Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jyn Erso’s body is a latticework of scars, and she’s only earned half of them.

Mystics and beggars whisper about the Force, how it hasn't left them yet. Jyn grits her teeth as one of Saw’s medics sees to a blaster shot in her shoulder, and thinks that the Force is a kriffing load of--

“Again, hmm?” Saw surveys her from the hole in the wall that serves as a door in this hideout, arms crossed over his chest.

“No, I just - argh - just shot myself for fun.”

“Don't blame me for the fact that your one true love is shit at dodging, child.”

Jyn gives him the finger, and the rolling warmth of his laughter soothes her urge to hit something. For a moment, at least.

She's definitely punching whoever the idiot is that managed to get their soul connected to hers, though, shared injuries be damned.

Assuming they survive to meet each other.

“Eating for two?”

Cassian rolls his eyes at Melshi, taking a bit out of an extra polystarch portion. He's normally more careful with what he eats, cautious of taking more than he's worth from the rebellion. But there's a gnawing ache in his gut, like his internal organs are caught in a vise that's squeezing every last bit of nutrients out of him. Exhaustion drags at his bones. He's taken phantom pains before, but nothing like this.

There's a certain despondency to the sensation. Cassian has never heard of people sharing more than physical injuries with each other, but it doesn't seem implausible that hopelessness could sink its claws into your body.

Anyway. They're at the new base on Yavin, not on a mission. No one is going to go without if Cassian tries to assuage a hunger that doesn't belong to him.

“Hey.” Melshi’s grin has faded; he nods at Cassian’s, where the knuckles have split open red and raw. Not for the first time that week, either.

He bites back a sigh, or a curse, or maybe both. Polystarch hanging from his mouth, he flicks a goodbye at the other rebellion soldier with two fingers, heading back to his quarters. They’re just scrapes, innocuous in their location and severity, but there’s something private about them.

He wraps them with care - probably more care than he’d bother with if he’d done it to himself. It won’t do anything for whoever is on the other side of the injury, is useless at best and self-indulgent at worst, and yet--

Here he is. Bandages in hand. He finishes up and then takes another bite of the polystarch, the wooden meal doing little to ease the hole in his gut as he stares at the bare bones of the room the Alliance has gifted him.

It’s not his hunger

Jyn is eighteen and alone, except for a blaster and an itch on her wrist.

She wanders. Jedha is long in the past, along with every other planet Saw ever laid claim or waste to. She tells herself it’s because she hasn’t decided if she wants to shoot him or shove a vibroblade between his ribs. But she knows - on those nights when sleep manages to catch her unawares, when the hatch in her mind creaks open and Saw Gerrara’s face is gazing down at her - she knows she’s kidding herself.

Jyn has had more parents in her life than most humans are allotted, and each one of them has left her. She doesn’t want to kill Saw. She doesn’t want to see him ever again, because to see him would be to acknowledge that he had gone in the first place, and left a hole worse than any hunger in his wake.

Jyn is eighteen and alone. The blaster serves as a shield against any potential contact, and that’s the way she wants it. The itch - the itch is just a reminder of everything else that isn’t there. The hatch in her mind shudders open a little further, and she thinks of her first parents, and the man in white.

The flash of blaster fire.

Two bodies hitting the wet earth of Lah’mu.

One desperate breath, sucked in by all three of them.

Her father gone, and her mother left in the dirt to die while Jyn--

Jyn digs her fingers into the itch until the skin splits and blood wells rusty red under the stubs of her nails. It doesn’t belong to her.

He doesn't get hurt like he used to.

The others joke about how he went into the spy game to save his pretty face, but that’s correlation more than causation. Cassian does what he does because he’s willing to do it. He comes away with less injuries, because whoever has the other side of this damn tether wrapped around their throat isn’t getting hurt as much.

Oh sure, his knuckles still split, breaking through the scar tissue of years. He wakes up with black eyes after a night alone, licks blood from his lower lip, feels a tooth loosen for no reason at one point.

But there are no more blaster burns (he’s better at dodging than he used to be). The hot spray of shrapnel had surprised him on more than one occasion, but there’s been none of that for years.

“Cassian’s a lucky bastard,” one of the newer recruits announces. They’re cooling their heels waiting for a briefing. “Suna got her leg broke bad a month or two ago, we were both in bacta for a full day. Whoever your person is, Andor, you’re lucky she’s not as suicidal as the rest of us.”

Melshi cuffs the kid over the head. “First thing you’ve gotta learn,” he says, “is tact.”

Cassian says nothing, letting his pretty face do the work for him. He’s been told it’s jarring, the sight of his apparently pleasing features arranged in a blank expression, and he’s the sort of man to make use of whatever tools he has at hand.

It’s not unusual for people to find each other in the rebellion, if they didn’t join up together in the first place. Adrenaline runs high when you’re fighting for your life and the soul of the galaxy, and Cassian supposes that emotion teams up with it more often than not. Throw in whatever it is that ties people together through their pain (the Force? He doesn’t have energy to spare for the Force), and it’s probably inevitable that you have people falling in lust, falling in love, etching their life stories into each others’ bodies.

It makes for an inefficient fighting force. Hard to keep focus if you know, intimately, whenever something’s hurt your partner. Hard to fly an X-wing when you’re being literally torn apart because your partner just blew up. Cassian remembers being in the field with Stormtroopers surrounding them and a bacta patch slapped over an ugly gut wound that had blossomed out of nowhere, breathing through the pain as he took each shot.

Ignoring the voice in the back of his head that said if I can fight through this, so can you.

His team, back when he had a proper team, had spent their victorious evening tossing rations and names back and forth, trying to guess who in the rebellion would be reckless enough to get the kind of injury Cassian was suffering from (no one can see him with anyone other than a rebel).

And he - maybe he forms a picture of that person as well. Someone fighting at the same time as him, for the same thing. Man or woman - he can’t even be sure if they’re human or not. Not because his experiences are so widespread, but because he has spent his life devoted to the rebellion and sexual exploration is sort of far down the list of priorities. But he spares a thought for the concept, at least, of sharing his life with someone who wants to see the galaxy free.

Half of those fighters are dead now. Cassian is in the spy game, and his person who used to take wounds consistent with Stormtrooper fire now takes wounds consistent with petty street fighting.

There are people who drop out of the rebellion, unable to take the guilt of risking their partner’s life, whether they’re fighting alongside them or not.

Cassian throws himself into his work.

-

After Corulag, the Stormtroopers are authorised to do their worst. Lucky for Jyn, imagination isn’t something the bastards are bred for, and their superiors prefer to save torture for people who actually mean something. She wants to laugh in their faces when they point rifles at her, like that’s supposed to mean something, but she suspects that might actually get one of them to fire.

Stormtroopers, Jyn has learned, aren’t very good at jokes

What’s the point teeters on the edge of conscious thought. She’s out of friends to break her out, has no money to bribe any of the guards with, and a death sentence under the guise of paying her debt to the galaxy doesn’t exactly give her much to live for. Any stores of hope have long since been drained, and yet she can’t quite drag the thought into the light.

Electricity sizzles through her body as she’s led to her cell, agony lancing up her spine. Another Stormtrooper exercising what pitiful power they have just because they can. Jyn staggers, biting her teeth on a groan as another one shoves her upright again. Sorry escapes the hatch of her mind before she can stop it, a murmured apology to the one other person in the world who has some idea of what she’s feeling right now.

Do the troopers know that kind of pain? If she grabbed one of their rifles and shot them, would another person drop dead? But that kind of thinking only shoves a crowbar into the place she stuffs most of her feelings, threatens to crack it open. Jyn sucks in a lungful of air and slams the hatch shut. The trooper shocks her again, what’s the point dances just out of reach, and she settles on spite as a motivator.

It doesn’t have anything to do with tethers, with souls, with a theoretical person who might draw their last breath alongside her. The galaxy has been trying to kill her since she was a child. Jyn refuses to give it the satisfaction.

-

Cassian hasn’t slept properly in weeks.

It’s not the mission, and it’s not what he did on it. Cassian wouldn’t be able to function if the faces of the dead stop him from sleeping.

It’s the stun prods. Not that he hasn’t experienced them before - he’s in the spy game, and he hasn’t always been This Good - but they’ve always been directed at him.

He’s spent the last few weeks chasing rumours of a planet killer with his body seizing up at random points throughout the day without warning, and he is not happy.

“Organics,” Kay informs him at one point, “are ridiculous.”

Cassian can’t disagree, which might have something to do with why he lends the droid to Melshi for the extraction of this Jyn Erso figure.

He feigns a respectful distance, watching her mouth off to Draven and Mothma. He’s seen what she did to Melshi’s face with a shovel of all things, and doesn’t plan on making the same mistake. His whole body aches at this point, and there’s a strip of raw red around his wrists that he’s doing his best not to look at too closely. After so many months of minimal injuries from his person, it’s unsettling to have experienced so many blows in so short a time period.

He’s doing his best not to think about it too closely. He has a job to do, and the only stranger it involves is this woman before him, flinching at the sound of her own name.

Cassian has had his own fair share of pseudonyms over the years. Even so, he remembers who he is. The bitterness in the back of his throat tastes familiar when Mothma introduces him, when he steps closer but allows himself space to manoeuvre, when he catches the twitch of lips that says Jyn Erso has noticed exactly what he’s doing and approves. In a wry sort of way.

He taps into that, tipping casual curiosity into a certain warmth that has served him better than any torture technique ever has. “When was the last time you were in contact with your father?”

This time, she doesn’t flinch. But he can sense the tension in her as he takes her in, mind quickly categorising every shift and sigh of her body. Just tell me, he thinks, as another wave of exhaustion sweeps through him. We both know I’ll get what I want sooner or later.

They have taken the measure of each other, Cassian and this woman. At least, right up until she hits him with I’ve never had the luxury of political opinions.

He wants to laugh. He father is an Imperial collaborator, and she joined up with Saw’s rebels at some point. She’s politics incarnated in a time when the Empire has created a planet killer, and that bitterness is coating his tongue now, stripping the warmth from his voice.

The luxury is not in having political opinions. The luxury is allowing yourself to run away from them, and it’s only long years of training and desperation that let Cassian keep his mind focussed on the job, ignoring Erso’s jabs and the slow burning disgust roiling in his gut. He has felt this before, although he can’t quite place where.

She gives away more than she thinks she does. Or maybe Cassian’s that good. Either way, he works on his face, on rearranging his features into that old casual blankness as Mothma explains the situation. Waiting for his moment. His hands ache.

“The pilot,” he says finally, when he thinks he’s found it. Disbelief is scrawled over her face, but there’s a grimness to the set of her jaw that says she knows the rebellion wouldn’t have bothered to save her if they didn’t believe utterly in what they’re telling her now. “The one Gerrera has in custody?”

“What about him?”

“He says he was sent by your father.”

It hits her with all the subtlety of a grenade. Cassian slides into the background again, lets Mothma step calmly over the rubble of the mental wall he just brought down.

It’s only later, after talking to Draven and having Erso steal his blaster (she doesn’t mentioned it’s his, but he knows what his own damn blaster looks like), that he thinks to look at his palms.

Red crescents cut into the skin. He doesn’t remember clenching his hands.

Chapter Text

Jyn would like to be able to say they got through the mission without figuring it out.

She would like to be able to say that, because that - that’s easier. She’d clocked the ugly marks around his wrist, the skin only recently stripped away in the shape of shackles, but Cassian Andor is a spy. A good spy, apparently, but even those messed up. It was feasible that he could have gotten captured and escaped recently - the rebellion isn’t Jyn’s business for any longer than it takes to (find her father) finish this mission, so she settles on that perfectly sensible explanation and resolves not to think about it any further.

The collar of his shirt shifts at one point as they thread through Jedha’s markets. The stretch of pink skin there is obviously a trick of the light.

(You won’t kill me. Her mother’s voice squeezes out of the hatch in her mind, breathless and determined. You need him too much.)

Being on Jedha with Casian is like walking a tightrope, and it’s only half because of the barely contained tension on the streets. He takes her shoulder to draw her away from the Guardians, the man who had known about her necklace, and she watches him absently roll his own. One misstep, and they’re both falling down.

(Oh, Lyra. You always were naive.)

Her father is alive. After all these years not knowing, of hoping he had died that day on Lah’mu - and that was a morbid thing to wish for, but Jyn was of the opinion that it was better to have a dead father than one who abandoned you.

Better, maybe, to be killed by the same shot that murdered your wife than to live knowing it had only taken her. But Jyn is on a mission, and there’s no time for any of this bantha dung. She focuses on the job, and when the fighting breaks out, throws her whole body into that. Muscles strain, sweat beading in the small of her back and Cassian--

Well, he’s a man who cares about the job, and he still needs her to get to Saw. She trusts him to have her back at least until that point.

Later, she’ll think that she should have figured it out then. It’s sloppy work, throwing yourself into a firefight and not keeping track of your hurts, of where they’re coming from. But she hadn’t felt the need to whirl on blows that didn’t quite seem to be directed at her, confident for some reason that Cassian was taking care of them.

-

Cassian would like to be able to say they got through the mission without figuring it out.

They don’t have time for this. The Empire is building a weapon capable of destroying planets, and while Cassian’s ego isn’t big enough to think he’s the only one capable of stopping that, he’s sure as kriff the person best positioned to find out how it can be stopped. Distractions on a mission like this are unacceptable, and what happens in Jedha City is the definition of a distraction.

Once, when he was very young, Cassian had wondered how he might meet the person he was supposed to spend his life with.It had been on the back of throwing up even though he hadn’t eaten anything bad, and he hadn’t been feeling exactly charitable towards whoever this phantom person was. But the fairytale - the idea of knowing there was something in the galaxy to love you, that there was at least one person out there who would definitely have your back - had appealed to him.

And so he had imagined the sort of ridiculous meeting a child raised in happier times might come up with. There were probably roses, and he had been wearing a direct replica of his father’s best suit.

There definitely hadn’t been any robots involved.

Reality, though, bears little relation to childhood fantasies these days. And the world seems to delight in throwing these little speed bumps into Cassian’s path just when he’s moving too fast to stop for them. He’s in the middle of working through some surprised admiration at Jyn’s ability in combat when they walk straight into a patrol.

All thoughts of Jyn, admiring or otherwise, are dropped in favour of figuring out how they're going to get out of this mess.

Right up until K2 smacks him in the face.

The gasp, he thinks through a ringing head, seems a little out of character for a woman who professes not to care about anyone or anything. But Cassian didn't become a spy without the ability to focus on things through pain, and the pause from the troopers strikes him as odd.

The pause from Kay, whose mannerisms he knows as well as his own strikes him as even odder.

“You must be joking,” Jyn whispers, and from the corner of his eye he sees hers, wide and green and endless above a bright red mark on her cheek.

World shaking information is nothing new for Cassian Andor. He allows himself one half-second to stare at her, bewildered, before he folds this new knowledge up and tucks it into the back of his mind for later analysis.

Jyn Erso gets hurt when he does.

That's fine. He can work around that. Nothing will change, so long as they live through the next ten minutes.

He has a mission.

-

It's just like Saw Gerrera to interrupt a moment like this.

Which is not to say that Jyn is having any moments. She is in favour, in facts, of having no moments whatsoever. If she could suspend time and just wander off to exist on her own, in a world without pain or the Force or Cassian Andor, that would suit her just fine.

But the fact remains. If Jyn had ever wanted to see Saw again, it turns out all she had to do is find her supposed soulmate. Sure enough, there are his goons, barging into her personal life like they have any right to be there.

(Getting involved in the middle of a firefight between them and the Empire, admittedly, might have something to do with the situation. A thought tickles the back of Jyn’s mind, a vague memory of a shot being fired behind her, a scream and an explosion. She tells herself it's nothing, because that's what most things in her life boil down to).

In another world, she is one of the goons. In another world, she storms in to face Saw on a cloud of righteous fury, secure in the knowledge that no matter how much she yells at him over not letting her handle her own life, he will have her back.

In another world, Saw isn’t there at all. Jyn has never been to Jedha, her mother lives as well as her father, and Cassian--

She’s brought in to face the man who raised her more than anyone else had a chance to, and isn’t sure that she finds him. The paranoid shell of a person shuffling towards her resembles Saw, but it’s like seeing his reflection in a pond. A pale, wispy imitation that will be snatched away by the next ripple.

The funny is, he’s the one who casts the stone. “You care not about the cause?”

There’s a lot on Jyn’s mind right now. Her abundance of fathers. The ache in her body, the way her cheek throbs, the startled, panicked look that had existed on Cassian’s face for a split second before blank professionalism had swept it away.

“The cause?” she says. “Seriously?”

“You were the best soldier in my cadre,” Saw accuses. “Not because of your skill, but because you believed. Because you knew our enemy like I did. Because you were willing to die for our cause and our army.”

There is a cavern in Jyn’s chest where words like that would have lit a flame, once. It’s the first thing Saw has said since she was dragged before him that actually sounds like Saw, but the match clatters dead in her heart. That fire has long since been extinguished by people like him. People who care more for the cause than for her.

Jyn gets what she came for out of Saw Gerrera. She does not find what she needs.

-

There is no question that Cassian is going to make sure Jyn Erso gets off this planet alive.

The strange part, he thinks later when they’re alive and he is a monster, is that he has the thought before it occurs to him that he may very well die if she does. The order of operations goes sort of like this.

The planet killer is real.

I have to tell the Alliance.

I have to get Jyn out of here.

That’s definitely not a good sound.

Getting out of here might be easier said than done.

I have to get Jyn out of here.

...If we’re sharing pain, we’re probably sharing death as well.

The word soul flits through his brain and is banished before any other kind of word might chase after it.

A chasm yawns open in front of him as he clatters into the room Jyn was taken to, and it takes a moment to realise it's just a metaphor. The ground is heaving - the whole world is heaving - but it hasn't dropped out from under him.

It only feels like it has.

-

Someone is shaking her.

Someone is shaking her and her hands are shaking and her father is alive--

My father is a traitor. My father loves me.

And what a thing she is to love. Her breath comes short and sharp in her chest, knifing into ribs, enough to make her gasp. She's bent over herself and if the pain is phantom or real it doesn't matter, because it hurts, she hurts--

Cassian Andor’s voice rasps in her ear, I know where your father is, and Jyn remembers how to survive.

-

They run.

They run, and her breath burns in his chest.

-

Cassian is told his orders still stand

He’s faced difficult decisions before. He knows how to compartmentalise and make the hard call, because someone has to. The blood on Cassian’s hands protects the Rebellion two-fold - once from the Empire, and again from having to send someone else to do this job.

You find ways to sleep at night. You find ways to keep going. And it doesn’t involve thinking about an after, of finding the person who wears your wounds on their body and making a life together, because chances are that you’re going to die and take them with you before you ever have a chance to meet.

So his trembling hands make no sense, when he finds himself soaking wet and freezing with his scope zeroed in on his mark. He’s been dubious before, been terrified before, but they’re all emotions he’s managed to shut off from his hands. The work gets done, and they do the work, and he accepts the toll as the price of revolution.

But they ache now in a way he doesn’t understand, exhaustion dragging at his bones. You know Jyn--

He cuts that thought off as unhelpful, and focusses on Galen Erso. If Jyn is to be believed (and she is, he knows it in bones that have never been hurt on either of their behalf) then the man in his scope also knows what it’s like to have blood on his hands in the name of a cause.

Cassian wonders if Erso knows what happened on Jedha.

He doesn’t wonder what a failure like that might do to a man. He doesn’t need to.

And then all hell breaks loose, and there’s no time for wondering at all.

-

Jyn has never felt so tired in her entire life.

Not even that time she and the idiot she’d spent her life connected to had gotten shot at the same time, which suddenly makes a lot more sense than it ever has before because that idiot--

“You lied to me.”

Jyn has been close to death before. She’s heard the footsteps echoing down the cavern in her mind, creaking open the trapdoor, but she’s never heard her own voice embody it like this. Her chest feels like something important has been carved out of it, leaving her breathless and awful and still clawing her way through life despite all of it.

Her entire body had been lit with hope for all of ten seconds, seeing her father alive and real and arguably not the most evil man on the platform. But the sound of Alliance fire rings in her ears, and her mouth tastes of ash.

It hurts. And if there’s any higher power in this shithole of a galaxy that ties the wrong people together, she hopes Cassian can feel every aching bit of her.

Chapter Text

Jyn waits for anger to fade to apathy, and isn’t entirely sure what to do with herself when it doesn’t.

Cassian remains on his own for the remainder of the trip to Yavin IV, but his voice echoes in her skull anyway, some of us just decided to do something about it playing over and over again.

The bitter husk of a girl that has made up most of her thoughts the past few years only has an eyeroll for that, a yes, and the thing you decided to do was try to kill my father, except she’s riddled with scars that know that isn’t true. Her body remembers battles fought together and apart, no matter how much her mind tries to insist that they don’t have time for this, that he isn’t to be trusted, that she doesn’t care.

It remembers the heat of him, even through the rain-chill. It remembers the surge of rage and despair, and the way he’d met her gaze unflinchingly once he’d made the decision to look at her at all. Jyn grits her teeth, clenching her fist, releasing. It twinges the strain in her hand from hauling herself up the ladder, and she spitefully considers doing it a little bit harder.

There’s something burning in her chest. My father is dead. My father loves me, and if it’s Saw or Galen she’s thinking about, it doesn’t seem to matter much anymore. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the follow up thought was nothing does, but instead she thinks

what they died for matters.

What Jedha died for matters.

(She wonders how many fathers she’s killed over the years. Wonders why it was Alliance fire that killed Galen Erso, and not a sniper shot to the head. Thinks about two children who once had no scars at all, and wonders if what they died for matters as well).

-

Death is less of a shadow stalking Cassian’s back than a constant companion, its arms wrapped warmly around his shoulders. He carries it with him, and doesn’t fear it.

Asking other men to follow him into a suicide mission is the most terrifying thing he’s ever done, even if they have the same relationship with death that he does. That’s theirs to manage, and he feels like a thief to steal into the middle of it and take away their choices.

They could say no, he thinks, but they couldn’t. He wouldn’t, faced with the same decision.

His hands ache.There’s a rising tension in his limbs, a clench to his jaw that says Jyn’s meeting with the council is going about as well as he’d predicted. A week ago, he might have been surprised at her passion, her fervour, but he’s seen the fire in her gut now. He thinks it might have been there all along, buried under the weight of an empire and a rebellion. He thinks he might have been blind.

“Welcome home,” he says to Jyn when she storms out of the meeting set to burn that weight to ash.

She bares her teeth at him, and it’s a smile.

-

There’s no forgiveness for Cassian from her, because there is no blame.

Maybe there is in another life. Maybe there’s a Jyn out there who finally buckled, who lay down and let hatred chew up what was left of her (and she doesn’t blame that girl, but she’s so fucking glad not to be her). Maybe if there was more time to dwell on what happened or what might have been, she would have turned her back on him. Scars be damned.

But there’s a planet killer to take down. A galaxy to save, and Cassian is here in the shuttle with her, not standing by Draven’s side. Jyn thinks of all the triggers she pulled on Saw’s behalf, thinks of the kind of devotion you can wring out of a child-soldier, thinks that the people with her now matter more than any of the people who left before, and there’s too much to do to linger on this anyway.

She looks him dead in the eyes, closer than she’s let anyone she’s not about to headbutt in years.

He doesn’t look away. And her body is a collection of his aches and her pains and a warmth that is almost comforting, under all of the adrenaline.

-

Jyn Erso, it turns out, can give one hell of a speech.

It’s not the most uplifting. Full of ifs not when, ending on the chances are spent. He can feel a lifetime of running in it, of picking up what weapons you can and dropping them when they’re used, of hacking the next day together out of pure will and spare parts.

It’s what men like this need to hear. Rebellions are built on hope, and he will carry those words to his grave if he’s lucky enough to get one, but hope is found in dark places sometimes.

He rubs his thumb over the palm of his hand. Typical of him, and maybe typical of her, to have found something else there as well.

“Make ten men feel like a hundred,” he tells Rogue One, because sometimes pointing out the impossible odds is all the impetus someone needs to pull them off.

-

She feels his heart break when Kay dies.

(And it’s a droid, a droid that’s been a pain in her ass since it first threw her on the ground, but she still thinks of Kay dying, still feels that one-two punch of breathless disbelief belonging entirely to her as the door seals them in, away from the droid’s body)

It’s enough to incapacitate, but Jyn remembers Cassian’s hands on her shoulders as Jedha fell around them, as a storm-drenched platform gave way under Alliance fire. She drags his attention bodily back to the task at hand, swallows down her own twinge of loss when they come across Stardust, and if there’s a screaming thing of agony rattling at the hatch in the back of her mind, they’ll deal with it later.

Her body aches. Exhaustion is creeping up on both of them, and jumping across an open chasm to grab at something that was definitely not constructed to be climbed on isn’t helping matters. Jyn doesn’t play with regret because she thinks she might die if she does, but she’s starting to reconsider hand clenching as a means of petty vengeance on the man who shares her pain. They both buckle under the effort of holding themselves in place, but--

But they hold.

They both do, and a giddy disbelief bubbles up in Jyn’s chest as she clips the plans to her belt, as that spark of hope that has been battling a hurricane of misery and despair suddenly bursts into flame.

It stands to reason that that’s when the man in white shows up.

-

For one glorious, heart-breaking second, Cassian sees the end.

They have the plans. They can get them to the Alliance. The Death Star will be destroyed, the Empire laid waste with the destruction of a weapon that must have cost trillions of credits and a lifetime to build. And Rogue One - what remains of their impossible team - will escape.

Jyn will escape.

And then he’s being shot at and he can’t see anything except for the next handhold, and out of the corner of his eye, the most ostentatious Imperial officer he’s ever had the misfortune to catch sight of.

Focussing on not falling to his death definitely seems like the best option. Not least because he knows who he kills now when he dies, and Cassian has never had such a drive to live in the two decades since the Empire took everything from him.

The burn of blaster fire doesn’t even hurt that much, in the end. He clings on through the shock, but there’s a weakness in his grip now. He tries, he tries, and that’s always been enough before now. He needs it to be enough now.

The last thing he hears before pain swallows him whole is the shriek of his own name, torn out of Jyn like a piece of herself.

I’m sorry, he thinks, and does his very best not to die.

-

She doesn’t let go when he does. She has just enough time to register that it’s happened, to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she won’t be able to climb through his landing. Instinct has her loosen her grip and drop as far and as fast as she can before the snap of her bones and his chases the last echo of his name from the air, and Jyn falls.

-

They have hurt before.

They have nearly died before, both of them. Of injury, of starvation, of despair. They have known pain, been forced to the ground from the weight of it, and pushed back against it every time.

Even if it’s just one foot, moving. One hand, scrabbling at the floor for leverage. One knee, braced, as agony screams through them and gravity does its best to keep them down, but they rise anyway because they have a mission to carry out and it’s not done yet.

-

Except it’s not one this time. Cassian’s arm drapes over Jyn’s shoulder and hers curls around his waist and it hurts, it hurts, neither one of them are going to climb anything again, but they don’t need to for this.

They just need to move forward.

Chapter Text

Hoth is cold.

Water is wet and Alliance regulations say that people aren't supposed to share bunks, but they’re a rebellion, not an army. And Hoth is really kriffing cold.

Jyn aches. The various rods and pins holding her skeleton together are supposed to be biologically inert, but she's pretty sure they’re freezing her from the inside out. There’s a chill in her chest that she can’t seem to shake.

So if she buries herself into Cassian’s blanket and wraps herself up in Cassian’s body, she doesn’t think that anyone can blame her. If they try, she’s perfectly content to tell them where to shove it.

“Your nose is freezing,” he mutters, when she tucks her face into the back of his neck.

“I mean, I can go if you’d rather.”

It’s an empty threat, but Jyn hisses as he turns in the blankets and a wisp of cold air sneaks in between them. His fingers, somehow, are warm as they cup her cheek, thumb sliding over the point of her nose. She wrinkles it, but otherwise doesn’t move.

“Stay,” is all he says.

Jyn rolls her eyes, and does.

-

Bodhi likes to remind him that he and Jyn are technically cyborgs now, but the truth is that Cassian has never felt more like a human being. Not just alive, but with something more to live for than a single minded drive to serve the Rebellion.

(Jyn likes to remind Bodhi that being technically a cyborg means she hits a lot harder now. Somewhere in the galaxy, there’s a stranger with a very sore shoulder that is to be pitied).

It’s a little surreal, at times. That they not only succeeded, but survived. Months later, they both still have nightmares, although Jyn tends to focus more on Krennic, while Cassian lingers on the fall that nearly killed them both, the long and arduous effort to beam the plans to the Rebellion.

Sometimes, Krennic brings reinforcements when he comes to make sure they’re dead. Sometimes Jyn misses her shot. Sometimes they succeed in killing Krennic and die anyway, the pain overwhelming them in the elevator, bodies failing before they can get to the satellite.

Sometimes they do all of that, and Bodhi never comes. They die together, holding each other, and it’s a good death, better than a thousand other options either of them have been given over the years, and he still wakes up sweaty and shaking because they lived.

They lived, and Cassian knows what it is to want to live now. Death in service to the Rebellion was once the final gift he could have given the galaxy, but he finds himself thinking that the galaxy really owes them both a break at this point.

-

They share memories where they’ve only shared hurts before. Trace the paths of a hundred scars on their skin and deeper - I got this one from a Stormtrooper, this is from when I broke my arm before the Empire, I was left and abandoned and I survived anyway.

I made it to you.

It’s not the only thing that matters in the end. They’re too pragmatic for that, to think that finding each other is the pinnacle of their life’s achievements.

But it does matter.

That’s enough.