It's so quick and so violent and so sudden that Martin doesn't understand what's happened at first. The restraining pressure around his waist is ripped away and he can't quite repress a startled shriek as the man lurches forward, slammed face-first into the bar with an awful, deafening crunch that seems to shatter everything around them. The music is still pounding away, but Martin is suddenly, vividly aware of being watched, being stared at, a sensation both familiar and mortifying. Nobody saw him until now, until this aggressive intrusion into what must have been the status quo.
He blinks, breathless and shuddering faintly with shock and deeply borne anxiety, at the small figure who's just burst onto the scene, not like an explosion, but like a gunshot, sharp and precise. She holds the man down like he's nothing to her, growling threats (the 'or else' is implied), and it takes several seconds for Martin to even recognize her, and a few seconds more to believe it.
He has only met Jyn twice. The first time is little more than a distant awkward memory now; the second, over two months ago. He can't make sense of the fact that she's here, now, that she saw him and recognized him and cared enough to intervene. Not just intervene; to assault the man who'd been assaulting him, lunging to his defense at the apparent drop of a bloody hat.
"Jesus—!" the man grits out, twitching in her grasp. "Get the fuck off me, you crazy bitch!" He makes a sharper bid for escape, and the sudden motion has Martin staggering back like a string's been cut, nearly tripping over himself in his haste to get up and put a bit of distance between himself and his would-be assailant. With nothing to sustain his anger, panic begins to take over instead, and a part of him wants to just run, to get out while he can. But he doesn't. He stands there, rooted, staring at Jyn. He doesn't know where she came from and he doesn't exactly know why, but she just threw herself headlong into something that could have gotten much worse to stop it, to save him from it, and he's not going to run from that.
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He blinks, breathless and shuddering faintly with shock and deeply borne anxiety, at the small figure who's just burst onto the scene, not like an explosion, but like a gunshot, sharp and precise. She holds the man down like he's nothing to her, growling threats (the 'or else' is implied), and it takes several seconds for Martin to even recognize her, and a few seconds more to believe it.
He has only met Jyn twice. The first time is little more than a distant awkward memory now; the second, over two months ago. He can't make sense of the fact that she's here, now, that she saw him and recognized him and cared enough to intervene. Not just intervene; to assault the man who'd been assaulting him, lunging to his defense at the apparent drop of a bloody hat.
"Jesus—!" the man grits out, twitching in her grasp. "Get the fuck off me, you crazy bitch!" He makes a sharper bid for escape, and the sudden motion has Martin staggering back like a string's been cut, nearly tripping over himself in his haste to get up and put a bit of distance between himself and his would-be assailant. With nothing to sustain his anger, panic begins to take over instead, and a part of him wants to just run, to get out while he can. But he doesn't. He stands there, rooted, staring at Jyn. He doesn't know where she came from and he doesn't exactly know why, but she just threw herself headlong into something that could have gotten much worse to stop it, to save him from it, and he's not going to run from that.