candor1 | Open RP Post

2-1B8 had had one job for more than twenty years. Keep the machinery running in a particular room. The rest of the relatively new facility had steadily been returning to the conditions of the rest of the ruined ancient temple, but med bay remained immaculate. …Or at least, one corner of med bay.

Toowun-beeate had been left behind when the Alliance evacuated Yavin 4 after the Death Star was destroyed. It wasn’t an oversight. In case any Alliance agents abroad hadn’t received the transmission or couldn’t read the signs on arrival to get to the next base, Beeate was the last line of communication. It had been badly damaged and was only rudimentarily functional, so this was one last assignment. No one would have expected it to last this long.

But Beeate had extended its own existence with a personal project. (How many even knew that worked for droids as well as for organics?)

Mere days after full evacuation, an Imperial ship had indeed arrived on Yavin 4. But not to invade or destroy, not even to try and find the next base then destroy Beeate when it refused to disclose. This one all-but crash landed. And out of it stumbled a single young woman, badly burned, who collapsed on the ground. When Beeate tried to get her into the temple, she revived enough to scream and resist until finally becoming cogent enough to communicate that there was something else in the ship that she wouldn’t leave without. Beeate retrieved the thing and got it and the woman inside to med bay.

Fresh bacta reserves had been taken on to the next base, but there was enough used leavings that Beeate could purify and reinstall. Bacta didn’t go bad and couldn’t be tainted, but it did lose its potency. It took longer than usual to restore the young woman to health. The thing—the body—she’d made Beeate retrieve didn’t seem to react to the diluted bacta at all.

She waited a long time. A long, long time.

When she finally left, she returned. At first, once a month. Then at longer intervals. At the end, once a year.

When she stopped returning, Beeate had enough faculties to search for a few of her names on the holonet. It decided she had either changed her identity fully or been killed. Most likely the second. It had a feeling nothing else would keep her from coming back to check on the body.

Especially because… the bacta had started to show an effect. The body was beginning to look less charred. It was even starting to regain some living functions.

Left to its own devices, with nothing else to do, Beeate began cannabilizing the rest of the defunct equipment. Fresh bacta was miraculous. The weakened old stuff needed help.

Now the bacta tank no longer looked quite like a bacta tank. To one who would know (which would not be Beeate, even though it had created it) it had come to resemble more of a Spaarti cylinder. The reconstruction it had done to the burned remains it had been given was almost more an act of cloning than of healing. And it had taken thirty years.

The woman had not been back in fifteen. And surely the Alliance, if it even still existed—Beeate thought it had heard about the war ending, but then another beginning so maybe it had been wrong; it hadn’t been functioning well enough to be brought along, after all, and it had degraded further since then—would have changed bases multiple times by now. Even if anyone else were to show up, it would be useless to direct them to Hoth.

But its pet project had become something it hadn’t expected. The thing in the tank was now clearly a living human man.

Beeate kept the cylinder and the man within in perfect stasis. But its ability to sustain its own power levels while not plugged in were diminishing now daily. It knew it would lose all function soon. If the man it had brought back into the world were to actual reclaim a place in it, outside of the tank, Beeate had to set it free. But what to tell it, where to send it, how to explain?

Beeate decided it needed help.

That night, for the first time in the thirty years since the base had been abandoned, through various crevasses and portals of the Massassi Temple, Beeate turned on the lights.

Edited 2018-05-25 01:55 (UTC)

[ooc: continued from here]

Back on their ship, they sent their report, got their rendezvous, and took off for hyperspace. Once the autopilot was engaged, they were free to move around the ship, and Cassian went to store the samples he'd taken—including of the pollen.

He didn't come back to the cockpit, but was to be found sitting on the cot, staring at his hands.

Being together wasn't the difficulty.

Being together on a base full of personnel was. Jyn and Cassian both were exceptionally private people, and neither were particularly interested in broadcasting their relationship to people who didn't need to know.

So, to be apart even when they were together was a very particular kind of torture that she wasn't sure that she could weather forever. The most they shared in the briefing room, or even in the canteen was a nod when they locked eyes, short conversations that did not betray that behind closed doors, their mouths usually found much better ways to communicate.

Their gazes didn't linger. They didn't touch. And as her hands balled into fists at her side, all Jyn wanted was to reach out, catch his hand, squeeze his fingers as if to say that she was still there, still loving him, still wanting nothing more than to be at his side for as long as they were allowed.

She snuck into his quarters at night and snuck out of them in the morning, and every atom in her body screamed at her to stay.

They'd escaped from Scarif only to be parted in the evacuation of Yavin 4.

Cassian, who'd spent his life alone except for Kay, couldn't stand it. He couldn't stand to sit or lie down, could only stand staring out of viewscreens or pacing the halls.

After sticking at one another's sides every moment after Scarif, they simply hadn't been together when the alarms sounded and they had to get to transports. Taking the time to find one another would have been a breach of protocol, at the cost to others.

But when he'd looked out of his own transport and seen the Imperial ships starting to descend on the Massassi Temple, he couldn't stop all the imaginings. Jyn not getting out after all. Jyn in Imperial custody. Jyn tortured… executed…

When the blazes were they going to get to Hoth and he could karking well find her??

Edited 2018-10-07 01:23 (UTC)

Kay had not been happy to be left behind. The fact that it was for his own safety didn't help at all. And even though most of Cassian's career (and life) had been conducted alone, before taking Kay as a partner, he found going back to that now… different. He might not need the backup or the analyzing perspective… but he missed it.

He walked through the city, now, feeling a chill of isolation he hadn't in a while. It was ridiculous, it was irrational, Kay was still there waiting for him back at base. But the echo was of the years before Kay… and it turns out he'd made quite a difference.

Still, loneliness possibly added an extra edge to Cassian's awareness of the people around him. And one that caught his attention in particular.

Edited 2019-05-27 18:22 (UTC)

[ooc: stealing wholesale from my own AO3 fic]

Cassian wasn't nervous.

Yes, it was a high profile assignment—full year undercover as aide to Imperial Admiral Uillt Grendreef. No, Cassian had never been embedded for that long with someone so high up before. Yes, there was a lot of new training being saddled on him, and a bit of cosmetic surgery (straightening nose and teeth, removing certain scars)—to better fit in on Coruscant, where semi-retired Grendreef lived with his family. But, the job would be probably more padwork than anything.

Cassian wasn't nervous—until Mon Mothma set a few final training sessions. With her. One-on-one.

Mon Mothma had always been good to Cassian. A myth, a giant, in her own right, mostly seen from afar; she would go out of her way when she could to tell Cassian herself when something he'd done had had positive repercussions for individuals. Let him know he was recognized and appreciated. To some extent, he couldn't believe it or let himself crave it. But… it meant she occupied an unprecedented place in his life.

That she was taking on some of his training…?

He'd been told to come in full Imperial uniform. So he entered the room at perfect regulation angles. To see Mon Mothma not alone after all; but the nobleman from Alderaan, Bail Organa, also looking benignly over at him.

"Commander," Mon Mothma greeted. "You'll understand momentarily why there's a deficit of Alliance trainers in this last discipline. But I have a feeling it will be vital. Admiral Grendreef, and by extension Joreth Sward—" his incipient operational alias, "—occupy a particular station in Coruscant society. You will very probably be joining him to official functions. At which, you will be expected, like any Core citizens of rank, to know how to do this."

She held out her hand to Bail Organa.

They demonstrated Core Ballroom dancing.

She held out her hand to Cassian.

* * *
Kaytoo would take their getaway shuttle straight to Coruscant and embed himself there independently. Cassian would go through Five Points Station to give Joreth Sward a data trail.

On his last day at Five Points, Cassian got his hair shorn to the scalp and made himself clean-shaven for the first time since Operation Spectrum. Looking at himself in the mirror, it seemed like a really bad farce: how much younger he looked.

Mon Mothma had been right. His cover would have been blown at the first party. But it wasn't. The job ended up being less about padwork and more about things like dancing. Socializing. Running interference for Grendreef's family. There was a surprising wealth of intel to gather from those things too.

Cassian danced with Grendreef's wife, Aune. In their home, he would bring her reports of her husband's whereabouts. She commented she saw more of Joreth than of Uillt. It didn't take long before she decided to literalize it. At his hesitation, she informed him that if he did not fulfill this lapsed duty of her husband's, she would tell Grendreef he had. She didn't call him to her bed every night. But it was a staple of that year.

Cassian danced with Grendreef's four year old daughter, Linat, and six year old son, Dyv. He kept them occupied when they couldn't be allowed anywhere near home meetings. Ran interference when they shouldn't see something going on between Uillt and Aune. He was profoundly uncomfortable with children—but they latched onto him. Nanny droids were not enough. They sought him out. Maybe it was that he was truly good at many interesting things. (Some things they would beg him to show them or play at with them and he diverted or flatly refused. He would never ever play war games.) Maybe it was that he talked to them like they were adults. (It was how he'd been talked to as a child. He didn't know how children were "meant" to be talked to.) Maybe because he explained more to them than any adult ever had. Maybe because he had a different way of looking at things.

Maybe they reacted instinctively to the ache of what he would always consider just cost for just cause.

Whatever it was. They adored him.

One evening they found his room as he lay on the bed going through reports. They cheered their discovery like he was a beast they'd been hunting for days. They responded to his protest that they shouldn't be there by coming all the way into the room and clambering onto the bed with him—clambering on him, with sharp elbows and heels, until he relented and pretended to wrestle them.

Dyv fell asleep with his arm flopped onto Cassian's ribs, his feet on Cassian's shoulder, and his contented drool on the sheets. Linat put her little copper head against Cassian's obsidian one and tried to read aloud from the datapad he'd picked back up. (The moment the door had opened, he'd switched the display to a report he was supposed to be looking at.) Amused by her attempts to wrap her mouth around the terms, he read it aloud to her, as her head began to loll like her brother's. Cassian finally stopped and demanded, "You can't understand any of this. Aren't you bored?"

Linat got up on all fours and crawled, unheeding of her palms and knees digging painfully into him, to curl up in the crook of his chest and arm. She mumbled back, "Your stupid accent makes it nice." and also fell fast asleep.

On Lothal, during the Blockade, Cassian had been intercepting the transmissions of a probe droid. To avoid getting shot by the thing, he'd had to stay so perfectly still, for so long, that several wild loth-cats—too small themselves to trigger the droid's targeting—had sauntered over, climbed onto him, and gone to sleep.

Lying very still on the bed with Linat and Dyv, Cassian shifted his hand, so careful not to displace either of these little loth-cats; and used the datapad to message the caredroids.

Something made him look up. A surprise: Aune in the doorway, staring at them. The look on her face was nothing Cassian had seen before. So different from when she was normally with her children acting like they were pure cartwheeling headache. Also different from when she was blackmailing Cassian, even when she turned playful, wanting to give him pleasure without herself being touched; even when she seemed to relax into admiring him, and feel herself regarded as more than ornamental means to an end.

She'd never looked so nakedly… fearfully… in need of any of them, as she did now. Lasting even when her eyes flickered to meet Cassian's.

What he'd felt with these alien creatures—human children—actually liking him despite his complete lack of knowledge of what children were supposed to be and how to treat them. (He'd certainly never been one.) He saw for a moment in their mother's eyes.

* * *
Periodically, Cassian would retreat to the hidden shuttle that was his and Kay's base. Kay would have gone crazy simply waiting there, but still was (wanted) to be on hand as surveillance and backup. So he'd been given his own cover and activities through the city. Even with the severe limits of staying inconspicuous as an unaccompanied droid, Cassian was powerfully glad that Kay was getting to have some experiences and life independent of Cassian.

Kay was still always there when Cassian needed him. Sitting in that tiny shuttle that used to be (…?) the boundary of their lives. Cassian letting the Imperial uniform hang off his body which felt downright skeletal inside it. Unable to cry anymore. But feeling his own lightyear-long stare and whispering, as he never would to any being in the universe but Kay, how lost he feels.

How much more lost than when committing the unspeakable

Living… a continuous… day-in, day-out… life

With an enemy he's growing to

…love

Edited 2019-06-08 03:53 (UTC)

Jyn Erso had only met Joreth Sward one time in the weeks leading up to their wedding - a wedding that she wanted no part of, a wedding that was being forced upon her under the guise of doing it for the good of the Empire. She knew damn well that it was a reward for her husband-to-be, and a punishment for her, because she'd always been too strong-willed, too inquisitive, too unpredictable, because recently, she'd been questioning too much and digging into things she had no business digging in to. She needed someone to keep her in line. Why not this heretofore unknown officer - rumored to be Grendreef's favorite, to prove that he was up to the challenge?

At the very least, he had seemed ... kind enough. Not that Jyn could really tell, as they hadn't been given much of an opportunity to speak, and his expression had been practically unreadable. He'd been stoic and stone-faced, and for all Jyn knew, he was just as displeased by the thought of marrying her that she was every time she thought of starting her life as a wife, knowing what was to be expected of her then. The baser part of her mind took solace in the fact that he wasn't old and he wasn't ugly, and if she had to be party to this ... there were worse men she could have been marrying.

Krennic had thrust many of them at her, after all, growing increasingly frustrated as she turned them all away. But there would be no more fighting the inevitable when her Uncle informed his protege that if she did not acquiesce, funding to her father's research would be diverted elsewhere.

"You do want your father to be able to continue his oh-so-important research, don't you Jyn?", Director Orson Krennic asked, the smooth lilting of his voice causing a shiver to run the length of her spine.

"Of course, Uncle", she answered, forcing the words through gritted teeth.

How was she to know, though? Joreth was a stranger.

Not for the first time, Jyn smoothed imaginary wrinkles out of her dress, uncomfortable and out of place in the finery of it all, even though Krennic, had insisted that nothing was too good for one of the Empire's brightest young minds.

That was as good a starting point as any, she idly thought, exchanging vows that seemed hollow and impersonal, sliding rings onto each other's fingers, offering fleeting smiles as if to prove that this was exactly what they wanted, that this wasn't all some sort of political machinations rather than what it was supposed to be.

Jyn always had wanted to marry for love. Maybe she was naive to believe that she ever would have gotten the chance.

Jyn came around slowly - as warm and as comfortable as she was underneath the covers, she knew that she couldn't stay in bed all day. For that matter, with her eyes closed, she couldn't exactly tell what time it actually was.

Nor did she actually want to extricate herself from her current predicament -

She and Joreth hadn't moved much in the hours they had been asleep. She wasn't clutched as tightly against him now, but she still occupied the same space she had when they had laid down together, only now, her arm was curled nonchalantly around him as well.

And for as much as her back was screaming at her to get up ... she didn't want to disturb the peacefulness of the moment. She could stay here for a little while longer, she thought, just watching him sleep.

That was strange, wasn't it, wanting to do something like that? No matter - he finally seemed at ease, and Jyn didn't want to steal that way.

As Cassian fought with the screaming controls, his mind wasn't on the mission that was about to die with him, the enemies who'd finally gotten him, or his probability of survival—even as his body and training continued to try and optimize both chances (survival and mission retrievability), steering the dying craft away from its killers and to a neutral crash zone (where he also wouldn't hurt anyone collaterally).

No… his mind went to Draven. Warning him: These near-things are starting to look like a death wish. I'm this close to taking you out of the field or assigning you a partner.

Did he want to die? He didn't want to fail. Take the mission with him. Take out anyone else. But in the abstract…?

Jerón's face, physically the same but flattened somehow. Khryw never coming back. Dorosz, Narede, Xilo, all the others it took effort not to recite

It wasn't really the moment to dwell on it… on the other hand, when and what else?

Okay. He was away from the turrets and from habitations. The ground swirling up to meet him was predominantly sand: not as good as water but better than stone. Even if he didn't make it, the black box might. He spared one hand to further strap himself in, even while he tried to ease the angle of chaotic descent.

Cassian wasn't sure to whom this other thought was addressed, but it was his last one before blacking out. I'm sorry

| 4 ABY |

There were stretches of Cassian's life when he hadn't counted time. His early childhood which he (more than the usual) couldn't remember. The end of childhood (however that was classified) and early adolescence after becoming a soldier. The span as a SpecForce agent when the missions started to run together.

They changed the calendar itself in 3277 LY. 0 ABY. They counted time differently because of what they'd done. He was never going to lose track again.

It was 3281 LY. 4 ABY. He was deep undercover in a frontier town on a semi-charted world. He was trying to pick up the trail of an Imperial agent who'd given their last shadow the slip. It was a low-tech city; they rode ungulates to get around, drank four liquid meals a day, and the highest level of tech anybody had access to were outdated blasters.

And, of course, they were slow to get current event news.

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