Chapter Text
Jyn didn’t know where she was. What she did know was where she was not, and that was a patch of rocky beach where her vision had been consumed by the sight of the world rising up to swallow her whole. Or at least it was a world - a world in its last clutches of life. And she had been so sure that she would be there with that world, leaving this life in a blaze of destruction with only the vague sense of hope in her chest that had held her panic at bay. That hope had been an anvil on her chest, rooting her to the ground, when her body wanted nothing more than to fly apart at the seams.
Jyn took a breath. There was a weight on her chest now, too, but it was not her clutching hope. It was warm and solid and heavy. With an effort she did not feel capable of, she lifted a hand and found the source of the weight - a body.
Jyn squeezed her eyes shut tight against the thought of whose body she held. The last thing she remembered was Cassian - her arms wrapped tightly around his neck, the roughness of his beard against her skin. She had no way of knowing if the others had survived, if they could have had such luck, but her gut told her that it must be Cassian’s weight against her. Her gut lurched at the thought of it being anyone else.
With another intake of breath, Jyn forced her eyes open and saw that it was Cassian. Whereas before, when they’d stumbled to the beach, Cassian had been weak, barely strong enough to hold her hand, now here he was gripping the fabric of her shirt so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. His eyes were wide but unseeing, and his breath came in quick, hard punches of air through his nose. Once she took her eyes off the man, it was like the flip of a comm link switch; she was enveloped in sheer cacophony of noise and light and shuddering movement around her. A red warning light was flashing above them, accompanied by a blaring klaxon. It all flooded Jyn’s senses, making orienting herself impossible.
Looking past Cassian, Jyn could see that they were on the floor of yet another cargo ship. The frame was quaking so hard beneath them that Jyn was sure they were about to fall out of the sky. It was like Jedha all over again, and for a moment the familiarity, the deja vu, was almost a comfort - it was, at least, a known entity. Though her mind raced, her body had reached its breaking point, and Jyn could do little more than lie there, taking in her surroundings while her muscles spasmed feebly.
She couldn’t say how long they both laid there. At one point she faded back out of consciousness, and when she awoke again the ship had gone blessedly silent. The red light still flashed, and the ship bucked beneath them, but the alarm had stopped, and Jyn began to gather her bearings. It took her a long time to get Cassian to loosen his clenched hands from her shirt. All she could think to do - all she could physically manage - was something her father had done when she was a little girl. It was one of the few vivid memories she had of him.
“You look frightened, Stardust,” he’d said in their flat high up amid the the skyscrapers of Coruscant. From her bedroom, Jyn remembered the constant barrage of flashing lights outside her window. When Galen had held her in the semi-darkness after a nightmare, he’d carded his rough callused fingers through her tangled hair.
Though each and every muscle she had ached and protested at the slight movement, Jyn lifted one hand and slowly, gently laid it at the nape of Cassian’s neck. When he didn’t protest, or even move, she let her fingers slide through the short hair at the base of his skull. It was matted and greasy, but that didn’t matter - there was not a part of them that had been left unscathed, unmarred with grime and sweat. As she gently threaded her fingers through Cassian’s hair and moved her hand up to faintly trace the curve of his head, she began to worry. His breathing had slowed slightly, but his eyes remained glazed, staring in blank shock at nothing.
“Cassian,” she said, or rather, tried to say. The name barely left her mouth in anything more than a wheezing rasp.
But it was enough. Cassian’s breath stilled and his eyes blinked - once, twice, and then in rapid succession.
“Cassian,” Jyn repeated, this time with force enough to send her into a coughing fit. She saw stars at the pain that coursed down her razed throat; her mouth tasted of ash and smoke. Cassian bolted upright at the disturbance, hands still clutching at Jyn’s shirt. Jyn struggled to pull herself into a seated position as she gasped for air, and they both surveyed the streams of light as the atmosphere soared past them outside the window of the ship.
Jyn was reminded again of their escape from Jedha, of Cassian and Kaytoo at the helm, and suddenly panic rose like bile in her throat as she realized she had no earthly idea who was piloting their ship.
As if in answer to her unasked question, Kaytoo appeared from the cockpit a couple yards away, swiveling his head around for a brief moment to take in their place on the floor. “Oh, did you two finally decide to wake up? If you’re feeling quite rested, I could use a second pair of hands in this daring rescue mission.”
The sound of another familiar voice jolted Cassian further back into reality, eyes wide in disbelief. With a brief jerk, he looked down at his hands, still knotted in Jyn’s shirt, and slowly loosened his grip with obvious effort. For the first time since they’d arrived on this mysterious ship, Cassian looked at Jyn and their eyes met. He reached a shaking hand up to cup her cheek. His movements were rough and uncoordinated as he moved from her cheek to her brow, down to her nose and finally a slightly softer swipe of his thumb against her lips. It was as if he needed to ensure himself that she was real.
Jyn reached up and stilled his hand with her own, firm and what she hoped was reassuring. A huff of breath escaped Cassian’s mouth in what Jyn realized was a laugh. His wide eyes shone and his lips moved into a small incredulous smile - one that Jyn thought looked more like a rictus of pain.
“ Captain ,” came Kaytoo’s voice from the cockpit, this time more pointed and urgent. “Our chance of survival is rapidly decreasing with every minute we remain in this system.”
Cassian’s face fell, and in an instant he was stumbling to his feet toward the cockpit and the pilot’s chair. “Kay?!” he called, but Jyn’s attention shifted as realization struck her.
Pilot ...Jyn thought, and tamped down another wave of nausea - half panic, half grief and a whole array of emotions that threatened to drown her. She slowly got her feet under her, legs shaky but they held her weight, and moved to the single small port window in the side of the ship, where below, Jyn could see the blast radius from the Death Star’s single sickly green shot. It was larger than the strike against Jedha City, Jyn thought. The planet looked like it would cave in on itself, a massive crater that got bigger with every moment she watched.
“Hold onto something,” Cassian said behind her, and Jyn turned, tearing her eyes away from the nightmare below, to stumble over to the cockpit. Cassian caught her gaze as she steadied herself on the back of his chair. Though his eyes were weary with countless hours under so much duress, Jyn could see past the show of strength he always possessed in the line of duty to a stormcloud churning behind his eyes, with flashes of emotion she could not get a handle on. Jyn moved her hand to Cassian’s shoulder as he pushed them into hyperspace, and held her footing as they leapt light years through the galaxy.
Once they were settled on their route, they had a few hours to rest and regroup. It was enough time for Kaytoo to administer rudimentary first aid with the limited supplies they discovered on board, enough time for them to begin formulating a plan.
“We don’t know how many Imperial ships were left above Scarif when we left. We could have been followed,” Cassian said, sitting stock still in the pilot’s seat as Kaytoo dabbed at his scorched side with antiseptic before applying a bacta patch.
“Why waste their resources on us when the plans are with the Alliance?” Jyn countered, sitting across from him in Kaytoo’s vacated seat with her legs crossed, rifling through their first aid supplies, taking a mental inventory. It was more for distraction than real purpose as there wasn’t much to inventory in the first place. She’d seen plenty of blaster wounds, and many worse than Cassian’s, but the sight of his burned and bloodied side sent Jyn’s stomach into knots.
Cassian’s eyes darkened. “Any intel they could get out of us would benefit them. Besides, we had access to the entire Citadel databank. Who knows what else we could have stolen.”
In that moment, Jyn wished they had had the wherewithal to steal something else. But it was all moot now, as the Citadel and the entire planet were nothing but a heap of rubble. Jyn was hit with another wave of nausea at the thought and everything around her turned grey at the edges. She thought Cassian might have been saying something to her, but all she could hear was the rapid beat of her heart pounding in her ears.
Before she knew what she was doing, Jyn stood numbly and left Cassian with Kaytoo, who was still prodding at his master’s wounds with disinfectant, and moved to explore the rest of the ship.
There wasn’t much else to it - it was smaller than Rogue One’s stolen Imperial cargo shuttle, with only one deck. She passed the smallest refresher she’d ever seen, little more than a closet with a small toilet and basin. Beyond that were the sleeping quarters, equally tiny. The room was dark, with a single sterile cot and storage cupboard crammed into the corner. Jyn hauled the bedding from the cot - white, Imperial military-grade, rough and practical, with little comfort, but she’d slept on worse. Her hands had begun to shake and she was desperate for a few moments alone, a few moments to hide. But she knew this would be the first place Cassian would look to find her.
Jyn felt drawn back to the cave on Lah’mu, to when she was seven years old, waiting for Saw to come and find her. She’d grown to hate that cave - it was nothing more than a mental prison anymore, where she tucked away her darkest memories, the secrets she needed to bury in order to function, in order to simply survive. But now, Jyn was sure she was living in her darkest memories, making new ones that made her long for those glimpses of her mother’s smile, her father’s soothing voice. It was all she could do to pull the bedding from the sleeping quarters, move across the cramped hall, and slide open the door to what she realized was a small, hot engine room, where she collapsed in a heap on the floor.
She wanted to cry and scream with the wave of anguish that was rushing up to envelope her. She knew that somewhere in the back of her mind she had felt elation at their victory, but in the ugly light of their survival, it felt hollow and nebulous, like a dream she’d had so many times that she could never be sure what was real.
Her body screamed with tension, with the need to lash out - at that awful man in white, at the Empire that had killed her friends - Bodhi, Chirrut, Baze, the entire Rogue One squadron, the only loyal friends she’d ever had, at her father and Saw, who’d returned to her in the briefest, most painful moments, only to be snatched away forever - but she had nowhere to go now, and more importantly, no energy left to spend. In the heat and white noise of the engine room, Jyn held the rough blanket to her mouth and screamed.
She screamed until her already damaged throat could do nothing more than gasp silently as she caught her breath and willed her heart to slow its heavy pounding. Now along with her body, her eyes ached in their sockets. No matter how desperately she willed it, no matter how hard she tried, her tears refused to fall.
When Jyn had wandered off, face blank and eyes hunted, Cassian held himself back from following her. He could still feel the fabric of her shirt beneath his hands, and knew that if he followed her now he would have to fight the urge to clutch her to him - to feel her heart beating beneath his palm, to feel her lungs expanding, to simply feel life .
Sitting in the pilot’s seat, Cassian stretched out his aching hands. Kaytoo had tended to them, along with his blaster wound and badly bruised but thankfully unbroken legs and ribs, but even cleaned of the dirt and blood, he could still see the inflammation in his palms where he had dug the small crescents of his nails hard into his flesh. Cassian shook his head in an attempt to clear it from the flash of images running like blaster fire behind his eyelids. The sickly green beam of the Death Star coursing across the sky, the earth exploding in massive waves, the surf rising up to swallow them.
“Where are we, Kay?” he asked, more for the distraction than because he really wanted to know. They’d set a course for as far from Scarif as they could get, as far from the rebel base as they could get - anything that would lead them and any potential tails away from the plans. Cassian knew he needed to know their next move - they needed to know - but when he’d tried to broach the subject with Jyn, she had grown distant and pale before leaving the room without a word. He couldn’t blame her; at the moment all of Cassian’s nerves were frayed, too. He barely heard Kaytoo when the droid answered his question.
“This route will take us into the Unknown Regions,” Kay told him, and his vocal circuits sounded almost gentle. “I highly suggest you get some sleep, Cassian. We still have another couple hours of hyperspace travel. I will alert you immediately should we run into any danger.”
Cassian trusted Kaytoo with his life - he’d done so for as long as he’d known him. That’s what happened when you reprogrammed a droid yourself. Or at least, that was what Cassian had done. In the eight years since he’d built Kaytoo from a stolen Imperial security droid, he’d never had a reason to doubt him. That didn’t mean Cassian didn’t have questions for the droid. Kaytoo was being particularly evasive on the topic of his rescue mission, but Cassian would save that conversation when he had more energy for real conversation.
Instead, he took Kaytoo up on his offer to rest without a second thought, too exhausted to protest. He searched the small confines of the shuttle and felt a creeping panic when he did not immediately find Jyn. The sleeping cabin’s small cot was empty, nothing more than a raised padded pallet stripped of bedding. Having barely left Jyn’s side over the course of the last...how long had it been? Days? Weeks? Cassian knew their time together was short compared to the rest of his life spent with the Alliance, but he had a difficult time remembering what it felt like to be without her steady presence beside him. Without her there, he felt unmoored, and that scared him more than just about anything.
As he turned to return to the cockpit, his eyes fell on the door to another room. The insignia at the top of the door marked it as the engine room, and he knew that that must be Jyn’s hiding spot - there was simply nowhere else she could be. Before he could slide the door open, Cassian paused, suddenly unsure. He knew what he would find behind it, and he wasn’t sure he could face that. While he craved the physical contact of life next to him, he wasn’t sure he could face Jyn with his sudden dependency.
If he didn’t open that door, though, Cassian would be left with nothing but a cryptic Kaytoo and his own thoughts for company and, selfish as it was, those were thoughts he was sure he was not ready to face. Not when the moment his eyes closed he was met with the stuff that not even a lifetime of resistance fighting had prepared him for. He finally came to a decision, and entered the room. When the door closed behind him with a soft hiss, Cassian found Jyn asleep in a heap of pale bed clothes, no doubt scavenged from the cabin’s single pallet. She was tangled amid the blankets, boots caught roughly at the fabric while her fingers grasped at the edges, held tightly to her chest. She had pulled herself into a fetal position in the corner - as protected as she could get herself, facing her only exit. The position was more defensive than comfortable and she slept fitfully.
Cassian slid down to the floor and watched her eyes as they moved frantically beneath her lids. After a few moments, her movements became more fraught, and a deep furrow creased her brow. She mumbled something unintelligible. When Cassian focused, he could catch snippets of words and phrases: please, papa...trust...the force…wait...
She had drifted back into silence and was still for a long while. Cassian’s eyes grew heavy and he’d begun to drift off when suddenly Jyn shrieked. The sound was like a blaster bolt to the spine. Before he could think about what he was doing, Cassian was surging forward toward her, hand flying to Jyn’s shoulder. Her cry became garbled and frantic at the touch, but before Cassian could pull away her eyes snapped open, accompanied by a strangled gasp. In an instant, she ripped Cassian’s hand from her shoulder, lunging toward him in a flurry of limbs. She landed heavily on top of him, pinning him to the floor. He held back a gasp of pain. His blaster wound was on the mend with the help of the bacta patches Kaytoo had applied, but it was still tender. Above him, Jyn’s eyes gleamed with fear, hazy and unseeing in the dim room.
“Jyn,” Cassian said, low but insistent. “Jyn, it’s me.”
Jyn’s eyes slowly cleared and focused. She blinked rapidly down at Cassian as if trying to piece together the reality she found herself in. She then lifted her eyes to look around her, head moving wildly to take in her surroundings.
“Jyn,” Cassian repeated softly, and when her eyes met his again, her face crumpled.
“ Cassian? ” her voice was brittle and small, a sound Cassian had never heard from her, and which sent his stomach into knots. Jyn Erso had never sounded so fragile or uncertain.
“Yes, it’s me,” he said. “We’re…” He wanted to say okay , but that wasn’t true, he knew. “We made it.” It sounded hollow and stupid to his ears.
“ Cassian ,” she repeated, the name a slur over her tongue, and Cassian wasn’t sure if she had heard him at all. As if invisible strings had been cut, as if she simply had no more strength to hold herself up, Jyn pitched forward against Cassian’s chest. Her hands grasped his shirt and she sucked in a shaky breath. Cassian reached up to wrap his arms around her and Jyn let out a muffled wail that wracked her entire frame, letting loose a tumult of guttural sobs against his shirt.
The sound was such intimate grief that Cassian felt like an intruder, and could do nothing but hold her tighter against him. Lying there in the small confines of the engine room, he felt his own resolve cracking, his long-standing defenses weakening in the wake of Jyn’s naked pain. An ache began at his temples and across his brow, which he did not recognize as the welling of tears until they were already streaking unbidden out of the corners of his eyes.
Cassian’s breath shook and his hands trembled where they held fast to Jyn’s back. He moved them to her nape, where he smoothed her tangled hair and glimpsed a flash of a memory of her hands carding through his own hair, though it felt distant and dreamlike. At the new contact between them, Jyn lifted her head, face mottled red and eyes puffy. For a fleeting moment, Cassian thought he must have made a mistake, that she was about to retreat again, but instead she leaned down again and pressed her lips to his.
The contact was rough and Jyn tasted like ash and salt, but the weight of her grounded Cassian. His hands found her hair again and he couldn’t help but pull her closer to him, anything to close the space between them, anything to feel the solid heat of Jyn’s living, breathing body against his.
Jyn gasped against his mouth and Cassian took the chance to deepen the kiss. But he didn’t get far before she was nipping at his lower lip - hard enough to draw a small shocked breath from him before she eased off, lapping at the bite with her tongue for a moment before tracing her lips along his jaw. He couldn’t help the rough groan that escaped his lips as he thought, even when she’s kissing, she’s fighting .
Jyn took his reaction as permission to continue, and she leaned down again, this time raking her hands through his hair and levering herself up onto one elbow so she could look down at him. Her tears had slowed, but the fire in her eyes was as bright and fierce as ever, so bright Cassian felt he’d be consumed by them if he didn’t look away. But he couldn’t look away, couldn’t do anything but tip his head up hungrily to meet hers again.
Cassian wrapped his arms tightly around her again and Jyn let him pull her back down against him, where their legs tangled together in an awkward shuffle of boots. Without breaking contact with his mouth, Jyn somehow managed to kick one boot off, and then the other, before settling back against him and letting her hips grind purposefully against his.
In his years fighting and spying for the Alliance, Cassian had shared various beds and nights, but the trysts rarely lasted long before his assignments ended or his partners asked too many questions. He’d never let himself feel anything beyond the immediate physical needs of sex. Emotions were dangerous in his line of work, and letting himself get caught unawares was all but deadly.
But now, with his future uncertain, with his own survival a sheer mystery he had yet to understand, Cassian could not bring himself to be careful or distant with Jyn. This woman, whom he had been so sure he would die next to in a blast of kyber-generated destruction, was an anomaly. He’d never met someone who could move him from cold distrust to the deepest faith and loyalty that she had evoked in him in a matter of days. He’d never let himself get close to anyone who would draw undue attention to him, but Jyn - she was like gravity.
As she ground her hips into his, Cassian bucked up to meet hers, letting the contact run electric down his spine, across every inch of his skin, to the tips of his hair. He snaked a leg over one of Jyn’s hips and held them together as they both frantically found purchase against each other. After a few moments, Jyn pulled away with a frayed and frustrated groan. Cassian tried to gather his bearings, tried to think of something to say to keep her from leaving, but he didn’t have to. Before he could sit up fully, she was sitting back on her knees making quick work of undoing the clasp of her trousers and gracelessly sliding them down her thighs. As she wiggled out of them fully, Cassian let his gaze trace the landscape of old and new bruising against milky skin from where they snaked beneath the edges of her panties across the tops of her thighs and down to her ankles. Jyn Erso could take a beating, but she had yet to show a single sign of breaking.
Cassian tugged at his own belt and quickly kicked off his boots as Jyn pulled her shirt off over her head, leaving only her kyber crystal necklace against her breastbone. He’d shucked his trousers by the time she knelt back down, and Jyn straddled his hips, pulling at his shirt until Cassian sat up and she could tug it over his shoulders to join hers on the floor, gentle enough to avoid his bandaged side.
She kissed him again, held his face in her hands - and even though she was the one on his lap, Cassian felt cradled and protected by her. He kissed back with growing urgency. Though he’d only found her sleeping fitfully a short while ago, their shared touches felt like they’d been drawn out over hours, and if left alone could turn into days and weeks and years.
As Cassian slid his fingers against Jyn’s skin, around the ridges of her ribs up to the swell of her breasts, he let his instincts take over, let the war of emotion fall to the background. Jyn sighed into Cassian’s mouth at the touch and ground down into him again. Cassian groaned as his erection finally received some unfettered attention. At his reaction, Jyn reached down between them and stroked him - careful at first, almost gentle. Not tentative, but inquisitive.
As he was learning to expect from Jyn, when she knew what she wanted, she wasted no time in getting it. After a few moments of even, sure strokes, Jyn rose up onto her knees and positioned herself before sinking down onto him. The tight heat of her surrounding him was almost more than Cassian could take. He reached a hand up to trace a thumb over Jyn’s cheek, where it was still marked with fresh tear tracks and old scrapes. When he looked her in the eye, the fire still burned bright in her eyes. She did not break eye contact with him as he shifted beneath her, building a rhythm.
Jyn held tight to his shoulders as she met him thrust for thrust, forehead coming down to meet his, breath mingling with his as they both came closer and closer to the edge. Jyn’s grip tightened and her breath hitched as she came, and Cassian held her tightly as he followed, all coherent thought leaving him, replaced by pure sensation.
For a single moment, they could forget - who they were, where they were, and everyone and everything they had lost.
When Cassian awoke, at first he could not tell where he was. He was warm and the ache in his body had receded into the background. When he opened his eyes, it was to the dim light of the engine room and the memories of the hours before flooded back. He was slightly surprised to see that Jyn had stayed - he’d half expected her to flee, but he realized that in the short time they’d spent together, Cassian could not say that he knew her beyond the blind conviction she elicited from him, beyond the pure belief he’d placed in her as a figurehead of the rebellion. Now, he could see the woman in front of him, the one who had smiled at him atop the Citadel tower, letting him see a glimpse of Jyn stripped of her symbolic aura, simply human.
Next to him, Jyn was awake, sitting up against the bulkhead, hair in disarray and blanket wrapped loosely around her bare chest. Cassian’s gaze was drawn to the strafe of mottled bruises across her shoulder and collarbones, and the string of the kyber crystal that hung around her neck and disappeared beneath the blanket where he knew it sat between her breasts.
Jyn cast him a brief look and a small smile before returning her attention to something in her hands. She was tying knots of fabric together - strips she’d torn from one of the blankets, Cassian thought. It was in the shape of a person - a doll, Cassian realized, and his gaze softened as he took in this part of Jyn that was so new to him.
“My mother used to make these for me,” she told him, holding up the figure. “Well, they were much better than this - properly sewn and dyed. I never left home without them.”
Jyn tugged at one of the arms, smoothing the fabric between deft, callused fingers. “First it was Beeny - Mama gave him to me for company when we were on Coruscant. Then there was Stormy on Lah’mu. But I lost him…”
Jyn’s eyes grew distant and Cassian pictured a little girl with dark curls and sharp inquisitive eyes carrying around her trusty friend on her many adventures. He envied her the innocence, though he knew that it surely had not lasted long once she’d joined Saw Guerrera.
“What will you name this one?” Cassian asked her.
Jyn was quiet for a long time, and Cassian thought she wouldn’t answer. When she finally did speak, her voice was filled with a warm crackle of fire, like glowing embers.
“I think I’ll name him Bodhi,” she said with a small tremble of lips before she tied a final knot and held him up for Cassian to see.
Cassian felt a sharp pang in his chest at the mention of Bodhi’s name, and was startled by the feeling. Over the years he’d let himself become hardened against death, especially those of his fallen comrades - if he didn’t, he’d never have survived. But something about Bodhi’s death, and about Baze and Chirrut’s, too - felt different. Maybe it was because they hadn’t been soldiers. They had fought, though, with more heart than Cassian had grown used to after so many years in the thick of a war.
Beside him, Jyn was watching Cassian, lashes laced with tears as they had the night before. He realized she wanted him to take the doll, so he did, cupping it between his palms, as if he could protect it the way he’d been unable to protect Bodhi in the end.
Before he could say anything else, before he could thank Jyn, the walls around them began to tremble and the floor bucked beneath them. Not again , Cassian thought. He shared a brief steely look with Jyn before they leapt to their feet. Cassian was pulling on his shirt and buckling his belt when the door slid open and Kaytoo loomed in the doorway.
“We’ve approached an anomalous gravitational field. The nav is malfunctioning and I have no data on our location on this hyperspace route,” he said, looking to Cassian expectantly before sliding his gaze to Jyn, who was pulling her shirt on, followed by her battered vest. Before the droid could make any number of pointed comments, Cassian pushed past him to the cockpit. Kaytoo and Jyn were fast on his heels.
Kay resumed his seat as Cassian took in the readings on his display.
“What were you doing?” Kaytoo asked pointedly in the brief silence.
“Not now!” Cassian said sharply, and was surprised to hear Jyn’s voice echo the same behind him.
“Where are we?” Jyn asked as Cassian and Kaytoo settled into the pilot seats. Outside the viewport, stars streaked past them through dizzying hyperspace.
“While you two were sleeping ,” Kaytoo said and Jyn refrained from rolling her eyes. If she’d had a blaster handy, she’d have threatened him with it. “We entered the Unknown Regions as planned. But the hyperspace route I had logged appears to have been inaccurate, and I cannot get a read on our exact location.”
The mention of inaccurate hyperspace routes pricked a memory at the back of Jyn’s mind. She thought she remembered hearing myths about a part of the galaxy where hyperdrive malfunctioned, where only the most skilled pilots could successfully navigate. At the time, she’d been living as Tanith Pontha, smuggling her way across the galaxy with a band out of Tatooine. At the time, she’d thought them nothing more than spooky stories told to children, but she remembered what they’d called it.
“The Tangle,” Jyn murmured to herself as she tried to recall details, but Cassian turned his head at the name.
“What --” he started, but suddenly the ship lurched violently. Jyn almost lost her footing, and reached out for a handhold as another shudder wracked the ship’s frame. Cassian gripped the console and reached for the hyperdrive. “I’m pulling us out of hyperspace, Kay. We can’t keep going without the nav working or we could end up hundreds of lightyears off course.”
Kaytoo’s head swiveled around to look at Cassian, “How do we get off course if we don’t know where we’re going in the first place?”
Cassian ignored the droid as he pulled them out of hyperspace. Outside the viewport, Jyn could see they were nearing a planet. It was surprisingly blue and verdant for so far out in the wilderness of space. Jyn didn’t recognize it, though she’d never been this far out in the galaxy before.
As they neared the unknown planet, Cassian tried to steer them into orbit, keeping them far enough out to avoid entering the atmosphere. Suddenly a sensor flared to life on the dashboard, blinking urgently.
“What’s happening?” Jyn asked as the ship continued to vibrate around them.
“I don’t know! I’m losing control! Reverse the thrusters, Kay.”
“Reversing thrusters.”
Cassian gripped his controls hard, trying to regain any distance they could, but nothing worked. Something was pulling them in, and fast. As Jyn moved away from the cockpit to secure herself in one of the ship’s two passenger seats, the ship bucked and shuddered again, sending Jyn flying across the cabin. She cried out as she landed against the floor and a jolt of pain shot up her right ankle.
“Jyn?!” Cassian shouted from the cockpit. Jyn hauled herself across the floor on her knees and wrapped her arm through a secured seat strap.
“I’m fine,” she cried back, breathing hard through the pain as she watched them enter the atmosphere through the viewport. “Try to set us down!” She looked down at her ankle where she held it off the floor. It throbbed painfully in her boot, but she couldn’t tell what the damage was beneath the leg of her trousers. Around her the cabin only shook harder and she vaguely thought they’d never escape a life of stolen freighter ships falling apart around them.
The klaxon she’d woken up to before began blaring again in earnest and Jyn held on tighter to her handhold. She tried to get a glimpse out the viewport again, but all she could see was darkness streaming past them.
“Pull up!” Kaytoo urged.
“I’m trying!” Cassian yelled back.
The ship banked suddenly and Jyn’s grip slipped.
“Hold on, Jyn!” Cassian yelled, and Jyn was hit with another sense of deja vu, of wind and rain and darkness. “We’re coming in hard.”
Jyn fumbled with the restraint, but before she could secure herself the world seemed to tilt, and she was suspended in air for a moment before everything crashed down around her in a roar of sound and pain.