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“I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I'm afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I'd take to bleeding inwardly.
- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
-----
Blaster fire rings out in every direction, too fast and too many to know where the shots come from or where they land. Smoke fills the air and finds its way into her lungs, adding a thick block to her already shallow breaths. Through coughs and shouts, Jyn knows they’re in over their heads. They’ve lost the advantage of surprise. Troopers storm the field. They were already outnumbered, and now they’re overpowered.
“Everyone back to the ship!”
The team retreats as much as they can, gaining mere inches on the unforgiving turf of this rocky planet. Cassian is too far away. Jyn sees him across the field, taking the same onslaught she is. She prefers fighting by his side, at each other’s back. Since their bodies had first collided on Scarif, those years ago, it was as if a string, a bond of some sort had latched between them, keeping them connected no matter how far away they were. Now it felt taut, like it was about to break, ripping them both in the process. She feels it tremor, a warning, and turns toward him in time to see him go down, a round of blaster fire hitting his body.
The band snaps and sends her reeling. She runs towards him immediately, willing the string to reattach. Her eyes lock onto his, begging them to stay open as her feet pound against the dirt.
Too many troopers stand between them. She can’t possibly take them all down. A piece of her realizes that, but no part of her cares. She’ll reach him, whatever the cost.
“Jyn no!” Hands grab at her, pull her back to the ship and away from where Cassian lies. She recognizes them, knows they’re friendly. But they’re an obstacle between her and him so she throws them off and runs.
She takes a hit from a trooper, but keeps going until her chest collides with something hard. Metal arms pull her back now, with a grip she can’t break no matter how much she thrashes.
It’s Kay, dragging her back to the ship, making her leave Cassian behind. She could kill him. He must read it on her face.
“I’m following orders,” Kay tells her.
“Kriff orders, it’s Cassian,” she screams at him. She knows it’s not possible for a droid, but his face looks distraught, his eyes dimmer.
“They’re Cassian’s orders.”
In the end, he has to knock her out to get her back to the ship.
For a moment, when she first wakes, she doesn’t remember. For just a moment, she lives in a serene darkness, a place just on the verge of unconsciousness, a place of unknowing, a place of peace. It’s the last moment of contentment she’ll know.
As her eyes blink against the blinding white of the med bay, the knowledge hits her harder than the blaster fire she took. The image of Cassian, his body falling to the ground, plays in slow motion, over and over and over in her mind. She bolts up, whipping off the lines connected to her body and sending her machines whirring. Familiar human hands once again find her shoulders and push her down, as a mechanical voice gives medical instructions. It’s the softer voice that she latches onto instead.
“It’s okay, Jyn, you’re okay, You’re safe,” Bodhi whispers, repeating the words so many times they start to meld together. She doesn’t care about them. She knows she’s safe, she’s not worried about herself.
“Cassian?” she asks him hoarsely, the name a plea on her lips. She knows the answer, can feel it in the gaping hole in her own chest, but she asks anyways because it’s Cassian - she has to hope.
Bodhi bites his cheek as he looks down at the ground. He takes a steadying breath and finally meets her gaze.
“He - he’s gone, Jyn. Kay analyzed the shots to be sure. We tried to get to him anyways, I tried to bring the ship back to find him, to bring him home but we couldn’t do it. We… we had to leave him,” his voice is laced with every bit of guilt and pain she feels. She knows he’s telling the truth, knows how hard he would have tried, but still she wants to be angry at him. To be able to yell about not going back. But she can’t do that. Because he was right. And Cassian would have done the same.
So instead she closes her eyes, and pushes it all away - the sound of Bodhi’s breathing, uneven even now long after the battle has ended, the feel of his hands on the bed next to her, two fingers brushing against her own, timid in the comfort they want to provide. Instead she focuses on the darkness of her eyelids and tries to reconstruct the cavern that once held all the pain she’s feeling now, the dark bunker that kept her safe, that kept her alive. It refuses to be rebuilt, having been ripped open by the very person whose loss she needs protection from.
The rebellion grounds her, claiming it’s medical rest, mandatory after the hit she took, but she knows it’s more than that. Her and Cassian may not have announced their relationship to the rebellion, but they never hid it either. They must think they’re doing her a favor, giving her time to mourn and pull herself together. They’re not. The last thing she needs is time to think, alone on the base that was only home when he was there.
She spends her free days restless, searching for the bond, tugging at it, hoping if she pulls hard enough she can drag him back. She can’t. He does not show up two days later on a stolen ship, moments from death but wondrously alive. Rebels don’t free him from a prison in the midst of a random mission, luck alone being his only savior. No far-flung miracle dream comes true. They never even recover his body. She’s not sure they ever tried.
They release her from the med day a few days after she wakes, with the message that she needs more rest in her own quarters. But her quarters weren’t her own, and she can’t face the emptiness of them now. So instead she wanders the base, feet pounding until exhaustion overtakes her where she stands. She spends days at a time awake, always searching out some kind of motion, before crashing against training mats or curled up in unused ships. The first few times it happens, she wakes up in a cocoon of blankets, with Bodhi slung uncomfortably on his chair beside her, fast asleep. She’s never sure if he’s the one who finds her, or if others just know to seek him out. One day she wakes to shuffling, the zipping of a bag. She blinks her eyes open, peering over the blue gingham of a blanket to find Bodhi packing up. He smiles at her tentatively when his soft wide eyes meet her own.
“I have to report in a few minutes, we leave within the hour,” he whispers, seeing sleep still resting heavy on her lashes.
“We?”
“My new squadron. Since we don’t have a- I’ve been assigned to a new immediate superior officer now that Cassian’s... now that he’s gone.”
“No forced grounding for you?”
“I didn’t take as hard of a hit as you did,” he murmurs, and she wonders if he intends the double meaning. He hesitates for a few moments, searching her face before pushing ahead. “Take the time, Jyn. You’re allowed to miss him. It doesn’t make you, I don’t know, weak or vulnerable or anything less than the person you are.”
Jyn just shakes her head, but knows better now than to leave it at that.
“Be safe, Bodhi.”
That night her pacing leads her right to their door. It was the very place she has been avoiding, but her body took advantage of her mind’s distraction in order to conduct its betrayal - her feet following the path they had walked so many times before - slow, heavy steps when she was half-dead from exhaustion, quick cadences as she returned home to him, and silent tip toes as they snuck back amid other duties, shadowing the pair that would soon sweep them off the floor. She pauses at the door, steeling herself before she allows her hand to reach up and open it.
The room is exactly as they had left it that morning, before heading on the mission that had gone so wrong. Cassian’s datapad lies on the desk beside the door, the chair still angled from when he had pulled it out to sit. Pieces of her clothing lay strewn around the room, and Cassian’s blue parka sits folded neatly across the foot of their bed.
She crosses the room to bring the worn jacket to her face, burying her nose into the soft fur at the hood. It still smells like him, and she gasps at the vivid reminder that he once stood in this room, in this jacket, still so very much alive. She wraps the blue fabric around her, willing it to transform into armor. Not the plastoid composite she had once donned while undercover, but something much stronger. Something that carries beneath her weary body to the heart and soul that lies within. An armor that protects her in a way even her thick skin couldn’t. The best she can find is a numbness, so she wraps that around herself as well.
The next morning she marches into the council room with the jacket still around her shoulders, bypassing her previous superior officers for Princess Leia herself.
“I’m ready to go back in the field, ma’am,” Jyn tells her, her hard green eyes meeting brown ones that burn as warmly as hers are cool.
“Have you been cleared by the med bay,” the princess asks, unrumpled by Jyn’s bluntness.
“We both know that’s not the issue,” Jyn remarks, keeping her voice level. “I’m ready.”
Leia studies her for a minute, and Jyn sees something change in her countenance. It’s not pity or doubt, but a knowing few people could understand.
“Pathfinders are heading out today, check in with Sergeant Dameron.” With a quick nod, Jyn is dismissed.
She throws herself back into the rebellion, the way she once had with her own survival. This is a new distraction, but the concept is the same - keep fighting and moving so there’s never time to think about what’s behind her, to dwell on what she’s lost. Her life from that moment is once more a blur of mission details and vital intel, shouted commands and blaster fire, blood on her hands and the taste of iron in her mouth.
---
A familiar voice and the clunk of metal shakes her from the haze she had tried to drown herself in.
“Jyn Erso,” Kay states when he sees her. Like her and Bodhi, he had been reassigned to a new partner. She wondered who had argued more about the change, Kay or the new captain.
She nods at him once, intent on pushing forward at the pace she has established, but the sight of him snaps something in her, and instead she turns back and corners him in an empty hangar bay.
“What orders?” she demands from the droid. Maybe it’s pointless to even ask, because how could the answer change anything? But she needs to know what Cassian had said to Kay to make him leave his friend behind. Kay turns to her, and she knows he doesn’t need her to specify further.
“As I told you, they were Cassian’s,” Kay responds. “They were given some time ago, but as far as my records show were still in effect.”
“What do you mean Kay?” Jyn asks, too weary to be frustrated with the droid the way she normally was.
“They were issued on Yavin IV, before we departed for the Scarif mission. Cassian informed me that I was to be there for you, and make sure you were able to carry on your mission if he were to fall in battle. His orders never specified which mission, or which battle, so naturally the order extended to every mission and battle since then,” the words are succinct and clear, but Jyn can hear the slight tremor on the word fall.
“It’s been years, things might have changed in that time, Kay. You could have let me go to him, you could have let me try,” her voice cracks, and she feels as desperate as she was those months ago, the moment she first saw him fall. Kay responds with the same practiced logic he did then.
“The probability of Cassian rescinding such orders was highly unlikely. On the contrary, his desire to protect you had only increased since then,” he tells her. He hesitates, something he’s never done before, and it causes Jyn to do the same. Then he adds, with more feeling than she knew a droid could express, “As has my own.”
That drains any other words from her mouth. As she moves to leave the droid sighs, a heavy grating sound.
“I wanted to go after him too, Jyn Erso. His survival from such a hit was an impossible scenario, but I still wanted it to be true.”
“I know Kay,” she tells him with no trace of bitterness. “You were a good friend to him.”
“The order still stands. I’ll be there for you Jyn, now that Cassian cannot be.”
She smiles at him then, her throat tight, and turns away before either one of them can say anything more. Of course it would be his stupid droid that would finally break through to her, she thinks as she hears his retreat echo through the hangar.
After months of numbness, emotion finally finds it way back to her. The awful pain, the sadness, the reason she clung so tightly to the stupor in the first place.
Beneath it all though is something she never expected. Something she clings to now instead. Gratitude she might call it. For all the time they had together, for being with him in some way in that last moment.
He had told her once, as they laid tangled together in the safety of darkness on a cold night on Hoth, he told her what she already knew. What she herself had believed. He told her he had thought he would die alone, for the cause, surrounded by enemies. That no one would miss him, except maybe Kay. That no one would care. That he would fade into the depths of history - unknown and unremembered. He had accepted it long ago. But now, he had whispered to her, his breath tickling her cheek, now things were different. Now he had her. Now he had something tangible to fight for. Something he could hold in his arms.
She wonders now, if that had changed anything in the end. He had died on a mission surrounded by enemies. He had laid down his life for the cause he still believed in so fervently. But, at least, he had not been alone. She could not reach him, could not grasp his hand or whisper in his ear. But he had known she was there. He had seen her. His eyes locked on to hers in that final moment, and she had watched as the warmth had slowly left them. She must have been the last thing he saw. She hoped it was a comfort to him. She tried to let it be a comfort to herself. She knew him and she would remember him.
The war continues on, and she throws herself back into it, but with a purpose and clarity once again. She fights on for him, for herself, for those beside her and those who will come after. This had been their fight, one he had helped her find her way back to. And if he couldn’t see it to the end, she would for both of them. At least, as close to the end as she could get.
----
Brightness blinds her as she looks up to the sky, and soon the sun is eclipsed by a shadow too large to be anything natural. Tilting her head back until her neck aches, Jyn sees the star destroyer start its descent towards Jakku, coming down too fast and hard for her to ever get out of its path. She knows it means the end for her. But more importantly, she knows it means the end of the war. If the star destroyer is falling, then the last remnants of the Empire fall with it. A half-hearted smile tugs at her lips, one that her face has worn before. With the sand beneath her knees, and fallen soldiers surrounding her, the view isn’t much different from Scarif after all. She accepts the illusion, closing her eyes to imagine his arms around her. She wonders what he would say in this moment, now that they had the chance to know each other in the way they could only wish for on the day they had thought was their last.
In the end, she’s not sure what it is that kills her - the crash of the ship or the blaster pointed by a desperate trooper. Whatever it is, she doesn’t feel it. Instead all her body registers is a knotting in her heart that used to be so familiar. It weaves its way into her, pumping through her body with the last of her blood. With her final heartbeat, she feels it tug, this time pulling her in an indiscernible direction until finally she feels him again. Cassian is there, coming back for her once more.
The bond is stronger now, and she knows it will never be broken.