open ✧ the time to fight is now

[realists]

☒ ᴀᴄᴛɪᴏɴsᴘᴀᴍ ☒ ᴘʀᴏsᴇ ☒ ᴘɪᴄᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴘʀᴏᴍᴘᴛs ☒ ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴡᴏʀᴅʟʏ ☒ ᴏᴠᴇʀғʟᴏᴡ

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[ouzel]

[realists]

[ jyn didn't think she would get to see another sunset. and yet here they are, surrounded by palm trees and a cool blue lagoon and natives that speak like a melody with skin so pale and transluscent their veins and organs look like a complicated circuit board. they don't ask questions when their female guest physically recoils from those sunsets she didn't think she would get to see. jyn likes them. recuperation, mon mothma had called it, but jyn knew it wasn't their injuries -- cassian's more than hers -- keeping them from the fight. rogue one was persona non grata in the empire and they were the only ones left.

she frowns at the sand squishing between her toes, tiny waves lapping across her bare feet, before her gaze lifts to squint into the twilight. ]

I hate-- [ waiting? "recuperating"? sand? she doesn't finish her sentence regardless, lips pressing together, slanting back into a frown. ]

[ouzel]

We could always request to go somewhere else, [ Cassian replies from his chair, where he's occasionally recalling how difficult it was to breathe and now it isn't; it's like his mind is in this unending chain reaction of shock and then being startled by the fact that few things hurt. He's not watching the sunset - he's watching her, just out of reach, and trying to ignore the twinge of panic that accompanies the distance, until he moves the chair closer.

If she doesn't turn, doesn't say anything for a moment, he'll stand. Either way, he's reaching for her hand. ]

Or just stay inside.

[realists]

[ she doesn't make him stand, taking the noise of the chair shifting as a sign to move back into arm's reach like a moon in his gravity. reaching back is like an instinct, rewarded with the warm grip of his fingers, a flare of warmth blossoming in her chest. it doesn't lessen her frown, if anything it deepens further. ]

I don't want to be someplace else, [ she argues, even though she does. ] I want to be doing something.

[ she has guilted and goaded and all but begged the alliance to listen to her and all of them has perished, no amount of relocations will allow her to accept that when she isn't able to do anything in their honor. just to live for them seems so weak and she doesn't have the self-worth to believe she was worth surviving. ]

[ouzel]

[ Instead of telling her that he knows, Cassian rubs his thumb along the top of hers. Yet he does know, understands much too well the survivor's guilt that has woken him up with the names of the dead trapped in his throat in the middle of the night. He'd be more restless if it weren't for things like the chair, the difficulty walking still that they tell him should take only a little while longer to sort itself out.

There's a blanket on his lap and the hand not occupied with hers rubs the texture of the fabric before he does stand, allowing her to help, and spreads the blanket on the sand before settling down on it and giving her hand a little tug. ]

It'll take them a while to figure out what they think we can safely manage.

[ He also knows that part of her doesn't care. ]

[realists]

[ it takes a great force of will for jyn not to stubbornly shout that they can handle anything. they can't and she wants nothing more than to ignore cassian's injuries and she doesn't want him to remind her to prove a point. the fact that she has to support him at all proves that point perfectly well and makes her heart ache every time she sees him flinch or try to cover a wince.

folding down next to him comes with the same ease and reflex as taking his hand. her words may be frustrated and defiant, but she melts like snow at nearly every physical cue. she can't fight physics. ]

They won't finish that equation.

[realists]

♪ story goes on -- richard maltby, jr

If she's honest, Jyn doesn't remember how they got off the platform in Eadu. She remembers Cassian pulling her away from her father's body, she remembers her father's eyes opening again, she remembers screaming. How they got him to the ship, how they got off the planet, who washed her father's blood off her hands, when they arrived back on Yavin, those are details that she missed. She remembers, vividly, shouting at Cassian even though the blood on his jacket should have been enough to tell her who carried her father aboard, she remembers Baze physically dragging her away so she could scream and rage in peace. She remembers Cassian again, hands curled around her biceps so she won't leap like a particularly enraged cat at the Alliance doctors working on her father. She doesn't remember falling asleep next to Bodhi at his bedside or being carried back to her room.

What she remembers with the most clarity is waking up to find him gone from his room and searching the base in a panic until she finds her father engaged in discussion with the entirety of the Alliance Cabinet, defending his actions for the Empire. Ignoring manners and protocol and General Draven shouting at her to stop, she pushes past Mon Mothma and Senator Organa and throws her arms around her father in the middle of a sentence, burying her face against his neck.

No one seems particularly surprised when Jyn blindly pulls a blaster on Draven when he tries to order her out of her father's arms and out of the room -- he was the one who also ordered Galen's assassination so it's a good bet that someone won't be forgiving him any time soon -- and it's Bail Organa who gently plucks the weapon out of her hand. Maybe it's just something about watching a daughter reunite with her father that touches a soft spot in his heart, Jyn doesn't know, doesn't even realize, just curls that arm back around her father.

Realizing the rebellious young woman isn't going to give up, at least not until she stops crying, Mon Mothma suggests they reconvene later and the council leaves to give the Ersos their privacy. It's hours before Jyn is willing to part with him again and it's only due to the many reassurances to his safety that she finally allows the cabinet to finish their meeting, collecting the rest of the wealth of Imperial secrets that Galen has at his disposal.

She's waiting outside the door when they break for the day, idly watching Cassian across the hanger in a comical display of missed glances. When she looks away, the captain's gaze is immediately drawn to her and neither of them are the wiser or both of them refuse to be. But still she looks up to her father, the natural downturn of her mouth making her relieved expression still look half somber.

"Hi."

[neutralist]

That he should be judged is not a sentiment Galen would protest. Judged, and harshly so; he couldn't have imagined he would still be alive at the end of all this, didn't so much as hope for it--the best he could hope for was that his treachery would only be discovered in its explosive aftermath. And then Krennic would do what Krennic did best, which was paint Galen into a corner, this time with no escape.

He had longed for that, once enough time had passed that he knew Jyn must be out of the Empire's reach. To simply rest. The once bright clamor of his mind, thoughts and ideas and visions demanding to be given form and voice were prison bars now, a throughline that went straight to the heart of the Death Star, to his perfect flaw, and--stopped there. To go on, after that, to breathe in and out and put one foot in front of the next...there seemed only one reason to even try, and it wasn't the purity of purpose of the Alliance.

Which was ultimately why part of him bristled that he was kept for hours trying to explain his actions, not that they should not be explained, weighed and measured and somehow, impossibly, paid for, only--he supposed there was no such thing as an impartial judge to be found. Nevertheless the Rebels had been close to Lyra's heart, not his. Even if he'd realized long ago there was no refuge in neutrality. Science didn't take sides, but science hadn't been what he held onto when failure felt like the shadow of a knife at his back. And fathers, anyone could tell you, were never neutral.

He can still feel the imprint of her arms hours later, the steel spine so like her mother's, that fierceness he has no way of knowing was, until recently, doused by the weight of one abandonment after another. Ostensibly he's meant to be finding something to eat just now, but Jyn's presence makes that prospect seem utterly unimportant. The volley of missed glances doesn't escape him, but--what should he say? She hasn't had a father in fifteen years, and he wouldn't know how to speak to...whatever is happening here, even if he'd been there every day of her life.

So, instead. "Stardust," he tries, like it's hello, like it's simple, but the word cracks, the T, already soft with the accent she didn't keep, dissolves, sticks in his throat. Instead, it's his turn to reach for her, thinking still, I have so much to tell you, but saying none of it, face tipped down into her hair instead.

[realists]

Stardust.

Jyn spent so long hating him, making herself hate him in order to protect herself, and then he calls her stardust and the anger melts away like water down the drain. It will return, she knows, anger fuels her above anything else and she holds on to the fire like it can crystallize into a weapon.

She knows the science of this is false. Her father taught her that. It also doesn't matter.

Her face twists where it's pressed against his chest, fighting against emotions she is not equipped to deal with, breathing in the scent of him. It doesn't smell like the damp dirt of Lah'mu, the sour chemical scent of his Imperial uniform from her very early childhood. It's unfamiliar and strange, clean and sterile like K-2. She doesn't like it.

"I'm here." It's me. You did it. I'm proud of you. Something.

[neutralist]

Her father doesn't have the faith in science he once had, and religion has always been a faraway concept to him. It meant a great deal to Lyra, so he respected it even if he didn't understand it, but his strange dreams and stranger relationship to the crystals he worked with hadn't saved him. Hadn't saved Lyra.

So if he's going to find faith at all--it's here. This one hope, that he'd only given form to in his strongest moments: that Jyn might still be out there somewhere. That she wasn't with Saw anymore had been a surprise, from what little info he's gathered, but Saw ...Saw had changed. If Lyra was alive, if they'd made it together away from Alpinn, would she have fallen to that fate? Scarred over and twisted by constant fighting, constant fear--no, he can't believe that. Never Lyra.

Then again he doesn't know his daughter so well as he once had, either. Now is the opportune time to find out, it seems. The opportune time being the only time. "Yes. So you are."

It's a little choked; when he backs up just to arm's length, keeping his hands tight on her shoulders, his eyes are wet. "Let me have a look at you." ....a look that seems like it might go on quite a while, Galen trying to draw the lines that melted away a child's features; she has her mother's mouth, strong and stubborn and petulant, the kind that grows radiant in smile; the nose and cheekbones could be either--but. Even when she was little, she had his eyes.

"So much of your mother," he murmurs, only semi-voluntarily; mostly it feels like a compulsion. "But so much that is just you, I think. I want--" he falters a little; the difficulty had been there with Bodhi too, the assumption that any grand words he might have to give would never actually be said. This is a lifetime's worth of words, though, everything he should have been there to say as she grew. "There's so much I want to tell you. For you to understand. Will you tell me of you, first? Anything you like."

[realists]

Tell him what? There is so little goodness in Jyn's life and the idea of burdening her father with what her life had become makes her feel physically ill.

Is she supposed to tell him that the first time she saw someone die it was her mother? That so many of her memories include death and loss? That she knows what Saw did to Bodhi because she'd seen it before even if he tried to hide so much from her, to protect her? That she learned how to torture before she learned how to ride a speeder?

Her life is not worth a story and all it will do is upset her father.

"There isn't a lot to say," she hedges instead, eyes darting away in shame. She tried to convince herself that she was better than Cassian, that she didn't murder, but how many times had her direct inaction cause someone else to fall? Isn't that the same thing? How is she supposed to tell her father that the little girl that doodled his equations on the edge of her pictures like they were a border turned into a woman that walked away from trying to protect the galaxy because she was angry with the universe?

She can't tell him that he shouldn't care for her because she doesn't deserve it, she's far too selfish for that.

this is trash

[admonished]

war is not a
time for love..

come back to me

writes you a novel about garbage

[realists]

It's a miracle that Jyn and Cassian survive Scarif, a miracle that they survived together, protected by her crystal. To be the lone survivor of Scarif would have been too much, but at least they had each other. Slowly, almost painfully so, they find themselves returning to their duties: Jyn a reluctant and ever oppositional member of the rebellion. She's always refused to take things sitting down and now she has to deal with orders from General Draven and it doesn't go as well as they would have hoped.

So they assign Jyn to Alderaan, under Bail Organa. It goes about as well as can be expected, but he is used to willful young women and as long as she doesn't insult someone to their faces, it works out reasonably well. She's got a lot of anger and even more grief, but she also has her father's captivating charisma.

She's ferrying information back to Yavin when she hears about the destruction of Alderaan, mentally adding another name to the list in her mind.

It's not until after the Death Star has been destroyed by that Skywalker boy, leader of the Rogue Squadron, a fact that makes her chest ache for Bodhi, that Jyn even meets the princess. (Former princess? Does one retain a title when the planet has been destroyed?) Introduced as the heroes of Scarif, titles that Jyn and Cassian obviously despise, Jyn finds herself being thanked. She can't bring herself to express her condolences for Alderaan, but the haunted look in her eyes does enough and Cassian offers his sympathy for both of them.

When Yavin is compromised, the rebels move to Hoth -- a move that displeases the children born on ice planets, but it's not like Jyn and Cassian have a real say -- and Jyn's new duties include beating up rebel soldiers to prove they don't know anything about combat and how to better themselves to they won't get beat up by a girl the size of an Ewok. She approaches this job with gusto and finds herself circling the periphery of Leia Organa without even realizing. She is very much like her father.

Circling turns to the pathetic approximation of social niceties that Jyn weakly manages, which turns to talking properly, which turns to something like friendship. There aren't a lack of women on the base, but Jyn has always found herself something of a novelty and she hates it. Leia treats her like a person.

Friendship turns to... well, she doesn't know. It's a strange nebulous thing, like her strange nebulous thing with Cassian, except newer and stranger.

She's slouched on a bench seat in the empty communications tower, one of Cassian's blankets wrapped around her as she readies a supply ship for departure, when she hears the door open and sees Leia walk in. "You're back." A beat, her attention drawn back to the ship with a crackle over the radio. "Not you, you moron, you're leaving. Now get off my landing pad."

A+ work there. She is really the most serious about keeping to proper radio protocol. She shoves the radio away and turns in her seat to look at the princess. "When did you get back?"

rambles back pls tell me ignore there are weird typos it's my rude ass phone

[admonished]

Alderaan is a tragedy. Leia practices these words in the mirror with a suitably appropriate look of sadness -- but not grief, never too much weakness. Alderaan is a tragedy, and thank you for your kind words, yes it really is a miracle that she survived to lead the people left through this trying time. She's never despised her titles more than when her planet blows up and takes her parents with it. Still, she has a duty and she does it, and as the rebel forces move she throws herself in full force.

( Tragedy never seemed an adequate word to describe the destruction of her people, and curiously there was only one person who never seemed to try to put the heartache into words, and maybe that's why her eyes haunt Leia so. )

Along comes Hoth, and Leia hates it almost as much as she does her duty, almost as much as she hates her titles. People still use princess to mock her - not when Leia is around, of course, but she hears about it all the same. The base isn't that big, and honestly there's no right way of dealing with this. Call the behaviour out, she's behaving right in line with expectations, can't take a joke, such a princess. Ignore it and she doesn't know what's going on in her own base, doesn't know how people see her, what kind of leader misunderstands their troops this much? It's the kind of thing that keeps her up at night, looking for third options that probably don't exist.

So when Jyn starts beating rebels up for a living it actually helps. She starts observing their sessions, and it's easy to see the same patterns repeating. 'Princess' thrown poisonously at Leia becomes 'criminal' muttered spitefully as men stroke bruised egos, and she strikes. She can't dismiss these men, there aren't enough heads to begin with, but they are dealt duties fitting their behaviour. The problem dries up in a matter of days, and the time spent watching Jyn fight seems to have earned her a new friend, too. Leia doesn't trust very many people these days. It's a nice change.

She doesn't have to leave Hoth as much as she did Yavin, but it still has to happen sometimes. This time she's meeting with a leader that had, until now, pledged himself to neither the Empire or the Republic. She comes back to base giddy with success, with new allies, new funding, and most importantly new soldiers. It's the resources they've desperately needed for a while now, and actually securing them gives Leia a rush she hasn't experienced since being an active part of the battle. For the first time since the destruction of Alderaan she has real, tangible hope -- and good news, which obviously has to be shared.

"I should really give you a warning for that," she says seriously as she gestures to the communications desk that Jyn is tending to, but the smile cracks in moments and instead Leia just rushes into the room. She can't contain herself, it's entirely unlike her, and she likes it. "I just walked in. Who left you in charge of departure comms?"

Not that Jyn wasn't perfectly capable of manning communications, clearly, it's just that she wouldn't exactly have been Leia's first choice. No offence or anything.

[realists]

"Cassian." Literally the only person capable of telling her what to do anyway, at least without much of a fight. "He thinks it will be good for my interpersonal skills."

That last part is a joke, tone wry, eyes amused. Nothing will be good for her people skills but the tower is empty and quiet and it gives Jyn a lot of space to be alone and she appreciates that tremendously. Besides the fact that the outgoing ships are fairly infrequent so when he comes to keep her company under her blanket, there is nothing to interrupt their lazy kisses or Jyn falling asleep on his shoulder. It's positive reinforcement, he'd told her once, in between kisses, for only fighting people as part of her job.

Regardless, she shifts the blanket to make room for Leia to join her this time. The view from the huge window of the tower isn't that bad, snow swirling around cheerfully under the blue grey sky.

"What has you so happy?"

hi

[evasives]

hey u

[realists]

It's a miracle, that's what they call it.

Jyn can't find it in herself to agree, can't find it in herself to accept accolades and honors for somehow surviving when she's done nothing to deserve it. Outside of Base One, Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor are martyrs for the rebellion, their names among the dead. The survival of Galen Erso's daughter is a desperate secret. The Empire would not let their continued existence stand like a blight against their power and so they die.

They die and while the Death Star remains, so to do their names.

The Alliance ships them off to some small planet of Jyn's choice (demand) for Cassian to heal from his injuries and for the both of them to heal from their loss. And so they find themselves on Lah'mu and Jyn doesn't make any fuss of it, but her childhood home is untouched, her rainbow cavalcade of stuffed animals strewn across the floor, brightly colored hand drawn pictures plastered to the walls.

Even with her memories of the place foggy with passed time, Jyn relearns how to distill water from the constant fog and vapor, she slowly restarts their little farm, even if the Alliance has provided them with everything they could possibly need. The work soothes her, keeps her out of the house and from hovering over Cassian. She had said they would take the next chance, and the next, and every chance after until they'd run out of chances and here they are with one more chance and Jyn can't bring herself to act on it.

She's taken to swimming when she can't sleep, a nightly occurrence, waiting until the sun has gone down because she's grown to hate the sunsets. They remind her of the shockwave of the Death Star's blast growing like fire on the horizon. But walking along the black sand beach at night, with the distant moon illuminating the planet's ring, helps to relax her. She's always been a nocturnal creature. She's exhausting herself in the mineral soaked water when she sees a familiar silhouette on the sand, illuminated by the faint light coming from the house.

She treads water silently, a pale buoy in the dark water, before she calls out to him. "Can you swim?"

[evasives]

It's not easy to be restless. Cassian has spent most of his life always on the move for the Rebellion that staying in one place feels wrong. Not that he can do much of anything while he heals, and he suspects his leg will never fully recover - it isn't paralyzed, but there's a limp that feels permanent. It might fade over time, but it's hard to be optimistic. His days in the field are over, probably.

He pushes it anyway, not enough to damage the leg further, but enough to tell himself that making it better is why they're here in the first place. It's much easier to think about the uncertainty of his leg rather than thinking about the apparent certainty of his death.

He always suspected he'd die for the rebellion; Cassian just never thought he'd live to experience it.

Jyn's childhood home being intact is one of the strangest things in all this, perhaps even moreso than the fact that they've come to live here. Sometimes he thinks he might ask her about it, and instead she walks out the door, conversation silenced. Not that he blames her, but there are a lot of things he might want to ask her beyond that, if only she'd stop leaving so much.

It's easy to find her at the water, because he's more or less figured out her nightly routine. Jyn is impulsive but sometimes predictable in her rashness, and even he has to admit, there is something quite calming about the beach at night.

Cassian settles in on the sand, stretching his leg out with only a slight hiss. He finds her in the water without issue even before she speaks up, feeling like a pro at this point when it comes to finding Jyn Erso. It helps to be with her, because there is no one else who understands what it's like to escape a planet's death twice over.

"I can." There's a pause. "I used to be able to. I'm not sure it would work so well right now."

[realists]

He makes a valid point, she supposes, but then again, he's never been swimming on Lah'mu where the water is so thick with salt and minerals you practically float. Maybe she should have told him about it before but that would involve talking and she hasn't felt capable of that.

"The water here is..." She doesn't know the word to describe the feeling of floating freely and without effort. She doesn't bother trying, maybe there isn't a word for it. "I won't let you drown."

Without waiting for an answer, Jyn kicks forward, slicing through the water with ease, closing her eyes against the salt and the sting of her shoulder. She ignores the pain, feeling weak whenever she gives into it -- Cassian's injuries and pain were so much greater than her bruises. It doesn't matter that it's not a comparison that should be made, she cares more about him than she does about herself.

Even if it's silent.

She stands when her kicks brush sand, pushing her hair back from her face and pulling her self dripping from the water, waves licking at her ankles as she lingers in the gentle surf. "I promise."

[evasives]

Just from watching her, he can recognize there's something about the water that doesn't make it quite so crystalline, confirmed when she trails off mid sentence. It's not dangerous, or she would not have invited him in.

As she swims closer, he would never call her graceful - the idea is laughable - but there is an ease at which she moves herself through the water that he might like to find in himself again.

He smiles, faintly. "I believe you," he says, not for the first time. Cassian can't pinpoint when he started to believe in her, but he can't say he regrets it either. He kicks his shoes off, the sand cool on his toes. He already knows he'll step into the shallows at the very least, but it may take some effort to climb to his feet, so he just settles for watching her a little more first. He would much prefer this image of her standing at the water under the moon to be seared in his mind instead of her face halo'd by a burning planet. "Is it cold? I don't think you can stop me from freezing too."

It's teasing. Mostly.

do you wanna build a snowman

[evasives]

He misses Yavin 4.

Hoth might be, arguably, a less conspicuous place for a Rebel Base, but it's cold all the time and Cassian feels like the snow is going to blind him. It feels far colder than Fest ever was, but it has been a while so his memory could be faulty on that one, even if he's still just going to assume nothing is colder than Hoth. He and Bodhi get back from their mission, and the other man immediately heads off to his quarters to warm up, far less used to cold than Cassian is and not required to check in with Draven.

He finishes up the debriefing then gets dismissed, with a period of about twenty-four hours of recuperation before he needs to report back in. Heading towards his own room, he's not really surprised to find it isn't empty, save for the time of day. It's still the afternoon - he thinks, the snow outside was coming down hard enough to blot the skies - but Jyn is burrowed into his bed, completely covered from head to toe. The only reason he knows it's her is because he's come to recognize her shape when she curls up and burrows like this, as well as the fact that she's the only one who would go into his room while he wasn't there.

He could use a nap though. Cassian kicks off his shoes and takes off his parka before sitting down on the bed, reaching over to tug at one of the blankets she's tangled in. She has too many.

"Stop hogging all the blankets."

no

[realists]

She has not enough blankets, not nearly enough.

Jyn hates Hoth. She hates the snow and the white and the wind and the cold and everything conceivable about the icy planet. Even things she used to like she finds herself hating out of spite. She likes Cassian, though, and she likes Bodhi. Hoth's only redeeming qualities.

Which is what usually finds her in Cassian's room when he and Bodhi are off being useful and Draven is punishing her for existing. He's not, he would happily get her out of his hair, but Jyn is terrifyingly competent at assaulting Storm Troopers and the rest of the rebels should have at least some degree of that competency. Jyn enjoys the violence as a form of stress relief, but she hates feeling like she's been grounded, she hates watching Bodhi and Cassian fly away. And so she curls up under Cassian's blankets and continues to hate Draven.

But that's probably something she just won't get over. She's not evolved enough.

"'m not hogging," she protests, voice muffled from where her face is pressed into his pillow. She shifts the tiniest bit, making room, offering approximately three inches of blanket to him. That's enough, surely. Besides, "You've got that nice coat."

She loves that coat.

what about a tauntaun

[evasives]

He is only half smiling. That's all. Cassian is used to coming back and finding her here, which means he's also used to this never-ending battle for covers. Jyn hates the cold even more than he does, and she doesn't even bother pretending otherwise. He doesn't mind it though, mostly because he kind of likes when he comes back to find her there. It's like something - someone - to come home to.

"It is a very nice coat, feel free to use it yourself. Right now I would like to make use of at least one blanket and my bed."

And he just yanks at the one she tried to give him part of, pulling about eighty percent of it away from the Jyn blanket lump he's acquired. Definitely not enough blankets for him yet, but it's a start, and he shifts closer to her, hauling his legs up so he's entirely on the bed too.

yes!

[realists]

With a noise like a dying cat, Jyn rolls over with the momentum of the blanket being dragged off her (rude!) and immediately scoots back to make room for Cassian. On his own bed. She'd fight it more, but he is always so incredibly warm that she isn't going to argue him joining her. She's more than happy to have a space heater next to her.

"There, you've got both now." Both being one blanket and his bed, she's still laying claim to the other blankets, nose crinkling up as if offended by her sudden cold. Because one less blanket means she'll freeze to death.

Maybe she can steal more of the pillow though... "How was the mission?"

perfect

[evasives]

He moves in towards the spot she empties, tossing the blanket over him, and a little back over her. He has every intention of stealing more of them, or at least sharing them, but he can give her the illusion otherwise for a bit longer.

"If one is not enough for you, it's hardly enough for me." Cassian wriggles down further and closer, looking for some sort of edge to the cocoon. He finds her shoulder and pats it once through all the fabric, shaking his head.

"Simple. I was meeting a contact. But it'll be a while before I see them again. Apparently it's getting more dangerous to be seen with me than it used to be. Have you been up to much here besides this?"

It's a tough call. Jyn hates being idle, but she might hate the cold more.