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Some days just weren't worth the effort they required.
By the time Jyn made it into her AP Physics classroom -- just moments before the bell rang, which would have earned her a glare from Draven, had the old fart actually been in his own room -- she was just about ready to fake an illness and drive herself home.
But then she remembered Saw's disappointed face when he'd seen her score on the last Physics exam.
She couldn't afford to miss any more of this class, if she was going to do well enough to apply for a scholarship next year.
So she took her seat, alone in the far back corner of the room -- no one was brave enough to sit next to the angry daughter of Saw Gerrera.
Two men walked into the room just as the bell rang to signal the start of class. One of them was tall and burly, with a tangle of wild dark hair and a permanent scowl affixed to his face as he surveyed the room. He reminded her of a bear, in some strange way.
Jyn liked him immediately.
The other one was slim, with dark hair and a walking staff that he tapped impatiently against the floor while the chatter in the classroom died down.
“Good morning, class,” he said cheerfully -- far too cheerfully, for the way Jyn's day had been going -- turning to look everyone in the eye.
Some people gasped, some people giggled. Jyn simply raised her eyebrow at the man's cloudy white eyes.
He's blind.
“I am Chirrut, your substitute teacher for the day. Draven left a lab for you to complete in his absence. All the materials you need are on your tables, and…” he glanced down to consult the paper that Draven had left him
He's not really reading that, is he?
“...Oh, yes, this lab was designed to be done in pairs. What do you think, Baze?” He turned to the bear-man, a joking lilt to his voice. “Are they old enough to pick their own partners?”
Bear-man -- Baze, apparently -- grunted in what Jyn took as affirmation.
Apparently Chirrut agreed. “Come up and grab a lab paper once you have chosen your partners. If you can't find one, I can and will assign one to you.”
Jyn stayed in her seat while everyone else got up to go partner off with their friends.
She saw glances thrown her way, faces averted as soon as they met her flinty glare.
No one wanted to be partners with the daughter of Mad Dog Gerrera .
Jyn was just fine with that. She didn't want to be partners with anyone, not after the day she'd had.
Usually when this happened, Draven would have to break up one of the groups of three that inevitably formed and assign her a partner, who would grumble and glare before running back to her friends, leaving Jyn to compete the lab on her own.
(It wasn't doing it on her own that made Jyn want to snarl and grind her teeth. It was the fact that she did all the work to earn her grade and some bimbo was going to get the same grade for talking to her friends while Jyn did the lab for the both of them.)
But there were substitute teachers today. They didn't know how it usually worked. So she had an opportunity.
She did a quick head count. Twenty five students, not counting herself. Was someone absent?
There's that one kid, with the… blonde? Brown? Dark-ish hair. Dunno what he looks like, but he's the one who always spends the first twenty minutes of class in the bathroom doing Force knows what.
There were twenty-seven students in the class in total. No one was missing.
If she pulled this off, she could tell Draven that the subs had just let her work on her own. He wouldn't like it, but he would let it go rather than have to assign her another partner.
So she went up to the front of the classroom, past the snickers and barely audible comments of the other students.
(She'd stopped caring about what they thought years ago.)
“Mr. Imwe?” she asked, stepping up.
He looked right at her, with those disconcerting milky eyes, as if he could actually see her, “Chirrut, please, miss…”
“Jyn Erso,” Jyn replied. “My uh… my lab partner is absent today, so I was wondering if I could just do it on my own until they get back.”
Calm breathing. Fidget slightly. Absolute stillness is just as much a giveaway as incredible nervousness.
She was the only girl whose stepfather had taught her how to lie well enough to beat a polygraph test.
“Are you sure? You could always join up in a group of three,” he looked at her knowingly as he spoke, as if he knew the truth through her lie.
“I'd rather do it on my own,” she answered, honestly, and that seemed to appease him.
“Very well. You can ask Baze or myself if you need help on anything, but I really don't think you will.”
“Thanks,” Jyn muttered, taking her lab paper and making a hasty retreat to her seat in the back of the room.
The lab in and of itself wasn't that hard. Conservation of Mechanical Energy was a fairly simple concept to grasp.
She started to get into the rhythm of it -- she liked science, really she did, and she was good at Physics, it was just Draven's grading policy that made her struggle. The lab used a car on an incline, with a spring at the bottom, to measure mechanical energy; the first part of the lab had her adjusting the angle of the incline to see how that affected the mechanical energy of the car's movement.
She did run into a little bit of trouble by the time she got to part two, since it required her to change the gravitational potential energy of the earth-car system.
Thankfully, the bell rang before she had to go over to Chirrut and Baze and admit that she was too short to reach the top of the ramp.
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The next day, Jyn walked in exactly three and a half minutes after the bell rang.
Everyone else had gotten to work by the time she burst in, her backpack hanging off one shoulder, papers from her last class still clutched in her hands.
And it she couldn't even blame it on a Monday.
Chirrut and Baze were at the front of the room again -- she was glad for that; she liked them, liked the way they handled their classroom.
Cassian Andor was standing next to them, awkwardly shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“Ah, Jyn!” Chirrut called brightly -- far too brightly, for Jyn's peace of mind. “It's good to see you.”
(Okay, maybe Saw had made her a little paranoid.)
But any good will she might've harbored towards Chirrut disappeared when he said “Miss Erso was kind enough to start the lab for the two of you. You should be able to catch up fairly quickly, Mr. Andor.”
“Wait, what?” Jyn asked, her voice colored with disbelief.
“You did say that your partner was absent yesterday, did you not? Cassian here was the only student missing yesterday.”
Fucking shitballs of the Force.
She'd counted, hadn't she? Twenty-five kids not counting herself…
...and the kid in the bathroom whose hair she couldn't remember, the kid who had obviously not been in the bathroom when she counted.
This was worse. This was so, so much worse than having to work with one of the catty girls who would get Jyn's grade without doing any work.
She had Cassian Andor as her lab partner.
Fuck.
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They'd gone to the same elementary school, apparently. Jyn only vaguely remembered playing tag with him and his friends once or twice.
He'd always been nice, and polite, even when she was bossy.
(Jyn was often bossy, as a little girl.)
He'd disappeared when they entered middle school (went to a private school, apparently, rich sucker), and Jyn hadn't really been bothered. She'd had her best friend Maia, and the two of them had been social outcasts together. They laughed and made up stories and watched The Lord of the Rings even when everyone else told them it was boring and pointless.
Jyn's life was pretty good then. Her mother was dead, and her Papa gone, but she had Saw -- who had yet to lapse into the vaguely-present authoritarian figure he was to her now -- and Maia, and they were all she needed.
And then Maia's family moved to Canada for her father's work halfway through their eighth grade year.
Jyn's life went downhill after that. Saw had starting turning… strange, muttering to himself, hiding phone calls and letters from her.
Graduation was awful. Saw didn't show up and Jyn had no friends in her grade besides Maia. There was no one there.
(She felt like nothing, like less than nothing, when everyone had left the school and she was still sitting out front waiting for Saw to pick her up.)
High school, when it started the next year, was hell. Jyn had no one -- she ignored the people on her bus, choosing instead to stare out the window with her earbuds in and her music turned all the way up. She wore jeans and converse every day, and she did own a couple cute shirts, but it was mostly overwashed Avengers and AC/DC t-shirts.
There were other girls, with three-inch heels and flowing blouses and perfectly straightened hair and a huge group of friends that talked all class and never got any work done. Jyn tied her hair back in a bun every day, blared old music through her earbuds, got her work done on time or early, and spoke to no one.
(She'd never wanted to be one of those girls. She still didn't. She had to work hard at high school so that she could work hard at college so that she could work hard at graduate school so that she could do something with her big brain, something that would have made her dead parents proud.)
High School also heralded the return of Cassian Andor to the Yavin Public School System.
He wasn't a jock, or a “popular kid”, but everyone knew him. Everyone spoke to him, he was nice and polite and engaging to everyone…
Jyn saw him, getting off the bus in front of hers on the first day of their Freshman year. She already felt out of place, with her worn high tops and faded Back In Black album t-shirt, but he…
He…
He looked good , okay. He had a shirt and a pair of dark jeans on, and his dark hair was perfectly combed -- except for that one lock that fell over onto his forehead as he walked. He turned his face, as he entered the school, and Jyn got a glimpse of his jawline.
He's hot , her brain supplied.
She didn't know him. She vaguely knew his friend Bodhi Rook -- they'd been partnered on a series of projects at the end of eighth grade -- but she hadn't spoken to Cassian Andor since before third grade.
And yet, she was fairly certain she'd had a crush on him ever since that first day getting off the buses.
The problem was that everyone else did, too. Half of the girls and at least a quarter of the guys in the school had tried to hit on him at one point or another. Because he looked good , always, but also because he was sweet and kind and considerate and polite and funny and ridiculously, insanely smart.
(Jyn wondered, sometimes, if he wasn't quite so happy with his social standing as he seemed to be. If he tired of having fake people talk to him for fake reasons, because they wanted to hit on him or use his brain to get a good grade.)
(She thought he did, sometimes. She'd caught him in the cafeteria, once or twice, staring off into space while his friends laughed and joked around him. His warm, brown eyes had been heavy and sad.)
(He'd looked around, then, almost caught her staring. But she'd whipped her head around and walked out of the cafeteria before he could register that she'd been there at all.)
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Cassian's dark brown eyes were still looking at her in confusion as she tried desperatey to think up a reasonable excuse for her actions.
Fucking hell, Erso. Say something.