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The first thing he heard was the monotonous beep of a heart monitor, slowly speeding up as he came to full consciousness.
The first thing he realized was that he couldn’t move his arms or his legs.
“Easy!” said a voice. “Easy, easy. It’s not permanent. We had to give you a paralytic.”
He stared up at the strange face hovering over his. Twi'lek, he registered. He wasn’t a prisoner of the Empire, then.
Of course, that didn’t mean he was among friends, either.
“I couldn’t have you thrashing around and undoing all my hard work,” the Twi'lek went on.
He made a questioning noise.
“I had to brace your back to keep the spine immobile, remove your spleen and your appendix, set several ribs and vertebrae, and pump in a lot of synthblood. You’re not entirely out of the woods but you may be seeing daylight. Do you know where you are?”
Scarif, he thought, but no. That was where he’d been.
The last thing he remembered was kneeling on the beach, Jyn in his arms, holding onto her as his internal injuries and the shock wave of the boiling ocean raced each other to kill him first. And the burning point of her kyber crystal, pressed between them -
How he had gotten from there to here was a mystery he couldn’t even begin to solve.
Jyn. Where was Jyn? Dead? Somewhere else in this facility? He tried to look around but there was some kind of brace keeping his head immobilized. All he could see was a rough pourstone ceiling, pitted and stained with age, and some of the area around the foot of his bed. That wasn’t any more informational - just pourstone wall and a jumble of medical-supply crates, long expired if their labeling was anything to go by.
“You’re on Tamsye Prime,” the medic informed him.
Tamsye Prime, he thought. Why was that important? Why was that ringing the most distant of alarms?
When he tried to reach for it, pain burst in his midsection like a bomb, and a groan escaped his throat.
“Sorry, let’s get these meds dialed up.” A couple of clicks, and something cool began to spread through his veins from a spot in his elbow.
“What are you doing?” said a second voice. “She wanted to know when he woke up.”
“I’m checking him first.” A straw nudged at his mouth, and he instinctively jerked his head away. “It’s water,” the medic said.
He considered pulling away again, but his throat was dust-dry and a coughing fit might tear him open. And this medic didn’t seem the type to poison him after working so hard to put him back together. He accepted the drink, holding most of it in his mouth to trickle as gently as possible down his throat.
“Right away, she said.”
“I’ll comm her in a moment.”
The painkiller started to take effect, blurring the knife edges of the pain into spiky clouds. He thought about asking for it to get dialed down again. He didn’t like to be fuzzy. But he wasn’t sure he could form coherent words.
Jyn, he thought. Jyn.
A click and a buzz and the second voice said, “Yeah, he’s awake.”
“Kriff you,” said the medic.
“I’m not presenting my ass to be kicked along with yours,” said the second voice.
He lost time then, awareness blurring in and out until a door swished open. The mysterious Her.
“Everybody out,” said a voice. It had the mechanical edge of a vocoder, distorting it from original.
Shuffling and murmurs as people exited.
“Everybody means everybody,” said the vocoder’d voice.
“Kest - ” the medic said in a pleading voice.
“Do I have to say it again?”
A pause, and one last set of footsteps, and the hiss of the door.
He scrabbled through the clouds in his head to pull his thoughts together and work out what to do.
Was this Jyn?
The aggression tracked. But why would she be wearing a vocoder? Unless she was trying to disguise herself from whoever it was that had them.
“You awake?” said the voice, now clearly addressing him.
He let his eyelids flutter in confusion that wasn’t entirely feigned.
“I’m turning down your painkiller drip so you’re clearheaded enough to talk,” she went on. “Of course, that means the pain will come back, too. If I like what you have to say, I’ll turn your meds back up.”
No. It couldn’t be. Not talking to him like this.
He was pretty sure.
He waited long enough for the clouds to clear to the edges and then allowed his eyelids to slide open.
“Took you long enough,” said the voice.
She was staying to one side of his head, correctly guessing that with his neck braced, his field of vision was severely limited. Anything he could use to guess at age and species were disguised by the vocoder, of course. Gender, too, if he hadn’t heard the pronouns the medics used.
But he had the feeling that, like many inexperienced interrogators, this one was letting the vocoder do the work and didn’t realize the kind of information he could extract from what it left behind.
Like a Core accent, there in the syllabic emphasis, the rising and falling tones of the sentences.
Like -
No, it wasn’t her.
He didn’t think.
“What’s your name?”
He flicked through aliases like flimsicards. “Aach,” he managed. “Clem Aach.”
“Hmm. Where do you come from, Clem Aach?”
“Ogem,” he said. Mid-Rim, far enough away from Scarif so that if the Empire were searching for them - and the Empire had to be searching for them - it might throw these people off the scent.
“How did you get here?”
“Crash,” he said.
“Crashed in what? We didn’t find any wreckage. Anywhere. ”
He made a puzzled face, as if the lack of his entirely fictitious spacecraft was a surprise to him as well. “Crashed,” he said again.
Silence for a moment, as if she thought he might change his mind about that. He waited it out with the patience of one who used silence like a scalpel.
Soon, much sooner than he would have, she went on, “I was the one who found you. In a rock canyon just outside our perimeter.”
“Thank - you,” he managed. A little politeness sometimes went a long way, and if he played this right, they might think he was some gormless civilian in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“You were saying a name,” the voice said.
“I was?”
“That name is why I brought you back. You think we waste resources on every broken wreck of a being we find in the wastes? I want to know where you heard that name.”
“Don’t know,” he lied. “Maybe - delirious?” That was possibly not a lie. Given the extent of his injuries, and his lack of memory, he could have been delirious. He hoped he hadn’t dropped anything other than Jyn’s name.
Because who else would he have been calling out for?
“Handy,” the voice said.
Stalemate. He wasn’t willing to betray Jyn’s identity, she wasn’t willing to give him anything to go on.
And yet, his captor had already heard him. If he admitted to it, maybe they could get somewhere. Even if “somewhere” was knowing how he’d ended up here.
“Could - have - could have been ‘Jyn,’” he said.
Silence again. This time, calm and considering, like she was working out which of his fingers or toes to slice off first. “Jyn Erso,” she said.
Hells. He had said her full name. Maybe in response to someone. That wasn’t like him.
Reluctantly - “Maybe.”
The footsteps again, traversing the length of his bed. Slowly, his interrogator stepped into view.
It was Jyn.
And it wasn’t.
Her face was different - rounder in some parts, sharper in others. Her mouth was softer and fuller, most of the lines and shadows around her eyes missing, some scars vanished, only smooth skin in their place. And there was no recognition in her eyes as she looked at him. Just suspicion.
Her eyes cut to the heart monitor, whose high beeps matched the sudden galloping pace of his heart. “So you do know who I am,” she said.
He made a noise of partial assent, still staring dumbfounded. If the girl in front of him was a day older than sixteen, he’d walk into the nearest Imperial base and give himself up right now.
“Good,” she said. “We’ve got that out of the way.” She stepped out of his line of sight again, and he stared at the ceiling, trying to feel his way through a situation that had suddenly gotten a lot stranger - and it hadn’t been particularly normal in the first place.
Tamsye Prime.
Sixteen-year-old Jyn. Clearly not going by her original name, and not willing for anyone else to hear it, even in the Partisans - for that had to be who the others had been.
Impossible.
The dial of the medication clicked again, two times. Three. Downward, as there was no cool rush into his elbow again.
“Now,” she said very softly. “Who sent you?”
FINIS