Jyn Erso drifted back to consciousness gradually. Her eyes hurt, like they were filled with gritty sand. In fact, it seemed like they were filled with gritty sand. Her throat was dry, her mouth tasted like… a Hutt's armpit. Or at least like she imagined a Hutt's armpit might. If she was the sort of person to imagine the taste of a Hutt's armpit. Which up till now she hadn't been. Weird!

Her first external sensations were smells, rather than visuals. An acrid burning smell, overlaid with something vaguely sulphurous, with an undertone of… really rank, stale sweat. The next sensation was tactile – something solid and… muscular underneath her. Then aural – the rhythmic thub-dub of a heartbeat. That was a relief. She wasn't lying on a dead body.

Cautiously she opened her eyes, blinking to clear the tears and sand away. There was a grey half-light enveloping the scene. As far as the eye could see, there was a kind of glassy, fused surface, the sort of thing you'd expect at ground zero of a prehistoric nuclear blast. Except for the immediate vicinity. She… they… were lying on a perfectly circular patch of sand, about 3 metres across. She glanced down. The body she was lying on was unmistakably that of Captain Andor.

As if reacting to a cue from some external force, Captain Andor chose this moment to open his eyes. He too blinked blearily, then turned his head to one side. He squinted at the scene around them. Jyn stared at his profile. Funny how she'd never noticed how gorgeous his stubbled jaw was before now. Then she gave her head a shake. What a bizarre thought to pop into her head about her comrade-in-arms. Where had that come from?

"Shouldn't we be dead?" Cassian's voice was husky. Strangely sexy. Or, she rapidly corrected herself, maybe he too was simply suffering from the "Hutt armpit" problem.

"We should be, but we're not."

"How can that possibly be?" Cassian paused, assessing the scene. "It's almost as if we were protected by some sort of force field… a kind of force bubble. Centred on..." He looked around as if taking cross-bearings, then his gaze shifted to the exact centre of the circle of still-granular sand, to… Hie eyes fastened on Jyn's hand, clutching the Kyber crystal which hung round her neck.

Jyn followed his gaze. She managed to croak, "Not a force field, a Force field..."

"Has your crystal ever done anything like this before? I mean, can kyber crystals do that sort of thing?"

"No… but then it hasn't been exposed to the blast from a potentially planet-destroying death ray before."

"What do you think the odds on that are?" Cassian asked. Then he frowned. He sounded slightly choked up as he continued, "Kay Two would have been able to tell us."

"We must be just about the luckiest people in the galaxy."

Cassian went silent for a while. The frown deepened. He was good at frowning, Jyn thought to herself. Frowning and looking brooding. Finally he spoke.

"One might almost think there was some sort of higher purpose behind us surviving..."

"Some sort of fate, or karma – the sort of thing Chirrût might have talked about?"

"No, not exactly." Cassian's lips drew together in a grim expression. "More some sort of convenient external factor, some sense that someone wants to use us for some sort of purpose."

"Not… the Empire?" Jyn gasped.

"No, something even more scary. Something who can get inside your very soul, twist your being into acts you never thought you were capable of, send you down paths that every fibre of your being rebels against."

"You mean..." Jyn suddenly had an inkling of what he might be talking about. The way she'd suddenly noticed him as sexy, after huge periods of time spent simply as his comrade-in-arms, the way her kyber crystal had turned into a convenient deus ex machina, the way they'd survived certain death. The pieces were beginning to drop into place.

Cassian's brown eyes regarded her levelly. She sensed that he could tell she knew where he was going with this. Oh god, add that to the list – suddenly she was telepathic and could do the whole "he knew that she knew that he thought that she sensed that he felt that..." thing.

"I think the only explanation is that we're in a fix-it fic. And the author may be capable of doing anything – anything that takes her whim – to us."