Chapter Text
When Jyn is nine years old, barely six months spent under Saw’s tutelage, she beats one of the young recruits within an inch of his life. He mutters something under his breath as she’s walking past him one morning, something about her father and letting the Empire get the better of him, what a coward -
She tackles him to the ground before she can blink, fire roaring in her veins and fists as she hits him again and again and she doesn’t stop, not even when his nose cracks and warmth spatters from the place his face used to be.
(It takes two of Saw’s partisans to pull her off him.)
They put her in solitary for a few days after this. “For your own protection,” Saw tells her, the look in his eyes something between awe and fear.
She decides right then and there that she loathes the phrase.
-----
After Scarif - (Jyn laughs at that word, after, because she’d knelt on that burning beach fully prepared to die, to let all afters die with her-)
After Scarif, things get messy.
“You six,” Mon Mothma tells them on Echo Base, commanding and ethereal as ever, “are being hunted. The Empire will stop at nothing until they find you. The likelihood of that happening increases exponentially if you leave this base.”
“She’s right,” K-2 says, earning a sharp glance from Jyn.
Bodhi looks uneasy. “All due respect, ma’am, but the fight’s not on this base, it’s out there-”
“This is for your own protection,” the senator cuts in politely, all politician, and Jyn bristles. Where were you, she thinks, remembering a council all-too willing to run and hide, turn tail in the face of the Empire’s most devastating threat to the galaxy, where was your protection when we made the decision to risk our lives for your cause?
Baze seems to share the sentiment. “We are not cowards,” he growls. “We did not come this far so you could ask us to bury our heads in the kriffing ice.”
“Baze,” Chirrut warns low in his throat, fingers curling firmly over the mercenary’s shoulder, and Jyn’s heart clenches at the sight. Nothing has changed since Scarif, she thinks, nothing, nothing, and if this - hunkering down on this icy rock, hiding and withering into oblivion - is the cost of her father’s sacrifice, of everything the six of them have endured and survived together, if this is the cost of victory -
“What, then?” she asks. “What would you see us do?”
Mon Mothma smiles, soft and sad. “I would see you endure.”
No one speaks for several moments. Jyn feels the weight of someone’s gaze on her face, knows whose it is even before she turns her head.
Cassian’s eyes are fire and starlight, the curve of his mouth not quite a smile but Jyn recognizes trouble when she sees it. This is a rebellion, isn’t it? she’d asked the first time she met him, and she sees it reflected in his eyes now, a silent promise scorching the distance between them.
I rebel.
-----
The council doesn’t expressly forbid them to leave the base in the weeks following Scarif, having firsthand experience with Rogue One’s it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission style of operation. Instead, the six of them are scattered across various divisions and departments, each kept busy with a steady stream of menial short-term assignments. Jyn exists in a near-constant state of restlessness, but she tries, she really does, because she’s a part of something now and she didn’t embark on a death-defying mission, survive against all odds, to abandon the cause because she dislikes following orders.
She tries, but old habits apparently die hard.
The first time she tries to leave the base without permission, she doesn’t even make it to the hangar. “You couldn’t have gone very far, anyways,” says the entirely too cheerful sergeant escorting her back to the barracks. “The hyperdrive motivators on the BTL-S3s tend to be a bit shoddy.” Jyn scowls, hands curling reflexively into fists at her sides - three weeks with the Rebel Alliance has done little to curb her tendency to hit first and ask questions never - but then her father’s face is swimming behind her eyes, Jyn, my stardust, and for awhile after that she keeps her head down and attends to her orders.
“You, Jyn Erso,” Draven tells her in the briefing room the next time she attempts to leave, “you are going to be the death of me.”
Jyn tries a new strategy this time - saying absolutely nothing at all - and it seems to work because the general heaves a massive sigh and informs her she is to report to hangar bay seven in the morning for a patrolling mission off-base. She has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep a smile from splitting her face, she’s so ecstatic. Never mind that it’s Hoth and that the landscape is about as thrilling to look at as a tauntaun’s backside, it’s a mission out in the world and Jyn will take it, run, sprint, leap with it.
It’s typical for her to go a few days without seeing any of the Rogue One crew, so she’s surprised to find Cassian suiting up outside her designated Y-wing. He’s reaching for his flight helmet as she approaches, turned away from her slightly, and she pauses, uncertainty coiling tightly in her gut as she remembers the last time they were in each other’s presence for more than a few minutes, bruised and battered and kneeling in the sand, fire and light on the horizon and his arms cinching around her, welcome home -
“What are you doing here?” she manages to sputter.
He whips around to face her and holy hell, the mischievous glint in his eye sets something sparking low and warm in her gut.
“I called in a favor,” he says with a smirk. “Besides, you need a pilot.”
“Was Bodhi busy?” she deadpans and he laughs, sharp and clear. Danger danger danger her heart thuds against her ribcage, but she hauls herself up the ladder and into the gunner’s seat all the same.
They’ve barely gone two leagues off-base when the explosions start.
-----
(Later, they’ll learn that the base’s location was compromised by a new form of Imperial technology, a probe droid that can track energy signatures. They’ll learn that after Scarif, the impounded shuttle Rogue One had used to bypass the shield gate had been seized to test prototypes of these droids, and that several thousand were subsequently deployed across the galaxy, searching, hunting for six very unique energy wave signatures-)
Now, all they know is Mon Mothma’s voice over the comm, a thin shimmer of static as she orders them to evacuate the planet.
“What about the others-” Jyn chokes out at the same time Cassian asks, “status of Rogue One?”
They’re together and they’re alive, she replies, and all Jyn can think of is what the senator had said to all of them during that first briefing after Scarif -
(I would see you endure).
Jyn watches Echo Base fall away, a starburst of flame and ash, and thinks not like this, not like this.
-----
They limp along for a few days before the hyperdrive finally conks out, spitting them out into the velvet darkness of Outer Rim Space near Tatooine.
“Looks like this is home for awhile,” Cassian says from the pilot’s seat, sounding as bone-weary as Jyn feels. The planet looms just outside the viewport, an orb of dust and sand, and she thinks of another desert world, one with a crater where its capital city once stood -
Her fingers clench around the crystal that hangs in the hollow of her throat. Chirrut’s voice is in her head, the strongest stars have hearts of kyber, and judging by the Death Star-sized lump in her throat, she figures hers must be made of something else entirely.
(I miss them, she thinks, stars, I miss them.)
The threat analysis grid equipped in this particular BTL-S3 is unreliable at best and completely non-functional at worst, and as such does not detect the approaching class-three sandstorm that forces them to make planetfall several leagues from their intended destination of Mos Eisley. It’s a rough landing and Cassian’s breath is ragged by the time they’re on the ground.
“This ship,” he rasps, “is a piece of mierda.”
“Oh, switch off,” Jyn fires back, struggling to breathe evenly against the adrenaline pounding in her chest. “It’s gotten us this far, hasn’t it?”
He glances up sharply at the word us, looks like he wants to say something in response but he doesn’t. Ice-cold guilt floods through her - he regrets coming with me, leaving the others behind - and she feels herself shut down, burying the rest of the thought before it can take shape.
They hunker down for the night in uneasy silence. The interior of the ship is little more than a pilot and gunner’s seat, less than ideal conditions for sleeping, but Jyn’s unconscious almost as soon as she closes her eyes.
-----
A dream. A memory -
She’s underground, curled against the far wall of the cave and waiting. The air is strange down here, almost stale, and she suddenly aches to be above ground, breathe the lush-sweet petrichor of the surrounding hills and fields -
(be strong, my heart, my stardust, be strong and remember those who love you-)
There is a loud groan of metal as the hatch above her head yawns open. She tilts her head up, squinting against the sudden brightness, and she’s -
- kneeling in the sand under a canvas of endless blue. Cassian, is her first thought, and she twists, cranes her neck wildly to find him standing a short distance away along the shoreline, the lean length of his body bisected by a curve of horizon in the distance.
“Where are we?” she shouts, even though she already knows.
His eyes are tired, tired as he turns towards her. “Home,” he says.
Behind him, the sky explodes.
-----
As always when torn from sleep by a dream of Scarif, she jerks awake in a cold sweat, feeling like she’s shed a second skin, like maybe it wasn’t a dream at all. “Cassian?” she gasps into the hazy half-darkness, and her nerves sing with something like relief as she hears him shift in his seat.
“I’m here,” he says, and even husky with sleep his voice is steady like an anchor, like a promise. She feels small, suddenly, caged beneath the weight of what that promise might entail and she ducks her head, bites her lip hard to choke down the sob building at the base of her throat. Maybe, she thinks, maybe I’m not meant to endure, maybe I was never meant to survive that beach -
There’s a rustling from behind her and she flinches as warm fingers skim the surface of her knuckles, thread through her own. Jyn doesn’t turn her head but she can feel his eyes on her, and that’s when she starts sobbing, real, true cries that rack her entire frame and leave her shuddering against her seat. All she knows is the ache in her chest and Cassian’s hand intertwined with hers, and she clutches it tightly like he’s the thing that’s tethering her to solid ground.
“I’m here, Jyn,” he whispers over and over as his thumb movies in circles against her own, “I’m here, you’re not alone.”
Welcome home.
She’s not sure when she stops crying, only that her eyes sting and her lungs burn and she’s utterly exhausted. As her eyes flutter open-closed-open, she realizes she’s never thought of home as a someone instead of a someplace, but here in the shadow-soft interior of their Y-wing, on the run from the Empire along the edge of the galaxy and holding Cassian Andor’s hand like she holds her heart, she thinks that maybe she should start.