Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Five.

Cassian doesn’t remember ever having held someone – or having been held – like this. But then, he is trying not to, right now: he is trying hard not to remember anything at all. He is trying, too, not to think of the future – neither the one that might have been, nor the one that now tears towards him with a sound too low and too loud to comprehend. He is trying, against all history and habit, to focus on the present, for what remains of it.

It is difficult. So he clutches at her back, and he takes careful note of the details: the pain that shoots across his ribs as she pulls him still closer in response; the shifting of her fingers on his shoulder; the determined, pointless stability of her, as though trembling now would be some sort of defeat.

Four.

He has thought – once, involuntarily, shockingly – of her hands on him like this, of her unsteady sigh in his ear, of his face buried in her shoulder, in her hair. Again, for a moment, he is taken from his knees in the sand to another place altogether.

He would gather her up, in all her pieces, and count them one by one as he laid them out before him. He would smooth flat the frayed edges of her rage, tracing each seam with his eyes, his mouth, piecing her together and wrapping her around him until she knew she was whole and his breath came short and longing.

Three.

He’s wasting his moments, thinking like this; there’s no time for distraction. Even with his eyes closed, the sharpening light is invasive. The air, already hot in this place, is drying out like dust. Sand-sharpened wind scours his cheeks and whips his face with her hair, filled with the smell of brine and electrical smoke.

Will it hurt him? He can take it, he thinks – he hopes. Pain is an enemy he has met more often and known more intimately than any friend or lover. Will it – Force forbid – hurt her?

Two.

Her conviction that the file got through was so solid that he hadn’t questioned it, but fear now races through him, pushing doubt into the cracks, expanding and forcing him apart in the ever-growing heat. What if it all ends, sometime soon after him, all he has given his life for since he has been old enough to know that life can end? Now for the first time he has known that life can begin. And he doesn’t want to die.

One.

He realises again he has wasted a precious second in distraction. Focus. Eyes shut. Mineral tastes of sand and blood. Roaring water, rending air. She is, at last, shaking, and he feels her gasp in fear as it thunders nearer, pictures her frightened, beaten face –

He stares ahead in sudden horror: he cannot remember what colour her eyes are.

Out.

Chapter Text

The agony was exquisite. Alive, Jyn thought. I must be alive.

Carefully, eyes still closed, she catalogued her sensations. She was lying on her front over something hard and jagged; it was digging into her abdomen and it hurt. Good. There was an aching, crackling, burnt feeling on the right side of her neck and face. Good. She moved her tongue experimentally: sand in her mouth, and a gap where one of her molars should be, and the taste of salt. Good. The sound of waves. Good. All evidence that she was alive.

Her stinging face protested as she opened her eyes with effort, but otherwise she wouldn’t have known she’d done it. She saw nothing. She tried to quell a jolt of dread, to be grateful instead for life, but her thoughts instead turned to isolation and Chirrut and how he, at least, had not been alone in his darkness. He had had –

“Little sister.”

She felt a large hand touch the back of her head gently.

“Little sister,” came Baze’s voice again, soft but pleading. His voice was hoarse and choked.

“Cassian.”

It wasn’t what she’d meant to say, she didn’t know what she’d meant to say, but suddenly she was filled with rage. How dare the Force spare her and not him, and how dare she be so ungrateful and resentful, and it was too vile, too cruel, to find herself in darkness, and yet alive, and yet vicious with hate, all hope burnt away from her arms.

She heard Baze give a shuddering sigh of relief, and felt him start to try and move her. She cried out as her hip screamed in complaint and he hesitated, then gently tried again. She bit back the pain this time and the object beneath her seemed to fall away, but he staggered a little as he lifted her and the jolt was too sudden this time for her to suppress. She gave another cry, louder, and having done so, and having found that she could, she kept on doing so, and the sound came out of her like an insult, choking and sobbing with each lurch as the wrong man limped with her along terrain she couldn’t see. And when he set her down, presently, on sand, propping her back against a rock of some kind, she could feel the roughness of it grate against her shoulder blades as they shook with misery.

Jyn awoke as the sun was rising. There was dark brown sand beneath her, filthy and fetid, reaching away towards the ocean, grey beneath the paling sky. She looked down at herself, at her arm, an angry, blistered red where it showed through the charred rips in her sleeve. She could see. She began to cry again.

“You’re awake.” She looked around; Baze was sitting nearby, watching her. Behind him, the fuselage of a wrecked X-wing lay grimly on its side, one wing jutting outwards and upwards. Baze’s hair and beard were burnt short, his face dark and grimy, but he seemed otherwise well enough. She swallowed and wiped her eyes, and looked back out at the ocean.

“It’s just us,” he told her.

She nodded. She knew she should say something. His loss was as great as hers – greater, said a traitorous voice inside her – but she couldn’t even look at him.

More than anything, she felt disgusted with herself. He hadn’t been there in the archives, on the tower, on the beach. He hadn’t been the one to bring her back from ruin. He had given all that he had - all that he had was Chirrut, who had given himself - and yet she knew that, could she trade Baze for Cassian, she would. The shame of the knowledge was too great to bear.

“I’m going to look around,” she said, forcing herself up, and limped away.

Scarif was a ruin. She realised why her clothes and hair crunched with salt; the shockwave had brought the sea racing in across the archipelago, ripping everything with it. She must have been carried inland on the wave, like everything else.

The severed tangles of tree-roots whose trunks had been snapped and borne away reached up out of the ground like charred hands. Everywhere the sand lay soft and dark and dirty. In the early morning sun, it was already starting to dry out, stinking.

She wandered aimlessly, tripping over herself now and again, staring and avoiding thought. Control panels, pieces of ships and walkers, burnt wrecks all quenched by the raging tide. She passed a body; one of the rebels whose names she had not had time to learn, judging by his clothes. He lay horribly twisted, slammed up against the side of what had once been a building of some kind.

The sky had paled to a bright, fresh blue. The sugar-soft silt that covered everything in sight seemed even darker against the cloudless expanse. She stumbled on.

Across her path lay some shallows. The islands had shifted and changed shape with the pace of the water, it seemed. Here, water lay around the base of a structure, while a little way off, the low sun flashed silver: a school of hapless fish flung clear of their home, long since ceased begging to return.

She lowered herself gently to her knees in the shallow water and scooped a little onto her burnt arm. It stung viciously. She washed her face, too, noting the same sting, and slapping more water against herself still harder. Penance, of a sort.

Onward. Still the dark brown sands stretched in silent accusation, down toward the sea again. There wasn’t far to go in any direction, she assumed, before meeting the sea once more. Isolated, the real meaning. The shape of another body was sprawled further down toward this other coast; the poor man was utterly immobile, draped with black weeds. Underneath the detritus and mud, she could just make out what remained of his pale green shirt -

She stumbled to all fours and vomited.

Wiping her mouth, she tore over to him as fast as her limp would allow and threw herself down beside him. Underneath his hair, matted as it was with the awful sand, the side of his face that she could see was horribly pale. She slipped her hand under his cheek, and flinched at the chill.

“Please,” she gasped desperately, “no, please, Cassian… please…”

She gripped his shoulder, patted his face, shook his arm, begged frantically. There was no response.

But Cassian had always come back for her. Always…

He didn’t look troubled or afraid. With resignation no longer scoring his face, he almost looked young. He didn’t even look lonely.

Everything knotted inside her, igniting and pouring forth in a howl of fury. Suddenly, she hated him, detested him for just lying there. How selfish, how despicably spiteful to leave her now. Tears burned down her aching face and she punched him, hard.

He rocked away and back sickeningly, as if in mockery of movement.

She gaped at him for a moment, nauseated, then all at once she fell on him then in a blizzard of emotion. She pummelled him viciously, her fists sounding out a dull, outraged tattoo on his body as she screamed curses in a wordless language. She beat him aimlessly, artlessly, desolate and despairing. To think that Cassian, even Cassian, like everyone else, would abandon her: violence consumed her. She grappled for solace or revenge with each helpless blow, wishing she could wish for anything other than to have him back.

Finally, she faltered, collapsed onto him, spent and wretched. She found his hand his once more and pushed his limp fingers between her own, while the brine-brittle fabric of his shirt softened slowly under her tears.

Jyn lay there with him until the system’s sun was high in the sky, skull-white and sour, and when she let go of his hand, there was nothing more to do. Thoughts of staying still until she joined him had flowed in and out of her, thoughts even of carrying him – if only she could – back down to the sea and just waiting beside him for the tide. But in the end, she could only push back his hair, and bend over his cold cheek, and place on it the ghost of the kiss she realised now she’d always meant to give to his mouth.

It was, she supposed, love.

It came with quiet weight, more acknowledgement than revelation, and all the more bitter for it. But there were no more tears to water it with; her head pounded in the late morning heat and every part of her ached with burns or bruises or simple exhaustion. It was, and then it could not be, and all that was left was this.

She hadn’t the energy to dig, couldn’t bring herself to leave his side in search of assistance. She simply turned him tenderly onto his back and patted the sand under his head into a pillow. The thought of leaving him exposed, alone, should have been horrific, the thought of just walking away from him still more so, but Jyn felt she had no space left for horror now. The worst was here.

She kissed her shaking finger and placed it to his lips.

And froze.

Something – she could not have imagined it – a movement of air on her hand. The slightest, tiniest whisper of a zephyr. And again.

Jyn had thought there could be no more horror, but it filled her now in an icy torrent: he was breathing, he was breathing, he was alive, he had been alive all this time, and she hadn’t known, she hadn’t even checked, how stupid could she be, how selfish, how utterly senseless? How long had she wasted? Had she left it too late? Had she – the thought almost made her vomit again – had she broken him further, in her self-indulgent rage? She grabbed his face in her hands and stroked it roughly, panting out panicked pleas and prayers. He still didn’t respond.

Her heart slammed against her ribs and she looked around wildly. There was nothing but the dark, muddy sand, littered with vile debris.

“Help!” The intended scream rasped too dryly from her throat, fading nearby in the hot air. She tried again. “Help!”

It was no good. It was getting hotter every minute; he needed shelter, he needed water. She could wait here and cling to him as his breath came ever more faintly, or she could go and find Baze, leaving Cassian, perhaps to die, alone.

She’d been selfish for long enough.

“I’ll be back soon,” she told him uselessly. “Cassian. You hear me? Hold on.” She put her hand to his face once more. “Hold on for me, Cassian.”

As she staggered to her feet, she tried to believe she’d reached him, somehow. Her legs, numb from hours of kneeling at his side, almost gave way beneath her, but she found her balance and made away unsteadily across the island with careless speed.

The clay seemed more treacherous underfoot now, as she made her way back to the start; it sucked at her feet, gave way too softly, tricked her and tripped her. She passed the rebel again and looked away. He, too, might still be alive. There wasn’t time. She shook away an apology and lurched on, gagging. She just had to find Baze, just had to bring him to Cassian, had to – something. There had to be something to save him. At last, she reached the place she’d left that morning.

There was nobody there.

Jyn fell to her knees. Reeling, she planted her hands in the silt before her, letting her throbbing head hang low, fighting to catch her breath on all fours. Suddenly, she felt a light tug at her neck, and looked down. The kyber crystal had slipped out from her shirt and was swinging pointlessly just above the muck. Disgusted, she yanked at it until the ancient cord snapped agonisingly across her blistered neck, and she hurled it aside with a hoarse bellow. Her throat felt like splinters; the ground only a few inches from her face seemed darker and unresolved.

She imagined she heard it again – the dull crunch of Cassian’s back on durasteel, the sound of him falling still further as if forever, her own voice crying out over the shrill whine of blasters. She had gone on, then, somehow, because it had mattered to do so. She’d left him far below, forgetting him with each fractional ascent, hoping she would have a chance later for remembrance. But now? What else was there but to live?

She sat back on her heels and dug her fingers into the silt, blinking heavily. She’d get up again. She’d carry on. For as long as she could. Live, or die trying.

“Jyn?”

Jyn looked up and, exhausted as she was, felt herself tauten, ready to flee. The blurry shape not twenty paces from her was unmistakeably an Imperial officer. She could just make out the colour and shape of the uniform.

She couldn’t seem to move. But something was wrong. The officer wasn’t marching with cold Imperial efficiency but running, a little lopsidedly; the uniform was capless, dark with mud and badly torn.

“Jyn?” The officer crouched beside her. Jyn stared at her hollowly, uncomprehending.

“I’ve found her!” the officer shouted over her shoulder. “She’s over here!” She turned back to Jyn. “You’ve had your friend pretty worried.”

“Jyn!” Baze appeared at a shambling run, his footsteps heavy on the turgid ground.

Jyn felt herself sway slightly; one of her arms was shaking beneath her. “Cassian,” she managed to whisper.

“What did she say?” came Baze’s voice, her footsteps slowing as he drew near.

“Oh, by Tyth,” muttered the Imperial, “she’s really dehydrated… she said something like, cashing, or casting?”

“She said Cassian.” He sounded pained.

“One of yours?”

“He was.”

Jyn shook her head thickly at the ground. “Cassian,” she tried again. They had to understand. “That way.” She raised an arm from beneath her, pointed limply, and toppled.

“He’s alive?” Baze seemed to be speaking from a long way away. “Wait here with her.” Again, the soft, heavy sound of his shambling run.

Jyn seemed to perceive everything through black syrup. Lying on her side in the sand, the constriction in her head intensified with each rapid hammering of her pulse. But suddenly, there was water at her lips, spilling down her cheek, acrid and tepid, but water. She licked her lips slowly and turned her head to allow more to pour in.

“Gods, when did you last have a drink, woman?” the Imperial demanded, tipping her battered canteen to feed more water into Jyn’s mouth. “One that wasn’t trying to drink you back, I mean.”

A hard shove on her arm reminded Jyn that she had forgotten to swallow.

“Come on, stay with me, Jyn,” said the woman as Jyn drank more eagerly. “Come on. Can you sit? I can’t exactly help you up.”

Jyn found her vision was clearing; she dragged her eyes up and looked at her companion properly. The woman’s left arm was hanging uselessly by her side; it bent unpleasantly just below the elbow. Now she looked at her, she reminded her a little of Bodhi – oh, Bodhi – her profile as sharp and striking, and, though one of her eyes was dark and sightless with blood, the shape of them held a similar quiet strength.

“Stay with me, Jyn,” she urged again. “I don’t fancy being the one to tell your mate you pegged out. He’s a lot bigger than me.” The jovial tone had a tired, forced edge to it.

Jyn pushed herself up on one arm with an effort, and took the proffered canteen.

“You have to talk to me,” the woman told her. “You know that, right?”

Jyn nodded slowly, painfully, her head screaming.

“I’m Captain Keyna Parq, if that helps. Now tell me about yourself.”

Jyn knew it made sense to talk, and so she talked. The captain asked simple questions and she answered them as best she could. Lies, mostly; nonsense, partly; a fiction patchwork of Kestrel and Lianna and all her other selves and the selves she might have been had she gone on. She drank as she talked, her mouth moving more freely but her mind always fixed: Cassian, lying alone in the sun…

The sun. It was blazing now and Jyn glanced over to the wreck that served as shelter. “We should get into the shade,” she muttered.

“Can you walk?”

“I can try.” Her head was still pounding but the water had helped, and she somehow found her way to her feet. Parq offered her good arm, but Jyn simply stalked unsteadily away.

“Tell me about your friend,” came Parq’s voice from behind her. “Cassian.”

“No,” said Jyn,

“Friendly little rebel, aren’t you.” The edge was harsher now. “I’m trying to help.”

Jyn reached the shade under the shattered wing and slid to the ground again. “No.”

The officer gave an exasperated shrug and followed her over, sitting beside her. “I’ll have more water in a bit,” she told her. “I’m distilling it against a broken viewport. Canny, huh.”

Jyn sniffed.

“Listen, Jyn, for Scyva’s sake, I’m trying to live too, here, right?” The Imperial looked away and put a hand gingerly to her head – her short hair was interrupted by a large, glistening red burn on the left side.

Jyn stared straight ahead and hugged her knees, cursing her headache. The waiting was unbearable enough without having to share her anguish with a stranger. She dismissed the creeping suspicion that she was grateful for the company.

Chapter Text

“He’s still alive!” Baze’s shout as he approached with Cassian’s inert form in his arms was wringing with emotion. Jyn’s heart almost stopped and she struggled to her feet once more.

“Gods, he doesn’t look it,” observed Parq as they drew near. “I’ll see how much water we’ve got.” She stood with difficulty as well and stumbled off around the end of the wrecked ship.

Baze knelt and laid his charge down as carefully as he could. The other woman was right; Cassian could not have looked further from life. Jyn steadied herself against the wrecked hull and looked down at him, helpless.

“What do we do?”

Baze, still kneeling, put his hand on Cassian’s chest. “He’s breathing,” he said. “But not much. I’m sorry, Jyn, I don’t know.” He looked up at her, and she realised that his cheeks were wet.

She swallowed, and crouched beside him, putting her arm over him. They both stared at the still form.

“I’m sorry about Chirrut,” she muttered at length. And, to herself, I’m sorry.

She felt, rather than heard, his short, gruff moan, saw his head drop briefly and nod. “He is one with the Force,” he said huskily. He sounded like he wanted to believe it.

Parq appeared around the end of the fuselage again, holding the canteen in her hand; the rest of her arm pinned what looked like part of a helmet to her side; it was sloshing messily.

“Water,” she announced, and crouched opposite them, almost dropping the helmet. Jyn regarded her warily, then took the canteen with a nod of acknowledgement.

Baze pushed his broad hand under Cassian’s shoulders and raised him gently.

“Hey,” whispered Jyn. “Come on.” She held the mouth of the bottle to his lips and tilted it carefully; the tiniest trickle rolled into his mouth and Baze adjusted his hold to let it run back.

A drop at a time, she ministered to him, terrified at every moment that after everything, after surviving the torrent that had flung them apart, he would drown now at her own hand.

Out of the corner of her eye, Jyn noticed Parq look away. Finally, the woman shifted and began to scoop water with her good hand out of the helmet, splashing it awkwardly round to the burn on the other side of her head with a hiss of pain.

“Looks bad,” remarked Baze.

“Feels it,” she agreed through gritted teeth.

That they could hold a conversation at this moment needled Jyn, but she maintained her steady rhythm of tilting and tipping wordlessly.

“Hot circuit, I think,” the Imperial went on, her hand orange with watery blood. She sounded relieved to be talking, no longer just a silent observer of Jyn’s ritual of care. “I was next to the secondary router panel when it blew. Thump.” She gestured demonstratively at her head. “Taught to fight and then you’re taken out by a piece of bloody kit.”

“You don’t look like a soldier,” he replied.

Parq smiled wryly and quirked an eyebrow. “Well, no. I’m flight team. Landing, takeoff, routing, clearance, all that.” She snorted bitterly. “Probably one of my lot let you bastards in in the first place. And then obviously there was such a scramble to fly off-planet when –”

She broke off and closed her eyes for a second, pressing her bloodied hand hard onto her thigh. Then the tired brightness returned. “Busy-busy-busy.”

Baze was incredulous. “They ordered you to stay?”

“People needed to fly,” she told him simply.

It wasn’t, Jyn noticed, strictly an answer.

“Anyway, point is, all the officers get basic. Flying, combat, medical, coding, comms. You specialise later. It’s a full career, with the Empire.” There was a note of pride in her voice; perhaps sardonic, perhaps sincere – Jyn couldn’t tell. “Anyway, combat didn’t prepare me for assault by circuitry. Neither did medical, come to that,” she added, prodding gingerly at her wound.

Finally, Jyn spoke. “So, medical training?”

Parq looked at her, then down at Cassian, with a look of grim apology. “Out of my scope, Jyn. Sorry.”

Baze adjusted his hold on Cassian’s shoulders again. “How’s he doing?”

“Fine.” What a thing to say. “It’s going fine. Almost out of water though.”

“It’ll rain in a couple of hours,” Parq said confidently. “Rains every afternoon, here. Question is storage. Bottle, half a helmet. Could do with a bit more.”

Jyn turned back to the task in hand and silence fell again. A little water spilled down Cassian’s cheek and she brushed it gently away, holding her hand near his mouth again for a second to feel the reassuring trace of his breath.

Once more, the Imperial shifted uncomfortably in the dirt. At length, she got to her feet and began to head off, stepping over Cassian’s legs.

“Can you help me sling this bloody useless arm?” she muttered as she passed, touching her hand to Baze’s back. He glanced at Jyn uncertainly, and she nodded, shuffling around so he could lower Cassian’s head onto her lap. With that, he stood, and followed the other woman away.

Jyn felt herself loosen and breathed out slowly as they left. She trickled the last of the water into Cassian’s mouth, then set the canteen down and rested her fingers gently on his throat. A pulse, faint and rapid.

“I’m still here,” she murmured, moving her hand to his hair. “I’m here.”

Her panic had dissipated; she felt calm, now, wrapped in a curious, half-delirious conviction that Cassian would return to her, as he did every time. Whatever was keeping him from her was temporary. She would be sure to be with him when he awoke.

The afternoon air was starting to feel damp as the last of the flood rose from the ground, caking the silt to clay. She could feel sweat beginning to trickle down her neck and moisten her hairline; her headache had still not gone and she needed to drink again very soon, she knew. But for now, she was content to sit in the shade of the wreckage, holding his hand and idly threading the silt out of his hair, and to study the shape of his face with fond patience, as she had not had time before to do.

There were other details, too: the awkward line of his leg, not lying quite as it should; the charred burn on his hip that fused his clothes to his flesh where the blaster bolt had struck; the sun-dried line of black blood where something thin had left a slash across his arm as it raced by in the wave. They didn’t seem relevant. His hand felt warmer in hers than it had that morning. She could almost convince herself he was only asleep.

Something moved in his face – the barest twitch, pulling at the lines on the bridge of his nose and she realised she didn’t even feel surprised to see him move. She touched a finger to the spot lightly as though to smooth it. She didn’t know when she had last sat so easily, or if she had ever done so.

“I lived on the coast once,” she told him, for no real reason, twisting the dirt from his hair again. “Dark sand there, too. Not like this, though. It was clean. Rocky. There was lots of – lots of cobalt, I think it was, in the ground. It was meant to be good for the crops we had but it turned the water blue. Sort of a – like a dull blue. It tasted awful if you didn’t filter it.”

The faintest sound, almost a sigh. She squeezed his hand gently and went on.

“We had way too many, um, filters and rods and things. We didn’t really know what we were doing. In our third season, I think, we filtered everything, we had it set up wrong, filtered every last trace of mineral out of the ground and we lost the whole harvest. Mama couldn’t stop laughing. Everything was so grey and droopy. I remember she was just standing there in the field with a great bunch of these limp stalks in her hand, just laughing harder than I’d ever seen. I didn’t really know what was going on but it was so funny.”

Cassian’s face flickered again.

“I had my own little patch just right next to the house. Used to plant things in it, root vegetable sorts of things, but I always pulled them up too soon. I liked them small like me, I think, these – these tiny little kid roots that were shorter than my fingers. I was so proud of them.”

And his eyes opened.

“Hello,” she whispered. Her throat tightened.

He looked at her hazily, dry lips moving slowly, soundlessly.

“Verdes,” he finally said, a cracked, barely audible grunt, and he closed his eyes again with something approaching the shadow of a smile. She smiled, too, feeling the hot sting of tears approach, not knowing what he’d said but knowing only what mattered: he had come back to her.

But then he coughed, and coughed again, and then he was convulsing and gasping, his hand nearly crushing hers, and she lifted him up and held him steady with his chin on her shoulder, on and on, until at last his fit faded to a painful, shallow wheezing beside her ear.

She moved to stroke his back, and hesitated. Uncertainty took her with sudden force, pushing cold thorns out through her skin as she shrank from him, gripping his shoulders to hold him away from her. He gasped again as she moved him; his expression was eloquent with agony.

“Sorry, sorry,” she muttered, straightening his shirt over the tops of his arms clumsily. “Your ribs, I know.”

Cassian’s took a breath to steady himself, choking again slightly as he did.

“I think…” his voice was harsh with pain and he broke off, gesturing at his chest instead.

“I think so too,” she answered. “I don’t know what to do.”

He shook his head, jaw tight, eyes screwed shut.

“I think you need to stay sitting up,” she tried, still holding him at arm’s length. The ship’s hull was close enough beside them for him to lean against if he turned. “Can I help you turn around?”

His expression didn’t alter, but after a moment he swallowed, and braced his hands against the dirt below him with a shaky nod.

It was a tortuous project, inch by inch, to hold him upright, to bring his legs around, and Jyn felt fear and guilt crash back over her with every gasp and cry he let out. It seemed to take forever, interrupted time and again by agonised coughing fits, each marked by deep scoring in the sediment where his fingers dug in violently. Finally, though, he was leaning against the ship, winded and worn out. Clean, pale lines now tracked through the grime on his cheeks.

Jyn let go of him at last and sat back on her heels. The space between them seemed at once too great and not enough.

“We’re still on Scarif,” she told him, awkwardly factual. He simply nodded, eyes still shut tight. “There’s Baze and someone else. We’ll have more water soon.”

He didn’t answer. His panting was thin and unnatural; breathing with the least possible pain seemed to be taking all his concentration.

“Can you tell me what else hurts?” she tried again.

Again, no answer. Her growing sense of uselessness was enraging. She dredged through her days as a soldier to find a way to reach him.

“Captain,” she barked. He almost flinched. “I need your perceived med-status. Now.”

Jyn felt a pang at the way his fist tightened on the ground beside him, but he licked his lips carefully and readied himself to speak.

“I don’t know,” he told her, and stopped for a breath. “Ribs – punctured a lung, I think.” Another breath. “And, broken leg. But… I can’t really...”

Everything, she realised. His struggle was unbearable to watch.

“Alright, alright,” she stopped him hastily, reaching out, and he nodded gratefully before resting his head back against the ship again. She realised with a spasm of panic that she’d put her hand on his thigh in reassurance, and she snatched it away again. “We’ll work it out. It’s alright.”

She looked around helplessly, and noticed the sky. The wisps of cloud that had been forming since the morning were drawing together heavily now, and the sky was dark out towards where the sun had risen. The ocean was still an unreal topaz at the shore, but slate-grey shadow was pushing inland at speed. She felt the hot, thick air lift and move around her.

The wing jutting out from the wreck brought shade from the sun, but it wouldn’t keep them dry in a storm… A sudden realisation seized her like ice and she wheeled back around wildly to stare at Cassian, leaning in semi-consciousness against the smooth metal of the ship.

“Cassian,” she hissed, scrambling over to him. “Cassian, you have to move.”

He opened his eyes heavily and tried to focus on her.

“I’m sorry,” and she was already putting his arm over her shoulder. “I’m sorry. You can’t be touching the ship. You have to move again. I’m sorry.”

There wasn’t time to be careful. As the sky darkened further, the band of azure at the coast was narrowing every moment. She slipped an arm between his back and the ship, ignoring the sound he made, and pushed another under his legs, careful not to knock her head against his chest.

She felt dizzy herself, thick-headed, and paused for moment. There was no way she could lift him. “I’m sorry,” she said once more, and heaved.

Cassian had to have been trained to deal with pain, she knew. She knew what his job was and what it meant. She told herself this to help shut out the sound of his suffering as she hauled him, clumsily, roughly, a little way across the filthy ground. There was nothing to rest him upright against, but as she began to lay him down another coughing fit began. His fingers were digging hard into her back – when had his arms found their way around her? – and he put his forehead to her shoulder as he shook and fought for breath.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, pulling her arm out from under his legs to steady herself against his convulsions. “You can sit, you can sit.”

Just when she was starting to chill with the fear that he might never catch his breath again, it subsided back to a rasp, and she was left kneeling, self-consciously immobile, in his shattered hold.

Something in her wanted to comfort him, to touch his neck or smooth his hair as she had while he slept, but something else stayed her hand. It seemed too much, or too little, or somehow wrong and bewildering.

Electricity had tattooed her when she had touched him first, on the shuttle: charged in her hand and crackling in his nonplussed gaze. She still felt the mark of it in her palm. But now, though her stomach writhed and her pulse raced to feel him so near and so warm and so real, she floundered.

He didn’t seem to notice, so she knelt there in stillness as the rain began to fall, fists in the dirt, listening to his laboured breath and counting the things that sounded too stupid to say aloud.

Chapter Text

Baze and Parq returned at speed, dragging with them a sheet of metal laden with debris, eerily backlit for a moment by the flash of lightning. They were both already drenched through, water pouring down their faces. Bellowing thunder shook the air and ground.

“How’s he doing?” Baze shouted over it.

“He’s awake,” Jyn called back, not moving for fear of triggering another coughing fit. “Just about.”

She watched, through the curtain of rain pouring off the wing over her head, as they began unloading their makeshift sledge. Gusts of wind pushed the tepid waterfall under the shelter at regular intervals, soaking their backs and hair as he held on to her.

Parq darted across and handed her the canteen, already half-filled with rainwater. “Go on,” she shouted, and ran back to planting the contents of the sledge into the ground: dented scrap metal, a boot, the shell of a large nut, anything that would hold water. Her useless arm was now held neatly out of the way by what Jyn realised was her torn-off shirt sleeve.

Jyn took a couple of gulps and then tapped Cassian’s saturated arm. “Water,” she murmured in his ear. “Come on, Cassian.”

He stirred and lifted his head carefully, releasing his hold on her with one arm to take the canteen. The rain gusted in again onto his face, blurring tear-tracks back into grime. She fought the urge to wipe it away, instead watching his slow and tentative movement while he drank, his eager gratitude measured with caution.

He drained the canteen and began to cough again. As another torrent blew in off the wing overhead, Jyn felt her hair flatten against her scalp and, water already teeming down her cheeks, allowed herself to cry quietly.

“Nasty!” shouted Parq, scurrying at last under the shelter of the wing and seating herself in the puddling mud. “Doesn’t sound good.”

Baze joined them with a heavy sigh and the land lit up again, brilliant lilac lace searing across the sky and stabbing into the ocean with a roar.

“It’s not,” Cassian croaked at length, hanging his head to recover control, and Jyn held her breath for second to keep from pulling him back to her.

“He’ll be alright,” she answered belligerently, but she caught his eye as he glanced up at her through soaking hair, and his expression was apologetic, almost pitying. Hesitation dissolved to desperation; she seized his face in both hands, leaning her forehead against his. “You will be alright,” she promised him, implored him. “You’ll be alright.”

His didn’t answer, but closed his eyes and touched his hand unsteadily to where hers lay against his cheek for a moment. Then his arms went around her again, his head back to her shoulder, and she allowed herself now to hold him gently as they huddled once more against the pouring rain.

The storm blasted them for hours. Occasionally, Baze darted out to fill the canteen from the now-overflowing containers, and by the time the sky finally cleared they had all drunk their fill. Even Cassian seemed more alert, though his movement and breathing were still an effort.

According to Parq, the storm was unusual even by Scarif’s standards. The regular afternoon rain was heavy, she told them as they sat miserably in the downpour, but the thunderstorm was cataclysmic compared to those showers.

“Atmospheric disruption,” Baze had suggested, and Parq had nodded, and Jyn had not really cared.

Now, though, what remained of the clouds was streaked with jasper as the sun sank, spilling long channels of coppery liquid storm-light across the saturated ground. Their misshapen collection of water-butts glowed as if filled with amber, lit from within.

The beauty seemed absurd to Jyn. She shivered. The burns on her neck and arm had stung viciously in the rain but now seemed to radiate a heat the rest of her could not match. Parq’s burnt scalp, too, glistened vividly beneath the short hair plastered over it.

Baze had been sitting almost motionless in between his forays to the water-vessels. Now he sighed and shifted.

“Chirrut loved sunsets.”

Jyn looked at him curiously, and she felt Cassian lift his head in confusion.

“He said he could feel them,” he went on. “He said he wished I –” he broke off.

He didn’t say anything else for a long moment, then he got up and staggered out from under the wing. Parq drew her legs up and watched him with interest, chin on her knees. A little way off, face to the sun, he knelt.

He was praying, Jyn realised with a twist like a knife. Then he sagged, and she saw his shoulders shudder.

“Sorry, Cassian,” she murmured, then turned to Parq. “Can you hold him up for me a moment?”

Parq shuffled over and took him awkwardly with her good arm, while he pushed his hands into the ground for stability. Liberated, Jyn stumbled out and over to Baze, shaking off the pins and needles in her legs.

Cautiously, uncertainly, she crouched beside him, placing a hand on his shoulder. The right words were impossible to find. He reached up and placed his hand over hers gratefully.

“The Guardians have a Sunset Prayer,” he told her at length. “I had almost forgotten it.”

Jyn pressed her lips together and watched the steady sinking of the nearby star, regret aching within her. What apology could she give? What amends could she make? The weapon she sought to destroy had followed her path, crossing his, bringing ruination to all he knew and loved. Home, in all its forms, was lost for him.

“In the Force, there is life,” he choked, finally. “And the Force is eternal.”

She could only nod, and think of the crystal she had hurled aside in the sand, and of her mother’s face.

Night fell, starless and merciless, and Jyn realised that the ash and dust thrown high into the sky by the Death Star’s destructive rage had blocked out more than she could have guessed. It was no wonder she’d first thought herself blind in the absolute blackness of the night. Nobody spoke, and she drifted in and out of sleep, Cassian once again leaning against her. Who was awake and who was asleep at any given time, she couldn’t tell in the darkness, though sometimes the shape beside her trembled and huffed with the threat of another coughing fit, before eventually reclaiming control. In the darkness, it should have been easy to move to him as she wished, to kiss his jaw and stroke his neck and promise him everything she could not truly promise him. The weight within her, though, pinned her to stasis, and when she slept, she only slept half, careful not to let words give her away.

Chapter Text

Dawn came, and with it, another coughing fit, tedious and agonising. Parq propped herself up on her elbow and watched, sucking her cheek, as Cassian convulsed and sobbed, with Jyn fighting to hold him steady. When it finally abated, Jyn caught Parq’s eye: the same look of soft pity that Cassian had given her before. Jyn screwed her eyes shut in defiance of the tears that threatened to spill.

“You all need to eat something,” gasped Cassian over her shoulder. She couldn’t fail to notice he hadn’t included himself and she screwed her eyes tighter, balling her hands into fists against his back.

“He’s right,” said Baze. “Keyna, how well do you know the planet?”

“Well enough to work here,” answered the Imperial. “I mean, we don’t exactly live off the land.”

“There’s fish,” Jyn muttered, eyes still shut. “I saw fish yesterday, on the sand, by one of the landing pads.”

“Well,” said Baze, getting to his feet, “let’s trust there are some left in the sea.”

“Tyth alive, trust what?” scoffed Parq. “Our ongoing good fortune?”

“The Force,” growled Baze. “And if you’re going to take your own gods’ names in vain you could try trusting them, too.”

“I don’t trust anyone,” she shrugged. “I’ve already been smote from on high, thanks, and it was people that did it.”

Baze lumbered off without looking back. She stared after him.

“So your friend’s a true believer,” she sighed after a moment.

“He has to be,” replied Jyn, hard and cold.

Parq sighed again and rubbed the back of her good hand across her face. “Alright, I’ll catch him up.” She had only gone a few steps when she paused and brought one of the containers across to within Jyn’s reach – a dented fragment of a ship, apparently beaten into a bowl shape over a rock. “Um, will you be ok alone for a bit?”

“We’ll be fine,” snapped Jyn, but Cassian spoke softly at the same time, and what she heard under the sound of her own voice sounded like, “She’ll be fine.”

When the Imperial had gone, Jyn took Cassian’s shoulders and pulled him away from her, examining him. He was paler than ever, the dampness in his hair and under his shirt something more than last night’s rain. He met her eyes tiredly.

“You need to stop,” she told him. “You need to stop with that, hear me? We’re going to sort you out, alright?”

He gave her a sad smile and closed his eyes.

“Cassian,” she whispered, leaning forward and putting her cheek against his, “trust me.”

Timidly, she slid a hand from his shoulder, up his neck, into his hair, and heard him release a shaky breath by her ear. It should have been so easy just to turn her face into his, brush her lips over his cheeks and beard, murmur to him a reason to stay with her.

“HEY!” the shout came from a long way off, and she looked up, dropping her hand. Someone was approaching from over the dune that lay between them and what remained of the citadel. “HEY!”

The figure slipped and slid clumsily down the dune and raced toward them. She tensed as it drew nearer, calculating how she could lay Cassian down quickly in the case of a fight, summoning her last shreds of energy.

It was a young man – practically a boy, Jyn realised with a start as he reached them – pale, shirtless and stunned, with a dark bruise down his side. She relaxed and he almost crashed into them, breathless. Steadying himself, he gazed down in wonder, then sank to the ground beside them.

“You’re – who are you? You’re Rebels? You made it? I thought I was the only one here –” He began to cry.

Jyn had feared herself alone for barely moments before Baze had found her; this boy had suffered a full day and night. Shock and relief were overcoming him in waves.

“I’ve been over there,” he gasped, waving an arm wildly in the direction from which he came. “I just – I just came to see what – oh Force, I’m not alone…”

His name was Faaven, they learned. He’d regained consciousness sometime early the previous morning, near the citadel tower, and, having established (he thought) that he was alone, had begun hunting around for supplies to try and survive his new solitary island existence. Jyn recognised his vigour – she had also found herself, on too many occasions, alone and faced with the choice of simply giving up or going on, and had chosen going on each time, as much to spite the world as anything else. Nothing was quite so resourceful as hopelessness – except, she had learned, hope.

He was nineteen in standard years, in his second year of training as a junior in the medbay. He was quick to assess Jyn and diagnose only superficial burns, a sprained knee and, still, mild dehydration. Cassian gave him more concern. Jyn moved away to give him space, triggering another coughing fit.

Faaven frowned, and gently laid Cassian flat.

“You shouldn’t be sitting up like that,” he told him.

“It seemed to make it better,” Jyn cut in anxiously as the coughing stopped again.

“Right, sure, but I don’t think… hold on.” He turned back to Cassian. “I’m going to need to…” he gestured awkwardly, and Cassian nodded breathlessly. He pulled out a scalpel from his boot – smart kid, thought Jyn abstractly, who knew what it was to never travel without a weapon – and notched a starting cut in the bottom of Cassian’s shirt, from where he began to rip the fabric.

Jyn rubbed her hand across her mouth and looked away, embarrassed.

“Alright,” Faavel hummed, “this is going to take a bit of patching up.”

Cassian gave a wheeze that was almost a laugh.

“No, no, I think I can – I think if it’s what I think.”

“You can help?” Jyn asked sharply, staring at the horizon.

“The leg, obviously, just broken, and the collar bone; they’ll fix themselves, but he’s got this tr–”

“Punctured lung –” she supplied unnecessarily.

“Erm, in basic terms, yes,” he nodded, and then looked around at her uncertainly. “I don’t – I mean, I haven’t done one of these.”

“But you know how?” She looked round and winced. Cassian’s narrow chest was black and blotched with bruising, and there were strange bubbles under the skin. How many of those bruises were her work? It rose and fell shallowly, and she looked away again, hot-faced.

“I think so,” Faaven answered. “I mean, I think I can. I’ve got some supplies. They were down in the bunker level, replenishments; I managed to push some stuff out the way and get in.” He got to his feet. “I’ll be back,” he said. “I won’t be long. I’m… I’m really glad you’re here.” And he shot off again, back over the dune at a scramble.

Again, they were alone, and Jyn shuffled in the damp ground nervously, looking everywhere but at Cassian.

“Jyn,” he said – and his voice did sound clearer, lying down.

“It’s going to be alright,” she repeated, staring at her knees.

He didn’t go on, and she didn’t ask him to. But he pushed his hand in her direction, and her insides knotted and she pretended not to have seen, and soon he seemed to be asleep again.

Baze and Parq returned presently with a good load of small fish and some damp logs.

“We found these in a lagoon over there,” Parq told her cheerfully. “Reckon they got zapped by the lightning. We’re going to try it dam it off after the tide, see if we can’t make the same thing happen again.” Then she raised her eyebrows as she took in Cassian, lying on his back with his shirt cut open. “Well, you two didn’t hang around.”

“There was a medic,” Jyn snarled impatiently. She filled them in on Faaven’s unexpected appearance as she helped Baze to raise a fire. Setting fires was something she’d learned to do well, for necessity or aggression, and soon it was sputtering grudgingly over the damp flotsam.

“Perhaps he can sort out your eye,” Baze suggested to Parq once Jyn had finished.

She snorted at him, prodding one of the fish with a sharp shard of transparisteel. “Past rescue, mate.”

Jyn scooted over and took the ersatz blade from her. “Look, it goes in here,” she said, and demonstrated how to gut the fish. Parq gave a low whistle.

“Check out Sergeant Survival,” she muttered with a note of admiration. “Fires and fish, she can do it all.”

It suddenly struck Jyn that she was probably the only one of them who had ever had to simply survive, with the possible exception of Cassian, who was in no state to help. Rather than pride, though, she felt a sting of injustice. Who would she be if she had not had the life that led her now to fires and fish? Happy? Whole? But she glanced across at Cassian, and the sting fled.

Jyn hadn’t realised how painful her hunger had been. She’d been hungry before, many times before, and the ache and grip of starvation were something she’d learned to act on if she could, and ignore if she could not. But soon, as the smell of cooking fish spread, she felt almost dizzy.

It felt like a feast, although the meat was charred and tangy, and she could have eaten as much again twice over, but instead she took one of the last two fish and moved back across to Cassian, touching a hand to his cheek. It was clammy and chilled, but he opened his eyes and smiled up at her. How easy it was to touch him when she had an excuse.

“Breakfast time,” she told him.

“Is he back?”

“Not – not yet, no, but come on.” She raised him a little, and he ate, gratefully and with difficulty. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw Baze smiling.

Faaven did at length return, stumbling awkwardly behind a stack of boxes, which overbalanced as he slipped down the dune with a curse. Baze leapt up to help him, and Faaven blinked up from the brown sand, stunned and delighted to find his patient count had increased.

“We saved you some breakfast,” grinned Parq, then turned to Baze. “So, what I was saying about our ongoing good fortune...”

He smiled back.

Faaven’s young face lit up further and he made short work of the fish, stabbing himself painfully with the bones several times in his enthusiasm. Jyn noticed that both Parq and Baze seemed chirpier, more colour in their faces, and felt energy returning to her as well.

The young medic finally set to work, opening a box and pulling out antiseptic and sponges. He quickly showed them how to clean their injuries and handed out bacta patches to cover them, before returning his attention to Cassian.

“Hey, uh, Cassian,” he began. “This is - this is going to be a bit nasty, sir.” He set about wiping antiseptic across a patch of Cassian’s chest, and again Jyn coloured and stared at her knees. “I mean it’s going to hurt, ok, but - but I think it should make it better for you, I think.”

Jyn looked up again and saw Cassian nod his assent.

“What I’ve got to do,” he went on, “is I’ve got to put this into your, into what we call the pleural space, it’s to let the air and so on out, and - and hopefully the, you know, the puncture in your lung is small enough to heal on its own if we just sort that bit out.”

Cassian nodded again and Faaven looked nervously at Jyn.

“Can any of us help?” asked Baze.

The kid glanced around and then back at Jyn. “You might want to hold his hand or something? It’s - I mean it’s going to hurt a fair bit.”

She moved over and took Cassian’s hand, and stared at the sky.

“Ok,” muttered Faaven, blinking down at his patient. “Is it the fifth or – I think so…”

In the days that followed, she struggled to forget Cassian’s trained, strained silence, his tight jaw, the crushing pressure on her fingers, and, the one time she glanced down, the dark lanes of blood that Faaven quickly wiped away from his chest. But time brought with it improvement; colour returned to his skin and his breathing came ever more easily. Still bound by his broken leg and burned hip to stay seated and resting, he was ever-present at their camp as the others found and fell into roles, and each time she saw him he seemed more himself.

Baze managed the food supply; daily damming the lagoon meant that the lightning brought a plentiful supply of the tangy fish, and one of Faaven’s boxes contained some high-protein ration bars.

Faaven was boundlessly energetic and creative with their resources, quickly building them proper shelter from the tempestuous storms that each afternoon brought. He seemed never more pleased than when checking over his patients, ensuring that their wounds stayed clean and freshly-dressed, and doing his best to set Parq’s arm.

Parq and Jyn spent the days scouting what remained of the archipelago, mentally cataloguing the resources available to them and bringing back firewood for Baze and useful detritus for Faaven’s building project.

It was on one such venture across of the islands, some time later, that they encountered what remained of the rebel Jyn had seen on the first day. She tasted bile rising and swayed slightly, remembering her choice to pass him by. Keyna – as she now felt able to call her, uniform notwithstanding – stopped and stared; Jyn tried to pull her away.

“Leave it, come on.”

“No chance,” Keyna said, pulling her arm free and heading over. “Poor bastard’s probably got people out there missing him. Think they’d want him bleaching?”

Jyn stood back while Keyna threw handfuls of dirt with her good arm over the stinking mess - the mess that had once been a man who had known Jyn's name.

"You got anyone out there?" Jyn asked suddenly.

"Mm-hmm," Keyna nodded, still occupied in her endeavour. "Smartest ship engineer in the galaxy. She made it off before the big zap."

Jyn remembered the Imperial's commitment to staying back to route flights off-planet, and understood.

Keyna looked up suddenly, her hand deep in the dirt. "Nothing squishy, though."

"Oh," Jyn said, unsure of how to respond. "Just a friend, then."

"'Just' a friend?" Keyna echoed drily. "You can't have had many friends."

She blinked, then shrugged. "I haven't."

"What, chatty lass like you? You amaze me." Keyna grinned and winked. "Look," she went on, returning to her enterprise, "the you and Cassian stuff just isn't my scene, alright? So I'm sorry if I get a bit wriggly when you guys do the thing but that's just how it is."

Jyn felt something twist inside. "There isn't any me and Cassian stuff,” she protested.

Keyna gave a derisive snort, not looking up. "Just because I don't want it doesn't mean I don't see it, Jyn," she said. "Get your head sorted out, alright? He's as alive as we are now. Let the poor guy live."

Jyn stared. The analysis seemed intrusive and crass to her. But she knew how she felt, suspected she knew how Cassian felt, and night after night as he slept fitfully beside her she wondered why, if it was so, she should feel so disabled by his proximity. She blinked at the sky frustratedly.

Finally, Keyna finished her labours, a drift of claggy sand built up against the side of the wall. "Scytha send you, mate," she muttered to the pile, tamping it down with her foot, and turned to Jyn. "Onward?"

They moved off in uneasy silence - or it felt uneasy to Jyn, whose head fizzed with confusion. But at length, Keyna broke the quiet amiably, reaching down to pull up a ripped-off branch and handing it to Jyn with a smile.

"Is he any good with tech?" she asked.

"What?"

"Cassian. Any good with tech? Coding and all that was my absolute worst in officer training."

"Oh." Jyn nodded, letting the branch trail behind her in the sand. "Yeah, he's good, I think. Reprogrammed an Imperial strategy droid once."

Keyna gave a low whistle. "He's really good then," she said with respect. "Those bastards are eight layers deep in encryption."

Jyn nodded again, thinking with a pang of Kay, and of Cassian's scream of grief, and shook away the replay in her mind.

"See I think we need to build some sort of transmitter," Keyna went on. "All very well getting by on fish and rain for months on end, but I for one would quite like to be rid of Sandy-Land now." She bent down and picked up another piece of wood, handing it over. "I reckon there's enough salvage to rig something up, if young starry-eyes can focus on anything but you for a moment."

"Can you stop that?" snapped Jyn abruptly, throwing the branches down.

Keyna hesitated. "Sorry." She sounded like she meant it. "I just don't... I'll leave it."

"Do."

Jyn picked up her load and moved off, furious and mortified.

"We could do it, though," called Keyna from behind her. "Route the lightning, fire up some power, send up a distress signal. Someone might pick it up, somewhere. We could do it."

Jyn span around, ready to lash out again, and stopped in her tracks. Keyna's expression was unfamiliar: desperate, beseeching.

Jyn took a breath, and pushed down her anger. "Let's find some tech."

Chapter Text

They got back to their camp at sunset. Silhouetted against the golden sky a little way off was Baze, praying, as he had done each evening since that first time. Jyn had come to realise that the Force held shape for him now, was easier to believe in, or to hope for, at least, and in her experience, hope was all that faith could be.

Faaven was checking the dressing on Cassian’s hip when she and Keyna arrived, and Jyn ignored the sidelong grin from Keyna as she steadily focused her attention elsewhere until he was done.

“I mean, it’ll never be, you know, perfect,” Faaven was just finishing explaining. “But it’s not infected and it should knit together in time, I think, just, you know, be a bit uncomfortable in cold weather.”

“Well, I should be fine then,” Cassian replied, patting his arm gratefully. “I doubt winter here is exactly brutal.” He looked up at Jyn. “Our young doctor here is pleased with his worst patient,” he told her with a conspiratorial grin, and something warm inside her writhed pleasantly.

Faaven twisted round and smiled as well at the two women, baffled by their burden of wires and circuity.

“Kit,” said Keyna. “We figured we could try and set up a signal transmitter.” She dropped her armful of salvage in front of Cassian. “Jyn says you’re good with tech; can you do it?”

Cassian raised his eyebrows at the pile of wires and circuits before him, looking cautiously pleased.

“We can try, I suppose,” he nodded. “I can’t make any promises - I’ve done re-routing, intercepting, overriding, but I’ve never built a transmitter from scratch…”

“I bet you can, though!” enthused Faaven, planting himself down beside him and starting to sort through the heap eagerly. “What do you need?”

And Cassian, taken aback by the boy’s uncomplicated cheer, laughed.

Jyn thought she had never seen or heard anything more wonderful in her whole life. It was as though he pulled the sun briefly back up from the horizon as the tired lines on his face were translated in an instant to something simple and lovely. She stood transfixed while he turned pieces of kit over in his hands, swiftly and methodically, still lit by the last of his laugh, and when he looked up at her, and quickly away again, she felt a smile of her own begin. Unstoppable and untainted by irony, it spread across her face, and not even Keyna’s wry sidelong smirk was enough to take it away.

It served another purpose: Cassian had needed something to do. Over the course of the next few days, his focus seemed to renew him, the project giving him an energy and alertness Jyn hadn’t seen in him since the archives, but with a new lightness that, to her, was intoxicating.

The burns on her neck and arm and on Keyna’s head had faded to dark, tender scars when one evening, as Faaven dutifully checked them over, he suddenly asked, “So how many did you lose?”

Jyn blinked. “What?”

He was still busy examining Keyna’s head. “Your lot, here. We mostly got out I think, except I was down in the store and nobody came to get me.

Jyn stared at her hands for a moment. “All but us,” she told him. “We were - maybe thirty.”

“Twenty-seven,” Baze interjected from the other side of the fire, poking at the fish with a stick. “All of them proud to follow you, Jyn Erso.”

Faaven started and looked around, wide-eyed.

“Erso?” he repeated. Her heart skipped a beat. Keyna looked between them with interest.

“Are you - you’re not related to Galen Erso, are you?”

Jyn noticed Baze freeze; Cassian looked up warily from the cable he was untangling. What could she say?

“Yes,” she admitted.

She didn’t know what reaction she had expected, but unsullied elation was not on the list. Faaven beamed, eyes shining, and turned to her fully, forsaking his scrutiny of Keyna’s injuries in his excitement as he seized her arms.

“My uncle says he’s a genius!” he babbled delightedly. “My uncle works on his team for the Stardust project; he’s always telling us how amazing he is - there’s never been an engineer with a mind like his, he just sees every detail and - POW - magic! And he’s, what, your father? That’s amazing!”

She nodded mutely, suddenly feeling very sick, but Faaven seemed not to notice her pallor, chattering on.

“I don’t believe it! What a small galaxy, right? Honestly your dad is almost all my uncle talks about - working with him was a kind of life goal and he’s just so honoured - of course, he can’t tell us what they’re working on but, oh wow, just wait till I tell him I’ve met you!”

He didn’t know. How could he know?

She gave him a queasy smile, aware of Cassian’s eyes on her. He’d seen them all gunned down for her papa’s treachery too. And here was this boy, filled with excitement and awe, praising him to her, his uncle’s killer.

“But you’re a rebel,” Keyna said at last, and Faaven blinked in confusion.

“Of course,” he frowned, “What - how - ?” His hands fell from her and he stepped back.

She couldn’t think straight. Lying normally came easily, but she was unused to fondness. It complicated things.

“They’re estranged,” Cassian supplied for her, not untruthfully.

Faaven’s smile returned in an instant, reassuring now. “I’m sure you can make up - my uncle will introduce you.”

Even Keyna was staring at him now. Despite the thick, fair beard that now covered his chin, he had never seemed younger. There was something dizzying and beautiful about the easiness with which he saw things. Imperial engineer, rebel fighter, war and feuds and estrangement - all could be saved: just embrace and make up, and none of these things would be an obstacle. In another life, Jyn would have laughed at him, but now she only felt a tear spill down her cheek, for so many things, as she nodded again, and attempted another smile.

She watched as he returned to satisfying himself with Keyna’s progress, then submitted as he checked her over as well, and shook her head almost imperceptibly in forgiveness when she caught Baze’s eye.

That night, as she lay staring into the starless dark, she felt the creep of dread, an old unease from a time before the quotidian mundaneness of just surviving. It was, she realised, the first time that where she had come from and who she had been had threatened their guileless truce. How could she explain to Faaven that his uncle was dead, that the Empire had betrayed him, that the work of which he had been so proud had been turned on him in callousness? She couldn’t, but holding it back, when he was so open and generous, she felt would sour her day by day.

Cassian lay to her side, a little apart; without warning, the need for comfort swept over her in a great wave. She lay still and breathless for what felt an age, feeling the pull of his nearness, wondering why, still, she was afraid to be close, when at first, nothing had been more natural.

Finally she quietly shuffled across until she found him. There was a sharp, suppressed intake of breath - so Cassian, too, was awake. Tentatively, she settled beside him, facing away, and her heart raced to feel his warm side against her. He didn’t move for a long time, but she could hear him breathing, feel his heartbeat as fast as hers, and the electricity that had jolted her on the flight to this planet crackled through her again.

She heard him turn his head and his breath blew warm and shaky onto the back of her neck. They both lay in absolute stillness, as far from sleep as they could be, until silently, his hand appeared on her waist, feather-light and frightened, with a hesitancy that spoke of disbelief. She slipped her hand over his and felt it relax onto her, and his long, unsteady exhalation on her neck, and she thought she might never sleep again.  

By the time the sky began to pale, Jyn had not closed her eyes for a moment, but Cassian’s breathing behind her was long and slow, now mercifully unlaboured. He had not stirred all night, his hand still resting heavily on her waist, his face still turned into her hair. She stared ahead at the pale yellow line where the sea stretched beyond sight, panic rising. At length, she carefully lifted his hand and slipped out from beside him.

Everyone else was asleep. She stood, and walked toward the sea. It was a reasonable distance to the water’s edge, and when she arrived, the first glimpse of the nearby star was throwing silver across the water toward her. She took off her boots and stood in the shallows, feeling the warm water rush and recede gently around her aching feet, the sand pulling out beneath her soles, as though to welcome her down. The sound of the small waves whispered to her. She wondered abstractly what it would be like to just keep walking forward, and wriggled her toes to feel the sand draw them deeper.

The soft crunching of footsteps on the beach behind her broke her reverie.

“Another day again,” said Baze.

She knew exactly what he meant.

Chapter Text

There were more sunsets and more sunrises and more unpleasant fish; there were less fruitful tours of the land and fewer conversations. Cassian fell to his work with studious zeal, and rarely met Jyn’s eye, and she slept as far from him as she could bear. As one, the group began to feel a change: survival was no longer an adventure, no longer an exercise in achievement and pride. It was a waiting game, dependent on Cassian’s enterprise. Tempers tightened, patience thinned. Keyna’s acerbic wit began to grate, but to Jyn’s relief, she stopped short of commenting on the wounded gulf that flickered between her and Cassian. Even Faaven’s cheer waned, stripped as he was now of most of his duties; burns had healed, bones had set.

Perhaps it was the distance between them all, or perhaps it was boredom, or perhaps it was the guilt and deceit that ate her away, but Jyn found herself one day calling Faaven aside from his desultory attempts to carve a figure from a piece of wood with an old scalpel.

“Can we take a walk?”

He blinked at her, then nodded, surprised.

She headed down toward the beach again where she’d watched the sun rising, and he followed in silence. When they got there, she sat in the sand staring out to sea, pushing her fingers deep into the fine white sand and feeling it pile against her palms. He sat beside her and continued his carving, waiting for her to speak. Emerging from the rough wood was a beautiful bird of some kind, as though hatching from bark and splinter.

“I need to tell you something,” she said in time. “About my father.”

He looked sideways at her. “It’ll be ok,” he said, his familiar smile hovering determinedly beneath his shaggy yellow beard.

She sighed and put her chin on her knees. “It’s not, Faaven. He’s dead.”

The sound of his blade on the carving stopped, and she sensed him looking at her again, expectant, confused.

“The Stardust project,” she began, pushing her fingers deeper down. “It was – you won’t have seen it. But it did this to us. It’s a battle station. It destroys planets. My father built it.”

She could just see Faaven shaking his head. “No, no, it’s an Imperial project, why would they fire it at us?”

She sighed. “Because of me. Because I was here. I’m sorry.”

The sound of carving began again, more heavily. For a moment, she irrationally pitied the bird for the change, the forceful extraction from its peaceful wooden shell.

“My father wasn’t an Imperial. He lied for years. And he told me how to break the weapon, if I could get the plans from here.”

The sound stopped again.

Again, she said, “I’m sorry.” She took a breath. Compassion was not something she had learned much about, but this sweet, generous boy deserved the truth. The shallows hissed just ahead of her. “The Empire murdered the whole team, Faaven. Your uncle…”

She still couldn’t look at him. In the corner of her eye, he was absolutely silent and still. Then –

“Is that true?” His voice sounded low and cold and utterly unlike Faaven. “Tell me, are you telling me the truth now?”

She closed her eyes with a sigh and nodded.

Ice and fire shot through her hand and she screamed as another slice blazed across her forearm. Suddenly she was scrambling away across the sand, blood dripping onto the creamy white as Faaven advanced with the scalpel, his bird lying forgotten. Jyn found her way to her feet, daring to glance back as she ran; contorted with grief and betrayal, he didn’t pursue her.

When she arrived back at their camp, only Cassian was there. He started and looked up as she fell to the ground, and swore. Blood poured forth from the stab wound in her hand and the gash across her arm.

“What happened?” he ran over to her as best he could on his weakened legs and held her hand up to examine it. “Where’s Faaven, this needs –”

“He’s lost it,” she gasped. “I’m such an idiot.”

“Faaven did this?”

“I told him about his uncle.” She looked up at him, at his eyes full of concern and comprehension, and wondered wildly, irrelevantly, why she could only stand to be near him when one of them was in pain. There was a beat, then he dropped her hand abruptly and ran to the boxes of medical supplies over in the next shelter. He returned at speed with a pack of bacta patches and a bottle, and took her hand again more gently.

“The arm’s just superficial,” he said, tipping liquid from the bottle onto her hand. She winced while it stung. “This hand’s not nice, though. He’s gone right through.”

Jyn nodded, still wincing. Cassian pulled the thin film wrapper away from a patch and placed it across the back of her palm, then turned her hand over and stuck another patch across the place the blade had entered.

“I’m such an idiot,” she said again. “I couldn’t lie to him, I couldn’t bear it when he talked about his uncle and Papa and…”

“He’ll be ok,” Cassian soothed her. “He’s in shock. You did right.” He began to roll up her sleeve.

She knew she hadn’t lost too much blood, so she knew it was something about the brush of Cassian’s fingers on her arm that made her vision fizz. He applied the patch gently, far too slowly. She watched his slender hands, and how they paused there for a long moment after the patch was in place.

All at once, she pulled away and rolled her sleeve back down, shattering the inertia. He sat back and looked aside.

“I’m sure he’ll be ok,” she sniffed briskly. “He’ll calm down.”

Cassian nodded.

“How’s the transmitter?”

“Almost done, I think,” he said flatly, and got up to walk away.

Faaven didn’t appear for the rest of the day, and when the sun was setting and Baze was saying his prayer, Jyn kept expecting to see him coming up from the shore, haggard and spent with grief, but apologetic, hungry, tired. Night fell, and she lay awake as she was now used to, staring into the blackness and listening to the shore.

Under the sibilant breath of the distant waves was another sound; she thought she heard a scraping of some kind, and a muffled thump.

When the sun rose, Faaven was still nowhere to be seen, but Baze gave a hoarse shout and they ran across to where he stood, and stared.

The transmitter was destroyed.

Keyna fell to her knees with a guttural howl, hands to her face, and Baze went to her and crouched by her side. Jyn couldn’t pity her; all she could see was Cassian, still staring in anger and despair at his ruined work, brows drawn, jaw set beneath his unkempt beard. She wanted to hold him, reassure him: it could be fixed, he could do it, she could help him. It was her fault. She walked away and sat by the black remains of the previous day’s fire, gazing unseeingly at the twisted charcoal and ash.

When Keyna recovered herself, she said she would look for Faaven, reason with him. As his superior officer, technically, she said, she could order him to return and help put right the results of his outburst. Baze walked off in the other direction, giving no reason, and Jyn and Cassian sat apart from each other, waiting.

Keyna returned shaking her head. She had not found him, she said. Then she picked up a small tool, and handed it to Cassian, patting him on the shoulder. Such easy companionship. Jyn had never felt so envious in her life. She watched as he sighed and went back to work. The days wore on.

The storms had not abated with time. One afternoon, in the twilight of the stormclouds, Jyn sat beneath their shelter and watched: the lightning threaded across the sky and lit the sea and the land in brilliant contrast over and over. It should have been beautiful, but familiarity had worn its appeal thin. How long had they been here now?

She looked over at Cassian, watched him as he observed the lightning impassively. It flashed across his tired face, scoring the lines more deeply. Jyn screwed her eyes shut and took a breath, preparing to speak.

“Don’t,” he said, barely audible above the roar of rain and thunder. He didn’t look away from the filigreed sky.

She physically flinched. But she found that she had made up her mind, and had never been easily dissuaded. She shuffled over to sit beside him.

“Ok,” she said, and simply put her head on his shoulder. She felt him stiffen, then relax, and rest his head against hers.

He muttered something wearily, almost drowned out by the storm, which sounded like, “Be nice, Jyn.”

Her hand found his, and she realised her eyelids were heavy at last. “I will,” she mumbled sleepily.

She woke up when the storm had passed, her head still on his shoulder, and smiled, seized by a sudden folly. “I’m going to cut your beard,” she said, and he jumped.

“You’re awake.”

She smiled up at him. “You’re a mess.”

He returned her smile. “And my hair?”

“Looks fine.”

There was a small pair of scissors in one of Faaven’s boxes – she still thought of them as Faaven’s boxes. She missed him, and worried about him; they all did, she knew. The scissors were so small that her fingers barely fitted through the metal loops on the handles but she held them up and grinned. “Ready?”

It was such a pointless, silly thing to do, but time had stretched them all to shadows; as she knelt in front of him, took his chin in her hand and began to snip at the shaggy hair around his jaw, she felt like the colours around her brightened a little. Tedium had drained her days for too long.

He knelt before her patiently, eyes shut, and she wondered whether he, too, felt a little more human for this moment. She trimmed away industriously until she reached his moustache, and hesitated for a second, then touched a finger to the corner of his mouth.

He kept his eyes closed, but again came that sharp, suppressed intake of breath. She cautiously traced the line of his lips with her shaking finger, and he held still, tense, electrified. Finally, she dropped her hand, slipped the scissors against his skin and cut back the last of the overgrown hair. He didn’t move.

“All done,” she murmured.

His eyes opened and met hers, dark and searching, and after a second he tentatively reached out to hold her side. She swallowed, not breaking his gaze, and when she raised a hand to dust loose trimmings from his jaw, she kept it there.

For a long moment, they were motionless, lost in each other. Then heavy footsteps running broke the spell and they stood, moving apart. Baze was pelting toward them, red with exertion and fury, tears staining his ruddy cheeks.

“Where is she?” he bellowed, looking around wildly. “Where’s Keyna?”

“What’s she done?” Cassian asked urgently, and Baze wheeled around to him.

“I found Faaven,” he choked. “What’s left of him. His throat…”

Jyn staggered backward, and Cassian caught her arms.

“Where is she?” Baze repeated menacingly.

“We don’t know,” Cassian answered.

Jyn broke free of Cassian’s hold and ran aside. She retched violently into the ground. What had she done? She had meant so well… the poor boy… she thought distractedly of his bird lying abandoned in the sand, half-frozen in wood forever, perhaps borne away by the sea, and the insignificance of this tragedy leaping absurdly to mind made her throw up again. Baze hauled her upright and squeezed her shoulders, dropping his head onto hers in shared grief.

“What’s the fuss?” That familiar tired, forced cheer – Keyna’s voice came from not far off. Jyn twisted round as Baze’s head flew up with a growl. She was slipping awkwardly down the same dune that Faaven had arrived over, weeks ago.

Jyn pushed back against Baze as he tried to tear past her, restraining him. Cassian planted himself between them and Keyna.

“Did you kill Faaven?” He sounded conversational, almost. Jyn remembered the first time she’d met him, his piercing detachment, his cool manner. It seemed like another world.

The Imperial stopped slipping down the dune and tugged her tattered uniform back into shape as she straightened up, walking towards them, apparently unembarrassed.

“You know what he did,” she said. She might as well have shrugged. Baze gave a shout of rage and Jyn tightened her hold on his arm, her injured hand aching violently as she did so.

“I’m his superior officer,” she went on smoothly. “It was insubordination. He sabotaged our operations, and he would have continued to do so.” She spread her hands at Cassian. “I was defending our best chance of getting away from here.”

“By murdering a troubled boy?” His voice had grown dangerous and accusatory now.

She gave them a rueful expression. “Someone has to be efficient.”

“And your bloody Death Star in the sky that nearly wiped us out,” shrieked Jyn. “Was that efficient?”

She noticed with bitter satisfaction that Keyna looked pained, but the response came: “What else could you call it?”

Baze moaned and sank to the ground, but Cassian didn’t move an inch, and Jyn wished she could see his face. She could hear his voice, though, full of regret and – she could have sworn – sympathy.

“It was wrong.”

Keyna nodded in agreement. Then, “Tell me you haven’t done worse.”

He didn’t say anything.

Chapter Text

Cassian had somehow brokered a truce, and while Jyn found Keyna difficult to forgive, and Baze didn’t say another word to her, they went on as a group. There was nothing else to do.

In the days that came, Jyn found it easier to sit beside Cassian as he worked. She asked questions about what he was doing, and he explained softly and patiently why this or that part needed to connect in such a way, or told her about other times he’d done similar things. They even talked about Kay, and when he couldn’t speak any more, she rested her head back on his shoulder and he worked on. In the nights, she slept as she had before, with her back to his side, and it seemed enough for him. Baze spent longer praying in the evenings and gradually learned, if not to tolerate Keyna’s unabashed presence, at least to cope with it. Jyn suspected he was only acting as he felt Chirrut might have acted.

It wasn’t many more days before Cassian completed the transmitter. It was a piecemeal, patchwork mess of tech, sitting under one of Faaven’s creative canopies of detritus to avoid storm damage, but it lit up, its red and orange lights blinking like eyes in the blackness of the starless night.

It hadn’t occurred to Jyn that the transmitter’s completion would herald the start of a new, worse chapter of waiting. Now, with not even the equipment to build, they all became aware that they were at the mercy of fate. Baze began saying “The Force is strong,” before and after every meal, and Keyna was so successful in suppressing her disdain that Jyn came to wonder if she wasn’t in fact silently hoping he was right.

But for Jyn, waiting for nothing and having no control were, she was sure, slowly driving her insane. She barely slept at night, the weight of Cassian’s hand resting on her side not comfort enough to coax her weariness to oblivion. In the day, she went for long walks and lost her way more than she had done before. Each morning, she got up earlier and earlier, going down to the sea to watch the sunrise without really knowing why. She had long since lost count of their nights on Scarif. She passed the time by pulling sutures out of Faaven’s box and patching up their bleached and ragged clothes with bandages.

She wondered if Baze watched at her and screamed with the same frustration she felt herself, and wished he had one more moment of tenderness with Chirrut, while she threw her chances away in hesitation. She knew he must. She had even come to pity Keyna, whose conviction that she would somehow find her friend seemed to fade daily. How could she, Jyn, dare to hold back, when she, unlike both of them, actually had the only person she wanted right there with her? But Cassian didn’t ask anything of her; all he had ever asked of her was “Be nice, Jyn.” So she fought these barriers down daily, to sit beside him, to sleep beside him, to hold his hand or touch his arm, and tried not to hurt him when her awkward uncertainty told her to run.

The sun rose again, as she stood with the warm sea pushing gently at her knees. Everything seemed such a long time ago. She wondered if she even remembered properly what Bodhi had actually looked like, or what it was exactly that Kay had said to her, that first, bruising meeting. Chirrut was nearer in her mind, she thought, with Baze his ever-present witness. But the life before this one seemed somehow unreal, lost. It was a thought that might once have pleased her, but that life was the life where she’d met Cassian, and felt, without explanation, always safe at his side.

“I didn’t thank you,” came his voice from behind her, and she jumped. She hadn’t heard him approach over the sound of the waves. She turned and stepped back onto the sand, toward him, the wetness on her legs raising bumps of chill despite the warm morning air.

He was sitting on the beach, one hand in his hair, watching the light move over the water. She sat beside him and joined him.

“For what?” she said at length.

“You saved my life, I think.”

She stared at the sea, then laughed. “I think I still owe you a few.”

He barged her gently with his arm, almost toppling her sideways, and she could tell without looking that he was smiling. It lifted her.

They sat in silence for a while, until he turned to her and pulled her chin gently around to face him.

“Jyn,” he said earnestly, “we’ll be alright.”

She nodded, hoping he believed she believed him. The morning light lit him in the most extraordinary way. He was, and always had been, the most beautiful person she’d ever seen. Then she realised he was holding something out to her. She looked at his hand.

Twisted between his fingers was a frayed and tattered cord, and swinging below, a sharp-pointed crystal caught the dawn rays and refracted them in a thousand directions. Her breath caught.

“I found this ages ago,” he told her. “Sorry for keeping it for so long. I –” He looked down. “I wanted you with me.”

She stared at him through eyes filled with tears, and somehow - she had no idea how - nothing now held her back. She leaned in and cupped her hand to his jaw, watched his eyes close, and put her open lips to his. His arm slipped around her, his other hand into her hair, and he laid her gently back onto the sand, kissing her with the yearning and amazement that she herself felt.

Chapter Text

Five.

The hold of the rebel ship is stark and hard, but Cassian leans into her, her skin still flushed and warm against his. Opposite them, Keyna averts her eyes, but smiles, hopeful; something he recognises. Baze has his face buried in his hands as the land falls away from them, taking Chirrut with it.

The first sight of the ship in the sky, he assumed was an illusion, catching the early morning sunlight with a buttercream glow below the clouds. He runs a hand across Jyn’s collar-line and down her side, feeling her exhausted stability against the wall behind them, and against his arm, as she smiles, half asleep.

Four.

She is all he dreamed and all he can dream, a clean piece stitched over the rends and slashes in his conscience. There is sand in her hair and he traces the line of the cord around her neck with his mouth, tasting the sea-salt still dried on her throat.

Three.

There is time for everything, now, perhaps. They’ve been promised medical attention when they arrive, but the ever-present pain in his hip seems unimportant to him. The engines of the ship pick up in pitch as they break through the atmosphere.

Two.

He remembers her face when they heard they had succeeded. It was unsurprised; just the same pure, ordinary joy he had seen on top of the tower when she threw the switch. It was worth it, he thinks. It would have been worth dying where they knelt. It was even worth living where they survived. To bring an end, to find a beginning.

One.

Roaring engines, whining hyperdrive, as they prepare to break into hyperspace, and through the viewport, as he twists his fingers adoringly into her hair and drops his head to press another kiss to her cheekbone, they flash through some kind of aurora as they pass into lightspeed, and the last thing he sees before space around them stretches out into time is a flash of brilliant green.

Out.