A/N: Hey, y'all. So I've had this little story in my pocket for a few months now, and I thought RebelCaptain Week was as good an excuse as any to finally get it out there.
To be completely honest, the story is just my outlet for some shameless angst, whump, and shipping of my favorite rebels. It starts a few months after the end of Rogue One, so yes, this is a slight AU since I protected our two lovely rebels from dying (there are some minor details that I tried to keep canon). However, that means there are a few OCs since only Cassian and Jyn survived the Death Star blast on Scarif in this story. Rated T for violence, swearing, and some minor anatomical language (IV's later on, so don't stick around if you can't handle language about veins).
Stay-tuned for whump in literally almost every chapter. Will update regularly.
Jyn loathed the cold. It was something the bit and nipped even if you didn't provoke it. So it was just her shit rotten luck that she ended up freezing her arse off on Hoth with her most recent mission assignment at Echo Base.
She had kind of a love-hate relationship with her new position as sergeant. For one, it had been by the grace of Cassian's smooth-talking that she received her stripes. When they had returned from Scarif, Mon Mothma was ready to honor her end of the bargain and release Jyn back to whatever life on the run she wished to assume—picking an alias like a name out of hat. But Cassian wouldn't hear of it. As far as he was concerned, she, and everyone else who'd aided in the retrieval of the plans, deserved an honorable level-up, even despite having gone rogue. And that's exactly what she got.
Cassian, on the other hand, was offered a position as head operative for a series of missions on some planet Jyn couldn't pronounce. But he'd turned it down in favor of his current ranking as Captain.
Acquisition of her title aside, there was also the manifestation of that title. Smuggling—even when she was a soldier for Saw—was just always something that sounded more enticing than real titles, because now there were expectations and duties. Her only duty, her entire life, had been to herself.
But even still, it felt nice to be needed by something...and someone.
With this newfound responsibility, she was unable to see Cassian as much, even despite being assigned to the same planet after they were moved from Yavin IV. The good Captain had been busy on deployments out onto Hoth to stake out hidden places to anchor transmission dishes. He and his teams were usually flown out to some obscure corner of the ice planet to dig their picks into glaciers looking for pockets of air.
After the stunt they had pulled on Scarif, the Rebels had become less forgiving with insubordination and mutiny. So, naturally, they decided to set up more points of contact all over their base planets to receive transmissions if another fleet was in trouble again.
That way the rebels who rebelled against the rebellion might be rescued and then dealt with, instead of…being left to die.
Jyn swallowed hard. She and Cassian had been the only ones from Rogue One to make it off Scarif once the Death Star had blown it to kingdom come.
Even despite the Death Star being destroyed several weeks back, the Rebel generals still thought it best to punish Jyn and Cassian by setting them to work on remedying the bases in a way that would make what they did impossible. And the destruction of the Death Star was only a small comfort to the guilt that bullied her conscience. Little did they know that Jyn was already pretty damn good at punishing herself.
Every face. Every soul. She had led them to their death, and yet she still stood. Jyn decided she should've died on Scarif. With K2, Bodhi, Baze, Chirrut, with…Force, she didn't even know all of their names!
With a trembling breath, Jyn toggled off the monitor she'd been working on since six in the morning and tipped her head back against her pod in futile effort to stave off whatever headache was trying to encroach on her retinas. While Cassian was off doing active work, Jyn had been assigned to writing new codes for the security systems around Hoth. With her father's engineering genetics, Jyn found she was rather good at programming the rebel systems to firewall them against hacks and infiltrations. But her legs ached to be used. She had always led a life on the run.
Still, she couldn't complain too much. At least she was inside. Jyn shuddered at the thought of being sent out to the swirling land of frost-bite. Even thinking of Cassian out there with only three men made her stomach constrict.
After one sour mission to sector forty-two stranded Cassian and his team out overnight, Jyn had been a little less indulgent with him whenever he was assigned to a new installation site around Hoth. Sometimes, she tried to volunteer for perimeter duty to be the first one to know when he returned, but Rieekan always figured out her motives and had Triko Rhane, her security chief drag her back to her monitor.
Forgoing all formality, Rhane was absolutely terrifying—hair-ram-rod-straight-down-your-neck terrifying. Originally stationed with Outer Rim Oreworks on Lamaredd, he had shoulders the expanded the width of a freighter ship, and knees the size of boulders.
It didn't help that he now was the head sentinel of the weaponry—his favorite being the melee Vibroblade, or as Jyn liked to call it, the glorified talon. Because when he brandished that thing, it really did look like a three-foot claw sharpening his mammoth paws into a blade that was looking more and more like an invitation into the next world. Being dragged back by such a bantha of a man with one of those blades clipped to his waist was almost as terrifying as it felt for Jyn to hear that Cassian's mission had been reported missing in action that one mission a few months ago.
The moment his troop stumbled back through the gates of Echo base, Jyn swore she could've killed him herself for worrying her so much. After spending four nights submerged in a bacta tank to dethaw, Cassian and his troops only had a week of recovery—a week of Jyn, Tavion, General Draven, and a few other privates from their hallway hovering about them like angry maids making sure the troop didn't over work themselves—before they were re-commissioned to a new sector.
Jyn had held onto Cassian a little longer than usual before he left that time. Seeing as how her attempts at stowing away on his next mission were soiled the moment he caught that worried look in her eye, she was forced to settle for his promise to be less reckless.
"Maybe after a bit of Intelligence training," Cassian was a bit smug at his ability to read her so well, "you might be able to paint on a better poker face, hm?"
"Jerk," she rolled her eyes, but her voice betrayed her worry. Cassian had given her a nudge over the shoulder before boarding his vessel out.
She counted the hours, and sometimes the days, to his returns. It was always much easier if he was around.
Nights had been hard for both of them since Scarif. Several times a week, Jyn would be woken up in a cold sweat by a strong pair of arms wrapping around her shaking shoulders and pulling her into a broad chest while her sobs subsided. She would be drenched in sweat and trembling so hard that Cassian would end up holding her firmly against him until she had no more tears left to ruin his shirt.
He would mumble comforting words into her hair, sometimes in his native language, Festian. She never understood what he was saying when he did that, but she almost liked it more. Jyn would cling to him with equal fervor, testing out her lungs.
When she finally convinced herself that she was at Echo Base instead of back on that bloody battlefield, Cassian would slowly unwrap himself from his comrade and shift to the edge of the bed.
It only took one gasp of his name just as he stood up for Jyn to get the captain to come back to her side and stay with her until morning. At first, he would just sit on the side of her bed as if to keep watch. But only several months ago he began laying with her. Jyn would roll back on her bed and scoot against the wall to make room. She would wait until the other edge of the bed depressed with his weight as he settled in next to her before turning her gaze to his.
They never touched. They only held each other's gaze until one of them fell asleep.
When Jyn would wake in the morning, Cassian would usually be gone. And they never mentioned it or acknowledged whatever it was they were doing during operative hours.
This happened every week, at least two to three times while he was on leave from mission duty.
But when Cassian was deployed on one of his missions, Jyn was left to many sleepless nights on her own. She knew she needed sleep—without it, Jyn's immune system made her pay the consequences and she often ended up with a stuffed up nose or searing throat pain and throbbing sinuses. But the alternative was seeing the face of every person she killed on Scarif flash under her lids while she slept, dreaming of their painful deaths.
Jyn pushed away from her desk in the main reception laboratory and stretched her legs. It was only when her stomach churned its emptiness that she realized she hadn't eaten yet.
But on her way to finding sustenance, Jyn caught wind of an exchange that displaced all thoughts of food.
Around the corner from where she stood, General Draven spoke in hushed tones with someone.
"—have been orbiting Hoth at wide range, past the point of our detection, for several hours now."
Jyn skidded to a stop and made herself scarce in the shadows to listen.
"What do you mean, General?" It sounded like the Senator. Jyn had no idea she was even on Hoth. When had she arrived?
"Senator Mothma, we have reason to believe they have been in secret contact with a hidden Empire fleet somewhere on Hoth."
"That's impossible, Draven." It sounded like she was trying to convince herself. "We've been setting up transmissions all over this planet. We would have intercepted loose signals coming too and from our bases."
"That's just it, though, isn't it," he hissed. "One of the men on that mission must be compromised."
Jyn bit the flesh of her cheeks, heart pounding in Mothma's silence, who must have been just as shocked as she was to answer.
"General Draven," she spoke low and dangerously. "Is this why you summoned me here? You realize the severity of the allegations you are making."
"I do not believe them to be allegations, Senator." Draven responded with just as much malice. "One of our satellites picked up a loose signal from the southern border of Hoth's glacier near Echo Station 3-T-8. It was encrypted. I've had a secret commission of men trying to declassify it all night. Who from the rebellion would be trying to hide things from it?" She heard a rustle of fabric. "Someone working for the Empire."
"Why did I not hear about this message as soon as it was received?!"
"If our transmissions are compromised, would you have had me risk the exposure of this knowledge just so you could find out several hours earlier?"
"Have you alerted General Rieekan yet? I do believe he has primary jurisdiction over this base, if I'm not mistaken." The last part had been deliberately staccatoed.
Jyn could almost hear General Draven stiffen. "Aye, ma'am. He does. But I have kept this confidential until I could notify someone I knew to be uncompromised."
The south side of the glacier. Jyn cursed internally. That was where Cassian's mission was. But who in God's name was betraying the Rebel Alliance?
She heard Mothma sigh. "We'll have to close the gates and seal every entrance until we know who the mutineer is. No one in or out of Echo until this is sorted."
"And deployed mission Alpha-G74, ma'am?"
Alpha-G74—Cassian.
"If a-G74 is believed to be compromised, I'm afraid there is nothing we can do. Unless the man himself steps forward, re-entry to the base for that mission is denied."
Jyn's heart spiked. Night was drawing near. And there would be no retrieval by the base. Exposure to the elements over night was as good as a notarized death sentence.
"We'll bolster the deflector shield and load the v-150 ion cannons in the event of an attack. But there is to be no retrieval."
'Like hell,' Jyn thought fiercely.
She quickly disappeared down the far corridor toward the hangar just as Draven and Mothma were making their way toward Echo's headquarters.
Her legs were milling at a steady rate for several minutes as she made her way to the decommissioned fighter jets they kept under lax security. That was, until the alarm system began to blare throughout the base. Red light bled over the corridors, and fire doors and barricades all began to slowly rotate on grumpy hinges as they creak closed.
Shit!
She pushed herself to a sprint that she knew she would not be able to maintain and launched herself under the last door just before it could sever her leg.
Hangar seventeen.
Echo hadn't seen organized combat in the few months of its operation, but it meant the old jets they'd stationed here just in case had gathered ice in their jams and fallen out of use. They were unreliable and potentially had been stripped of their batteries and engines to serve as parts for the other cargo ships being used. But it was Jyn's only hope of leaving the base to find Cassian and his team.
Not to mention, the frigid temperatures of the planet made speeders and X-Wings the only viable form of travel. So the chances of her larger ship stalling out was more a life-gamble than anything else. But if there was a hidden fleet out there, then by hell, they would need fire power.
Jyn steeled herself as she lithely swung into the least dilapidated ship. She'd be damned if she let another member of Rogue One die again on her watch. Not if she could help it.
Because if Cassian died, she'd finally have no more reason not to follow the rest of Rogue One.
Reviews satiate me. Strongly consider leaving one :)