Work Text:
Jyn Erso hadn't had many lovers in her life. When she was a young teen, Saw Gerrera would have personally killed anyone who laid a hand on her. Literally. And people knew it. After that, she flitted from place to place, never trusting anyone enough for a brief fling nor knowing anyone long enough for a genuine relationship. The nights she spent in other people's beds were usually pleasurable, often exciting, but they blurred together in her memory. No one ever helped her learn what she really wanted from sex. She'd never been in love. Never much felt the lack.
She hadn't known Cassian Andor very long. She didn't come to truly trust him until he put together the team that would go with her to Scarif. But before the end she knew: He would've been the one. Her next lover and her first love.
**
Cassian Andor was, by his nature, a romantic. Gentle, even—a fact that would've startled any of the Imperial operatives who had the misfortune to cross his path, had they lived long enough to hear it. He made himself into a ruthless man because that was what the galaxy needed. And ruthless men cannot give in to the temptation of love.
So he imagined countless affairs with some of the people who crossed his path in those final few years. Found people he wanted to take to bed, to make breakfast for in the morning, and plan out a future neither one of them could guarantee but both would risk feeling hope for. But he never went even as far as bed with most of them. To love was to leave your heart unshielded, and Cassian knew he couldn't afford to do that with a war on the horizon.
Leaving your heart unshielded around Jyn Erso was a bad idea. He knew that almost before he knew anything else about her. She wasn't a romantic in any sense of the word. Not the type to relish breakfast in bed. Still, before the end, he knew: She was the one he needed, the one he could never have let go.
**
If they'd survived the Battle at Scarif, they would've returned to the Yavin base just in time to be threatened by the Death Star yet again. Cassian wouldn't have gotten away with less than a broken collarbone, and while Jyn's one hell of a fighter she wouldn’t yet have been the nimblest pilot, not the way she would've been just a few months later. So they would've sat together in sickbay, a 21B droid fussing around, Jyn holding Cassian's good hand while they tried to find something to say, but failed. They would have looked into each other's eyes, breathing shallow and fast.
"I like it better when I can punch the thing that's trying to kill me," Jyn might've said.
Cassian would have laughed. "Finally. We have something in common."
They would’ve clung to each other, waiting for death until the moment cheers and screams and applause broke out through the entire base. Cassian's eyes would have met hers—both of them transfixed by an astonishment too great for joy—in the instant before she broke down in sobs.
And the moment when they fell in love would've been this one, when he knew without being told that she cried from the joy of knowing her father's sacrifice had saved them all. While the others whooped and celebrated all around them, he would have cradled her against his chest, ignoring the pain in his collarbone and the objections of the 21B. They would have begun the long process through which two souls intertwine forever.
**
The next day there was a medal ceremony. Instead of three honorees, there would have been five. Jyn and Cassian would've walked into the room behind the new recruit who fired the final shot at the target Galen Erso had prepared for him and the smuggler who'd wandered in from nowhere in time to save the princess and then the day. Also a Wookiee, who for whatever reason didn't want a medal. Cassian would've resented the smuggler's prominence, though not enough to ever say so. Jyn would've been too overcome with thoughts of her father to even notice that anyone other than Cassian stood beside her.
After the ceremony, Cassian would've packed his medal away for safekeeping. Jyn would promptly have lost hers, something he would never have stopped teasing her about. During the frantic evacuation to the new Rebel base, they would hardly have seen each other for several days.
On the day they found each other again, they would've become lovers.
No private bunks on the new base yet, so they'd have made do with a small transport and a pallet of blankets snatched from emergency storage. Jyn would've ridden him long and hard and good. Cassian would've kept kissing her, touching her, long after his own climax—until she finally had the kind of orgasm that lasts and lasts and explains why humans are fools for love. They would've held each other for hours afterward, too exhilarated to sleep and too infatuated to let go. Cassian would've felt as if his true self had finally been set free. Jyn would've been surprised to learn that her true self could feel like this about another human being. And for most of the following two months, they would've been together so much that others tried to make fun. The lovers would never would've noticed.
Even the most wonderful infatuation eventually settles. Wartime demands practicality. So soon Cassian would've gone back to his intelligence work, vanishing for weeks at a time, and unable to share what he'd been doing when he got back. He would've curled in Jyn's embrace, not speaking, clinging to her as he tried to convince himself that what he'd done had been for the best.
As for Jyn, she would've asked to help wherever the Rebellion could most use her, which would've led to piloting lessons. Her latent capabilities would've burst into bloom, taking her to the top of the class within mere months. She would've become known as Gold Seven, and the members of her squadron would've loved her like a sister.
The lull between major battles lasted for nearly three years, enough time for people to lose perspective. Jyn and Cassian would've come to notice small irritations about each other; they would even have had time enough to magnify those irritations all out of proportion.
Cassian would've become annoyed by Jyn's insistence on leaving a light on at night and by her odd, unconscious habit of naming everything she eats just before she begins eating it. The eightieth time she said, "Hengar fruit," he would actually have thrown his tray across the room. (In his defense, he would've had a headache at the time.) As for Jyn, she would've come to resent Cassian's refusal to identify her as his partner; what he saw as humility in the face of wartime's uncertainty, she would've taken as a lack of commitment. And the way he hums under his breath as he gets ready in the morning—it would be one thing if he hummed a tune, but he doesn't, just odd broken notes that can't be connected into any melody, and she wouldn't have been able to stand it.
Then the Battle of Hoth would've upset the dynamic between them yet again. At first it would've brought them back together more tightly than before; Jyn would've escaped from an Imperial walker only seconds before being crushed, and afterward Cassian would've held her for hours. Only the sound of her heart beating in her chest could've reassured him.
But then Jyn's newest confrontation with mortality would've driven her deeper within himself. The tumult within the Rebellion would've led Cassian to go on longer missions with even less word. Two months after Hoth, they would've had a terrible fight and broken up for what they believed to be for good.
He would've drunk an entire bottle of Mon Cala brandy and, in an unprecedented loss of personal dignity, would've cried in front of an extremely patient R2 droid. Jyn, more pragmatic, would've decided this was the time to see if her passing attraction to Princess Leia Organa might ever become something more.
(It wouldn't have. Jyn would've found out within days that Leia had fallen in love with another—with the smuggler, of all people—and resigned herself to defeat.)
But the war was in its final days, though they wouldn’t have known it yet.
When the discovery of a second Death Star was announced, Jyn would've been shaken to the core. Another of her father's creations—but this time, the Empire knew about the flaw he'd programmed and removed it. All the evil Galen Erso had been forced to do had been made manifest in the galaxy again, without any of the good he did to save them. After the briefing to the troops, Cassian would've found Jyn. Although by this point they wouldn't have spoken for four months, he would have known how she was hurting, and she would have accepted his embrace wordlessly. Both of them would have realized how deeply they knew each other, and remembered how much more that mattered than petty annoyances.
So, after the Battle of Endor, they would have found themselves among the dancing soldiers and drumming Ewoks. They would've danced with the rest until slipping off to find a soft place beneath the ferns. There they would have made love again with more intensity than ever before, knowing that this time, they were joined for life.
**
The possibilities become foggier after that. Their commitment ceremony soon afterward would've been likely, but not certain. Imperial uprisings through the Battle of Jakku could have killed either or both of them, or simply have separated them for such long times than their marriage, or at least its ultimate fate, are harder to predict. In the fullness of time, there might well have been a daughter, who would've been named Galena.
But would they have settled on a peaceable world in the New Republic and found out what kinds of people they might be in a galaxy at peace? Or would Cassian have continued intelligence work, forever digging at the remnants of the Empire until he brought the First Order to light years before anyone would otherwise have known? He might've been the one to save the galaxy from the second great war. Or perhaps Jyn would've chafed at normality and legality. Most people's idea of peace resembled her idea of boredom. She might have sought trouble, or caused it.
There's a possibility Galena would've become a scientist like the grandfather she never met.
Or maybe she'd have been a dancer, an artist, one who disdained politics as dull and pointless.
Or would she have flown an X-wing with the kind of finesse her parents could only have dreamed of?
No one can say. Galena Andor Erso was never even a fully envisioned idea in the minds of the people who might have been her parents. She was only a possibility, one among millions.
The closest Galena ever came to existing was in the final minute of Cassian Andor's life. He wrapped his arms around Jyn, partly out of affection for her—but more because he knew he was going to die, that these were his last seconds and he didn't want to spend them alone and afraid. Better to give what comfort he could, and take what little there was to have.
While he held Jyn close, Cassian wondered, What might we have been? And maybe a hazy vision of Galena danced in his mind for an instant, before the fire boiled away the sea.
Jyn never imagined Galena at all. As she clung to Cassian, and the steam rising from the ocean cast a haze across the horizon, she looked at the hell her father had wrought against his will and knew why it was evil. She knew it more fully than anyone else on Scarif did, even more than her father had.
Every soul creates its own world. With the loss of each soul, that world dies. All the worlds that might have come to life in her, in Cassian, in Bodhi and Chirrut and Baze and even maybe Kaytoo, if droids have souls—they were burning away to nothing.
Turning to ash, like Scarif itself.
What might we have been?
Then the all-consuming fires came closer. Jyn tightened her embrace around Cassian and closed her eyes against the fast-approaching light.
FINIS