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anghrainetitle: per ardua ad astra (17/?)
verse: Death Star
characters: Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso, Bodhi Rook; OCs—Bain Efrah, Mihal Zekheret; Jyn/Cassian
stuff that happens: Jyn gets frustrated with inaction; Cassian distracts himself by working on K-2SO; Jyn and Efrah try to keep Zekheret from bumbling about the prisons.
previous chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen
Five nights passed before Jyn and Cassian managed to sleep separately.
Before Jyn did, at least. Maybe he would have managed it, left to his own devices. Maybe not. Though neither said much of anything beyond “do you …?” and “move over,” he grasped at her when she reached for him, the shape of their nails imprinted on each other’s skin. Neither did much of anything, either, except nestling together in the dark, the close press of their bodies almost required by the narrowness of the bed.
Jyn slept poorly, her nightmares bizarre and erratic, though she couldn’t remember many details. She didn’t dream of Alderaan, at least. A mercy: otherwise, no hour passed without the explosion playing out in her mind, a singularity that dragged every thought towards itself. In its flaming shadow, little else seemed quite real—but, of course, little else was real. She was Lyr, drowning in pretense day after day after day.
She grounded herself with what little she had. Bodhi’s voice, anxious and determined. Cassian’s hands, as steady and cautious with a blaster as with the mess of wires that had been Kay, but shaking when they clung to each other at night.
This might be the end, she realized. Not because of suspicion, necessarily; they’d seen no signs of that. Because this could become their lives, permanently, not a brief detour. Perhaps the Rebellion would never recover the plans. Perhaps Cassian would never get them posted elsewhere. They’d just stay here, all three of them, suffocating onboard this thing, with a trail of dead planets behind them.
Then there was the better scenario she’d often considered: perhaps the Rebellion would manage to snatch up the plans, and they’d finally face the death they escaped on Scarif. Jyn still didn’t resent the possibility of death, if they could take this monstrosity with them. Not in itself. But she sure as hell resented the idea of dying in Imperial uniform, dying politely—
That had been Bodhi’s life. And Cassian’s, in a different way. They would accept it without complaint, if it really achieved the most for the Rebellion and the galaxy. Jyn, though … oh, she’d accept it. She had to. But the hope of more than this, when and later, animated her as much as determination. If her life would go on and on, but only ever as this … if …
Jyn shifted closer to Cassian’s probably-not-sleeping body (they pretended to believe each other on that point), and did her best to push it out of her mind. They had plenty of trouble without inventing more. Anyway, she would do whatever was necessary to keep fighting the Empire. At any cost.
On the sixth day, just before the end of Willix’s and Lyr’s shift, a new order came through the prison. Princess Leia was to be executed for high treason.
There would be no trial or ceremony. Though Tarkin might be fool enough to make a martyr out of her, he was nowhere near foolish enough to put it on display.
“We’ve got to get her out of there,” Jyn said urgently, as soon as they escaped into their quarters. They hadn’t breathed a word even in the apparent obscurity of the lifts.
“It isn’t possible,” said Cassian, almost dismissive. He unbuttoned and refolded his jacket, in exactly the way he always did. Jyn all but tore hers off.
“Then we have to make it possible!”
“How?”
It was more attack than question. Jyn prickled even before he picked up her crumpled jacket, shaking it out, then dropping it into the laundry chute alongside his own. But she didn’t have an answer, after all the others she’d improvised. They didn’t have a ship. Any movement would be seen. Any disappearance of the sacrificial prize would kick off a manhunt. Even if they somehow managed to secret her away in their quarters, it would only paint a target on all their backs.
Her own understanding did nothing to improve her mood.
“You’re the spy,” Jyn retorted, more mildly than she intended. But Alderaan burned behind her eyelids, and she wasn’t heartless. Had never been, really.
“So are you,” said Cassian, sitting down with Kay’s head. It could hardly be recognized as such, by now, with so much of the internal wiring detangled and bent out into an array of metal roots—it looked more like a particularly incompetent drone than a droid. “You seized just about every chance in this place before I even woke up.”
“Not quite.” She didn’t bother demurring further; she knew perfectly well what she’d accomplished. “We can at least talk to her, find out where she sent the plans.”
Without looking at her, Cassian extracted yet another wire. “And hope no one is listening?”
“I know it could be a trap,” Jyn said, impatient. She thunked onto the chair opposite him. “But what’s the point in surviving if we don’t try anything?”
His shoulder twitched in a shadow of a shrug. “Surviving long enough to achieve something.”
“I thought rebellions were supposed to be built on hope.”
“Reasonable hope,” said Cassian. He bent the wire aside and reached inside, each movement slow and careful. Then he frowned and sighed.
“Was Scarif reasonable?” she asked.
“We knew it wasn’t a trap.”
“I knew,” said Jyn, bracing herself for something she couldn’t quite define.
“That’s good enough for me.”
Around them, Alderaan was crumbling from asteroids into flame, yet the corners of her mouth bent. Just a little, just … they were alive. They could have died a dozen times over, in fear and pain, but they lived. Not any sort of life she wanted, but not one devoid of small pleasures, either.
“I suppose,” she grumbled, “that you’ll say we had a plan for escape from Scarif, too.”
Cassian glanced up. He didn’t smile—she doubted he had it in him right now—but his gaze changed, softened, in a way that she couldn’t assign to any particular muscle or shift of colour.
“Well, I won’t now.”
She rolled her eyes.
For a few long seconds, he snipped and adjusted wires. But his attention almost immediately returned to Jyn, and he set down the wire-cutters.
“They didn’t find the plans on the ship,” he said. “They didn’t find them on her. We know that much. Either she transmitted them to the Rebellion or sent them away. If the first, our work is already done, and there’s no point in risking ourselves for it.”
“That’s not likely, though,” said Jyn.
“No,” he agreed. “They would have attacked before Alderaan. Certainly afterwards. It’s much more probable that she managed to smuggle them planetside before her ship was boarded. In that case, she herself probably doesn’t know where in particular they ended up.”
Jyn exhaled through her teeth. “Okay. We’d be risking everything for information we have no way to pass on, and which likely won’t tell us anything we can’t already guess. I know.”
They’d talked about it before. She knew. But—
“How long does this go on?” she asked quietly. “Keeping our heads down and backing away from risks and … how long is it worth it?”
Cassian looked straight at her, dark eyes very clear. Jyn expected one of his well-turned declarations, his way of slicing through layers of difficulty and complication to some simple, burning core. Rebellions are built on hope. You’re not the only one who lost everything. It was for a cause I believed in, a cause that was worth it.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She almost laughed. “Seriously?”
“I only … weigh things. What might be gained, what could be lost.”
Jyn couldn’t really see Cassian living by risk-reward analyses. He was too zealous for that, too instinctive. Too much like her. But then, she’d never had a devoted strategic analysis droid following her around and spouting probabilities. And once, she really had been more cautious, in some ways—always conscious that the slightest error could bring down an entire mission. Everything had to be perfect. She had to be perfect.
“If we didn’t have valuable information of our own,” said Jyn suddenly, “would you weigh this differently?”
His gaze didn’t falter. “I might.”
“It’ll make a difference, if we can survive. And there’s no way to help Princess Leia. So.” Jyn had to swallow an unpleasant taste in her mouth. In her imagination, probably. “I still don’t like it.”
“I don’t either. But some risks—” Now, his glance dropped to whatever lay within the wreckage of Kay’s head, the tip of his tongue wetting his lip. A nervous tell, not a trick, unless letting her see it counted as a trick. She decided it didn’t. “Can’t be taken, can’t be … contemplated. You know.”
She did. Her father had been an intolerable risk; but she remembered, too, killing a man who’d seen her planting a bomb and opened his mouth to shout. There’d been blood everywhere; they didn’t have enough blasters and she was better at hand-to-hand, and she told herself that he was a collaborator, someone who would sooner run to a stormtrooper than resist, they’d taken out an entire facility, and the cause comes first, the cause comes first. Saw drilled that into her head from childhood—
Less than a month later, he left her in a bunker.
“I do,” she said, tired. “So we’re just going to stick around until … what is a reasonable chance even going to look like?”
Cassian shrugged and picked up the wire-cutters again. “Reassignment, perhaps. Anything that takes us off this thing.”
“Then we make a break for it.” Frustration still crawled over her, if less of it. “Hopefully without drawing attention, I suppose.”
He peered inside the head. “Hopefully.”
Jyn wasn’t going to bet on that. Sure, it would be a pity to lose Willix and Lyr, for all that she hated pulling Lyr over her skin. She could well have had to pull worse things, or more difficult ones. And they’d never have lived this long without them, certainly not in comfort. Nevertheless, she’d give up far more than a useful identity if it meant escape.
“A ship,” she muttered, more to herself than him. “We need a ship.”
Cassian made a low sound of satisfaction, and Jyn twitched.
“What?”
With one last cut, he dropped the wire-cutters and reached inside Kay’s head. It only took a few seconds for his hand to re-emerge, fingers folded over something flat and square. When he opened them, she saw that the square was small, a good deal smaller than his palm, and an unassuming mix of metal and plastic.
After all, one datachip looked very much like another.
“Is that him?” she exclaimed.
“Maybe,” said Cassian, but his mouth was soft and his eyes bright. “I’ll have to check if the code’s intact. It could have taken damage—probably did, and so much developed organically … well, not organically, but …”
“Right,” Jyn said. She eyed the datachip. “If it is intact, more or less, you can get him pestering us again?”
“Yes. Hopefully.” With care, he set it aside. “I may be able to requisition parts. Willix is supposed to be a droid specialist. And escape would be easier with Kay. We might even manage to extract Leia, if everything comes together fast enough.”
“So we need a security droid shell,” she said. “And a ship. And an excuse to leave. With a stormtrooper, and maybe a sentenced Rebel spy.”
“Right.” He picked up the head, and carried it back to the safe, Jyn grimacing. Kay’s face looked even more disturbing before, with the mass of aimless wires poking in every direction and the knowledge that no part of him remained within. “Then we can go home.”
“The Rebellion?” she said, doubtful. They’d never been what she would consider hospitable. She might not know what hospitable even looked like, but it wasn't that. “It’s supposed to be home?”
For him, maybe. For her, she couldn’t quite believe it. Not in itself, anyway.
“Just about anything is, right now,” said Cassian, which … okay, granted. “As long as we—”
Abruptly, he knelt to deposit the head and lock the safe. Something seemed to be wrong with the latter.
“As long as we what?” she prompted.
Cassian fiddled with the lock. “As long as we manage to slip under the Empire’s radar. It shouldn’t be too difficult, if we can get out.”
“I’d like to register serious doubts about your idea of difficult,” said Jyn. Her mouth was doing the thing again. Not a smile, exactly, but something akin. Well, she was the reasonable one, really. Everything always had to be impossibly difficult or impossibly simple with Cassian.
He appeared to give up on the lock, or fixed it. Rising to his feet, he gave her a wry look and said,
“Noted.”
They both left it at that, without any particular acrimony. They couldn’t allow acrimony, she thought, aggravation simmering. Not that she wanted a fight, least of all now—for every Rebel who died today, we just made ten more kept flashing through her mind—and not that she actually felt angry at him. Or herself. Or anyone, specifically.
But she was so tired of reasonable. She needed to do something. She needed, they needed … Force, she didn’t know.
Jyn said nothing of this to Cassian. In fairness, she often said nothing about most subjects. That came naturally, though, and this total containment was anything but. She could sense the tension all but bleeding off both of them; it felt like one more push would have her screaming and carving up the walls, or Cassian cracking into springs and bolts. Or both.
No, she wasn’t angry at him. Nevertheless, Jyn kept to her own bed, and stayed awake half the night in even deeper frustration. She’d gotten used to the consolation of touch, breath and flesh and thrumming blood all together, the comfort in reaching out and finding a ready welcome. She craved more than she resented. But she shouldn’t get used to it. Shouldn’t she? If they ever got out, it would all change. They weren’t … they were … she couldn’t afford dependence. It didn’t feel like that, but if the mere act of sleeping in her own bed kept her awake and fretful, well—
She drifted off a good two hours after Cassian’s breaths turned slow and deep. Two hours after that, she jerked awake once more, remembered horrors all tangled up in her mind.
Stay, she thought dimly, too dream-lost to know who she meant. Don’t leave me here alone. I love you, come back, don’t go—
Cassian slept on, and so did everyone else she ever loved.
“You look terrible,” Zekheret informed Jyn.
“Better turn off the irresistible charm before she swoons,” said Efrah. For all her professional dismay over Alderaan, her sardonic ease had yet to falter. “Coffee, Lyr?”
Jyn grunted. “Please.”
Through an incipient headache, Jyn listened to Zekheret and Efrah talk. Since they periodically dropped something useful before it filtered its way down to Bodhi, that could be worth the time. At least the coffee, and perhaps the bit of soup she managed to hold down, quieted the sharp stabs in her skull through the chatter. Efrah complained about her much-admired commander losing credit for something to Krennic and now Tarkin, while Zekheret boasted of half-baked plots to infiltrate Alderaanian spy rings.
“What Alderaanian spy rings?” Efrah finally snapped.
“The ones I’m going to find!”
She dropped her head into her hands. “Zekheret. You know you’re not in intelligence, right? This is not exactly your skillset.”
“Intelligence never finds anything,” he said, which Jyn suspected might be only a slight exaggeration. Apparently the Rebellion had been plotting circles around Imperial spies for years.
“First of all, that’s not true,” said Efrah, “and second of all, it’s not your problem! You’re a prison guard now. Do you know what kind of trouble you could get into? Even if all the Alderaanians onboard spontaneously built a major espionage operation in the last week, which they haven’t—I don’t know where you’re getting this ridiculous idea, anyway—”
“I’d want revenge if my town got destroyed,” he said simply, “and it doesn’t even have running water.”
To Jyn’s exhausted surprise, Efrah turned pale. “Don’t say things like that, Zek.”
Plainly unswayed, he shrugged and nodded his head towards Cassian’s approaching figure. They’d planned that: Cassian would lag behind so that Jyn alone joined her supposed friends at first. They’re your assets, he said matter-of-factly, and she felt at once exasperated, proud, and chilled. Regardless, it would let them keep an eye on the gap between their behaviour with Jyn alone and Jyn with Cassian.
“Okay, it’s not all of them,” Zekheret said. “I just have to find the dangerous ones.”
“You don’t have to find anyone,” said Jyn, forcing herself to engage. “Willix and I are keeping track of things, okay? Nothing gets past us, I promise.”
“You wouldn’t know about it if it did,” he insisted. “I mean, obviously.”
Efrah gave Jyn a look of sympathetic irritation. “If you want to strangle him, I won’t stop you.”
Cassian’s approach had brought him within earshot (if he’d ever been out of it). He settled himself beside Jyn and said,
“Who is Lyr going to strangle?”
“Me,” said Zekheret brightly.
Cassian’s brows rose, his voice going soft and almost slippery. “You really should tell me these things, Isidar.” He lingered unpleasantly on her n—on Lyr’s name.
“You’d be the first to know, sir,” said Jyn. Were all his roles as repellent? She supposed it made sense for Imperials, or most Imperials, but it still felt uncanny to see Cassian’s high-strung resolve replaced by Willix’s slimy assurance. Maybe the next would be … no, she couldn’t think of a next.
They headed to the detainment centre with Zekheret, whose shift overlapped with theirs. As he headed off, Jyn snagged his arm.
“Remember, you’re here to oversee prisoners. Not pester other soldiers.”
He heaved a dramatic sigh. “Tell her to mind her own business. I’m fine.”
With nothing else to do, she left him to the prisoners and the imaginary spy ring. Not my problem, she told herself, unless he actually managed to turn up something. And he’d be the first to reveal it if he did.
After an exciting morning of standing in place and running errands for Cassian’s arse of an alter-ego, a buzz against her waist and exchange of glances had Jyn escaping into the women’s fresher. Empty, thank the Force.
She unhooked her hand-held and switched it on. “Lyr.”
“Sergeant, ma’am,” said Bodhi. “Checking in.”
“Good. Any news?”
She started when he replied, “Yes.”
“Really? What is it?”
“Well, maybe,” he said. “I think.”
“Spit it out, trooper,” said Jyn, trying to choke down a flare of excitement. If he didn’t know for sure if it counted, it couldn’t be that monumental. She might have already heard, anyway. Still, the hope of change, even slight change, rushed in her blood.
“They’ve sent a contingent to Dantooine,” Bodhi said.
Booted feet clattered past the door. Too quiet for stormtroopers, too sharp for prisoners. Two … no, three guards or administrators. She waited for them to pass, just to be careful, then said,
“And?”
“We didn’t hear about it at first. They must have been sent … I don’t know, almost a week ago.”
Jyn frowned at the floor and moved from the door, turning away and dropping her voice.
“Right after …?”
“Yes,” said Bodhi. “I think so.”
Had Leia talked, after all? But the base was on Yavin 4, not Dantooine. They had others, of course—maybe she’d hidden the headquarters by directing attention to a minor operation? Cassian would know, but she could hardly ask him here.
She took a deep breath. “Interesting. Good job.”
Even floors away, she could hear his quick exhale. “Thanks.”
“How are you holding up?” she asked.
“Good,” said Bodhi, sounding surprised. He paused. “Sort of good. My aim’s a lot better.”
She coughed over a sudden laugh. “Glad to hear it. Stay safe.”
“You too,” he replied. Before Jyn could disconnect, he quickly added, “Wait! How … how is he holding up?”
“The captain?” said Jyn, as if he would care about any other man here.
“Yes.”
She thought about it. Cassian, inflexible by day and trembling at night. Cassian outside their quarters, adhering to his role with unflinching determination, and Cassian within them, slicing up ten thousand credits.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s a … strange situation.”
“That’s one word for it,” said Bodhi soberly. “You’re still in the prison? Have you seen—um, her?”
“No,” Jyn told him. “Direct interaction is too risky. She’s not much of an actress, apparently. And we can’t just walk out with a Rebel slated for execution. But I’ll update you if anything changes.”
She switched off the handheld, just in time to hear a strangled,
“Lyr?”
She whirled around. Zekheret stood at the door, framed like a holopic, his mouth open. He stared at her with bugging eyes.
“It’s you!” he burst out. “The whole time, it was—you’re—you—”
Jyn’s skin went numb. By will alone, she maintained her usual expression.
“What are you talking about?” she snapped, then scowled. “And what are you doing in the women’s fresher?”
A mottled flush ran up his neck and cheeks, wrecking all resemblance to Cassian. “I—well—that’s not the point! You’ve been spying! For them!”
“No,” she said desperately. “This is a misunderstanding.”
He shook his head, eyes still wide, and pulled out his blaster.
“You can’t talk your way out of this one.” Zekheret waved the blaster in her face. “Isidar Lyr, you’re … you’re under arrest as a Rebel traitor and a spy.”
verse: Death Star
characters: Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso, Bodhi Rook; OCs—Bain Efrah, Mihal Zekheret; Jyn/Cassian
stuff that happens: Jyn gets frustrated with inaction; Cassian distracts himself by working on K-2SO; Jyn and Efrah try to keep Zekheret from bumbling about the prisons.
previous chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen
“How long does this go on?” she asked quietly. “Keeping our heads down and backing away from risks and … how long is it worth it?”
Cassian looked straight at her, dark eyes very clear. Jyn expected one of his well-turned declarations, his way of slicing through layers of difficulty and complication to some simple, burning core. Rebellions are built on hope. You’re not the only one who lost everything. It was for a cause I believed in, a cause that was worth it.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Cassian looked straight at her, dark eyes very clear. Jyn expected one of his well-turned declarations, his way of slicing through layers of difficulty and complication to some simple, burning core. Rebellions are built on hope. You’re not the only one who lost everything. It was for a cause I believed in, a cause that was worth it.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Five nights passed before Jyn and Cassian managed to sleep separately.
Before Jyn did, at least. Maybe he would have managed it, left to his own devices. Maybe not. Though neither said much of anything beyond “do you …?” and “move over,” he grasped at her when she reached for him, the shape of their nails imprinted on each other’s skin. Neither did much of anything, either, except nestling together in the dark, the close press of their bodies almost required by the narrowness of the bed.
Jyn slept poorly, her nightmares bizarre and erratic, though she couldn’t remember many details. She didn’t dream of Alderaan, at least. A mercy: otherwise, no hour passed without the explosion playing out in her mind, a singularity that dragged every thought towards itself. In its flaming shadow, little else seemed quite real—but, of course, little else was real. She was Lyr, drowning in pretense day after day after day.
She grounded herself with what little she had. Bodhi’s voice, anxious and determined. Cassian’s hands, as steady and cautious with a blaster as with the mess of wires that had been Kay, but shaking when they clung to each other at night.
This might be the end, she realized. Not because of suspicion, necessarily; they’d seen no signs of that. Because this could become their lives, permanently, not a brief detour. Perhaps the Rebellion would never recover the plans. Perhaps Cassian would never get them posted elsewhere. They’d just stay here, all three of them, suffocating onboard this thing, with a trail of dead planets behind them.
Then there was the better scenario she’d often considered: perhaps the Rebellion would manage to snatch up the plans, and they’d finally face the death they escaped on Scarif. Jyn still didn’t resent the possibility of death, if they could take this monstrosity with them. Not in itself. But she sure as hell resented the idea of dying in Imperial uniform, dying politely—
That had been Bodhi’s life. And Cassian’s, in a different way. They would accept it without complaint, if it really achieved the most for the Rebellion and the galaxy. Jyn, though … oh, she’d accept it. She had to. But the hope of more than this, when and later, animated her as much as determination. If her life would go on and on, but only ever as this … if …
Jyn shifted closer to Cassian’s probably-not-sleeping body (they pretended to believe each other on that point), and did her best to push it out of her mind. They had plenty of trouble without inventing more. Anyway, she would do whatever was necessary to keep fighting the Empire. At any cost.
On the sixth day, just before the end of Willix’s and Lyr’s shift, a new order came through the prison. Princess Leia was to be executed for high treason.
There would be no trial or ceremony. Though Tarkin might be fool enough to make a martyr out of her, he was nowhere near foolish enough to put it on display.
“We’ve got to get her out of there,” Jyn said urgently, as soon as they escaped into their quarters. They hadn’t breathed a word even in the apparent obscurity of the lifts.
“It isn’t possible,” said Cassian, almost dismissive. He unbuttoned and refolded his jacket, in exactly the way he always did. Jyn all but tore hers off.
“Then we have to make it possible!”
“How?”
It was more attack than question. Jyn prickled even before he picked up her crumpled jacket, shaking it out, then dropping it into the laundry chute alongside his own. But she didn’t have an answer, after all the others she’d improvised. They didn’t have a ship. Any movement would be seen. Any disappearance of the sacrificial prize would kick off a manhunt. Even if they somehow managed to secret her away in their quarters, it would only paint a target on all their backs.
Her own understanding did nothing to improve her mood.
“You’re the spy,” Jyn retorted, more mildly than she intended. But Alderaan burned behind her eyelids, and she wasn’t heartless. Had never been, really.
“So are you,” said Cassian, sitting down with Kay’s head. It could hardly be recognized as such, by now, with so much of the internal wiring detangled and bent out into an array of metal roots—it looked more like a particularly incompetent drone than a droid. “You seized just about every chance in this place before I even woke up.”
“Not quite.” She didn’t bother demurring further; she knew perfectly well what she’d accomplished. “We can at least talk to her, find out where she sent the plans.”
Without looking at her, Cassian extracted yet another wire. “And hope no one is listening?”
“I know it could be a trap,” Jyn said, impatient. She thunked onto the chair opposite him. “But what’s the point in surviving if we don’t try anything?”
His shoulder twitched in a shadow of a shrug. “Surviving long enough to achieve something.”
“I thought rebellions were supposed to be built on hope.”
“Reasonable hope,” said Cassian. He bent the wire aside and reached inside, each movement slow and careful. Then he frowned and sighed.
“Was Scarif reasonable?” she asked.
“We knew it wasn’t a trap.”
“I knew,” said Jyn, bracing herself for something she couldn’t quite define.
“That’s good enough for me.”
Around them, Alderaan was crumbling from asteroids into flame, yet the corners of her mouth bent. Just a little, just … they were alive. They could have died a dozen times over, in fear and pain, but they lived. Not any sort of life she wanted, but not one devoid of small pleasures, either.
“I suppose,” she grumbled, “that you’ll say we had a plan for escape from Scarif, too.”
Cassian glanced up. He didn’t smile—she doubted he had it in him right now—but his gaze changed, softened, in a way that she couldn’t assign to any particular muscle or shift of colour.
“Well, I won’t now.”
She rolled her eyes.
For a few long seconds, he snipped and adjusted wires. But his attention almost immediately returned to Jyn, and he set down the wire-cutters.
“They didn’t find the plans on the ship,” he said. “They didn’t find them on her. We know that much. Either she transmitted them to the Rebellion or sent them away. If the first, our work is already done, and there’s no point in risking ourselves for it.”
“That’s not likely, though,” said Jyn.
“No,” he agreed. “They would have attacked before Alderaan. Certainly afterwards. It’s much more probable that she managed to smuggle them planetside before her ship was boarded. In that case, she herself probably doesn’t know where in particular they ended up.”
Jyn exhaled through her teeth. “Okay. We’d be risking everything for information we have no way to pass on, and which likely won’t tell us anything we can’t already guess. I know.”
They’d talked about it before. She knew. But—
“How long does this go on?” she asked quietly. “Keeping our heads down and backing away from risks and … how long is it worth it?”
Cassian looked straight at her, dark eyes very clear. Jyn expected one of his well-turned declarations, his way of slicing through layers of difficulty and complication to some simple, burning core. Rebellions are built on hope. You’re not the only one who lost everything. It was for a cause I believed in, a cause that was worth it.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She almost laughed. “Seriously?”
“I only … weigh things. What might be gained, what could be lost.”
Jyn couldn’t really see Cassian living by risk-reward analyses. He was too zealous for that, too instinctive. Too much like her. But then, she’d never had a devoted strategic analysis droid following her around and spouting probabilities. And once, she really had been more cautious, in some ways—always conscious that the slightest error could bring down an entire mission. Everything had to be perfect. She had to be perfect.
“If we didn’t have valuable information of our own,” said Jyn suddenly, “would you weigh this differently?”
His gaze didn’t falter. “I might.”
“It’ll make a difference, if we can survive. And there’s no way to help Princess Leia. So.” Jyn had to swallow an unpleasant taste in her mouth. In her imagination, probably. “I still don’t like it.”
“I don’t either. But some risks—” Now, his glance dropped to whatever lay within the wreckage of Kay’s head, the tip of his tongue wetting his lip. A nervous tell, not a trick, unless letting her see it counted as a trick. She decided it didn’t. “Can’t be taken, can’t be … contemplated. You know.”
She did. Her father had been an intolerable risk; but she remembered, too, killing a man who’d seen her planting a bomb and opened his mouth to shout. There’d been blood everywhere; they didn’t have enough blasters and she was better at hand-to-hand, and she told herself that he was a collaborator, someone who would sooner run to a stormtrooper than resist, they’d taken out an entire facility, and the cause comes first, the cause comes first. Saw drilled that into her head from childhood—
Less than a month later, he left her in a bunker.
“I do,” she said, tired. “So we’re just going to stick around until … what is a reasonable chance even going to look like?”
Cassian shrugged and picked up the wire-cutters again. “Reassignment, perhaps. Anything that takes us off this thing.”
“Then we make a break for it.” Frustration still crawled over her, if less of it. “Hopefully without drawing attention, I suppose.”
He peered inside the head. “Hopefully.”
Jyn wasn’t going to bet on that. Sure, it would be a pity to lose Willix and Lyr, for all that she hated pulling Lyr over her skin. She could well have had to pull worse things, or more difficult ones. And they’d never have lived this long without them, certainly not in comfort. Nevertheless, she’d give up far more than a useful identity if it meant escape.
“A ship,” she muttered, more to herself than him. “We need a ship.”
Cassian made a low sound of satisfaction, and Jyn twitched.
“What?”
With one last cut, he dropped the wire-cutters and reached inside Kay’s head. It only took a few seconds for his hand to re-emerge, fingers folded over something flat and square. When he opened them, she saw that the square was small, a good deal smaller than his palm, and an unassuming mix of metal and plastic.
After all, one datachip looked very much like another.
“Is that him?” she exclaimed.
“Maybe,” said Cassian, but his mouth was soft and his eyes bright. “I’ll have to check if the code’s intact. It could have taken damage—probably did, and so much developed organically … well, not organically, but …”
“Right,” Jyn said. She eyed the datachip. “If it is intact, more or less, you can get him pestering us again?”
“Yes. Hopefully.” With care, he set it aside. “I may be able to requisition parts. Willix is supposed to be a droid specialist. And escape would be easier with Kay. We might even manage to extract Leia, if everything comes together fast enough.”
“So we need a security droid shell,” she said. “And a ship. And an excuse to leave. With a stormtrooper, and maybe a sentenced Rebel spy.”
“Right.” He picked up the head, and carried it back to the safe, Jyn grimacing. Kay’s face looked even more disturbing before, with the mass of aimless wires poking in every direction and the knowledge that no part of him remained within. “Then we can go home.”
“The Rebellion?” she said, doubtful. They’d never been what she would consider hospitable. She might not know what hospitable even looked like, but it wasn't that. “It’s supposed to be home?”
For him, maybe. For her, she couldn’t quite believe it. Not in itself, anyway.
“Just about anything is, right now,” said Cassian, which … okay, granted. “As long as we—”
Abruptly, he knelt to deposit the head and lock the safe. Something seemed to be wrong with the latter.
“As long as we what?” she prompted.
Cassian fiddled with the lock. “As long as we manage to slip under the Empire’s radar. It shouldn’t be too difficult, if we can get out.”
“I’d like to register serious doubts about your idea of difficult,” said Jyn. Her mouth was doing the thing again. Not a smile, exactly, but something akin. Well, she was the reasonable one, really. Everything always had to be impossibly difficult or impossibly simple with Cassian.
He appeared to give up on the lock, or fixed it. Rising to his feet, he gave her a wry look and said,
“Noted.”
They both left it at that, without any particular acrimony. They couldn’t allow acrimony, she thought, aggravation simmering. Not that she wanted a fight, least of all now—for every Rebel who died today, we just made ten more kept flashing through her mind—and not that she actually felt angry at him. Or herself. Or anyone, specifically.
But she was so tired of reasonable. She needed to do something. She needed, they needed … Force, she didn’t know.
Jyn said nothing of this to Cassian. In fairness, she often said nothing about most subjects. That came naturally, though, and this total containment was anything but. She could sense the tension all but bleeding off both of them; it felt like one more push would have her screaming and carving up the walls, or Cassian cracking into springs and bolts. Or both.
No, she wasn’t angry at him. Nevertheless, Jyn kept to her own bed, and stayed awake half the night in even deeper frustration. She’d gotten used to the consolation of touch, breath and flesh and thrumming blood all together, the comfort in reaching out and finding a ready welcome. She craved more than she resented. But she shouldn’t get used to it. Shouldn’t she? If they ever got out, it would all change. They weren’t … they were … she couldn’t afford dependence. It didn’t feel like that, but if the mere act of sleeping in her own bed kept her awake and fretful, well—
She drifted off a good two hours after Cassian’s breaths turned slow and deep. Two hours after that, she jerked awake once more, remembered horrors all tangled up in her mind.
Stay, she thought dimly, too dream-lost to know who she meant. Don’t leave me here alone. I love you, come back, don’t go—
Cassian slept on, and so did everyone else she ever loved.
“You look terrible,” Zekheret informed Jyn.
“Better turn off the irresistible charm before she swoons,” said Efrah. For all her professional dismay over Alderaan, her sardonic ease had yet to falter. “Coffee, Lyr?”
Jyn grunted. “Please.”
Through an incipient headache, Jyn listened to Zekheret and Efrah talk. Since they periodically dropped something useful before it filtered its way down to Bodhi, that could be worth the time. At least the coffee, and perhaps the bit of soup she managed to hold down, quieted the sharp stabs in her skull through the chatter. Efrah complained about her much-admired commander losing credit for something to Krennic and now Tarkin, while Zekheret boasted of half-baked plots to infiltrate Alderaanian spy rings.
“What Alderaanian spy rings?” Efrah finally snapped.
“The ones I’m going to find!”
She dropped her head into her hands. “Zekheret. You know you’re not in intelligence, right? This is not exactly your skillset.”
“Intelligence never finds anything,” he said, which Jyn suspected might be only a slight exaggeration. Apparently the Rebellion had been plotting circles around Imperial spies for years.
“First of all, that’s not true,” said Efrah, “and second of all, it’s not your problem! You’re a prison guard now. Do you know what kind of trouble you could get into? Even if all the Alderaanians onboard spontaneously built a major espionage operation in the last week, which they haven’t—I don’t know where you’re getting this ridiculous idea, anyway—”
“I’d want revenge if my town got destroyed,” he said simply, “and it doesn’t even have running water.”
To Jyn’s exhausted surprise, Efrah turned pale. “Don’t say things like that, Zek.”
Plainly unswayed, he shrugged and nodded his head towards Cassian’s approaching figure. They’d planned that: Cassian would lag behind so that Jyn alone joined her supposed friends at first. They’re your assets, he said matter-of-factly, and she felt at once exasperated, proud, and chilled. Regardless, it would let them keep an eye on the gap between their behaviour with Jyn alone and Jyn with Cassian.
“Okay, it’s not all of them,” Zekheret said. “I just have to find the dangerous ones.”
“You don’t have to find anyone,” said Jyn, forcing herself to engage. “Willix and I are keeping track of things, okay? Nothing gets past us, I promise.”
“You wouldn’t know about it if it did,” he insisted. “I mean, obviously.”
Efrah gave Jyn a look of sympathetic irritation. “If you want to strangle him, I won’t stop you.”
Cassian’s approach had brought him within earshot (if he’d ever been out of it). He settled himself beside Jyn and said,
“Who is Lyr going to strangle?”
“Me,” said Zekheret brightly.
Cassian’s brows rose, his voice going soft and almost slippery. “You really should tell me these things, Isidar.” He lingered unpleasantly on her n—on Lyr’s name.
“You’d be the first to know, sir,” said Jyn. Were all his roles as repellent? She supposed it made sense for Imperials, or most Imperials, but it still felt uncanny to see Cassian’s high-strung resolve replaced by Willix’s slimy assurance. Maybe the next would be … no, she couldn’t think of a next.
They headed to the detainment centre with Zekheret, whose shift overlapped with theirs. As he headed off, Jyn snagged his arm.
“Remember, you’re here to oversee prisoners. Not pester other soldiers.”
He heaved a dramatic sigh. “Tell her to mind her own business. I’m fine.”
With nothing else to do, she left him to the prisoners and the imaginary spy ring. Not my problem, she told herself, unless he actually managed to turn up something. And he’d be the first to reveal it if he did.
After an exciting morning of standing in place and running errands for Cassian’s arse of an alter-ego, a buzz against her waist and exchange of glances had Jyn escaping into the women’s fresher. Empty, thank the Force.
She unhooked her hand-held and switched it on. “Lyr.”
“Sergeant, ma’am,” said Bodhi. “Checking in.”
“Good. Any news?”
She started when he replied, “Yes.”
“Really? What is it?”
“Well, maybe,” he said. “I think.”
“Spit it out, trooper,” said Jyn, trying to choke down a flare of excitement. If he didn’t know for sure if it counted, it couldn’t be that monumental. She might have already heard, anyway. Still, the hope of change, even slight change, rushed in her blood.
“They’ve sent a contingent to Dantooine,” Bodhi said.
Booted feet clattered past the door. Too quiet for stormtroopers, too sharp for prisoners. Two … no, three guards or administrators. She waited for them to pass, just to be careful, then said,
“And?”
“We didn’t hear about it at first. They must have been sent … I don’t know, almost a week ago.”
Jyn frowned at the floor and moved from the door, turning away and dropping her voice.
“Right after …?”
“Yes,” said Bodhi. “I think so.”
Had Leia talked, after all? But the base was on Yavin 4, not Dantooine. They had others, of course—maybe she’d hidden the headquarters by directing attention to a minor operation? Cassian would know, but she could hardly ask him here.
She took a deep breath. “Interesting. Good job.”
Even floors away, she could hear his quick exhale. “Thanks.”
“How are you holding up?” she asked.
“Good,” said Bodhi, sounding surprised. He paused. “Sort of good. My aim’s a lot better.”
She coughed over a sudden laugh. “Glad to hear it. Stay safe.”
“You too,” he replied. Before Jyn could disconnect, he quickly added, “Wait! How … how is he holding up?”
“The captain?” said Jyn, as if he would care about any other man here.
“Yes.”
She thought about it. Cassian, inflexible by day and trembling at night. Cassian outside their quarters, adhering to his role with unflinching determination, and Cassian within them, slicing up ten thousand credits.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s a … strange situation.”
“That’s one word for it,” said Bodhi soberly. “You’re still in the prison? Have you seen—um, her?”
“No,” Jyn told him. “Direct interaction is too risky. She’s not much of an actress, apparently. And we can’t just walk out with a Rebel slated for execution. But I’ll update you if anything changes.”
She switched off the handheld, just in time to hear a strangled,
“Lyr?”
She whirled around. Zekheret stood at the door, framed like a holopic, his mouth open. He stared at her with bugging eyes.
“It’s you!” he burst out. “The whole time, it was—you’re—you—”
Jyn’s skin went numb. By will alone, she maintained her usual expression.
“What are you talking about?” she snapped, then scowled. “And what are you doing in the women’s fresher?”
A mottled flush ran up his neck and cheeks, wrecking all resemblance to Cassian. “I—well—that’s not the point! You’ve been spying! For them!”
“No,” she said desperately. “This is a misunderstanding.”
He shook his head, eyes still wide, and pulled out his blaster.
“You can’t talk your way out of this one.” Zekheret waved the blaster in her face. “Isidar Lyr, you’re … you’re under arrest as a Rebel traitor and a spy.”
no subject
on 2018-06-24 02:41 am (UTC)Also, I think I see what you meant in your last comment on my last comment about "Jyn's eventual test" because OH SHIT. That is all I'm sayin'. WOW.
no subject
on 2018-06-24 04:19 am (UTC)