#if anyone's wondering i don't really see cassian leaving the rebellion before the fall of the empire

[andorerso]

166. “I’ll take care of you.” - “It’s rotten work.” - “Not to me. Not if it’s you.” , please and thanks. :0)

hello, thank you!! this is a bit depressing/melancholy but I hope you like it :)

also in my mind this is pre-relationship… just because I love them being soft with each other and acting like lovers even before they actually are. but it’s never really specified so you can read it however you want to!

Cassian is not the same after Scarif but it doesn’t stop Draven from sending him out the second he’s cleared for fieldwork. Jyn sees him off with a tight-lipped smile, refusing to put a name to what she’s feeling – but it stays with her the whole time he’s away, eating at her insides.

She knows how this goes; she’s been burned before. Cassian had welcomed her home but it’s not as though people didn’t break promises. He wouldn’t have to do it on purpose. All it would take is a bad intel, the wrong kind of informant, a blaster bolt he didn’t see coming. Then she’d be alone again, and she’s so tired of being alone. It hadn’t been until Cassian burst into her life and awakened her soul that she realized how much she craved this kind of intimacy only he could give her now.

When the notification of his arrival pings on her datapad, she excuses herself from the pilots she was chatting with and heads towards his room. His back is turned when she enters, his shirt off. Jyn can see the faint red line across his spine where they had to operate on him to save his mobility. He doesn’t turn around at the sound of the door and that’s how she knows he’s aware of her presence – anyone else, and he’d be on them with a blaster raised in a second. But he trusts her like this; back turned and vulnerable.

It’s a bad sign, however, that he doesn’t greet her. He’s upset; she can tell from the way he holds himself, the way he focuses single-mindedly on the task in front of him. Jyn steps closer, careful. She has to stop herself from reaching out to touch his shoulder because she doesn’t want to spook him.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he answers, his voice curt. A pause. Jyn waits. “Can you… can you get my back?”

His voice is softer now, just a little bit – an ordinary person wouldn’t notice but she does. He reaches for the medpac on the table and she realizes he’d been putting a bacta patch on a recent injury. Jyn’s mouth twists as she stares at the fresh red wound on his abdomen. It’s probably not too serious, nothing that would kill him but… but the animal instincts in her are still screaming to protect him.

He shouldn’t be pushing himself so hard but they don’t have the luxuries of choosing their fate.

He holds out a tube of ointment to her, and she takes it wordlessly. She’s done this before, many times in the aftermath of Scarif. It helps ease his pain, and the thing she quickly learned about Cassian was that he never complained. If he willingly accepted or asked for pain relief, it had to be bad.

She tries not to think about that, or his soft hiss of discomfort as she rubs the ointment onto his skin. He thanks her quietly once they’re done, pulling on a clean shirt, and settling down on the edge of his bed. She follows suit, watching him with his downcast eyes and sagging shoulders. She doesn’t want to push him so she waits.

“You always take care of me,” he murmurs after a while. He almost sounds guilty about it.

She smiles, a small thing. “Somebody has to.”

Cassian huffs out a quiet laugh, both fond and painful. “I’m just… so tired.”

Jyn doesn’t ask him what happened out there but she thinks about his injury, she thinks about her restlessness while he was away, she thinks about the possibility that one of these days, he might not come back. And she says, “We can go. We can leave.” She reaches out to him, her fingers wrapping around his wrist. “I’ll take care of you.”

Cassian shakes his head, watching her from under his lashes. “It’s rotten work.”

“Not to me. Not if it’s you.”

He looks at her for a second before pulling her into his arms. Jyn melts into him, letting his embrace calm some of her anxiety, his physical touch like a balm to her poor tattered heart. They breathe in and out in sync, clinging to each other like they were the last two people in the galaxy. Cassian rests his head in the crook of her neck, his breath hot on her skin.

“I can’t leave,” he murmurs at last, though she already knew as much. It was a pipedream from the start, a longing for certainty and safety and peace. But Cassian can’t give her certainty, and she can’t ask him to.

“I know,” she reassures him, understanding.

“Will you stay anyway?”

Jyn smiles into his neck, her eyes closing as she buries herself in the scent of him.

“Always.”

[ohmytheon]

i don't know if you are still doing requests, but could you do a last words soulmate au for either Royai or RebelCatain. I know you have already done first word soulmate aus for both but I would love to see this as basically no one writes last word ones and I love your work! You are amazing!

I chose Rebelcaptain because we know their last words and I’m a sucker for pain. I might do a second part to this where they find out the truth. I was going to write more, but the little monster started to wake up. lmao

Jyn is sixteen and hiding in a bunker, abandoned by a man who had become something of a father to her, when fire burns around her right calf. The sensation nearly causes her to drop her blaster, so she has to crouch down and wrap a hand around it as fire laces through her skin. It stops as abruptly as it started, leaving a cold, tingling sensation in its place, but she doesn’t move or pull her hand away.

No, no, no. She doesn’t want it. She doesn’t want anything to do with this. Rage builds up inside of her, along with grief, and she hates how both emotions are able to dig their claws into her heart even now. She grips her leg so tight that her nails dig into her even through her pants.

There’s something to be said about the beginning of something also being the end. It’s hard knowing that somewhere out there is her soulmate and they will die. She feels marked by death, the surety of its coming written on her skin. Trust the Force, her mother said before she died, but the Force is cruel. It plays a terrible game on everyone.

Marking people with their soulmate’s last words – allowing people to truly and fully fall in love with someone, only to take them away.

She told herself that she would never fall in love – she won’t do it, she won’t – and the lack of a soulmate mark both comforted her and made her feel alone in the galaxy. It didn’t matter. She had been alone for a long time. And now it’s here, mocking her, reminding her that she isn’t alone. But she will be. Oh, she will be once they die or she dies. Everything ends. Everyone leaves.

Finally, she pulls her hand away and sits down on the ground. Sighing in defeat, she rolls up her pants leg and looks at the soulmate marking.

Your father would be proud of you.

Jyn throws her head back against the wall of the bunker and laughs coldly, so loud that the sound echoes around her. Proud of her? He’s gone. Galen Erso is gone and most likely dead – has been for years. And Saw Gerrera? He left to her too. Found her in a bunker and abandoned her in one. The laugh turns into tears until she’s doing both and curls in on herself.

Soulmate marks are supposed to make a person feel loved, even if it’s their last words, like they’re going to be with you until the very end. But all Jyn feels is the emptiness of them and how little she believes in anything these days. Proud of her. They don’t even know she’s alive.

*

He’s been deep undercover for over two months. It’s exhausting work. He’s only twenty, but he feels at least ten years older. Still young, he allows himself to wonder if he’ll actually make it another ten years. Doesn’t seem likely. People in his line of work don’t live for very long.

It doesn’t scare him as much as it used to anymore. He realized a long time ago that he wasn’t long for this world. Some stars burn faster than others. Not everyone is made to make it to the finish line. After all, the ladder to the end is built upon the bodies of those who had fallen. Somehow, he knows that he will be one of them. As long as he makes good use of his own end, he is fine with it. 

He can live with it.

So he doesn’t think much about the future, especially his own. He thinks about the Rebellion and allows himself to hope for its success. He can’t think about its defeat or everything he has done and will do will be for nothing. And he’s done a lot of terrible things already that he needs a reason for. The end justifies the means, he repeats over and over again before he falls asleep. His end is just a stepping stone for something much larger. He doesn’t think of it much.

And then, right when he’s about to take another shot with a few other cadets in the Imperial Academy, a lightening burn lances down his left forearm. It’s so shocking and sudden that he lets go of the shot glass and it falls to counter, spilling everywhere. The drunk cadets laugh and the bartender scowls at him. It’s all he can do to not grab his arm, but he knows that if he does, someone might figure it out.

His heart is pounding in his chest as he apologizes to the bartender and then stumbles away from the cadets to the back of the bar where the restrooms are located. He has to shove his way through the unruly crowd, the smoke getting in his eyes and the music drumming in his head, but his entire body is distracted by the burn on his arm.

Once he finally makes it to the bathroom, he practically tumbles inside and slams the door shut, locking it behind him. He shouldn’t do this. It’s dangerous to let something so personal out in the open for people to see. His cover does not have a soulmate mark. It’s not him. He’s supposed to be blindly hoping for the day it comes.

But Cassian Andor apparently does have a soulmate mark and it chose a very inopportune time to show. It is him. But he was never hoping for one. Honestly, he had never expected to get one. He always figured that he would die or there would never be the time. There’s little room in his life for anything save the Rebellion, much less his heart. It doesn’t seem practical that someone might love him. It doesn’t feel believable that he might fall in love.

After making sure the door is locked, Cassian takes a deep breath and rolls up his sleeve. I do – someone’s out there. In his paranoia, his eyes jerk around the bathroom again, but he’s alone and, if anyone was listening out there, they would only hear him breathing. He licks his lips.

Letting go of the sleeve, he rubs his face, exhaustion seeping in his bones past the alcohol. He’s tired. He wants to… Oh, he doesn’t know. Go home? Back to Yavin 4? He doesn’t have a home, not really.

(Vague memories of his mother drift into his mind: her showing him her soulmate mark, her voice telling him, “You will know who they are even without the words because they will feel like home.”)

He shakes his head and turns on the sink so that he can splash water on his face. The other cadets will tease him for spilling his drink and having to get control over himself. Such a lightweight, they’ll laugh, and he’ll grin sheepishly and try to make up for it. He’s always trying to make up for silly mistakes. There’s a chance he won’t make it through the Academy, but he can always keep trying.

They don’t need to know that he’s more than capable of hitting a target 900 meters away or flying most ships with precision or even rewiring robots. They don’t need to know anything about him, certainly not his soulmate mark.

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself later that night. All it means is that they are going to die, just like him. It’s not a comforting thought and he doesn’t sleep well that night.