I. If he hadn't known better, Cassian would have thought Jyn had been left alone on Vallt after her mother died and her father was abducted. There was something feral about her, as if she had spent years learning the language of rocks, how to sing to moss, when it was safe to call a cloud down and a raptor with it. When she ate, her hands, those clever hands, could look like claws, and when she slept, she curled around herself like a nautilus. He'd woken her once and she had gazed at him for a long moment, her lips parted; it was as if she thought he'd entered her dream or knew her the way the air did and space did not.

When the world ended, she seemed almost as sorry for the rising waves as for her own destruction but she clung to him and she spoke with her face pressed into his neck Cassian, Cassian. There was no room, no time for regret, there was only Jyn in his arms, who understood him, who took his name with her into the darkness, the overwhelming light.

II.

She'd never considered the future so losing it did not trouble her. The past, though, that she would forfeit with bitterness, the chances she had not taken iron gall. She had not asked enough questions or not the right ones; she had spoken too soon when she woke and Cassian still slept. She had not watched his face as he dreamt. She had not told him a secret when it would have cost her everything and she hadn't seen his eyes as he listened, judging, accepting without a nod. She had never sung where he could hear her; she had stared at the back of his neck and kept her lips pressed tight.

Jyn had not asked him his mother's name, all that was left of her, and she had never reached out her hand to him, when it could have fallen away, untouched or caught as he chose. The water was rising, the light lifting it from the crust of sand, and there was only the present left to hold him as he had not been held since he was six. To make him precious, loved and beloved, to remind him and make the shortest promise. There was no time for a question, only his name, and what it meant to never let go.