Chapter Text
21:12, 04/09
A mugshot with a false name.
He looks at the image behind a layer of smoke. It’s imprinted in his brain somehow, after the long miles in the desert spent driving, smoking, and looking at the picture on the dashboard – her lips are irregular, her bangs hide half her face. It’s just like smoke: a gradient of black and white and the same ghostly passenger.
He finds himself talking to the picture sometimes.
The picture is a memory now, you can’t see the rigidity of the photo once you've seen the curves of reality.
There is more color on her cheeks, now that she is next to him, but perhaps not as much as he would have thought. The picture had been peculiar, unexpected – she looked too young, too wise, perhaps. She simply didn’t look like a rebel, not like someone who could pop up in his mail box with a reward.
Maybe it’s only the picture. She looks more brutal in color; her makeup is smudged, remnants of black framing her green eyes and some red on her lips – a warrior.
(Did he imagine a smiling girl wearing a yellow dress? He didn’t, he simply imagined something else.)
Unlike the picture, she’s not immobile. She’s fierce and fighting against her handcuffs, emphasizing her gestures with colorful words. “How do you say in Spanish? Hijo de puta?”
The tilt of her accent makes it almost hilarious.
He looks at the flickering light of the motel sign, then at the drops of water on the seat; then a brief glance in the rearview mirror to look at her. Jyn Erso.
When he sees her looking back, he focuses his gaze on himself and his swelling nose.
19:47, 04/09, Cassian reads on his phone. He throws away his cigarette and looks up.
Vegas, written in neon lights and false promises; that’s where he finds her. Glittery dress and red lipstick, fake smile and white shark teeth, throwing cards and money around but still relatively discreet for a winner.
He doesn’t know if she sees him or the security first, but she starts running, fast, her black boots taking her anywhere but here.
She takes a sharp turn, a gaming chip falls, and she escapes the men in black, but not Cassian. He opens the exit door, unable to say a word before he finds himself on the cold hard ground, his bloody nose ringing. “Puta madre!” he curses, before he looks at her silhouette escaping him, running towards the too bright lights of Vegas. He tries to follow, to run after her but he only sees a flash of legs diving into a red car.
Cassian hates this city, its artificial lights, its half-naked bodies and its fake money and promises, he’s been here too many times, it’s just an empty town full of lost people. Like her. Like him.
She is just a contract he needs to fulfill, but she’s an infuriating one.
Cassian follows the red car fumbling through the streets like an angry bull. He keeps his distance and parks farther away from where she stops.
It’s in a cheap motel in the edge of town, where he finds her again. The red car she stole sits alone in the deserted parking lot, like a ruined statue in an abandoned museum; and it is ruined, she hasn’t been delicate, there’s a broken window and yellow dust everywhere.
Cassian grabs his packet – it’s crumpled, the cigarettes are crooked, he should put it elsewhere than in his back pocket – taking a moment to let her believe she can flee. Confidence makes people make mistakes, Cassian believes. He checks the bullets in his gun. He knows he won’t use it, and he hesitates to bring it with him – fear makes people react unpredictably.
He puts the gun in his holster on his side, throws his cigarette and steps on it, makes a finger gun pointing at her silhouette and shoots.
Jyn looks at the lights, the dark sky, and her distorted feet in the blue – too blue – water, clutching the little bag full of gaming chips in her lap. Her impulsivity has run its course, and like all things it must die. So she dips her feet in the water and she waits.
Waits for something, anything, to make her get up and leave again.
(Where? Los Angeles, maybe, or Vancouver, why not?)
When she feels the water between her toes she realizes how tired she is of running all the time.
It’s like being prey. Does prey in the savanna or in the jungle always hear alarms? Because there’s this constant noise, especially here in Vegas.
When she was younger, Jyn used to lie down on the grass catching a few seconds of complete silence before the birds started singing again, before she started running away from the wind. It’s impossible now. Not only in Vegas, but everywhere she wanders – there’s always noise following her, because of whatever marching band installed in her mind.
The wind is gone.
He tries to be silent. He has this walk, soft, cautious, instinctive; she feels like there is a shadow hovering her, and she senses him even before the drop of red falls in the fluorescent blue.
“I am going to ask you to follow me.”
That’s when she notes the accent.
“I should have hit you harder,” she answers.
There’s still a stripe of blood descending towards his mouth, and as she says the words, he brings his fingers to his still ringing nose – his fingers are coated in red.
Running away now would be careless, she needs to paralyze him first, Jyn thinks. It’s more than a thought, even; she grabs his jeans and pushes him into the water, taking advantage of it to start running, the tokens and lights forgotten.
There’s a deafening sound as the skin of her chin breaks and her jaw shuts in a painful slap; she’s running out of air, her chin coloring the water in red. The violence of the fall paralyzes her, gulps of water filling her mouth and throat until she feels something pulling her away.
Cassian groans as he tries to comb his wet hair with his fingers, the drops falling on the leather seats of his car. It smells like chlorine, and pine from the little green tree hanging on the rearview mirror.
Jyn, on the back seat, is still coughing because of her burning lungs. She can’t move, but she keeps struggling, like a fish out of the water – there isn’t an ocean big enough for Jyn, she’s always been a bit out of everything – she hates this feeling. The metal around her wrist is biting the skin, a painful reminder that she’s been caught, again , her hair is getting in her eyes, and she still tastes blood in her mouth. She is groaning, kicking the seats, but he stays silent. She curses him, whoever he might be, but she mostly blames herself even as the gears turn in her mind to come up with an escape plan.
Cassian lights up a cigarette – from another packet, since his last one is completely wet and ruined – ignoring her complaints, the vipers slithering out of her mouth to strike. Jyn starts hammering the window with her bare feet, so Cassian turns the radio up to cover it. It’s a country song.
“How do you say in Spanish? Hijo de puta?”
In the glove compartment, he hides her pictures away – among ammo, more cigarettes, an audio cassette, gum and a prayer card of Anima Sola – and grabs a small first aid kit.
She’s stopped.
He doesn’t start the engine yet, Jyn sees him looking at his reflection in the mirror. He hisses when he touches his nose – it’s not broken, but it’s enough to make Jyn smile.
“Where are you taking me?” she asks. Her voice seems so close, it feels like she is whispering in his ear.
“Mexico.”
Jyn nods. She doesn’t even try to guess what he wants her for now, there’s always been a target on her back anyway. She’s tried to cover it with a suit jacket, a white dress and a pearl necklace, in vain. It was still grotesquely obvious.
“You’re bleeding,” Cassian says, looking at her through the mirror, “your chin,” motioning with an unlit cigarette between his lips.
Jyn notices the drops staining the awful dress she is wearing, and how her jaw still hurts, but she just nods. She’s been hurt before, her blood is a color she wears often.
Cassian sighs and recognizes a stubbornness in her passivity, takes the aid kit and opens the door to slide on the back seat with her. Jyn backs off as best as she can and Cassian shows his hand in an almost vulgar peaceful manner, as if he was drawing a gun – she can see his holster, and that’s what frightens her, that she can see it .
“What – “
Cassian slowly grabs her neck, his thumb caressing her jaw to make her lift her chin and to keep her from hitting him, knowing what she can do with her fists, he doesn’t want to find out what she can do with that stubborn head. “I won’t hurt you.”
It makes her scoff, because if he wanted to kill her he would have done it by now, he’s already had plenty of chances – a bullet in her head, her dead body in the fluorescent water – but his hand on her neck tells her that he’s used to trying.
And she grits her teeth – so hard it makes her skull buzz – but she lets him clean her cut with a compress that smells a lot like tequila, and put a butterfly stitch on her chin. That’s when she notices his eyes, tired and warm and completely focused. Dangerous eyes.
Jyn looks at him, doesn’t thank him – why would she?
Cassian smirks, trying to read her face; her light frown, her lips in a thin line - she doesn’t want to give too much, he can tell.
He’s been driving for an hour now. The road hasn’t changed. Jyn counts her breaths, and keeps a list in her mind: road 93, she notes.
She is usually not an observer, Jyn. She listens, she feels, but she keeps her head down, she knows how to be discreet. But here – she notes how he taps on the wheel to the rhythm of a few songs, she counts the number of cigarettes he smokes (12), the cacti by the roadside (32), as if all these details were crucial.
(And they may be, those marks of the time passing by, the minutes, hours she loses, like wrinkles in the corner of her eyes.)
He has looked in the mirror 23 times since he started the engine, briefly and regularly, like a watch. (Tick tock.) He is watching her.
Kick him and flee , she repeats in her head. She is going to wait, for the right time, for an opportunity. Like she always does.
She’s going to watch him too.
Cassian has his gaze fixed on the everlasting, straight, yellowish road, like some kind of old postcard he would rather forget, because remembering’s when you miss whatever you’ve left at home. Every minute, he gazes at the rearview mirror and at his disturbingly quiet passenger.
He notices the mood changing when she starts looking back. Vultures have the same gaze.
Jyn looks at the curve of his neck, as if the answers are written there in cursive, but she only finds questions. Among them, one that makes her lips itch: “Why?”
She scolds herself for asking, for even wanting an answer, but she’s been left alone in her own thoughts for too long, they were starting to get obnoxious.
Cassian takes a peek at the rearview mirror, a raised eyebrow feigning confusion, “Why?” he repeats.
“Why Mexico? What did I do?”
“I don’t know what you did.” Cassian shrugs, half-lying. She does have a full criminal record, but that's not why she's here. But it’s not his job anymore, to investigate and answer questions, now he just delivers.
Jyn opens her mouth to protest but – “Whatever,” she whispers, gritting her teeth and drifting her gaze away to look at the yellow outside. (It’s something Saw hated, when she simply dismissed the conversation, maybe that’s why it’s become a habit.)
He lights up another cigarette, pinching the filter between his lips, “I was paid,” he starts, takes a drag, “to bring you to Mexico, to someone named Krennic.”
Jyn just nods. She doesn’t know the name, she still doesn’t have the answers she was looking for, and her throat is burning.
“I’m thirsty.” She makes her voice tilt higher, unconsciously, but she wants to talk, she wants him to be troubled by her presence, just like she’s troubled by the metal around her wrists. She wants to bug him like some insect near his ear.
Cassian keeps his eyes on the road all the while rummaging through a bag on the seat next to him. He throws a water bottle behind him, gruff and annoyed. “Here.”
Jyn looks at the bottle, then at the holster, at the gun.
“I can’t use my hands.”
Shrug . He can be an annoying brat, too.
She's already broken her thumb. The first time and the most painful was when she was 7 years old, all braids and dirty knees. She was running and a bad step made her fall to the ground; a crack, one of a bone, the other, a tooth on the floor.
But it was only the first time – there had been others. Her right thumb has never really healed, and she can hear the bone pop when she moves it.
(She often makes it snap when she’s with Chirrut and Baze, mostly because the former hates the sound.)
But it allows her to bend it at an almost inhuman angle.
It's been 20 minutes since she got rid of the handcuffs, but Jyn keeps her hands behind her back because she can still see his holster and the shining metal of his gun.
Cassian rolls the sleeves of his shirt and Jyn sees the veins, the muscles of a shooter.
So she keeps her hands behind her back, does not take a sip of water.
And Jyn waits and looks at the water swaying.
Jyn looks at him now, wondering if it would be better to hit his temple or the back of his head. Either way, the car would get stuck in the sand of the side road and she would have time to run away.
Running in the desert? Stupid.
There’s a nagging voice saying that it doesn’t really matter anyway, that she should just stay still and wait.
“So what do you think you did?” he suddenly asks, turning his head briefly to meet her eyes. Jyn hates how soft it sounds.
“I don’t know.”
“No mames!” Cassian curses (Jyn guesses it’s a curse) and gazes at the red light on the dashboard.
He murmurs something, again and again, and there’s the regular click of the blinkers.
Next thing Jyn adds to her list is that they turn right.