Chapter Text
Celebration consumed Massassi Station like hungry fire.
Even cooler heads who could not mistake winning a battle for winning a war knew that the destruction of the Death Star represented a crucial turning point in this struggle. The galaxy now had proof that the Empire was not invulnerable. Once-silent sympathizers would dare to become vocal supporters of the Alliance; the ranks of the rebels would swell with new recruits.
One laughter and song-drenched night of drinking and coupling and affirming life, of cheering a princess and farmboy and smuggler and Wookiee and each other, certainly could be justified – especially now, while the Empire reeled from this blow.
General Draven didn’t begrudge the others their festivity.
But that didn’t mean he felt like taking part.
Only a skeleton staff remained at critical posts. His footfalls echoed in corridors that were usually active with personnel, day or night.
This was the best time for it. He didn’t need an audience.
The short row of lockers sank back into the ancient stone of a hallway that led to guest quarters. Intelligence operatives rarely received permanent barracks assignments; they were in the field most of the time. They passed their brief stays at the base in the impersonal comfort of temporary rooms. An individual locker was the only show of permanence their would-be Massassi home provided.
After setting the empty box at his feet, Draven stared at one locker for several moments before overriding its security code and opening its door.
So very few things, and most of them single-minded in their practicality. Small tools. Spare socks. A battered transponder awaiting repair. A tube of the eye drops favored by human pilots to combat the strain of long flights.
A lone piece of candied bofa fruit by itself on the shelf, still wrapped.
No threads left to dangle, no mess for others to clean up. An extraordinary agent to the last. Undercover even here.
Draven forced a deep breath. The sound was overloud in the vacant space.
“I’m sorry, Cassian,” he said.
***TWENTY YEARS AGO***
Draven woke remembering she was there, reaching for her. But he was alone in his bed.
He found her wrapped in his shirt and staring out his viewport, a mug of steaming caf cradled between her hands.
“Kivren?”
They had kept things casual between them. It made sense in a time of war, when uncertainty and upheaval seemed to be the only constants in the galaxy. Considering that one of them was military intelligence and the other a civilian pilot, and they rarely found three days together in every sixty, it seemed wise simply to enjoy the connection they had without the complication of added expectations.
At least, that’s what Draven understood Kivren Bo’s position to be. If he were foolish enough to want more, he wasn’t going to compound his folly by saying so.
Her focus remained on the stars. “I can’t get Carida out of my head.”
He rubbed at sleep-blurred eyes and frowned at her reference to the Colonies world. Why now? Months had passed since that unfortunate incident, and even then it was more footnote than headline.
He held his tongue, giving her time to say more. After a pause she did.
“You do see the problem, right? Not that long ago we lived in a Republic that had no standing army. We’ve gone a long way in the other direction in a very short time.” She turned to face him, brown eyes bloodshot with lack of sleep. “If citizens who are protesting the increased militarism of the Republic are killed – by Republic blasters in Republic hands – then that sort of makes their case for them, doesn’t it?”
“What happened at the Carida military academy was tragic,” he said. Even to his own ears, those words sounded hackneyed and hollow. “But we’re at war, Kivren. We don’t have the luxury of forgetting that. Talk of demilitarization must wait until there’s peace. Then –”
“Then what?” she asked. “Do you really think the giant war machine of the Republic will just dismantle itself? That all the power concentrated on Coruscant will just” – she detached a hand from her mug and made a shooing gesture – “trickle back to the civilians on their homeworlds?”
For several heartbeats they stood there, frozen in frustrated silence. She was hitting a bit close to home, given the nature of Draven’s work. Not that he was an ideologue. He was a most practical man. And practically speaking, he knew this debate could go on and on in circles until they were both ill with it.
Before he could formulate a reply with any chance of making things better instead of worse, Kivren shook her head. “No, I don’t want this. I don’t want to fight with you.” She deflated before his eyes, sinking into the modest standard-issue sofa, tucking her legs under her.
Wordlessly he refilled her caf and poured a mug for himself, and then he settled next to her. Something had pulled her from his bed, and it wasn’t abstract politics. He was willing to wait until she was ready to talk.
“I was just there,” she said at last.
“Carida?” This was news.
“It was a one-off gig between regular runs. You know me: the more of the galaxy I can see, the better. I like to get boots on the ground and explore at each stop. Of course the war has made that a lot more difficult.”
And dangerous, Draven added to himself.
Kivren blew across the surface of her drink to cool it. Her gaze grew distant as she fell into memory.
“There was this boy.
“He was throwing rocks at a line of Republic walkers moving up the central lane of the capital. Not laughing and running away, as if he’d been dared to do it by friends. No, deadly serious. Committed. Rock after rock, like he was fighting his own private war.
“He was all knees and elbows: a little undersized and a lot underfed. I thought he’s just a baby and then I saw his eyes: huge and dark and so sad. He had the eyes of an old man – one who’s outlived everyone he’s ever known.”
The story seemed to catch in her chest. She shifted and cleared her throat.
“The street cleared when the walkers showed up, so the boy and I were practically alone. After a time I pulled a ration bar out of my pack and offered it to him.
”He needed it – he was practically vibrating with need – but he didn’t move. Instead he asked, ‘What do you want for it?’ He wasn’t some feral, raging child. He spoke softly, warily, as rational as any adult, with a voice like... well, like music.
“I could tell he wouldn’t trust me if I said I didn’t want anything from him, so I said, ‘I’d like some information.’”
“’Whose side are you on?’ he asked.
“I told him I was new to the planet, and I didn’t have a side. I just wanted to understand what I was seeing. Why was he throwing rocks at the walkers?
“He said, ‘I want them to go. I want them to know we don’t want them here. We just want to be free. We want to live our lives and not be killed.’ He couldn’t have been seven years old.”
At her glance, Draven shook his head mutely. What could he possibly say?
“I asked him if his parents agreed with the rock throwing. He said his mother had been with the Force since he was a baby, and his father – Papa, he called him – had been killed earlier that year.”
“And then, then, he said, ‘It’s not safe on the streets at night. Be careful. Leave if you can.’ I asked him what he did when it got dark, and he said, ‘I hide until morning.’ I must’ve looked horrified, because he said, ‘I’m good at hiding.’ Not bragging, just… reassuring me.
“I tossed him the ration bar. I doubted he’d ever come close enough to take it from me. He thanked me first, and then he inhaled it.”
She applied herself to her caf once again, blinking hard.
After some moments, she added, “He asked me where I was from, and I told him I was a pilot, and so I was from many different places. He changed like that.” She snapped her fingers. “His eyes lit up. You could see the intelligence and the curiosity in them. He seemed genuinely happy to learn that we both liked ships and droids and space.
“And then a group of clone troopers came out of one of the state houses, and the next moment he was gone. Nowhere to be found. That remarkable gift of a boy.”
Half-turning to face him fully, Kivren continued. “When I got back to the ship, I accessed the reports of deaths on Carida this year. One of the protesters killed at the demonstration at the military academy was the mirror image of that little boy, if you added another twenty-five or thirty years. Same dark hair and soulful eyes. Same intent expression.”
She rested a warm hand on his knee. “I know you care. I know you’re doing your damnedest for the galaxy, which is a lot more than I can say for myself. I know that. But right now, what you’re doing, what everybody’s doing, it isn’t good enough. I’m going to keep waking up in the night and imagining that little boy, hiding somewhere in the dark, until… I don’t know what. Some kind of change happens. Somehow.”
Draven could only digest this; he had no useful reply, and to her credit, Kivren didn’t seem to expect one. He just held her until the morning refused to be denied, and then they parted, Draven for his office and Kivren for her ship.
She didn’t return to him again. He confirmed she was alive and unharmed, and then he taught himself to let her go. The galaxy soon shattered around him – the Republic transformed into Empire, the Jedi exterminated – and there was no time for anything else, anything for himself, even if he had known how to ask for it.
Kivren proved to be right about the giant war machine of the Republic.
She also proved to be right about the remarkable boy.
It took Draven two years to connect the pieces. After his defection to the Rebellion, he had set himself to intensive research, flagging potential recruits for the unglamorous but desperately necessary work of Alliance intelligence. He was reviewing a file he had opened some time earlier on a former member of an insurrectionist cell turned anarchist activist in the Outer Rim, a gifted child with a penchant for dismantling advanced combat machinery with little more than sticks and stones, when Kivren’s story resurfaced in his mind with all the impact of point-blank blaster fire.
Seconds later a search confirmed that the dark-haired, dark-eyed protestor killed at the Carida military academy was Edrian Andor.
Kivren hadn’t exaggerated, either: young Cassian was the living image of his late father.
Draven added a note to the boy’s file and moved it to the top of his queue for immediate action.
If he had been the idealistic or romantic sort, the kind who sought deeper meaning in random coincidence or nursed a secret belief in destiny, he might have wondered if this was what they meant when the starry-eyed echoed weighty phrases such as “the will of the Force.”
But Draven was a most practical man. And he had work to do.
***SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO***
“You already know everything that’s happened in my life,” the boy said, measuring Draven. Not hostile, not scared, merely trying to understand. “Now you want to know what makes me tick. You want to know if I’m bad. Or broken.”
An efficient definition of a psych eval if ever Draven had heard one.
“Well, are you?” Draven wasn’t known for his delicacy. Besides, the boy’s forthrightness begged to be returned in kind.
As they walked side by side, pacing back and forth in the rubble beside Draven’s hastily-camouflaged ship, the boy mimicked Draven’s body language, back straight and hands clasped behind him. He was still mostly knees and elbows and dark, dark eyes.
The answer apparently required time. Draven got the impression that prosecution and defense were presenting complicated arguments behind the boy’s somber expression.
“I try not to be,” came the decision at last, simply put.
Draven considered this. “I think you’ve answered both concerns, then,” he said, “because I suspect that’s the best any of us can do.”
This made an impact.
The boy halted and lifted his chin, meeting Draven’s scrutiny. “With or without you, I’m fighting the Empire. That’s the right thing to do. But if you’ll take me with you, sir, I’ll fight your way.”
Draven was accustomed to shouldering great responsibility, but upon hearing those words, he abruptly felt the strain of it.
He leaned forward, closing some of the distance between their heights. “You and I, we’ll do what we do not because we enjoy it, but because someone has to do it, and we know we can.”
When the boy nodded, Draven knew they understood each other.
He extended his hand. “Welcome to the Alliance to Restore the Republic, Mr. Andor.”
***
Draven had his speech chosen, his rebukes planned: The Kid, as young Andor had been dubbed, was neither a pet nor a mascot. He had earned his place at this dubious excuse for a work-in-progress base, and no one should forget it. The boy had a great deal to learn from the specialists assembled here, but no small amount to teach them in return.
Take him seriously: Draven would hammer that point home.
The tirade turned out to be wholly unnecessary.
By the time the pilots and slicers, intelligence operatives and munitions experts paused to consider the smallest satellite thriving in their orbits, The Kid was already a fixture, as accepted – and, indeed, as relied upon – as the lights at their ceilings and locks on their doors.
Draven allowed himself a moment of satisfaction one night, witnessing The Kid sitting shoulder to shoulder with seven comrades around a table in the mess hall. When Andor ducked his head to blush and giggle at some ribald joke, Draven felt an undeniable surge of relief that the boy still could do both, after all he had seen and done in his brief life.
The relief passed quickly. Draven could read the writing on the wall, and he could render a competent translation: in five years, more than half of the rebels at that table would be dead, and The Kid would be a fourteen-year-old veteran agent with a laugh like strangled tears.
There was nothing Draven could do to stop what was coming. He could only make certain the side he had chosen was equipped to the best of his ability. He could only sell them all, himself included, as dearly as possible.
In their own individual ways, Draven thought, each of the rebels accepted this.
Even Andor.
Especially Andor.