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‘Don’t. Just — don’t.’
Melshi’s voice is quiet, just loud enough to be heard over the din of the unit, but his tone is serious. Cassian doesn’t know precisely what he’s talking about, but he could hazard a guess and is pretty goddamn sure he isn’t talking about the job.
‘What?’
Melshi won’t stop staring at him — like he has been all shift.
‘You’ve got that look on your face.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Cassian grits his teeth, wrenching the spanner in his grip until it clicks, muscle memory propelling him forward despite the lack of feeling in his limbs as he hovers one step removed from his body.
It’s been this way since he was a kid, possessing this uncanny ability to detach and observe whenever he feels overwhelmed or in a potentially dangerous situation. It’s a useful skill, but right now, it’s just making his palms sweat and his heart hammer in his ears as he fights to stay present.
It’s been creeping up on him for the past few weeks, emerging and then receding, beginning as a tickle in his throat, a tightening in his chest, and a crawling sensation constantly working its way across his skin. Today, it’s accompanied by adrenaline and cold sweat, a sense of growing dread that he’s finding harder and harder to ignore.
He can feel Loy’s eyes combing the floor from the other side of the room and is confident that, given his extraordinary luck, his steely gaze will shutter in on him any moment. There’s a reason the floor manager is watching him, looking for a chance to put him back in his place. Cassian is already on thin ice. Not through any fault of his own — if anything, he picked things up too quickly, is too good at slipping into the role. It fills him with enough self-disgust that he has to allocate an inordinate amount of concentration to the not-thinking about it bit of this whole setback. No, Loy’s problem with him would be his reigning mantle as the ‘new guy’ — although, he can’t imagine this will last for long with Palpatine’s new re-sentencing mandates.
‘Yeah, well. We lose another guy, I get fried, so get your shit together.’
Cassian doesn’t have to make eye contact with anyone to feel the energy shift at the table, the subtle tense of Taga’s shoulders next to him.
It’s a right enough assessment. One month into a six-year sentence with a likely extension tacked onto the end, it’s not like it hasn’t crossed Cassian’s mind. Veemoss clearly wasn’t an outlier, either. There have been others since. The atmosphere returning to the cellblock in the evenings has been even more tense these past two weeks, if that’s possible. From what he’s gathered from snatches of conversation between inmates, it usually only takes one for a smattering of others to shortly follow.
Melshi is still staring at him expectantly.
Cassian almost fires back something sharp — thanks for the concern, maybe, but Loy takes this opportunity to glare over at them, and Cassian can physically feel his gaze boring into the back of his neck, daring him to fuck up. Instead, he bites the inside of his cheek and pinches the bridge of his nose in a poor attempt to fend off a migraine.
It’s too fucking bright in here.
Unit 5-2d is a vast, sterile room; functional, almost clinical. Garish white floors, walls, tables, and ceilings with fluorescent lights that leave everything and everything blanched of life. The only other colour that stands out on the factory floor is the lurid orange of their jumpsuits, which even now sometimes catches Cassian’s attention from the corner of his eye, shifting and warping, for a split second appearing violently red.
‘Hands off!’ Ulaf hollers, and everyone pulls back.
‘Clear.’
The hunk of quadanium currently being lowered into position, hydraulics grinding, lands with a dull thunk, and everyone gets to work again, slotting and rotating components. The tang of metal that hangs in the air and clings to Cassian’s sweaty palms is so strong that he can taste it, like a fistful of credits, a swill of hot blood. His tongue feels thick in his mouth, and a fine tremor runs through his arm as he slides the bolt into place.
‘Don’t think about it,’ Melshi says. ‘That’s what I do. We do the work and then we get out.’
Win and walk away.
‘I’m trying.’ Cassian’s voice is tight.
No matter what he does, though, he can’t help but think about it.
There were so many times he could have turned back, ran, snuck away, done fucking something. He keeps coming back to it over and over again: Why couldn’t he bring himself to acknowledge how bad things could really get? It doesn’t take much rumination to see that his true motivations were probably selfish. Some foolish bid to prove that his life was his own, even after everything the Empire took from him — his home, his family, his sister, his dad, his sense of safety and meaning, his freedom.
It’s a dawning horror that comes to him in fits and starts, mind flitting back and forth between denial and then sluices of turgid fear — the realisation that, for once, he can see no way in hell that he’s going to make it out of this. Cassian’s whole life has been a series of unfortunate turns and bad decisions, and this one is no exception. It just so happens that he has no way to fix it this time.
The worst part is that while he doesn’t know what it is they’re constructing exactly, he’s seen enough imperial navy ships, artillery, and various death machines over the years to know what's going on here — not only that, but to understand that this time it’s something big. Half the inmates here have no fucking clue what they’re unwittingly a part of, although maybe that’s a blessing. It’s not just the schematics or the construction that immediately tips him off. It’s the way the guards watch them, the Empire’s sudden indiscriminate approach to incarceration, the ‘P.O.R.D.’. They’re not just afraid of brewing rebel sentiment. They need manpower.
The not-thinking is one thing, trying to repress the terrible knowledge of what he’s being forced to do; fending off the panic, the constant urge to double over and retch is another. He's shivering — fists clenched, chest aching. A thin sheen of sweat has broken out over his whole body. The usually freezing room is somehow too hot.
‘You don’t look like you’re trying, Girgo. You look like you’re about to have a breakdown.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Well, good.’ Melshi huffs out something quiet that barely resembles a laugh and tosses a glance over at the nearest guard, who is watching them closely. ‘That would be bad for morale.’
When the guard finally looks away, Melshi leans forward, catching Cassian’s eye. The implication behind his words is clear. You know it’s not just your arse on the line. They’ll punish all of us if you lose it. So, don’t fucking lose it.
Cassian grunts, slots the nearest axle into place. ‘Stop — talking.’
‘Stop sweating, then.’
Melshi’s voice is barely a whisper, but Cassian can still hear him, even over the clangour of metal on metal, as the guards’ voices echo over the workshop.
‘Hands!’
‘Clear.’
It’s the same every day. The exact routine. They go through a series of motions — put this piece here, attach that one there, move this one to here. It’s like a holovid on a loop, repeatedly playing until the image is burnt into his retinas, and he can’t even close his eyes without seeing it. It’s the same thing when lying in his bunk while trying to get to sleep at night — as if his very mind is not his own anymore.
Cassian reaches for the next gear piece, willing himself to focus on the task. His hands are so unsteady that he can’t even get a proper grip on the piston. The room is spinning, and he can feel his pulse in his temples. Suddenly, he feels faint.
‘Hey,’ Melshi snaps, voice a low growl, he’s leaning in close, and Cassian almost flinches, the world juddering back to focus. ‘Calm down.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Keef,’ Melshi’s voice is calm, but he’s holding Cassian’s gaze with his own too deliberately like he’s trying to reign him in. ‘For fuck’s sake. Listen to me. Breathe.’
Finally, he allows himself to acknowledge the feeling in the pit of his stomach. All the futility, the terror, the grief, the regret — it all pressurises in his gut, threatening to roil up a storm of nausea and despair.
‘I can’t.’ Cassian’s voice is like a gasp, he’s panting, and his entire body feels like it’s vibrating as he somehow, against all odds, manages to continue to move through the motions of the assembly process. What the fuck is he doing here? How did this happen?
‘Yes, you can.’
‘I don’t think —‘ Cassian can’t look at him, can’t even focus; his vision has gone grainy.
‘Shut up,’ Melshi hisses, his voice like a shot through the clamour of the floor before Cassian can finish the sentence: I don’t think I can do this anymore. ‘You can. I’m not getting toasted today because you can barely keep it together after a month. Neither of us are. Breathe.’
Cassian forces himself to focus on the quadanium axle in front of him, on how the metal feels, heavy and cold in his hands as it's cranked into position. No one around the table but Melshi dares to look at him, patently ignoring their conversation and instead staring down their respective tasks as if his distress is somehow contagious.
Then, Cassian finally does breathe. In and out, like Maarva taught him as a child, when he could barely introduce himself in Basic, and he still didn’t understand where he was or why he couldn’t see his sister again, why they couldn’t just go back for her, why he suddenly felt like there was always something pressing down on his chest. For a moment, he can see B2 behind his eyes, counting backwards from ten in Kenari, can hear the familiar stalling of his vocal processing unit. The resulting pang of grief is so strong it’s almost enough to distract him from how much he wants to throw up.
Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six.
Cassian’s breath is still ragged, but he’s starting to calm down, and the room is beginning to stop spinning. He’s still shaking, but he’s back in his own body, the frigid ground solid beneath the soles of his feet.
He thinks about the last time he saw his mum, back on Ferrix, home; that brief, shining moment where he truly believed that maybe they could leave together, and then her fierce rebuttal that that’s what she wanted for him, that this time it really could be different and this was his chance to go somewhere safe and be allowed the time and space to heal. He remembers how she looked at him, how she hugged him, and then, quite morbidly, he tries to imagine what she would do if she realised he was dead, if she found out about how he never even had a shot at a normal life, whatever that means. He can't picture it without feeling like a knife is twisting in his gut.
But wasn’t this how things were always going to go?
Sometimes, he gets the sense that he’s been stained from birth. That ever since then, things have been lurching towards their awful, inexorable conclusion — his personal appointment with death, delayed and delayed and impossibly delayed again. The truth is, he has always known that when that day finally comes that the blaster bolt isn’t just a graze, when he’s six feet under, pushing daisies or lying on the cold ground on an unforgiving planet in the middle of nowhere; the Empire will be what put him there.
Five. Four. Three. Two …
It’s then that, for the first time in his life, he allows himself to be properly angry.
Maybe he always has been because once he acknowledges it, Cassian's rage is a living thing. It's a hot coil of wild energy that burns through his veins and urges him to lash out, to fight, to run. He knows it's irrational, but it truly takes everything in him at that moment to control it.
What he can do, is finally breathe again, and when he does, he feels a surge of strength run through him. He doesn't know if it's him or adrenaline or some complex chemical reaction spurring on this new feeling, but for the first time in almost a month, he feels like he can finally think straight.
His whole life may have been a series of bad decisions and near-misses, but he's not dead yet. He can still fight.
The sounds of the workshop are still there — the low hum of the equipment, the whir and clang of the pistons, the hiss of the hydraulics, the scrape of metal on metal. But now, it’s all background noise. Cassian can see the room as clearly as if he’s seeing it for the first time.
‘You with me?’
Cassian nods, a short jerk of the head.
‘Good,’ Melshi’s voice is laced with relief. ‘Now, focus.’