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open ✧ the time to fight is now
☒ ᴀᴄᴛɪᴏɴsᴘᴀᴍ ☒ ᴘʀᴏsᴇ ☒ ᴘɪᴄᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴘʀᴏᴍᴘᴛs ☒ ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴡᴏʀᴅʟʏ ☒ ᴏᴠᴇʀғʟᴏᴡ
☒ ᴀᴄᴛɪᴏɴsᴘᴀᴍ ☒ ᴘʀᴏsᴇ ☒ ᴘɪᴄᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴘʀᴏᴍᴘᴛs ☒ ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴡᴏʀᴅʟʏ ☒ ᴏᴠᴇʀғʟᴏᴡ
☒ ᴀᴄᴛɪᴏɴsᴘᴀᴍ ☒ ᴘʀᴏsᴇ ☒ ᴘɪᴄᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴘʀᴏᴍᴘᴛs ☒ ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴡᴏʀᴅʟʏ ☒ ᴏᴠᴇʀғʟᴏᴡ
☒ ᴀᴄᴛɪᴏɴsᴘᴀᴍ ☒ ᴘʀᴏsᴇ ☒ ᴘɪᴄᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴘʀᴏᴍᴘᴛs ☒ ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴡᴏʀᴅʟʏ ☒ ᴏᴠᴇʀғʟᴏᴡ
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♪ story goes on -- richard maltby, jr
If she's honest, Jyn doesn't remember how they got off the platform in Eadu. She remembers Cassian pulling her away from her father's body, she remembers her father's eyes opening again, she remembers screaming. How they got him to the ship, how they got off the planet, who washed her father's blood off her hands, when they arrived back on Yavin, those are details that she missed. She remembers, vividly, shouting at Cassian even though the blood on his jacket should have been enough to tell her who carried her father aboard, she remembers Baze physically dragging her away so she could scream and rage in peace. She remembers Cassian again, hands curled around her biceps so she won't leap like a particularly enraged cat at the Alliance doctors working on her father. She doesn't remember falling asleep next to Bodhi at his bedside or being carried back to her room.
What she remembers with the most clarity is waking up to find him gone from his room and searching the base in a panic until she finds her father engaged in discussion with the entirety of the Alliance Cabinet, defending his actions for the Empire. Ignoring manners and protocol and General Draven shouting at her to stop, she pushes past Mon Mothma and Senator Organa and throws her arms around her father in the middle of a sentence, burying her face against his neck.
No one seems particularly surprised when Jyn blindly pulls a blaster on Draven when he tries to order her out of her father's arms and out of the room -- he was the one who also ordered Galen's assassination so it's a good bet that someone won't be forgiving him any time soon -- and it's Bail Organa who gently plucks the weapon out of her hand. Maybe it's just something about watching a daughter reunite with her father that touches a soft spot in his heart, Jyn doesn't know, doesn't even realize, just curls that arm back around her father.
Realizing the rebellious young woman isn't going to give up, at least not until she stops crying, Mon Mothma suggests they reconvene later and the council leaves to give the Ersos their privacy. It's hours before Jyn is willing to part with him again and it's only due to the many reassurances to his safety that she finally allows the cabinet to finish their meeting, collecting the rest of the wealth of Imperial secrets that Galen has at his disposal.
She's waiting outside the door when they break for the day, idly watching Cassian across the hanger in a comical display of missed glances. When she looks away, the captain's gaze is immediately drawn to her and neither of them are the wiser or both of them refuse to be. But still she looks up to her father, the natural downturn of her mouth making her relieved expression still look half somber.
"Hi."
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He had longed for that, once enough time had passed that he knew Jyn must be out of the Empire's reach. To simply rest. The once bright clamor of his mind, thoughts and ideas and visions demanding to be given form and voice were prison bars now, a throughline that went straight to the heart of the Death Star, to his perfect flaw, and--stopped there. To go on, after that, to breathe in and out and put one foot in front of the next...there seemed only one reason to even try, and it wasn't the purity of purpose of the Alliance.
Which was ultimately why part of him bristled that he was kept for hours trying to explain his actions, not that they should not be explained, weighed and measured and somehow, impossibly, paid for, only--he supposed there was no such thing as an impartial judge to be found. Nevertheless the Rebels had been close to Lyra's heart, not his. Even if he'd realized long ago there was no refuge in neutrality. Science didn't take sides, but science hadn't been what he held onto when failure felt like the shadow of a knife at his back. And fathers, anyone could tell you, were never neutral.
He can still feel the imprint of her arms hours later, the steel spine so like her mother's, that fierceness he has no way of knowing was, until recently, doused by the weight of one abandonment after another. Ostensibly he's meant to be finding something to eat just now, but Jyn's presence makes that prospect seem utterly unimportant. The volley of missed glances doesn't escape him, but--what should he say? She hasn't had a father in fifteen years, and he wouldn't know how to speak to...whatever is happening here, even if he'd been there every day of her life.
So, instead. "Stardust," he tries, like it's hello, like it's simple, but the word cracks, the T, already soft with the accent she didn't keep, dissolves, sticks in his throat. Instead, it's his turn to reach for her, thinking still, I have so much to tell you, but saying none of it, face tipped down into her hair instead.
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Jyn spent so long hating him, making herself hate him in order to protect herself, and then he calls her stardust and the anger melts away like water down the drain. It will return, she knows, anger fuels her above anything else and she holds on to the fire like it can crystallize into a weapon.
She knows the science of this is false. Her father taught her that. It also doesn't matter.
Her face twists where it's pressed against his chest, fighting against emotions she is not equipped to deal with, breathing in the scent of him. It doesn't smell like the damp dirt of Lah'mu, the sour chemical scent of his Imperial uniform from her very early childhood. It's unfamiliar and strange, clean and sterile like K-2. She doesn't like it.
"I'm here." It's me. You did it. I'm proud of you. Something.
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So if he's going to find faith at all--it's here. This one hope, that he'd only given form to in his strongest moments: that Jyn might still be out there somewhere. That she wasn't with Saw anymore had been a surprise, from what little info he's gathered, but Saw ...Saw had changed. If Lyra was alive, if they'd made it together away from Alpinn, would she have fallen to that fate? Scarred over and twisted by constant fighting, constant fear--no, he can't believe that. Never Lyra.
Then again he doesn't know his daughter so well as he once had, either. Now is the opportune time to find out, it seems. The opportune time being the only time. "Yes. So you are."
It's a little choked; when he backs up just to arm's length, keeping his hands tight on her shoulders, his eyes are wet. "Let me have a look at you." ....a look that seems like it might go on quite a while, Galen trying to draw the lines that melted away a child's features; she has her mother's mouth, strong and stubborn and petulant, the kind that grows radiant in smile; the nose and cheekbones could be either--but. Even when she was little, she had his eyes.
"So much of your mother," he murmurs, only semi-voluntarily; mostly it feels like a compulsion. "But so much that is just you, I think. I want--" he falters a little; the difficulty had been there with Bodhi too, the assumption that any grand words he might have to give would never actually be said. This is a lifetime's worth of words, though, everything he should have been there to say as she grew. "There's so much I want to tell you. For you to understand. Will you tell me of you, first? Anything you like."
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Is she supposed to tell him that the first time she saw someone die it was her mother? That so many of her memories include death and loss? That she knows what Saw did to Bodhi because she'd seen it before even if he tried to hide so much from her, to protect her? That she learned how to torture before she learned how to ride a speeder?
Her life is not worth a story and all it will do is upset her father.
"There isn't a lot to say," she hedges instead, eyes darting away in shame. She tried to convince herself that she was better than Cassian, that she didn't murder, but how many times had her direct inaction cause someone else to fall? Isn't that the same thing? How is she supposed to tell her father that the little girl that doodled his equations on the edge of her pictures like they were a border turned into a woman that walked away from trying to protect the galaxy because she was angry with the universe?
She can't tell him that he shouldn't care for her because she doesn't deserve it, she's far too selfish for that.
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"I know I haven't been there to tell you, but nothing...I trust that you did what you needed to do, my girl."
He's prepared to keep saying this as many times as it takes. For the record. Her life is the only story he wants to hear.
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The shame in her eyes ignites into that familiar anger like a match on dry tinder.
"I did what I needed to do because I was alone." Because she was abandoned, again and again and again, by people who were meant to stay with her, to find her and protect her. Knowing it was all to protect her -- and she does, she's always known that her father had gone to the man in white to give her and her mother time to run and she knows Saw made the only choice he had to protect her from people who would find out she was Galen Erso's daughter and seek retaliation or leverage through her -- didn't do much to keep her safe and warm at night and it didn't keep her company in prison.
It's absurd to think that the people who raised her would leave her behind and Cassian would be the one to come back for her. More than once.
She forces that thought from her mind, letting her anger settle into stiff bones and sore muscles like a balm. She'd let it go and felt only hurt, but now that it's racing warm and wild through her again, the hurt seems to subside. Not just the emotional hurt, but the physical.
"You weren't there. No one was."