AN: Trigger Warning for torture.

I'm not sure how to tag this it's not super violent but idk what triggers people. If somebody sees something specific that needs to be tagged let me know...but um...Jyn's not having a nice day.

If you want to avoid this chapter entirely I'll include a summary at the bottom.

Chapter 14: Nothing Left to Burn(Jyn)

Hand me your hand, let me look in your eyes
As my last chance to feel human begins to vaporize
Maybe it's the heat in here, maybe it's the pressure
You ought to head for the exits, the sooner the better
—
Houses swallowed by the earth, windows thick with frost
And I reach deep down within but the pathways twist and turn
And there's no light anymore and nothing left to burn

–Autoclave, The Mountain Goats

Everything's a blur and she just knows there was no better way so she jammed herself into the escape pod and barely had time to buckle herself in as she smashed the button for it to go. She felt the dizzying loss of equilibrium as the small pod leapt out of the Falcon to dive through space and the whiplash when it got caught in the tractor beams pull. The change happened so fast her head smacked against the plasteel of the small window built above her head.

Soon she saw the Falcon, still being dragged ahead of her. It slowed to a stop instead the hangar bay, while the gray of the death star loomed with its machinery craters above her. As she watched it come closer and swallow her, she organized her thoughts.

Saw had trained her for this, he trained all the Partisans and when she was ten years old he told her it was time.

She imagines her home... The one that feels ancient now, back on Lah'mu. She imagines its subterranean rooms and the dome built over it. Only one way in or out. She imagines it all and it's sturdy, in her mind it's a fortress.

She can't put everything in there, it's impossible. She has to choose the few things that are the most important and be willing to sacrifice the rest. It's a useful tool no matter what kind of questioning methods they employ. Everything is clearer when she's packed the most important parts away.

She puts in Yavin IV, she will not know the location of their Rebel base.

She puts in the plans, the droids, Stardust, all of it... Scariff won't fit, but the reason she went there will be a mystery, if they ask she will say she doesn't remember. And in a way, she won't.

Then she tucks away the names.

Cassian Andor, Bodhi Rook, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Jyn Erso won't fit, she can't put herself in that house. Besides, she might get some use out of her name, they might wait to shoot her when they hear who her father is. Or they might shoot her on sight.

But that's enough. She locks the door. She seals up the only entrance. She cannot have these things in her head if they use any kind of invasive methods that she knows the Empire is capable of.

Her fortress is done as the pod comes to rest in the hangar bay and the door is ripped off it by a couple of Storm Troopers.

She lifts her hands in surrender and decides: Keira Ahksona the smuggler would have a reason to run, she just made a delivery and so the ship has no cargo but... She'll try that first and see where it gets her.
Her own name is one of several last resorts.
There are five storm troopers surrounding the pod as she scrambles to her feet. Her leg twinges and she ignores it.

"Identify yourself," says one of the Troopers from behind their skull masks. There are blasters aimed at her and so she keeps her hands in the air.

She's scared, her hearts pounding, Keira isn't brave, she's a coward. It's time to play a part.

"I-I-I'm Keira Ahksona," she lets herself shrink in the face of their blasters, lets all the fear bubble up to the surface. Fear for her friends and for herself. She's terrified like her friend who shakes all the time, she tremors just like him.

"State your business," one of them says and a tear slides down her cheek. Keira's a coward, she can't hide her fear.

"I w-was on my way back from Tatooine and I was stopping at A-Alderaan to refuel, but Alderaan wasn't t-there and—"

"Why were you on Tatooine?" a man asks from behind her. He's wearing the brown uniform of an officer, brown like dust or dead trees. As an officer, he wears no helmet which means she can look him right in the eye and see how smug and self assured she is. A deep down buried voice wants to punch him in his smug mouth, but Keira simply says,

"J-j-just business, you know?" Her voice gets too high. They are going to question her no matter what, all she can do is be enough of a distraction that checking the ship is a low priority. Low enough that they send only a few guys for her friends to deal with.

"Take her for questioning."

It doesn't take them long to start.

Blows land on her body while she denies knowing anything and denies that she was smuggling to Alderaan. The blows are hard and Keira feels each one with a wail.

They think she was smuggling to the Rebellion and if Keira was, she knew nothing about it. Her thoughts are clinical even as their interrogator begins to pull out the toolkit she's seen before. It's all the spikiest ghastly looking objects. The tools are meant to instill fear at the prospect of their use. It's as much about fear as is it about pain and while Keira is scared, Jyn watches and knows exactly what they are trying to do.

That officer from before is in the room for some reason. Curiosity or maybe he likes to watch. A few glances at him showed a man with sideburns and a mouth that looked like it was made for frowning.

If he likes watching, it doesn't show.

Keira begs him to make this stop, but he doesn't.

She just needs them to leave the room so she can work on these restraints with the hairpin she'd hidden in her sleeve. They probably would only leave when they knocked her flat and maybe that will come soon. Each blow makes it harder to breathe even as she forces herself to think. Reinforces the regimented lines in her mind, keeping everything in its place.

The interrogator lands a good blow just beneath her eye, snapping her head back and making her vision pop and spark with stars.

"What did you smuggle for the Rebellion?" The interrogator asks,

"N-nothing," Keira sobs and she has a stutter like her pilot friend when she's scared.

"I don't know about anything for the Rebellion."

The interrogator turns to his tools and starts basic. He pulls out a knife. In her mind, Jyn laughs in the face of this man with his hard mouth and dead eyes. Only a knife, she can handle a knife.

The man jams it into the thigh of her bad leg and Keira howls while Jyn swears mentally. That will make things difficult further down the line, but she will deal with it later.

"What did you smuggle for the Rebellion?"

"I j-just was stopping at A-Alderaan to resupply?" Keira cries and the pain has cleared her head a little, but if he hit a major vein she might pass out from blood loss soon.

Even the officer seems bored with this.

"Officer Radiian, this is taking too long, go fetch the IT-O."

The interrogator leaves the knife on the table without a word, neatly turns on his heel, and marches out. In his absence, she can hear the officer behind her stand up from his seat. The chair she's strapped in doesn't leave her much leeway to turn, but she tries anyway.

The officer comes to stand in front of her with his frowning mouth. Neither Keira or Jyn knows why he's staring at her. Both of them are gritting their teeth from the pain, but Keira is still crying. Her face is a mess of tears and blood.

For a moment she wonders if this man is feeling some kind of pity she can capitalize on. But he just simply looks her over like he finds her unsatisfactory.

Then she hears something.

A rasping sound like a respirator.

The interrogator returns with a black orb of a droid floating beside him, and he's followed by a figure she hoped she would never meet.

She doesn't have to fake her fear she simply lets it all come forth.

The sound of his rasping breath makes her heart pound and her hands clench.

Darth Vader stands there like a black wraith out of a nightmare. But the sound of his breathing reminds her of Saw with his O2 tank strapped to his back and suddenly she wants to vomit. The interrogator stands by the door with his hands at his sides. He reminds her of a droid waiting to be activated, much like the one floating beside him.

"General Tagge, is there a reason you are overseeing this interrogation?" Vader asks, addressing the officer who was staring at her and his voice is low, it vibrates in her bones.

"After your failure to draw real answers out of Princess Leia I thought I would research our standard interrogation techniques," the man says sounding both aloof and dissatisfied.

"And who are you questioning?" he asks and Keira is looking anywhere but at Vader, Jyn prefers it that way.

"Her name is Keira Ahksona, we believe she was smuggling supplies to the Rebels on Alderaan," he says, and suddenly there's a feeling like a hand at Jyn's throat. A hand that's slowly, casually cutting off her air supply.

At the same time she feels it.

It's different than Bor Gullet, it's worse than Bor Gullet. For a moment her head is on fire, everything burns and her nose fills with the scent of dead bodies rotting in the sun. She can't breathe, she's burning.

It retreats as quickly as it came. The spectral hand and the presence in her mind. They leave her gasping for breath, but her fortress is safe.

"Wrong," Darth Vader says and there's no eyes to gauge him, but it still feels like he's staring right through her.

"Her name is Jyn Erso. Daughter of the traitor Galen Erso. She knows something, but she's been trained. She's hiding it well.

There's blood in her mouth, she bit a hole in her tongue and they are all staring at her now.

She spits blood and their feet and smiles defiant as she lets Keira drift away like mist. Nothing but her tears remain. It's just Jyn now and she can take this. She tells herself like she's told herself hundreds of things. She tells herself this like she believes it, until she believes it. If nothing else she's gotten farther fueled by spite alone. She can take this.

If she dies here, then it just means she got a few borrowed days after... fter the mission on that other planet she can no longer name...

She reinforces her mental fortress. Blocks up the gaps, locks the door. Seal's it up in concrete and durasteel.

Only the general seems disturbed by her little display. He immediately steps up to her and slaps her hard across the face, knocking her head again like whiplash. He steps back, but she keeps grinning at him, at all of them, because her lip split and she's got blood running down her chin. She knows what it's like to stare at someone smiling with blood in their teeth, it's chilling. She wants them to feel a little fear while she has the power to do so. The general takes two more quick steps back and she looks him in the eye and smiles wider.

Vader seems undisturbed.

"Prep her with the IT-O and then come get me, I am taking over this interrogation."

"Why? You already failed Leia's interrogation," the general says and Vader turns to him, looms over him. The man reaches for his throat like he's choking and after a minute he breathes deep like he finally can.

"Inform me when she is ready," Vader says to the interrogator before sweeping out of the room. Jyn watches him go and then turns to the other two men. The general coughs like he wants to bluster at something, she files that unrest away for future use as the man storms out. Then it's just her and the interrogator with the dead eyes.

He flicks a switch and the droid seems to wake from it's rest mode. It's one light blinks at her behind a black lens like an eye and she thinks of K-2SO with a deep ache. A few more buttons are pushed and a needle extends out of it like a knife.

She can take this, she thinks. Her fortress is safe.

The droid approaches her slowly and she can do nothing but watch. She would close her eyes but she's herself now and not Keira, she will not show them any weakness.

She bares her teeth at it as it slowly drives the needle into her shoulder.

The feeling starts in her arm and spreads from there. The feeling like she's being injected with shards of glass, something sharp driving through her bloodstream like it could cut her open from the inside. She bites back any kind of scream as it spreads down past her shoulder, into her aching chest and all it's bruises, into her lungs and her throat. It goes behind her eyes and down to her fingertips and she has to close her eyes against it because the pain is unbearable. Her skin feels like it's burning. Her breath comes in ragged gasps and when she opens her eyes she feels... Strange. Her vision has gone hazy and they drugged her. Somehow it makes her angry as her mind slowly puts the pieces together.

She was trained for this, she thinks, grasping at the threads of what she knows and what she had to hide away. Her fortress is still there, still whole and steel and concrete.

She can't breathe and she can't think, feeling trapped in her body and floating somewhere above it.

She didn't notice when the interrogator left, but she opens her eyes again to the sound of the respirator and sees the black wraith again hazy and smeared, she steels herself.

She trained for this.

She can take this.

Then he reaches out with a hand that blurs and she burns from the inside out.

AN: THIS CHAPTER STRESSED ME OUT A LOT and seriously if you need a specific trigger warning let me know I will add it to the top.

As for her mental strategy...before Sherlock made me hate 'mind palaces' an author I love, Tamora Pierce used that concept in her Trickster's series. I kinda went off her idea of it with some liberties of my own.

Also apparently that little droid with the needle from A New Hope is called an IT-O I took some liberties with what it's stuff does and General Tagge is one of the minor generals on the Death Star in the film as well.

Chapter Summary:
Jyn gets taken into Imperial custody and she uses the pretends to be Keira Ahksona, a smuggler. She is physically beaten by the interrogator who is being overseen by General Tagge. Darth Vader shows up when the interrogator brings an IT-O droid. He and the general argue and he invades Jyn's mind and immediately sees through her ruse and knows she's hiding something. She's injected with some kind of drug from the droid that messes with her head and causes her a lot of pain and Vader returns to get inside her head some more.