open ✧ the time to fight is now

[realists]

☒ ᴀᴄᴛɪᴏɴsᴘᴀᴍ ☒ ᴘʀᴏsᴇ ☒ ᴘɪᴄᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴘʀᴏᴍᴘᴛs ☒ ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴡᴏʀᴅʟʏ ☒ ᴏᴠᴇʀғʟᴏᴡ

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[neutralist]

That he should be judged is not a sentiment Galen would protest. Judged, and harshly so; he couldn't have imagined he would still be alive at the end of all this, didn't so much as hope for it--the best he could hope for was that his treachery would only be discovered in its explosive aftermath. And then Krennic would do what Krennic did best, which was paint Galen into a corner, this time with no escape.

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.

[realists]

Stardust.

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.

[neutralist]

Her father doesn't have the faith in science he once had, and religion has always been a faraway concept to him. It meant a great deal to Lyra, so he respected it even if he didn't understand it, but his strange dreams and stranger relationship to the crystals he worked with hadn't saved him. Hadn't saved Lyra.

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."

[realists]

Tell him what? There is so little goodness in Jyn's life and the idea of burdening her father with what her life had become makes her feel physically ill.

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.

[neutralist]

Also, it would be impossible to make him listen. He designed the Death Star, if Jyn can still care for him, it's beyond Galen not to do the same. "It's been hard," he hazards, not because he knows her well enough to tell why her eye contact just blurred off, but--oh, how he recognizes that, every small regret, every mistake, every time he told himself what Had to be Done, that, he knows. They have the same eyes.

"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.

[realists]

Far from making her feel better, a bitter sounding noise claws its way past her lips at his words. There was a point, she knows, where need didn't come in to play at all and she ran on pure anger. Not everything she did was because it needed to be done and so little of it was for any good greater than herself.

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."