Bodhi's teeth were bloody. He was also grinning at Jyn and, even with the flicker of static that always came with a poor connection on his end, the combination was unnerving. "I wanted to let you know I was alive," he said, which was not any less unnerving. "People are always telling you things, and I thought that they might tell you I was dead."
"That's—" Jyn said, and then she had to stop, because she really had no idea what she was supposed to say in response to that, especially since he looked so proud of himself for thinking of it.
"There was an assault on our base," someone said, and Jyn had noticed the woman standing behind Bodhi, but she hadn't paid her much mind, distracted by Bodhi's bloody teeth and the alarming things he was saying. "Rook piloted one of the transports we used to evacuate the ground crews. Did a good job of it, too," she added, almost as an afterthought, and Bodhi briefly turned his red-stained smile on her. "Mostly."
"The flying was fine," Bodhi said to Jyn, "it was the landing that did me."
"Lucky shot took out his stabilizers," the woman said, "anyone would have fumbled the landing, and most of us would have taken casualties. He just ended up with his face in the control panel."
A head injury would explain all the smiling, Jyn supposed.
"Green Squadron?" Jyn guessed, and the woman's mouth turned up a little at the corner.
"Talked about me, has he?" She reached out and ruffled Bodhi's hair a little, although Jyn thought that the way her fingers lingered might have had more to do with wanting to check for lumps and blood beneath the singular knot that had become Bodhi's hair at some point during the escape. "Shara Bey. Now, if that's all taken care of, I think I'll get him down to the infirmary. Like I should have done an hour ago, Rook."
"M'good."
"You're concussed," Shara said, "and letting you pass out in front of your friend would be a poor thanks for getting my husband off that ice ball. Nice to meet you, Erso." When Jyn started, she shrugged. "He's talked about you, too. Mind, a lot of people talk about you. Sometimes I learn new words, listening to them talk."
Jyn could guess. "How many different ways are there to say 'ship thief'?"
"Sixteen, if you're talking to a Weequay." Shara smiled, brief and weary, before she nudged Bodhi. "Say goodbye."
For a moment, Bodhi looked like he might protest. Then he shifted in his chair, and whatever spinning the room must have been doing seemed to decide him. "Goodbye," he said to Jyn, and she saw Shara's hand grow large in the screen a second before it went dark.
"Goodbye," Jyn murmured to the empty room. She was glad that Bodhi was still in one piece. She was glad that there were people willing to look after him when he needed it, if he needed it. She was glad, and she didn't dwell on the question she hadn't gotten the chance to ask.
She got her answer three days later, when the next shipment from the Rebellion arrived. It had probably already been on its way when their base had been attacked. Blasters, this time, few of them in working order but all of them with enough of their original parts still intact that someone with clever hands could make them work again. The spindly black figure unloading the crates at the designated meet spot out in the desert was familiar, and Jyn thought that she might be able to pick him out of a crowd of nearly identical enforcer droids now, although she couldn't have said what the difference was, if it was a scratch on his plating that gave him away or something about the way he held himself.
"Jyn Erso," he said, and he dropped one crate on top of another hard enough to make Jyn wince. "I am here to deliver the goods you requisitioned." He paused. "Cassian said I had to."
"He's okay?"
He fixed his photoreceptors on her and was silent long enough that she was certain – although not as certain as she would have liked – that the silence was meant to make her squirm, rather than being the precursor to bad news. "He is in good health," K-2SO said, eventually. "We were nowhere near Hoth. Other side of the galaxy, in fact. He's been in deep cover for the past month. He wouldn't even let me go with him. ApparentlyI'm too conspicuous." He sounded irritated, which Jyn couldn't fault, even if he was—sort of inarguably conspicuous.
She popped open one of the crates and pulled out a blaster. When she pointed it at the sand and fired, the shot came out spluttering, and veered sharply to the right. Well, that would have to be fixed. "This one's fussy," she said. "Maybe I'll name it after you."
"Depends," Kay said. "Will the name prove to be at all fitting? I am highly effective. Have you gotten any better at hitting the things you shoot at?"
She pointed the blaster at him. "We could find out," she said, but she was smiling.
It was weeks before she saw Cassian again. He brought no supplies, no news, no excuse for arriving on Jedha other than that being where Jyn was. He let her crowd him up against the front door, let her kiss him until heat replaced some of the nervous, jittery energy of having spent days not knowing after Hoth and weeks not knowing after Kay had arrived on Jedha. He let her push back his coat, his shirt, find new bruises and bumps with her fingertips, let her try to be gentle even though she knew—she was aware that she wasn't very good at it.
Later, curled up within the familiar four walls of her room, she traced the fresh, bright red streak of half-healed skin over his ribs. The skin around the edges felt hot, but not so hot that she worried about infection. A glancing blow from a blaster, probably, not serious enough for him to justify the use of a bacta patch, and it was silly to be bothered by it when she knew for a fact that Cassian had gotten worse in the past. "How long can you stay?"
His eyes were half closed, lazy and content in a way that she still wasn't used to seeing him. "A couple days. Maybe a week."
"New mission?" she asked, and he nodded.
She still didn't want the Alliance. She still wanted Jedha. But things had gotten more complex when she wasn't looking. She wanted Cassian, too, wanted him alive and in one piece—and Jedha could spare her for a while, once in a while. Had always been able to spare her, if she was honest. "Want some company?" she asked.
The rebellion on Jedha was changing. Jyn watched it change, watched as more people who called NiJedha home quietly made their way out to the catacombs that housed Saw's rebels, watched as the pushback from the Imperials became more vicious with every successful attack, every fugitive that escaped from under their noses. The local resistance movements got angrier, more likely to take risks and less likely to shy away from a fight with their better armed, better trained occupiers. Those that wouldn't or couldn't fight went out of their way to cause other kinds of trouble, even if that only meant making sure that the Imperials who patronized their restaurant got the dregs of the beer or meat that had started to go off, so smothered in spices that the person eating it wouldn't know until they spent the rest of the night crouched in the 'fresher. The basement got crowded enough for Jyn to give up entirely on the ruse of not knowing what Chirrut and Baze spent their spare time doing; they drew the curtains and made sure that people knew about the hatch at the back of the stairs, and in its own way Jyn's house became as busy with life as Tana's had always been. She watched as more civilians got caught in the crossfire, and then she watched one day as Tana strapped her emergency blaster to her hip and twitched the bright red of her shawl to cover it for a trip to the market, and she wondered if there really were any civilians left on Jedha.
Almost three years earlier, another young woman had looked dead in the eye of the man who would give the command to destroy everything that she had ever called home, and warned him that to tighten his grip was to feel everything he wished to hold slip between his fingers. She was right. This was the Empire's mistake. This was always the Empire's mistake: with Jyn, with star systems, even with Jedha, a little moon valuable only for the crystals that grew on its surface and the symbolic weight of its history. The things you held too tightly learned to hate you. The people who hated you learned to push past fear and fight back. They rebelled.
(Jyn met Leia only once before the end of the war. She brought in a shipment of the supplies that were the Rebellions' side of the bargain Jyn had struck with Cassian. She was hollow-eyed with exhaustion and the white of her tunic was rumpled from the long journey; Jyn didn't even realize that she was talking to a princess, a leader in the resistance, until much later, when Cassian asked her how it had felt to have a royal escort for her cargo.
They hadn't spoken much. Jyn had offered her half a nutrition bar, and the princess had declined before abruptly changing her mind. She had eaten in quick, mechanical bites, and Jyn was familiar enough with the act of eating because she'd realized how long it had been since her last meal rather than eating because she felt hunger to recognize it in someone else.
"I understand there's an Alderaanian among Saw Gerrera's Partisans," Leia said. "I hear that you have Gerrera's ear." Idly, Jyn wondered who this woman had befriended to learn that little tidbit of information. Bodhi seemed the most likely culprit, although Jyn supposed that one of the strays she had sent to the Rebellion might have passed along some rumor they had heard, or Cassian might have felt compelled to include it in a report to command. "Could you arrange a meeting?"
"Why?" Jyn asked.
She watched the woman's expression go shuttered, and waited for the lie, so it was a surprise when the answer, while hardly illuminating, sounded so much like truth: "It's important. To me. Can you?"
The Partisans' base was no safe spot for a woman of the Rebellion. Saw held grudges, and it seemed sometimes like every passing day made him more twitchy, more paranoid, more likely to turn a blaster on a friend instead of keeping it pointed at the enemy, where it belonged. "If you get yourself shot, I'm not taking the blame." Something about the woman's bearing, the way that even tired she held herself like she was one wrong word away from a fight – as familiar as the short work she had made of her half of the nutrition bar had been – made Jyn add, a smirk already tilting her lips, "But I'm not taking the credit, either."
Leia startled, and then she smiled, reluctantly, like it had been dragged out of her.
Jyn didn't hear much about how the meeting she arranged went, although she did wonder what had been said when she heard that Euwood Gor, the man who had once spat every time that Jyn passed him, had left the Partisans to rejoin the Alliance's Pathfinders. She didn't wonder as much once she heard who Leia was.
She was glad, a little, that she hadn't known. She thought that the conversation might have gone differently with the weight of Alderaan hanging over them both.)
The rebellion on Jedha was changing, which was why, when Jyn came back from one of half a dozen missions with Cassian to find no one at the checkpoint to show her identification to, she felt nothing but the first stirrings of dread.
The streets were not quite empty, but they were emptier than they should have been at this time of day. Most of the booths in the marketplace had pulled down their awnings or the metal grates that kept out would-be thieves at night. The vegetable merchant Tana had chatted with during Jyn's first excursion into Jedha was just locking up. When he saw them, he reached for the blaster he had set on his table.
No—not when he saw them. When he saw Kay. There was not a single Stormtrooper on the streets, not a single Imperial droid. For once, the KX-series droid at Cassian's back had no way of blending in, here in the middle of occupied, hostile territory.
Only, it didn't appear to be occupied anymore.
She waved her hand at the vegetable seller. He knew her face well enough by now that his fingers fell away from the blaster, but he kept his eyes on them as they passed.
"We could just ask him what's going on," Kay said. "He seemed friendly."
Jyn got her explanation within seconds of walking through the door to her house. "The Imperials pulled out late yesterday," Baze said.
"Trade ships have been told that they have until midnight to leave Jedha," Chirrut added, with a calm that Jyn was certain she wouldn't have been able to replicate.
The Stormtroopers were gone, but the Destroyer was still squatting over the city. Imperial personnel had all been evacuated. The Empire never gave up the things that it had claimed, or at least never left those things intact when it did. Suddenly, the deserted streets Jyn had passed through made more sense.
Jyn had heard whispers all while she was growing up: planets that had pushed back too hard against the Empire, or had become inconvenient in some other way, were dealt with. Perhaps the worst thing about the Death Star was that the Empire had never truly needed it. They had already possessed the technology necessary to wipe a settlement or a city off to the map, to leave nothing of the place or the people that had angered them except ashes and molten rock. If Jedha was lucky, it might be a few days of bombardment, a lesson for both Jedha and the nearest systems about what happened to those who refused to submit. Some of the city's population might survive, once the Imperials felt certain that any opposition had been stamped out. If they weren't lucky—.
"They're going to raze the city," Cassian said, giving voice to the worst of Jyn's fears. No one in the room disagreed.
"You should go," Jyn said to Cassian later that night, across the table and the remains of the dinner she had eaten only because it would be stupid to starve herself before a fight (as if this was a fight, as if any of them would be given the chance to fight). "The Rebellion will need to be told what's happened here." Communications had been down since the Empire had left Jedha; even Bodhi's heavily modified transceiver wasn't working. It was as good an excuse for sending him away as any.
Baze flicked a glance in her direction, but then he returned his attention to Chirrut, continuing whatever quiet conversation they had been having as though Jyn hadn't spoken at all, giving her the illusion of privacy. She wondered if he was trying to convince Chirrut that he should leave. If so, she wished Baze luck, although she didn't think he'd have any.
Cassian tipped his head, acknowledging her point. Jyn felt some of the tightness in her shoulders and in her chest relax.
"No," he said.
Jyn looked at him. "No?"
"No." He didn't explain, just met her eyes across the table, like he thought she could figure out his reasoning on her own if he gave her enough time to get there. Maybe she could.
"Speak for yourself," K-2 said. "I, personally, have no desire to meet my end in a fiery inferno." When Jyn looked at him, one brow raised, he added, with an air that implied that she never should have doubted him, "I think we should all leave."
"All of us?" Jyn asked. "There are eleven million people on this moon. Fifty thousand of them live in NiJedha. I'm interested to hear your plan for evacuating them all."
"All has a variable meaning," K-2 said, and he was undoubtedly displeased with her, because he loved Cassian, or came as close to it as a droid could, and it—it had been made clear that Cassian's continued presence on Jedha was dependant on hers. Maybe he was even right, but Jyn didn't have the heart to think of that tonight. Morning would be soon enough.
It wasn't. Word came to their door early the next day: a group of pilgrims had tried leaving the moon's surface just after dawn, a few scant hours after the deadline given to the trade ships in Jedha's port. The scavengers had found the shredded remains of the pilgrims' vessel outside of the holy city's walls. No one was leaving Jedha.
For the first time in years, there was no Destroyer hovering over Jedha City. Jyn made a quick trip to the roof after dark, taking the macrobinoculars she'd found in Cassian's pack with her, and confirmed what one of the neighbors had told her: the Destroyer was still there. All of the Imperial ships previously assigned to Jedha were still there, floating in the moon's orbit, out of sight to the naked eye but not gone.
A week passed, then two, and nothing changed. Jyn made daily trips to the roof, sometimes with Baze or Cassian. Communications were still down. The few ships that didn't take what had happened to the pilgrims as the warning it was clearly intended to be were found in the same condition: twisted wrecks in the desert, with no signs of life aboard and little that was worth salvaging.
No ships left Jedha. No ships arrived on Jedha, either. Soon, it became clear that razing the city had never been the Empire's plan at all.
Baze was the one to finally say it, one night when he and Jyn stood on the roof and passed the binoculars back and forth, as though what could be seen through them would change. "Not a blitz, then," he said. "A blockade."
Weeks stretched into a month, and then two. The food available for purchase stretched too, until it didn't, until the tables in the marketplace were bare and most of Jedha's restaurants were shuttered and dark. Not much grew on Jedha. The further flung settlements were all small enough that they had never needed to rely on trade to for food, but the holy city had long since grown past the point where it could sustain itself on the plants that grew wild at the base of the plateau or the few native animals that roamed the desert, the kitchen gardens on rooftops or in the narrow space between buildings, planted with things that wouldn't wither in the dry air or wilt in the cold.
The Empire wouldn't destroy Jedha, not when there was an alternative. It would starve Jedha instead. Jedha, its history, the weight the place held for a hundred different faiths spread across the galaxy—those things made Jedha City and its continued subjugation symbolically important, if occasionally politically inconvenient. Its people were nothing but inconvenient, and the Empire would hardly mourn over thinning their numbers through hunger, especially if hunger made them more malleable.
"I've started rationing the children," Tana said one night, regretful but unyielding, like she expected Jyn to argue. Jyn didn't, not about that. Tana's cheeks were thinner than they had been when the blockade had started, thinner than they had been years ago when Jyn had first arrived, even if there had never quite been enough to go around even then. She wondered how strictly Tana had been rationing herself, and for how long. If Jyn was a betting woman – and she was – she would have bet that Tana had started skimping on meals the moment she had realized that no new shipments of food and goods would be arriving on Jedha's surface.
Jyn went home and pulled crates out of the basement – nutrition paste, ration bars, the last of the strange imported root vegetables that she had bought in the market on a whim that none of them had ever really been able to figure out how to cook. Not everything, but most of it. Kay watched her as she worked, his head tilted like a bird that had found something interesting to watch. "You could help me," she said.
"But I don't want to," Kay said, which was about what she had been expecting. She shook her head, and returned to the basement.
"Don't argue with me," she told Chirrut, when he came to listen to her sweat her way through moving the last of the food up the stairs.
"Did you think I was going to?" he asked, sharper than he usually was when he spoke to her, but hunger and worry had sharpened all of their tempers. Jyn dropped the final crate with the rest, and reached out to thump his shoulder in apology. Chirrut nodded his acknowledgement, which she took to mean forgiveness; years with Baze had made him accustomed to rough apologies, the kind that didn't require words or the concession of an argument.
"Leave two or three crates with me," he said. "I'll make sure they get where they need to go."
Jyn hesitated, but of course Tana wasn't the only one in the city who took in lost and hungry mouths, and Jyn had already learned her lesson about the potential cost of safeguarding only that which she loved – with Alderaan, with the Death Star, with months (years) of dithering over when she would reveal the existence of her father's weapon and its flaw, dithering which had ultimately proven pointless. Worse than pointless. She wouldn't ever really know how much worse, if anything would have changed or if something else might have been salvaged or saved had she spoken up sooner, had she been able to take that step back from Galen's safety as her primary concern. She didn't regret prioritizing her father, or at least she didn't think she would have known how to do anything else, but she could admit now that it had been a mistake, maybe even a costly mistake. She wouldn't make the same one twice. "Good," she said.
She borrowed a speeder from one of the neighbors and took two of the crates to Tana's house. Any more would draw attention, and while supplies were not yet scarce enough for people to have started looting their neighbors, Jyn didn't doubt that it would get there, eventually, if nothing changed.
Something was going to have to change.
She found Cassian standing out front when she returned, his elbows resting on the low wall that surrounded the front of the house. His gaze was fixed on something up above, and at first Jyn was sure that he was watching one of the surveillance droids the Imperials had deployed after the extraction of the garrison. There were hundreds of them, buzzing above the city like fat metallic flies, watching, undoubtedly feeding information back to the Destroyer and her crew. Jyn wondered what they were looking for. Ships making a break for orbit, perhaps, so that the Imperials could give them the same welcome they had given every other ship that had tried to leave Jedha. Perhaps they were just looking for signs that Jedha's population was sufficiently beaten down and broken. Jyn wondered if the droids had captured any images of her. They undoubtedly had. She wondered if she had been recognized as a fugitive yet, if, when Jedha was forced to welcome back its conquerors, hers would be one of the first doors they came to.
She heard a shout from above, and realized that it wasn't the droid that had caught Cassian's attention. There was a boy and a girl on the roof of the house across the way. As Jyn watched, the girl lifted her arm and threw something at the surveillance droid hovering overhead – a rock, perhaps, or maybe a bottle. She missed, but the boy cheered anyway, and then he made his own attempt, his improvised missile clattering harmlessly onto a neighboring rooftop. "They do know," Jyn said, and she sounded so much calmer than she felt, her heartbeat already kicking at the base of her throat, "that those things can shoot back, right? And that their aim is a lot better. And that they explode if you actually take one down." She'd seen it once, soon after the surveillance droids had arrived: one of them had passed too close to an open window, and a man had swatted it out of the air with a vibromop. It had laid in the street for a few seconds, rolling around in the dirt and trying to get airborne again, but once it had become clear that the droid was too damaged to fly it had self-destructed and taken a speeder and the doors and windows of the nearest building with it.
"If they're anything like me at that age, they don't care," Cassian muttered, but he already had a leg half over the wall when the second rock that the girl threw hit the droid. Jyn's breath caught, and she braced her hands against the wall to follow Cassian, but she already knew that if the droid came down there wasn't much either of them could do, other than shout a warning and hope that the kids had the sense to heed it.
The droid listed to the side, and the children cheered again. It wobbled, and then lurched up a few feet in the air. The blaster attached to the round body swiveled, seeking out a target, but the rock had clearly damaged something essential inside of it, and after a moment of uselessly seeking out a target it spun and listed unsteadily upwards again. This time, it didn't stop, not until it disappeared into the inky darkness of the sky. Damaged, then, but not so badly damaged that it would self-destruct rather than returning to the Imperial ships for repair.
Jyn let go of the breath she had been holding and settled on top of the wall. Cassian fell back a step until he could lean next to her, and he looked a little bit breathless himself. Neither of them spoke, until Jyn said, "I need to go see Saw."
He didn't argue, although Jyn thought he probably wanted to. From what she had been able to gather, the Alliance didn't like or trust Saw any more than Saw liked or trusted them. They almost seemed to resent him for becoming someone too infamous to be useful. Cassian's personal opinion seemed more mixed, perhaps because his own hands were not nearly as spotless as the Rebellion's reputation was, but he still didn't trust Saw, which was—reasonable, really.
(She wondered, sometimes, what would happen to men like Cassian Andor if the war ended—men like Melshi and Sefla, people like the ones who had volunteered to fly a doomed mission to rescue her father. We're a bit of a ragtag bunch, Melshi had said, and she wondered how they would be remembered, the ones too unruly for military discipline, the ones who might not clean up as nice as history liked for its heroes. She wondered if they would be remembered, if their sacrifices would be recognized or if they would be allowed to fade into obscurity, or be swept hastily under the rug to rest beside the Rebellion's previous involvement with Saw and every other dark and bloody thing that had been done under the auspices of war but which would prove inconvenient in a time of peace, if such a time ever arrived.)
"Tomorrow, when it's light," Cassian said, and there was no question to his voice but Jyn knew it for the request it was. She followed him inside. As she passed the top of the stairs leading down into the basement, she scooped a nutrient bar from one of the crates. She broke it in two, offering half to Cassian and ignoring the way her stomach snarled a protest. If he understood why she was rationing them more strictly tonight – if he knew that she had given away the majority of their stockpiled supplies, and he had to, because K-2 wouldn't have remained silent for her sake – he said nothing.
They were still learning to be kind. She didn't think either of them had much practice, but some nights, nights like this one, when she tucked herself close and warm against Cassian's side, too tired to do anything other than kick off her boots before her head hit the pillow, Jyn thought that they might just be getting the hang of it.
"Jyn!" Her name was a rusty bark on Saw's tongue, and when she looked up, for a moment it was as though neither he nor time had moved since the first moment she had seen him: light glinting off of metal and clinging softer to flesh and cloth, every inch of him a challenge (a warning), twice as large as life and ten times too loud for the living. The whole room stopped when Saw raised his voice, hands pausing abruptly in the act of cleaning a blaster or moving a dejarik piece. The whole world stopped.
The moment passed. The usual chaos of the militia's improvised base resumed: too many people in too little space, voices bouncing against each other loud enough that Jyn had sometimes wondered how the Empire couldn't hear them even from orbit, how the noise didn't vibrate the bones of Jedha's long dead loose from the walls. Saw was what he always was, which was to say that he was everything he had been in that first moment but also older and more tired, more like her than she would have imagined and more flawed than she would have wished for. He clapped her shoulder once she managed to weave her way through the room to his side, the pressure cuff around his wrist digging into her skin. She didn't mind so much. This conversation would go easier if he was pleased to see her at the start of it.
"Come, child," he said, and he turned to lead her down the familiar paths that would take them to the rooms set aside for Saw's personal use.
Her eye caught on a pile of crates shoved deep into a alcove, and Saw made a faint, satisfied noise when he caught her looking. "The Empire would starve us out. They'll have a trickier time of it than they think, eh?"
Jyn stepped into the room, and saw supply lists drawn on flimsi, hyperspace nav charts, the holographic rendering of a planet that was not Jedha rotating placidly near the window. "Not that tricky," she said, the softest condemnation that she knew how to give. "You're leaving."
He stopped, and his expression clouded briefly, like he had forgotten that he had left his plans on display here at the heart of his sanctuary, or like he had forgotten that she wasn't the child he half remembered, and that she would be able to draw her own conclusions from the evidence. "Nothing's certain yet," he said, and there was a warning in his voice, as there always was at the start of an argument. Jyn had never once heeded it.
She wasn't sure what she would have said. Something about how half of the people they had passed in the outer room were Jedhan (they hadn't been, when she had first come here; desperate times made for desperate allies). Something about how he was abandoning them, and possibly something she couldn't take back, something about how he was a coward (he wasn't, and she knew that even as the word flashed across her mind; he just knew the futility of fighting a battle already lost when the war was still in progress). Instead, what came tripping out of her mouth was, "You're dumping me?" sharp and angry and more hurt than she would have liked, too much and much too personal a confession to put into the hands of a man like Saw Gerrera.
Saw's expression softened incrementally, and she was once again reminded of the way he had looked the first time she had seen him, the way he had looked at her, wistful and half-buried in memory. "I wouldn't have to," he said. "You could come with me. There's more to this war than Jedha. We can find another place to stand and fight."
Jyn's laugh startled even her, and she shook her head. She thought there might have been a time, young and furious and with nothing to bind her other than Galen, when that offer would have sounded like the best one she was likely to get.
She had wondered what it would have been like to be raised by Saw. Saw would have taught her to stand and fight. Lyra had taught her to negotiate, and Galen had taught her to compromise but to never actually take no for an answer, even if she smiled and nodded when the word was said, to look at a wall and wonder if there was a way to burrow under it rather than blast through it. "What if there was something else you could do?" she asked. "You told me to come to you if I ever thought of another way to fight a war."
He'd actually told her to come to him if she thought of another way to win a war, but the distinction had never held much weight with Jyn. The closest she had ever come to winning had been with her standing at the top of a tower and looking her own death in the face. Saw had been right when he had said that she'd never seen a war won. She couldn't imagine what that kind of victory would look like. She kept her victories small.
It wasn't the kind of thinking that won a war. It might win a few battles, though. It had on Scarif. It had at Yavin, with the help of a nice-enough-but-too-short pilot. She'd take her chances with Jedha, this one and the next one and the next, until she won, or until all the chances were spent.
She expected Saw to argue. She'd forgotten that he hated backing away from a fight as much as she did. He placed the ventilator to his mouth, took a deep breath, and said, "I'm listening."
It wasn't much. It was a chance. "Have you ever run a cargo blockade?"
Saw had eleven X-wings secreted away in the depths of the catacombs. Only two of them were operational, and only one of them was operational in a way that included the ability to fly in a straight line. Getting any of them into a state fit to run an Imperial blockade would mean spare parts, and a better than average mechanic.
The former, Saw had readily available. He had already been planning a departure, and ships' parts cost less on a planet that no one could leave. The latter, Jyn could provide.
"This is going to cost you double, Erso," Gavra Ubrento said, her wary, narrow gaze fixed on the Tognath mercenary standing closest to her. "Triple," she snarled, when he pulled the hood over her face. She threw an elbow in the Tognath's direction, even though she had agreed to the hood, to all appearances with no intent other than to be as ornery and difficult as possible whilst still getting paid.
Jyn could appreciate that.
When Gavra saw the X-wings, she solemnly offered her professional opinion of what she had to work with: "Stanging trash." Jyn left her in the Tognath's care, pretending not to hear the way he muttered. She couldn't translate the words, but she had spent enough time around Bodhi to know what a pilot sounded like when someone had insulted his ship.
"Quadruple!" Gavra yelled after her.
It took two weeks for Gavra to fix Saw's ships. Jyn spent most of those two weeks watching Saw and Cassian circle each other, because it turned out that they were missing one more essential component of their plan: enough capable pilots to fly the ships once they were repaired.
"I've seen courting couples who dance around the question less," Baze muttered one night, after Tana had briefly forgotten that the kitchen table that Cassian and Saw's most recent emissary were dancing at wasn't hers and ejected them both into the yard with nothing more than a flutter of her shawl, a firm word, and the serene expectation that anyone she was felt needed to be removed would cooperate in their own removal.
"If you still need a pilot," Jyn told Saw the next time she saw him, "just take Cassian."
Saw frowned, but he gave in. He didn't trust the Rebellion, but he trusted her. (As much as he trusted anyone rose silently at the end of the thought, but no, he had trusted her enough to agree to this, and to agree to a half-mad run past the blockade in the first place on her recommendation alone, and that was what trust looked like to people such as they.)
She didn't much regret asking, or his agreement. Jyn might have preferred that the people she cared about be safe, but Cassian wasn't built in a way that would allow him to sit on the sidelines any more than she was, and Jyn knew better than anyone what a terrible thing it was to make someone's decisions for them and call that care.
It was another week before the next sandstorm blew up out of the desert and left Saw's people scrambling to take advantage before it blew back out again. It was clear that the Imperials were watching Jedha and the barren stretch of land around it closely, even the places where the surveillance droids weren't, or they would have seen smugglers eager to capitalize on the moon's misfortune long before now. The storm wouldn't be easy on the ships – no amount of mechanical skill and second-hand replacement parts would change the fact that the X-wings were hard used and well past their prime – but it would give them the cover they needed to get well away from whatever attentive eyes were fixed on Jedha.
Cassian went with them. If this was a holodrama, Jyn would have stood outside, perhaps blown a kiss or at least have waved, watched his ship until it was a speck on the horizon. As it was, those who had spent more years than Jyn weathering Jedha's storms thought that this one might have enough spit and fire to sweep up across the plateau, and Jyn allowed Tana to herd her somewhere with a roof and solid walls. She didn't think it would have mattered whether she was there to see Cassian off or not. She knew herself well enough to know that the idea of a wave or a smile would have crossed her mind, and that she then would have discarded it and stood there with hands in pockets and watched him go. (Perhaps she even would have watched until his ship was a speck on the horizon; she couldn't say.)
A week passed, but the ships were back before the second had stumbled to a close. They brought with them what little the X-wings' cramped cockpits would store and a cargo shuttle not unlike the one that Bodhi had once flown that someone had seen fit to liberate along the way.
"It won't be enough," Baze said, his eyes fixed on the open door of the cargo shuttle, where Saw was standing unsteadily and overseeing the delivery of the bounty his rebels had won. It was probably the most popular Saw had been with the people of Jedha City in all the time he had been here, and Jyn thought that Saw was smart enough to know it.
It wouldn't be enough. The crates of foodstuffs that the pilots had brought back would have stretched far if they had only needed to feed the forty or fifty people crowded in the marketplace (there would be more, many more, once word spread), but it wouldn't do much at all, or for very long, for the five hundred thousand people who called NiJedha home.
"It'll buy us some time," Jyn said.
To do what, she didn't know.
The rebels of Jedha – both the Partisans and members of the local resistance – were celebrating their victory, such as it was. The nettle wine had never been imported, and therefore hadn't run dry the way stronger liquors and food had over the past months. Saw's people seemed determined to make the most of that.
Jyn had meant to join them, but now her cup sat abandoned on top of one of the crates in the shadowed alcove of Saw's base, what had once been a cell for prisoners now repurposed for use as food storage. Cassian had drawn her away soon after the revelry had started, and he alone among the returning pilots had not looked to be in any mood for celebration.
"A second Death Star," Jyn said, and she couldn't have put a name to what she was feeling in that moment: ripped open but also curiously distant, like bleeding from a wound that she could see but couldn't feel. "I suppose that explains why they were still taking kyber out of Jedha."
Cassian had contacted the Rebellion once he had been far enough away from whatever the Imperials were using to jam communications out of Jedha. Jyn had known he would. She'd thought that he might be able to bring her word that Bodhi was in one piece. He brought her word of something else instead.
The Empire was rebuilding the Death Star. That was all he had been told; if the Alliance was planning an attack, they were doing a good job of keeping subspace radio chatter to a minimum. Whoever he had spoken to probably hadn't even been meant to tell Cassian that much.
"Four years dead," Jyn said, without meaning to say anything, "and they still won't let him rest."
Any response that Cassian might have made was drowned out by Saw's voice. He'd been speaking for some time, Jyn realized, his words broken only by the occasional scattered cheer from the gathered rebels – Saw knew how to keep his people motivated, how to take the rush of one victory and feed it into the next – but now his voice rose sharply, the occasional quick rasp of the ventilator serving as punctuation rather than a pause, as if he would turn even the damage that years of fighting had done to him into a strength at the end of the day. "—to remember: one fighter with a sharp stick and nothing left to lose can take the day."
Jyn's breath caught, and somewhere between the spark of pain that came from knowing that the worst part of her father's legacy once again floated in the depths of space and the roar of approval that greeted Saw's victory speech, a new idea caught and held.
One shot. It had only taken one lucky shot to destroy the Death Star the first time.
Two children on a rooftop, flinging whatever came to their hands at the most visible symbol of Jedha's continued occupation, their voices when one of their improvised weapons finally connected a shrill echo of the shouts of the rebels.
And Jyn thought: maybe not a sharp stick, but a rock might do.
"Jyn," Cassian said, and she thought that he might be trying to offer her some comfort, now that the noise had quieted down from deafening to merely loud. She waved him off.
"Get Saw," Jyn said. "Get everyone. I think I know how to break the blockade."
Jyn ended up being the one to gather Saw, her hand on his elbow, his militia now far enough in their cups that they didn't mind too much when she absconded with their leader. When they reached Saw's room, Cassian was already waiting, K-2, Baze, and Chirrut with him. Jyn started when someone stepped in behind her and closed the door, and when she turned she was even more surprised to find Tana Rook on her heels. The offer had been made, true, but Jyn hadn't actually thought that Bodhi's mother would find the thought of watching a group of rebel fighters drink to their own triumph enough of a lure to actually allow herself to be swept up in it.
When Tana caught Jyn looking, she just smiled. "You know I hate to be left out of the gossip," she said, with the air of a woman who was certainly not inviting herself to be a part of an impromptu war council, but didn't think she'd be denied even if she was. She was right; Jyn was of the mind that Tana could invite herself wherever she damn well pleased, and even Saw, who looked less than happy at the number of people Jyn had gathered in his inner sanctum, said nothing.
Jyn got right to the point. "The surveillance droids retreat to the ship when they're damaged," she said. "What if we sent something back with them?"
Saw was the first one to get it, the start of a smile curving his lips and erasing his annoyance. "A bomb," he said, and he said it like a man who had never met a piece of the Empire that he didn't wand want to see burn.
Jyn nodded, and after that she didn't need to say very much at all. (This was and had been her gift to the Rebellion, and to the rebellion, the best part of herself that she knew how to give: connecting information to people, causes to causes, people to people. She didn't have her father's genius, but Lyra had always said that it was better to be clever than to be a genius, and no one could claim that the people Jyn had found weren't clever.)
"We've used that tactic before," Cassian said. "Disable an Imperial droid, attach the payload, wipe its memory and send it walking into an enemy base." He looked at K-2 and shrugged an apology. "The spy eyes go off if you get them on the ground, though. We'd never have the time."
"I'm not suggesting we get them on the ground," Jyn said, and she held up the jagged chunk of rock she had collected from the floor of Saw's base. Cassian had been there the night that the children had damaged the surveillance droid, and she saw his expression turn considering.
Baze grunted. "Flexi-paste and mud," he said. "It'll stick."
"That's your answer to everything," Chirrut said, which wasn't untrue. Jyn had once watched Baze replace a window with nothing more that flexi-paste and determination. It held together their kitchen table, and every dish that she had ever broken trying to cook. He used spacer's tape to patch holes in the walls and cracks in his armor. Like the Rebellion, and like the rest of Jedha, Baze was used to making what he had make do.
"And yours is the Force," Baze said with a shrug. "I like mine better."
"The surveillance droids move," Chirrut said, for once making the decision to sidestep this old argument with Baze. "But there are always some near the temple." Jyn didn't ask him how he knew, how much close attention he paid to the place he had once been a Guardian of, even now, or how much it cost him to pay close enough attention to know what had become of it.
"We'll only get once chance at this," Kay said. "And the odds of one of you making the throw are—low. They're very low."
"Then it's good that we have you," Jyn said. "Isn't it?"
The droid looked at her, and he said nothing, but she thought she had surprised him, possibly even in a good way.
"We'll have to clear the streets," Tana said, as implacable and as pragmatic as ever. "If this works – if you succeed, and the Destroyer comes down – it's coming down on Jedha." Grief flashed briefly across her face, and Jyn remembered that the night Magva Yarro had been shot down in her X-wing, it had not only been Yarro whose life had been lost. "Even if it doesn't, there could be retaliation. People should know that there's danger, and be able to take what precautions they can."
Jyn looked to Saw, knowing that if someone was going to complain about the risks to their plan if so many people were to know that, at the very least, they were planning something, it would be him. He pressed his lips together, but he nodded. "It hardly matters. Even if someone would betray us," and his tone implied that someone would always be willing to betray them, if the price was right, if they were promised safety in exchange for information, and he wasn't wrong, "the Imperials have cut off communications to the surface."
"It wouldn't have mattered even if they hadn't," Tana said, as firm in her faith in her neighbors as Chirrut was in his faith in the Force. Maybe she was even right. Tana had faith, but she wasn't naïve. The rebellion had changed on Jedha in the past years. Not everyone was a rebel, but perhaps even those who weren't found themselves less willing to negotiate with a force that had already made it clear that they didn't care if the people negotiating lived or died.
(This was always the Empire's mistake: to hold a thing too tightly and think that it wouldn't grow to resent you for it, to rule through fear with the expectation that fear would buy obedience rather than anger and desperation.)
Saw made a faint, disbelieving sound, and he pressed the ventilator to his mouth, but the argument Jyn had been expecting never came. "We have another problem," he said. "To disable the Star Destroyer, we'd need a big blast. Nothing I have can make that. Nothing I have that could come close is small enough to lob at a surveillance droid."
No one seemed to have an immediate answer. They lapsed into silence, until Cassian finally broke it.
"When I was tracking kyber shipments," he said, "before we knew what they were being used for," and here he cast a glance at Jyn, and he almost looked like he was struggling not to smile in response to her grimace, "someone told me about a run another rebel cell made at an Imperial freighter that was transporting one of the crystals. They destroyed the freighter, but the blast took out two other freighters and half a dozen TIE fighters. Our best guess was always that the kyber on board was responsible, that it amplified the damage done by the ion canons, or by the blast."
He was looking at her again. Jyn's father had been the expert in kyber crystals—or at least, the expert in their destructive potential. She was the closest thing to an expert that they had. "That—sounds right," she said.
"I can get us an ion bomb," Saw said, and Jyn thought of the young sapper she had sent to him, less young than he had been now and seasoned by years of building incendiaries for Saw's militia out of anything that he and they could find.
Tana let out a sigh, soft and almost sad. "I can ask around," she said, and Jyn could hear her reluctance. "Someone might have kept safe a kyber shard large enough to do what we need it to do." She didn't look as pleased as she had been by their plan before. Neither did Chirrut, his mouth set and the thump of the butt of his staff against the floor something like a reproach. Kyber was sacred on Jedha, and beyond Jedha. People had died to protect it.
Jyn's hand went to the collar of her shirt, fingers brushing against the necklace her mother had given her. It was warm, not warm like it had absorbed the heat of her skin but warm like a living thing.
Lyra had been a woman of faith, even if Jyn wasn't. Like Tana, like Chirrut, Lyra had seen something sacred, something holy in the crystals, as her husband never really had, even before the Death Star, when the word kyber had still meant the chance to help rather than the potential for devastating harm. Perhaps if she did this, she was doing a disservice to her mother's memory.
She slipped the necklace from around her neck and brushed aside maps and battle plans so that she could place it on the table.
Or perhaps this was the best memorial she could offer her mother: a reckless willingness to do what had to be done to protect the people she loved, even when it cost her.
Jyn didn't know. But she liked to think that Lyra would have approved. That she would have been proud. "You won't have to."
They waited two days. That was enough time for Saw to get them the rest of what they needed. It was enough time for Tana to spread word to the people she knew, and for them to spread it from there. It was enough time for Chirrut to whisper to the few other remaining Guardians in the city, and for that whisper to trickle down to the pilgrims who hadn't fled when the Imperials had issued their warning. Baze went to the ports, spoke the to the other mercenaries and the captains of ships that were now half-buried by sand and disuse. Jyn returned to her job at the gambling house briefly, just long enough to tell the people who made a living at the tables to keep their heads low for the next few days and to watch them scatter like those who operated just to one side or the other of the law tended to do when there was a threat hanging overhead.
Two days and two night later, Chirrut led them into the kyber temple. He didn't say a word when Baze stepped automatically to the front of their little group – her, both former Guardians, Cassian and K-2 – and he pressed a finger to his smiling lips to indicate that Jyn should remain silent as well. Baze led them through the temple, his steps sure, never hesitating before selecting a door or turning one way down a branching corridor, as if he had walked this temple every day for the last twenty years, as if he had never left.
They made their way onto the roof. Jyn raised Cassian's macrobioculars to her face, and pointed silently to the droid hovering overhead. K-2 stepped out to take aim.
It went wrong immediately.
For years, Kay's ability to blend in with Imperial forces had been as much of a boon as his inability to convincingly pretend to still be one of them had been a curse—but there were no more Imperial forces on Jedha. The garrison was gone, and they had taken their enforcer droids with them. In her eagerness Jyn had forgotten that a surveillance droid's primary function was to surveil, to look for things that were out of the ordinary. Any enforcer droid still on Jedha was out of the ordinary. Any enforcer droid on Jedha was a potential threat.
She saw the moment when the surveillance droid's blasters swiveled. She saw the moment when Kay decided that he would take the shot anyway.
She moved.
In a fair fight, K-2 would use Jyn to mop the ground every time. One of Saw's fighters might have been able to take him, but Jyn didn't have the experience to best a bigger, stronger, faster opponent who had metal and gears instead of skin and blood. It wasn't a fair fight, though; he wasn't expecting her, and when she wrapped her fingers around the cold metal of his arm and used momentum and her own body's weight to drag them both toward the ground he wobbled, off balance, and then he staggered. Not far, but far enough that the first shot of the surveillance droid's blasters missed him.
Not far, but far enough for his throw to go wild, the bomb with its sticky coating of mud and paste landing somewhere near the center of the roof with a thunk that Jyn could hear but couldn't track in the dark. She turned her head, trying to see where it had landed, before Kay shoved her out of the way of the next blaster bolt.
She stumbled and went down hard, and K-2 went down beside her, less intent on getting shot now that doing so would fail to win them anything. For a moment Jyn stayed there, breathing in dust and stone. She heard Cassian return fire, and then she heard him swear. "More incoming."
He fired again, and was answered by the quick, angry buzz of a surveillance droid firing back – more than one surveillance droid, from the sound of it. Then she heard something else.
"The Force is with me. I am one with the Force."
"Chirrut!"
"I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me."
She rolled onto her side so that she could see the rest of the roof. There wasn't much to see, until a shot from Baze's repeating blaster caught one of the surveillance droids. The resulting explosion lit up the night, lit up the rooftop below, and let Jyn see the man standing at the center of it, his shoulders straight and his staff held between neatly folded hands.
"I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me." Chirrut stooped, hand groping for the bomb, and Jyn knew he wouldn't find it, that if she couldn't spot where it had fallen in the dark there was no chance of Chirrut finding it blind, and that he was going to die for nothing.
"Chirrut, come back!"
She thought she could have gone her whole life without knowing what Baze Malbus sounded like when he was afraid.
Another surveillance droid blew. This time it was Cassian's doing. Chirrut straightened away from the roof. There was something in his hand, and as she watched he tested the weight of it, and then he brought his arm back.
"I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me."
We'll only get once chance at this, K-2 had said.
The bomb sailed through the air. It hit the surveillance droid, mud and flexi-paste splattering across metal, covering the droid's holocam and half of the shell that served as its body.
It wasn't—possible.
(It was. Four years earlier, a pilot had trusted the Force and fired blind at the greatest weapon the Empire had ever built. More had been done with less.)
The droid jerked a few times, like it was trying to shake loose the thing that had been thrown at it. Baze picked his way across the roof slowly, cautiously, ready to shoot the droid down if it looked like its repusorlift would fail, although Jyn doubted even that would save them if the droid activated its self-destruct sequence with the bomb they had built still attached to it. The repulsorlift and whatever other systems powered the droid must have remained intact, however, because Baze had barely reached Chirrut's side when it veered sharply up, and up, away into the night.
Jyn scrambled for the binoculars, which she had dropped when K-2 had shoved her, barely feeling Cassian's hand on her elbow or the way her bare hands scraped against the rough stone of the rooftop. When she lifted them to her face she found that they had broken in the fall and most of the area over her right eye was dark. That didn't matter. She could still see through the left.
"The Force willed it," Chirrut said, just a shade too giddy for her to think he hadn't been shaken at all. Baze laughed, just a shade too relieved for the sound to be as derisive as it might otherwise have been, and Chirrut added, "It bothers you because you know it's possible."
"I know it's possible that you almost got yourself shot," Baze said pointedly, but Jyn's attention was on the night sky. She couldn't pick out the surveillance droid, but she could see the Destroyer.
"Anything?" Cassian asked, his voice tense and his hand still resting on her elbow.
The sky blazed red. It crackled green. "Yes," she said, but she couldn't find the words to say anything else as she watched the Star Destroyer that had shadowed Jedha for years rip itself to pieces.
It was a small victory. It wouldn't last. But even a small victory was still a victory.
They sheltered in the Temple of the Kyber until the sun peeked over Jedha's walls, although other than a few pieces of the Star Destroyer that hadn't been vaporized by the blast and managed made it through the atmosphere, there was nothing really to shelter from. There had been TIE fighters on the Destroyer, but maybe their pilots hadn't been able to scramble them in time to escape, because none appeared in the sky. When Jyn stepped out of the temple, she found people already on the streets, putting out small fires and assessing the damages. If there was to be retaliation for the destruction of an Imperial warship, it wouldn't be today.
Or the next day, or the day after that. The tattered remains of the Destroyer hovered in Jedha's orbit for a week, and no other ship came to replace it, to rain yet more fire down on Jedha for their disobedience.
"It can't be that easy," Cassian said one morning, eyes still groggy with sleep and a mug of caf held loose between his hands.
(It wasn't. Somewhere, on the other side of the galaxy, an Emperor was dead. Another Death Star had been destroyed. Coruscant was in revolt. The remains of an Empire were slowly eating itself. The war hadn't ended, but it was ending.)
The first of the smugglers, opportunists all of them, arrived two days later, with the food and goods that Jedha's people were desperately willing to pay for. Jyn found out about the Empire's defeat in the most unassuming way she possibly could have: one of the smugglers laughed at her and said, "What, you haven't heard?"
She stood there for a long minute after he told her, unable to make her tongue or her muscles work. He took another look at her face and snorted, although he looked a little more sympathetic now, assuming that the same expression meant the same thing on a Iktotchi's face. "A rebel, huh?" He turned his back on her. "I've got a discount for you, in that case. Tell Han Solo that Marvee says hello."
"We don't actually all know each other," Jyn managed to say, but either she hadn't spoken loudly enough or he didn't care, because he gave her the discount anyway.
She took the news back to the house, and saw the same stunned disbelief echoed back to her on Cassian's face, and on Baze's. K-2 said only, "We need to find some way to contact the Rebellion," and Chirrut seemed to greet the news more calmly than the rest of them could manage, but even he spent the next few days moving carefully, as they all did, like one wrong step might make it not true.
Tana sat and listened quietly as Jyn told her, and then she got up and reached with trembling hands for the one of the kitchen cabinets, the one she used to store odds and ends, mostly the junk that inevitably accumulated in a busy home. She reached deep, into the very back, and pulled out a bundle of red fabric, which she then rolled out on the counter. Jyn didn't know what the symbols embroidered into the fabric meant, but she knew that the thing wrapped inside was a kyber crystal, as long as her thumb and twice as wide. She watched silently as Tana picked it up carefully and placed it on the windowsill, where it would catch the last of the fading light. Her hands were steadier now.
The news reached Saw before Jyn did. He looked down at the table in his war room, at a datapad containing battle plans that now might never be used. He didn't look up when she entered.
"I didn't," he said, and then he stopped. He reached for the ventilator mask, decided against it, and let his hand fall away, his voice rasping breathlessly when he spoke again. "I didn't think to live to see the end of this war."
Jyn studied him. She had wondered once what the end of the war, if it came (when it came) would have to offer men like Cassian Andor. It probably had even less to offer a man like Saw Gerrera, who had given so much of his strength to the fight, and had taken so much of his strength from it. Who had done so much, for better or worse.
She had no easy answers to offer, but she did have a bottle of wine. She put it down on the edge of the table and used the broken off tip of a vibroknife, the end of it wrapped in rags, to pry off the seal. "We'll have to figure out what to do, now that you have," she said.
Saw almost smiled. "We?"
She didn't always know how she felt about Saw, but she knew she wasn't going to abandon him. They were too much alike. He was too much what she might have become (for better or worse), had the war stretched on another decade or two. "Always so eager to abandon me," she chided, but she was smiling when she said it.
The last of the Imperial ships left the next day. Perhaps they had received orders (perhaps they had received many different orders, from different corners of what had once been an Empire), or perhaps they simply tired of waiting over a moon that had never been important enough to hold when other worlds were now also in revolt. It meant that communications opened up again, and that Cassian was finally able to confirm the news that the smugglers and then the more legitimate merchants had brought them. It meant that others were able to do it same.
It also meant that on the night when Bodhi Rook once again returned home, Jedha was free, and Jedha was celebrating.
"They sent you a medal," Bodhi said, and he placed a small transparisteel box on the table in Jyn's kitchen. His hair was a mess, and his cheeks were flushed. They'd had an interesting time getting through Jedha's packed streets. Someone had handed Bodhi a mug filled with something pungent and undoubtedly very intoxicating the moment he had stepped off the ship, its hull painted with a slightly lopsided Alliance starbird. They'd been two streets away from the house when a large man had lifted Bodhi off his feet, hugged him hard enough that Jyn was sure she'd heard his ribs creak, and then kissed him full on the mouth before setting him down again. Jyn hadn't asked if they'd known each other. No one tried to kiss her, so maybe, or maybe they just knew that Jyn would be less appreciative of having that much of the celebratory mood spill over onto her.
"And, uh, a commendation," Bodhi added. "For Scarif. Apparently, when Sefla started calling you sergeant, that counted as a field promotion? I don't know how you ended up on the rosters, honestly, because I really don't think that's how a field promotion works, especially if you're, you know, not actually a member of the military. Probably someone lower down the chain of command just thought it was funny." He nudged the box a little closer to her. Jyn took it like she thought it might bite. "Congratulations, Sergeant Erso. I guess."
"Does that come with a military pension?" Jyn asked as she flipped the box open. The medal was round, and shiny, and would probably look very nice holding up the uneven leg on the table Baze had built.
"Honestly? Probably not." He smiled at her weakly. "Might come with a job, though, if you want it."
Outside, she could still hear the revelry, accompanied by the occasional boom of the kind of fireworks that people who had spent the last few years making bombs might conceivably piece together. Bodhi had jumped the first time he had heard one, and he still occasionally started in his seat. He'd always been nervy, but never like this, and she wondered when that had changed. They had a lot to catch up on. Years. They had stories to tell, the kind that couldn't easily be told over a patchy transceiver.
Odd to think that they might now have the time to tell those stories.
"We can talk about it tomorrow," Jyn said. She arched a brow at him. "Assuming you plan to stick around that long?"
Something like guilt flashed across his face, so she still knew him well enough to have guessed that much correctly. "It's not that I don't want to see what Jedha's like without the Empire," he said, "and I know there's a lot to do. It's just—there's a lot to do everywhere, Jyn. And I—." He stopped, took a breath, and shrugged. "Maybe I'm the one to do it. Some of it. Sometimes."
Bodhi. Still trying to make right. Or maybe just trying to make something. Jyn smiled and stretched out a leg to kick the edge of his chair. "Maybe you are," she said. "Maybe I'll even come watch you do it. Some of it. Sometimes."
He smiled back at her, surprised and pleased and so transparently both of those things that it made Jyn's chest hurt. She didn't like the feeling, but she wouldn't have traded it for anything. "Yeah," Bodhi said. "I'd like that."
Hours passed, and the noise from outside the house quieted, although not by much. Bodhi eventually left to, according to him, visit his mother and find someone else to kiss, not necessarily in that order. Jyn walked him most of the way to Tana's house, because no matter what he said, she knew him well enough to know that kissing would wait. She kept her fingers tucked deep into the pockets of her vest to keep them from the cold, and her shoulder bumped companionably against his as they walked. When they were a few feet from Tana's door, Bodhi told her to go find someone of her own to kiss, and winked at her so broadly that she worried he might injure himself. She swatted at him half-heartedly, and watched as he darted, laughing, toward Tana's door. She was still smiling a little on the walk home.
She found Cassian up on the roof. For a moment she just watched him, the long straight line of his spine and the way that his hair glinted with red when another firework burst in the sky above Jedha. He turned his head, not enough to look at her but enough for her to know that he had heard her approach, and lifted his arm. Jyn stepped forward and tucked herself beneath it, warm and close and familiar, and so much of so many things that she hadn't known she'd wanted—or, at the very least, hadn't known she'd be permitted to have.
She brushed her knuckles against his side, hesitating over the place where she knew the scar from Yung's blaster shot was. So many things she'd come close to not having at all. So many things she'd never thought she'd be able to keep. The list went on, and now that it looked like she might have a chance at having them, she found that she was greedy. If she might be able to have what she wanted, she wanted it all.
It was strange, still, to contemplate a future that might be determined by want instead of need. It was strange to think that she might now have to consider what would make her happy, rather than what would keep her alive.
It was strange, so strange, to think that they were winning, that they had won, that she'd lived to see it after all.
"Nice night," Jyn said.
"It is," Cassian said. "Welcome home." He pressed his lips to her hair, and she could feel the thump of his heartbeat where her side pressed against his, steady and strong. They'd said that they would talk about whatever was between them after Scarif. They never had. There had never really been the time—or, no, that wasn't true. There had been time, but the middle of a war was never really a good time to talk about the future, or to promise anything.
Tomorrow, perhaps she'd figure out what she wanted, and the right words to use to tell Cassian what that was. Tomorrow she'd figured out whether she would go with Bodhi, or whether she would stay, or whether she would do something else entirely. Tomorrow she would find out what Baze and Chirrut intended to do with the Empire gone. She would start to figure out what kind of life she wanted to build for herself, without the Empire or the Rebellion or the next fight to define where the corners should be.
Tonight it was enough to know that there would be a tomorrow, and that tomorrow could wait. She could wait to savor her victories, and to count her losses, and to determine what her next steps would be. Tonight she could just take the time to breathe in deep, until the cold, dry air of Jedha burned her lungs. She leaned in closer to Cassian and reached out to swipe his cup, sitting abandoned on the low pourstone railing that closed in the edge of the roof. He made a faint, annoyed sound, but he let her have it, and whatever was in the cup burst bright and sweet across her tongue. The arm around Jyn's shoulders tightened, and she took another long, deep breath.
She lived.
A/N: It's done! Thanks for reading, and big thanks to everyone who left a review. I am not always excellent about responding to people here, but I'm under the same username on AO3 and things-with-teeth on Tumblr; feel free to stop by and say hello.