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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2k4301a:
‘Relationship’ isn’t the right word. ‘Relationship’ implies something between them, the existence of ties beyond spy and senator, general and soldier, and that just isn’t true. (A pyromaniac has no relationship with the matches she tosses into the pool of accelerant. There’s no special love between between a weapon and the hand cradling the blaster.) Whatever they have lives in the negative space of what they are. ‘Relationship’ isn’t the word.
But then again, Cassian suspects matches don’t feel anything about the pyromaniac. Or about the fire, either.
.
Technically, Cassian has a supervisor, the way that technically, the rebellion is a coalition of militarized terrorist cells undermining a democratically elected authority. (Namely, these things might be true, but they’re not exactly relevant. They’ve waded too far out into the storm to be discussing whether the water is cold.)
Still, Mothma likes to bring it up sometimes. Mostly when he sidles into her meetings, her office, her caf breaks, her—
“I’m fairly certain you are meant to report to General Draven, Captain Andor,” she says coolly after her rank and file have filed out, and he ducks his head, smiles. His smile is like a blaster-shot, brutal and unerring, carving bloody lines into where it lands. Mon Mothma is draped in stainless funerary white, she is a woman already wearing her shroud, but she let out an awful hiss of breath the first time Cassian Andor smiled at her. (It still aches.)
“And you, Senator Mothma?” he asks, his dark eyes fixed on her, already flaying her open, bloody. “Who do you report to?”
“All free peoples,” Mon answers with the practiced ease.
“I don’t think I know them,” Cassian says mildly, because Mon is good at nothing so much as finding these men, full of so much unrealized and violent strength; their sharp teeth, their bright determination, all masked beneath mildness. “You should introduce me, next time.”
“I shall,” Mon Mothma says, and then Cassian Andor is very close to her, smelling of the particular bitter chemical discharge of a blaster. “Do you doubt me?” she asks archly. (When she turns her head, her jugular is bared. Is this deliberate, or weakness?)
“Of course not,” Cassian Andor says. “To doubt you is to doubt the Rebellion.”
“That is not an answer,” Mon Mothma says sharply, but he is already gone, vanished from the space she commands. And then she is alone.
.
There’s a very beautiful lie he tells sometimes, about how they met. That he was a boy with a flower in his hand, and she was a junior senator, very young and yet already grave, draped in purple. That he had made her smile.
The truth is that he burned her in Separatist effigy before he ever met her. Knew her name, and cursed it. When they did meet, she was still young but he was younger, rawboned and furious, just over the edge of youth into manhood. (It was strange to see her in the flesh at last; how small she was, standing there before him.
They’d gotten her eyes wrong on the effigy, he thought.)
“War makes strange bedfellows,” are Senator Mon Mothma’s first words to Cassian Andor.
His first words to her are crude and unrepeatable. "Senator,” he tacks on after a long minute of silence.
“You do not have to like me,” Mon Mothma says, though the corner of her mouth quirks, and he knows then that she likes him. “You do not even have to speak to me, after this. What—will be asked of you, you do for the Rebellion. I do not enter into its calculus.”
Cassian Andor looks at her. Remembers flames.
“Done.”
.
She kills him.
She kills him over and over, on a dozen, two dozen planets. Not herself, of course—he doesn’t think she’s ever actually held a blaster, regards them with thinly-veiled contempt whenever they enter into her line of sight, which means her mouth is always pinched in a thin, unpleasant line, as though to keep her lip from curling. But she authorizes Draven’s orders regarding his missions and that’s much the same.
Cassian is a good soldier. (Has been, since—) He doesn’t take it personally.
“Your microexpressions indicate anger,” the Imperial droid they’ve saddled him with for this mission says, in the neutral, pleasant voice that drives Cassian mad. Gods spare him from kriffing droids.
“Do they,” he answers dryly, watching as Mon Mothma disappears into one of Yavin’s makeshift conference rooms. She does not look in his direction, though she only just signed the order to make him a killer.
Well. More of a killer.
“In fact, there is a ninety-four percent correlation between Senator Mothma entering your line of vision and—”
Cassian whips around to glare at the droid. (Kaytoo, to his credit, does not bring up this subject for discussion again.)
.
She is still there, posture very straight and draped in white, whenever he returns. She is always there, standing or sitting at the head of the war-table, watching someone else speak her orders for her. (She doesn’t talk much. It’s an odd realization, when she looms so large in Cassian’s mind, when her voice, her commands, seem thick in the air on Yavin. But she lets others give orders, and Cassian isn’t certain how to feel about that.)
Once—exactly once—he comes across her falling asleep, her head tilted back against the cushion of the chair. It is just between shift-change, and so they are alone in the command center. Her face is older, asleep; she has lines at the corners of her pursed mouth, her shuttered eyes. Her copper hair is falling in her eyes.
He gets close enough to his breath stirs her hair, and he very gently touches her forehead, just with two fingertips.
Cassian doesn’t feel the knife until it is already between his ribs and twisting home. He drops to his knees, finding himself laughing despite himself. (He can feel the warmth of blood gathering thickly at the back of his throat.) He has the unique pleasure of watching Senator Mothma blanch, shoot to her feet and shout for a meddroid—
“Knife?” he rasps, as she drags in a ragged breath.
“Vibroblade,” she says dazedly, sounding more shellshocked than Cassian feels. She can’t stop staring at the hilt, sticking out of his chest. “We’re at war. No—traitor to the Empire would go unarmed. Even among friends.”
“And here I thought you were incapable of violence, Senator,” he says, grinning, and the grin is helpless too.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she breathes. Her eyes are wide and very pale, colorless fish-eyes, reflecting light when they flick to the door. The med staff rushes in, their noise almost eating up the next words: “I send sentients to their death every day.”
(When Cassian returns to the command center, still smelling of bacta and metal hands, Viceroy Organa stands at the head of the war table. “Chancellor Mothma has recused herself from duty, citing lack of sleep,” Organa says. “She’s—she regrets the harm her lack of judgment caused,” he adds, glancing at Cassian’s chest and then away.
Cassian is disappointed, for reasons he can’t quite name.)
.
The first time—
She is thirty-four, and is sure she will die sooner rather than later. But then, she has known that since she stood up in the Senate chambers and called for a vote to remove the usurper snake from his Imperial throne.
(She had been alone, more alone than she had been before or since, and looked into Sheev Palpatine’s eyes. She had thought, I am not afraid. You can hurt me, but you cannot use me, because I am not afraid.
Palpatine had smiled.)
Cassian Andor is twenty-five, and dead. He shows her the holonet notice with a grin, all his teeth bared the way Mon’s noina cat had once left mice on her doorstep. ANDOR, CASSIAN (CONFIRMED DEAD) watches her face as she reads the official Imperial record, which says he was blasted apart by a trooper on Morand.
His skin is smooth and brown, for someone who was supposed to have died with a hole burned through his skull.
“A dangerous rebel has been eliminated,” Mon says dryly, handing the datapad back to him. “Hurrah.”
“Aren’t you proud of me, Senator?”
She’s not, really. She’s somehow annoyed he made it to the grave before she did. (MOTHMA, MON is only LOCATION UNKNOWN.) “Of course, Captain Andor. It was a successful mission, losses were minimal and we have every hope the intelligence you gathered will lead us to Imperial weapons caches. You have a good deal to be proud of.”
“Not the same thing.”
She glances at his face. He is better than he used to be at keeping it blank. “No.”
“No,” Cassian echoes, a little more softly.
Something about the way the shadow falls on his face is—
He bridles when she reaches out, though he forces himself back into stillness so quickly she almost misses it. (He is better at that too.) Still, he does not resist when she presses her fingertips just below his jaw, where the stubble softens into throat. Underneath her hand, his pulse beats, fast and strong. “You seem very alive to me, Captain.”
He swallows, her hand moves. She can feel the rumble of his voicebox when he says, “Yes, Senator.”
She withdraws her hand, but he catches her by the wrist, tightly as binders. She wonders if he can feel her pulse, how hard it’s beating against her skin. But he doesn’t say anything, a faintly quizzical look on his face, as though he’s not sure how to proceed.
She kisses him out of clumsy uncertainty, more than anything. (She skipped the mother, went directly from virginal maiden to sexless crone without stopping. She has practice in defying demagogues, ordering men to die, not to—)
It is a fumbling, cold affair. But afterwards, he rests his cheek against hers, and she rests her palm over the place where her blade went in between his ribs. It is the closest to human contact either of them has come in some time, she thinks.
.
“What will you do, after?” Mothma asks once. Cassian is gathering up his things, pushing an errant lock of hair behind his ear, and she is studying the way the light slants onto the dust. Neither of them is thinking about the other, but then, they are not supposed to be. (It is easier, if they are looking separate ways.)
“After what?” he asks.
“After the war. What will you do?”
He twitches, and then goes very still. “You seem sure there will be an ‘after’ for me, Senator,” he says lightly, the corner of his mouth curling.
Mon has no answer for that.
.
She keeps killing him; there’s a war on.
He keeps killing; ditto.
(Who cares what the dead do, in those snatched moments between dying?)
.
Senator Mon Mothma is forty-one, and sure she will die—sooner, rather than later. But she has known that for nineteen years now; its sting no longer can pierce her. She is a dead woman, she wears her white shroud. Everything else is…
Captain Cassian Andor is thirty-seven, and dead. Truly dead, this time, nothing to reach for and assure herself with, no proof of life.
(She does not think of his pulse, hot and steady under her hand. She does not think of his mouth curling, the way he had said after. She does not think of anything. No true pyromaniac would pity a match burnt up to ash. No soldier cries, firing a blaster.
She hates blasters.)
She personally changes his Alliance file to read ANDOR, CASSIAN (CONFIRMED DEAD).
‘Relationship’ isn’t the right word. ‘Relationship’ implies something between them, the existence of ties beyond spy and senator, general and soldier, and that just isn’t true. (A pyromaniac has no relationship with the matches she tosses into the pool of accelerant. There’s no special love between between a weapon and the hand cradling the blaster.) Whatever they have lives in the negative space of what they are. ‘Relationship’ isn’t the word.
But then again, Cassian suspects matches don’t feel anything about the pyromaniac. Or about the fire, either.
.
Technically, Cassian has a supervisor, the way that technically, the rebellion is a coalition of militarized terrorist cells undermining a democratically elected authority. (Namely, these things might be true, but they’re not exactly relevant. They’ve waded too far out into the storm to be discussing whether the water is cold.)
Still, Mothma likes to bring it up sometimes. Mostly when he sidles into her meetings, her office, her caf breaks, her—
“I’m fairly certain you are meant to report to General Draven, Captain Andor,” she says coolly after her rank and file have filed out, and he ducks his head, smiles. His smile is like a blaster-shot, brutal and unerring, carving bloody lines into where it lands. Mon Mothma is draped in stainless funerary white, she is a woman already wearing her shroud, but she let out an awful hiss of breath the first time Cassian Andor smiled at her. (It still aches.)
“And you, Senator Mothma?” he asks, his dark eyes fixed on her, already flaying her open, bloody. “Who do you report to?”
“All free peoples,” Mon answers with the practiced ease.
“I don’t think I know them,” Cassian says mildly, because Mon is good at nothing so much as finding these men, full of so much unrealized and violent strength; their sharp teeth, their bright determination, all masked beneath mildness. “You should introduce me, next time.”
“I shall,” Mon Mothma says, and then Cassian Andor is very close to her, smelling of the particular bitter chemical discharge of a blaster. “Do you doubt me?” she asks archly. (When she turns her head, her jugular is bared. Is this deliberate, or weakness?)
“Of course not,” Cassian Andor says. “To doubt you is to doubt the Rebellion.”
“That is not an answer,” Mon Mothma says sharply, but he is already gone, vanished from the space she commands. And then she is alone.
.
There’s a very beautiful lie he tells sometimes, about how they met. That he was a boy with a flower in his hand, and she was a junior senator, very young and yet already grave, draped in purple. That he had made her smile.
The truth is that he burned her in Separatist effigy before he ever met her. Knew her name, and cursed it. When they did meet, she was still young but he was younger, rawboned and furious, just over the edge of youth into manhood. (It was strange to see her in the flesh at last; how small she was, standing there before him.
They’d gotten her eyes wrong on the effigy, he thought.)
“War makes strange bedfellows,” are Senator Mon Mothma’s first words to Cassian Andor.
His first words to her are crude and unrepeatable. "Senator,” he tacks on after a long minute of silence.
“You do not have to like me,” Mon Mothma says, though the corner of her mouth quirks, and he knows then that she likes him. “You do not even have to speak to me, after this. What—will be asked of you, you do for the Rebellion. I do not enter into its calculus.”
Cassian Andor looks at her. Remembers flames.
“Done.”
.
She kills him.
She kills him over and over, on a dozen, two dozen planets. Not herself, of course—he doesn’t think she’s ever actually held a blaster, regards them with thinly-veiled contempt whenever they enter into her line of sight, which means her mouth is always pinched in a thin, unpleasant line, as though to keep her lip from curling. But she authorizes Draven’s orders regarding his missions and that’s much the same.
Cassian is a good soldier. (Has been, since—) He doesn’t take it personally.
“Your microexpressions indicate anger,” the Imperial droid they’ve saddled him with for this mission says, in the neutral, pleasant voice that drives Cassian mad. Gods spare him from kriffing droids.
“Do they,” he answers dryly, watching as Mon Mothma disappears into one of Yavin’s makeshift conference rooms. She does not look in his direction, though she only just signed the order to make him a killer.
Well. More of a killer.
“In fact, there is a ninety-four percent correlation between Senator Mothma entering your line of vision and—”
Cassian whips around to glare at the droid. (Kaytoo, to his credit, does not bring up this subject for discussion again.)
.
She is still there, posture very straight and draped in white, whenever he returns. She is always there, standing or sitting at the head of the war-table, watching someone else speak her orders for her. (She doesn’t talk much. It’s an odd realization, when she looms so large in Cassian’s mind, when her voice, her commands, seem thick in the air on Yavin. But she lets others give orders, and Cassian isn’t certain how to feel about that.)
Once—exactly once—he comes across her falling asleep, her head tilted back against the cushion of the chair. It is just between shift-change, and so they are alone in the command center. Her face is older, asleep; she has lines at the corners of her pursed mouth, her shuttered eyes. Her copper hair is falling in her eyes.
He gets close enough to his breath stirs her hair, and he very gently touches her forehead, just with two fingertips.
Cassian doesn’t feel the knife until it is already between his ribs and twisting home. He drops to his knees, finding himself laughing despite himself. (He can feel the warmth of blood gathering thickly at the back of his throat.) He has the unique pleasure of watching Senator Mothma blanch, shoot to her feet and shout for a meddroid—
“Knife?” he rasps, as she drags in a ragged breath.
“Vibroblade,” she says dazedly, sounding more shellshocked than Cassian feels. She can’t stop staring at the hilt, sticking out of his chest. “We’re at war. No—traitor to the Empire would go unarmed. Even among friends.”
“And here I thought you were incapable of violence, Senator,” he says, grinning, and the grin is helpless too.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she breathes. Her eyes are wide and very pale, colorless fish-eyes, reflecting light when they flick to the door. The med staff rushes in, their noise almost eating up the next words: “I send sentients to their death every day.”
(When Cassian returns to the command center, still smelling of bacta and metal hands, Viceroy Organa stands at the head of the war table. “Chancellor Mothma has recused herself from duty, citing lack of sleep,” Organa says. “She’s—she regrets the harm her lack of judgment caused,” he adds, glancing at Cassian’s chest and then away.
Cassian is disappointed, for reasons he can’t quite name.)
.
The first time—
She is thirty-four, and is sure she will die sooner rather than later. But then, she has known that since she stood up in the Senate chambers and called for a vote to remove the usurper snake from his Imperial throne.
(She had been alone, more alone than she had been before or since, and looked into Sheev Palpatine’s eyes. She had thought, I am not afraid. You can hurt me, but you cannot use me, because I am not afraid.
Palpatine had smiled.)
Cassian Andor is twenty-five, and dead. He shows her the holonet notice with a grin, all his teeth bared the way Mon’s noina cat had once left mice on her doorstep. ANDOR, CASSIAN (CONFIRMED DEAD) watches her face as she reads the official Imperial record, which says he was blasted apart by a trooper on Morand.
His skin is smooth and brown, for someone who was supposed to have died with a hole burned through his skull.
“A dangerous rebel has been eliminated,” Mon says dryly, handing the datapad back to him. “Hurrah.”
“Aren’t you proud of me, Senator?”
She’s not, really. She’s somehow annoyed he made it to the grave before she did. (MOTHMA, MON is only LOCATION UNKNOWN.) “Of course, Captain Andor. It was a successful mission, losses were minimal and we have every hope the intelligence you gathered will lead us to Imperial weapons caches. You have a good deal to be proud of.”
“Not the same thing.”
She glances at his face. He is better than he used to be at keeping it blank. “No.”
“No,” Cassian echoes, a little more softly.
Something about the way the shadow falls on his face is—
He bridles when she reaches out, though he forces himself back into stillness so quickly she almost misses it. (He is better at that too.) Still, he does not resist when she presses her fingertips just below his jaw, where the stubble softens into throat. Underneath her hand, his pulse beats, fast and strong. “You seem very alive to me, Captain.”
He swallows, her hand moves. She can feel the rumble of his voicebox when he says, “Yes, Senator.”
She withdraws her hand, but he catches her by the wrist, tightly as binders. She wonders if he can feel her pulse, how hard it’s beating against her skin. But he doesn’t say anything, a faintly quizzical look on his face, as though he’s not sure how to proceed.
She kisses him out of clumsy uncertainty, more than anything. (She skipped the mother, went directly from virginal maiden to sexless crone without stopping. She has practice in defying demagogues, ordering men to die, not to—)
It is a fumbling, cold affair. But afterwards, he rests his cheek against hers, and she rests her palm over the place where her blade went in between his ribs. It is the closest to human contact either of them has come in some time, she thinks.
.
“What will you do, after?” Mothma asks once. Cassian is gathering up his things, pushing an errant lock of hair behind his ear, and she is studying the way the light slants onto the dust. Neither of them is thinking about the other, but then, they are not supposed to be. (It is easier, if they are looking separate ways.)
“After what?” he asks.
“After the war. What will you do?”
He twitches, and then goes very still. “You seem sure there will be an ‘after’ for me, Senator,” he says lightly, the corner of his mouth curling.
Mon has no answer for that.
.
She keeps killing him; there’s a war on.
He keeps killing; ditto.
(Who cares what the dead do, in those snatched moments between dying?)
.
Senator Mon Mothma is forty-one, and sure she will die—sooner, rather than later. But she has known that for nineteen years now; its sting no longer can pierce her. She is a dead woman, she wears her white shroud. Everything else is…
Captain Cassian Andor is thirty-seven, and dead. Truly dead, this time, nothing to reach for and assure herself with, no proof of life.
(She does not think of his pulse, hot and steady under her hand. She does not think of his mouth curling, the way he had said after. She does not think of anything. No true pyromaniac would pity a match burnt up to ash. No soldier cries, firing a blaster.
She hates blasters.)
She personally changes his Alliance file to read ANDOR, CASSIAN (CONFIRMED DEAD).
