A spoonful of comfort
"Keep her safely here and out of trouble..." With those words, Baze leapt back through the AU-gate.
Jyn would of course have followed him, but Kay picked her up by the shoulders of her jacket leaving her legs cycling helplessly in the air. She unleashed a torrent of swearing - "shavit" and "kriff" (in its various forms – noun, verb, adjective, adverb… all parts of speech were covered) figured prominently, as did a range of choice swear words from a range of cultures from Coruscant to the Outer Rim. Finally she went for the deadliest insult of all; recalling her childhood in Born-Vil, she accused Kay of being an Aston Villa fan.
After about five minutes of impressively inventive language (with remarkably little repetition), the fight finally went out of her and she dangled limply in Kay's grasp. He set her feet back on the floor, but kept a good hold of her just in case.
She stood, now mute, eyes huge and glistening with unshed tears (she would later claim frustration) within her pale face. Her hand went up to clasp her kyber crystal. The minutes stretched out, first five, then ten, then twenty.
Nearly an hour had passed when Baze finally staggered out of the AU-gate, his arm around Cassian. The captain sagged against him, eyes half closed, blood trickling from a wound on his forehead.
"It was mayhem… we wandered into a football AU. As bad as it gets. Think Milwall in the 1970s, heyday of the Intercity Firm. Worse. Dick Kerr Ladies in the 1920s, after the FA announced the ban on women playing. It was carnage."
Jyn rushed to their side. She lifted her hand to Cassian's forehead, with uncharacteristic delicacy, and her fingertips fluttered across the wound with extraordinary gentleness. Cassian winced. As if the abrasion wasn't bad enough, he sensed the input of the Writer. He and Jyn were straying dangerously close to hurt-comfort. But there was nothing he could do about it, swept along by the spring tide of the narrative.
Baze lowered him onto the acceleration couch, misjudging the distance and dropping him uncomfortably. Seemingly unaware of Cassian's scowl of pain, Baze explained what had happened. "We went into a bar. Wrong supporters. A fight kicked off. Epitaphs flying everywhere."
"Don't you mean 'epithets'?" said Chirrut, pedantically.
"No, epitaphs."
Cassian gave a groan and managed to speak for the first time. "And we're not talking tightly rolled newspapers with the obituaries column showing. Those fuckers were carved onto fucking marble slabs."
Jyn knelt beside him. His brown eyes swam with pain. She could see the faint imprint of Requiescat in pacem in mirror writing on his forehead. He gave another soul-rending groan.
"I really got put through the mill out there… but the physical pain, the physical agony was nothing compared to the thought that I might never see you again..."
Standing above him on the other side of the acceleration couch, Baze looked slightly nauseated.
"They threatened to pull my fingernails out one by one, my toenails out two by two, and rip my eyebrows off with salon wax, all the hairs in one fell swoop, unless I talked. Worse, they wanted my soul. They wanted me to forswear allegiance to my home futebol team, to become a glory hunter instead. The one thing even worse than being a bounty hunter." He swallowed, then took a sip of the cup of water that had miraculously appeared in Jyn's hand. She dunked the ends of her scarf in the cup, and mopped his fevered brow. "Baze appeared in the nick of time. They were about to force feed me prawn sandwiches."
Oh goddess, thought Jyn. It was even worse than she'd feared. He was a broken man, broken in body and soul… In a cracked voice, Cassian managed to croak out the final act of depravity they'd inflicted on him.
"They wanted to make me sign up to the Manchester United fan club..." His voice trailed off, and he was suddenly racked with sobs, seemingly drawn from the very core of his being.
Jyn felt for his hand and pressed it. She shook at the thought of the long road to recovery in front of them, the time it would take to piece together the shattered fragments of his psyche, the turmoil that faced both of them.
Was she strong enough to be his support on the arduous way ahead? Would he be better off on his own? Or with someone else? Or with something else? An emotional support womp-rat, perhaps? Would he ever be allowed on another trans-galactic flight with a womp-rat now they'd tightened up the rules?
Just in that instant she realised how much life was about to change for both of them
Then a feeling akin to a torrent of icy water cascaded over both of them. Largely because an actual torrent of icy water cascaded over both of them. Spluttering, she looked up. Chirrut stood there, holding an empty bucket, staring profoundly into an unseen middle distance.
"What he's trying to say," said Bodhi, "Is for fuck's sake pull yourselves together and let's get on with what passes for a plot round here."
Cassian came to himself first.
"It's the fucking Writer again…"
He leapt off the acceleration couch and strode into the cockpit, where he swung himself into the pilot's seat, pulled the headphones on, and started flicking switches. (Most of them didn't actually do anything, but it always made him feel better.)
"You haven't every actually told me where the rebels have relocated to," Kay said primly.
"Need to know, Kay, need to know."
"Well, given that I'm the one who does the hyperspace calculations round here, Mr. Discalculia, I'd say I need to know."
"Oh, okay. You have a point. Set course for Yavin IV."