#jynersos

They had barely survived Scarif. She had thought that the sight of the very last transport scanning the beach for survivors (far too few) had been a mirage of the cruelest sort - at least until the hatch opened and Baze’s gruff face appeared.

And then, just as suddenly, they were unceremoniously yanked aboard by two long durasteel arms, even though the haste with which they were rescued probably exacerbated already dire injuries - at least in Cassian’s case. “Punch it, pilot!’, he ordered, and Jyn wanted to ask how, but the burns inflicted by the oncoming kyberwave made it mostly impossible for her to speak.

The ship rocketed in the atmosphere, and for a moment - one terrifying, heartstopping moment in time - they ship shuddered violently, and, they held their collective breath as they worried that it might break into pieces around them. But it didn’t, and the small group of survivors hurtled through hyperspace, screaming toward Echo Base, toward safety to a medbay where doctors and medics could help, because none of them had come away from Scarif unscathed.

“It’s alright, little sister”, Baze tried to reassure Jyn, holding her tight against his broad chest when Cassian stopped breathing and Kay - rather, the new chassis holding old Kay - commenced performing chest compressions until he gasped back into life, Jyn’s wild sobs echoing throughout the ship.

She had never felt so lost, never felt so alone than in the moment when she believed that even though they had escaped the destruction of Scarif, she had lost Cassian anyway.

For the first time in a long time, when Cassian had said ‘welcome home’, Jyn had begun to believe that maybe she had, however inadvertently, found someplace to belong.

But she found herself bereft at the thought of a life without Cassian in it. And as she stared at his silent, still body lying on the floor of the ship, all Jyn could do was pray to deities and Forces she didn’t even believe in anymore in a last ditch effort to spare his life. She would give her own if it meant that he could open his eyes for her once more.

But he didn’t - and if not for the shallow rise and fall of his chest, he could be mistaken for any one of the fallen soldiers they’d had to leave on destroyed planet they’d barely gotten away from.

When all of the frenetic energy had drained from her body and her heart-wrenching wails turned into sniffles, she was finally allowed to slump down to the floor, where she clutched Cassian’s limp hand tight and buried her face against his chest, quietly begging him not to give up just yet, please just hold on.

When they touched down on base, all of them, save for Kay, were swept away for treatment. Bodhi’s mangled arm couldn’t be saved, so he was fitted with a mechno-arm instead. Chirrut, rendered temporarily deaf from walking through close explosions, serenely recovered from a blaster wound to his side, which miraculously hadn’t hit any vital organs. “All is as the Force wills it”, was all he would say when asked how any of them had managed to survive what they’d gone into knowing was a suicide mission. Baze grumbled as he was treated for two wounds severe enough to have taken down anybody else, but he was perfectly content to rest and recuperate by Chirrut’s side.

Perhaps luckily, the worst injuries that Jyn suffered from were burns from the kyberwave that had almost atomized she and Cassian on that beach. A small handful of bacta treatments later, and she was healing well, new, sensitive patches of pink skin littering her right side from her ace to her toes, mostly hidden underneath her Rebellion-issued sleep clothes. And although Jyn was not exactly a vain woman, the less anyone said about her newly shorn, chin length hair, the better.

“Irreparably damaged”, they’d called it. Jyn thought that was a nice way of saying ‘burnt to a crisp’.

Cassian was the most severely injured of them all. Blaster graze, multiple broken vertebrae, internal lacerations as well as bleeding, bones broken and shattered from ribs to pelvis to leg. It truly was a miracle that somehow, he had managed to pull through.

Although Jyn couldn’t be present for every surgery performed to wire Cassian’s broken body together again, she insisted upon sitting with him through every bacta treatment afterwards. Most likely, he didn’t even know that she was there, so deep in his medically induced coma was he, but that hardly mattered to Jyn.

He was her home now, and she was never going to leave his side again for as long as she possibly could.

.. If that was what he wanted.

But Jyn thought … she’d felt … she hoped that the connection she had felt on that beach was real and not just borne from the knowledge that they were going to die together. Fleetingly, she’d wondered what could have been if they only had the time to find out.

And now they did.

And Jyn was terrified of the prospect of … being open and vulnerable with another person when she was far more used to being on her own, but … she trusted Cassian. What she felt for him was more than she’d felt for anyone in her life, and despite the fear, wasn’t that worth exploring?

So she sat, and she kept vigil over Cassian as he went through surgeries and bacta treatments, and she sat by his bedside as his body slowly began to heal, and even though she couldn’t be sure that he could even hear her, she began opening up and talking about herself little by little, the sorts of stories and details that would be missing in een the most complete dossier.

She was dozing, sitting right by his side in a hair, where she’d faithfully been every moment that she wasn’t receiving treatment herself, or visiting with their recuperating teammates - friends - to check up on them and to report on his condition. Through her dreamy haze, it took a while for Jyn to realize that the gentle pressure she felt were Cassian’s fingers tenderly carding through what remained of her hair. Her breath hitched in her throat, and it took a moment longer before she raised her head, afraid to find out that she’d been imagining it all along, like so many times before.

But Cassian was awake, and as alert as could be expected, given the sheer amount of painkillers and antibiotics being fed to him intravenously. Despite that, though, the relief he felt upon meeting her eyes was palpable between them, as was her own. She could finally allow herself to believe, at long last, that he was going to be okay. Maybe not the same as he’d been before, but okay nonetheless. A tear silently slipped from one eye and down a cheek and she -

Well. She’d never seen a more wonderful sight in all her life.

“Jyn”, he rasped out, his voice a hoarse, thin whisper. “You’re here.”

A soft, shaky chuckle passed her lips and she searched out his free hand to hold, squeezing gently as though to reassure him of her presence all the more fully.

“All the way, remember?”, she murmured, heart beating back into life at the recognition and the light in his dark eyes as he held her hand more firmly, and lifted it to his lips to press a gentle kiss against her knuckles.

“All the way”, he answered, and Jyn couldn’t know how or why, but she believed with everything that she was that Cassian meant it with everything that he was.