Otherwise known as "The One Where Everyone Loses Their Marbles A Bit From Jealousy".
I'm kidding. They have other things to worry about :)
Into the War Zone
For Jyn, lying inside a coffin at the back of a moving truck counted as a first. She wasn't bothered by small, confined spaces (waiting in the cave for Saul to get her proved that once and for all), and they tended to be handy when trying to escape pursuit. But it was strange.
Noises felt like they were coming from far, far away. Little creaks sounded like distant cries, bumps in the road like the scratching of small things, voices — neutral, or otherwise — were unbearably, excruciatingly muffled. The minutes during the inspection at the Nantes checkpoint had felt like hours, and Jyn had been so tempted to crack the lid just an inch, just so she could hear what Solo was saying to them.
But she hadn't, and they'd gotten through.
The truck had been moving slowly for the last half-hour since the inspection, swaying and rocking in a vaguely soporific rhythm, but Jyn felt all the sleepiness burn away in one heart-pounding blaze as the clang of something — a gate being lowered — echoed close by.
She reached to her side and picked up her knife, curling her gloved palm against the grip.
The lid burst open with a rush of cool air, and Jyn exhaled in relief. But it wasn't Han who'd come to get her, it was Cassian.
"We made it," he said, like he could barely believe it himself. "We're in Nantes."
Jyn sheathed her knife and accepted his hand to help her out of the casket. It had been hot, breathing in her own air and staying as still as possible, and she knew her cheeks were flushed pink when she slid out the back of the truck, straight into some kind of loading bay.
"Where are we?" she asked, as Solo slammed the driver's side of the door.
"Morgue," he said, throwing her a beaten leather jacket like it was the most natural thing to do. "Undertaker's a friend. He thinks I'm just taking art out of the country — let's keep it that way."
Not being the type to turn down free gifts, Jyn slid her arms into the jacket to try it on. It was most definitely secondhand, maybe a little shorter than she would have liked, but there was something fuzzy in the lining and the shoulders fit right, which was all that mattered. She tended to move fast during fights, dodging and parrying to compensate for her smaller size. Judging by the faded smell of perfume — it wasn't Solo's either.
"Did one of your friends leave this behind, Mr Solo?" she asked, and he lifted his shoulders.
"Hey, if it fits," he said, with an unashamed grin. "And call me Han."
Jyn pushed a worn cap onto her head, tucking the twist at the nape of her neck out of sight. "Stop calling me kiddo, and I just might."
"Jyn," Cassian said quietly. He and Kay were standing around a table, clearly about to discuss the final details of the plan.
Han clearly anticipated not being welcome to the conversation, because he rolled his eyes and made a show of climbing onto the truck for some unspecified purpose. Except that it involved loud shuffling.
There was no paper, no written plan, but she hadn't exactly been expecting one. The table beneath Cassian's hand was streaked with the colors of a sunset, burnt orange, faint gold and a wash of crimson. The light was coming from one of the high windows, clouded and small, but she guessed that it was a little past five, maybe later.
"Curfew starts at nine," Cassian said. "If we're outside and we're caught, they'll shoot. No jail, no questioning. Everyone out after curfew hour is assumed to be one of Guerra's."
"What's your plan to find his faction, exactly?" Jyn asked. "They're hiding in the mountains — we'll have better chances of finding treasure than stumbling into their hideout without an invitation."
"Less, actually," Kay pointed out. "They severed contact with HQ after their refusal to merge with the other factions. But lucky for us, we have intelligence that the Guerra faction have infiltrated the city. Some of them work in establishments frequented by members of the government — good to spy, pick up news, that sort of thing — and if we loiter around one of these places, we might be able to slip your name to one of them, hope it finds its way back to Mr Guerra."
Jyn lifted her eyes from the table and found herself looking directly at Cassian. "Hope?" she said, trying to decide if he was crazy, or something worse. "That's all you're basing this on? Us going through all this trouble to get into the city — the meeting with Saul — what it comes down to is hope?"
Cassian had watched her while she spoke, not speaking, and when she fell silent at the end of her question, he lifted his shoulder slightly, almost in defiance. "Resistance is built on hope."
The way he'd said it, like it was the simplest thing in the world, as untouchable as something of worship, clung to in the darkest of times and guarded like a secret part of the soul, simultaneously made Jyn think: you fool, and something else. Something she wasn't quite ready to quantify, or name.
There was a slam from inside the truck, and their locked gazes broke, the both of them turning around to see what it was. Jyn blinked hard, rapidly, as though she'd been out of focus. Han jumped down again, a greasy rag in his hands. "It might just be my two cents," he said, wiping his hands on the cloth, "but I'd turn back right now instead of taking my chances in a war zone."
Cassian gave him a look. "Or, you'd rather get paid for the return trip now, seeing as it's unlikely we're about to survive."
"Very unlikely," Kay corrected.
They started to move, but Jyn shook her head, with a dawning realization. It was wrong, all wrong. The plan — a word used in the loosest sense — wouldn't work like this. "You're not serious," she said, and it stopped everyone short. She pointed to Kay. "You can't come with us. You look like Gestapo. We'll never get close to Saul's people if we're sitting anywhere near you."
Kay looked offended. "I do not."
Jyn glanced at Han, who cocked his head, as though just realizing the truth of what she'd said. "Oh, you're right. I think it's the nose."
"Well, forgive me if I'm not inclined to trust the word of a smuggler," Kay answered scathingly.
Han only held out his hands. "Smugglers like me look out for people who might be secret police, so you've kinda shot yourself in the foot there, your majesty."
Cassian, pinching the bridge of his nose, muttered a frustrated sentence under his breath. Jyn's Spanish was fairly limited, but she recognized the word cabrón, which didn't sound very polite at all — a suspicion reinforced by Kay turning to him and adding as an aside: "Oh, I wholeheartedly agree. Rather an ass."
"Hey, that's the thanks I get for smuggling you guys past half the German reserves in France?" Han said, even though he didn't sound particularly offended.
Jyn supposed it had something to do with being called a bastard or an ass on a relatively frequent basis, but before the three men could digress into the kind of argument that showed every sign of becoming an ego contest, she interrupted to bring things back to the matter at hand.
"Look, it's nothing personal," Jyn said, winding a scarf around her throat. "But Saul's trained his men to be suspicious. If three strangers ask for a meeting with their leader — and one of them looks like he should be wearing an SS badge — they'll shoot us, guaranteed."
Kay looked deeply annoyed, even for him. "And you couldn't have shared this — ah — vital information before we went through all this trouble?"
"That was before I found out that the Great Plan hinged on nothing more than hope," she said, with a pointed look in Cassian's direction. "Sorry, but I vote that you wait here with Han."
"You can't be serious." Kay turned to Cassian indignantly. "That's not the plan."
Clearly, they both knew who the deciding vote was, and Jyn looked at him too. "It makes sense," she said. "You brought me here because I know Saul. Believe me, we need to look like friends, or this whole thing goes to hell."
A moment passed, during which Cassian clearly weighed Jyn for what she was worth — her word, to be precise — and she waited. Like he said, hoping.
Then Cassian jerked his head at the truck. "She's right," he said. "We'll find a way to meet you later, but blending in matters more."
Jyn pretended the implied vote of confidence didn't make her stomach feel oddly light.
"Unbelievable," Kay said, stalking towards the truck. "Whose side are you on, really?"
"So this is goodbye, I guess," said Han.
Jyn had been waiting by the door, watching a harried-looking Cassian in a low-voiced discussion with Kay across the room, who was — to put it lightly — displeased at the sudden change of plan. She knew the feeling. Between thinking there was a more concrete plan and finding out it was the equivalent of a tightrope over twenty feet of empty air, and knowing there was no concrete plan only to have it swapped out for an even less concrete one at the last minute — vexing, either way.
Then again, she knew quite well that the specificity of an agent's orders went only as far as an objective meant to be achieved. The plan (if any) was reserved for the operative to determine once they made landfall, taking local intelligence and on-the-ground circumstances into account. It sounded more like directed survival to her, but she didn't imagine General Draven would be particularly interested in an outsider's opinion, least of all hers.
She gave an impatient sigh that neither of her team members heard, eyeing the darkening window above the morgue. Either they were discussing how trustworthy she was and whether it was some kind of ruse for the purposes of sabotage, or they were trying to reason their way from one half-baked plan to another.
Han stepped up to her, leaning against the wall with a hand planted above his head, nonchalance from head to toe. "Is it always like this?" he asked.
Jyn made a face. "Only whenever they're around each other. I'm starting to think there's a little club I'm not part of."
"That's your style? What d'you call 'em — gentlemen's club?"
She considered her answer, and phrased it as sweetly as she was capable of. "None of your business, Han."
"All right, Jyn." Han was looking at the pair of them, and a smile spread slowly over his not unattractive features. "So I guess this is goodbye for now, huh?"
She looked at him through narrowed eyes. "Thanks for the vote of confidence," she said. "I'll remember to hit you when I come back, alive."
"Hey, you never know during wartime," Han answered, shrugging his shoulders. "Better safe than sorry. Couldn't live with myself if I sent a girl like you off without a goodbye kiss."
Jyn actually laughed in surprise, and the sound immediately caused Kay and Cassian to look over like they'd smelled smoke. "You're not getting a kiss," she said, even though the base of her neck was starting to feel a little warm.
But Han wasn't her type. Too brash, too loud, too…same. It'd be like kissing a mirror version of herself, only more annoying, male and taller. Like knowing exactly what the person across from her was thinking because the same thought had flashed into her head. No challenge, no intrigue. It wasn't what she wanted — if she even wanted anything at all, and maybe she didn't.
So Jyn set her jaw and warned Han with a look not to try anything. But clearly, he had a penchant for bending the rules.
"Who said you had to give it to me?" he said, very close to her ear. He turned and kissed her on the cheek, in full view of everyone present. "See? Harmless."
It was like Han had snapped his fingers and performed magic, because Cassian was suddenly behind them, finished with his impromptu war council. "Ready to go?" he asked.
Jyn reached for the pack at her feet and swung it onto one shoulder. "Are you joking?"
Han held the door for them, returning Cassian's sparingly professional nod, and winking at Jyn before she stepped through. "Be seeing you."
They emerged from the mortuary's side exit and walked up a narrow, dusty alleyway, pausing on either side of the opening to make sure their covers were in place. Neither of them mentioned Han, or anything that had happened before the door swung shut just seconds before. The mission came first.
Jyn nodded silently at Cassian, and he nodded back. Steeling herself, she slipped out onto the street, blending into the flow of pedestrian traffic, Cassian at her side.
She'd been right to be careful, since there wasn't much of it.
Châteaubriant was the smaller town in comparison to Nantes' city, barely two hours by motor, but it was hard to tell they'd stepped into a city at all, rather than a ghost town. It was eerily quiet, windows in the buildings staring like empty eyes, broken glass and grit beneath Jyn's boots as the silent evidence of destruction not quite smoothed over. They made their way up the sloping street, and the only people they saw were ones hurrying like they didn't want to stay on the street for too long.
No market stalls, no children playing on the pavement, no bicycle bells ringing to signal pedestrians — nothing.
Then they reached what must have been the center of the neighborhood, and Jyn's throat tightened. There was a blackened ruin where one of the buildings used to be, a simple residential, but when she saw what stood next to it — a municipal police station — she realized what Saul's faction had done. They'd tried to take down a Gestapo station (everyone knew the French police meant German these days), and missed. Careless, and the Germans weren't the ones to pay the price. All they had to show for it was scorch marks on the side of the brick building that had been the actual target.
Cassian's hand was warm on her arm, and Jyn realized she was cold. "Hey," he whispered. "We have to keep moving."
Jyn wanted to spit, not at him, but the careless — fanatical — blinded men and women who'd done this. Saul's power over them, to the point where his fiery speeches could convince them that anything was worth the cost of a few dead Germans.
Maybe one of them might have been her. Maybe she would have had a gun in her hands. Maybe she would have been the one to throw the bomb.
Maybe — and this thought hurt her more than she'd expected — she might have been able to change Saul's mind, if he hadn't left her behind.
"Jyn." Cassian was pulling her now, away from the uncleared rubble and the charred, forgotten house. "Come on."
After they were clear of the square, some of the noise and animation characteristic of a city seemed to return, and Jyn shifted her arm out of Cassian's grip. Not out of hostility — she just wanted to walk alone.
There were still signs of skirmishes, sooty smears on walls, maybe the odd cluster of shattered glass, signs of where the local police had tried to burn away a painted V winging across a blank wall, for fear of offending the German presence…
V for Victoire. Victory.
It was hard to tell how it might be true.
Jyn passed a child squatting in the shadow of a stone statue, a sword-wielding angel with half its wing gone, and hesitated. Before she could reconsider, she was already doubling back. She dug into her pocket and found a few francs, which she pushed into the girl's hand.
The girl was too dumbfounded to reply, and Jyn tried not to think about how a few francs wouldn't bring back the dead in Nantes. Cassian was waiting for her when she strode past him, her pace quickened as if to make up for the ground she'd lost.
They were drawing near the shadow of the church, but the windows were shuttered, the doors boarded up, paint slashed across to hide whatever had been written beneath it, and slashed again. The edges of the building seemed singed too, like it hadn't been immune to the dangers of the city either, consecrated ground or not.
"May the Lord be with you on this day," said a strong voice in French, echoing off the flagstones. "May the Lord be with you on this day."
A hooded man sat on the steps of the abandoned church, a long wooden staff resting beside him in the dust. There was no cup, no bowl for begging, he only raised his hand as people passed him, repeating the same blessing like clockwork.
"What's he doing?" Jyn said.
Cassian had already taken her sleeve in pre-emptive precaution against her going any closer. "The Nazis don't like Catholics. They've ordered all the churches in Nantes to be closed, and no one's thinking about appealing because the Bishop of France has gone silent. Says he doesn't want trouble. That man on the steps is either mad, or too devout to care that he's risking his life by blessing people on the street," he said in her ear. "Leave him."
Jyn turned to look over her shoulder as they passed, and she could have sworn that the hooded man was faced in their direction now, as though he knew what they were saying.
"May the Lord be with you both!" he called, but Cassian didn't seem to hear, his stare pointed straight ahead, like there was nothing — nothing — the matter with the ruin in front of him.
There was to her. "How can you be like that?" she asked, in a furious undertone. "How can you — see — all of this, and just…have nothing to say?"
Cassian swept a quick gaze at their surroundings, then pulled her into a narrow side lane, clearly sensing that she'd been about to raise her voice. "Me?" he said, incredulously. "I'm the one who's been fighting against the people responsible for these things. I haven't been the one keeping my head down and avoided forming an allegiance to anything and anyone except myself."
Jyn had been staring hard at the bricks behind Cassian's arm while he spoke, but she raised her head at that, because it stung. She'd expected Cassian to disagree — not to be angry with her, and it sounded very much like he was. Even more than that, like there'd been anger simmering beneath the surface for some time, and this was the chance to set it free.
Except Jyn could be stubborn too. She couldn't deny that she'd seen terrible things done to ordinary people, and yes, she'd kept her head down, but the Resistance — through mouthpieces like Kay and Cassian — had judged her for doing the exact same thing as they were. Her only mistake was not slapping a so-called cause onto her forehead. For all the Resistance's posturing, the talk about greater causes and gloried allegiances, the conditions in the real cities that their work affected — it spoke for itself. Saul Guerra may have formed a divergent resistance faction of his own, but the division had only become terminal, critical, because General Draven and whoever he counseled with hadn't taken steps to bridge it before.
"The prison camp. The man on the steps," she listed, while the words thrummed with resentment. "They're the people who suffer while you and your types play chess with their lives, with all your creeping, and guesswork, and spying."
"Hey." Cassian gripped her shoulder, not gently at all. "You don't know what you're talking about. If we tried to save every single person there is to save, we lose the war."
Maybe she didn't, and maybe she was being unfair, but there wasn't a phrase Jyn despised more than just following orders, and Cassian — right then — seemed content to do just that.
"Sounds like you and General Draven need to rethink your priorities," Jyn said, her eyes hardened to shards of glass as sharp and dangerous as the ones she'd ground beneath her heel. "Because there won't be people left to save if all you're ordered to do is strike deals and talk in backrooms."
Cassian's response to challenge was to fold his arms and stay precisely where he was, an infuriating habit that only made Jyn want to force something more out of him, more than just this steely calm. "Larger objectives need to be followed, and orders need to be respected. If you can't stomach that, then maybe you shouldn't be an operative," he said, in a voice that cut with the neat precision of a surgeon's scalpel.
"Fine," Jyn spat. "Find Saul Guerra on your own. Bring Kay with you, leave me behind with Han. I'll let the General know where to find your bodies — if Guerra's men leave anything of you for the crows to peck at."
She'd clearly said something to spark Cassian's usually dormant temper, and his eyes flashed with something almost dangerous. "Fine, you want to stay with Han. Next time, I'll remember that, agent Erso," he said, deliberate and quiet. "But for now, we're wasting time we should be using to find Guerra."
They had moved closer to each other during the course of the argument, responding to the natural push-and-pull of each other's words, but now that it was over — or close to being over — Jyn still didn't stand down, and neither did he. Cassian was acting like her commanding officer, and maybe he was, but they were disagreeing about something else that went unspoken, beyond the actual words they threw in each other's faces.
She'd struck him somewhere personal, and he'd returned the favor.
But like he said, there wasn't the time, and he clearly wanted to be done with the mission as much as she did.
"Fine," she said.
"Fine," he answered.
Jyn hadn't spoken to Cassian since their disagreement in the alley. She proceeded in stony silence at his elbow, close enough not to lose him in the flow of people — sparse as it was — but at a distance that suggested they weren't anything but two strangers walking in the same direction.
Cassian knew that Jyn's main point of contention would be the issue of authority. Her life had hardly groomed her to be receptive to commands without first questioning the who, when, and why of it. The reasons were obvious, and he practically knew them by heart. Figures of guidance were few and far between in her life — the father she'd presumed dead, her deceased mother, and the resistance general who'd abandoned her. She was a survivor, but she was also fiercely questioning of anything she was told.
Admittedly, Cassian had failed to defuse the argument as he should have. He'd gone at her point of weakness because she'd instinctively managed to put her finger on his, to the part of the work that always felt the hardest to justify — why one over the other, why some lives mattered more than others in the chess game of Axis versus Allied. Logically, there were always reasons, reasons Cassian could recite to himself whenever he felt himself slip, but consciences didn't operate on numbers and strategic analysis, and in his heart of hearts, he felt like there couldn't be a justification for it, no excuse. At the end of the day, it was just what became the easiest to live with.
Some days, easiest wasn't easy at all.
But all of it ought to have been said in the alleyway, and now Cassian was left with the general impression that whatever tentative goodwill they'd built up during Jyn's time in training seemed to have evaporated in the wake of Châteaubriant. Not that goodwill was necessarily essential to field work as operatives, but Cassian didn't like knowing that Jyn was angry with him, and that there were matters that hung unresolved between them.
Cassian sighted the tavern doorway and climbed the steps, ducking his head at the low lintel. Jyn followed, close only because the space and their cover stories demanded it. Their arrival went by unremarked, the most they got was one or two glances before more came in behind them; workers in overalls and smelling of a day in the fields or mines.
There were a number of options they might have chosen in order to get close to one of Guerra's fighters. The establishments they infiltrated were divided between the higher and lower class levels of reputability, both with their respective advantages. Upper-class establishments would be helpful if they wanted to pick up on German intelligence, but fresh faces into the echelons of high society would be scrutinized, less so than if they went to a simple neighborhood tavern. Middle-class, nothing remarkable, the kind of place people would walk into after a hard day's work, to exchange stories and neighborhood gossip. An inconspicuous mine of information.
Jyn bumped her shoulder into someone big and burly on her way in, and in an instant her fire seemed to spark again, but Cassian grabbed her arm again and pushed her along. "Not looking for trouble," he murmured as a reminder, and she yanked herself free to keep walking.
"I can walk by myself," she hissed, and Cassian left it well alone.
They edged their way to a shared table and sat down. The patrons only glanced briefly at them before going back to their foaming beers and conversation, clearly upset about something that had nothing to do with them. Jyn, her cap pulled low over her face, leaned into the shadow left by a convenient pillar, watching and listening. Further inside the tavern, Cassian could see clustered tables of German officers near to the music, and their raucously drunken singing of songs from home (the target of some resentment in the other patrons, though they kept their mouths shut).
They were served hot mugs of cider, and Cassian leaned forward with his. "Can't go anywhere without them," he said conspiratorially to the man across from him.
Agreement sparked in his gaze. "Swine," he muttered. "All the best places are theirs, all the best food and drink."
As they spoke, a pair of pretty girls passed their table, perfumed and lipsticked and undoubtedly French, but they brushed past their countrymen without so much as a glance, and there was a roar of welcome from the German side of the tavern. "Collaborateur," the man grumbled, and shoved his empty mug back to get another.
Cassian turned his head slightly to see that Jyn was scanning the inside of the tavern from her hidden seat. "There must be a backroom here somewhere," she said. "I might be able to stop one of them if I wander."
He disagreed. "Risky," he murmured, as an officer stumbled drunkenly towards the toilets. "It'll look suspicious if you're caught."
"Doesn't leave us with a lot of options," she said, and he detected an undercurrent of impatience. "We're on a tight schedule."
There was a stir near the door, and Cassian detected a dozen raised hackles, tension rising from something they were seeing that he wasn't. "What's going on?" he asked someone, as they walked back from the window.
"That's not a normal car," the man whispered. His breath was foul, onions and something pickled, but there was something else — close by.
Cassian turned, silently searching the faces around him.
It was the smell of gunpowder. Fresh, like someone had been test-firing to make sure the weapons didn't jam. There was always a second explanation, and in this case — moderating the urgency of suspicion — it was mining work, which involved gunpowder explosives just the same.
But there was no accompanying smell of fresh earth, and the absence of it put him on edge.
There wasn't time to process it fully; something else was happening.
"Mon dieu, Obersleutnant Schmidt," someone whispered, and the whisper was traveling. Obersleutnant Schmidt, Obersleutnant Schmidt.
Cassian felt Jyn's fingers dig into his arm in a wordless question, and he searched his memory for the face and file to go with the name. Schmidt. Dieter Schmidt. Lieutenant Colonel. There'd been something in the wires about him replacing the previous security official in charge of Nantes, meant to be a step in a crackdown over an unruly city, quashing resistance to German rule.
"What's he doing here?" someone asked, unfriendly.
"Probably showing off," was the disgruntled answer.
But the doors banged open, and Cassian saw why. The Lieutenant Colonel wasn't blind-drunk — just very close to it — and stumbled in between two attractive, very young women, his face pink and flushed with drink. He raised his arm in a salute, and the dozen officers — maybe more — clustered near the back all leapt to their feet to return it.
As they passed the barman, Cassian saw Schmidt turn to slur something in his direction, and the man's fluent reply, his stiff gesture towards the area in the back. Unwilling, but compliant. Some of the noise died down at the front of the bar after the Lieutenant Colonel stumbled off to join his fellow countrymen, but Cassian was still searching for the source of the gunpowder smell, his thoughts racing at a breakneck pace. It didn't make sense — it didn't connect. Was there a Resistance fighter somewhere here? If so, who? And how could he approach him without being seen?
Jyn's hand was on his shoulder. "Who is he?" she asked.
"Obersleutnant," Cassian murmured. "He's one of the people in charge of policing the city."
"Not very smart, is he?" Her gaze flicked across the crowd. "Walking drunk into a place where he's the enemy."
"It's a show of confidence in the military administration," Cassian guessed. "Germans have nothing to fear — that kind of thing."
Jyn snorted quietly into her drink. "How's that going to look when he's lying dead on the floor with a knife in his back?"
Cassian shot her a warning look. "Don't say that. Don't even think it."
"I'm not," she said, matter-of-factly. "But th—"
She tensed, looking at something behind him, clearly seeing something he hadn't. He turned; the men sitting opposite from them had been replaced, their faces harder, more grizzled, and unfriendly. Jyn's eyes gleamed as she took them in, as though there was something familiar about what she saw. Her head moved, towards the German officers, then back again. "Something's not right," she said, and he felt his nerves draw taut in response to her agitation.
But before he could say anything else, she wedged her boot into a horizontal support in the wooden bench, and kicked. The men sitting across from Cassian bowled over with a chorus of yells, mugs and glasses smashing, foam and sour-smelling beer flying everywhere.
Cassian was about to yank Jyn out of the place — starting a scene with German officers and a senior official close by, was she mad? — until a gun spun from one of the men's splayed hands, coming to rest in the puddle near his boot. "He has a gun," Jyn said, and all hell proceeded to break loose.
Jyn had been watching the tavern while the others had their attention on the Germans. There was hate and dislike in its various descending denominations, as expected from those beneath the boot of Nazi Germany, but she'd started to suspect something wasn't right when the men sitting near them had been shoved out of the way, by two strangers who had entered shortly after the Lieutenant Colonel. They'd chosen a table diagonally across from the German cluster, not close enough to eavesdrop, not close enough to take out their frustrations through petty gestures or audible insults, either.
So why?
While she'd been whispering with Cassian, she'd noticed their hands. Scarred, with blisters and mottled burns, like they'd handled crudely made and dangerous weapons in a hurry and with frequency. The same scars she might have had in abundance, if a man named Saul Guerra hadn't shielded her from the worst of them and taught her how to be careful.
Her head flicked to one side, gauging the distance it would take for a gunshot to the head. Point-blank — manageable with any handgun.
One of them nodded to the other, and slipped a hand into his jacket.
The pieces came together in one dizzying rush. They were going to assassinate the Lieutenant Colonel, probably on Saul's orders, and Jyn had some very quick decisions to make. She could either sit back and watch it happen, escape into the dark with Cassian — but the fighters connected to Saul anywhere near the tavern would probably all be dead by morning, either by their own stupidity, or from retaliatory fire by the group of German officers better armed and trained than they were.
It wouldn't compromise their cover.
But it would also make what she'd seen in the square much, much worse, because the Germans wouldn't stand for one of their own being assassinated by a defiant resistance faction in defeated French territory. The hostages in the camp outside of Châteaubriant would bear the brunt of it, probably more hostages from Nantes in reprisal…
It equalled a weaker French Resistance, a wearier, more beaten France, and people hungry for blood.
Damn her orders, because Jyn knew what she was going to do. What she had to do.
So she skidded back on her chair, leaving her enough room to brace her foot against the table, and shoved with all her strength. The sturdy legs screeched across the floor, and the table caught the two faction members across the chest, knocking them straight off the backless benches onto the floor.
She turned to Cassian, who looked incredulous (probably because he assumed she'd actually lost her mind, after what happened at the meeting with Han), and Jyn explained her action in the most succinct way she could manage. "He has a gun," she said.
By some kind of unexpected miracle, Cassian understood, and he backed away from the bench, pulling her with him. Jyn held off, because he should have kicked the gun on the floor — he'd been closer to it — but before she could get there, men around them were getting to their feet. Two — five — eight…nearly a dozen now, fanning out across the crowd inside the tavern, their stances tense and ready for action. More were coming in from the street, stamping on the floorboards with the hard, determined march of men with a purpose.
Jyn swore under her breath. They'd come prepared.
The German officers were just starting to look around at the disturbance, the ineffable shiver of danger in the air. Jyn searched for the Lieutenant Colonel's face in the group, except they all looked the same to her, a pack of animals herded together and indistinguishable. Their uniforms may have given them power on the streets, but now — here — it only marked them as prey.
A hush fell over the tavern, like the quiet before the storm. "Vive la France," someone said, and the first gunshot went off with a roar.
"Look out!" Cassian ducked behind the table, and he hauled Jyn down with him, shielding her from the spray of broken glass as bullets shattered the glasses on the table where they'd been sitting.
The two faction members she'd knocked over had been shot dead, and the fight was on the move. It sounded like the German officers were returning fire while the resistance faction regrouped, firing over their dead and others. Jyn slid behind a column for cover and Cassian dived behind another, the both of them waiting — listening — for an opening.
For a second — and a second was all they had — they looked at each other, mutually assessing the aftermath of their disagreement. Then Cassian nodded, and Jyn returned it. Whatever trust there was left, it was enough to try and get out of the situation together, alive.
She yanked off her cap and tossed it to the side. It would only block her ears and eyes, and she needed both if they were going to have a hope in hell of surviving an impromptu gunfight. The others (Resistance or German) finding out that she was a woman came only secondary to the first priority. Survive. Weapons were going off on all sides, panicked shrieks and glass shattering as people caught in the crossfire tried to flee, or failing that — hide.
A bullet sank into the corner above her head with a small explosion of powdered grit, and Jyn felt a brief — deserved — flash of rage at Cassian for not trusting her with a gun. If she died because she was weaponless in a shootout…
But more importantly, whose side were they on? Jyn looked across the narrow space at Cassian, who'd drawn his gun and had it at the ready. Were they going to shoot Saul's men to stop them from causing more damage than necessary? Or were they going to fire at the Germans, because the skirmish had already started, and between helping the French and the Germans, there was really only one choice they could have made?
Before she could make it for real, a resistance fighter fell with a spurting wound in his throat, his gun falling from twitching fingers and landing just an arm's reach away. Jyn lunged for it. Her palm closed around the blood-slicked grip just before a bullet smashed into the spot where she'd been a second before, and she threw herself behind cover again.
"You!" A German officer had her in his sights, and Jyn rolled, just barely missing the gunshot he'd aimed at her. Her pulse roaring in her ears, she squeezed the trigger and he fell with a spreading wound on his thigh, and she fired off a second shot into his chest before he could try again.
"Guess we know which side we're on," she said to Cassian.
Credit to him; he barely even blinked. "We need to move," he said. "We have to get out of here before they think we're part of Saul's faction too."
One of the lights exploded above their head, a dozen small holes peppering the plaster and raining dust on them both. "Easier said than done, Captain," Jyn muttered. "You have a plan?"
Cassian shot twice, and a German officer rolled senseless onto the floor at his feet. "Working on one," he said, and Jyn almost laughed at the sheer absurdity of the situation they'd found themselves in.
Their plan had been to encounter Saul's men, an encounter that would hopefully lead to a quiet, unnoticed meeting.
Suffice it to say the plan had exploded — literally — far out of proportion in terms of its success.
Jyn glimpsed an opening as a faction member fell, and gestured for Cassian to follow her. "Come on," she said, bending to steal a blunt truncheon from the dead officer's belt.
Cassian ran behind her, dodging bodies and overturned furniture alike. The people left in the tavern were either panicked and trying to escape or stone dead and senseless, but they all had something in common — they were obstacles. Jyn and Cassian were forced to scatter at machine gunfire, each of them diving to opposite sides for cover. Jyn didn't have time to worry about his ability to handle himself, and she was sure the feeling ran mutual.
In front of them, within sight of the door, a girl screeched — a single, shrill wail — that was cut off by the rapid tap-tap of a Sten gun. She fell without a sound, blood smearing her lipstick, bullets in the front of her pretty red dress, and her friend — in spattered yellow — bent over her, weeping.
Jyn should have leapt over the body without a second glance. Saul's methods were bloody, but she'd be damned if she'd let them be the reason she and Cassian didn't make it out alive.
But the girl was her age — her dead friend too — and Jyn raced forward, grabbing the girl by the back of her dress and dragging her along into a run. "Move," she shouted, hating herself for being impatient, for having no sympathy at someone else's stunned grief. "Move!"
The girl stumbled along, barely keeping up, and Jyn half-hurled her towards the stairs leading up to the apartment above the tavern. "Stay out of sight," she said, and glimpsed movement in her peripheral vision.
It was a resistance fighter, and Jyn almost left him alone, but he raised his gun at a target behind her, clearly branding collaborators as one of the enemy. The girl shrieked and scrambled up the stairs on her hands and knees, and Jyn — doubling back again — threw her elbow into the man's nose and slammed him hard into a wall. Maybe it was a betrayal of family — he was Saul's, after all — but as far as she was concerned, she hadn't been part of their world for years.
Fool, she thought, even though it applied to him just as much as it did to her.
No time for that. There was a shout in German as one of the officers sighted her, clearly mistaking her possession of weapons as a sign that she was an assassin too. Jyn kicked over one of the benches so that the surface landed perpendicular to the ground and dropped to her knees behind it. The bullets blew a neat row of concentric holes in the thick, polished wood, and she fired off another round of shots over the top. The chamber clicked, empty, and Jyn tossed it away with a grunt of frustration.
Cassian was nowhere to be seen — was he dead? Hurt? — and even though Jyn wanted to look for him, for reasons too urgent and contradictory to puzzle over, she had to deal with her situation first. She was pinned down, no assistance.
Not that she needed it. Jyn whipped out the black iron truncheon, the length expanding to match her forearm, and then some, listening for footsteps.
Another resistance fighter fell dead on the ground, and there was nothing. She could still hear the Germans, maybe around three or four, definitely more than Saul's men — if there were any left. They were overturning tables with grunts of disgust, occasionally firing precautionary shots into bodies that looked like they might still be alive. Scanning what she could see of the room, she caught a flicker of movement. Cassian.
He lifted a finger to his lips, warning her with a look to stay still. He was crouched by the bar, where only she could see, telling her silently that he'd cover her from where he was.
Jyn didn't doubt he would, but they were behind her now. The table overturned with a slam, and her instincts took over. They hadn't been expecting her to be alive, unhurt, much less to be a woman. Surprise was a powerful advantage, and she used it with a vengeance. She went for the guns first, striking hard and fast until metal hit the ground, then to the softer targets like chests, knees, and throats. The truncheon was built for blunt impact, breaking fingers or wrists without prejudice, the weight of the metal compensating for shortfalls in physical strength.
A fist flew blindly towards her face, and she parried with a crushing swing that definitely broke bone, dodging another to sweep his legs out from under him with hers. She hit and crunched until there was only one disarmed officer left, and even he looked at her like she was purely mad. Maybe it was because she'd picked up a gun during the struggle, but insisted on using a blunt weapon anyway.
Jyn inhaled deeply to catch her breath, her muscles aching from the unrestrained ferocity of her attacks. "Come on then," she said in German.
"Jyn!" Cassian's warning shout was accompanied by a resistance fighter staggering towards them, his leg bent and splattering blood as he barreled towards them like a stampeding bull.
She saw the mottled round shape in his fist and realized what was about to happen.
"Hey!" she shouted, but never got to finish the thought.
There was a shot and the man went down, dead for real this time, the hand that had been about to toss the grenade pinned beneath his weight. Except —
Almost by accident, Jyn scanned the floor and found the pulled pin gleaming next to his other limp hand, slowly being swallowed by a spreading pool of blood.
"Get out of there!" Cassian yelled.
The only thing at Jyn's back was the German officer and the front window of the tavern. Three out of five seconds gone now. She had to think fast, so she swore and did the first thing that came to mind. She grabbed the officer by the back of his collar and twisted him around towards the grenade, her grip tight enough to strangle, and braced for the explosion.
When it came, it hurt a lot less than she thought it would.
Cassian saw the faction member stagger from the middle of a pile of bloodied bodies like something from a horror picture, dogged and crazed with purpose in spite of the arterial wound in his thigh — holding a grenade in his hand. Straight towards the last remaining German officer, who'd just been about to face down Jyn.
Cassian was out of the blast radius and protected by solid cover, but he still shouted for her. "Jyn!"
She'd been fighting in a haze of furious efficiency, disarming and taking down at least four soldiers all by herself while armed with nothing but a truncheon, and for a breathless second he was worried she wouldn't hear him.
Except she did, and the understanding dawned on her face.
Only she didn't run.
There was a split-second choice to make, but Cassian made it in less. He took aim and shot the resistance fighter before he could get halfway across the room, and he let out a soft breath of relief when the man crashed facedown onto the floorboards, the grenade trapped along with his arm beneath the body.
The relief was short-lived, as soon as he realized — from the look on Jyn's face — that the grenade was still live.
"Get out of there!" he shouted, and it was worse only because he knew it was probably too late.
Jyn probably knew too. But instead of running, she grabbed the officer by the back of his uniform and swung him around, like the last thing she meant to do was choke him to death, and before Cassian could stop her — the grenade went off.
The detonation was immediate and forceful, a shockwave that slammed him into the wall at his back. His ears were ringing when he got off the ground again, blinking at the red-tinted haze of dust and debris left by the explosion. Where Jyn and the officer had been was shrapnel-ridden floor and a gaping broken window, a ruin of twisted wood and blasted body parts. But he couldn't care about that now, or whether there were survivors upstairs who might have seen their faces. None of that mattered.
Cassian raced out the door and to the front of the tavern, only to find the German officer lying glassy-eyed on the stones with spreading patches of dark red gleaming on his gray uniform. Jyn had used him as a shield from the blast, but there was no sign of movement underneath the officer's body.
Cassian felt a tight ache somewhere in his ribs, and he was about to reach for the corpse when it twitched. Then, the German officer, still stone dead, rolled onto his face, and Jyn groaned beneath him, grimier and bloodier but amazingly — beautifully — unharmed.
She cracked an eye at him. "All right?" she asked.
Cassian almost laughed with relief; he was nearly dizzy with it. "Could ask you the same."
"Never better," she grunted, and accepted his help to get back on her feet.
For a second, their hands stayed locked, because Cassian couldn't quite believe they'd made it out alive, and more importantly — that she had. Reckless, but more brave and resourceful than he'd given her credit for.
He wouldn't make that mistake again, and he wanted to tell her so. But as always, there wasn't the time.
So he let go, and they ran for it.
Jyn wasn't bleeding anywhere (that she knew of), but getting thrown out a glass window and onto solid stone had its bruising qualities — even with an enemy soldier cushioning her from shrapnel fragments — and she was starting to lose her breath from sprinting immediately after the hard landing. Still, she pushed, because they could not be caught at the place where German officers had been murdered in cold blood.
No, not murdered.
Assassinated.
She'd tried to stop Saul from making the mistake, but they'd failed.
The knowledge stung her worse than any wound ever could, and she gripped the gun she'd taken from one of the officers with cramped, bloodstained fingers. They made it about as far as the alley before someone shouted at them in German, in a voice ringing with authority.
"You there! Halt!"
Jyn and Cassian both froze, and she had no doubt that he was imagining the sound of a firing squad.
But it sounded like the officer had made the fatal mistake of coming alone.
Well.
Jyn whirled, the gun in her hand, and pointed it at the only thing to mark a target — a gray uniform — before pulling the trigger.
Two things: the gun was empty, and she was firing at a familiar face.
"Kay." Cassian was breathing hard. "Menos mal. I thought I told you to wait with Han."
The exclamation went ignored, as Kay (dressed in full Wehrmacht uniform, same as the first day they'd met) looked indignantly between Jyn and the useless gun. "You were actually going to shoot me, weren't you?"
Jyn let the emptied pistol fall to the ground and kicked it out of the way, too tired to care. "Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to."
Kay was looking hard at her, and she decided it was probably the blood. "It's not mine," she panted, just in case he was concerned. "Mostly."
"Things got interesting at the tavern," Cassian added, in a supreme example of understatement she might have corrected, if she wasn't conserving her energy for more sprinting.
Understatement notwithstanding, it was as though Kay's worst suspicions had been confirmed, and he grabbed Jyn firmly by the arm and began to march her towards the alley. "I'll deal with you later, young lady. Come on, from the sound of it — you've made a downright mess of your attempt to blend in. Maybe next time you'll think twice about asking me to stay behind."
Her relief at seeing Kay was undeniable, but Jyn gave herself and Cassian a hasty sweep, cataloguing injuries and anything that would look suspicious to the reasonably alert enemy officer. Both of them had soot smears from the grenade blast (in her case, she probably looked like she'd climbed out a coal mine), various incriminating blood stains (again, her especially), and all the injuries to suggest they'd been in some kind of struggle. Cassian had a fresh cut above his eyebrow, another on his cheek, while Jyn's knuckles were scraped raw from throwing punches, and her lower lip throbbed from a fresh split.
"What's your plan — you're going to pretend we're your friends?" Jyn said, pointedly. "Unless you haven't noticed, we don't exactly look like German military."
"He could pretend we're Gestapo informants," Cassian suggested, keeping pace with them while he checked behind to make sure they weren't being trailed. "Or worst comes to worst —"
He trailed off at the rumble of engines, and the three of them went still at the armored cars, unequivocally emblazoned with the German military insignias, passing them on the way to the scene of the skirmish.
Fantastic. Just when Jyn thought their luck couldn't have gotten any more spectacular. "It's worse," she murmured, and received a warning hiss to stay quiet.
Kay saluted like any German officer, and Jyn whipped her hands behind her back to pretend she was in irons, noting out the corner of her eye that Cassian did the same.
They almost scraped by, except for the one bringing up the rear. It rolled to a stop, and a trench-coated captain climbed out, followed by half a dozen armed guards. "What's this, lieutenant?" he asked. "Who are these people?"
Kay saluted again, stiff-backed and unsmiling. He'd snapped into the role of the quintessential German lieutenant like it was a second skin, and even Jyn (who'd never seen it firsthand and was disinclined to be impressed with Kay's anything) felt a tiny glimmer of relief, that they might actually have a chance.
"I arrested them at the scene of the crime, captain," Kay said. "There was an incident at a local tavern, and I found these vagrants trying to escape as I arrived. They looked like bystanders, but I thought it would be safer to take them in for questioning."
The captain raised one eyebrow. "Admirable instinct, lieutenant, but you should have stayed at your station. Now hand these two over to us, and produce your papers for inspection — I want to have a word with your commanding officer."
"Yes sir, but —" Kay didn't let go of Jyn's arm, courteously, delicately prodding the subject "— surely the priority for you is to secure whatever survivors you can from the unfortunate incident?"
Jyn felt Cassian wince.
"Do not question a superior officer's orders, lieutenant," barked the captain. "I will have you shot for insubordination if you cross me again."
"Sir, she's —" One of the guards was peering at her, and Jyn held her breath, hoping it didn't mean she'd been recognized as anyone in relation to Erso. "She's a woman."
Not good, but not terrible.
"Oh yes, I thought she might be suspicious — she was wearing men's clothes when I found her," Kay lied coolly. "French people are so strange."
The captain jerked his head at the guards, and they moved to secure the prisoners. Jyn tightened her grip around the truncheon behind her back, wishing she'd picked up an actual loaded gun, but Cassian was looking sidelong at her, and he moved his head from side to side once. Don't.
She wondered if he'd already given up, seeing how they were outnumbered, and outmatched.
She wondered if he was trying to tell her to use her cyanide capsule, the easy way out. They were caught now.
Jyn lifted her head to look the captain in the eye. He was still watching Kay in evident dislike, unaware that she was silently rehearsing how quickly she could take him out before the guards at his side — six in all — shot her for trying to fight back.
One Nazi captain wouldn't make much of a difference in the war, but…
Cassian was speaking in French, doing very well at sounding bewildered as to why they were being arrested. "We weren't involved in what happened — we were just passing —"
It still got his wrists clapped in irons anyway, and another one was coming towards her. Jyn dug her heel into the ground, bracing for the attack. If he so much as touched her —
Thunk. Thunk.
Jyn's arm was just poised to whip out in a neck-breaking strike, but she paused at the unfamiliar sound. All of them looked, in the falling dusk, at a single figure moving towards them from the steps of an abandoned church.
"Blessed be the name of the Lord, now and forever," said a deep, echoing voice that Jyn had heard somewhere before. "Let them go, captain, for they are innocent of wrongdoing. The Lord guides their steps, and they walk in His light."
"What is this?" the captain snapped.
"The local madman," one of the soldiers scoffed. "He sits in front of his ruined church and preaches all day — like a stray mutt who won't run when people throw stones."
The hooded man ignored them. "The Lord is with me on this day, and I am with Him," he said calmly, and planted his staff where he stood, squarely in front of the armored car like there was nothing to fear.
Then he lifted his head, and Jyn saw why. His eyes were a milky, sightless gray, and from the way they roved without direction around the scene in front of him, she knew it wasn't a trick of the light.
Blind, or as good as.
And he was trying to help them.
"A blind madman," said the captain scornfully. "Step aside, or we'll arrest you for public disorder."
"Do as he says," Jyn found herself saying, in inexplicable — silent — desperation. "Leave us."
The man only smiled. He clearly wasn't a local, but she only saw the friendly lines in his sun-browned skin, the kind — almost habitual — tilt to his head. "I do not fear for myself," he answered, in a different voice meant for her. "For I am guided by the Lord."
The captain sighed in impatience. "Enough of this. Shoot him — and leave his body in front of the church as an example."
Jyn backed away until she felt Kay at her shoulders. No.
Two guards stayed on Cassian and Jyn, leaving the other four to have their rifles cocked, ready to fire, but when the first volley came, there was no body to fall on the stones, no blood to seep into the cracks. The priest moved faster than anyone could have expected, and his staff sliced through the air like a whip. Two rifles went flying into the dark, Cassian attacked the guard standing near him, and Jyn seized her chance to lunge at the captain. Kay could handle the guard meant to be watching her — she wanted him.
Her truncheon caught her target in the ribs, followed by a solid whack into the silver army crest at his shoulder, and when he fell back, gasping, she brought the length of the weapon down into the bend of his neck, smashing and repeating the crushing blows until the smirking, cold-eyed captain was lying facedown and still at her feet.
Her whole body was throbbing, aching and at near-exhaustion, but she wasn't done.
Have to help him.
Maybe it was the fatigue, or the disorientation of being too focused on her fight, but it didn't seem like the priest needed much help. As she watched, he caught a soldier by his arm and twisted simultaneously out of the path of a bullet, leaving it to ricochet off — completely by chance — to hit a third of his uniformed comrades. The staff was clearly made of wood, but the way he wielded it seemed to give the weapon the heft and striking power of an iron truncheon. Again and again he ducked, and swung, like a dancer in an impossible story, until only he was left standing.
A flicker of movement. One of the soldiers was still conscious, and he reached for his gun.
A single shot caught him at the back of the head, and he fell face-forward onto the ground. They all turned towards the source of the shot — apart from the man, who smiled calmly like he'd known all along it would come (how could a priest smile at murder?), bracing his palms against the staff.
"Close one, my friend," he said. "You almost shot me."
A gruff voice gave a growl of disgruntlement. "You're welcome, Chirrut."
The man that emerged looked more bear than human, untidy hair in woven braids and a hood he'd pulled down as though to have it out of the way when he shot. No uniform, no priest's habit, but he was helping them, along with his blind friend. His grizzled face looked like it had seen war before, not just because of the scar that cut across his eyebrow or his tanned cheek, but the look in his deep-set eyes. Wary, and jaded.
What on earth was going on?
"Who are you?" Cassian asked, as the second man gestured for him to hold out his hands.
The question went ignored, and the man grabbed him by the wrists. "Out," he grumbled irritably, and shot through the link holding the cuffs together. The metal plinked away into the dark.
"Rogue team, I assume," said the man he'd called Chirrut. His head was turned towards Jyn now, even though she hadn't spoken, and he looked almost amused. "Didn't they tell you we were coming?"
Jyn looked around, and saw that Cassian and Kay weren't any less nonplussed than she was. "You're…" Cassian said, clearly having some trouble with his disbelief "…operatives. We were told there were agents in the city, but —"
"Only of a sort," Chirrut smiled. "Baze and I are here to assist in whatever way we can to speed your meeting with Saul Guerra."
The bear-like man — Baze — whirled suddenly, his rifle directed into the dark. "Before or after his fighters kill us?" he asked, in a perfectly flat voice.
The shadows were moving towards them, rapid and too many to fight. No uniforms — not German, then — but Jyn picked up the strong smell of blood and explosives, and she guessed it had something to do with the fate of the armored cars that had sped off to the tavern. A dim part at the back of her mind had been wondering about the possible survival of the German Lieutenant Colonel — she guessed the armed support meant they'd finished the job.
German. There was only one uniform left standing, and —
"Really," Kay snapped, as the men surrounded them, guns drawn.
"Stop!" Cassian had moved faster than anyone had expected, putting himself in front of his friend, and Jyn had done the same, so quickly that she stumbled into Kay, her arms raised in her haste to stop them from shooting. "Wait," she said. "He's not an officer — he's with us."
Whether it worked, she wasn't sure, because the faceless men surged forward to separate her from Kay and Cassian. Someone grabbed her by the shoulders, another by the arms, yanking her forward into the throng and with enough force to bring her to her knees. Behind her, she heard Cassian grunt and Kay's noise of indignation at being manhandled, along with the less distinctive noises of Chirrut and Baze being restrained too. Jyn felt a stab of panic at the scrape of a gag descending past her face, and twisted out of its path. "Stop," she said, in a voice that rang fierce, fierce enough to make the hands stall at the ingrained authority — authority she hadn't used in years. "We're not who you think we are."
One of them, cloth pulled across his nose and mouth to mask his features, stepped forward to crouch in front of her. "You may not be German, but one of you killed our fighters," he said. "That makes you an enemy."
Jyn's eyes flashed dangerously. "Call us what you want," she said. "Just remember that Saul Guerra won't be happy if he finds out you hurt me — or my friends."
A shiver traveled the circle around them, as though the very name had power. Jyn remembered how the group worked, how fearful they were of the man who led them, but her trick didn't earn them more than a few seconds, and the squad's captain pressed forward again. "And why is that, traitor?" he spat.
Jyn threw her head back, letting them see her face. "Because my name is Jyn Erso," she said defiantly. "I think you might remember me."
So Chirrut and Baze have shown up too, yay! Again, sorry for the wait. Now onto the stuff Cassian said in Spanish: I'm just gonna add a quick disclaimer about other languages that crop up in the fic. I'm bilingual, but to my everlasting regret and sorrow, one of those languages is not Spanish, French or German (*shakes fist*). So...yeah. I'm trying my best. Honestly, if you can help out with translations (especially if you know what people in 1940 talked like), that would be SO GREAT. My intention isn't to offend anyone, just treat my mistakes as an unintentional funny.
I also decided to keep their names as is, because they're awesome, and I can't call Chirrut "Chiro" or something like that. Personal preference. Anyway, they'll have more time with Jyn and the others in the next chapter, and there'll be more backstory to the pair.
- Cabrón was to call Han a bastard (but quietly :D)
- Menos mal means something like "thank goodness".
Okay, I'm done now. Until the next update :)
