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cassian andor

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Though Jyn doesn't think, at first, that she'll be able to sleep at all, after what was apparently days of it, it turns out that that part comes easily enough. It's what comes after that that doesn't. When she sleeps, she dreams, and when she dreams, she's back on Scarif, Cassian growing weaker beside her, the bodies on the ground now those of their comrades, their friends. In person, she never actually saw them die to get confirmation of it, but their silence over the comms had spoken for itself. She sees them now, Bodhi and Chirrut and Baze, bloody and burned and broken because they were stupid enough to follow her, because her father built a monstrosity for the Empire, because all those years ago, he tried to run and they found him again.

She's sitting in a bunker, waiting and waiting, but light shines through the hatch, splits it into pieces, and she knows it's the Death Star, that they've found her, too. This time, there's no peace in it, no warm body against hers, because Cassian is already dead. All of them, gone because of her. Everyone she's ever cared about and plenty more besides. Galen Erso built a planet killer, but what is she?

Her father's creation swallows her whole, and this time, every inch of her is on fire, burning her to ashes. My Stardust, she hears in her head. It's me, she'd told Cassian, the two things her father made inextricably intertwined, she and the Death Star both causing nothing but destruction.

She wakes with a start, remembering that she isn't alone before she's even processed where she is. In one swift, sudden movement, she tugs the pillow out from under her head and presses it to her face instead, using it to muffle the gasps of air she has to force into her lungs. The instinct is an old childhood one, going back to her days with Saw and not wanting to admit to the weakness of nightmares among his company of soldiers.

Only when her breathing levels out and her pulse slows does she move the pillow again, letting it rest against her abdomen as she lies flat on her back on the thin mattress, staring up at the ceiling and taking everything in all over again. The room is still dark, the hallway outside nearly silent. If she had to guess, she'd say it's still probably the middle of the night, no light coming in from behind the re-closed shades. It's a relief and it isn't. She doesn't want to face any doctors or nurses, but the dark and the quiet are about as oppressive as her own thoughts, and she can't stop trembling. There won't be any getting back to sleep tonight, not for her. Even if she thought she could manage it, she'd be too afraid of what she would see this time.

When she speaks, it's on a whim, the impulse acted on before she can try to talk herself out of it, which she too easily could. Even then, she's cautious, her voice not rising above a whisper so she doesn't wake him up, in case he is asleep. If he can get the rest she couldn't, he deserves it. "Cassian?" she asks, still staring straight up, not sparing so much as a glance in his direction. "Are you awake?"

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She hadn't expected anything else, really, and Jyn nods again, a slight little movement, still not yet able to look up at him again. Of course they're the only ones. She didn't see it or hear it, but the silence over their comms spoke volumes, and she'd have been surprised if Cassian had suggested any alternatives. There was never going to be any rescue. Try as she might to remind herself that they all knew the risks when they came along, though, and that there was always every chance that they'd be walking into their own deaths, it's hard to reconcile. As a girl, she lost her parents, and a few years later, she lost Saw, and now, despite having only known Bodhi and Chirrut and Baze for a matter of days, if that, it's hard not to feel like she's lost another family all over again.

Stupid, she thinks. This is where caring about people gets her. This is always what happens, in one way or another. Anything important to her gets snatched away.

Cassian is still here, though, and she curls her fingers slightly in his hospital gown where her hand is splayed out in lieu of clutching at the necklace that hasn't yet been returned to her. "I thought so," she mumbles. "I saw them. Before I woke up just now, I mean." She doesn't add that she'd seen him, too, and doesn't stop to consider that a few minutes ago, she'd said only that she couldn't sleep, not that she had already tried it. There was probably never any way he was going to believe that, anyway.

"They don't go away," Cassian says, meaning the good and the bad. Saying May the Force be with us as a token sort of salute is the closest he's ever come to believing in unseen powers but after days of listening to Chirrut's quiet chanting and absolute surety of belief, it hurts a little less to tell himself that they really are one with something larger. It's better than just being dust without meaning on a broken world that none of them called home.

But he also means the nightmares, something he thinks Jyn already knows. The losses of that day are just new fodder for his brain to grind out behind his eyes when he tries to sleep, reminders of the ways he failed and the people he's hurt. He wishes he didn't care. He'd regret getting Jyn to care if not for the way it had lit her up for what seemed like the first in a long time.

It will be a long time before he sleeps easily. A long time that might turn into forever.

It's a relief when he doesn't say much or ask about it, though not entirely surprising that he seems to be speaking from experience of his own. Jyn still remembers, as much as she tries not to, what he'd looked like on the shuttle back from Eadu when she confronted him. She'd been too angry, at the time, to make much sense of it or even care, but that haunted, hollow look is burned into her memory now as much as anything else, and the words that later followed. After nearly all of his life in this fight, she can only imagine how many orders he didn't disobey, how many people like her father he followed through with pulling the trigger on.

Somewhere in the back of her head, she thinks that she should still hate him for what he almost did, but it's something else, something that she refuses to classify as need but is probably close to it, that sparks in her chest when she turns her face up towards him. If she doesn't have him, she has no one, and she's used to that, but he'd said it himself — she doesn't want to be alone here, not after what they've been through. Besides, she can't abandon the one person who's never abandoned her, even if it's bound to be only a matter of time before he leaves her like all the rest.

"I didn't think they would," she says ruefully, and she means both, too, the memories of the friends they've lost and the nightmares that leave her gasping for air upon waking. "That would be too easy, wouldn't it?"

There are things he could say that, in another situation, might be comforting. You'll get used to it. You'll figure out how to cope. In the lives they've led, it's just a fact and it's probably one that Jyn has already heard and told herself as many times as Cassian has. By now, it wouldn't be advice or help, just harsh reality, and despite living that for twenty years, Cassian finds he doesn't have the stomach to follow through on it now.

"I don't think we've ever had anything easy," he says, not thinking until he says it that maybe they aren't still a 'we,' no matter how much he'd meant it when he'd told her welcome home. There had never been time to discover what that could mean, how there were places and people in the Alliance that took care of their own. He doesn't think she'd have believed it.

Not for the first time, Jyn reminds herself that she barely knows anything about him. It's an uncomfortable disadvantage to be at, when there's no telling how much information the Alliance might have gotten on her before extracting her from Wobani. For all she can tell, he might well know more about her life than she does herself, while she's only got the barest few facts to work with in trying to piece a clear picture together of his. Still, in this regard, they speak for themselves. To have joined the fight as young as he did — barely younger than she was when Saw took her, and she wonders if he knows that, too, or if all they ever found out about was that connection itself — and to all but tell her that he lost everything too, no, of course he's never had anything easy, either.

She wants to ask, a question on the tip of her tongue that almost escapes her, but this isn't the time, and anyway, it isn't her business. He'll tell her whatever he wants to tell her. She isn't going to ruin a rare moment of peace by trying to push her way through one of his many walls.

"Good point," she agrees, voice soft and wry. It's the understatement of the millennium, more like, but she doesn't need to tell him that, least of all now. Besides, it seems inherently wrong, somehow, when this is easier than it has any right to be. Later, maybe, she'll stop and question it and curse herself for thinking it was a good idea to climb into his bed in the first place. Right now, lying here against him, his heart beating under her hand and his fingers in her hair, even still reeling from a nightmare, she thinks she feels better than she has in years. Safe. Home.

Later, too, she'll blame such a ridiculous thought on exhaustion.

"I'm not sure I'd even know what easy looked like, or what to do with it," she adds, thoughtful. "And Saw would say not to trust anything that seemed it."

Edited 2017-02-28 09:23 (UTC)

It had been a lie, if only because you had to have something to lose everything. Cassian's childhood had been nothing, just a bunch of separatist lies in a fabricated war that claimed his father's life before Cassian was old enough to remember much of him. His mother? He had no idea. As a child, all he'd known was fighting, it was just a matter of finding a real cause that had taken him a long time.

When she agrees, it allows him to continue thinking of them as a unit, a 'we.' It doesn't do much for their numbers but it's better than fighting through this alone.

Jyn looks small in his arms. Not delicate or fragile, just small enough to be precious, something he wants to protect. It's a big change from only a few days ago when it had seemed perfectly reasonable to leave her in a crumbling temple outside of Jedha City. Practical but not acceptable. It had been a new and difficult perspective for someone who didn't allow himself to form attachments because he might have to kill them later.

"Saw didn't trust much of anything," Cassian says, thinking of the bags over their heads. He isn't sure, at the end, if he'd entirely trusted Jyn.

Jyn wants to tell him that Saw hadn't always been the man they saw at the end on Jedha, with more pieces of him missing than not and falling apart under the weight of his own paranoia, but she bites the words back. Defending Saw Gerrera isn't a hobby of hers, least of all since he cut her loose, and while maybe their last meeting rekindled some of the affection she once felt for him — or, at least, put out some of the resentful fire — that doesn't mean she's about to take up his cause again, start speaking like she's one of his soldiers. Cassian isn't wrong, anyway. Even before Saw was the sad, worn-down man she'd seen and pitied what must have been only a matter of days ago, he was never exactly trusting.

He'd trusted her, though, she thinks. All these years later, and he said she'd been the best soldier he had, and she never knew him to be one to throw around hollow untruths. If anything, he was more of a father to her than Galen Erso ever was, but that, she keeps carefully guarded, close to her chest, not in the habit of giving away more of herself than is strictly necessary. Just being here in Cassian's arms breaks that rule; it's all the more reason why she needs to continue following it where she can.

She thinks again that Saw would be so, so disappointed in her for all of this, maybe even more so than he must have been when she collapsed watching the hologram, for all that she barely remembers doing so now.

"No, he didn't," she allows, smiling faintly at the thought as if recalling a rare fond memory, turning her head enough that the expression is hidden in Cassian's shoulder. "But especially not anything that seemed like it might be a good thing. There's always a catch." The same must be true of this, being here. She won't let herself believe otherwise. She can, though, let herself put off dealing with it for a little while longer.

It is, Cassian thinks, the consequence of a hard life. Kindness is rare and therefor untrustworthy. The woman in his arms is a perfect example of what that can do to a person, the toll it takes...

Cassian turns his head and looks at the television. Thinking about what kind of person Jyn might have become if life had been a little kinder to her is not a good path to take. It leaves Cassian envisioning a woman who is softer, happier and it's a disservice to the person next to him now. Whatever Jyn might have had–deserved even–she didn't get it, nor did Cassian. imagining otherwise was a cruel game.

"He trusted you more than the rest, at least," he says. It's a fact that they had abused to try and get a message that Cassian had almost been willing to disregard.

He isn't wrong. As a child, still reeling from the loss of her parents, she'd burned with pride over the fact of that, that no matter how hard he pushed her, he felt an affection for her that he didn't for the others, protected her even while throwing her out into the midst of danger. Of course, she hadn't known then how short-lived that would be. No matter how much he might have cared for her, it wasn't enough to stop him from cutting her loose without any sort of an explanation. And maybe, deep down, she knows that the reason he gave for it when she finally saw him again was a good one, but that doesn't change the past or how abandoned she's spent all these years feeling.

"He raised me," she says with a shrug, as if it's as simple as that, as if there weren't plenty of others her own age or close to it among his cadre. Still, it's a far cry from the last time she said those words, a defense to what might as well have been his accusation regarding her connection to Saw. So much has changed, she thinks, in such a short time. Certainly, when she first met Cassian, she could never have imagined that she would be climbing into his bed in the middle of the night the way she has, or that she would take such comfort from his presence.

With that in mind, she supposes she can add just a little more than she did then, surrounded by people she had no reason to trust. She has one — several, really — now with him. "Saw's the one who got us off Coruscant when I was young. Then he came for me when my parents... after I lost them." It's still just facts, none of the feelings, and it still doesn't touch on how much she'd come to see him as a father or the way he abandoned her, but it's more than she's told anyone in a long time, maybe ever. Lying in the dark like this, it's easier than it might otherwise be, especially when it's in lieu of speaking about more painful truths, like her dream or what happened to them. Being swallowed by the Death Star's blast again seems safer than talking about it. Besides, there's a strange satisfaction in the idea of telling Cassian something he doesn't already know, details about her that the Alliance might not have learned, a way of regaining the upper hand even this long after the fact.

Edited 2017-03-01 09:08 (UTC)

It's more than he can say. Cassian's not sure who raised him, if there's anyone at all. Ahsoka Tano? Davits Draven? In the end, Cassian thinks it's the Rebellion itself that raised him. There had been no individual parents and he had not been an individual to be raised. He was one of many hopeless children and teenagers who'd joined up, cultivated like unruly plants into something useful.

It's hard to say if that makes Jyn luckier than him. More loved, perhaps, if the way Galen had looked at her is anything to go by, but he doubts that Jyn Erso grew up any happier or safer than he had. War, no matter what side you're on, is a devourer of childhoods.

"I was born on Fest," he says, because it seems like he ought to tell her something of himself too. It's not a particularly remarkable planet by any stretch of the imagination, cold and mountainous and densely populated. Or it had been. Cassian avoided going back if he could, despite its proximity to Yavin. It never seemed worth it.

Jyn smiles, just a little, to hear that, tipping up her chin to look at him without lifting her head off his shoulder. It isn't much, but she thinks it might well be the first concrete fact she's learned about him aside from his rank and how old he was when he joined the fight, and that's worth something, making her feel a little less laid bare with all the Alliance managed to find out about her. Her aliases, her record, her father, her connection to Saw... Even without some of the finer points, it's more of herself than she's accustomed to giving away. Of course she'd been nothing but defensive and closed-off having that thrown at her.

This is different, though, truths offered willingly, slowly, in whatever fragments they can manage. She doesn't need to know more than she already does to get the sense that he keeps himself about as carefully guarded as she does. It makes it easier that way. At least he's probably not expecting her to just open up and tell him everything that wasn't in whatever dossier they compiled on her now that they have the time and the opportunity for it.

There are a few things, though, that she can still give without crossing the lines she's set for herself, like a trade of sorts, a fact for a fact. "I don't know where I was born," she admits. "I think we might've lived somewhere else for a while, but I don't remember it, and we never talked about it."

He feels her shift. Spy training tells him to read her body language and simple logic tells him that if Jyn is lying in his bed, arms around him, then a simple shift of her head is far less indicative than it might usually be. When he dials those instincts out, he hears her properly and frowns a little at that. Where a person is born isn't the end all be all of one's identity but in a galaxy as easily traversed as theirs, it still means something.

"Is Coruscant the first place you remember?" he asks. Is it the first place she thought of as home? He knows that at some point, they came to Lah'mu, where the Empire sent Krennic to extract Galen. The details on her file are fuzzier after that. Time spent with Saw Gerrera obviously, various aliases, and then Wobani prison camp. It's an unfair advantage for two people who live by secrecy and survival.

"Mmhmm," Jyn hums in response, nodding as best she can without pulling away. It should bother her more than it does, she thinks, that those first few years are a blank, something she didn't know her parents long enough for them to tell her about. Given everything, though, including the reasons why that's the case, it doesn't really faze her. Obviously it hasn't made any kind of difference. Besides, it would just give her more to remember of her parents, and more ways for her having lost them to hurt. That, she'll never admit to, something that would have to be torn out of her, but it's true all the same. "Not very well, but I do. Bits and pieces."

The droid who took care of her, her favorite holodrama, the toys she had to abandon, the conversations her parents would have with the man in white that she never understood but was often upset by, those are things seared into her memory, that she would see in her sleep even if she tried to shut them out. Before that, though, it's a blur, and then a blank.

Still looking up at him, she asks, "Do you remember Fest? Did you live there long?"

Edited 2017-03-02 06:46 (UTC)

"It was cold and there were mountains. Nothing worth remembering," he says and he knows that what he doesn't tell her is just as revealing as what he does. The memories of throwing trash and harassing clone troopers are clear in his might, hyper colorful with a child's memory. Some of the Anti-Jedi slogans still go off in his head at times, unwanted reminders of his indoctrination. It's not worth remembering.

"After I joined the Alliance, I lived on their bases." As Draven had dragged him up the ranks, Cassian had shifted through so many Rebel bases, moving with the Alliance and dispatched hither and yon to gather information. If he thinks about how young he was when he first killed someone he might need to grab that bedpan from the side table.

"I wandered a lot. Made it easy to adjust when I was sent somewhere new."

"I wandered, too," Jyn says, soft, without looking away from him. There's no way he doesn't know that already, but it seems right to say it, for him to hear it from her. For one, it's common ground, one small, shared thing they have in common. More than that, though, she doesn't want to be just the contents of her file to him, the daughter of an Imperial scientist, one of Saw's Partisans, a petty criminal. She doesn't want to be Liana Hallik or Kestrel Dawn or Tanith Pontha, or any of the charges on her record. She can't tell yet who that person is, what's left of her now that the Death Star has burned away so much else, but she thinks, after years of trying to stay invisible, drifting under every radar possible, that for once, she wants to be seen. "After Saw."

She doesn't lie and say she left him. She doesn't tell the truth of it, either, that Saw cast her aside without so much as a word. That much is still too raw, especially after having seen him again and leaving him to die as Jedha collapsed. For all her secrets, she's not sure there's any she keeps such tight hold of as the way she's been abandoned time and time again. She'd rather just be the one to leave before she can be left by someone else. Easy as it would be, though, to get up and go back over to her own bed and pretend like she never let herself be this openly vulnerable, she stays put.

"Guess there's nowhere to wander now."

"I guess not." And isn't that just as terrifying. What is he going to do without missions and enemies to flee? Who is he without those things. The Alliance had made Cassian into what he was and without them...that's twenty years of an identity to reconfigure. His vision goes black around the edges with the weight of it and Cassian looks down again, forcing himself to look Jyn in the eye, to focus on her.

"I wonder what it'll be like. Having a home in one place." He's trying to spin it into something positive but he thinks Jyn is smart enough to recognize what it is. There's no polishing up a terrible situation, not with even the warmest and brightest belief, and Cassian lacks that on a good day.

He may as well adopt an alias. Say he's someone else. It's better than figuring out who Cassian Andor is now.

Welcome home. She hears it again in her head, an invitation and a promise, and her breath stutters a little for it. Maybe he doesn't mean anything by it, maybe he's just talking about a home as in a place to live, but even in that sense of the word, Jyn hasn't had a home in a long, long time, since she was a teenager naïve enough to trust the idea of one. Now, her every instinct is telling her to fight it, to run, not to believe it. For all she knows, he was just talking about the Alliance anyway and the possibility of her being one of them, and it's been made abundantly clear to her that they're somewhere without any of that, rendering the point moot.

She's not so sure that's the case, though. At least, that isn't what it's meant to her, what made warmth bloom in her chest at the sound of those words. The Alliance, she could take or leave, especially after the Council wouldn't listen to her. Cassian, though, who came back for her time and again?

Whatever planet they're on and however out of options they might be, she thinks she's as much at home here as she was in the hangar on Yavin 4. She thinks, she could be that for him, if he wanted.

With no reason to believe that he would want that, though, Jyn dismisses the thought as quickly as she can, only hoping the hitch in her breath hasn't been too apparent, or at least easily written off as relating to something else. "I couldn't tell you," she says, wry, lighter than the subject should call for. "The longest I've spent in any one place in years was a prison."

He understands the wry tone in her voice. It's the humor of someone who doesn't know the answer because she's been on the run her whole life. It's the same tone of voice that he knows all too well himself. Nodding, Cassian keeps his arm around her. Maybe, in a kinder universe, he could find that home for her. He thinks he nearly had when he'd said those words back on Yavin. The Alliance could be her home and she could build with a group of people, find the ones who were idealistic enough to remind her of hope.

Cassian likes to think that that's what it gave him, before Draven made him into something worse.

"Maybe it'll be an adventure. I'll learn how to match curtains to a sofa," he says, the domestic fantasy wasted on them. He can't remember if he ever had a room with curtains. All the homes he remembers are gray, utilitarian things for storing people like weapons.

He could cook again, Cassian thinks. He hasn't cooked in a long time, at least nothing more complicated than packet rations. He's missed that.

"If ever there were a time to take up interior decorating..." Jyn says, teasing, and nudges him with the shoulder pressed against him. Maybe he will, difficult as it may be to imagine, but she won't. Everywhere she's lived over the past few years, she's kept empty, sparsely decorated, her belongings few enough to fit in a bag or two. This is meant to be permanent, evidently, if it really is true that they can't leave, but she can't see this place being any different for her, and it all comes down to exactly what they've been talking about in the first place.

It's been so long since she had a home that she doesn't know how to have one anymore, and the second she settles will be the same instant something goes wrong. The apartment that's been promised to her will be a place to stay and nothing more. Right now, the very idea of it hardly even seems real, as if nothing could exist outside of this room, though she's seen out the window and stumbled down the hospital's hallway.

"You'll need matching throw pillows. For the sofa."

"They'd better not clash with the wallpaper. Or the carpet," Cassian says, weaving a fantasy of a home he's never had, never allowed himself to want. In his mind, it's a roughly imagined thing, shining with warm color and metal accents like the pictures he's seen of Coruscanti luxury apartments, kilometers above him and worlds of class away. Even if he's visited that planet, it's a different world and not one that can be permeated, certainly not by Outer Rim boys from Fest.

"For all I know, the apartment they give me will be Naboo marble and hardwood from Endor." He laughs then, a low chuckle that disappears into Jyn's hair.

"Talk about aiming high," Jyn says, her laugh softened a little by the way his feels against her hair. This quiet, easy sort of intimacy isn't something she's at all familiar with or has ever really allowed herself. She's not sure how it comes so naturally, except that it did, too, at the end, their arms wrapped around each other as the horizon disappeared and the world burned. There's a lightness to it now — a necessary one, maybe, a means of keeping everything else at bay — that there wasn't then, but it feels like a natural extension of where they left off, the one right thing about all of this mess. "And a view like Coruscant's."

It's a silly dream, nothing more, the sort of thing she can play along with simply because she knows that. Truthfully, as long as her bed is more comfortable than the one in her cell on Wobani and there's no leak over it, she'll be satisfied with anything.

"I've seen out the window, Jyn. That's nothing like Coruscant." It looks...well he doesn't know. It's familiar in a mishmashed way, mixed styles of buildings and serviceable materials. It's a city that's grown around the needs of others and its occupants rather than the intense, constructed worlds if the core planets.

"I'm sure you'll get an apartment with a better view anyway."

"Might be some taller buildings somewhere," Jyn says with what she can manage of a shrug, though the whole thing is just pretend anyway. There won't be any apartments — certainly not just given to them — with Naboo marble and Endor hardwood. They won't match curtains to sofas to throw pillows to carpets. She'll live as she's always lived, with just enough to get by, being able to pack up and leave at a moment's notice. At least as long as she knows it's just imaginary, there can't be any harm in playing along, piecing together the idea of an apartment that's far nicer than anywhere they'd actually wind up living.

"If I do, you can have it. Any view would be better than my last."

"I'm not very good company," Cassian warns her. Maybe it's little hypocritical to say when she's holding so tightly to him but a desperate lifeline isn't the same thing as a good friend. It's possible she may rescind her friendliness once they're settled and she remembers she hates him.

"You may not want me around in your apartment. I'll lower the property values."

"You haven't threatened to kill me lately," Jyn points out matter-of-factly. If anything, the opposite is true. On so many different occasions, he could just have left her to die, and each time, he never did. She's still not sure what that means, but while she's not foolish enough to think she owes him some kind of debt for it — they've had each other's backs each step of the way, and for all that she might not be letting herself think about it right now, there is always, always what he almost did to her father — she isn't just going to disregard it, either. "Puts you a step up from my cellmate, so I'll take it."