Breaking Points

"Don't."

Her voice had chilled, whip-snap sharp and as forbidding as her entire body language from her raised hand to the way her shoulders were turned slightly away.

She seemed to falter for a moment before she caught herself. "Just. Don't."

The senator approaching her fell silent and left after half-heartedly muttering pleasantries, leaving Leia Organa to stand in utter solitude in the middle of Home One's crowded bridge. She looked older than she was, aged by her experiences and grief more than by years. It wasn't an unusual story among rebels.

Cassian withdrew further into the shadows, not wishing to draw her attention and thus her ire, but not ready to abandon his observation of the princess. She was, after all, his mission.

Barely recovered from Scarif and not recovered enough to go back in the field, he had been given what could easily be dismissed as a babysitting mission. It could have, if it hadn't come from General Dodonna himself, that was, and if the Princess hadn't successfully escaped Alliance Command's protective clutches before, or if she had any inclination whatsoever to remain put and let herself be sheltered.

His mission, as such, was simple. Make sure she doesn't get herself killed.

Even the explanation was straightforward enough. The price on her head has skyrocketed, and she Is determined to be at the frontlines of the fight. She's too valuable as a symbol to lose her in some unimportant skirmish.

None of his mission objectives accounted for the sheer force of nature Leia Organa was. Cassian watched her dismiss another fellow senator coming to pay his respects for Alderaan's tragedy, and make all the proper noises that she needed to be careful now, and Bail and Breha would have wanted you to be safe.

He stepped forward, smoothly side-stepping the officers and politicians until he was at her side. His hand barely touched her elbow, but it was still a gesture of calculated familiarity which he would not have permitted himself if it were sincere. "Ma'am, your presence is required."

He didn't flinch under her sharp eyes, he had braved greater terrors than the wrath of a fellow rebel, but he was nevertheless proud that he didn't twitch at all. She really was a force of nature.

"Thank you, Captain. If you'll excuse me, Senator."

They left briskly, passed through one more corridor briskly, and into another, till it was just the two of them.

There, Leia Organa stopped and faced him.

"I didn't need you saving me, Andor."

He scowled, squashing the frustration welling up in him. He hadn't expected thanks, but… Well, it was what it was. He straightened, stood at attention. "Speaking frankly, you looked like you were about to explode at a rebel dignitary, ma'am. I have been tasked with curbing your unreasonable behavior."

"Unreasonable behavior?" she spat, bristling like a wet cat, just like he had known she would.

All the heat of her anger, barely suppressed back there with the dignitaries, flared up at once. She was as bright as a supernova – almost hot enough for her warmth to thaw him. Almost.

"I'll tell you what's unreasonable here, Captain. Unreasonable is locking me up like an unruly child after I made it through capture and torture by the Empire! Unreasonable is blaming it on childish rebellion when I refused to twiddle my thumbs while other people fight and die in this war! I've proven I can take care of myself. But instead of trusting my judgment or thanking me when I went out there and saved lives, I get a slap on the wrist and am sent back to my room!"

"You defied orders," Cassian reminded her, his voice as steely as hers had been when she dismissed the senators and their platitudes.

Leia Organa snorted disdainfully. "Don't tell me you've never done the same!"

It raced through Cassian like an electric shock, the last time he had defied orders. He'd been told to stay put, too. He hadn't. He'd followed Jyn to Scarif and… Well. This was no time for such thoughts. He clenched his jaw. "I did. I paid the price for it."

Or more like, all those who trusted and followed him had paid the price with death, while he paid his with life. But this was no time for such thoughts.

"You are… You are so…" Her hands were balled into fists, leaving Cassian with no doubt that she was just short of punching him. He didn't know for sure what was holding her back. Most likely it was just knowing he was doing his job and wanted to be here no more than she wanted him here. "I can't with you!" the princess snarled and stalked away.

Cassian followed her at a respectful two steps' distance.

Home One, the Rebel Alliance's flagship, was sanctuary and mobile headquarters alike after they had been forced to flee Yavin 4. Yet for all the Mon Calamari cruiser's size, it felt stifling after a while.

Cassian knew Leia Organa had long since passed that point.

He knew, for he had passed it as well, and he could see the same trapped feeling in her eyes that he saw when he looked into the mirror. They were trapped with nowhere to go and very little to distract them from their own thoughts.

She lost herself in Alliance politics, and he… He lost himself in his mission, the only one he had left – her.

He studied her with a thoroughness K-2 would have called obsessive – don't think of him, don't remember, don't relive the stifling helplessness as he died – and firmly attached himself to her side till the only one who questioned his presence anymore was Leia herself.

You need to take it easy, Captain, you're running yourself ragged again, the therapist he was to see once a week warned him once, but he scoffed and shrugged it off. He had his duty. It wasn't much of one, protecting a woman who could very well protect herself while she was stuck in the place she was safer than anywhere else in the galaxy, but if this task was the only thing that stood between him and seeing the light fade from Jyn's eyes time and again, then he would do it better than anyone else ever had.

Leia Organa disagreed.

"Why are you still here?!" she hissed at him after one meeting that had ran too long and too unproductive, and taken all the iron self-control that would keep her from snapping at Cassian on her better days.

He snapped to attention, as if he hadn't been at attention before, as if he was ever anything else but tense and primed for battle that just wouldn't come these days.

They were the only ones left in the conference room, Leia still standing by the chair she had sat in, Cassian standing by the wall. It was her job to be visible, and his to be not.

He met her eyes, as hard as hers, but cold to her heat. "Where else would I be, ma'am?"

"It's been months! You're healed!" She stalked towards him, placing herself right in front of her and glaring up at him – staring him down from below by sheer force of will, as if height were merely a question of determination. "Why are you still here?!"

Cassian opened his mouth to give some bland, perfectly formal response. He couldn't think of a single word. His mouth felt dry, his stomach twisted.

"I have never been reassigned," he said, but his voice was weak with hesitation. He'd never permitted himself to show weakness with her. Theirs was not the kind of relationship to invite weakness. They didn't have any kind of relationship at all, theirs could rather be defined by the absence of one.

"Is that all you are then?" Organa's eyes flashed. "Some drone who follows orders without question, without thought?"

Like a Stormtrooper, he heard, and for a moment Leia Organa was replaced with Jyn before his eyes. Jyn as she had been, alive and angry and so full of promise, before he'd convinced her to make this war her own once again and she'd paid for it with her life.

He licked his lips. They were dry, too. "I try, ma'am."

Cassian got the satisfaction of seeing her falter and if he had not tried so hard to numb himself to it all, he might indeed have felt satisfaction. He did not and simply filed it away with everything else he had learned about her.

She inhaled deeply. Her nostrils flared, her hands balled into fists at her sides. He had often seen her angry, but this was the first time she let them slouch in front of her, just for a moment before she caught herself and squared them, and raised her head higher than before.

For a moment Cassian wondered if she would punch him, and then wondered if he would permit it if she tried. He couldn't tell. He didn't know himself very well anymore these days.

"Well, I'm not," she snapped and she must have read the confusion in his eyes, for she added, "I'm not ready to turn myself into a droid at the Empire's pleasure. I don't know about you, but I'm not planning to let them win!"

"So you'll do what?" Cassian sneered before he could remember that he was supposed not to let himself care, "You'll stalk around within your cage and snap at your only allies? You can be as angry as you like, but it won't bring Alderaan back."

She inhaled. Her breath trembled. "At least I haven't given up!"

She left. For once, Cassian didn't follow.

The following day, he asked General Draven to be put back on active duty.

A week later, he killed his first man since Scarif and called it healing.

Their paths didn't cross again till Hoth, a world as icy and unforgiving as the one that had birthed Cassian.

It would become their new headquarters, in two years maybe when they were done forcing something you could call home from ice and snow and stone. For now, it was an assortment of windswept tents, plasteel container boxes and hastily drilled snowy caves which barely served to shelter the hardened construction workers, never mind General Rieekan's twice as miserable fighting sentients.

Cassian couldn't even figure out why he had been deployed here, never mind why the last princess of Alderaan would be stomping through icy sludge.

She dodged a giant eight-armed construction droid and came to a halt in front of him. She pulled down the scarf and pushed up her protective goggles, revealing pale blueish lips and a face rough from the cutting winds that never quite ceased on Hoth.

He was struck by how beautiful she was, now that her eyes were no longer those of a trapped animal.

"It's high time, Andor, we'd been expecting you three days ago. I need you to take a team out to survey Wampa Valley first thing tomorrow."

He blinked. Felt himself floundering, still half caught in the soft flutter of the strand of brown hair that had escaped her buns. "You realize I'm specialized on urban guerrilla warfare, don't you?"

"Of course. I'm familiar with the Fest Resistance. That's not why I asked for you."

She didn't sound like she was ready to tell him why she had asked for him. Cassian decided to consider it a small victory to learn at all that she was to blame for his new assignment.

He nodded, expression as solemn and professional as ever, as if he didn't have a hundred questions begging to be asked. "I'll need to know where I can leave my bag, and then I'd like to meet the Pathfinders I'll be working with."

As small as their under-construction base was, they shouldn't have been running into another all the time. The princess spent most of her time in the command center, while Cassian was all over the place.

Nobody quite seemed to know what to do with a man of his skills in a place where the closest thing to espionage work was mapping wampa nests.

He shouldn't keep running into the princess, and yet here he was, yet again.

In the makeshift container building that was their mess hall, cantina and recreation room all in one, he sat at one of the wobbly tables clutching a steaming hot mug of caf and tried his hardest to pretend that Leia Organa wasn't the only other person in the room.

She often came in here late, just like he did. They didn't talk, didn't even acknowledge another, but he was still so very aware of her.

Today he felt her approach and he tensed, already preparing an excuse while he had to leave just in case she chose today as the day to break their ceasefire silence.

"Don't lie to me," she said in greeting, cradling her own steaming mug, "if you want to avoid me then just do so, you don't need to make up pretty excuses."

Cassian looked up, brown eyes caught by brown eyes. He gulped audibly. There were many things he should or could be saying, he was sure, but he couldn't think of a single thing to say.

The wind howled and tore at the metal walls. Inside, it was warm and smelled faintly of caf, and though they only had rickety tables and folding chairs, it felt like a sanctuary amidst the storm.

"Why?" Cassian asked, his voice so quiet it could barely be heard over the wind's angry howls. He had no strength left for anger. He didn't even have the strength left for coldness.

Miraculously, Leia looked away first. "I thought you should be given a chance to grieve." Her voice was little louder than his.

He bristled. Oh. There it was, the anger. "I don't need to grieve!" he snapped. "I was doing fine keeping busy!"

"Fine!" Leia snapped. "Fine!" Her derisive snort cut deep, and Cassian's shoulders stiffened further. A fact she, of course, briskly ignored. "Is that why they were going to pull you from active duty? Because you were doing just fine?!"

Her words hit him with the force of a slap.

He stilled, body and mind. Stunned.

"The reassignment…" He looked at her but didn't have the courage to meet her eyes, so he just awkwardly looked at the tip of her nose, then dipped his gaze lower to her lips. They still looked beautiful, even pinched into a thin, frustrated line.

"I wasn't going to let them put you behind a desk. I know you would have…"

She trailed off, mercifully, and Cassian lowered his gaze to study his half-empty mug. "I knew it was coming. General Draven was growing tired of the risks I was taking."

Risks not just for himself, he was supposed to risk his own life, but risking other personnel, risking missions, contacts, equipment. Foolish risks, at that, gambling with too many lives for too little gain.

"But as long as you kept running there was no time to think," Leia whispered.

Cassian finally dared meet her eyes. She looked as haunted as he felt. She looked away first.

"Do you ever question why you deserved to survive when better people had to die?"

It was warm inside, yet Cassian felt cold. "I don't." He put down his mug. It was still steaming. His hands, too, felt cold once he no longer held onto it. "I don't wonder. I know I should have died on Scarif."

He walked away and didn't look back.

The next evening, she was back. Leia, the princess. No, just the princess. She couldn't be Leia to him. He knew that, but she was back and he had been waiting.

She poured herself a cup and sat down across from him, no beating about the bushes today.

"I'm back there every night on the Death Star with Tarkin and Vader, and I wonder…" Her hands clenched around the handle of the delicate cup she had chosen tonight from their assortment of mismatched kitchenware. "If I had said something different. If I had been someone different. If I had been less defiant, or proud, if I had pleaded more, if I had…" She drowned the rest of her sentence in a large gulp of too-hot caf.

"No wonder you can't sleep, if you drink caf before bed," Cassian said, and sipped on his own mug at a more measured pace.

Her brows knit into a frown.

He met her gaze evenly. "I knew what I was doing. I convinced them to go anyway." His chest felt tight. This was the point his heart ought to be stuttering, but it just kept beating, uncaring of his turmoil. "And I failed them. Alderaan died anyway."

"Because I didn't get the plans to the Rebellion in time!" Leia barked, leaping up from her chair. It toppled backward, she took no notice. It looked to Cassian as if months of concealed tension had been unleashed; she was taut with it now in a way she hadn't been even in these restless days on Home One. "Because I let myself get caught and Artoo ended up on Tatooine instead of Yavin, and I got Alderaan killed!"

"You, you, you!" he barked, getting up as well and circling around the small table to face her, "not everything's about you, Princess!"

Leia was younger than him, twenty years old. He knew for there had been a party Cassian hadn't attended. Her eyes were old in the same way as many rebels' eyes were, weighed down by the grief of more years than she had seen. Hers just burned hotter than most.

"And it's not about you!" she barked right back.

Their eyes met again. She was so short that even Cassian with his average height and slim build towered over her. Experience had taught him she would still be able to glare him into submission.

She didn't.

She stepped towards him, and Cassian matched her. Their lips crashed into another like fire against ice.

They both tasted of the strong, bitter caf whose dredges had thickened to something alarmingly molasses-like at this hour of the night. Leia's fingers tried to dig into his back like claws, but they found no purchase through the many padded layers of his Hoth uniform. He kissed her harder, and swallowed the growl of outrage she made when his hands found her ass and pressed her flush against him. Her nails scraped over the back of his neck where no many layers protected him, leaving in their wake a burning.

She tore herself away from their kiss first, and Cassian took a moment to do nothing but marvel at the sight of her, her face flushed, her saliva-slick lips parted for sharp little gasps.

The sight of her so flustered made tight heat coil low in his belly. It was like some of her heat had infected him. He couldn't retreat into ice anymore, all he could think about was kissing her again. His mind returned to the feel of her body pressed against his, but Cassian didn't permit himself to linger on it.

"You are wrong." She had her finger pointed at him, and her face was quickly returning to barely contained fury as if the last minutes had never happened. "You know nothing about me or my grief. You," she gritted her teeth, "you have no right to judge me."

He felt a jerk. One pair of angry eyes momentarily overlaid with another. You can't talk your way around this. Cassian shook his head, forcing her accusing eyes back into the box with the other ghosts.

I don't have to, he had said to Jyn all these months ago, and his lips almost formed the same words, except what came out was, "I do." He looked at Leia. Saw her and only her, no ghosts except for the ones she conjured. Felt weary and shaken, yet every nerve ending was still lit with the feeling of her in his arms. He was coldly furious again. Still. Whatever, they were blurring into the same thing as so many things did these days. "Don't tell me you aren't judging me, too."

"I am," she said.

Cassian didn't wonder if she had judged him and found him wanting, there was no way she wouldn't have.

A part of him wanted to run and retreat, to put an end to this before one of them said or did anything truly irredeemable. But had he been doing anything but running since Scarif?

He stepped closer again, just by a minute step. "Tell me my flaws."

Her eyes were hard. She bared her teeth before she spoke. She was still beautiful. "You're a coward, Andor."

"Because I'm not…"

"Because you're hiding!" she snapped before he could even figure out how he was going to end that sentence. "You're hiding behind your perfect military posture and your talk of duty when everybody knows you've just been trying your hardest to get yourself killed!"

For the second time tonight Cassian's thoughts jarred to a halt. He felt very, very cold again. The warmth Leia had transfused with their kiss had been snuffed out while he wasn't paying attention, and he hadn't even noticed it until now. His hands clenched into fists at his sides. He forced them to unclench. "Like you're one to talk. You're clinging to nothing but your duty and royal perfectionism as if that will bring Alderaan back."

"It's all that's left of Alderaan, you insensitive braintick!" Leia blinked rapidly until the conspicuous gleam to her eyes had faded.

The wind's howling got louder and one of the shutters rattled ominously.

Cassian stood there, feeling very lost and a lot smaller than he usually did, even now in these post-Scarif days in which he always felt smaller than he once had.

"So what you're saying is that we're both cowards," he surmised tentatively. He couldn't even say why he was trying to be gentle with her now. Had the threat of tears cowed him? Or was it just this blanket of weariness that was covering him again and burying all emotions under a layer of ice – or as Leia would call it, hiding.

It wasn't worth it. They were just running in circles, and he was so tired of running in circles.

Cassian sighed, rubbed a hand over his face. "I can't even remember what we fought about in the first place." He gazed at Leia Organa, looking vulnerable with her brown eyes betraying he had caught her off-guard with this moment of honesty. There hadn't ever been a lot of honesty between them, at least not unless it was shouted. "Can you?"

She opened her mouth, but then she just shook her head. She looked like she felt diminished, too.

Unease stirred in Cassian. A soldier shouldn't see his commander in a moment of weakness.

He could see the very moment she realized it. Her spine didn't snap straight, the motion was subtle, but impossible to miss for a spy's trained eyes. "Good night, Captain."

He sat down on the closest chair and picked up his abandoned mug. His steaming hot caf had cooled to tepid. He watched her leave and didn't manage a weak, "good night, Princess," till the door had already closed behind her.

He returned the next night. So did Leia.

They didn't speak, at least not of anything of importance, but something had changed between them.

Cassian wondered how long this fragile limbo could last, and how much worse things would be once the truce shattered. He would have been lying if he said this was a risk he was willing to take, but it was also one he was unable not to take. He couldn't stay away. He had tried.

In the meantime, the construction crews dug deeper into stone and ice, and they moved from windswept tents into overcrowded caves. Cassian slept in a room of eight and considered himself lucky for it, for it was one of the smaller sleeping quarters. It wasn't well-suited to someone who had trouble falling asleep, but he had long since learned to have his nightmares quietly, so he made do.

Life was good, he told himself, or as good as it could get.

"Why did you never accept a medal for Scarif?" Leia asked late one evening when they walked together, him finding excuses to postpone returning to his quarters and her probably doing the same.

"For the same reason I didn't accept a promotion," he said, and no more.

Leia Organa was silent for a while before she nodded. "I understand." He was inclined to believe her, though he barely understood it himself.

When he let himself think about how well she could read him it terrified Cassian, all the more since he knew nothing but idle base gossip about her. He knew of the Jedi and the smugglers that had rescued her from the base star and he knew of her trying to keep in touch with what remained of the Alderaanians, but he knew only what everybody knew. The princess liked to play her cards close to her chest and he had never made himself someone she would confide in. They still tore into another far too often to reveal anything which could be used to hurt another.

It was ironic that she would be so much better at reading him even when he said nothing at all.

Maybe it would be nice if she did confide in him.

Maybe it would also be nice if she kissed him again.

Every time his thoughts strayed he told himself that neither was likely to happen.

"After that first day you didn't ask again why I had you reassigned to Hoth."

Cassian's steps slowed slightly as he went through the past months for an instance to prove her wrong. "I didn't," he had to admit, "I… I guess I was too caught up in my work here to wonder why I'm here at all."

He was still being shuffled around, but it was no longer because they didn't know what to do with him and more because he had proven himself adaptable and willing to misuse his skills for whatever purpose they could have here. All week now he had been using his experience in sabotage and demolitions for tunneling, and the better part of last month had been spent in a task force coming up with scenarios for imperial infiltration and rebel counter strategies.

Leia's lips curled into a smile.

Cassian found himself a little disappointed that she didn't gloat.

They walked in silence till she stopped in front of a door as nondescript as all the others. She sized him up, strangely thoughtful. Wistful, he would have called it, if there were any reason for it. "These are my quarters."

Cassian felt a jolt race through him, then called himself a fool for it. It meant nothing. She was just stating a fact. One never-acknowledged kiss weeks ago didn't mean a thing.

Except she opened the door and took two steps into the room before turning to him, asking sharply, "Are you coming or not?"

He knew how much she buried under hard eyes and sharp word. Home One had taught him she was at her most brittle when she was closest to breaking.

She looked very brittle in this moment.

Cassian passed the threshold before he could think better of it.

Leia Organa, of course, had a room to herself, though it was no more lavish than Cassian's.

She was waiting for him on the other side. Her eyes widened a little when the door closed behind him, as if she were taken aback by the consequences of her own bravado.

Cassian could feel his pulse echo in his ears. He ached to reach for her, though he would feel nothing through the thick insulated gloves they all wore. Barely thinking about it he tugged them off and placed them neatly on the counter before his eyes returned to Leia.

"I don't do this, normally," she said awkwardly and averted her eyes.

"You don't have to explain yourself," he said briskly. He didn't like to see her looking so small, so unlike the princess she was.

It was harder without the noxious cocktail of grief and anger giving them an easy excuse. Cassian missed that excuse. He missed her passion burning away the cold.

He straightened, forcing a little more of that coldness into his voice and his face, and said, "It's not my place to judge how you hide from mourning your people. This way is at least less likely to get good people killed."

Indignation flared up in Leia's eyes, and yet Cassian could have sworn he saw some gratitude lurking there, too. Or maybe he just desperately needed to believe that she understood why he had said that, for it had been cruel even to his own ears. But anger would make it easier for both of them.

"Who do you think you are?" the princess hissed. She was all princess now.

"Someone who looks beneath the brave survivor façade." He took the first step towards her, she didn't make one of her own and he nearly faltered, but she wasn't backing away either. "You're bottling it all up, aren't you? Alderaan… your captivity."

Cassian could have sworn he saw her flinch. Everybody spoke of sharing her grief for Alderaan, but nobody ever addressed her time in imprisonment. They spoke of the rescue by Solo and Skywalker, but not of what she had suffered before. It was an unspoken rule, consideration given to all former prisoners of war.

"I think you have more nightmares to dredge up than I do, Captain!" she snapped, her back ramrod straight. "Would you like me to start listing yours?!"

He kissed her. His bare hand cradling her cheek, his lips hard on hers. She made a noise, he thought it a protest and meant to pull back already when she pressed back against his lips and her tongue slipped into his mouth, claiming it. Cassian felt heat race through him as Leia rose onto her tiptoes and pressed her body against his.

This time there was no danger of anyone bursting in, no awkwardness of a space too large and open to provide any sense of privacy even when they were alone.

They didn't tear at another's clothes, not quite. That would have implied something uncontrolled or chaotic, and there was no such thing about the purposeful way in which they divested another of the many layers of their thick white Hoth uniforms. Hats and gloves and vests and jumpsuits were shed piece by piece by deft hands, their eyes returning time and again to find the other's for reassurance though they did not speak, only pulled another back into these hard, firm kisses.

Cassian's fingers found the pins in Leia's hair and released it. "You could stab a man with them," he finally murmured, having tested the sharpness of a hairpin and pricked his finger.

"In the eye," Leia said as she shook out her hair, and shot him the kind of pointed look that told him she had often enough considered his eyes. She stepped out of her untied boots and let her jumpsuit fall, pool at her feet, then stepped out of that, too.

He dropped the pins next to his own gloves, Leia's laid abandoned on the floor.

He was naked, but Cassian didn't even feel awkward anymore. Her heat was burning him even in the cold air of her quarters.

She stood before him as naked as him, and still proudly defiant, or should that be defiantly proud. She was enchanting either way.

Her nipples were hard from the cold, her skin covered with goosebumps much like his own. She was beautiful. Cassian wanted to bask in the sight of her, he wanted to drop to his knees and worship her body.

But he wasn't here as her lover, not even as her friend.

He stepped forward and she stepped back until her back hit the wall, and her arms wrapped around his neck as she rose to her tiptoes. He pressed closer, till her breasts were pressed against his chest and his cock rubbed against her crotch. Cassian nipped at her earlobe, hard.

"List my nightmares," he growled, "and I'll list the procedures the torture droids use."

Leia's nails dug into the back of his neck. They left pain in their wake as they scraped along his spine. She arched up into him, one leg hooking around his waist.

He grabbed her ass and hoisted her a little higher, she rewarded him with teeth digging into the crook of his neck and then with a shift of her hips. His own body responded to meet her, his eyes squeezing shut, teeth stubbornly gritted against any moan that might try to escape.

It wasn't easier when you held on to your anger, but tenderness would be far too dangerous.

"I was told the people of Fest are as cold as their planet. I thought it was a stereotype until I met you."

Cassian regarded her with exactly the same Festan coolness he had just been accused of, a coolness which belied the fact they were in Leia's quarters, in her bed, and he still felt her scent cloud his senses. "I heard the people of Alderaan are winsome and charming. I believed it," he shot back, "until you proved me wrong."

A hint of a smile tugged the corners of Leia's mouth upwards as she sat up. The blankets fell to pool around her lap.

Cassian, laying on his side with a perfect view on her, let his eyes linger on her breasts before dipping lower. He still wanted to taste her. He had a far better idea now of the many things he wanted, but that didn't make them any less impossible than they had been an hour ago.

She tried to comb out her hair with her fingers, and after watching her for a moment longer Cassian scoffed and sat up as well. "Let me," he said. He didn't reach for her till Leia nodded and shifted to face away from him.

His fingers ran through her long brown hair, unknotting snarls and smoothing away the signs of their… whatever it had been, kriffed if he had a name for it.

"Would you have done it?" Leia asked quietly.

His hands stilled. "What?"

"Listed the… the techniques." Now her voice was barely above a whisper. "The ones used on me."

"Would you have listed my kills?"

They fell silent, no sound but their soft breathing, no movement but him combing her hair with his fingers.

They looked very much like lovers, Cassian mused. He took note of the pang of longing he felt and shoved it to the back of his mind. It wasn't helpful right now.

"I noticed that you never speak of your imprisonment," Cassian said hesitantly, though he added to himself maybe she did, just not to him. After all, they had both taken great pains to remain strangers to another.

Her breath hitched. "There's nothing to speak of." Her voice had cooled to the iciness she had accused him of, yet he could hear anger simmering underneath the ice. "You know how the Empire interrogates its prisoners. It happened. It's over. Others have suffered more for the rebellion, and they didn't get rescued."

"That's what I tell myself, too," he murmured.

Silence again. Unlike so many times before it didn't feel right this time.

He felt restless with it, he could sense Leia's restlessness as well. Even playing with her hair seemed to have lost its calming magic. A shame, he liked the feel of it between his fingers.

"Do you ever wish you had…" Leia cut herself off. Her fingers dug into her thighs, knuckles white.

Behind her, Cassian stilled.

"I miss them," she whispered.

Alderaan, Cassian knew, and in his mind, he completed her abandoned sentence. Do you ever wish you had died with them. He didn't dare ask if she had ever wished for it. "You're the one who kept reminding me of my duty." She hadn't even needed words for it.

"Yes," she echoed, "duty." For once, it sounded hollow.

Cassian's hands started moving through her hair again. "I have been told duty can be a joy."

When it was a burden shared and halved by those you loved, when it was not about tearing yourself apart but about building something better. There were those rebel fighters on Hoth and elsewhere who placed all their bets on a brighter future. Cassian had always known them to be braver than himself, the operative he had been would have never dared to open himself up to such hurt.

He didn't know what risks the man he was now could be driven to take, he barely knew him at all.

Leia turned around to face him. She hadn't really changed, but to Cassian's eyes she didn't look so cold any longer, though still frustratingly unreadable.

"This changes nothing," she murmured and kissed him. They both knew it was a lie.