As requested by guest reviewer LolWhaddup on my Captain America story, here is "a little RebelCaptain fic."
The Gift of Hope
The air was laden with tension; the interior of the stolen spacecraft damn near crackled with it as the thrumming engines propelled the ship through hyperspace. The three men tried their best to ignore it. Bodhi Rook fixed his gaze on the floor, his introspective, far-seeing eyes roving over the deck plates as he searched the battered remnants of his memory for elusive nuggets of knowledge. Grizzled veteran Baze Malbus focused on polishing his heavy repeater cannon. Every few seconds, he blew grains of dust out from between the gun's parts and grumbled that he'd had a quiet life before the Rebellion had come to Jedha. Slender Chirrut Îmwe, meanwhile, sat tall and straight, his blind eyes staring beyond the ship's bulkhead at something only he could see.
Seated opposite Chirrut, Jyn didn't ignore the tension in the air. She drank it in with every breath she took. Pulled it into herself and made it a part of her. She filled her mind with anger, because the only other option was sadness. She had learnt long ago that anger was the only emotion worth nurturing. The only one that didn't get you captured, or killed, or betrayed.
Her hands tightened to fists, nails cutting into her palms, and she welcomed the pain, too. Betrayed. For one brief moment, she had allowed herself to be weak. To have hope that Cassian Andor and his Rebel Alliance could rescue her father from the clutches of the Empire. In that moment of weakness, they had struck. The Rebels didn't care about rescuing her father; they'd sent Cassian to kill him. They'd used her to get to him.
She had held and lost her father in the space of a few heartbeats, and now it felt like her heart might never beat again. In the end, the Rebels had got their way. Their bombs had killed Galen Erso, and the memory of his broken, twisted body brought the ghosts of unshed tears to her eyes. Weakness. She could not allow herself to cry. Not now. Not again. Instead, she nursed hatred. It was easier. Safer.
"It is not healthy to shroud yourself in anger," Chirrut spoke up. His unseeing eyes were trained on Jyn's face, his voice infuriatingly calm.
"I've found anger useful for staying alive," she countered. "For staying strong."
"And alone."
His words plunged like a knife into her chest. Alone. All her life, she had been alone, even when Saw Gerrera had still been around. But… alone was best. Being alone hurt, but not as much as being betrayed, as she'd thought her father had betrayed the galaxy, as Cassian had betrayed her. Being alone hurt, but not as much as having everything taken from you, as her family had been taken when she'd been just a child, as her friends had been taken when Saw abandoned her without warning or explanation. Alone. It was for the best.
"We all make mistakes," Chirrut continued. "What defines us is not which mistakes we make, but how we atone for them, and whether we can forgive others when we cannot forgive ourselves."
She swallowed the lump in her throat and tried to drink in a little more of the anger. "Captain Andor came to Eadu for one reason, and one reason alone: to kill my father."
"But he didn't."
Jyn pushed herself to her feet, fingers twitching again into fists. "That doesn't matter! He lied to me. He looked me straight in the eyes, and he lied."
"Hrmph," Baze grunted. "Arguing with Chirrut will get you nothing but a headache, Jyn. I've learnt that from experience."
"And still you argue with me at every chance you get," the blind man smiled.
"Sometimes the headache is worth it."
Bodhi cleared his throat and brought his brown eyes up to Jyn's gaze. "I know you probably don't care about my opinion, but I don't think Captain Andor wanted to kill your father."
"You don't understand, Bodhi," Jyn insisted. "If he lied to me—to us—about this, what else has he lied about?"
"There is only one way to find out," said Chirrut.
"You're right." She sighed deeply. "We'll have to torture him until he confesses everything."
Bodhi's eyes widened with shock, and Baze grinned at the suggestion. Chirrut merely shook his head, and Jyn could almost hear him mentally schooling himself to patience.
"Perhaps you should first try earning his trust."
"Earn his trust," she scoffed quietly. The man barely trusted her to carry a blaster pistol. Besides, Chirrut had it backwards. Cassian was the one who needed to earn her trust, after what he had done. She'd offered him a sliver of trust, and he had exploited it. Whispered lies in her ears whilst behind his back he prepared the knife.
"Stay angry, if you wish," Chirrut said. "But ask yourself: is this what your father would have wanted for you?"
The ghosts of tears haunted her eyes once more at the thought of her father. He'd risked everything, everything, to give the Rebels a chance to fight back. Stardust, she heard him say in her mind, take this chance. Use it. Give my death meaning. Don't let me be known as the man who destroyed freedom and hope.
She bit her lip, not hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to push back the ghostly tears before they could materialise into something real. The Rebels had dragged her into this venture, but now that she was here, she had to see it through. Her father was not the traitor she'd thought him. She had to exonerate him. To show the galaxy that the name Erso was not synonymous with traitor and collaborator and criminal. For that, she would need Cassian's help.
As if sensing her changing thoughts, Chirrut nodded imperceptibly.
"Perhaps you could ask K-2SO to come and speak with me," he said. "There are questions I would ask him about his time as an Imperial droid."
One corner of her lips tugged up into the beginnings of a smile. In Chirrut, she saw her father's mild-mannered wisdom. And in Bodhi was her father's good-natured absent-mindedness; in Baze, his protective instinct. For a brief moment, it felt… it felt as if she was finally home.
"We are all one with the Force," Chirrut said.
Jyn turned and hurried down the walkway to the cockpit. At times, the blind man displayed such an uncanny ability to discern her thoughts that it brought the chill of gooseflesh to her skin. Not for the first time, she wondered whether he was more than be claimed to be.
When she reached the cockpit, K-2SO turned his mechanical head to observe her. Cassian thoroughly ignored her.
"Chirrut would like to speak with you, K-2," she told the droid.
"Very well." He pushed himself out of the co-pilot's chair. "Please don't touch any of the controls whilst I'm gone; I don't trust you not to crash us into an astronomical body or scatter the ship into a million tiny pieces across several solar systems."
"You have my word I'll touch nothing."
When the droid left, grumbling to himself about the inefficiency of organic beings, Jyn took the empty chair and fixed her gaze on the window. The light of hyperspace flooded the cockpit, flashes of blue and green and purple, and colours so nuanced that she didn't have names for them. It was beautiful, in its own way. A dance of light that lasted only as long as the journey. A brief foray into a foreign realm where the laws of physics were entirely different to normal space. Her first memory of the dancing light had been when Saw Gerrera took her away from Lah'mu. She'd watched the dance and wondered whether her father was seeing the same act of celestial beauty.
From the corner of her eye, she studied Cassian Andor. The man's hands rested on the navicomputer controls in front of him, his fingers dancing up and down as he brought up sensor readings and made minute course corrections to account for gravitational flux within normal space. His deep brown eyes very pointedly didn't stray even once from his work, and the flat line of his lips told Jyn he was still smarting from their heated exchange.
She had known angry men all her life. Saw Gerrera had been prone to fits of angry paranoia, and his deep hatred of the Empire was fuel for his single-minded crusade. Later, after Saw abandoned her, she had run with smugglers and thieves, men who were angry about the stark divide between the have-alls and the have-nothings. Men who were determined to shift that balance and generate wealth for themselves through crime and exploitation.
But none of those men had carried with them the suppressed vulnerability that she saw within Cassian. The cold fury in his voice as he'd told her of his own induction into the Rebel Alliance at the age of six, was a stark contrast to the smoldering anger in his eyes.
She had known violent men all her life, but never before had she seen violence so carefully tempered and restrained, focused and boiling to anger's flashpoint.
Clearing her throat, she said, "Thank you." Cassian's fingers continued to dance over the navicomputer controls. Jyn imagined that he asked, "For what?" "For disobeying your orders. You could have shot him. Should have shot him. But you didn't. Thanks to you, I was able to speak to my father one last time. To hear his voice and see the love and peace in his eyes when he looked at me."
He didn't respond, but she thought she saw his face soften, just a little. The permanent scowl of disapproval was less pronounced; the line of his lips a little less flat.
"Growing up," she continued, turning her face to the window so that the light of hyperspace danced across her vision, "I believed that my father had abandoned me. That he'd betrayed my mother's memory by capitulating to the Empire. I hated him. I wished he was dead. That he wasn't my father. That I didn't share his name, or his blood, or…" She swallowed the lump in her throat. Now that he was dead, her anger seemed so petty. So… childish. "I think not many people know what it's like to live with that anger, to carry it around inside for so long that it becomes a constant companion. To want it, to need it, because it's the only thing that keeps everything else at bay."
She glanced to him again. His fingers weren't dancing over the controls quite so much, now. His usually tightly-clenched jaw was a little more relaxed. In his eyes, she saw the same struggle she had lived over and over again. The struggle to keep hold of the anger. To fan its flames and nurture it into a raging inferno. Anger was the easiest emotion to handle. It was raw and pure and uncomplicated. But for the first time in her life, she did not want uncomplicated.
"I know it can't have been easy for you, disobeying your orders like that, but I'm grateful that you did. Killing my father… maybe you, maybe the Alliance, thought it was necessary, but it was wrong. I've done a lot of wrong things in my life. In fact, my life has pretty much been a catalogue of mistakes. But looking for my father after all this time, that wasn't a mistake. And I want to think that trusting you isn't a mistake, either. I realise, now, that you've given me a great gift today. You've given me hope, where before I had nothing but my anger. So… thank you."
Finally, she dragged words out of him. They were gruff, and smacked of reluctance, but it was a start.
"I'm sorry that I lied to you."
He didn't try to offer another explanation or excuse, and Jyn didn't need one. The apology was enough. A tenuous truce.
Some of the tension in the air dissipated. From the rear compartment of the ship, she hard K-2's quiet tirade of complaints as he told Chirrut how challenging it was to perform missions with somebody as temperamental and grouchy as Captain Andor. For the second time that day, a smile tried to steal across her lips. Her father's wisdom could be found in Chirrut, his kindness in Bodhi and his fighting spirit in Baze. She wasn't sure whether Cassian embodied some aspect of her father, but she wanted to find out. To discover whether there was something of home within him, too.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she reached out towards the hand nearest to her, the one perched on the navicomputer controls. Gently, she rested her hand atop his. He was a slight man, with hands only a little larger than Jyn's, but his skin was warm and soft—except where a small scar ran over two of his knuckles. She brushed that scar with her fingers, learning it, accepting it.
He said nothing, but the tense set of his jaw was back. The indecision warring within his eyes told Jyn he wasn't touched with softness often, and that this was as new and terrifying for him as it was for her. After a moment, he turned his hand, letting her palm fall into his so that he could brush his thumb against hers and capture her fingers in a gentle hold. Inside her chest, something stirred, like the wings of a hawk-bat slowly opening after a long, cold hibernation.
Neither of them spoke as the light of hyperspace danced over them, but his soft squeeze of her hand within his grip made a thousand promises. He would show her that trusting him wasn't a mistake, and she could finally stop looking for home.