Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jyn is four years old when it appears on the inside of her left arm: a long, twisting tangle of flowing lines and blocky symbols. They run along her bicep, dip in the crook of her elbow, and finally stop just short of her wrist, blocking out her view of the familiar veins and freckles she likes to trace when she’s bored.

She’s playing out in the family room when she first sees it. Her collection of toys is scattered carelessly about the carpet, wedged in the couch cushions, lined up on the windowsill overlooking the vast city below. She likes to imagine they enjoy the view of Coruscant’s afternoon sunlight reflecting off a thousand glittering buildings. The light bounces into her eyes sometimes, makes her see things that aren’t really there, but she knows her toys don’t have that problem.

For a moment, when the dark scrawl appears on her arm, she thinks that’s all it is—just another trick of the sun’s glare, making black spots and squiggles dance in front of her eyes. She’ll blink a few times, and then it’ll be gone.

She blinks.

It isn’t gone.

“Mama?” she says, grip loosening on the toy in her fist. It clatters to the ground, forgotten before it hits. “Papa?”

“What is it, sweetheart?” her mother calls from the kitchen, voice distant more with distraction than with space between them.

Jyn gropes for a response and doesn’t find one. She doesn’t know what it is. That’s the problem.

“Mama,” she says again, more insistently, but it’s her father who enters the room first, leaning down to swoop her up in his arms. He holds her close against his chest, and she feels calmer, just a little bit. There’s nothing her Papa can’t make all better.

“Look,” she says when he’s finished spinning her around, and the room rights itself again. She holds out her arm to him. “What’s that, Papa?”

He grasps her wrist, tugging her arm out straight. His fingers are gentle as always, but the smile disappears from his face. For a long time he’s silent, his eyes moving across her arm and back, over and over again, until Jyn starts to squirm in his grip.

“Shh, Stardust,” he says. He tears his eyes from her arm and looks back to her face. He’s smiling, but something about it doesn’t seem right. It’s not his normal Papa smile, the one that makes her feel all warm and safe inside.

“What is it?” she says, at the same time that her mother walks into the living room, wiping her hands on her tunic. Her father looks at her mother over her head, and he mutters something Jyn can’t quite understand. Something passes between them, and then Mama’s soft fingers join Papa’s on Jyn’s wrist.

“Well, look at that,” Mama says, her voice bright. A little too bright.

“Mama!” Jyn shrieks, finally reaching the end of her limited toddler patience. She doesn’t have the words to express what she’s feeling. She only knows that her Mama and Papa have never looked at her quite like this before.

It’s even scarier than the ugly black monster that she’s convinced lives under her bed.

It’s several years later before Jyn learns how to read the words on her arm, and a little longer still before she begins to realize their significance.

“A soulmate?” she says, drawing out the word, dangling it like it’s a particularly disgusting thing she found at the bottom of a lake, because she’s seven years old and boys are icky. “But I don’t want one of those. Ew!”

Her father smiles at her, and it’s a warm smile. Proud, almost. Not like the annoying know-it-all smiles that other grown-ups give her when she says things like that.

“That’s perfectly all right, Stardust,” he tells her. “Your path is your own to choose.”

“So…” Jyn pins her arm down on the table and glares at it. It never changes back to normal, unmarred skin, no matter how many times she stares it down. “This doesn’t mean I have to get married?”

“No, it doesn’t.” Even though she’s bigger now, her father still picks her up the same as he did when she was a little girl, settles her on his knee like he’s the strongest man in the galaxy. Which, of course, he is. “Think of it as…a hint, I suppose. It’s a suggestion of a possible future. One road you might take, out of many. Nothing more.”

“Oh. Okay.” Jyn bites down on the inside of her cheek and concentrates, mouthing the words on her arm one at a time, the first sentence that her soulmate—whoever they might be—will ever say to her.

When was the last time you were in contact with your father?

“Papa?” she says. “What does that mean? ‘In contact?’”

It takes her father a little while to answer.

“It means,” he says, “that whoever says this to you will be asking when you last spoke to me.”

“What?” Jyn wrinkles up her nose. “But that’s a silly thing to ask. I talk to you every day!”

“You certainly do, Stardust.” Her Papa’s smile crinkles his face, and he gently bops the tip of her nose with his finger. “And I hope that never changes.”

And for a while, Jyn stops worrying about the whole thing, because no one that she would ever marry could possibly ask her such a stupid question. Her Papa is right by her side, and he always will be.

It’s right about that time that Papa tells her to pack up all her things, because they’ve outgrown the little apartment on Coruscant, and they’re moving to a wide-open space full of fields and plants and green, green grass as far as the eye can see. A faraway place where no one will ever bother them. A place where Papa won’t have to go away to work anymore, where he’ll always be nearby, keeping Jyn safe.

On Lah’mu, the idea of a soulmate seems as farfetched as Jyn’s old fears of the monsters under her bed, back when she was just a baby. Most days she sees no one but her parents, and even on the days when they go into the small town to buy supplies, there are hardly any kids her age. And certainly no one she would ever be interested in marrying.

The months slip by and pass into years, and she helps her Mama and Papa tend to the crops, burying her arms in the dark crumbling soil until the words on her skin disappear, swallowed up by the dirt.

And just for those moments, she can almost forget about them altogether.

She’s nearly ten when the curiosity begins bubbling up again. She sits in the tiny kitchen with her parents, poking at the sprouts on her plate, wondering how much trouble she would be in if she just dumped them all in her glass of blue milk.

“Mama?” she asks, and waits until her mother meets her eyes across the table. “Where’s your soul-mark? What does it say?”

She’s become used to the long silences that typically follow every question she asks about the marks. Even so, her mother lets this one stretch on for an almost unbearably long time. Her eyes leave Jyn’s, looking to Papa instead. Once again, something passes between them, something Jyn can sense but never grasp, like the wind blowing through her hair.

“Here,” Mama finally says, pushing her chair back from the table. “Come around, and I’ll show it to you.”

Jyn’s out of her chair almost before her mother’s finished the sentence, darting around the table, flying elbows just missing her father’s milk glass. Mama bends down, removing her shoe and sock, rolling up the patchwork leg of her homespun trousers.

“It’s right there. See it?” she says, and points to a thin band of words curling around her ankle, written in a messy spidery script. The words look a little faded, but Jyn can still make them out if she squints.

“‘Aren’t you a troublesome one?’” she reads aloud. It’s enough to startle a laugh out of her, quick and disbelieving. She glances up to meet her mother’s eyes. “That was the first thing Papa ever said to you?”

But her mother isn’t laughing. Instead, she sighs.

“No,” she says, so quietly Jyn can barely hear. “Not your father.”

Jyn gets to her feet, every movement slow, like she’s spent the night outside in the cold season and awoken to find her limbs all covered with frost. She looks back and forth between her parents, unable to read their faces. “What do you mean?”

“Your father wasn’t my soulmate,” her mother says. Her voice is still soft, but every word is clear. “It was…someone else.”

“But…” Jyn stares at Mama, a cold dark pit growing in her stomach. “You didn’t marry him?”

“No,” her mother says. “When I met him, the man who said those words written on my ankle, I was already in love with your father. So I had to make a choice. Stay with the one I loved, or give him up to take a chance on someone else, because of some words that appeared on my skin one day when I was little? I chose to stay with your Papa, and I’m glad I did. Otherwise, you would never have been born.”

“You see, Jyn,” her father speaks up. He reaches across the table, taking her shoulders and drawing her toward him. “This is what I mean, when I say many different paths are open to you. You don’t need to be restricted by your mark. It might not mean anything.”

“But Papa,” Jyn says, her mind spinning. “What about your soulmate?”

He smiles. “Your mother is all I need. Your mother, and you, Stardust.”

“But—”

“Jyn,” Papa says. His tone is mild but firm, and she knows it means the conversation is over.

She doesn’t learn until later that her father doesn’t have a mark, and never did.

It’s only a short time after that when things fall apart. Her mother is murdered, her father disappears, and a fierce bald man who smells like a discharged blaster takes Jyn away. He puts her on his ship, and she watches Lah’mu disappear through the viewport, until it’s nothing but a faded green dot hanging in the void of space. Jyn knows, without knowing how she knows, that she’ll never see it again.

After that, she learns that fighting matters. Blood matters. Surviving matters.

Finding—or not finding—her soulmate doesn't matter at all.

Even so, she never forgets the words. It would be hard to, when they stare her in the face every morning, whether she’s eating her rations or cleaning her blaster or even just brushing her damn teeth.

When was the last time you were in contact with your father?

As the years stretch on, and the potential answer to that question grows larger and larger, Jyn wishes all the more that her mark was somewhere else, perhaps along her spine or on the back of her neck. Somewhere that she couldn’t see it at all.

But of course, she could never be that lucky.

When she ends up in the Wobani Imperial prison camp, Jyn fully expects she’ll be dead within the next few weeks. Perhaps she’ll last for a month or two, if she’s lucky.

(But she’s already established that she’s never lucky.)

The first day she walks through the tiny barred sliver of a door into her cell, its confines as bleak and cold as her future, she spares one single thought of sardonic pity for her supposed soulmate. The poor sap will never get to meet her now.

“A real shame,” she says aloud, holding up her flimsy dinner cup in a mock toast, imagining her faceless other half standing in front of her. She ignores the dagger-eyed look from her cellmate, who clearly thinks she’s lost her mind. “You’re missing out on such an excellent prize.”

Then she settles into the waiting game that passes for life in the work camp, tugs her sleeve firmly over the mark, and doesn’t think about it again.

Until the door blows off the prisoner transport, and a new, desperate chance at life blooms before her eyes, like the careful rows of plants in her little garden back on Lah’mu.

“This is Captain Cassian Andor, Rebel Intelligence.”

The whole bloody Rebel base is so dark that Jyn can barely see said Captain as he prowls across the room toward her, but she doesn’t much care. Her mind is already ten paces ahead, charting out steps she can take, paths she can forge out of this newfound possibility of freedom. Even if the Alliance doesn’t want to let her go, any place is easier to escape than an Imperial prison camp. There are hundreds of people milling about here on the base—she can easily lose herself in the shuffle, steal a ship, and—

“When was the last time you were in contact with your father?”

She’s buried so deep in her calculations that she almost misses the words. Would have missed them beyond a doubt, if they hadn’t been the same words etched across her arm, staring up at her every day for the past two decades.

She almost falls out of her chair. Then she almost laughs in sheer astonishment. Then she focuses, peering up through the darkness to finally lay eyes on the no-longer-faceless poor sap that the Force, or fate, or the universe itself has, in its infinite wisdom, decided is The One For Her.

Well. He’s…not exactly what she expected, in the few moments that she’s even bothered to imagine such things, the breathless spaces between training and battles and assignments from Saw. He’s not even her type, really. She’s had flings here and there, no one who ever really stayed around, always leaving her either by choice or by death. But those men tended to be a bit, well…brawnier. Muscled, seasoned men who could lay out a Stormtrooper or two in one fell swoop.

This—what was his name? Cassian—is more wiry than she’s used to. A little older than her, a little scruffier, nothing showing in his face but—

She blinks.

Nothing at all, really. It’s disconcerting, but it makes sense, she reasons. He is an intelligence officer, after all. Fancy words that mean “spy.” People in his position are good at shelving their emotions. Good at analyzing, dissecting, discarding. Good at eliminating inconveniences from their lives, whether perceived or real.

Wonderful. Well, two can play that game.

She stares up at him, keeping her face deliberately blank, and considers her next words. It’s a bizarre feeling, downright surreal, knowing that whatever she says next has already been decided years ago, already written somewhere on his skin. She’s half-tempted to say something outrageous for the hell of it, just to see if this very serious galaxy-defending spy has had words like ‘your mother is a purple-spotted two-faced Hutt’ carved on his body all his life.

But far more than she wants a soulmate, Jyn wants her freedom, and saying something like that would probably get her shot dead on the spot.

She tilts her head back, looks him square in the eye, and says, “Fifteen years ago.”

Oh, she has to hand it to him. He’s good. She’d anticipated at least some kind of tell—a brief widening of the eyes, a parting of the lips, anything to indicate a speck of surprise. But he doesn’t react in the slightest, just keeps his eyes fixed on her, staring steadily ahead.

It’s almost enough to kindle a flicker of doubt, a question that perhaps he’s not her soulmate after all. But no, he has to be. What are the odds that two different people will ever ask her, word for word, how long it’s been since she had contact with her father?

She doesn’t have time to ponder the probabilities before he’s already plowing ahead with his next question, and then the next, and Jyn pushes the whole matter from her mind.

It doesn’t mean anything, she tells herself, remembering her Papa’s words to her all those years ago. Just a suggestion. One possible path I could take, out of many.

Maybe this doesn’t change anything. Maybe she’ll still slip out of her guards’ sight and steal a ship after all.

She doesn’t.

The Alliance wastes no time. Jyn barely has a moment to catch her breath after the cursory debriefing, no space afforded her to rearrange all this new information in her brain. My father, alive. My soulmate, here. Saw, on Jedha. My freedom, waiting for me after this is over.

She snaps back to the present when the debriefing ends and Cassian takes her by the elbow, steering her toward the base’s entrance. His grip is firm, no-nonsense, but not too tight, and his hand falls away from her once he’s certain she’s following. She’s oddly glad for that. She’s been manhandled before. Never again, if she can help it. And certainly not by him.

He walks her out toward a ship on the landing pad, his stride brisk. She waits for him to pull her aside, to ask her about her mark. He doesn’t. She’s not sure if she’s relieved or disappointed.

Within moments, she’s boarded the ship, re-introduced herself to the mouthy droid that gave her the headache of her life back on Wobani, and helped herself to the contents of her soulmate’s duffel bag, dumped in a pile just inside the ship’s doorway. Jyn casts a glance over her shoulder, to where Cassian appears deep in conversation with some other Rebellion figurehead. She wonders if he left his bag here on purpose, to test her, or if he’s actually far more trusting—or careless—than his profession would indicate.

In any case, it doesn’t contain much of interest. Not that she was expecting to find a diary filled with sordid longing details about his search for his soulmate. (She tells herself she’s not disappointed, not even a little.)

She does help herself to a blaster stowed away in the duffel’s side pocket, and listens with half an ear while the droid prattles on about how it thinks her presence here is a mistake—

Oh, you don’t know the half of it, she thinks with an internal snort, ignoring the familiar little jab of melancholy in a hollow space behind her ribs. My parents weren’t soulmates. My entire existence is a mistake, depending on who you ask.

“—and so does Cassian.”

Well. That stings a little. She can’t deny it, not even to herself.

She settles in for the ride, deliberately easing all the tension from her shoulders. Cassian surely knows how to read body language. He already has something over her, even if it’s something ill-defined, intangible. She doesn’t want to give him anything else. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

When he re-boards the ship, he only gives her a few meaningless details about the droid, as though there’s nothing of greater importance to talk about, and then—

He tries to take away the blaster.

Jyn lifts her chin and steels herself, looking him directly in the eye. Nearly all interactions are power struggles, Saw told her, so many years ago. Everyone always wants something. If you’re the one that comes out of the conversation with your goals accomplished, you’re the one who wins. Don’t appear weak. Don’t break eye contact. Make your adversary look away first.

All right, soulmate, she thinks. Here’s your first big test.

She gives him a line about how she’ll need a way to defend herself in the potential dumpster fire that is Jedha, which is true enough. Yet as she holds his gaze, she finds herself thinking, if we’re soulmates, what’s yours is mine, isn’t it?

She doesn’t let her brain fill in the other half of the phrase—what’s mine is yours. After all, it’s not as though she has anything left to give him.

He lets her keep the blaster.

The trip through hyperspace promises to be long and dull. Jyn settles in her corner and waits, keeping her eyes on the back of Cassian’s head. He appears to be a competent pilot, at least—she knows enough about flying a ship to be able to tell that the droid isn’t doing all the work.

She also knows enough to be aware that once the ship is in hyperspace, there’s not a whole lot left that the pilot needs to do.

Yet even once the pinprick stars turn to needle-thin streaks of light through the viewport, and the ship settles into the steady thrum of the hyperdrive generator, Cassian stays seated next to his droid. Jyn narrows her eyes, wonders what he’s playing at.

Is he waiting for her to make the first move? Does he not want to talk about it with the droid in earshot? Does he just not care about the entire soulmate business at all, think it’s a load of bantha fodder and nothing more?

(She has to admit, if it’s the latter, they may be a better pair than she’d anticipated.)

But the more she thinks about it, the more she remembers Saw’s teachings about power and control, and the more it makes sense that Cassian is simply biding his time. Waiting for just the right moment to catch her off guard. Deliberately holding her in this uneasy state of suspense, keeping her wondering if he’ll ever even broach the topic.

Jyn grits her teeth together hard enough to grind them, narrows her eyes until she sees nothing but the vague gray blur of hyperspace through the window. She’s never been one to sit around and let others decide her fate. She won the power struggle for the blaster. She won’t let him take this one, either.

She pushes to her feet and marches over to the cockpit, positioning herself to the side of Cassian’s chair, blocking off as much of the droid’s vision as she can.

“I need to speak with you,” she says.

He looks up at her through half-lidded eyes, as though her presence is a mere distraction. As though he’d forgotten she was even there.

“I’m listening,” he says, even as he reaches out to flip a few switches on the flight console in front of him.

Jyn barely holds back a snort. Like hell is she discussing her soul-mark in front of a droid more sharp-tongued than most people she’s known who actually have tongues. “Not in front of the droid.”

“Excuse me,” the droid cuts in, sounding downright affronted. “I already told you, my name is K-2SO. And anything you have to say to Cassian, you can say in front of me.”

She ignores him, keeping her eyes fixed on Cassian. What does he want, for her to get down and beg? He must know what she needs to speak to him about.

Finally, she sees a little flicker in the back of his eyes, and he gets up from his chair. He releases a sigh, holding up a hand to forestall the protests already pouring out of the droid’s vocabulator.

“It’s all right, Kay,” he says. “Leave it. I’ll be back in a moment.”

The ship is small enough that the droid will probably hear every word of the conversation anyway, Jyn thinks sourly, but there’s nothing to be done about it. She can’t have this hanging over her head in the middle of a city where every Imperial trooper will clap her in irons and haul her back to Wobani in two shakes of a nerf’s tail.

“All right,” she says, rounding on him as soon as she’s led them as far from the cockpit as they can get. “I’m pretty sure you know what this is about, so let’s just have it out now and be done with it.”

She doesn't wait for a response before she tugs up her sleeve and thrusts her arm out like she’s delivering a punch. Her eyes stay fixed on his face, waiting for his reaction. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

For the first time, she sees something shift in his gaze, something that looks like recognition. Wordlessly, he unbuckles his belt, and Jyn has a sudden moment of panic that his soul-mark is in some highly indecent location and he’s about to drop trou right in front of her. But then he’s grasping his shirt instead, easing it halfway up his chest, and Jyn catches sight of script slanting diagonally across his ribcage. The writing looks almost too delicate to be hers, but the words are familiar enough.

Fifteen years ago.

It occurs to her, very dimly in the back of her mind, that it would feel right to reach out and trace her fingers along the curving script, to see what her words feel like on his skin. She doesn’t.

Yet she does feel an odd sensation steal over her, like the not-quite-unpleasant ache in her shoulders after setting down a heavy load. It’s not relief, not entirely, but it’s something close.

“Well, that’s that,” she says, pulling her sleeve back down her arm.

She’s already so used to Cassian’s blank sabacc face that she’s taken off guard when she catches a flare of something like alarm in his eyes. “It’s what?” he says, watching her warily, like she’s about to wrestle him to the ground and force him to marry her on the spot.

It occurs to her that, for all he knows, she might have it in her mind to do just that. She’s certainly met people over the years who turned into squealing imbeciles at the mere mention of their soulmates, let alone upon actually meeting them. Perhaps Cassian’s expecting her to launch herself at him and shower him with kisses. Perhaps he’s expecting her to slap him senseless. Who can say? He knows nothing about her, and she knows nothing about him.

And yet here they are.

“Oh, nothing,” she says hastily, trying to disarm any preconceived notions he might have, whether for better or for worse. “It’s just good to have that question answered, after all these years. Mystery solved.”

“Ah,” is all he says, looking evasive.

And it suddenly occurs to her that nothing is solved at all. She knows her soulmate’s identity, but she doesn’t know him. He’s as much of a mystery as ever.

She doesn’t even know if he’s one she wants to solve, or not.

Chapter Text

When his soul-mark finally appears, Cassian hardly notices.

He’s a late bloomer: most people with soul-marks have them before they reach the age of four or five. For Cassian, it happens twelve days after his eighth birthday. He’s crouched in the long, thistle-tangled grasses clustered at the top of the ridge overlooking the path to the village, a grenade hot against his palm.

He squeezes the little gray ball so tight he’s almost afraid it’ll slip out of his damp fingers and blow up in his face. But he won’t let that happen. He can’t. This is the first time he’s been allowed a real weapon, something that can actually cause damage, not just a stray rock or two. Those always bounce harmlessly off the clone troopers’ armor no matter how good his aim.

This time, with this grenade, he’ll prove his worth. He’ll show the village leaders that he can be just as brave and strong as his father was. He wasn’t supposed to be there at the protest the day his father died. He was anyway. The memory of the way his father’s head snapped back when the sharp gunshot cracked the air isn’t something Cassian will soon forget. Neither is the smell of the blood soaking into the dust, thick and cloying and sour, turning the soil to dark muddy red.

He’ll make the troopers pay. He’ll make them all pay for his father’s death, for the way his mother sits alone at the empty table when the moonlight seeps through the window and she thinks Cassian’s gone to sleep. Night after night he peers down from the stairwell and sees her, a glass in her hand, her old blaster dangling from her hip, her face blank and worn with an exhaustion no sleep can ever cure.

Cold clods of dirt press into his belly as he sprawls nearly face-first, peering through the grass, waiting for the signal. The grenade feels far heavier than he expected, and he risks a glance at it. It’s primed and ready, little red dots flashing bright and hot against his skin. With a jolt of horrified shame, he notices his fingers are trembling.

No! he orders himself. You can do this. You have to. For Father.

His head jerks back to the overpass, and he finally spots it across the way—the two blinking blue lights that mean now, now, throw the grenade now!

Cassian leans down over the ridge, fixing his eyes on the line of troopers marching down the path. If he were on the other side of the battle, he might think them resplendent in their perfect rank and file, their armor polished so white it almost glows in the midday sun.

He knows better.

He cocks his wrist, aims at the thin line of shadow that separates the nearest trooper’s helmeted head from his shoulders, and lets the grenade fly.

The explosion is louder than anything he’s ever heard, even louder than the blaster bolt that killed his father. Involuntarily he jerks back into the cover of the grass, throwing up a hand to shield his eyes from the blinding flash, but the troopers’ reflexes are honed like the edge of a vibroblade. As one they turn toward him, and then all hell is breaking loose, blaster bolts cracking the air from both sides of the canyon. There’s another white-hot grenade flash, then another, then a great belching rumble as the Republic’s mounted cannon prepares to fire.

Cassian has just enough time to notice the cannon is pointed toward his position before his whole field of vision lights up with a flare of red and white. It blots out the sky, and then the grass is gone, the canyon floor is rushing toward him, and the world slides into a sickening black haze.

When he wakes, everything hurts. He takes that to mean he’s probably not dead. That, and the muffled sounds slowly making their way through his consciousness: the steady beep of a monitor, the drip-plop noise of bacta filling a container, the low moan of an injured soldier nearby.

It isn’t until he feels a warm hand on his shoulder that he realizes he’s the one moaning.

“Cassian,” says a voice above him, tired but gentle. “Can you open your eyes?”

His eyelids feel like they’re glued shut, but he pries them open with an effort that would have made his father proud. Even that minuscule movement sends pain arcing across every nerve ending, but he bites down on his tongue until the hurt subsides, and focuses on the face hovering over him.

His vision is still blurry, but he can recognize the face of a healer, lined and weary and overworked. The village is too poor to afford the fancy state-of-the-art med droids the Republic uses. They have to rely on people working around the clock, running on fumes and stims, on determination and willpower.

(That heart, that gumption, is why we’ll win in the end, Cassian’s mother says. Cassian wants to believe her. He really does.)

“What happened?” Cassian croaks. Then he remembers the weight of the grenade in his palm, the force of the explosion, the ground plummeting toward him. He tries to jerk upright, ignoring the pain lancing through his head.

“The battle!” His eyes flare open wide. A shock of dark hair falls across his eyes, and he pushes it out of the way with an impatient shove. “Did I get any of them? The troopers?”

The healer purses her lips at him, one hand gently pushing him back down to the cot, the other reaching out to take his pulse.

“You should be less concerned with the battle and more worried about yourself, young man,” she says. “You took quite a tumble when that cannon fired at the overpass. You have a concussion and a couple of cracked ribs. You’re lucky to be alive.” More quietly, she mutters, “I suppose even the Republic won’t murder children.”

Cassian bristles. “I’m not a child!”

The healer opens her mouth, then she meets his eyes. Something passes over her face, like a spaceship flying in the path of the sun.

“Well,” she says, and Cassian can hear her forcing brightness back into her voice. “You’ll live, that’s the good news. And there’s something else, too. Lift up your shirt.”

Cassian frowns, but he’s learned long ago that nothing can stop healers from poking and prodding, so he follows the order.

“Look there.” The healer points, and Cassian follows the line of her finger, tracing over a bit of dark script rippling across his ribcage. For a moment he thinks it’s a prank, that someone took a pen to his skin while he was unconscious, but when he rubs at the words, they don’t smear under his fingertips.

“I’m afraid you won’t get rid of it that easily. It wasn’t there when you were in for your birthday checkup two weeks ago, was it?” The healer is smiling now. “It’s your soul-mark, Cassian. That means, somewhere out there, someone is waiting for you.” Her eyes go distant, her smile softening. “A little ray of hope in all this heartache.”

Cassian screws up his face, pulling his shirt down with an impatient yank.

“But the battle,” he presses. “What about the battle? Did we win?”

The healer looks at him and sighs. Her smile fades away, her face going tired and lumpy, like grass slowly receding under snow that won’t stop falling.

Cassian thinks of his mother, sitting beside his father’s empty spot at the table, the moonlight cold and pale on her cheeks.

As the years pass, his mark—three fractured words, not even a full sentence—becomes just one of many blemishes on his skin. It’s joined by a jagged scar across his left shoulder, courtesy of an Imperial spy’s blade, a searing burn from a blaster bolt to his thigh, a crooked curve to his nose from an ill-placed fist, a collection of whip-lashes across his back from an alien culture’s misunderstanding. He sees them all when he disrobes every night, each one a reminder that his life is uprooted, dangerous, and almost certainly marked by a fast-approaching expiration date.

He’s been a soldier, a Separatist, an assassin, a spy for a fragile, fledgling rebellion against a sprawling Galactic Empire. Nothing about his life is compatible with a soulmate. People like him don’t settle down. They don’t grow old. They don’t have families.

When he finds himself tempted to think otherwise, to imagine other possibilities, he remembers being seven years old and watching his father lie unmoving in the street. Then he pulls his shirt down over the soul-mark and forces it from his mind. It’s nothing but another reminder of his mortality written on his skin. He’ll probably die before he even meets his soulmate, whoever they might be.

As long as his death in service to the Rebellion, that will be enough.

Cassian doesn’t even have to lay eyes on Jyn Erso to know that the Rebellion’s latest endeavor is truly borne out of desperation. He’s just gotten out of a meeting when the ship returns from its high risk trip to Wobani, and he pauses mid-stride in the hallway, watching colleagues limp from the landing pad to the infirmary. He sees Melshi groaning and holding his head, Jaxson stumbling along with a bandage wrapped around his midsection, and Trayle out cold on a stretcher, supported between two med droids. Yet none of them are suffering the blaster bolt injuries he’d half-expected.

“Cassian. There you are.”

He turns, and can’t suppress a jolt of relief when he sees K-2SO ambling down the hallway toward him.

“Kay.” He reaches up to clap the droid’s metal shoulder. “What happened? Did you run into Imperial resistance?”

“Imperial resistance? No. All the Stormtroopers we encountered were neutralized quite easily.” K-2 swivels his arms, as though in imitation of a flailing trooper. “The ship did take several hits from Imperial fire as we were escaping the planet, but nothing critical was damaged.”

Cassian looks back over his shoulder at Melshi and the others. “Then what happened to them?”

“Ah. Well, you asked if we encountered Imperial resistance,” K-2 says. “Technically, the extraction target is not Imperial.”

Cassian raises his eyebrows. “Erso’s daughter did this?”

“Yes. She attacked them with a gardening implement. She is—how did General Draven put it?” K-2 cocks his head. “‘Quite spirited.’ I nearly had to carry her all the way from the prisoner transport to our ship. Fortunately we were able to convince her that it was in her best interest to use her own two feet.”

Wonderful, Cassian thinks. The fate of the Rebellion could very well lie in the hands of an Imperial scientist’s daughter who barely even cooperates with her own rescue.

“She’s on her way to the briefing room now,” K-2 adds. “You had better get moving, don’t you think?”

He takes one look at Erso’s daughter, and he can tell she’s a loose cannon. He hasn’t reached his current position without being able to read faces, expressions, body language. It’s all right there in the sharp set of her jaw, the closed-off tightness in her shoulders, the defiant light in her eyes. She has no intention of cooperating, not if it doesn’t benefit her in some fashion.

He knows her type. The galaxy can burn, for all she cares, just as long as she doesn’t get singed.

He stifles a sigh and flicks his eyes to Mon Mothma, waiting for his cue. At her subtle signal, he approaches Erso’s daughter, looking her down, sizing her up.

“When was the last time you were in contact with your father?” he asks.

There’s a pause. It lasts no more than a handful of seconds, but it’s long enough for a sudden chill to seize Cassian’s bones, something like a premonition playing out in his head. He’s no Jedi, no supernatural abilities in his repertoire, but his job—his daily life—requires him to be able to see things before they happen, in a manner of speaking. He prides himself on his ability to read the room, to analyze facts and faces, to calculate possible scenarios and decide which one is most likely to occur, all in a manner of seconds.

He is suddenly, acutely aware of the words stretching across his skin beneath his tunic, dipping in the crevices between his ribs.

Don’t say ‘fifteen years ago,’ he thinks. Say ‘it’s been a while.’ Say ‘ten years ago.’ Say something else, anything else.

But Erso’s daughter meets his eyes, and he realizes she’s sizing him up, too.

“Fifteen years ago,” she says.

Cassian just knows that somehow, somewhere, the Force is laughing at him.

“Captain Andor, a word?”

Cassian feels a surge of reluctance at the thought of leaving—

How should he even think of her? ‘Erso’s daughter’ doesn’t seem adequate, not anymore. Neither does ‘the girl’ or simply ‘her.’ ‘Jyn’ feels far too familiar. ‘His soulmate’ opens up a raw, bare patch in his mind that he’s not ready to expose.

The mission asset. He doesn’t want to leave the mission asset unattended, but General Draven is standing near the landing pad wearing his most serious face, which is really only a few degrees more unhappy than his default expression.

Cassian briefly locks eyes with her—Jyn—the mission asset as he turns back toward the general. She stays expressionless. He tells himself that’s a good sign. She hasn’t initiated any conversation about their marks. Maybe if he acts as though nothing has changed, she will too. Maybe they can get through this in one piece, with a minimum of distractions.

He strides over to Draven, taking note of his surroundings out of habit. The landing pad is alive with its usual bustle: droids chirping at each other as they go about their tasks, maintenance crews taking stock of the ships, pilots murmuring to each other. Yet far too much of his attention stays locked behind him. Hiding a grimace, he realizes he’s half-waiting for an explosion.

“What do you think of her?” Draven says, as soon as Cassian’s within earshot.

For a moment, Cassian’s heart stutters.

He doesn’t mean—he can’t know…?

“Give me your tactical assessment,” Draven prompts, lifting one eyebrow, and Cassian mentally kicks himself. Focus. This is just another mission.

“She’s unpredictable,” he says. “Saw Gerrera will have taught her military tactics, infiltration, survival skills. I’m not expecting her to be overly cooperative. If she sees a chance to escape, she may take it, not wait for us to keep our end of the bargain.”

“You’ll need to keep a close eye on her, then,” Draven says, meaningfully. “Gerrera is, of course, the primary target. The girl is just a means to that end. If you need to, you can dispose of her. I trust your judgment.”

It takes all of Cassian’s experience and willpower to keep his face entirely blank. “Understood.”

He wonders if Draven is the kind of person who could end his own soulmate’s life without a second thought, if the mission called for it. He wonders if he, himself, is that kind of person.

He isn’t sure he wants to know the answer.

“Why does she get a blaster and I don’t?”

Cassian’s instant reaction is no, oh no, not a chance. Yet when Jyn—the mission asset points out that Jedha is a war zone, his brain supplies him with a sudden mental image of her, weaponless, sprawled and broken in the middle of the street. He imagines her eyes, wide and pale green (not that he’s taken note of the color), staring sightless into Jedha’s dust-choked sky, blood spreading in a grisly halo around her head.

For just a moment, his mind superimposes the image with the all-too-similar memory of his father’s crumpled body, and something hard and sharp clenches in his chest.

“Trust goes both ways,” Jyn reminds him, her voice firm, but softer than he expected from her. Gently chastising, perhaps.

He isn’t a man often taken off guard, but he feels a little spark of something like surprise as he processes her words. It doesn’t fully occur to him until later that it’s probably a bad sign that the quietly earnest, steady look in her eyes took down his resolve with so little resistance.

When she finally corners him in the cockpit and asks to speak with him about the marks, it goes about as well as could be expected. She makes no demands on him, expresses no expectations. Still, Cassian knows it’s too early to be optimistic—if he can even remember what that feels like.

“What was that about?” K-2 asks when Cassian returns to the cockpit, petulance still running through his tone. Cassian knows K-2 hates to be left out of anything, even things that don’t concern him. Especially things that don’t concern him.

“It was nothing,” Cassian mutters. “She just wanted to clear up a few things about the mission.”

“I see,” K-2 says. He lets the silence stretch out a beat too long. “Was it about that mark on your ribs?”

Cassian resists the urge to bury his face in his hands. “How did you know that?”

“When you approached just now,” K-2 says, “you were holding your right arm very stiffly. Like you didn’t want to let it touch your side, where I know the mark happens to be.” He pauses. “Also, I have hearing far superior to a human’s.”

Cassian sighs. “Kay…don’t speak to her about this. All right?”

“Why not?”

“Because…” Cassian flattens his hands on the control panel, measuring his words. “It’s a topic that humans can often be sensitive about.”

“Jyn Erso does not appear to be a very sensitive person.”

“Also,” Cassian goes on, wondering when exactly the throbbing ache in his temples began to flare up. “It’s important for her to stay focused on the mission. I don’t want her to be distracted by this…issue.”

K-2 moves his arms in the expression that Cassian learned long ago is his version of a shrug. “She doesn’t look very distracted to me.”

Cassian looks over his shoulder. Jyn is leaning against the wall, eyes closed, lips parted in sleep. Even in slumber her hand is clenched tight around the blaster she “found,” and her sleeve has ridden halfway up her arm, exposing several words in the handwriting Cassian immediately knows as his own.

“I find this entire human pair-bonding ritual rather ridiculous anyway,” K-2 is saying, affecting the long-suffering tone he uses when pontificating on one of the many nonsensical quirks of human behavior. “It seems like a pointless waste of energy.”

Cassian wants to agree, but somehow he can’t get the words out.

“I’ll be right back,” he says instead. He steps out from the cockpit, leaning a little closer toward Jyn, realizing the blaster in her hand looks familiar.

He frowns, crossing the cabin to his duffel bag, hand slipping into the side pocket where his backup blaster should be.

Empty.

He turns back to Jyn (when did he stop thinking of her as the mission asset?), letting his eyes scan her face. Her eyes are closed shut as tight as her fingers around the blaster, and Cassian can see the movement beneath her eyelids. She’s dreaming.

Blaster or no blaster, it takes a certain amount of trust to fall asleep in the presence of perfect strangers. Cassian risks a step closer, looking back and forth between her face and his words on her half-bared arm. There’s something unfamiliar and almost warm in his chest. Strange, but not unpleasant.

For just a moment, he allows himself to wonder what she’s dreaming about.

Jyn snaps awake to the sight of a looming sphere through the viewport, filling up her vision with dry, rusty red-orange. Jedha isn’t large—it’s only a moon—but from here, it looks like the inverse of Lah’mu. Just as much of an isolated backwater, but desolate and barren instead of dotted with plants and crops.

“That’s Jedha,” comes Cassian’s voice at her shoulder. As if she didn’t know. “Or what’s left of it.”

He lingers instead of walking away, one hand at the back of his neck, the other bracing against the cabin wall.

“I heard you,” he says, his voice softening, possibly to avoid drawing the droid’s attention. “Murmuring, in your sleep. I didn’t make out any words, though.”

Jyn stares at him.

“I have dreams, too,” he says, as though that’s an explanation. “Bad ones. Sometimes.”

Jyn’s gaze darts to his face, but there’s something in his eyes that kindles discomfort in her chest. Something not quite open, but close. Something like the first lines of an invitation, something she can’t look at too long without taking the risk of being drawn in.

“You were watching me sleep?” she says, tightening her grip on the blaster. The words come out as more of a snap than she intends.

She watches the expressionless mask steal back over Cassian’s face. His eyes drop to the weapon in her hand.

“Did you enjoy your trip through my bag?” he says.

Jyn lifts her chin, feeling herself slip back onto solid ground. She ignores the little twinge in her chest. “It was very enlightening.”

“Good,” is all he says, his tone mild. The ship creaks, settling onto Jedha’s dusty surface, and Jyn hears the door’s seals grind and release. She stands, holstering the blaster at her hip, and watches Cassian warily.

“Let’s go,” he says.

Chapter Text

In Jedha City, out in the open air, Jyn lets herself relax a little. The Rebel base is far behind, and this is more what she’s used to: a backwater dump of a village, teeming with refuse, populated by people too poor or too stubborn to move someplace closer to the heart of the galaxy.

(She tries not to think about the fact that she feels more comfortable in an Imperial-occupied city than she did in the heart of the Alliance’s headquarters.)

Distracting herself, she looks around at the townsfolk going about their day, and picks out replicas of herself at all the different stages of life. A little girl sitting on a bench across the street, legs swinging, dirt under her fingernails. A teen leaning against a nearby food stall, sullen but keen-eyed, already far too experienced with the weapon strapped to her hip. And in the shadow of an overhang several doors down, a hooded individual of indeterminate species and gender, loitering a little too casually, waiting for a contact—or a mark.

Jyn recognizes the signs. She’s been the person on both sides of that equation, more times than she can count. She just usually doesn’t have company while she waits.

A few paces away, Cassian is playing that same waiting game, and Jyn has to admit he does it well. His eyes scan the crowd every few seconds, but subtly enough that at a casual glance, he looks like just another downtrodden Jedha villager browsing through supplies at the market. Half the time when she glances at him, he’s picked up some trinket or another, brows narrowed as though deep in consideration. Blend in. Act normal. Don’t draw attention to yourself until the time is right. All the same rules that Saw taught her, pounded into her head until she could recite them backwards and forwards.

She’s not sure whether or not she likes the fact that she keeps finding similarities between herself and her inconvenient soulmate.

It’s easiest to just not think about it, so she affects her own casual pose, leaning back against a wall, propping up one foot. She knows patience is a non-negotiable part of the process, but they’ve already been waiting for Cassian’s contact for the better part of an hour.

“Are you sure this rebel’s sister is coming?” she asks, voice pitched low so only Cassian can hear.

He keeps his eyes on a nearby table of wares as he responds. “She’ll get here when she gets here.”

Which is not an answer. Jyn narrows her eyes at the back of his head. It has no more effect than usual.

Her shoulders stiffen involuntarily when Cassian turns away from the market stalls and makes his way back toward her. He looks her up and down, like he’s just noticed her presence.

“Are you hungry?” he asks.

She’s famished, actually. Her last meal was back on Wobani, a loaf of bread so stale it nearly chipped her tooth, and a tin of misshapen lumps that might have been meat of some sort. The Rebels hadn’t exactly taken time to feed her before ushering her off to be used as a bargaining chip for Saw.

Yet she has no money, and nothing to barter with except the necklace that never leaves her neck, and the thought of being dependent on Cassian’s goodwill sends unpleasant prickles cascading up and down her arms. Besides, she’s gone without food for longer periods than this, when supplies ran short, when missions went wrong, when Saw’s people were lax in carrying out their extraction plans.

“I’m fine,” she says.

Cassian gives her a look that conveys volumes of skepticism, and she finds herself wondering if she’s lost her ability to tell a convincing lie, or if he’s just that good at reading people—at reading her.

Both prospects are disconcerting.

“You need to keep your strength up,” he says. “We could be here for a while yet. Now is as good a time to eat as any.”

Jyn puts on a beatific smile, the one that always made Saw want to either hug her or deck her, depending on his mood. “You know, nagging isn’t a very endearing behavior.”

In a soulmate, she doesn’t add. Better to dance around that topic. Good thing she’s always been light on her feet.

Deep down, she has to admit she’s trying to push his buttons. It’s petty, she knows, but not without a purpose: there’s no better way to find out what someone is truly made of than to discover how easy it is to annoy them, especially in tense situations. She thinks this qualifies.

But Cassian confirms her initial assessment by merely looking at her, expressionless aside from one quirk of his eyebrow.

“Neither is stubbornness for the sake of stubbornness,” he says.

“Really?” Jyn shoots back. “Judging from your droid, I would think you like stubborn.”

Oh, kriffing hell. That wasn’t supposed to come out. Whatever happened to not blundering right into topics like soulmates and compatibility? she berates herself. So much for being quick on her metaphorical feet.

Yet for the first time, Cassian looks a little caught off guard. His eyes widen just slightly, and then comes the last thing Jyn expects: he laughs.

“Fair enough,” he says. His laughter fades into a chuckle, but his eyes are still lit with a quiet smile, defenses fallen away, warmer than anything she’s seen in longer than she cares to admit. When was the last time anyone looked at her like this, with something other than boredom, disgust, or calculation?

Despite everything, Jyn can almost feel herself smiling back. She doesn’t step away when Cassian walks toward her, holding out his hand.

“Here,” he says. “Get something to eat.”

Jyn looks down at the credit chit in his palm, then up to his face, her lips pursing.

“Please,” Cassian adds, softly.

Jyn takes the chit.

Cassian may never have spent time in the Wobani labor camp, but he’s no stranger to Imperial prisons. He knows all too well the hollow, not-quite-alive feeling that follows their victims, even days after release. Jyn is adept at hiding it—impressively so, kindling a spark of respect in Cassian’s mind—but he can still discern the subtle signs. He doesn’t miss the brief press of her wrist against her stomach, or the way her eyes linger a bit too long on each food item they pass, even the ones that don’t look the least bit appetizing.

He settles back into his watchful routine, scanning the crowd, then wandering up and down the market aisle, then glancing at Jyn. She’s purchased a meal of…something that only stopped wriggling several seconds after his credit chit changed hands. He’s not entirely sure what it is, but he assumes it’s edible, given how rapidly Jyn is devouring it.

For the first time since he saw her asleep on the ship, he watches something raw and unguarded slip over her. Her whole face crinkles up in delight, her cheeks bulging with mouthfuls of sea creature. Several seconds pass before Cassian realizes his mouth has softened in a matching smile, and he has to yank himself back into focus, returning to his careful surveillance of the crowd.

His contact still hasn’t shown up.

Cassian stifles a sigh, resisting the urge to check his chrono or his blaster. Nothing draws Stormtroopers’ attention like signs of boredom or impatience.

He glances back in Jyn’s direction, expecting to see her polishing off the final traces of her meal. Instead, she’s gone.

His heart does a flying leap into his throat, then plummets like it’s been tied down with a boulder. He hisses a curse under his breath. Wasn’t it only hours ago that he was telling Draven about how Jyn was unpredictable, that she might seize any possible chance to escape? Now he’s gone and gotten distracted, lulled into a false sense of security, and she’s—

He blinks, straightening.

She’s only several meters away, kneeling down in front of a child no more than six or seven years old. Cassian can’t catch her words over the bustle and murmur of the marketplace crowd, but he can read the scene well enough. The child—a little girl—is scrawny, her clothes shabby and threadbare. Probably homeless, possibly an orphan, or perhaps sent out by her parents to beg. Or steal.

As he watches, Jyn places half of her meal into the child’s hands. She smiles when the girl’s eyes light up. Then she stands, brushes the dust from her knees, and heads back toward Cassian. Over her shoulder, Cassian watches the girl tear into the food, clearly relishing it just as much as Jyn had.

As Jyn approaches, Cassian’s gaze moves to her face. She looks…content, almost. Pensive. Something a little softer than usual has stolen over her, smoothing away some of the edges from her tight jaw and furrowed brow.

Then she meets Cassian’s eyes, and her expression shifts, growing more guarded. Yet some of the softness remains, her face not completely closed off, he notes—with a relief he doesn’t want to admit to feeling.

He draws a breath, but before he can speak, Jyn cuts him off with an almost imperceptible shake of her head. The skin tightens around the corners of her eyes.

Cassian understands. She wants no commentary on her act of charity. She isn’t looking for praise, surprise, or questions about her motives.

Cassian releases his breath and lets the moment crystallize, then fade into the background.

“Tell me about Saw Gerrera,” he says instead.

Jyn’s body language is more relaxed now that she’s eaten, but at the mention of Saw, her lips thin.

“What, you don’t know him?” she says. “I would have thought you worked with him before he split off from your group.”

“Our paths crossed occasionally,” Cassian says, keeping it vague. “And of course I know his reputation. But you have a perspective no one else in the Rebellion can provide. He actually raised you, didn’t he? That’s what you said back on Yavin Four.”

“That’s right.”

He waits for her to continue, but she only looks into the distance, eyes unfocused. Apparently he’s not the only one good at staying vague.

“Anything in particular we should expect from him?” he tries again.

Jyn sighs. “I’m not sure what all I can tell you. Saw isn’t any one thing. You can’t just put him in a little box labeled ‘extremist.’ He’s more complicated than that.”

She motions over her shoulder to the street urchin girl, who’s licking the remnants of Jyn’s food from her fingers with gusto. “That little girl? She has nothing, no one. She relies on the kindness of strangers to stay alive on a good day, and on all the other days, only desperation and wits keep her from starving. That would have been me, if not for Saw. You call him an extremist, and he is, but there’s good in him, too.”

Cassian chooses his words with care. “Why aren’t you still part of his group, then?”

There’s no good way to ask the question, and Jyn’s reaction doesn’t surprise him. Her face slams shut, the softness vanishing, and she folds her arms over her chest, hunching into herself.

“Your Rebellion has a file on me, I’m sure,” she says. Bitterness threads through her tone. “Didn’t you read it?”

“Of course.” No point in denying that. “But it was a thin file, to be honest. Just the basic information and not much else. Nothing about why you split from Saw.”

He expects her to clamp her mouth shut and refuse to say more. He couldn’t even blame her, really. The more personal details of her relationship with Saw are none of his business.

Instead, her eyes flick to his. Her mouth pinches at the corners, and she scrubs one hand over her face.

“I didn’t split from him,” she says.

Her shoulders are still hunched, and Cassian can almost see the knots forming in her muscles beneath her jacket. Suddenly, he has to resist an urge to reach out and rest his hand in the space between her shoulder blades, to gently press away the tension. The notion surprises him with its strength, drawing him in like gravity.

“What happened?” he says instead. His hand twitches. He ignores it.

Jyn shrugs, the movement overflowing with forced nonchalance. “He left me.”

Cassian opens his mouth, but before he can ask the obvious question, Jyn pierces him with her eyes. The pale green of her irises has gone dark, like jade under running water.

“I don’t know why,” she says. “So don’t ask. Please.”

Cassian nods once. “Okay.”

His agreement seems to mollify Jyn, and she rolls her shoulders, leaning back on the heels of her hands. “He gave me weapons, left me in a bunker, and told me to wait,” she says. “I never saw him again. I was in a bunker when he first found me, too. There’s something poetic about that, I suppose.”

Cassian tries to catch her eye, and when he does, he gives her a little smile. “I was never much for poetry,” he says.

He’s pleasantly surprised when Jyn laughs, a throaty sound that sparks a warm glow in his chest.

“Me neither,” she says. “Shocking, isn’t it?”

Her laughter fades, but the smile remains. Cassian realizes, at the back of his mind, that it’s the first time he’s seen her look like this—almost carefree.

It dawns on him with a jolt that it’s something he wouldn’t mind seeing again, and again.

The jolt turns to a sinking feeling deep in his gut. In the middle of the war that’s consumed his entire life, with the stakes higher than ever—to the tune of a possible planet killer—the unthinkably inconvenient has happened: he’s met his soulmate. And he likes her.

Worse, she intrigues him.

In the past, he’s heard some people claim that they can feel their soul-marks on their skin, particularly in moments of high tension or emotion. Tingling, burning, thrumming. Some have said it’s pleasant, others say unpleasant. Cassian always listened with no more than half an ear, dismissing the whole thing as irrelevant at best and nonsense at worst.

Yet for the first time, he can sense something prickling at the words on his ribs, a warm electric tingling. It feels like the sensation left in the wake of a gentle touch, skin on skin.

His mouth goes dry. He brushes at the front of his jacket over his ribcage, as though swatting away a stinging insect.

“Something wrong?” Jyn asks, her eyes narrowing on his face. Force, she’s observant.

“No, nothing,” he says automatically, looking through the crowd. There, finally, he sees his contact lingering on the edge of a group clustered around a food cart.

“Wait here,” he says to Jyn, moving in the contact’s direction. “I’ll be right back.”

He hasn’t made it more than a few steps before he turns back to Jyn, a thought filtering through his mind.

“What did you do with my credit chit?” he asks.

Jyn meets his eyes full on, motions over her shoulder to the spot where the little girl stood, now vacant. “I gave it to her.”

Somehow, Cassian isn’t surprised.

Cassian’s meeting with his informant—to which Jyn is apparently not invited—goes faster than she expects. It seems no more than a few minutes before he reappears at her side, not quite looking at her, his face set in an expression somewhere between pensive and worried. His hand hovers at the small of her back, and her toes curl for a few seconds before he settles for gripping her elbow instead, steering her back onto the road. The pathway is thick with dust and bodies milling around, and Jyn finds herself pressed in close against him, her hips and shoulders twisting to avoid collisions with random passersby.

“You seem awfully tense all of a sudden,” she says, trying to catch his eye. He finally looks at her, locking eye contact for no more than a split second before his gaze peels off to scan the crowd once more. He’s still holding her elbow, but she notices his other hand clenching the fabric of his jacket just above his ribcage. She watches his fingers flexing, grasping and releasing over and over, the closest thing to a nervous habit she’s seen out of him yet.

She says nothing, but files it away in her memory.

“We have to move,” he says, close to her ear. “This town…it’s ready to blow.”

After that, everything is a blur.

When Saw’s rebels attack and the Stormtroopers start crowding in like flies descending on roadkill, Jyn’s almost relieved. This, she knows how to do. She’s in her element here, her blaster solid and comforting in her grip. Her quick spins in and out of cover are an easier dance than the social and tactical maneuvers the Alliance requires. This is what she was trained to do. What she was born and bred to do, perhaps. She may be a mistake, a blip on the universe’s radar, but none of that matters on the battlefield. What better cannon fodder than a child born of two people not meant for each other?

(In her deepest thoughts, she knows such notions are unfair. Soul-marks are a suggestion, her father’s voice reminds her, not a requirement. But sometimes it’s easier to just take unfairness between her teeth and run with it.

And her memory of her father’s voice gets dimmer and dimmer every year.)

She ducks down, tucking herself in the crevice between welded-together sheets of metal on an Imperial transport. Her blaster points skyward, parallel with her face, and her eyes dart rapidly in search of the best target. In the chaos, she thinks she can almost hear Cassian’s voice rising above the din, but she can’t be sure.

Her eyes snap to the alley, where Cassian has plastered himself into cover, only his face and his blaster visible behind a column’s rise. The barrel of his blaster points to an overhead awning across the street, fires, and a moment later Jyn hears the roar of an explosion behind her.

She swivels, watching the oily red-orange bloom fade away, then lets her eyes snap back to Cassian’s position. He meets her gaze and nods, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Beneath her sleeve, her soul-mark warms, flaring against her skin like a brand. A roil of emotions twists in her—some good, some not, some indeterminable—but there’s no time to pick them apart and analyze them one by one.

She runs for the cover of the alley, and Cassian falls into step beside her.

Wait for the right moment, Saw’s voice echoes in her head. If you catch your opponents off guard, and fight the way I taught you, nothing in the galaxy can stand in your way.

When the timing is just right, she lets her baton unfold in her hand like an extension of her arm, and when she flies into action it feels better than anything since the time before, the parts of her life she doesn’t let herself think about. She whirls and pivots, every hit against Stormtrooper armor delivering a satisfying crack, and she knows that if a blaster bolt catches her in the chest, at least she’ll go out free and clear.

But she doesn’t get hit, and in the midst of her battle-dance, she thinks she can glimpse Cassian watching her, his eyes dark and wide and intent. Jyn goes on fighting, and the words on her arm pulse in time with the rapid-fire beating of her heart.

Her reunion with Saw doesn’t exactly play out in any of the multiple ways she’d imagined it, time and time again over the years. She spills out all her rage, the bitterness and frustration of betrayal, but somehow it doesn’t feel as satisfying as she’d hoped it would.

In the end, none of it matters. In the space of seconds, her whole world distills down to a flickering hologram and the distant rumbling of something massive fast approaching, like an earthquake. Then Cassian is in front of her, his hand tight and tugging on her arm, his eyes wide and urgent. She can see his lips moving, but his words don’t stand a chance against the thunderstruck roaring in her mind, the afterimage of her father’s holographic face and voice drowning out all else.

But Cassian’s hand on her arm is insistent, and the world is coming apart in jagged pieces all around her. Through the daze, she waits for his self-preservation instinct to kick in, for him to turn around and escape down the collapsing hallway, leaving her to be swallowed up in the dust.

After a moment, she realizes: he’s still there. He hasn’t left without her.

His hand slips down to hers, and she lets him take it. He runs, and she matches him stride for stride.

Later, in the soothing mindless hum of hyperspace, Jyn unspools her thoughts and picks through them one by one.

If all goes according to plan (when does it ever? her mind whispers, sardonic as always), she’ll see her father soon. With the initial whirl of shock and emotion faded, she finds herself surprisingly calm on that subject. She knows what she’ll say to her father if—when—she sees him. She’s been thinking about that for years, during the long nights when she lay awake in her quarters on Saw’s base, unable to sleep.

She can’t think of Jedha City. She won’t. She won’t think of the bustling marketplace and the once-proud temple and the roads blanketed with footprints, all turned to ash in the space of a breath. She won’t think of the girl she tried to help, her efforts ultimately meaningless. The memories of billowing smoke and churning ground claw at the edges of her mind, but she refuses them, firmly. Saw taught her to clear her mind, to channel her thoughts and push them away, like closing the door on an unwanted guest.


Saw…but no, she can’t think of him, either. She won’t. Not yet. Not until she’s ready.

That leaves Cassian.

Jyn sits alone, huddled in a far corner at the edge of the ship, away from the pilot defector and the temple guardians, the few they were able to rescue from Jedha’s destruction. Away from Cassian and his droid, who sit in the cockpit, eyes trained straight ahead. Cassian hasn’t glanced in her direction since the ship set course for Eadu. Perhaps he senses she needs her space.

Perhaps it’s something else altogether.

She rolls back her sleeve, staring down at his words etched on her skin, tracing the lines and curves with her fingertip.

Why did Cassian come back for her?

Jyn closes her eyes and lets her mind travel back to the dark green-stained interior of the Alliance base on Yavin Four. The terms had been simple: get to Saw. Get the Alliance in the door safely. Get out. Be free.

She remembers staring Cassian in the face for the first time, taking note of his stern expression, his carefully chosen words, his buttoned-up body language. From the start, she’d marked him as someone devoted to the cause, someone who would put the Rebellion first in all things. Someone who should have had no problem cutting her loose when she’d served her purpose, leaving her to her fate on Jedha. Instead, he’d risked everything to come drag her from the maelstrom of her thoughts, out into the sunlight.

Why? Should she have died there in that stifling little room, huddled at her ex-mentor’s feet?

She can only think of one reason why not. It stares her in the face, stretching darkly across the length of her arm, as unrepentant as it’s been her whole life.

“Is this it?” she says aloud. Was my father wrong all along? Do choices mean nothing? Are our entire lives mapped out by words that appear on our skin?

She curls her fingers into a fist, watching her arm stiffen, corded muscles tense and rippling beneath the mark. Discontent boils up within her, a restlessness she can’t name.

She rips the jacket sleeve down, hiding the words, but she can’t ignore their telltale prickle on her skin.

Chapter Text

Cassian is beginning to hate hyperspace.

He sits in the cockpit as the ship hurls itself across the lightyears, pewter-gray streaks streaming past the window. The rhythmic, pulsing sight always makes him feel like space itself is trying to hypnotize him—a poisonous notion, to the mind of a spy. He looks away, grinding his teeth, and activates the Rebellion databank from his pilot console. His fingers stab at the keys, pulling up the file for Eadu.

It doesn’t have much.

Eadu: Bheriz sector, the file reads. Outer Rim Territories. Moons: one. Known enemy strongholds: Advanced weapons research facility - Imperial Intelligence jurisdiction. Climate: 90% overcast. Expect frequent storms.

“That could work in our favor,” he mutters beneath his breath, more to distract himself than for any other purpose.

“What could?” K-2 pipes up.

Cassian stifles a sigh. The droid’s efficient hearing always seems to assert itself when Cassian’s least in the mood.

“The climate on Eadu,” he says. “Apparently it rains often, and hard. That could help disguise our location from Imperial sensors.”

“I suppose so.” K-2’s voice turns tinny with reluctance. “But I don’t like getting wet. It isn’t good for my joints.”

Despite himself, Cassian smiles. “Well, with any luck, you won’t even have to leave the ship. We’re only here for one man.”

He knows that if it were possible, K-2 would be frowning. “I don’t like being left on the ship, either.”

Cassian breathes in deep, drawing on his last reserves of patience. “Well, Kay,” he says, “unfortunately, things don’t always go the way we would like.”

K-2’s head swivels toward the back of the ship, where Jyn sits in the furthest corner. Her knees are pulled up to her chin, her arms wrapped around them, her eyes tight and distant and vaguely furious.

“I suppose,” he says, “that means you’ll be taking her along.”

Cassian finds himself briefly but intensely grateful that Jyn is the only her currently on the ship, sparing him the necessity of looking at her. More and more, he has the uncomfortable sensation that if he glances in her direction, he’ll never be able to tear his eyes away.

“I haven’t decided yet,” he says, voice tight.

“What?” K-2’s head swings back around so fast Cassian can almost hear the gears creaking. “Cassian, as much as I don’t like her, taking her along is a good strategic move. If our goal here is to extract Galen Erso, that will be much more easily accomplished if he knows we have his daughter.”

“Yes, but there’s just one problem.” Cassian lowers his voice, leaning in closer to his droid. “I have orders from Draven to assassinate Erso, not extract him.”

He waits out the pause as K-2 processes the new information.

“I see,” the droid says. His tone turns brisk, businesslike. “In that case, when the time is right, give the word and I will be happy to restrain Jyn.”

Cassian winces. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary, Kay.” I hope.

“You don’t think it will be necessary?” K-2 stares at him. Despite his familiarity with the droid’s mannerisms, from time to time Cassian still finds it unnerving to be stared down by something that can’t blink. “Of course it will be necessary. When she discovers you’re planning to assassinate her father, she will attempt to stop you. There is a 98% probability that she will use lethal force.”

“Kay.” Cassian rakes a hand back through his hair. “I don’t know yet what I’m going to do, all right? About Erso. I need to get there and assess the situation before I make any final decisions.”

“But you have orders from—” K-2 stops speaking so abruptly that for a moment, Cassian almost wonders if he’s spontaneously shut down. Then the droid turns toward him, slowly, the entire upper half of his chassis swiveling in the co-pilot’s seat.

“Cassian,” he says, with an exaggerated, incredulous air, like a parent speaking to a slow-witted child. “Is this about that mark on your ribs again?”

Cassian feels his whole body wince. He risks a glance toward the back of the ship, thanking the Force for small mercies that Jyn is still staring into the distance, giving no indication of awareness that her father’s fate hangs in the balance.

“Would you please keep your voice down?” he grits out between clenched teeth. “And no. It is not about that.”

“It certainly appears otherwise. I can’t think of any other reason you would be considering defying a direct order.”

Cassian leans back in his chair, crossing his arms. “That’s ironic coming from you.”

“You are attempting to evade the subject.”

“Kay…” Cassian closes his eyes briefly. “Listen to me. It is not about the mark. Okay? It’s about the fact that Erso could be on our side. I talked to the pilot—the Imperial defector—and he’s convinced that Erso can help us. He’s staked everything on that claim. Risked his life for it.”

He slumps back against his chair, stabbing a finger at his console without really seeing it, thinking back to the Ring of Kafrene. He remembers the panic in his contact’s eyes and voice, the way the man had relaxed under the pressure of Cassian’s hand on his shoulder, soaking up the false comfort in the gesture. The way his body had jerked, the tiniest shocked grunt escaping his throat when Cassian pulled the trigger.

Hardest of all is that it’s not even the only such memory in his mind.

“If there’s a chance Erso can help us,” he says, “it’s worth considering an alternate path.”

K-2 is silent a moment.

“And if you’re wrong?” he asks.

Cassian grunts. “That’s why I need to see how the situation unfolds. And why Jyn can’t come along. In case Draven is right.”

“Understood.” K-2 inclines his head, turning back to the viewport. After a moment, he adds, “I remember what you said about the marks on your skin being a ‘sensitive subject.’ I will try not to mention it again. Especially in the earshot of Jyn Erso.”

Cassian chuckles, short and dry. “I would appreciate that.”

The rest of the trip passes in a crawl. He spends it deep in thought, sketching out strategies in his mind, accounting for each possibility he can conjure, playing out potential scenarios one by one.

(He visualizes infiltrating Eadu’s facility, sneaking down a hallway and into a laboratory, or perhaps an office, coming face to face with Erso. Perhaps he’ll recognize Jyn’s eyes in the older man, or her nose, or the stubborn set of her jaw.

I’ve been ordered to kill you. By the way, I’m your daughter’s soulmate.)

He leans forward, elbows digging into his knees, fingertips pressing hard against his eyelids.

His job has never been easy. But it was easier before he met the wild card that is Jyn Erso. For every constant he can fix in his mental plans, she throws in a dozen variables. She shifts back and forth in his thoughts like a hand of sabacc cards, ever unpredictable, ever subject to change.

(He discovers early on that trying not to think of her does no good at all.)

Despite the hours spent deep in meticulous plans, he doesn’t anticipate the sheer fury of Eadu’s rain lashing the ship’s viewport. The lack of visibility he’d hoped would play in their favor instead works against them, striking the ship against an outcropping of rock, sending it careening to Eadu’s surface. The planet’s landscape itself is a contradiction: rain-soaked yet barren, boulders strewn about as though hurled in a Sith Lord’s temper tantrum, choking away all potential for fragile plant life.

“Everyone all right?” he calls out after the bumpy landing, when the ship has skidded to a groaning, precarious halt. He cranes his head over his shoulder, forgetting his promise to himself not to look in Jyn’s direction. His eyes skim over the defector pilot and the two temple guardians, landing on Jyn and staying there.

She looks perfectly fine, perhaps aside from her white-knuckled grip on the edges of her seat. He looks twice just to make sure, scanning her slowly from head to toe, looking for bruises or jutting, jagged bones.

On the second pass, her eyes meet his, and hold. Her brow furrows just slightly, a question in her gaze. Or perhaps a challenge.

Cassian looks away first. She’s fine, he tells himself, breathing in deep to slow the rapid patter of his heart. They’re all fine.

“Bodhi,” he says, pushing himself out of his chair. “With me. Let’s look over the ship, assess the damage.”

To his relief, Bodhi doesn’t complain about being asked to go outside in the downpour. To his even greater relief, Jyn watches them go without comment.

Even through the massive sheets of rain, it takes Bodhi only a handful of seconds to circle the ship, his apprehensive expression turning grim. The poncho they dragged out of the meager supply storage dwarfs his slender frame, the sleeves draping over his fidgeting hands, but even the excess of fabric can’t hide the gloom spelled out in his body language.

“See this?” he says, pointing his light in the direction of the ship’s engines. “This is completely shot. This ship won’t fly again.”

“I know.” Cassian looks to the distance, where the Imperial weapons facility is barely visible through the rain, blurred outlines of distant spires rising out of the mountainside.

“You know?” Bodhi echoes. Confusion darts across his face beneath the poncho’s hood. “Then why did you bring me out here?”

“Because I’m going to need your help.” Cassian runs his hands down his face, pushing rain-slicked hair back from his eyes. The water’s pouring down his face in rivulets, a constant obstruction to his vision no matter how many times he tries to brush it away. “I need to infiltrate that facility and find Galen Erso. You’re familiar with the place, right? You know where he might be?”

Bodhi hesitates, tucking his elbows in tight against his sides. He rubs his hands together briskly, sending water droplets flying everywhere. Cassian’s not sure if it’s a nervous tic or a futile attempt to get warm.

“I didn’t spend a lot of time there,” Bodhi says. “Usually just long enough to drop off the supplies, refuel, maybe eat something if there was time…”

“Bodhi.” Cassian closes his eyes. Somehow, that makes the rain’s endless roar even louder. “Yes or no?”

To his credit, Bodhi stands up a little straighter, his arms dropping to his sides. “Yes.”

“Good.” Cassian isn’t much for relying on the Force, but he’s almost tempted to send up a brief prayer of thanks for at least one thing going right. “Now—”

“But I can’t go in there,” Bodhi says, the words coming out rapid-fire, like he’s afraid Cassian will punch him before he finishes speaking. “I’ve been marked as a defector across all Imperial channels, or at least the ones that I used to frequent. If I step foot in that facility, or any of the other ones where I used to drop off supplies, they’ll shoot me on sight.”

Cassian suspends the prayer of thanks. “Okay,” he says, plans working and re-working in his head. “Then I’ll go in alone. I’ll find some other way of convincing Erso to come with me.”

“Oh, well, that should be easy,” Bodhi says. “Just take Jyn with you.”

Cassian feels his lips thinning before the words are even out. “That’s not a good idea.”

“Why not?” Bodhi stares at him. “I got to know Galen pretty well over all the times that I brought supplies to his lab. If there’s one thing I can tell you about him, it’s that he would give anything to see her again. They’ve been separated for fifteen years.”

And I might have to kill him before he gets that chance, Cassian thinks.

“I know that,” he says. “But she’s too much of a loose cannon. Infiltrating the facility will take stealth and subtlety. I’ve never met a person less subtle than Jyn Erso. She wants to see her father again as much as he wants to see her, and that kind of emotion is too unpredictable for a mission like this.”

Bodhi blinks at him, rain dripping from his eyelashes. “But…”

“Bodhi,” Cassian says. “It’s complicated. All right?”

He can just make out Bodhi’s frown through the rain. “I understand that family dynamics can be—”

“It’s not just that,” Cassian hears himself say, impatience and desperation weaving through his tone. “Listen. Jyn—she’s my soulmate.”

Bodhi comes up short, goggling at him, his eyes huge under the lip of the poncho hood. His hand strays up to rub at his left shoulder, absently, gingerly, like he doesn’t know he’s doing it.

Cassian’s not a gambler—at least not with money—but he would bet a week’s pay that he’s just discovered where Bodhi’s mark is.

“Oh,” is all Bodhi says.

“Erso and Jyn can have their reunion,” Cassian says, trying to gentle his tone. “All right? But not until I’ve made the extraction.”

He plows on, hurriedly, not giving Bodhi time to question the plan further.

“I know you can’t go into the facility with me,” he says. “But any intel you can give me will help. The facility layout, typical defenses, directions to Erso’s lab—anything.”

Bodhi’s already nodding, head bobbing up and down like a tame orokeet hoping for a treat. “Of course, of course. I’ll tell you everything I know, yeah.” He pauses, and Cassian can almost hear him swallow even over the downpour. “What should the rest of us do while you’re in there?”

“We’ll need another ship if we want to have any chance of getting out of here,” Cassian says. “You head to the platform and see if there’s anything we can steal.”

Bodhi nods, once. “And the others?” He worries his lower lip between his teeth. “Jyn?”

“She needs to stay here,” Cassian says. “They all do. It’s not safe.”

He’s grateful that Bodhi doesn’t point out how unsafe their paths have been thus far, or that as long as the Empire continues tightening its fist, no place in the galaxy will ever be safe.

They trudge back inside the ruined vessel, where Baze and Chirrut sit calm as statues against the wall, and Jyn is pacing with the intensity of a caged animal. Her head snaps up as they enter, but she doesn’t break her stride. Her eyes are fierce in the dim glow of the ship’s emergency lighting.

“It’s not good,” Cassian says without preamble. “The ship is scrap. It won’t fly again. We’ll need an alternate route out of here.”

Jyn finally stops pacing, centering herself in front of Cassian. She waves one hand in a terse gesture, as though news of the ship’s demise is as irrelevant as a breeze on her face.

“My father,” she says. It’s more a demand than a question.

Cassian shoots a glance at Bodhi, quicksilver. “We’re going to take a look around, figure out the best way to approach the facility and get to your father. Bodhi and I will go. He’s familiar with the territory and the installations here.”

“I’m going with you.”

For all his reservations about Jyn being impulsive and unpredictable, he’d seen that coming from a parsec away. “No, you need to stay here, in case things go south. It’s paramount that your father’s message gets back to the Alliance. You’re the messenger.”

“That’s ridiculous. We all know what the message is. We all heard it.” Jyn’s glare is a wild thing, threatening to cut him off at the knees. She steps closer to him, and though he’s at least a head taller than her, the sudden darkness in her eyes looms large.

“Cassian,” she says, her voice low and thick, as though she’s grinding the words out of her throat. He watches her wrap her fingers around her forearm, over her soul-mark, her nails sinking in deep. “If this is about—”

“It’s not.” Part of Cassian’s brain screams at him that this is not the appropriate time or place for this conversation, with Bodhi, Baze, Chirrut, and K-2 all gathered around like spectators at a podrace, leaning in, greedy for a fiery crash. The other part of his brain registers nothing but Jyn: the muscles working in her throat, the whip-sharp tension in her posture, the fury sparking in her eyes, brightening them to a shade of green so vibrant he almost has to look away.

“Jyn,” he says. His gaze drifts to her arm, then back to her face. “That’s not it.”

Off to the side, Bodhi muffles a cough. It’s all Cassian can do not to turn and skewer him with a glare.

“We’re just going to look around,” he says, eyes never leaving Jyn’s. “That’s all.”

More than anything, he suddenly wants to ask her to trust him. More than anything, he knows he can’t. Not when her father’s life sits squarely in his hands. Not when he doesn’t know yet whether he’ll follow the path of duty or of mercy.

Jyn’s gaze doesn’t waver, but something shifts in her eyes. Her mouth tightens, then she gives a single, brittle nod. Her posture relaxes a fraction.

“Okay,” she says.

Her eyes hold his, keen and sharp. He can read the message in them, as clear as an Alderaan summer sky.

Don’t be lying to me.

Cassian turns away.

Sneaking inside the facility is easier than Cassian thought it would be. He sticks as closely as possible to the little-used back hallways Bodhi marked out for him, affecting a casual posture, an unhurried pace. It’s impossible not to tense a little bit each time he crosses paths with an officer or a trooper, but none of them look too closely at him—or at the Imperial uniform Bodhi stripped off and passed over to him.

“I’m not sad to be rid of that,” the pilot had said, watching Cassian shove the goggles up over his forehead. He’d been shivering a little, whether from the cold or with revulsion at the Imperial insignia, Cassian couldn’t tell.

The uniform is far from a perfect fit. Cassian’s a little taller, a little heavier than Bodhi, but it’s not the first time he’s had to make do with discomfort for the sake of going undercover. It probably won’t be the last.

(He tries not to think of how the tunic rides up against his ribs, as though taunting him, the constant press of fabric rough and scratching against his soul-mark.)

He holds his breath as an Imperial officer walks down the hallway toward him, eyes flicking up and down the uniform. The man barely blinks before his gaze shuffles back to the data pad in his hand, fingers flicking over the screen with lazy swipes.

For just a moment, Cassian envies him and the other Imperials like him, their ability to be nonchalant, to be so thoroughly off their guard. To be so confident in the status quo that they don’t even think to look twice for potential intruders, lulled into complacency like the endless drumming of the rain against the roof.

The thoughts darken, wrapping around his brain, threatening to drag him into a mental quagmire. He shakes them off, turning the corner, stepping closer to Galen Erso’s office.

Level two, he thinks, running Bodhi’s directions over in his head for the hundredth time. Sub-block twelve. Room seventeen.

There.

He slows his steps. The office is marked by a large window facing the hallway, its light spilling out onto the dull gray corridor floor. Grimly, Cassian wonders if the intent is for Erso to be able to look out, or for the Empire to keep its eye on him.

Cassian lingers at the far side of the hallway, peering through the glass pane. For a moment, the office looks unoccupied: strewn with various pieces of machinery and chunks of kyber crystal in different stages of experimentation, but empty of life.

Then a flicker of motion catches his eye, and he lifts his head, squinting further into the depths of the room. A desk is pushed into the furthest corner, layered in shadow, and a man sits with his head bent over the surface. A single lamp illuminates his face.

Cassian lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

In contrast to the other officers he’s seen in this facility, their faces ranging from haughtiness to apathy, Erso simply looks tired. More than tired—weary, like he’s been forced to carry a heavy weight, something exhausting him inside and out. His head is bent, his face drawn and lined.

Cassian takes a step toward the office door.

“Cassian? Cassian, are you there? Can you hear me?”

He muffles a curse, darting away from Erso’s door like he’s been stung, his hand flying to the radio at his ear.

“Kay,” he whisper-hisses. “This is really not a good time.”

“I’m afraid it might be an emergency.” K-2’s unapologetic voice filters through the earpiece. “Jyn has left the ship.”

“What?” Cassian stumbles back against the wall, blood roaring in his ears. “Where did she go?”

“I didn’t ask,” K-2 says. “But she appeared to be headed in the direction of the facility.”

Cassian closes his eyes, counting to ten in the language of Fest, then again in Basic. “Kay. Didn’t you say you would be happy to restrain her if necessary?”

“I said I would restrain her if you ordered me to,” K-2 corrects him. “And then you said you thought it wouldn’t be necessary. So I didn’t.”

He pauses, and Cassian cycles through several responses. He’s unable to come up with one not laced with expletives before K-2 speaks again.

“Would you like me to track her down and bring her back to the ship?”

Cassian’s brain supplies him with an image of K-2 bodily hauling Jyn, kicking and screaming, through Eadu’s mud-soaked terrain. Without warning, he remembers the very first time he met her—

Was that really only a day or two ago? he thinks, distantly. It feels like it’s been a lifetime—

He remembers the murder in her eyes when he’d taken her elbow to escort her out of the Alliance headquarters briefing room, steering her toward the landing pad. He remembers sizing her up in those early moments, how he’d interpreted her sharp eyes and defiant posture as selfishness and apathy rather than the guarded self-reliance of someone who’d been alone for a long time.

A trait, perhaps, not so different from his own.

“No, Kay,” he says. “Let her go. I’ll deal with it.” She’d never forgive me if I ordered her dragged back to the ship like a child.

True, his mind whispers, one thought coming right on the heels of another. And do you think she’ll forgive you lying to her? Or murdering her father?

He closes his eyes, pushing the nagging thoughts away with an effort. He’s long since learned that most problems don’t have optimal solutions. All he can do is choose the best path he possibly can.

Mind clear, he opens his eyes, refocusing his gaze on Erso’s office door.

He doesn’t have much time.

Erso looks up as he enters, a frown creasing his brow. He rises from the desk, meeting Cassian halfway across the office, his frown deepening as he takes in the ill-fitting flight suit.

“Do I know you?” he asks, meeting Cassian’s eyes. His voice is a little rough around the edges, lacking the crisp refined Coruscanti accent of his Imperial peers, but it’s his eyes Cassian notices. His eyes, and the skeptical tint of his frown.

Cassian knows those eyes, that frown. He swallows hard.

“No,” he says. “I’m afraid you don’t know me.” Unless you count my words on your daughter’s arm.

Almost without meaning to, his hand drifts to the blaster at his belt. Erso’s eyes follow, understanding creeping in like dawn spreading across the sky.

“You’re with the Alliance,” he says. “My message? The one I sent to Saw?”

“We don’t have it.” The mark tingles on Cassian’s ribs, warm and prickling. He draws a deep breath, shutting it out. “The weapon, the one you built? It destroyed Jedha City and everyone who lived there, including Saw Gerrera. And your message along with them.”

He watches Erso closely, but aside from a slight flicker in his eyes, the other man’s face remains impressively blank. Cassian recognizes it, knows it as well as he knows his own face: the mask of someone long accustomed to hiding their emotions.

Someone working undercover, his mind whispers. His hand hovers near his weapon, fingers twitching.

“I see,” Erso says. His voice is as tightly controlled as his expression. “And without Saw’s word, you have no reason to believe me, even if I were to give you the message right here and now. To you, I’m just an Imperial scientist, someone responsible for the deaths of hundreds. Thousands.”

His eyes drop to the blaster, then back up to Cassian’s face. Cassian watches something settle over him, a sense of calm—resignation, perhaps, yet mixed with determination.

“Very well,” Erso says. “If you’re here to kill me, I understand. I won’t try to stop you. But there’s something you need to know first. About the weapon.”

“The weakness,” Cassian says. “The trap you built inside it?”

Erso stares at him, sharp, unblinking. It reminds him so strongly of Jyn that he almost forgets to breathe.

“If you didn’t get the message,” Erso says, “how do you know about that?”

“One person did see it.” Cassian lets his hand drop away from his blaster, his uniform falling to cover it. “Your daughter. She’s with us.”

This time, Erso can’t disguise his reaction.

“Jyn,” he whispers. “She’s alive?”

“Listen.” Cassian takes a step closer. “You’re not wrong. I have no reason to believe you. But Jyn…”

He breaks off, letting out a long, unsteady breath.

“I believe her,” he says, almost more to himself than to Erso. The moment the words leave his mouth, he knows they’re true.

It feels like a weight has tumbled off his shoulders and careened down a mountain, never to be seen again.

“Come on.” He turns toward the door, gesturing. “We don’t have much time. I need to get you back to Yavin Four. And Jyn—she’s here, and she wants nothing more than to see you. I’ll take you to her.”

The sudden crackling noise startles them both, static buzzing from the direction of Erso’s desk. It whirs and whines, then gives way to a voice, the tone sharp and urgent.

“Erso? Erso, are you there? We’ve just received word: Director Krennic is on his way here. He’ll be landing within minutes, and he’s requested to speak with you. You’d better get up to the landing platform; you know he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

Erso moves to the desk, toggling the radio. “Acknowledged. I’ll be there in a moment.”

He switches off the radio, meets Cassian’s eyes over the desk. He looks like a different man, now: his face alight instead of exhausted, eyes burning with stoic determination.

“I have to go,” he says. “If I don’t, Krennic will know something’s wrong. He’ll have troops searching the area within minutes, and none of us will get out of here. As soon as he’s gone, I’ll meet you outside the facility. You’d better move, get out of sight before he arrives and sees you.”

Cassian nods, moving to the door. He reaches it, then slows, turning to look over his shoulder.

“Your daughter,” he says. “Jyn. The words on her arm…”

For a moment, Erso just looks at him. Then his face slowly clears.

“You?” he whispers.

Cassian can only nod. He watches from across the room as Erso takes a long, ragged breath.

“Ever since the mark appeared on her skin,” Erso says, “all those years ago…not a day has gone by that I don’t think of it. For years, it terrified me. I couldn’t look at my daughter without wondering if someday those words would come true. Knowing that I might be separated from her. It’s one of the reasons I moved my family to the Outer Rim, hoping we would be safe, away from it all. It didn’t work.”

He shakes his head, staring into the distance. “After that day, whenever I thought of the words, they angered me. A constant reminder that despite all my efforts, I couldn’t keep my family safe.”

He steps toward Cassian, absently moving a piece of kyber crystal out of his path.

“I have to admit,” he says, his voice going low and dark. “In my weaker moments, I hated you. Knowing that you, whoever you were, would be with her when I wasn’t. But I never imagined this—that the one for whom I harbored such dark thoughts would be the same one to bring me the best news I’ve ever received: the news that Jyn is still alive. That she’s here.”

For the first time, he smiles. It looks almost strange on his careworn face, as though it’s been so long that he’s nearly forgotten how.

“When Jyn was a child,” he says, “I always told her that her mark wasn’t set in stone, that it was just one possible path out of many. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps…perhaps all of this will have been worth it.”

He lifts his head, eyes sharpening, as though coming out of a trance.

“Go,” he says. “Go to Jyn, quickly. I’ll meet you as soon as I can.”

Cassian runs.

The back hallways are nearly deserted as he retraces his steps, the troopers all headed topside to greet the director. Above his head, he hears a sound like a thundering roar echoing across the structure. It’s impossible to tell if it’s Krennic’s ship descending or if it’s actual thunder, the planet’s Force-forsaken climate giving voice to its fury.

He’s two hallways away from clearing the structure when his radio pings in his ear.

“Cassian? Are you still inside the facility? You need to get out. Immediately. Cassian, can you hear me?”

He nearly stumbles, catching himself on a corner. “Kay? What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Are you clear of the facility?” K-2 repeats. In all their time together, Cassian can’t remember ever hearing him sound this panicked.

“Almost. Two minutes and I’ll be out.” Cassian picks up his pace, veering around a corner. “Why, what is it? What’s happening?”

“The Alliance is sending air support. They launched fighters when they lost contact with our ship. I told them that you were still on-site, but they said it’s too late to recall the squadron. They’ll be here any minute. Are you out yet?”

Cassian skids to a halt. Just in front of him stands the door to the outside, its console glowing an inviting green. Through the window he can see the pummeling rain, the curve of the mountainside, a glimpse of dark sky.

“Jyn,” he says. “Kay, where’s Jyn? Did she go back to the ship?”

“What? No, she’s not here. I don’t know where she is.”

“No,” Cassian whispers.

“No? What do you mean, ‘no’? Cassian, are you out?”

“Call them back,” Cassian orders. “Tell them they have to pull up, as soon as they can. Tell them something, anything! Jyn has to be somewhere here in the facility. I’ve got to find her!”

He turns, making his way back down the hallway, switching the radio off in the middle of K-2’s protesting squawk. He’s halfway to the landing platform when he hears the unmistakable scream of an X-Wing’s engines, followed by the deafening boom of a bomb impacting the base.

The explosion knocks him off his feet, hurtling him headfirst into a wall. He tries to push himself to his hands and knees, but the world sways dizzily around him, and even his most determined glare can’t hold off the darkness rushing in.

Chapter Text

Cassian wakes to the smell of smoke and the rush of cold water on his face.

Even blinking hurts, but that doesn’t matter. He’s known how to push through pain since he was a child. He tests his ankles first, then his wrists, flexing everything with careful precision.

Not broken. Good.

He rolls onto his side, then pushes gingerly to a sitting position. Pain ripples through his head, but it’s more the dull ache of a concussion rather than the sharp stabbing that might indicate a fractured skull. He runs his hands through his hair all the same, checking for bumps—or worse, bone fragments. His fingers come away clean, blood-free.

Not dead, he thinks. Not yet, anyway.

He’s known people who took knocks on the head and seemed to be fine, then dropped dead hours later. Intracranial hemorrhage, the medics had said. Blood building up beneath the skull, pressing on the brain, no way to escape.

Cassian grits his teeth and grimaces, trying not to apply parallels to his current situation. Even if he’s living on borrowed time, it doesn’t matter. Jyn could still be out there. She could be lying trapped under a fallen structural beam, rendered helpless by a broken bone or a shredded spinal column, gray-white nerves bunching up and spilling out like the limp noodles in the commissary back on Yavin Four—

“Enough,” he hisses aloud. The ragged anger in his own voice grips him, brings his thoughts back to ground level. He didn’t get this far by flying into a panic at every setback. He won’t start now.

He tilts his head back, ignoring the shockwave of dizziness, and squints up through the rain to where the ceiling used to be. He can still hear the roar of not-too-distant battle, and through the yawning maw that was once the roof, he sees the errant streams of energy bolts missing their targets and soaring off into space. Red and green bolts, alike. The Empire’s starfighters have launched in defense of the facility. He hears the crisp snap of TIE fighter fire, followed by a roil of orange-gold as an X-Wing explodes across the sky. The engines scream as they die, tumbling to the planet’s surface and cratering the distant hillside.

Cassian closes his eyes, concentrates, and heaves himself up and forward. He totters in place, fingers braced on what’s left of the wall to steady himself.

The fact that the battle hasn’t ended yet is a good sign, he tells himself as he takes his first lurching step forward. It means he wasn’t unconscious all that long.

It means he still has time to find Jyn.

If she’s still alive.

The thought hits him as hard as the blast had, and he stops dead in his tracks, almost falling to his knees with the sudden lack of movement. His shaking hands fly to his jacket, ripping it off and letting it tumble to the ground in a graceless pile. He fists his fingers in his tunic, yanking it free from his belt, not bothering to undo the buckle.

Despite having spent most of his life maintaining a steadfast apathy toward the concept of soulmates in general and his mark in particular, it’s been impossible to avoid picking up on the basic facts of how the soul-marks work. He knows they remain sharp and vibrant, like a freshly-inked tattoo, for as long as the soulmate is still living. Once that person dies, their words on the other’s skin fray and fade, the mark scarring over, a permanent reminder of what was lost.

He jerks his shirt up and cranes his head, looking down at his ribs with wide eyes. Jyn’s words stare back at him, still dark and clear as the day they first appeared on his skin.

Cassian feels his knees weaken, and he splays his fingers on the wall, breathing hard.

She’s still alive.

The relief is intense but short-lived, ebbing as fast as it came. His fingers press harder against the wall as another Alliance bomb rocks the base to its core.

She’s alive…for now.

He thrusts his shirt back down, squares his jaw, and runs. It’s more of a staggering hobble, his legs and his head alike screaming protests at him with every step, but he grits his teeth against the pain. The mental image of Jyn lying unconscious on death’s door flickers through his mind again, forcing its way through the ache in his skull, pushing his body past its pain threshold.

Another few staggered steps, and he catches sight of the elevator—or what was the elevator. Shrapnel has blown clean through the side of the shaft, and the instrumentation panel dangles off the wall, forlorn sparks leaping from the sheared-off wires and drifting to the floor. Cassian spares it one regretful glance, shifts directions, and heads for the stairs.

It’s only three floors, but it feels like three hundred. By the time he reaches the roof he’s bathed in sweat, his jacket long since shed, the coarse threads of his tunic chafing against oversensitive skin. His gun’s barrel is slick against his palms, and he spares enough mental energy to curse himself for failing to wear gloves.

Out in the open, the rain feels like a balm on his skin, but he pushes away the urge to close his eyes and turn his face up to the sky. Fires blaze across the landing pad, and he can still hear the screeching of TIE and X-Wing engines overhead, far too close for comfort.

They’ll be coming in for another pass soon, he realizes, dimly. More bombs. I’m out of time.

Something creaks, then groans, an unearthly rumble like a massive beast rousing from decades of slumber. It takes Cassian a moment to realize it’s the base itself, shaken down to its foundation, the structure beginning to dislodge from the mountainside.

“Jyn,” he whispers aloud, squinting through the smoky haze of mingled ash and rain. “Where are you?”

He leans against the battered wall, grimacing, eyes scanning back and forth in desperate arcs, searching for her familiar proud outline. Head high, shoulders back, spine taut and stubborn.

Nothing. Cassian swallows, licks the rain from his lips, and lets his eyes drop to the bodies sprawled on the landing pad.

He spots her, hunched over and huddled, at the same time the Stormtroopers do.

If he could see her now, Saw Gerrera would be shaking his head, his thin mouth puckered in disappointment. As it is, he’s probably rolling over in his grave.

No, Jyn thinks, almost dreamily, the thoughts coming to her as though from a great distance. He doesn’t even have a grave. He’s nothing but little bits of bone and dust floating in Jedha’s atmosphere.

It’s strange, the kinds of things that filter through her head in moments of high stress. The whole galaxy slows down, Eadu’s revolutions around its axis diminishing to a crawl. She’s vaguely aware that there’s a battle happening directly above her head, that at any moment a starfighter’s laser could obliterate her, reduce her to the same nothingness as Saw. She won’t even have the perfunctory courtesy of an unmarked grave.

None of it matters, because for the first time in fifteen years, she’s staring at her father. Hunched over him, as though her muscle and bone and sinew can protect him from the X-Wings’ rage.

“Papa.” The word rattles out of her throat, rusty and strangled, jostled out of the storehouse of words she thought she’d never use again. Words like family, hope, love. Peace. “Papa, hold on.”

He’s alive, but just barely. Jyn’s seen this before, flickering across the faces of more than one battlefield colleague: the thousand-yard stare of one wounded past awareness. Usually followed by death, in hours if not minutes.

A furious surge of bitterness floods her mouth, turning everything so sour she almost spits. He won’t die. He can’t. Not now, not mere moments after she’s finally reunited with him following fifteen endless years. Even the Force wouldn’t be that cruel. Would it?

The unfairness of it blinds her, roars in her ears, and she doesn’t register the distant clatter of Stormtrooper armor hitting the ground until seconds after it happens. It pushes into her consciousness, and she tears her eyes from her Papa, looking to her left. A column of troopers lies strewn across the landing pad, the blinding white of their armor now dulled with rain and spattered soil, their limbs sticking out at random angles. Their weapons clatter across the ground, useless lumps of metal and plasteel battered by the rain.

Jyn looks to her right, directly into Cassian’s eyes. Even in the downpour, little wisps of smoke rise from his blaster’s barrel, still hot.

The phantom Saw inside her head sighs his disapproval at her lack of awareness, her reflexes all deserting her in the space of a moment. “Those Stormtroopers would have riddled you with bullets,” he admonishes her, brandishing a clawed artificial finger at her. “And if Cassian wasn’t on your side, he could have killed you, too. Without blinking.”

“Is he?” she snarls aloud, but the screech of the wind carries away her words. Her father’s blood is hot and slick beneath her fingers, spilled by Cassian’s people. “Is he on my side?”

Either way, his hand is on her shoulder, the warmth of it burning through every soaked layer of her clothing. He leans in so close she imagines she can feel his breath like a battering ram against her ear.

“We have to get out of here!” he yells over the wailing of the wind. “This base is going to blow at any second!”

Jyn turns to him, matching his closeness, her forehead almost pressed to his, their lips inches apart. At any other moment, in any other scenario, it might be romantic. Now, it’s anything but.

“Not,” she hisses. “Without. My. Father.”

She sears Cassian with her eyes, daring him to defy her. For the first time, she notices a dark indigo bruise unfurling across his temple and several gashes, small but bloody, staining his face. His arm is pressed against his midsection like he’s holding in his guts, and one leg cants behind him at a not-quite-right angle.

Before, her heart rate might have pitched up to an uncomfortable pace, worry spiraling through her mind. Now, her heart is already going as fast as it can, and she has no more emotion left to spare.

“My father,” she says again, looking down at her Papa. His eyes are half-lidded, glazed. His chest still rises and falls, but so slow and shallow it sends a bolt of pure fear deep into Jyn’s heart.

She looks back to Cassian. He’s rising to one knee, struggling with the effort. Jyn watches barely suppressed pain dart across his face.

“Okay,” he says. “Here, help me lift him up.”

Her father’s arms are limp and boneless, but she slings one over her shoulders, the other over Cassian’s. She’s not injured, herself, but It feels like all the strength’s been drained out of her nonetheless, siphoned away by the weight of long-buried emotions clawing their way to the surface of her consciousness. It takes everything she has left to haul her father to his feet. Even then, she suspects Cassian’s doing most of the work, his own injuries be damned.

She has just enough energy left to feel a whispery sliver of guilt work its way through her, and then she buries that, too.

Jyn hardly registers the trek back to the ship. She barely notices that the ship itself is entirely different from the one they flew in on, that poor vessel now reduced to sopping wet scrap. It’s probably already begun to rust in its grave on the far side of Eadu’s hills.

Every step toward the stolen Imperial shuttle feels like running a long-distance race. Her father’s weight grows heavier by the second, his hand flopping against her shoulder each time her foot hits the ground, ceaseless as a child trying to get a mother’s attention. She tries not to notice his feet dragging behind them, leaving a conspicuous trail through the muck. Something warm trickles down her neck, a bizarre counterpoint to the icy rain pelting her in sheets, and it takes her a moment to realize it’s a thin stream of her Papa’s blood. The droplets roll down her clothes, disappearing as soon as she notices them, mingling with the rain and disappearing in the slog beneath her feet.

She’s spent a lifetime learning to control her emotions and expressions, to hide her true feelings beneath masks of stoicism or sarcasm. Yet her exhaustion and despair must be showing on her face, because she hears Cassian call out to her from her father’s other side. For some reason, or by some whim of the Force, the wind carries his words to her instead of away.

“Keep going,” she hears him say. “Keep going. We’re almost there.”

Jyn steels her jaw, tugs her father’s arm tighter around her shoulders, and puts one foot down in front of the other.

The supply of medical equipment on the shuttle is rudimentary at best. Not terribly surprising, to learn that the Empire doesn’t spare much thought for the health of its underlings, but Jyn still takes the opportunity to mutter a heartfelt curse on the Emperor’s name, ancestry, and bodily functions.

“Here, Papa,” she gasps out with a last burst of energy. She steers him over toward the nearest standard-issue Imperial bunk, helping Cassian lower him to the pallet as gently as she can manage. Despite their best efforts, Galen’s head impacts the poor excuse for a pillow with a dull thud, jarring a moan from his lips. The sound cuts deep through Jyn’s defenses, wrapping fear and pain around her heart.

“Here.” Cassian appears at her shoulder, and despite the weariness in her limbs, she stifles the urge to jump. “This is everything I could find in the supply storage. Bacta, bandages, a few vials of anti-infective medicine. It’ll have to do until we make it back to Yavin Four.”

“I’ve got it.” Jyn snatches the supplies from his grasp, keeping her hands steady with an effort. She’s familiar with basic field medicine, patching up Saw’s other soldiers in the middle of battlefields on more than one occasion, but this is different.

This is her father. It still hasn’t quite sunk in yet. A tiny voice in her head speaks its doubts, wondering if she’ll look back and find his face has changed, turning to a stranger, playing tricks on her mind.

She can’t look at Cassian—not yet, it’s too much, too soon—but she senses him hovering just behind her shoulder.

“If you want me to help—” he begins.

Jyn’s hands go still, a bandage unspooling around her fingers.

What was it Chirrut had said, back on the crashed ship?

The Force moves darkly near a creature that is about to kill.

She doesn’t realize she’s spun around, teeth bared, until she’s at eye level with Cassian’s chin. Her hands clench around the bandages as though they’re a lifeline. Or a weapon.

“I said I’ve got it.” She hurls the words like javelins, shifting so that she’s blocking Cassian’s view of her father. From the corner of her eye she notices his gun, and wonders at her chances of wrestling it from its holster. “Just—stay away from him.”

A distant part of her realizes she must look nothing short of possessed, a tiny half-drowned rodent stained with blood and muck, hair plastered to her face, irises ringed on all sides with bloodshot white. Cassian looks little better, his own rain-slicked hair failing to hide the deepening black of his bruised face, but his eyes meet hers and hold.

The silence stretches, deepens. Jyn feels something like fire crawling up and down the words on her arm.

“Okay,” Cassian says. His palms shift up and out, and he takes a slow step backward. “Call if you need any help.”

Jyn says nothing. She watches as he turns and makes his way toward the cockpit, her eyes staying pinned to the door until he’s well out of sight. The ship’s engines crescendo to a roar as the shuttle jumps to hyperspace, and Jyn turns back to her father, bracing her hands against the side of the cot.

“It’s okay, Papa,” she whispers, reaching out to smooth the hair back from his brow. His skin feels cold and clammy, and she’s not sure if it’s from his injuries, residual damp from the rain, or her own body coming down from its emotional overload. “It’s just you and me now.”

She works with grim precision, squeezing out every last drop of bacta. When it’s gone, she squats back on her heels, hands dangling from her knees. Absently she watches her fingers quaking in front of her, part barely restrained helpless frustration, part post-shock adrenaline.

“There must be something else I can do,” she whispers, fixing her eyes on her father’s face. He’s long since slipped into unconsciousness, his breaths regular, but still far too shallow.

But there’s nothing. Jyn balls her hands into fists, then forces herself to relax. She sits on the edge of her father’s cot, pulling his hand into her lap, pressing her fingers to the inside of his wrist. She waits until she feels the pulse, slow and sluggish.

Minutes pass. She counts her father’s heartbeats.

The slow rhythm blends in with the fatigue finally settling over her, almost lulling her into drowsiness, until movement at the doorway catches her peripheral vision. She jolts alert, nails digging into her Papa’s wrist before she can stop herself. Even then, he doesn’t stir.

“What?” she says, stiffening, watching Chirrut enter the room. The word stops just short of a bark, and she breathes in deep, forcing calm back into her voice. Chirrut’s done nothing to earn her ire, she reminds herself. “What’s happened? Is everything all right?”

“Nothing has happened.” The not-Jedi looks and sounds just as calm as ever, his serene expression unchanged. “How is your father?”

“Breathing.” Jyn draws a ragged breath of her own, pressing parched lips together, suddenly realizing she would give almost anything for a drink of water. Ironic, considering the weather on the planet she just left. “I’ve done all I can for him. I just hope it’s enough.”

Chirrut steps closer, tilting his head toward her father’s pallet, his brows drawing together in a look that could be either sorrow or concentration. He makes a quiet humming sound, but says nothing—no meaningless platitudes, no effusive sympathies. Jyn feels a rush of gratitude.

“Are there any medical supplies left?” Chirrut asks after a moment, lifting his head back in Jyn’s direction. His unseeing eyes drift over her. “Bandages, painkillers?”

“Yeah, a few.” Jyn leans over to the small pile on the bedside table. She palms two vials of analgesics, tucking them into her pocket. “I’m saving these for Papa, if—when he wakes up, but you can have the rest. Are you injured?”

“No, not for me.” Chirrut holds out his hand, and Jyn places the supplies on his palm. “For the captain.”

Jyn stills.

“Wait.” Her voice sounds strange, forcing its way past a sudden constriction in her throat. “I’ll take them to him. Can you sit with my father? Make sure he’s—make sure nothing changes? Just listen to his breathing. Here, you can keep track of his pulse—his wrist is—”

“Jyn.” Chirrut’s voice is gentle. “Yes, I will stay with him. I don’t need to feel his pulse. I can tell.” He inclines his head toward the door. “Go.”

Jyn pauses, searching his face. He waits, and she sees no pity in his expression. Only patience touched with compassion.

On an impulse, she reaches out and grasps his hand, pressing it in hers. “Thank you,” she whispers, then makes for the door.

The hallway leading to the cockpit feels warmer than the makeshift med-bay, but she’s still shivering as she stalks through it, her nails tinged a dusky blue. Just the leftover chill from the rain, she tells herself, wrapping her fingers beneath the damp collar of her shirt, tugging sharply. The whole shuttle smells like air filters working overtime, the atmosphere laced with a canned, bleach-like scent. She wonders how the Imperials can stand it for more than a few minutes without losing their minds.

She rounds the corner. Cassian stands bracing himself against the co-pilot’s chair, a grimace on his face, one hand massaging his lower leg. Jyn marches up to him, not breaking her stride.

“Here.” She pushes the supplies in his direction. “I was told you need these.”

Cassian straightens, his movements stiff as a junk-pile droid as he turns to face her.

“Thank you.” He holds one vial to his leg, a spasm of something like relief crossing his face as he decompresses it. “Your father?”

“Chirrut’s with him.” Jyn shifts her weight back on one heel, crossing her arms. “Why are you injured?”

Cassian blinks at her, eyes still groggy with the medicine’s effects. “What?”

“You told me you were just going to have a look around.” She hears the growl in her voice, acidic enough to melt durasteel. “You said you were going to look around, then come back to the ship. Not infiltrate the facility. Not go to find my father.” Her breath whistles between clenched teeth. “You lied to me.”

She waits for him to defend himself, but he only looks at her. She sees a hint of something like sorrow in his eyes, but no repentance.

“Why did you go in there?” she presses. “You were going to kill my father, weren’t you? That’s why you didn’t want me to come along. Is that why you’re injured? You were in there looking for him, hunting him down, when the Alliance bombers attacked?”

“I wasn’t looking for him.” His voice is ragged, his fingers pale and clenched around another painkiller vial. “I had already found him. If I wanted to kill him, I could have. But I didn’t. We talked, and I agreed to extract him. I was going to meet him outside the facility, once the coast was clear.”

“But you did go in there to kill him.” Jyn feels like she’s weightless, spinning, her heart hammering a drumbeat in her chest. “You lied to my face and went to kill my father.”

“I had orders.” Cassian’s jaw clenches. Still she sees no sign of regret on his face. “Orders that I disobeyed.”

“You were still thinking about it, though, weren’t you? You were going to carry out those orders. Otherwise you would have had no reason to lie.” Even as she speaks the words, she feels the pain of betrayal squeezing its way around her heart. It’s less of a sting and more of a throbbing ache, one she knows won’t recede anytime soon.

“Do you know,” she says, vaguely amazed by the raw hurt in her own voice, “that I was actually starting to think you might be different?” Her fingers drop to her arm, rubbing up and down her soul-mark. She watches his eyes follow her movements. “But it turns out you’re the same as everyone else. The same lies. The same manipulation.”

She sees a flare of anger in his eyes, quick and hot. “How would you know what it's like?” he hisses. "When did you last take an order from someone who's not an extremist?"

He doesn't wait for her answer before he plows on. "And since you asked: I was looking for you."

She stares at him. “What?”

“That’s why I’m injured.” His tone is flat, matter-of-fact, but his eyes never leave hers. “That’s why I was in the facility. Kay told me you had left the ship. I went back to find you.”

She can’t breathe, can’t blink. Disbelief is a cold, hard ball inside her, slowly expanding. She wonders how many emotional blows one person can absorb in the space of a day.

“Why?” she whispers.

Cassian doesn’t break eye contact, but he says nothing. If he has an answer for her, it’s an unspoken one.

She takes a step backward, lifting her arm and shoving her sleeve down. The soul-mark feels like it’s blazing out from her skin. Out of the corner of her eye, she registers the others’ reactions: Bodhi looking away with a duck of his head, K-2’s optics brightening, Baze huffing a throaty noise somewhere between a grumble and a snort.

“This is it,” Jyn says, pointing at the mark. “Isn’t it? This is the reason you came back for me. On Jedha, and again here.”

“Jyn,” Cassian says. It sounds like a warning. His eyes have gone guarded.

“Listen,” Jyn bites out. “This mark doesn’t mean anything. Actions have meaning. My father always told me that I didn’t have to live by my mark, that I could make my own choices. So, whatever you think this mark means, whatever obligation you might think you have toward me, I’m releasing you from it. You don’t have to come back for me anymore. And after my father is stable and he’s helped your Alliance stop the Death Star, we don’t have to see each other again. All right?”

She stops, breathing heavily. Silence falls between them, sudden and ringing like the echo after a cymbal’s clang. Cassian watches her, his face as unreadable as the first day she met him.

“Fine,” he says. “If that’s what you want.”

His voice is low, and the chill of it quenches the throbbing heat of the mark on Jyn’s arm. She nods, a sharp dip of her head, lingering no more than a second before she turns on her heel and strides through the door, leaving the silence behind her.

Chapter Text

“I can assure you,” the med droid says, “we are doing everything we can.”

Its mechanical voice is calm, peaceful, and utterly infuriating. Jyn’s hand hovers near the blaster at her belt. She can almost feel her fingers itching for the trigger. She imagines how the scene would play out: the metal warming against her palm, the snap of the blaster bolt shattering the med-bay’s silence, the smoky smell of the plasma and sparking droid parts left in its wake.

(Several of the Rebellion’s guards had moved toward her when she’d poured out of the shuttle on Yavin Four, shaking Eadu’s metaphorical dust from her clothes. She’d watched their eyes drop to her blaster, then their posture had stiffened, their faces alert, their steps growing purposeful. The look of death in her eyes had made them falter, but it wasn’t until they glanced at Cassian over her head that they’d stopped altogether.

She wasn’t sure whether to feel grateful, or even more furious.)

“Doing everything you can,” she repeats, her tone flat and lifeless. “You know that’s the third time you’ve said that, right?”

The droid makes a humming noise that some deluded programmer must have considered soothing, and it bats its hands at her in little shooing gestures. “Please, step aside and let us work. We are doing everything we can. We will update you when we have a prognosis.”

Eight or ten years ago, she might have punched the damned thing and broken her knuckles on its chassis. Or she might have turned away, buried her mouth in the crook of her arm, and screamed herself hoarse. But Saw’s face flashes through her mind, his eyes muted with something like disappointment. Then his face disappears, replaced by her father’s. His eyes are warm and kind in her imagination, telling her to be patient.

“I’ve been patient for fifteen years,” she mutters.

The med-droid tilts its head at her. “I beg your pardon?”

Jyn makes a guttural noise in her throat and pushes past it, ignoring its bleat of alarm.

“Papa,” she calls, elbowing another droid out of her way. She’s at her father’s bedside in seconds, grasping his hand. It’s cold enough to send chills skittering down her spine, but it feels like the first solid thing she’s had to hold onto in more than a decade.

“I’m here, Papa,” she whispers, the words threatening to lodge in her throat. “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere. Not this time.”

She looks up at the med-droid, which somehow manages to exude distress at her obstinance despite its lack of facial expressions.

“I won’t get in the way,” Jyn promises, softening her voice to her most firm-yet-persuasive tone, the one that used to work wonders on Saw. The one she used when convincing Cassian to let her keep his blaster—but no, she won’t think of that.

“I won’t interfere with your work,” she goes on. “I promise. I just…can’t leave him. Do you understand? He’s my father, and this is the first time I’ve seen him in fifteen years. That’s more than half my lifetime.”

The droid emits a noise that sounds almost like a sigh.

“Very well,” it says. “But if your presence hinders our work in any fashion, I really must insist that you leave.”

“It won’t.” She’s already tuning the droid out, reaching out with her free hand to grasp a chair. It makes a forlorn screeching sound as she drags it across the floor, settling into it and leaning her elbows on her father’s bed.

She’s distantly aware of the hours passing, watching out the corner of her eye as Yavin Four’s foggy light slants through the med-bay window. Its angles slide across the floor, growing harsher as the sun sets. As the shadows stretch longer, Jyn half expects someone to come for her. Or if not for her, then for her father. Yelling, most likely. Demanding answers.

If the Force decides to smile on her for once, perhaps it’ll be Mon Mothma, serene and white-garbed, floating across the med-bay floor to extract information with a gentle touch. But knowing her luck, more likely it’ll be Draven with his scowls and impatient words. Maybe he’ll bypass answers altogether and send someone to finish the assassination job that Cassian couldn’t—or wouldn’t—carry out.

Or maybe it will be Cassian himself who comes to fetch her. Jyn’s mouth thins at the corners, taking on an unhappy twist despite herself.

She usually has a keen talent for forgetting things when she wants to. But it’s hard to push away the memory of something sharp and stony flashing in Cassian’s eyes after their argument on the shuttle. Harder still to forget how his face shut down entirely for the remainder of the trip through hyperspace.

No, she thinks. It won’t be Cassian. She settles in at her Papa’s side, gripping his hand tighter. He won’t want to see me again, after that blow-up on the ship. And that’s fine. It’s exactly what I told him, after all.

She expects to find the thought comforting. One door closing, another opening. Her Papa will recover, he’ll wake up, and she can learn who he is all over again. He’ll give the Rebellion whatever information they need to stop the Death Star, then the two of them can leave it all behind, return to living their own lives for once. Papa will show her where her Mama’s buried, and she can finally say goodbye. She can open the tightly sealed lid on her past, unpack the buried pain, and tell him about Liana Hallik, Kestrel Dawn, Tanith Pontha, and all of their secrets.

He’ll understand, she’s sure, if some things are harder to share than others. Liana and Kestrel and Tanith, all of them did things that might be considered less than moral. But her Papa won’t judge her. After all, he’s no stranger to making hard choices for the greater good.

Same as Cassian, her mind whispers. She grinds her teeth.

Outside, darkness is falling, a square of deep violet sky visible through the med-bay window. Jyn can just see the sparkle of starlight rising over the forest, and for the first time since the trip to Jedha, she allows the full weight of her exhaustion to settle on her. Her head droops, her arms dangling limp and heavy by her sides.

She casts a glance over her shoulder. The med-bay is quiet, the lights dimmed, the staff reduced for the night cycle. The deactivated med-droids perch in their alcoves against the wall, ready to spring to action if the need arises. Even the medical equipment seems to slumber, aside from an occasional beep or blinking light.

Jyn looks back to her father. His skin is still an ashy gray, his cheeks sunken, but his breathing is regular and his pulse continues throbbing against her fingers. With a last cautious look around the room, she leans forward, resting her arms on the side of the bed. She pillows her head in the crook of one elbow, and keeps her fingers wrapped around her father’s wrist.

She only means to stretch the kinks out of her muscles, but the fatigue pulls at her eyelids, and she drifts asleep to the slow, faint beat of her father’s heart against her fingertips.

In her dreams, she’s ten years old again, running through Lah’mu’s fields toward her Papa’s voice. She can hear him calling out to her, yet no matter how she strains, she can never understand the words. His gravelly tone skims across the endless waves of grass, tearing at her skin, almost reaching her ears, then at the last moment it’s swallowed up in the expanse of Lah’mu’s gray sky.

She runs faster, helpless, until the thunder of her own heartbeat drowns out the last traces of Papa’s voice. Her arm burns, and she stares down at it, peeling back her sopping wet sleeve to reveal the words of her mark, inch by inch.

When was the last time you were in contact with your father? the words taunt her, as her father’s formless voice swirls over and around in the wind, darting past her ears like a stinging insect that never stops tormenting her, yet never comes in for a landing.

She opens her mouth and lifts her hands, trying to let out a scream of frustration and fury, trying to scratch the damned words right off her skin. Yet something holds her back, a weight pressing down on her shoulders, heavy yet gentle. Warmth suffuses her, chasing away the chill of Lah’mu’s dew-soaked mornings, and Jyn’s frantic running ceases.

Trust, her mother’s voice whispers. Jyn can’t see her, but she wonders if the warm weight on her shoulders is her Mama’s hands, pulling her in for one last hug.

When she wakes, it’s a slow and gradual return to consciousness, not the near-frenzied snap that was the norm in Saw’s bunkers and bungalows. Her surroundings are bathed in mellow sunlight, and she blinks, lifting a hand to shade her eyes. Instead of sitting by her father’s side, half-draped over the edge of his bed, she’s lying on a cot of her own.

Someone moved me. The thought slides through her head, groggy and thick like Sullustan jam. Where—?

Something heavy slips down her arm. Out of reflex, she catches it before it hits the floor, and coarse fabric bunches in her fingers. It smells of earth and smoke, tinged with a faint ozone scent that Jyn recognizes as a blaster’s discharge. The fur trim around the sleeves and collar is still damp with Eadu’s rainwater.

It takes a moment for her sleepy brain to recognize it as Cassian’s coat. The rest of it is still draped over her left shoulder, cascading down her torso. It’s not quite big enough to cover her whole body, but it envelops her with soothing warmth, a sensation lingering from her dream.

“He thought you looked cold.”

The voice is faint and raspy, the words carried on little more than a wisp of breath, but the familiarity of it makes Jyn’s head jerk to her right.

“Papa?” she says. Her heart kicks up a wild beat, even faster than in her dream.

He’s smiling at her from the bed next to hers, mere inches away. With a start, she realizes she’s still clutching his wrist, probably hard enough to hurt, but he makes no complaint.

“Hello, Stardust,” he whispers. It’s almost a wheeze, his breaths coming out ragged. He’s propped up against a pillow, his brow damp with sweat, his skin leeched of color, but his eyes are open. He’s looking at her, smiling at her, right here within her reach. No longer a ghostly hologram delivering a message from lightyears away.

A thousand responses cycle through Jyn’s brain, too fast for her to even choose one.

“How long have you been awake?” she finally says. After fifteen years, it’s hilariously inadequate, but at least it’s a step above stunned, gaping silence.

“Several hours.” He’s still smiling, and the light of it makes his face look a little less gaunt. He reaches up with an obvious effort, fingertips brushing a cold trail across her cheek. “The Alliance leaders came to debrief me not long ago. I told them everything I could about the weapon. What they choose to do with it, now, remains to be seen.”

Jyn blinks, frowning. “They were here talking to you and I slept through the whole thing?”

“They wanted to shuffle you off to a spare room,” her father says. Jyn tries not to hear the rattle in his chest. “Or a cell. There was some debate over which would be more appropriate. But the captain convinced them to let you stay here. He said that if you woke up in a strange place without knowing what had happened to me, the consequences would be dire.”

He finishes the sentence off with a wet cough, but Jyn sees the warmth in his eyes. Her thoughts collide and jumble, and she shakes her head sharply, as though the motion can set the galaxy in order.

“So what happens now?” She swings her legs over the side of her cot, letting Cassian’s jacket pile on the mattress. “Are they going to attack the Death Star? Use the weakness, the trap you built?”

At the mention of the super-weapon, her father’s face sobers. “They have to,” he says, a spasm crossing his face. “It must be stopped. At all costs.”

“But you’ve done your part.” Jyn’s fingers curl against her legs, nails scraping over the fabric. “We’ll stop the Death Star—I know we have to. I saw what it did to Jedha. But after that…”

Something hot and itching stings at her eyes, and she blinks in confusion, lifting a hand to rub it away. Her knuckles come away damp, and she frowns, momentarily dazed. She can hardly remember the last time she allowed tears to spill over. Even watching her Papa’s hologram didn’t make her fully cry.

“Jyn.” Her father’s voice is gentle, but solemn, layered with a grave undertone she doesn’t want to hear. “Look at me.”

She does, dashing away the tears with the back of her hand. Her Papa doesn’t seem to notice the moment of weakness. He’s still watching her, eyes warmer than the sunlight, like she’s the greatest treasure the galaxy has ever known.

“I don’t know how much time I have left,” he says. There’s regret in the words, but also a deep and quiet calm. “But however little it may be, I’m grateful that I had this chance to see you again. To see the woman you’ve become.”

“Papa…” Fear rises in Jyn’s throat, sharp as a Trooper’s blaster bolt, cutting off her words. “Papa, no. Don’t talk like that. You’re going to be fine. We rescued you out of Eadu—we got you here in time. The med droids are going to fix you up.”

“There’s only so much they can do, Jyn. The human body wasn’t built to withstand the kind of damage those bombs did.” Her father grips her hand, squeezing her fingers tight in his. “But it’s all right. I’m not in any pain, and I have you here with me. I can’t ask for anything beyond that. I spent the last decade and a half thinking I would never see you again. Death is a small price to pay for that not to be true.”

He slips his fingers beneath her chin, drawing her eyes to his. “I’m very proud of you, Stardust. I always have been.”

The finality in the words sinks deep into her bones. She can almost feel her blood beginning to churn, a crimson haze of fear and anger, grief and helplessness stealing across her vision. She feels like she’s built of ash, like a single wayward puff of air could knock her over and scatter her uselessly across the floor, good for nothing but to be swept up and discarded.

“Why?” she grinds out. Her voice sounds thick and alien. “Why are you proud of me, Papa? You don’t know the sort of things I’ve done these past five years since Saw abandoned me, the person I’ve been…”

She feels the room shift and realizes she’s pushed up off her cot, her fists clenched, her spine stiff. She’d always found Yavin Four’s heat and humidity on the oppressive side, but now the med-bay feels even more stifling, pressing down on her, prickling under her collar.

“Would you still be proud,” she says, the words little more than a whisper, “if you knew I turned my back on the Rebellion after Saw left me? All those years you were forced into working for the Empire, I was fighting for nothing but my own survival.”

Her face is wet, and for a moment she thinks it’s the humidity before she realizes the tears have returned. Her Papa is silent, his face gone as unreadable as Cassian’s was, back on the shuttle. A wave of shame washes over Jyn, hot and stabbing.

She looks away. It was already enough, watching Cassian’s face slam shut like the trapdoor over her head back on Lah’mu. She can’t see the same disappointment, the same cold nothingness in her father’s eyes. Not after all this time.

Maybe they were right, all those people in her past who whispered about her behind her back, all the rebels in Saw’s cadre who shied away from working with her because she was a misstep in the fabric of the universe. Not just a twist of fate gone wrong, but a deliberate error, a mistake made on purpose. The product of two people who looked at the paths pre-ordained for them and willfully stepped elsewhere, spitting in the face of the Force.

Maybe she should have stayed Liana Hallik, or Tanith Pontha, or Kestrel Dawn. At least when she was them, she could choose who to be. She could create her own past, her own future.

Her father still hasn’t said anything. She still can’t look at him.

“Do you think,” she goes on, quietly, “all this has happened because Mama didn’t marry her soulmate? If she had, maybe she would still be alive. That man in the cape wouldn’t have come for us on Lah’mu. If you hadn’t had a wife and child to worry about, maybe you could have—”

“Jyn,” her father cuts her off. His voice is still gentle, and a tiny kernel of relief lodges in her chest, like a handful of water tossed on the inferno of her shame. “There’s no sense dealing in maybes and what-ifs. What I do know beyond all doubt is that if your mother had married her soulmate, you would never have been born. And no matter what, she would not have traded you for the whole galaxy. She loved you more than anything.”

He pauses, and Jyn hears the creak of his bed as he leans forward. She feels his fingers on her cheek, rough and callused, the hands of someone who never quite took to farming.

“And Stardust,” he says. “So do I.”

The old nickname undoes the cold hard knot in her chest. She turns back to him, lashes wet, tasting salt at the corners of her mouth.

“Listen to me, Jyn,” her father says. “There is then, and there is now. Right now, you’re here, right where you need to be. It doesn’t matter what path you’ve taken to get here. Back then, you did what was necessary to survive. Never be ashamed of that. We’ve all had to make sacrifices, to do unsavory things just to make it to another day. No one can judge you for that, myself least of all. Not after the things I’ve done.”

His hand slips down to hers, squeezing tightly.

“And yes, I am proud of you,” he says. “Because you survived, against all odds, against everything the universe threw at you. You made a life for yourself, just like I taught you that you could. The choices you made were yours alone.”

“But were they?” Jyn blows out a long breath. “I still ended up here, fighting for the Rebellion. I still met my—” The word sticks in her mouth, but she forces it out. “My soulmate. I didn’t actively choose those things. They just happened.”

“Perhaps,” her father says. “But you can still choose what to do with them. You can stay here with the Alliance, or you can walk out, take a ship, and go back to your old life. You can choose whether or not you want to see your soulmate again, just like your mother did. Don’t make the mistake I did, of trying to manipulate the future based on a soul-mark. Do what you think is right, just like you’ve always done. No one can ask for anything more than that.”

He taps at the top of her hand with one finger.

“Jyn,” he whispers. “Say you understand.”

In a rush, she feels ten years old again, like she’s back in that tiny hut on a planet in the middle of nowhere, everything she’s ever known on the brink of irreversible change. She looks into her father’s face—older and paler, more careworn—and sees that same mingling of love and tension, marked by the inescapable knowledge that time is running short.

“I understand,” she says. She lifts her free hand to her face, wiping the tears away. “Thank you, Papa.”

Cassian can’t remember the last time he slept.

He exits yet another briefing room after yet another meeting with Alliance generals, and the heat of Yavin Four bears down on him, sapping his strength, pulling at his eyelids. Even though he hasn’t been back to Fest and its frigid climate in years, he’s still never fully adjusted to life on a tropical planet. The heat threatens to play tricks on his tired mind, lulling him further into a state of exhaustion.

But he can’t sleep. Not yet. There will be time for rest when the Emperor is dethroned and the Death Star is nothing more than microscopic bits of dust tumbling through the vastness of space.

“Captain Andor?”

Mon Mothma’s voice weaves through the haze of fatigue and humidity, and Cassian straightens to attention out of the force of long habit.

“What do you need me to do?” he asks, his eyes clearing, focusing on her face.

Her responding smile is carved in weary sympathy, an exhaustion mirroring his. They’re all tired, every one of them here in this jungle ziggurat, laboring under the weight of hard choices and harder odds.

“At the moment?” she says. “Nothing, if you can believe that.”

Cassian blinks. “But the intel we received from Erso—”

“No decisions have been reached as of yet.” Mon Mothma cuts him off with a gentle wave of her hand. “We must convene a meeting of the entire council before we commit to any course of action. This situation is too grave to move forward without input from all the ranking officers. Many of the senators are still making their way here from off-world, so there’s nothing more to be done until they arrive.”

Bureaucracy. He doesn’t have to like it, but he understands its necessity. Still, it takes everything in him to stifle a sigh.

“Understood,” he says. “In the meantime, I can go and interview Erso again, see if there’s anything more he can tell us about the weapon.”

Mon Mothma’s face stills, settling into a mask even more composed than the one she typically wears.

“I’m afraid Galen Erso passed away several hours ago,” she says. Her voice is serene as always, but Cassian hears the undertone of regret. “I received word from the medical staff shortly after it occurred.”

Cassian knows he shouldn’t be surprised. He saw the X-Wings’ damage firsthand, was nearly victim to it himself. Yet a mental image of Jyn’s face twisted in grief flashes behind his eyes, and it leaves his head spinning, his breaths coming quick and shallow.

“Why wasn’t I told?” The words come out a little sharper than he intends, certainly sharper than his usual interactions with Mon Mothma. Somehow he can’t find it in him to apologize.

She regards him, her eyes shadowed. “You were in a debriefing at the time. I’m afraid it would have made little difference, in either case. Unfortunately, there was nothing more to be done for him.”

“But—Jyn.” Suddenly he’s as wide awake as he’s ever been, his previous exhaustion banished. “Where is she?”

“I’m not sure.” Mon Mothma purses her lips. “I gave orders for her to be allowed space to grieve. It’s the least we can do, given that it was our own ships that caused her father’s death.”

Cassian nods once, sharply. “I need to see her, if she wants to be found. If there’s nothing else…?”

He doesn’t miss the slight lift of Mon Mothma’s eyebrow, but to his gratitude, she makes no further comment.

“Go,” she says.

It takes a while, but he finds Jyn in one of the temple’s upper levels. She sits cross-legged on the edge of a crumbling ruin, part of the structure the Alliance didn’t have the time or funds to renovate, staring out across the forest’s canopy. The sun sits low on the horizon, a glimmering haze of sullen red, its light stretching across the sky and glinting in her eyes.

Cassian takes one step toward her, then another. The unstable rock grumbles and shifts beneath his feet, and he stretches out a hand to keep his balance. If Jyn notices the ruins’ precarious state, she makes no move to slip back onto more solid ground.

Grief strips people of their caution, Cassian thinks. Other strong emotions do, too. He’s no stranger to the phenomenon, himself.

He takes one more step. With the noise he’s making, Jyn must be aware of his presence, but she gives no sign.

“If you want to be alone,” he says, “I’ll go.”

He keeps his voice soft, yet it feels like shattering a heavy stillness. Jyn stays motionless, her eyes steady on the horizon.

A moment passes, then another. Cassian takes a step backward.

He’s about to turn away when Jyn looks over her shoulder, sparing him a glance. Her eyes are dry, but bleak and distant, looking through him to the hazy atmosphere beyond.

Cassian’s breath leaves him in a soft hiss. His feet carry him toward her of their own accord, heedless of the stone’s ominous creaking. He slowly lowers himself to the floor beside her, his knee an inch away from hers.

The silence settles. He can hear her breathing, steady and quiet, layering with the sounds drifting up from the trees. Muted insect calls and mournful birdsongs. Far below, the Rebellion bustles on, heedless of the quiet grief unfolding in the spaces above.

When Jyn finally speaks, her voice is flat and calm. Almost too calm.

“If you’re looking for your coat, I left it in the med-bay.”

Cassian watches her out of the corner of his eye.

“Okay,” he says. “Thank you.”

The sun sinks further, its last rays making a futile attempt to beat back the spreading purple and indigo. The first hints of stars pepper the sky before Jyn shifts in place.

“Are you in contact with your parents?”

She keeps staring straight ahead as she speaks. Cassian leans back on the heels of his hands, giving her space.

“Not anymore,” he says. “My mother died many years ago, in service to the Rebellion.”

“And your father?”

“I was six when he died.” Cassian closes his eyes. So many years ago, and yet the memory is as fresh and clear as spring water. “It was a rally in the city, a protest against Republic military expansion. He was one of the loudest voices in the crowd, no fear, no hesitation. He was shot right in front of me.”

Even through the gathering dusk, there’s enough light left for him to see Jyn’s eyes as she turns toward him at last.

“My mother was shot in front of me, too,” she says. Her eyes sweep over his face. “Were your parents soulmates?”

Cassian meets her gaze and holds it. “I don’t know.”

Her brows shoot up. “You don’t know?”

“It wasn’t something we spoke about.” Absently Cassian’s hand drifts to his ribs, rubbing Jyn’s words through his tunic. “My mark didn’t show up until I was eight, after my father was already gone. And my mother…” He shakes his head. “She was never the same, after he died. I didn’t want to burden her with it.”

Jyn looks away, her eyes going distant.

“My parents weren’t soulmates,” she says. “My mother had someone else. My father didn’t have a mark at all.”

There’s something low and guarded in her voice, a weight behind the admission that makes him think this isn’t something she tells just anyone.

“That must have had an effect on your view of soulmates in general,” he says, carefully.

She gives a brittle, soundless laugh. “You could say that. My father told me a hundred times, my choices are my own, not dictated by fate. But now he’s…”

Her voice hitches, a watery breath cutting off her words. Cassian can see her nails digging into her palms as she fights to regain control.

On an impulse, he scoots a little closer, until their knees are just barely touching. Jyn stills, but doesn’t move away. When she speaks again, her voice is clear.

“It’s impossible not to second-guess,” she says. “My father moved us out to Lah’mu because of the mark on my arm. That was where everything started to go wrong. My mother was killed. My father was forced into Imperial service. Now he’s dead.” Her lips twist in a bitter, wry expression halfway between a smile and a grimace. “If my parents had chosen differently, if I had never been born, maybe he would still be alive. Maybe they both would be.”

“Jyn…” Cassian can’t stop himself from reaching out, gripping her shoulder lightly. “You are not to blame for what happened to them.”

She looks at him, gaze steady. “You don’t know that.”

“You didn’t ask to be born.” His fingers tighten on her shoulder. “And you don’t know what lies ahead. You don’t know what part you could still have left to play in this galaxy.”

Jyn makes a guttural sound. “I’ve always thought the galaxy—the Force—considers me a mistake.”

“If so,” Cassian says, “then the Force is wrong.”

Jyn looks back at him, and for the first time, a hint of a smile crosses her face. It’s a little bemused, shadowed with pain, but it’s still there.

“I’m surprised you would think that,” she says, “after the way I bit your head off in the shuttle.”

“You were in shock.” Cassian shrugs. “Believe me, I’ve heard worse. Usually from Kay.”

Jyn stares at him a moment, then makes a noise like someone choking. It takes Cassian a moment to recognize it as laughter.

“Knowing Kay, I can believe that,” Jyn says. She tips her head back, looking up at the sky, and swipes at the corners of her eyes. “I know I said that you don’t have to keep coming back for me, but…I’m glad you’re here, right now.”

Her words hang in the air between them, like a confession.

Right now. Maybe not later. There’s too much up in the air for that, he knows. But for now, it’s enough. Cassian leans forward, ever so slightly, and brushes a lock of hair from her face.

“So am I,” he says.

Chapter Text

The Alliance Council meeting chambers are dark, damp, and packed from wall to wall with lifeforms from more species than Jyn can count on both hands. Despite the stifling atmosphere created by the complete absence of personal space, she feels a chill trickle down her spine, every instinct screaming at her to get out as fast as her legs can carry her. She closes her eyes, blocking out the mass of milling bodies, wishing she could deafen the ceaseless buzz of murmurs, too. The anxiety and uncertainty in the voices cuts through her like the edge of a vibroblade fresh off the sharpening whetstone.

This is exactly the sort of situation she’s been avoiding like the brainrot plague for the last five years. Large groups of people clustered together in small spaces usually mean trouble. Large groups of people under intense amounts of stress, nerves stretched thinner than a strand of hair, tens or hundreds of competing opinions all trying to decide on a single course of action—that means even more trouble.

She opens her eyes and steels her jaw.

She’s standing at the edge of the war table in the center of the room, scores of people pressing up against her back. Their eyes bore into her, accusing, distrustful, and their breath is hot against her neck.

At least, that’s how it feels. She’d be more comfortable at the outskirts, observing, ready to make a quick break if necessary, and yet…

Deep down, she can sense it: this is too important to leave unfinished. When she closes her eyes, she can still see the faces of all those people in the marketplace back on Jedha. The nameless citizens browsing the wares, the vendor who sold her a meal, the little beggar girl she fed. All vaporized, reduced to ash and stardust in the space of an instant, at the wave of an uncaring Empire’s hand.

Worse still, she can see her father’s face, cold and ashen, sunken eyes deep-set in a frame worn too thin with years of forced labor and strain. All for this, all leading to this moment.

Jyn straightens her shoulders, draws a breath as deep as her lungs can hold, and presses her self-preservation instinct down into the tiniest, deepest corner of her mind.

Directly across from her, Mon Mothma makes her way to the table, her face set in its usual serious yet serene expression. She doesn’t seem to feel that oppressive sense of suffocation, Jyn notices. Or if she does, she doesn’t show it. Then again, maybe that’s because the crowd parts to let her through, swaths of people falling back as one, like courtiers in the presence of a monarch. With her white robes and solemn bearing, Mon Mothma almost seems like a figure straight out of some ancient mythology. A savior come to set the bedraggled legions free.

Or the leader of the organization that killed my father with friendly fire, Jyn thinks. Even over the mutter of the crowd, she hears an angry grinding sound like stone on stone. It takes her a moment to realize it’s her own teeth.

No, she thinks. There are no heroes here. No saviors, no miracles, no epic strokes of luck, no storybook endings wrapped up in a neat little bow. Only real, broken people, trying to fight their hardest in the face of bleak odds.

Perhaps she’s not so different from the rest of them, after all.

“Senators,” Mon Mothma says. Her voice is quiet but clear, commanding, with the gravitas of one accustomed to the attention of others. “Generals. Agents of the Alliance. We have called you here to discuss a matter of grave importance. If we are all ready…” She pauses, looking around the table. Jyn notices her eyes moving from face to face, lingering, making eye contact with each person before moving on. “Then let us begin.”

As the meeting comes to order, Jyn finds her own eyes scanning the room, darting from one face to the next. She isn’t quite ready to admit it, but in the back of her mind it lingers, silent and steady: she’s looking for Cassian.

She’s unsure whether or not to feel relieved that she doesn’t see him at all.

An hour and a half later, or possibly two, Jyn’s almost at the end of her patience, importance of the mission be damned. With each senator who shakes a perfectly coiffed head and insists the Rebellion is doomed, that her father’s dying word isn’t enough, Jyn wants to launch herself across the table and smack sense into them with the flat of her hand.

She feels the heat of frustration and anger rising in her blood. Each time she raises her voice in objection, she expects to see Cassian there at her side, attempting to rein her in with one of his well-timed words of wisdom or disapproving looks. But still, he’s nowhere to be found.

“Listen,” she says, looking around the room with a stare that’s probably turned wild by now. Almost feral. She can hear the desperation in her voice, knows it’s probably bouncing uselessly off the stubborn shields all the senators have erected around themselves, but she can’t turn it off. She can’t be anything other than who she is.

“I know—knew my father,” she continues. “What reason would he have to lie? He died for this, to get this information to us. To you. And it was your own ships that killed him. Will you really let his death mean nothing?”

One of the senators peers at her with a suspicious gleam in his eye. “How well did you really know your father? Isn’t it true that you were separated from him when you were just a child? And that your reunion on this base was the first time you’d seen him in fifteen years? I do not mean to be callous,” he adds, layering false gentleness over his tone. “But it is impossible to say how he might have changed in all that time. He was in the Empire’s employ, after all.”

“He was forced to work for them.” Jyn hears her voice crescendo, ricocheting around in the enclosed space. “Don’t you understand? That was the entire reason we were separated. As a child he drilled into me what I was supposed to do if the Empire found us. He knew it was only a matter of time before they came for him.”

She looks around the room, seeking understanding and finding only hesitation and distrust.

“You spoke directly to him,” she says, her eyes finally landing on General Draven. “Didn’t you cover all this in your interrogation?”

He shifts in place, his hands braced on the table’s edge. His mouth pinches even tighter than normal, like he’s been forced to swallow a bite of spoiled nerf.

“Details of…interviews are classified,” he says, voice drawn taut.

“In a situation like this?” Jyn gestures around the room. “Don’t all these people deserve to know what he said?”

“Ultimately it doesn’t matter what he said,” another senator speaks up, “if he’s not a trustworthy source. We understand your position, and your devotion to your father is admirable. But it also makes your position a thoroughly biased one.”

“Look,” Draven says, cutting Jyn off before she can fling the biting retort on the edge of her tongue. “I understand you want to believe your father. We all do. Trust me, no one wants to take down this weapon more than I. But try to see it from our perspective. Intelligence coming from the high-ranking Imperial weapons specialist responsible for designing a monstrosity capable of pulverizing entire planets? And now he’s dead, and his strongest advocate is his daughter? Surely you can see how that appears on the suspicious side.”

“We want to believe you, Jyn. I want to believe you,” Mon Mothma says. Her tone is as sad and tired as her eyes. She looks like she’s aged a decade in the space of one meeting. Jyn imagines she herself looks little better. “But we cannot afford to act rashly. If we miscalculate, it could mean the end of the Rebellion in a single moment.”

“And besides,” Draven adds. His voice has gone oddly quiet, his eyes pinned to the table, mouth set in a hard line. “We—I made a snap decision before, to attack Eadu. You yourself saw how that turned out. At the time, I believed it necessary. But now, a decision of this magnitude?”

A murmur of assent rises up from the crowd around them, the balance tilting and swaying. Jyn knows she’s just imagining it, but she can almost feel the ground moving beneath her, like a boat taking on water faster than anyone could ever bail it out.

When the meeting finally grinds to its inevitable, infuriating conclusion, she pushes her way through the crowd and bursts out into the open. The air on her face should feel like a blessing, but she finds it a powerless remedy for the frayed ends of her nerves. Blindly, she makes her way over to a parked ship, leans against the hull, closes her eyes, braces her hands on her knees, and breathes and breathes and breathes.

“That bad, huh?”

The voice is rough-worn and spun with a grave sort of resignation, and she doesn’t have to look up to know it’s Baze. It should strike her as odd, and a little alarming, that she already feels as though she knows these people, knows their tones and quirks and temperaments despite having met them only days before. It’s only temporary, she thinks, a pang driving quick but deep into her heart. You think you know them, you think they’re with you now, but it doesn’t matter. Not when the Alliance isn’t going to do anything. There’s nothing to keep us together now. Here today, gone tomorrow. It’ll be like Saw all over again.

“Worse,” she says. She pushes off the side of the ship, arms jangling out in a sharp, aggravated gesture. “They prefer to surrender.”

Baze cocks an eyebrow. “But you want to fight?”

“We all do,” Bodhi says, his voice floating up from somewhere behind Jyn. It strikes her in a sudden, fierce moment of something that might be hilarity if it wasn’t so frustrating, how ironic it is that an ex-Imperial scientist and an ex-Imperial pilot have risked and given more for this fledgling cause than the Alliance that so desperately fears and distrusts them.

“Somehow,” she says, her words so brittle that she can almost picture them shattering as they leave her mouth. “I don’t think four of us will be enough.”

She almost says five, but Cassian is still nowhere to be seen. It shouldn’t hurt, but it does. It’s an old ache, shifting around beneath her skin like a bruise that can never quite heal when she keeps getting hit there over and over again.

Jyn looks around the landing platform, as though in search of a miracle, even though her belief in miracles died along with her mother, long ago trampled into Lah’mu’s soil. Alliance personnel scurry around the base like they’ve done every time she’s been here. Their faces are harried, their strides brisk, and even though most of them probably weren’t even present at the meeting, Jyn still can’t shake off the feeling that they’re all deliberately avoiding her eyes.

“Well,” she says aloud. Her voice is a strangled little thing, and she hates it. “I guess that’s that.”

She pushes off the starfighter’s hull, slapping her hands together in a gesture more symbolic than anything. The sound of her palms connecting is a loud crack, and she sees Bodhi flinch out of the corner of her eye. She half-turns toward him, but her apology lodges in her throat, and the little seed of anger and guilt and frustration in her gut sprouts into a sapling.

“That’s that?” Bodhi echoes. “You’re just giving up?”

There’s disappointment in his eyes, warring with despair, and a sick jolt lurches in Jyn’s chest.

“I’m not the one giving up.” She stabs a finger at the base looming behind them. “I want to stay and fight. They’re the ones that want to surrender.”

“So we convince them otherwise,” Baze grunts, as though it’s that simple. As though one could walk outside on a rainy day and make the sun shine just by commanding it.

“I tried.” Her bun is coming unraveled. She rakes her fingers through it savagely, letting the tangled remnants spill around her shoulders. “Bodhi, you were there. You heard me. I gave them every argument I had, but they’re a bunch of bureaucrats. These people argue for a living. Once their minds are made up, they’re not going to budge.”

“So, then,” Chirrut says. “What will you do, Jyn?”

Everything goes still around her, the landing pad’s bustling clamor fading into nonexistence. Chirrut is looking right at her, right through her in an impossible way that raises goosebumps hard enough to hurt. His face is as calm as a pool of water in an undisturbed forest, his brows raised in expectation.

His question brings her up short, but only for a moment. She thinks back to the base’s hot, dingy little room passing for an infirmary, to her father stretched out on a pallet, broken down beyond repair, his words seared on her memory just as surely as Cassian’s are on her skin.

Don’t make the mistake I did, of trying to manipulate the future based on a soul-mark. Do what you think is right. No one can ask for anything more than that.

“I’m going to do the same thing I’ve always done,” she says. “Survive.”

She can almost feel herself tipping over a precipice as she speaks the words. No going back now. She absorbs each emotion in sequence, like ducking her head and turning her shoulder to a series of blows: disappointment, relief, bitterness, resignation.

“I’m getting out of here,” she says. “I’ll find some backwater place to hole up, away from the Empire. I’ve done it before. I can do it again.”

Chirrut sweeps his arm in a wide arc, his eyes still trained on her. “You will leave all these people to their fates? To the Empire’s mercy?”

His voice is mild, entirely devoid of judgment or scorn. Somehow, that makes it all the more cutting.

“They chose their own fate.” The words force their way out of her throat, picking up speed with each syllable. “Now I’m choosing mine. It looks like my father died for nothing. I don’t see any reason I should do the same.”

She stands up straight, pushing her chin up, shoulders back, projecting confidence the way her mother taught her. Her eyes dart from one face to the next, assessing, defending. Baze looks back at her, his gaze heavy. Chirrut’s face never changes, still trained on her with that hint of a smile, like he knows something she doesn’t. Bodhi avoids her eyes altogether. She can see his jaw working, the despondent slump of his shoulders.

“If any of you want to come with me,” she says, holding her voice steady, “you’re more than welcome. Otherwise…”

May the Force be with you, she almost says, but it doesn’t feel right. She doesn’t know if it’s because she doesn’t quite believe the Force has their best interests at heart, or if, deep down, she isn’t sure she has the right to speak the words.

“Good luck,” she says instead. It’s inadequate, a paltry offering next to the trials they’ve already shared together, but it’s all she has to give.

She fixes her eyes into the distance and steps forward, not waiting to see if any of them follow.

It feels like it takes an hour to find Mon Mothma, though in reality it can’t be any more than a few minutes. People are still streaming out of the meeting room, some defiant, some subdued, every one of them in Jyn’s way. She shoulders past one group, then another, picking and pushing through the crowd until she spots Mon Mothma’s white robes standing out like a beacon in the dark hallway.

“I’m ready,” she says without preamble as soon as she’s within earshot.

If Mon Mothma’s surprised to see her, she gives no sign aside from the tiniest furrowing of her brow. “Ready for what?”

“For you to hold up your end of the bargain.” Jyn takes a deep breath. Her heart dips and clamors in her chest, pounding harder than it should be, considering she didn’t break into anything faster than a trot to get here. “You said if I talked to Saw for you, you’d make sure I went free. If your Council doesn’t want to fight, then I’m here to collect. I want out of this place.”

For a long moment, Mon Mothma says nothing. The hallway is still cluttered with people—agents running to their next task, technicians scrambling to solve problems, senators and their retinues hurrying to their ships—but all of them flow around Mon Mothma like she’s a rock in the midst of a river.

“Jyn,” she finally says. “I’m sorry the meeting didn’t go the way you hoped. For what it’s worth, I understand your frustration, and I wish there was something I could say that might convince you to stay with us. Captain Andor spoke very highly of you.”

The mark on Jyn’s arm burns, and she almost jumps, almost opens her mouth to let out a flurry of questions. Where is he? I haven’t seen him in hours—I thought he’d be here—

She shoves her arms behind her, clasping her hands at the small of her back to keep from rubbing at the cursed soul-mark. If Cassian wanted to be here, adding his voice to hers, he would be. Simple as that. No need to spend any more time adding him to her long mental tally of people who haven’t come through for her.

“I don’t want to leave,” she says. “I want to stay. I want to destroy this thing. But I’m not going to spend any more time trying to convince you. If my word, and my father’s word, wasn’t enough for the Council, then I don’t know what else I can say.” And I don't want to die. I want to get out of here before the Empire finds this place and—

“I understand,” Mon Mothma says again. Her face is wan in the hallway’s dim light, deep shadows beneath her eyes. “Thank you for your help, Jyn. I’ll summon a pilot for you right away.”

Jyn all but deflates, tension rushing out of her, replaced by something bittersweet that she can’t quite name.

“Thank you,” she says.

Mon Mothma smiles, but it’s stretched thin across her face, too thin to meet her eyes.

“May the Force be with you,” she replies, almost too quiet to hear.

The ship is slow and clunky, groaning like a bantha in its death throes as the pilot spins it up, but Jyn can’t bring herself to mind. She props up against the wall and stares out the viewport, watching the people below muddle and blur into little colored dots.

It takes her a moment to realize she’s looking for Cassian. Her jaw goes tight, and she pushes away from the window.

The pilot is a wiry man of indeterminate age whose face looks frozen in a permanent frown. It only deepens as he leans forward, as though willing the ship to clear Yavin Four’s treetops, but then it does, and Jyn watches the old temple fade into the distance behind them.

“All right,” the pilot grunts, turning toward her. “My orders are to drop you off wherever you like—within reason, of course—and then report back to the base. So. Where to?”

I can go anywhere. My choice. The thought hits Jyn all at once, and even though her mouth still tastes like ashes, she can almost feel the whole of the galaxy unfurling before her. The soul-mark on her arm, the fate it carries, has no power over her. Not anymore.

“I don’t know yet,” she says. She pulls down her sleeves and lowers herself into the co-pilot seat, looking out at the stars. “For now, just fly.”

Chapter Text

Sometimes, on the few occasions when he gives his thoughts free rein enough to sink into the morose, Cassian wonders if he was born cynical.

Logically, he knows cynicism is the result of a life hard-lived, and if any life qualifies, it would be his. But it still doesn’t keep him from pondering. It’s easy to do, when he thinks back and finds it difficult to remember a time when he wasn’t cynical, even back into his younger years.

Easier still, when his cynicism ends up proven right nine times out of ten.

“I’ll give it ten minutes,” he mutters to K-2 as they walk toward the Council meeting chambers. “By then, I’ll know whether or not they’re going to listen to Jyn.”

“Hmm,” K-2 says, with an airy tone, as though the droid’s pretending to ponder. Can droids even do that? Cassian cuts off the train of thought before it gives him a headache. An even worse headache than he already has.

“I calculate it will take five point seven two minutes,” K-2 is saying. “At least once they get past all the pointless opening statements and introductions that go on for an hour.”

Cassian groans. He’d nearly forgotten about that painful necessity, though he isn’t sure how.

The room is still packed when he slips out the door, a senator’s passionate voice chasing him until he’s halfway down the hall. He pushes through the doors out into the open, blinking away Yavin Four’s sullen sunlight, and checks his chrono.

Seven minutes, thirty-four seconds. “We were both close to right,” he mutters beneath his breath, though K-2 is long absent. The Rebellion doesn’t see much reason to invite agents’ droids to high-clearance meetings, reprogrammed Imperial droids in particular.

The thought of having been so close to his prediction sparks a flare of grim amusement, but it’s short-lived, disappearing under the heavy loads of duty and strategy. His mind darts, considering and discarding possibilities within seconds. He could go to Mon Mothma and plead the case to go to Scarif—but no, she would simply shake her head mournfully and refuse to override the Council’s decision. He could go to Draven and do the same, but would his superior be willing to go behind Mothma’s back again in such short order? And on such a large scale?

Not likely.

Cassian comes to a stop without realizing it, clenching his jaw, staring off at the crumbling ruin of a ziggurat without really seeing it.

When he was a soldier of the Rebellion—even as a child—it was drilled into him: respect the chain of command. Always obey orders from those above you, even when you disagree. They are the ones responsible for making the hard decisions, not you.

But when he became an agent, it was like a whole new world opening up. Now, making his own decisions, often life-altering snap decisions, isn’t only expected. It’s required.

Required more than ever, now, he thinks. It can’t end like this. Not after everything we’ve sacrificed. Everything Jyn has sacrificed, everything I’ve sacrificed.

The cynicism fades, and in its place comes a rush of cold, bittersweet certainty.

Cassian turns and walks back into the base.

He has to move quickly. All the discordant voices inside the meeting hall are harping on one point: that the fragile Alliance doesn’t have the numbers or resources to weather the unstoppable force of the Empire’s storm. And in a way, they’re not wrong. This mission will fail if he can’t gather up enough men and weapons to create the necessary distractions.

But if there’s one thing they do have on their side, something the Empire in all its might has never quite tasted, it’s desperation. Adrenaline. The sensation of being backed into a corner, willing to do anything and everything just to survive another day.

He pulls aside soldier after soldier, hissing quick whispers in their ears. He’s tempted to tell them to pass it on, but he can’t take the risk. One word falling into the wrong ears, and the mission is over before it can even spread its wings. He bares his teeth at the thought of being pulled into Draven’s office, chastened, expected to tuck his tail between his legs and surrender to his grim fate along with the rest of the Rebellion.

But the Alliance base is sprawling, its forces tucked into every corner of the old Temple complex, and his legs can only cover so much ground, so fast. He presses on, doggedly, hoping that the meeting will drag on just a few more minutes. Just enough to give him the time he needs.

By the time he’s finally chased down the last person on his mental list of trustworthy allies—a rebellion within a Rebellion—he can tell the meeting has already adjourned. As he doubles back in on his tracks and makes his way back toward the base’s entrance, he sees the meeting room doors are open, the flow of exiting attendees slowed to a mere trickle. The conference has been finished for some time.

He sets his teeth. It’ll make things harder, but not impossible. Nothing is impossible, he tells himself. If it sounds a little hollow in his thoughts, he tries not to notice.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” K-2 gripes into his ear, not for the first time, or even the second. “The odds of survival are—”

“Kay.” Cassian stifles a sigh. “We’re doing it, all right? We have no choice.”

“Do I have to come along?”

“Yes.” The word is automatic out of his mouth, but Cassian slows his steps enough to look back over his shoulder. “Ah, come on, Kay. You know you want to come, anyway. You’re the one who’s always complaining whenever I tell you to stay on the ship. You can’t resist being in the thick of the action.”

“Perhaps,” Kay says. “But I’d really rather not be there if Jyn Erso is, too. She can be highly annoying, and I have noticed that being in her vicinity does unhealthy things to your heart rate.”

“What? That’s—” Cassian slams his mouth shut. “Never mind, Kay. This isn’t the time.”

He increases his stride, as though he could hope to outrun a droid at least two feet taller than him. Behind him, he hears something suspiciously like a sigh issue from K-2’s vocabulator, but the sound fades to the back of his mind.

Bodhi, Baze, and Chirrut are clustered in a melancholy little group not far from the base’s entrance. Chirrut appears calm as ever, but Bodhi looks on the verge of tears, and Baze’s scowl is twice as deep as usual, his eyes cold and dark and missing nothing.

And Jyn…

Cassian’s step falters.

He realizes he’d been keeping his ears tuned for her voice, expecting to hear her before he even saw her. He knows Jyn isn’t someone who has an easy time of keeping her feelings to herself even if she wants to. Over an hour of being stonewalled by politicians spitting on her father’s name would drive anyone to a frothy rage, let alone someone with as short a fuse as Jyn. Cassian feels his shoulders tensed up, braced to find her seething and smoldering, one push away from an explosion.

Instead, she’s simply…gone.

It’s all he can do to keep from spinning in a circle, scanning the crowd, searching for the pale green fire of her eyes. Something sour and quivering congeals in his gut, and he draws a ragged breath to keep the nausea at bay.

Maybe there’s an explanation. Perhaps Jyn’s stayed behind to speak with Mon Mothma, to plead her case one-on-one. Or maybe she’s simply wondering at his whereabouts and has gone to look for him.

The scenarios run through his mind, each one plausible, logical. Yet something about the deep set of Baze’s face and the bleak look in Bodhi’s eyes tells Cassian he’s only lying to himself.

Worst of all, he can feel his soul-mark stretched across the skin beneath his jacket, burning him hot and sharp as a brand.

“Jyn,” he says, hoarsely, almost before he’s even within earshot of the group. As one they turn toward him, and if possible, Bodhi’s expression sinks even lower. Cassian imagines what they must see, pictures the sight of his own face, blanched and thunderous with disbelief.

“Jyn,” he says again. “Where is she?”

Baze mutters something unintelligible and glares into the distance, tightening his grip on his rifle. Chirrut shifts, a graceful tilt to his head, but Bodhi speaks first.

“She’s gone.” His voice is raw. “She left.”

“Gone?” Cassian echoes. His mind feels dull, like the harmless edge of a child’s toy blade. A dangerous condition for a spy. “Where did she go?”

Bodhi gives a helpless shrug. “She said if the Alliance wouldn’t fight, she wasn’t going to stick around for nothing. She just…left. She got a ship and left.”

“She was afraid,” Chirrut says softly.

“We’re all afraid.” Cassian hears the whistle of Bodhi’s breath, barely controlled, sucked in through clenched teeth. “Or at least I am,” he adds, with a sad, self-deprecating chuckle.

“No,” Chirrut says. “Not afraid of dying, or of the Empire. I sensed a darker sort of fear around her. Something not well defined. Nebulous.”

“Helpful,” Baze grumbles, though without any real bite.

Cassian barely hears the rest. He takes a step away from the rest of the group, tilts his head back, and looks to the sky. He imagines one of the Rebellion’s vessels, held together with outdated parts and determination, leaving jet trails in its wake as it delivers Jyn into the impossible vastness of space.

He left me, Jyn says in his memory. Matter of fact, like her mentor’s abandonment is the sort of thing that happens every day. Wake up. Get dressed. Eat breakfast. Watch another person walk out of your life. My parents weren’t soulmates. The Force thinks I’m a mistake. He left me. I don’t know why, so don’t ask. He left me.

“I didn’t leave,” he wants to yell into the sky. He wants to grab her shoulders, stare into those hard green eyes, make her understand. “I was gathering an army for you. For us. I knew they would never believe you. But I do. Don’t you understand?”

But it doesn’t matter. He can yell until he’s hoarse. She won’t hear. She’s gone.

“Cassian?”

Cassian has been in more than a few scrapes and scuffles during his time in the Rebellion. He knows just what it feels like to be slugged repeatedly by a Stormtrooper’s armored fist. Confused, dazed, hurting like hell. Unsteady, like nothing would be better than to let gravity win and plummet face-first into oblivion. It’s exactly what he feels like right about now.

“Cassian.”

But to give in to the pain in the middle of a fight means death. And that’s something he won’t do. Not yet.

He turns back to the group. They’re all looking at him, expectant, questioning. Worst of all, he can see a hint of pity in their gazes.

“What?” he says. It comes out flat and strangled.

Bodhi gives a full-body shrug. “What do we do now?”

Cassian releases his breath. He pushes Jyn and her wounded eyes and stubborn mouth into the back of his mind.

“We go on with the plan,” he says.

Baze’s skeptical eyebrow makes its usual appearance before Cassian’s even finished speaking. “What plan? Bodhi says they don’t want to fight.”

“Some of us do.” Cassian pushes a hand through his hair. “While the Council was in the meeting, I rounded up everyone I could find who wants to face this threat head-on. They’re gathering weapons and making preparations as we speak. We’ll take the Imperial shuttle we stole from Eadu, fly to Scarif, and get those plans. We’ll be off before the Council realizes we’ve gone.”

To his surprise, Baze looks mildly impressed. “That could work. If you have the men.”

“But—wait.” Bodhi begins to pace, threading his fingers together. Cassian can see the whites of his eyes. “You want to take the shuttle? That—that could be a problem.”

“What is it?” Cassian can feel his shoulders tensing, bracing himself. “What problem?”

“Well…” If anything, Bodhi increases his pace. “What day is it? Is it the first of the month? I can’t—things got a little, little out of place in my head the past few days. Because of the—” A visible spasm crosses his face. “The Bor Gullet. Just—just tell me what day it is.”

Cassian exchanges glances with Baze. “It’s the third of the month.”

“Oh, no.” Bodhi stops his pacing abruptly, slumping back against a stack of crates. His sudden lack of movement almost makes Cassian’s head spin. “No, no, no. That’s no good.”

“What is it?” Cassian forces himself to breathe, steady and even, burying the rising tide of frustration and resignation. Nothing else has gone smoothly up to this point. Why would it start now?

“They change the clearance codes on the first of every month,” Bodhi says. His face is a study in misery. “Sometimes more often, if there’s a security breach or a problem of some kind.”

Baze makes a grumbling noise deep in his throat. “A problem like a cargo pilot defecting?”

Bodhi nods. “Whatever codes are in that shuttle’s databank, they aren’t going to work anymore. We give them an outdated code, and the mission’s finished before it even begins. If we’re going to go to Scarif, we’ll need some other way to get past that shield gate.”

Silence falls. Cassian looks over his shoulder at the Imperial shuttle sitting there on its landing pad, mocking them. So close, and yet so far.

He turns back to Bodhi with a sigh. “You’re the only one of us who’s been to Scarif before. Any other ideas?”

“No, that’s the thing. That’s what I’m telling you.” Bodhi strips the pilot goggles off his forehead, rubbing vigorously at the twin circular imprints on his skin. “The shield covers the entire planet’s surface, and there’s only one gate. It’s monitored every second. There’s no way we’d be able to sneak in without being noticed. The only way in is either with a code, or if the whole control center is destroyed and the shield fails. The shuttle doesn’t have that kind of firepower, and even if it did, we’d be blown out of the sky the moment we opened fire.”

“The answer is simple, then,” Chirrut speaks up. “We need the updated code.”

Bodhi’s whole face twists, his mouth gaping open, showing his teeth. For a moment, Cassian thinks he’s about to begin laughing in hysterical despair.

“Simple?” Bodhi echoes. “Just like that? Do you have any idea how many layers of security and protocol are around those codes?”

Chirrut turns in his direction, his gaze unflappable. “Simple and easy are not the same things, my friend. Yet the sooner we set ourselves on a course of action, the sooner we will determine how to accomplish it.”

“Wait.” Cassian straightens, rubbing his palms together. The sand and grit of Jedha’s doomed surface still clings to the cracks of his hands, a constant reminder of the stakes. “I have an idea. Admiral Raddus has a spy undercover on one of the Empire’s bases. Bodhi, you know how to find the code, right? If we can relay your instructions to Raddus’s man, maybe he could transmit the updated code to us.”

For the first time, Bodhi brightens, his eyes widening. “Raddus was one of the Council members who wanted to fight instead of going underground. You think he’d help us?”

Baze leans forward on the barrel of his enormous blaster, peering at Cassian. “And how long would this take?”

“Longer than I’d like.” Cassian spreads his hands. “But I think it’s the best shot we have. It may be the only shot we have.”

Bodhi is already nodding, cautious excitement beginning to replace the disquiet on his face. “I can do it. If you get me on a line with Admiral Raddus’s spy, I can tell him everything he needs to know. It might be dangerous, but…” His mouth twists in a rueful half-smile. “What hasn’t been, at this point?”

“Then it’s settled.” Cassian nods, once. “I’ll talk to Raddus and see what he says. If he wants to fight like you say he does, I think he’ll be open to helping us. Hopefully we can get it done before the Alliance comes up with other plans for the shuttle.”

“Our path is set,” Chirrut says. Cassian doesn’t have to look to know he’s smiling that mild, mysterious smile. He’s not sure whether to find it unsettling or comforting.

Baze grunts. “And what do we do while we wait for this other spy to get the code?”

“We prepare.” Cassian turns toward the base’s entrance, mind already racing to the gathering of soldiers, information, weapons. The memory of Jyn’s face lingers in the periphery, and he tries not to think of how he’d imagined she would look when he presented his ragtag group of volunteer soldiers to her. He can see it in his mind’s eye, as clearly as though she’s standing in front of him: her eyes narrowing in thought, her head tilting, a stray lock of hair brushing her cheek. Her chin rising, jaw squaring in determination.

He shakes himself free, looks over his shoulder to Baze, then Chirrut, then Bodhi. “We prepare, and we hope.”

The cool interior of the base is a balm after his harried rush to gather his troops, but it does little to ease the sting of Jyn’s absence. He clenches his teeth against it, hoping no one else in the vicinity can hear the grinding sound.

Yet no one else pays him any mind. The base is still bustling, activity carrying on as normal, as though the Council hasn’t just effectively voted to put a spike through its own Rebellion’s heart. As though the woman who’d been instrumental in getting them this far hasn’t just turned on her heel and walked away from it all.

Cassian’s soul-mark burns against his ribs, like someone’s shoving a hot poker beneath his jacket. He ignores it, activating his radio.

“Kay? I need you to do something for me.”

A beat of silence, then Kay’s voice pipes through the speaker. “I suppose, depending on what it is.”

“Check Admiral Raddus’s itinerary. I need to know when he’s leaving, and I need to speak with him before he does. All right?”

“Very well. I’ll have it for you shortly.” K-2 sounds vaguely disappointed, as though he’d been hoping for a more exciting command. “Where are you going?”

“There’s someone I need to talk to.” Cassian turns a corner, his steps slowing as the hallway deepens, the crowd thinning out. “Just send the information to my terminal, all right?”

“Fine.” If he has any more protests, K-2 mercifully forestalls them. The radio clicks off, and Cassian lets out a deep breath. He stops, hovering before a doorway, then knocks twice.

From within, Mon Mothma’s voice answers, smooth and calm as glass. “Enter.”

The moment she sees Cassian, her expression changes. It’s almost imperceptible, but he’s long known how to read faces, translate even the smallest tells. Mon Mothma wears regret like a garment, but threaded through with steel. She’s readying herself for an argument.

“Captain,” she says. She rises to stand at the head of the table, hands folded serenely in front of her. “If you’ve come to discuss the Council’s decision at the meeting—”

“I haven’t.” Cassian comes to a halt, standing just shy of attention. “I don’t agree with it, of course. But I know better than to try to change your mind.”

If she’s surprised at his quick acceptance, she doesn’t show it. No catching her off guard this time.

“Very well,” she says, and spreads her hands on the table. Cassian notices a half-full cup of caf near the edge, abandoned and probably long cold. “What can I do for you then, Captain?”

“Jyn Erso.” Cassian takes a deep breath. “She’s gone.”

Speaking it aloud doesn’t make it any easier. Even so, he keeps his face carefully neutral. Across the table, Mothma sighs.

“I know.” Her voice goes quiet. “She came to me shortly after the meeting, requesting a ship. I would have liked to see her stay, but I saw no reasonable grounds to hold her against her will. We did make a deal, after all. She held up her end of the bargain.”

“I understand,” Cassian says. “I was just wondering: which ship did she leave on? Which pilot? Do you know where she was headed?”

Mothma regards him steadily, holding his gaze just a beat too long. Cassian forces himself not to look away.

“I didn’t ask her where she planned to go,” Mothma says. “Why do you need this information?”

Her voice holds that even, measured tone that always suggests she knows more than she’s letting on. Knows everything, perhaps. Not for the first time, Cassian wonders if she’s really a Jedi without a lightsaber, concealing mind-reading Force powers behind that unflappable gaze.

He might not be a Jedi, but he still knows a thing or two about concealing the truth of his intentions. A skill of his that Jyn had discovered first-hand.

No, don’t think of that. Don’t think of her face when she learned you planned to kill her father. Don’t think of how she looked sitting at the top of the base with the sunset in her hair.

“I was just thinking,” he says, “it might be a good idea to keep tabs on her whereabouts. At least for the time being. She knows the location of this base and a great deal about the Rebellion, its leaders, and its missions.”

Mothma lifts an eyebrow. “She has no love for the Empire. You think she would betray us to them?”

“Not intentionally, perhaps.” Cassian’s jaw tightens. “But she was captured and thrown in an Imperial prison once. It could happen again, and if it does, they will show her no mercy. You know what kinds of methods they use to extract information from their victims.”

“You make a convincing point.” Mothma nods once. “Very well. I will forward the information on her ship to your terminal.”

For the first time, Cassian lets himself relax, just an inch. “Thank you.”

He turns to go, halfway out into the hallway’s darkness when Mothma’s voice stops him.

“Cassian.”

He looks over his shoulder. Mothma’s face has softened, her voice gentling. Light from her holoterminal casts a glow over her face, turning her pale visage a melancholy, almost ghostly blue.

“I thought she would stay with us, too,” she says.

Cassian doesn’t trust himself to speak. He can only nod, and then he disappears out the door.

Mon Mothma is true to her word: the information on Jyn’s ship is ready and waiting when Cassian checks his terminal. He increases his pace, near a run by the time he reaches the communications center. The agent manning the frequencies looks up as he enters, alarm already creasing her brow.

“It’s all right,” Cassian says, making what he hopes is a soothing gesture. “I just need to make a call to a ship that departed here not long ago. If I can have use of the comms for a moment? It won’t take long.”

That, at least, is true. He has a million things he wants to say to Jyn, but not on a patchy connection stretched frayed and thin across lightyears. He needs to see her eyes, hear the full strength of her voice.

The communications agent nods and moves away, and Cassian plugs in the contact information for Jyn’s ship at record speed. The console beeps and blips, and he grinds the heels of his hands against the desk’s edge, waiting for the call to connect.

The console whirs, the signal pinging out, seeking. Cassian waits. An astromech droid trills on the other side of the room, the sharp sound plucking at Cassian’s tightly-drawn nerves.

He waits. The console continues its dutiful search, and he imagines he can hear its gears grinding. Standing at a respectful distance, the communications agent coughs politely.

“Sir…” she says.

“Just give it a moment.” He’s gripping the desk hard enough to hurt.

“Come on,” he mutters, the words little more than a breath given shape. “Come on. Pick up, Jyn. Pick up. Where are you?”

The signal keeps on going, reaching into space, searching for a connection.

Chapter Text

It’s a blessing, really, that the Alliance has kept the Yavin headquarters a secret from the Empire for so long. It’s the first time in Cassian’s recent memory that the Rebellion has been able to set down roots for more than a few months. Eventually, he knows, they’ll have to pick up everything and move again. Bad luck or bad intelligence or betrayal will lead the Empire to their doorstep. But until then, the Yavin base is the closest thing he has to a home.

He’s grateful for that familiarity now, his feet carrying him on autopilot through the hallways, doing all the work without any input from his brain. He takes no notice of his surroundings, not glancing up until he feels a tentative brush of fingers against his shoulder.

“Cassian?”

He blinks. Bodhi’s standing in front of him, ponytail disheveled, eyes bright with worry.

“Sorry,” Cassian says. He straightens, centering himself, the way he would do in the middle of a tense mission. Focus is the difference between life and death. Foolish of him to forget, even here in the familiar territory of the base. “I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”

Bodhi wets his lips. “I was just asking if you’d had a chance to speak with Admiral Raddus.”

“Oh. Not yet, but soon,” Cassian says. “He’s in another meeting right now. I’ll catch him as soon as he gets out. Once I have the word from him, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Okay.” Bodhi shifts on the balls of his feet, fingertips pressing together. “You were trying to get ahold of Jyn, weren’t you? Just now?”

An automatic denial is on his lips, yet somehow, Cassian finds himself dipping his head in a sharp nod.

Bodhi swallows. “What did she say?”

“Nothing.” The admission is like a spear twisting in his chest. “I called twice. No response.”

He can tell from Bodhi’s expression that he’d already guessed the answer. “Maybe she just needs some time to cool off?”

“Maybe.” Cassian’s voice comes out just shy of a growl. “Or she wants nothing more to do with us. Or…”

He doesn’t want to finish the thought, let alone speak it aloud. But his brain defies him, filling in all the possibilities anyway: or the ship she was on ran into trouble. It came across an Imperial patrol. They were boarded. Or just fired upon. Maybe she didn’t answer because she’s dead. Maybe her body is frozen and floating in the depths of space.

Even in his peripheral vision, he sees Bodhi’s eyes widen.

“Have you checked your mark?” Bodhi asks. His voice is hushed.

Cassian hasn’t. He knows he should. It would at least give him one definitive answer, something solid to hold onto in a tide of uncertainty. Yet the thought of running his fingers over his soul-mark, feeling it twisted and scarred over, sends currents of fear searing through his nerves.

“No,” he says shortly. Sharper than Bodhi deserves. “I don’t want to talk about this, all right?”

“I get that,” Bodhi says, but his face is drawn tight. He sucks in a deep breath, then blurts, “Do you mind if I talk, then?”

Cassian frowns. “Talk about what?”

In response, Bodhi grips the collar of his flight suit and yanks it down. He cranes his neck in the opposite direction, turning his face away as though he can’t look. And Cassian sees it: script reaching up from Bodhi’s left shoulder, ending just beneath his collarbone. It’s gone white and rough, the letters almost unreadable. They stand out in harsh relief, like leprous scars on his skin.

Bodhi’s soulmate is dead.

Cassian exhales in a soft hiss. His mind digs for the right words, but he already knows he’ll come up empty. He’s heard every platitude over the years—after the deaths of his father, his mother, friends, colleagues—and though the intents may ring true, the words themselves never come close to dulling the ache.

He reaches out instead, grips Bodhi’s other shoulder, brief but firm.

“When?” he asks. “On Jedha?”

Bodhi nods. His fingers have gone white against his collar, and he releases it slowly. The flight suit eases back into place against his neck, covering the mark. Cassian thinks of ocean tides rising, erasing footprints on the sand. If only it were that easy.

“That’s where we’re from. Where we were from,” Bodhi says. His hands are trembling, his eyes glassy, but his voice is clear. “We met when we were kids. Funny thing, right? Knowing that early on who you’re meant to be with. ‘Course back then we thought it was all rubbish, the way kids do. Youthful free spirits and all that.”

Cassian tilts his head. “I take it that changed.”

“Yeah.” A smile darts across Bodhi’s face, quick and lanced with pain. “But even then, it was always ‘not now, later.’ Like the timing was never right. You know? Especially when I got into the Imperial Academy. First it was ‘after I graduate.’ Then, ‘after I get my pilot license.’ Then, ‘after I make it into the starfighter training program.’ Always some obstacle in the way. At least that’s what I thought.”

He runs a hand down his face. Cassian watches him blink, the rapid battle of someone trying to beat back tears.

“I always thought I wanted to be someone worthy,” Bodhi goes on. “Not just someone who happened to have a mark. But maybe I was really just afraid. And now it’s too late.”

He reaches up, gesturing to his shoulder. “You have something like this, something that’s literally a part of you, and you think it’ll last forever. You think you’ll have time.”

“And then you don’t,” Cassian says softly. He thinks of Jedha City going up in smoke and dust, its debris rising to blot out the Death Star’s looming outline. He thinks of Jyn, putting lightyears between them, her determined face pressed to a starship’s tiny port window.

“And then you don’t,” Bodhi echoes. His eyes are closed, his face worn with grief and memory.

Silence descends, and Cassian lets it linger.

“Thank you, Bodhi,” he finally says. He keeps his voice quiet, careful not to shatter the stillness. “For telling me that. It can’t have been easy.”

Bodhi opens his eyes. He looks drained, but the tremor is gone from his hands.

“It’s good to finally tell someone,” he says. “It helps. I’ve been trying not to think of it, ever since—ever since Jedha. It’s always there at the back of my mind, but every time I let it get any closer I can feel myself starting to lose control. And I can’t. Not until after this is done.”

“I understand,” Cassian says. Memories tug at the edges of his consciousness: his father’s body sprawled on a street corner on Fest. The emptiness in his mother’s eyes. The weight of the rifle in his hands the first time he ever shot an Imperial soldier. The faces of dead colleagues, good agents sacrificed in the name of his missions. The heavy thud of his informant’s body hitting the ground back on the Ring of Kafrene.

I wanted to be someone worthy.

For himself, he knows, that possibility is already long gone. Perhaps it never existed. It’s easy to curse the Empire and all the lives it’s ruined—thousands of people murdered, thousands more left bereaved—but can he truly count himself much better? Are his crimes somehow more palatable because he’s killed fewer, with a blaster instead of a super-weapon? How many soul-marks have turned white and scarred because of him?

Maybe that nagging guilt is part of why he never gave his own mark much thought, before Jyn came into his life. Perhaps she senses it, that darkness trapped within his heart. Maybe that’s why she didn’t answer when he called.

But she has her own darkness, he knows. A stubborn flicker of hope beats back against his thoughts. She’s impulsive and hard-headed, and selfish sometimes. An extremist. A convicted criminal.

Maybe they’re two broken halves of the same whole.

“Anyway,” Bodhi is saying, his wistful voice cutting back into Cassian’s consciousness. “I don’t blame you if you don’t want to look at your mark. Some days, I wish I didn’t know, either.”

“Yeah.” Cassian exhales. He twists his fingers in the hem of his shirt. “Still, I think it’s better to know than to pretend.”

He tugs at his tunic, easing the fabric up over his ribs. He doesn’t have to go far before he sees the inky darkness of Jyn’s words on his skin. Still fresh, still clear.

His breath comes out in a gush, a burst of relief he didn’t know was in him. Across from him, Bodhi smiles, subdued but genuine.

“There you go,” he says. “You still have hope.”

It doesn’t explain why Jyn didn’t answer his call. But for now, at least, she’s still breathing. That much, he knows.

“Cassian? Cassian.”

He only hears the last two words, but from the exasperated sound of K-2’s voice, the droid has been calling him for a while. Cassian sits up, blinking groggily at his surroundings. His quarters’ blank walls stare back at him, lit by a triangle of fading sunlight peeking through the window.

He squints up at it, fumbling for the radio on his nightstand. “Sorry, Kay. How long was I out?”

“Close to eight hours,” K-2 replies through the speaker. “You needed the sleep, apparently.”

His pointed tone carries all sorts of implications about the weaknesses of organic beings and their inconvenient biological requirements. Cassian smothers a yawn, swinging his legs over the side of his cot. He must have been truly exhausted if it took K-2 more than one call to wake him up. Not surprising, considering the events of the past week.

“Apparently so,” he replies. “Did you need something?”

“I didn’t,” K-2 says. “But I believe you wanted to be informed when the starship that Jyn Erso was on arrived back at the base. It just landed not long ago.”

Cassian sits bolt upright, halfway through the motion of shoving his feet into his boots. “And it’s intact? Any signs of damage or battle?”

“None,” K-2 says. “The pilot should be finished with his debrief soon if you want to talk to him.”

“I do. Thanks, Kay.” He thumbs off the radio, scrubbing the last remnants of sleep from his face and pushing his way through the door.

Nearly three days since Jyn left. Three days of waiting and hoping. Trusting in the Force, as Chirrut would say. Cassian isn’t too sure about that, but at this stage he’ll take anything he can get.

The plan to infiltrate Scarif, at least, has been coming together as well as he could have hoped. Raddus’s enthusiasm for the idea had been instant and plentiful, and he’d been quick to put Bodhi in touch with his undercover operative. Now that, too, is on hold, waiting for the operative to make contact again.

Cassian has always been good at waiting when his objective calls for it. But putting his fate in others’ hands is another matter. With the Alliance in a holding pattern after the Council meeting, giving him little to do other than wait, the enforced inactivity has been gnawing like a mynock attached to his skin.

It takes an effort not to run down the hallway toward the landing pads. He breaks into a trot anyway when he rounds the final corner, catching the pilot by the arm as he emerges from the debriefing chamber.

“Hey!” he says, lifting both hands in a quick ‘I’m harmless’ gesture as the man spins around. “You were the pilot who took Jyn Erso off-planet? Is that right?”

“Yeah, that was me.” The pilot already looks weary, like he’s just flown through a gauntlet. “What about it?”

Questions tumble through Cassian’s mind, one after another until they all muddle together. It’s hard not to feel like his brain’s been put through a blender. Where did Jyn go? Did she say anything to you? Why did she leave? Why didn’t she pick up when I called?

He forces his racing thoughts to slow, locks his hands together at the small of his back. It takes an effort, but he slips back into his cool agent persona, a second skin borne from years of practice. Brow creased. Mouth pressed in a flat line. Eyes sharp, missing nothing. “Is she all right?” he asks.

The pilot shoots him a ‘how the hell should I know?’ look. “She was fine when I left her,” he says. “Look, I’m a pilot, not a bodyguard. My orders were to get her where she wanted to go in one piece. I did that. Whatever she does now is up to her.”

“Of course.” Cassian inclines his head. “Still, the Alliance leaders feel it’s best to keep an eye on her whereabouts, given all she knows about this base and how we operate. Where did you drop her off?”

“Well, she wanted me to take her deep into Imperial territory.” The pilot rocks back on his heels, brows scaling his forehead. “If she’d had her way, I think she would’ve made me fly into the heart of Coruscant and deliver her straight to the Emperor’s office door, blasters blazing. I told her, no way in hell. I wasn’t getting killed on whatever insane suicide mission she was on.”

Cassian’s stomach goes into freefall. “Suicide mission? What are you talking about? What did she say?”

“Wasn’t so much what she said, really,” the pilot hedges. “She didn’t say much at all. It was more this glint in her eyes. Intense. Calculating. That type of ‘damn the consequences’ look that makes you think everything’s not quite right up there, you know what I mean?”

Cassian’s heart seems jammed in his throat, speeding fast as a ship jumping to hyperspace. “Mm,” he says, voice carefully modulated. “So if you didn’t take her right to the Emperor’s door, where did you leave her?”

“Imvur,” the pilot says. “It’s Imperial-occupied. They’ve got a base near the capital city. Even that was more harrowing than what I figured I’d be getting into with a simple passenger ferry mission. Had to do some tricky flying to avoid the patrols.”

“But you made it,” Cassian presses. “She made it.”

“She made it.” The pilot spreads his hands in a shrug. “I dropped her at the farthest landing pad from the Imps that I could find, then I got the hell out of there and high-tailed it back here.”

“Okay.” Cassian’s hands are beginning to sweat, clamped together behind his back. He tries to loosen his grip, but his fingers are claws, digging in against his wrists like he’s holding on for dear life. “One last question, if you don’t mind.”

The pilot lifts one shoulder. “Shoot.”

“We attempted to put a call through to your ship while you were en route,” Cassian says. “I—we had a few…questions for her. But there was no answer. Did she tell you not to respond?”

“Oh, that? Nah, that wasn’t it at all.” The pilot shakes his head. “It was the opposite, actually. She wanted me to answer.”

Despite himself, Cassian can’t smother the hitch in his breath. “She did?”

“Yeah, but I couldn’t,” the pilot says. “We were in the middle of Imperial territory. If I’d picked up that call, they could have traced us, figured out where we were—and where the call was coming from. Could have been disaster for us and for the base. She backed off when I told her that, but it was close for a minute, there. I thought she was going to bash me upside the head with her blaster and answer the call herself. Like I said, she had that look in her eye.”

Hope rushes in, so swift and unexpected it almost makes Cassian dizzy. He takes a step backward, his hands unclenching at last.

“Thank you,” he says with a nod. Relief fills his voice, and for some reason, it doesn’t seem important to hide it. “You’ve been very helpful.”

The pilot gives him an odd look, but sketches a salute. “Not a problem, Captain. But if you’re the one assigned to, what was it—keep an eye on her? Well, all I can say is, may the Force be with you.”

“So…” Bodhi says, his eyes questioning over the top of his mug. Steam wafts up from the froth of tea inside, and he uncurls his fingers from the handle to wave it away. “What are you going to do?”

It’s deep into the night cycle, and the base mess hall is nearly deserted. Even so, Bodhi shoots a nervous look over his shoulder as he speaks. Cassian tries not to react. The plan to infiltrate Scarif is still under wraps, for now. He’s not sure how much longer it can stay that way before they hear back from Raddus’s spy.

“The only thing I can do. Keep waiting.” Cassian pushes his fork around his plate, hardly seeing the lumps of potatoes and protein cubes long gone cold. “Raddus’s agent could contact us at any minute. There’s nothing to be done but focus on that, keep the teams on standby, and be ready to go as soon as we get that updated code.”

“Yes, I know, but…” Bodhi’s voice drops even further. To a casual observer, it would look more like he’s mumbling to his tea than talking to Cassian. “You know where Jyn is now. Or where she was, at least. Don’t you want to go after her, ask her to come back? Let her know she left too soon?”

“Of course I want to.” Cassian finally abandons his plate, pushing it away with a sigh. “Going to Scarif without her doesn’t feel right. But what choice do I have? I can’t just fly to Imvur and tear the place apart looking for her. What if the call with the updated code comes through and I’m lightyears away searching for Jyn?”

“Yeah. If we don’t get those plans, this will all have been for nothing.” Bodhi sets down his mug, his hand straying to his shoulder. “Still…”

Cassian doesn’t have to be a Jedi to sense what he’s thinking. Could there be time for both? What if?

He doesn’t want to admit the same thoughts have been racing through his mind, a possibility dangling just out of reach. The Force doesn’t often give out second chances. He knows that far too well. What if he’s meant to take this one?

What if he’s squandering it?

“This is the way it has to be,” he says, startling himself with the steel in his own voice. “I’ve done too much in the name of the Rebellion to put this plan at risk now. Even for my—even for Jyn.”

He can’t quite say the word soulmate. It feels like an admission of surrender.

“Jyn made her choice,” he says instead, the words rough against his throat. “She didn’t want to be tied to fate, and she took the path she thought was best. Now I have to do the same. Maybe when all this is over…”

He can’t let the thought go any further than that. The memory of Jedha disintegrating around him surfaces in his mind’s eye. He sees the pillars of rock crumbling to sand, whipping hard as a battering ram across the bow of his ship, and he forces himself not to push the mental image away.

Across the table, Bodhi leans down, cradling his head in his hands.

When the call finally comes, days later, it’s the middle of the afternoon.

The base stirs with activity, strategies still whispered in corners, ships still primed for battle at a moment’s notice. Cassian is halfway to a meeting when his radio’s earpiece buzzes harshly, the sudden burst of noise clawing up the side of his head.

“Kay!” he hisses, ducking into an alcove. “What?”

He could almost swear the droid clears his throat. “Admiral Raddus is on the line for you, Captain,” K-2 says.

Time crystallizes, but Cassian’s blood is racing, roaring. “Put him through,” he says.

It would have been easier if the new code had come in the dead of night, with the base at its quietest. No one keeping vigil but the night security staff, insomniacs, and fevered agents working overtime.

It would have been easier, but “easy” is something that happens to other people. Cassian has accepted this, long ago.

He stands near the edge of the landing platform, utilizing all his undercover experience to look inconspicuous, just another rebel blending in. He’d never anticipated he would have to use his subterfuge skills on his own base, surrounded by his own people. It kindles another tiny flare of frustration at the Council’s decision, but he smoothes his expression and lets it go. Better to be a spy among allies than to sit back and let the Empire reduce the base to cinders.

His eyes flick back and forth, deliberately casual, between the stolen Imperial shuttle on the platform and the datapad in his hand. On the datapad’s screen, a progress bar inches forward at an agonizing crawl. Across the way, another barely noticeable soldier disappears up the shuttle’s open ramp. Cassian holds his breath, toes curling in his boots. Any moment now, he’s half-sure, he’ll hear Mothma’s or Draven’s voice ringing out across the platform, demanding to know what’s going on—

A sudden noise makes him jump. He nearly spins around, but it’s only the buzz of his radio. Biting back a curse, he toggles the switch, holding the receiver to his mouth.

“Go ahead.”

“How’s it looking out there?” Bodhi’s voice crackles through the speaker. Already on board the shuttle, he sounds surprisingly, impressively calm, but Cassian can detect controlled tension simmering beneath. Anxiety, or adrenaline, perhaps. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

“Clear so far,” he answers. “Baze and Chirrut are on board, and so are Melshi and his men. One more group to go, and then we should be set.”

“And the code?” Bodhi asks. “I’m monitoring all the systems from in here. No update yet.”

“It’s getting there.” Cassian glances at his datapad again. “The transmission is still coming in from Raddus’s man. Eighty three percent.”

“I am here as well, Cassian,” K-2 interjects over the comm. “All systems green. Setting in course for Scarif.” He pauses. “That is where we’re going, isn’t it?”

The noise around Cassian fades to the background, reduced to a tinny whine as though a grenade’s just gone off near his head. He hefts his datapad, toggling the screen to the Alliance’s file on Imvur.

As is so often the case for Imperial-occupied worlds, the information is sparse. Rocky terrain. Scattered cities. A handful of spaceports, all kept under the Empire’s watchful eye and tight patrols.

It’s already been days since Jyn landed there, he reminds himself. Easily enough time for her to have boarded a ship headed somewhere else. She could be on the other side of the galaxy by now. Lying low in the Outer Rim, perhaps, or searching for the last remnants of Saw’s people. Or returned to the planet of her childhood, visiting the spot where her mother died and her life forever changed. It pains him that he can’t remember the name.

With one last look, he sets his jaw and closes the file on Imvur, switching back to the code’s progress bar. Ninety-six percent.

“Yes, Kay,” he says. “We’re going to Scarif.”

Scarif proves to be the sort of place that, in a perfect galaxy, would be filled with peaceful settlements. Or perhaps a vacation world, with its pristine beaches and cloudless skies. Anything but an Imperial archival hub.

It’s almost a relief to get inside the complex’s soaring tower, away from the sight of stormtroopers crawling up and down the beach like fleas on an akk hound's snout. Encased in the starch of his stolen Imperial uniform, Cassian lets himself be moved along with the current of personnel moving down the main corridor, K-2 half a step behind. For once, he’s glad he never painted over the droid’s old Imperial insignia.

He knows from previous infiltration experience they can’t stay out in the open indefinitely, disguised or not. Too long spent tempting fate, and the Imperials might zero in on him and start asking questions, demanding clearances he doesn’t have. At the first opportunity, he moves smoothly down a side hallway. K-2 veers off to follow him.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Kay asks as soon as they’re out of Imperial throng’s earshot. “This complex doesn’t appear to have any signs stating ‘this way to the top-secret planetkiller plans.’”

“Yes, thank you for that observation, Kay.” Cassian moves to rake his fingers through his hair, then remembers the officer’s hat perched atop his head. “We’ll have to find a map or a directory of some kind.”

He doesn’t know why, out of all the things he could do in that moment, he turns and looks to the left. In the intersecting corridor a few feet away, a column of troopers marches past, the harsh overhead lights glinting on their black armor. His eyes skim over them, looking for a terminal to hack, a droid to override, any hint that can set them on the right path—

A trooper’s helmeted face swings toward him. Instinctively he stiffens, slipping into parade rest, one hand straying toward the blaster at his hip.

The trooper never breaks stride, face turned toward Cassian’s only for the briefest moment. Through the helmet’s open slit, their eyes lock. Cassian sees a flash of green, widening, the muted color of water running over rocks.

Shock bursts through him, knifelike. It takes every ounce of his training to keep him locked in an upright stance, feet solidly rooted to the floor.

“Jyn,” he whispers.

Chapter Text

His face flashes by so quickly that she isn’t even sure she saw it. That it wasn’t just a figment of her imagination.

It wouldn’t be the first time. Jyn likes to consider herself a practical person—she wouldn’t have survived to adulthood otherwise—but even the most practical mind can be susceptible to suggestion, if the need is great enough. In the early days, after her mother died and her father…left, it seemed like she saw them everywhere. Each time she’d caught sight of a woman with brown hair and determined eyes, or a man with her father’s height and build, her heart had leapt into her throat, beating fast enough to choke her with hope.

All the years in between have bled that hope out of her. Until now.

The urge to turn around and run back to that small hallway, to see if it really was him, is almost overpowering. But Jyn hasn’t lived a life of almost.

If she breaks ranks now, all the disguises and carefully crafted lies in the galaxy won’t save her. She covers her stumble, matching the stride of the troopers beside and in front of her, and breathes a quick prayer of thanks to the Force—if the Force is even listening—that she’d had the presence of mind to march in the back of the column rather than the front or middle.

She turns her head just a fraction, far enough to catch a glimpse of the wall chrono in her peripheral vision. Ten more minutes until patrol is over. Ten minutes until she can double back and find Cassian.

If he’s still there, her brain whispers. If it even was Cassian at all.

Her grip tightens on her rifle, hard enough to make her leather gloves squeak against the polished surface. She can feel the curious gaze of the trooper next to her, and she forces herself to relax.

Ten more minutes.

It feels more like ten hours, but the march ends at long last. The troopers peel off from the column, spines ramrod straight, rifles held at the officially-decreed correct angle, and head for their individual assignments.

It had better be Cassian, Jyn thinks, striding back down the main corridor at the fastest pace she can manage without drawing unwanted attention. Her heartbeat quickens, caught somewhere between annoyance and anticipation. This was going to be the part where she headed for the archives, searching for any clues to the location of her father’s super weapon plans. Taking a detour back to search for a man in an officer’s uniform—as though there aren’t hundreds of those in this base—hadn’t been part of her plan. If her eyes deceived her, if the man she saw isn’t Cassian after all, this will all have been a colossal waste of time she can’t afford.

But if it is him…

She doesn’t allow herself to finish the thought. Her heart speeds up another notch anyway.

As she draws closer to the hallway, she glances around, taking stock of all the Imperial personnel around her. None of them are paying her any mind. It’s just another normal day on the Scarif base. She’s just another nameless, rank-and-file trooper who has perfectly legitimate business down this little hallway that probably contains only storage closets.

She takes a deep breath and turns the corner.

Nothing.

What did you expect? her mind whispers. Even on the off chance that it was Cassian you saw, he has better things to do than sit on his hands waiting for you to show up.

Then another voice, quieter, oily-smooth, but no less insistent: Why would Cassian want to see you, anyway? You left him. You turned your back and left all of them at their darkest hour.

“No,” she says aloud, hurling the word out like a rancor spitting leftover bone after a meal. “They didn’t want to do anything. I’m doing something.”

She catches herself, casts quick glances over her shoulder. A lone trooper standing in the middle of a darkened, deserted hallway ranting aloud to no one will definitely draw attention. Probably the kind of attention that would get her shipped off to a mental ward or a re-education facility.

She’s already seen enough of standard Imperial prisons for one lifetime. She doesn’t even want to think about what kind of inventive torture awaits her if she fails here and now.

Enough of this. Cassian is in the past. They all are—him, K-2, Bodhi, Baze, Chirrut. They were part of her life for a time, and now they’re gone. Just like Saw. Just like her mother and father. It’s simply the natural order of things in a war-torn galaxy. At least for people like her.

The thought brings a hollow ache deep in her chest, but with it, the slow build of unyielding resolve.

She can do this alone. She has to. No one else will.

The foyer leading to the archive room is empty, almost miraculously so, except for a lone officer standing guard and poking at an array of terminals. He glances up as she enters, an almost comical expression of boredom pulling at his face like gravity. He blinks at her sleepily, and she can see tension around his jaw, telltale signs of a yawn being stifled.

“State your business,” he drones.

Jyn modulates her voice, trying to make herself sound as gruff and monotone as possible. Just another manufactured trooper straight off the assembly line.

“Need access to the archive,” she says.

The officer raises his brows slightly at her feminine voice, and Jyn hides a wince. She’d hoped to get through this without talking.

“On whose order?” the officer asks.

Jyn sifts through her mind, pulling up fragments of the conversations she’s overheard within the past several days. Who is the commander of this facility, again? Who are his underlings?

“General Ramda,” she says, pulling a name from her memory.

“Straight from the top, eh?” the officer says. He still sounds more bored than surprised or skeptical, but it’s far too soon to relax. “What’s your operating number?”

And there it is. Damn. She knew this was going too smoothly to last.

“R271H3,” she says glibly, pulling letters and numbers out of the air at random.

The first sign of a puzzled frown creases the officer’s forehead. “That’s not a standard—”

The butt of Jyn’s blaster silences him mid-protest, and he topples over in a graceless heap. She leans down, grabbing hold of his arms and dragging until all the crumpled limbs are hidden behind the console. If anyone glances in, they’ll just assume he’s on a bathroom break. Hopefully.

A slap of a button on the terminal, the whoosh of the door, three quick steps—and she’s in. She halts in the entryway, staring up at the column housing all the archival files. From her vantage point, it looks like it stretches on forever, reaching all the way up until it disappears into the sunlit arch of the sky. There must be hundreds—no, thousands of plans and blueprints stored here. How many other monstrosities does the Empire have up its sleeve, innocently sitting right here in this archive?

Jyn pushes the thought away with a sharp shake of her head. The others are all hypotheticals. The Death Star is terrifyingly real. She’s closer to stopping it, closer to completing her father’s sabotage, than she’s ever been. All she needs now is to figure out how to access the file.

A quick scan of the area reveals the handle-based mechanism for retrieving the plans, but determining which of the files she wants is another problem altogether. Another few seconds, and she realizes the search algorithms must be centered in the terminal outside.

“Only the Empire would make retrieving a simple archival file a two-person job,” she mutters, heading back into the foyer. Even as the words leave her mouth, she thinks of how it would be if Cassian were here. She imagines him leaning over the console, the full intensity of his brown eyes honing on the screen, relaying the instructions to Jyn through his comlink. Or better yet, it would be K-2 outside on the terminal, and herself and Cassian together on the retrieval mechanism. She pictures herself standing beside him, one on either side of the handle, fingers pushing and pulling in tandem. The two reluctant soulmates bound by a quirk of fate, driven together on a mission to save the galaxy.

And yet. Enough with the wishful thinking, she scolds herself, stabbing at the console screen with her fingertips. The time for romantic best-case scenarios is long past.

To her relief, the officer she felled is still logged into the terminal, so she doesn’t need to worry about bypassing security protocols. She calls up the archive software, funneling her search down routes and pathways, skimming through categories and code names until—

Project Code Name: Stardust.

For a brief moment her fingers still, and she stares at the screen, wondering if it’s her eyes playing another trick on her, like they did when she thought she saw Cassian in the hall. But it’s there, staring up at her in bright bold letters.

Her papa titled his super-weapon project, a machine that’s already killed hundreds, after his pet name for her. In another life, she might be dubious, even incredulous. But in this moment, it’s the only scrap of him she still has left. Proof that she never left his thoughts, even if he missed almost her entire life.

She notes the file’s archival coordinates, mouthing them several times until they’re committed to memory. Then she turns on her heel, strides back into the archive room, and seizes the handles.

It feels like an hour before the system delivers the file to her waiting hands, but it’s only a matter of minutes. She tucks the file beneath her arm, its black casing blending in smoothly with the darkness of her armor. Turning, she leaves the room with a crisp stride. The foyer is still empty, the officer still lying senseless and prone beneath the console.

Can it really be this easy?

A red light on the console catches her attention, blaring at the corner of her eye. There’s something insistent, almost frantic about its rhythmic pulsing.

For a moment, she’s tempted to just look away. Pretend she hasn’t seen it. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. The Empire is fond of harsh red lights, after all. Overly so, in her opinion. And even if it is an alarm of some sort, she has her disguise. Her stolen armor and helmet mask everything but her eyes, and even without physical disguises, she has a repertoire of methods for remaining unseen. Saw made sure of that, in another life.

But something dark and uneasy coils in the back of her mind, and she hasn’t stayed alive this long by ignoring those gut feelings.

She bends over the terminal, stepping over the officer, and glares down at the message feed scrolling across the screen.

ATTENTION: HIGH ALERT. Code 374-A is now in effect. This is not a drill. See below for details.

As of 1300 hours, Director Krennic arrived at our facility and was promptly provided with a full report. Events are still unfolding and are being monitored accordingly, but be aware that there is a known REBEL PRESENCE on site. Director Krennic has personally apprehended one of the criminal scum and is taking appropriate action. All personnel are hereby directed to respond without delay to any orders issued by the esteemed Director or members of his entourage. He has complete authority and the full resources of this base are at his disposal.

Be on constant guard for any suspicious activity or behavior. It is unknown if the apprehended rebel was working alone, or if he has other allies still undercover on this base. If other rebels are among us, they may attempt an attack without warning. Interrogation of the captured rebel is currently in process and details will be provided on a need to know basis. As always, if you observe any unusual or treasonous behavior whatsoever, report it to your supervisor immediately.

Glory to the Emperor!

Jyn lets her hands drop from the console. Her skin feels pulled too tight, itching beneath the plasteel of her armor, just beyond her reach.

Captured rebel. Krennic taking “appropriate action.”

She knows all too well what that means. Weeks in the labor camp on Wobani laid bare the Empire’s savagery toward all who dared raise a finger in defiance.

It might not be Cassian.

But what if it is?

What if I try to rescue him, and I take too long? Or fail altogether? What if the Alliance is destroyed because I tried to save one person instead of delivering the Death Star plans? What if entire worlds are obliterated?

For the first time in as long as she can remember, she wants to slip her hand beneath her sleeve, run her fingers along her soul-mark. Instead of the usual blend of irritation and apathy, she craves reassurance, to trace the edges of the words and know Cassian is still alive.

She can’t. Not without removing the disguise that keeps her from imprisonment or execution or worse.

The plans are a heavy weight tucked under her arm. She pulls them out, hefting them in her palm, transferring the load from one hand to the other and back again. One man’s life, balanced against a galaxy’s fate.

Her father was just one man, one man who could have stopped all of this. And the Alliance let him die. Let him die, and ground the truth of his words into the dust.

Jyn shoves the plans back against her side and pulls up a map of the Scarif complex. It takes no more than a few quick swipes to find her destination. She fixes it in her memory, steps over the fallen officer, and leaves the room.

She doesn’t look back.

On the surface, the atmosphere in the base doesn’t seem much different from normal. Yet Jyn can sense the tension closing in around her, thick as fog on a cold Lah’mu morning. Officers stand a bit straighter, eyes wider, their heads whipping back and forth as though expecting a blade in the kidney at any moment. Trooper formations march at a quick tempo, and even the droids seem to scurry through the hallways a little faster.

They don’t suspect you, Jyn reminds herself. You’re just another anonymous trooper walking down the hall.

Until someone checks the archive room, finds the unconscious officer, and reviews the security tapes.

The weight tucked beneath her arm grows even heavier. The back of her neck prickles with sweat, and she increases her pace.

Whoever designed Imperial bases apparently went out of their way to make the layout as confusing as possible—probably as a defense against this very scenario. Jyn hisses under her breath, taking another sharp turn, rounding the third corner in the last five minutes. Almost there.

One final detour through a side corridor, and she sees the door looming in the distance. She pauses, inconspicuous beneath the shadow of an overhang, and assesses the situation.

In a facility of this size and function—little more than a glorified retirement post for washed up officers—she’d hoped that the security might be lighter than average. Yet even from the distance of her vantage point, she can tell the door is thick, reinforced durasteel, impossible to penetrate without the security code or a pack of explosives. Two troopers stand guard, one on either side of the door. Just behind the right trooper’s elbow, she can see the edge of the locking mechanism.

She has no more time to linger. She pushes forward, stepping out into the glare of the overhead lighting. It feels like a spotlight scorching through her armor, laying her bare.

With each step drawing her closer to the door, she strains her ears, listening for any hint of what lies beyond. Nothing. The reinforced door serves a dual purpose, it seems.

She’s within ten feet of the door when one of the troopers holds up a hand, mechanized voice grinding out from the helmet speakers.

“Halt. State your business.”

Jyn reaches to her side, producing the file with her father’s plans. “Special delivery. I’ve been ordered to bring these files to Director Krennic.”

The troopers’ helmets and armor hide their eyes, muffle their body language. She hopes the air of skepticism is just her imagination.

“Very well,” one trooper finally says. “Give it to me. I’ll see that he gets it.”

Over my dead body. And yours. “I have orders to give it to the Director himself, no one else. It’s a matter of importance concerning the rebel infiltration. I was instructed to deliver it to him as quickly as possible. I’m sure you received the message enacting Code 374-A, stating all personnel are required to comply with all orders from the Director and his entourage.”

The troopers exchange glances. Jyn holds her breath.

“Proceed,” the trooper on the right says. He takes one step back, keying in the door’s unlock code.

When it slides closed behind her with an audible boom, the darkness swallows her up. For one brief, frozen moment, Jyn is ten years old again, lowering herself into the muddy gloom of her father’s hideout and watching the latch close over her head. Not knowing if it will ever open again.

She walks on.

Much like the rest of the base, the corridor is long and winding. She proceeds slowly, following the dull gleaming lights along the hallway floor. In the distance, she can finally begin to hear sounds—voices, perhaps, but muffled. She can’t make out any words, or recognize any of the speakers.

Halfway down the second corridor, she sees an unmoving black shape, sprawled on the floor, bent into unnatural angles. Her feet quicken, her heart picking up speed.

It’s a deactivated K-2 unit. By the looks of the model, the deactivation process was not a peaceful one.

The jolt to her system is as sharp and sudden as a prod from the electrostaffs the guards at Wobani used when they were feeling particularly bored or vicious. She stares down at K-2, fighting a sudden wave of vertigo, blackness crowding in at the edges of her vision like staring into the depths of a tunnel with no exit.

Another distant boom echoes through the base, knocking her unsteady, and it takes her a moment to realize this one wasn’t just in her mind. She tears her eyes from the mangled droid and jerks her head up, teetering on the balls of her feet, reaching out to brace herself on the wall.

A third boom, then a fourth. The sounds are muted, far away, but the aftershocks are racing fast. Mingled hope and dread rise in Jyn’s throat.

She breaks into a run, abandoning stealth and subtlety. The plans clatter against her armor with every step, and she tightens her hold on them, grateful for the gloves covering up the slick sweat of her palms. She careens around a corner, pitching wildly to the side, scanning in desperation for any sign of life. Or death.

There.

At the end of the hallway, she spots a door with its entrance panel glowing green. Just beyond, she can hear a voice yelling, issuing orders, dripping with the brand of arrogance unique to Imperial officers. It’s enough to tangle her footsteps, bringing her headlong rush to a jarring halt.

She hasn’t heard Krennic’s voice in years, at least not out loud. Only in the darkest fringes of her memories, or the whispers of nightmares that leave her hollow-eyed each morning. Yet she knows she’ll never forget the sound of it, no matter how much she wishes she could.

Jyn forces herself to freeze in place, holding her breath. She strains over the sound of her thundering heart, listening for a second voice. A rebel’s voice, filled with defiance and hope.

Instead, she hears another explosion in the distance, then another. Then the scream of a starship’s engines, swooping too close to the building for comfort.

The sounds of battle stir a tiny flicker of relief in the back of her mind. The Alliance must have changed its mind, must have decided to send troops to Scarif after all. She allows herself one brief moment for exasperation to sour the back of her throat—half at herself for putting her back to Yavin and burning her thrusters, and half at the rebels for taking so damn long to take action—

Then the moment passes, and none of it matters. The explosions fade to the background, drowned out by a hoarse yell of pain echoing from the interrogation chamber. Beneath her armor, Jyn’s soul-mark flares, a sudden urgent spike of something not quite pain, but far from pleasant.

She runs, barreling toward the doorway. Somehow, her blaster rifle is in her hands, though she has no memory of grabbing it.

When she bursts through, the first thing she sees is Krennic’s exquisitely impractical cape, a blotch of glaring white against the shadowy black-red of the interrogation chamber. Somehow, despite being dragged through the muck of Eadu and back, the hem has remained spotless. Distantly, she watches it swirl in the corner of her eye as Krennic pivots toward her. But for once, he’s the least important thing in the room.

Cassian is in the center of the chamber, strung up and tilted off balance in an elaborate chair-contraption that clearly doubles as a torture device. His head lolls to one side, his eyes half-closed, shadowed by mottled bruises that cascade down his cheek. His hair is standing up on end—the result of an ‘electrotherapy’ session, she guesses—and far too many blood splatters dot the floor around the base of the chair. It’s as though she burst in on someone in the middle of the creation of a macabre painting.

Her eyes stay locked on Cassian, but she feels the bluster of Krennic’s outrage before his words even reach her ears.

“What is the meaning of this?” he splutters. “Who are you?”

Then her body is turning of its own accord, cold rage working her muscles, peeling her lips back from her teeth. The rifle’s flash blinds her, bright orange and green afterimage burning on her retinas, then it clears just enough for her to catch the almost comical look of shock on Krennic’s face before he pitches forward. He hits the ground face-first, his cape fluttering gracefully around him.

Jyn’s already moving. Two anonymous troopers flank Cassian on either side, torture devices still in their hands—because of course Krennic would never do it himself, still can’t get his precious hands dirty, just like when he murdered my mother—

She wishes she had her baton, but the blaster rifle works almost as well. She swings it in a swooping arc, bringing it down against the closest trooper’s helmet, sending him sprawling. Then she pivots, swift as a dancer, and blasts the second trooper in the chest. He drops, a moan gurgling out through the mouthpiece. The pain-inflicting instrument he was holding clatters to the floor, spiraling away like a child’s toy, spraying tiny droplets of blood with each bounce.

She sucks in one long breath, cold sterile air hitting her lungs, metallic tang of blood souring the back of her tongue. It’s enough to clear the haze from her vision, and she lurches to Cassian’s side, one hand gripping his shoulder, the other cupping his jaw.

“Cassian,” she whispers. “Cassian.”

His eyelids are drooping, his pupils sluggish, but she can tell he’s making an effort worthy of the Force itself. “Jyn?” he slurs. “Really you?”

“It’s really me.” Her voice has gone thick, her throat tight. The world is blurring around her.

She has no idea how he manages it, but a hint of a smile lifts the bloodied corner of his mouth. “Tried to follow you,” he says.

“I doubled back—I wasn’t sure if it was really you. I thought I was seeing things.” What are you doing here? she wants to ask. How did you get here, where are the others, how many of you are there—

But he’s in no shape to answer any of those questions, and there’s no time. There’s never any time.

“Come on,” she says instead, and reaches for his restraints. “Let’s get you out of here.”

Chapter Text

She could almost be forgiven for expecting Cassian to be invincible.

It takes only a few minutes in his presence to realize he’s been through more than anyone should ever have to endure. He’s not unscathed—she’s never met anyone unscathed—but she knows he’s someone who meets challenges without flinching and comes through every time. Battered, perhaps, but still breathing.

So when she unlocks his shackles and watches him collapse to his knees, a fine mist of blood spraying in his wake, the burst of fear almost knocks her over. It jolts through her entire system in seconds, flash-freezing her blood. It’s like she’s just thrown back a shot of the cheapest, strongest liquor in a backroom Outer Rim bar.

“Cassian.” She’s down on her knees beside him in the space of a breath, slipping her hands under his shoulders. Her fingers come away slick and crimson-stained. A quick once-over reveals more red, red all over. Blood mats his hair, drips down his neck to pool at his collar. More bloody patches slowly spread on his jacket—at his side, his ribs—

She has to stop the bleeding. She has no time, the Death Star plans burning a hole at her side, but Cassian has even less. She has to bind his wounds or he’ll bleed out right here in front of her, and somehow, in this moment, that seems even more unthinkable than the Death Star’s very existence.

“Okay,” she says, pushing back on his shoulders as gently as she can manage. “Sit back. I’m gonna take care of this as best I can, and then we have to get out of here.”

Cassian doesn’t answer. His breathing is harsh, much faster than she would like, but he braces his hands against the ground and forces himself upright. Jyn tightens her grip on his shoulders, easing him back against the edge of the torture chair.

Now that he’s no longer doubled over, it’s easy to see the source of the primary wound: the front of his jacket is soaked clear through, just beneath his ribcage. If her time in Saw’s company hadn’t made blood a common companion, she’d be choking on the coppery stench right now.

Her hands move quick and deft, pulling up on Cassian’s jacket, easing it over his shoulders. All that’s left is his tunic, the sturdy material gone thin and sopping, and she only has to glance for a second to tell that the blood is still flowing freely beneath it. Faster, she has to move faster.

She fumbles at the belt of her trooper uniform, fingers leaving slick trails over the shining plastic, and fishes out a multipurpose tool complete with a small knife. She allows herself a feral grin, grateful, for once, for the Empire’s level of preparedness. The blade slashes through the tunic, and she grabs both halves and yanks them back, heedless of the tear echoing through the confined space.

Her hands are already dropping to staunch the flow when the sight of the wound brings her up short. It’s a messy, jagged thing, angry red trails like claw marks shredding the skin to expose the tissue beneath.

Jyn goes cold all over. Her heart is lodged somewhere at the base of her skull, crashing against her ears.

Half of Cassian’s soul-mark is gone. Krennic carved it away. He carved her words away.

For a moment the sight leaves her bolted to the floor, unable to move, unable to breathe. But only for a moment.

Rage rushes in to replace the shock, and the anger is almost a relief. She knows anger. She’s lived with it since she was a girl. It’s a catalyst, pushing her to her feet, curling her bloodstained fingers around the knife’s handle.

She stalks to the other side of the room. Krennic still lies face down, an undignified heap, his cape bunched up around his calves. Jyn bends down, seizes the hem, pulls the cape taut and slashes through the middle. The last time she saw him wearing the ridiculous thing, it was drenched in Eadu’s mud and rainwater, but now it’s back to pristine white. Clean and fresh, winding soft around her fingers.

It’s no more than a handful of seconds, yet it still feels like too much time has passed when she runs back to Cassian’s side. He’s still conscious, but his eyelids are fluttering, and his face has gone far too pale. Jyn works quickly, cutting the cloth into strips, winding the makeshift bandages around the wound as tight as she can. The remnants of her handwriting on his skin disappear beneath the cloth, black letters overlaid in white, encased in red.

“Stay with me, Cassian,” she says, her voice low and urgent. She pulls the bandage taut, and Cassian’s eyes flare open wider, his face contorting. He mutters something she can’t quite understand—another language, perhaps, probably a curse—and though mingled guilt and anger press down on her shoulders, a touch of relief flickers alongside them. Right now, pain is good. Pain means he’s awake, alive.

When she’s all out of cloth and the blood has finally stopped seeping through—for now—she returns to her trooper belt, sifting through the contents until her fingers close around vials of painkillers and stims. She depresses the syringes against Cassian’s thigh, then lets the empty vials clatter to the floor. One rolls away with a cheerful rattling sound, unstoppable until it disappears beneath a grate in the floor.

That’s probably there to drain the blood, Jyn thinks, almost dreamily.

She should look at Cassian. She’s not sure if she can muster the energy. Her eyes stay fixed on the swatch of cloak-turned-bandages instead, as though daring the blood to soak through.

A light breeze ruffles the hair at her forehead. No, not a breeze. A breath.

“Jyn,” Cassian whispers.

Finally, she looks up. His eyes are clearer now, pain still present but no longer overpowering, and a little of the color has returned to his face.

Given their situation, it’s probably inappropriate to smile at him. She does anyway.

“Hey,” she whispers back. A stray blood drop rolls down the side of his face, and without thinking, she reaches up to brush it away.

She should say something else. Something profound, some explanation for how she got here, for why she left Yavin 4 in her dust. An apology, perhaps, for the words on his skin, now half-erased in blood and pain.

She licks her lips, then opens her mouth.

“Can you stand?” she says.

In response, he settles one hand on her shoulder. Jyn slips her other arm beneath his, takes a deep breath, and braces hard.

It’s no easy task, but the painkillers and stims do their work. Cassian lets out one short, sharp grunt through gritted teeth, and his weight is a constant heavy pressure on Jyn’s shoulder, but he doesn’t fall.

Together, they stumble toward the door. Cassian’s steps falter at first, but he seems to gain strength with each stride, and Jyn feels a rush of relief for small mercies.

Krennic still lies sprawled halfway between them and the exit. This time it’s Jyn’s steps that slow as they approach, her free hand straying toward the blaster at her hip.

For a moment, it’s impossible to tell if he’s dead, alive, or hovering somewhere in between. Then her eyes sharpen on the stretch of floor beneath his head. The tile is all polished black, dark as space, but in front of his mouth is a misty patch of white.

He’s still breathing.

Jyn’s eyes snap up, but Krennic doesn’t move. With his cloak now absent, he looks small and pathetic. His eyes are closed, jaw slack, and his usually immaculate silver hair shivers in the room’s artificial current.

And on the back of his neck, just beneath his hairline, his soul-mark unfolds in two words, old and scarred over, indicating a soulmate long dead: Excuse me?

Jyn stops so fast that Cassian nearly falls over. She steadies him with a shaking hand, her eyes never leaving Krennic’s neck.

The soul-mark, that handwriting: looping letters, widely spaced. Not small and cramped, but free. Defiant. As familiar as Jyn’s own name.

My mother’s handwriting.

It hits her like a blaster bolt between the eyes. Vaguely she hears Cassian’s voice, probably wondering why she’s stopped walking, but none of the words make it through.

Krennic knew. My mother was his soulmate, and he knew. And he killed her anyway.

Somehow, the knife is in her hand again. She lunges toward Krennic, one step, then another. She’s on a collision course, and the world is in a tailspin around her.

She’ll gouge his soul-mark out, flay it from his skin like he’d done to Cassian. Her mother’s words won’t stay on his neck. Not after what he did to her. Not after what he’s done to their entire family. Not after all these years.

Not one minute more.

The pain is a heavy blanket around him, but Cassian is lucid enough to realize: one moment Jyn is there, the next, she’s gone.

She’s still physically present, her shoulders still warm and solid beneath his arm, but her mind is lightyears away. She moves like she’s no longer aware of his existence, her whole being focused on Krennic and Krennic alone. Her eyes are flat, empty and terrible, and the blade glints in her hand.

At any other time, he might be tempted to stand back, to not intervene. After all Krennic’s done, there’s no denying he deserves whatever Jyn has in store for him behind that look in her eyes.

But there’s no time. Despite the drugs jolting through his system, doing their best to keep him functional, he can barely stand on his own. Spots float at the edges of his vision, more of them crowding in after every blink. And he still hasn’t completed his mission.

He gathers the dregs of his strength and clamps his fingers around Jyn’s arm. He tugs her toward him, pressing her back against his chest. This close, there’s no mistaking the breadth of her fury. Her muscles are wound tight enough to snap, and her whole body shakes with rage and adrenaline.

Cassian doesn’t have the strength to stop her. If she wants to wrench free from his grip, she will. He lowers his mouth to her ear anyway.

“Leave it,” he says. It’s a hoarse whisper, half-trapped in a throat still raw from enduring Krennic’s torture. “Leave it. The plans—we have to get the plans.”

Or this is all for nothing, he wants to say, but just those three sentences have sapped all his energy.

For a moment, he thinks Jyn’s not going to listen, that she can’t even hear him through the roar of her fury. But on the word plans she hesitates, pulling her steps up short. Her eyes are still fixed on Krennic, but Cassian can see her slowly returning to the present.

When she turns to face him, her eyes are shadowed and her mouth pulled tight, but her shoulders loosen beneath his arm. She reaches behind her, pulling a datapad from her belt.

“I already have them,” she says.

Cassian blinks. He must have lost more blood than he thought.

“What?” he says thickly. He’s too dizzy; it’s hard to focus. The pain beneath his ribs is fighting an epic battle against the drugs swimming through what blood he has left.

A tiny smile cracks Jyn’s face. “These are the plans,” she says. “I found them.”

He could kiss her. He’s going to kiss her. It doesn’t even matter how wounded he is. She’s wearing the enemy’s armor, her hair is wild and disheveled from her helmet, her face is splattered with his blood, and she’s holding the galaxy’s salvation in her hands and he’s never seen anything more beautiful.

Somewhere beyond, he hears an explosion—distant, but not too distant to rattle the room. It jars him back to now, tearing him away from his study of Jyn’s mouth.

No. This isn’t the time or the place. He’s not going to kiss his soulmate for the first time in an Imperial torture chamber, the taste of his own blood still thick on his tongue. He breathes in too deep, his ripped-open abdomen screaming beneath the makeshift bandages, and the pain clears his mind.

“We have to get them to the Alliance,” he says. “We have to get back to the ship, get out of here.”

Jyn gives him a dubious look. “You can barely even stand. How did you get here? How did you get past the shield gate?”

“The stolen shuttle.” Cassian sways on his feet, unsteady even with Jyn’s support. He’s never felt more tired, not even after missions with thirty-hour stakeouts. “Bodhi flew it in. He’s waiting. They’re all out there, buying time for me—for us. Landing pad nine.”

“That’s on the outskirts. We’ll never make it that far.” Jyn’s face blurs as she shakes her head. “There’s a hangar here in the base, a few floors up. The ship I came in on is still parked there. If I get us in, can you fly it out? You can contact Bodhi and the others once we’re on board, tell them we have the plans.”

Can you stay conscious that long? She doesn’t ask it aloud, but the question is written all over her face.

Cassian steels his jaw in response. “Let’s go,” he says.

He’s never felt this cold before. Even the bitterest winters back on Fest didn’t have this bite, this different sort of chill that gnaws at him from the inside out. His legs don’t want to move, and the path to the elevator is impossibly long.

One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. How many times has he heard those phrases over the years, when the Empire’s power seemed absolute and hope was like rain in a drought? He’d never thought he would be taking them so literally.

“Almost there,” Jyn murmurs. Cassian’s not sure if it’s really true, or if she’s just trying to keep him awake. He takes another step. Pain shoots from his toes to his heel and all the way up to his gut. His stomach churns, and it takes all his willpower not to drop to his knees and vomit.

The floor beneath his feet turns slick and red, and he frowns. He should be alarmed. Shouldn’t he?

“Blood,” he croaks.

“It’s not yours.” Jyn jerks her head to the side. “Look.”

He does. For the first time, he soaks in the controlled chaos unfolding around them: Imperial troops and officers alike charging up and down the halls, barking orders to whoever will listen. And he’s not the only walking wounded being dragged down a corridor. Multiple troopers—some limping, some supported by comrades, some on stretchers—lurch in the opposite direction. Toward medical facilities, he imagines.

His people did that, he realizes. Baze and Chirrut and Melshi and the others. They’ve struck a blow, a significant one.

Pride fills him up, a warm, suffusing glow. It doesn’t quite chase off the pain, but it helps take the edge off the chill.

“In here,” Jyn says, and eases Cassian through the elevator door. His back hits the wall, and even though he’s shivering, he’s never been so grateful for the steadiness of cold, hard plasteel. Then the door slides shut behind them and all goes silent, bathed in darkness.

The elevator is large enough to comfortably fit several people, but Jyn leans up against him anyway. Maybe she’s just trying to keep him warm, he thinks, or make sure his heart is still beating. But then a pulse of light illuminates her upturned face, and he's not so sure that’s all it is.

Another explosion outside makes the turbolift shudder, and Jyn lifts both hands to steady herself on Cassian’s shoulders. Her sleeves slip downward with the movement, leaving her soul-mark exposed.

There’s just enough light for Cassian to meet her eyes. He looks to her arm and back again, his hand drifting toward hers in a wordless question.

She nods, just barely. Her eyes are open wide, her pupils huge and dark. Her tongue darts out to wet her lips.

Cassian curls his fingers around her wrist, gently pulling it forward. His thumb runs up and down the words on her skin, then his hand slips around, one fingertip tracing the letters.

The turbolift’s gears creak around them, but he can still hear Jyn release an unsteady breath. Her other arm wraps around the back of his neck, erasing the space between them, and her heart beats staccato against his chest.

Warm white light slashes through the elevator again, sharpening the text spilling down Jyn’s arm. Cassian threads his fingers through hers, lifts her wrist to his mouth, lets his breath play over her pulse point. He lingers, numbering the seconds by her heartbeats, then trails his lips down her arm, pressing kisses to each of his words on her skin.

He can feel the moment her heart rate spikes, and it chases all the lost warmth back into his blood.

After the quiet darkness of the elevator, stepping out into the hangar is like staggering headfirst into an explosion. Ships careen wildly across the deck like drunken sailors, and panic-stricken troopers are bolting headlong toward the few vessels still parked and empty. The Empire’s typical stiff decorum has long since vanished, and a prickle of alarm creeps down Cassian’s spine. His small band of soldiers brought a sizable cache of weapons and explosives, but not enough to cause this level of frenzy. His people should all still be down on the beach, anyway, not close enough to harm anyone in the base itself.

Jyn doesn’t give him time to wonder further. “There,” she says, pointing, her voice tight and sharp. “That’s the shuttle I came in on.”

A cadre of Imperial officers is already beelining toward the ship, and Jyn pulls her sidearm. A single crisp, efficient shot, and the nearest officer sprawls with a scream, clutching his thigh. Two more turn, catch a glimpse of Jyn’s face, and wisely bolt out of her way. The last one, almost to the ship’s boarding ramp, never even hears the blaster bolt coming.

The ramp might as well be a mountain. Cassian stumbles halfway up, his knees scraping the ground, but Jyn is a battering ram brought to life. She hooks her arm beneath his shoulders and jerks upward, already hissing apologies in his ear as pain explodes through his midsection.

Putting one foot in front of the other hurts. Breathing hurts. He puts a hand to his stomach, pressing down gingerly, and his shaking fingers come away damp with blood.

But he makes it.

He collapses against the bulkhead wall, fighting off the black spots crowding in at the corners of his eyes. Distantly, he hears Jyn slap the control button for the boarding ramp, hears her firing shots into the mass of Imperials crowding outside, demanding entry. Then he hears the ramp snap closed, and the screams and pounding fists fade away, muffled and unimportant.

“Cassian.”

Jyn’s breath is warm against his ear, but her voice seems very far away.

“Cassian, come on.” Her hand is on his shoulder, one spark of light pushing back against the darkness closing over his head. “Cassian, stay with me. I need you to stay awake. You have to fly us out of here before they break down the door.”

K-2 can fly it, he almost says, and then a stab of grief hits him as he remembers that K-2 is gone, and Bodhi and Baze and Chirrut might all be gone, and all of it will be for nothing if he and Jyn don’t get the plans back to the Rebellion—

He forces his eyes open. He can see the cockpit, just a few feet away.

“Come on,” Jyn says. She tugs his arm over her shoulders, and together they cross the distance to the control console, each step short and grueling.

Then he’s in the pilot’s chair, and the ship’s buttons are familiar under his hands. It’s not the first time he’s flown a stolen Imperial shuttle. He lets muscle memory take over, allowing his exhausted brain a few minutes’ retreat.

When the shuttle bursts out of the hangar and into Scarif’s sunlight, he lets himself exhale. The ship soars upward into crystalline blue, aiming toward where the shield gate should be.

He hears Jyn suck in a sharp, bitten-off breath at the same moment he sees it: the steel-gray curve of the Death Star’s hull, breaking through the tranquility of Scarif’s atmosphere. Its firing mechanism points straight toward the base.

Oh, he thinks, distantly. So that’s why the Imperials were so desperate to get out.

The thought has barely finished forming when the Death Star fires. The beam lances out, a flash so quick and bright Cassian throws up a hand to shield his eyes. He hears the thunderous crack behind him as the weapon finds its mark, the base disintegrating in a shower of debris. He spares a glance downward as fiery chunks of the structure rain on the beach below, slamming into the sand like fallen meteorites.

And beyond, through the viewport, he sees Jedha all over again.

This time, it’s a swell of light and water instead of dust, the Death Star’s beam whipping Scarif’s ocean up into a pearlescent sphere as tall as Coruscant’s skyscrapers. In any other circumstance, it might be beautiful.

Jyn’s fingernails bite into his shoulder. “Can we make it?” she says. Her voice is tight as a bowstring.

He can’t answer. He blinks rapidly, fighting off the dizziness with everything he has left, coaxing every last drop of power from the shuttle’s straining engines. This craft was built for transporting troops, not for speed—

The swell of light and energy and death comes marching closer. The shuttle trembles, bucking against Cassian’s hold. Jyn slips into the co-pilot seat beside him, her fingers closed tight around the necklace she always wears tucked beneath her tunic. Her lips are moving, but no sound comes out.

Cassian leans forward, pulling on the control stick with all his strength, as though he can increase the ship’s speed through willpower alone.

He watches, almost in disbelief, as the shuttle’s engines give a final burst, hurtling the ship straight up. The swell of light passes beneath them, so close that Cassian imagines he can feel his hair singeing.

He doesn’t have time for relief. He doesn’t even have time to worry about the shield gate. It can’t possibly still be closed, he thinks—hopes—what with the Death Star having just fired straight through it. But if it is, the shuttle is going far too fast for him to pull up in time. At least if the shield is still functional, they’ll slam against it so fast that death will be almost instantaneous—

But pale blue turns to star-speckled black through the viewport as the shuttle breaks atmo, soaring into space. Beside him, Jyn sags back in her chair, boneless with relief.

But only for a moment. Just beyond the atmosphere, battle rages, the blinding reds and greens of starfighter weapons tearing across the expanse. Cassian pulls up hard, narrowly avoiding a collision with an oncoming X-Wing.

Jyn bolts upright in her chair, eyes flaring wide. “So the Alliance did send their fleet after all? Took them long enough!”

“Get on the radio,” Cassian bites out, a hiss of pain escaping him. Adrenaline can only last him so long, and the blackness is coming back with a vengeance. “Tell the Alliance—tell them—”

Jyn is already pulling up the frequencies. “All Alliance ships, does anyone read me? This is Jyn Erso. I’m with Captain Andor, and we have the Death Star plans. Repeat: we have the plans. We are in a stolen Imperial shuttle. Do not fire. Return to base. Repeat: we have the plans. Return to base.”

For a breathless moment, there is only silence.

Then the radio crackles to life, an incredulous voice bursting through the static: “Jyn Erso? How did—”

The voice cuts off as a blast rocks the ship, nearly sending Jyn tumbling from her seat. A dozen alarms shriek in unison, and bright, blinking red text scrolls across every console.

Cassian cranes his neck toward the viewport. “Someone’s firing at us—they must not be patched into our frequency.” His fingers fly over the console. “This shuttle won’t last against a starfighter. Engines are already damaged. I have to make the jump to lightspeed, now.”

He punches in the coordinates for Yavin 4 even as the words leave his mouth, then feels the familiar shift as the hyperdrive powers to life, pinpricks of stars elongating around them.

One by one, the alarms deactivate, until the silence is absolute. Cassian leans back in his chair, turning to look at Jyn. Even that tiny movement hurts, but it’s worth it to see her face, luminous in the ethereal light of hyperspace.

Even better, she’s smiling.

“You did it,” she says. Her hand reaches out, finding his.

It’s hard to tell through the pain, but he thinks he’s smiling back. He has just enough strength left to squeeze her fingers.

And then, finally, he stops fighting.

His head falls back against the chair. Just as the blackness roars in, he hears a loud but distant thud, like the sound a ship makes when something goes wrong. He feels something like a lurch, and then his hand is open and empty and cold as Jyn’s fingers disappear from his. He tries to turn his head, to focus on the blaring lights on the console in front of him, but he can’t keep his eyes open any longer.

The darkness is a flood, closing over his head, and the last thing he sees is Jyn leaning over him, the bright green of her eyes like a flare against the black.

Chapter Text

By the time she’s counted backwards from ten in every language she knows and the alarms still haven’t stopped, Jyn is pretty sure she’s about to scream. She’s going to scream and slam her fist into the Force-damned ship’s console until the strobing lights are pulp and the alarms fall silent as space.

She closes her eyes. Breathes. Wrestles the rage back into the depths of her brain and slams the door on it.

When she opens her eyes, her mind is clear and sharp. Time slows, and she lets her senses drift from one disaster to the next, taking stock. Performing triage. Through the viewport, the oily haze of hyperspace has given way to spinning starlight. Either she’s taken a nasty blow to the head, or the ship dropped out of lightspeed long before it was supposed to.

Jyn reaches up, runs her fingers along her scalp. No bumps, no blood. No pain, at least no more than usual. The ship is the problem, then.

Wonderful.

The alarms are still wailing, loud enough to wake the dead, but Cassian hasn’t stirred. He’s slumped over in the pilot’s chair, eyes closed, mouth slack, fingers limp. His face has gone the color of blue milk left out far too long, and when Jyn inhales she’s reminded of post-disciplinary cleanup duty back at the camp on Wobani. Smoke and sweat and terror and blood, a miasma thick enough to choke on.

She staggers over to the pilot’s chair and presses her fingers to Cassian’s neck. His pulse rises to meet her, but just barely, a sluggish throb that fails to warm his skin. The damned alarms still haven’t shut up, and the Death Star plans lie on the co-pilot’s seat where Jyn dumped them when she came aboard. The galaxy’s only hope, and right now, utterly useless.

Think, Jyn. Think!

She clenches her jaw and makes her hand drop from Cassian’s neck. For a moment, she’s tempted to forget the ship, forget the plans, to raid the shuttle’s medical supplies and force life back into him with her own brute strength. But if the ship explodes they’ll both be dead, medicine or no medicine. And if the plans don’t get back to the Alliance, the whole galaxy might as well be dead.

“Hold on, Cassian,” she mutters. Jyn Erso doesn’t beg, doesn’t plead with anyone, but this is as close as she gets. “Just a few more minutes. Hold on.”

She’s no pilot, but she’s been on enough ships to decipher a few of the instructions scrolling spit-fire across the console. She leans over Cassian, careful not to let her elbows brush his injured abdomen, and stabs at buttons until the alarms mercifully cease their racket.

A moment ago, she would have given a kidney for a few seconds of silence. Now, wish granted, she can hear the wheeze of Cassian’s breathing. A rasp, a gurgle, then a long, long beat of silence before the next rasp. It’s almost enough to make her want to turn the alarms back on.

But labored breaths are better than none. She pushes down the tide of dread, keying in the command for a ship diagnostic. If something’s about to go critical and blow them both into literal stardust—

The shuttle whirs and whines, but it spits out the diagnostic faster than she expects. The Imperials may be evil sons of Hutts, but at least they keep their ships’ systems well maintained.

SHIELDS: 30%

LIFE SUPPORT: FUNCTIONAL

OXYGEN LEVELS: STABLE

ENGINES: DAMAGE SUSTAINED

HYPERDRIVE: CRITICAL

COMMUNICATIONS: NON-FUNCTIONING. REPAIRS NEEDED.

“Well, we can’t call the Alliance and we’re not going anywhere fast,” Jyn says. “But at least we’re not going to suffocate. Or explode, apparently.”

She looks back at Cassian, but his eyelids aren’t even fluttering. Panic threatens to swallow her alive, but she refuses.

“Unless the Empire finds us,” she amends, more to fill the silence than anything else. Or to cover up that terrifying rattle of Cassian’s breathing. “Then we’ll definitely explode.”

It strikes her, all at once, like the sort of thing K-2 might have said. She can’t resist the impulse to look over her shoulder, as though he’ll be standing there looming over her, gangly and hulking, ready with a snarky quip. Or better yet, ready to fix the hyperdrive.

But he won’t be there, she knows even before she looks. She saw his deactivated chassis back in the base on Scarif. If they’d had more time, maybe—

But they didn’t, and she has no time for the grief that wants to skewer her, hot and sharp right through the gut. Not if she wants to keep Cassian alive.

And I do. I really, really do.

A week ago, the thought might have sent her into a tailspin of wanderlust. Now, it crystalizes everything in front of her.

She casts one more glance at Cassian, long enough to see his chest rise and fall, and then she takes off at a run down the hallway. A shuttle of this size won’t have much in the way of medical supplies, she knows. But there’ll be something. A first aid kit, two if she’s lucky. She’ll find them.

She’ll tear the ship beam from beam if she has to.

She’s never been good at waiting.

She sits in the co-pilot’s chair, elbows braced on her knees. Cassian’s blood is drying under her nails, in the creases of her palms where the rags couldn’t quite get it all. There’s a ‘fresher somewhere she could wash it off, but she isn’t about to leave him. Not now. Not when the memory of his skin, cool and clammy under her hands, is far too close for comfort.

At least he’s newly bandaged now, and she got as much fluid into him as she could manage. And his breathing seems to be coming a bit easier, she thinks, holding her own breath to listen. Then again, maybe that’s just her own wishful thinking. Or delusional thinking. When was the last time she slept? Ate?

She blinks, rubbing the heel of her hand across her eyes. Blood smears over her cheek, sending a fresh waft of copper-scent drifting through the air, but she can’t find the strength to wipe it away.

For at least the tenth time, she checks the readouts on the ship’s control panel. Oxygen levels and life support still holding steady. Communications still down. Hyperdrive still inactive. The Force apparently hasn’t seen fit to miraculously fix them while she was tending to Cassian.

“Thanks so much,” Jyn mutters, sending a sarcastic salute off in the Force’s general direction.

The minutes crawling by only serve to amplify the helplessness building in her brain, turning it to something almost physical, like an electric current crawling over her skin. If she closes her eyes, it’s all too easy for the blackness of space through the viewport to transform into the press of dirt and rock all around her, suffocating darkness staved off only by the lantern her father had left in his hiding place. She might as well be ten years old again, a helpless child entombed in earth and grief, armed with nothing but her father’s promise to return for her.

Only now, she doesn’t even have that.

Her fist lashes out, striking hard against the console with an unsatisfying clunk. At least the jolt of pain in her knuckles allows for a few moments of distraction.

If she gets out of this situation, Jyn promises herself—and she will, she will—she’s going to learn everything there is to know about ships. How to fly one. How to fix one. How to make a quick escape on her own, not reliant on anyone else to ferry her or rescue her. How not to be crippled and stranded in the middle of Force-knows-where.

She cradles her hand against her chest, nursing the already-forming bruise, when Cassian’s chair creaks.

Jyn catches her breath, the pain in her fingers forgotten.

“Cassian?” she whispers.

In return, she hears him mutter something in a language she doesn’t understand. Whether it’s his native tongue, or some garbled phrase produced from a brain that’s lost far too much blood…

“Cassian,” she says again, more urgently. She resists the urge to hover over him like one of those ridiculous fluttery med droids. “Are you awake? Are you…”

All there? Lucid? She swallows down the rest of the sentence, forcing herself to wait. More waiting, always more waiting.

His eyelids are moving, but slowly, like he hasn’t yet mustered up the strength to force them open. “Jyn?” he whispers.

Pure relief whisks away all the strength from her limbs, and she sags down in her chair, reaching out to grip his seat’s armrest. “I’m here,” she says. “It’s me.”

Finally his eyes open, glassy and unfocused, blinking groggily. His hand twitches by his side, straying out until his fingers brush hers.

“Are you okay?” His voice is rough like a nexu’s tongue, his accent thicker than usual. Jyn breathes out a noise that might be half laugh, half sob.

“I’m okay,” she says.

She watches Cassian relax, his eyes drifting back closed.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Now she hovers, comparisons to med droids be damned. Carefully she places both hands on his shoulders, applying just enough pressure to make his eyes creak back open. “I need you to stay awake. Do you hear me? We’re in a—a situation.”

He frowns, then a spark of memory flares in his eyes. “The plans?”

“We have them.” Jyn motions with her head to the unoccupied cockpit seat. “But we have no way to get them to the Alliance. Our ship was hit just as we jumped to hyperspace away from Scarif, do you remember? We dropped out of lightspeed too early and now we’re drifting somewhere between Scarif and Yavin Four.”

Cassian draws in a breath, a spasm of pain crossing his face. “Radio?”

Jyn’s already shaking her head. “Non-functional. The hyperdrive too.” She squares her body in the seat, facing Cassian fully, digging her nails into her chair’s plush black leather until they puncture straight through. “Unless you can think of something else, our only option is to activate the distress beacon. Problem is—”

“—The Empire might find us before the Alliance does,” Cassian finishes. Now his face is drawn with more than just lingering pain.

Jyn nods. “Fifty-fifty chance.”

Cassian braces himself on the edges of his seat, pushing upright with a grimace. “I’ve had worse odds,” he says, though there isn’t much optimism in his tone. “I don’t suppose there’s any shot of fixing the radio or the hyperdrive.”

“You tell me.” Jyn gestures to the diagnostics still scrolling on the console. She watches Cassian lean forward close enough to read them, the effort draining color from his face. Her fists clench at her sides, helplessness creeping up her throat again. She’d pour her own blood into him if she could, but this shuttle doesn’t have the equipment, and for all she knows it would do more harm than good—

The jerky shake of Cassian’s head interrupts her spiral. “Hyperdrive is shot,” he says. “The radio might be salvageable, but it’ll take more time and parts than we have.”

Jyn swivels her chair, reaching out to touch the Death Star plans. A childish gesture, she knows, but somehow she needs tactile reassurance that they’re still there, that maybe all of this won’t be for nothing.

“Looks like the distress beacon is our only option, then,” she says. “It’s that, or float here hoping the Alliance somehow stumbles on us. Or until the food supply runs out.”

Or until your wound gets infected, she doesn’t say. Or until you bleed out.

Cassian meets her eyes, and she can tell he’s thinking the same thing. The life support may be stable, but that doesn’t mean time is on their side.

He’s still holding her gaze when he reaches out to the console, his practiced fingers finding one switch among dozens, flicking it upward. Flashing crimson light fills the console, less blinding than the previous alarms, more like a grim countdown than a cry for help.

“The beacon’s activated,” Cassian says.

Now we wait. Again.

If she thinks about it, she’ll go insane. Instead she takes the opportunity to look Cassian up and down, taking stock of all his wounds. She might not be able to do anything with the ship or the plans, but there must be something she can do for him. Keep him talking, if nothing else. Keep him conscious.

“Are you all right?” she begins, then grinds her teeth. Obviously not. “How bad is it?” she tries again.

He manages a smile. It’s weary and shadow-dim, but it’s still the best thing she’s seen in a while. “I’ve had worse,” he says.

Jyn tries to imagine that, then just as quickly tries not to. She can’t go that route, not now. Not ever. “Your lips are turning blue.”

“Yours too.” Cassian’s smile softens. “The ship’s diverting power from the heating system to the life support. The temperature shouldn’t drop beyond livable levels, but it’s not going to be warm in here.”

“I’ll find some blankets or extra uniforms. There must be supplies in here for emergencies.” Jyn jumps to her feet, flooded with relief at having something specific to do. “I’ll be back in a minute. Cassian—?”

His brows tilt upward. “What is it?”

“Stay awake.” Jyn swallows.

He reaches out toward her, and Jyn steps forward, just close enough to take his hand in hers. The chill of his skin jolts her, and his fingernails are a dusky purple, but the look in his eyes warms her to her core.

“I will,” he says.

In any other circumstance, she might be able to trick herself into considering it peaceful. A vacation, even. Just her and Cassian, away from the froth of activity, safe from the terror and cruelty of the galaxy, curled together under a thick blanket with nothing to do but watch the stars drift by.

For just a moment, if she closes her eyes and holds perfectly still, she can pretend. She can block out the steady blink of the emergency beacon’s light. She can avoid brushing up against the thick, blood-stiffened edge of the bandage wrapped around Cassian’s abdomen. She can relax into the cadence of his heartbeat and imagine the rhythm is slow because he’s calm and content, not because his body’s desperately trying to conserve what energy it has left.

She can even pretend they’re huddled up together purely out of intimacy, not out of the necessity to share body heat.

But then Cassian shifts beside her, his shoulder moving beneath her head. It jars her eyes open, and the moment is lost.

Just as well, she thinks, stifling a sigh. Wishful thinking and overactive imaginations never got anyone anywhere. Her least of all.

She’s just about to settle in again when she feels Cassian’s jaw move above her ear, hears the rasp of his teeth grinding. Even before he speaks, she remembers all that’s been left unsaid between them.

“Jyn,” he whispers. “What happened?”

She goes still, tries to keep her heart from speeding up, knowing he can feel her every reaction. “I told you—the shuttle was hit just as we went into lightspeed—”

“Before that,” Cassian breaks in. “Back on Yavin Four. When you left.”

Jyn closes her eyes, but this time she can’t pretend. She knew, assuming they both survived, they would have to have this conversation. She just hadn’t planned on having it in such close quarters, close enough that they’re sharing the same heat, the same breath. Close enough that she can count every one of his heartbeats.

“You weren’t there,” she says. Tries to keep her voice level. “I tried to convince the Council, but they wouldn’t listen. I got out of the meeting and I wanted to fight, and I looked for you, and you weren’t there, Cassian.”

Just like my father. Just like Saw, she wants to say, but she can’t get the words out. It’s been years, yet somehow the wounds are still too raw, too fresh.

“All I had to go on was instinct,” she says. “I did the same thing that’s kept me alive for years: I took matters into my own hands. Look, I understand why you weren’t there. Your commanders all thought it was a hopeless situation, and I’d outlived my usefulness and I’m sure you had your orders—”

She’s worked up a full head of steam, and she doesn’t realize something isn’t quite right until she registers Cassian’s hands gripping her shoulders, shaking her. Not hard, just enough to get her attention.

“Jyn,” he says, his voice piercing right through her. His eyes are bright and sharp, and this is the most alive she’s seen him since she found him in that torture chamber on Scarif. “I did have my orders, and I was ignoring them. I wasn’t there because I was gathering forces. I was getting an army together for you, as many volunteers as I could find. If you’d just waited a few more minutes—”

He breaks off, releasing her shoulders, and sags back in his chair. He tilts his head toward the ceiling, throat working, as though just those few sentences have sapped him of his strength. Something cold trickles down Jyn’s throat, freezing her ribs, crystallizing in her gut.

“I didn’t know,” she murmurs. Her tongue can barely move; her whole chest feels numb. “I’m not used to people sticking around when things go bad.”

Cassian’s head turns toward her. It takes all the force of her will to lift her eyes, meeting his. Yet she finds no judgment there, only a fond exasperation, something rueful and tender all at once. He lifts his hand to her face, brushing a lock of blood-spattered hair back from her forehead. Somehow, the cool touch of his fingers doesn’t seem so jarring anymore.

“I’m not them,” he says softly.

Don’t trust him, part of her mind whispers, even as her heart jumps. What makes you think he’s any different from the others?

But before the thought even finishes, she already knows the answer to that question.

He’s here. Things got bad, and I was the one running away this time, but somehow he’s still here.

All at once it hits her, a soundless revelation just as impossible to ignore as the chime of the ship’s alarm bells.

She’d been so afraid of being trapped by a soulmate, terrified of being tied down by fate. She’d questioned his every motivation, sure that he was with her, that he kept coming back for her only because he had to, only because fate demanded it.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh. I think I might have been interpreting this all wrong.”

Cassian furrows his brows. “What do you mean?”

Maybe, she thinks, he doesn’t keep coming back to me just because he’s my soulmate. Maybe he’s my soulmate because he’s the only one who keeps coming back.

Maybe she hasn’t been giving the Force enough credit after all.

She doesn’t realize she’s broken into a grin, spreading wider and wider and threatening to overtake her whole face, until she sees Cassian looking at her with growing bewilderment, like he’s wondering if she’s lost her mind. And maybe she has, but for just this moment, she’s not going to question it.

“What I mean is,” she says, and reaches out to thread her fingers through his. “I believe you.”

Cassian studies her, a cautious sort of hope in his eyes. “You do?”

She tightens her grip on his hand, pulling it up to her lips. “I do.”

Chapter Text

It’s only been an hour, but it feels like years.

For the hundredth time, Jyn’s eyes stray to the shuttle’s instrument panel. For the hundredth time, there’s no change. The diagnostic report still sprawls over the primary display, blaring all the shuttle’s broken parts, all the faults keeping her and Cassian adrift in a sea of nothing. The digitized words still flash behind her eyes even when she blinks, pulsing red like a fresh welt.

The distress beacon continues pinging, sending its signal into the expanse, a call forever unanswered. For the first time, Jyn begins to grasp just how immense the galaxy is. They’re like a message in a bottle, she and Cassian, bound together in this tiny shuttle, borne on a tidal wave of uncertainty. Helpless and drifting. Hoping for the off chance that they’ll tumble to shore, make it safely into someone’s outstretched hand.

“Do you think we’re the only ones left?” Cassian murmurs beside her. “Do you think anybody’s listening?”

He’s of a similar mind, apparently, his thoughts echoing hers. Somehow that doesn’t surprise her.

They are, after all, soulmates.

Jyn considers the question. It’s a surreal thought. Out here in the drift, cut off from all communications, the galaxy could be coming to an end and they wouldn’t even know it. The Empire could be on a rampage, its Death Star careening from planet to planet, reducing them all to stardust. She and Cassian could be the last beings alive. Or the last members of the Rebellion, anyway. Did anyone else make it off Scarif? And what about Yavin 4? The Empire could have discovered the Rebels there, for all Jyn knows. Even if the hyperdrive was functioning, is there even a base left to return to?

She doesn’t know the answers to any of those questions. But she can still hope.

“I do,” she says. She tucks her head beneath Cassian’s chin. “Someone’s out there.”

As she speaks the words, it’s a comfort to realize she believes them. And yet anxiety lingers, gnawing at her, hard and sharp around the edges.

Hope won’t carry their distress call to friendly ears. It won’t transmit the Death Star plans back to Mon Mothma and the rest of the Alliance. And it won’t save Cassian, either. She can tell he’s clinging to consciousness with every bit of determination he has, but he’s still growing weaker by the minute. He needs far more medical attention than she can give him. He needs blood, and bacta, and medicine—

He needs time, and that’s something in far too short a supply.

He shifts beside her, a hiss of pain drawn between his teeth, and Jyn tries to control her surge of panic. She jolts up, eyes zeroing in on his face. With as much power as possible diverted to life support, the cockpit lighting has dimmed almost to nonexistence. Yet even in the darkness, Cassian looks nearly as pale as a hologram. Or a ghost. Crimson light from the instrumentation panel flickers on his skin and glints in his drooping eyes.

“We have to get you warmer.” Jyn’s own teeth chatter as she speaks, though she hardly notices. Cassian’s lost so much blood, and though Jyn doesn’t dare to lift the blanket draped over him, she suspects there’s even more seeping through the bandages around his abdomen. She leaps up, ready to pace the tiny cockpit. “There must be something else we can do, some other supplies in this blasted shuttle—”

“You’ve already searched it top to bottom.” Cassian’s voice is thick and sluggish, but his grip on her wrist is surprisingly strong. “The best thing we can do now is—”

An alert erupts from the panel, rapid and shrill, and Jyn’s heart somehow soars and plummets all at once. In two steps she reaches the display, eyes darting over the readout.

“There’s a ship approaching.” She can barely manage the words, unsure if she even believes them. “Dropping out of hyperspace any second now.”

She whirls around to meet Cassian’s eyes. “Someone heard the distress signal. Someone’s actually coming.”

He reaches toward her, wordless, and she grips his hand. His fingers are like ice. She doubts hers are any better.

“If it’s the Empire…” Cassian says. He doesn’t need to finish. Jyn feels his pulse jump in his wrist.

“Here,” she says, plucking up a blaster. What their stolen shuttle lacks in medical supplies, it compensates for in weaponry. She presses it into Cassian’s hand, curling his fingers around it.

He swallows. “Jyn—”

Through the viewport in front of them, the star-strewn black lights up in a brief, brilliant flare as the approaching ship drops out of hyperspace. Without meaning to, Jyn throws up a hand to shield her eyes.

Beside her, Cassian goes very, very still.

An Imperial cruiser drifts through the expanse before them, its approach slow but steady. Jyn lowers her hand from her face, balls it into a fist, and lets out her breath.

It’s over, she thinks. She opens her mouth to say it, but the words refuse to come.

Instead, she looks at Cassian. In a way, here at the end, it feels like she’s seeing him for the first time. Not as a grudging ally of circumstance, not as a soulmate she didn’t ask for. Not as a taunt from the Force or fate, not as a tether to a life she fears. Just…Cassian.

There’s still so much about him she doesn’t know. His family. His home planet. His favorite food. What he likes to do when—if—he ever has a spare moment, freed from demons both galactic and personal. All the little things one should know about one’s soulmate.

And yet, she doesn’t need to have any of those details to feel, in this moment, like she truly knows him.

He meets her eyes, and she sees her own tangle of emotions reflected there: pain, resignation, determination.

They won’t go out without a fight.

In the viewport, the Imperial ship continues its lumbering approach. Its weapons are primed, coils of glowing red, but not yet firing.

“They’re probably trying to hail us,” Cassian mutters. He tries to lurch out of his seat to check the still non-functioning radio, then winces and thinks better of it, collapsing heavily back into the chair. One arm curls around his midsection, as though trying to mask the dark splotches seeping through his tunic.

Jyn nods, eyes darting around the cockpit, searching for a miracle. But life has never seen fit to give her miracles before—why would it start now?

“When they can’t raise us,” she says, thinking aloud, “then they’ll board us. As soon as they find out we’re not Imperial, that we stole this shuttle…”

Cassian gives a mirthless laugh. “Two of us against a whole crew of them.”

“I’ve had bad odds before,” Jyn says, her mouth in a grim twist. “But never quite that bad.”

“What other supplies did they have?” Cassian asks. Jyn tries not to dwell on how much pain laces the words, at how labored his breathing is. If they don’t figure a way out of this, in a few moments it won’t matter anyway. “Anything we could use to set a trap? Maybe we could take a few of them out as they board. Even the odds a little.”

“Maybe. Not sure if there was anything that wouldn’t blow us up right along with them,” Jyn says. The cockpit is so damned small. “But I’ll check.”

Cassian nods, a blur in the dark. “Hurry. They’re starting to pull up alongside us.”

Jyn runs, hope and desperation waging a war within her. Is this a fool’s errand, a battle already lost, and she’s spending her last moments fleeing like an insect scuttling frantically from a boot? Or is there actually a chance at life, at getting those precious Death Star plans to the Rebellion?

There has to be, she thinks. As long as we’re still breathing. Everything I’ve done, everything my father sacrificed—it can’t all be for nothing. It can’t.

It’s a litany that pulses through her as she tears apart the shuttle’s store room, pawing through crates of weaponry, tossing aside cleaning supplies and spare droid parts, seizing up anything that looks useful. Even if she and Cassian don’t make it out of this, they can take as many Imperials out with them as possible—

“Jyn!”

Cassian’s yell tears through her like a lightsaber to the gut. She’s back in the cockpit in seconds, a grenade in each hand, eyes wild, disheveled hair a nebula around her face. She fully expects to see a legion of stormtroopers pouring through the shuttle’s door—

But there’s only Cassian, propping himself up on the arm of his chair, straining toward the console.

“There’s another ship on approach,” he gasps. “About to drop out of hyperspace.”

Jyn joins him, slips a grenade into his hand. Cassian meets her eyes and holds her gaze. Nods once.

Space ripples and warps, and the new ship materializes. The Imperial cruiser is already turning to meet it, docking attempt abandoned.

And Jyn hears a sound from her own throat that’s half laugh, half sob, because it’s a Rebellion ship, its weapons already blazing, the Imperial cruiser in its crosshairs, and she and Cassian might actually make it out of this after all. Then Cassian’s arms are around her, his injuries momentarily forgotten, and she can feel his fingers in her hair and his breath against her ear. A flash unfurls in the viewport as the Imperial cruiser breaks to pieces, bright as Lah’mu’s sunrise on a cloudless morning. And it is perfect.

The light beyond fades. The cockpit returns to darkness, and there is only her and Cassian, entwined together. With her eyes temporarily useless, adjusting to the afterimage of the explosion, her other senses amplify. There is Cassian’s breathing, ragged and beautiful against her ear. The scents of smoke and blood, sweat and singed machinery. The cold metal bulk of the grenade in one hand, the soft bristle of Cassian’s hair against the other.

He pulls back, just an inch or two. Light blinks from the instrumentation panel, bathing his face in a pale glow.

Then his mouth is on hers, his lips rough and soft and deliciously warm, and she had never thought the coppery tang of blood could taste so sweet.

Only the clang of the Rebellion ship docking with theirs breaks them apart. Yet they remain side by side as the doors sync, then slide open, revealing a small group of Rebels, tired and disheveled but very much alive. At their head stands a familiar figure.

“Bodhi!” Jyn exclaims. “You made it off Scarif!”

“So did you,” he replies, relief and joy lightening the exhaustion on his face. Then he catches sight of the grenades still clutched in their hands, and raises his eyebrows.

“Do you want to…” He gestures, a grin flickering at the corners of his mouth. “Maybe put those down?”

Jyn meets Cassian’s eyes. His face remains shadowed and drained, his injury still weighing him down, but he’s smiling at her. Soft and bright, like she’s the only person in the galaxy.

She hoists him up, and they limp toward the door together, picking up the plans from the co-pilot’s chair. The grenades drop from their fingers and roll away into the dark, harmless and forgotten.

Chapter Text

“This time you will save him,” Jyn demands. “Are you listening to me? You have to. And don’t just give me that line about doing—”

“We are doing everything we can,” the med droid says, with its infinite, infuriating patience. It looks at her with something like pity in its unblinking eyes.

Jyn knows she’s wound too tight, her nerves stretched tripwire-thin. One more tiny push and she’ll snap. Or explode. She’s been in this state before, more times than she cares to admit. Back when she was a teen and her temper frayed like this, Saw would order her to go pummel the stuffing out of a training dummy—and she would, her fists flying and beating until she was soaked in sweat and too sore to move.

But she doesn’t know if the Rebellion has anything suitably punchable here in their Yavin 4 base, and even if they did, it wouldn’t matter. She’s not leaving Cassian’s side, even though it means she’s forced to stay here in the infirmary, trapped in an encore of the anguish she experienced last time she was here. Her brain is all too quick to replay every detail of her father’s last hours: him lying on a cot in the far corner of this same room. These same med droids tending to him, spouting their same useless platitudes. The same sickly pale tint to his skin that Cassian now wears, though he, at least, is still weaving in and out of consciousness.

Even now, he blinks up at her, sluggish and groggy, but still fighting.

“Jyn,” he manages. “It’ll be all right.”

The med droid swivels toward him. “Hush, now,” it says, taking on a softer tone than it used with Jyn. “Please conserve your energy, sir.”

“He’s lost a lot of blood,” Jyn breaks in, shouldering closer to the bed. “The Imperials tortured him. He’ll need—”

“We are already giving him fluids and preparing an appropriate transfusion,” the droid says. “Please do not worry.”

It might as well tell her not to breathe. Yet a fraction of her anxiety eases as she watches the droids’ practiced hands tending to Cassian, and she settles into a mutinous silence, pacing near the edge of the cot. Her soul-mark aches beneath her sleeve, and she pushes her fingers beneath the fabric, tracing the letters, using every ounce of her stubborn willpower not to think about her father.

This time will be different, she thinks. It has to be.

“How is he?”

The voice comes from behind her, and Jyn whirls, sleeve still half-pushed up her arm. Mon Mothma stands there, as pristine and unruffled as the last time Jyn saw her.

That time when you demanded a ship and left them to fend for themselves. The words slither through her mind like oil. When you abandoned them.

She clamps her jaw, refusing to give the guilt a foothold in her mind. She made her choices. Now she’ll live with them. It’s all she can do. It’s all she’s ever done.

“He’s alive,” she answers. For now, she doesn’t say.

Mon Mothma glides over to stand next to her. For a moment they simply exist, side by side, eyes following the droids as they work.

Then Mon shifts, her eyes drifting along Jyn’s exposed arm, taking in the soul-mark. The barest hint of a smile touches her mouth, but there’s no surprise in her eyes. Briefly, Jyn wonders how long she’s known—but then again, it doesn’t really matter. Mon Mothma’s the type of person who seems to know everything, someone who contains multitudes beneath her shroud of unflappable calm.

She doesn’t say I’m sure he’ll be fine, doesn’t offer any meaningless comfort or promises she can’t keep. Instead, she clasps her hands in front of her, turns to face Jyn, and says, “I want to thank you.”

Jyn blinks. “For deserting?”

Mon actually smiles a little. “You were never officially a member of the Rebellion, so you couldn’t truly desert. You struck a deal with us, upheld your end of the bargain, and asked us to fulfill our end in return. I was disappointed to see you go, of course, but all the more grateful that you’ve come back to us. And the plans you’ve delivered…”

For just an instant, there’s a bright sheen in her eyes. She lifts a hand, pressing her knuckles to the hollow of her throat, and the moment passes.

“It could be our salvation,” she says. “You have given us life, Jyn. You and Cassian and Bodhi.”

And Kay, Jyn thinks. And Baze and Chirrut. She doesn’t ask if the former Guardians made it off Scarif, isn’t sure if she wants to know the answer. Not now, not when Cassian might be slipping through her fingers.

“Someone had to do it,” she says, forcing the words out through sudden tightness in her throat. “I’m just glad your fighters showed up eventually.”

There’s a little bite behind the words—she can’t hold it back any more than she could hold back an ocean’s tide—but Mon only nods.

“I know your future with the Rebellion is probably the furthest thing from your mind right now,” she says, tilting her head toward Cassian. “But you are welcome back with us, if you so choose. You don’t need to give an answer now, of course. But when things have calmed down a bit…give it some thought.”

Jyn presses her lips together, gives a single, short nod.

Silence resumes, more thoughtful than tense, until one of the med droids breaks off from the pack surrounding Cassian’s bed.

“He has stabilized enough for surgery,” the droid reports. “We are prepping him for transport to the operative suite now. We will update you on his prognosis when we have more information.”

“How long?” Jyn demands. Her nails dig into her arm.

“Difficult to determine with certainty,” the droid says. “At least several hours.” Behind it, the others lift Cassian onto a stretcher, and all the tubes and wires trailing from him make Jyn’s heart lodge in her throat.

“There’s nothing more you can do for him now,” Mon says at Jyn’s side, not unkindly. “Come. You should get some rest. We can hold a more thorough debriefing once he’s out of surgery.”

“No.” Jyn holds her ground. “I want to stay nearby. I’ll wait. I should be here when—”

When he wakes up, she thinks, yet somehow she can’t form the words. The hope is there, but it’s too raw, too fragile to be given voice.

The corner of Mon’s mouth tilts up. “Very well,” she says. “I’ll have someone bring you a chair, at least.”

A rebel appears moments later with the promised chair in tow, and Jyn lets herself sink into it. Though it’s all hard angles, she feels suddenly boneless, as though only the Force itself kept her upright for so long. Exhaustion steals over her, as intense as she’s ever felt. She fights it off, glowering into the distance, bracing her hands on the edge of the seat.

But she’s only human. The more she fights, the more the weariness pulls her down, blurring the world around her. She pitches headfirst into uneasy slumber, the image of her soul-mark fading behind her eyes.

When a bone-jolting thudding knocks her from sleep, for one terrifying moment, Jyn has no idea where she is. She lurches upright, nearly throwing herself from the chair, wild eyes casing the room.

“Ma’am?” a voice calls from outside the closed door, muffled but unmistakably urgent, underscored by the ceaseless knocking. “Ma’am!”

Jyn’s pretty sure she’s never been called ma’am before in her life, but the strangeness of it hardly registers. She races to the door and flings it open, her heart thundering in time with the frantic knocks, and comes face to face with a nameless rebel. His expression is tense, but relief crosses it when he sees her.

“Mon Mothma sent me,” he says, halting and breathless. “She said you were to be notified at once when Captain Andor was out of surgery.”

Fear seizes Jyn’s heart and rattles it like a gong. “Is he—?”

But the messenger is already shaking his head. “I don’t know any details, ma’am. I’m sorry—”

Jyn runs, halfway down the hall before he can get the next word out. The Rebels’ infirmary takes up a sizable portion of the base, a grim testament to the dangers of their cause, and the operating area lies tucked away in the quietest corner. Jyn’s feet slam against the barren floor, picking up speed, and when she careens around a corner she nearly bowls a med droid off its feet.

“Cassian,” she gasps, cutting off its squawk of alarm. “Where is he? What room?”

“In there,” the droid says, pointing. “But—”

She shoves past it, slaps at the door’s control panel, and bursts into the room.

It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust. There’s no happy medium on Yavin 4—everything is either blazing bright outside, or shadowy and dim within the base. But then the shades of brown and gray resolve before her eyes, turning to a cot’s hard edges and the wrinkled drape of a blanket pulled up over an unmoving form.

A wave of dizziness slams into her with the force of the Death Star’s blast. “Cassian?” she whispers, not daring to breathe.

She steps closer, and sees the barest shift, a tiny ripple of movement beneath the covers. Then the cot creaks, the blanket rustles, and a familiar shock of dark hair appears—mussed and drooping and framing a face that’s still far too pale for her liking, but alive.

Jyn erases the distance between her and the bed, dropping to her knees beside it, snatching up Cassian’s hand. A monitoring device beeps from his index finger, and a tube snakes from between his knuckles, but his skin is warm and his eyes are open and smiling at her and absolutely nothing else matters.

“He is supposed to be resting,” the droid says from the doorway, sounding peevish.

Jyn tears her eyes from Cassian, looking over her shoulder. “He’ll be okay, right?”

“Yes, assuming he stays in bed as directed.” The droid’s tone suggests it knows those odds are slim. “Fortunately, he arrived just in time for us to assist him.”

Cassian’s fingers tighten around Jyn’s. He looks up at her, still groggy from blood loss and anesthetic, but when he speaks, his words are clear.

“I know you said I didn’t have to keep coming back for you,” he says. “But apparently I just can’t help myself.”

Jyn laughs, grinning through the sudden sheen in her vision. “If you promise never to scare me like that again, I think we can call it even.”

Cassian pulls their twined hands closer, resting just under his collarbone. “I’ll try my best.”

She feels the beat of his heart, steady and strong beneath both their hands, and it is enough.

“Are you ready?” Cassian asks.

Jyn blows out a long breath, palms slick, fingers tensing. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

Cassian rumbles a laugh beside her, and though he’s still healing—only allowed out on this excursion with reluctant, grumbling permission from the med staff—the sound sends a current of heat running down Jyn’s spine.

“You’ll be fine,” Cassian says, and Jyn forces herself to focus. “I’m right here with you,” he adds, and she can’t keep a smile from darting across her lips.

She eases back on the controls in her hands, and the small shuttle Cassian ‘borrowed’ for her flying lessons lurches beneath her, lifting up from the base’s launch pad with a jerky hop. Across the pad, Jyn can see Chirrut giving her an encouraging wave, while Baze shakes his head beside him.

“Steady now,” Cassian says, drawing her attention back. “You don’t have to keep a stranglehold on the controls. Just give it a nice, gentle touch.”

“Gentle?” Jyn manages a smirk. “The word’s not in my vocabulary.”

There’s no way she’s imagining the spark of heat in his eyes, but she tears her mind away, refocusing once again on the ship’s instrument panel spread out before her. It would be embarrassing to survive infiltrating an Imperial base and stealing top secret planet-killer schematics only to careen to a fiery death during a piloting lesson.

Yet distractions aside, Cassian is a good teacher, and Jyn finds herself beginning to relax. She eases her grip, letting the ship float up into Yavin 4’s cloudless sky, and in moments the base and all its inhabitants diminish beneath them. She looks out the viewport and releases her breath, letting the sunlight play on her face.

“Good job,” Cassian says. “Now just take her on a few nice, slow turns around the base.”

Jyn flicks a switch, punches a command into the interface, and listens to the ship’s engines pulse all around her. Then she’s soaring, Cassian beside her. For a moment, it’s intoxicating, the blossom of a familiar itch beneath her skin—all the potential wrapped up in a single starship. The whole galaxy open to her, the ability to go wherever she wants, to leave her footprints on distant planets, to create and discard new identities as easy as changing clothes.

But then the itch fades, and the mark on her arm thrums, Cassian’s words on her skin as warm and ceaseless as the engines.

“Jyn?” comes Cassian’s voice beside her. She looks over at him, and he raises his brows, a question in his dark eyes. “You still with me?”

“Always.” And she finds that she means it, as much as she’s meant anything in her life. “Shall we go back home?”

Cassian reaches out, his fingers brushing hers. “Already there.”

Jyn squeezes his hand, feels the smile light up her entire face. She points the ship back to the base, and lets the engines ignite.