(A/N) Title taken from the song "Solsbury Hill" by Peter Gabriel, although I actually prefer the Sarah McLachlan live cover.

Cassian often thought that emerging from deep cover was like surfacing after a deep-sea dive. You had to take it in measured stages, pausing at certain depths on your way up through the levels of ocean, just the same as you had to move carefully through Imperial space, core to rim, changing covers every so often to chill your trail.

If you did it too fast, you'd get the bends, or your cover would be blown, both possibly fatal outcomes. So you took it slow.

Which he appreciated. He did. But Force, it took so long.

He didn't remember it taking so long all the other times, although logic dictated that it always had, or possibly longer.

He'd always been able to sink deep into a cover before, leaving Cassian almost completely behind as he became Joreth or Willix or whoever. But this time, a stubborn knot of Cassian-ness remained deep inside, tied up around a pair of green eyes and a smirking mouth.

He'd missed her desperately.

But he was almost home. One more stop on some nameless rim planet, a brief check-in over a heavily encrypted line. Then a rendezvous with a Rebel shuttle that would take him that last hop back to base and back to Jyn.

"Any messages?" he asked after his check-in and status report (intelligence acquired, agent uncompromised).

Other intelligence agents he'd worked with used to ask this on their last check-in before home, when it was finally, marginally safe. Anything from their loved ones, it meant. Any news of their spouses or parents or children. He'd always put up with it as a time-eater before they could make their rendezvous. More than a few times, he'd had to take over getting a distraught agent to the rendezvous after they'd heard that some important person had died in the skies or on the ground while they were gone.

He'd never thought he'd be asking the same question some day. He'd never thought he'd live that long.

"No messages," the relay droid said.

He swallowed. "Deposit message, Sergeant Jyn Erso." Dread in his throat, he waited for the next words to be Sergeant Erso classed KIA -

"Sergeant Erso is currently off-base and out of contact. ETA unknown."

Even as relief spilled through him, frustration came with it. He shut his eyes.

Of all the kriffing timing -

But that was the deal, wasn't it? Their time wasn't their own, their movements weren't their own. Both belonged to the Rebellion.

"Cancel request," he said.

"Request cancelled. Report to Jahassa City spaceport. Your contact is the light shuttle Errant. Passcode sixteen A."

"Understood."

Jahassa City was halfway across the continent from the spaceport where he'd landed. He shrugged on one of his light covers - Histain NaJex, annoyed traveler trying to catch his fucking passage off this rock - and took public transport, paying with a fistful of wrinkled scrip. He sat on the train watching the landscape rip by underneath at several hundred klicks an hour, scowling to himself so fiercely that the commuting salarymen in the rest of the carriage left all the seats around him empty.

He was tired. Worn to the bone. He'd been traveling for a week, hopscotching across the galaxy and through several covers, and between this and hyperspace, it would be a good twenty hours before he set foot on base. All he wanted was to kiss Jyn for the first time in four months. And now she wasn't going to be there when he got back.

He shifted in his seat, trying to find a comfortable position on the rock-hard plastic. He would be planetside for a good long time after this, he reminded himself. He always was after deep cover. He could meet the Pathfinders' transport as it lurched in, probably smelling of blaster burns and outerspace dogfights, because the Pathfinders as a whole wouldn't know the meaning of subtlety if it kicked them in the shins.

She would walk down the gangplank (yes, walk, no stretchers or bacta tanks needed this time, he forbade it). She would spot him, stop, say something snarky or breezy. Maybe she'd let him fire something back, maybe she would just laugh and grab him, hauling herself up on her toes and him down by the shirt so they could finally kiss.

It wasn't completely satisfying, but it would do.

Checking the spaceport logs, he found the light shuttle Errant in berth 34-X and made his way there.

"Who's that?" said a garbled voice, crackling with static through the speaker outside the entrance to the berth. This spaceport's connections must be especially poor. "You my pickup?"

"Yeah, Histain NaJex," he said. "And I want to complain about your stupid 'net site. It crashed my handcomp twice."

"Tell it to tech support, that's nothing to do with me. I'm just a contractor."

He relaxed. That was the countersign. "Just let me in already."

The door zipped open, and he hefted his bag over his shoulder to duck through. As it shut behind him, the gangplank lowered and a familiar figure strolled down it.

A very familiar figure.

Jyn smirked at him and said, "Need a ride, soldier?"

He felt his bag slip through his fingers and thump to the duracrete behind him as he stared, mouth hanging open.

She took the last few steps and stood less than six inches away, chin tilted up. "Well? Are you - "

The rest of her words got swallowed up in Cassian's mouth as he dragged her close and gave her the kiss he'd been dreaming of for four months. She wrapped her arms tight around his neck, kissing him back fiercely, heat and appetite and Jyn, just Jyn, heady as wine.

When they both had to come up for air, he realized he'd hauled her off her feet. He set her down, still staring. "You're real," he said blankly.

She grinned up at him. Her hair was longer, the wisps that had fallen stubbornly in her eyes when he'd left now long enough to tuck behind her ears. "Real as gravity."

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Are you AWOL?"

She gasped in indignation. "Why would that be your first thought?"

"My entire history with you," he said.

She snorted. "I'm here on orders. I'm your contact."

He eyed her. "Are you sure?"

"Excuse you, Captain. I have clearance, you know. I have rank. I'm one of the heroes of Scarif."

"Which makes it all the more unlikely that Draven would suddenly decide to send you on a junior agent's errand."

Her gaze wandered. "I may have agreed that the Pathfinders would lend me to Intelligence for an unspecified future mission."

His brows went up. "I'm sure Draven was terribly excited about that offer."

"In fact, he was, which is worrying." She grimaced.

He took her chin in his fingers. "You agreed to that?"

She looked up into his eyes, and then away, almost shyly. "I missed you," she muttered to his shirt collar.

He found himself smiling, maybe his first smile since he'd boarded the transport away from her. "I missed you, too."

Her eyes went soft, the kind of expression only he and maybe one or two others were ever allowed to see. "Come on, Captain," she said, curling her hand around his and backing up toward the gangplank. "I'm taking you home."

He tugged her close for another kiss. "I already am."

FINIS