But One of Many

by Face_of_Poe

Summary:

“You,” she corrects. “What if I want to leave you?”

“Oh.” His eyes that have been wandering around the town square where they’re sitting – it’s not even a square, she doesn’t know why they call it that – slide around to fix on her as his face settles into a forced evenness as he weighs this new and unforeseen complication. Why would you do that? she imagines him asking or, where would you possibly go? or stop wasting time. “Then you leave, I guess.”

“You won’t stop me?”

“I’d hope you’d be smart about it.”

“You won’t hunt me down and bring me back?”

Back where? she imagines him retorting, and feels foolish for even asking. “What would be the use of that?” he grunts instead.

Notes:

• For Asher_2179.

gifting to Asher_2179 whose fabulous story I'd wait with you got my muse turning to finally be brave enough to tackle some backstory ideas for these two. They're so tragic and complicated gah. Anyway, everyone go read that.

Chapter 1

When I tell you to move – you move.  

“What if I want to leave?”

It’s academic, theoretical. Fantasy. If she wanted to die, she wouldn’t have stowed away. Taken his hand. Backed his play, played her part, chased after him and demanded answers. Leaving implies a concept of permanence, something to be abandoned.

The only constants in their lives are the names Luthen and Kleya. Even those feel shaky still, like if she woke up tomorrow and declared no, that didn’t quite suit her fancy, she’d rather be Vrika or Nuali or Rew, he would roll his eyes and spend the day weighing the relative merits of each option presented and by nightfall tell her to pick but it’s final this time.

“Leave,” he echoes. “What does that mean, leave? Leave this planet? We aren’t finished yet.”

She wonders if he realizes he does that. Asks for clarification, gives it himself, and answers the question that’s easiest, whether it’s what she intended or not.

It’s grating. She’s not a child. “You,” she corrects. “What if I want to leave you?”

“Oh.” His eyes that have been wandering around the town square where they’re sitting – it’s not even a square, she doesn’t know why they call it that – slide around to fix on her as his face settles into a forced evenness as he weighs this new and unforeseen complication. Why would you do that? she imagines him asking or, where would you possibly go? or stop wasting time. “Then you leave, I guess.”

“You won’t stop me?”

“I’d hope you’d be smart about it.”

“You won’t hunt me down and bring me back?”

Back where? she imagines him retorting, and feels foolish for even asking. “What would be the use of that?” he grunts instead.

“Would you worry about me?”

He blinks once and looks away. “Stop wasting time.”

~

We made our choice, he tells her the day it’s finally real, the day he offers her rage a violent outlet and she feels only hollow disconnect where she expected gleeful satisfaction, and then they leave together.

~

I

Their first ship can hardly be called that. It’s a project, a waste of time, and he grows snappish at her criticism as they roam the scrapyard on Ord Mantell. “It’s a good frame. Whatever we can’t salvage and do ourselves, we’ll still save plenty against the cost of something new.”

“What about time?” she demands, stomping after him through mountains of components each as unknowable and useless to her as the last. “Isn’t our time worth the difference?”

“You’re thinking small,” he rebukes, stopping so abruptly she nearly barrels into the back of him. “You’re thinking with your hate.”

Her hate isn’t small, though, and today a greater share of it than usual is reserved for him. They made their choice, back on Naboo, and now he’s going to make her spend weeks foraging for parts and criticizing her work and complaining about re-doing it anyway.

“They ruined your life in a single day and you want it to be that easy to ruin theirs, but it’s not, and so we put in the legwork and learn as we go until it all pulls together into something useful.”

“Bombs are useful.”

The short laugh he barks is pitying, mocking. “That? That, Kleya, was a statement. The only bomb that would ever be truly useful is if we could plant one right under Palpatine’s wrinkled old ass. Now move,” he barks, and turns and leads her deeper into the scrapyard where other pathetic foragers like them haven’t wandered so much to pick things over.

Kleya moves, and thinks about statements.

That night, she leaves.

 

They’re camped out in the ship that’s still sitting right in the same cluttered junk lot where they’d bought it. It’s been a long time since they slept properly rough, but this isn’t that exactly, sleeping rolls on the unforgiving metal deck, the sounds of nature swapped for the occasional raucous burst of noise from the old city bordering the lot.

She tells herself Luthen’s asleep, when she extracts herself from her bedroll and tucks her blaster in her pocket and her boots under her arm. When she pads on silent footsteps to where his cloak is draped over the one remaining seat in the cockpit, and that not even the pilot’s, when she shoves her hand in the inner pocket and grabs a random fistful of credits while trying not to let them clink against each other too much.

When she steps through the opening where the ship is missing a hatch and hops down onto the dusty ground a meter below.

She tells herself he’s asleep as she leaves because it’s easier than all of the complicated conflict that comes with realizing he wasn’t lying about letting her go.

 

Kleya spends six hours roaming the seedy parts of the city with her eyes wide and wary and her hand never straying far from her weapon. She gets a greasy meal at a tapcaf that apparently never closes and hosts what seems to be a never-ending holo card game, players constantly coming and going and laughing and brawling through the time she spends eating and watching.

She orders a drink, just to see if the skeptical bartender will give it to her. He does, eventually, with a resigned shrug. She takes it back to her table, takes one sip, and pours the rest into a nearby potted plant.

After leaving the tapcaf, she thinks about getting a room for the rest of the night, but doesn’t like the looks of the beings lurking around the nearby hostels. She thinks about returning to the lot, but two hours doesn’t seem like much of a statement. In the end, she decides to take the public shuttle to the spaceport, but it only comes through twice an hour at this time of night, and so by the time she does that and wanders and compares fares and tries to conjure fantasies of one place or another and comes up with nothing except families on café terraces and shocked murmurs with the push of a button –

It's six hours before she makes her way back to the ship, or the scrap that aspires to be a ship, just as the sun is cresting the horizon. Luthen’s standing outside the would-be hatch, scowling vaguely off into the middle-distance until he catches sight of her and goes back to hammering out a dent in the hull.

Satisfied? she imagines him mocking, or, stop wasting time, or where’s my money? “You’re in charge of comms,” he grunts instead once she’s in ear-shot, and that’s that, it never happened, the only evidence of the whole affair her exhaustion through the day after her sleepless night.

Kleya settles in with a tech manual loaded on a datapad and dedicates herself to learning comms systems as well as the best experts out there.

 

Later on, Luthen sits by her side where the ship’s hatch ought to be and holds out a gem that has no business in a place like this. She doesn’t know what it is, except that it’s unlike anything else they’ve bought and sold, and she has no idea where it came from, where he’s kept it hidden or why. “Take this,” he tells her, and she reaches out and closes her hand around the chain of the necklace it’s mounted on.

“What is it?” she asks, holding it up in front of her eyes to watch the way the light plays through it where the brightness of the blue bleeds out and fades away.

“Kuati sky stone. Kyber.”

Kyber she knows but only by reputation. It’s rare and getting rarer, to hear the dealers lament. Everyone wants kyber; Luthen’s never explained quite why, what the knowing looks askance convey, what seed of evil from which all the other evil has sprouted is wrapped up in the fascination of the market that thrives under the galaxy’s plunder.

“What is it?” she repeats.

“An escape pod,” he says, and doesn’t look over at her sharp glance. “I’d have said twenty thousand a few years ago; thirty at least today, maybe more.”

She came back; she doesn’t want it. It feels like pity, or charity, or doubt, except she has no choice but to swallow the humiliation because she gave him reason to doubt, didn’t she? “So,” she remarks delicately as she wraps the chain around the crystal and tucks the thing in the pocket at the inside of her boot (the mirrored pocket in the other boot holds her knife), “it was the difference between this,” she raps her knuckles against the metal decking with a clang, “or something nice?”

Luthen lets out a sharp, abortive laugh, climbs to his feet, and gets back to work.

~

II

The second time she leaves is not a statement.

Kleya has seen Luthen kill. Not in her settlement, not him personally, that she knows, though she does not doubt that he did and she can never forget that. But she’s seen him kill from afar, detonator triggered from a safe distance in a crowded café; she’s seen him kill up close, desperate thieves stumbled upon their encampment in the early days. A scout wandered too close to a rendezvous point with a resistance group they’d been circling. A lone guard left tending a local armory.

There is a cost to what they do, this life they lead, this choice they’ve made, and not just the stain on their own souls and the semblance of normal they’ve sacrificed. Collateral damage. Provocation and collective retribution. Entire cities punished for the crimes of outsiders who are already gone by the time the Empire coordinates a response.

She hasn’t yet seen him execute an ally, a contact they’ve made on the ground, for the crime of knowing too much.

She lets Luthen steer her back to the ship on numb feet, thinks about all that she knows, and finds herself abruptly quite cognizant of the knife in one boot and the kyber necklace in the other.

They’re on a schedule – there’s an auction he wants to attend on Commenor, the closest they’ve yet maneuvered in towards the Core, and they need time to scout it out and prepare, make themselves presentable.

Luthen detours to collect a supply shipment that’s been left with the dock managers.

Kleya continues towards their refurbished little freighter and carries on right past and out another gate, feeling the weight of her own expendability bearing down.

 

There are enough credits in her pocket to get a room for the night without resorting to hasty deals for the kyber. So she gets a room near the port – even if he followed her there are enough hotels in the surrounding blocks he’d be at a loss where to start – and uses the public directory access terminal in the room to scout out collectors, using all the tricks he’s taught her to discount the likely frauds.

Then she lays back on the bed, turns her head to stare at the chrono on the table, idly wishes she’d taken two minutes to collect a change of clothes or two from the ship before walking off, and counts down the minutes until their scheduled departure.

An hour passes, and two – each one takes Luthen farther away, or leaves him swearing and recalculating how long to tolerate her tantrum until he has no chance to make the auction. Another hour and she starts mentally tabulating the docking fee penalties for overstaying their berth.

Another hour and she wonders if anyone’s yet found the body they left in an abandoned warehouse in the old factory district.

She stops staring at the time after that and stares at the ceiling instead, working up a plan for the morning to circle ‘round to the most promising options to sell the kyber, figure out what she could get for it, and start over from there.

 

When Kleya wakes up, she wakes all at once with the first glint of sun through the sheer curtains. She washes up, feeling gross in the same clothes as the day before, and then thinks back on those long, brutal, early months with Luthen and wonders when she grew so spoiled. One boot and then the other, knife tucked in the side and the kyber brought up and draped around her neck, tucked under her cloak. Blaster in her pocket, remaining credits in the other.

She steps out of the hotel lobby and glances right, towards the commerce district where she’s mentally mapped out the antiquities dealers who might offer a fair price for the Kuati sky stone.

She turns left and makes her way back to the public dock, where the little freighter they’d pieced back together bit by bit with their own hands and wits and sweat – and some blood, if she’s being honest – is still sitting where she left it. Abandoned it, forsook it.

Where she left him.

The hatch is open; she steps aboard and brings her hands to her temples, looks down to her feet and sucks in three slow breaths. Reaches blindly for the pad to seal it up and steps around to the cockpit where she settles herself in the co-pilot’s seat and begins drawing the harness over her shoulders.

Luthen looks at her until she looks at him, clears his throat roughly, and begins the startup sequence.

“Why didn’t you leave?” she bites.

Why did you come back? she imagines him challenging in turn, but there’s no answer for a long time. Not until they’re in hyperspace, she doesn’t even know where, too late for Commenor. She settles back to stare out the viewport and draws the kyber from around her neck, turns it over in her hands, twines the chain around her fingers and brushes her thumb along the irregular shape of it.

“It’s for you, Kleya,” he murmurs at last; she thinks he means the stone, at first. “All of it. What do I fight for if I don’t fight for you?”

“You said I could leave,” she retorts, and she’s angry, she’s so angry and not sure what for.

He hums his agreement, but points out, “I never said I could,” and she shoves the crystal in her boot and tears out of her harness and stomps back to the cramped little cabin they share and shuts herself in for the duration of the journey.

~

III

The third time she leaves she knows exactly why. It’s the permanence of it, the space they buy for an obscene pile of credits near the Federal District, a storefront in a shopping plaza frequented by the monied elite who have thrived these past years under the Imperial oppression of anyone or anything that doesn’t look like them, act like them, think like them, anyone that dares try to say no.

They have a small network cobbled together of resistance cells, each with their own particular grievances and at desperate philosophical odds, but useful in their ways even if just as another thorn in the Empire’s side. They have a foot in the door with the Empire’s new intelligence agency, and she’s long numbed the dread at the strings they’ll undoubtedly pull, the sacrifices they’ll make, to nudge his career up the ladder until it pays off into something useful.

They have the same ship they’d rebuilt together and, “I suppose it won’t do for long here,” Luthen was forced to admit the first time they flew in and took in the luxury speeders and sleek personal yachts occupying the skylanes. They have a pile of valuables to establish a starter storefront, and a list of connections forged across the galaxy these past five years, buyers and sellers and informants of one sort or another.

They have an empty shop with a landing berth ‘round the back and attached quarters because even the average Coruscant top-sider would struggle to afford both the office and the home, but it is the topside and so it’s nice, it’s luxury despite the economy of space.

She takes in the state-of-the-art cooking and cleaning units in the kitchenette. The proper water shower. The control panel in the sitting room that brings up the holo display and controls the broadcast selection, or turns the display to a choice of nature scenes, mountains and oceans and woodland streams, and she hates it, she hates this place and what it has done to itself and at what cost.

They have ident cards with full names and fabricated histories, they have closets full of fine clothes and more packed away on the ship. They have money and status, neighbors who drop by to spy on the new establishment and attempt to discern if they’ll be competition or not, they have –

Home.

They have a place at last to leave.

So she leaves it.

She takes a few hundred credits and trades her fine Coruscant wear for a nondescript field jacket and the same scuffed boots that have seen grease and mud and blood on dozens of worlds by now.

For three days, she loses herself in the undercity. It’s an awful place without having to go too deep, look too hard. She struggles to understand it at first, what is the sensation clawing at her, the source of the dread settled low in her gut. It’s not the eyes tracking her – she knows how to handle the attention by now, whatever its intent. It’s not even, she doesn’t think, the poverty or the casual violence, the eyes that turn awkwardly away, beings long accustomed to minding their own business.

She finds a bite and a drink and spends a night at a crumbling motel a thousand levels down, wakes up the next day – day is relative – and pushes deeper.

Someone propositions her; another tries to sell her death sticks; a third, spice of some variety or other that’s clearly supposed to impress. She’s never heard of it. It’s cold and suffocating, too deep for the sun to penetrate, a curious blend of claustrophobic and lonely, crowds of hidden faces wrapped in scarves or lost behind hoods, turned away as if the only dignity to be offered down here is simply to be found in not looking. Maybe she should have accepted the spice; or the proposition.

She doesn’t stop to sleep that night and wanders deeper still. The forgotten levels, largely unlabeled, the infrastructure crumbling. Every third public lift still functional, air scrubbers failing. Whole block snuffed it in their sleep on 2112, someone exclaims with a morbid sort of fascination that’s wholly devoid of outrage. Toxic air in a sunless city – simply the status quo.

She reaches what seems to be generally regarded as the deepest anyone can safely go, and finds a lake. They’re still more than a thousand levels from the surface, and there’s a lake somehow, inky black and gleaming, reflecting starlight in the form of neon signage and speeders moving about through the crowded empty nothing of this forgotten place.

On the third day, she realizes she hasn’t seen any sign of the Empire since her initial descent.

It doesn’t exist here. It doesn’t have to.

This place was forgotten and left for dead a long time ago.

 

Kleya begins the long climb up out of the dark and goes home.

Home.

The place smells sharply of cleaning agents and Luthen’s hands are dry and cracked, too long sat polishing up their wares and never mind that they’ll just do it all over again once the place is redesigned and ready for business. “You look awful,” she says. He grunts. She goes to the ship and curls up in the familiar space of the cramped little cabin to pass out.

Home.

The nightmares start soon after that.

~

IV

“Kleya.” His voice is foggy and distant, like she’s hearing it crackling across a staticky radio. “Kleya, wake up.”

She struggles towards consciousness. Luthen doesn’t make a habit of intruding into her room – except no, she’s curled over the side of the armchair while the holo display cycles through random scenery. Her blurry vision resolves in time to see a sweeping pan of the city of Theed and she laughs, or tries to, and ends up lolling forward into Luthen’s arms.

He’s not supposed to be here, she thinks. Or maybe she’s forgotten the day, lost track of time. He was due to meet with a contact, he was –

“Kleya. I need you to wake up.”

Leave me alone, she wants to say, let me sleep. “Mm,” she manages, eyelids heavy, Luthen swimming in and out of focus. He pushes her back and relief floods her, until arms go around her shoulders and under her knees and the room starts spinning as he hoists her up into the air. Indignation burns bright and scatters apart just as quick, forgotten, caught in the drowsy undertow of the beloved serum that drives the dreams away and offers the sweet reprieve of empty nothing.

That makes it all stop.

 

She knows he’s there before she opens her eyes. Brooding. Scowling. Mad.

She opens her eyes and only managed one of three. Brooding, staring down at the tiny vial in his broad palm, eyes drawn and tired and pained. “I didn’t know you were struggling so much,” he murmurs at the first sign of consciousness. “What is it?”

Not much point lying. “Reveril. Sleep serum. Nightmares.”

Perfunctory. Answered and explained. Her business and hers alone.

“No more,” he states, so soft she thinks at first she misheard him. “No,” he counters when she shoves up onto her elbow, outrage forming up on her lips. “I mean it. No more. It’s difficult to numb the mind; it fights back. And you’ll find yourself started down a road you don’t want to travel. One you can’t afford to travel.”

Kleya glares; Luthen holds her eyes steady, resolved. “You said I could leave,” she reminds him, cruel and biting.

I lie; get used to it, she imagines him retorting. “Not this time,” he shakes his head. “Not like this.” They hover there frozen, glaring – she’s glaring, rather, he’s just being sad – until he grunts in vague dissatisfaction, braces his hands on his knees and climbs to his feet.

In the doorway, he pauses and turns, catches her gaze and says quietly, “Move.”

Once he’s gone, she sits up and throws her legs over the edge of the bed, sits with her elbows braced on her knees and her head in her hands trembling, angry, frightened. The grasping hands of the half-forgotten dead reaching for her, breaking through the bloody mud to stop her while she runs, survival all well and good until you’re forced to live and live with what it costs.

A gallery full of plundered pretty things, a home built atop a living tomb.

 

Neither of them get much sleep for the next few weeks. Luthen keeps the chair by her bed, and runs a cool cloth over her forehead when the nightmares leave her thrashing and sweating and gasping. Strokes a hand through her hair when she jolts awake with a bitten back scream or tears glistening on her cheeks.

They don’t speak of it during the day while they work.

On the third consecutive morning that she wakes alone because she slept through a peaceful night, Kleya retrieves the spare vial she tucked away in her walk-away pack for the Fondor and the kyber from the boots where they’ve been sitting unused at the bottom of her wardrobe since her three-day trek through the undercity.

She wraps the sky stone in its chain, pads softly into the living area where Luthen is drinking caf at the kitchenette counter, places both the gem and the serum vial gently down. He lays his hand over them and pulls them closer, before turning a softly scrutinizing gaze on her, a moment’s suspended uncertainty.

“You should sell that already,” she says.

“When the time is right.” She scoffs; he looks away to hide the edge of the smile that threatens to quirk his lips. “Get dressed. There’s a lot to do.”

Isn’t there always?

She turns away, walks away, forgets the escape he offered and the one she’d seized, and tells him, “I’ll get started on comms.”

Chapter 2

Summary:

She took his hand and followed him, backed his play and played her part, left and came back again and again until she found the limit of his word. They fight together, and they’ll win together or die together, one way or another, of that she is quite certain.

The Cause is what matters, and so she needs him alive. Everything else is negotiable.

 

“This isn’t negotiable,” she breathes barely a day later, standing in the safehouse kitchen opposite the island from Luthen, eyes skirting constantly past his shoulder to the hunched and weary figure sitting at the table in whatever set of oversized clothes left behind in the place, hair still damp from a sanisteam and untouched rations kit sitting in front of him.

He went out to find and kill Cassian Andor, and now he’s gone and brought him home, clothed and washed and fed him like some pathetic stray.

It’s not the bitter echo of mirrored experience that rankles so, she tells herself.

Notes:

me finishing chapter 1: this might get a cassian chapter if it can figure out what it wants to be

me after a hilarious number of starts and stops and discarded words: full disclosure I'm not sure this ever did figure that out LOL but it finally reached the end without a re-start and I need to stop staring at it.

 

part 4 carries through season 2 and Rogue One so, obligatory warnings therein.

By the time she’s talking down Luthen’s nerves and filing away his fretting, I wasn’t careful, to deal with later if there’s something needs dealing, Kleya understands that the bombs that made it real, sitting in a café terrace on Naboo – that wasn’t even a statement so much as a whisper.

Aldhani is a statement. All that’s left now is finding out who will have the final word.

 

By the time they receive the debrief message from Vel through a very delicate series of channels and encryptions, Cinta’s already pinged a pulse code to signal the first stage of her extraction complete. They need to know where they stand with the others, if the whole affair has worn them down and scared them off or if they’re more committed than ever.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. “Taramyn and Gorn were lost on-site,” she relays to Luthen’s back where he’s standing with his palms braced against the work counter, listening and waiting. “Nemik wounded in the escape, died with the doctor. Skeen –”

She cuts off and pauses there, reading it again, and a third time, to make sure she understands it. Her silence stirs Luthen, who straightens and turns, waiting.

“Andor killed him, he…”

“Kleya?”

A fourth time doesn’t particularly soothe her unease. “Andor – Clem,” she amends, “claimed Skeen offered him to take the money and leave Vel on Frezno. Took his fee, bought,” bought, she shakes her head, “the doctor’s ship, and left item to return to mutual friend.” Luthen’s expression is guarded, wary, when she looks up. “Item. What item, what does that mean?” His eyes slide sideways while he works out a response. "What did you do?"

 

Luthen doesn’t believe her, but it’s not that he gave the sky stone to a stranger in some half-cocked, desperate bid to garner faith or manipulate trust or something in between, it’s that he’s kept it all this time at all and kept it on his person.

There’s no excuse for it save sentiment, and sentiment has no place in this. He should have sold it a long time ago, at any number of moments when funds were tight.

“He came through,” Luthen points out, but even as he says it he knows it’s not enough. Knows what needs doing. He gave Andor too much, offered up too much of himself. This was no quick, no-questions-asked buy from one of their black market fences scattered about the galaxy, he had to coax him, convince him, he gave him a clue to his public face and took him on the Fondor.

Cassian Andor came through but he knows too much, and it’s been a long time since Kleya settled her conflict over doing what needs done.

 

I

 

“You’re slipping!” Kleya accuses Luthen even before the full scope of their calamity has been laid bare by Lonni’s summons. His nerves before the raid were one thing but this reckless desperation, as he argues to take the call from Ferrix, is precisely what got them into the mess.

It bought them Aldhani, but what’s the use of it if it only brings everything they’ve built these long years crashing down in the fallout. Finding Andor was important as a preemptive measure – learning that the situation on Ferrix has escalated to an ISB inquisition, that they’ve connected the timing to Aldhani, that they’ve finally crossed that threshold of imagination that a figure like Luthen exists at the center of a scattered web – they’ve got to find him first. Everything depends upon it.

She tells herself it’s just that – he’s slipping – that drives her nerves in turn, has her pleading to take the meet with Lonni in his stead.

That has her desperately urging, “You should come home,” when his compounding frustrations and anxieties leave him determined to do more, do anything, to go stand spectator to the ISB's trap that's really about finding him, and there’s only so much tempting fate this whole sorry exercise will tolerate, of that she’s quite certain.

They won Aldhani; the Empire replied with the PORD; it all hinges on Ferrix and Andor, waiting to see which of them should have the last word after all.

When the signal cuts in the middle of their conversation, Kleya prepares. Walk-away pack sitting ready by the rear exit from the ship berth. Bottle of acid in ready reach of her left hand, blaster in reach of the other, knife in her boot.

It’s not the first time they’ve come to this. Moments of uncertainty, contacts gone off the grid in suspicious circumstances. A strike team once landed on the other side of the plaza, absurdly, to tend to a ship malfunction. They’d spent the entire first month after Lonni’s elevation to supervisor snappish and on-edge, Fondor packed and ready to go. Nights spent in the safehouse two districts away after close calls, waiting to make sure no trail had been left for the Empire to follow.

It isn’t terribly long, all things considered, before she receives the pulse code from Luthen, all-clear. But he does not send word he’s coming home, and he doesn’t comm properly, which could mean he’s still in a tense situation but more likely means he just doesn’t want the argument when he tells her he’s ignoring her pleas and going to Ferrix anyway.

He’s slipping, she frets, because it’s easier than sentiment. Or maybe it’s all the same and always has been, Luthen the man wholly intertwined with the promise he’s sold her, bring them down or die trying. She can’t do it alone, and the only thing that eases her mind in admitting it is the knowledge that he’d say the same.

She took his hand and followed him, backed his play and played her part, left and came back again and again until she found the limit of his word. They fight together, and they’ll win together or die together, one way or another, of that she is quite certain.

The Cause is what matters, and so she needs him alive. Everything else is negotiable.

 

“This isn’t negotiable,” she breathes barely a day later, standing in the safehouse kitchen opposite the island from Luthen, eyes skirting constantly past his shoulder to the hunched and weary figure sitting at the table in whatever set of oversized clothes left behind in the place, hair still damp from a sanisteam and untouched rations kit sitting in front of him.

He went out to find and kill Cassian Andor, and now he’s gone and brought him home, clothed and washed and fed him like some pathetic stray.

It’s not the bitter echo of mirrored experience that rankles so, she tells herself. It’s the insanity, beyond slipping, it’s a ticking detonator, a matter of time, the ISB knows his name and his face and his connection to Luthen and the only use of bringing him to Coruscant should be dumping his body on their doorstep to state their final word loud and clear.

“He followed you to save his own skin,” she grits out. “He did it the first time you left Ferrix and he did it again, and whatever he’s said to convince you not to pull the trigger –”

But Luthen cuts her off in a gravelly rumble, “I didn’t find him, he came to me. When I went to evac he was waiting. Stowed away on the ship.”

It’s not the bitter echo, she tells herself as she braces her elbows on the counter and puts her head in her hands, finally tears her eyes away from their unhappy guest, of a sort, sitting there listening while she unsubtly debates his fate.

There’s a scraping sound of Andor’s chair shifting before, “Can I say something?” 

“No,” Luthen grunts, “Eat.” She looks up in time to catch the peeved scowl thrown at Luthen’s back and Andor shoving the pack further across the table in petulant protest. Except –

“No,” Kleya echoes, except she’s contradicting Luthen, and she circles around and yanks out the seat opposite and lowers herself down in front of their errant thief. “Say it.”

Luthen turns and leans against the counter, arms crossed, frowning. Andor glances between them once before leaning in, dark, tired eyes roving over her face with a shrewd sort of curiosity. Still trying to decide who they are, what they are, who and what they are to one another, as if any such thing is any of his concern.

“I had every chance to kill Vel and take the money,” he murmurs. “I had every chance to kill him when I hid on the ship.” She throws a look at Luthen, who shrugs a shoulder in irritated concession of the point. “I had every chance to leave Ferrix with friends, and disappear, and I chose this instead.”

“It’s not enough.”

“Why?”

“Because you left,” she snarls.

Andor sits with that for a long moment; shoots another wary look around at an impassive and watchful Luthen before his tongue darts out to nervously wet his lips and he asks, “Does it count for nothing that I came back?”

Luthen looks away, too quickly, down at his feet with a slow and forcibly steady exhale, and Kleya understands.

Maybe it is the bitter echo after all.

 

Luthen goes to get in enough supplies to keep him parked in the box that is the safehouse while things cool down – “It has good views,” Luthen defends to Andor’s nonplussed look – while Kleya does what she can to satisfy her unease.

It’s not much. He’s tired and snappish and anxious which eventually she decides is cover for how desperately aggrieved he is for his home, his mother, his people evacuated and no telling if they made it to safety. A horror that’s only just seeming to dawn for the prison he’s claimed to escape, and she’ll need to run that down and verify what she can, five thousand men and the Empire strangely quiet on the breach.

He's a walking knot of conflict and contradiction and he has too much yet to lose. The unsettling thing is that she’s not altogether certain Luthen realized that when he first asked Caleen for a meet and months later went rushing to make the sale. A thief, a scammer, a business arrangement.

Well, Cassian Andor snuck past the Imperial line and Luthen alike in the midst of his mother’s funeral to pull his business arrangement out of the ISB’s hands. “We’ll be needing to debrief Bix,” Luthen supposes when he returns.

Andor – in all of his conflict and contradiction – perks up at the suggestion they’ll need to be found, while his eyes narrow in suspicion at the suggestion it’s any of Luthen’s concern. “I’ll have to think about that.”

Later, it will occur to Kleya that this moment, so early on, Andor in all of his conflict and contradiction while she and Luthen hover at unusually polar odds themselves over his presence, over the fact that he’s still breathing at all, will be the axis around which the whole of it turns.

 

II

 

There comes a time, fleeting, when Kleya imagines that, after all these long years, Cassian Andor might take a third seat at their table; might drag up a chair and carve out a space, rather, a space neither of them ever saw in need of filling but feels somehow earned.

A strange trust, and ill-defined intimacy, that comes from their machinations laid so brutally bare. In the offer he handed Luthen aboard the Fondor, when he could have saved his own skin and run; in the open deliberation of his life that ensued, and the way Kleya wasn’t especially subtle about the fact that she only moved to avoid reaching the point at which Luthen would reluctantly tell her to.

Few assets they engage ever come so close as to be made privy to their names, let alone the gallery, to their public faces. Cassian knows it all within a month.

It’s a strange time, in the wake of Ferrix. Something like anticlimax, except Cassian demonstrates early on that he won’t be handled easily, doesn’t bother to hide the evidence that he’s venturing out to the nearby plaza for peezos and nog when Kleya returns three days after his arrival with some more clothes, gear, the Bryar he’d given Luthen, a forged ident chip.

“At least he came back,” Luthen supposes when she reports it, with enough absent distraction he must have known he’d never sit still anyway.

It’s something like anticlimax, receiving regular reports from Vel and Cinta about the security presence in Morlana looking for him, who they’ve tucked away right here in the heart of the Empire, looking for Bix who Cassian hopes made it to a safe place on Gangi Moon and has no way to verify until they decide the ISB has conceded defeat and can risk letting him go look.

“Go with him,” Luthen tells her. “Keep him focused.”

She goes, and they find Cassian’s four refugees and a powered-down droid jammed into a tiny one-bedroom apartment in a sprawling port hub residential block under the attentive care of the older woman’s older brother.

Kleya hovers in their midst and endures their wary stares as she declines to offer a name or their offers of refreshment or a seat in turn. She listens to the vicious outburst from the bedroom when Cassian goes to greet Bix and watches Salman Paak’s boy pull his hood up over his tousled head like it’ll tune out the chaos around him while he sits at a cluttered table and works on what might be a part for the droid.

She hovers there in this untenable place in the wake of the scattered wreckage of a meeting on Jondora, and doesn’t look away when Bix twitches and trembles and breaks down mid-recall, or where she stops and stares in still silence, save the way her fingers drum frantically at the tabletop like she’s tapping out fractal code.

She doesn’t look away when Paak’s boy refuses Cassian’s attempts to engage him, endures the lips pressed to the top of his head, and goes back to his work without a word; doesn’t look away when Cassian disappears and Brasso follows and he comes back with wild, red eyes and new resolve in the set of his jaw.

She doesn’t look away. Life shows what he stands to lose, and this is what it costs.

 

When they get back to Coruscant, it’s late in the Federal District, and she decides – likely with almost as little thought into it as Luthen put into sparing him – to go straight to the gallery. “Come,” she tells Cassian, who has been hiding away in the cabin, and hears his footsteps falter behind her as the ramp lowers, not onto one of the platforms opposite the residential tower, but into the enclosed berth behind the shop.

“Kleya?” Luthen emerges from the connected quarters at the same moment she leads Cassian through into the workshop, and there’s a moment where he doesn’t know where to look, Luthen with his clothes and his wig, or the workshop chock full of fussy tools and extra inventory. For a moment, it wipes the melancholy from his face as he bites back a sound of surprise and turns on the spot. “I take it things went very well or very poorly.”

Both; neither. Mission success, his people alive, and not much else to recommend. They’ll need to figure out what to do with the lot of them, because they can’t stay in Morlana and this is the vulnerability Luthen accepted when he declined to take the shot and so they’ll have to manage it, but not tonight.

They’ll need to press Lonni on this Gorst character, but that conversation isn’t for Cassian’s ears.

“Not a night for drinking alone,” is what she settles on.

Back in the flat, Luthen pours them a drink apiece, puts away the bottle, and settles in to hear the report.

 

“What’s real?” Cassian asks the next morning, blinking blearily awake from the pathetic ball he’s curled himself into on the armchair in the living space with all the ease of someone long-accustomed to seizing what precious moments of shuteye were possible.

Kleya hums as she prepares her tea, and supposes, “That’s the wrong question.” The hair, the attendant garb, the very way she moves, he drinks it all in, enthralled. “The right one is how much will you risk if you don’t do as you’re told, and how quickly I’ll kill you for it.” A soft noise slips past his lips, on its way to a laugh before he catches himself and decides she’s not lying. “Stay here.”

He didn’t see them land, but he’s looked out the window – he knows where they are. “Okay,” he agrees, and she might even believe him.

The answer to his question of course is: none of it. They’ll be who they have to and they’ll teach him the same, because Cassian Andor is the Rebellion right now to the ISB and so he cannot be himself.

~

There’s a fleeting time – or a scattered series of moments, perhaps – in the months ahead when she imagines Cassian sidling into the heart of their operation in a way no other has in all these years. It’s the balance of the thing – Bix, Gorst, they’ve focused his hate and balanced his myriad conflictions. He does what he’s told and drinks in each lesson, because they are his best bet towards making it all mean something in the end.

He leaves with Vel to help settle the others on Mina-Rau, and he comes back and pushes on. Eager to stay moving, happy complement to Luthen’s always something to be done. From time to time, when they return late from a gear drop or informant meet or weapons appraisal and have plans to leave again in a day or two for another, Cassian lurks about the gallery flat in the time between. Always something to do, something to learn, some use to be made of him.

Those instances don’t necessarily become more frequent so much as more fluid. Familiar. The only thing surprising in the end is that she did not anticipate the violent recoil.

Cassian keeps a kit on the Fondor and spends enough time crossing the galaxy one end to the next with Luthen. But it’s a quiet moment in the apartment – scanning the HoloNews and drinking caf, absently reaching for a gervi fruit from a bowl and scattering the peels on the countertop – that triggers the rebound.

“That’s my mug,” Luthen complains when he surfaces and he’s not wrong but

“They’re all the same,” Cassian retorts without missing a beat, and he’s also not wrong.

When Kleya glances over from where she’s affixing her cloak ahead of her morning stroll about the signal spots, he’s staring blankly into the middle distance and she can see the moment it dawns. Can see all the complicated contradiction of him grappling with existing in this place, with them, and letting it feel in any small way like home.

It’s a sharp reminder for Luthen of the gamble he took, in taking on someone with so much yet to lose. The constant push and pull of all the tangled conflict for what he’s already lost and the role in it they played, that narrow knife’s edge walked between loyal devotion for their Cause and bitter resentment for its costs.

When Cassian proposes soon thereafter taking a radio to Mina-Rau, Luthen lets him go.

 

III

 

Luthen’s pride collides viciously with Cassian’s fury in the wake of Sienar and Mina-Rau’s unraveling.

Luthen pushes hard, like he has something to prove – to her or to Cassian, or to himself – or perhaps drowning out whatever echo or sign or weakness stayed his hand on Ferrix. Cassian Andor isn’t special, he’s expendable like all the rest, what matters is the Cause, and he has no time for Cassian’s sudden reticence, standing in the shattered wreckage of all his best efforts and realizing it’s not enough, it will never be enough, he can no more save them from Luthen than he can from the Empire.

Luthen pushes hard but keeps them close. His pride and guilt for their own missteps in that fateful mission coalescing into an insufferable, frantic urgency. He’s rushing, he’s slipping, he can sense he’s losing Cassian in a way far more absolute than leaving them for Mina-Rau, and responds by chasing him down and dragging him back again and again to the city and the safehouse and only exacerbating the problem.

Kleya warns him exactly once, “You’re playing with fire,” when he kicks over the board of whatever game, the push and the pull and all of Cassian’s complicated contradiction, by coaxing Wilmon under his wing instead, plays his simmering rage against his mounting grief and that innocent youthful need for simple attention and approval with skillful calculation while Cassian is juggling demanding missions against Bix’s deteriorating mental state.

It’s a brutal equation, keeps Cassian more hostage to the Cause than loyal devotee.

Wilmon hovers between them in tenuous push and pull, until Luthen sends him to Saw and he returns with a fresh fire behind his eyes, eager to put down the tools and pick up a weapon.

It’s a brutal equation to get Cassian back into the fight and focused.

Kleya can’t decide if it’s pride, Cassian second-guessing and holding back and Luthen’s refusal to be challenged; or if he’s proving something, to her or to Cassian or to himself, that he may have spared Cassian Andor on Ferrix but he’s no more special than any of the others they’ve used and used up in service of the Cause.

Whether he’s special or expendable, Luthen never gets a chance to decide, to draw a line or loosen his grip, tame his temper, temper his expectations.

Vel’s return from Ghorman begins the slow slide of all of it crashing down.

Every loss is different; every one’s the same, she hears herself telling Vel once, in the wake of the news about Cinta.

Every loss is different; every one’s the same, she hears herself telling Luthen, when Cassian and Bix follow Vel to Yavin and Cassian takes their calls less frequently and with ever-decreasing enthusiasm. He’s found another option, and perhaps a better one, to direct his energies.

But the push and the pull of it, the contradiction, is its own sort of motivation, Kleya knows better than anyone even if Cassian cannot see it, cannot know it with that conflict long-settled. The space Luthen occupies at the heart of Cassian’s purpose, his rage, for his friends and for Ferrix, is its own fuel to follow him and find meaning in all the compounding grief of their acquaintance. Yavin cannot offer him that, not Davits Draven nor Jan Dodonna. “I’m done,” he tells her in the wake of the massacre in Palmo Square when he once again comes back to them when it counts. “He’ll know what it means.”

“Something I wouldn’t understand?” she can’t help but scoff.

 

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Luthen haltingly greets Cassian in the shadow of the Senate offices.

I’m only afraid of what I’m doing to you, Kleya hears echoed in it, except it’s far too late for that.

 

IV

 

The last lesson Luthen teaches Kleya is a reminder of one of the first. I lie.

He leaves. Leaves her behind. Leaves to destroy the comms in her stead, leaves in the back of an ambulance, leaves finally for good with a last shuddered breath and a fleeting kiss to his forehead, all of her own scattered contradiction resurfaced as she kills him with tears on her face.

 

She sends a distress call out to Wilmon. The four-beat rhythm knock a day later is a relic of Ferrix; the muffled voice through the door is jarring in all of its impossibility and all of its obviousness, because of course it would be him, who left and was hunted, who came back and stowed away and stayed Luthen’s hand in a moment’s slipping or sentiment, meaning and mercy found in bitter echoes of their damning past.

Who left and came back, from missions and Mina-Rau, from their own mistakes that led him to calamity on Sienar. Who appeared when Luthen needed him for Aldhani and then again in the wake of Ghorman, all of it at risk of collapse with Senator Mothma’s stand.

All of it’s collapsed now and only Jedha, Kyber, Erso running through her head again and again while she grapples with this impossible reality of this life without Luthen in it, this fight, a mission he cannot help her to carry on.

All of it’s collapsed, and so of course, “It would be you,” she marvels as the door slides open to reveal Cassian Andor, come back one last time when Luthen needed him, to understand why, to see it through and make it all mean something. “Wouldn’t it?”

 

He won’t leave her to die in the scattered wreckage of this home they built, plundered pretty things atop a living tomb. Her own frantic and complicated contradiction exploding out, accusing and begging him by turns.

“You left us behind!” she snarls, because she remembers that time, or those fleeting moments, when whatever fate Luthen had seen in it, had seen in Cassian stowing away and offering up a choice, had seemed poised to develop into some kind of inevitability. But even as she says it and he defends his decision, she knows it could never be so simple, because it counted for something that he came back, he comes back, and how could he come for her now if he had never left? What use would any of it be, if they had no one to tell with any hope to carry on the fight?

“You owe him that,” she pleads, and doesn’t know where Cassian ends and she begins, she doesn’t know how to do this without Luthen and cannot fathom that it should end like this after all they’ve done and been and carved out of themselves in the name of Cause that hangs now by the thinnest of threads.

Luthen left, and left her behind.

“I’m not leaving you here,” Cassian repeats stubbornly until she yields, thinking of Luthen and I never said I could.

~

The mission that begins with Luthen leaving her behind ends with Cassian failing to come back. The only thing surprising in it, for all of the curious fate Luthen read and rejected by turns in his association with Cassian Andor, is that the inevitability of it shouldn’t have occurred from the start.

Kleya stands in the midst of Yavin base in all of its chaos and confusion in the wake of Scarif’s destruction; it’s alive, Yavin, in a way Coruscant is not, built atop a living tomb, and she won’t look away, turns on the spot and looks at what it’s cost, and what it’s built.

What a bitter ending.

Except.

“Kleya?” Vel finds her staring out over the landing field, so many empty spaces for ships and pilots that will never return. But not all of them, crews already assembling to handle the survivors, and she spies Wilmon amidst the commotion, wiping at his face and carrying on nonetheless, helping to hitch up the fuel tanks and get them moved back.

Nothing’s ending, Cassian had quietly argued.

Always something to be done; and she’s very good with comms.

Move, she imagines Luthen barking.

So she moves.

Notes:

this... might get a second chapter or companion fic with the Cassian element, if I can wrap my muse around what it wants to be.