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When Cassian Andor was three years old, he got himself a cat. Or, more accurately, a cat appeared in his house and refused to ever be more than three metres away from him. She was so small that she couldn’t be more than a day old, her eyes still closed. Still, anytime she was moved away from Cassian, she yowled with a volume and resonance that seemed impossible for her tiny body to produce.
Half-deaf and sleep-deprived, Jeron and Magdalena gave in, teaching their son how to hold and feed the cat and fashioning a sling so that he could carry it around with him. The three-year-old took on this responsibility very seriously, especially when, after three days, the kitten opened her grey-flecked green eyes and blinked them up at him. Cassian was enchanted by his new friend, although the active toddler was a little put out that she never responded to any of his attempts to play, simply nestling closer to whatever body part was nearest and going back to sleep.
When after a month the kitten still did nothing more than sleep, more like a newborn human than a cat, it was clear to the Andors that their son had a companion rather than a pet. Somewhere out there was a month-old baby who would one day mean everything to Cassian. Until then, the force had decided to give him a part of that person to give him comfort. Only the saddest of souls ever had companions and Magdalena wept at the knowledge that her son would have enough pain in his life to need one.
The cat grew very slowly, so that two years later she was hardly bigger than she was when she first came to him. Her feline reflexes had not yet fully developed, making her the clumsiest cat anyone in the town had ever seen. Five-year-old Cassian was an affectionate, tactile child and while the cat allowed him to pet her and always purred when he stroked along the twin stripes on the top of her head, she always looked vaguely grumpy about it.
Her preferred means of affection was butting her head against him and this she did with such gusto that she often seemed like a small and fluffy battering ram. She still didn’t tolerate anyone but Cassian’s touch and had taken to using her teeth and claws to enforce this policy. After a particularly ferocious bout when they’d tried to get her off the lamp before she hurt herself, his frustrated parents had half-jokingly suggested he call her Ira. Cassian looked at his cat who was still glaring and hissing from his arms, the very embodiment of fury, and thought Ira was the perfect name for her.
A year later, when Cassian’s world had shattered around him, his father dead on Carida and his mother executed as a traitor’s wife, Ira became his only family.
At his mother’s funeral, she seemed to know he needed comfort. She gently brushed up against his legs, asking to be held instead of climbing up him like she normally would, and once he’d lifted her onto his lap, she allowed him to stroke her with no sign of unhappiness and even started gently patting his thighs, careful to keep her claws tucked away. Cassian let himself cry for a while and then focused on the steady rhythm of her breaths until the sobs eased. He held her up against his chest and she nuzzled her head against his heart, periodically meowing as if to remind him that he wasn’t alone.
The now orphaned Cassian was adopted into the separatist cell his father had been a part of. He was first put to use throwing rocks at convoys and then using his youth and apparent harmlessness to infiltrate and gain intelligence. Having Ira near him helped sell this façade and many a stormtrooper would laugh derisively at the scrawny boy with his grumpy cat before he stole their secrets. Ira was gradually growing more independent, she began letting him out of her sight for short periods and had started hunting, making up for her lack of size and technique with an unbounded ferocity.
Cassian would watch her usually unsuccessful tussles with lemmings and voles with a smile, half from amusement and half from admiration at her spirit. She brought him the first catch she ever made, waking him up in the middle of the night by repeatedly tapping him on the head with her paw and then presenting him with the small rabbit she’d killed. While he was not overly pleased with her timing, she looked so proud of herself that he put on a jacket and set about preparing and cooking it. They shared their meal as they sat together near the fire and from then on, Ira made sure to bring him every rabbit she ever caught.
One morning when Cassian was eleven, the whole camp was woken by Ira’s cries. They echoed powerfully off the walls of the cave that served as the cell’s temporary home. Amidst the aggrieved shouting of his comrades, Cassian hurried in the direction of her calls. He found her huddled in a dark corner of the adjacent cave.
As soon as she saw him, she leapt into his arms, clawing at him to hold on when he didn’t quite catch her. She would only ever hurt him was when she was scared and indeed, her whole body was trembling. She pressed her ear against his chest and seemed to be listening for his heartbeat. As he held her against him, Cassian looked around for the source of her fear but the cave was completely empty.
Cassian then remembered what his parents had told him about companions, that they reflected the people they came from. Somewhere out there was a person with Ira’s soul who was hurting so much that their pain had travelled across the galaxy to find her. He desperately wanted to find that person and comfort them, but he settled for holding Ira tightly for the three days it took before she could bear to be apart from him.
Years passed and Cassian joined the Rebellion after catching the eye of a Captain Draven during a joint mission with the Festian Resistance.
In the years since whatever had happened with Ira in the cave, she had grown, in strength more than in size, and was now the terror of Dantooine’s small fauna. She was no longer the clumsy kitten that Cassian had laughed at as a child, but a highly skilled predator. She had also taken to attacking every stormtrooper she saw with a fury that truly reflected her name and thus couldn’t accompany Cassian on his missions.
Instead, she stayed on the ship, watching Cassian leave with baleful glares. When he returned, she would jump onto his head from wherever hiding place she’d found near the overhead as a way of registering her displeasure at having to follow his orders. To reward her for her (albeit grudging) obedience, Cassian allowed her to accompany him on the few assignments with a negligible chance of encountering Imperials.
One such mission was a meeting with Maz Kanata to gather intelligence from her vast network of smugglers. Although they’d never met, Maz greeted him like an old friend before turning her gaze to Ira, who was scanning the room with the suspicion of a soldier.
Maz bent down to get a better look at her eyes and when she did, she nodded as if in confirmation of something before she asked, ‘And what’s the name of your charming companion here?’ Cassian didn’t miss the hint of irony, no one could look at his bristling cat and call her ‘charming.’
His mouth twisted as he replied,‘Ira.’
A hearty laugh tumbled out of Maz’s mouth.‘A fitting name! Yes, I can see the fury that fuels her just as it fuels the person whose soul she shares.’
Cassian’s brow furrowed, he’d heard hushed rumours about Maz’s force sensitivity and her eyes that seemed to see deeper than they should. Perhaps she would somehow know the person Ira had come from. ‘You know them?’ His heart beat a little faster at the thought. It seemed a silly thing to think about in wartime but he often imagined a person with Ira’s fire and seemingly grudging yet constant affection and he couldn't help but want to meet them.
‘Oh yes, I’d know those eyes anywhere. She’s as charming as her feline counterpart I can assure you.’ A woman then, with Ira’s eyes.
‘Do you know her name?’ He knew he should be directing his intelligence extraction efforts towards Rebellion business but this was the first time he’d come across a real possibility of finding them, her.
Maz was shaking her head, ‘She didn’t give a name. She was one of Saw Gerrera’s fighters, perhaps you’ll meet that way when the time comes.’ She patted his hand then straightened, ‘However, I believe you and I have matters of more consequence to discuss.’
The conversation neatly moved on to Imperial shipping routes and troop deployments. Cassian walked back to the ship, Ira in tow, satisfied with a mission well done and eager to get back to base to look up the Rebellion’s files on the Partisans. That night, after failing to get access to even the most basic of files, he turned to the cat sleeping next to him. As if sensing his gaze, she opened an eye and seemed to tilt her head in question.
‘I don’t suppose you know where you are?’ The eye closed and she returned to sleep. ‘No, then.’
A year later, Ira had another attack like the one in the cave. This time her fear and loneliness were accompanied by anger and more than a few rebels were left the worse for wear before Cassian found her. His heart ached for the green-eyed woman as Ira clung to him, desperate for every scrap of affection and sign she wasn’t alone.
He took her to his quarters and held her against his bare skin so she could better feel his warmth and hear his heartbeat. Her claws were still out and he winced as they dug into his skin but he never dreamed of letting her go. After she’d fallen asleep on his lap, he reached for his datapad.
When he’d first tried to access the files on Saw Gerrera’s troops, he hadn’t yet been an official member of the Rebellion and so his clearance was severely limited. Now however, he might be able to find a lead.
He spent the whole night sifting through every mention of Gerrera or the Partisans, frowning as he read about some of their less savoury methods. He found nothing other than a passing reference in some meeting minutes to a young girl who’d once accompanied Saw to the Rebel base. There was no record of her name but something in Cassian told him it was her. It was both a source of comfort and longing to know that they had walked the same halls and breathed the same air.
Ira grew even more mistrustful of others, skulking around the base where she’d once roamed proudly. She mirrored Cassian, who began to be weighed down with the increasingly ruthless acts he was being asked to commit for the sake of the Rebellion. He drifted away from his friends, he couldn’t bear to sit and laugh in the mess knowing what it was like to kill a man who trusted you, but Ira would let him sit and pet her after a mission, looking at him with what seemed like understanding in her grey-green eyes.
After one mission, he returned with a hotwired Imperial droid. While he’d managed to override its code for the purposes of his mission (i.e. not being shot by an Imperial droid), it would take time to do a complete reprogram. Cassian threw himself into the project, eager for something to occupy his mind that wasn’t rehashing past mistakes and moral failings.
Ira was unimpressed by this new addition to their lives. After he’d finally convinced her the droid wouldn’t harm him and that she therefore didn’t need to constantly blunt her claws trying to attack it, she watched him work from the corner of his quarters, always ready to pounce if need be.
When the reprogram was complete and the newly liberated K-2SO ‘awoke’, he and Ira didn’t get along at all. Still, they both liked Cassian enough to tolerate each other. Kay provided a steady stream of disparaging remarks about the cat but Cassian was quietly confident that he enjoyed having something to be frustrated by.
Once she’d grown used to the droid, Ira’s favourite activity was trying to climb onto his head to gain the best vantage point from which to survey her surroundings. Kay soon grew tired of the scratch marks she kept putting on his chassis and eventually just started lifting her. The sight of her there, one friend on top of the other, was a bright point in Cassian’s increasingly dark life.
When Cassian returned from the Ring of Kafrene, he had news of a planet killer and a new objective, finding an in with Saw Gerrera. He thought now might be the time to make a serious attempt at finding Saw’s elusive young protégée. With no small amount of reverence, he approached the senior Senator Organa when he was next on base, who couldn’t tell him any more than Cassian already knew. Remembering that she was also at the meeting, Cassian found the other Senator Organa, hoping that she might have paid more attention to a girl her age.
Leia, as she always insisted he call her, did remember a quiet, green-eyed girl with Saw. ‘Gerrera seemed to treat her like a daughter. He called her something like ‘Jen or Jin’, but I’m not sure if that was her real name. I’m sorry I can’t be more help.’
But Cassian’s mind had already made the connection with something he’d read while researching Galen Erso. Specifically, that he’d had a daughter called ‘Jyn’ who had never been found by the Imperials and that Erso’s wife Lyra was an old friend of Saw’s. It was as solid a lead as he ever had in Intelligence and after hurriedly thanking the Senator (‘Leia’, she yelled after him), he rushed to the slicers in the Communications Department to give them the name.
With nothing left to do but wait and see if they came up with anything, Cassian returned to his quarters to find Ira bouncing off the walls. She’d been unusually restless lately and as soon as he opened the door she raced out of the room. Cassian assumed some hunting would calm her down but he did worry that the flightiness would make Jyn (and how strange it was to finally use her name when he thought of her) that much harder to find.
After a few days and the sort of slicing that was indistinguishable from magic to Cassian, it was determined that Jyn Erso, under the alias of Liana Hallik, was currently serving out a prison sentence at Wobani. Draven nodded and suddenly a woman’s face filled the screens.
So, there she was. Like the good soldier he was, Cassian kept the brunt of his attention on the recovery mission details. Still, a small part of his mind noted the attractive incongruity between the delicate loveliness of her features with the stubborn set of her jaw and almost murderous look in her eyes. In Ira’s eyes.
One successful extraction mission later, Cassian waited with Draven in the command centre for Jyn to be escorted in. She walked in and was directed to a seat. For a fresh escapee from Wobani, she did not look happy but her sullen face was nevertheless beautiful, her eyes huge and fathomless in the blue light.
Draven walked over and began the questioning with,‘You’re currently calling yourself Liana Hallik, correct?’ before going on to list her various offences.
Jyn was not responsive to Draven’s interrogative style (for which she could not be blamed) and, sensing this, Mon Mothma introduced Cassian. His breath caught for a moment at the full focus of those eyes on him but he couldn’t allow himself to be distracted.
He adopted a softer, almost conversational tone as he made his way toward her.‘When was the last time you saw your father?’
‘Fifteen years ago.’ Her voice was strong and even when she responded, but her hands had started to fidget. Cassian suddenly remembered Ira’s cries echoing off cave walls fifteen years ago, the way her tiny body had trembled against his for three days. It felt almost invasive, knowing that this woman had once been that afraid.
He let the wave of sympathy for that lost, lonely little girl draw him to a new tactic.‘Jyn, we need your help.’
Her lip trembled slightly and he wondered when the last time someone had called her by her name had been. Her gaze was now steady on his.
‘There’s a pilot with a message from your father about a super-weapon, a planet-killer.’
She looked how he remembered feeling when he’d first heard of the weapon, the scale of its evil so vast it was impossible to immediately comprehend. ‘What do you need me for?’ She was softer now and seemed to be genuinely asking.
‘The pilot’s with Saw Gerrera and we need an introduction. You were close to him, weren’t you?’ He remembered Leia saying that Gerrera had treated Jyn like a daughter and Cassian had a sneaking suspicion that it was their parting of ways that had caused Ira’s second major outburst seven years ago.
Jyn bit her lip. ‘It’s been a long time,’ she paused, weighing her options, then took a breath, ‘but he’ll remember me.’ Taking this as the acquiescence it was, Mon Mothma smiled and Draven started in on the specifics of the mission.
Once the briefing was finished, Jyn was directed to the quartermaster for warmer clothing and Cassian went to his quarters to pack. He walked in to find Ira lying on his bed, her body curled up with that of a Festian Arctic fox.
For all he’d thought about Ira and Jyn over the years, he’d never considered the fact that there was a piece of his own soul somewhere out there. Yet here it was, its dark eyes, his eyes, warily taking him in. The two of them looked good together, the brown and white of the fox’s summer coat complementing Ira’s fur. She was purring louder than Cassian had ever heard her and he couldn’t help but smile at the scene. His thoughts were interrupted by Jyn, who had acquired a jacket and scarf and had somehow managed to track him down. She was arrested by the same sight he was, taking in the two animals together and reaching the obvious conclusion.
‘It’s you then.’ Her gaze was on him now, looking wary but not entirely disappointed by the universe’s choice for her. He nodded, not sure what else to say. He felt like he knew her both too much and not enough to be able to start a conversation. Ira had noticed the newcomer and they were now watching each other with their identical eyes.
Jyn scrunched her nose and said,‘I always thought I’d be something a bit fiercer than a cat.’
Cassian laughed, especially when she turned to scowl at him with an expression he’d seen on Ira a hundred times. ‘Trust me, it is impossible to be fiercer than that cat. Almost everyone on this base has the scars to prove it.’
Ira just tilted her head slightly and blinked innocently and Cassian couldn’t help but smile at her. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jyn watching him, a smile tugging at the edges of her mouth as well.
‘What about him?’ Cassian gestured to the fox who was still surveying the room from where it was snuggled against Ira.
Jyn walked over and sat next to it, fondly rubbing its back. Cassian felt a slight blush rise to his cheeks at the way the animal seemed to revel in her touch.
With a teasing lilt she said,‘This one’s a total wimp, he turns white as soon as it gets below 15 degrees standard.’
The fox had the right idea, Cassian thought as he eyed the thick blue jacket he intended to take to Jedha.
Jyn followed his gaze and smirked, before returning her attention to her fox and growing serious. ‘He’s the only thing in my whole life that’s never left me.’ Her words were ostensibly directed at him but her voice had a dreamy quality that sounded like she hadn’t meant to say them aloud.
Cassian went to join them all on the bed. He knew it was too early for any sort of grand romantic declaration, he did. Still, looking at this woman and the part of her that he’d loved almost his whole life, a bone-deep part of him whispered that he wouldn’t leave her while there was still breath in his body.