Rebelcaptain, an abandoned or empty place
(This one springboards off a Lah’mu-related drabble I wrote last year, though it wound up going in a different direction)
*
At the bottom of the shallow set of stairs, the muck of years has silted up against the entrance to her childhood home.
Jyn picks her way across, but mud and leaves are on the inside, too, invading through the small gap left open between the door and its frame. The track was rusted stiff and jammed so tight that it took Kay’s strength to shove it wide enough for her and Cassian to enter. (The droid doesn’t come in, though, choosing not to stoop under the low ceiling.)
All she sees is wreckage: dishes swept onto the kitchen floor and smashed to shards that crackle under her muddy boots; sheets of flimsi scattered around her father’s desk like more dead leaves. She circles across to that side of the room and picks one up, hoping to see her father’s work. The sheet hangs limp in her hand like a piece of fabric, the blurred lines of the drawing on it barely visible in the watery green light seeping through dirty windows. But once she finally deciphers the faded image, she sees her own drawing of a twelve-armed farm droid, with notes on how to build it here and there in her father’s neat engineer’s hand.
Jyn presses a hand to her mouth to catch a noise that’s half-laugh, half-sob. She’d forgotten the game she and Galen used to play in which she’d design outlandishly elaborate machines and droids, and he’d very seriously help her draft the plans for them.
Cassian comes up behind her, his steps just loud enough to give her warning of his presence. “Anything you want to keep?” he asks softly, one hand resting on her shoulder and his thumb gently sweeping the nape of her neck.
Jyn blinks rapidly and shakes her head. “No. There’s nothing here.”
And it’s true. She could take something from this dilapidated, destroyed home, but it would mean less than the way she was taken from it. Everything important she has from her parents, she sees now, is already with her: her brain, her beliefs, her fight.
