For better or for worse, the two faced each other. They both opened their mouths at the same time, but pausing upon seeing the other try to speak.
Who should go first? Jyn, the Knight and shield who so brazenly declared her love, yet now realized something new, or Kalender, the Champion, who wished for them to stand their current ground?
After a moment of flinching, pausing, watching, starting, trying…it was the Knight to move. “Kalender, there’s something I wish to say.” She just jumped right into it.
She might have been putting up a brave front, but she was behind enemy lines here! She kept her knees together as they sat beside each other, and—in Kalender’s Interpersonal Bubble–her space seemed to be just barely touching his own.
“I” —she struggled to get the words out— “Page and I, we…we had gone to the castle earlier.”
Kalender listened intently. All he could do was be patient and not speak.
“She told me some things.” Jyn paused. “And I…had realized some things.” She brushed her hair out of embarrassment. Before she spoke again, she turned away from Kalender, and when she turned back around, he was elatedly surprised to see a white rose in her hand.
She presented it to him…and his All-Language Fluency kicked in.
— Innocence and pure love
It was a white rose, not a red one. It was a humbling moment for him, as he realized, right then and there, that he’d been subtly wrong about something—that he’d made a millimeter-sized error in his understanding about what she’d felt towards him.
“I have been selfish,” Jyn continued, keeping her gaze on the floor beside Kalender, “but—no, that’s not what I want you to understand. I think—I believe I realize now just how big the world is.”
Kalender looked up at her from the rose. He didn’t expect those words coming from her at all.
He gently took the rose from her hand. When he showed her his smile, she smiled back.
“After all, wasn’t that what you were considering all this time?” Jyn asked. “That you, alone, shouldn’t bear the burden of shouldering all of my happiness? That you would be burdened with sorrow if I were to throw away the rest of the world, self-inflicting a deep tragedy just to make you my entire world on your own?”
Kalender nodded. “Well.” There was some hesitation—a tinge of anxiety about all of this—but he ignored it. “That’s the gist of it.”
He looked at Jyn’s face to see whether she was sad about it, but what he found instead was a face that said, ‘I’m finally saying it.’
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“Perhaps you would imagine that I am making my heart a martyr just to consider what you feel,” she continued. “I feel, instead, that I have earned much more clarity in how I look at you.” She smiled a peaceful smile. “Much clearer, indeed.”
The white rose, still in Kalender’s hand, still sticking out and intercepting his view of Jyn, made her smile seem so much brighter than it really was.
She looked right at him with that smile. “Now I know… I love* you.”
*There were 11 words for love in Lyrica. Kalender had mixed emotions about the fact that this was the one typically used between mother and child.
“Huh?” he rightfully uttered…maybe rendering him frozen a little. “Love*? Not ‘love’? Huh?”
Jyn just laughed—really laughed—as Kalender’s failure to understand—to comprehend intensified with each ‘huh’ playing on loop. The posture of the guy himself steadily collapsed as if he were a mud golem having an existential crisis.
“What do you meeeeeaaan!”
Poor guy was a mess with his hands on his head.
“I-I mean!” Jyn just couldn’t settle down. “L-look at you! H-” —breathe— “So adorable…”
Those words blended Kalender’s feelings. That’s how mixed they were.
Just…y’know! Here he was prepared to have a difficult discussion and gently turn her down for good, but Jyn just had to be so splendidly honest…too honest!
“Well… That aside,” Jyn continued. “I think—I believe I understand now how you feel from your side. From me to you, even if I now understand that asking you to marry me may have been…excessive…my raw feelings have not diminished.
“My Devotion to you is not so weak that it would simply vanish. I simply know better now that love is a vast plain, and there are many places for us where we can possibly be. All I ask of you is that I remain by your side—wherever that may be.”
Kalender tossed out his carefully prepared mental script with a light chuckle—not that his script would have been useful in front of Jyn’s sustained assault.
“I think…where we are now is just the right place for us,” he told her. They shared a look and a chuckle. “Don’t you think so?” he asked.
Jyn chuckled—then looked at Kalender with disproportionately determined eyes. It shocked him for a good moment, but then she said, “Your hand, please.”
Oh. Hand. Okay. He made no resistance, showing her his free palm, and she took it in both her hands, bringing it up so the back of his hand faced her—and she kissed it.
Thus, Kalender suffered tactical nuclear mental annihilation at the hands of Jyn’s gambit: the Interpersonal Ballistic Missile. [1]
By the way, love* may have been used most commonly by a mother to her child, but its true and literal meaning…was unconditional love. [2]