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In case you were wondering, this is how Jyn Erso feels about love.
There’s not much to be said, actually, because when she thinks about it, she hurts. And survival instincts have bred her to fight hurt. Saw tells her to press wounds until they bleed and then seal them up, and move on. The first time she tries this, she screams in agony, and he has to take several breaths from his respirator before he can reprimand her. She’s rocking back and forth, tears in her eyes, cradling her arm and glaring at him with all the anger she can muster. “You think I told you to hurt yourself?” he says. “No! I told you to heal yourself! Try again.”
So she does, and she screams again, and bites so hard into her lip that she tastes salt for hours. By the third time, she’s learned to keep it to a groan. The fifth time she does it, she grits her teeth and chips a molar. Then she wraps the gaping cut in her forearm, stands up, and looks him in the eye. It’s always difficult for her to tell what he’s thinking. The expression on his face can be as mundane or fearsome as any other.
He leaves her be. She finds it’s near impossible for her to bend her arm, but she goes back to work anyway. She plays sabacc with some of the older recruits during mealtime. Reaching across the board sends a jolt up to her shoulder, but she ignores it, and turns her squeak of pain into a sound of protest at her opponent’s next move. “No way am I letting you have that one,” she says indignantly, and tugs down her sleeve to cover the pale edge of her hastily arranged bandage.
Three years later, she’s on the streets when she ends up on the wrong end of a blaster. The bolt strikes her shoulder and she chokes out a curse, and runs before she can think to do anything else; she doesn’t trust herself to do much of anything other than get far, far away. This works. When she ducks into the alcove between two buildings, the wound is sizzling and sinking deep into her flesh. Some horrid, acrid scent reaches her nose, and she bites down on the scarf she's scavenged. She does this until her jaw aches and she's managed to shove down any revulsion roiling in her stomach, and then she reaches over and pokes tentatively around her shoulder. It's cauterized, which means no blood, which means everything is different. She sits and tries moving the muscle a few different ways, and very nearly passes out. At this point she decides she's better off getting some sleep.
As she's drifting off, and the chill is stinging her skin where the blaster burned through her clothes, she thinks, This is Saw’s fault.
Does she love him?
Sixteen-year-old Jyn says no.
No, she thinks, gnawing on the collar of her oversized vest, he can pilot a piece of blockade bait straight into a black hole for all she cares, because he's left her. It's as simple as that, even though it seems like it should be more complicated, because they are two complicated people living complicated lives. But the answer, to her, is as clear-cut as anything. He's left her with a few weapons and advice better served to a battle-ready recruit than a frightened child. Of course she doesn't love him, because after what he's done to her, how could he possibly love her at all?
And that’s what love is all about, isn’t it? Equal exchange. If he doesn’t love her, she’s not obliged to give him another thought. She’s going to live for herself, she thinks, and it doesn’t matter what he wants for her. He’s made his decision and so has she.
When she thinks about it, she hurts. The burn on her shoulder is still hissing softly in the chilled air, and she pulls her knees to her chest and leans her head against ragged layers of stone, disappearing into the niche she’s made for herself. And she doesn’t think about him. She doesn’t.
He’s made his decision and so have I. He’s made his decision and so have I. He’s made his decision and—
She’s learned a few things after living with him for eight-odd years. Here are three things Jyn Erso knows from Saw Gerrera:
- Crossfire is just as dangerous, if not moreso, than being shot at. You don’t expect the blaster bolts to come for you and when they do, it’s because you aren’t prepared, so you have no one to blame but yourself.
- Trust is only earned by way of judgment. If someone is a fickle judge, you may have to earn and re-earn their trust, over and over again, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
- Fear is something to be listened to, not pushed down or eradicated. If you are afraid, there is a reason, and it may be one that saves your life.
The thing about fear is that she can never simply feel it; no, she has to feel it with the weight of the memory of the monsters that come out of the mist, her mother’s body crumpling to the dirt, the wind that rips at her limbs and hair even as she runs because she can do nothing else—
“Jyn,” someone says, and it’s not Saw’s voice, not Saw’s hands that wrap around her forearms and pull her to her feet, and—why is she on her knees? The room is shaking and the ceiling shudders and she’s reaching out for Saw, even though she doesn’t know why, because he doesn’t love her, does he? And I don’t love him. “Please,” she says, “please—come with us, we can get you out, please—”
I don’t love you, but I don’t want you to die. Isn’t that love, then?
Love is the way her vision blurs when she hears her father’s voice, even though she had promised herself he was dead, that he had been killed along with her mother in that empty field. It’s the knot that builds in her chest until her heart is rattling her ribcage and dust is raining down around them. It’s the way she reaches out for Saw.
“Save the Rebellion!” he screams after them, and this is when she imagines the tears start to fall, but instead she stumbles blindly through the tunnels until the U-wing’s ramp is under her feet, and then she trips and scrapes her knees on the crafted floor. She’s up again before she knows what’s happening, pressed to the window, drag pulling at every molecule of her body as if there is some inherent gravity calling her back home.
This place is not home.
The shockwave hits. She doesn’t see the fortress crumble, but she knows when it does. And then something like shock hits her and she sits down, hard, wrapping her hands around the ship’s netting for support and digging her fingernails into her palms until they bleed. This time, she doesn’t scream. She doesn’t groan, or grit her teeth. Hyperspace erupts around them and she feels so numb that she fears the drag really has gotten to her, that it’s detached each and every molecule in her body. Blood seeps down her fingers and soaks into the netting, but it doesn’t matter, because she cannot feel.
Since then, Jyn Erso’s had a few ideas about love.
She hasn’t gotten much time to think about them. They’re more sensations than ideas; small things, little feelings that creep up on her and refuse to give themselves a name. Sometimes they strike her so hard that she sees stars. Other times they rise out of nowhere as a dull ache, the blunt edge of something prodding at her side. And when this happens she chokes them back because it’s not the right time—it’s never the right time—it’s far from her largest problem when she’s dodging blaster bolts.
(Love is just as dangerous, if not moreso, than being shot at. You don’t expect it to come for you and when it does, it’s because you aren’t prepared, so you have no one to blame but yourself.)
The stormtroopers that arrest her don't shoot to kill, but for all the expression across their blankly polished masks, they might as well be. Cassian has a blaster that she knows doubles as a defensive measure and a cautionary one; that is to say, he knows which setting it’s on. She watches it, hanging at his side, and rubs her thumb over the slimmer barrel that weighs heavy in her palms.
Shooting people isn't in her nature. She shoots stormtroopers without a second thought because they, like the monsters, are faceless and nameless. She cocks her blaster at potential aggressors who don't know where to draw the line. But as hair-trigger as she feels, there is resistance in every iota of her body. Saw Gerrera did not raise a killer.
What does it matter who Saw Gerrera raised?
Saw Gerrera raised a daughter who clung to her father in his final moments, who weathered the storm around her to say goodbye. No, I don't want to say goodbye, we've only just met again—the hands that close around her shoulders and drag her upright feel familiar, dreamlike. Protests bubble up in her threat but they die before they reach her lips, laying dry on her tongue, sinking into the soft flesh of her mouth. Maybe she cries. Maybe she doesn't. She can't remember. All she knows is that Cassian is able to pull her away, and that means she wasn't holding tightly enough.
Love is not taking the shot.
When they return to the U-wing, drenched and dazed, she can hardly bring herself to look at him. He, who looked down the barrel of his rifle at the man she convinced herself was dead. He, whose finger rested on the trigger as if it belonged there. He, who had looked into her eyes and lied with such conviction she had almost convinced herself. When she does get up, she's shaking, fighting the ringing in her ears, so sickeningly tempted to go for the blaster at her side and demand to know who else is lying, who else is setting me up, who else wants to pretend they're an open book?
He doesn't take the shot. But that doesn't change anything. It changes nothing. (It changes everything.)
They're so close in that moment and her heart is still pounding, hair pressed flat to her skull, shedding rainwater onto the ship’s uneven floor. Something screams faintly at the back of her mind, but in an instant every impulse that pulls at her flickers and dies. And she doesn't go for the blaster. She never would have gone for the blaster.
You're not the only one who's lost everything. She wants to say, what the hell does that mean? But she knows without having to think. It's easy to find scars on people where the Empire has ripped part of their lives away.
She doesn't pity him. But she knows.
The first time Jyn Erso meets Cassian Andor, she's in shackles, and he's asking her questions she doesn't know how to answer. This isn't the first time this has happened. She knows all the traits of an interrogation: no-holds-barred, personal inquiries, looking into her records as if knowing her criminal history makes them omniscient. It's a tired routine and she's on a planet far from home—she thinks, is Jedha really the closest thing she has to home?—and she can feel a bruise throbbing on her collarbone where the droid had snatched her up. Her fingers twitch, and she wants to press on it, to squeeze the pain up and out of her skin. She holds.
The second time Jyn Erso meets Cassian Andor, he's soaked and wild-eyed and confronting her, casting a shadow larger than his lithe frame. His words rasp in his throat when he speaks, like he's only just now remembered he can use his voice. She wants to grab him by the shoulders. She wants him to look beyond the girl who’s lost her father, beyond the miscreant taken into Alliance custody—to what, though? That's all she is, isn't she?
The third time Jyn Erso meets Cassian Andor, he welcomes her home.
The fourth time Jyn Erso meets Cassian Andor, they're all that’s left.
What is love, exactly?
Love is “little sister.” Love is linking hands. Love is listening to someone you've never thought of as remarkable. Love is leading the charge. Love is freezing up. Love is taking the shot. Love is the brace that holds you back from lashing out. Love is the pitfall that hits when you realize exactly what's happened, and how it's going to end.
Love is closing your eyes before it happens.
She's a full head shorter than he is, which means that when he leans on her, she has to lock her knees to keep from sliding to the ground. They take the elevator down. His forehead rests on hers, and their breaths intermingle in the humid air, tangling in the space between their open mouths. Her words have dried up somewhere before her throat. Something is stabbing into her leg, a persistent sensation that forces her to limp as she walks. At sixteen she’d have been cursing with every step, vowing revenge on the perpetrator, scavenging for shelter with the desperation of a wounded animal. She can't exactly recall when pain stopped mattering to her.
Walking over sand is even harder. It shifts under her feet and a few times she trips and almost falls, but he reaches over to steady her with a hand on her shoulder. They find a place the tide has not yet reached. This is when her knees hit the ground. They sit there, on the white shores of Scarif, catching their breath and looking out on the water. Her hand hovers over her thigh, and then she shifts it to rest on his. He links his fingers with hers. His palm is soft and dry.
"Your father would be proud, Jyn," he says.
The shockwave hits. It's the light that reaches them first. It splits the sky and flashes wildly over the ocean, followed by a monstrous rattle that grips the planet’s core. The sound is like a crack of thunder. They can feel the crust groan and break apart, and then the vibrations wash over them as the planet uproots itself. And despite the chaos that hits miles away from them, all she can feel is a gentle breeze as she rests against Cassian’s shoulder, clinging to his hand. Damp with sweat and ocean spray, if she closes her eyes against the glow, she can pretend they’re on a beach anywhere in the galaxy.
Here are three things Jyn Erso knows in this moment:
- The mission is over.
- Cassian is warm.
- They’re going to die.
They hold each other. With her knees sinking into the sand, she can just barely glimpse the coast over his shoulder, but she chooses to concentrate on Cassian's body against hers. She can feel him shaking, and violent tremors grip her from the inside out, and she grips him harder as if he can anchor her to the ground. A knot builds in her throat and blurs her gaze, but she won't cry. Not now. The mission is over, she thinks. He is warm and alive and she is breathing—in, out—and they are safe, here, in this moment.
In case you were wondering, this is how Jyn Erso feels about love.
She doesn't think about it, so it doesn't hurt.