Chapter Text
“Maybe if we just stay asleep, we won’t have to take this exam.”
Even her sleepy whisper was harsh enough to make him shiver, curled around his ear in a dull gray morning. He groaned, at first pulling her closer, instinctively melding his lips to hers at the first realization he could. He traced a lazy circle on the back of her shoulder, savoring her shudder. She was always cold, almost never without her signature bulky jacket, but when he’d talked her into shedding it there was an unspoken agreement to never leave her cold again. Under the sheets she was bare, and his body made for quite a substitute.
“Easiest way to top your score, I’m only mad that I even studied if you’re just going to sleep this one out.”
Her sleepy hand punched against his chest, not awake enough to cause the damage he knew she was capable of.
“I’d only sit this one out if you stayed here too, idiot.”
“If .2 points below you is idiotic, you need to do something about the metric you use to determine intelligence.”
“.2 can be the difference between life and death, in some contexts.”
“How many times are you going to wake me up letting me know I’m not smart enough for you?”
Her head shrugged on the pillow, her hair flowing and free from its messy bun. She had to really squint at him without her glasses, which he found heartbreakingly cute when he was this tired.
“How many more times am I going to be waking you up?” she wondered aloud.
He rolled onto his stomach, pushing himself up on his elbows to look at her.
“What are you doing?” he touched her face curiously, and she leaned against his hand.
“Thinking about when I have to put my clothes on and go back to hating you.”
“Well we can’t have that,” Cassian whispered, hand dipping between her thighs. She hummed nervously, a little sore from the night before, but his fingers gently coaxed pleasure out of her, as they always did.
“Cassian-”
“We can’t have that,” he repeated, lips pressed to hers, body surging forward to touch hers to his, a longing he hated but not enough to fight.
She looked a little sad when they had to dress and do just that, her scuttling off to catch her train back to her apartment, him eating cereal in his apartment, alone.
Two months earlier:
“If you hand over the Byronic Poetry, I won’t have to hurt you.”
Cassian Andor snapped the book in his hand shut, pushing off the shelf he was leaning on.
“That’s a threat if I ever heard one, Jyn Erso.”
The messy-haired brunette had been silent in her approach. She was interrupting his happy place. Used bookstore. Concave floorboards. Labyrinthine shelving. Nothing costing more than ten dollars. A lot of dust.
“What do you need it for?”
“Paper on Brontë’s use of the archetypal Byronic Hero in Wuthering Heights.”
He rolled his eyes. “I thought you were avoiding true love stories, after spending so much time picking them apart in class.”
“Two souls being opposed, or dovetailed, or dualistic, is not true love,” Jyn said flatly.
“You’re terribly unromantic. And yet,” he wagged the book in her face, retreating around a corner that would have her lose him in an instant, “Romantic poetry,” he called when she turned down the wrong aisle.
He smiled at her grunt of frustration.
“What do you even need it for?” she needled, holding up a watermarked copy of Fanny Hill. " I promise you there’s more of what you’re looking for in this than in there.”
“My intentions are less honorable, but no less valid. She Walks in Beauty will get you laid, every time, like a charm.”
She seemed offended to the core of her entire being at the wasteful use of a good book
“I’m actually using it for an academic paper,” she straightened her back, fearsome and entitled in a way that made his hand want to dart under her skirt.
“First rule of negotiating, Erso” Cassian smiled to himself, listening to her stumble and try and weave through the bookshelves after him, “never let the other party know how much you need what they’re offering.”
“You seem awfully convinced you should teach me something,” she blew her bangs out of her eyes. He smiled easily down at her. He could name a thing or two.
“Do you need this book?”
“On principle, I must rescue that book from the likes of you.”
“Then I must be obliged to defend it.”
Jyn sighed, and he felt the full weight of midterms hit both of them at the same second.
“I already picked out what poems I’m using. I can probably find the poems online, but citations would be a nightmare.”
Cassian broke with a sympathetic smile, leading her back to the aisle they’d started in. “Pick me something better.”
Jyn knelt in front of him, taking her job seriously. He would commend her for it if her face wasn’t entirely level with his dick.
“I want this to work, I have a date tonight.”
“Freshman humanities major?”
“I -what?”
He had been caught up staring at the way the frame of her glasses curled behind her ear.
She smirked up at him, eyes sparkling. “You have A Type.”
A Type heavily implied Not Me.
She held up her find, a gloating smile on her face. He rolled his eyes.
“Emily Brontë?”
Wordlessly, she thumbed through the book, mouth forming words she already knew she’d find. With a pen withdrawn from behind her ear, she marked a line. Smug, she slapped the open book against his chest.
“She’ll love it,” Jyn called over her shoulder tartly, sauntering away.
Cassian rolled his eyes, looking at the underlined passage;
Thee, ever-present, phantom thing-
My slave, my comrade, and my King
Hell. It would work on some freshman humanities major. It was sure as fuck working on him. He bought the copy of Fanny Hill for good measure. It wasn’t what he was looking for, but he found out a great deal he hadn’t known about Jyn Erso: Literary Pervert.
One week later:
She asked him, abruptly in a coffee shop, as he was entrenched in his work at one of the tables, if he was working on the paper for Krennic. Again, he hadn't seen her coming, but he looked up and she was already mid-sentence, gripping the back of the empty chair.
He was working on the paper for Krennic, and she launched into the suggested sources and this really good outside biography she was reluctant to use because Krennic was a famed control freak and tyrant.
“I’d just keep your head down and write it as the prompt says. You can take this as a draft of your own, probably much better paper,” Cassian informed her honestly.
“I’d like to get those ideas graded, and some constructive feedback, on the paper I want to do.”
“Sit down,” he ordered her, feeling uneasy by her fidgeting and looking down at him so intensely, “you can still do things with a paper on your own. Hell, it sounds interesting, I’d read it.”
She stopped adjusting herself in the seat across from him, frozen in place.
“Really?”
He rolled his eyes. “I can agree with your academic findings, even if you are a pain in the ass. What’s the paper about”
She softened, her guard dropping considerably for the first time since he’d met her.
“It’s more of a pet project,” she explained, smirking into her mug, “I call it Six Degrees of Byron’s Dick.”
He almost choked on his coffee. “He certainly got around.”
“You’d be amazed. Aaron Burr, for instance.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“He fucked Aaron Burr?”
Jyn rolled her eyes, but he could tell she was excited to tell him; “No. It’s a game. Byron was Bffs with Percy and Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, founder of modern feminism, and Godwin was good friends with Aaron Burr when Aaron Burr fled to England after shooting Alexander Hamilton. Which also ties Byron indirectly to a bunch of founding fathers.”
Cassian couldn’t help but laugh, for the first time, with her instead of at her expense.
“That has to be a coincidence.”
“Byron's daughter helped with the mathematical calculations that led to the modern computer, so you can also work forwards from there.”
“Do you just sit around and think this stuff up?”
“Nope. I do thorough research,” her smile turned challenging. “Brontë sisters were obsessed with him too. Based a lot of early writing on him. He never had sex with them. But his dick inspired poems, and they used those poems as inspiration. So we have him to thank for that.”
“Speaking of Brontë sisters…” he hadn’t been able to form words about her suggestion at the bookstore. He tried to. In class, he watched her chew on a pen, glasses smudged with too many fingerprints, pointedly ignoring him. Words failed.
She raised her eyebrows. “Right. How did that date go.”
“It worked.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Oh. Gross. Why do I ask you these things?”
Cassian laughed, “No idea. Thanks for being my wing-woman.”
Jyn smiled, "I'm good at it."
From then on, Jyn started slipping him lines like that as a joke, in passing. He could only answer as often as she did, which was a breakneck, challenging pace for his wits. They had a dog-eared copy of a collection of love poems they’d procured from the bookstore and passed back and forth, highlighting, annotating, and shoving into each other’s arms in hallways or at the beginnings and ends of classes.
Jyn almost got kicked out of their shared class with Krennic mid-lecture for making the mistake of looking at his new contribution to the page; Cassian’s notes on Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: “‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?’ You make my balls sweat.” The sound she made as she read it and the horrified, delighted look on her face was something he already knew he would never forget.