Ears and eyes still above water, ears still trained for a change in the ambient noise--cracking brush, birds going silent, the crackle of a cloud of fireflies--he hears the scrape of her feet and the swat of her arm against a branch. Swimming immediately to the other side of the rocky pool, he dips until he's just a pair of dark eyes watching from beside a mossy stone, wet hair trailing its uncut tips in the water.

They narrow to see her, assessing her clumsiness and exhaustion for similarities to four days prior--when she'd been stumbling, weaving, a raving thing with ragged edges that set fire to whatever they touched. And she'd touched his jaw rather forcefully, when he'd tried to reach for her.

That was his mistake: he'd accepted it at the time, continued to accept it even as Casey lit up with fear for the threat of violence and sickness both.

Pretending their escape is placating on his part let him swim above the guilt of leaving people behind to deal with everything. He could have stayed, herding the sick to the safety of the inn, making cold compresses and stretching broth from the meat stores to see people through it. Seeing her here, alive, defied his helplessness, his own familiar blanket to pull around his shoulders, and tell himself someone else would come along and do it better.

When her intent seems entirely on the stream, not the searching alertness of before, and her movements seem more tired than desperate, Kira lifts himself with an arm slung over the stone, moss rubbing green to his arm, water splashing away louder than before. The livid bruise is neither displayed nor hidden, just a feature of his cheek and throat, everything from his shoulders up exposed with droplets forming in the wake of his movement. "Jyn," is all he says, voice hoarse with the early hour and days of little use.