Work Text:
The first time Nemik visits, Cassian is still in the bacta tank. No missing limbs, no new prosthetics to be fitted for. They won’t match now, or anything so poetic. Cassian and the woman – Jyn Erso, the stories say, and Nemik will have to learn more about all of that soon, make himself useful now that he’s convinced the Alliance to put him on a ship and bring him all the way out to Yavin, a base on the verge of an evacuation – both have exposure burns. Respiratory problems. Too close to a site of mass destruction. And, of course, Cassian had been shot.
Nemik possibly shouldn’t be the one getting these medical details, but Cassian doesn’t list a next of kin, apparently, and right now Kaytoo Esso is a bunch of data on a back-up drive. Someone needs to send word down the line to Cassian’s people, to Brasso and Bix, and everyone who isn’t here on Yavin.
So Nemik writes.
“Better they hear from you,” Dr. Kenau speculates. “You’ll make it sound good. Sound right. The gods only know how his droid friend would put it.”
“Quite,” Nemik agrees, for lack of anything better to say. He watches Cassian float for a few more minutes, pats the curve of the tank in farewell, and says, “Well. See you in the morning, friend.”
He’s been in with Mon Mothma, for hours, drafting. His head aches, a bit. Meeting with her is like that. Not because she’s aggravating, though she can be, but because she’s exactly as clever as she needs to be and ten times more stubborn.
Sometimes Nemik thinks it’s a pity she was born on a Core world. Most of the time he doesn’t let himself indulge in the littleness of a thought like that.
“We could have made a dent in public opinion, if I’d been writing for you, back when they’d still let your speeches onto the holonet,” he’d said once.
He’d meant it.
She’s a good speaker, would’ve more than wiped the floor with any of his old university debating society friends. In another world, she would be Chancellor now. (In another world, maybe, she would still have a daughter.)
She had smiled and replied, “You wouldn’t have lasted a day on Coruscant.”
It’s probably true.
“It’s a big planet, isn’t it?” he’d replied. “I’ve read about the Lower Levels. There are regular people. People who would’ve listened.”
“There were,” she agreed, after a long beat of silence.
She likes silences, uses them well. His Rhetoric professor would have approved. She wasn’t being calculated, though, not with just two of them in the room.
She’d closed her eyes, pressed two fingers to her temple. “There are,” she’d amended.
He’d liked her, for saying that.
It doesn’t mean he doesn’t find it tiring, the way she picks through his words to find not so much the truest arrangement as the broadest, the most potent. She is, unfortunately, the most exacting editor he’s ever worked with.
“Surely not worse than General Draven,” she laughs.
“No, he is worse,” Nemik agrees. “But he doesn’t like to talk to me. He just sends notes. Not even notes. Only redactions.”
He still goes to the medical center, after, because he’d promised. Cassian hadn’t been conscious to hear it, but it had still been a promise.
On his third visit, Nemik peeks his head into the room to find Cassian awake.
“Nemik,” Cassian says, sitting up in bed, letting the hand holding a breathing mask up to his face fall to his side. “You’re here.”
“No, no,” Nemik says, gesturing hurriedly as he comes over to Cassian’s bedside. “Do whatever the med droids are telling you.”
“I’m fine,” Cassian says slowly. “I don’t need it all the time, or I would have it on.”
“You can’t possibly be fine,” Nemik counters. “No one who’s fine spends three consecutive days in a bacta tank.”
Nemik would know.
“No,” Cassian agrees, as Nemik sits down in the uncomfortable chair nearest the bed. “But hearing we got the Death Star helped.”
“Yes,” Nemik agrees, reaching out to grip Cassian’s forearm. He’s warm, at least.
“What are they saying about it?” Cassian asks, gripping back, briefly, before letting go.
Nemik sighs, rubs his palms over his thighs. “What you’d expect. Terrorism on a never-before-seen scale. That kind of thing.”
“They killed a planet,” Cassian hisses, as if anyone will ever be able to forget. “It exploded.”
“I know,” Nemik says, because he does.
The Empire has always poisoned water, always strip-mined forests, always pinned people into smaller and smaller zones of movement. The Empire has always killed planets, but before, it took weeks or months or years.
“We’re working on it,” Nemik promises. “Making sure Alderaan is the name on every tongue. They can’t hide from something like that.”
“Good,” Cassian says.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” Nemik says, twisting his fingers together, to deal with the twitchiness. “On Scarif.”
Cassian’s laugh, or perhaps scoff, devolves into a cough. He picks up the breathing mask, inhales deeply, exhales, inhales. “What would you have done?” he finally asks, dropping the mask again.
“I can handle myself with a blaster,” Nemik says, wishing he weren’t bristling. He knows that he could do it still if he needed to – be a soldier – but he also knows that isn’t what Cassian means.
"I know," Cassian says.
Nemik nods, once, dropping his eyes to his lap. A lot of people who went to Scarif with Cassian died. That the Alliance was able to rescue anyone at all is a miracle surely as great as a backwater boy taking a shot that blew up a planet-destroyer.
"I hear they’re incandescent about losing their archives,” Nemik says, a peace offering.
Cassian gives a hint of a smirk in return. “They did it to themselves.”
“That they did,” Nemik agrees.
“Sorry,” a voice comes from behind Nemik’s back. “We didn’t realize you had company.”
There’s a slight human woman with very blue eyes and a dark-eyed human man who seems uncertain on his legs, a feeling Nemik recognizes all too well. They have to be Jyn Erso and Bodhi Rook.
“Come in,” Cassian says, with a single hand gesture. “This is Nemik.”
“Do you break people out of prison, too?” Erso asks.
“Prisons of the mind,” Nemik says, absently, automatically, taking in the two of them. They look about his age. Maybe a little younger, even. He's still unaccustomed to that.
“He is our best philosopher,” Cassian says, tilting his head up, a hint of a smile playing across his face. He doesn’t smile very much and in Nemik’s experience, makes jokes even less often than that, so it’s almost strange. Actually, it is strange.
“I write,” Nemik explains. “And I’m a navigator. Supply routes, mostly, these days.”
“A . . . writer. So you’re a Rebel propaganda maker?” Jyn Erso asks, a grin flickering across her face.
Nemik winces, to be reduced to that. “I write treatises. Speeches. The odd pamphlet. Propaganda isn’t – Well. I’ve been informed that as far as that goes, people generally prefer pictures.”
“Not everyone reads Aurebesh, I guess?” Rook offers, hands stuck in his pockets.
“I write in Huttese and Aldhaani, too,” Nemik says, scratching at his knee, though he knows that’s not really the point. Draven doesn’t care that Karis first learned to make words in a sacred script that only a few thousand people can still read. (He does, at least, care that Karis’s words burrow under people’s skin and can’t be killed.)
“I try to make sure everything’s got a spoken option, but.” Nemik shrugs. “It’s a resource problem.”
These are not the battles he imagined he would go on to fight, during those long, terrible days of recovery when the combination of pain and crushing boredom were so all-encompassing that he needed all the fantasies he could muster.
“I didn’t know the Rebels had just . . . writers,” Rook says, eyebrows drawing together. There’s no way he hasn’t been sleeping for hours and hours, after the kinds of injuries people say he sustained, but he still looks overtired, worn thin.
“The frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere,” Cassian says steadily, nodding over at Nemik. “That’s one of his.”
Normally, Nemik might’ve flushed or something under the scrutiny of Cassian’s friends, but he’s distracted by a distinct flinch from Rook.
“That was you?” Rook asks, tugging for a moment at the loose fabric of his shirt.
“You’ve read it? The manifesto?” Nemik asks, feeling buoyancy bloom in his chest. If it’s gotten as far as Imperial cargo pilots, it’s wound its way deep – right where it needs to go.
Rook shakes his head. “Not, not read it. Heard about it.” He sucks his lower lip in for a second. “You could get in a lot of trouble, being caught with a copy of that.”
“Sounds like the Empire’s afraid of you,” Erso says.
“Not me, specifically,” Nemik says. “Not really. The words are just the conduit. The idea’s always there, for everyone. The Empire is afraid of the tipping point, because they know it’s coming.”
Erso tips her head for a moment. “You have very unexpected friends,” she tells Cassian.
Nemik thinks he agrees with that.
The med staff have been encouraging Cassian to walk, to get his strength back, and Nemik thinks he likes the jungle. So they’re walking, very slowly.
“Have you met the pilot yet?” Cassian asks, abruptly breaking through the background layers of bird calls and monkey screeches and engines thrumming.
Nemik looks away from the deep green of the overhanging canopy. “Which pilot?” he asks.
“The Death Star pilot,” Cassian says.
“Not yet,” Nemik says.
“He reminds me a little bit of you, when we first met,” Cassian says, after a moment’s silence.
“What, curly hair as well?” Nemik asks.
Cassian huffs through his nose, short and amused. “No. Very young.”