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In the image the inbuilt security afforded him he could barely make out a face in the person standing outside his door, but the way the woman stood was achingly familiar, so he let the the heavy durasteel slide open to allow her in. Under the head scarf and the flying goggles, wide blue eyes over a freckled nose stared him up at him proudly. He knew better, though, and quickly scanned her body as he motioned with his head for her to get inside.
Her clothes were stained with dried blood and he could see she favored her left leg. He lifted his arm for her to pass under it into his living room, throwing a quick glance down the icy street outside to see if anyone or anything unusual lurked about. He was conscious it was due to his overt sense of caution. No one other than a handful of people, really, would have matched the woman in his living room, wearing military fatigues and shaking the snow out of a cheap scarf and a heavy brown parka, to the carefully poised young senator that he was used to rivetedly stare at whenever she popped up on the holonews from wherever the capital was currently situated.
“I knew you were antisocial, but seriously,” she grumbled fondly, as she took in her surroundings, pulling out her fingerless gloves, better to handle the blaster she had just unstrapped from her trousers.
“Some people would say paranoid rather than antisocial, but after this week, they’d probably admit I’m right. Speaking of which, how did you get here? I figured you weren’t on there, because otherwise I would have heard something. You know. My mother. Your mother-“
“… Or the fact that you illegally intercept Republic transmissions from the comfort of your home on an Outer Rim planet?”
He swallowed at what he was pretty sure was a jibe at him.
“Yes. That.”
“I figured it was happening and grabbed my ship. Ditched it on Mandalore and caught a transport here.”
He nodded and vaguely gestured in her direction. “And when did you get like this?”
“You mean the clothes?”
He only scoffed and let that be his response.
“I knew something really bad would happen, you know, not like what’s happening already but worse – I felt it, really, like we usually do. For a while I just figured I’d stay on Hosnian Prime like the big coward that I am-“ she held her hand out when he opened his mouth to argue and kept talking, “just so I didn’t have to deal with – and I just didn’t – I was getting ready to flee anyway, but had to scramble my way out of the explosion. Stuff kept falling on me as I ran out to the hangar, the ground was shaking… I think I scraped my knees and my hands at some point, really. It was ridiculous. Everyone thought it was some seismic shit. To be honest, I didn’t know what it was until I broke atmo and saw the thing. Then I just hit hyperspace towards here as I pretty much was going to do anyway.”
She was babbling, but he let her talk, his chest doing a funny little thing when she mentioned that her first instinct was to head his way. He noticed she was breathing hard as she spoke, as though there was something caught in her lungs. As she finally stood there in a white shirt and her fatigues, having even pulled her combat boots out, he saw that she looked actually peaky.
“Are you sick?”
“I spent five days cooped up in a freighter ship, sleeping on the floor. Just tired.”
He eyed her warily, but smiled. “Don’t make me comm your mother.”
“My mother’s got a lot on her plate right now.”
Oh, so this was it. He could understand that her wellbeing would take a back seat in her mother’s worries at the moment. After all, she had groomed her eldest child to be much like her: resilient and diplomatic despite being a tight ball of righteous anger. Whatever shenanigans her youngest got up to (he now felt that he had to use a graver term to address his childhood friend’s proclivities, actually) had always made her leave her daughter if not to fend for herself, to feel like it was expected of her to be independent and thus to never request any extra attention at all. Her father had always been affectionate and even slightly overbearing in his protectiveness, but recent events had sent the man in a tailspin. He didn’t even know where the old rebellion general was. He smiled a little at her, tilting his head to the side; he knew two other people who would be livid if she wasn't taking care of herself.
“I’ll comm mine, then. Or my dad, who’s the actual mother bantha of the two.”
Her face finally gave away into the toothy smile he knew so well, but then turned solemn all of a sudden.
“They’re doing good work, you know.”
“You mean they finally farking stayed in one place.”
“Running a safe house is dangerous stuff, too. But yeah, I’m glad they’re taking it easy. With your dad’s back-“
“And her knees.”
“Exactly.”
“They would say we weren’t supposed to fight. They did everything they did for us not to have to.”
“And here you are,” she replied, with a wide gesture, “helping build houses with your brilliant mathematical brain.”
Something snapped within him, the echoes of the last conversation he had with his best friend bubbling forward in his head and consuming him with guilt. He had learned better than to immediately lose his composure but the words burst forth from his mouth without any semblance of control. He figured later it was because he spent too much time alone arguing with himself.
“Because that was what we were supposed to do! That’s why you’re in the senate, biting people’s heads off in your speeches. That’s why-“
He could kick himself, for referring to the senate in the present tense, but kriff if he knew whatever they were going to do now about the Republic, if it still existed.
For the first time since she stepped into his house, she reached out to him. Grabbed his clean hands with her dirty ones and stared up at him with those wide eyes most people would think were innocent. She wasn’t as short as her mother, but still tiny, the first realization of which he could remember from the time he saw her a year after leaving home for university and realized that his growing spurt had affected not only the size of his clothes, but also the vantage point from which he saw her and the world around them.
“I know,” she said, sweet, but grave, as he usually saw her speaking from the senate floor, “I was not censuring you.”
He kept quiet, hung his head down for a bit. She patted his hands.
“You’re not worried about Poe.” A statement, not a question.
“I’m feeling stupid and angry, but no, not exactly worried. Out of us, he knows how to deal with Ben best, I think. I know that if something happened-”
“I would tell you, somehow, through some back channel.”
“Well, yeah. With your witchcraft and all. ”
She made a face at him, laughed even a little, let go of his hands and backed away to look around his living room, her delicate pale fingers touching the shelves as she walked. He had then a burst of self-consciousness. Despite their being born on the same planet, within only a few years of each other as their parents reeled from an unlikely war victory, he always felt slightly daunted by her. His parents were war heroes, much like Poe’s had been, and so among the elite that emerged from their political movement, they were always treated different. But she was, as it turned out, actual royalty and as their parents found out at the close of the war, not only by adoption. He was, in his own way, proud of his achievements, of his time in university, of his choice in coming to help his father’s planet instead of setting up a lucrative architecture business in the Core as most of his classmates had done. But it never felt like it was enough when he was next to her, this girl with her hair bound in intricate but practical braids, who had been studying politics as soon as she could read, who would sit enthralled as their parents argued around meals in Hanna City and even occasionally offered her own carefully crafted opinions.
Above all else, while he was used to his mother’s particular strain of faith in the Force, of his godfather’s babbling and cryptic answers to his curious questions, he could never quite figure out how to deal with her family, especially after her brother developed an intimacy with the Force much further than she had cared to show. She almost never referenced it. It was most in terms of “I felt”, “I knew”. She would meditate and he knew she wouldn’t put it past her to trick people if she were in danger. When she was four and he was six, he knew her uncle trained her, but she felt much more confident wielding a blaster than a saber. And he knew, deep down, that she was wary of her family's past.
“Sorry about the mess,” he found himself saying, “I didn’t know I’d have company.”
She snorted, shook her head as if to say You call this a mess?
“This is a nice place,” she said softly, taking in his cushions, the heavy carpet under her feet, the heated walls that kept the blasting cold outside. Then she swayed a little and he sprung into action.
“I think you need three things.”
She hummed as he picked up her backpack and led her from the living room toward the corridor.
“A ‘fresher, some food and a medkit.”
She opened her mouth to protest and he shushed her with a simple motion of his head, narrowing his eyes at her. At this, she quickly changed course, from indignant to teasing.
“Are you saying I smell?”
“Yes, Senator.”
She bit her lower lip and frowned at him, at which he mouthed at her an apology.
“Alright, then. ‘Fresher?”
“Through there. I’m going to put your pack in my bedroom. Chilaquiles?”
“Force, yes,” she yawned as she moved.
“You need to sleep, too.”
“That’s four things, then.”
“Yeah, well…”
Before she ducked into his refresher, she stopped and gave him a crooked smile, a smuggler’s one, and spoke in the most lilted tone her Core accent could get, the way they started talking in their teens, emulating their elders.
“Andor?”
He was suddenly thrown back to a clearing on Yavin, chasing a pair of dark brown braids, laughing and ignoring the affectionate admonitions of a Wookie, two other boys running along with them.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
“Sure thing, Solo.”
She blinked heavily and he could swear she seemed almost insecure.
“I mean it, Galen. I’m sorry to disrupt-“
“Anya, shut up and go shower. I’m making you some food. And then you’re taking whatever meds I say you need.”
She laughed and closed the door.
*
She was sick. She could call Galen many things from the top of her head in a second and one of the first of them would be perceptive; it came with being raised by the Galaxy’s finest spies. She wasn’t about to admit it, however. She felt pathetic enough just by showing up at his door without warning, but she couldn’t have risked it. She couldn’t even risk thinking too much about it, for fear of her brother. And she didn’t know where else to run. She didn’t want to run elsewhere, honestly.
His ‘fresher, like the rest of his house, was neatly organized. No sonic shower there. She was under actual abundant hot water, probably harvested from the constant snowstorms, which beat what she had at her senatorial apartment, a thought that briefly made her chest seize. Her neck and lower back were a wreck and she let the water hammer the tension out of them, even if she knew that the pain wasn’t only due to the weird positions in which she fell asleep during the journey.
Caked blood dissolved from her right knee, showing the gash she had acquired while running through the destruction on Hosnian Prime. When Galen saw that, he would get on her case about her not mentioning it sooner, though he had probably already catalogued the places she was hurt. She coughed up some phlegm and watched as that ran down the drain as well, feeling a slight relief in her breathing. For a while in the shuttle, she had felt so miserable, shivering with what she knew was a constant low fever, that she ached for her mother as if she were a little girl. She felt her, then, as she usually did, through the means they mostly communicated since General Organa’s defection from the Republic. She felt her mother’s relief at her being alive, a tinge of concern as it became clear that she was sick and hurt, and then she had directed her feelings towards her childhood memories. Luckily, her mother would deduce in search of whom she was going and would keep that knowledge tightly to herself. It wouldn’t do to let the men in their family into the mix.
It was why she liked better the company of men like her father, really, with his wry sense of humor, his awful jokes, bad on purpose in order to make her roll her eyes. Always smacking his head somewhere on the Falcon on his way to berate Ben about something, but always eager to explain anything to her about his beloved ship. Her brother looked down on people who weren’t like them. She, on the other hand, coveted their company. She felt easier, with them not knowing what she was thinking, with no expectations heaped upon her, no wariness due to her name. It was why she liked hanging around Poe, whenever he dropped by the capital when he was in the Navy, so that she could complain about her brother to him and how he was slowly driving their parents apart. It was no surprise that things finally got to a breaking point for her when Poe himself went missing on his last mission, and why she spent three days planning to escape Hosnian Prime for Fest as soon as she could, and in the end escaped death by her teeth.
Which led her here, to the other non-Force-sensitive man she also loved and his neat ‘fresher, with different bottles of soap arranged in almost military order. As she scrubbed the Mandalorian smuggling transport out of her scalp and skin, she did her best not to feel embarrassed by the fact that she was going to come out of the shower smelling like Galen Andor. Galen, the late bloomer, who the girls around them in Hanna City never paid attention to in detriment of Poe Dameron, and then who one day grew up, all sharp cheek bones and delicate eyes, which he seemed to always have buried in a science datapad. For her they would crinkle as he laughed, ruffling her hair when her braids allowed it, and she would feel small and weird. Small, weird Anya Solo, the eldest daughter of the princess of a killed planet and a loudmouthed smuggler, the granddaughter of almost mythical Old Republic politicians and a Sith Lord -- the niece of a Jedi and therefore Force-sensitive to boot, at a time when most people were afraid of such things. She pretty much conjured Galen spending most of his rare smiles on university girls whose fathers didn’t spend their time with a Wookie and who no one expected too much of. Normal, ordinary girls, like his lovely down to earth parents. Unlike her, who wasn’t raised to be ordinary at all and whose family seemed like one huge delusion of grandeur.
She turned the water off and grabbed two towels, ambling towards the bedroom across the hallway. With one hand, she held on to the towel hiding her torso and with the other pulled a change of clothes from her pack. She became lightheaded for a while and had to sit down on the made bed behind her, pulling on her clothes despite not being entirely dry yet. She saw that Galen had laid out slippers for her, which were obviously too big for her feet. After she was dressed, she looked around his bedroom. Everything was organized, as seemed to be the norm in the small house, and there were no signs of female company. She didn’t even bother pretending she wasn’t relieved.
As she walked back into the living room, she felt the smell of spicy salsa and eggs. She saw that he had spread out a medkit on the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room and stopped a moment to watch him as he cooked. Whereas before his shoulders seemed tense, now they relaxed as he commandeered a skillet over a cooktop. His hair, long enough to cover his ears, had looked mussed when he opened the door for her and now she realized that she had probably interrupter his work, by the cluster of flimsi notes and datapads on the desk in the corner of the living room.
He looked like his father, with his skin a little less roughened by the sun, his hair always a little bit more unkempt, his hands those of someone who was reserved for higher things rather than holding a blaster from young age. But she knew that somewhere around this house there was at least a functional one with enough charges, and pairs of boots that were either good enough to walk into a construction site or to run into battle. Their parents may have wished they didn’t have to fight, not to the extent that they themselves did, but that didn’t mean that they were going to set forth into this galaxy unprepared. And because of that, he didn’t even have to turn in order to know she was there. It wasn't for nothing that they were sometimes called the children of the Death Star. They all had their burdens.
“Stop going over my stuff and come taste this. I never know how spicy you really like it.”
She came up beside him and he held out a spoon with bits of sauce on it. She licked it, trying not to make an embarrassment out of herself.
“Your dad may have been the best cook in the rebellion, but you’re the best in the entire galaxy, you know,” as soon as she said, she cringed inside.
For a brief second, he looked actually pleased with himself, “you’re just flattering me because you took long enough in the shower for me not have any water left.”
She told her own mind not to go there, even as her eyes were in the range of his lean shoulders and chest.
“Water shower and food,” she hummed, for once throwing all care out the window, “I might just stay forever.”
She felt rather than saw him swallow before shaking his head and snorting.
“Wouldn’t want to cause the Republic any political impairment.”
“Afraid it’s too late for that,” she sighed.
For a while he looked remorseful, like he was aware he had stuck his foot in his own mouth. Anya wondered if it had been like that for her mother, too, after her planet had been destroyed. She touched his shoulder in comfort and moved on to look for utensils.
He set the food on the table for her and then took a few shots out of the medkit. He held her gaze with a warning.
“Eat first. I don’t want you falling face first into your food."
It was spicy enough to rip the skin off the roof of her mouth and, most importantly, to open her sinuses. She ate in silence and noticed that he didn’t take a plate out for himself.
“You’ve eaten already.”
He scrunched his nose and nodded.
“Kriff. I’m disturbing you, aren’t I?”
“Anya, for Kriff’s sake. You’re no bother. You and Poe – even Ben – are family. It’s no bother when it’s family. Well, to be honest, not even if it isn't, really.”
She felt something warm spread on her chest. Her family had fallen apart and here he was – the boy she would blindly follow in childhood into any scrapes they could get into, but who had become distant as time passed – giving some of that sense of belonging back to her. She found herself really smiling at him, but her lips felt funny. It made her grin widen.
“What?”
“My mouth’s numb.”
He grinned back at her, a flash of dimples that made something in her ache, and he made it infinitely worse as he thoughtlessly ran his fingers over the slope of her nose.
“Finish that. Then we’re taking a look at that knee and that cough I heard when you were in the ‘fresher. There’s lime in the fridge if you want to feel your lips again.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Galen, for Force’s sake. You’re like an old woman.”
“I should never have left. Look at what you people get up to when I’m not there.”
“That’s not even remotely funny.”
“Fine. But let me fuss over you, okay? Makes me feel less like a tool.”
She sighed and finished eating, after which she let him prod the cut on her knee, put a bacta patch over it and shoot her full of painkillers and antipyretics. He dumped the dishes on the sink and walked her over to his bedroom, where he made her lie down on his bed. All sorts of alarms were ringing on her head, none of which meaning she didn’t trust him, but rather that she was wishing for things she knew she couldn’t have. By the time he was putting an old Alliance issue blanket - a childhood memento - over her, she was feeling too sleepy, so she just slurred “stay with me”, at which he nodded and sat down on the bed beside her, her hand draped over his lap, his back to the wall.
*
She woke up drenched in sweat, with Galen softly breathing beside her at a weird angle, his sharp features and the almost permanent crease between his eyebrows soft in sleep, buried under his messy hair. She coughed, hard, and made for the ‘fresher so she wouldn’t wake him up. By the time she came out from another shower and had stolen some of his clothes, feeling much better, he was awake, having changed the sheets. She crawled back into bed and he sleepily made to go to the living room. Galen, ever the righteous, honorable one, treating her like the princess she was supposed to be. She honestly felt like punching him sometimes.
“Stay. I really don’t want to be alone.”
“All right.”
For the first time since she had walked into his house, she felt a knot gather at her chest and her throat. Her chin trembled and she stifled a sob. He didn’t say anything, only opened his arms for her, gathered her like the small creature she was and felt like at that moment.
“First my brother, then my uncle, then Dad, then Poe. You’re all I have left, you know.”
She felt him kiss her forehead, splay his fingers on her back and hold her firmly to him. And she didn’t know why she chose that moment to take a deep breath and let the words come out of her mouth in the messy way they did. He would later attribute it to his cooking; she would claim it was because he pumped her full of drugs, just to watch him indignantly protest he would never pull any such dirty tricks.
“But, you know, you’re not like my brother, or my uncle, much less my dad - that would be weird. Back then, all the other girls would go on and on about Poe, but as much as I love him, you know, I would always much rath-“
He didn’t let her finish. She sighed into his mouth and after about five minutes of honest necking in a tiny bedroom in a state-built house on Fest, the former junior senator from Chandrila fell asleep on Galen Andor’s shoulder.
*
In the morning, he woke up with the smell of food coming out from his own kitchen, which made absolutely no sense. No one cooked in his kitchen but him, unless his father was visiting, which almost never happened. Then he caught up to the different smell in his sheets and the fact that he was naked, which had happened after the second time Anya had woken up that night.
("You're going to catch whatever it is I was dying of," she had said, shimmying out of his shirt.
"Shut up.")
He got up, thumbed a strap of the messy military pack at the foot of his bed and padded over to the living room to investigate.
Anya was barefoot, much to his chagrin, wearing nothing but an old shirt of his, her wavy brown hair braided down to the middle of her back, stirring what looked to be eggs.
“More eggs?”
“We need protein. Well, I need protein.”
She pointed over to the rustic communications bay in his living room, where he had set up a way to hack into the transmissions of the Republic, the First Order and the Resistance alike. There, on a datapad, was a message. Poe Dameron had appeared on base in D’Qar and was on his way to Takodana. Her father had also surfaced, with a scavenger girl from Jakku and a repentant stormtrooper, at Maz Kanata’s place. Apparently, the Resistance was gearing up to destroy Starkiller base.
“You’re going,” he said, his chest tightening.
Her Skywalker blue eyes widened as she nodded. She worried her lower lip in her teeth as she looked sideways at the datapads and the holo house projects on his desk in the living room. He knew, then, that she respected him and his decisions, and that she would never, ever ask him for anything she didn’t feel like he could give.
He also knew that she had nowhere else to go. The senate had been destroyed, it would take probably a generation to repair the damage done to the Republic; billions were dead. She had escaped Starkiller much like his own parents had escaped a weapon very similar to it, more than thirty years before. Despite everything, he felt deep down that his name was still implicated in these atrocities. It was, he figured, time.
“Well, someone has to keep you from catching every kriffing infection known to man in this galaxy.” He pointed down to the peeling bacta patch on her right knee, “and you know, from bumping into stuff.”
She was still biting her lower lip but her mouth turned into a small smile and he had to keep himself from crossing into the kitchen and kissing her senseless. One corner of her lips lifted more than the other.
“You saying you’re with me, Andor?”
He inhaled, exhaled and nodded carefully.
“All the way.”