Chapter Text
He came back for her.
She stands all but pressed against him in the elevator, her face barely apart from his, and she sees in him a man she didn’t think he was at first.
He came back for her. He was hurt and he fell, but he still came back.
She wishes she could think of a single thing to say, but it’s better that she doesn’t. It’s better that she only stands there, staring up at him, her mouth half-open as if at any moment she could find the words she needs. In the dark confines of the elevator, their eyes can meet without self-conscious uncertainty, and she can let him be this close, can let herself feel how real he is. It’s better if she doesn’t ruin it with words, with something that will break this moment.
He came back for her, and he’s still here. His eyelids flutter, he’s fading in and out, but he never loses her eyes, locked with his. Her fingers trail over his shoulder, at the back of his neck, and she thinks that might be better than words.
There’s anguish in her heart, too. This feels too much like the end and she feels, for a moment, like every second before this one was wasted time. To meet Cassian so late, to meet him only as their worlds came apart, it feels cosmically unfair. There’s a feeling like this is something that should have started so much earlier.
Looking in his eyes, she knows he understands in a way that no one else has even tried to. Things would have been so much easier if he was near for longer than just the short time they’ve had together.
She wants to say these things to him. Wants to tell him that ‘what if’ is on the tip of her tongue, but still she doesn’t speak. He knows, she thinks. He’s looking at her as if he knows it too.
The elevator ride seems to last an age, and it feels deceptively safe in here, with the sounds of the battle muffled, unreal. The light flickers over Cassian’s face as he leans closer, breathing ragged, and she hovers in this space between kissing him and holding back.
She holds back.
But there’s a moment in which she feels the muscles in her toes curling, preparing to push her up the required distance for her lips to meet his, and that moment lodges itself in her brain. It becomes something tangible, almost physically a part of her heart. She almost did it. Almost.
The elevator grinds to a halt, and she tucks back against his side, letting him lean his weight into her, sliding her arm around his waist to keep him steady.
“Here, lean on me,” she says, because she can tell he’s refusing to put his full weight on her out of pride, or consideration for her own injuries, or something, and her voice cracks a little. She feels, absurdly, as if her voice is betraying her, as if he will know just from that sound about her almost moment. He doesn’t argue, doesn’t say anything, just sags further against her and trusts her to keep him standing.
And she does.
An Imperial ship is waiting just outside the elevator, a different style than the one they arrived in, and Baze is the one who stands in the cargo bay door, waving them on. Jyn thought she had no strength left, no energy, but she finds it in herself to speed up, her legs churning, her feet and Cassian’s feet sliding together in the sand, awkwardly bumping and jarring, but eventually gaining purchase. Baze hauls them up as the ground begins to shake, the world ending around them just like on Jedha, and Jyn finds herself face down on the cold metal floor, someone else’s blood pooled beneath her, her breath coming out in short gasps, with Cassian’s hand still gripping her shoulder tight, and his own rising and falling chest a comfort against her back.
“Just in time,” Chirrut says blandly, sitting in one of the passenger seats, strapped in, holding one arm like it hurts.
“We’re going!” Bodhi shouts defensively in reply to some unheard judgement in Chirrut’s tone, and the cargo door slams closed, and then they’re off.
And they’re alive.
Cassian is in bad shape. She can tell from the wheezing sound his breath makes and because he doesn’t even bother to get to his feet. Jyn and Cassian are still mostly strangers to each other, but she knows that he’s never idle if he can help it. And Bodhi could use a co-pilot, and someone needs to contact the Alliance, but Cassian rolls over onto his back and stays there, breathing shallow but strong, eyes open wide.
“It’s okay,” she assures him, absent and uncertain, and she pushes herself to her knees. Baze is looking down at them doubtfully.
“Well, help him,” Chirrut sighs, as if this is obvious, but Baze just grimaces a questioning expression down at Jyn, as if he expects her to have any ideas when she’s kneeling there on the ground, her hands opening and closing into anxious fists, hovering over every part of Cassian.
“How?” the bigger man wonders. Chirrut sighs again. Pretends, poorly, that his own injured arm isn’t bothering him at all.
“Cassian?” Jyn asks.
“I’m all right.” The lie is obvious, grimaced out rather than spoken, and Jyn looks nervously up at Baze, who shakes his head.
“He’s lying,” Chirrut informs everyone.
“Here, I can do it,” Bodhi says, pushing past the pilot’s seat with a medkit already half open, spilling bandages everywhere.
“He fell,” Jyn says, explaining to them all, again absent, again unsure. Everything after the tower feels like a dream, and she can’t move fast enough to keep up. “And he was shot.”
“I can fix it,” Bodhi promises.
“I guess I will take over piloting then,” Chirrut offers. Bodhi gives a pause, like he might actually believe him. Cassian coughs and tries to sit up, which Jyn prevents, pushing his shoulder to the ground, glaring at him for even trying.
“I’m fine,” he says, which sounds even more like a lie this time, and Jyn grips his shoulder tight as Bodhi kneels down beside them both.
“Yeah, you’re fine,” Bodhi says, and it’s apparent that Bodhi is the worst liar among them.
Later, Jyn remembers little of the flight back to Yavin.
She remembers that Chirrut at one point, evidently wanting to lighten the tension of Bodhi trying to assure Jyn and a half-conscious Cassian that he didn’t entirely fail his medical training, actually does try to take command of the ship. She remembers Baze loudly and laughingly pulling the warrior from the pilot’s seat.
Later, she remembers holding Cassian’s head steady in her lap, transforming instantly into another person, someone who knows how to be nurturing and warm, her fingers stroking through his hair as he lets his eyes slide slowly closed, her other hand flat on his chest so she can still feel his heart beating.
“It’s okay,” she tells him, and she remembers that later too, remembers the feeling of the words on her lips and the way they’re shaped like a lie under her tongue except for the hope that they’re not.
Later, Jyn remembers standing in the elevator and looking up at Cassian, seeing the light play over his face.
Later, with the solid rock of another planet under her feet, and her ceremonial dressing down and much more sincere private thanks from Mon Mothma behind her, Jyn stands in the door of the medbay and cannot make herself go forward.
The elevator happened, and she cannot help but remember it. There was a moment between them that felt like the end, but it wasn’t. And Jyn has never had a second chance like this with someone. Goodbyes were goodbyes. They didn’t meld themselves into lasting longing. But Cassian is cleaned up, bandaged up, bacta patches applied, asleep in the medbay looking more peaceful than Jyn has ever felt. This should be easy.
He came back, she remembers. He didn’t have to, but he came back. On Jedha. Eadu. Scarif.
She takes the first step forward.
He wakes like he was waiting for the sound of her boots on the concrete floor, and he smiles at her like he is proud of her for doing it. It still feels like too much, and Jyn would like very much to turn and run, but she won’t do that to him, and she won’t do it to herself either.
No more running, she tells herself. Saw had had enough, was tired of running because running was all he ever did. It pains her now, with the sharp, empty gulf of hindsight, to remember how paranoid and lost he had seemed. He was a father to her, was a hero to her, and though at the time her thoughts were of Galen and then of escape, she now feels the pain of his loss as starkly as she feels Galen’s. To lose two fathers in so short a time... Jyn is afraid to lose any more, is afraid to open what she knows is already here with Cassian, open it further and risk feeling grief again when it’s over, but she’s also afraid to turn and walk away.
No more running.
“Hi,” she says to him. It could be better. She really is glad now that she didn’t say anything in the elevator. Nothing feels good enough. She feels clumsy. Her mind seems unable to keep up with the demand of what her heart wants to say, and she knows now why so many people run before they get to this part. Running seems so much easier than this.
“Hi,” he says in reply. For the first time it occurs to her that he might not really know what to say either.
“How are you feeling?” is the only thing she can think of to ask. It sounds stupid, but he doesn’t laugh.
“Surprised to be alive,” he answers.
“You fell a long way.”
“I noticed.”
Jyn smiles at that, walks closer, and Cassian sits up, grimacing, pushing to one side so she has room to sit tentatively beside his legs on the edge of his bed.
In the elevator, this closeness felt natural. Now it feels dangerous, and Jyn wishes it felt more normal. She wishes she had followed through on that potential tension in her muscles, wishes she had pushed herself those few inches upward to capture his lips. At least that would have been something.
“You came back,” she says, like it’s an explanation, though she’s not sure what it’s an explanation for. “Not just at Scarif. You had to at Scarif. I just…”
“I didn’t have to at Scarif.”
“You had to. You knew we had to finish it.”
“Well, yes. I only meant that if I wasn’t there…I have a feeling you would have found a way to do it anyway.”
Jyn laughs, hollow. Remembers that split second of certainty that she was the one who had taken the blaster shot instead of Krennic.
“I was finished,” she remembers. “He had me.”
Cassian reaches out, his hand lighting on the nearest thing he can touch, which is her leg, near his. It’s a quick touch, barely a graze, but it burns long after he’s retracted his arm, changing his mind. He clears his throat and speaks as if he never tried to touch her at all.
“I don’t know. You are consistently surprising. You might have found a way to best him. Impossible odds meant something to K. Never to you. I’m the same way.”
“Sometimes impossible odds are actually impossible,” she points out, skirting around the sad reflection in his eyes when he thinks of his lost partner. “One day, they catch up to you. There are some things you just can’t escape from. Saw used to remind us of that. Every close scrape was just…more borrowed time.”
“I’ve lived my life on borrowed time,” Cassian says, which sounds like agreement. It also sounds just reflective enough that it makes Jyn want to change the subject again.
But she reminds herself: no more running.
“So have I,” she says. She ignores her usual compulsion to cover up the sadness with a quip or a deflection. It seems that when it comes to Cassian, her instincts disappear. The safeguards she keeps in place to keep herself from wandering into any dangerous conversational minefields is completely absent.
Cassian looks at her then, eyes as soft and sure as they were in the elevator, and Jyn feels too close, sitting just beside him, her lips quivering with the want to say everything she’s feeling, as if the explosion of words would help her re-center herself, help her explain to herself exactly what it is that she’s feeling.
“We…” Cassian starts, but he stops again, and she thinks she understands what he was about to say. Instead, he clears his throat, looks down at her hand on the bedspread, so close to his sheet-covered body. “How are the others?” he asks.
“You got the worst of it. Bodhi was banged up. Just outran a blast. Chirrut and Baze, too. Different explosion. Only three of your men made it back.”
Cassian closes his eyes to hear that, and he nods. With those eyes elsewhere, not seeing through her, she feels bold enough to reach out and brush her fingertips against his forehead, pushing his hair aside, grazing over the bandage at his hairline.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, and it feels like an apology for more than just his lost friends.
“They knew what could happen,” he says. “We all did.”
The moment of realization in the elevator. Acceptance. Standing so close to him, so certain that this was the end for them both.
“We did,” she agrees. Cassian opens his eyes and looks at her again, eyes sparkling with something she feels just as strongly.
Later, in the quarters she was assigned, her face crumbles, and she pulls her knees to her chest. Then she cries for the first time since they came back to Yavin 4.
Chirrut is the one who finds her like that, though he acts as if he doesn’t know she’s wiping snot from her nose to make herself presentable for the blind man. He sits beside her on the floor, bends his knees in front of him in the same manner she is, only instead of hugging them like a child he rests his arms on them casually, carelessly.
“Your path has always been clear,” he tells her. His voice is a comfort, certain as always, even though his next words are, “it’s not so clear anymore.”
“It doesn’t feel as if it matters what my path is,” she tells him. With Chirrut, it’s easy not to care if her voice is heavy with tears. She doesn’t care if her breath is shaky, if he can surely hear the hitching, quiet sobs that always trail away too slowly after a good cry.
“Of course it matters. Though you should not worry. Trust the force.”
Jyn reaches, reflexively, for her Kyber necklace, and Chirrut smiles.
“How can you be so…?” she asks, though she’s not even sure what it is she means to say.
“Baze tells me I’m frustrating.”
“That isn’t what I was going to say. I don’t think.”
“No? That’s surprising. Annoying, then?”
“No,” she says, a breathy laugh escaping her, and it’s true. Chirrut is mystifying and confusing, but he isn’t annoying. “How can you be so sure?”
“Ah, well that’s the important thing about faith. Trust. Belief. Take your captain.”
“He isn’t my captain,” Jyn says, and immediately feels foolish for being such a cliché.
“He is,” Chirrut says, not missing a beat. “And he is a perfect example. He believed you when it was most important, and he was right, was he not? You just have to know what to put your faith in. For me, it is the force. It is Baze. It is this mission.”
“The mission is over,” Jyn reminds him, and she can hear her own helplessness at the truth that she finds in those words. She knows that he hears it too. She knows that that’s what is at the heart of this. What else is there for her to do?
“Our mission is not over,” Chirrut says, smiling at her, shaking his head. “Little star, it is only beginning.”
As far as she sees it, there are two paths: staying or going.
Simple enough, but for the actual choosing.
Stay on Yavin 4. Stay with the Rebellion. Help them fight until she can’t fight any longer. Commit at last to something bigger than herself, no matter what the consequences might turn out to be.
Or leave. Leave her new friends. Leave the cause she has only just begun to believe in. Fly for the nearest neutral planet and get back to scraping by on a hope that one day she might find something better for herself.
The choice would have been easy once, probably. It isn’t easy now.
Cassian finds her standing in one of the hangers, her arms tucked around her middle, her eyes gazing up at the shuttle they stole.
“Where will you go?” he asks.
It’s a fair question. One without an easy answer until she turns and looks at him. His arm is in a sling, his jacket open to expose a tightly wrapped, bandaged chest. He’s balanced poorly on crutches for his injured leg. The hollows in his cheeks and the bruises under his eyes are deeper than ever. He shouldn’t even be out of bed, and she knows he rushed to be here.
“Why do you think I’m leaving?” she asks.
“Chirrut. He said that if I didn’t get to the hanger soon, I would not see you again.”
“He is annoying,” Jyn murmurs, changing her mind on her earlier determination.
“Is he right?”
She looks away, fighting back the sudden lump in her throat.
“I’m not used to sticking around in places where things are…” She doesn’t know how to finish the sentence, she realizes, and that helpless, squeezing feeling in her chest starts up again, stronger this time.
“Where things are what?” Cassian asks, stepping closer. He’s doing that thing again, the thing that makes her want to run, where he lowers his head towards her, eyes on her with such understanding. Like no matter what she says, it won’t be enough to drive him away. She hates that look, because she wishes desperately that she was strong enough to look away from it, but she isn’t. It convinces her that what he sees in her is real, and it terrifies her to think that he might discover that it isn’t.
“There isn’t a place for me here,” she admits, stubbornly allowing him to see the tears that gather in her eyes, as if just saying the words have made them more true. Cassian sighs towards her, moving ever-closer, and she moves too, meeting him halfway.
“There is a place for anyone here,” he says, gesturing with his good arm to the empty hanger around them. In the distance, they can hear voices, hear people working on X-wings damaged in the fight, can hear people planning their next steps, but it’s like the elevator again: it feels safe here. It feels deceptively isolated, just the two of them left in this bubble of the world.
“Why? Why me? I’m not…Cassian, I’m not anyone. I’m no one now. You needed me because of Saw. You needed me because of my father. But they’re dead now, and all I am is…is a halfway decent fighter and someone who, I don’t know, has improbably good luck when it comes to surviving.”
“You are more than that,” Cassian says, and she hates, for just a moment, how certain he sounds, because she knows that if he takes a closer look, all he will see will disappoint him.
“This Rebellion doesn’t need me anymore. I’ve done what I could.”
“I think you’re afraid,” Cassian says.
And it’s horrible, the way he can pinpoint the exact right thing.
“I’m not afraid,” she answers.
“Not of the Empire, no. Not of the Death Star, even. You’re afraid of feeling like you belong somewhere, because you’re afraid we’ll leave you alone. Is that it? You think we’ll abandon you, and that we will say you don’t belong after all?”
She wonders if he heard her conversation with Saw, or if he just knows this about her, somehow. Any desire for confrontation, for getting in his face and shouting him down, telling him that he’s wrong, it leaves her in a deflated sigh.
“People don’t stick around,” she reminds him.
“I’m very loyal,” he reminds her in return.
“To the Rebellion.”
“To my friends, too.”
“And if you were ordered to…”
“Don’t even say that,” he says, sharply, and he has somehow found that there is space yet between them, though Jyn would have said they were already too close for normal conversation. If anyone happened to walk in now, they would have a lot of questions about this. Cassian looms large before her, staring down at her with something that might be betrayal. “Do you have to ask that?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m Galen Erso’s daughter.”
“Stop it.”
“I’m useless now, and I know about…”
“Jyn.”
Her name is spoken sharply enough that she does stop, drawing a shaking breath and finally looking away from him, turning her shoulder.
“I know what you’re doing,” he says, taking her arm to keep her here. “I understand. But I won’t let you push us away. We are your friends. I am your friend. After all we went through…”
“The past is the past.”
“It’s barely the past, Jyn. It’s barely been a day.”
“I know.”
The fight leaves her as quickly as it entered. This certainty that she had to go, this dark, pulsing need to be away from here, it’s fleeting. Because his fingers are wrapped tight around her upper arm, and his voice is soft, and she doesn’t know where she would go anyway.
“There will be other missions. Bodhi will fly them. I will lead them. Chirrut and Baze will protect them. And you will…”
“Screw them up?” Jyn asks when he hesitates, looking at him at last, a smile playing on her lips. He smiles back, his eyes showing relief because he knows he has convinced her.
“I was going to say you will follow my lead, but I realized that didn’t sound realistic.”
“I can take orders.”
“Not well, probably.”
“I can take orders when they make sense.”
“I will never ask you to do something you’re not comfortable with,” he says. It’s unprompted, almost a tangent, but she understands why he said it, and it softens her up a little. Makes her smile again.
“No, you’ll do all the questionable things yourself without telling me.”
“That sounds like a perfect partnership to me,” Cassian says, and Jyn considers. Cassian’s voice is soft next when he says, “I know you haven’t had a home in a long time. Not a real one. Let us be your home. The Rebellion. Rogue One.” Hesitation, as if he can’t decide if it’s appropriate or not, but finally he says, “me.”
She must surprise him by pulling him close, because he comes easily enough. Maybe the surprise is that she doesn’t kiss him. Again she wants to, again she feels it tingling behind her lips, this desire to taste him. But instead she settles for her arms around him.
His arms surround her, his fingers curling at the back of her neck, his face pressed into her shoulder, and she for a long moment considers what to say.
“Thank you,” she finally decides. “Don’t tell Chirrut he was right.”
Chirrut knows he was right, though, and so Jyn avoids him for most of the following day.