#fic: rebelcaptain | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

dilf-din · 14 days ago

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Who is in Control?

A Rebelcaptain fic for Febuwhump Day 5: Not trusting reality @febuwhump

Rating: M

WC: 3k

Warnings: medical trauma, body horror, buckets of angst with a happy ending

Read on AO3

Freezing durasteel wearing grooves into her wrists and ankles, rushing air vents that kept the room cold enough to see her breath, the fluorescent light that burned her retinas, shining day and night. These were things that Jyn thought surely she would get used to over the length of her captivity, but every time her head lulled too hard and shocked her back into consciousness, every time her arms ached like fire against her restraints, she was reintroduced to the subhuman conditions her captors had decided to subject her to without breaking their resolve. With soulless eyes and movements that bordered on robotic, they would swing open the heavy door and approach her writhing body. She squirmed with the small reserves of strength she had tried to ration, spitting venom and curses in their faces as they pushed long needles full of strange serums into her veins. They broke the skin in her arms while she yelled with a hoarse voice, flooding her body with burning heat. The fevers would overtake her until she was dripping sweat onto the floor, even in the arctic temperatures.

“What do you want from me?” Jyn tried to roar, but it came out as a mere croak.

The nurses didn’t even acknowledge her, just retreated across the steel floor, footsteps echoing in a metallic and lifeless way.

Jyn fought as hard as she could to hold on to reality, but the grip on her mind slipped time and time again. The fevers came with hallucinations. Though there was no furniture in the barren room, the edges and corners would warp into looming monsters. Packs of nurses armed with needles plunging them into every surface of her body. They pulled her teeth from their sockets, shaved her head and collected the stringy, greasy clumps of hair that fell wetly to the floor. She would scream until she was sure her throat would bleed.

Her arms were shackled outward, exposing her veins as easy access, and she was far enough from the wall that she couldn’t knock herself unconscious.

Jyn thrashed as her body hung limply. This went on for hours, or maybe days. There was no way to keep track of time in a windowless room. After the first ten or so days she thought, she simply stopped trying. The mental weight was too much as she felt herself slipping away from her body more with each injection.

When she could, she tried to dream of Cassian, but whatever drug they were pumping her full of was fucking with her memories. She had a hard time recalling his face or his voice. Often she could see him for a second before he distorted into something unnatural. The skin of his face would melt away to reveal the metal frame of a droid, limbs dripping with viscera and eyes glowing red. It would rip her limb from limb and she would feel every muscle fiber tear in half, every bone shatter and break. The pain was blinding. It ingrained itself into her psyche until she was too afraid to fall asleep altogether. Willing herself to stay awake until she was pulled under by total exhaustion and malnutrition.

They weren’t feeding her. She figured one of the things they injected intravenously were base nutrients to keep her from completely withering away, though she could feel herself sweating off weight quickly from the merciless fevers.

They moved her every few days or so to hose the urine from her legs and pull on a new set of stark white underclothes. They were stiff and scratchy, but at least they saved her the dignity of being naked.

Every limb was covered in varying hues of bruises from the fluids they were steadily swapping from her tender body. She was a mosaic of sickly yellow green streaks and deep purple patches. They hadn’t interrogated her. Jyn thought they must’ve been torturing her just for shits and giggles. From the uniforms, she could tell they weren’t empire, unless they were some new fucked up faction that had sprung up like the severed head of a hydra.

They wore masks over the lower half of their faces, and they never spoke, making them all sort of blur together in her mind. At the beginning, she tried to memorize the coming footfalls as if she could hatch some sort of escape plan, but any attempt to fight was pathetic at best. They didn’t underestimate her. She had had no chances to prove just how feral she could be when she was stripped down to her barest form.

Every morning, an orderly came in to draw what Jyn felt like could be classified as excessive amounts of blood. It took her a few days to deduce that they must be experimenting on her. But why her and why now? Any attempt to intimidate or grovel for answers was met with the same robotic stare.

Black out after black out, she was losing strength, and quickly. The familiar clang of the door being unbolted caused her to tense. Her muscles coiled tightly, screaming to be freed, but they had nowhere to go. Another injection of the cloudy chartreuse concoction. She was too tired to fight it as it slowly drained into her veins, thick like honey, gunking up every part of her body and mind.

“Fuck you,” she tried to cough out. Her throat was like sandpaper. She couldn’t remember the last time they gave her water. She was starting to forget what relief felt like. It was becoming increasingly obvious that she could die in here, but not quickly or with any mercy. She was beginning to fear they would keep her alive far past the point that she wanted to be. For the first time, she allowed herself to cry. Hot heavy tears careened down her face and to the floor to mix with her sweat and piss and god knows what else. She wailed as loudly as she could with a throat so raw, feeling utterly broken and sorry for herself. Jyn cried until she lost consciousness.

She was jolted awake some time later, not long enough to feel rested, but long enough to be almost certain a cloudy stretch of time had passed. Everything was hazy. It always was. There was a commotion outside her door, and then a burst of light, so bright it burned her pupils and she croaked, trying to turn her head away. Her muscles were aflame from the simple movement.

A team of people flooded in in their masks and white coats and quickly began to unbind her. She heard a familiar voice barking orders and glimpsed the noses of several blasters aimed at her captors.

Bracing herself to hit the ground hard, she collapsed into warmth and softness that felt so much like her distant memories of home instead. Her eyes fluttered from the exertion and her limbs were screaming as they moved independently for the first time in what felt like eons. More muffled voices hummed around her like a swarm of insects as the pull of unconsciousness weighed her down with a new ferocity. She felt gentle hands turn her over so she was no longer facing the floor, and what she saw made her scream.

Cassian. At least, she thought it was Cassian. Any moment from now, he would finish the job these assholes had started.

Jyn tried to scream and it came out ragged and pitched in a desperate, broken way, uncharacteristic of the force of nature she was known to be. She tried to scoot backwards, not wanting to live through another dismembering by the man she loved. In all her other dreams, she couldn’t fight back. This time would be different.

Adrenaline coursed through her bruised veins, and she felt herself humming to life, halfway at least. Jyn wobbled to her feet unsteadily like a fawn in spring, legs trembling and a half hearted pair of fists hovered in front of her.

Cassian rose and inched towards her with his hands out like she was a frightened animal.

“Jyn,” he said cautiously, eyebrows drawn together as he tried to calculate the damage to her body and psyche.

“Don’t come any closer,” she rasped.

The rest of the room was fuzzy, and her head swam from the exertion of holding herself upright, but she refused to let herself be bent to anyone else’s will any longer.

Cassian took another half step towards her, then another.

Jyn rolled her neck to try to stretch out the tension that ran to the tip of her spine.

“I’m warning you,” she tried to sound as menacing as her desert-dry vocal cords could muster.

Cassian paused and contemplated her words before ultimately deciding to inch one step closer.

Jyn leapt and swung at him with a surprising amount of force. Cassian stood firm as a wall as she beat against his chest and jaw. Swing after swing as tears and snot poured down her face. Cassian didn’t flinch, didn’t budge. Bruises started to swell on his cheeks and blood poured from his nose as he let her unleash the fear inside of her that had curdled into rage. Over his shoulder, he heard Melshi call an order, but Cassian held out his hand to let the rest of the team know not to approach.

Jyn swung at him for a few minutes until her strength gave out completely. She sank to her knees wailing silently, before she fell forward and caught herself on stinging palms, completely spent.

One more needle broke the skin in her neck. A quick pinch and rush of cool, and she felt herself fall into blackness quickly.

Cassian shed his jacket and wrapped it around her near bare frame before scooping her up tenderly and walking towards the exit. His right eye was swelling shut, and he stopped to wipe the blood pouring from his nose with the back of his hand before continuing.

“Captain?” Melshi asked tentatively.

“Let’s get out of here,” Cassian said curtly, not inviting any questions into whatever had transpired in front of his team. He marched through the hall stone faced.

Another team of rebel officers was busy cuffing her captors and seizing things around the lab as evidence. Cassian walked by bacta tanks full of unrecognizable creatures, stitched together in gruesome ways. Some parts were clearly human. Cassian tasted bile in his throat as he wondered what would have become of the girl in his arms had they not gotten there sooner. He glanced down at her limp form, and even with her eyes closed, he could see that they had drained so much from her in a few short weeks. Only time would tell if she would ever be the same.

The ride back was silent as Cassian slumped against a wall, blood caked on his swelling face and in his beard. His eyes were more hollow than usual as he adjusted his elbow on the edge of a crate and leaned back, not relenting his grip on Jyn who slept noiselessly in the safety of his arms. The way her chest rose and fell was almost mechanical. Her heart beat slowly but steadily. Her eyes didn’t move or flutter at all, and he silently thanked the maker that she seemed to be in a dreamless sleep.

The comfort of having her broken form against his chest was fleeting. Guilt like talons had already begun to rend his flesh, ripping away all the good things they had built together. By the time they landed, the ramp hit the floor of the hangar with the finality of a death sentence. His feet carried him to the medbay on autopilot, and when he passed her into the soft bed that awaited her, he was certain in his heart that she would never forgive him for the things she had faced in his absence. He began to envy Jyn’s numbness, and for that too, he drowned in guilt.

——

2 weeks later

At first, Cassian spent every second by her bed, draping extra blankets over her when the chills of detox shook her now feeble frame. Dropping water onto her parched tongue with a syringe and clasping her hand riddled with tubes and wires in his own. For her sake, they kept her sedated and monitored her blood to track the concentration of the mystery drug in her system. They hadn’t been able to deduce much about it aside from it being a hallucinogen. It was clearly experimental.

As they flushed it out of her with time and liquids, and her labs showed the levels had dropped considerably, the medical team began discussing weaning her off of the sedative to slowly ease her into the wake up process.

Cassian was nervous. He replayed her rescue in his mind a thousand times over— enough to convince himself that her fear that day was also thinly veiled hatred. That she blamed him for her capture, and that every blow she landed was meant to make him feel a fraction of what she had endured. And each time he re-lived it, he took the same docile posture and allowed her to unleash that weight on him. He would do it every day if it would earn her forgiveness.

He paced the hall of the waiting room with clenched hands at his side as he struggled against the invisible fist at his throat. It had been several weeks since he had been able to take a full and proper breath. The tension was wound tight through his shoulders, and had certainly been exacerbated by sleeping slumped over in the small chair by her bed. A small price to pay, he reminded himself grimly when the pain started to dictate his thinking.

A nurse beckoned for him at the doorway, pulling him out of his trance.

“She’s awake,” he announced with a small smile.

Cassian took a step back, “I think I’ll just wait for her to adjust for a bit.”

“She’s asking for you,” the nurse softened his face even more.

Cassian tried to swallow down the lump lodged in his throat before following the nurse back to Jyn’s room. He entered alone, knocking first so as not to startle her.

Jyn gave him a weak smile. Some of the brightness had returned to her eyes, and, if he wasn’t mistaken, she seemed genuinely happy to see him.

“How are you feeling?” Cassian asked cautiously.

“Like shit,” Jyn replied flatly. The scratch in her voice sent her into a small coughing fit that drew Cassian closer with concern.

She winced and screwed her eyes shut, adjusting her shoulders against the pressure of the central line going straight into her chest. The bruising on her arms had prevented them from starting a traditional IV.

“Do you need some water?”

Jyn nodded, eyes fluttering open to fully take in Cassian as he drew closer.

He poured water from a plastic blue pitcher into a cup of the same color and held it to her lips for her to take a long draw.

“Thank you,” she murmured softly.

Her hand caught his cheek, causing him to tense under the feel of her. With a firm thumb, she rotated his cheek to observe the yellow and green bruise still painted across the bridge of his nose and under his eyes. His right eye showed evidence of a burst blood vessel where a streak of bright red colored what should be white.

“Maker, what happened to you?”

“Like you look any better,” he tried to joke, dodging the question.

Her mouth fell into a tight line, and she drew her hand back to herself. Fatigue clung to her even from small movements like that still, and she exhaled carefully so as not to make anything else burn unnecessarily. Cassian could see the wheels turning in her head as her eyebrows drew together.

He stepped back from the bed a bit nervously.

“They said you can probably try walking tomorrow, just for a minute.” He desperately wanted to change the subject.

“Was it me?”

Cassian hesitated.

Jyn’s eyes bore into his, coated with tears that threatened to spill at the answer she seemed to already know.

“Was it me?” She punctuated each word firmly.

“Yes, but,” Cassian began.

Jyn swallowed and shut her eyes as a tear tracked down her cheek.

“You weren’t in your right mind. We still don’t have any idea what you went through,” he tried desperately to soothe her.

“I thought it was a dream,” she barely whispered.

Cassian paused and tilted his head.

“Nearly every night I was there, I— I had these dreams of you,” she stammered, swallowing hard again. “You tried to kill me and I,” she stopped as another tear fell. “I’m so sorry. I thought it was real.”

Cassian stood in limbo, anchored to the floor unable to decide if he should run to her or out of the room. He tried to read the expression on her face as she started the first steps of processing her captivity.

“Are you afraid of me now?” He finally asked, breaking the silence.

Jyn looked at him a long time. The way he stood submissive, almost afraid, apologetic. He wasn’t the man from her nightmares, but rather the evidence of the gentle life she had created for herself. He was kisses in the morning light and tender hands cauterizing wounds. The smell of fresh laundry and sweat and adventure.

Not only his heart, but his whole body looked like it might crack in two for the fear of rejection. He would never forgive them for poisoning her mind against him.

But instead, she said one single word.

“No.”

And he knew they would see the other side of this together.

#febuwhump #febuwhump 2025 #febuwhump2025 #febuwhumpday5 #rebelcaptain #Rebelcaptain fic

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