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The Force paints her dreams in inky tendrils. Through a haze, Jyn feels sand, blinding sun, and such heat that makes the sand burn. It is Scarif. It has to be Scarif.
Except her fear is not heavy resignation or adrenaline like Scarif, but acrid and metallic at the back of her throat. There is loss like she’s never known. Her fingers are ice cold despite the heat. She leaves something terribly important behind.
Jyn wakes with tears coursing her down her cheeks. Despite her eyes opening, she is not aware. She is still floating in unrelenting dunes--until Cassian’s stare weighs her down to reality. Their bedroom is cool. The secondhand fan in the corner valiantly battles Takodana’s humidity. There are soft, worn synth-cotton sheets under her hand. They had bought the set off a smuggler. Jyn had haggled the price for so long and so well that she got a job offer along with the linens.
“Are you here?” Cassian asks.
Jyn sucks in a breath. Nods. It’s both an answer and permission for him to pull her back under their blankets. He pillows her head against his propped-up arm. She lays there for a few moments, just breathing with him. Cassian’s bare stomach presses lightly against her mid-back with every inhale.
“It wasn’t Scarif,” Jyn starts, unnecessarily. Scarif doesn’t leave her in tears. Scarif is one of her good almosts, a death with hope and love. Broken spines and burned hips and perishing in a blaze of light does not compare to the horrors she has witnessed and committed during decades of war.
Cassian hums in agreement, an easy reminder that he is listening as she grasps at the liquid blots of her dream. Her husband is patient, good at letting her reveal in her own time. He is used to her ordering the details of her dreams and giving him details to parse through analytically.
“You were there, but I didn’t see you. I didn’t see anyone. There was burning sand and sun and…” Jyn trails off. How does she articulate the feeling of loss without death? Particularly to Cassian, who sheds some losses like a coat too torn to mend. He knows strategic abandonment, casualties, killing for the greater good but Cassian has never hoarded with a fear of having nothing at all. The Rebellion had provided him with basic tools for over twenty years. This abstract loss, a thrumming emptiness that is rapidly fading, is hard to explain to him.
When he had first traded Jyn his blaster for her trust, she had thought him stupid and spoiled. Now she knows it had been his willingness to give up anything for the Rebellion’s goals--his goals. He has always had his priorities neatly organized. Loss, even loss of his own life, ranks low on his list.
“We left something important behind,” Jyn finishes lamely.
Cassian doesn’t wave off her concern. His brows furrow with concentration. Despite having her back to him, Jyn feels the weight of his thoughts. He is sifting through all the desert planets they’ve ever visited. They’ve had missions in Tattooine and Utaupa. There was the Battle of Jakku, Scarif, and numerous stopovers in sandy depots. This vision is too nebulous for him to nail down to one memory.
Jyn cuts into his train of thought. “Maybe it’s something we should have left behind.”
Cassian doesn’t answer right away, and Jyn doesn’t give him more time to contemplate. Her unease propels her from their bed. The wrongness of her dream crawls along her skin and she needs to shake it off. Cassian makes to follow her, but Jyn waves him off.
“No, it’s okay. I just need to walk.”
They both know that she’ll pace their small home, double-checking all their locks, analog and digital. They both know it won’t help her agitation, even as it does.
Cassian lays back in their bed, but flicks on the bedside light and grabs his datapad. He’ll stay awake until she returns.
Jyn shuts their bedroom door behind her. Cassian’s bedside lamp leaks light under their door and eases the darkness of the narrow hallway. In front of her, everything is dark and still. No light shines from the small, second bedroom, but it calls to Jyn all the same.
She cautiously presses against the other bedroom’s magnetic handle, and the lock thankfully doesn’t catch as Jyn eases open the door. Inside is nothing but the warm quiet of her daughter’s bedroom. Rey breathes softly and evenly under the covers; Jyn can just make out the movement in the dark. She’s sure that Rey’s normally pinched expression has smoothed and her mouth gapes slightly.
It will be the same look as how Rey had first fallen asleep on the ship back from Jakku. Jyn and Cassian had literally tripped over her, a little girl hidden in the shadows of sand dunes. Cassian had quickly handed Jyn his blaster and crouched before Rey to speak to her on her level. Jyn would have walked a few paces away and given them space to talk while she kept look-out, but she hadn’t been able to move. Her feet had sunk into the sand while she choked on mirrored glass. A little girl with brown hair in pigtails crying about her parents. A little girl weeping about their promise, about how they would come for her. Jyn hadn’t been able to breathe. She hadn’t seen anything besides the little girl’s curled fists and deep, dirty teartracks.
“My name is Rey,” she had sniffed. Cassian had smiled. Jyn had heard it in his voice when he replied, “like sunshine.”
“I think so,” Rey had said. Her eyebrows had scrunched harder in concentration--just like Cassian, Jyn had noted. “I think my papa used to call me that.”
Whatever part of Jyn had been hardhearted, who had been able to ignore the similarities between Rey and herself, between Rey and Cassian, how the little girl could be a mix of them, who had committed to only getting Rey off Jakku and passing her off to the Alliance’s refugee program, burned away. Mine, Jyn had thought. It had been a conscious choice, a greedy claim that had torn out her own heart. It had been a thought that shoved the mirror glass down her throat until she had sucked in nothing but shards.
Jyn doesn’t remember how Cassian had coaxed Rey from her junkyard ship or how they had slid across the desert sand back to their own u-wing. But she remembers with visceral clarity how Rey’s dusty, gritty hand had slid into her own. Their fingers hadn’t fit perfectly together, Rey’s hand had been too small to get a good grip against the buttery leather of Jyn’s gloves. But Jyn had curled their fingers together and held on with a crushing grip. She had pulled them, both of them, across Jakku even as the wind had buffeted her back. Even as every step away from Rey’s ship, Jyn had left sharp glass fragments of herself behind.
Now, years later, Jyn watches the outline of her daughter and realizes that she had not been choking on her own trauma as she left Jakku. That pain of pulling Rey away from her junker had not just been Jyn’s own, but the Force’s warning. Now, more strongly than she has ever felt it, Jyn feels the Force swirling around Rey in agitated swaths. The Force wills a path for Rey, and Jyn has plucked her from it.