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“He has information. I need you to get it.”
Jyn Erso nods, her expression neutral as she observes the prisoner through the one way transparisteel. He’s just lit a cigarra, extinguishing the flame with a deft flick of his wrist as he looks around the interrogation room with something like contempt. He’s not cuffed, has been allowed certain liberties. She dislikes him already.
Mon Mothma hands her a datapad, her voice cool. “Do what you need to do. You’ll know.” As the Director of the Imperial Army leaves in a swish of smooth white and sleek auburn, Jyn scans through the datapad. His name is Krennic, first name Orson but he seems to prefer the surname. A rebel but more of an ally than part of the rank and file, a smuggler flying the fringes of the civilised systems in a sleek powerful ship called the Tangara, occasionally partnered with a human or sentient xeno.
He’s nobody.
Except for the one name in his dossier that slides across Jyn’s vision like acid. It shouldn’t affect her like this anymore. She knows what she is, she knows she’s valued as an Imperial officer. The Director calls her into interrogations when all other methods have failed, and she always always gets the information they need. Jyn Erso has long since proved herself far far superior to her unfortunate father with his conflicted and long since rebel sympathies. She knows this. And usually when the cannier of prisoners try to fling that name at her, she’s unmoved or even amused at such idiotic obviousness. Her father is no longer a weakness or a sin to atone for.
And yet. Today.
Today she looks through the transparisteel at this man with his grey hair and blue eyes who sits smoking at the table, this man who looks like and nothing like her father, and she becomes aware that today she’s very, very angry. Today she’s going to hurt someone.
It may as well be him.
When she enters the room, he looks at her with a certain coolness and says, “Aren’t you a little young to be an Imperial officer?”
“Aren’t you a little old to be smuggling cargo through Imperial systems?”
So it’s going to be like that. In the moment of silence as she approaches the table, she sees the way he looks at her, knows he’s reassessing her just as she’s recalculating her strategy. Jyn sits in the steel chair opposite the prisoner, feeling very precise as she places the datapad before her. Her hair is pulled back smooth and neat, contained in the tight little knot at the base of her skull. Her uniform is immaculate black, the emblem clear and crisp on her sleeve. She is a perfectly contained fury.
When she looks across at him, he is a study in contradictions. Untidy blue shirt hanging open, grey tank top, a lighter grey than his unruly hair. He’s unshaven, silver stubble across his tapering cheeks and chin. But there’s a hardness in his face and a definite steel in his eyes as he watches her, a cold intelligence on guard. Anything but careless. Jyn sees all this, rearranges the plan in her mind just a little, and gives him a polite official smile.
“You know what we want,” she says evenly. “Perhaps we could make a trade.”
His contempt curls his mouth, the blue of his eyes livid against pale brown lashes. “What could you possibly give me?”
She does not rise to this. “Your liberty, of course. So far we’ve been reasonable, I think.”
“Do you?” he replies with perfect insolence. “Are Imperial officers allowed to think?”
She does not let her expression flicker. “Certainly, we are. And you know we’re willing to negotiate to get the information we want.”
“Which is what exactly?” He doesn’t hold the cigarra like other smokers she’s seen. Instead, he holds the stem pinched between index and forefinger, the lit end flicking up with the same insolence. The smell is acrid and somehow familiar, tickling her memory. “Remind me,” he adds, an intense amusement now in the cold eyes.
She takes a breath and says it without inflection. “Galen Erso. You’ve met him, you know where he is. We would like you to tell us his location.”
The amusement in his face goes somehow glacial. “And why would I do that?”
She feels her own expression crystallise. “We have your ship.”
A micro-expression of utter rage and panic contorts his mouth and around his eyes. “Of course you do,” he says smoothly. “But ships can be recovered. Rebuilt.” He leans back in his chair, in control of his emotions again. She watches the smoke curl around the contours of his face. “My ship never stays too long away from me,” he tells her.
Jyn looks down and smooths her palms across the surface of the table, judging her tone very carefully. “People, however.” When she lifts her gaze, his eyes have narrowed on her. “People,” she continues, “can’t always be rebuilt.”
“Which people would you have in mind?” His voice has gone almost silky soft. She thinks absently it’s an attractive voice. Coming from an attractively soft crooked mouth. The thought slides into the cogs of her ever-shifting strategy.
“Your friends in the Rebellion, perhaps?”
He leans back and laughs. Of course. She realises why immediately, latently furious at herself for being so predictable, playing into his expectations of Imperial interrogation. But she mustn’t panic and follow up with stupid threats. So she swallows on the stung feeling and waits, trying for that sensation of infinite patience as she watches him.
He takes a drag on the cigarra, long and smug, enjoying her attention and the silence of the steel room. His throat is strong, collarbones bold and elegant, his skin so creamy at the edge of the tank, a strange absurd patchwork of tanned and pale. She watches him wield his masculinity like a sort of casual weapon, a performance of confidence and arrogance, and she wonders suddenly how he makes love. How he’d coax a woman or a man into bed. He glances across at her, unsmiling now. And she wonders how he charms, how he kisses.
Sexual attraction isn’t always a weakness. If anything, it’s one more tactic to be carefully deployed. So she tries something very small. She straightens her back and breathes in, watching to see if his gaze drops to her breasts.
It doesn’t.
Discard that path for now.
But something tightens around his eyes, among the crinkled skin that speaks of so much time in the sunshine of planets, of maybe so much laughter and grief too.
“Why Orson?”
He blinks, actually thrown off guard. “What?”
Concealing her smile, Jyn replies, “Your parents. Do you know why they named you Orson?”
He stares at her for a long moment, obviously trying to work out the reason for this shift. She sees the moment he thinks he knows. His mouth curves a little, the blue eyes softening just a little but still so very careful. “My mother was a great reader. She named me after her favourite author.”
They could be talking at any central city sidewalk cafe. For a moment, she sees him in Coruscant sunlight, or in the reflected glimmer of an aquatic planet. “Your father didn’t mind?”
He turns the cigarra and looks at the burning end. “They both liked him. A writer of novels. Of xenocide.” The word falls between them, bloody. His eyes are direct and pitiless. “He was a bigot. Racial purity, the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. Sound familiar?”
This time she lets her smile appear, slow and charming. Sees his eyes slide to the dimple. “And how different is that from Rebellion propaganda?”
He arches a brow, leaning the chair back on two legs. “Freedom is propaganda? Basic respect for living creatures?”
“People don’t know what to do with freedom.” She becomes aware that she’s slightly enjoying this, the pull and push of intellect. “They will always create chains and jails for themselves.”
“So you lot provide them instead.” He doesn’t sneer it, says it with a curious keen attention.
“We believe in order. You must know that. People require a semblance of order to function and to be … happy.”
Of course he catches that hesitation. “Are you? Happy?”
This time she lets him see the flicker of uncertainty. And he responds instantly, letting the chair come back to rest, his arms folding on the table as he narrows his focus on her. “How does a little girl become an Imperial officer?”
Specialising in interrogation. They don’t say it but it hangs between them. Jyn lets herself swallow, lets her gaze flick to the side before she replies. “How else do you think? An orphan girl needs someone to take her in, something to believe in. Isn’t that the cliche?”
He doesn’t answer, watching her as his mind picks apart the possible truth and lies in that. She watches his face, looks at the soft curve of his lip damp and gleaming a bit. He’d taste of cigarras and sarcasm. He’d fuck her in a narrow lumpy bed with ragged sheets in a backroom somewhere, or a narrow lumpy berth in the back of his ship.
“But that’s not true,” he says softly. “Is it?” It’s so disarmingly compassionate she has to look down at the datapad, struggling against sudden alarming emotion. “You had a mother once,” he continues, almost tender. “Maybe she looked like you. Do you remember?”
She doesn’t but there were pictures. “She did. She did look like me. But that’s not what I remember.” It’s a small earthquake to hear herself talk like this, but it’s not entirely unpleasant. Jyn moves her fingertips again against the surface of the table, enjoying its smoothness, enjoying this weird sensual experience of tangling with this man. Her nails are trimmed perfectly round and neat, and as she looks at them, she sees for a moment how she’d dig them into his creamy skin and leave so many marks all over him.
“I remember being rescued,” she continues, her gaze on her nails. “She came like a saviour, all billowing white and beautiful. She was so beautiful and so much in control. My father … was not.”
When she flicks her eyes up to his face, he hasn’t reacted. He doesn’t know yet. But he watches and listens. And Jyn tells him something very, very close to the truth. “Mon Mothma saved me. She was everything I wanted to be. She taught me how to be. Alive.”
“Unlike your mother.”
“Yes. And capable. Unlike my father.”
He makes a little half grimace at that, like he understands and didn’t expect to. Eyes hooded with memories, he looks at the end of the cigarra, and his mouth is a grim line. “It’s difficult to love a parent you can’t respect.”
“It’s impossible,” she agrees. He looks at her from under his brows, suspicious but not so much anymore.
“What happened to them?” she asks.
He leans back in the chair, opening up the air and distance between them. His eyes are cooler now. Almost flippantly, he says, “I don’t know.” He takes a drag off the cig, glancing across the room to the control panel. “I left when I was sixteen, I wanted very different things to what they wanted for me.”
“Adventure?”
Sharp blue grey. “Yes. And freedom,” he adds with a certain naughty deliciousness. “There was so much to see, so much to experience, much more than they ever knew.”
“You had ambition then,” she says with some admiration.
He snorts, flipping the cig between his fingers. “Not in the accepted sense of the word, no. But I knew what I wanted my life to be.” The eyes are slightly cruel now, so very intelligent and focused on her. “I knew who I wanted to be.”
She feels her skin spark, her back stiffen. “And you think I don’t?”
“I don’t think you could, no.”
“We are not all brainwashed,” she snaps, furious despite herself.
“You certainly sound it!” His eyes snap blue back.
Jyn makes herself in breathe in deep, forcibly calming herself down. He was not meant to rattle her like this, but sometimes these things happen. Every interrogation takes a subtly different path. The trick is to anticipate and wrest that path back to where she wants it to end.
“Then it was a good thing you did, leaving so young to explore the galaxy? You must have had very many adventures.”
He starts to smile at her, and it’s unexpectedly mesmerising. It’s a smile of slow exquisite charm and sweetness, the hard face softening and crinkling into so much tender expression, a certain purity of soul through his clear eyes and curving mouth. That’s it, that must be how he gets them into bed.
“I saw more beauty and more wonder than I could ever have imagined. And” -- there comes the knife point -- “I saw the Empire form. The Separatists with their pseudo rebellion --”
“Because yours is the only right way?”
“Because we don’t lie about our ideals.” He blinks when he hears himself, a small self-betrayal that makes her laugh inside.
“We,” Jyn echoes quietly, holding his gaze with a certain hidden smile.
He meets it, refusing to be moved. His file had shown a very deliberate history of keeping himself distanced from every political movement. No ties, no affiliations. But always drawn back to the one cause, always accidentally on purpose helping those often misguided and ill-fated missions.
“When did you first meet them? Any of them. Were you very young?”
“You don’t care about the rest of them,” he interrupts.
“Don’t I?” Her voice is smooth, pitched just right between seductive and compassionate. She’s seen how people respond to that tone, no matter their gender or their relationship history. And he, though it’s taken him this long, now he looks at her mouth and she knows she’s got him.
“I want to know how someone so independent as you fell in with an organisation so … indoctrinated as the Rebellion.”
His eyes glint at that, as much fury as admiration because he sees exactly what she’s done.
Jyn leans forward in her chair, folding her arms on the datapad, keeping that intense blue gaze locked on her. “Did the Empire take someone from you? Traumatise you in some way?”
“You think that’s a cliche,” he says, a slight edge to his voice.
“Isn’t it? Isn’t that how all you noble heroes find your cause?”
He laughs abruptly, flicks the cigarra to the side in a sudden explosion of energy. “Yes,” he snarls, his eyes flashing. “Yes, I suppose it was a fucking cliche. To watch your home burn, watch your village go up in smoke, the people you grew up with slaughtered.” He sneers at her, so beautiful and insolent and wonderfully damaged.
“And your parents,” she murmurs, pleased.
His smile is insane now, wide and red and shiny with teeth and mad blue. “You’d like that detail, wouldn’t you? Want me to describe it for you …”
Jyn laughs on a breath, rising from her seat without even thinking. “You found them …”
Krennic, rebel smuggler and wild card, slowly rocks his chair back on two legs again, the overhead light catching the blue of his eyes and turning them strangely brightly silver as he laughs back at her. His brows are fine and slanted, making his eyes almost fey and beautiful and so very deranged. “I found them …”
She rounds the side of the table, catches the placket of his shirt with her hand, and hooks her foot around the leg of his chair so she has him caught fast. “Where?”
This close, he smells like cigarras and steel, like a fast dangerous ship careening away into the far reaches of space, untrammelled and defiant. This close, he looks at her breasts in the trim officer’s uniform, looks at her waist, and his nostrils flare, all contempt or lust or both. “In our house, the entryway.” He’s touching one hand to her hip, to where the empty holster straps her body.
Jyn pushes him back so she can sit on the edge of the table, and jerks him to his feet. He catches himself with a hand on the table beside her, so much taller than her. The heat of him is a shocking organic sensation in the interrogation room, the heat of his breath and the way he looks at her mouth now, hateful and hungry. “Was there blood?” she asks, wanting to taste his mouth.
“So much. There was so much blood, everywhere. My mother’s blood all over the walls of the corridor. My father’s --”
That whimper is Jyn, involuntary and full of clenching wetness. She makes that sound despite herself, her eyes wide and yearning, and he breaks off and kisses her so hard and so violently that he swallows her moans and she tangles herself around him, fingers raked hard in his hair, her mouth open and devouring, her legs hooked around the back of his thighs. He pushes her down on the table, covering her body with his, hips wedged between her thighs, and it stops.
Because he has his hand around her throat, gripping so very hard, his eyes very very cold. Jyn knows she should be alarmed, every fighting instinct screams he’s a threat and to kick him away. But she doesn’t and he sees it. He slowly tightens his grip as he straightens up and they watch each other. Her throat is a fragile breakable thing in his hand and he has his grip placed just right, just so he can kill her.
“Tell me,” she says breathlessly and lying below him. “Tell me what I want to know …”
He lowers his face so there’s barely a breath between them, so she’s crowded entirely by his lean male body and all the scents and history of him. “What could you possibly give me?” And this time it’s quiet, so full of promise and possibility.
Jyn swallows against the pressure of the hand holding her throat, swallows because it draws his attention to her lush mouth and the wetness inside. “Whatever you want.” She doesn’t need to pretend the way her body sways towards him, her mouth towards his now that she’s got his taste. “Whatever an Imperial officer can give you.”
The rage flares wild in his eyes, all that bloodlust surging right back over the intelligence, his hand tightening to the point of making her gasp. It’s exhilarating, roars right through her blood. He’s going to try and break her, and she wants it, wants that so much because she can break him right back in the process. They could tear at each other in lust and incoherent physicality but that won’t be enough. So Jyn curls her legs around the back of his calves and says, “You tell me something, and I’ll let you do something to me. How’s that?”
But he’s controlled his rage already, his grip easing, and his eyes go cold again on her. “I didn’t realise the Empire was quite so depraved in its techniques.”
Jyn smiles, mischievous and beautiful. “Are you complaining?”
“You’re vile,” he snarls.
“And I’m here.” She presses her shoulders down so he looks at the shape of her breasts. “An Imperial officer completely at your mercy.”
He scoffs a little at that but she can tell she’s captured his imagination. His hand rests now at the base of her throat. “Look,” she says softly, running her nail down the placket of her shirt. “All those things you’d like to do to an Imperial officer.”
“You have no idea,” he says low, his eyes intense. “You have no idea what you’re playing with, little girl.”
That makes her grin, remembering the little girl running across the fields to save her father, the little girl running right into the arms of a white caped saviour. “Try me.”
This time he fits his hand around her throat with a careful deliberation. “What happens if I kill you right here?”
She gazes steadily up at him. “Then you never get all the answers you want. And you do want them, don’t you? Why the Empire chose that village, that house, that particular time.” He flinches, his grip tightening, but she continues against it. “Was your family targeted?”
She pauses, eyes bright. “Was it your fault?”
He snarls and kisses her so hard she tastes blood. Jyn laughs into his mouth, arches her hips up against the ridge of his cock as she bites at the shape of his lips and lets his tongue into her, sucks the taste of him right into her. There is no pretence of gentleness, none whatsoever in the way she wraps her legs around him and he yanks at her hair til it escapes the confines of her official control. If he wants her undone, that’s fine, she can handle that. “You,” he chokes out against her mouth. I am the Empire, she wants to tell him, unavoidable and unassailable. Instead she laughs as she helps him undo her shirt and pull up the regulation singlet, as he gropes at her breasts and kisses her with that crooked attractive mouth all full of secrets and manipulation. “Tell me about her,” she whispers to him, “how you found her. What she looked like.”
It makes him shudder, appalled and maddened, his teeth tearing at the skin of her throat, at the curve of her bare breast, and then sharp and wet on her nipple. Does he know what he’s doing, how depraved he is right now, with his mouth on her breast and his dead mother in his head? How incredibly hot this makes her? She moans and twists against him, so wet between her thighs and wanting more, pulling at the fastenings of his trousers. Her palm against the shape of his cock, she grasps him with clear demand, and he lets out a harsh sound, surging up to give her access. Her back comes off the table, the shirt and singlet stripped away, her hair tumbling down around her face. If he has the chance to come to his senses, he doesn’t take it. He pulls off his shirt and tank, comes back to her with bare torso and trousers open, eyes blazing blue and mouth bitten, utterly hers, utterly claimed.
She takes him with teeth and tongue and cunt. Her trousers are pushed down beyond her knees, trapping her but she doesn’t care. Because his fingers opening her up becomes his mouth shockingly wet and invasive, making her fuck his face, fingers tangled in the mess of his hair. He pulls her to the edge of the table and tips her hips up, his hands gripping her thighs. It’s a beautiful sight when she looks down, the glimpses of his face all reddened and wet, the perfect line of his nose, and his lashes all tangled over blue. He gets greedy about the taste of her cunt, goes in deep, coaxing out so much wetness, licking it up and licking her clit til she’s shuddering with so much heat and need. “Now,” she gasps, yanking a fistful of his hair. “Now, I want your cock in me now.”
Wild intelligence through the clear blue eyes that shocks her a little. He shouldn’t regain his composure so soon, and especially not at this point. But before she can say or strike, he’s driven his cock hard up into her, so deep in one savage violation that she cries out and clutches at his shoulders. He doesn’t give her time to adjust, he’s already pounding into her, relentless and unforgiving. This is it, this is him wanting to hurt her, an Imperial officer, exactly what she promised him. She takes it, laughing, joyful, gasping, marking him with her nails like she promised herself. She hauls herself upright against his chest, nails digging into his back, and sinks her teeth into the beautiful curve of his shoulder. Wanting so much to devour him in every possible way, to keep him as her own personal prisoner, a defiant fucktoy to the end of the war and beyond. Her biting him doesn’t make him stop or falter, it only makes him wrap his arm around her back and, with the other braced against the table edge, fuck her harder. It’s maybe an uncomfortable intimacy, her naked breasts against his chest, nipples and heartbeats, glimpses of mouths and eyes, breath into breath. But then she’s coming long and hard, her cunt seizing around his cock in endless engulfing contractions, so wet it’s slick on her thighs and his, so hot all over her skin that she’s arching like a wild thing in his arms and he’s watching her face as she comes, watching her lose herself in sensation. She goes so far she doesn’t even realise when he comes in her.
When her vision clears and her breath returns, Jyn finds herself flat on her back against the clammy table. She registers it through the haze of returning consciousness, blinking up through tear-soaked lashes at his face. He’s hunched over her, the lines etched hard around his mouth, watching her with an indefinable mix of too much conflict.
“Even if I tell you where he is, you won’t find him in time.”
“Doesn’t --” she swallows and tries again, her throat raw. “Doesn’t matter. It’s what we want.”
“And I’ll still have told you, betrayed --”
“Your cause? Yes, perhaps. But maybe there’s information you can take back to them.”
Krennic straightens up and moves with a sort of grace back from her, taking all his heat and presence with him. She finds she misses that already, like she hasn’t had enough of him yet.
“Like what?”
Jyn sits up on the table, reaching for her singlet. She doesn’t want it on, she wants to take him back to her private rooms and have him for several more hours, naked and under her. But she smiles flirtily at him. “Come on now, you know that’s not how it works.”
He watches her for a long grim moment, all the cogs of his brain ticking over behind the hard face. The tank and shirt are back on, making her regret that she didn’t spend enough time learning and devouring his body. She doesn’t even remember what colour his nipples are. Now his lust is gone, vanished behind the intellect. And when he speaks, he says the very last thing she expects.
“Come with me.”
Jyn blinks, halfway through buttoning her shirt. “What?”
“Come with me and tell them yourself. You can have a different life, a different cause if you need one. You don’t belong here --”
She had almost begun to laugh until that last bit. Stung, she interrupts, “You don’t know where I belong.”
“I think I do, actually,” he says, stepping forward. Her skin thrills, wanting his hands back on her, the taste of him in her mouth, his cock up inside her. Krennic touches her chin and then cups her face in one hand, his intensity not entirely sexual. She can’t read him now. Not until he tells her with such serious blue eyes, “He’s kept pictures of you, you know.”
Jyn goes cold with horror.
“He carries them wherever he goes. Wherever we’ve met, wherever he hides. The many times I’ve met him with supplies, with papers, when I’ve brought him tools and chemicals, given him passage across systems, helped him escape Stormtroopers and TIE striker attacks, he always carries your pictures with him. You as that little girl playing in the fields, reading in his lab, with your mother. He’s convinced he’ll find you again one day, that you’ll be a family again.”
He smiles at her, eyes like steel once more. “Do you want me to tell him where I found you?”
“Or,” he adds softly, stroking his hand down her throat, a certain heat creeping into the blue, “do you want to come back with me and find him yourself?”
The mission forms itself before her, so clear and perfect. And as she looks at the man watching her think, Jyn knows he would never let her get away with it. He’d monitor her every move, block her every attempt.
Krennic slides his fingertips into her loosened hair, tipping her face up, and kisses her slow and soft and utterly filthy.
And maybe, Jyn thinks as she kisses him back, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. He’d fuck her in the ship and those seedy bars, in some haphazard planet accommodation. Maybe they’d build some weird semblance of a life together, and she’d be warily accepted by the Rebellion as some redeemed child and lover. She’d have to open fire on people she’s worked and lived with for most of her life, maybe fly attacks on ships she’s loved, kill pilots and officers she’s befriended. Pretend to hate the only mother and leader she’s ever known.
She’d have her father back.
The thought feels like treachery, makes her taste it in his mouth, in the way his hands grasp at her hips with new urgency. It makes her hate him all over again, and kiss him harder back. And of course he mistakes it for lust, of course he responds with fiercer mouth and roaming hands. If she enjoys that, so be it. This is what she chooses, and right now she chooses him.
“Here.” She pushes the shirt off his shoulders, baring the mark of her teeth half hidden by the tank strap.
“Wait. No, wait.” He grabs her wrists and looks hard at her. “Tell me what you want to do. What do you think about what I said?”
He seems like an utterly alien creature to her now, so earnest despite all his cruel intelligence and beautiful rage. It doesn’t seem possible that she could ever have him, maybe it was idiocy, temporary lunacy that she thought she could, even for the breadth of an hour or so.
He reads it in her face somehow, his hands slipping away. Silent, he turns away, shrugging the shirt back onto his shoulders. She looks at the ruffled hair on the back of his head as he bends it and does up some of the buttons. If she’s meant to feel regret at having disappointed him, she doesn’t. Only Mon Mothma, Director of the Imperial Army, has ever had that power.
“Very well.” Jyn hops off the table, pulling her hair into a loose knot at her nape. Her face stings suddenly and she realises it’s burn from his stubble, the same burn on the inside of her thighs. “You’ll be returned to your cell now. If you don’t convey the information to us in three hours --”
He’s turned back to her, expressionless. Like the last hour or so hadn’t happened, all the secrets and near truths told, that explosion of ferocious sexual energy. Maybe she does feel regret after all. Disquieted, Jyn reaches for the datapad and continues, “-- you understand steps will be taken. Your ship will be confiscated and you will be moved to a different location.”
He snorts. They both know what she means. Imprisonment by the Empire is non-negotiable past a certain point. But for three hours, they’ve passed that point.
When she’s a few steps from the door, he speaks. “Was that the first interrogation you’ve ever failed?”
She has to think about it for a second, wind back her memory. She glances over her shoulder and then turns back to him. “No. I failed three times when I began. This will be my fourth.”
They watch each other across the steel space, she thinking that she may never touch this clever attractive man again. Maybe he’s aware of that too.
“Was he well?” The words come out before she thinks. She commits to them, says it clearly. “Was he well the last time you saw him?”
“As well as can be expected.” His voice is steady. “He was suffering with claustrophobia, I believe.”
Jyn Erso stares hard at the prisoner, then nods and leaves the interrogation room. In the corridor, Mon Mothma appears, her expression curious.
“Basteel,” says Jyn. “Probably Eladro City.”
Orders are dispatched immediately. When Mon Mothma glances back at her, Jyn says, “I think I’ll return to my quarters.”
“Of course,” replies the Director immediately.
Back in her private rooms, Jyn Erso moves to the transparisteel and watches the TIE striker formation swerve across the blackness of space. The apparatus of the Empire has kicked into new gear, all because of her. Because of that man who remembered pictures of her as a child and then fucked her with a feral madness and so much anger. He’s probably being walked through corridors now towards the bay where his ship waits. Probably wondering whether the troopers will kill him anyway.
She could make a mad dash now to save him. To escape with him. And for what? That life he promised her. The family he asked her to choose over the family who’d cared for her almost all her life.
They won’t find Galen Erso. He’ll have vanished off planet by the time the transports land. And maybe Krennic will tell him of the daughter he found (and fucked) in an Imperial interrogation room. She wonders at her father’s reaction. Would he try to rescue her from this fate worse than death? Would she have to laugh in his face and tell him she is exactly where she wants to be?
She stands at the black expanse of skies for a long while, and eventually touches the base of her abdomen with the thought of a little girl running across a field.