The first time Jyn senses her soulmate, she feels a stabbing pain on the top of her hand right before it begins to bleed. She's five, and she runs screaming to her mother. Lyra can't hide a slight smile as she bandages up the wounded finger, and then she sits with Jyn on her bed with her toys scattered around them, and she explains soulmates.
This is a world of the Force, magic, and witches. Sometimes strange things happen, and Lyra explains that the strangest of them all is the determination of one person perfect for another. Two souls longing for each other since the first moment of existence.
When Jyn gets hurt, her soulmate will feel her pain and a mark will show on his or her body. When the soulmate is wounded, Jyn will bleed. This is how it's always been, and this is how it is for Lyra and Galen. Even now, Lyra says with a wry smile, they're both feeling the sting of Galen's wounds from tending the crops. Her mother shows her the shallow cuts on her fingers, yet unbandaged. Jyn traces them gently.
Jyn looks down at her hand and wonders how her soulmate cut it so neatly.
Jyn trips over nothing a week later and can't stand up when her father glances down in concern. Her soulmate has sprained his or her ankle and left Jyn hobbling for a week. Suddenly she's not nearly as enamored with the idea of this soulmate anymore.
Her soulmate is far too prone to getting injuries, and she doesn't like that—too much pain.
She watches her mother die. She runs when her father screams at her to go. She cries in the hole in the ground.
As she waits for Saw to find her, Jyn wonders if soulmates feel when the other cries. When their entire world has been flipped upside down, shot through the chest, and left to lie in the dirt.
She almost hopes so. Because that means all the times she cried and didn't know why, all the times when her heart ached – that must have been her soulmate. He or she can feel, feel deeply. They're not like the man who just heartlessly broke her family apart.
And what's the point of knowing someone's physical pain if you can't understand what they really feel?
Jyn breaks her arm soon into her time with Saw. She doesn't think about how her soulmate has also lost motility in his or her left arm and it still aches, long after Saw's medic says that it's healed.
What's the point? Soulmates are hope, and she's lost that.
Saw abandons her, and she's sleeping in a jail cell on some planet whose name she can't remember. She wakes up to a burning hole in her shoulder.
She doesn't scream, but she does bite down on her scrappy pillow and let tears stream from her eyes until the agonizing burning stops in a wave of coolness when the med droid brings in a bacta patch. Then she wraps it up and makes herself forget about it.
Kestrel Dawn doesn't have a soulmate.
She breaks her leg during an insurrection on the next planet. She didn't mean to get involved, she doesn't know how she got involved at all, and now she's lying in an alley in a city she can't pronounce waiting to be captured or finished off. She doesn't care anymore.
The leg doesn't heal quite right, the healing process leaving a lump on her leg, and she limps through the halls of the next Imperial jail. That's okay. Lianna Hallik limps and her leg aches when it rains, even though she's only nineteen. There's no reason she would need to run.
There's no such thing as hope anymore.
She's rescued, and suddenly there's a little bit of a light.
Captain Cassian Andor rescued her for the Rebellion, and his best friend is a reprogrammed Imperial droid, and she hates both of them. She doesn't trust them, and she doesn't know how to trust people anymore, not really.
They take her to the Rebels, and the woman in white explains their mission. Find Jyn's father, and bring him back to the Rebellion. Memories flood her mind – growing up with her parents always beside her, her father in the fields, her mother playing with her, both of them teaching her about life and love and soulmates and pain and death.
Hope embraces her light-forsaken heart.
The three of them fly to Jedha, to find Saw. The man who abandoned her when she was sixteen. But she'll work with Cassian and K-2SO, if it means she can find her father. Nothing else matters, all of a sudden, when before nothing mattered except how to survive the next day and the next and escape the next jail cell and keep running and running.
Saw Gerrara is maintaining his own rebellion against the Empire in this tiny city, and Jyn and Cassian run throughout the shots, weaving through the messy crowds of insurgents and Stormtroopers. The blind man speaks to her, but Cassian pulls her away before he can tell her what she so desperately wants to know. They end up in a fight, because they seem to be those kinds of people.
A shot brushes past Jyn, just a little too close, and as she glances down at the scorch of Imperial weaponry, she sees Cassian grasp absentmindedly at the same place on his arm. He shakes it off quickly and continues shooting; Jyn sees no tear in his jacket.
Coincidence. It has to be.
A grenade goes off too close to Cassian, and Jyn feels the right side of her body burn even though she's clear across the town square. Cassian curses and examines his right side for fire or holes. Shavit. Her soulmate is—
She can't think about it now, because the blind man and his bearded friend are slaughtering Stormtroopers left and right until they're completely gone. It does look awesome until the four of them are captured, Cassian taken with the other two men, and Jyn is taken to Saw.
The past six years seem to disappear when she sees him. He shows her the hologram of her father, and she can't stop the tears of memories from racing down her cheeks. Her father tells her of how he's betrayed the Empire, and she remembers every word he says.
The city is destroyed with the power of stars, and the man she once loved like a father is murdered by the Empire. She and Cassian and Baze and Chirrut and the Imperial defector pilot escape.
Bodhi flies them to Eadu. Cassian leaves the little ship to explore, to find Galen and bring him back. But she felt the deception in his heart before he left the ship.
He's not going to find her father, he lied, he's going to kill him, and Jyn has no choice. She climbs up to the landing, wondering if Cassian is feeling the bite of hard rock as she climbs. When she gets to the top, she gazes at her father, alive again.
He's wearing an Imperial suit and standing among Imperials, but he laughs and it's like she remembers and when his friends are murdered, she can't stop herself from screaming for him.
Her father is dead. Her father is dead and her soulmate had tried to kill him.
Her only comfort is the depression and confusion written across Cassian Andor's face and beating in his heart.
He tells her that everyone has lost someone, his voice harsh and condemning. Then she understands the indescribable pain over the years. The agony that wasn't just her own. That pain she felt in the middle of the night, when she woke up with tears streaming down her face even though she had gone to sleep with a smile.
Her anger at him still pours through her, but suddenly she feels a flash of nothing but compassion.
They return to the Alliance base and Jyn tries to make them listen, to encourage them to attack the data base, but none want to believe her.
But there is something she has that she hadn't possessed before. Her father's revelation and death have given her one thing: hope.
Cassian approaches with his recruits and she's home.
One time her mother described the magnetizing pull of soulmates. Blushing slightly, she whispered to Jyn about how once she met Galen, there was no one else for her. She couldn't imagine a life without him.
Throughout their flight through the blur of time, space, and stars, Jyn knows exactly where Cassian is. She's aware of every step he takes, every brush of his fingers against her leather jacket, every breath that strains the ribs he should have had bound on Yavin 4.
She realizes that she has no idea how one could live without the other. If every wound is mirrored— obviously soulmates can live through the other's death. If that were not the case, Jyn would have become an orphan sixteen years ago.
She doesn't understand it, but there's something that lets one soulmate live on—alone. Without its other half.
They break onto Scarif and put their plan into motion. They kidnap Imperial officers and steal their uniforms, Cassian and Jyn now as inconspicuous as they can be with a clearly Imperial droid stepping behind them.
The rebels set their explosives and the beach begins to burn. They walk through the hallways of the storage unit as if they belong there, and K-2 finds the access room with little difficulty.
Finding the plans, however—that will be difficult.
Stardust. That's it. Because that'sher.
The file blinks and K-2 shouts for them to climb, to reach it, to take it to the top of the tower. The door shuts behind them and locks. Cassian looks at her after the droid's goodbye and his anguish is painted across his face. Jyn can feel Cassian's loss at K-2—it may be just a droid, but he was Cassian's only friend, she can feel that. They jump across to the databank. And they climb.
They grab the file and Jyn has hope again.
The agony of Cassian's wounds is almost too much and she almost falls, even while he's still holding onto the file dock. Krennic shoots him once more—
And he falls.
Jyn feels her own ribs break as he hits support beams on the way to the floor. His body lands on the ground, so far below. Pain rips through Jyn's stomach and she screams for him. But there's nothing she can do except finish this. Avenge him. So she climbs.
Finally she reaches the top of the tower and keeps climbing. The ache of Cassian's wounds has mostly faded—adrenaline or his death? She has no idea, but she keeps going.
She recalibrates the antenna and runs back to the tower. When the bridge begins to break, she holds on grimly because there's nothing else she can do. The ribs she didn't break by her own doing scream at her as she pulls herself back to safety.
The white-cloaked monster she's seen in her dreams since she was a little girl steps out from behind the pillar. Before he can end his taunts with a shot to her heart, he falls.
Cassian steps out from behind the same pillar, and her heart jumps. He smiles.
The falling Star Destroyer annihilates the shield around the planet. She pulls the lever and grins at Cassian. He still hasn't said anything, but he doesn't need to—she doesn't have to. They've won.
She glances back over at Krennic, and he pulls her back from her revenge with words he could never have said just a few days ago. She doesn't need to do anything else to him.
He's lost.
They've won.
She pulls his arm around her shoulder and they limp toward the elevator. Someone was listening, and the message was received. She knows it.
Together, they fall onto the sand of the beach. The clouds of fire grow closer, and Jyn's heart sinks because they can't escape this. The Death Star is a match that's just been lit, and Scarif is the first thing in its path.
She grabs Cassian's hand. He rubs his thumb over the scar, the mark from the first wound they matched. She looks into his eyes and he nods, shrugs, and smiles shyly. Her surprise disappears quickly. After all, how couldn't he have noticed?
Deep inside, they're one in the same, their souls crying for each other. Of course they knew.
As the fire draws closer, he pulls her into a hug, so tightly she can hardly breathe. But she's holding him just as fiercely, and anything less wouldn't be enough.
The world disappears in a wave of light.
When she wakes up on the Rebellion's ship, flying away from the ruins of Scarif, Cassian's still holding her hand.
He meets her gaze through the oxygen mask and smiles. The feeling sparkles through her, his joy piercing through the pain of the years. He squeezes her hand quickly.
Jyn knows he'll never let go.