Work Text:
Over the ridge, she hears the echo of their voices. Galen, bless him, can't dissemble long. His mind focuses on the one true path in front of him. He'll tell that bastard Krennic that Lyra and Jyn have died, but he'll forget the details. Krennic will know. He will come hunting.
Lyra looks down at her daughter, their hands tightly clasped, and she makes her choice.
"Come on," she whispers, knowing they can't hear from this far away. If they run, keeping their profiles low, they can make it to the hiding place before her husband blows the plan. Hiding galls her. She wants nothing more than to put a blaster bolt through Krennic's head.
She runs, taking her daughter with her.
She shoos Jyn down the ladder, then pulls the cover tight. Their pursuers don't know where they've fled, and will search everywhere. Galen built this hideaway for this reason, and Lyra spent her spare hours perfecting the camouflage. From her hiding place, she hears the boot treads of the Death Troopers. She doesn't dare breathe. She doesn't dare tell Jyn to hold still and for the sake of her life, not to cry.
After too long, the troopers move off. Lyra bolts the hatch and climbs down the ladder. Her muscles tremble from the aftereffects of the fear, the run, the tight hold she's placed on herself as they waited.
She won't allow Jyn to ask her questions, silencing her with one finger over her lips. They will sit in the uneven light of their shelter, even after the voices have left, after the shuttle has departed, after the air even down here tastes of the faraway burning of their home. They will wait, sparing the stored food and not speaking in case of a trap or a trick.
Krennic must know they live. He must suspect they are close by. He may have posted sentries. He took Galen.
The lamp flickers and dies after three days. Jyn has learned to weep silently as Lyra holds her, frightened, paranoid, unsure if risking emergence will guarantee their death or capture.
One shot fires not far from their bolthole.
The hatch opens.
Lyra readies her blaster.
She sees Saw Gerrera's face. He watches her, and she knows there was a guard left, and the guard is now dead.
"Come," she says to her daughter, and helps her up the ladder from the cave into her new life.
*
Lyra was an explorer once, conducting surveys of worlds for colonization. She's a rough hunk of wood under the chisel of Gerrera's teaching, knotty and ill-suited to the shape he wants. Jyn is wet clay, ready for impression. Her daughter takes to the weapons Saw places in her hands, echoes the key facets to a successful attack like another child would recite the names of planets, thinks of situations in terms of potential success and acceptable loss. Jyn grows like a strange vine in front of her, clinging to Saw's extremism to guide her upwards.
"She's not a warrior," she tells him at night as they sit across the fire from each other.
"Jyn is far more than a mere warrior," he agrees, the fire reflecting in his eyes. "She is already leading raids."
"She's eleven years old."
"I know. Think of how many soldiers she will command when she's twelve."
Lyra drops it, again, always. The truth is that she and Jyn are not prisoners, and can walk hand-in-hand from tonight's temporary base any time they please. Saw trusts they will not reveal his secrets. He will not stop them, certainly not the way his men stopped the last deserter. Jyn watched that. They all did. One lesson is worth a thousand speeches.
Saw's lieutenants come and die. His followers buoy him with belief and with their own need for revenges large and small. Lyra's place is separate from these. Jyn is Saw's daughter in all but blood. The newer recruits assume that makes Lyra Saw's woman. They learn, slowly with observation or quickly with Lyra's fist, that this is not the case. Her gratitude to him does not extend so far, nor would she tolerate her daughter being in his influence were Saw the kind of man who would assume it should. He does not treat Lyra as an equal, but alone of the people who live with him and die for him, he respects her as a friend.
She does not assume he is a good man under it all. As she learns to fight, and to plan raids, and to patch wounds, Lyra understands good people don't join the Rebellion. Good people are why the Rebellion exists.
*
At thirteen, Jyn has made contact with three other Rebel cells, and Lyra has conducted the negotiations between them. She's not a peacemaker nor a spinner of words, except in comparison to the people she surrounds herself with. There is no organization, no structure. Rebels resist the Empire until they get interesting or unlucky. One cell stops contacting them abruptly. It takes a month to confirm the leaders have been executed for treason.
Their band is different. Saw is different. He leads a holy crusade against the oppressors, and his fervor wins him new allies even as the old friends are killed. They've lived on four different worlds, their cell splitting and flowing to keep beyond the Emperor's grasp. When Jyn is fifteen, Lyra is on one ship and her daughter is on another as they're forced to flee in separate directions.
A month passes. Three. Lyra has little loyalty to the cadre she's with, or to the cause she's spending her life fighting for. Saw rejoins them after five months. Jyn isn't with him.
The moment, the very moment, she can get him alone, she demands to know if her daughter is alive, even as the bile rises in her throat telling her Jyn is dead, Jyn is lost, Jyn has offered her life up on the altar of Saw's convictions.
"I left her. She had a weapon and some food." He meets Lyra's eyes without blinking, firm in his belief he did the right thing. "She'll be fine."
"Tell me where."
"She will be fine. She is my finest soldier."
Lyra screams at him, but it is like screaming against a mountain. The mountain doesn't care. His followers are trees and reeds. She finds one who bends. She gathers her weapons and walks out of the camp expecting to be shot with every step.
She isn't shot. She isn't followed. She's free to go, free to starve.
Lyra has held onto her necklace forever. She sells it for passage to the lonely world where her daughter is waiting for a man who will never return for her. It takes Lyra days to reach the planet, and longer to reach the site. She finds Jyn still at her post, thin and frightened, rattled enough almost to shoot her mother before she recognizes her and throws herself, sobbing, into Lyra's arms.
The words "Where is Saw?" cut her to the bone, but Lyra has spent these past several years sewing flesh back together as fighters shouted and cried. She'll heal.
"We're done with him. He's done with us. We can go anywhere now."
"We have to fight," says her poor little soldier, brain full of explosives and slogans.
"There are many ways to fight." She takes Jyn by the shoulders. They bought their safety and their freedom with scars and with the thump of Rebellion flowing in her daughter's pulse. The purchase is complete. Lyra does not wish to pay more.
*
They avoid the Core. The Empire's shadow stretches across world after world. They are doubly hunted, as the family of Galen Erso and the hands of Saw Gerrera. Lyra would like to be themselves, but false names are safety. Jyn is too old to start school. She gets a job beside Lyra on a farm, tending crops and working soil until their hands cannot come clean at night. Lyra watches the fists Jyn makes, sees the roll of her lean muscles as she recalls the snap-kick of her rifle. She is no more a farmer than she is a starship engineer.
The other farmers hate the Empire, grumbling over their drinks in the evenings, too frightened and worn down to stand up. Jyn pities them. Lyra considers them. The Rebellion she knew was small, their disjointed, individual cells operating with complete and futile autonomy. Jyn is a fighter. Lyra is a builder. She begins to talk with the other dissenters, begins to offer them the stories she knows. Out among the stars, ordinary people are standing against the Emperor. Jyn can teach them the means of resistance. Lyra intends to organize them into something more.
There's a stranger at the bar one evening. The regulars give them a wide berth. Lyra feels her pulse race. If they have been betrayed, she's made her choice. She will stand in the stranger's path, allow her daughter time to run, to recollect, to fight. Lyra makes her way to the table where the interloper waits, and she sits down across from them.
"Lyra Erso," says a voice from under a deep cowl.
She hasn't used that name in years. "Who's asking?"
"A friend." The stranger leans forward. "You've come to my attention. You and your daughter."
Lyra's blaster is ready under the table. She'll get one shot. She dreams of shooting Krennic, of leaving Jyn to run and marching back to her homestead, and shooting the man who took her husband. If this Imperial intends to fight her, Lyra will end it.
Defiant words come to her lips, but before she can speak, the stranger leans forward. From under her cowl, the woman smiles, the bar's dim light warming her orange skin. "You may call me Fulcrum. We have much to discuss."