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It Wasn’t Until (Jyn Erso Appreciation Week Day 2)

Day 2 Prompt: Luxury

Summary: Five times Jyn redefined “Luxury” in her life.

Words: 1559

AO3 /  Below the Cut!

(1) Coruscant:

“Galen, that’s too much of a luxury,” Mama chastised when Papa brought home a crystal from his work. “I know how important those crystals are to your work. I couldn’t possibly take them away from you.”

“It’s a reminder to me,” Papa assured her, drawing her into his arms. “Of how important you are to me. You and Jyn. I’ve gotten too absorbed in the work, Lyra, and I’m sorry.” He ran a thumb over her cheek lovingly. “You two are the real luxuries in my life. If everything else was taken away from me, but you remained, I would have all the luxuries I need.”

As Papa pulled her even closer, Jyn shrank back around the corner, back into her bedroom. She may only be five, but she understood when some moments between Mama and Papa were private, just for them. Besides, she felt safe hearing her Papa’s words. He had been distant for a while, always reading and writing and locked away in his study for hours on end. Jyn had missed him then. But Papa said it himself: she and Mama were the luxuries in his life, even more than the crystals her parents argued over so often.

Mama and Papa tucked her into bed that night – the shining crystal now hanging around her mother’s neck – Jyn snuggled into her blankets, content and secure in her parent’s love.

It wasn’t until Lah’mu that Jyn learned having her parents was a luxury.

(2) Onderon:

“We don’t have the luxury of mourning the dead, Jyn,” Saw told her when he found her with tear tracks across her face. She was only ten – or was it eleven now? She hardly celebrated her lifeday with the Partisans – but she gripped a knife tight in her right hand. Blood dripped down its blade, staining her wrist and her conscious. She’d killed the Imperial sympathizer attacking Saw’s cadre, but not before she’d seen men and women she knew shot down and stabbed.

Those people raised her, those people knew her, and they were gone in an instant. Saw didn’t want to speak of them – not how they’d lived nor how they’d died.

“We must move forward, Jyn,” he’d said. “We must focus our efforts on the future and not on the past.”

She remembered his words as she grew into her anger and her truncheons. Luxuries like Maia’s gloves were few and far between in the fight against the Empire; wasting them on missing those who would never return – and she counted her parents among those number – was senseless.

Still, when the nights stretched on after gruesome skirmishes, Jyn could not stop the thoughts of those she loved and those she never knew parading across her mind. She reminded herself of the benefit of Saw’s stoicism and asceticism. Put away the luxuries, she told herself, and this life will be easier.

It wasn’t until she sat alone and scared in a bunker that Jyn realized the luxury was not mourning other people’s deaths; luxury was having people to mourn yours.

(3) Garel:

Jyn lifted her shirt to examine the bruise blossoming there. Less than half an hour old, and thick streams of purple and blue ran across her rib cage and down to her stomach. Several weeks of forced starvation – merely the scraps of meals others had thrown away had been her only nourishment – weakened the muscles Jyn depended on to guard her ribs; without them, they shattered like pottery, as evident by the harsh burn that accompanied every breath.

She closed her eyes and willed herself not to think of others she wished would be there. Her mother, with a soothing voice and gentle hands. Her father, with his in-depth knowledge of what would ease her pain. Saw and countless Partisans who could use the local products to create a homemade cure just as effective as the ones sold on the upper levels of Coruscant.

With a grunt, Jyn ran her hands over the wounds, inspecting the damage done in her most recent bar fight. She pictured the bounty hunter whom she’d angered had credits to spare for the luxury of a medic or a warm meal or a safe place to rest their head. At the beginning of the fight, Jyn imagined the outcoming would be buying her those luxuries for the evening, instead of the rough floor of the cave she now laid on, away from civilization and those willing to help her. She chewed on moss and took shallow breaths, telling herself she was content with this, that in a few days she would be healed enough to find another bounty hunter – or a smuggler, Jyn wasn’t picky – with the credits to get her off this Force forsaken rock.

Until then, if only the smells of fresh meat would stop wafting in from the local village; if only her head had a more comfortable place to rest…

It wasn’t until Wobani that it occurred to Jyn that even the ability to breathe was a luxury all its own.

(4) Eadu:

“We don’t all have the luxury of deciding when and where we’re going to care about something,” Cassian snarled at her as the ship raced through hyperspace, away from her father’s corpse and back to the people who’d killed him.

Her thoughts tangled into knots as she and Cassian, their anger finally spent, retreated to two separate sections of the ship.

Her father was dead. Cassian had orders to shoot him. The Death Star was real. The Death Star needed to be destroyed. We don’t all have the luxury of deciding when and where we’re going to care about something.

She scoffed. What did Captain Cassian Andor of Rebel Intelligence know about luxury? He didn’t stay to deal with the chaos caused by his assassinations; he didn’t live amid Imperial occupation, like the Guardians; he knew a safe place to rest his head awaited him at Yavin 4 when he returned from a mission. He even had the luxury of companionship, even if it was a reprogrammed Imperial droid filling that role.

These rebels struck and ran, too cowardly – or was it diplomatic? – to face the Empire head on in a war.

But as a group gathered around the Captain in the hanger of Yavin 4, offering themselves – their skills, their positions within the Alliance, likely their own lives – to retrieve the Death Star plans, Jyn found herself shocked. These rebels understood the price of sacrifice. Like the members of Saw’s cadre, they had lost their brothers and sisters in arms. Tragedy had struck their lives in some way in another, turned them away from the Empire and into the arms of the Alliance. More than that, they believed in what they were fighting for with a passion that Jyn herself had once had, though the flames of her belief had dulled to embers over her years of struggle.

Jyn found herself respecting the soldiers that gave up the luxuries of Yavin base to follow her on the deathly mission to retrieve the plans for a planet killer.  

It wasn’t until the sky of Scarif was awash with artificial light that Jyn truly understood being a soldier of the Alliance didn’t mean living a life of luxury.

(5) Aria Prime:

A cry broke through the air. With a grunt, Jyn opened her eyes to glance out the window. The sky was still dark without even a hint of the sun on the horizon.

“That’s the third time tonight,” Cassian groaned beside her, his arm warm around her waist. “Do you think she’s sick?”

“I don’t think so,” Jyn murmured as she pulled herself up. “Just uncomfortable.”

Or, Jyn considered as she pulled her daughter out of her crib, Lyra was merely taking advantage of the luxury of having her parents nearby, reading and willing to dote on her at a moment’s notice. After all, Jyn would have taken advantage of that luxury for many more years if she’d been given the chance.

“You don’t have to get up,” she assured Cassian, who was leaning out of bed to grab a shirt.

He shook his head, coming to join her. “I don’t want to leave this all on you.”

They paced the length of the house, cuddling their daughter close to their chests, rocking and soothing their hands over her back. The sun just peaked its way over the horizon as Lyra’s eyelids fluttered closed. Once Cassian laid her back down in her crib, Jyn’s head fell to his shoulder.

“Let’s hope she lets us sleep for a while now.”

Cassian chuckled, placing a kiss on her forehead and leading her back to their bed.

As they fell asleep, Cassian’s steady heartbeat echoing in her ears, Jyn considered how even the idea of a roof over her head while she slept was a luxury for so long in her life. Now, it was the everyday normal. Pillows fluffed just the way she liked them; Cassian’s delicious cooking multiple times a day; Lyra’s loving coos and eager smiles: though Jyn saw them daily, she vowed she would never take these luxuries for granted.

It wasn’t until the war was won and the galaxy free of the hold of the Empire that the true luxuries of life – love, peace, comfort – became a regular part of Jyn’s life.