Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In what is most certainly the moment between her last threads of her consciousness and her death, Jyn dreams of a different kind of world. Different lives, unthinkable in the present moment. Hope, a charge detonated in her heart in those final seconds of not-quite-life.

She dreams of a warm, wet, green planet where friends and comrades break bread together, sharing rum and whiskey and anything else that may have come through on a merchant ship. The work is never done, but there is always, always enough, and no one is ever truly alone. Children run about the place, always with a keeper, because it takes a village. A heavy but kind and calloused hand rests on her shoulder, reassuring her of this. It is not an easy life, but it is true, and it is joyful, and it is a life.

She dreams not of a sunset, but of a sunrise. She is awake before the violet-indigo sky, tending to a home. To a legacy. She burns her breakfast, but it’s alright, because everyone laughs with her at her attempt at domesticity. Laughter, young and old, male and female. The breakfast, replaced by fresh greens from the garden, made by loving, storied hands. The dishes done in tandem. The morning light revered, and never wasted.

She dreams of standing barefoot on a black sand beach and letting safe, strong arms encircle her. Hands rest on her stomach in silent acknowledgment of what is yet to come. She is safe, because she has someone to catch her if she should fall. Her future is not a destiny; it is not foretold. It is not a careless accident, nor is it a tragedy. What she shares with the one whose arms keep and protect her is a choice, their choice, and it is one she can’t help but be proud of.

She dreams of the chance to grow up, and to grow old. To fall in and out of love and back again. She walks a parallel path with someone who is too much and not enough like her. The vertices at which they meet are fleeting, but more than meaningful for their infrequency. It all loops back around in the end, hands clasped, arms thrown around each other. Facing the end together, like they ought to. Like they must have always been meant to.

When she finally comes to, though, all the warmth of her dreams is gone. Only ice remains.

Day after day, a barrage of questions. Day after day, she hasn’t the ability to answer.

“Can you tell us your name, dear?”

Jyn Erso.

“Do you know where you are?”

Hell.

“Have you any family?”

Not anymore.

Someone makes the questions stop. She’s relieved, because they’re so damn loud. But her mystery savior doesn’t do anything about the cold, and so she’ll curse them until the end of her days.

Bastards.

Her sight comes back to her, eventually, albeit in pieces. Not that it’s much use—she truly is surrounded by ice and snow. If she could, she’d rant and rave all over this place about the uselessness of perpetual winter.

She finds that her savior can’t possibly be much older or younger than she is. The snow angel, Jyn calls the young woman in her mind, wears the weight of her responsibilities clear as day on her face. Still, she greets Jyn every single day, without fail, but also without pomp or circumstance or any of the karking mad questions her caretakers ask.

Jyn tries to indicate a question to the snow angel, but speaking is a far more complex action than breathing, and she can barely do that right. Helpless, she stares pointedly at her savior until the message—or a least, a message,—is received.

The woman, her brown hair in a crown of braids around her head, raises an eyebrow at Jyn’s expression. She must admit, it’s probably something to see. “Got a question for me, rebel?” the angel asks, a bitter little laugh trailing after her words as if she only just now realized Jyn can’t respond. “Of course. I’m sure you have a lot of questions. Let me see if I can answer a few without even trying. You didn’t die on Scarif, for one, though I suppose you probably figured that out already. We’re on Hoth, now, not Yavin. And I’m Leia Organa of Alderaan. Or what’s left of it, I suppose.”

The slant of her words suggests that the two of them share the thought that, We’re not so different, you and I. Jyn supposes that’s true. Young, fair skin, dark hair, lost everything to the greed and terrible might of the Empire. Perhaps, in another life, they could have been friends.

It’s probably a bit too late for that.

Wait—what’s left of it. What happened to Alderaan?

Fuck.

Jyn can guess, actually. Unfortunately.

She doesn’t suppose forgiveness is in the cards.

Leia’s visits don’t stop, regardless of the fact that Jyn now knows (and that Leia must know, too) that her father was partly responsible for the deaths of her entire people. It’s a shame. She met Bail Organa, briefly. She likes—liked—him alright. Not enough to grab a caf with, but she doesn’t tend to feel that sort of pull with any politician. Or any person, for that matter.

In all of the ways she has ever felt alone, she has perhaps never felt more alone waiting for body to catch up with her mind. She can’t ask those pressing questions that demand answers, about survival and success. Obviously, there are things she knows. The rebels, at least institutionally, survived. Yavin was compromised in a situation that she doesn’t quite understand yet. The only faces she recognizes from before Scarif are Draven’s, and Mon Mothma’s, and neither brings her much comfort.

By the time she can breathe without assistance, Jyn is beginning to question whether or not survival was worth it. She doesn’t question her choice to go rogue; she won’t regret whatever sacrifices were made. Still, without knowing more, it would see that no one in the galaxy will ever know, will ever understand, the circumstances in which she has found herself.

Jyn Erso is the sole survivor of Scarif, but the ghosts of her fallen comrades stand by her bedside, a haunting she can’t rid herself of even when she closes her eyes.

Chapter Text

Jyn isn’t meant to see anything past the curtain. It’s for her own privacy and that of others, they tell her. It bolsters the loneliness and makes her wonder, makes her think. Is she a part of this, really? Is she a rebel like the others? Maybe she doesn’t want to be. Maybe she meant to die on that forsaken planet, or maybe she meant to take her freedom in hand and run. She doesn’t think she was meant to survive. She certainly doesn’t think that anyone else sees her as one of their own.

And although Leia visits, does it really mean anything at all? It isn’t as though she can find it in herself to respond. Perhaps, if she hadn’t been so badly injured at first, if she’d recovered faster, the urgency that accompanied every question she could think of would still exist. But the days pass by in a chill monotony. She can hear the mantra of the monk chanting in the recesses of her mind, I'm one with the Force, and the Force is with me. Chirrut. A blind man, once. A dead man, now. His guardian, his warrior by his side.

“I spoke to the doctor,” Leia tells her on one occasion. “They say you haven’t been responding verbally. Is that a medical condition, or a choice?” Jyn just thinks, Why can’t it be both?

I am the pilot, says the ghost of Bodhi Rook after she leaves.

Another time, the princess-senator-whatever-she-calls-herself-these-days frowns as a medic puts Jyn through the intensive physical therapy routine required to prevent atrophy. “It would be easier to help you if you gave us something to work with, you know,” the other young woman tells her, hands on her hips. To Leia, Jyn’s silence must speak volumes, because she walks out in peaceable frustration. Jyn almost wishes she had enough patience to be like that, then thinks better of it; someone out there needs to carry the rage, and it might as well be her, whether confined to a bed or the back of a prison transport. In the same reassuring way he asked her the first time, Sergeant Melshi looks at her and murmurs, You wanna get out of here?

She does. She really, really does.

The only voice missing is Cassian Andor’s. Perhaps she isn’t lucky enough to have anchored his spirit to her heart, her mission; perhaps he made his peace with death in a way the others hadn’t. She doesn’t know, and she only cares enough that a small ache festers in her chest when she thinks about him. If only one of them could have survived, she almost wishes—no, she definitely wishes—

You wanna get out of here? she hears Melshi ask again, more pointedly this time. What are we looking for?

Jyn screws her eyes shut. Echoes, echoes, that’s all it is, that’s all it can be.

When the voices quiet once more, she opens her eyes and lets her gaze drift through the accidental openings in the curtains. Her view remains mostly empty, save for a few passersby. She lets her body sink into the thin cot, defeated. That’s what she gets for listening to a ghost.

I want to go, she thinks. I need to go. She has to find someone who won’t hold her prisoner in an infirmary where she doesn’t belong, someone who will bend or even break the rules to ensure she can make a clean exit. It would be ideal if it were someone she already knows, but she’ll take what she can get.

Slowly, silently, she shifts on the cot until she can allow her legs to fall off the side, the floor cold even through the thermal socks they force her to wear. Her back aches from all the time spent sedentary and waiting, and her legs shake even beneath her meager weight; she’s sure it’s lower than it was before she arrived in this place, if only because she’s hardly eaten any solid food. The doctor insists it would upset her stomach in combination with the pain medication she’s on. Pain meds she doesn’t need, because why waste them on someone who might not even be a real rebel? Someone who isn’t planning on sticking around?

A rebel’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness, she muses, pondering the waste. A bloody bleeding heart.

There is no wall to hold onto. There is no bannister. There is no Cassian. She has to keep herself upright, which is hard enough without the needles and wires attached to her body, pumping fluids in, occasionally taking blood out. She hardly feels it when she rips the tubing out, her field of vision narrowing as she focuses in on the only direction she knows.

The medbay is far enough away from other parts of the base, it would seem, that there aren’t people here to notice her move in between drapes and through shadows. Her stomach is already turning, her lungs burning at the effort of staying awake and aware. But if she can make it to a place where she’s seen, she can gain leverage. Because that’s what she’s looking for—leverage. A way out.

Out.

She claws at the walls of the corridor as she goes, nails that can’t help but be the wrong length scraping painfully against the icy surface. Force, she just needs to breathe. If she can just breathe, just get the oxygen back into her brain, then she can think this through a little while longer. She can come up with a feasible plan that doesn’t involve vomiting or passing out on the freezing floor.

There’s a door only another ten or twenty steps away now. It would be foolish to stop, of course, but she’s starting to realize that it might just be lethal to go on. And, despite everything, she would really rather not die like this, here. Anywhere else, sure. But not here. Not alone and too close to the infirmary for comfort.

Voices carry from the room, two distinct women from different worlds, and a man who shares an accent with one of the women—an accent just like Cassian’s. Voice like his, too. It occurs to her as she’s trudging along that he might actually have survived, but she doesn’t want to get her hopes up. Nothing could be worse than that.

“You didn’t have the right to keep that from me!” the man cries out. With every word, Jyn’s dread grows.

The woman with his same accent speaks next. “You don’t have to—”

“Oh, don’t I?”

“It’s fine,” says the second woman. She sounds tired, perhaps a bit bitter. Disillusioned is a word that Jyn might have thought of easily had it been literally any other day but the one she’s currently living through. “It wasn’t my secret to keep.”

The man sighs. “Thank you.”

“But it wasn’t mine to tell, either.”

The man grumbles something low and unforgiving, but Jyn can’t make it out.

“She respected my wishes,” the first woman says calmly, though not so quietly. “We could argue about this for the next century. But tell me this. Could you really have lived with yourself if you left the Rebellion? After all of this, everything you’ve done, could you have given up so easily?”

Jyn leans against the freezing wall and tries not to let the groan of pain escape her throat as she struggles to stay on her feet. She’s not meant to hear any of this, she can tell. It’s none of her business. She doesn’t even care if she hears more, she doesn’t want to know—but she’s been caught and compromised enough times to know that letting herself be known now would be worse than anything else.

“For my son? I would have done anything, Bix.” The man takes in a deep, shaky breath and exhales slowly. “I still would.”

She brings her hand to her mouth and bites down, and she regrets it instantly. There’s no meat there now, no flesh to soften the impression of her teeth on her skin. The small act becomes the final straw as she loses her wherewithal, sinking to the floor as a noise louder than a woolamander’s howl echoes through the corridor, her own self the point of origin.

The three people in the adjacent room go silent, and Jyn imagines that they freeze in wary surprise, if not plain confusion. There’s a small cacophony of shuffling as they begin to move, the sound growing louder as they get closer and closer to the door, and to her.

Fuck. She should have just stayed in bed.

A red-haired woman appears first, not engaging but staring with suspicion—no, apprehension? Is there a difference? Jyn can’t remember. Gods, is someone driving an ice pick into her temple? She’d like them to hurry up and finish the job.

The next two hustle out in quick succession—the first, a dark-haired woman holding a small child, a baby, really, and the second, hobbling out on crutches—

Cassian.

The planet tilts on its axis, and Jyn isn’t sure if it’s the pain or if it’s the realization that she is not the sole survivor of Scarif, after all. That she isn’t the only one who made it out. That the right person made it out.

“Jyn?”

His crutches clatter against the ground as he discards them in favor for lowering himself beside her. There’s something different, asymmetrical, uneven about him, but she can’t bring herself to care. It’s Cassian, she thinks. He’s here. He’s alive. He made it home.

Her name leaves his mouth again in a rough, terrified voice. She feels his hands on her, trying to prop her up more reliably. He barks orders to the women, something about medical and getting help. Then, he whispers to her something about never and here and safe. She isn’t aware enough to comprehend the words themselves, but she understands the soothe in his tone, understands the way his hands move up and down in slow, reassuring strokes. At some point, he tells her that she’s home. Now that she knows he’s alive, she’s inclined to agree.

He’ll tell her later that, as much as he was glad to see her, she was something of a sight to behold. Clad only in a medical tunic, collapsed on the ground and bleeding from all the places she’d haphazardly pulled and removed the needles and tubes and wires. Half-starved, thin and frail. Half-dead, really, though it could have been worse. She could have just been dead, and then he never would have gotten the chance to thank her. To say goodbye. To say the rest of what he needed to say.

The way he looks at her when he finally visits is hard to describe. She doesn’t hate it—she could never hate it, or him, or anything about him, she thinks, not anymore, not after all they’ve been through—but she doesn’t much like it, either.

They don’t talk about the things she may or may not have overheard, even if the pieces have been coming together for her in the time she’s had to think about them, alone in her recovery. Alone with her thoughts.

“Your leg,” she croaks out as he pulls up a stool to sit at her bedside. She noticed it before, only she didn’t, really. Couldn’t have pinpointed what was so strange about him, not while she herself was in medical crisis. It’s clear as day now, though. One of his legs has been replaced with a cybernetic prosthetic. It isn’t a great fit, she can tell already. He still can’t walk on it well, hence the crutches. Knowing the state of rebel medical care herself, it’s probably secondhand.

He smiles at her gently, sadly; brings his hand to her forehead and brushes back her hair. “It became infected. They tried, but—” He cuts himself off before he can get too emotional, his serene mask returning, obscuring a truth he isn’t ready to share. “I still have my life. That’s all that matters.”

And you still have me, Jyn thinks, though she won’t say it. Instead, what comes out sobers them further, if that’s even possible. “I thought you were dead,” she tells him. There’s no drama in her voice, no desperation. It’s merely a statement of fact, though they both know it means so much more.

“I should have come to see you the second you were awake,” he says, taking her hand in both of his. He hangs his head and closes his eyes. “I’m so sorry you thought you were alone.”

Bodhi Rook’s voice whispers, Galen Erso sent me, before fading away. She’s glad she doesn’t have to work too hard to ignore it.

“Wasn’t your fault.” And she believes herself when she says it, too. “Lots going on.”

Cassian laughs, and it’s only because of that brief letting down of his guard that it quickly transforms from joy to sorrow and regret. He doesn’t sob or howl, doesn’t keen like a wounded animal. His tears are silent, his body only shaking every now and then as he tries and fails to contain the weight of what has passed, between the two of them, between him and the galaxy.

She wants to get past this early stage of them, where things are awkward and stilted and strange. There isn’t anything normal about the way that they met, or the things they’ve been through. They aren’t at the beginning, but rather well-past the ending. She wishes that she had kissed him in that elevator, not because she’s desperately in love with him—she isn’t sure she knows what that would feel like, anyway, doesn’t trust she wouldn’t mess up any attempt at something normal and real—but because she wants to make him a promise. She doesn’t know everything about him, not yet. She hardly knows anything at all, in truth, but she wants to. She wants to be there for him. Be there with him. She isn’t planning on going anywhere, now that she found him again.

Doing all of that requires walking on solid ground, however. She isn’t sure either of them is capable of that at the moment, not when it feels—when it’s true—that there’s so many other things up in the air.

When his tears slow and his lungs can take in and expel air without extreme force or fear, he simply keeps holding her hand, drawing circles on the back of it with his thumbs. It’s soothing. It scares her.

“Who is Bix?” she asks finally. Might as well break through the haze of it now rather than later.

He sighs. “Someone from my past,” he says achingly. “Maybe someone from my present. It’s a long story, Jyn, and I don’t want to talk about her right now. Not when I’m here, with you.”

But it isn’t a good enough excuse, not for someone like Jyn. Certainly, he has to know that.

“What happens next?” she asks after a while, after she’s convinced herself that she won’t burst into tears.

He squeezes her hand; her stomach drops.

“I wish I knew.”

A month later, it’s the redhead from the room with Bix and Cassian who catches Jyn slicing through restricted Alliance files.

The medical team won’t clear her for active duty; Leia doesn’t want Jyn anywhere near a combat scene until she can be sure that… well, Jyn doesn’t know, actually. But she knows that if she’s grounded on this forsaken freezing wasteland of a base, she’s going to learn everything she can about the woman in the corridor holding a child. The only thing is, either no one knows, or no one will tell her. Most still don’t consider her a friendly, after all.

What are we looking for? Melshi’s ghost asks. Describe it.

There are, essentially, open access personnel files with minimal redaction. It takes very little effort to get to them; all she needs is an unlocked data pad, which are easy enough to come by since the rebels aren’t nearly as paranoid as the Imps. There’s some demographic data on a Bix Caleen, though to her surprise, Cassian is not listed as her next-of-kin. Instead, it’s someone named Wilmon Paak. When she looks at his file, his next-of-kin is listed as someone named Dreena, no surname featured. Her file is even bleaker; the only information of note is that she is a survivor of the Ghorman Massacre.

Bix and Wilmon are both from Ferrix. Cassian’s file says he’s from Fest, and not much else. Problem is, she’s not sure that’s right. Something in her gut tells her that Cassian has known Bix Caleen for much longer than when it is noted they both joined the rebellion. What’s more, she has a feeling that his file in particular is an intentional dud.

There are more files, linked to the personnel ones but that require encryption keys to remove the redactions, and she sets to work at them. The code is somewhat overly complicated, a little backwater and home-brewed, but she’s just about to crack the first one open when—

“You don’t have the clearance for that.”

Jyn looks up to see the red-haired woman looking at her with a strange combination of both curiosity and disinterest. “So arrest me,” she challenges, and waits for the fallout.

But instead, the woman smirks.

“You’ve got questions,” she says. She sticks out her hand. “Guts. Grit. We could use more people like you, I think. Call me Vel.”

“I’m Jyn.”

“Oh, I’m well aware. I don’t think there’s a person on this base who doesn’t know who you are.”

She laughs. “I don’t think there’s a person on this base who trusts me.”

Vel shrugs. “Cassian does, and he doesn’t trust easy. Consider you might have to give everyone else some time to catch up.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Jyn puts the data pad down beside her. “He doesn’t trust me as much as he should, given what we went through. Not enough to tell me the truth about Bix.”

“Ah,” Vel sighs. “That’s… a complicated truth.”

Oh, she hates feeling like this. She has an intense range that doesn’t sit quite right, that doesn’t match her age, her experience. She feels like a child, maybe the child she never got to be. Acting like a spoiled brat won’t get her anywhere, but that doesn’t mean she knows how to handle this.

“Are they married?” she asks.

“Not as far as I know,” Vel answers cautiously. “But there are things even the most talented of intelligence agents wouldn’t know.”

“And the child?” Jyn stands eye to eye with the other woman, giving no quarter. She doesn’t seem like the sort of person who can be intimidated, but Jyn’s getting desperate. “Cassian is that child’s father?”

“I think we both know the answer to that.”

And that’s it. That’s all she needed to hear.

Jyn pushes past Vel and is glad that the woman doesn’t follow behind. She’s neither looking for reason or sympathy right now, just—just—

You wanna get out of here?

Space.

She needs space.

Chapter Text

Jyn’s first memory boils down to what must have been a terrifying moment for her mother. Little Jyn, maybe three years old, plays with the kyber crystal pendant on Lyra’s necklace. Her mother whispers stories about the Force and the way it connects every living being to each other, and maybe some non-living, too. How no one is free from their ties and bonds to others; how all are obliged to help one another survive in the face of terrible things. Then, she remembers the sound of thunder and her mother pulling her close against her chest.

Looking back, she realizes that the sound wasn’t thunder. It was soldiers. Stormtroopers.

So much time has passed, but she remembers that. She remembers life in the clutches of the Empire, though she doesn’t remember being miserable then. All of her misery started when her mother was killed, when her father was taken by Krennic. It must have been exhausting, she thinks, for her parents to have pretended all of the time to be happy living like that. She doesn’t remember a single complaint, not from before they moved to Lah’mu, and barely any after. Mostly, she remembers her father’s lessons about the stars, and her mother’s lullabies. 

It’s entirely possible she wants to forget that any of her early life ever happened, even if she can’t help but cling to the few memories of her mother that she has. It’s a bittersweet thing, knowing that her mother was more dedicated to her values than to her own survival, or to the wellbeing of her daughter. She can forgive her father for his part in the making of the planet-killing weapon that wiped out entire civilizations, oddly enough, but she isn’t sure she can forgive Lyra Erso. Not yet, at least. Her mother’s voice twists with Chirrut’s in her head, The strongest stars have hearts of kyber.

She doesn’t feel very strong right now, sitting on her own at the end of a table in the mess of a base that isn’t even half-finished. People walk past and don’t talk to her, except for the seldom few she’s already met—Vel, Leia. Cassian, when he’s not otherwise occupied.

Bix, of course, never speaks to her.

She supposes she’s not really alone, not anymore. Not ever, really. Chirrut sits calmly across from her, even though she ignores his presence. Mostly, he says nothing. Every now and then, when her thoughts drift, he’ll worm his way into her mind and she’ll hear him say something he’d said to her while they were alive. Usually, though, he watches her, tilts his head like he can actually see her, like he’s really there. She supposes that, if any of her fallen comrades would be able to communicate in death, it would be him. The not-quite Jedi.

His image dissipates as Leia slams her tray aggressively down on the table, triggering an automatic wince from anyone within twenty feet of them. She bites into the warm rations like she’s trying to rip the head off a loth-cat, and Jyn is pleasantly surprised not to be the angriest person in the room anymore.

“Hello to you, too,” she says.

Leia frowns down at her tray and then looks up at Jyn. “I hate men.”

Unable to stop herself, Jyn laughs, then slides her hand over her mouth when her friend—one of her only friends—shoots her an incredulous look. “Sorry,” she chuckles through her fingers.

“I’m surprised you don’t,” Leia mutters, stabbing at her food.

Jyn shrugs. “Hating people is a waste of energy. ‘Sides, I’ve been told there are a few good men left in the galaxy.”

“Well, allow me to assure you that Han Solo is not one of them.”

Though she hasn’t had the displeasure of meeting the smuggler with whom Leia seems to have an obscene amount of hysterical sexual tension, she’s seen him around the base now that she isn’t confined to the medbay. She’s seen the way his eyes soften when he looks at the princess, how he flounders when she meets his casual, noncommittal energy with the rage of a thousand suns. But she’s also seen the way that Leia looks longingly after him when he leaves on supply runs, the way that she can’t let go of the tension in her shoulders until she knows he’s back safe. They’re perfectly matched, really. Just both too obstinate to do anything about the spark between them, too obstinate and too scared of their own feelings.

“You know, you’re lucky,” Leia rambles on. “At least Cassian—”

“At least Cassian what?”

When Jyn glances upward, the very subject of her friend’s unfinished statement stands above them, a little spark of mischief in his eyes. She slides over to give him enough room to sit down, and he thanks her with a nod. Leia closes her mouth, opens it, then closes it once again. Whatever she planned on saying, she isn’t saying it now.

Though, Jyn can guess any number of responses Leia might have.

“At least Cassian isn’t an asshole,” Jyn smoothly fills in, not looking at him. “Leia’s having boy troubles.”

The princess blushes. “Erso, I swear to—”

Cassian lifts an eyebrow. “Boy troubles? What, with the farm boy? Or the smuggler?”

She’s impressed at how easily he takes to the conversation. Cassian Andor is the kind of man who can blend in anywhere, who can be anyone, but when he’s himself, he’s always just the right amount of friendly, the right amount of honest. She’s been able to tell this since the second he let her keep the blaster she’d lifted, back before Scarif. Before things changed—between them, between them and the universe.

The topic of relationships has been off the table for them, or so she thought. Maybe, it’s just the topic of their relationships. A third party’s problems are fair game.

Jyn tries humor on for size. “I hate to admit this, but I’m curious which one you think it actually is.”

“Jyn,” Leia warns, but Jyn’s too invested in extending the bit.

His eyes roll up, not rudely, but rather as if he’s weighing his options. “I think,” he starts after giving it some thought, “that it’s not the farm boy. If it was, you would be discussing his inexperience, and you wouldn’t be doing it in the mess hall.”

Leia almost chokes on her food, while Jyn snorts water up her nose. “Oh, fuck—”

When she looks over at him again, he’s smiling, wide. It doesn’t quite reach his eyes, and she can’t see any teeth, but it’s the most she’s seen from him… maybe ever. When Leia threatens him with a court martial, he just shrugs. “She asked, I answered. So what’s the issue with the smuggler? Besides the fact that he’s a liar and a cheat.”

It’s Jyn’s turn to cast a curious look at him, now. Just how well does he know this new little group of Rebellion heroes? Fuck it. It doesn’t matter. Stop reading into him.

“She hasn’t actually told me yet,” Jyn offers, slowly turning her head towards Leia.

Damn. If looks could kill, then the princess’s would commit mass murder. “I’m not discussing this in front of him.”

“Oh?” Cassian leans forward with his elbows on the table, pursing his lips. To anybody else, he looks serious, but Jyn knows he’s just holding back a smile. Playing a game. “I wouldn’t tell anybody. I’m pretty good at keeping secrets.”

Jyn’s intrusive thoughts circle like carrion birds around his words. Yeah, like the fact that you were probably married and had a kid that you were just never going to tell me about.

But you don’t know that, she reminds herself. You both thought you were going to die. It didn’t seem important at the time.

She takes several deep breaths in, holds them, then lets them out. She doesn’t even realized how checked out of the conversation she is until she realizes that both Leia and Cassian are staring at her concernedly. Before she knows it, Cassian is ghosting his fingers over the inside of her wrist, checking her pulse. “Sorry,” she gasps, jolting out of her undesired reverie. “Sorry, I just—”

Force, there’s nothing she can say to sweep this under the rug, is there? “It’s just—a little loud in here,” she lies, her fingers going to rub her temples. At least it’s only half of a lie. It’s just a question where here is. Plus, her head really is starting to hurt. She pushes away from the table, forgetting that she’s sitting on a bench, and meets resistance, stumbling. People are starting to look over at them. At her.

“Jyn?” Cassian helps her right herself. “Careful,” he warns softly, like he didn’t even mean to say it out loud.

“She should go to medbay,” Leia tells Cassian. But truthfully, that’s the last thing Jyn wants.

“No.” She tenses as his hand comes to rest on the small of her back; he pauses, but only for a moment, clearly attributing it to physical discomfort rather than the unexpected—potentially unwelcome, she hasn’t decided yet—intimacy of the gesture. “I’m not going to medbay,” she says through gritted teeth.

“Erso, you really—”

“I’ll escort her to her quarters,” Cassian offers, and Jyn is both grateful and irate. She doesn’t resist as his hands hover, guiding her. She can feel too many sets of unfamiliar eyes on her already.

True to his word, he walks with her back to her quarters, one hand behind her, ready, just in case. She’s not sure what contingency he’s planning for, but she supposes it’s fine, even if the tension in her spine only increases every second they’re alone together. He keys in her access code, because of course he knows it without her telling him. Maybe he knows everybody’s, but that’s what a fool would believe, isn't it? More likely that he just keeps tabs on her the same way she does him.

Strangely, though, he doesn’t follow her inside. It’s a decent-sized room, if you consider a broom closet decent. But it fits the bed and has been outfitted with a private fresher, and the fact that she gets a room at all when she’s not really one of them, and a solo room at that, has kept her from remarking on it at all. She wouldn’t complain under normal circumstances, of course, but knowing it’s a favor from Leia—or, possibly, Cassian—gives her a bit more motivation to stay silent.

“If it’s too much—”

She closes her eyes. “I’m fine.”

“If you feel worse,” he says softly from the doorway, “you’ll go to the infirmary?”

Just come inside, she wants to tell him. Just come inside and hold me like you did on the beach. I just need you to hold me.

That isn’t going to happen, though. There’s more than just her perceived malaise standing between them and that.

“Jyn,” he says again when she doesn’t respond, more forcefully this time. His voice strains. “Promise me.”

Anger, frustration—mournfulness, it fills her. Lights a fire inside her. She should just—just give him what for, now, because how dare he have the audacity to ask her to promise him anything. How dare he ask her to do something he knows she won’t say no to.

“I will,” she says without looking back at him. She clutches the wall, preferring that pain to whatever it is she feels when she looks at him. “Promise.”

His voice is so quiet she isn’t sure he actually says anything at all. “I’ll hold you to that.”

The door whooshes shut behind her, and she’s alone again.

She throws up the little that she was able to eat. She can almost feel a hand between her shoulders, smoothing up and down her back as she expels the unsavory food from her stomach. If she turns her head, it’ll just make things worse, but she likes to think it’s Melshi, or Bodhi. They seemed like they were kind, the short while she knew them.

At night, almost every night, Saw stands pathetically in the corner of her room. As powerful as he is, was, always will be, it’s like he’s cowering now. If spirits, if visions can cower.

She doesn’t bother looking at him past the first time she notices. Are we not still friends? he asks her.

“You’re not real,” she mutters, staring up at the ceiling. It’s too much to ask to be able to fall asleep easily at night, she knows this. It doesn’t matter what medicines the infirmary gives her, because none of them work. She tries to cut caf for a few days, but even Vel that makes everything worse, including Jyn’s attitude.

If you continue to fight, what will you become?

She sighs. “Doesn’t really matter at this point, does it?”

Because, what hasn’t she become? What hasn’t she done for her own good, her own survival? What is she now that she’s given up every last bit of herself and the people she loved to save a galaxy that’s never done her a kindness? She wishes she were dead. Wishes she’d died on that beach. Would have been a good death, at least.

The little comm on her nightstand, the one that Vel gave her, had encrypted especially for her, chirps softly. Grateful for the distraction, she affixes it to her ear and speaks. “This is Erso.”

“Jyn,” Vel says plainly, “good, you’re up. Can you report to the war room?”

Ugh. Just because she can’t sleep doesn't mean she wants to work, and there’s no place she’d rather avoid than the war room. She isn’t a strategist, not in a context like this. She isn’t important to this fight. Hell, she’s not even a real member of the Alliance.

She swings her feet over the side of her bed.

“Be there in ten.”

It shouldn’t surprise her that Vel’s called her to the war room under false pretenses. Actually, though, Vel didn’t say anything about reasons at all. Just made a request, and Jyn followed, obedient little pet that she’s turning into. Well, maybe for Vel. Not for the Rebellion.

Her friend isn’t alone; she stands next to a man that Jyn’s seen around before, although not lately. He looks tired, though not irritated, and he gives her a friendly enough nod as she enters. Alongside the both of them is Leia, who’s already shoving her tumbler forward across the table for a second serving of whatever liquor Vel’s pouring.

“Glad you could join us,” says Vel dryly, filling Leia’s cup and sliding Jyn one of her own.

Leia eyes Jyn suspiciously. “This is a bad idea,” she mutters, tossing back her drink.

“What’s a bad idea?” Jyn asks, letting the liquor burn her tongue and throat as she drinks it slowly. One thing she learned from Saw, never get so drunk you can’t jack a speeder and fly your way out of town. That, and let your enemies stumble before you do. Not that Leia’s her enemy, but still, she reasons she can never be too careful.

The man with the large eyes and dark hair watches her, smirking. She bristles, but tries not to let it show. If he even suggests she should be flattered, if he even tries to flirt with her, then—well, she deflates a bit. It isn’t as if she has someone to go home to. No one to be jealous for her. Maybe she wouldn’t mind, then.

But, then again, he’s wearing a wedding ring. So maybe that’s not anything she needs to worry about.

Huh. She doesn’t know why she feels a bit disappointed by that.

Vel and the man clink glasses. “Sergeant Dameron wants to recruit you to the Pathfinders,” she explains.

Oh. Guerrilla-types. What a surprise.

“Because of your sill ske—skill set,” Leia hiccups, her voice dripping with sarcasm. Jyn is mildly amused to find that her friend is a lightweight, but it’s not enough to make her smile. Not quite yet.

“Kes Dameron.” He nods and lifts his tumbler to Jyn. “You’ve got the kind of skills we could use, and I’ve got a bunch of greens who still jump at the sound of blaster fire.”

Jyn sets down her drink. This is a delicate sort of thing, she realizes. An opportunity to build bridges—or burn them. “Last time I led men into battle, none of them made it out alive,” she says coolly.

Leia groans. “I told you.”

The sergeant doesn’t falter. “Every man who went to Scarif with you knew what he was signing up for. You beat the odds. Even if you and Andor had died there, you still would have beaten the odds.”

She shifts on her feet. “I’ve never been very good at following orders.”

Vel smirks behind her glass. “Never stopped them from promoting Andor.”

Dameron takes a step forward, not close enough to crowd her, but close enough to feel his intent. “My wife and I joined the Alliance when they first arrived on Yavin, when we were just kids,” he explains. “You’re the reason we’ll still have a home to go back to at the end of this war. I don’t need a soldier, Erso. I need a rebel.”

All three of them are looking at her now—Kes with patience and determination, Vel with cunning wisdom, Leia with skeptical reluctance. It should feel wrong. She remembers the last time she was in a war room, being stared down by leaders who didn’t believe her. Didn’t believe in her. To some extent, of course, they were right. Then again, her father had called both his daughter and his revenge Stardust, and that had been the only reason for the Alliance’s survival. So maybe they’d underestimated her.

Her own words echo in her memory. On and on until we win... or the chances are spent. She’s got a chance, now. Again. And it’s all her own.

There’s a flutter of something inside her, and she expects it to grow into the all too familiar sense of being cornered. It’s strange to find that it doesn’t. Funny, she thinks. The last time she felt like this, she was being welcomed home.

Saw’s voice rings like a call sign in the back of her mind. Save the dream!

Kes holds out his hand, willing her to join him.

Jyn’s already made up her mind. She surprises even herself when she takes his hand, warm and friendly, big-hearted. He smiles, a big, goofy grin. It feels nice to have someone smile at her and mean it.

“Welcome to the Rebellion, Sergeant Jyn Erso.”

Chapter Text

“Come on, Erso. Don’t tell me you’re tapping out on me now.”

Jyn is starting to think she might hate Kes Dameron.

Her body isn’t used to the kind of strain she’s asking of it as they trek through the jungles of Konkiv. Its capabilities are greatly reduced as a consequence of injuries on Scarif and disuse on Hoth, and she’s paying the price now. The sweat feels like liquid fire on her skin; her muscles ache, her head pounds. Her lungs beg for air not made of water, and her stomach turns every time they hit a patch of uneven jungle floor. Unfortunately, that’s often.

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, trying not to think about the fact that her breakfast—just a ration bar, but still—is now for the scavengers. She knows she can’t go on like this, this slow wasting under the guise of temporary illness. They just need to get to this kriffing listening post and blow it up, and then they’ll head back to Echo Base, where she’ll get some nutrient infusions from medbay and start re-conditioning her body to handle more than a few days’ hike through swamp and rainforest.

“If I die on this planet,” she tells Kes, taking the hand he offers to help her stand upright, “I’m going to kill you.”

“You’re not going to die,” he tells her. He gives her a pointed, but not unkind, stare. “I’m not gonna let you die, kid.”

Anyone else, she’d kill them for calling her that. But it’s Dameron, and she figures she owes him a little flexibility, given that he’s one of the only rebels who trusts her at all. He’s certainly the only one who trusts her implicitly. Well. Probably the only one, given that she hasn’t had a conversation with him since Dameron recruited her.

The only thing this jungle is good for, she muses as they continue on, is that she doesn’t hear the voices here. She still dreams about Scarif and Eadu and Jedha and Lah’mu, about the people who’ve died there and the things that they said, but she can live with dreams. If heat and humidity are the only way to keep the ghosts at bay, she’ll suffer through it as long as she can.

Though, frankly, she wouldn’t mind a more temperate climate. Maybe they can snag a mission on one of those fancy resort worlds next time.

They march only a little bit ahead of the group, which Jyn figures is getting her a little judgment from the others for being such a barnacle to their leader. But she would only care if she were here to make friends, which she’s not. She’s here to get the job done, and she likes to think the other Pathfinders know that. Likes to think they can rely on her in a bind.

“You think too loud for someone so quiet,” Kes says.

“Loose lips down ships,” she quips back. “It’s not anything important, if that makes you feel better. Just noise.”

He shakes his head with a mirthless chuckle. “Not sure if that’s a good thing.”

She knows he wants to chastise her, has plans to trick her into going to medbay upon their return if she doesn’t go willingly; she heard him mention it to another of their group, a quiet one whose name she probably won’t remember. She will, though—she doesn’t like feeling sick. She’d just rather be here than stuck behind a desk, slicing. It’s all fun and games when you’re on a go, but to do it every day, no urgency, no set purpose? Her patience doesn’t quite extend that far.

Kes is the one who knows where they’re going, so she lets him get ahead of her and follows him from a short distance, the rest of the group a short distance behind her, all of them within sight of at least one other person. She tries not to think about how good a real water shower will feel when she gets back. Hell, she tries not to think about a sonic shower. The memory of being clean isn’t helping her cope with the jungle, and you could say that she’s learned not to assume she’ll be alive from one day to the next, even if her commanding officer insists that he won’t let her die here.

The quietude of their journey through the thick undergrowth has her ruminating, alone with her thoughts for far too long. It’s a shame none of the other rebels trust her. She’d like to be their comrade in more than just name. Then again, she isn’t sure she trusts them either, and she thinks of the four words she spoke to Cassian back before they ever flew off to Jedha. They’re ever present, in times like these—just harder to believe. Harder to follow.

When the sun goes down, the scout that Dameron sent ahead rejoins and tells them they’re only an hour’s walk from the listening post. The jungle is as dense and ill-suited for humans as ever, but they’ve been making do the whole time; they’ll make do here, too. They aren’t here to carve up the planet, so they spread out, hang their hammocks, and use glow sticks for light, no fire necessary. Probably a good thing, Jyn thinks, since it’s hot enough, even at night.

Jyn sets hers up at the periphery, and Dameron at an angle to hers. As much as she might cling to him, he hasn’t really left her alone this entire mission, either. When it comes to her being a part of his team, he’s dedicated, she’ll give him that. Actually, he seems dedicated to it all—his team, his wife, the Rebellion. Kes Dameron is a man who may think strategically, may use his mind when it matters, but he’s a man driven by love.

She’s not used to it. But she thinks she could be.

In the silence of the night, his voice is clear. “Melshi recruited me, you know.”

She startles a bit at the sudden noise, but takes a deep breath, reminds herself where she is, who she’s with. “Yeah?”

“I mean, I knew I would join up from the second the rebels were on the moon. It’s said the temple complex was built by the Massassi for Sith, but humans have been there for so long now—no one remembers that shit, you know? The Massassi were long gone, the Sith were long gone, and it was just us. There’s a lot of stories about when and why all of that happened, and maybe I can tell you someday. But the temples are still sacred to the Yavinese, in our own way. Especially for those us who were born in Wetyin.”

Despite having been to the Alliance’s old base at the temple complex, she didn’t know any of this. She only barely knew that Wetyin was one of the continents on the moon. “Did the Alliance ask?” she wonders aloud. “If they could use the temples, I mean.”

Kes snorts. “More like, we were gently told. Most people didn’t really care, though. We all hated the Empire already. The Massassi were warriors, and so, we understood, were these rebels. Shara—she started thinking of herself as Yavinese the second we got married, and damn, I thank my lucky stars for her every day—she joined because she wanted to fly, and the Imps certainly weren’t gonna let her do that. She’s got something of a mouth on her.”

“I’d like to meet her, someday.”

“Soon,” he replies, a smile in his voice. “She’ll be back on base when we are, this time. She’ll like you. I think you’ll like her, too.”

A comfortable silence lingers between them for a little while, but Jyn has the sense that Kes isn’t quite done with his story. “Why did you join?” she asks.

“Stormtrooper used his boot to break my father’s neck,” Kes tells her, his voice hard but trying, really, truly trying to seem unaffected. She knows the lie of detachment as much as anyone.

“I’m sorry, Kes.”

But it’s like he doesn’t hear her. “It wasn’t even on Yavin 4. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. When the ‘troopers confronted him—I don’t even know what they thought he had, or who they thought he was. My uncle held me back as they killed him. We had to pretend we didn’t know who he was, so that we didn’t die, too.”

Jyn’s heard more stories like this than she can remember. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong look, wrong attitude, wrong species—when it comes to intimidating people, ‘troopers aren’t interested in either discretion or accuracy. Easiest way to make someone feel true terror is to pick off the innocent while claiming they’re guilty, to have neighbor turn against neighbor. Let the paranoia set in, let the rabble send each other to die. For those who resist the pull of propaganda and fear, all they can do is bear witness. Tell the truth to people who will listen but not run and tell. Ensure, whenever possible, a good death.

“Imps shot my mother,” she offers in return, solace and solidarity the only comfort she knows how to give. “In front of my father. Technically, in front of me. Years later they killed my father. They killed Saw. They killed Chirrut and Baze and Bodhi, and they killed Melshi, and sometimes I think they should have killed me, too. Like every second that I’m alive is borrowed, extra. My luck’ll run out one of these days, you know?”

It’s a heavy confession, but no heavier than what he’s just told her. A few more moments of silence pass between them before Kes replies. “Did you like Melshi?”

“I hit him in the face with a shovel.”

“So…”

Jyn smiles to herself. “Yeah, I liked him fine. Not his fault I’m cracked.”

Dameron laughs, and some of the tension dissipates. It’s a damn good laugh; she wants to hear more of them, from him, from everybody. “I was just ground crew when Melshi plucked me out of the crowd. I knew the jungle, I could think on the fly. I was a good shot, too. Felt like I had to be, after what happened with my dad. And… I don’t know. He understood. There were a lot of greens back then who joined up to be heroes, or because they couldn’t let it sit on their conscience. Plenty of them had never had any face to face experience with the Empire. They joined the war because they thought it was the right thing to do. But Melshi and I—we knew it was.

“And I think that’s why I like you so much, Erso. You know it is, too.”

There’s no one in particular waiting for Jyn when they get back to Echo Base. To be fair, there’s no one waiting for most of them, but she’s choosing to take it a little personally that not even Vel or Leia could be bothered to show up.

Shara is waiting for Kes, and she jumps into his arms, wrapping her legs around his waist and kissing him. Jyn looks elsewhere, starts to head anywhere else, but then there’s a hand on her shoulder and a pair of lean but strong arms embracing her, and there’s a mass of dark curls flooding her vision.

“Thank you for bringing him back to me,” Shara says to Jyn as she pulls back, her gratitude so clearly genuine that Jyn doesn’t have the heart to tell her she isn’t much one for hugs.

Jyn shrugs. She’s not used to this much—feeling. Open displays of it. That sort of thing. “Figured I owed him one.”

Kes reminds her to get checked out in the infirmary before heading off with his wife to do who knows what, who knows where. Actually, she can guess, but she’d rather not imagine what her commanding officer’s face looks like when he—

“Jyn.”

She turns at the sound of her name, searching for its source for far too long before her eyes land on Cassian’s tall, slim figure some two dozen feet away. She almost doesn’t want to go to him, and she does have an excuse… but then she’d have to explain to him the fact that she met his eyes and ignored him because she’s pretty sure she’s fucking dying a little bit, and she doesn’t really want to have that conversation just yet. Or ever.

Steeling herself, she calmly walks over to where he’s standing. He looks like he’s aged ten years since the last time she saw him, which wasn’t even two weeks ago. Dark circles around red-rimmed eyes, a defeated sort of posture that doesn’t suit him, doesn’t make sense for him. His arms are crossed, but not like he’s mad. Rather, like he’s stuck flinching backward, perpetually avoiding whatever’s coming to him.

“You’re back,” he says quietly once she approaches him.

She eyes him warily, not liking the version of him she’s seeing seep out through the cracks in his Captain facade. It’s the one he wears when he has to be professional. It’s not the real him, the honest him, the one who told her that her father would be proud of her. “I am.”

“You joined the Pathfinders.”

“I did.” This doesn’t feel like a welcome.

“Leia told me.”

“Of course she did.” Jyn smiles wryly. This sure is a strange interrogation. “Are you just going to keep telling me things I already know?” she tries to joke.

He doesn’t laugh. “You didn’t tell me.”

“Again, are you just—”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She wants to say it’s an unfair question. That he doesn’t have the right to ask her to tell him anything, not when they haven’t had a proper conversation since—well, maybe since ever. But certainly not since Scarif. Then again, she understands. If he’d left without telling her, she wouldn’t be happy about it, but she doesn’t think she’d bring it up. But does she owe him that? Telling him anything about the choices she makes from this moment forward?

What makes her more uncomfortable than the question is that she doesn’t have an answer. Or at least, she doesn’t have one she thinks she’s ready to acknowledge. Like quiet waves against a shore, Melshi speaks to her again. What are we looking for? But she isn’t sure if the question is for her, or for Cassian.

“Got busy,” she mutters, lying through her teeth. “Figured you did, too.”

His arms fall limply to his sides, and she can’t tell if he’s disappointed or concerned or in disbelief. Mostly, that’s because she’s not looking at his face. She isn’t sure she’s ready to do that.

“I always have time for you, Jyn.”

The words strike a disharmonious chord, remind her of something else she heard him say, albeit in a much harsher tone. For my son? I would have done anything, Bix. I still would.

It’s the same sort of sentiment, she realizes, one of self-sacrifice for a loved one. Because of course it is. Of course, Cassian Andor would make any sacrifice to protect or help or comfort or put a smile on the face of someone who matters to him, because there are so few of those people left. She should be honored that she still ranks among them, after this. Fuck.

Fuck. She shouldn’t have left without telling him. She should have told him what she was doing.

“I’m sorry,” she hears herself saying, guilt roiling up inside of her. It doesn’t sound like her, though. The words are sincere, but they’re hollow, like they’ve had all the emotion scraped out of them. Empty.

Huh. Maybe it does sound like her.

“I know,” he says, not much better at whatever this is than she is. “Are you hungry? There’s time before mess closes, we could—”

A wave of nausea passes over her and she pinches up her face. It’s not like she means for it to happen, but she can feel the warmth of Cassian’s hands hovering around her shoulders, not sure if he should touch her or not. Not sure if he’s allowed. His voice doesn’t betray his uncertainty, though. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I—”

“Kriff, Jyn, hasn’t anyone ever told you not to lie to a spy?”

She opens her eyes and sees his looking at her like she inches from death. Which, for all she knows, she might be. She’s no medic. She sighs, then instantly regrets it when she hears the way her breath shakes. “Been having some trouble keeping things down,” she admits begrudgingly. She’s not sure if she says it like that because she actually feels that way, or if she can’t say it any other way through the nausea. Would he be angry if she vomited all over his shoes?

He’s all serious-like now, and it would be funny if she didn’t feel like utter bantha-shit. “We need to get you to the medbay.”

“Was already planning to, but then you showed up.”

Harsher than she meant, but not untrue. He sighs, forgoing his earlier hesitation as he puts an arm around her for support. “C’mon,” he grumbles, more likely frustrated by her inability to set a priority than the act of escorting to the infirmary. “Let’s go.”

“I can get there myself—”

His grip tightens. “Not a good idea.”

She tries to wriggle free. “I’m sick, Cassian, I’m not an invalid.”

“Just shut up and let me help for once!” he whisper-screams, a hiss like hot water on ice in her ear. She freezes in place, because he doesn’t talk like that, not to her. He’s practically shaking next to her, and she’s not sure which of them is the more wounded animal now.

Cassian takes a deep breath and looks straight ahead. “Sorry,” he says, too roughly. He tries again, and it’s marginally better. “I’m sorry. Just—please let me help, Jyn. Please.”

Fuck, he really needs this, she thinks. She nods in answer, not sure she trusts herself to speak just yet, especially when Bodhi appears in the corridor ahead of her.

Master switch, he whispers before disappearing.

Gods. Her ghosts are really fucking cryptic sometimes.

The medic on duty is nowhere to be found, but there’s a med droid who instructs her to go to a cot behind a curtain and remove her clothing. When Cassian doesn’t move, Jyn gives him a pointed look. “You gonna stand there and watch?”

“Sorry,” he mumbles, before going to wait in the hall.

She’d like to say it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before, but she’s pretty sure he hasn’t. That fact is what makes her feel strange, makes her throat tighten. Not the fact that the last time it was just her and a med droid alone inside the room, she hadn’t been a willing participant.

Well. That’s a memory she’d forgotten about.

But this isn’t an Imperial med droid operating on orders from Imperial scientists, or medics, or prison wardens. This is just a neutral party, doing a job. So she steadies herself and sits on the cot after she removes most of her clothes, wondering how her burns are looking, if her insides are shredded yet, how long this is going to take. It’s Hoth, after all. It’s karking cold.

It’s a short couple of scans and blood draws, along with a reluctantly-given listing of symptoms, before the droid has her laying on a cot, mostly back in her clothes. It hooks her up to an IV on the arm that looks less like melted plastic, and she watches the tubing as the cloudy nutrient solution makes its way from the bag to her bloodstream.

“Could—” Her voice catches when she tries to ask the droid a question, and she clears her throat, tries again. Her cadence is stilted; the sound wavers. “Could you tell the man who came here with me that he can come in now?”

If droids could raise their eyebrows with as much skepticism as she’s seen from any military man who’s ever looked her up and down, she’s pretty sure this droid would. It clicks a few times, cycling through commands. “I will retrieve him,” it says, an odd, tinny monotone.

When Cassian comes to sit next to her as she gets her infusion of nutrients and anti-nausea medication, she refuses to look him in the eye. She can already sense the pity, the caution. She doesn’t wanted to be treated like she’s broken; she’s so fucking tired of that. She’s not broken, she’s just… not fixed yet.

“When was the last time you could keep anything down?” he asks softly, studying her.

She stares at the ceiling. “Kept dinner down the night before we torched the listening post.”

“And before that?”

She shrugs with the shoulder that doesn’t have an arm attached to a tube. She’s managed to probably eat a half of a ration bar a day, on average. It’s just that some days are better than others, and there doesn’t seem to be a consistent pattern. It’s something the doctor here suggested she keep a record of, so she does.

See, she’s not a total lost cause.

“Does Dameron know?”

“Do C.O.’s have access to their subordinates’ medical records?”

He bristles. “Only insofar as it affects the mission.”

I find that answer vague and unconvincing.

Oh, great. Now even the droid is haunting her.

“He knows I haven’t been feeling well,” she says carefully. “But he probably thinks it started after the mission began.”

Something nearly inscrutable flashes across his face, and—oh. Oh. He’s angry. She’s not sure if he’s angry with her, or Dameron, or the both of them, but he’s definitely angry. She remembers that look. It’s his fighting since we were six years old look. Indignant. Righteous. Desperate.

Shit.

He’s hanging on by a thread, too, isn't he?

She finds herself reaching out for his hand, relieved when he takes it. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. She means it, too.

His head snaps up, brow furrowed in confusion. “What for?”

“Worrying you.”

He lets out a mirthless little laugh, and she could swear she hears the beginnings of a sob in his throat. “You’re—you—I always worry about you, Jyn.”

She can’t stop herself from asking. “Even with—”

“Yes.” His grip on her hand tightens, and she feels a little safer for it. He smirks ruefully “You think I climbed that tower on Scarif with a shattered leg for shits and giggles, Erso? Nothing changes that.”

The humor makes her smile on instinct, but it also makes her want to cry. Even if it diffuses the tension, it’s really not funny. Not funny at all.

Chapter Text

Things start to get… easier, after that night in the medbay with Cassian. It isn’t like they start to open back up to each other, to spend time alone together. But they can sit at dinner together, so long as someone else is there, and even Bix doesn’t leave the room anymore if she walks in. Of course, there are other things that get harder, like Cassian’s reinstated protectiveness now that they’re on regular speaking terms again. When he reams Dameron out over letting her go on a mission without consideration for her health, she thinks about just walking out of the base and freezing to death. That would be less awkward than watching the two men discuss her as if she’s not the room.

On the surface, it’s a lot of Cassian’s bitter accusation of, “She could have died!” with a mix of Dameron’s refrain of, “I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

That is the extent of the conversation before the med droid powers off to charge, signaling the late hour. She’s not actually sure why Kes is here, when he should be in his quarters with his wife, but she suspects she’ll find out if she just lets them keep going.

“It’s not my responsibility to personally check the medical fitness of every member of my team before a mission,” Kes says calmly, though Jyn can hear the slight irritation beneath his deep, tranquil voice. “If Vel and Leia thought she wasn’t ready to deploy, they could have grounded her. They didn’t.”

“It’s no excuse,” Cassian hisses. “You knew enough about what she’d been through—”

Kes laughs incredulously. “If you were so against her going, why didn’t you speak up? No one knows more about what she went through than you, after all.”

Jyn inadvertently groans out loud, causing both men to turn to her. “He didn’t know,” she sighs. “Cassian didn’t know I’d joined up properly. Leia only ”

Her C.O. looks between the two of them a few times before letting his shoulders drop. “Fucking ridiculous,” he mutters, shaking his head. “I’m going back to bed. I don’t have a lot of chances to spend the night with my wife, Andor. Don’t drag me out in the middle of the night for bullshit like this again. Erso, I’m grounding you until you figure your shit out.”

“What? You can’t do—”

“The hell I can’t. Look, until I can trust you won’t croak in the field, you run support from base. I’d let a lot of things slide for you, kid, but don’t you dare put me in a position like this again. Got it?”

She mutters a halfhearted, got it and watches him leave. She doesn’t like the guilty feeling it leaves her with. If you continue to fight, what will you become?

“You should get back to your quarters, too,” she says to Cassian after a moment, trying to keep her voice and face free from any emotion. “Wouldn’t want Bix to wonder where you are.”

Confusion flashes over his face before it get smothered by the Captain facade. Force, he’s too good at that. She wonders briefly if he’s ever tried just saying what he’s feeling, but then she remembers who she’s looking at.

“You’re right,” he says flatly. “I should go. Goodnight, Jyn. Try—try to rest?”

“Goodnight, Cassian.” She closes her eyes and doesn’t think about the receding sound of him walking away. Or, at the very least, she tries not to. Tries, and tries again.

Things do really get better from there, though. The awkwardness lingers, but it settles like dust on the ground, not in their eyes. They get used to the distance. Jyn gets used to it. It hurts less than it did at the beginning. She hopes against hope that one day it won’t hurt at all.

Sometimes, at meals, she sits with Cassian and Leia, and sometimes Vel deigns to join them. Sometimes she sits with the Pathfinders, especially if she’s just had a training session with them. She knows that Kes is serious about being grounded until she can get her health sorted out, although she’s not altogether sure that’s possible. At least she can help with planning, logistics. Sometimes she does a bit of slicing on the side, whether it’s for the mission or not, just to keep her skills sharp. If—or, maybe, when—everything comes crashing down, she wants to be considered useful by someone. Maybe by anyone.

And then sometimes, when everyone’s feeling a bit stir crazy and no one’s quite ready to go to bed, everyone goes down to the makeshift cantina in one of the unfinished tunnels and drinks, dances, finds someone to warm their bed for a night.

Jyn doesn’t bother with more than a single drink. It’s that uncomfortable feeling of slowly losing your faculties that she’s afraid of, but more than that, she doesn’t want to dull the things she feels. The pang of jealousy that appears she looks at Leia arguing—but smiling, laughing—with Han; the melancholy she feels hearing Kes and Shara talk about each other whenever the other is off base; the impossible yearning in every atom of her body when she sees Cassian talking to Bix, even if the latter rarely joins them on nights like these.

Cassian asks her to dance, shyly, like he’s young and never asked a girl to dance before, and she declines politely. She lets him sit next to her, though, engages in a comfortable silence as they watch the others pairing off. They even have a little fun, guessing who will go with who. It makes her miss the adolescent years she never really had.

Her attention is commandeered by the farm boy, the ace pilot, Luke. She doesn’t know much about him, except that he grew up on a desert planet and thinks he’s some kind of Jedi. Maybe that’s real, Jyn thinks. Maybe he’s an unpolished version of Chirrut, or something. He isn’t her type, but he’s nice enough to talk to, and she isn’t ashamed to admit—at least to herself—that she likes the attention.

Chirrut, in fact, speaks to her and only her from across the room. Take hold of this moment. The Force is strong.

No. No, she shouldn’t indulge him.

Should she?

“So you’re the one who blew up my father’s life’s work,” she says dryly. Either he’ll take the bait, and she’ll give him a chance, or he’ll shy away, and she’ll write him off.

He smiles sheepishly, tilts his head down, looks up through those pretty blond bangs of his. “Hope you won’t hold it against me. Wouldn’t have been able to do it without you.”

Gods, he’s flattering her. Worse, she likes it.

“Can I ask you a question?” she tries, holding back a laugh when he nods, eager, wide-eyed, innocent. “What are you in this for?”

“What, the Rebellion?”

Jyn snorts and brings her drink to her lips for a sip. “No, the Empire.”

He wears his uncertainty on his face, which she can’t help but find charming. When his grin breaks out—when he realizes she’s fucking with him a little bit—he shakes his head. “You’re something, Jyn Erso.”

She smiles behind her glass. “I try to be.”

Luke sits back and she thinks about the fact that he’s got a pretty face, and pretty hair she could run her fingers through. He has a relaxed sort of aura that only comes with living a life without loss, though she knows that’s not entirely true. She’s heard the story of how he witnessed the death of the last Jedi, how he took on the very same mantle for himself. But his loss is new, and while it stings, it doesn’t burn deep inside him. They might all have some hope that things will get better someday, but he has hope things will get better someday soon.

It doesn’t hurt his chances that growing up on a farm has left him with a strong, sinewy body beneath his clothes. Not like she can see it here, but she’s seen him train, and she hasn’t minded what she’s seen.

On the other side of Skywalker sits Melshi, smirking. You wanna get out of here?

Oh. Yeah. Right. It’s that easy.

“You wanna get out of here?”

He seems surprised—but, relieved? Excited?—to hear her ask the question, and she makes a note to thank Melshi’s spirit for the line when she’s properly alone again. Sweet thing that Luke is, he follows her to her quarters. She isn’t sure if she’s doing this because she’s angry or lonely or sad or just needs to scratch an itch. But if she’s going to do this, it might as well be with someone with a heart still intact enough not to break hers.

He’s green—so green, so fresh, he’s bloody virginal—but she takes her time, teaches him how to seduce a woman. She shows him how to let his hands wander in a way that makes him look generous; she walks herself backwards against the wall to give him an idea of the sort of closeness a lot of people like. He takes direction and correction well, which is a blessing, in her mind. She teaches him how to get her off with his hands, and by her second orgasm, he’s quickly mastering the art.

When she has him on his back on the bed, he swallows his pride. “I, uh—I haven’t exactly done this before."

She gropes over his groin and he lets out a breathy little moan. “We don’t have to do it now,” she tells him softly, her hand gliding up across his stomach and making gentle circles on his sternum. “If you aren’t ready. There’s other ways to make you feel good.”

His hand comes up and takes hers; his eyes shine with want and nervousness. “I want to,” he whispers back. “I just—it’s a little embarrassing, you know? I feel like if you touch me, I’m gonna explode.”

She leans down to kiss him chastely. “That’s kind of the point. But it’s your choice, if you want to make it.”

He does make the choice. Of course he does. He lets her straddle his hips and sink down on him, the stretch of it delicious as she stutters over him after months of lonely nights dedicated to her and her hand. She can barely remember the last time she did this, but she remembers all too clearly the last time she wanted this, when she was maybe going to die on a planet far, far away and she had two warm but tired arms around her, holding her close, a face buried in her neck.

The thought of Cassian Andor makes her come as she spears herself on the farm boy’s cock, and the sound she makes triggers his climax in kind. She resists the urge to throw him out of her bed like she would with any other lover, instead choosing to wash up in the ‘fresher and crawl back in bed beside him when she’s done. He hasn’t moved, stunned and bewildered into silent paralysis. His first time, at least, was probably better than hers.

She skims her fingers lightly against his bicep, wondering how it would feel if he properly wrapped it around her waist. He shivers and closes his eyes. “Holy… kriff,” he sighs.

“You okay?”

“I’m ruined,” he laughs. “Wow.”

Jyn doesn’t know what possesses her to let him stay the night, that night or the next. He doesn’t spend every night in her bed, but she feels strangely safer when he does. Her ghosts linger, but they don’t speak. They don’t ask anything of her. They simply bear witness to her affair, to the ease and simplicity of letting her legs fall open for the Rebellion’s golden boy. He’s lucky he’s a good egg, else she’d have probably eaten him alive by now.

Weeks of this, and he comes to her one night when she can’t force herself up off the floor of the ‘fresher. Of course, he’s able to come in anyway—she doesn’t know when she became careless enough to give a boy like Luke Skywalker her access code, but it must have been during some moment of fucked-out bliss. He crouches down next to her.

“Are you okay?” he asks, crowding her.

What a stupid question, she thinks as she vomits into the toilet bowl. “Fine,” she growls, harsher than she means it to be. “I’m fine.”

“Jyn, you’re obviously—”

But she doesn’t listen, because another round of sick pulls her back over the bowl. He’s kind enough not to say anything else, or maybe just dumbfounded. Still, he ties her hair back and runs a rag under the water for her. When she doesn’t think anything else will possibly come out, he helps her hobble to the infirmary. Well, more like he insists on it, and she’s too tired to argue.

The medic on duty draws her blood before asking her any personal questions. “Most people prefer to answer the questions without anyone else present,” they say.

“I can go,” Luke says softly, awkwardly. He leans over her and kisses her forehead before leaving, casting a parting glance at the threshold. A sad smile adorns his pretty mouth. “Just—let me know, if you need me.”

She certainly doesn’t have the heart to tell him she won’t. But she also doesn’t have the courage to give him up, yet. He’ll be back in her bed soon, and she’ll be chasing her pleasure with his body. It’s easy when she doesn’t think too deeply about him. Easy when she thinks he doesn’t think too deeply about any of it.

The medic asks her the questions she hates answering every time—symptoms, her sexual activity and practices, if she could be pregnant—

Fuck.

No. That’s not—

Scarif should have made it impossible.

No. This isn’t happening.

She’s not going to have a panic attack about this. Most definitely not.

“In theory,” she says, interrupting the medic, “what’s the likelihood of getting pregnant if I have an implant?”

They shrug. “Low. Can still run the test, though, if you want to be sure.”

“Please,” she hears herself whisper. Her father stands behind the medic, smiling down at her. My stardust, he tells her. It’s a peaceful life.

It doesn’t help.

The options don’t bear thinking about. There’s only one option, only ever has been one option for her. She won’t bring a child into this war, won’t tie anyone to her who hasn’t already bought into her special brand of hell wholeheartedly. She’s had scares before, she knows how it’s all done, no matter the stage. She isn’t afraid of termination. The only thing she’s afraid of is the one, secret reason she might have gone through with it. Might have kept it. The reason she won’t even think to herself, because it’s just not on the table, and she won’t bait herself into a delusion. Or, well. Any more delusions.

The medic can’t possibly know the importance of the moment they tell Jyn that the result is negative, and that the vomiting and general unwell feelings she’s experiencing are just a part of her particular continual health issues. They remind her to reduce stress—as much as one can, during a war—and to rest, to eat when she can and come in for infusions when she can’t. But none of it matters, because it’s all the things she’s been doing before. Now she’s just free from the burden of telling Luke about any of it.

She’ll have to tell him something, of course. Get into more detail about the side effects of her mission on Scarif, minus the ghosts. After all, she’s not yet ready to let him go completely.

So she’s self-indulgent. She karking deserves to be.

Her next day off coincides not with Luke’s, but with Leia’s, and she thinks she prefers it that way. Jyn isn’t sure if she’s ready to spend a whole day with Luke with nothing to do but fuck and eat and sleep. She’d rather have a simple day with Leia, watching a trashy holo drama pirated from the Mid-Rim and throwing snow through the blue light of it whenever the characters do something stupid.

“So,” Leia starts when they’re already four episodes deep, too far gone to turn back now, “you and Luke.”

Jyn blushes, but she really shouldn’t. It’s nobody’s business who she gets her rocks off with. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Her friend rolls her eyes. “You know evasive maneuvers don’t work on me, right? I literally joined the Senate as a teenager. I’m pretty good at getting to the heart of an issue.”

“I don’t know what there is to tell,” she says, shrugging. “It’s just sex. Simple as that.”

Leia raises an eyebrow, skeptical. “Does he know that?”

“If he doesn’t, that’s his problem, not mine.”

“Jyn…”

She hugs a pillow tight to her chest. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But—”

“Please.” She hates hearing the desperation in her own voice.

Leia sighs. “Fine. But try not to string him along forever. He’s just a kid.”

“Aren’t the two of you the same age?”

“Still. We’ve lived very different lives.”

“Yeah, alright. I’ll be careful with him. Want to give us a curfew, too?”

“You’re such an asshole sometimes.”

“As if you would have me any other way.”

Next time she’s in medbay getting an infusion, Cassian comes lumbering in with a mighty blaster burn on his arm, and the medics who she’d been enjoying shooting the shit with all turn their attention on the Rebellion’s finest.

Jyn watches them as they move with precision, strip him of his shirt, clean the wound, apply bacta. He stops them from putting on more at a certain point, quietly muttering something about scars and actions, and they back away once they’ve hooked him to an IV that’s a mirror of hers for some fluids and pain meds and a little more bacta, just in case there’s an infection from inside.

He looks… good isn't the right word. He looks bad, actually. Oh, he’s still as handsome as ever, his hair and beard both a bit overgrown, his facial features so sharp you could cut kyber on them. But his eyes are as hollow as she felt when she first woke up in this place. He looks tired, and thin—wiry, not lean, not all steel and sinew. If she focuses, she can see a couple of gray hairs on his head, and tries not be so self-obsessed as to think that she might have put them there.

As the pain meds start to work their magic, his head lolls a bit to the side and he catches her eye. He smiles weakly at her, then sees her IV and frowns. “You’re still doing that?” he asks, his words almost slurring but not quite. “You’re still sick?”

“I might always be,” she replies, though the answer is as much a surprise to her as it is to him. Sure, she’s talked about it with the med team. They all agree that there’s no surefire cure for whatever ails her. But saying it aloud makes it a little more real, and something real is something that can gain on her, can take her down. She isn’t sure how she feels about that. She isn’t sure how she should feel about that.

“I wish I could fix it,” he says sadly, still staring at her. It’s not awkward, because he doesn’t have the wherewithal to make it awkward.

“I wish a lot of things,” she says, trying to smile at him. “You know what I wish right now?”

His eyes go wide with wonderment, like a child being told a secret for the very first time. “What?”

“I wish you’d get some rest, so that you feel well enough to go back to work in the morning.”

It must be the drugs that make him complete crack up, because apparently, nothing has ever been funnier. He laughs and laughs and laughs, and it’s just contagious enough that she laughs a little bit, too. Once he settles, it’s as if all the fight is gone from him, and he starts to relax into the cot.

“Hope you miss me,” he mumbles, closing his eyes.

“I always miss you when you’re gone.” Not a lie, not technically.

“I miss you all the time.” He lifts his unaffected arm above his eyes to block out even the dullest light. “Miss you when you’re right there. All the time, Jyn.”

It’s like her throat and mouth are stuffed with cotton. She’s never been more at a loss for what to say, never not had a way to make a bad situation worse, or maybe better, depends on who’s asking. Now, though, it’s simple—she’s speechless. Cassian Andor has rendered her utterly speechless.

“Me too, Cassian,” she whispers once she knows he’s not away anymore. “Me, too.”

Chapter Text

“Do you think we could talk?”

It isn’t that Jyn hasn’t been anticipating some kind of confrontation with Bix Caleen since the minute she realized that the woman was the mother of Cassian’s child. In fact, she’s kind of surprised it didn’t happen earlier. The only difference between the way she imagined it and the way it’s happening now is that now involves a lot less screaming and hair-pulling. She can imagine telling Cassian that and the look on his face if she did. But what can she say? She likes a good fight.

Jyn sets aside her data pad at the work station and turns, leaning back in her chair. She doesn’t know if she gives off an air of confidence or defeat, and at this point, she isn’t sure she cares. Let’s just get this over with, she thinks.

Bix pulls up a metal stool and sits across from Jyn, elbows on knees and hands clasped in front of her. Jyn almost feels bad for her, the tiredness in her eyes, the internal conflict evident on her face. It must be difficult, being a mother, cycling through whatever dramatics she is with Cassian. But there remains an emphasis on the world almost—someone who matters to her is everything but lost to her because of the woman.

“Cassian told me what you did for the galaxy,” Bix says kindly. “What you did for him. He said that he wouldn’t have survived Scarif without you.”

“He wouldn’t have been there without me,” Jyn mutters, cursing herself immediately for allowing herself to self-deprecate in front of this total stranger.

“Even so,” Bix continues, a gentle smile on her face. “You are the reason my son will know his father. I’m not sure anything would have brought me back, except that he survived the unsurvivable.”

“And now that you’re back?” Jyn asks, trying not to let her discomfort show too badly. “Will you stay?”

Bix averts her eyes toward the floor. “I’m not sure yet. Now that Cass has seen him, knows him… I don’t want to keep Jeron away from him, you know? But this isn’t the life I ever imagined for myself. Maybe this is awful, but when Vel first commed me to get me to come here, I thought she meant to tell me he was dead, and I was so relieved. Relieved that I’d never have to explain myself, that my son’s father could die a hero and there would be a clean, easy story to tell him someday. Can you understand that, Sergeant?”

Jyn listens, and is regretfully reminded that she is disinterested in hate, the emotion too much of an expenditure on her body, which at this point seemed to be held together by sheer will alone. But at the very least, she had been determined to feel indifference toward Bix Caleen. At most, mild annoyance. Instead, the feeling that the woman’s words stir up inside her is that dreaded tie that binds, that depth of understanding, that kinship that she never wanted to feel in the first place. So, yes, she can understand Bix. It’s the last thing she wants, but she knows exactly what she means.

“It would have been easier if he’d died, wouldn’t it have been?” Jyn asks. “Would have been easier for us all, if he and I had burnt up on that beach.”

“That isn’t what I meant—”

“It’s okay, I’m not judging you for it. I feel like that, too, more often than not.”

Bix doesn’t exactly look at her with horror, but there’s a trepidation in her eyes that Jyn is sure usually precedes complete fear and disgust. “What are you saying?”

Jyn shrugs. “Sacrifice is easier than survival. Especially for people who thought they had nothing left to lose. That was how Cassian felt on Scarif. I felt it, too. And maybe, if he’d died, it would have been easier for you to do give him up completely, since he wouldn’t be around the galaxy anymore and the universe would stop throwing the idea of maybe or someday in your face.”

For a long time, the two women just stare at each other. As much as Jyn would like to know what Bix is thinking, she would also rather steer clear of any mind that knows Cassian that well. Any contradiction of the carefully crafted character she’s got stored in her mind can’t possibly end charitably. In another life, she thinks, the two of them might have been friends. Allies. Comrades in arms.

Maybe. Maybe in a world without Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso and Bix Caleen could have been each other’s family.

Bix purses her lips. “So. You don’t think I’m a terrible person, for all that I’ve done?”

“I don’t know,” Jyn tells her, mostly because there’s got to be more that she’s done than hide Cassian’s child from him, she just doesn’t know what. “But I know I’m not the person who can make that call.”

“Ah. Well. I don’t know if I feel better or worse about it, now.”

“Sometimes that’s just the way it is.” Suddenly, a thought appears unbidden in her head, accompanied by Melshi standing across the room, looking pointedly at her companion. What are we looking for?

Yeah, yeah, she thinks. I’ll ask. She clears her throat. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.” Bix nods.

“You and Cassian… were you ever married?”

If the question surprises her, Bix doesn’t let on. She merely smiles nostalgically and tilts her head to the side, noncommittal. “Not in a way any planet would recognize. There was a Ferrixian ritual… but it was just for us. A long time ago, now.” She gives Jyn a curious look. “I don’t want to get in the way of his happiness. Or yours. You know that, yes?”

“I doubt that’s possible,” Jyn lies. If the bitterness doesn’t come out like klaxons, she’ll be lucky. “You gave him a son. What more could he ask for?”

“More.” Another sad smile from Bix. “So much more. But he never will. I think we both know that, don’t we, Sergeant?”

Ah. Whatever wall between them goes back up, but Jyn isn’t sure she wants it to. She scrambles through her brain, searching for anything to hold the line before it disappears completely. When it comes to her, the solution seems so obvious that she’s not sure how she didn’t think of it before.

“Jyn,” she tells Bix finally. “You can call me Jyn.”

Luke’s mouth is one of Jyn’s favorite characteristics of his. Not only because it makes her laugh when he says the most innocuous things, not only because his smile when he looks at her is brighter than the sun. She likes that his mouth can do what most men’s won’t—he’ll put it anywhere she asks him to, graze his teeth down the inside of her thigh, close his lips around her clit and suck when she taps his temple to cue him.

Her other favorite part of him is his hair, because it’s long enough to run her fingers through, long enough to pull and steer him how she wants him. Soft like silk, the color of sand, it makes her want to get herself back to a desert planet, any desert planet, just to feel him under the warm sun.

HIs hands, however…

He can get her off with them; he’s certainly proficient. She’d never doubt his skill, but his intentions, his inhibitions can get in the way of her wants. The skin of them is rough, but they’re gentle with her. He pets her, his touch featherlight. He strokes, but never shoves, never curls where she wants them. She has no issue getting what she really needs from him. Sex between them is never physically unsatisfying. Still.

Still.

She pulls him into a supply corridor behind a tarp and shoves him against the wall, pressing her mouth against his. She wants, she wants, she wants, and she plans on getting what she wants from him. He smiles against her lips and kisses her, but it’s too good, too slow. His hands rest on her waist like they want to take care of her, but not in the way she wants to be taken care of. But he can take direction, she forces herself to remember. He doesn’t take her criticisms personally, only seriously.

Describe it, Melshi’s spirit whispers in her ear, and she shivers. It’s almost like he’s right there next to her, even when there’s no possibility that it would ever happen.

Her fingers scrape against his scalp and she runs her tongue along his lips as she grabs a fistful of his hair, drawing out a sweet, syrupy moan. “On your knees, Skywalker,” she murmurs, her voice husky with a need that masks anything else.

Like a good boy, he complies without making her ask twice and manages to expose the small and necessary part of her body without having to fully undress her; it’s to their benefit that they’ve had quite a bit of practice at this, she thinks with a wry smile to herself. Soon, his face is between her legs and she hears him breathe the scent of her in, and it’s the kickstart she needs to ride his face from above like she wants to, needs to.

His tongue darts in quick circles around her clit, and he never leaves it exposed for a second. She comes so fast and hard that borders on painful, and the excitement of his unexpected vigor and enthusiasm sets her on a course for another climax. She glances down at him, and he’s looking up at her with his eyes that shine the color of the ocean, his pupils blown, his gaze more intense than she’s ever seen it.

“Fuck,” she pants, tugging on his hair, bucking her hips forward. “Fuck, kriff, fuck—Luke, I’m—”

Bodhi stands in the corner, smirking. Master switch, he says.

He rips another orgasm out of her and she nearly shouts. Her legs shake beneath her, as he’s not yet given her any quarter, any rest. He gentles his mouth only to surprise her with his gloved hand. His index finger moves back and forth across her clit, gathering up the wetness there before pushing inside of her without prologue. Gods, Force, he’s never done anything like this before. Where did he fucking learn how to do this?

Two hide-covered fingers move inside her inexpertly, but the friction from the gloves’ material delivers her finally to a third orgasm, weaker than the others in sensation but different enough to have her hips start to cramp up. If he wasn’t supporting her, if she wasn’t leaning against a wall, she’s pretty sure she’d just fall over and die.

He’s got a little handkerchief with him, ever the gentleman, that he uses to clean her up as she comes down from her high. She’s almost dizzy with the way the air has rushed away from her head, and her heartbeat pounds in her ears. Near the opening of the corridor, she spots the outline of one of her ghosts and wishes she could tell them to fuck off and leave her be for a day.

Luke does her the courtesy of letting her leave first, giving her a little bit of time before walking out himself. It’s only then, as she watches her ghost retreat, that she realizes that while she most definitely saw and heard Melshi and Bodhi, the man at the entrance to the corridor was not a ghost.

She catches his jacket in her eye as he rounds the corner, the dark swoop of his hair, lightly streaked with gray in some places. The familiarity of it is what damns her, damns him, damns this whole damn place.

Cassian.

Cassian Andor watched Luke fuck her with his tongue.

And doesn’t that just bring up a whole host of other things to think about? Cassian knows what her voice sounds like during sex. Cassian knows her orgasm face. Cassian probably knows how he could get her off, if he needed to, beyond a rudimentary understanding of female anatomy—not that that was ever in doubt, actually, which is almost worse, because that’s not who she’s supposed to be thinking about.

It hits her like a blaster bolt that Cassian now knows about Luke. Cassian is going to tell someone he thinks he can trust, but that someone will tell someone else, and then someone else, and so on and so forth. And then, within an hour, all of Echo Base is going to know her private business.

Jyn, in a way that she hasn’t had to do in quite a while, runs—she runs for her life, runs after him. She has no intention of letting him slip past her in that subtle, slithering way that he does.

She catches up with him when he’s nearly to his quarters, grabs him by the elbow, and immediately regrets it. Although she’s been on the receiving end of his anger, she’s never seen him like this, shaking and flushed with fury. He looks like he could kill a man without a second thought. His eyes are dark, his pupils overtaking his irises. Suddenly, he turns the tables on her, grabbing her arms and pushing her against the wall so roughly that the force of it leaves her breathless.

“What are you doing?” she asks, her voice hardly audible. Stupid question. It’s pretty damn obvious what he’s doing.

“What do you want from me?” he snarls.

How is she supposed to explain—no, beg—him not to tell anyone what he saw? She can feel the pressure to just go ahead and tell him, ask him, whatever, but that would mean admitting what she was doing. But it’s understandable, isn’t it? Rebels get lonely. She’s not the only one to have engaged in a bit of fun in a less than private place. So why does she feel like she’s done something she can’t take back?

“You don’t get to be angry,” she says, her brain scrambling for a defense.

He’s fuming; if she didn’t know better, she’d say he’s rabid. “Oh? And why is that?”

Fuck. What is happening between them? “Cassian,” she breathes, bringing her hands to lay flat on his chest. “Please—”

But he crowds her more, until their bodies are pressing together. “I knew the rumors. You and the wunderkind farm boy. Did you want to get caught? Were you trying to have me catch you?”

Jyn shakes her head, her breath and heart racing. “No, no—I didn’t—”

He brings his face down to hers, the warm air from his lips sending a shiver down her spine. “Then why? Why let me see?”

She doesn’t have an answer to that—it wasn’t intentional, but she doesn’t think he’ll listen if she tries to explain that again. The longer he stays this close to her, the more she realize that his anger isn’t anger at all—it’s arousal. He’s increasingly hard between his legs, pressing into her lower abdomen with his hips. His desperation is as palpable as hers was not five minutes earlier.

“Jyn,” he sighs, his lips so, so close to hers. “Jyn, please—”

It’s too much—too much—

She screws her eyes shut and stops thinking—

When she opens them again, her hands are in front of her, and he stands a few feet away now, looking at her with a dreadful, horrified expression. She's pushed him away, she realizes. He scrubs a hand across his face, and she can tell that he’s close to tears when he whispers her name again, whispers, “I’m so sorry.”

She doesn’t know where he goes; she barely knows where she’s going. Her body takes her back to her room in utter silence, not even the machinery that normally buzzes all around piercing through the veil of whatever is happening to her. She crawls into her bed and doesn’t sleep, just stares at the wall until the chrono says that it’s nearly tomorrow. Just as she closes her eyes for a fitful and restless night, the door slowly whooshes open. She registers that there’s someone who comes to kneel by her bed, maybe more than one someone. She isn’t clearheaded enough to notice who.

The first set of hands moves her to make room, sitting next to her and combing through her hair with short, sharp fingernails. Another takes her boots off and sits at the foot of the bed. The two figures converse quietly, sometimes asking her a question, but she never really answers. If she does, it sounds like a grunt or hum to her.

She thinks she falls asleep—she doesn’t know for sure. It’s had to tell, in her state. It’s been so long since she felt so outside of herself, so removed from her own body, that she can’t remember if she actually can sleep like this. But she starts to come out of her strange fog, and it feels just enough like waking up that she wonders if she can will it to be so.

Blinking a few times, she glances around her quarters. Leia’s fallen asleep sitting up by her head, while Vel is conked out sideways on the bed with Jyn’s legs in her lap. Though the two of them are no strangers to her room, she’s surprised to see Kes in his fatigues minus his jacket, legs out perpendicular to the wall against which he rests. It makes her sad, but it also makes her smile. They’re good friends.

Oh, kriff. I have friends.

She sees her ghosts, too, though not all of them. Her father watches from a short distance, while Bodhi stands by the ‘fresher door and Melshi sits next to Kes. Chirrut is on the floor right next to her and Leia, while Baze stands guard by the entryway. It’s the first time, she realizes, that she’s happy to see them. They watch over her like she matters to them, or something. Like they’ll protect her at any cost.

It’s overwhelming, but she isn’t quite ready to cry. She finds herself praying to the Force or whatever other higher powers might exist in the galaxy that all of her friends are as lucky as she is, to have people who care this deeply. Praying that Luke will forgive her for her long, unspoken list of transgressions. Praying that the next time she looks at Cassian, she can actually stand to look at him.

If the powers that be can grant her that—if they could just give her the strength to keep on better than she has been—she might be willing to do just about anything. She tries to ignore the voice in the back of her head, the one that belongs solely to her, that tells her she needs to be careful what she wishes for. She knows she needs to be careful.

That’s the reason she’s wishing at all.

Chapter Text

When Kes finds her in the training room and asks her if she’d be amenable to returning to Yavin, Jyn cocks her head to the side and frowns. “Why wouldn’t I be?” she asks, suspicious.

He shrugs, though there’s clearly more behind the question than he’s letting on. “Just figured I’d ask. Was gonna do a recon sweep through the old base. I wouldn’t say no to some good company.”

If she were a better woman, she’s let this go. She wouldn’t push, or prod, or dig. But that’s the thing about Jyn Erso—only on very few occasions has she ever been the better woman. “Thought I was grounded,” she quips.

Her heart fills with a somewhat sadistic sense of glee as Dameron’s cool-toned facade finally breaks. “Fine. Okay. I’m doing a sweep, and it’s come to the attention of some higher-ups that you might benefit from a break.”

Jyn raises an eyebrow. “Higher-ups?”

Kes nearly blushes. “Leia, mostly,” he mutters. “But I can’t say I disagree. That isn’t a dig at you, Erso. It’s just—well, you know how you’ve been. Can you honestly say you couldn’t use a vacation?”

Well, damn. She guesses he can just come right out and say the quiet part out loud. She’s not going to argue that the base on Hoth isn’t giving her cabin fever, but she also isn’t going to admit that she’d sell her fucking soul to get off this barren hunk of ice. Yavin wouldn’t be her first choice, but at least it’s a place she’s been before, where she knows what to expect. There shouldn't be any surprises.

A thought arises, one she finds herself wanting to pull at the threads of. “Could Luke come?” she asks, her voice smaller than she thinks she’s ever heard it.

Dameron clearly wasn’t expecting that particular question, but he doesn’t dismiss it out of hand. “I mean, I’ll have to talk to some people. But I can try to make that happen for you. Since, you know. You’re you.” He cracks a half smile, and it settles whatever nerves the beginning of this conversation may have raised.

In her ranking of her friends, Kes Dameron might be at the very top.

She finds Luke after dinner and spirits him away to her quarters. When he goes to kiss her, she lets the moment linger, slow and gentle. He pulls back and strokes his thumb across her cheek. “That was different,” he whispers, a smile twitching on his lips.

Despite what should be clear signs, she can’t tell if her restraint is being praised or questioned. “Good different?”

He kisses her again, just as chastely. “Good different. Definitely.”

She traces the outline of his collarbone that’s just barely visible through his shirt. “Dameron’s asked me to go to Yavin with him, do a sweep.”

His hands rest comfortably on her waist. ‘How long will you be gone?”

Jyn blushes—she can’t remember the last time she truly blushed. “Well, that’s the thing. I get a bit of a vacation afterwards—” it’s not untrue, she thinks, and he doesn’t really need to know all of the details “—and I asked if you could maybe come, too. If you wanted that.”

He abandons her waist to hold her face, tilting it up to look at him in the eyes. “You want me there with you?” he asks. She can’t quite read his tone, but she pushes down the unsettled feeling it leaves her with.

“I’ve let this fight keep me from living my life for far too long,” she admits, a surprise to the both of them. “Before I know it, I won’t have any time left. I know it’s just a short trip—”

Suddenly, she’s up in the air, held tight in his arms and spinning to the sounds of his laughter. She’s a bit dizzy when he sets her down, kissing her, grinning like a maniac. “Of course I’ll go,” he tells her. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

Her nervousness dissipates, and they lumber slowly to the bed, Jyn pulling him down on top of her. “You matter to me, you know. A lot.”

He looks down at her like he knows how much it took for her to say that much, and he kisses the tip of her nose. “I know,” he answers. “Promise.”

They don’t go any further, holding each other in intimate silence, hands seeking the pleasure of each other’s company instead of each other’s bodies. I want to love you so much, she thinks as he rests his head on her chest and she pets his hair.

So do I. Bodhi sits on the other end of the bed and looks at her with a melancholy smile. We all do.

Luke’s fingers find the kyber crystal that hangs in perpetuity around her neck. “You’ve never told me about this,” he muses.

She fights the urge to snatch it from him. “It was my mother’s,” she murmurs. “When Krennic—she put it on me before she died.”

“Jedi used to make lightsabers out of kyber.” He stares at the crystal for a moment, his pensive eyes a little sadder as he puts the pieces together. Both of their minds, she’d bet, leap from her mother, to Krennic, to the Death Star. “I don’t understand how something so holy can be used for something so evil.”

“It’s a mineral,” she counters. “There’s nothing inherent to its character. Its meaning is made by the ones who use it, whatever they use it for.”

“What did your mother use it for?”

Jyn shrugs one-shouldered. “I don’t really know. There are some days I don’t remember her face clearly, much less what she was like beyond the fact that I felt safe with her. But I know she believed in the Force. She wanted me to trust it.”

He shifts his head to look her in the eyes. “Do you? Trust it, I mean.”

“I want to,” she tells him. She isn’t sure it’s enough. She’s only mostly sure that it’s true.

Jyn and Luke stay in one of the abandoned cabins on the outskirts of old Base One. There’s a comfortable domesticity that starts to settle in after a couple of days, one she resists if only because she’s afraid of how much it will encourage complacency in her. Ideally, she would like it if she could imagine her life this way had the Empire never gained control—easygoing, quiet, a nice boy or girl by her side. If there had never been an Empire, perhaps she would have found an easy personal peace.

They make sweet, slow love in the shadow of sunsets that feel too good to be true, until she’s crying and he’s kissing away her tears. When she has him between her legs, her heels digging into the small of his back, she feels something—more than just a physical thing, it’s beyond her ken. He grinds against her in languid circles, balancing on his hands with his torso stretched up above hers.

“Jyn—Jyn, are you—please—tell me you—”

The very core of her contracts as the drag of his length within her sparks the flame. A delicate, keening cry escapes her mouth and she shivers beneath Luke as he abandons his relaxed pace and ruts into her in service of his own completion. He comes with a shout and collapses on top of her, his seed spilling into her. She can feel every part of him; she feels him everywhere. She imagines him pulling out, the friction just slightly on the right side of painful; he makes his way down until his face is between her legs and licks his own spend out of her. She glances down, on the precipice of another orgasm, and it’s not Luke she sees, but Cassian eating her out.

She shivers—because Luke doesn’t do any of that, doesn’t clean her up with his own tongue. He pulls out of her and rolls onto his back at her side. He takes the way her body vibrates as a sign of aftershocks, brings his lips to her shoulder for sweet, thankful kisses.

They lay together in the silence for a little while, Luke with his eyes closed and Jyn staring off into the middle distance.

“Cassian tried to kiss me,” she confesses into the quiet evening.

Luke sighs. “I know.”

Things start to feel far away; she pulls her knees up as far as she can. “Are you angry with me?”

“I am angry,” he says, reaching for her hand. She doesn’t retreat from his touch, trying to be brave with him, for him. “But not with you.”

Her throat feels tight, but she’s already in motion; there’s no point in stopping now. “I don’t think I know how to be normal. Or healthy.”

“I used to think I knew what was normal.” He turns his head toward her, earnest. “And then some crazy old hermit told me that my father was a Jedi, and my aunt and uncle died. Then the old man died, too, fighting Darth Vader. I don’t know why or how it almost broke me, but, you know. I’m not sure there’s any such thing as normal, Jyn. If there is, maybe we’re not actually meant to know it.”

Jyn exhales for what feels like the first time in forever, but what must only have been a few moments. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

“I think that joining the Rebellion has made me realize that most things aren’t under my control. So, if there’s something that is, I should care about it.”

He squeezes her hand; she does the same in return. There is so much that she wants to say, but none of it really feels like it matters just now. Or maybe it’s just impossible to figure out the words; she’s never been one for eloquence.

“I wish you could have met them,” she murmurs.

“Met who?”

“Rogue One.” Bodhi. Chirrut. Baze. Melshi.

“You miss them, don’t you?”

“I didn’t know them very long.” She isn’t sure if it’s a dream or her ghosts that she sees sitting around the table, drinking together, laughing together. “But they were my family, for as long as I had them.”

Luke doesn’t say anything to that, and Jyn can’t blame him. What are you supposed to say when your girlfriend—she’s pretty sure that’s what they are now, boyfriend and girlfriend, even if it feels a little juvenile—tells you she misses her dead friends? The people who fought by her side and paid the ultimate price? The people who died, when she survived?

So they say nothing, and she watches the table in the center of the cabin, watches her crew—her family—find their peace without her.

On the day that they’re set to leave from the rendezvous point, it occurs to Jyn that she has no idea what Kes has been doing on Yavin this entire time. To be fair, it is his home; he was likely visiting family or friends, or sleeping the days away to take whatever rest he can before returning back to war. Seeing him again, his beard has grown out a little more, and he looks… not renewed, exactly, but ready to dive back into the chaos. It’s been so long since she’s had friends like she does now, she’d nearly forgotten what it was like to be happy for other people.

The look he gives her tells her that he knows exactly what she and Luke have been up to, not that it’s hard to intuit. Especially not when there’s a purpling bruise at the juncture of his neck and shoulder that she enthusiastically put there—and that he readily received.

“Ready to head back?” Kes asks, mostly to her.

She wrinkles her nose, only slightly in jest. “Do we have to?”

Dameron laughs. “Don’t tell me you’re ready to desert now.”

“I just think it would be nice if we lived on a base where we didn’t have to risk frostbite just to step outside.”

The journey back to base is long enough to rest but short enough that it doesn’t drag. Shara’s waiting for Kes, and she and Luke have the misfortunate of watching the married couple practically jump each other right there in the hangar bay. She makes a face and dramatically hides from the public display of affection in Luke’s shoulder; he laughs, wrapping his arm around her waist and pulling her close.

In the midst of the happy reunion, Leia marches up to them, her face blank but by no means serene. “Dameron. Erso.” She eyes Luke, but doesn’t say anything. “Welcome back. We have a briefing in ten. Don’t be late.”

Kes and Jyn exchange a look, and whatever leftover glow from their time on Yavin dissipates as Leia turns on her heel and walks away. “I have a bad feeling about this,” he mutters. Shara smacks his arm, shushing him.

But he and Jyn are on the same page—it’s one thing to be called to a mission briefing, but minutes within landing implies more urgency than either of them desire. It serves as a stark reminder of the fact that they are very much in the middle of a war.

She turns to say something to Luke, but pauses when she sees a flicker of something over his shoulder. Saw stands some ten feet away, and his refrain seems to echo throughout the whole base.

If you continue to fight, what will you become?

The briefing is… small. Leia is there, of course, and Vel, but Jyn is surprised to see Mon Mothma there. Normally, the the leader of the Alliance’s High Council is in hiding elsewhere; at least, Jyn thinks, she didn’t die at Mako-Ta like so many others. Also present are Cassian, which makes sense, and Bix, which makes less sense—along with their child, sleeping in Bix’s arms, wrapped to her chest. Not like it has anywhere else to go, Jyn muses.

It’s a strange menagerie of misfits.

Kes taps a message discreetly on the outside of her hand in dadita as soon as he sees who’s in the meeting. All good?

Even subtle forms of communication don’t stop the sarcasm from pouring out of her as she taps back, Never better.

Behind Bix stands the ghost Baze Malbus—one of her rarer ghosts, she notes. You don’t look happy, he says.

Yes, well. She isn’t.

Chirrut stands next to Leia with an oddly serene smile on his face. She wants to fight.

One of these days, her ghosts are going to make her look crazier than she already feels. Hopefully, today is not that day.

“Thank you for joining us on such short notice,” Mon Mothma says as she addresses the entire group. “I will attempt to keep this as brief as possible. We have received intelligence that suggests the Empire is coordinating what are likely to be simultaneous purges on various planets with suspected Alliance cells. Fortunately for us, most of their targets have already moved on in light of this information. Unfortunately, one of the planets they are targeting is Ferrix.”

Immediately, Jyn looks over at Cassian. His face is impassive, but she can imagine how this must feel, after all this time. They haven’t talked much about it—it’s impressive they’ve talked about it at all, considering how little they speak to each other now—but she knows the story of the Rix Road Riots. Knows that the open Imperial occupation there has been going on for years, since the death of the woman that Cassian called his mother. It doesn’t surprise her that an active rebel cell could be housed on the planet, but she also can’t imagine it without him at the helm.

Rebellion is a complicated thing.

The mission they are assigned is, as far as missions go, fairly simple. They are to extract any remaining members of the cell on Ferrix and return through a scramble of hyperlanes in order to ensure that the Empire does not become aware of the base on Hoth, unfinished as it is.

Cassian and Bix are the ones with inside knowledge, and also the ones with the most espionage experience. Jyn and Kes are their boots on the ground; they’ll be focused on security and safe passage. Vel will coordinate from the ship. Leia, it seems, is only present because so few Alliance leaders are left. Jyn wonders if she’s bitter about not being included, or if she’d rather be safe and tucked away, far from the action.

“May the Force be with us all,” Mon Mothma says to close the briefing.

Like some kind of message has been broadcasted to everyone present, the room empties of all but Jyn and Cassian, though she knows that Bix is lingering just outside in the corridor. The woman does that, she realizes. Lingers. And she can’t even bring herself to be upset by it.

“You good?” Jyn asks him, not sure what else to say. They haven’t been alone together since he backed her into a wall, and it takes everything in her not to run. At least now, he’s a good ten feet away from her.

His mask slips, and the years seem to catch up with him all at once. “I haven’t been back since—I haven’t been back.”

She nods. “Are you gonna be able to do this?”

He smiles sadly, and it makes her wish that months hadn’t passed since he first came to visit her in her sickbay bed. “I’m a soldier and a spy,” he tells her, avoiding the question. “I go where they tell me.”

Cassian goes to leave, and as he passes her, it’s the closest they’ve been since that last fateful moment. He pauses, and she can’t help but hold her breath.

“Will you promise me something?”

Her response originates from so deep in her bones that she can’t stop it from coming out. “Of course.”

His gaze on her is apologetic, brutally self-critical. She doesn’t have to wonder how they got here, and most of her doesn’t really think about it any more. The rest of her, though, stays heartbroken.

“Make sure I don’t get us killed,” he pleads in a whisper, something utterly unknowable haunting his dark, tired eyes.

And, then, he’s gone.

She doesn’t ruminate on it, doesn’t have the time to. Isn’t sure she would know where to start. Besides, she has far too many things to do before they leave for this mission—loading up on supplies, getting the requisite scans from the med droid, stealing Luke away for one last intimate moment before she says goodbye. None of which involve Cassian Andor.

Chapter Text

The closest thing Jyn has ever had to a real home is Lah’mu, but even her fondest memories of her time frolicking amongst its rolling hills and traipsing about its black sand beaches have been tarnished by memories of the Man in White, of her mother’s death, her father’s greatest—truly, his only—betrayal. Her understanding of home has been entwined with the knowledge that no matter where she is, she will always be left behind. There will always be something else, someone else, with a stronger call. The people who claim to love her, who call her their family, are never able to choose her over them.

It’s strange, then, to be the one leaving.

Luke bends her over the desk, curls himself around her as he fucks her. Genuinely, this might be the first time he ever has; until now, he’s made love to her with such delicate wholeheartedness that it’s almost too precious to think about. But this time, it’s different. His arm wraps around her stomach, holding her to him as his cock slides in and out. He’s taken her from behind before, on the bed, with both of them on their sides. She doesn’t know where he learned this particular form, though. Probably holo porn.

It’s how she used to imagine Cassian might take her, before everything changed.

“Kriff, Jyn,” Luke pants, the curse almost unnatural coming from him. “I love you—love you so much—”

Her orgasm dies on the spot, but she clenches around him anyway, cries out something light and airy. Is it cruel? Perhaps. Her hope is that he’s too far lost to his own pleasure to notice the subtle inconsistencies in her climax.

The way he fucks her until he’s spilling inside her and kisses the back of her shoulder as he comes down from his high suggests that he was indeed distracted by his own pleasure.

He pries himself away, slipping out of her and letting his come trickle down her thighs. “I love you,” he says again, his forehead against hers. For lack of a better response, she pulls his head forward and kisses him like their lives depend on it.

She thanks her lucky stars that he never asks her to say it back, not even later when he kisses her goodbye before she boards the ship for her mission. She refuses to think about the way that a certain someone watches them as they kiss.

A memory flashes in her mind’s eye, of her telling Cassian that she isn’t used to people sticking around, and of him looking at her with earnestness and devotion—whether to her or to the cause, she doesn’t know—and saying, Welcome home. She glances up to the cockpit, where Cassian and Bix are at the controls. She wonders what home means to them. Either of them.

“You’re not gonna spend the whole mission looking at him like that, right?” Vel asks from her seat.

Jyn flushes, but the lights are dim enough that she has hope it isn’t seen. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Vel arches an eyebrow. “Right. Of course.”

Gods. Jyn wishes she could be like Kes right now, eyes closed as he dozes, not at all awake but also not fully asleep. She could use the rest; they probably all could, but she could really, really use it. It doesn’t make much sense to her, why she should be so tired after a holiday. It’s probably just the whiplash, the difference between how things were and how things are. Not that it really matters; it is what it is.

Turns out, Vel’s not done. “You and Andor will be one team, Caleen and Dameron will be another.”

“Great,” Jyn replies. She doesn’t care. Honestly, she doesn’t. She just wants a minute alone, as if there’s such a thing, in this Rebellion.

The journey to Ferrix is dull, quiet, and painfully untenable. She tries not to think about the way that the pressure inside her head is slowly increasing, or the way that her hips ache the longer she stays strapped in. There’s a dull throb behind her eyes and her stomach, though things have been improving in general, doesn’t seem to want to settle. She never quite got the chance to properly wash up after getting back from Yavin, and Cassian’s request seems to want to play on a loop—make sure I don’t get us killed.

These are all the things she tries not to think about. Tries being the operative word, because if she’s not thinking about those things, then her ghosts come knocking, and that’s simply another distraction that she doesn’t need right now.

Ferrix is… cold. Not as cold as Hoth, but it makes sense as to why she’s never heard Cassian say a damn thing about the temperatures on the ice planet.

In a way, the place feels like it’s frozen in time. Nothing here has been updated in at least ten years—or at least, nothing of free and public use. She’s sure that the surveillance and any facilities used by the Imps are the latest and greatest. Isn’t that how it usually goes?

Considering that she and Cassian are the two of their party most wanted by the Empire, Vel has them hiding out in an abandoned housing unit along a slum corridor, far away from prying eyes. They’ll wait for the signal from Bix and Kes, and then they’ll make their move, clearing an extraction pathway for the rebels holed up not too far from their position.

Until then, however, it’s just the two of them, alone in a room together. No buffer. No supervision.

Kriff. This is going to be hard.

Cassian stands leaning against the wall in the small entryway of the unit, reading and rereading what Jyn assumes must be the mission briefing, given that there’s not really any other way to kill time. He’s probably used to this sort of waiting, but it’s safe to say that she isn’t. It would be different if they were on a stakeout, or if they were ones being extracted, waiting on something to do or be done. But this is… well, it’s the definition of boring. Specifically, it’s the definition of agony, considering who she’s alone in a room with.

Of course, there are always tricks to keep the boredom at bay. Jyn just knows that they might also make things worse.

“Why do you think you’re gonna get us killed?” she chooses to ask him, rather than bear another minute of silence.

His head comes up, his face surprised. “What?”

“Back on base. You asked me to make sure you didn’t get us killed. I want to know why.”

He deflates a bit, and she tries not to feel guilty. “It’s hard to try to survive when you feel like you’re running out of things to live for.”

Oh, shut the fuck up, she thinks. What a waste.

“Excuse me?”

Oh, did she say that out loud?

“Do you really think you have nothing to live for?” she asks. He looks like he’s about to answer, maybe even in defense of himself, but he’s gotten her started now. “You have a kid. A fucking kid, Cassian, who doesn’t need to know what it’s like to grow up without his father. Believe me, my mother thought it was a better decision to die for a cause than to live for her daughter, and there isn’t a single day in my life that I haven’t felt the consequences of her choice.

“Bix might be generous and forgiving, but I’m not. If you don’t even try to fight for a better life with your son, I will make damn well sure that he knows his father was a coward.”

He just stares at her, dumbfounded, maybe a little angry. She’s breathing hard, but the self-satisfaction of taking him down a few pegs fades quickly into something less pleasant, less energizing. There isn’t a word of it she’d take back, but she isn’t above acknowledging that she might have taken it too far. And it’s not like she really thinks he’s a coward. Just, you know, that he would be. If he did that.

If she knew him like she used to, she could have predicted his reaction. But nothing prepares her for what he ends up saying in response.

“You turned out just fine,” he says bitterly, his face emotionless.

Fuck.

This.

Shit.

Jyn stands up and marches over to him, ready for a fight. “Are you really that stupid? You think I’m fine? I led men to their deaths on Scarif because I turned out fine? I’ve watched every parent I’ve ever known die, and I turned out fine? I’m fucking falling apart, Cassian!” she nearly screams, lowering her volume only after she sees his eyes flick over to the doorway, a glimmer of panic in them. She takes a centering breath—as centering as it can be—before continuing.

“My body barely lets me eat. I’m in constant pain, everywhere, all of the time. I think I’m actually starting to lose it because I see the ghosts of all the people I know who’ve died, and they just keep showing up and looking at me and saying the same things over and over—”

“Seeing ghosts? Jyn, what do you—”

“And you can’t even talk to me or look at me because—because—fuck!”

She brings her fist up to her mouth and bites down, because she knows that if she doesn’t, she’ll start crying. And here you thought you’d be the one to get us all killed, she wants to joke with him. But also doesn’t. Because it’s Cassian, and she’s finally telling him so much of the truth that she’s held back even from herself for so long, and she doesn’t want to laugh. She just wants to back to the way things were. Before everything.

Neither of them have the time to say anything else as the comms in their ears come to life. “Fulcrum, Stardust,” Kes’ tinny, electronic voice hums through. “You’re clear. Let’s go.”

Cassian sends a pulse through the comm to let Dameron know that the message as been received, then looks down at Jyn with uncertainty. “We’re not done talking about this,” he says, surprisingly gentle.

Jyn swallows her pride, her shame, maybe everything she has just to get through the moment. “Let’s go.”

Where are they? Jyn thinks, her patience wearing thin. The path’s been cleared. Time is running short. She glances across the alley at Cassian, but he’s not paying attention to her—his gaze points upward as a shadow passes over his face.

She doesn’t have time to comm him before she feels the barrel of a blaster pressing into her back.

Whatever happens next, she’ll have a hard time explaining. Not because of guilt, or because her actions are so extreme that they need to be justified, but because she won’t really remember how she started out vulnerable and ended up with three civilians dead on the ground.

No, not civilians. Rebels.

But not rebels.

Spies?

Cassian is halfway across the alley when a round of shots is fired. He swears in that language she still doesn’t know, and then suddenly he’s right in front of her, one hand on her shoulder and the other holding her face, eyes scanning for answers, or maybe injury.

“Are you alright?” he asks. A bold question, coming from him. He looks like he’s about to fall apart himself.

“Fine,” she breathes. Stupid Kay’s voice right there in her head, I find that answer vague and unconvincing. Yeah, no shit, you asshole bucket of bolts.

They quickly move through the city—Cassian at the lead, because he knows where he’s going, but also because Jyn doesn’t remember starting to run with him. It’s probably better to have a leader who isn’t actively losing their mind. They’re headed out to the wastes, she guesses, where Vel’s waiting with the ship. Except, there are klaxons going off, drowning out even the sound of her own rapid heartbeat pounding in her head, and the Imps are shutting down the city.

Next thing she knows, he’s hoisting her over a wall. Everything comes in flashes, her mind not equipped to handle this, maybe; or maybe it’s so full of everything else, of fear and memories and longing and whatever fucked up shit lives there after Scarif, that she can’t take in the present. Maybe she’s reached her maximum capacity.

A searing pain shoots up and down her leg, and another at the opposite shoulder. She keeps running, though, because what other option does she have? She could tell Cassian to leave her—she’s slowing him down, that’s inarguable—but he wouldn’t. Most people don’t stick around when things go bad, but Cassian does.

Cassian always stays.

She must hit her head—she doesn’t remember doing so, but it hurts, fuck it hurts—because her vision in one eye is clouded by red that stings, and then he’s scooping her up, carrying her, and Force, you’re going to get yourself killed, you kriffing idiot, she thinks. Just leave me.

They pass her ghosts as he runs—Bodhi, Melshi, Chirrut, Baze, Saw, her parents, that damned droid—as if they’re the backup, as if they are the ones who will fight off the onslaught so that she and Cass can escape.

“We’re almost there,” he tells her, breathless from running, from carrying her dead weight. “Just hold on, Jyn.”

She’s dying. She knows what it feels like, to be on the brink of death, and it feels like this. Pain fading, sharp sensation made dull. The noise turns to static, then to silence. Tired, and then at peace. It’s like falling asleep. Simple. Easy.

They’ve stopped running. He’s looking at her. He’s crying. “Stay with me, Jyn, please.”

The only thing she sees now is his face, and she reaches up with a bloodied hand to touch it. “Cassian,” she whispers.

“Jyn, I—”

Jyn, gather your things. It’s time.

Chapter Text

Then

His whole life, Cassian Andor has been torn between worlds.

Kenari, or Ferrix. Kerri, or Maarva and Clem. Thief, or rebel. Life, or death.

It hasn’t been easy, but he’s found that living as half a man is easier than trying to fit it all into one. Sometimes, he prefers to live as a different man altogether. Those undercover moments are undoubtedly exhausting, but they come with their own thrill, their own priorities, backstories, emotions, investments—it is time that he doesn’t have to spend thinking about all the ways in which he is lacking.

When he first wakes up after Scarif, Vel is the one who talks to him. “Your leg is infected,” she says matter-of-factly. “They want to cut it off.”

He looks around, but nothing tells him where he is, who else might have survived. He hopes someone else survived. He can’t be the only one—he can’t have left anyone behind. Not again.

“Where’s Jyn?” he asks.

“She’s alive,” Vel tells him. “Barely, but she is. Still sedated, I think. Look, you need to consent to the amputation.”

Jyn’s alive.

Jyn is alive. That’s all that matters in the entire world.

“Take it,” he grits out, “I don’t care.”

It takes some time, getting used to the prosthetic. The cybernetic connections between the false leg and what’s left of his own malfunction more often than not, in the beginning, and everything the med droids do to try to fix it makes it worse. It’s only when they let him get his hands on a set of tools that he can make the adjustments he needs.

He imagines that Kay is beside him, criticizing occasionally, seldom helpful but always welcome. He misses the droid, misses his pessimism and his inability to read a room. He misses his sarcasm and his ridiculous devotion, the kind a machine shouldn’t be capable of but Cassian knows that they are, they always are. It’s helpful to pretend that his friend survived, if only because he needs someone to bounce ideas off of, and Jyn is unconscious and unavailable.

The medic in charge of his physical therapy seems burnt out at best, so Cassian takes it upon himself to strengthen what needs it, to rest what doesn’t. He’s never been good at taking care of himself, but he can do it, if it means that Jyn has someone to take care of her when she wakes up. Vel is too busy to help, most days, but Kleya—he’d almost forgotten about her, and chastises himself for it later—is kind enough, while in the limbo of the Alliance deciding whether or not she’s truly trustworthy, to help him apply ice or heat to his back.

“You’re lucky you didn’t fracture your vertebrae,” she says the first time that she sees the bruise in the center of his back.

“Believe me, I know,” he says, trying to be light. Trying to be a little bit happy, because he’s alive and Jyn’s alive and maybe once she’s awake he can tell her how much he—

“Do you know how he died?” Kleya asks suddenly, her voice barely above a whisper. “Ru—Melshi?”

Melshi? He hadn’t expected that. He’s hardly thought about his friend or any of the people from the mission, not since getting back and finding out Jyn was alive. His stomach twists for the shame of it. “No,” he replies softly. “I don’t know. I imagine it was quick, though, if that’s any comfort.”

Kleya sighs, but he can’t see her face. “It isn’t.”

He could kill Vel.

He could kill her a million times over, and it still wouldn’t be enough to make her see how wrong it was, how wrong it is, that she’s brought Bix to Hoth.

When Bix steps off the shuttle, though, Cassian wonders if he might be dreaming. Wonders if maybe he hit his head on Ghorman and everything he’s experienced since then has been some fretful, wonderful, complicated dream. My love, he can still hear the recording of her say. We can do all the things we ever wanted. Everything we'd know we've missed. I'll find you.

She holds a child in her arms. A child that, despite all that has passed between them, he knows is his child.

Bix Caleen steps off the shuttle and walks straight toward him, though slowly. He walks straight to her as well, though he stops just short of her. There can be no long embrace in honor of all they’ve lost and all they might still yet share. This is not a happy reunion. This is a betrayal.

She doesn’t even look at him at first, instead looking down at the infant in her arms, all wrapped up in blankets and fur. “Jeron,” she murmurs, “look. Look, baby, it’s your papa.”

Papa.

Why is it that when he hears that word, he only hears Jyn crying out for Galen as he dies?

Unable to bear any of it, he turns on his heel and walks way. Not even fifteen minutes later, Bix and Vel have him cornered, trying to make excuses, or explanations, it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t care, and then—

The sounds of a body crashing to the ground. A muffled cry. Things he shouldn’t be hearing.

The three of them move to the corridor to inspect the source of the sound, but it’s like only Cassian can see the reality—Jyn, weak and broken, bleeding, collapsed on the ground in front of them. He yells, tells the other women to get help, any help. He thought he lost her once, he won’t lose her again.

The child—Jeron, damn it, Bix, why did you give him that name?—starts to cry. He ignores his instincts to soothe his son, his son who he didn’t know existed until mere moments ago. A crying child has always been something that pulls at him, but Jyn is here, and she could die. She won’t, because he won’t let her, but she could.

If she does, he might just burn the whole Rebellion down.

Bix is waiting for him in his quarters after he goes to see Jyn. Jeron sleeps on the bed behind her, but she’s still awake, still wants to talk.

“I have nothing to say to you,” he tells her, his voice gruff. He is as angry as he is tired.

“I couldn’t let you give up everything for me,” she replies. By the sound of it, she’s been crying. He can understand that—he’s been crying, too. “The Rebellion was too—”

“Was it?” he bites back. “I thought were fighting to make our own choices, but you took that from me, Bix! You took my choice and you took my son—”

“Your life was devoted to the Rebellion, Cass. I couldn’t ask you to give that up. I couldn’t ask you to put something else before it.”

He runs his hands back through his hair, desperate for any solution to keep himself calm and not wake the baby. “It was not your fucking choice to make!”

“I did what I had to!”

“For who? Who, Bix? Don’t pretend that it was me.” He turns around, his stomach churning. “I would have had something to live for.”

“Vel told me about your mission, the one with the girl.” She doesn’t sound jealous, just sad.She puts a hand on his shoulder; he tries to shrug it off, but she doesn’t let him. “If you weren’t ready to die on Scarif, if you knew what you were leaving behind—could you have lived with yourself?”

No. Yes. He doesn’t know. How can he, when she deprived him of ever being able to make the choice for himself? He turns, slumps against the wall and lets himself collapse to the floor. He looks over at Jeron, a child who knows no hardship, no war. A child who has a loving mother, and a father who doesn’t know how to be a father.

“Why now?” he asks.

Bix sighs. “Vel’s message implied that you were at death’s door. I thought it was as good a time as any to make sure you knew.”

He nods. “Sounds like she sent it out a little bit after they fixed me up.”

“It’s a very Vel thing to do, isn't it?”

That it is.

“I want to be his father, as much as you’ll let me,” he finds himself saying, finds himself meaning. “But… we can’t go back to the way that we were.”

“I know.”

“Things are different now.”

“I know that, Cassian.”

“I have a—”

He has a what? A girlfriend? A lover? A best friend? He doesn’t know what to call Jyn in relation to him, can’t say what he means to her. He knows that she’s the only person in his life that existed before, during, and after. Melshi is long gone, and none of the rest of Rogue One survived, either. Jyn Erso, he believes, he knows, understands him. She’s his partner. She’s—she’s—

She is the sun.

He does a shitty job of showing it.

Now

Cassian wakes up in the rubble of a ship, the engine still smoking. Around him, all he can see beyond the broken walls are trees, trees, nothing but trees. He has no idea where he is, except that he’s not on Ferrix anymore. He tries to retrace his steps—the mission, a failure, aborted. The hideout, the anger, the blaster. Jyn, taking shots, falling apart.

Jyn—

He sits up faster than he should, his back screaming at him for it. He whips his head around, searches for any sign of her, any sign of life, of movement—let her be okay, let her be alive, please, please, Force, please—

Her black boot peeks out from the collapsed-in ceiling. He scampers over to her, the terror in his veins propelling him faster than he ought to go. Piece by piece, he tosses away the debris on top of her until he can see her face, until he can hold it in his hands and weep her name, beg her to come back to him. After everything, Jedha, Eadu, Scarif, this can’t be it. It can’t.

He lowers his thumb to her throat, places his ear next her mouth. She’s breathing—thank the stars, she’s breathing—but her pulse is thready and weak. He doesn’t have the kind of equipment he needs to stabilize her, nor the skill to keep her alive.

But this can’t be it.

“Jyn,” he sobs against her mouth, pressing his lips to hers in an act of utter desperation. “Please, Jyn. Not like this.”

“Does she need a healer?”

Words, familiar and yet foreign, not spoken in Basic. Cassian snaps his head up to see a human woman dressed in what on any other world, he would have called tatters. Her hair is tied back elaborately, but practically; he imagines it denotes a status as much as it serves a function. There’s black paint on her face, not all over it, but in lines he can remember putting on his own face, so, so many years ago.

“Help her, please,” he manages to choke out in Basic. The woman’s hand goes to a hollowed out piece of wood fastened at her hip. Realizing his error, he corrects himself.

“Please, help,” he begs the woman in her language.

In his language.

Kenari.

She isn’t Kerri, he has to remind himself about the woman when the others come with a stretcher to carry Jyn to their village. He limps behind them, never letting any of them out of his sight. At least if all of his work has been for nothing, he’ll have spent some of his time keeping the people he loves safe.

The village—and it is the very same one, he knows as soon as he sees it—has grown so much since he was a child. It’s strange to see adults walking amongst children, to see families. In its time left alone by the Republic, left alone by the Empire, his homeworld—his true homeworld—has thrived. And he missed every second of it, fighting for a freedom that he may never have needed if he’d stayed.

But he can’t think like that. He only cares about one thing right now, and that’s that Jyn might survive this. If he can hold onto that hope, he will.

The woman who found them stops him from following the rest of the group as they enter a building made up of old industrial machine parts—he imagines it must be their version of a medbay, or a hospital. “You will be questioned,” she tells him when he tries to push past her. “You must speak to our leaders.”

His throat tightens as Jyn disappears from sight. He clenches his fists, then releases, taking a deep breath. “I have to stay with her,” he says, his Kenari rough and slow, almost rusty from disuse. “She is my—” It wouldn’t matter if he remembered the word for what he wants to say, because he still doesn’t have a word for what she is to him.

“She is my friend-partner,” he tries, not sure any word is enough to encapsulate what she means to him.

But the woman doesn’t relent. “Later. Now, you must answer the questions of the leaders.”

She takes him further into the village, though there isn’t much further to go. Finally, he’s brought into a sort of cabin, a bit more than a shack or a hut, but not much. Before him sits a small group of adults, most of them near his own age. He’s guided to sit on a small wooden bench before them, and they speak to him just as the woman does in the language of his childhood.

“You come by ship, but you speak our language,” says one of the men.

Another leans forward. “You speak it like a child, though.”

This is—overwhelming. His mind processes the words these people are saying, words he knows but can’t speak with the same articulation. The second man is right, he sounds like a child.

“I left when I was a child,” he explains. “The people who took me did not know I had people.”

A short, slight woman on the edge of the half circle speaks up. “Before or after The Disappearance?” she asks.

The Disappearance. It comes back to him like a slow, gentle wave from the ocean—the name that they gave as children to the economic collapse and resulting exodus of adults on the planet. There were the ecological dangers, too, mining disasters that left Cassian and his peers as orphans, but it’s harder to find records of those.

“After,” he says. The small council erupts into whispers so quiet that he can’t hear them.

The slight woman ignores her fellow councillors. “Did you have family?” she asks.

“Here, or there?” he tries to clarify.

She smiles, shrugs. Some things are universal, he supposes. “Both.”

“A sister, here,” he tells her, though he can’t explain why it’s so much easier to tell these people the truth about his life than anyone else. “A mother and a father, there.”

One of the men speaks up. “Do you have a name?”

“Cassian.” But then he remembers that they’re likely looking for a different answer. “Kassa.”

The council goes silent at the mention of his name, exchanging wild, unknowable looks. He has no doubt that he knew some if not all of these people once, a long, long time ago. But they would not recognize him, and he wouldn’t recognize them, not now. Not after all this time, and all that has changed.

The man in the center looks at him. “Our hearts are with your heart, Kassa,” he tells him, and just like that, Cassian’s heart sinks. Of all the phrases, he knows that one.

“Kerri is dead, isn't she?” he asks, feeling very much like the child he once was.

The slight woman steps forward, puts a hand on his shoulder; he doesn’t have it in him to stop her. “She left with the passing of six moons,” she says. Six months, his sister has been dead. Six months earlier, and he could have seen her.

“How?”

“A festering. She hadn’t enough blood left to fortify her.”

A festering—an infection. She lost blood. How, though? An injury? Some sort of hemorrhagic fever that weakened her immune system and triggered internal bleeding? As if these people would know. As if these people could treat something like that.

As if they could even come close to saving Jyn.

He has to leave—he has to go to her. If they can’t save her, maybe he can broadcast a beacon, even if it’s not safe, he has to try, he has to be with her—

The woman who found his ship, the woman who brought them to this place, steps to Cassian’s side. “Her child still wants for a family, and a name.”

Cassian steps back. “Child?”

The slight woman looks at him warily, like he might collapse right there on the spot. “A baby,” she clarifies, the word so similar and yet just different enough to matter.

A baby. He has a nephew.

He looks between the two women at either side. “Can I see the baby?”

Both of them look at him with a sort of pride that he doesn’t have the wherewithal to take in. The slight one takes his large hand in both of her small ones. “She waits for you.”

Chapter Text

Jyn floats on an endless sea of memory, those burned into her brain by hot irons and those constructed from little fragments, pieces filled in where she can. She can tell the difference, but that it makes it that much harder to stay afloat. Half-truths, half-fictions. Codo teaching her how to swim—truth. Codo staying her friend after she rejected his advances—fiction. Maia being her friend, the most important friend she thought she’d ever have—truth. Maia surviving—fiction. Holding hands with, kissing, sleeping with Hadder—truth. Him staying with her and not his mother as they escaped—fiction.

Having someone to love is a truth. Loving Luke Skywalker is a fiction.

Knowing that Cassian Andor is the only one who can soothe her fears and sit with her in the grief until the silence becomes too much to bear, that’s a truth. Cassian loving her, despite everything that’s happened between them, to them, as a pair and as individuals—that’s a fiction. It can’t be anything else.

Jyn knows the feeling of fever well; she knows what it is for death to circle her, watching, waiting to pounce. In that faint way of a passing thought, she feels herself being cared for. Someone forces her to drink broth, to take medicines that taste worse than the aftertaste of the bitterest pill. They speak in a language she doesn’t know, but vaguely recognizes; her caretakers sound apologetic as they touch her, cleaning the sweat off of her skin.

In the haze of whatever ails her, she floats to the easiest fiction, the one where the Empire never found her parents on Lah’mu. Who would she have been if her mother had been prepared for not only Krennic, but also the Death Troopers? If the shot her mother fired had done more than wound him, but kill him? If her father hadn’t been a coward?

No, no. Her father wasn’t a coward. He was just—patient. Resigned. Afraid. It isn’t fear that makes men cowards. It’s ego.

In her truth & fiction memory, she watches Little Jyn traipse about the homestead. Little Jyn grows in flashes as time swims around her, until she’s not so little anymore. The Empire never takes her father, her mother doesn’t die; she meets a nice girl down at market when she’s fourteen, gets to kiss her at sixteen, gets her heart broken at seventeen. There is no Death Star; there is no life with the Partisans. There is only a soft and precious life on Lah’mu, with a spouse and children and the farm. Her parents die of old age and nothing else.

Older, tired, she lays her head down in her mother’s lap. “Did your life turn out how you thought it would, Mama?” the old Little Jyn asks.

But it’s like Lyra looks straight into this Jyn’s eyes when she says, “Did it turn out how you thought it would, Jyn?”

No.

But I’m better for it.

Better not for her hardship, but for the grit it required. For the loyalty it bred in her. She is better for the camaraderie she has known, for the hope that has wormed its way inside her heart. For the love that she has felt.

Love. For her friends. Her family. For Cassian—her Cassian.

This life isn’t real. This fantasy, this husband, these children who she adores. None of it is really hers. None of it, except for the distant ache for a different life. There’s something missing, isn’t there?

The waters shift and change, and she sees herself by Saw’s side, older than she was when he left her. They stand with Bodhi kneeling before them, half out of his mind from Bor Gullet.

“And what shall we do with this creature?” Saw rasps.

“Put him out of his mystery,” Partisan Jyn replies.

Saw sighs. “Do as you will.”

Partisan Jyn slits Bodhi’s throat.

I would never, real Jyn thinks.

Saw looks at her as Bodhi bleeds out. “Ah, but if you continue to fight, what will you become? A killer? My executioner.”

But he’s wrong. Fighting has not turned her into a killer, even if she has killed. She doesn’t dole out justice at the word of a single man. She has no interest in killing indiscriminately. Her hands have caused more death than she cares to think of, but they have also carried children to safety, have tended to the wounds of her comrades, have shown others what it is to feel loved and cared for.

Her hands are not clean. But neither are they are not stained with blood.

The fiction evolves, and she’s staring at Melshi in the seat across from her on the way to Scarif. She remembers it clearly, the way that they said nothing. They merely nodded at one another, and it was forgiveness. Acceptance. Dedication.

“I’m sorry,” Scarif Jyn tells him.

He cocks an eyebrow. “For what?”

“Wobani,” she replies. “Kicking you. And now. Leading you on a suicide mission.”

“You heard the captain. None of us could live with ourselves if we didn’t try.”

“Still sorry.”

Melshi shrugs. “If I die, at least I’ll die fighting.”

Scarif Jyn smirks. “Wonder if we could’ve been friends, in another life.”

“Eh,” he waves his hands noncommittally, glancing up at the real Jyn and smiling softly. “We’d have done alright.”

Cassian used to say that, back when they were talking. She misses him. And, she thinks, might still be alive, in her truth.

She’s always preferred truth to fiction.

The first light in her eyes since Ferrix hurts like a bitch. She closes her eyes, but someone speaks to her in a chastising tone.

“Go to Mustafar,” she mutters, her voice cracking.

“That’s no way to talk to your hosts.”

She opens her eyes again, because she knows that voice. She knows that voice like she knows her own, or Saw’s, or her father’s.

He sits on a bench to the side of her cot, his tired face gazing down at her. It’s a different kind of tired than she’s seen on him before, intertwined with sadness and joy and relief. Like he’s missed her, almost. He hasn’t shaved in a few days, the stubble aging him a bit. He looks so lovely to her, she could cry.

Though she still doesn’t feel whole, she no longer feels like she’s dying, and she’ll take that as a good sign. She looks down at herself, covered in a thin woven blanket and, she realizes as she shifts in the cot, wearing nothing but her underclothes. A sense of vulnerability sets in, one that she would normally ignore and even lash out at; instead, she looks back at Cassian, sitting there, watching her, and she wonders if maybe, instead of folding into herself, she might reach out a hand. Ask for… whatever it is she can get.

She doesn’t know why, but something on her face seems to send a flash of panic behind his normally stoic mask. He pulls the little bench closer, close enough so that she can feel the warmth of him near her. He runs the back of his fingers down her arm, and it’s like she almost forgot what it’s like to feel loved.

“Hi,” he murmurs.

She thinks she’s going to laugh, because what sort of greeting is that? When he looks the way he does, looks at her the way he does. Instead, though, the pressure in her chest comes out as a gasp, first, and then a sob. He doesn’t say anything to her—he doesn’t have to. He just keeps touching her in his little, comforting ways, the ones that let her say everything without saying anything at all. By the time she calms herself, by the times her nerves are soothed, Cassian has moved to sit on the edge of the cot.

“Do you remember what happened?” he asks.

Jyn shakes her head too vigorously, at first. Feels like her brain is bouncing around in her skull. “I remember running on Ferrix. We were made.”

Cassian nods. “We got off-world. But we crashed. Do you remember that?”

Vaguely, she thinks. She can recall turbulence and pain and confusion, but it wouldn’t be the first time. She could very well be mixing all of her memories up. “I don’t know,” she answers honestly. “Where are we?”

He bites his bottom lip, as if he’s nervous to tell her. As if anything can upset her as much as all their time apart has. He inhales deeply and holds his breath for a moment, like he’s preparing himself for an oncoming storm. When he exhales, the answer comes out in the same breath.

“Kenari.”

Kenari. I know that name. And it’s true, she does. She knows she knows it, and based on Cassian’s face, she’s pretty sure it has to do with him. She pilfers through her mind’s files, throwing away the decoy of Fest, setting aside the half-truth of Ferrix. It hits her, then, that deep in his personnel files, she’s seen Kenari mentioned as a keyword—there’s an alert set for the planet name, and he’s supposed to be informed immediately of any intelligence that includes a mention of it. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing a man like Draven would have assigned, but she isn’t sure Cassian could have set up the alert himself. Or, maybe he could. She’s spent the last—what, year or so?—coming to terms with the fact that she doesn’t know him very well at all.

“I was born here,” he says, surprisingly calm now that the secret is out. “I had a sister.”

Well, she most certainly didn’t know that.

“Had?” As in, past-tense?

He nods solemnly. “I left her. Not on purpose, but—still. I tried to find her, once I was older. I never did. Turns out she never left Kenari. She spent her whole life here, until she died.”

She wants to hold his hand, wants to drag him down to lay beside her while they hold each other in shared grief and solidarity. But she doesn’t think they’re quite there yet. “Do you know when?” she asks.

“Six months ago.”

Six months, are you joking? That’s it? Six months earlier, hell, anytime earlier and he could have had said goodbye? What did he waste all of his time on? Why didn’t the damn Force intervene, or something?

Oh. No. That’s the wrong question. Those are all the wrong questions. If there’s one thing Jyn knows, it’s that there’s no rhyme or reason to loss, to faulty timing. If the universe made sense on even the smallest level, there never would have been an Empire to begin with. This galaxy and beyond, she’s sure, is entirely indifferent to suffering, and everything moves regardless.

Stupid galaxy.

She doesn’t want to steer him away from talking about his sister or his homeworld, not if he needs to. Still, she has questions that only multiply the longer they remain unanswered. “What about the others?”

“Others?”

“Kes, Vel, Bix.”

Cassian shrugs. “I don’t know. If they’ve tried to contact us, I haven’t received a signal. I activated the beacon, but it could take time.”

“So we’re—”

“—stuck here? For the time being, Jyn, yes. We are.”

She rolls her eyes. “I was going to say, just waiting it out, but yeah. Stuck here works.”

He offers her a perfectly tempered smile, and though there’s something about it she doesn’t quite understand, she knows that it is, at the very least, genuine. And it might just be the first genuine smile she’s seen from him in a very, very long time.

It’s a few days before Jyn can walk without assistance, which takes her back to the unfortunate memory of her post-Scarif recovery. Thankfully, it’s not all so brutal, this time; maybe that’s because there’s no Death Star radiation, or maybe it’s because her body fully knows what to do with injury and pain now. Whatever the case, she’s just happy not to be stuck in bed.

The true wildcard comes when Cassian reveals to her that his sister had a child—he’s an uncle and a father, now—and that he plans on taking the infant back to base, when they get rescued.

“Not sure the Alliance High Command will make an exception for another one of your relatives,” Jyn teases him. But that’s the thing—it’s all in jest. As soon as she meets the baby, she can’t help but be taken with her wide brown eyes and her little black curls. “But given that you have a tendency to break the rules—”

“I have a tendency?!”

“—we should probably come up with a name. It’ll help people get attached, want to keep her around, etcetera.”

It takes hours, if not days, of brainstorming to come to a name that feels right. Teza is what they decide on, a word that Jyn learns in Kenari means something like precious, but with an even higher value. Treasure, perhaps, or priceless. Sometimes she lets Cassian sleep when Teza cries in the night, and when she holds the girl in her arms and feels that tiny head on her chest, she understands why he picked the name.

The people on Kenari are generous; it’s a bit different from when Cassian was a child, apparently, when exploitation and warfare and fear were constantly on their minds. Though Jyn doesn’t understand a word they say, she knows she’s grateful when they offer her food, or when their healer comes to change her bandages. Or when they finally let her sleep outside of their hospital, in the same semi-permanent structure as Cassian and Teza.

“It was my sister’s,” he tells her. There’s room enough on the bed for both of them, and a little alcove with a cradle for the baby. It feels wrong, in some ways, that they should trespass in a dead woman’s home. She knows very well that they don’t belong here. Still, there’s a sense of peace in her bones for the first time in a long time, and she likes not worrying. She likes not seeing her ghosts anymore.

She still feels like they’re in an in-between, though. They talk about chores, about leaving, about the baby. But they don’t say much. He hasn’t asked about what she confessed while on Ferrix, and she hasn’t asked about the way that he looks at her when he thinks she’s not paying attention. This limbo that they’re in, this necessitated peace, it feels as fragile as she felt when she woke up after Scarif.

In the middle of the night, she startles awake not to the sound of a baby crying, but to the sudden, unexpected touch of Cassian’s arm sloppily draped across her waist. He isn’t quite right up behind her, but she can feel his closeness nonetheless. It would behoove her to remove his hand from her body, but she wants him there. Well, she wants a hell of a lot more than that, unfortunately, but things—they’re still complicated between them, cloudy.

She knows he’s awake, too, when she hears his breathing hitch without becoming slow and deep again. The fact that he doesn’t move his arm makes her wonder if he feels the need to speak with her as much as she does with him. “Cassian?” she whispers. “Are you awake?”

“Mhm.” He sighs, and his breath is hot against the back of her neck. His hand flexes on her waist. “You okay?”

She almost laughs, but it’s more of a scoff than anything else. She rolls over onto her back and turns her head to look at him. His hand still doesn’t leave her, falling instead in the center of her stomach. “Not sure.”

He props himself up on his elbow, blinking sleepily. “Do you need me to get the healer?”

Jyn shakes her head. Though she could do with some healing, she doesn’t think she can get it from a fully operational med droid, much less a Kenari healer. There are too many things wrong with her, too many things she can’t un-know or un-live. It’s almost laughable, the way that she can’t even imagine a time when she didn’t feel wrong, somehow. The only glimpses of the opposite have been—

“I miss you,” she says, her vulnerability like a knife in her gut.

He finally takes his hand and moves it to her face, and she swears she can see him softly smiling in the night. “I’m right here.”

“It’s been a year.” She’s missed him for an entire year, even when she pretends not to. She leans into his gentle touch. “More than, since…”

“I know,” he whispers. “I know, Jyn.”

“I didn’t know what I was supposed to do when Bix showed up,” she admits. “Wasn’t sure who I was to you anymore.”

He hums as he strokes his thumb across her cheek. “I didn’t know either—the first part, I mean. To see her—to see my son—it changed a lot of things.”

She nods. “I know it did.”

“But Jyn, please, know that—know that it never changed you, for me. Never changed what I feel for you.”

She rolls once more so that she faces him, her eyes focusing in the darkness on the slight gleam in his. “What do you feel?”

He touches her so delicately that she shivers, despite the warm air around them. “I could say so many things, Jyn. But the only one that matters is that I love you. I am alive because you live. Because seeing you happy, even if it’s not with me, is enough. I don’t think I could survive losing you.”

She almost expects to be speechless before the words tumble out of her mouth, betraying a truth she’s been denying for too long. “I don’t love him.”

Cassian’s hand freezes. “What?”

“I don’t love him,” she repeats. “Luke. I want to, wanted to. But I just—”

“Wait, Jyn—”

“—I can’t love him, because he’s not you.”

He looks down at her like the wind’s been knocked out of him. “Jyn,” he breathes. There’s only one way out of this, she realizes when she sees the headiness in his eyes.

Through.

With so much caution that she might cry, he shifts on the pallet until his body hovers over hers. His hair hangs down a bit over his face, but she doesn’t mind. “Tell me,” he demands. No, no—not demands. Pleads.

She knows what he needs to hear. “I love you, Cassian.”

Still hovering, he presses his forehead against hers, breathless. “Again.”

It’s her turn to touch him as she grabs his face between both of her hands and forces him to look her in the eye. “I love you,” she tells him. “All this time, I’ve loved you and no one else.”

“You want me?”

He sounds incredulous. It makes her smile.

“I want you. I want to feel you, every part of you, in every part of me.”

His lips crash into hers, and it’s not the heated, passionate kiss of reunited lovers. The release of it is like weeping after holding every tear inside for a lifetime. She isn’t sure she’s ever felt so relieved, or so loved, in her entire life. She knows by the soft sounds from his throat that he feels the same. This man, stupid and obstinate and clever and good, has her heart.

When he takes her, it’s with all the reverence of worship, all the absolution either one of them will ever need. She knows that when they have the chance, they’ll do this and moan and scream and shout, writhing and wrecked. But for now, it’s enough to be quiet, to live in this tiny little bubble all to themselves. He comes inside her, and she comes when he puts his mouth on her to clean up the mess he’s made. The wild look in his eyes and what must be a matching one in hers make her want to do it all over again, in every which way possible. There’s nothing she’s ever wanted more than him, him and all the time in the world to have her way with him.

Any minute now, she knows reality will start to creep back in through the haze of lovemaking. She knows that the child will cry or the sun will rise or nature will call to one of them and interrupt this bliss. For now, though, this is her truth.

No fiction necessary.

When Cassian wakes her in the morning, he’s already dressed and looking down at her, Teza in his arms.

“The beacon transmitted,” he tells her. “We’re going home.”

“We’re leaving?”

“As soon as they arrive. Could be any time now.”

She nods, but there’s only one thought on her mind.

I’m already home.

Chapter Text

Only Kes, of their original mission, is a part of the rescue squad. It is, after all, an extraction. He shakes Cassian’s hand, and they share a look that Jyn hopes means good things. But when he sees her, he scoops her up into a hug that is less shocking than it is likely to make her cry. “Had me worried sick, Erso,” he mutters.

“Someone’s got to,” she murmurs back.

He pulls back and gives her an exhausted look, though behind it is the glimmer of mischief that the two have shared for a while now. “You’re a damn piece of work.”

She offers a half smile. “You wouldn’t change a thing.”

“Stars, no.” Kes laughs, and it almost sounds like he wants to cry. “I wouldn’t.”

The villagers on Kenari pull Cassian aside for a final, hushed conversation. Jyn and Dameron watch as Cass takes Teza gingerly from a woman’s arms and seems to promise them something, to reassure them. Probably telling them that we won’t come back, she muses. No need for the Empire to catch wind of them.

If Dameron is surprised by Teza, he doesn’t let on. In fact, he takes naturally to the infant, smiling and cooing, happy to hold her for a not insignificant part of the journey back to base. When Jyn gives him a look, he shrugs. “It’s good practice.”

She cocks an eyebrow. “Something you’d like to share?”

His wide grin tells her everything she needs to know. She smiles, and Cassian smiles, too, and he offers congratulations.

“I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone,” Kes admits, blushing as he looks down at Teza like she’s the most precious thing he’s ever seen. He wouldn’t be wrong to do so, Jyn thinks. “It’s still early, and I know Shar wants to stay up in the air as long as she can. But there’s a reason I’m not in intelligence.”

It’s all too easy to feel like everything is falling into place, even though Jyn knows that it’s not. She rests her head on Cassian’s shoulder and guilt surges through her. Guilt for not having the guts to put the tension between the two of them to rest a long time ago; guilt for never bothering to consider that Bix might be her own person not in relation to anyone else; guilt for what she’s now done to Luke, and for never really loving him right in the first place. It wasn’t a lie when she said that she didn’t love him, but it wasn’t the whole truth. She doesn’t know what she would have done without the ease of being with Luke Skywalker, the unquestioning loyalty, the innocence and the tenderness. Just because she’s spent so much time with him while unwell, doesn’t mean he didn’t make it better, sometimes.

She’ll miss him, in a way that’s too complicated for her to unpack or even understand just yet. She hopes he won’t hold that against her. Hopes he won’t hold any of this against her, once the dust properly settles.

Cassian laces his fingers with hers. “You okay?”

“Dunno yet,” she mutters. “Ask me in a few days.”

“You have me.” He squeezes her hand, just subtly enough so that it’s just for them. “Just remember that.”

Like she could forget, after all of this.

They receive no particularly warm welcome, but she and Cassian—and, of course, Teza—are ushered quickly and quietly to medbay. Leia waits for them there, seemingly resigned to the fact that they brought a baby back with them. It isn’t something that makes very much sense to her, probably, but rebels have done crazier things—blown up Death Stars, invaded Scarif. What’s one more wildcard?

Leia crosses her arms over her chest as the droids scan Jyn and treat her lingering injuries. “You know I care about you,” she says, a continuation evident.

Jyn nods. “Yeah,” she sighs, fairly sure she can see where this is going. “I know.”

“You need to tell him. End things with him. It’s not fair to keep him on a string, Jyn.”

Might as well get it over with, then. “When can I see him?”

Leia shakes her head. “He’s not on base right now. He should be back by the time you’ve been cleared and debriefed. Don’t push this off, okay?”

She won’t. She most definitely won’t. She knows what it is to not want to share, and she doesn’t think that Luke or Cassian would be willing to do so, even if she wanted to—which she doesn’t. Having Luke was a balm, for a while, but his isn’t the sort of love that runs so deep it scars your bones, becomes a part of you. At least, it isn’t for her.

The debrief is long, but Cassian tells most of it, holding a sleeping Teza in his arms as he does. Jyn thinks it’s rather beautiful, the way he won’t let his niece out of his sight. She wonders what it’s like to feel that way about anyone, or anything.

As she listens to him tell a story of two rebels crash-landing on a planet that held more than survival for them, she finds that she’s surprised he’s telling the whole truth to them. Not the Alliance has ever been particularly rigid about the rules—there’s no danger in them knowing the truth about his origins, not like there would be with the Empire. Leia listens with a neutral expression, and by the time Cassian is finished, she already looks as though she’s formulated a plan.

“We need to be careful how we catalogue this,” she says. She turns to one the officers present, one that Jyn doesn’t know. A secretary of some sort, maybe? Leia continues. “Find a planet or a moon the same distance traveled. One that is either already our ally or has a strong rebel presence. That will go in as the planet in question. Officially, the child is an orphan rescued by Captain Andor and Sergeant Erso.”

The princess looks at Cassian. “No one needs to know.”

Cassian’s shoulders relax just enough that Jyn knows this is exactly what he was hoping for. Hoping against hope, really, because had it not been Leia, Kenari could very well have been put on the map for all of the wrong reasons. Better than the people there be left alone, rather than subject to the oppression of the Empire or the so-called ‘help’ of the Alliance.

What? Just because she’s a rebel doesn't mean she doesn’t see the devils within.

As the briefing concludes, Leia comes up to Jyn. “He’s back. Getting checked out with medical, just standard procedure. You should go.”

Yeah. Yeah, she should.

Luke seems surprised—pleasantly so, however, almost exuberant—to see Jyn waiting for him once medical has cleared him. Immediately, he pulls her into his embrace and holds her tight, burying his face in her hair. “Gods, I was so scared,” he mutters. “Thought I’d lost you.”

Oof. It’s like getting punched in the gut.

Gingerly, she pulls back, trying and failing to give him a genuine smile. “We need to talk, Luke.”

“Oh.” His face falls gradually as the silence and the distance grows between them, realization dawning and cutting like a knife. “I did lose you, didn’t I?”

Kriff, she didn’t realize how much this would hurt. She wants to crawl into herself and bury her head in the sand and never speak to anyone ever again. Shame worms its way under her skin and into her blood, and she finds herself literally biting her tongue to keep herself from bursting into tears. “It’s not you,” she chokes out. “You—you were—are—perfect. So kind—too good to me.”

He looks like he might cry, too. “No such thing,” he argues, shaking his head, remarkably put-together.

“I wouldn’t have survived with you—I needed you, then. I—I don’t need you that way, anymore.” Her confession is liberation, but it’s also a door closing and dissolving into a wall, never to be opened. There’s no going back now.

Luke clears his throat. “Andor?”

Jyn nods, her eyes pointed to the floor. She can’t begin to summon the courage to look him in the eye. “Yes,” she whispers. “It’s… complicated. But it’s always been there, in the back of my mind. Now I just have to actually do something about it.”

It’s strange to admit all of this to the man who told her that he loved her right before she set out on the mission that would ruin them. Though, maybe they were always destined for ruin. Maybe there was never a happy ending for the two of them, and all she could hope for was bittersweet. She thinks this qualifies.

“I love you,” Luke says with a soft, bitter laugh. “Guess I’ll have to work on that. Think I’ll always love you, though. At least a part of me will.”

“I’ll never be able to thank you for all that you’ve done for me,” Jyn says, and she knows that she means it. He’s been the bridge she needed between her before and her after, one life and the next. It’s just, now that she’s crossed it, the world looks a little different. Different colors, different light. Different empty spaces to fill.

With more generosity than she deserves, he leans forward and kisses her forehead before he walks away without another word. She lets herself collapse against the wall once he leaves, her heart aching, the tears finally falling. Just because she wants something else now doesn't mean that saying goodbye is painless.

She isn’t sure how long she’s sitting there with her face buried in her knees when she feels more than one set of arms falling around her shoulders. She glances up and sees Kes pulling her close on her right, with Shara on her other side, resting her head on Jyn’s shoulder. Vel sits across from her, watching, waiting, like maybe she’ll need to step in, if the Damerons get too sappy.

“I know it wasn’t easy,” Shara says with the soothing voice of a soon-to-be mother, “but it was the right thing to do.”

“I feel like a traitor,” Jyn confesses in a crackling whisper. “I shouldn’t be sad, I should be happy, because I have—”

“He mattered to you,” Vel interrupts. “Luke and Cassian matter to you in different ways. You can grieve what you had and still want what’s coming.”

“Why do I feel like shit, then, if I can do that?”

Kes squeezes around her shoulders. “It’s called being a good person, kiddo. You feel bad that you hurt someone, even if it had to happen. That’s not a bad thing.”

Shara takes her hand. “It’s the most human thing in the world, honey.”

Just because Jyn knows that her friends are right, doesn’t mean she has to like it.

Things don’t fall into place as immediately as she thought they would. There is still a way of life on base that isn’t conducive to long talks and longer nights, to relationships and intimacy. She isn’t entirely sure how she did it before, except, she realizes, that she didn’t. She wasn’t invested in it, not the way she is with Cassian. She tries not to let that little epiphany affect her.

So things are still up in the air. But things are better. She spends more time slicing, so that she can help take care of Teza; Dameron understands, even if he does grumble about it until he looks into the infant’s tiny face and falls to pieces. Shara starts to show, and all of the new life around theme begins to stir up a new hope in the rebels as they expand Echo Base to make it usable as a home for the greater Rebellion.

Things with Bix are… still tense. But they’ve worked through the strangeness of it, for the most part. Jeron is fascinated by Teza, and there’s been more than one instance in which Jyn has had to ask for Bix’s advice, even if they’re both still figuring it out as they go along. Even if she still doesn’t trust the woman completely, just for the lack of familiarity, Jyn trusts her with Teza. And, she’s pleased to say, Bix trusts her with Jeron.

It’s a boon to have seen the look on Cassian’s face when Jyn brought his niece to meet the toddler, and the toddler decided immediately that he liked them both.

Holding a dozing Teza is how Cassian finds Jyn one evening when everyone else has gathered in the makeshift cantina. More nights than not, these days, she excuses herself from her comrades’ outings, finding the quiet moments with the baby are preferable to the boisterous antics of the oft intoxicated adults. There’s more time for thinking, like this.

She’s curled up against the pillows in Cassian’s bed with Teza in her arms when he comes in and smiles gently at the sight. “She’s domesticated you,” he teases, his voice just above a whisper as he kicks off his boots, shrugs off his jacket, and joins them on the bed.

“Don’t start,” she warns him, but it’s a toothless threat. Jyn isn’t afraid of a little bit of settling down, so long as it isn’t settling.

He presses a kiss to her temple and brings his hand to the back of her neck. “We haven’t gotten to do this in a while. Just be by ourselves, without the others, I mean.”

“I know,” Jyn sighs, tension melting away when he starts massaging the muscles of her back, neck, and shoulders. “Gods, that’s good. Is this what they teach you in spy school?”

Cassian laughs. “Ah, but you forget, I went to the spy school of life. I learned this from having too many girlfriends when I was young.”

Even a month ago, a comment like that would have sent her reeling. Now, there’s just some slight discomfort, a passing thing that she just has to feel and then let go of. “Hmm. Is everybody good?”

“Everyone’s fine. I’d rather talk about you.”

The tension suddenly returns, and though he pauses for a moment, he continues his ministrations. Damn him for having perfect hands and knowing how to use them. “What about me?” she asks, trying not to get defensive—and failing.

He shrugs, as if it’s just a casual conversation about the weather or a game of sabacc played while on leave. “We never talked about what you said, when we were on Ferrix. About the ghosts.”

Jyn swallows roughly; it feels like a kyber crystal is caught in her throat. Her ghosts are a subject she’s purposefully not brought up, not to anyone. Leia would be angry; Kes would be so disappointed in her. And Cassian, well, he had plenty of opportunities to bring it up. Why start now?

“I haven’t seen them in a while,” she tells him, and it’s not strictly false. She sees—ghosts of ghosts? Like shades, misperceptions. A brief flash, sometimes, when she’s stressed, or when she’s thinking about something tangentially related. But none of them have lingered. None of them speak to her anymore, or at least, she hasn’t heard them.

“Who were they?” He asks, gently, carefully, like she might break. Kriff, she doesn’t want to go back to feeling like that.

“The team,” she answers, her gaze on Teza, centering herself. “Bodhi. Melshi. Chirrut and Baze. My parents, sometimes, and Saw, too.”

“Did you ever—”

“No,” she interrupts. Whatever the question is, and she assumes that he’s going to ask if she’s spoken to anyone, the answer is probably no. “I never told anyone. I don’t know why they kept showing up. But they weren’t telling me to do things. They were just… I don’t know. It was like a commentary. Like an echo.”

Cassian reaches very slowly for the crystal she wears around her neck and takes it between his fingers, turning it gently, feeling every smooth facet and definite edge. “Your mother, she worshipped the Force, yes? Maybe whatever connection she had became a part of you, too.”

“Maybe.” And in truth, Jyn knows that the Force is real. She doesn’t believe the way her mother does, that it’s worthy of worship. But she can respect that it is that which connects every sentient being in the galaxy, in the whole universe, even. Like gravity, it’s a part of the natural order of things. Beyond that, though, she isn’t sure. Still, she wouldn’t be surprised to learn that her crystal is what kept her connected to the ghosts of their past.

“It would bring me peace of mind, if you talked to someone about this,” he tells her, setting the crystal back down on her skin. As if he senses her hackles raise, he nuzzles the side of her face like a loth-cat, and she can’t help but enjoy the feeling of his closeness. “I’m not saying you have to. Just that it would make me worry less.”

“Liar,” she says, resting her head on his shoulder. “You always worry.”

He chuckles. “Maybe I do. But will you think about it?”

She glances up at him, then shifts her gaze back down to Teza. This fragile thing, she thinks, this darling creature, deserves every bit of the future that she can grasp in her tiny hands and more. With no mother, no father, she has only the two of them. Jyn knows that Cassian is doing what he can to take care of himself, doing what he trusts himself to follow through on. It’ll get better after the war, whenever it ends.

And it will end, she believes. It will end in her lifetime. Hopefully, it will end soon, if only because Teza deserves to be raised by people who can be entirely present for her, her and whatever other family they might add along the way. Jyn has to be well enough for that. Well enough for her. Them. Her damn self, even, because who’s going to take care of the baby if Jyn lets herself keep falling apart?

“It won’t fix everything,” she warns. It might not fix anything.

“I know,” he admits. “But do you really think it will hurt?”

Yes, she thinks, but not in the way that you mean. “I’ll think about it.” For Teza. For hope.

Cassian smiles down at her, mostly with his beautiful brown eyes that his niece has been fortunate enough to inherit, and it warms her like the sun. He takes her face in his hand and brushes his thumb across her lip, no expectation, no meaning beyond the closeness, the promise of being here, now, with her.

“That’s all I ask.”