Chapter 1: Reunion
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Cassian is already five minutes into his presentation when Jyn finally slips into the tiny conference room on the Marriott’s second floor. She’s still in her comfortable travel jeans, she smells like airplane, and the other attendees give her dirty looks as she wheels her creaky suitcase to the back of the room.
She doesn’t care.
At the front of the room, Cassian meets her gaze.
He doesn’t falter, smoothly continuing his explanation of the rhetorical constructions of Mexico in US propaganda, but Jyn can see the crinkles at the corners of his mouth and eyes that mean he’s smiling.
She sinks into a chair next to a woman she vaguely recognizes — Someone she knew in grad school? Someone she saw at last year’s conference? — and lets the tension slide out of her shoulders. Her lanyard itches against her neck and she can already see the stuffed shirt from Yale who she knows will ask a long-winded, completely irrelevant question, but she can’t help the smile tugging at her lips.
15 hours of travelling, the stress of her own presentation (which she hasn’t written yet), work piling up in her absence, and the dread of three days of networking are all worth it just to see Cassian.
Chapter 2: First Meeting
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Their first meeting is not an auspicious one, and Jyn is self-aware enough to admit that it’s almost entirely her fault. In her defense, she’s been awake most of the night on the plane to the conference – and why why does she always take flights at the worst possible hours?! – and isn’t feeling the best and normally she wouldn’t have been in this session because it’s definitely not her field, but she hadn’t realized she was in the wrong room until halfway through the second presentation and she didn’t want to look rude by walking out so she’d been determined to just sit quietly and leave at the end, but that last speaker had just been wrong wrong wrong and she couldn’t say nothing—
Five minutes into a heated exchange with the speaker, both of them standing and tripping over their own words and cutting each other off, she realizes she’s become That Person, the worst conference attendee, the one who derails everything with her own theories and critiques and generally acts like an asshole that everyone else wants to murder.
She feels her gut churn. She’s faced down enough of those awful attendees and had always promised herself she’d never become one.
And now here she is.
Fortunately, before she has to figure out what to say, the moderator jumps onto her sudden silence to wrap-up the session and the room empties quickly.
Jyn busies herself with collecting her bags, determinedly ignoring the speakers filing out of the front of the room.
She’s going to go find her hotel room, she thinks, then a bottle of wine to drown out today’s embarrassment.
“You didn’t get to finish your argument,” a voice says and Jyn jumps.
She looks up and finds the speaker, the one she’d been so rudely arguing with, standing only a few feet away. He’s tall, with dark hair falling across his forehead. The tan skin of his face stretches around his smile.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “About my attitude.”
She doesn’t want to say the words, hates apologizing, but she’s in the wrong here and she knows it.
“Don’t be,” the man says. He sticks out his hand. “I’m Cassian Andor and I’d love to continue our argument over dinner.”
Jyn blinks at him, then slowly shakes his hand.
“Jyn Erso. And I might have a few more things to say.”
Four hours later, a frustrated wait-staff kicks them out of the long-closed restaurant. Three hours after that, the baristas at the coffee shop do the same.
Chapter 3: Long Distance
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Jyn still sometimes finds it hard to believe how soothing she has come to find the blue screen and cheerful dial tone of Skype’s call interface. Three years ago, the idea of facing this with anticipation would have been laughable. Three years ago, it made her think only of the immense distance between her and her family, of missed calls and shallow exchanges of small talk before she was being abandoned.
It matters, she thinks, that she has someone she wants to talk to now.
The call connects and Cassian’s face appears on the screen.
There’s a three-hour time difference between them, so while to sun has long since set in DC, its light still shines in California, haloing Cassian in soft reds and oranges.
Jyn grins.
“Hey stranger,” she says.
Cassian’s smile is smaller, tucked in the corners of his mouth and the crinkles around his eyes, but no less warm.
“Hey stranger,” he says back. “Grading night?”
She nods and lifts a precariously tall stack of papers into view of the camera.
“Freshman midterms,” she says despairingly.
Cassian winces in sympathy and taps the tablet in front of him.
“First essay of the semester,” he says, raising an eyebrow.
Jyn playfully frowns back at him. Cassian’s department has gone paperless the year before and he likes to tease her over the mountain of paper she still has to drag home for every assignment. Jyn doesn’t mind; there’s something about the feel of paper and the smell of ink that makes the students’ work more tangible, even if the weight of it does put a strain on her back.
They don’t exchange any other words, each settling back on their respective corners of the country with hours of reading ahead of them.
It’s not quite cuddling together on a sofa, but it’s warm, comfortable company, and that’s more than enough for them.