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anghraine...and I renewed my contract several months ago. Haha. But my "final" version of my fics is always what I post here, so I do actually want to try and get them gradually (ha) moved over.
title: per ardua ad astra (13/?)
verse: Death Star
characters: Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso, Bodhi Rook; a prison officer from ANH, various background OCs, and in absentia, Lyra Erso and K-2SO; Jyn/Cassian
stuff that happens: Cassian recovers enough to go on duty as Willix; Jyn and Cassian start some work projects while keeping up with Bodhiand accidentally flirting; the Death Star finally reaches the plot.
previous chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve
“Sounds satisfying.”
To her alarm, he broke into the bright, dimpled smile that he usually reserved for lying, absent the usual traces of coldness. “Very.”
She felt a bit like he’d brained her with one of her new blasters. It was profoundly unfair. Not to be outdone, she let herself return the smile without any attempt at restraint, her own as light and vibrantly alive as she felt in that moment. Not triumph, not relief, not even hope: just the sheer pleasure of their coexistence.
Again, Jyn and Cassian dutifully made their way to the medbay. Again, Dr Esten scanned Cassian’s bones. To their vast relief, she announced that his ribs had continued to improve at the bacta-accelerated pace, and should be healed altogether within seven or eight days. For the present, she approved increasing hours of half-duty through the coming week.
Back in the elevator—bored rather than cringing—they both sighed with relief.
“For once we do have good luck,” she said, just to needle him.
Cassian leveled a long-suffering expression at her. “There’s no such thing as—”
“I know,” said Jyn, smug.
“And if there were,” he went on, “we’ve already had plenty.”
Doubtfully, she said, “Really?”
He didn’t reply except for the familiar, fractional tug of his mouth, something warm in the gaze intent on her face. Since Cassian almost always looked at her like that, Jyn saw no need to bother analyzing it. It wasn’t like she glanced elsewhere when they talked. And she, too, felt a certain difficult warmth when she considered him, one she suspected might be just as visible in her own features. Not to strangers, not most people, but—most people wouldn’t catch the flickers on his face, either. And Cassian wasn’t most people.
For all that acknowledged reciprocity, though, it still came as a surprise when the elevator jolted and a half-stumble had them plastered together. They must have drawn within a few breaths of each other, but Jyn hadn’t noticed.
She didn’t think Cassian had, either, to go by the flush matching hers as they disentangled themselves. He kept one hand hovering near her waist where he’d braced her, the imprint of his fingers lingering.
“All right?” he said, just as Jyn burst out,
“Your ribs—”
“They’re fine,” said Cassian, colour still high. “I took the pills right before we left. I won’t feel anything for another hour.”
She eyed him suspiciously, but let it pass as the elevator pinged. Only then did they remember to back into a suitably professional distance, both stumbling a little. Cassian looked self-conscious and Jyn felt sure she did, too; she certainly felt it. In an instant, they’d recreated the hand’s-width distance that allowed for collision in the first place, but she hadn’t noticed.
Well, why shouldn’t they? It was better to stay close in this place, anyway. You never knew what might happen.
All the more now, she decided over the next few days, with Cassian properly venturing out as Willix. Nevertheless, that proved less exciting than she hoped. Their commander, reasonably enough, decided that immediately assigning a Scarif evacuee to the quadrant’s prisons seemed unlikely to foster confidences. Cassian probably wasn’t yet fit for it, anyway. Instead, Tor ordered him to oversee the cryptanalysts for the first two days. The delay chafed, but after the hours upon hours of dredging up scraps, Jyn couldn’t help feeling like a child in a candy store as they observed Imperial techniques, Imperial knowledge, and best of all, Imperial intelligence codes.
Without anything but slight nods, they split up to survey as much as possible. While Cassian occupied himself with snapping out occasional commands or corrections, Jyn didn’t imagine that a mere aide could get away with it. And she didn’t want to. Instead, she cleared her mind of anything but committing as many details to memory as possible, covering a significantly wider swath than Cassian. He had the role to maintain, and she could see traces of increasing weariness as the hours rolled by. Jyn couldn’t do anything about those, but she could remember everything.
They hardly spoke on the way back to their quarters, expressions unchanging. But when the door shut behind them, they grinned at each other.
Shyness still crept between them these days, but slower and fainter. Cassian’s crooked smile turned uncertain, Jyn’s hesitant, and yet they stayed where they were. He handed over his datapad without a word.
Needing no explanation, she began tapping out codes into the pad’s records, everything she could remember, as precisely as she could remember it. Once she’d finished, she handed it back and waited as Cassian added his own observations. It might seem like correcting her record, but Jyn didn’t think so; rather, she’d seen more and had less to distract her, so her memories should have priority.
“Can you secure it?” she asked, once his own taps ceased.
“Yes, I think,” said Cassian. “Better than yours, certainly.”
“I should hope so. Mine’s just nuts and bolts.” Jyn paused. “If we get back, this is going to be …”
“Worth its weight in kyber,” he supplied.
Eyes meeting again, they exchanged satisfied looks. If, thought Jyn, always if—but now, a more promising one than ever.
That first day, after they finished Cassian’s shift and ate lunch, he insisted that he wasn’t tired and could stay with Jyn on her surveillance tours. She just scoffed and pointed at the bed.
“Esten—”
“I know,” said Cassian irritably. Nevertheless, he listened to reason and lay down. He fell asleep within five minutes.
Jyn stayed long enough to feel reasonably sure he wasn’t about to do something foolish the instant she left. For all his caution, Cassian followed his instincts, whether they led to pragmatism or wild danger. If he felt it necessary, he’d risk anything.
She understood, and that was why she kept a suspicious eye on him for a good half-hour. Still, it felt odd—a bit creepy, really—to just sit there and watch him sleep.
It’s not my fault, she reminded herself.
Cassian didn’t completely relax in sleep, but Jyn could see years fade from him. As usual, her fingers itched to push his fringe back and irritate him by ruffling up the strict part in his hair. Even gentled in rest, he had a sharp, angular face, all the more after days without real food and his clothes hanging on him before that. Imperial gear did nothing to soften the impression.
As if somehow aware of her wayward thoughts, Cassian shifted, turning his face into the pillow with a soft noise in his throat. Irrepressibly, she wondered if he ever made the same noise while conscious, or—
Death Star, she reminded herself.
Anyway, the movement had mussed his hair. Obscurely satisfied, Jyn left him to his probably-terrible dreams, and headed out for another day of eavesdropping on tedious conversations.
Five hours resulted in little beyond junior officers sulking about no shore leave on Alderaan. She’d never seriously anticipated that, but it only confirmed her fears. None of the senior officers seemed to anticipate a landing, either, though she heard a major talking vaguely of a reconnaissance team. Jyn didn’t quite see the need for that, even if they intended a full military occupation rather than the attack she feared. Of course, there were always unknown nooks and backstreets in cities, and beyond them hidden routes and cavities. But those seemed hardly significant in this case.
As she returned to their quarters, Jyn decided that Cassian might know more about the higher levels of Imperial ineptitude. They could discuss the reconnaissance issue. It wasn’t like she hadn’t meant to pass on everything she heard. Unless he still slept, but—the thought came with some dreariness—there was no hurry. The next week alone seemed to stretch out in some endless, featureless corridor.
As it happened, he was not asleep. Jyn’s train of thought swerved as soon as the door rose halfway to the recess above, even before she stepped through.
Cassian sat at the table usually folded into the furthermost wall. With his right hand, he held an unfamiliar tool: pincers of some kind. With his left, he steadied Kaytoo’s severed, upside-down head.
“There you are,” he said, not looking at her. Since he had a wire from inside the head caught delicately in the pincers, Jyn didn’t take it personally. She darted inside, sealed the door back down, and overpowered a certain amount of queasiness as she strode over to the table. A weakness, perhaps, but she didn’t like corpses.
“Here I am,” agreed Jyn. She sat down in the narrow, metal chair attached to the table. “Ah … how’s that going?”
“I don’t know yet.” With slow, precise movements, Cassian disentangled two wires and then set the pincers down. He looked over at her, to all appearances very alert. “He took severe internal damage.”
“Internal damage?” Until now, she neither knew nor cared about the technical details of droid construction. All her work was with raw data.
“The head itself didn’t get the worst of it. You see?” He gestured at the mostly smooth metal. “The main frame must have. But everything is connected.”
She did see the head. Specifically, she saw the vacant, unlit eyes.
“Like a person,” said Jyn.
With one of his warm looks, Cassian nodded. “Yes. Not as much as most organics, but shocks to wiring in the legs can affect the whole system. At a certain point, central functioning stops, even if the data core is intact.”
“So there’s a chance that it is?” The head still unsettled her, but it receded into something like insignificance. “I thought there might be. I hoped.”
“A chance—yes. You gave him that much.” The softness in his face lingered. “Thank you.”
Awkwardly, Jyn nodded. To go by the sudden pressure of his teeth against his lip, Cassian didn’t feel much more comfortable. He picked up the pincers again.
“Willix’s record says that he’s some kind of droid programmer,” she said. “You really are?”
To her vast relief, he turned Kaytoo’s head about, the eyes now fixed on the wall instead of Jyn.
“More or less.” With a indeterminate quirk of his brow, Cassian went back to carefully separating wires. “I’m nothing to a real specialist, of course. I haven’t had … time for that.”
She doubted that he’d have made a profession of it in any case. Many people suffered the same losses they had, but few turned those losses into causes while still children, then never swerved from them in twenty years. A man like that would always find something to fight.
“I did get a few years of training when I was a boy, though,” he added. “Not only droids, though that’s where it is most useful.”
Just as she’d gotten a few years of training as a girl, Jyn thought. Hers had drawn her in a different direction, slicing data and breaking codes rather than building new ones: a microcosm, perhaps, of the difference between Saw and the Rebellion. And the Partisans didn’t have the people or the time to spare for dedicated training in anything. They learned the necessities as they went, or burnt out, or died.
“I imagine,” she said. “So you’ve got robotic spawn wandering around? Let’s hope I meet some eventually.”
“They’re not—” Cassian shook his head, then tilted it downwards. “Anyway, you already have.”
Genuinely taken aback, Jyn stared at him. “You created Kaytoo? You built him that way?” She thought it over. “On purpose?”
He made a choking sound. At first, she could only hope he wasn’t about to cry—hard to imagine with him, but he’d turned his face away and pressed his lips together and—oh.
“Er, no,” said Cassian, laughter running beneath the very slight tremble in his voice. “I reprogrammed him. He was already himself; Imperial droids develop like any others, if they manage to avoid wipes. They’re just coded with constraints on their behaviour and processes. I managed to strip those out with Kay and leave his consciousness intact.”
“Just took them out?” Jyn didn’t know whether to be skeptical or impressed. “I’m not familiar with robotics in particular, but Imperial protocols are usually pervasive.”
“You’d know,” he said, tugging at wires again. Despite the matter-of-fact tone, the sudden flash of respect in his face left her sure that he himself had only just remembered that. “It took months. Almost a year.”
Well, that was more believable. If less impressive.
She lifted her brows. “A year?”
“I was eleven,” said Cassian, setting the pincers aside.
Jyn swerved back. “You were rewriting Imperial code at eleven?”
With Saw, she’d had all sorts of training by eleven. But though she was a top-notch slicer these days, back then she barely knew what it was. Data work required a patience she only grasped in her teens. Not that she couldn’t have managed it, if necessary. In some other universe where she’d been passed to the Rebellion instead of the Partisans, she felt sure she would have. Competed with Cassian, perhaps.
Something about the idea chilled her. Not the cold discomfort that Kay’s head provoked, but a shiver that ran over and under her skin. It was easy to envision that life, a more orderly, more cautious version of the one she’d led with Saw. If Lyra had survived, if she’d stayed, she likely would have turned to the Rebellion. The very year that Cassian wrangled with Imperial codes, Jyn might have first walked into Massassi Base as a girl rather than a woman, hand-in-hand with her mother rather than cuffed. If—
Cassian’s face smoothed out, which could mean anything. “You can’t believe it? Gerrera must have had you doing more than that.”
“No,” she said, after a moment’s consideration. “He was always more about blowing things up than figuring out how they worked. It was my mother who had me learning.”
“Your mother,” said Cassian carefully.
“I’m not insane.” Jyn fiddled with the pocket of her trousers. “I mean, before she died. She had some sort of laboratory, and she’d teach me while she worked, and have me help her with experiments when I got older. You wouldn’t believe how much I could tell you about rocks.”
“There’s not much I wouldn’t believe about you,” he said, dry tone at odds with a faint, but almost sweet, smile. “She was a geologist, I think?”
“Yes,” said Jyn. She could feel a peculiar softness drifting over her thoughts and face, unsteady and involuntary, but pleasant for all that. Not happiness, but perhaps some near relative to it. Distracting herself, and hopefully him, she lifted the crystal out of her pocket by the cord. “She was the one studying kyber crystals, originally. This was hers.”
When Cassian reached out with his free hand, Jyn nearly twitched. From the moment that her mother bound the kyber crystal around her neck, she’d fought to keep it. The necklace was the one thing she could claim as entirely her own, and she had not retained it this long by letting it fall into the grasp of others. Holding herself very still, she said nothing, letting the crystal dangle between them.
“Kyber,” he repeated, fingers only just brushing it. “This has the power to destroy worlds?”
“You’d need a bit more,” said Jyn. After all these years, she studied the planes and edges, the way light gleamed along them, somehow different against Cassian’s hand. “My mother never imagined—she didn’t care about practical applications. And she didn’t trust the Republic.”
“Good for her.” He lifted his eyes to hers and instantly pulled his hand back.
“I don’t mind,” she said, surprised to find it true. That in itself made her uncomfortable, and she hastily changed the subject. “So the Rebellion started you on data work? At six?”
He paused, then shook his head. “It was just political dissent and mercy missions then. The missions became a cover for sedition soon enough, though, and it was easier to pass them off as helping war victims with actual war victims there.”
It only took a few seconds to put that together. “Your job was being a tragic orphan?”
“Many tragic orphans,” said Cassian.
She gave a short laugh. “Of course. You were that convincing?”
“Yes,” he said frankly. “I was valuable because I could remember the stories I needed to tell and act them out, and looked small and”—he gestured vaguely—“pathetic.”
“I can imagine.” Looking at him now, she really could. His fine-boned features, often harsh, lent a certain delicacy to his face when he felt like it. He’d already shaved off a good half-dozen years with his beard, looking like a remote cousin to the Rebel captain she’d met less than a month ago. As a literal child, no doubt Cassian could have turned himself into something fragile and pitiful when needed. “Missed your calling on the Holonet, did you?”
“My sister used to say so.” He looked startled as soon as the words left his mouth, and quickly got to his feet, picking up Kay’s head and taking it back to the lockbox.
She already knew that there had been a sister at some point, but the reference to her struck Jyn as odd, nevertheless. There seemed something profoundly solitary about him, as she felt in herself. Until he mentioned Rana and her goggles, she’d assumed he must be an only child, too.
Jyn pocketed the crystal. “She was older, right?”
“Yes. Five years.” Cassian, half-kneeling, fiddled with the lock on the box. Re-setting it, no doubt; if she had succeeded in preserving Kaytoo’s data, not much could be more dangerous for discovery.
When he rose and turned back towards her, he looked friendlier than she’d expected from the clipped answer. Baze, she remembered, had thought he looked like a friend. Baze, of all people—but she supposed she’d thought so, too. The realization of his real plan for her father had come not just as horror, but shocked betrayal. After so many breaches of trust through her life, she somehow never imagined yet another from this spy she’d known for little more than a fortnight.
Maybe time didn’t matter much in war. When it came down to it, Cassian probably hadn’t imagined himself choosing faith in Jyn over the Rebellion, either.
He said abruptly, “She used to tell me to cry to get us out of trouble.”
Jyn nearly laughed. “You can cry on demand?”
“I could as a child,” said Cassian, looking uncomfortable.
“Useful.”
The discomfort vanished, his eyes brightening in one of his incomprehensible changes of mood. “Yes. When I was … eight, I think, I had to be this girl rescued from Fieris—”
“Girl?” she said.
Unperturbed, Cassian replied, “Back then, I looked more …” He gestured vaguely at his face. “Ambiguous. I wasn’t even human all the time. So they had me with, you know, curls and grime and dust everywhere, and when Imperial troops came to examine the ship—we had crates of blasters—I just started crying and screaming. I didn’t have to pretend not to understand the questions, since I didn’t speak very much Basic yet, and kicked and bit every time anyone came near, while the senator apologized and—ah, they left quickly.”
Jyn, imagining a tiny, curly-headed Cassian shrieking and biting Imperial officers, gave up the fight and snickered. “Sounds satisfying.”
To her alarm, he broke into the bright, dimpled smile that he usually reserved for lying, absent the usual traces of coldness. “Very.”
She felt a bit like he’d brained her with one of her new blasters. It was profoundly unfair. Not to be outdone, she let herself return the smile without any attempt at restraint, her own as light and vibrantly alive as she felt in that moment. Not triumph, not relief, not even hope: just the sheer pleasure of their coexistence.
Gratifyingly, Cassian looked a bit dazed.
“I’ve never cried on cue,” she admitted, “but—all right, I’m sure you can guess that Saw didn’t laugh much.”
One of his hands had rested, curled, on the table. Now he flattened it out. “Gerrera? I wouldn’t have imagined it, no.”
“Well,” she said, “let me tell you what happened when I was ten.”
The transfer to prison duty proved less interesting than Jyn hoped, though she’d known better than to expect it.
They were posted in a prison only a few floors above the entrance to the Death Star. The lower ranks, of course, did most of the actual work of feeding, guarding, and terrorizing captives. Minor officers oversaw them, while the current commander stood guard at the main terminal, keeping track of changes, managing personnel and prisoners, issuing orders, and dealing with outside interference. It was profoundly dull—all the more so for Jyn, stuck at Cassian’s side with vastly less authority to do anything.
She did, at least, have somewhat more freedom. As often as they dared, she strode up and down the halls, trying to inconspicuously take the measure of other staff and memorize the structure of the prison. The rest of the time, Jyn stood by while Cassian chatted, in a standoffish way, with the sergeants, corporals, and lieutenants who answered directly to him. Soon, she was just about ready to drill a hole in her brain, not assisted by the sheer amount of time it took to travel between the prison and their quarters.
Bodhi laughed at her. “Boring is good, sergeant.”
“Sure it is,” said Jyn.
“Any moment that those … Rebel scum aren’t causing trouble has to be an improvement.”
She felt like a proud aunt. “More or less. Who knows what they’re planning, though?”
“We’ll figure that out when it happens,” Bodhi said, firm despite the faint edge of shrillness. “How is the captain?”
“Much better.”
His voice settled into good humour. “Really?”
“He stole my blanket last night,” she told him, almost as entertained by his strangled laugh as she’d been by Cassian’s guilty face. “In fairness, I kicked it off at some point. I run a lot hotter than him.”
“I bet everyone does,” said Bodhi. “Remember what he wore when we met? It’s not—it wasn’t all that cold.”
Hurriedly, she said, “Right! I didn’t need more than a scarf, and he was huddled in that fur coat. It’s not like he’s from a warm climate, either.”
“He’s told you where he comes from?” Bodhi asked, sounding startled.
“Alderaan,” she said. “Up in the mountains, too! There really is no excuse.”
“Oh, like—”
Jyn’s throat tightened. “Yes.”
“Have you seen …?”
“No.” Though the risk of interception wouldn’t come from those physically near, Jyn still peered about the women’s fresher. Completely empty, as usual. “We don’t want traitors looking at us. And it’s a nice post, when all is said and done. We’re not risking any appearance of … conflicts of interest.”
“Huh,” said Bodhi. Without a body to study, face and gestures, she couldn’t quite tell if he understood. After what he’d managed so far, though, she also couldn’t seriously believe that he didn’t.
Putting Cassian and Princess Leia aside, she asked Bodhi about news from his end. But apart from the same hints she’d heard about a reconnaissance team, he could report nothing. He felt sure his rudimentary combat skills had improved. He got along with the other troopers—Jyn nearly shuddered at the thought—and his commander seemed satisfied with all the transferred troops. They couldn’t hope for much more than that.
As far as Jyn and Cassian’s own duties went, they picked up nothing suspicious from any of the officers, Alderaanian or otherwise. Jyn felt no surprise, but it came as a twisted relief; this way, they didn’t have to choose between their cover and what passed for decency here. Instead, the first three days in the prison dragged on vacantly. By the end of the third, she found herself looking forward to the arrival of the sneering officer who always relieved them; Jyn hadn’t bothered to learn his name, but she knew his shift had been moved to accommodate Cassian’s.
He resented Cassian and alternately insulted and leered at Jyn, but he was very nearly pleasant as he marched through the door.
“Lucky bastard,” he grumbled.
“Excuse me?” said Cassian.
“I hear we’re coming out of hyperspace,” the officer said. “Ten minutes or so.”
Jyn’s fist clenched behind her back, pulse ticking in her ears. Exchanging a glance with Cassian, she swallowed the hot lump in her throat.
“About damn time,” she said.
“You said it. Now you can go see, but I’m stuck in here.”
“A pity,” replied Cassian, clapping his shoulder. With that, they strolled out, the usual silent halls hectic with officers and stormtroopers and the occasional droid.
Jyn and Cassian turned to each other, wide-eyed.
“Do you think—?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. She felt her skin heat with the pounding of her blood, but he was pale.
She could think of nothing else to do. Neither, plainly, could Cassian. Without another word, they walked together towards the nearest available viewport. It took a good ten minutes, with other officers clustered like insects in front of pane after pane. Jyn and Cassian had only come to a standstill when the relentless light of hyperspace fled, darkness illuminated by the gleaming planet in front of them.
Alderaan.
Cassian stared unblinkingly at his world. Oh, he might say it wasn’t his home. The city of his birth had been blown to rubble twenty years ago, its place in his heart entirely supplanted by the Alliance. Yet he still talked of Alderaan with pride, echoed resentments he could only have absorbed second-hand, admired the senator, murmured Alderaanian to himself when he thought Jyn asleep.
She’d never had anything like that. Jyn could hardly call Coruscant home, and the rest of her life passed from town to town and planet to planet. Home meant people, not places. These days, it meant Cassian.
In that moment, she couldn’t regret it. Jyn suppressed the urge to reach for his hand, not knowing if she sought the comfort for herself or for him. Instead, they both stood perfectly straight, gloved fingers clenched at their sides.
“Alderaan,” said someone watching from the next panel. “There it is, thank the Emperor. We’re finally out.”
A sergeant replied, “I’ve never seen it before. You’re sure we won’t get shore leave?”
And without warning, without explanation, green light lashed towards the planet. The same horrifying light she’d seen as they fled Scarif, but brighter and more poisonously vivid. Jyn and Cassian’s hands did fumble together now, dread choking her—and with a blinding flash, Alderaan exploded into fire.
Gasps and chatter echoed meaninglessly in her ears, nothing tethering her to the galaxy but the crushing grip of Cassian’s fingers. She couldn’t look at him, look at anything but the fading ring radiating out where billions of people had lived, thirty seconds ago.
Papa, she thought numbly. Papa, I’m so sorry.
“Yes,” said the first officer. “I’m pretty sure.”
title: per ardua ad astra (13/?)
verse: Death Star
characters: Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso, Bodhi Rook; a prison officer from ANH, various background OCs, and in absentia, Lyra Erso and K-2SO; Jyn/Cassian
stuff that happens: Cassian recovers enough to go on duty as Willix; Jyn and Cassian start some work projects while keeping up with Bodhi
previous chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve
“Sounds satisfying.”
To her alarm, he broke into the bright, dimpled smile that he usually reserved for lying, absent the usual traces of coldness. “Very.”
She felt a bit like he’d brained her with one of her new blasters. It was profoundly unfair. Not to be outdone, she let herself return the smile without any attempt at restraint, her own as light and vibrantly alive as she felt in that moment. Not triumph, not relief, not even hope: just the sheer pleasure of their coexistence.
Again, Jyn and Cassian dutifully made their way to the medbay. Again, Dr Esten scanned Cassian’s bones. To their vast relief, she announced that his ribs had continued to improve at the bacta-accelerated pace, and should be healed altogether within seven or eight days. For the present, she approved increasing hours of half-duty through the coming week.
Back in the elevator—bored rather than cringing—they both sighed with relief.
“For once we do have good luck,” she said, just to needle him.
Cassian leveled a long-suffering expression at her. “There’s no such thing as—”
“I know,” said Jyn, smug.
“And if there were,” he went on, “we’ve already had plenty.”
Doubtfully, she said, “Really?”
He didn’t reply except for the familiar, fractional tug of his mouth, something warm in the gaze intent on her face. Since Cassian almost always looked at her like that, Jyn saw no need to bother analyzing it. It wasn’t like she glanced elsewhere when they talked. And she, too, felt a certain difficult warmth when she considered him, one she suspected might be just as visible in her own features. Not to strangers, not most people, but—most people wouldn’t catch the flickers on his face, either. And Cassian wasn’t most people.
For all that acknowledged reciprocity, though, it still came as a surprise when the elevator jolted and a half-stumble had them plastered together. They must have drawn within a few breaths of each other, but Jyn hadn’t noticed.
She didn’t think Cassian had, either, to go by the flush matching hers as they disentangled themselves. He kept one hand hovering near her waist where he’d braced her, the imprint of his fingers lingering.
“All right?” he said, just as Jyn burst out,
“Your ribs—”
“They’re fine,” said Cassian, colour still high. “I took the pills right before we left. I won’t feel anything for another hour.”
She eyed him suspiciously, but let it pass as the elevator pinged. Only then did they remember to back into a suitably professional distance, both stumbling a little. Cassian looked self-conscious and Jyn felt sure she did, too; she certainly felt it. In an instant, they’d recreated the hand’s-width distance that allowed for collision in the first place, but she hadn’t noticed.
Well, why shouldn’t they? It was better to stay close in this place, anyway. You never knew what might happen.
All the more now, she decided over the next few days, with Cassian properly venturing out as Willix. Nevertheless, that proved less exciting than she hoped. Their commander, reasonably enough, decided that immediately assigning a Scarif evacuee to the quadrant’s prisons seemed unlikely to foster confidences. Cassian probably wasn’t yet fit for it, anyway. Instead, Tor ordered him to oversee the cryptanalysts for the first two days. The delay chafed, but after the hours upon hours of dredging up scraps, Jyn couldn’t help feeling like a child in a candy store as they observed Imperial techniques, Imperial knowledge, and best of all, Imperial intelligence codes.
Without anything but slight nods, they split up to survey as much as possible. While Cassian occupied himself with snapping out occasional commands or corrections, Jyn didn’t imagine that a mere aide could get away with it. And she didn’t want to. Instead, she cleared her mind of anything but committing as many details to memory as possible, covering a significantly wider swath than Cassian. He had the role to maintain, and she could see traces of increasing weariness as the hours rolled by. Jyn couldn’t do anything about those, but she could remember everything.
They hardly spoke on the way back to their quarters, expressions unchanging. But when the door shut behind them, they grinned at each other.
Shyness still crept between them these days, but slower and fainter. Cassian’s crooked smile turned uncertain, Jyn’s hesitant, and yet they stayed where they were. He handed over his datapad without a word.
Needing no explanation, she began tapping out codes into the pad’s records, everything she could remember, as precisely as she could remember it. Once she’d finished, she handed it back and waited as Cassian added his own observations. It might seem like correcting her record, but Jyn didn’t think so; rather, she’d seen more and had less to distract her, so her memories should have priority.
“Can you secure it?” she asked, once his own taps ceased.
“Yes, I think,” said Cassian. “Better than yours, certainly.”
“I should hope so. Mine’s just nuts and bolts.” Jyn paused. “If we get back, this is going to be …”
“Worth its weight in kyber,” he supplied.
Eyes meeting again, they exchanged satisfied looks. If, thought Jyn, always if—but now, a more promising one than ever.
That first day, after they finished Cassian’s shift and ate lunch, he insisted that he wasn’t tired and could stay with Jyn on her surveillance tours. She just scoffed and pointed at the bed.
“Esten—”
“I know,” said Cassian irritably. Nevertheless, he listened to reason and lay down. He fell asleep within five minutes.
Jyn stayed long enough to feel reasonably sure he wasn’t about to do something foolish the instant she left. For all his caution, Cassian followed his instincts, whether they led to pragmatism or wild danger. If he felt it necessary, he’d risk anything.
She understood, and that was why she kept a suspicious eye on him for a good half-hour. Still, it felt odd—a bit creepy, really—to just sit there and watch him sleep.
It’s not my fault, she reminded herself.
Cassian didn’t completely relax in sleep, but Jyn could see years fade from him. As usual, her fingers itched to push his fringe back and irritate him by ruffling up the strict part in his hair. Even gentled in rest, he had a sharp, angular face, all the more after days without real food and his clothes hanging on him before that. Imperial gear did nothing to soften the impression.
As if somehow aware of her wayward thoughts, Cassian shifted, turning his face into the pillow with a soft noise in his throat. Irrepressibly, she wondered if he ever made the same noise while conscious, or—
Death Star, she reminded herself.
Anyway, the movement had mussed his hair. Obscurely satisfied, Jyn left him to his probably-terrible dreams, and headed out for another day of eavesdropping on tedious conversations.
Five hours resulted in little beyond junior officers sulking about no shore leave on Alderaan. She’d never seriously anticipated that, but it only confirmed her fears. None of the senior officers seemed to anticipate a landing, either, though she heard a major talking vaguely of a reconnaissance team. Jyn didn’t quite see the need for that, even if they intended a full military occupation rather than the attack she feared. Of course, there were always unknown nooks and backstreets in cities, and beyond them hidden routes and cavities. But those seemed hardly significant in this case.
As she returned to their quarters, Jyn decided that Cassian might know more about the higher levels of Imperial ineptitude. They could discuss the reconnaissance issue. It wasn’t like she hadn’t meant to pass on everything she heard. Unless he still slept, but—the thought came with some dreariness—there was no hurry. The next week alone seemed to stretch out in some endless, featureless corridor.
As it happened, he was not asleep. Jyn’s train of thought swerved as soon as the door rose halfway to the recess above, even before she stepped through.
Cassian sat at the table usually folded into the furthermost wall. With his right hand, he held an unfamiliar tool: pincers of some kind. With his left, he steadied Kaytoo’s severed, upside-down head.
“There you are,” he said, not looking at her. Since he had a wire from inside the head caught delicately in the pincers, Jyn didn’t take it personally. She darted inside, sealed the door back down, and overpowered a certain amount of queasiness as she strode over to the table. A weakness, perhaps, but she didn’t like corpses.
“Here I am,” agreed Jyn. She sat down in the narrow, metal chair attached to the table. “Ah … how’s that going?”
“I don’t know yet.” With slow, precise movements, Cassian disentangled two wires and then set the pincers down. He looked over at her, to all appearances very alert. “He took severe internal damage.”
“Internal damage?” Until now, she neither knew nor cared about the technical details of droid construction. All her work was with raw data.
“The head itself didn’t get the worst of it. You see?” He gestured at the mostly smooth metal. “The main frame must have. But everything is connected.”
She did see the head. Specifically, she saw the vacant, unlit eyes.
“Like a person,” said Jyn.
With one of his warm looks, Cassian nodded. “Yes. Not as much as most organics, but shocks to wiring in the legs can affect the whole system. At a certain point, central functioning stops, even if the data core is intact.”
“So there’s a chance that it is?” The head still unsettled her, but it receded into something like insignificance. “I thought there might be. I hoped.”
“A chance—yes. You gave him that much.” The softness in his face lingered. “Thank you.”
Awkwardly, Jyn nodded. To go by the sudden pressure of his teeth against his lip, Cassian didn’t feel much more comfortable. He picked up the pincers again.
“Willix’s record says that he’s some kind of droid programmer,” she said. “You really are?”
To her vast relief, he turned Kaytoo’s head about, the eyes now fixed on the wall instead of Jyn.
“More or less.” With a indeterminate quirk of his brow, Cassian went back to carefully separating wires. “I’m nothing to a real specialist, of course. I haven’t had … time for that.”
She doubted that he’d have made a profession of it in any case. Many people suffered the same losses they had, but few turned those losses into causes while still children, then never swerved from them in twenty years. A man like that would always find something to fight.
“I did get a few years of training when I was a boy, though,” he added. “Not only droids, though that’s where it is most useful.”
Just as she’d gotten a few years of training as a girl, Jyn thought. Hers had drawn her in a different direction, slicing data and breaking codes rather than building new ones: a microcosm, perhaps, of the difference between Saw and the Rebellion. And the Partisans didn’t have the people or the time to spare for dedicated training in anything. They learned the necessities as they went, or burnt out, or died.
“I imagine,” she said. “So you’ve got robotic spawn wandering around? Let’s hope I meet some eventually.”
“They’re not—” Cassian shook his head, then tilted it downwards. “Anyway, you already have.”
Genuinely taken aback, Jyn stared at him. “You created Kaytoo? You built him that way?” She thought it over. “On purpose?”
He made a choking sound. At first, she could only hope he wasn’t about to cry—hard to imagine with him, but he’d turned his face away and pressed his lips together and—oh.
“Er, no,” said Cassian, laughter running beneath the very slight tremble in his voice. “I reprogrammed him. He was already himself; Imperial droids develop like any others, if they manage to avoid wipes. They’re just coded with constraints on their behaviour and processes. I managed to strip those out with Kay and leave his consciousness intact.”
“Just took them out?” Jyn didn’t know whether to be skeptical or impressed. “I’m not familiar with robotics in particular, but Imperial protocols are usually pervasive.”
“You’d know,” he said, tugging at wires again. Despite the matter-of-fact tone, the sudden flash of respect in his face left her sure that he himself had only just remembered that. “It took months. Almost a year.”
Well, that was more believable. If less impressive.
She lifted her brows. “A year?”
“I was eleven,” said Cassian, setting the pincers aside.
Jyn swerved back. “You were rewriting Imperial code at eleven?”
With Saw, she’d had all sorts of training by eleven. But though she was a top-notch slicer these days, back then she barely knew what it was. Data work required a patience she only grasped in her teens. Not that she couldn’t have managed it, if necessary. In some other universe where she’d been passed to the Rebellion instead of the Partisans, she felt sure she would have. Competed with Cassian, perhaps.
Something about the idea chilled her. Not the cold discomfort that Kay’s head provoked, but a shiver that ran over and under her skin. It was easy to envision that life, a more orderly, more cautious version of the one she’d led with Saw. If Lyra had survived, if she’d stayed, she likely would have turned to the Rebellion. The very year that Cassian wrangled with Imperial codes, Jyn might have first walked into Massassi Base as a girl rather than a woman, hand-in-hand with her mother rather than cuffed. If—
Cassian’s face smoothed out, which could mean anything. “You can’t believe it? Gerrera must have had you doing more than that.”
“No,” she said, after a moment’s consideration. “He was always more about blowing things up than figuring out how they worked. It was my mother who had me learning.”
“Your mother,” said Cassian carefully.
“I’m not insane.” Jyn fiddled with the pocket of her trousers. “I mean, before she died. She had some sort of laboratory, and she’d teach me while she worked, and have me help her with experiments when I got older. You wouldn’t believe how much I could tell you about rocks.”
“There’s not much I wouldn’t believe about you,” he said, dry tone at odds with a faint, but almost sweet, smile. “She was a geologist, I think?”
“Yes,” said Jyn. She could feel a peculiar softness drifting over her thoughts and face, unsteady and involuntary, but pleasant for all that. Not happiness, but perhaps some near relative to it. Distracting herself, and hopefully him, she lifted the crystal out of her pocket by the cord. “She was the one studying kyber crystals, originally. This was hers.”
When Cassian reached out with his free hand, Jyn nearly twitched. From the moment that her mother bound the kyber crystal around her neck, she’d fought to keep it. The necklace was the one thing she could claim as entirely her own, and she had not retained it this long by letting it fall into the grasp of others. Holding herself very still, she said nothing, letting the crystal dangle between them.
“Kyber,” he repeated, fingers only just brushing it. “This has the power to destroy worlds?”
“You’d need a bit more,” said Jyn. After all these years, she studied the planes and edges, the way light gleamed along them, somehow different against Cassian’s hand. “My mother never imagined—she didn’t care about practical applications. And she didn’t trust the Republic.”
“Good for her.” He lifted his eyes to hers and instantly pulled his hand back.
“I don’t mind,” she said, surprised to find it true. That in itself made her uncomfortable, and she hastily changed the subject. “So the Rebellion started you on data work? At six?”
He paused, then shook his head. “It was just political dissent and mercy missions then. The missions became a cover for sedition soon enough, though, and it was easier to pass them off as helping war victims with actual war victims there.”
It only took a few seconds to put that together. “Your job was being a tragic orphan?”
“Many tragic orphans,” said Cassian.
She gave a short laugh. “Of course. You were that convincing?”
“Yes,” he said frankly. “I was valuable because I could remember the stories I needed to tell and act them out, and looked small and”—he gestured vaguely—“pathetic.”
“I can imagine.” Looking at him now, she really could. His fine-boned features, often harsh, lent a certain delicacy to his face when he felt like it. He’d already shaved off a good half-dozen years with his beard, looking like a remote cousin to the Rebel captain she’d met less than a month ago. As a literal child, no doubt Cassian could have turned himself into something fragile and pitiful when needed. “Missed your calling on the Holonet, did you?”
“My sister used to say so.” He looked startled as soon as the words left his mouth, and quickly got to his feet, picking up Kay’s head and taking it back to the lockbox.
She already knew that there had been a sister at some point, but the reference to her struck Jyn as odd, nevertheless. There seemed something profoundly solitary about him, as she felt in herself. Until he mentioned Rana and her goggles, she’d assumed he must be an only child, too.
Jyn pocketed the crystal. “She was older, right?”
“Yes. Five years.” Cassian, half-kneeling, fiddled with the lock on the box. Re-setting it, no doubt; if she had succeeded in preserving Kaytoo’s data, not much could be more dangerous for discovery.
When he rose and turned back towards her, he looked friendlier than she’d expected from the clipped answer. Baze, she remembered, had thought he looked like a friend. Baze, of all people—but she supposed she’d thought so, too. The realization of his real plan for her father had come not just as horror, but shocked betrayal. After so many breaches of trust through her life, she somehow never imagined yet another from this spy she’d known for little more than a fortnight.
Maybe time didn’t matter much in war. When it came down to it, Cassian probably hadn’t imagined himself choosing faith in Jyn over the Rebellion, either.
He said abruptly, “She used to tell me to cry to get us out of trouble.”
Jyn nearly laughed. “You can cry on demand?”
“I could as a child,” said Cassian, looking uncomfortable.
“Useful.”
The discomfort vanished, his eyes brightening in one of his incomprehensible changes of mood. “Yes. When I was … eight, I think, I had to be this girl rescued from Fieris—”
“Girl?” she said.
Unperturbed, Cassian replied, “Back then, I looked more …” He gestured vaguely at his face. “Ambiguous. I wasn’t even human all the time. So they had me with, you know, curls and grime and dust everywhere, and when Imperial troops came to examine the ship—we had crates of blasters—I just started crying and screaming. I didn’t have to pretend not to understand the questions, since I didn’t speak very much Basic yet, and kicked and bit every time anyone came near, while the senator apologized and—ah, they left quickly.”
Jyn, imagining a tiny, curly-headed Cassian shrieking and biting Imperial officers, gave up the fight and snickered. “Sounds satisfying.”
To her alarm, he broke into the bright, dimpled smile that he usually reserved for lying, absent the usual traces of coldness. “Very.”
She felt a bit like he’d brained her with one of her new blasters. It was profoundly unfair. Not to be outdone, she let herself return the smile without any attempt at restraint, her own as light and vibrantly alive as she felt in that moment. Not triumph, not relief, not even hope: just the sheer pleasure of their coexistence.
Gratifyingly, Cassian looked a bit dazed.
“I’ve never cried on cue,” she admitted, “but—all right, I’m sure you can guess that Saw didn’t laugh much.”
One of his hands had rested, curled, on the table. Now he flattened it out. “Gerrera? I wouldn’t have imagined it, no.”
“Well,” she said, “let me tell you what happened when I was ten.”
The transfer to prison duty proved less interesting than Jyn hoped, though she’d known better than to expect it.
They were posted in a prison only a few floors above the entrance to the Death Star. The lower ranks, of course, did most of the actual work of feeding, guarding, and terrorizing captives. Minor officers oversaw them, while the current commander stood guard at the main terminal, keeping track of changes, managing personnel and prisoners, issuing orders, and dealing with outside interference. It was profoundly dull—all the more so for Jyn, stuck at Cassian’s side with vastly less authority to do anything.
She did, at least, have somewhat more freedom. As often as they dared, she strode up and down the halls, trying to inconspicuously take the measure of other staff and memorize the structure of the prison. The rest of the time, Jyn stood by while Cassian chatted, in a standoffish way, with the sergeants, corporals, and lieutenants who answered directly to him. Soon, she was just about ready to drill a hole in her brain, not assisted by the sheer amount of time it took to travel between the prison and their quarters.
Bodhi laughed at her. “Boring is good, sergeant.”
“Sure it is,” said Jyn.
“Any moment that those … Rebel scum aren’t causing trouble has to be an improvement.”
She felt like a proud aunt. “More or less. Who knows what they’re planning, though?”
“We’ll figure that out when it happens,” Bodhi said, firm despite the faint edge of shrillness. “How is the captain?”
“Much better.”
His voice settled into good humour. “Really?”
“He stole my blanket last night,” she told him, almost as entertained by his strangled laugh as she’d been by Cassian’s guilty face. “In fairness, I kicked it off at some point. I run a lot hotter than him.”
“I bet everyone does,” said Bodhi. “Remember what he wore when we met? It’s not—it wasn’t all that cold.”
Hurriedly, she said, “Right! I didn’t need more than a scarf, and he was huddled in that fur coat. It’s not like he’s from a warm climate, either.”
“He’s told you where he comes from?” Bodhi asked, sounding startled.
“Alderaan,” she said. “Up in the mountains, too! There really is no excuse.”
“Oh, like—”
Jyn’s throat tightened. “Yes.”
“Have you seen …?”
“No.” Though the risk of interception wouldn’t come from those physically near, Jyn still peered about the women’s fresher. Completely empty, as usual. “We don’t want traitors looking at us. And it’s a nice post, when all is said and done. We’re not risking any appearance of … conflicts of interest.”
“Huh,” said Bodhi. Without a body to study, face and gestures, she couldn’t quite tell if he understood. After what he’d managed so far, though, she also couldn’t seriously believe that he didn’t.
Putting Cassian and Princess Leia aside, she asked Bodhi about news from his end. But apart from the same hints she’d heard about a reconnaissance team, he could report nothing. He felt sure his rudimentary combat skills had improved. He got along with the other troopers—Jyn nearly shuddered at the thought—and his commander seemed satisfied with all the transferred troops. They couldn’t hope for much more than that.
As far as Jyn and Cassian’s own duties went, they picked up nothing suspicious from any of the officers, Alderaanian or otherwise. Jyn felt no surprise, but it came as a twisted relief; this way, they didn’t have to choose between their cover and what passed for decency here. Instead, the first three days in the prison dragged on vacantly. By the end of the third, she found herself looking forward to the arrival of the sneering officer who always relieved them; Jyn hadn’t bothered to learn his name, but she knew his shift had been moved to accommodate Cassian’s.
He resented Cassian and alternately insulted and leered at Jyn, but he was very nearly pleasant as he marched through the door.
“Lucky bastard,” he grumbled.
“Excuse me?” said Cassian.
“I hear we’re coming out of hyperspace,” the officer said. “Ten minutes or so.”
Jyn’s fist clenched behind her back, pulse ticking in her ears. Exchanging a glance with Cassian, she swallowed the hot lump in her throat.
“About damn time,” she said.
“You said it. Now you can go see, but I’m stuck in here.”
“A pity,” replied Cassian, clapping his shoulder. With that, they strolled out, the usual silent halls hectic with officers and stormtroopers and the occasional droid.
Jyn and Cassian turned to each other, wide-eyed.
“Do you think—?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. She felt her skin heat with the pounding of her blood, but he was pale.
She could think of nothing else to do. Neither, plainly, could Cassian. Without another word, they walked together towards the nearest available viewport. It took a good ten minutes, with other officers clustered like insects in front of pane after pane. Jyn and Cassian had only come to a standstill when the relentless light of hyperspace fled, darkness illuminated by the gleaming planet in front of them.
Alderaan.
Cassian stared unblinkingly at his world. Oh, he might say it wasn’t his home. The city of his birth had been blown to rubble twenty years ago, its place in his heart entirely supplanted by the Alliance. Yet he still talked of Alderaan with pride, echoed resentments he could only have absorbed second-hand, admired the senator, murmured Alderaanian to himself when he thought Jyn asleep.
She’d never had anything like that. Jyn could hardly call Coruscant home, and the rest of her life passed from town to town and planet to planet. Home meant people, not places. These days, it meant Cassian.
In that moment, she couldn’t regret it. Jyn suppressed the urge to reach for his hand, not knowing if she sought the comfort for herself or for him. Instead, they both stood perfectly straight, gloved fingers clenched at their sides.
“Alderaan,” said someone watching from the next panel. “There it is, thank the Emperor. We’re finally out.”
A sergeant replied, “I’ve never seen it before. You’re sure we won’t get shore leave?”
And without warning, without explanation, green light lashed towards the planet. The same horrifying light she’d seen as they fled Scarif, but brighter and more poisonously vivid. Jyn and Cassian’s hands did fumble together now, dread choking her—and with a blinding flash, Alderaan exploded into fire.
Gasps and chatter echoed meaninglessly in her ears, nothing tethering her to the galaxy but the crushing grip of Cassian’s fingers. She couldn’t look at him, look at anything but the fading ring radiating out where billions of people had lived, thirty seconds ago.
Papa, she thought numbly. Papa, I’m so sorry.
“Yes,” said the first officer. “I’m pretty sure.”
