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English
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Part 1 of i've got you
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Published:
2025-05-22
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2,222
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1/1
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bones

Summary:

Kleya stays on Yavin 4 after the evacuation as a part of a skeleton crew to keep Rebellion comms connected. Melshi decides to stay, too.

Notes:

i wrote over half of this at work on my phone (it was field day and i was bored) and then finished it at home. Kleyshi truthers unite.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

After Yavin is evacuated, a handful of people stay as a sort of skeleton crew. It’s the kind of assignment that suits Kleya. She’s used to being on her own.

Only this time, she isn’t really. In some miraculous twist of fate, Scarif was not the suicide mission everyone thought it was. She feels guilty that anyone died there; it was the intelligence she passed along that started Cassian and Jyn Erso and the rest on that path in the first place. It feels wrong to feel relieved, but she’s glad that she doesn’t have to inhabit the role of executioner of her own people. Even better that there is only one Scarif survivor that stays on Yavin alongside her and a couple of other non-essentials.

Meeting Ruescott Melshi was never supposed to be an integral part of her life. She doesn’t have much love for soldiers. The only one who ever mattered to her was Luthen, and he can’t factor into her decisions anymore. We can honor the dead, she believes, but there’s no point in prolonged lamentation. It just gets in the way of doing what must be done.

But Sergeant Melshi is a different kind of soldier than the ones who destroyed her home, the ones who stole and pillaged and raped her people. He prizes loyalty and liberty above all else. He understands what it is to dedicate oneself wholly to a cause. He understands that children are not the enemy, that the people are not the enemy. He knows the importance of putting aside those factional differences in service to something much greater, something permanent. Built to last.

He and Cassian didn’t have to save her. She knows that. She knows why Cassian did it - some unpaid debt he believed he had to Luthen, some way to honor what they’d all done together. But Melshi… whatever he went along with, he went along with it for Cassian. She knows only some of the story of how the two of them met on Narkina 5. The price of his loyalty was likely steep, one way or another, but its rewards were bountiful.

His loyalty didn’t explain the way he cared for her as she floated in and out of consciousness on the stolen ship back to the jungle moon. The way his hand was gentle on her brow, his voice soft and reassuring. She probably should have died. Probably could have, if she’d not already made the decision to live. Because if Cassian failed to deliver the intelligence, she would have had to do it. But Melshi’s words reminded her of something, someone she couldn’t quite remember. Someone who’d loved her, once.

He lowers his head but not his gaze when he passes her in the corridors during their sweeps. The corners of his mouth twitch upward just enough to suggest a smile. It’s as if his eyes hold a thousand questions he isn’t willing to ask–not because of his own vulnerability, but because of hers. Neither of them is used to letting go of the cards they keep close to their chest. She’s built and rebuilt her own story so many times she wonders if she could even tell the difference between the lies and the truth. What’s the point in telling him anything, if she can’t guarantee her own honesty?

He surprises her, though, with how unbothered he seems. He comes to her cabin in the evenings, offers her the second portion of his adulterated rations. He has a way with the local plants and spices, can make even the dullest protein squares taste like they might have been something natural, once. They eat in companionable silence unless he’s telling her a story about his mum, or his sister, from his days before the Rebellion, before Narkina.

“I had a wife, once,” he says, shattering the silence that surrounds them.

Kleya doesn’t know how to respond to this. All her years of pretending to be someone else, all the time she spent acting as if she were truly invested in what others were saying, and she feels as if he’s just told her he skinned a lot-cat. It’s information she doesn’t know what to do with except file it away in her mental dossier on him.

She definitely doesn’t have one of those, though. That would be absurd. Insane.

“What happened to her?” she asks between small mouthfuls of her dinner.

“I tried to find her after my time on Narkina 5,” he answers. “Turns out she didn’t fare much better. She got caught in the crossfire during some argument between a merchant and some ‘troopers.”

She pauses, pursing her lips. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

He shrugs. “Another casualty of the Empire.”

Kleya snorts. “Sounds like it was a match made in heaven.”

“We were young,” he says matter-of-factly, as if that explains anything at all. “I think I was more in love with the idea of her than whoever she really was.”

Oh. It hurts that she can relate to that, if only because she, too, has suffered the consequences of being someone’s idea, rather than herself.

“The war’s taken its toll on everyone,” she murmurs. “I’m sorry it had to happen to you twice.”

He looks at her with gratitude in his eyes, and they say nothing more on the subject. She takes their bowls to the kitchen to clean, the rough scrubber satisfyingly painful against her bare hands. His part of their ritual is over now; she’ll return the bowls in the morning with hot breakfast. They’ve done this enough times now to know how it goes.

Except, tonight, that isn’t what happens. As she’s sudsing up the bowls, his tread, soft as ever, becomes louder. She hears him take a deep breath in behind her before she feels the hand that comes to rest lightly on the middle of her back. The intimacy of even the most innocent of touches is so unfamiliar to her that she nearly jumps out of her skin.

“Sorry,” he says quietly, wavering between standing his ground and retreating. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t.” It’s not technically a lie, after all. She isn’t scared.

She’s terrified.

Kleya knows that she is an unusual case for her age. She has touched, and been touched; such things are commonplace in the world of espionage. Her own desires, however, are always pushed down on behalf of a higher call. Sex is a tool, not recreation. That doesn’t mean she’s never thought about what it would be like in a different kind of life.

“You alright?” he asks as he steps closer, close enough so that she can feel the heat radiating from his body. The rain pours down outside and she can’t stop thinking about how nice it would be to be held tonight, falling asleep to the pattering on the tin roof and the slow and steady pace of someone else’s breath.

How does she answer that? “I don’t know,” she admits, putting the bowls down and gripping the edge of the counter.

“Do you want me to go?”

She shakes her head. “Please, don’t.”

Please. Where the hell did that come from? She can’t remember the last time she said it and meant it, with all the need and desperation it implies.

His hand flattens on her back and begins to move slowly up and down. “I’ll stay,” he whispers. “I’m not going anywhere.”

When she turns around and curls herself into him, when his arms embrace her like a homecoming, she still doesn’t let a single tear fall. This leads to her body shaking, shaking like it hasn’t since Luthen–since she had to do what needed to be done. She doesn’t know what to do with all of his kindness, but she knows it might be the only thing that keeps her from drowning.

She pulls back and looks up at him, wondering what it is that he sees. Wondering what it is that keeps him from letting go, walking away.

He lifts a hand, keeping it at all times in her line of sight, and brushed a lock of hair out of her face. “You’re not alone here,” he promises.

Resisting the urge to shrink back into herself, she takes a deep breath. “Aren’t I?”

And then his lips are pressing gently against her forehead, and he tucks her beneath his chin. “Nah. I’ve got you.”

She chooses to believe he won’t let her fall.

 

 

He doesn’t bother making dinner in his own cabin anymore. Instead, it’s as if he has a sixth sense that knows when she’d want him to start cooking; she provides the rations, and he brings the herbs and spices. He teaches her how to break open certain shells to get to the nuts inside, how to wield a knife for something besides violence. Sometimes, he’ll stand behind her, pressed into her, his arms and hands guiding hers, and she just thinks, How sickeningly domestic.

Except, of course, that she isn’t sickened by it. There may have been a time when she thought herself above such mundane human desires of closeness and camaraderie, but in the quiet of post-evacuation, she feels deeply the weight of that which she spent the majority of her life denying herself.

Melshi makes her feel less alone. Less lonely. And for that, she thinks she might feel an approximation of love toward him; affection, at the very least.

One of the little portable radios he scavenged from the abandoned Base One sits on the counter, perpetually tuned to a station that plays nothing but pre-Imperial standards of universal appeal, with crooning vocalists and large backing bands. Kleya is cleaning up the small kitchen, turning to grab another dirty dish when Melshi takes her hand and pulls her close, smiling sweetly at her.

“My mother taught me to dance when I was a wee lad,” he tells her. “Always liked it. Didn’t have much use for it, but I liked it.”

It’s one thing that the two of them have in common—she’s spent plenty of time acting as a native core-worlder that she’s learned more cultural traditions than she can name. Still, none of them have filled her cup quite so much as dancing. With the radio dialed into music that soothes her, she easily follows his lead.

“You rescue rebellious women, you dance,” she says, holding back a laugh. “Is there anything you don’t do?”

“Sing,” he replies, grinning. “Though I’d try, if it made you smile like you’re smiling now.”

They aren’t holding themselves in proper position anymore, arms having gotten tired and bodies having shifted closer. The song playing is a serenade, sans vocals, pulling the two of them into its thrall.

“You like it when I smile?”

He nods, tipping his head down, brushing his nose against hers. His own smile doesn’t leave his face. “I do.”

“I wasn’t sure I’d ever have a reason to, back when we first met,” she tells him, laying a hand on his chest, over his heart. It beats in time with hers.

“And now?” he asks, his own hand smoothing up her arm until it caresses the back of her neck, holding her without holding her.

“Cassian told me that no one can do it alone. I’m starting to wonder if he might have had a point.”

Melshi closes his eyes and sighs wistfully. They stay perfectly still, neither moving, neither daring even to breathe.

“Kleya?”

“Hmm?”

“Would it be alright if I kissed you now?”

She tilts her head up and nearly slots her lips with his, not quite touching. “Yes,” she whispers, a simple answer to a simple question.

Ruescott Melshi’s kiss isn’t brief by any means, lingering as it does long past the point that they part, but damn it if it’s not over far too soon. His lips are a little chapped, and the stubble from a few-day-old shave scratches her skin, but she’s filled to the brim with an unfamiliar feeling, something she almost only ever feels when she looks at him. She feels it in her bones, this feeling that comes alongside the kiss. She wants it to shimmer like a symphony in her blood.

When they part, she doesn’t know what to do with herself. If she were that kind of girl, she’d start crying, overwhelmed as she is by the power he seems to have over her. Instead, she keeps her eyes closed and takes a deep breath. “I don’t—”

“Whatever you need,” he vows, “you can take it. You can take it from me.”

That’s it, then—she knows what it is she feels when he kisses her. That thing that she hasn’t ever felt, not really, because it’s something she’s not sure she’s ever had.

He’s giving her a home.

She doesn’t take anything from him that night but for the pleasure of his company. Their legs tangle together in the rough blankets of her bed, and his arm drapes over her waist like it belongs there. She takes nothing else, though. One day, when she finally does, she wants to be able to give him just as much. That day is not today; that night is not tonight. But it will come, and she will know it in her bones.

Notes:

did you guys know that i'm in love with them, this doomed by the narrative completely non-canon couple

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