Work Text:
When the war ends, they bury the lost; the dead; the gone. They bury their comrades, their friends, and finally, their parents. Both of their mothers and fathers never received a proper funeral before. They will now.
+
They travel first to Fest, and the crunch of snow reminds them both of the month they spent on Echo Base on Hoth.
“I don’t mind the cold so much this time,” Jyn tells Cassian, pulling her coat tighter around her torso. The fur on her hood tickles her face, but at least it’s warm. Cassian wraps an arm around her shoulder and pulls her closer. The afternoon is cold and bright, the sting of the icy air sharp in her nose. “You were born here, weren’t you?”
He nods. “I once thought I’d die here, too.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” she says and kisses him. His lips are warm but his nose is cold, and it makes her smile.
“I’m glad I didn’t, either,” he agrees.
He doesn’t remember exactly where his mother died, but they find a spot on a bluff that overlooks a glacial lagoon and put up a makeshift marker. The ice in the water glows such a clear, pure blue that Jyn feels the prick of tears in her eyes. Cassian places small white flowers against the stone–a faint memory of how much his mother had loved these winter flowers–and says something quiet and soft in Festian.
“What did you say?” Jyn asks.
He grasps her gloved hand with his and raises it to his lips, giving her a kiss on the knuckles. “I said goodbye.”
+
Eadu is still too dangerous, still too occupied by the remnants of the Imperials to be safe for them to even land, but she at least had the chance to say goodbye to her Papa, she thinks, when life faded from his body on that burning platform.
Their ship floats just above the blue and gray planet, far away enough to be out of range of any sensors, and Jyn smears stardust on the viewport and forgives: him again for all his sins and herself for hating him the way she had when that anger was the only thing that held the pieces of her together when he was gone.
+
There are still protests on Carida, the same kind where Cassian’s father died decades ago, but now the blasters from the military stay holstered and the marchers all go home at night.
“I like to think that we were part of the reason for this,” he tells her, gesturing at the peaceful protest.
“You are,” she says. Jyn raises her mug of ale and clinks glasses with him at their table just outside the pub in the city’s marketplace, but neither of them takes a drink just yet. She puts down her glass and covers his hand with hers. “You would have made your father proud, Cassian.” She sees the slightest quiver in his lip, and then it’s gone just as quickly.
+
She hasn’t seen Lah’mu since Saw whisked her away, but her old homestead looks as it did when she left: green marsh grasses and bare-branched bushes a deep red-brown, black sand, and basalt hills covered in thick green moss. The skies are still gray in the mornings and blindingly blue in the afternoon, and the field where her mother died is still there.
She shows Cassian her cave–and it will always be her cave–and when he goes to open the hatch and look inside she curls up against a stone and pulls her legs up to her chest and feels a sob bubble up. If her mother had just stayed, she thinks. But if her mother had stayed maybe she would have never met Cassian, met Bodhi, met Baze and Chirrut and Kaytoo. Or maybe they all would have been dead and none of it would have mattered anyway. But she still wants her mama in the way children always do when they are sick or scared, but she also knows that she’ll never have it again.
But she has Cassian, and he holds her while she shakes and until she stops, helps her gather the black volcanic stones to mark the spot where Lyra Erso met her end, and he stays with her, which is what matters in the end, really.
+
They arrive in Jedha–all of them together. Jyn, Cassian, Bodhi, Baze, Chirrut, and Kaytoo. Jyn to give Saw Gerrera his send-off; Baze, Chirrut, and Bodhi to say goodbye to the place that was once their home.
Saw may not have been her father by blood, but their blood was somehow still the same. Galen Erso had slow, cool rivers coursing through his veins, but Jyn and Saw: lava poured from their wounds, fire surging out from their centers.
She understood that he had loved her now, though his shows of affection were nontraditional and infrequent when she had been with him. But the memories were easier now to remember: him braiding her hair until she could do it herself, the sweet cookies he gave her once when he remembered her name day.
“We bury our mothers and fathers,” Chirrut says, resting on his staff as he stands with her at the ruins of the Holy City. “And they are the seeds from which we grow.”
Jyn grasps his hand as he did once on a flight long ago and embraces him, then Baze, then Bodhi and calls them her brothers; and she reaches for Cassian, who holds her as a lover and a husband would; kisses her brow and breathes kindness and constancy into her hair. And Jyn thinks, closing her eyes and resting them for the first time without the fear that loss and death will come for her, I have buried my family and I have found them again.