—The Wayward Still Carry On:
Krennic looked more menacing than Jyn ever remembered, wearing an expression more poisonous than the one he wore years ago. "Galen!" She heard the man in white yell.
They were by the turbolift, a convenience on their part as they were only headed for the hangar where Bodhi supposedly was. Her father wrapped her in his embrace, to which she returned immediately.
"In your bedroom," he whispered in her ear. She tensed slightly, hearing the uneasy note playing in his voice. "Under the mattress. There's a holodisc. I want you to get it." Then he let her go.
Cassian Andor was standing there, and he looked to be flushing—as if he was witnessing something that he wasn't supposed to see. Jyn's father held her at an arm's length, his eyes still asking that same old question.
"I will," she answered with the words what he wanted to hear. Whispered it like a prayer. Murmured it like a plea. Her eyes dragged to Cassian just as the she stepped into the turbolift and watched the metal doors close.
His face was frozen, emotionless and unmoving. Just as the doors set a strait her father's eyes met hers, sending her into a trance that only said one thing: Go.
So she did. Floor after floor, she went up into the round tower: an aerial view of the terror that was to rage below her. She rushed straightaway to her bedroom, creeping her fingers under the soft mattress until her fingers reached for something hard and round and stared at it.
Jyn released the weary exhale she never realized she was holding, and then shoved the holodisc into her pocket. She rushed back to the lift, down the transparent glass tube. The sound of a thousand thundering footsteps rung in the silence of the elevator, into her bones. Reality bit Jyn in the neck, seeping the trance from her bloodstream.
The engineers she had gotten to know in her few days at the facility were lined up before a similar set of black stormtroopers from her past. Despite everything that stewed in her systems and the tingling down her back, she quivered in an eerie tranquil.
She was on Lah'mu again. In silence, her own breath and the heavy pant of the Rebel Alliance down her neck.
Then blaster fire. Louder than the sound of Jedha as it shattered under the Death Star's touch. Her eyes opened along with the door of the lift.
Glints of bodies strewn across her view, keeled over the storm. The unique shine of a single white uniform. I want no part of it.
"Papa!"
The floor of the turbolift was clean, apart from one distinct set of wet bootprints. She wished there were two. She wished she'd pulled her father into that turbolift with her.
Jyn ran closer, enough to see Krennic's quivering fingers reaching for the blaster at his side. But he didn't. His gloved hands found their lock at the center and met together in a sad clasp.
Jyn didn't look at him, but at her father. Raindrops sprayed against her as cold daggers at her back, and a harsh gust of wind pushed her to her knees right at her father's side.
He was warm; he was alive. She wrapped her arms around him as he did only minutes earlier. His head lolled and he stared at the dark gray clouds before turning her way. Jyn could see the pain and fear and relief in his face.
"Stardust?" He whispered, and she nodded. Her eyes stung with tears and rainwater. He was watching her with sad intensity. "Is it with you?" The weight of the thumb-sized disc in her pockets weighs on her too heavily.
She nodded frantically. "Yes," she muttered for every time her head bobbed.
"It can be destroyed," he released a painful exhale and wet his lips. "Someone has to destroy it."
Painfully slowly, as the rain ran down her back in colder strokes, he lifted one arm. His wrist twitched almost imperceptibly. Three soft fingertips dragged across Jyn's cheek and then fell.
"Papa…" Her throat felt thick, yet everything felt hollow. "No. No…"
She smoothed his hair away from his forehead. He was still warm, but his chest no longer rose and fell. Jyn took his hand and held it tight, as if she could squeeze the life back into him. "Papa…Papa! Come on."
Jyn looked inward, to the cave in her mind; but her father's blue shadow no longer glowed and its words no longer echoed. Even Saw's silver ghost had abandoned her.
There was only darkness and emptiness.
"It had to be done, Miss Erso," Krennic said over her. Jyn lifted her head to try and send him a glare, but it must have looked pathetic against all her tears. "A close friend or not, he was a traitor to the Empire." Because he believed in the Alliance, Jyn muttered bitterly to her own heart."We both lost someone important today."
Jyn lost him long ago, where she was alone for years. She is finally the orphan she always thought herself to be. Her father was dead, blood staining his pristine white uniform and his heart dead in his chest.
She wakes up screaming, as she very often has in the past year.
Her first instinct is to run, shove a blaster into her boot and run until everything stops chasing her. Until the nightmares bear away.
Jyn bites her tongue. She isn't alone; she is truly, finally, an orphan, but her father's dying eyes still watch her from the hatch every now and then. On most days, it's only dark.
Her newest instinct is to sit up straight from her soft bed in Coruscant, rip open her chest and pull out the starsforsaken thing that gives her all this pain.
Habitually, she gazes towards the window. Curtains drape the holes. They haven't opened in days, and she still isn't ready to open them a year later.
Those curtains are the last partition between her and the reality she works hard to avoid. But reality is dark now.
It isn't the first time she wakes so suddenly late at night.
She groans and stands. Her heart still hammers in her chest, her face wet with last minute's tears. The cool crystal necklace at her throat is cold like the rain of Eadu and the chill of Lah'mu's night. There are nights upon nights where Jyn imagines the necklace strangle her in her sleep. She pulls it over her head, burning a line onto her neck as the necklace comes out.
The grief-riddled girl throws the necklace and runs out of her house immediately. She can never sleep after reliving it all another time. She can barely handle the dreams of her mother falling on the ground, much more as she kneels over her father's body and feels his heart fade away.
Pins and needles shoot up her legs, but no pain flares. In fact, it feels soothing. The more weight she sets, the better it feels. So she runs, down the cold streets, to where she always finds herself.
Jyn remembers her first day here. The day she was to bury her father was the day she would first visit her mother's grave. It was also the day she first saw Orson Krennic in black, the first day she saw Orson Krennic cry.
Krennic is buried in another part of the planet. Not a kind memorial in a silent corner of world, but a grand ceremony for the heroes of the Empire who died in defense of the Death Star.
The truth about her father never reached Coruscant. The people here believe that the Alliance snuck in and killed everyone with involvement of the development of a planet killer. The people gave her father a peaceful place to rest alongside her mother.
But Jyn is not the only person there. There is a hooded figure, a silhouette blanketed by a soft halo of light from the small holograms of Galen and Lyra Erso.
Normally, she'd leave the other visitors of the cemetery alone, but this one stands before the blue ghost of her father. In her memories, all Jyn has preserved are his eyes that she sees in the mirror. She turns inward, but the cave is empty and the voice is gone.
"Who are you and what are you doing?" Jyn reaches for the blaster in her boot, which she had relieved from its place under her pillow earlier that evening.
The cloaked shadow turns around and shucks of his hood. Jyn checks the blaster at a stun setting and aims. "Captain Andor." He too is in her nightmares, standing as her father falls onto the ground. Sometimes, he even takes a blaster and shoots her in the heart.
His voice is the way she remembers it, accented and husky. "It's Major now, actually."
"Don't care." He gets promoted for everything he's done. What has he done? He watched her father die, and did nothing to stop it.
She tries to get angry, tries to force everything she's felt in her nightmares into her eyes; but it doesn't want to. She's burned out that anger a long time ago.
"I'm just here to pay my respects, Jyn." He says to her, both hands raised to prove he isn't readying an attack. But he's in the Imperial center; she won't put it against him to carry a blaster in his boot too.
She shrugs and replaces the weapon. Hopefully no one actually saw her pointing it at some random mourner. "Don't let me stop you," she says as she moves closer to where he stands, into the light of her parents' holograms.
The Cassian Andor she remembers and the Cassian Andor her father told her about are one and the same man: a man who could get what he needed with the right words. The words he seems to be looking for now.
Cassian coughs within their silence, "You look good, Jyn." He shrugs. "I guess the Empire does that to the people who help them." Ah, the wrong words.
"You've looked better," Jyn comments. His skin is grayer than her memory allows her to recall; his eyes are sunken yet alert. If anything, he has the air of a man who is tired and paranoid.
He tilts his head to the side and exhales a silent laugh. "You might've already heard, but we destroyed the Death Star. Your father helped us turn it around." Her father's last words were to destroy that monster. If only…
"Good on him then," she states. Jyn bends down to pick a small flower from a bouquet someone had left on her father's grave, and leaves it over her mother's.
She turns back around to see him watching her.
"Jyn, do you blame me,"—a pause—"for your father?"
Yes. I do. I should.
"No," she mumbles.
Jyn should hate him. He boiled her anger and left it to stew as he allowed the Empire to take her father and make her an orphan one last time. And for months upon months, she subsisted on that anger, and it burned her too.
But she can't hate him. He's been broken long before she cracked.
She closes and her eyes and walks away. "Best of luck to the Alliance, Cassian."
Cassian spins on his heel faster than she can move away, and he grabs her by the wrist. "Jyn, what are you doing?"
"I'm leaving," she shakes her head. It's dark and it's late and she needs to go back to the house. The house where she and her parents lived before Lah'mu, before the Death Star.
His hand holds over her thin wrist. She's a wisp of smoke; ready to fly away any second like her father's last breath. "You know what I mean."
Jyn doesn't try to pull her hand back. "I'm living my life, Cassian."—the way my father would have wanted. No, this isn't what he asked her on Jedha. This isn't what he asked her on Eadu.
Cassian steps in front of her. "You think your father would be proud of you, Jyn?"
Somehow, Saw has found the flint in her heart, igniting the fire in her one last time. She doesn't try to close her eyes and stop him.
She doesn't care if maybe this is the last warmth she'll ever feel. This fire will be the only thing she has, and it will consume her until there is nothing left for her to do but choke on her own smoke.
Because all time has done to her is kill her slowly. It has siphoned the warmth she's lived on, and all Jyn has ever been in cold.
"You don't know what my father would be proud of," Jyn hisses. "My father would have wanted me to be happy. I am happy."
No, this isn't what her father would have wanted. She knows what he asked her; his soft words on Jedha as he told her he was proud. Jyn just needs a reminder; she just needs to hear his voice and remember his words.
"No," Cassian argues, "you're alone."
Jyn Erso has always been alone. "Why can't I be both?" She already knows the answer.
She will never be both. She has never been happy on her lonesome. Her ninth, tenth and eleventh name days are testaments to that fact. "Because that's just who you are, Jyn," Cassian says as his hold on her weakens. "You're still the girl your father told me about."
Her father. She moves her gaze to the hologram of her father, and he's alive again in the hatch she's hid in for years. Galen Erso revels in the warmth of the raging embers, and his green eyes have a fire in them that Jyn has only ever seen in herself.
There is a need in his dead eyes as there was in her before.
What her father would have wanted was for her to take all five thousand pieces of her heart, sweep them all up into a dustbin.
And pour it all back in.
"My father is dead," she spits at Cassian. "And so is that little girl." Jyn steps out of the Erso family's final resting place and into the dark reality of Coruscant.
Of all things, Cassian Andor did not expect to see Jyn Erso again. Well, no, he did. He had planned on visiting her later that day at her house. What he did not expect was for them to run into each other at Galen's grave.
He visits a cantina, where a rebel cell most commonly likes to gather. Cassian stays among them until late morning; and he is still sober.
"Kay-Tu," Cassian strides into the warehouse and tosses his coat on the empty leather couch. Bodhi, Chirrut and Baze have situated themselves on the floor, playing sabacc. "You didn't tell me she liked taking midnight walks to go visit her parents."
His three teammates look up from their game as the droid steps away from the computer. They know which she Cassian talks about.
"Jyn Erso lives next to her parents' dead bodies," the droid comments. ("Cheery," Bodhi adds.) "The statistical probability of her visiting them daily has always been high."
Baze raises an eyebrow. "At midnight?"
"I thought we were spying on Jyn," Bodhi says as Chirrut lays down his hand of cards—then he groans because the blind man has won again. "That kind of information is something we're bound to get eventually."
"Cassian." Chirrut hands the jumbled cards for Bodhi to reshuffle—loser's prize. "In my opinion, I still don't think this is a good idea."
But not once has Cassian betrayed his orders, even for one of his closest friends. "That's not what High Command thinks," he pulls one of the chairs out to sit on it.
From the floor, Bodhi scowls as he plays around with the deck of flimsi cards. The three Jedha-folk share the same opinion on what High Command thinks. It's a war, not a negotiation. High Command wants to use Jyn and her new connections to the upper branches of the Empire.
Cassian jerks his head towards the wall, where a window overlooking a street should be. "Is Jyn down there?"
Galen made a small mention of his life on Coruscant, though most of it was literally just about his daughter. It makes sense that the first thing Orson Krennic does after Galen's funeral is sign over that house to Galen's daughter.
"You've already seen her, haven't you?" The blind man asks.
He doesn't answer. If Chirrut could see, it's most likely that the man would be glaring at Cassian already. "Did she say anything?"
"No," Cassian replies. "But she will." He picks up his coat and puts it on, before looking at Chirrut. "Is Jyn down there?" Cassian asks again.
Chirrut shrugs. "She is." Good.
He shifts over to stare at their cards before saying. "Bodhi has the Star and the Evil One." He's already walking out of the door when he hears the pilot yell.
"That's not an okay thing to do, Cassian!" Chirrut chortles greatly from behind the door as Cassian cracks a smile. Operation Fracture was a mess, but he got three good people out of it—four, if he wanted to count things right.
He walks down the stairs of the warehouse, watching the holoimages on the wall. It's a smiling Officer Moran, hugging her brother as he holds out his holo-diploma. Past several other images are the distinct black edges of a blaster bolt.
Moran and her brother died on the Death Star. Galen died for the Death Star.
His mind fills with as many things as possible, from ridiculous songs from his childhood to poems Galen muttered to himself when he thought Cassian wasn't listening. He keeps thinking of everything while he walks through the labyrinthine streets of Coruscant. A memory crosses his minds, then a thought, and on and on.
Anything to keep his mind away from the deep fire green eyes that peek behind a thin wall of duty and shattering glass.
Memories.
Problems.
The problem that is standing in a Coruscanti doorway. Cassian is just about ready to turn away, if not for those eyes. Her eyes are Galen's. They were empty when he ran into her at the memorial, but a fire runs in them now the way they did on Jedha and on Eadu.
Her hair is loose on her back, longer and darker than his memory allows him to remember. What he sees in his mind's eyes are a thousand raindrops weaving themselves into every strand on Jyn Erso's head. A tear cascaded down her cheek and melded with the rain, a mix of his pain and hers falling together in an unending freefall.
The tension in their senses is palpable in the air: the bitterness of his dutiful actions mixed with the grief of her loss. Her eyes meet his courageously. "Cassian, why are you here?"
There are distinct dark circles around her eyes. She hasn't slept since the visit to the cemetery, with their strangely personal encounter with each other. "The Alliance needs your help." He says it straightforward and honest.
He can't risk the anger of someone without a tether to the world.
Jyn scowls but doesn't look like she's about to close the door. She pokes her head out and glance left and right, before yanking him harshly into her house and pushing him against the narrow entranceway passage.
This is it. She's going to kill me.
"Are you crazy?" Jyn hisses. Even a year later, in the dry atmosphere of Coruscant, she still smells like a rainstorm over a field of millaflowers. She's standing so close to him, on her tiptoes but still she doesn't reach his height. It doesn't mean she isn't intimidating; it doesn't mean she is angered.
Her face doesn't show anger. She's bewildered; afraid. Her breathing rises ferally as her body tenses up. "They're watching me, Cassian."
Both sides of the Galactic Civil War know that. The Rebellion has been watching her since the destruction of the Death Star. And since that destruction, the Empire has learned the truth about Galen. They can't take any chance with the scientist's daughter.
Of course they're watching her. There was bound to be a catch to the comfort of Jyn's new life.
Cassian turns away slowly from her stance, towards the openness of the bright living room. "Are you safe anywhere?"
"No," she shakes her head in exasperation, "I can't talk about it, Cassian. I told you last night: I'm living my life. Everything my father's ever done is behind me."
Cassian wishes the same were true for him. "The Alliance needs your help. Put aside whatever hate you have for us, Jyn."
"This isn't about my hate against the Alliance, Cassian," she walks an unnerving pace around the furniture of the room. "The Empire has been watching me since the Death Star bl—" A pale peach bolt whizzes through her words and shatters the window and the mirror on the wall. The sound is familiar to Cassian: the distinct shot of a disruptor.
Jyn's eyes widen as she recognizes the shot as well. They don't bother to search outside for the shooter. Whoever they are, they have a disruptor blaster and it is best to avoid it under all circumstances. They press their backs against the near wall. Jyn turns her head to face him. "Do you have a ship, Captain?" Her smile borders a sneer but her eyes yell desperate.
Cassian rolls his eyes. "It's Major," he corrects, "and of course I do."
She nods. "Meet me on the roof."—Cassian is taken aback. There's a sniper and she wants to go out in the open? Whoever is outside has stopped shooting, but he's not taking that much of a risk. His eyes scan the flat.
Jyn doesn't even tell him how to get on the roof when she runs to the hallway, most likely to her bedroom. Based on his own observation, the flat is a single-floor building. Modest and homely. But no stairs or ladders to be seen; nothing that shows a discernable way of getting to the roof.
The most logical thing to do is to escape through the broken window and climb up. He paces the hallway, looking through the timeline of the Erso family's early life. He takes out his commlink, and then he sees the ceiling and smiles.
Cassian clears the holoimages and datapads off the table as he steps on it to reach the trap door on the ceiling. He fidgets with the lock on the hatch as he comms the people in the warehouse. "Kay-Tu? Kay-Tuesso, it's Cassian."
"I thought we agreed that we're Rogue Squadron," Bodhi's voice calls out in the back.
Chirrut replies though it's covered with static, "There is no Rogue Squadron."
"Quiet," Baze comments, "It's the captain."—he rolls his eyes—"What is it, captain?"
Cassian doesn't even bother to correct them. Since his promotion after they relocated to Echo Base, they never referred to him as anything but Cassian or captain.
He sets the comm on the table so he can reach the picks in his boots and play the lock with both hands. There isn't a tamper alarm—or stars forbid, mine triggers—on, so he is free to fidget as he wishes. "Bring the ship up the roof. Get everything and go." The first three tumblers click together, and he begins to work on the third.
"Why?" Bodhi asks.
The lock clicks open and the door swings to show the sun. "Because Jyn is coming with us," he says as he picks the comm back up and pulls himself onto the roof. Cassian scans his surrounding. There is no chaos, so the neighbors haven't yet figured out that there's someone on the street with a disruptor rifle at the ready.
But he can't find the sniper. The broken window is on the eastern side, so the shooter is somewhere there. Cassian can't properly deduce the angle of the shot, and therefore the direct location of their mark. Hopefully if they shoot again, Baze will see and shoot them too.
"Affirmative, Major," K-2SO takes the comm. "We'll be there in five minutes."
He presses himself to the foot of a satellite dish for shade and cover as he waits for Jyn Erso.
Jyn scrambles around her room pulling drawers and pillaging through her belongings. She doesn't need to pack; she's always kept a duffel ready, as any standard runaway should. What Jyn is doing is building a scene, a setting that the Empire can draw a story upon.
She yanks the mattress out of the bed frame to reveal a small box that's collecting dust on the floor. She picks it up and opens it gingerly.
The holoimage is still there, one of many that stayed with the house when they left. It's the photo of a young Jyn and her parents. She loves it because she's frozen in the photo, stuck in a state of mid-laughter.
The only other thing in the box is her mother's pendant, where she stowed it last night. She takes the thin strap and ties it around her neck. Jyn shoves the holoimage into her duffel bag and runs.
The table in the hallways has been cleared. The trap door is open, its lock discarded on the tabletop. Cassian went through that way; and Jyn berates herself slightly for not telling him about it within the notice. She slings the bag around her torso and jumps up, catching the rim of the trap door and pulling herself up.
When she's out of her house, she can see Cassian's U-Wing on the way. No one notices the two people on the rooftop of the infamous Erso home, and no one bothers to look at the one U-Wing among a hundred other ships.
Cassian pulls the other half of her body out of the narrow opening of the hatch. Jyn turns around once, to the direction of the disruptors' shots. She can see someone on the roof, a red Zeltron girl who Jyn knows to be her neighbor.
Jyn has always known that girl as the Empire's spy. No self-respecting Zeltron girl would ever stay in her house alone so much, when there are so much more Zeltron-worthy endeavors in Coruscant. She just never expected her to be Jyn's assigned killer.
And it isn't a disruptor rifle in the red woman's hands. If the light is right and Jyn's eyes aren't playing her, Jyn is very sure it's a cannon. "Karabast," she swears.
"Come on!" Cassian yells, and Jyn realizes that the ship has just made it to them. A memory flashes under her eyes: it's Jedha. She's running the short width of the temple, running again faster and faster. Jyn is running, and a part of her wishes her house wasn't so wide.
She reaches for the boarding ramps and jumps, and this time she doesn't fall. There is dust shaking through her eyes, and the Death Star strikes yet again. "Close the ramp!" Jyn can hear Cassian yell. His arm grabs her and pulls her close, close enough that she can smell him: blaster oil and the flowers from the cemetery.
And beyond that, Jyn can smell smoke. And just before the hatch closes her into the light of the cabin, she looks out to the black smoke that ties itself up to the sky. Jyn sees her father's house—the house she grew up in—in flames.
She gasps and tries to reach for it, but Cassian's arms hold her down. "No!" She wails. It repeats itself over and over again.
"Jyn," Cassian whispers against her hair. "Jyn, it's gone. You can't do anything anymore. It's gone." He keeps her there until the door closed on her memories—all the memories of a life before the Empire stole it and the Alliance destroyed it. Everything in that building, all the survivors of her private war before Lah'mu, are all in flames.
The flames she allowed to ignite. They caught up with her and burned the first home she's ever had in a while.
It isn't the Empire's fault; or the Alliance's.
It's Jyn's.