Chapter Text
"When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure."
--Anne Elliot, from Jane Austen's Persuasion
Jyn Erso is nineteen and Cassian Andor twenty-three when they fall in love against the backdrop of Onderon’s lush jungles. But it’s not meant to be, not then.
They fall in love in the span of a week, and it shouldn’t be so. It shouldn’t be normal. But this is a time of war. Normal is a luxury. And luxury is also long kisses in dark alleys, his thumb stroking promises onto her collarbone and the hollow of neck; her palms cradling his face and touching the lines of stress that form under his sad, dark eyes as well as those that crinkle around them when he gives her one of his rare smiles.
But Saw Gerrera disapproves, and he lets it be known between deep gasps from his oxygen mask. “Jyn,” he says, and she feels the weight of what she owes him (her life), while she thinks of Cassian with her name on his lips, and her heart twists painfully. Her foster father thinks it a bad match, though he thinks all matches are bad in times of war, but moreso it’s because Jyn’s a Partisan and Cassian is a soldier of the Alliance. While both sides fight the Empire, they don’t see eye to eye on many things. Cassian is here in the first place because he is trying to recruit, trying his part to repair the growing fracture, but it’s too late, at least in Saw’s eyes. And Saw does not care if his best soldier can help to bridge that gap. He sees it instead as losing her, and their numbers are already dwindling. He also doesn’t think highly of Cassian’s prospects for surviving very long anyway. He leaves it unsaid that the same is true for himself and for Jyn.
Her real father, Galen, is long gone and has no say, kidnapped when she was eight years old by the Empire. And her mother is dead from a blaster bolt to the chest, forever locked in Jyn’s memory, supine in death and lying among the cold grasses of Lah’mu.
Jyn is only nineteen, but she is already a hardened soldier. But then again, she is only nineteen, a girl whose closest encounter with romance was shoving her truncheon into Codo’s gut when he tried to grab and kiss her at seventeen. What does she know of love except that it's not meant for her? She only knows war.
So Saw persuades her to break it off. Cassian leaves, embittered.
At the last minute, she feels the weight of regret and rushes to find him. But it's too late (she seems always too late). “Cassian!” she cries out as he leaves, because for once, she cannot help herself, but he does not spare her a look as he boards his U-wing. It ends up being the last warm feeling she has for three years. Jyn is left alone, locked in the cave in her mind. When she sees the latch close once more, something cold and hard settles inside of her, and she thinks, this is who I am now.
In the intervening years, Jyn perfects the craft of guerilla warfare. Violence is in her bones. It colors her life the red of blood and the gold of the blast of a thermal detonation. But fighting wears on a person, and she loses the bloom of youth and what made her a girl. She learns to accept that she is just a soldier now. And Jyn takes some consolation at least in the fact that if she has to lose the brightness of youth, she can at least replace it with righteous conviction and the steady finger on the trigger of a blaster.
But when life seems settled--in the very tenuous way it can only be during times of great conflict--Cassian shows up again in her life in, of all places, the desert moon of Jedha. And she doesn't know what to think.
.
.
.
.
“Alliance fighters? Here?” Baze Malbus grunts when he says this. The gruff former Guardian of the Whills looks disdainful, but he almost always does. Jyn’s friend and fellow Partisan, Maia, does her best to look calm and self-assured as she delivers the news, but her excitement peeks through.
The walls of the building shake, and there is a distant rumble. Dust falls into her eyes, and Jyn looks up out of habit, expecting to see the Imperial Star Destroyer in the sky; she only sees the crumbling stone of Baze and Chirrut Imwe’s home. She blinks away the dirt and her vision clears.
The Empire’s presence on Jedha has ramped up gradually over the last few months, and she smiles grimly to herself because it’s on account of them--because of the Partisans and their work--that NiJedha has been given special attention. She and Saw had watched as Stormtroopers stripped the ancient temple of its kyber crystals, and they didn't need to know why to know that it had to be stopped. It was how they had partnered with Baze and Chirrut.
Jyn leans against the wall and keeps her face impassive as she speaks to Maia. “What do they want?” she asks.
“A truce,” Maia says, breathless. “A partnership.”
Jyn rolls her eyes and thinks about how that failed once before, scrubbing her mind of the other memories of that time, of the rawness of the hurt that she hides away even from herself. “Good luck there,” she says. “Saw won’t have it. We’re better off without weak-willed politicians and their idea of a fight. They’ll only slow us down.”
“They’ve only just landed,” Maia says. “Further out where they can’t be spotted.” She pulls off her synthskin gloves. Puts them back on. It’s a nervous habit, and Jyn has warned her more than once that she’ll lose them if she keeps it up. “They relayed the message to Edrio through the comms, and I overheard. I thought you’d want to know, Jyn. It’s a small group only. Just a captain and his droid and an X-wing pilot.”
“If that’s their idea of sending their best people to impress us,” Jyn snorts, “consider me unimpressed.”
Chirrut smiles and leans forward on his stick. “It is the quality of the person that counts, not the quantity, is it not?”
Jyn is used enough to Chirrut’s cryptic questions that she knows that he does not require an answer. They are never questions so much as they are judgments.
“Maybe they are big names in the Alliance,” Maia offers trying to be helpful. “Baze, Chirrut, have you heard of a Lieutenant Shara Bey or a Captain Cassian Andor? Have you, Jyn?”
Jyn wants to scream, and she sees white as she feels the ghost of his touch and the memory of his warmth, but she swallows her horror instead. She is made of tougher stuff than the Jyn of nineteen. “I have heard of the captain before,” she says carefully. Then slowly, “We knew each other briefly a few years ago.”
“And is he important?” Maia asks.
But Jyn has no answer for Maia. She feels frozen, colder and harder than she did the day he left.
Instead, it is Chirrut who has the last word. He turns his milky eyes in her direction, and she wonders how it is possible that it is this blind man who is always able to see right through her. “Are you impressed now, Miss Erso?”