Summary: They are always dancing around another, shoulders just a hair's breadth from touching, fingertips so close they can feel the other's warmth. They don't touch. They don't kiss. (But they want to, and the wait makes it all the sweeter.)
Notes: Thank you anothersadsong for the prompt basorexia
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Kiss
by Artemis1000
They are always dancing around another, shoulders just a hair's breadth from touching, fingertips so close they can feel the other's warmth.
They don't touch.
They don't kiss.
At night when it's all quiet and dark around her Jyn can still hear Cassian's voice echo in her ears. In her imagination, his voice sounds both softer and rougher than in reality.
By daylight, their dance continues.
He can make goosebumps rise on her skin with one lingering look alone. Then she feels the heat burn on her cheeks and turns away, caught between seething and mortified. She snaps at him, he snaps back, and they return to more comfortable middle ground.
Her eyes linger on his lips when he speaks, and yes, she feels mortified for that, too. She is no love-struck teenage girl. She has self-control, really. She had it. She's pretty sure she has it, Cassian is just… He's a walking, talking (glowering) zero-gravity field of self-control.
They whisper, they share secrets and fears and tentative budding hopes they barely even dare give a name to. His words paint the picture of a proud and frozen world in her mind, so vivid that she visits it in her dreams. She halts, then tells him of sowing and harvest and the smell of the woods right after a rainfall – not of Coruscant, that has been forever tainted in her memory.
Their noses brush. Their breath mingles. Jyn is close enough to count every one of Cassian's eyelashes.
They still don't kiss.
There is the quirk of his lips when he is secretly amused, just a notch off from a disapproving frown. It can pass scrutiny as the latter for most. Jyn learns better. There's a thousand little things she learns about him. She soaks them up and holds them close to her heart, safely guarded secrets, each one of them feeling like a kiss.
But they don't kiss.
His grip is firm, his presence at her side steady. Their paths diverge, it is the nature of their duty, and their war, but they return to another every time. Jyn learns to trust he will return, a little more battered and broken maybe, but he will return. She understands that she may be sent running, but she will never run so far that she can't find her way back to him; she learns that some bridges are built too solid to be burnt to nothing.
They share smiles that belong only to them and them alone - one more secret to keep.
There's nothing truly different on the day they do kiss. Nothing has happened, and maybe that's why.
They've passed so many points of no return already. They come together seamlessly, all their sharp broken edges matched to fit. Their first kiss is another way of coming home, but it doesn't feel like the first, it feels like something that has always been part of them, they just didn't know it yet.
The rhythm changes, and their dance continues.