step off the ledge and risk it all again

In the dark, Jyn waits.

She isn't sure how long she's been doing so, or how much longer she'll need to. Her thoughts have been a jumble since she first found herself here, in the small underground cave she knows so well, until eventually she's stopped trying to comprehend them. The pieces just don't fit. But she waits, because she knows she's supposed to wait for someone to come for her, everything just like it was before. For all she knows, it isn't even real. She's had so many nightmares set here, buried so much of her life here, left a part of herself behind that she could never get back. It doesn't make sense that she should be back here now, when she knows how this story ended — that her father left with the men who killed her mother, that Saw came and took her away until he left her, too — but even with a ladder and a hatch to the outside, memory overrides everything else. They practiced this. She never quite believed it was the game her parents tried to say it was. She knows her part, and that she's supposed to stay hidden until it's safe.

Down here, there's no light, the lantern she once clutched no longer working. Her hand wraps around her mother's crystal instead, an instinct she's had since she was given the necklace in the first place, that same day everything ended. The men who did it might still be there, except they aren't, because that was so many years ago. Part of her knows that. Part of her is right back where she was that day, unable to separate the past from the present, sitting and staring and waiting because it's what she did then and has to be what she'll do now.

At one point, her eyes close; it could be for seconds or minutes or hours, though it feels like little more than just blinking. Her head aches, and her mouth feels dry, and very, very distantly, she's aware that there's something that she's not getting, that she should be able to piece together. Soon that thought is lost to her too, though. She's here but she's not, a little girl who was pulled from a cave but who never really got out. For all she knows right now, this is all that's left, the small, dark space seeming smaller and darker, like it's closing in around her.

When Jyn first heard about Christmas from Rey a long time ago, a memory she only half-remembers for how much she'd had to drink at the time anyway, she hadn't expected it would be like this. Even before the month begins, there are signs and decorations going up, stores advertising the holiday like their very livelihood depends on it, seasonal drinks and candies and other such things to be found nearly everywhere. Part of her wants to think it's silly, indulgent. Rey compared it to Life Day, and that may not have been entirely wrong, but it all seems like so much more, too. She'd never have so much as taken part in anything like this before she got here, at least not before her family left Coruscant and her whole world turned upside down. For all that she would like to write it off, though, there's a part of her that can't help but be charmed by the whole thing — the lights, the scents in the air, the words to the stupid cheery songs that seem to be playing in every damned store that she doesn't understand most of the references in.

She still doesn't think she has much of a grasp on what the holiday is supposed to be. That won't stop her from wanting to take full advantage of it. She can, after all, for the first time in such a long time, and she's tried to start thinking of such instances as something to take advantage of rather than something to keep at a distance. Maybe she deserves this. Even if she doesn't, Cassian and Bodhi do, and if she's going to call a place her home, she may as well act like that's actually the case.

As such, she's on something of a mission when she texts Lincoln and asks if he wants to meet her, sitting on a bench on the corner of a block of shops near what she's heard called a Christmas tree lot. Trees are just one more piece of an increasingly unclear puzzle, but some of the decorated ones she's seen really are lovely, and she thinks, well — she could do that. She just might need some help, and she can't go to Cassian or Bodhi for that when she wants to surprise them. Besides, she can't buy them any gifts if they're around, either, and that's another thing that she could use some input on. She already has some ideas, but she's mostly going into this blind, and she expects the same is true for Lincoln, too.

Her gloved hands are wrapped around a warm cup of coffee, something too sweet but fragrant with peppermint and delicious all the same, as she waits, a cookie in a paper bag in her lap that she's been taking small bites of, savoring its sugary taste. As with any occasion, the food is one of the most important parts, and she isn't letting any of this go to waste.