here a fount in the desert (star wars | jyn/rey)

[fiachairecht]

here a fount in the desert. star wars (rogue one + sequels), jyn/rey. jyn, and the thing in the sands that loves her. 1.5k words, rated t. for spookykingdomstarlight in femslashex 2018.

Jyn sighs and brushes a damp tendril of hair off of her forehead, squinting at the wavering form on the horizon. Her landspeeder hums beneath her, the heat of its engine a suffocating counterpoint to the blistering sun above. She can't tell if the structure in the distance has actually moved closer.

Spy on the former Imperials, Jyn, they probably don't even know you're still alive, Jyn.

And, sure, she'd been dead to all but maybe a dozen people after Scarif. Didn't mean she had to be entirely happy about risking coming back.

At least Jakku seems to have some sympathy with that. Jyn hasn't seen another living thing since the Teedo at the landing field charged her a good five times what the tiny patch of solid ground was worth. She feels an undeniable kinship with the wrecked skeletons clawing their way out of the dunes. But Leia had asked, and although this was far from what Jyn had expected when she agreed to do one last favour for her old friend, she had agreed.

Old habits, it seemed, died even harder than old bones.

Sand drifts across the tops of her boots, obedient to the wind's whims. The sun doesn't seem to have moved at all, but the horizon ... she shields her eyes, as if her hand could do more than the polarised goggles she's been wearing since before she stepped off her ship. The horizon is definitely closer.

Jyn shivers. The sky is cloudless above, yet her shadow seems to stretch and lengthen across the shifting sands, creeping forward on its own to darken the expanse of desert in front of her. It grows out of step with the wind, roiling like the deep, unknowable energy Leia sometimes used to carry with her.

I am one with the Force and the Force is with me.

The echo of Chirrut's words strike through her like something physical, and Jyn lurches forward over her handlebars. She hadn't noticed she was still stopped, so much closer the horizon seemed.

Chirrut's been dead for years, though, and Jakku's desert is no Jedha. That the wind speaks with his voice here is ... Jyn tries to put it out of her mind. She's not here for ghosts; she likes to think she knows better now than to go disturbing them.

I am one with the Force, the whisper curls around her, and she shakes her head to clear it. Straightens up, and freezes.

There is a weight on her thigh far too heavy to be sand.

 

**

 

Rey watches from the rock-strewn roof of the Observatory as the dead woman makes her way across the sands. She's different from the others who have come, lately: death walks at her side like a friend, not like a weapon.

Rey opens her mouth, tastes the afternoon sun, tastes Jyn on the air.

And for the first time she feels the flame-tongued want licking at the underside of her skin find a new direction.

She steps off the roof.

 

**

 

The creature at Jyn's side regards her with piercing, uncovered eyes. The lack of goggles is even more unsettling than the staff strapped to her back or the blaster at her hip.

For a long moment they simply regard each other in silence, Jyn feeling oddly wary of giving her voice to the desert. It's an unfamiliar feeling, and Jyn hates it with a fervor she's not felt for anything in years.

The creature speaks first. "It's not safe to wear that." It's a woman's voice, young, Jyn would say if she didn't know better. If those eyes, now fixed on her pendant, could ever belong to someone — something — young.

Jyn's seen war wipe the youth from too many faces, steal it from too many bodies, and leave too many corpses in its wake. Jyn knows, as surely as she knows her own names, that the woman with her sun-drenched skin and oddly cold hands has never been young.

Her hand comes up to cover the kyber at her neck as the woman continues to stare. "That's too bad," she says, and her voice cracks in the dry air. "I've killed to keep it safe before."

The woman's own hand tightens on Jyn's thigh. "I mean it," she says, and there's a note of genuine concern in her voice that makes Jyn wonder what, exactly, she's missed in the kilometeres since she left Niima Outpost. "I'm not the worst thing you'll find out here. Neither are those you seek."

Jyn's lip curls in disgust. "Don't tell me you're one of the old Empire's lackeys," she sneers, leaning as far away from the woman as she can without falling entirely off her speeder.

The woman laughs, a light wisp of a thing like the wind through sand. "I'm Rey," she says, "And I have as much love for the Empire as they have care for my world."

So, none, then, Jyn thinks, as she looks closer at Rey. She has a hazy, unreal quality to her when Jyn looks from behind her lenses, and for a moment she wants nothing more than to see her clear. "Well, Rey," she says, and doesn't miss how the sound of her name makes Rey light up like another sun. "If that's true, will you help me find them? Or do you simply rise from the sand to dispense cryptic advice?"

There's creatures who do, she remembers, too late, and this time her shiver has everything to do with Rey's hand, so cold it feels as if it's against her bare skin. There's creatures who want your bones and your blood and your secrets and some of them only look mostly human and—

—and Rey is still laughing, or is laughing again. "Yes, I can help you," she says. "But it's easier to start from my home. People like you slip away so easily out here."

The horizon has moved away, when Jyn looks again. She says yes to Rey before she's quite realised she's decided to.

 

**

 

Rey leads her, following some tracks secret to her eyes only. Jyn drifts on the speeder, turning when Rey turns, matching her pace, always keeping an eye on the now-still horizon.

And yet it's still a surprise when the structure rises from the sand directly in their path, crystalline scatters glinting in the sun. The wind, hardly noticeable until now, screams as they approach the cracked stone doorway.

"Inside," Rey says, the closest to afraid Jyn has ever heard her. "Inside, now."

An infinitesimal part of Jyn wonders about taking her chances under the sudden clouds. The rest of her, battle-trained obedience still remembered, follows with newfound urgency.

She parks the speeder in the entryway, and steps carefully after Rey as she continues down a twisting set of stone corridors. There are stars on the walls, carved constellations that Jyn's memory can't quite catch on to. She focusses instead on their path: left, left, right, left.

If nothing else, she promises herself, she will remember the way back.

Rey stops so suddenly Jyn nearly runs into her, as the corridor widens into a room. Blankets are piled into a corner and strung up on the walls, and an ancient stove sits under a shelf cluttered with cooking supplies.

"This is where I live — well, usually," Rey says, as she starts fiddling with the kettle and the burner. "You're welcome to stay."

The echo of the wind down the corridor pitches higher, so loud that Jyn has to resist the urge to cover her ears. She had thought the walls were much thicker. "Thank you," she says slowly, "But, no, I'm not sure I am at all."

Rey turns, tilts her head, and Jyn experiments with telling herself it's just a trick of the light that's caused Rey's eyes to darken so, to a brown so deep it nearly seems flecked with gold. "Let me rephrase," she says, and Jyn knows an order disguised as a polite request when she hears one. "R'iia is angry tonight, and you are staying with me. Going outside right now means your death."

Jyn shuts her mouth so hard on words to the effect of I'm not sure that staying here with you doesn't mean the same that her teeth click together. Decades of being dead have taught her the survival skills that her life before didn't manage to, but the impulse to speak is still there, itching under her skin like so much sand under her tunic.

I rebel, she had once declared to Mon Mothma, and the memory stirs something inside her, a longing to ... not quite leave.

All she knows is that she wants, very much, to taste Rey.

And Rey is so very close.

"What price?" She says, and her voice doesn't shake at all. "If the outside will demand my death, what will you ask?" She has to tip her head back to see Rey's amused gaze.

"Clever," Rey murmurs. "So very clever." Her dry fingers catch at Jyn's cheek, grasp her chin. "Your company, for one. Your conversation. I don't get to speak much, down here."

Jyn watches her lips, waits for the last demand. It doesn't come.

But Rey doesn't resist when Jyn reaches up to lace her fingers through her hair, comes willingly when Jyn pulls her down for a kiss.

She'll leave soon.

She will.