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Jyn Erso always found her father’s parties to be incredibly dull. Galen Erso was the head of the company that mined kyber crystals and turned them into clean energy. Although he never did it for the money, the company had made him and his family particularly wealthy.
Hence the annual parties where Jyn was forced to wear heels to look nice.
It was two hours into the party and she was considering bailing like she did every year around this time – when she suddenly stumbled in her stupid heels. Luckily, a pair of strong arms were behind her to steady her back on her feet.
“Careful,” a man’s voice said.
“Heels,” she replied in an annoyed voice.
“A different pair of shoes, maybe?”
“Well, the deal is, if I wear heels for this annual party then I get away with only wearing them once a year,” Jyn explained as she turned around to face her saviour. He was considerably handsome, with shaggy brown hair and stubble covering his face. But Jyn wasn’t so much focused on how good-looking he was as she was on the aura of familiarity that surrounded him.
“Do I know you?” she asked him, her eyebrows knitted together in a confused way. “Have we met before?”
“No,” he replied, “I would have remembered.” His eyes scanned her in the same way she was looking at him – like there was something right on the tip of his tongue that he just couldn’t place. “But you do seem . . . familiar, somehow.”
Jyn smiled at him and grabbed a drink from a passing waiter and took a sip. “Do you believe in fate?” The words were out of her mouth before she could consider them; although, the word (“fate”) seemed appropriate as she continued to have the overwhelming feeling that somehow the two of them were meant to meet each other.
“No,” he said with a grin, “although maybe I could be persuaded to reconsider my stance on the matter.”
Jyn considered this for a moment as she took another sip of her drink. She decided on another topic. “How about past lives?”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Really? Oh, good. I was afraid I would be babbling about nonsense for the entire evening.” She felt a little strange bringing up topics like this in front of someone she had just met, but the longer he stood in her vicinity the more she felt like their strange familiarity towards each other needed to be explained.
A loud bout of laughter was heard across the room and interrupted the conversation that they had not yet started.
Her saviour gestured to the doors on his right. “Balcony?” he suggested. (Jyn didn’t know why she agreed to go be alone with a man she had just met two minutes ago. Her father would probably say something like, “The Force works in mysterious ways.” She always thought that was bullshit, but perhaps, like her saviour, she could be persuaded to reconsider her stance on the matter.) Jyn followed him outside and set her drink on the railing.
“So, past lives?” she brought up again.
He thought about it for a moment. “I believe that in my past life I was a rebel captain, fighting for a cause.”
Jyn grinned. “Exciting. And what are you now?”
He smiled. “A regular captain. Not so exciting. How about you?”
“My past life or what I do for a living?”
He gave her a shrug. “Either.”
“Well,” she began, “when I was a child I wanted to be a Jedi, like most children do, I suppose. But they said I didn’t have the right stuff to be one. It’s for the best; I was not a very patient child.” She laughed at herself. “As for now. . . My father wants me to take over his company when he retires.”
“What company is that?”
“Kyber Energies.”
He gave her a surprised look. “You’re Galen Erso’s daughter.”
She nodded and stuck out her hand. “Jyn Erso.”
He took her hand and shook it with a firm grip. “Cassian Andor.”
“Well, Cassian Andor, I suppose you’ve been wondering about my past life.”
“I have been kept in suspense for long enough, don’t you think?” he said and she looked up at the dark, starry night for some kind of revelation into her past.
“I was. . .” she started, thinking hard about it; when she met his eyes, words just kind of came out of her mouth, “a rebel. On your ship.”
Cassian smiled at her. “What a coincidence that we are meeting here, then.”
“Well, there had to be explanation as to why we feel like we know each other. I suppose us meeting again in this life is a result of fate.”
He took a sip of his drink. “Like I said, I don’t believe in fate. I believe we make our own destiny. But I will listen to what you have to say. So, how did it work out? Our rebellion?”
Jyn thought for a moment. “Successful,” she answered, then added, “But we both died for the cause. Tragic, but. . .”
“Poetic,” he finished for her, and she nodded in agreement. “You know,” he said after a few moments of silence, “You are probably the most interesting person at this party.”
She snorted. “Tell that to the three other men who approached me and were immediately bored by my topics of conversation. I can’t help that I had no interest in speaking about ‘settling down’ or ‘if I had children, how many would I like to have?’” She rolled her eyes.
“What were your topics of conversation that were apparently so boring to them?”
Jyn shrugged. “Kyber crystals. Clean energy. I do find my father’s work quite intriguing although it will be a long time before I get the chance to run it.”
“And that is what you want to do with your life?” he asked, “Run your father’s company?”
Jyn nodded. “It’s important to my father that I keep making the universe a better place for everyone.”
“And what about before?”
“Before?”
“You said it would be awhile before you take over your father’s company,” he reiterated. “So, what now? What are you doing until then?”
“I don’t know,” she replied honestly, “I suppose I haven’t figured that out yet.”
There was a long (not necessarily uncomfortable) silence. Jyn sipped her drink. “So, what was that about me being the most interesting person at this party?”
Cassian smiled. “You are the first person I’ve talked to that hasn’t brought up the scandalous news about Leia Skywalker marrying a smuggler.”
Jyn rolled her eyes and let out a groan. “If I hear one more piece of gossip about the Skywalker family I’ll go insane. For the sake of the Force, leave them be! I don’t care if Anakin Skywalker is the quote-un-quote ‘Chosen One’.”
“It’s like you read my mind.”
She sighed and looked out to the ocean that was the backyard of her parent’s place. Cassian followed her gaze down to the beach. When she looked back at him, he looked as if he had come up with an idea.
“Do you want to take a walk?”
She grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”
The two of them snuck out of the house and walked down to the beach. Jyn held her heels in her hand. They walked in silence for a while until Jyn decided to sit down and watch the waves. Cassian sat next to her. He took off his jacket and laid it down behind them.
“Lie back,” he told her.
“What?” she replied. Cassian rolled his eyes and lied back so his head was on the jacket. He was looking up at the sky. Jyn obliged and lied back. The jacket separated her hair from the sand and let her look at the beautiful array of stars.
“So how did we die?” he asked after a few moments.
Jyn considered the question. “In a blaze of light,” she answered.
“Dramatic,” he commented.
“We were stealing plans for a weapon,” she continued, “on a planet that was occupied by the enemy. Luckily, we transmitted the plans, but our mode of transportation was destroyed. The planet was going to be blown up and there was nothing we could do about it. So, we stayed and accepted our imminent deaths.”
“Tragic.”
“Poetically tragic,” she corrected, and when she looked over at him he was smiling.
Cassian began pointing out constellations to her, and although she knew most of them from her father, she listened quietly and intently anyway.
Before they knew it, an hour had passed and the party was probably close to ending.
“We should go back,” Cassian said.
“I always sneak out of my father’s parties before they end. They won’t miss us.”
“I believe you, but I have to be leaving early in the morning.”
“Leaving?” Jyn asked.
“Captain, remember?” he said.
“Right. Of course.” She sat up and handed Cassian back his jacket. They walked back to the house where people were beginning to leave. The two of them stood outside as the driver of the hover-cab waited for Cassian to get in.
“Do you think we’ll ever see each other again?” Jyn remarked. Cassian gave her a small smile.
“Only fate will tell.”
An amused look graced her features. “I thought you didn’t believe in fate?”
He stepped closer to her. “Consider me persuaded.” Cassian gently kissed Jyn’s cheek, then turned around and got into the hover-cab. She watched the cab fly away out of sight before returning inside.
Jyn was being crazy. And reckless. And insane. But she had never felt more driven to do something in her entire life.
The morning after the party, Jyn packed her things, told her parents she would be gone for a while, then headed straight to the starship dock. She didn’t know why she did it, she only knew that it felt right.
When Jyn got to the starship dock, she stood at the top of the stairs and looked down at the ships preparing to leave. Luckily, she saw Cassian straightaway, the closest ship within yelling distance.
“Were they in love?” she called down to him. He looked up immediately, and his eyes smiled when he recognized her.
“Who?” he called back.
“The rebel and the captain! Were they in love?” It was a stupid question, but it was the only thing Jyn could think of as an opener. Besides, who’s to say that their past lives weren’t in love? They were on the same rebel ship together, after all.
“In a way, yes!” he yelled to her. “But they didn’t know it! They hadn’t known each other long enough to put a definition to their feelings!” Jyn hurried down the stairs and started her way toward him. “But then they were spending their last moments with each other, and they both realized what might have been!” She finally stood before him, and he finished his thought in a quieter voice. “It ended before it had even begun.”
Jyn stood, catching her breath, words failing her.
“What are you doing here?” Cassian finally asked.
“Fate. . .” she breathed, “is ridiculous. We make our own destiny. I want to go with you. On your ship.”
“You hardly know me,” he said.
“I’m just picking up where they left off,” she replied. The beginnings of a grin began to show on his face.
“Welcome home.”