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The Dantooine evacuees were still alternating between debrief and catching their collective breath when a new alarm started blasting throughout the lower levels of the Yavin base, an incongruous tinny echo reverberating around the ancient cavern converted into chaotic hangar bay.
“Sir,” a fresh-faced young corporal came trotting up to the informal gathering around Yavin’s humorless Intel commander. “Captain Andor’s U-Wing is coming in hot. Badly damaged, comms down.”
The tension that hardened the lines around Draven’s face was palpable in the sudden stiffening of all their postures; the wordless murmur that hummed about the assembly. “Company?” the general asked.
If Yavin had been compromised, on the heels of losing Dantooine…
“Patrols report no unusual activity. Orbital sensors clear.”
“Very good.” Draven pivoted, dismissal obvious and unspoken, and cast his gaze about the group of Pathfinders standing in an uncertain parade rest. He went down the line, scanning their tabs until he landed on someone of some rank which, to Melshi’s dubious fortunes, fell to him. “Sergeant, gather a team.”
“Yes, sir.”
Two years, since Melshi had found himself pulled along in the haphazard wake of a far more resourced and organized Rebellion than he ever fathomed existed, against the seemingly all-seeing, all-knowing, gleefully cruel Imperial machine. Two years, elevations in rank gained in equal balance between proving himself through his own exploits, or simply advancing to fill in the necessary gaps when others met with less fortune in battle, and it still took him aback, the way nothing sometimes seemed to happen for weeks on end, and then everything seemed to happen all at once.
This was an all-at-once sort of a week, and he was exhausted.
Draven, he supposed grimly about two minutes later, must have been too, by the quick flurry of rifles rising and the droid’s arms going up in the air while it didn’t even break pace, jogging quickly down the ramp, and Draven’s nigh-panicked bark of “Stand down,” as if they should have expected the ship coming in for an emergency landing to have an Imperial security droid aboard.
“How bad is it?” Draven moved to intercept, already motioning for the medical team standing by to move into the ship.
The droid’s optical sensors flickered twice in rapid succession. “He’s begun requesting probabilities.”
Draven grimaced. “Bad, then.”
“I’ll say.” Melshi blinked between them, Rebel general and Imperial droid, and decided that his all-at-once week was taking on something of an element of fever dream. The droid turned its head and processed the group of dumbstruck commandos with weapons lowered at the ground, turned back just as dismissively as Draven had done with the corporal back in the hangar, and reported, “Captain Andor assessed an eighty-six percent success rate per the mission objectives.”
“Fine.” Draven belatedly followed the droid’s interest, glanced over at the medical team already maneuvering a hover gurney down the ship’s ramp, and nodded once, sharply, at Melshi. “Dismissed, Sergeant. Reconvene for full debrief at fifteen hundred.”
“Understood, sir.”
They stood aside and let the group of medics ferry their charge on through the hangar, voices snapping over comms to alert the medical bay of their incoming patient. The droid and General Draven trailed behind, conferring in quieter tones.
“Intel, huh?” Igban murmured incredulously.
Melshi shrugged. “Let’s see if Lieutenant Ri’por has made any headway with the quartermaster.”
The lieutenant and the quartermaster had indeed made progress, insofar as a bay had been designated as the temporary corral for the bulk of the evacuees. Actually supplying it with cots, either scavenged from storage on Yavin or offloaded from one of the supply ships from Dantooine, was significantly further down the priorities list, and so the weary commandos found their particular corner of the space, shook out their bedrolls, and roughed it as they had on any number of scouting missions.
The bay was complete and utter havoc, people darting around looking for their packs and their units, Yavin personnel milling about and distributing rations and basic supplies.
Melshi slept like a rock. If his offhand calculations were correct, fifteen hundred at the Yavin base was approximately oh-two-hundred where they’d just left in a hurry. When his alarm pinged time to get ready for the rest of their debrief, he gave it even odds on whether his absence would actually be remarked upon amidst the chaos, but forced himself up on the reluctant acknowledgement that the time adjustment would only get harder, if he didn’t force himself through it on the first day.
He started to reconsider his decision when the same damn Imperial droid descended upon the unit as they left the briefing and stated loudly, “Sergeant Ruescott Melshi.” A few laughs, somebody elbowed him in the side. It wasn’t really a question though, so he stayed silent and wary, never mind that the thing was clearly supposed to be here. “Your presence is requested in the medical bay.”
Melshi glanced around and blinked. “Requested by who?”
There was a pause, in which the droid tipped its head incrementally towards the side, giving the air of pondering the question or pondering its answer, perhaps. “By me,” it clarified eventually. “I am requesting. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Yarha muttered by his ear. “Good luck with that one.” Melshi shot her a sour look and got a bright grin in return. “We’ll save you a seat in the mess, sarge.”
Betrayal in his eyes, he watched his unit duck past him and around the lurking droid, chuckling and shooting furtive glances over their shoulders.
And then the droid asked loudly, “Have you ever been incarcerated?” and the peals of laughter echoed down the stone corridors.
He ground his teeth together and followed. “Haven’t we all?”
Another pause, except now Melshi could read the unspoken are you an idiot? in it before the droid answered his decidedly rhetorical question with, “I haven’t.” Melshi sighed, and at least tried to take solace in the way a trio of pilots, clearly just off duty with their flightsuits in various states of disarray and helmet-matted hair, didn’t even give the droid a second glance and never mind that he still carried his Imperial markings. “I began updating my memory banks with the new base personnel files while waiting on the slow and highly unpredictable process that is organic repair.”
Melshi chose to strategically sidestep the characterization of saving an Intelligence agent’s life as organic repair. “You understand that having an enforcer droid asking about my time in prison isn’t exactly reassuring, yes?”
The droid’s head craned around, even as it turned a corner in the labyrinthine temple corridors. “I am an Intelligence asset of the Rebel Alliance.” Melshi was starting to develop a headache. At least they were headed in the right direction, if it escalated. “I believe you may have a past association with my partner.”
He couldn’t actually remember the name of the agent who had come crashing in during the morning debrief, but he was quite certain it hadn’t registered as familiar. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh.” Melshi wasn’t sure he’d ever heard a droid’s modulator pitched so clearly in disappointment. “I raised the probability six-fold that you were the Melshi Captain Andor has spoken of when I cross-matched your personnel file with the Imperial prison records database.”
The speed with which Melshi considered the possibility, and then likelihood, that Keef Girgo had never been his name at all, sent a rather dangerous amount of hope flaring in his chest. “Is it possible I met your Captain Andor using a different alias?”
“Oh,” the droid repeated, tone brightening upwards. “Yes. He said if he ever told me what it was though, he’d have to deactivate me.”
Melshi woke to the sound of a wordless grunt. He startled in his chair, elbow slipping off the arm, neck protesting the jolt after too long leaned over in an awkward position, and forgot the stiffness and aches instantly at the dark eyes staring at him from the bed, blown wide in the bay’s dim lighting.
A few seconds passed and the alarmed expression didn’t fade, and Melshi realized that, while the low activity of the med bay was a decided positive, it didn’t create for an immediately recognizable atmosphere when the most urgent other case in the dim room was someone five beds down with a bite from a venomous local reptile.
“Hey,” he said softly. “You’re back on Yavin.”
Cassian – Cassian, Melshi repeated to himself – blinked and cast his eyes around, before saying simply, eloquently, “Ow.” Melshi glanced over his shoulder and lifted up a hand to catch one of the medic’s attention.
She bustled over and started peering at monitor readouts and tsking under her breath. “Congratulations, Captain Andor, you’ve been shot and stabbed, this time, and never mind –”
Melshi rose to give them privacy while she checked over and swapped out some bandages, and also to stretch out the kinks in his neck and shoulders after ill-advisedly falling asleep in the bedside chair. He could feel the heat of Cassian’s stare all the while though and, when he turned, found his eyes fixed on him even as he stiltedly answered the medic’s questions.
She left him with a new dose of pain meds in his drip, a cup of ice chips, and a sour expression on his face that eased back into something unreadable and maybe a little cautious as Melshi returned to his seat. “Dantooine?” Cassian asked, voice dry and gravelly.
He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised that he already knew about the evacuation and relocation. “Yeah. Your droid clocked my name on a personnel roster. Told me he estimated you’d offer medical staff approximately thirty-eight percent less resistance with the distraction of my presence.” Cassian’s face finally split into a rueful smile and, notably, he did not even try to deny it. “Your commander said I could stay so long as I swore under pain of death not to ask you any questions while you’re drugged to the gills.” He got a resigned sort of half-shrug at that, and then a wince as the movement tugged at something. “You okay?”
“That’s a question.” Melshi let out a noisy sigh. “I’ll live.” He shook half the cup of ice chips into his mouth, took a few seconds to suck on them, and then asked him, garbled with his mouth full, “Talk to me?”
His stomach, or possibly his heart, did something very complicated that he made sure not to broadcast across his face.
There was really only one logical starting point for such a vague prompt, so Melshi began weaving the tale starting with their parting of ways on Niamos three years prior. He got as far as booking passage off-world before Cassian’s eyes drifted closed and, before he even made it to his next stop, his breathing had evened out as the pain meds lulled him back to sleep.
x---x
Something snapped in Melshi the moment the Keredians’ ship lurched into hyperspace.
Hours of adrenaline waging war against the fear and panic – the helplessness and grief for all those they left behind as they swam for their lives, ran for their lives, climbed for their lives, gripped an impossibly narrow ledge of cliff face for their lives – it all went crashing down in an instant, forcing a ragged, wet exhale of the breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. A deep breath in and…
Keef had him sitting on the floor of the hold some seconds later; closest thing to privacy they were going to get aboard the little quadjumper. Sand-crusted, stinking uniforms, grit embedded in every line of their faces, their hands and feet cracked and bleeding, and all of it pushed aside and forgotten while Melshi fought to remember how to breathe how to think how to feel while Keef held his hand pressed firm against his chest so he could feel the rise and fall of his lungs. While he wrapped his other hand behind Melshi’s neck and brought their foreheads together, so he could hear the steady rhythm of his breaths. In and out. Again. Again.
“You’re okay,” he eventually caught on to Keef’s continual murmurs of reassurance. “We’re okay. We’re leaving.”
The hand at his neck was too much, overwhelming, overstimulating. He clenched his hand desperately into Keef’s shirt and repeated like a plea, a prayer, a promise, “We’re leaving.”
“We’re leaving.”
x---x
“You spend the whole night there?”
Melshi finished blinking the sleep from his eyes and took a few seconds to reorient himself – evacuation, Yavin, Keef-slash-Cassian, med bay – and found Cassian sitting upright in the bed in a flimsy paper shirt that was far too reminiscent of the disposable uniforms that had comprised Melshi’s entire wardrobe for more time that he cared to recall. He had his legs folded under him and was bent forward over a datapad, one arm curled around his midsection suggesting how not comfortable the position was. A barely-touched rations tray sat neglected on the cart on the other side of the bed.
He had the sense that he could glean more about Cassian Andor from this quick picture than he’d ever truly learned about him in a month’s time in prison.
A quick sideways dart of his eyes and the edge of a mischievous smile reminded Melshi that he’d asked a question. He yawned and stood to stretch out the kinks. “Commandos,” he pointed out. “Can sleep just about anywhere.”
“Just about,” Cassian echoed. He tapped at the datapad and read out, “Sergeant Ruescott Melshi. Trackers unit, Pathfinders. Kay forwarded your file.” He stared at it for a few seconds before repeating under his breath, “Ruescott. You know I never actually learned your first name? How is it that I never knew your first name?”
Melshi snorted. “Sure, okay, Keef.”
Cassian chuckled softly, the sound morphing into a hiss of pain, which he covered up by reaching for the ration tray and offering it over with a bland, “Breakfast?” He grabbed a strip of dried puhlu fruit and bit half of it off; it quickly stuck in his teeth. Cassian grinned, took a protein wafer, and carefully nibbled off a corner while holding the tray to catch the crumbs, and put the rest of it back in the tray and the tray back on the cart. “It’s good to see you.”
“You too,” Melshi said in between trying to unstick the fruit with his tongue.
Any number of trite follow ups cycled through his brain and were discarded before they could reach his mouth. Wish it were under better circumstances; what were the odds?; in all the tapcafs in all the galaxy…
Instead, he said, “Am I allowed to ask questions now?”
Cassian hummed thoughtfully under his breath, shuffled the datapad off to the side, and painstakingly unfolded himself so he could lie back against the pile of pillows. Arm curled back around his middle, teeth grit against the pain. “I won’t tell General Draven on you.”
Melshi glanced between Cassian’s drawn expression, the barely-touched food, the discarded datapad, and decided that he’d probably been offered and declined more meds. “You find yourself in here a lot?”
“Nah,” Cassian flung an arm over his face, shifting about on the creaky bed trying to get comfortable. “In my line, if extraction doesn’t go smoothly there’s a decent chance you won’t extract at all.”
The image of five thousand bodies flinging themselves off the prison’s landing bays accompanied a churn of nausea in the pit of his stomach. “Did you ever hear of any more of us?” Cassian shifted his arm up to glance sidelong at him. “Anybody else who got out?”
A moment’s pause and a terse shake of his head.
“I got on a transport,” Melshi found himself picking up his quickly-abandoned tale from the middle of the night wakeup. “And the second we lifted off thought… maybe it’d been a mistake? Splitting up?”
But Cassian lowered his arm again and shook his head, adamant. “I would have had to make the call if you hadn’t beat me to it. I just walked straight into more trouble.”
“Well, it’s good to see you’re finally catching some rest.”
“I was thinking about sneaking out soon,” Cassian confessed. “Lieutenant Bilvari is due to change the dressing on the crystal snake bite in twelve minutes.” Melshi stared. “What?”
He laughed, incredulous, delighted in a twisted sort of way. “Some things don’t change, I suppose.” Cassian shrugged, unapologetic. “But I think for this escape, you’re on your own.”
x---x
The Keredians dropped them off with their one spare, scratchy poncho and enough credits to buy some replacement clothes, with apologies they didn’t have more to spare. Melshi hated taking their money on top of the ride, could tell Keef felt the same, but they didn’t have much choice without risking creating more of a scene than their attire already begged.
Except Keef didn’t use the credits to go shopping. He tossed the poncho at Melshi and stayed in his shadow as best he could as they made their way quietly from the landing pad to the nearest beach, where they ignored the signs and kiosks for buying permits and found a spot on the periphery of a large crowd of young tourists of varying species that seemed collectively too inebriated to notice or care about their presence. “Stay here,” Keef leaned over to murmur close by his ear overtop the music and the shrieks of laughter, while pressing the credits into his hand. “Don’t move, don’t run, not for anything, you hear?”
Melshi nodded, mouth dry, and watched Keef strip off his shirt and wander his way down the shoreline in the descending dusk. The pants didn’t exactly blend in, but nor did they scream escaped prisoner anymore with the uniform broken up, so he tried to swallow down the anxiety and suppress the urge to count the seconds.
Two hundred and thirty-seven seconds later, someone leaned over and offered him a drink. A hysterical laugh threatened to bubble up from inside him but he managed to choke out a gruff, “Thanks,” and took it.
Nine hundred and twelve seconds later, a figure descended by his side and it took him a moment to fully register it was Keef, returned and wearing a mismatched set of ill-fitting clothes he’d clearly foraged from a variety of inattentive swimmers. “C’mon,” he murmured, and then paused as he caught sight of the drink. “Having fun?” he asked, mischief dancing in his eyes.
“Camouflage?” Melshi suggested with a strangled laugh, leaving the full bottle sitting there on the ledge, to be reclaimed or, more likely, knocked over in the raucous crowd and forgotten.
“You’re a natural,” Keef laughed, guiding their way back up out of the recreation area and back towards the town. “Rooms are cheap near the port.”
Admittedly, Melshi hadn’t counted their credits but… “Is that the best use of what we’ve got?”
Keef threw him a glance. “Trust me?”
The sounds of crashing waves and heavy music and carefree tourists assaulted his senses. Neon signs and salt deposits collecting on window frames. The heaviness of the air, salt and grit and the remnants of smoke, the smells of food he couldn’t even begin to identify, the cracked walkways beneath his feet.
Chaos, random, a sea of unpredictable imperfections he’d so determinedly forced himself to stop picturing, stop imagining, stop longing for, that he’d even stopped dreaming about them, eventually.
“Yeah,” he choked. “Yeah, I trust you.”
x---x
Barring any unforeseen further catastrophe, the Dantooine units were on indeterminate standby while they settled and acclimated and took inventory of the gear they’d managed to haul along in their wake, while the higher-ups decided how best to incorporate them or redistribute them into the existing Massassi Group command structure.
By the time Melshi left the medical bay at Cassian’s laughing insistence – he couldn’t entirely rule out it was because Cassian feared he’d be a hindrance to his escape plans – the chaos of the bay-turned-temporary-berth had somewhat subsided, some of the folk clearly relocated to more regular quarters, and some progress made towards shifting cots into the space for those who remained. The Pathfinders still had their bedrolls spread out in their claimed corner though, and Melshi dragged his into the circle where a sizeable portion of the unit were sitting around with ration packs, apparently having decided the crush of the mess wasn’t worth it.
“Hell, Sarge,” Igban tipped his canteen towards Melshi; someone else threw a pack at him, which he barely caught before it smacked him in the face. “We were starting to take wagers. Thought the droid might’ve done you in.”
Melshi tore open the pack and grabbed a stray canteen to hydrate the polystarch. “Nah. I have it on good authority that he means well however, ah… blunt the personality reprogramming.”
“That’s a word for it,” Yarha muttered under her breath.
“Found an old friend,” Melshi elaborated before tearing into the bread. “Caught my name on a roster.”
“And stayed out all night?” Igban quirked his brows; someone whistled.
“Med bay,” he clarified drily between bites, “let’s keep our imaginations in check, shall we?” At a couple of concerned looks, he hastened to add, “Him; not me.”
He could tell by Igban’s curious glance that he pieced together readily enough the connection between the droid, the ship that had all but crash landed, the agent who had been rushed off it on a gurney, and Melshi’s rather barebones tale of his absence. But all he said, pitched low for Melshi’s ears only, was, “Intel, huh?”
Melshi shrugged, resigned.
There was no good explanation for it, nothing fair in the sense that simple word, intel, erected an impenetrable wall in between them. Or perhaps, rather, laid bare a divide that had always been there, considering Cassian had gotten himself thrown in prison under a false name. A wider divide than the meter of electrified floor separating their cells. Wider than the flights and flights of stairs that had separated them during those first chaotic, agonizing minutes, while Cassian took Kino to take the building and Melshi stayed back to help rally the men and take down the guards.
Wider than the growing distance between them with each heavy step Melshi took away from the comm hub where he’d left him, clearly distraught after the call he’d put through, with no other choice but to push forward, until a flash of regret and panic threatened to overtake him as his transport lifted off-world.
x---x
The room was small, simple, clean. Keef muttered something apologetic about one bed and cheaper by the hour that went entirely over Melshi’s head until long after they’d parted ways. It was jarring, the way the world was shut out with the latching of the door, the way it dawned that finally there was no immediate task, nowhere to run, nothing to steal, just a quiet room and Keef poking half-heartedly around, like he felt he should check the place over but couldn’t fathom what he’d possibly find.
“There’s a shower,” Keef offered absently. “Oh, and,” he rummaged around in the pockets of his oversized pants and came up with a handful of wrapped bars, “they had some food at the front.”
Melshi’s eyes tracked them as Keef tossed them on the bedside table, one of them sliding across until it nearly slipped off the other side. “Why are we here?” Keef blinked blankly over at him and he clarified. “Niamos. Why…?”
Keef let out a slow, heavy exhale and leaned against the wall separating the bedroom from the refresher unit. “I got picked up here,” he admitted at last. “Had some money stashed. More than…” he glanced around the sparse room. “I’ll check it out just before dawn, when everyone’s sleeping it off. If we’re lucky…”
“Been pretty lucky so far,” Melshi said, not in any space to grapple yet with the implications of said stash.
The corner of Keef’s mouth tugged up. “We’ll make an optimist of you yet.” Which just made him think of Kino, his short fuse, his determined denial of the truth Melshi had intuited long before Keef showed up with audacious ideas. “Hey…”
“Don’t,” Melshi put his face in his hands; felt more than heard Keef stutter to a stop halfway across the room. “Just – I just...”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s too much. I can’t. It just. It doesn’t feel real.”
A hand carefully curled around his elbow; he shuddered, but let himself be led over to sit on the edge of the bed, where he folded over himself, dragging in great, sucking breaths. “It’s real,” Keef murmured somewhere close by in front of him. Close but not touching. “You got out. You got away. You’re on Niamos, sitting on the ugliest bedspread I’ve ever laid eyes on -” a reluctant laugh tore raggedly from Melshi’s throat. “Eat something. Wash up. You’ll feel better.”
It was… easier, when instructed. It was… embarrassing, that this was the case.
Keef didn’t comment. The following half hour passed in near total silence while they took turns in the refresher, while Melshi choked down the nutrient bar that was too tough, too flavorful, too everything after so long eating tasteless gruel.
When he finished showering and reluctantly tugged the uniform pants back on, he found Keef dozing off sitting upright in the bed, propped against the wall. Melshi slid under the eyepopping blanket and laid there flat on his back, staring at a crack in the ceiling, hyperaware of muffled voices passing by outside the door, of the whir of the cooling units, of the heat of Keef’s body and the hitch in his breathing as the movement jarred him awake. “Okay?” he murmured.
Everything was okay; none of it was right. “Talk to me?” he asked quietly, because that was the one thing they’d never bothered taking away from them, nobody’s listening, and if he closed his eyes and let Keef’s voice drown out the rest of the discordant sounds, then –
He felt sick. He felt selfish. But Keef started in immediately on a quiet tale of a beautiful place, sacred river parting a lush valley, the sun glinting on the dew in the morning grass and burning off the mist rising over the hills, untold ancient stories written in every rock and root, innumerable stars burning overhead each night.
x---x
Cassian found him that evening, lurking around the big bay when the unit returned from a sitrep meeting with their own leadership and that of the Massassi trackers units. “Hey. You busy?”
“Nah, we just finished up.” Cassian wasn’t in uniform, no unit or rank evident, which was maybe because he was convalescing or maybe because he didn’t want to field any awkward deference to his officer’s status, or maybe… “Are you on the run?”
“Not this time,” he swore. “Strict orders to take it easy, let the wonders of bacta finish stitching me back together.”
Melshi eyed the back of his head dubiously as he trailed him straight back out of the bay. “Uh huh; and how long did it take you to get from medical to your division HQ?”
Cassian didn’t dignify that with a response.
They climbed a flight of stairs just past the main fighter hangar, metal and mismatched with the worn stone of the temple. “Mostly billets up here,” Cassian led the way down a short passage, only to find themselves at another stairway, this one clearly part of the original structure, the stone well-worn and cracked to show for it. “They’re working on expanding up another level. Lot of retrofitting work; not the highest priority.”
Considering a secret base was only as good and lasting as the integrity of the secret, it wasn’t exactly hard to see why. They reached the third level, and then bypassed warning signs declaring the next set of steps off-limits to climb up one more, by which point Cassian was breathing more than a little strained and trying very hard not to show it. “We’re not going all the way to the top, are we?”
“It’s sealed above here,” Cassian answered, ignoring or missing the sardonic tone. “Pretty sure they’re things nesting up there, and not all the wildlife here is exactly friendly.” Even at this level, the air was dank, moisture seeping through the cracks along the exterior wall. No billets planned this high up, Melshi would hazard. “Kay and I come up here to talk strategy.”
He pushed out a door at the end of the passage, revealing a wide viewing ledge of sorts overlooking the west side of the temple and the jungle beyond. It was good timing, the sun just sinking below the tree line, pinks and oranges painting the horizon, the shimmer of what might’ve been a river in the distance catching the hues and sparkling through the leaves.
Cassian leaned against the moss-covered wall and peered down on the bustle of activity in the landing field below. Melshi mimicked his pose a meter down. “S’a lot more impressive than Dantooine.”
Cassian snorted softly. “I’ve passed through Dantooine, most places are.” That hit like a blow to the gut, took him back to the morning prior and oblivious to Cassian being carted by on the gurney not two meters away, just another new name, new face, in a new place. Something of it must have shown on his face though when Cassian glanced down at him, because he quickly clarified, “It was early days, setting up; you probably weren’t there yet.”
He hesitated. “Is it… can I ask -?”
A bark of laughter cut his stammering short. “Draven really put the fear of something into you, huh?” Melshi pressed his lips together, peeved. “Ask. If I can’t say, I’ll tell you. I won’t lie to you.”
“Fine.” He turned to face him square on, elbow propped against the wall; Cassian mirrored him, head tilted, curious. “Cassian is your real name, right?”
Cassian opened his mouth, paused, and closed it again, face going a bit pinched. “Define real.”
“Okay,” Melshi threw up his hands in defeat, “you know what -”
“No,” Cassian reached out and grabbed him by the elbow, laughing, stopping him from turning away. “Sorry; I’m sorry. In the spirit of your meaning, yes. In the spirit of the complicated first decade of my life…”
He trailed off with a shrug, no further elaboration. Melshi didn’t ask. He glanced down at the hand still curled around his elbow, keeping him here. Gentle pressure, a quiet request, and he thought about forcing himself to turn away and walk off in the quiet Niamos dawn, thought about the frequency in those first weeks where a surreal dread would creep over him, leave him fighting back a paranoid conviction that it wasn’t real, none of it, that he was dead or dreaming or part of some new creative, sadistic torture right back in his cramped cell, and he looked at Cassian holding himself ever-so-slightly off and realized that with him laid up in medical, he’d never actually –
“Oh,” Cassian said as Melshi stepped up into his space and wrapped him in a long-overdue embrace. “Hey.” Clearly caught flat-footed, it took him a moment to reciprocate, but his hold was firm when he did. “It’s really good to see you again, Melshi.” He hummed a wordless agreement, chin tucked against Cassian’s shoulder. “You have a scar.”
He pulled away and stared, brow furrowed. “What?”
Cassian touched his thumb to the corner of Melshi’s eye, traced it back over his temple. “I woke up and saw you there and it was like…” He swallowed hard, slowly lowered his hand. “But that scar. You didn’t have that. Before.”
“Ah.” His voice came out little more than a croak. “Training accident. Not even a good story.”
Cassian made a quiet sound, contemplation or commiseration, turned and leaned back over the wall and asked, “Tell me anyway?”
x---x
He woke up in the dark, heart racing, threatening to pound out of his chest. The glow of signs and street lights shone muted through the gauzy curtains, cast shapeless shadows against the far wall. The occasional muffled voice filtered through, either outside or in the next room, he couldn’t tell, and the thought slipped in before he could stop it, before better sense could take hold, that they were on their trail, searching –
“Breathe,” Keef mumbled, thick with sleep. A hand fumbled for his in the dark, found it clenched in a fistful of the blanket. Melshi released it with effort and forced out a steady breath.
Keef wrapped a light grip around Melshi’s wrist and fell promptly back asleep.
Melshi shifted over on his side so he could better hear Keef’s breathing, and matched it until the adrenaline subsided and exhaustion dragged him back under.
x---x
When the last scattered hues of sunset slipped off beyond the horizon, the floodlights in the landing and cargo zones below snapped off all at once, leaving the perimeter of the Great Temple illuminated only by the occasional red sensor rod. “Blackout protocols,” Cassian answered his unspoken question into the sudden heavy stillness. “After Dantooine.”
“Do we know – was Dantooine…?”
Cassian hesitated a moment before shaking his head. “No. Not yet, anyway. Could be the ISB is putting eyes on it and standing back waiting to see if we move back in, but…”
“But probably we jumped at shadows and bugged out for nothing?”
He shrugged and tipped his head back to look up at the stars. “Better than the opposite.”
Melshi followed his gaze. Unfamiliar constellations, the calls of unfamiliar birds echoing eerily from the trees, the rising hums and chirps of insects emerging in the darkness, made bold by the darkening of the base, the activity pulling indoors.
“Were you part of it then?” Melshi finally voiced the question that had tugged at him since slumping in the bedside seat in the medical bay and wondering at the fortunes of the galaxy. “Part of this?” he clarified at Cassian’s frown. “Is that why…?”
The name, he didn’t elaborate aloud. The money, the eyes that saw what the rest of us had grown blind to, the sheer, stubborn audacity…
“No,” Cassian said. Not quite sharp, but something reflexive, almost defensive in his tone.
Not a lie, Melshi decided, but something less than the whole truth.
He let it go.
x---x
He was too on edge to bother counting the seconds, or the minutes, or track the growing brightness of the morning sky, the second time Keef left him behind. Left him behind with quiet assurances, the scant remaining credits, and a lingering glance over him before he pulled the door closed that Melshi couldn’t quite parse the meaning of until he turned up just over an hour later with a shopping bag containing a shirt that fit like a glove and pants that hit two inches too short.
While he was gone, Melshi sat on the edge of the bed, chewing his way unthinkingly through another one of the nutrient bars, wondering idly at the state of food these days, running reluctant calculations and considerations through his head and simultaneously harboring a shameful fantasy of staying here, in this unfamiliar place, in this utilitarian room, everything with its place and its purpose and even the food formulated with barely more intent than to sustain.
And then Keef showed up with a satchel slung over his shoulder and shopping bags in hand, and the nerves settled back into a corner of his brain while he laughed at the shirt and laughed harder at the pants, and then opened the clasp on the small case Cassian passed over and went wide-eyed at the amount of money he’d just been handed. “You save any for yourself?”
Keef just pulled a tight smile, clutched at the strap of his bag, and assured him, “I’m fine.”
He let it go. And opened his mouth to broach the topic of his reluctant calculations when Keef preempted him and blurted, “I need to make a call. I found a hub.”
So he nodded and took the out. Balled up his uniform and stuffed it in the shopping bag to throw in a bin, and walked side by side with Keef in the quiet edge-of-daybreak, the tangy seaside air, delaying the inevitable.
He bought shoes, along the way. Keef hadn’t dared try to guess at sizes.
Keef bought him a necklace, simply because he could. Clasped it around his neck and told him, “Just because it’s not necessary doesn’t mean it has no purpose.”
Two years later, he gave it to a little girl who got separated from her parents during a refugee evacuation to Restuss. Whenever she’d start to cry, he asked her to count the beads, and when they disembarked and found her parents, far more hysterical than she, he draped it around her neck and told her to be brave for them, too.
x---x
Cassian found him in the mess the next afternoon, nodded him over, and informed him, “I’ve got to make a quick trip.”
“So much for taking it easy?”
“This one will be easy,” he assured him. “In and out. Back in couple days.”
Ruefully, nonsensically, considering a variety of logistical hurdles, he offered, “Need any backup?”
Cassian smiled, eyes crinkling, leaned in, and murmured, “That would be the quickest way to ensure it stops being easy. But thanks.”
He clapped Melshi’s shoulder, and Melshi watched him leave him behind again.
He didn’t count seconds or minutes, or even hours this time. He did count supplies, as they continued the slow process of offloading the gear from Dantooine and adding it to the Yavin inventories. Counted the dwindling heads still berthed in the temporary bay, as the quartermaster’s staff continued sorting out better accommodations.
The Pathfinders were content to yield any priority, used to sleeping in less comfortable spots than this.
Melshi, truthfully, still slept better with the quiet sounds of his comrades breathing around him.
Cassian returned two evenings later, as promised, barely made it in ahead of the blackout. None the worse for wear as far as Melshi could tell when he found himself pulled unceremoniously along in his wake to the closed and darkened kitchens for some caf and a couple leftover boli biscuits he rummaged out of a cooler unit.
The biscuits were simple, bland. They’d served them that morning with kurip sausages, and he watched Cassian slather on some type of jam that smelled cloying even from across the counter they leaned over. Not even really speaking, Melshi under no delusions about what any questions of Cassian’s travel would yield by way of response.
It occurred vaguely that he hadn’t actually seen Cassian use the mess for any other purpose besides as a strategic schedule bottleneck to find Melshi amidst the chaos of the base. He wondered if that was because of his recent injuries, or was just how he was. At a distance from the regular personnel, working alone, eating alone, assuredly living alone and not bunked up in a larger shared barracks like most of the infantry units tended, like the Pathfinders would eventually land themselves, once the space had been carved out for them.
He watched Cassian absently suck some errant jam off of his thumb, and he wondered at the things that lingered, after life had broken them down and reshaped them and set them on their respective paths bound to curve and curl and taunt around one another without, he suspected, he feared, ever again truly intersecting.
He wondered at the critical flashpoint where their lives converged; the solidarity in all that they endured, the full scope of their experiences so vastly and formatively contrasted. An obstacle for Cassian, quickly overcome; a deeply engrained way of life for Melshi, and he’d long ago accepted that some of the habits brutally impressed into him weren’t worth fighting.
He watched Cassian clean up after himself, wash up, dry, replace the dishes and utensils he’d used, with a familiarity that told him clearly this was a frequent enough occurrence.
“Do you have to check in?” he broke the silence as Cassian finished wiping crumbs off the counter; a silence he suspected Cassian found more comfortable than he.
“Not tonight.” Maybe his trip truly had been a simple, low stakes, low danger errand.
“What do you do when you aren’t dashing about saving the galaxy or nursing the injuries you accumulate along the way?”
Cassian stopped and looked at him; tipped his head sideways, mulling his answer. Clicked his tongue thoughtfully and glanced around the kitchens. “This, mostly. Catch up on meals, catch up on sleep. Catch up on work.”
“Don’t you – ?”
“Not here,” Cassian cut him off. “We can talk. I need to wash up and change, but we can talk. Just. Not here.”
Cassian took him to his billet, told him to make himself at home with a sardonic glance around the barren, impersonal space, and then went to go shower in the communal refresher down the hall. Melshi shamelessly took the opportunity to glean whatever insights into Cassian Andor he could without snooping too obviously – noted the carefully stacked crates in the corner, the topmost one at least holding neatly packed gear. The workstation cobbled together out of a scavenged sheet of metal set up between two overturned bins, some kind of project so far disassembled that he couldn’t quite make out the shape of whatever it had once been.
A shelf with a stack of rations packs, empty canteens. Two datapads, a decryption unit. Med kit and a half-empty bottle of disinfectant.
Spare blaster on the shelf and another sitting on the bedside table in easy reach. In fact…
Melshi crossed from one end of the cramped room to the other and realized that from any given point, he could reach for one or the other and have it in hand in a second.
He couldn’t even begin to imagine what was inside the table drawer, and decided he probably didn’t actually want to know.
Cassian returned in short order in a pair of lounge pants and a towel slung around his shoulders, dumped his worn uniform into a basket he pulled out from under the bed, and reached for the med supplies while Melshi sat on the edge of the bed just to get out of his way.
The tell-tale signs of bacta-treated blaster burns stood out shiny and pink against Cassian’s skin, one just above a hip and the other across the back of the opposite shoulder. An angrier wound with a colorful halo of bruising decorated his bicep on the same side, and he prodded at that one first with a wince. He tore open a sterile cloth from the kit, held it against the opening of the antiseptic, tipped it, and dabbed at the injury.
“Vibroblade,” he grumbled. “One of my less preferred experiences, all told.”
Melshi eyed a creative array of marks and scars across his torso, arms, back, did not say, You didn’t use to have those, either, but did say, fondly, “You’re a mess. Here,” he stood and plucked the bacta patch out of Cassian’s hands. “You really should have medical check that one out again.”
“I’d say okay,” Cassian said as Melshi carefully pressed it over the healing wound, “but I did say I wouldn’t lie to you.” He just shook his head while Cassian applied a patch to the pink skin at his hip, and then Melshi put the last one on the healing burn at his shoulder. He turned around, pressed close into Melshi’s space, reached past him to replace the kit on the shelf, and murmured, “Thanks.”
“Yeah,” Melshi responded hoarsely.
Cassian retreated to dig through one of the stacked crates, came up with a loose sleep shirt, drew it on, and sat heavily on the edge of the bed, far enough down to one end to signal the quiet invitation for Melshi to do the same. So he did, elbows braced on his knees, listening while Cassian started softly. “I come and go. I leave sometimes for months. I wear a lot of different names and faces; sometimes, I wear an Imperial uniform.” Melshi shot him a sharp look at that, but Cassian was staring absently off into the middle-distance. “I walk around the base with an Imperial droid, I… do the work that has to be done, if these days are to ever end, but it’s not… the work that will be remembered, when that day comes to pass. I suppose…”
He trailed off with a sigh, and shuffled back so he was sitting braced against the wall. Melshi mirrored him and edged incrementally closer. Futilely trying to close this gap that was in no way physical, this divide he’d intuited long before Cassian began trying to put words to it.
“I suppose it gets harder,” Cassian continued after a beat. “To take off the mask. Or to be certain it isn’t just another one, another calculated face, when there’s no one left you knew, before your life became secrets and lies, and the assurance that you damn yourself so that others don’t have to.”
Melshi wasn’t quite sure what to say to that; instead, he reached over, rested his hand in between them, an offer. Cassian eyed it for a long moment before reaching down to take a light grip around Melshi’s wrist, fingers pressed into his pulse point. “And then you were there,” Cassian murmured, tipping his head back against the wall, eyes closed.
“Was Keef Girgo a face, or just a name?” Melshi found himself asking before he could quite think it through.
Cassian dropped his wrist, wiped his hands over his face, and muttered, “Touché.”
Melshi swore inwardly, grasped desperately across the widening chasm. “I prefer army rations over real food,” he blurted, and then gave a self-deprecating chuckle at Cassian’s dubious, side-eyed stare. “They’re efficient, have what you need, edible without being interesting. No surprises. I… sleep better in a bedroll on the ground in a muggy forest with my squad than I do in a quiet, cooled billet with nothing but my own thoughts for company.”
Some of the tension bled out of Cassian’s shoulders, and he just looked… sad, instead. Which wasn’t Melshi’s intention. He grabbed at Cassian’s hand again and just held it there, thumb stroking over his palm, and supposed, “You’ve changed. How could you not? Doesn’t make you less real. Less… you.”
A long minute passed in silence. Almost silence, the sound of Cassian’s breathing coming a little faster, until he closed his hand around Melshi’s, turned his head sideways, and stared at him, questioning, gnawing on his lip and looking more open and uncertain and vulnerable than Melshi had ever seen him since that day he’d swept into his life and sent the course of his fate careening off into unfathomable waters.
“Come here?” Cassian prompted softly, tugging gently at him.
Melshi didn’t move. “If I’m being entirely honest, I never really figured out how to do… any of this… again either.”
“Any of what?” Cassian asked, the faintest edge of teasing in his tone as he clambered up onto his knees and shuffled over to Melshi’s side, sitting back on his heels. “Hey…” A gentle finger ran over the scar by his eye again and he shuddered, let out a gasping breath. “Is this – should I – ?”
Melshi clutched at his hand to stop him from withdrawing, and turned his face to press his lips against the palm. “Let me touch you?” he asked, and then urged Cassian up and over his lap at his tentative nod.
He stroked his thumbs across sharp cheekbones, rubbed idly at the two-day-old stubble Cassian hadn’t bothered to shave, and got a strangled laugh. He tipped Cassian’s face down and pressed his lips to his forehead, his temples, his cheeks, and then down under one ear and earned a shiver for his efforts. So he switched sides, was gratified to get the same reaction. Wrapped his arms tighter about his waist, as Cassian relaxed against him, as he planted open-mouthed kisses at the join of his neck and shoulder, just above where he’d applied the bacta patch.
He slipped his hands underneath the hem of Cassian’s shirt and splayed them across his back, pressing him close, listening to the ragged pull of his breaths, feeling the quick clip of his heartbeat. He traced a ghosting fingertip down the line of his spine, and then mapped out the curve of each rib down his sides, making him squirm and whine his objection while Melshi huffed out a soft laugh against his throat. “Sorry.”
“No, you’re not,” Cassian grumbled.
“Maybe not,” Melshi agreed.
Cassian sat back and watched him, eyes roving over his face; Melshi didn’t dare guess what he read on it, his only clue a lopsided smile, the pink flush in his cheeks. After a long, thoughtful moment, Cassian brought his hands up slowly, carefully, to curl along under his jaw before he leaned in and pressed a quick, gentle kiss to the corner of his mouth. “What do you want?”
He just made a vague sound of overwhelmed confusion and let his forehead fall forward onto Cassian’s shoulder.
“Stay with me tonight?” Cassian asked soft by his ear.
Because a night was all he could offer, went unspoken. Because calculations, and obligations, and their time was not their own, neither of them. But Cassian had given himself, his time and his skills, his mind and body and soul, to the Rebellion, surrendered himself in a way Melshi had not done and, truthfully, could scarce fathom doing again.
But he thought about a panic-haunted night on Niamos, that few hours’ reprieve from simply surviving; thought about the respective courses charted through their lives since he forced himself to turn and leave Cassian behind, the way their paths had twined ever closer back into one another’s orbit ever since.
He thought about numb, cracked hands clinging to a craggy cliff face and nine hundred and twelve desperate seconds waiting for Cassian to come back, and a necklace he didn’t need but had worn every day until he found someone who needed it more.
“Tonight,” he agreed, an assurance, an absolution.
Cassian accepted either, or both, curled a hand around between the back of his head and the wall, and pressed into him, kissed him slow and deep, practically shaking with the war between caution and desperation while Melshi gasped his way along a razor’s edge between overwhelmed and overdue.
They did not pass what Melshi would consider a restful night, but certainly a content one. The bed too small to accommodate them both comfortably, any fits of sleep invariably were short-lived, cramped limbs being stretched out, shifting from one side to another, clinging hands and sweaty skin and lazily questing lips.
His internal clock judged it was probably close to morning when he woke up with Cassian’s hair tickling his nose. He shifted lower, tightened his arm around Cassian’s middle, and pressed his face in at the crook of his shoulder instead. Got a quiet hum in response, but Cassian just pressed further back, let himself be held, and fell back sleep while Melshi drifted on the edge of consciousness, lulled by the rhythm of Cassian’s breaths.
He snapped back into awareness when Cassian turned over in his arms some time later, found his lips in the dark for one last, languid kiss, and murmured, “S’dawn, soon. Come up top with me?”
They got dressed in the faint glow of the lamp on the worktable. Quietly, like if they turned on the lights, talked too loudly, acknowledged the day ahead, it would shatter this suspended moment, this chasm bridged and the clock reset, or simply another flashpoint, the twisting and turning fortunes of their fates bound to converge and ricochet with proportional force, and they had only to wait for the next violent collision to see how it would manifest. A month or a night, grappling desperately at a cliff face or leaning on the overlook ledge, shoulder to shoulder, staring out on the jungle below.
There was no view of the impending sunrise, from this side of the temple. But the planet loomed over the western sky, casting an eerie gleam over the trees, over the ruins of the temple rising up some kilometers distant. A red haze dueling with the slowly brightening dawn, even as the gas giant slipped further and further down over the horizon, yielding to the daybreak with the first calls of the kitehawks.
When the treetops started to grow hazy with the morning mist as the sun sent the first rays spilling past the temple and burning off the night dew accumulated in the leaves, Cassian sighed. Their time quickly winding down.
Melshi clung stubbornly, jealously at the ledge for just a few seconds longer. “I asked you before, if you were already part of the Rebellion, when…” Cassian glanced over at him and nodded, waiting. “That night on Niamos – I couldn’t calm down. You told me about a place. The rocks and the river and the mists.”
Something almost wary set in over Cassian’s face.
Melshi clung harder, footing suddenly tenuous. “That night we came up here… I thought maybe it was here somewhere.”
“Oh.” Cassian frowned, and turned his face back out over the view, looked down at the first hints of activity down in the landing zone. “No.”
“What was it? The place you told me about?”
He knew the question was a misstep even before he could see Cassian visibly working through how to answer it. After a few seconds, Cassian straightened, stepped back from the ledge, and started fixing up the fastenings on his uniform jacket. “Nowhere,” he answered, and the moment shattered, rebounded, with the lie. “I made it up.”
Melshi nodded and stayed where he was, elbows braced on the ledge.
“I have to go report in.”
“I’ll come down soon.” Cassian hesitated, like he wanted to say something else, or maybe remind Melshi the level was technically off-limits, or – “It’s okay,” Melshi glanced back and nodded. Acknowledged; absolved. “I’ll be right behind you.”
One more tentative nod, and Cassian turned and walked away.
Melshi gripped the ledge in the early dawn and let him go.