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Her feet tap against the floor, and it’s as if she can literally feel seconds slip through her fingers. Wasted seconds, made all the more obvious the longer the silence in this room drags on.
In those wasted seconds, Bix’s mind has drifted, well more than once, to the stolen freighter that’s currently sitting in the hangar. From the pieces of information she’s been able to put together (mechanics and engineers don’t get the kind of security clearance that would allow access to a full briefing), the pilot and crew had run into complications on the way back to base — they’d been tracked, the engine had sustained critical damage — and they’d been lucky to escape with their lives. Visual confirmation had corroborated, at least, the state of the engine; when she’d pulled off the panel, she’d had to spend at least five standard minutes waving smoke out of her face, until what most would call scrap had revealed itself to her.
Maybe it is scrap. But she’d refused to let the crew drag it away, and she’s been thinking about it ever since, especially now. It’s that, or focus on the bright lights and the intent eyes of the minder in front of her.
The minder, whose voice brings her crashing back into the moment she’d rather not inhabit.
“It seems like there’s something on your mind, Bix.”
There’s nothing unkind in that voice, nothing sneering or condescending like the ones that speak to her in her nightmares — but that’s the thing; she’s still having them every night, without fail. It doesn’t matter how safe she can convince herself she is, and it doesn’t matter that she knows, for a fact, that one of the primary subjects of them had been killed on Coruscant years ago, she’s still waking up drenched in sweat, with a heart that doesn’t stop pounding for what feels like hours.
Nothing that she has tried on her own has helped. And now —
She glances up reluctantly. With how tight her chest has gotten, it’s an effort to breathe.
“I don’t know why this hasn’t fixed anything.” It’s an effort to speak, too, through that; her voice is quiet, and even a few words wind her. Still, she presses on. “I’ve been talking to you for, what, two months? Nothing’s changed.”
More seconds slip through her fingers. Said fingers twitch and fidget, tug at a loose thread from the jacket sleeve draping over her — useless. They’re just useless, like the words she’s cast out into the silence.
At least if she’d stayed back with the engine that everyone else is calling scrap, she’d be using her hands, rather than just letting them sit, and she’d be working toward something. She’d be useful.
The minder’s shoulders visibly sag with the long breath that she exhales. She laces her fingers together, sets her chin on top of them as she leans over the surface of his desk.
“Not everything can be fixed.” The minder says this with the air that her father had once used, decades ago at this point, when he’d explained basics to her. There’s something that flares up in Bix at that — annoyance, anger — and she can’t quite temper it. “Some things just have to heal, and it’s a process.”
Who is this person to tell her what can or can’t be fixed? Has she ever even picked up a hydrospanner in her life? There aren’t any visible calluses on those fingers, so judging by that, Bix is reasonably confident in assuming that’s a no.
What a waste of her time.
She stands, then, without warning or otherwise, grabbing her jacket off the back of the chair and slipping it over her shoulders. The only pause in this process takes place when she says, in a voice she’s practically hanging by that loose thread on her sleeve to keep steady, “You’re wrong. Everything can be fixed. I’ll prove it.”
Whether there’s a response to that, she’ll never know; she wastes no more time before stepping through the doorway and back down the corridor, walking briskly and with single-minded purpose back to the hangar. Along the way, she bumps shoulders with a few people (inevitable, when the hallways are so narrow), and while on any other day she would check to make sure they’re all right, she has a job to do now.
A job to do, and momentum that she can’t afford to lose, when half an afternoon has already slipped away from her.
That single-minded purpose is kicked into high gear when the first sight that greets her when she reaches the hangar is, in fact, the engine that’s been occupying her mind — but said engine being dragged away by two of the younger members of the crew, boys who can’t be any older than eighteen standard years, at best.
“Hey!”
Her voice is loud and sharp, and its echo pierces her ears — or it would, if there wasn’t blood rushing into them. She surges forward, feet taking her there as quickly as they can carry her, until she’s finally noticed.
The movement of the engine comes to a stop with a loud creak, and then a thump as it’s set back down.
There’s a stitch in her side from the exertion, tight and painful with each breath, and it takes her a moment to catch it. (Another wasted moment.) When she glances up, she sees that the two boys have silently waited through it.
They’re waiting, still, for their orders, or for whatever else otherwise comes next. Which is —
“Did I say that was scrap?” Her eyes blaze, and her tone snaps with it. “You don’t move anything unless it’s cleared with me. Got it?”
Two sets of eyes widen, and two heads nod their furious understanding in response. “Yes, Sergeant Caleen,” is mumbled by two voices in unison, before two sets of feet quickly scurry away.
Maybe she’d been a little harsher than she’d intended to be — and there’s a twinge of guilt in her for that — but she’s not going to take the time to dwell on it. She’s not going to take the time for anything at all, except evaluating the problem at hand.
Folding her arms across her chest, she steps over to the engine that’s been left to her, and her alone. It’s not smoking anymore, so she gets a clear view of it, genuinely, for the first time. What she sees is a difficult situation, but not an impossible one; it’s completely singed in two of the corners, and some of the metal is already starting to corrode, but that’s all cosmetic, and can easily be smoothed over with new casing once the internal mechanisms are back online. Sure, she might’ve herself just junked this back at the salyard, because she would’ve lost more money on it than she’d have made and therefore it wouldn’t have made good business sense to invest the time, but profit isn’t her objective here; it’s a point.
And the sooner she makes that point, the more quickly she’ll find the sense of peace that has been eluding her. (Right? She has to be right. Everything that’s holding her up depends on that, and she doesn’t want to consider any other possibility.)
In any case, it’s time, she thinks, to put on her gloves and get to work.
Judging by the way she notes the shifts change around her, it takes hours just to work on the corrosion that’s spread its way all over the engine — long, hard hours that leave her arms sore and her back screaming in pain, from the way she’s had to bend. She can feel sweat dripping down her back and streaking on her face, and even tastes salt a few times when it gets into her mouth, but she’s hardly deterred by any of that; she simply wipes it away with the back of her glove, pushes sticky hair away from her forehead, and returns to work like nothing had even happened.
Eventually, though, she sees metal — dull, but metal all the same. That’s enough of an encouragement to bolster her along.
For the most part, everyone else in the hangar gives her a wide berth as she works, not daring to intrude on something that probably looks like a kind of manic frenzy. That suits Bix just fine; without chatter around her, she can better concentrate on what actually matters.
Of course, she doesn’t stay so lucky forever.
Cassian is the one to intrude first. He doesn’t actually say anything to announce his arrival, but she can pick out the particularly annoying pattern of his footsteps when he’s trying to be discreet, and the worry in his eyes practically radiates off of him without her even looking his way.
She doesn’t hear him move away, so she’s forced to the point of huffing out an irritated breath and glancing up from her work — where she finds, sure enough, silent but profound concern, which is something she has neither the time nor the patience for.
“If you come one step closer,” she tells him, brandishing the arc wrench in her hand, “this is going through your head.”
They have enough accumulated years of a shared history for Cassian to know that she’s serious, so he does end up raising his hands in surrender, backing off, and leaving her to it. (Though she can’t be sure he isn’t still lurking, because there are a couple of times when she swears she sees a glimpse of his retreating back in the far corner of the hangar before it’s gone, he at least continues to leave her alone.)
Jyn, on the other hand, doesn’t. She pushes more and pushes harder, appearing every so often to tell her that this is “fucking stupid bantha shit”, and even once gets as far as forcibly wrenching the electrodriver from her fingers. Which Bix, of course, promptly snatches back, and maybe she even snarls a little in the process, but she’s trying to make a point.
She’s working, and she won’t be disturbed. This can be fixed; all she has to do is keep at it.
And keep at it — and keep at it.
The day shift returns, and she wordlessly accepts the caf she’s offered, but doesn’t turn to offer any acknowledgement or so much as clock the identity of the person who’d offered it to her, because she’s at a critical point. If she makes this one adjustment, and she does it just right, she can get everything completely operational again. No, not just operational; it’ll function exactly like it had the first time it’d ever run. When that happens, she’ll have proven, beyond anyone’s doubts, that with a little stubbornness and patience both, anything can be fixed.
Tipping the cup up to her mouth, she takes one gulp of caf, and then drains most of its contents in the next. Though she’d known, at the periphery of awareness, that her energy and focus had started to get fuzzy from the complete lack of sleep, she has to be at her absolute sharpest when the moment of reckoning comes.
She turns only to set the empty cup aside and exchange her tools. After that, she only pauses for a single deep, focusing breath before bending over carefully, making the final adjustment.
If all goes well, it should sputter back to life.
That’s not what happens.
No, instead, it blows up in her face — literally. She barely has time to clear personnel from the area and get herself a safe distance away before all that’s left of the engine is unrecognizable pieces, before the thread that’s been holding her together has shattered.
She doesn’t know how much time passes as the crew rushes around her, extinguishing the last of the fire and removing the last of the pieces. All she can do is stand there, frozen and useless, just watching all of this happen, forced to accept the truth: there are things that can’t be fixed.
Like her.
The thought is a vise, choking her, even as she somehow manages the wherewithal to move. It’s autopilot, more than anything else, that directs her toward her quarters.
Once there, slumps onto the bunk, defeated, the defenses holding back the tears that’d been stinging in her eyes now completely worn away.
When she breaks down, she isn’t alone. And when she finally exhausts herself, drifting off into a dreamless sleep, she’s surrounded by beating hearts and warm, loving arms.
They don’t fix her, but maybe they help, a little. Maybe she can put her trust in that.
The following week, she ends her shift early, delegating the repair of the day to the engineer she thinks is least likely to somehow blow up the hangar while she’s gone, and walks down the corridor with purpose. With a speed that will have her walking through the door before she changes her mind.
At the sound of her steps, the minder looks up from her desk. There’s a glimpse of startle, maybe, at the sudden intrusion, but there’s no trace of surprise. It’s like she could’ve seen this coming, like she knows her better than Bix knows herself.
Maybe that’s exactly the kind of help she can put her trust in.
“I’m here to work,” Bix says, calm and firm. Resolute. “Even if I can’t fix it.”
Gesturing with a hand for her to take a seat across from the desk, the minder smiles.