second. “He died. He died and I couldn’t stand to look at the lab. Everything I knew about science, everything I loved about it… All of it was tainted. With memories of him. So I took off, ran away from everything I knew. But, without all of it, I didn’t know who I was.” She turned, smiling at Cassian again. “So I’m here until I figure out.”

Their faces, Cassian’s alcohol fogged brain belatedly noticed, were much closer than he realized. His hand had snaked its way behind her shoulder and hers rested on his knee. His eyes stared into hers, though he tried to ignore quick glances she kept giving his lips.

“You don’t drink much, do you?” Jyn asked, her voice softer than he had ever heard it. Her fingers moved, just as softly, to his lips, lightly outlining them, following as he shook his head.

“I don’t have time to waste on drinking and a hangover.”

“It’s not always a waste, you know.”

“Oh really? What’s the benefit?”

“This.”

And she kissed him.

Her lips were gentle, barely brushing his. She pulled back after a second, but Cassian followed, matching the sweet kiss she had given him. The gesture was too romantic for the setting, the cops on the TV still attempting to solve some bloody murder, empty take out containers littering the coffee table, the lights around them harsh, designed for studying, not romantic trysts on the couch.

But, god, she tasted good. Cassian couldn’t resist meeting her lips with more force, winding his hand into her hair and grabbing hold. He didn’t mind in the slightest when Jyn took charge, the way she did with everything in her life, by swinging one of her legs over his. Cassian bit her bottom lip and, if her answering moan was any indication, she enjoyed it just as much as he did.

After a few minutes of messing up hair and battling tongues, Jyn reached down to the hem of his shirt, toying with the muscles of his abs; her cold fingers snapped Cassian back to the room. He groaned pulling away from her lips, and glanced at the clock. 2:04 AM.

“Jyn?”

She didn’t respond, her lips and teeth occupied against Cassian’s throat.

“Jyn, I have to be at work in six hours. I need to sleep.”

With a sigh, she pulled away, moving off his lap and standing up. With her lips swollen and her hair beautifully disarrayed thanks to Cassian’s wandering hands, the last thing he wanted to do was let her go. As if sensing this, she reached back for him, placing a hand on his face and one last kiss on his lips.

“I’ll see you in lab,” Cassian whispered.

“Not if I see you first.”

She calmly gathered her shoes at his door and left without looking back. Cassian exhaled, a weird mixture of a groan and a sigh. What had he just done?

Two weeks later, Jyn appeared at his door again, armed again with vodka and take out bags.

“Indian this time. Variety is the spice of life and all that.” She didn’t even wait for Cassian to respond before forcing her way through his front door.

“Jyn Erso and the revolting smell of curry? Spare me, please,” Kay called from the kitchen.

“Ah, Kay, too kind for words, as usual.” Considering most people’s reaction to Kay, Jyn’s sarcastic response was nothing.

“No need to worry,” Kay shot back, “I won’t be staying long. In the words of that little wizard boy, ‘I’ll be in my room, making no noise and pretending I don’t exist.’” With that, he closed the door to his room.

Jyn sent a questioning glance towards Cassian.

“He tends to say the first thing that crosses his brain and there was a Harry Potter marathon on this weekend.”

Jyn still looked bewildered, not that Cassian could blame her, but seemed to accept Kay’s behavior. She moved to their spot on the couch—when had it become their spot?—to sit down. Cassian went to the kitchen, returning with two glasses of coke, which he poured a generous portion of vodka into. They ate and drank in silence for a few minutes, their attention on the TV, before Cassian turned to her.

“Did you have more life secrets to share?”

“No,” Jyn answered, fiddling with the various take out boxes out on the coffee table. “I figured we could do you this week. After all, you could fill out an entire dossier on my life.”

He could, he supposed. He could fill out where she was born, her skills and her weaknesses, the labs she had worked in and what experiments she knew best. However, what Cassian wanted to know wouldn’t fit into the cold, hard facts of a dossier. Cassian wanted to know what he looked like before her coffee in the morning, her favorite food to grab when she was still studying at two in the morning, what she remembers of her mother, if she picked up her constant muttering from her father.

He wanted to know her in a way he had never wanted to know anyone before, and that scared him.

Jyn misinterpreted his silence as reluctance to speak about himself, because when she spoke again, it was in a smooth and reassuring tone, her eyes innocent and inviting. “You don’t have to, of course, it’s just… Trust goes both ways, Captain.”

“I trust you.” And he did. Idly, he wondered when that happened. “I just wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Where’s home?”

“Here, I guess,” Cassian shrugged. Naturally she would start with the most complicated question. “First place I ever felt wanted.”

“You didn’t when you were growing up?”

Cassian snorted. “My parents died when I was six, so a cousin took in my older brother and I. We were told to keep out of the way, most of the time.” The place he called home for a little over a decade was deep in the inner city, surrounded by gangs and violence. Memories of all the strange men and women, his cousin’s drug suppliers and dealers, Cassian would learn later in life, that would come and go in their tiny apartment filled his mind. He and his brother would be shoved into a backroom and told to keep quiet.

“The only place I enjoyed was school,” Cassian continued quietly, refusing to look at Jyn even though he could feel her gaze heavy on his face. “I was good at it, you know? Things made sense to me.

“But, I was small, couldn’t pack a very good punch, and the other kids knew it.” How many times had Cassian come home with a black eye or a bloody nose? “My brother would always fix me up, tell me it would be okay, that the other kids were just jealous. A few years later, he got caught in a gang fight. Ended up dead in the middle of the street about a block from home.”

Jyn gave no reaction, but her gaze slid away from his face. He wondered if he had gone too far with the story—he had only ever entrusted Kay with the story of his childhood before—and what her reaction would be. He wouldn’t blame her if she walked away now, deemed him too damaged to deal with, helpless beyond repair. She didn’t get up to leave, as Cassian half expected. She only gently probed further.

“Then how did you get here?”

“Hope.”

“Hope?” She echoed back, clear disbelief in her tone.

“My life’s been built on hope. And time management skills.”

She gave half a laugh, but obviously that explanation was not enough.

“One summer, some idiot from my neighborhood broke my nose and gave me this.” Cassian lifted his shirt to show a three-inch scar running across his abs. Memories of blood and pain broke through long standing barriers in Cassian’s mind. He fought against the onslaught of gruesome recollections, knowing they had the power to drown him. He fished, instead, for the shining beacon of hope that emerge from the wreckage of his childhood. “The doctor who stitched me up understood, said he came from a gang-infected area too. He told me I didn’t have to stay there, that if I worked hard I could get away and live the life I wanted.

“So I did what he said. I worked my ass off to get here.” Two jobs during the school year, three during the summer. Locking himself in his room for hours to study until he fell asleep on his textbooks. Avoiding others at school to prevent bloody noses and a police record. “The only other option was to rot in that hellhole like my cousin. Probably die bloody like my brother. My parents, my brother… they wanted better for me than that. I didn’t want to disappoint them. So I made something of myself.”

“Going to get your name on a Nobel Prize for medicine someday, Captain Andor?”

He shook his head. “I just want to help people.”

“Like that doctor helped you?”

He finally met Jyn’s gaze. “Exactly.”

She sighed and shifted closer to him on the couch. Silence overtook them for a few minutes. Jyn, with tentative fingers, reached out to rub a hand through Cassian’s hair. He relaxed into her touch, allowing her to comfort him in a way no one had ever offered before.

“You must have thought my story was so shallow. No wonder you hated me.”

“I didn’t hate you,” Cassian quickly disagreed, “Nor do I think you’re shallow.”

Their eyes met, both of them vulnerable and open in ways they weren’t accustomed to. Jyn’s hand shifted from his hair to his cheek and he leaned into it. He, in turn, reached forward to brush her hair away from her face as he’d been longing to do for so long. Slowly, he leaned forward to press his lips against hers. Like their last kiss on this couch, it was gentle, filled with emotion that made Cassian’s heart ache. They held each other close as their lips brushed over and over.

Cassian pushed her onto her back, his body hovering over her. He planted his arms on either side of her head, careful to keep his weight off her, until she wrapped her legs around his waist. Their hips met and Cassian groaned. His lips drifted from her lips, down to the column of her neck.

“Cassian,” Jyn breathed as he bit the skin lightly. Her hands roamed his back, reaching under his shirt. She traced around to his abs, reaching for the scar Cassian had showed her earlier. She mapped the skin there, memorizing the physical marks of his life story he had just shared. Looking back into her dark eyes, Cassian left a sense of intimacy he had been missing his whole life.

“Stay with me tonight,” he whispered.

She nodded, pulling his head back to hers for a kiss. After a moment, they shifted around, Cassian spooning behind her, his arms pulling her close to his chest. Their limbs tangled awkwardly in the transition before finally settling comfortably. Cassian reached for her hand, holding it tight.

“Good night, Captain.” The quiet words drifted along with Cassian as he fell asleep.

“Oh, good, she’s still here.”

Surprised by Kay’s booming voice, Cassian jumped up, nearly knocking Jyn off the couch in the process.

“Oh, I’m sorry, did I startle you?”

Cassian glared at his roommate through tired eyes. Kay only sighed before throwing up his hands in surrender and walking into the kitchen. Jyn rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, yawning loudly.

“I either need another two hours of sleep or two cups of coffee,” she complained.

“There’s a great breakfast place about two blocks from here,” Cassian offered. “They serve an excellent cup of coffee.”

“Are you asking me on a date, Cassian Andor?”

He couldn’t resist returning the smile she gave him. “Only if you want it to be one, Jyn Erso.”

“I’ll grab my shoes then.” She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “It’s about time you decided to buy me a meal. I’ve already brought you takeout twice.”

About halfway to the diner, Cassian’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out to reveal a text from Kay.

She’s going to be around a lot, isn’t she?

Yes, Cassian decided, beaming down at their intertwined hands, Jyn Erso was going to be around a lot.

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