#it's why i do find stuff like andor or the doctor's grief over the time war interesting

[weedle-testaburger]

it's kinda suddenly dawned on me that throwing all the emphasis of a sci-fi story off the characters and onto an Epic All Consuming War is the fastest way to kill my interest

[anghraine]

“threshold of a dream” - fic

Because I looked sadly at my dash, then looked at my wrist bandage, then went “hell with it.”

fandom: Star Wars

characters: Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor, Davits Draven; Jyn/Cassian

length: 2.8k

stuff that happens: Jyn manages that narrow escape from Scarif that we were cruelly denied and finds herself alone in the galaxy once more. Sort of.

(aka Rebelcaptain Appreciation Week, Day 1: Family)

Could a droid be one with the Force? She hoped so, not just for Cassian. The Force united everyone, didn’t it? Kay had been nothing if not someone, and now he was gone, like Papa and Saw. Like Bodhi and Baze and Chirrut, almost as certainly. The soldiers she’d hardly known, but who had believed in her, or in Cassian’s belief.

Everything had ended as it began, back on the streets of Jedha. Crowds of strangers, and the two of them, alone together. Jyn and Cassian, Cassian and Jyn.

The first time she landed on the Rebel base, Jyn didn’t recognize any of the voices shouting orders, snapping questions, offering explanations. Soldiers, droids, senators—it made no difference. Just a different sort of crowd. As ever, she was alone among strangers, with no one to depend on but herself.

She didn’t trust them. But Jyn wasn’t stupidly paranoid; whatever the Alliance might be, or do, or plan, it had to be a good sight better than an Imperial prison. And she understood revolutionaries, even ones like these, more hopeful and rigid than anyone with Saw had ever been. She could never quite wrap her mind around the Imperial true believers, everywhere in the prisons.

It wasn’t anything like home, like the family ripped away by this stupid war twice over. But it was familiar. She could work with this. And get the hell out, forever.

A month later, Jyn returned to Yavin IV in an Imperial shuttle, and she’d never been happier to see a place in her life. She didn’t even know what she said as they landed, babbling at Cassian through the dull pain in her head and muscles, the sharper pain where she’d busted up her leg. Speech for its own sake wasn’t Jyn, not usually, but—well, the same went for most of what she’d done in the last thirty hours.

She couldn’t fly. Cassian could, though, and he’d grated out can you talk? as soon as they escaped into hyperspace.

Of course I can, Jyn said, puzzled even as she stood behind him, watching his hands shake on the controls, and praying once more. But when crushed vertebrae flashed onto the scanner she’d dredged out of a medical kit, she realized: it was a request, not an enquiry after her vocal cords.

If he wanted her to talk, she’d damn well talk. So she did.

“Nearly there,” she told him now, pitching her voice above his laboured breaths. He’d be fine once they got to the base. This wasn’t like the Partisans, who always lived on the edge of desperation, with nothing but what they could build and steal. The Rebellion had resources, ships and uniforms and bacta. He’d be fine. “See? Right there. Home.”

Cassian didn’t say anything, but he managed to land the shuttle through it all. Skill or the Force or the painkillers she’d stuck into his veins, Jyn didn’t know. It didn’t matter. They were here now—not really home, but at least safe, for now. Who cared how they’d done it?

Still, as the ramp lowered and Cassian exhaled, sweat smearing the dirt and blood on his face, Jyn fumbled for her mother’s crystal.

May the Force of others be with you.

“We’re here.”

Cassian leaned his head back, eyes closed, and she felt outright grateful for the harsh gasps that meant he was alive, however painfully so.

Strange steps clattered up the ramp. Strange voices shouted for help, doctors, names, arms and bodies jostling as they clustered around Cassian, one of their own. But he didn’t talk to them, either, and it was all captain-this and sir-that, hardly even an Andor. They didn’t know him, except as pips on a jacket somewhere. Hardly more than they knew her.

For herself, she shoved off any hands that touched her, though her knees buckled, and her bad leg burned. Her throat, too. The talking, or—

Jyn twisted around. Below them, other strangers pushed two stretchers towards the shuttle, though it was more like running. Two?

“Jyn,” Cassian muttered, and she instantly turned back to him. The strangers were urging something. He needed to get up, or let them move him. No, he couldn’t. He was too tired, couldn’t they see? And they couldn’t take him from her, not now. She almost tuned out the voices, but one broke through her haze.

—in bacta for sure—

Bacta. Yes, he needed bacta. Jyn reached for Cassian’s hand, a little tentative until his fingers closed tightly around hers.

“It’s the Rebellion,” she managed to say. “They’re here to help. Listen to them.”

She didn’t know if he paid any attention to them, but he did to her. He also collapsed within a few steps, which would have horrified her if her own head weren’t spinning. Jyn fumbled for purchase, her hand landing on a narrow shoulder. She squinted, trying to focus.

“Cassian?”

“We’ve got him,” said someone in grey. Lighter than Imperial grey, but she still scowled, suspicious. “C’mon, you’d better lie down, too.”

“Why?” Dimly, she recalled that she’d lost blood, too. Maybe more than she’d noticed.

“We’re here to help and you should listen,” the stranger told her. She wasn’t listening, not really, but she decided to follow the path Cassian had taken. Fortunately, they seemed to want her to go that way, too, and they let her slump onto the second stretcher. Baze and Chirrut would think it funny, wouldn’t they? Cassian fainting, Jyn something like compliant. But they were gone. Everyone, unless they’d found some way of escaping, too.

Little sister and the face of a friend tangled in her head.

She didn’t count on that. And Kay for sure hadn’t escaped. Could a droid be one with the Force? She hoped so, not just for Cassian. The Force united everyone, didn’t it? Kay had been nothing if not someone, and now he was gone, like Papa and Saw. Like Bodhi and Baze and Chirrut, almost as certainly. The soldiers she’d hardly known, but who had believed in her, or in Cassian’s belief. 

Everything had ended as it began, back on the streets of Jedha. Crowds of strangers, and the two of them, alone together. Jyn and Cassian, Cassian and Jyn.

“You need to lie down, miss,” a different stranger said.

She was so tired. Jyn clutched her necklace, and obeyed.

An hour in the Yavin infirmary later, Jyn felt herself again. But if exhaustion and blood loss had made her hazy, it hadn’t made her wrong. She returned to the Rebellion as she’d arrived: a woman adrift in the galaxy, without home or family, who knew none of the people speaking to and around her.

In a horrific way, it seemed almost appropriate. A circle, now complete. But it wasn’t complete, she reminded herself, not quite. Just fear and grief lying the way they always lied. She remained alone because Cassian was drugged into oblivion, not because she truly had no one left. His injuries would put him in maddening pain if he regained consciousness—she couldn’t begrudge him that.

Of course, Jyn didn’t know for sure what she would find when he woke up, what shape not alone would take. She knew, though, that he’d had her back in one hell after another, as far as he was physically capable of. Beyond it, really, in the end. 

Before that, as they gravitated together in the hangar here on Yavin, Cassian had promised her—something, more in the tilt of his body and exchanged smiles than in anything they said. He’d looked at Jyn with her own awkward delight on the shuttle, and stared at her like the entire revolution lived in her skin after she kissed him in the elevator.

If she didn’t know exactly what it all meant, what she wanted it to mean, she knew what it didn’t. Instead of following her instincts and slipping away, demanding her promised freedom or some reward or other, Jyn insisted on seeing Cassian, and then all but welded herself to his bedside, fielding questions from there.

She wouldn’t have regretted it in any case; Jyn rarely wasted time with regrets, least of all when only one real choice opened ahead of her. But in the event, the next few hours only affirmed her decision. 

Doctors and nurses passed in and out, wanting to know when and how Cassian had acquired each injury; Jyn answered with as much precision and detail as she could. A few soldiers paid respects, deferential and solemn. The Rebellion, it turned out, was stretched far too thin to insist on rigid divisions of work; in a crisis, an officer was an officer, and Cassian had been tossed into full-on military operations more than once. His men liked him, or rather, respected him enough to do the work of liking. They gave her the impression of a stern but quietly personable officer, one who could carry off complex objectives with a handful of troops and a bootlace, and in most cases bring both troops and bootlace back home again. Namely, the exact impression she already had.

A couple of senior officers came by, too. Jyn only recognized one, Cassian’s general—a giant, fair-haired man who always looked at her like something he’d like to crush underfoot. She entirely returned the feeling; General Draven had to be the one who’d ordered Galen’s death, and no doubt the other terrible things that had left Cassian and his team hunting for something to make it all worthwhile. And he definitely was the one who’d all but accused her of manufacturing her father’s message in that failed Council meeting.

However, he did seem concerned about Cassian in his own way: droid-like, she would have said, if that weren’t an insult to Kay. And Draven’s rank extracted information out of the doctors she hadn’t been able to get on her own (not considered at risk of death or full paralysis, we won’t know more until he wakes up). So she grumbled out answers to General Draven’s questions, exact even as she glowered.

“You said he fell in the archive. How?”

She’d already answered this one at least four times. Since punching his smug, suspicious face wouldn’t accomplish anything, Jyn determinedly looked at Cassian. Someone had washed and combed his hair, which horrified her in a way she couldn’t define. Under the intense white light of the infirmary, it shone in shades of deep brown rather than black, his skin ashen.

“I already told you, he was covering me,” she said. “I had the plans. Cassian …”

Draven always said Captain Andor, like the doctors, like the soldiers. Jyn hadn’t heard a single other person say Cassian’s name since Kay died. She clenched her jaw and turned to face the general again, unimpressed by his looming height and open distrust.

“Cassian told me to keep climbing. Then he drew their fire. He shot down a deathtrooper, and another managed to hit him. He lost his grip and fell.” She always jumped ahead at this point in her account. Her nightmares were already plentiful and varied enough without focusing on that particular horror. But now she couldn’t help but remember the sound of it. The familiar exchange of blasterfire, something she’d thought herself inured to long ago. Cassian’s body crashing down and down, his spine smashing against a beam and then his body sprawled at unnatural angles on the platform below.

“I thought about turning back for him,” Jyn found herself saying. She hadn’t said that the other times, hadn’t meant to, perhaps ever. In the archive, she’d forced herself to keep going, her own scream echoing in her ears—Cassian! Cassian!—punctuated by the crack of his bones. But it wasn’t her first impulse. She had to repress that, the longing to throw everything aside and clamber back down, if only for what few moments seemed likely to remain to him, if any at all. 

Instead, she climbed.

“Really?” said Draven skeptically.

She glared. “Yes. But I knew—I thought it was pointless. He looked dead, and I had to get to the tower.”

For her father, her team, for the trillions who could die if she faltered. Cassian, of all people, would understand that. Remembering how he’d looked when he shot Krennic, when he gazed at her in the elevator, Jyn amended the thought. He had understood that.

Well, it was Cassian. Even dead, he’d probably haunt Jyn into eternity if she risked the galaxy for him.

“Miss Erso,” Draven said, “you have insisted that these plans contain a secret to stop the genocide of planets, an act of sabotage that your own father—”

“—who you killed—”

Draven ignored this. “An act of sabotage that your own father dedicated the last decade and some of his life to. You supposedly believed in that supposed message so strongly that you led dozens of good men into a deathtrap, and then you considered risking that for a stranger? You expect me to believe this?”

“A stranger,” repeated Jyn. She almost laughed. “Cassian?”

He wasn’t the first to suggest it, of course. They all did, really: the droids who tried to get her to leave, the doctors who refused to tell her anything, the soldiers bewildered at the presence of an unknown woman at the captain’s side, even when she identified herself. Jyn knew those people believed that she hadn’t known Cassian long enough to know him at all. Certainly not long enough to have grieved anything but possibility—the idea of Cassian, not the man he was. To them, it must really seemed impossible that she’d even think of risking her father’s desperate gamble for moments with Cassian’s broken body.

Those people could go fuck themselves, Jyn thought. Draven in particular.

“Captain Andor is—”

A comlink around his neck buzzed.

“Draven here. Can this wait?”

Jyn supposed that was flattering, in its own way. But then his face, even more rigidly controlled than Cassian’s at first, went slack. His eyes widened, mouth dropping open.

“Leia? Now? Yes, yes.” He clicked off the com and favoured Jyn with his most ambivalent look yet. “We’ll finish this later.”

She shrugged.

An hour later, Cassian woke up. A droid had grumbled about tapering off the anaesthetics, so she half-expected it, but Jyn’s breath still strangled in her throat as he stirred. Draven and whatever enquiry might be forthcoming fled her mind. She didn’t say anything, didn’t move, just stared at him with hope thudding an anxious beat in her chest.

Cassian’s eyes flew open. “Jyn.”

She swallowed.

“Is she—Jyn—” He blinked around, licking his dry mouth as he tried to make sense of his surroundings.

He’d figure it out in another instant, but Jyn still rushed over, her mouth trembling and hands steady. Gracelessly, she reached for him.

“I’m right here, Cassian.”

He turned his head to see her, his unfocused gaze sharpening, familiar lines of strain creasing his skin. But a smile did, too, around both mouth and eyes.

“Jyn,” Cassian managed, fingers fumbling about hers. “You’re all right?”

Jyn did laugh now, for real. “I had a sprained ankle. You broke pieces of your spine. Yes, I’m fine.”

His grip relaxed, just a bit. But his dark eyes remained fixed on hers, almost unbearably intense. “You’re … you stayed.”

If the last few days had taught her anything, it was that Cassian had about as many people to call his own as she did. Superiors, subordinates, fellow Rebels, sure. But that was the revolution, the respect for a valuable agent or leader in the Rebellion, not—belonging. She’d discovered the difference between family and usefulness in a bunker six years ago.

“Of course I did,” she told him, every instinct screaming to back away. Jyn leaned closer, letting her own mouth curve. “Welcome home.”

Cassian’s smile deepened, pressing into his cheeks. Because of course he turned out to have dimples, at least when he looked at her like that.

“Oh, thank the Maker,” called a shrill, metallic voice from the doorway. “You’re awake, captain!”

They both turned to scowl at the medical droid wheeling towards them.

“The protocols, as I’m sure you know, require us to perform all treatment required for basic functioning, which have included—”

“Get to that later,” said Jyn. “What do you want?”

The flat blue face managed to regard her with profound disdain.

“The lesser procedures require permission from the patient or interested parties. Now we can move ahead properly.” Its voice went bright and high again.

“Right,” Cassian said. He braced himself and tried to sit up, ignoring the 2-1B’s sputtering. Jyn just moved to raise the back of the bed until he could lean back comfortably, and shot a triumphant glance at the droid.

“Interested parties have been here the whole time,” she said, sitting back down.

“Captain Andor has no listed family,” replied 2-1B.

Jyn snapped, “He has me.”

The man in question looked down at her hand, resting on the edge of his bed. Jyn, torn between defiance and embarrassment, was about to pull it back, but instead Cassian laced their fingers together again.

“Well, unless he wants you added to his personnel file—”

“I do,” he said instantly, then glanced over at her, wide-eyed. His entire expression went awkward and uncertain, even as their hands clung together.

Jyn, no less overwhelmed, felt at least some reassurance that she wasn’t alone in it. In one side or the other, or—anything. She managed an unsteady smile.

2-1B’s whirr emanated the long-suffering that only a droid could manage. “Very well. J-Y-N E-R-S-O, next of kin. Is that right?”

Nervous, relieved, exhilarated, she couldn’t quite look at Cassian. But she curled her fingers more tightly against his.

“Yes,” Jyn said. “That’s good.”