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Always, when wanderlust crawls through her veins again, when she feels the compulsion of running, of flying, and never looking back, she finds herself here, in this pristine hall of alabaster and its cool marble busts and pretends to have no existence outside of this chamber, though several meters away, politicians are most certainly in session and quarreling over their new republic. She knows she shouldn't be skulking around the Senate building, trying to secure an appointment with Aris or Mothma or Organa or some other Rebel politician over her future (she just wants somewhere safe and quiet and comfortable to live out her life, if she's quite honest) and courage failing her every time those wood-paneled doors burst open on the lavish silks and velvets and jewels beyond the door.
She shouldn't be wandering the atrium where every surface is a tribute to the heroes of the Republic. She knows, but she troops through the halls anyways, the guards alternately ignoring the unlikely criminal-turned-hero or else staring at her with undisguisedly nosy intrigue. Jyn was never meant to survive the mission; it was pure luck and the expertise gained from her fifteen years of fleeing and laying low and merely surviving on a level near-primitive that she is alive right now at all, and now that she's lived despite all.
Mothma and Aris and Organa and the rest have no clue what to do with her, daughter of a notable, notorious scientist kidnapped to work on the Death Star, an agent they recruited for built-in deniability, the woman with a checkered past, countless assaults, robberies, and forgeries in the records. What will become of me now? she wonders privately. They had no use for a petty criminal who was meant to be disposable, and now that the war was over and said offender is alive...
Her feet carry her down the hall, her boots clanking unnaturally loudly, with none of the clipping grace of that of the genteel, and not for the first time, Jyn feels distinctly uncomfortable here in her ragged trousers and tunics, though she continues on down the path anyway. There's one statue here that fascinates her above all others that she longs to see again, a new addition after several yelling matches that even she has heard.
"He was a villain and all but became one of them, and deserved to have died when Skywalker blew up the Death Star," someone would rage vehemently, pointing out his many flaws, human flaws, Jyn thinks.
The others countered, "Without him in a high position providing clearances and information to our spies, we would have died on Yavin IV. He is a martyr for our cause."
She cares nothing for political technicalities, though she is grateful that Mothma had the last word and insisted upon a marble carving of his bust to grace the Senate Atrium. Never has she ever seen such an arresting figure, despite his marble flesh, one that her fascination with had stemmed from the connection... kinship, her mind supplies her, that she feels for the man, the both of them agents to be used as the Rebellion had pleased, before being discarded in one case, and almost discarded in the other. She stops in front of him, fingers reaching up to feel the grooves in the metal plaque that spelled out his name in Aurebesh beneath the bust.
"Orson Krennic," she reads aloud, her voice, as hushed as it was, flowing down the atrium in a series of echoes. She looks to his face, immortalized in the effigy, and as always, it runs a shock through her. Jyn notes how his marble countenance looks so severe, ponders the contrast between his glower against the benevolent visage of other heroes whose legacies are cemented in this hall- the wisdom Yoda exuded, the kindly intelligence on the faces of Bail and Breha Organa, the defiance and determination in the posture of Padmé Amidala. She gazes at him, raising a finger up to caress almost lovingly his worn and weathered cheeks, tracing the line of his furrowed brow, down the bridge of his long, thin, nose, a ghostly touch patterning down the cold lips, before sliding her hand down to gently cup his chin with the very tips of her fingers.
It's his eyes she is unsatisfied with; the stone blank and vacant, and truly at odds with the fierce sulleness of the rest of him, capturing none of the energy she often imagines he would have, menacing and dark and subtle and feline. She fancies his eyes blue, blue like the very edges of the Hoth sky and just as cold. She imagines his eyes cruelly glowing like a blade, his gaze twice as sharp.
She wonders what those eyes saw, and her mind supplies her with colors. Dirty gray of a piss-poor Outer Rim planet. Earthy browns and greens and oranges of the Rebel Alliance. Black and white of a pristine Imperial Academy. Menacing shadows of a Death Star. A bright burst of scarlet flames.
Impulsively (Jyn was always impetuous, always acted on instinct), she reaches up her free hand to rest over the blankly staring marble eyes, hiding them from her sight. Jyn presses her lips together, studying his face in the type of thrall- the marvel of something beautiful, but deadly- that she'd reserved for the first time she laid her eyes upon the Death Star(Jyn's first thought was that it looked like a moon, like a glowing pearl against the inky darkness of space). Without having ever met him, she knows Krennic is the same, knows it in her heart and mind that he would be as brilliant as a burning planet.
She was defiant, she was destructive, and she acted in the moment with little forethought when she leaned forward. One hand is covering his eyes, the other hand's fingertips resting on his chin. Jyn Erso presses her own lips, warm and red, to the cold and pallid marble ones of Orson Krennic.