Archive of Our Own

Cassian meets her first on Fest when he is a child, a woman in green walking barefoot in the snow.  They don’t speak, but she exists as one of his earliest memories, a blot of color against a sea of white. Her hair is in a scarf but the wind blows it off, and brown hair uncurls for him to see. “Who are you?” he asks, but something glows bright against her chest and she disappears.

When his mother dies, she appears again, flowers in her arms at her funeral. He tugs at her cloak and says, “I remember you.” And she smiles, sad, and tells him, “I’m Jyn. I am a friend.”

Sometimes she appears on quiet days. He’s five and eating bread and cheese and he’s sitting on a rock. It’s a spring day. The heads of wildflowers peek through the snow. She’s much younger than she was the last time he saw her—maybe eight—closer to his age, but somehow he knows her. She has braids in her hair, and he pulls on one experimentally. He calls her by name, and she asks, “How do you know who I am?” and he realizes that this is the first time she’s met him. She stays longer this time than most times, and they run through the fields and throw pebbles into the frozen pond until the ice breaks. “Will you be my friend?” he asks her. She nods and gives him a hug. “I will.” She gives him a black pebble from per pocket, “From my home,” she tells him, before she vanishes again.

She isn’t always there when he needs her. On Carida, when his father dies, he’s alone. But he finds his way. He finds his way into the arms of the Rebel Alliance.

When Cassian is sixteen, she appears to him on Talus at the edge of the woods, bleeding. They are the same age for the first and only time. He wants to take her to the base for medical attention, but she fights it, breathing hard through the wound. He tears back and steals precious Bacta and bandages and cares for her through the night. She’s fevered and delirious, and tells him how she’s been abandoned, how she has no one, but he grips her hand and tells her, “You have me. You always have me.” Her lips tighten and she laughs because she cannot cry. “But I can never stay,” she says. “I wish I could, but I can never stay.”

“Take me with you,” he says then as she cries out in pain and vanishes out of his grip.

When he’s twenty-one, she shows up while he’s undercover as Joreth Sward. She’s in a blue gown at an Imperial Ball, and she’s maybe twenty-two, older than he’s seen her in years. He almost blows his cover, walking too fast across the room toward her, wanting to call out her real name and have her say his, but she shakes her head and motions for him to meet her in an empty room. He kisses her before she can say another word, and breathes her in like she’s his last breath. She eases into his arms like she always lived there in his embrace. There’s never enough time, he thinks as she tugs at his uniform, undoing the tight angles of his collar and throwing his hat to the floor so that she can run her hands through his hair, but he’ll take every minute he can with her.

They meet in real time when he’s twenty-six and she’s twenty-three, and he has to pretend not to know her. He keeps thinking she will disappear, but she remains, her bold green eyes searching his. They’ve only just met, but they’ve known each other always.

Jyn is never older than twenty-three when he sees her, and he doesn’t know why first. But he finds out when he’s twenty-six, when he’s holding her on a beach and she is holding him. “I’ve loved you my whole life,” he tells her, and her arms tighten around his, and he knows that it’s also true for her. She glows bright—maybe it’s her, maybe it’s her pendant, maybe it’s the world coming apart around them—but she is with him and he is with her, and she won’t be vanishing without him this time.