AN: Thank you as always to aewgliriel for the Star Wars knowledge.
Chapter 10: Gone (Jyn/Bodhi)
Stitch by stitch I tear apart.
If brokenness is a form of art,
I must be a poster child prodigy.
Thread by thread I come apart.
If brokenness is a work of art,
Surely this must be my masterpiece.
— Neptune, Sleeping at Last
Jyn sits in the cockpit, practically vibrating in her seat.
She could fly right out of her mind, right out of her skin at any moment. Leia and Han are looking at her like she's a bomb ready to go off at the slightest provocation.
She feels like a bomb right now. Like she could shatter into a thousand pieces.
Earlier, Leia found her by that window, she was practically crumbling to the ground when she felt the other girl's hands on her.
"Jyn," she said softly and Jyn had her face in her hands, unwilling to look up at the sound of her name.
"We don't know that they were still on the base, they could have made it to the transports," Leia said and Jyn dropped her hands then to look at the girl.
"We could comm your transport… We were all supposed to be on it, I know the call codes," she said and then Jyn felt caught between mind numbing shock and the most dangerous glimmer of hope.
The kind of hope that could shatter a person when it was gone.
She didn't say anything but she let Leia pull her to her feet and guide her back to the cockpit. C-3PO seemed to take this as an invitation and so he followed them back as well, wittering concerns she doesn't particularly care about.
The first thing she hears upon entering the room is Han addressing Chewie. "Prepare to make the jump to lightspeed."
From behind them, the droid pipes up, "But, sir!"
And the sounds of laser blasts grow louder. From beside her Leia says, "They're getting closer," sounding both worried and impatient.
Han glances back at them with a look Jyn can't quite decipher before facing forward again.
"Oh yeah? Watch this," he says and cranks a lever.
Nothing happens.
Han and Chewie look at each other and Leia says with growing irritation, "Watch what ?"
Han cranks the lever again and nothing happens. He looks at Chewie and then back at them. "I think we're in trouble."
And the droid chooses that moment to tell them all, "If I may say so, sir, I noticed earlier that the hyperdrive motivator has been damaged. It's impossible to go to light-speed."
Han looks at the droid and then at them again.
"We're in trouble," he says and both he and Chewie scramble out of the cockpit, leaving Jyn, Leia, and C-3PO standing there in stunned silence.
Leia lets out a long suffering sigh and Jyn says nothing at all.
She can tell Leia's looking at her again and the girl moves to sit in the co-pilot's seat and starts punching buttons while she puts on a headset.
From down the hall, Jyn can hear Chewie and Han bickering, but all of her focus is zeroed in on the commlink and that fragile, terrible hope.
She watches Leia frown, pressing the headset tighter against her ears. And then she punches the same series of buttons a second time.
The ship is buffeted by another blast and it feels far, far away as Leia's frown deepens and her mouth goes tight.
She puts the headset back and looks up at Jyn with a new tension writ to her whole frame.
Jyn can't even speak, she just waits, and without warning, Leia gets up out of the chair and runs down the hall in the same direction Han and Chewie went. C-3PO clanks after her, calling for her to wait. Jyn follows at a slower pace, but she hears the whole thing. The conversation echoes down the hall even before she enters the room.
"Han, the comms are dead."
"What do you mean the comms are dead, princess?"
She replies slowly with words over enunciated words like Han might need it spelled out for him.
"I mean, I'm getting no signal. I can't send out a call. We have no way of contacting the Rebellion in this useless bag of bolts."
She turns the corner to see Han glaring at Leia from some below deck compartment that's belching out smoke. Chewie is crouched at the lip of the compartment with Han's toolkit and Leia is standing over them both with the droid at her side looking as distressed as ever.
Chewie gets up to look at one of the nearby panels, pressing a few buttons. He barks something at Han, who presses his lips together and ducks his head.
"Chewie says the satellite dish got hit."
It's then that he notices her lingering in the doorway. His glare breaks apart and Jyn wonders if it's possible to spontaneously combust. Leia follows his gaze and says quietly,
"We were going to contact the transport and see if everyone got aboard safely or…" she trails off.
Han pushes himself up to climb out of the compartment and walk over to Jyn.
He even has the gall to look apologetic as he approaches her when he was the one who dragged her away from there before she could find them. Her hand curls into a fist.
"Jyn, I'm—"
Whatever he planned to say next, Jyn won't know because she punches him in the face. She can hear Leia say something with alarm, but her ears are ringing and she feels almost deaf to everything except the sound of his footsteps as he reels back from her. His hand flies to his jaw where she hit him and Han almost, but not quite, scowls at her.
Still, he doesn't look away as she glares daggers at him. Behind him Leia looks torn, but doesn't intervene.
Then the whole ship trembles off its axis and Han looks away from Jyn, his gaze pulled towards the hall that leads to the cockpit.
"That's no laser blast, something hit us."
After obscuring his route by doubling back and around several times, Bodhi is able to rendezvous with their transport ship to get the rest of the way to Haven. He's glad to have that hour or two of solitary flight time to get himself back under control after saying goodbye to Luke.
He keeps telling himself, it's not meant to be goodbye forever and that Luke will come back soon and that it's not the end of the galaxy and he's just overreacting.
Telling himself this does not make him feel better as he flies back to meet with the transport. Once the ship is in sight, he comms them to be let onboard. The ship has a small hangar for him to land the X-Wing in.
When he's climbing out of the ship he notices Baze standing outside the ship, waiting for him.
Bodhi tries to force a smile as he steps down the ladder some ground crew member placed there for him.
"D-did somebody let y-y know I was coming? Or have you been here the whole t-time?" he asks as he walks over and Baze barely even blinks.
"We were informed," he says before he turns and starts walking out of the hangar. Bodhi knows him well enough to know this is a cue for him to follow, but something about it or maybe Baze's expression has him on edge.
He jogs to catch up with the larger man's stride and falls in step beside him as they navigate the halls of this large transport ship.
"Is s-something wrong?" he asks. "Did something h-happen?"
Baze glances at him sidelong, but doesn't respond until they enter the ship's med-bay.
"Cassian wanted to talk to you," Baze says in his low rumble and Bodhi doesn't know what that could mean. What kind of talk? Did he do something wrong? Or did something else go wrong? Why are they in the med-bay? He looks up at the other man nervously and without looking back at him, Baze puts a heavy hand on his back. He lets it rest like a comforting touch for just a minute before he uses that hand to propel Bodhi across the threshold.
Cassian is lying in a bed with a bandage wrapped around his head and Chirrut is seated by his bedside.
Both of them look towards the door when Bodhi steps through it and without a word Chirrut rises from his seat gracefully and moves to the door. As he passes Bodhi, the guardian lets his hand gently brush Bodhi's shoulder before he leaves the room with Baze.
The door slides shut behind them and Bodhi is suddenly alone with Cassian and the heavy air that he doesn't understand just yet.
He moves to sit in the now empty chair by Cassian's bed hesitantly, slowly sinking in the seat with increasing trepidation from the look in Cassian's eyes.
He looks unspeakably sad and he doesn't say a word as Bodhi settles himself and steels himself for whatever this talk could be.
He's imagining a lot of nightmare scenarios, including ones that aren't even possible. Like maybe they got news his mother and sister had survived Jedha only to have just died tragically in some shipwreck or something.
That's irrational, but the air in the room is so heavy, he's fearing the worst.
"Bodhi..." Cassian says, "Jyn's gone."
And his brain stalls.
In every worst case scenario he never imagined one where Jyn was…
"G-gone? Gone where?" he asks and Cassian almost winces.
"I don't know. Chirrut says she's alive, but I just know she isn't on one of the transports."
Bodhi doesn't know when he started taking Rogue One for granted as a permanent part of his life, but at some point they became untouchable in his mind. Not invincible. Just, an assumed forever presence in his life. Like his blood family before, he never really imagined scenarios like this one. Either they all died of some misfortune or were lost slowly due to the natural causes of age and time. He never thought he would lose his mother and sister in an instant.
He never thought he would lose Galen and he certainly never thought about losing Jyn.
But Cassian says she isn't dead.
"So sh-she's alive… You j-just don't know where she is?"
Cassian nods.
"You don't know if she's okay? O-or scared?" His mind is now churning with new nightmares he hadn't thought to consider before now.
"You don't know if she's hurt or been c-captured or..." He trails off and Cassian grips his arm and nods with a look of such misery that Bodhi stops talking.
He forgot for a moment about Cassian and how he might be feeling in this moment.
"I-I'm sorry for..." He helplessly waves a hand at Cassian as if that can encompass it but Cassian nods again as if it does.
"Wh-what happened?" he asks softly and Cassian sighs.
"I would have gone looking for her if I had seen she wasn't on the transport, but I was...delayed," he says, one hand gesturing at his head where the bandages sit.
"Some ceiling fell on me and I guess General Draven pulled me out and got me to the ship. I didn't even realize she wasn't there until the ship took off and by then it was too late."
So not only is Luke gone, but Jyn is, too. The full weight of that is finally sinking in. They're both gone.
Hopefully they'll both come back, but maybe they won't. He won't be with them to help ensure they get back safe and sound. A million things could happen to Luke on the way to Dagobah. Things could happen on the planet or on the way back to them. There's no way to know that his friend will come back intact. And he doesn't even know where Jyn is or how she is. He just knows that she's not here.
Bodhi exhales long and loud and wants very much to scream or cry or do something . He leans forward, bracing his hands against his knees and bites the inside of his cheek, trying to get himself back under control.
When he thinks he can speak, he says without looking up, "Luke left."
"What?"
"H-he left," Bodhi repeats, his voice cracking just a little bit and Cassian lets go of his arm so he has two hands to sit up in bed.
Bodhi looks up at the motion and sees the other man frowning and concerned. For some reason that surprises him a little. He can also see the question Cassian isn't asking and he tries to answer it.
"Luke found out about s-some Jedi Master in th-the Dagobah system... He wanted to g-go to complete his training."
Cassian's frown deepens.
"I thought Chirrut was teaching him," he says and Bodhi sighs.
"Even Chirrut w-was saying he could only teach L-Luke so much so…"
He trails off and buries his face in his hands. It's not the same as Jyn leaving, nowhere near it, but now they're both gone and the feeling of loss is doubled.
Cassian says nothing, but he can feel the man's gaze on him. Unasked questions hang in the air between them, he's sure the intelligence man has hundreds of questions about what happened.
Instead Cassian murmurs, "Are you okay?" and Bodhi huffs something nearing a laugh. He should be asking Cassian that question, not the other way around. Still, he can't look up. He asks through his fingertips, "Chirrut's sure th-that Jyn's alive?"
"He says he is," Cassian replies and Bodhi breathes out shakily, still trying not to cry.
A hand comes to rest gently in his hair and it reminds him of eons ago when Jyn did the same thing. He finally pulls his face from his hands to see Cassian looking as raw as he feels.
"Do you think Chirrut w-would mind if I keep a-asking him… About Jyn?" he asks sounding not at all like he's crying.
"No, I don't think he would," Cassian says quietly.
And neither of them say another word for a long time, until a nurse comes in and bustles Bodhi out, saying Cassian needs his rest.
Bodhi doesn't want to leave, but he does what the nurse says and leaves the room, getting one last look at his friend as he does. Cassian looks tired and empty as he stares blankly at the ceiling above him. Then the door slides shut, leaving Bodhi alone with gray metal durasteel and it's the first time in a long time that he's felt so alone.
AN: So I'm learning there's a fine line between good angst and just straight up depressing. An earlier draft of this depressed the hell out of me just writing it and so I dialed it back a bit. Also I want to hug everybody.