Work Text:
Kleya is still trying to piece together the events on and over Jedha, and the circumstances of the subsequent Rebel bombing on Eadu, when her radio pings.
Few left anymore who know this frequency.
She has a listen.
Sometimes, she translates the code, the rules fall apart. No exit to be built. No choice but try and climb the shaky scaffolding of hope.
Tell them…
She closes her eyes, rests her head in her hand, and commits the message to memory.
Luthen told her early on that the fervor with which Cassian’s passions burned was at once his greatest weakness, and his greatest strength. Love, anger, determination, despair, he could pivot wildly from one end of the axis to another without once stopping to set foot in the middle. No room for nuance, no half-measures.
Where he saw strength, she saw only liability, vulnerability. Luthen brought him in after the Ferrix riot, no warning, very much alive, and after detouring to a nowhere place in the sector at Cassian’s insistence, and so sparked the bitterest argument they’d ever had and ever would again.
“The ISB know him; they know her, know her connection to him and to you, Luthen! His intentions may be sincere but you must see that his commitment will be constantly torn.”
“I know that,” Luthen had countered quietly; counterarguments well-rehearsed during the trip. “To his credit, he knows that. Which is why,” he preempted her next protest, raised a hand to stay her cutting words, “we’re going to relocate them. They cannot linger where they are as it is. Make an honest effort to ensure their safety – and spare Andor the details.”
She’d worked her jaw in much frustration, bit back the first words that came to mind. “And he’ll go along with this, will he?”
Quietly, somber – “It was his idea.”
It was the first she conceded that Luthen might succeed in talking her down from marching aboard the Fondor where Cassian waited, killing him without further ado, and dumping his body on the ISB’s doorstep simply to taunt them and vent her frustrations.
He told her to delegate the details; in the end, she undertook them personally, identities and backgrounds simple enough to remember, innocuous enough to avoid red flags; a busy place where they could relocate without suspicion, blend in easily enough with their Ferrix roots, an economically comfortable planet with enough industry to sway the planetary priorities away from the political, and core-ward enough that the Empire harbored no concerns and the Rebellion harbored no delusions.
A fresh start; no guarantees. No such thing in such times as this.
Cassian took that love, that grief, and used it to fuel the hatred and determination that would see him become their most efficient, effective operative, until Luthen had to walk him back from the place where risk became reckless.
“Give it all at once, you said,” Cassian rejoined.
“I thought you were smart,” Luthen snapped right back. “If you should find yourself so lucky as to choose your moment, pick one worth giving it all for.”
To her lasting surprise, it succeeded in reeling him in. Things were different, Andor working within their confidence in a way they’d never before brought in an agent. Things were different, until they shattered apart completely, and the only words she had to ease his transition to Yavin 4 and Alliance Command was the quiet assurance, “They’re well.”
She didn’t tell him that their paths had diverged after a year on Axum.
Two years later, she sits and memorizes the final words of Cassian Andor, relayed in code through clicks and silences, and realizes he’d figured it out anyway.
A week after that, she’s sitting in a crowded tapcaf at the Rebel outpost on Generis Station, waiting on a supply convoy to come in. The atmosphere is charged – excitement still running hot after the victory over Yavin 4, the nervous tension while they all await the inevitable retaliation. News of the evacuation brought in piecemeal, instructions from Command scattered in the transition.
Rumors and gossip about the Death Star’s brief life and final moments. Some of it skirting the truth, most of it swinging far wide of the mark. Her ears catch a fleeting mention of the losses over Scarif, and Kleya spares a minute to run twenty-seven names through her mind and drink to the sacrifices on the ground.
A synchronized beeping of comms tells her when the convoy arrives. She waits on the exodus of easily a third of the patrons to go start unloading the ships, quietly settles her tab in the calmer atmosphere, and follows.
In the hangar, she spies the pilot she’s seeking midway down the column. No one pays her any mind as she sidesteps the bustle of activity, hover carts already hauling crates of supplies – weapons, gear, rations – off the ships and into the depths of the base. Kleya lingers in the shadow of the neighboring freighter while her target makes a quick inventory report with a protocol droid, and then catches her eye as she turns to leave the chaos.
She isn’t sure what to anticipate from Jezzi’s reaction, except that she does not expect any great measure of surprise. Indeed, the older woman pauses for only a moment while a shadow passes over her face, and then steps forward to intercept her so they can walk out side by side. “Long time,” Jezzi murmurs.
“How are you?” She gets a sideways, exasperated look at the question. So she pivots to what little good news she might bear. “I confirmed Wilmon is still on Telaris, before coming here.”
Jezzi nods and leads the way to one of the barracks structures on the other side of a gravel speeder lot. The day overcast and biting, fit to match the mood. “I made a run out there a few months back. He keeps busy.”
They make the rest of the trek in silence. Down into the lower levels of the barracks, to a bunk that shows clear signs of a roommate but is empty for the moment. Jezzi nods her somewhat sardonically into a dented chair, clearly salvaged, and shrugs off a uniform jacket before sitting on the bottom bunk and resting her forearms on her knees. “We heard about the evac. And, obviously about…”
She gives Kleya room to elaborate, clarify. Kleya finds herself… bafflingly lost for words. Now that the moment’s arrived. Too long spent receiving the casualty reports, rarely the bearer of tidings herself, except perhaps to Luthen who always weathered the names and details with the same quiet acknowledgement and careful detachment. Every loss different. Every loss the same.
“There was an earlier action,” she starts slow, when she figures out a place to start. “Over Scarif.” Jezzi’s expression betrays nothing. “The fleet suffered heavy losses in support of a team on the ground that stole and transmitted the plans for the battle station. The Empire destroyed their own base in the effort to stop them.”
Jezzi nods, slow. Looks exhausted, like she’s feeling every one of her years, but asks simply, “They were too late?”
“They were too late,” Kleya confirms. “Cassian… suspected there would be no opportunity for extraction. He sent me instructions. Before they left Yavin.”
What she doesn’t say – he passed along his wishes while lesser men and women planned their surrender in the war room.
No use lingering on what might have been.
As she told Draven – the galaxy needs its heroes.
“Tell them I love them,” she speaks quietly into the heavy silence.
“Tell Wilmon his father would be proud; that he’d take solace in knowing he found family in the cause, and a home with the Rebellion.
“Tell Jezzi she’s a true Daughter, wherever the fight takes her and no matter how far; and one day, she’ll return and the people will trust her to lead Ferrix in its rebuilding.
“Tell Bee I’m still counting on him. That I wish he could have met Kay-Two; but he’d be glad to know I had a friend as reliable and protective as him watching my back until the end.
“Tell Bix her strength to carry on, her refusal to be beaten, is where I find my faith when all seems hopeless.
“Tell Brasso that his capacity to remain unrelentingly kind in the face of such darkness is where I keep my hope for what comes after the dawn.
“Tell them everything I did – what I’m about to do – was in service of a better galaxy where they might some day have peace.”
Jezzi carries Cassian’s words to Telaris and Axum.
Kleya carries on the fight.
She carries a small box in her go-pack holding a kyber pendant and a fraying captain’s rank badge.
She carries more and more names as the years go on.
The heroes of Yavin become the heroes of Endor; she meets Mon Mothma for the last time, standing there on the brink of twilight, the cusp of a new dawn. She concedes Luthen’s early prediction, that she had been worth it – and then she retreats to the shadows to carry her names in that unspoken, unacknowledged place, the terrible cost of an unjust war.
One day she finds the courage and opens the box, picks up the crystal; it glows bright, and then shatters in her hand.
Rather… half of it does. She runs her finger along the jagged edge and then sifts through the silver dust left in the box. She picks out a small turquoise stone the size of her thumbnail, the heart of the crystal, and smiles.
It’s warm in her palm.
Eight months after Endor and she’s lost track of them. She journeys to Axum with the rank badge in the box and a small turquoise pendant around her neck that rests warm against her heart. She also carries a pouch that holds the intact half of the kyber and the glimmering dust left behind in the breaking.
“Moved on,” a neighbor in the big apartment block tells her. The people of Axum cautious but free with their attention, their help, in the waning days of Imperial power. “Just after… well.”
Home then, Kleya decides. A stubborn resilience in the people of Ferrix.
She bids her thanks and turns to leave.
“They were getting a bit cramped for space anyway,” the man remarks offhandedly.
Kleya glances back over her shoulder and cocks a curious brow. “Oh?”
After the Imperial sacking of the galaxy’s known kyber, only to see it obliterated – twice – the crystal is rarer and more valuable than ever.
Kleya locates an old dealer contact on Coruscant who looks at her with her grey-streaked hair worn long, her face lined by the years and the names. He blinks a couple times like he’s trying to match her face to the unassuming shop assistant of a decade past, shakes his head and shrugs, examines the remaining half of the sky kyber, and offers an obscene quantity of credits to take it off her hands.
She haggles a few more out of him anyway.
Luthen would be proud.
She’s never been to Ferrix before. Recruiting Salman Paak – ultimately setting him and the community on a path towards that fateful day, when Luthen picked up Cassian Andor’s blaster and found himself unable to pull the trigger – that was the extent of her involvement.
It’s a dreary place, at a glance, the clouds hanging low and casting a damp chill over the city. Rustic and loud, the sounds of rebuilding in the wake of the long Imperial occupation echoing down the twisting brick streets. But the people are acclimated, or simply tenacious – the latter, she decides after a moment’s consideration – and there’s a relentless optimism in the air, an air of open celebration that lingers even still, months on.
She takes it in, learns her way around, carrying in her cloak pockets a fraying captain’s rank badge, a satchel with an obscene quantity of credits, and a pouch holding the last of the kyber dust.
As the clouds darken towards dusk and her breath hangs heavy with every exhale, she winds her way towards the central square on Rix Road, where a memorial for the dead now stands prominent, the names of the lives lost held fast in the people’s minds until the occupation ended. She sits at a tapcaf across the way from the old hotel, and watches workers finish the day’s job and peel off their gloves. They shout their farewells to Bix, mostly obscured under a speeder out front; clasp Brasso on the shoulder, where he’s overseeing a pair of giggling younglings mixing mortar by the remnants of the front entrance. A third child sits scribbling chalk designs on the bricks under the watchful eye of the droid, to be washed away with the next rain and remade, or not.
The next morning, she takes the pouch of kyber dust to the funerary masons, with instructions to deliver the package upon completion to Jezzi and a generous fee for their discretion.
She returns to the same tapcaf, sits and watches and waits. Eventually, she sees the droid wander off down the adjacent alleyway on some errand or other. She leaves a credit chit on the table and rises to follow; catches up to him as he enters a small apartment three blocks up the road and then waits for him to come out again.
“B2EMO,” she approaches slowly, uncertain of the state of his memory drives.
He stops and whirs, head spinning a quarter around and tilting while he studies her before, “K-kl-Kleya.”
She smiles to be remembered. “I have something for you.” She kneels down to his level, right there in the street. “Something from Cassian.”
He hunches in on himself. “Cassian is c-co-counting on me.”
“Yes,” she agrees, pulling the old rank tab out of her pocket. “And the galaxy counted on him.” She holds up the patch in front of his optical sensor. “He wore this on behalf of the Rebellion. And he helped save us all.”
He opens a hatch in his chassis and extends a claw to delicately pluck the thing from her grasp. There’s a brief pause, and she nods, and he withdraws the claw and tucks the thing away with a melancholy, stuttered whir.
“I have something for Bix and Brasso, too,” she tells him. He perks back up marginally. “If I give it to you, do you think we might keep it a secret?”
“I can tr-tr-try.”
“Do you know what they’re working on?” she asks as she withdraws the credits.
“A home for the ch-ch-children.”
“That’s right.” He extends a tray so she can lay the bag in sideways, credits clinking through the thin material against the metal. “It’s expensive, that. And there will be more. More children who’ve lost their families, lost their homes. Lost whole planets.” He gives another sad hum of his vocabulator. “Can you give them this tonight, when the work’s ended, and tell them it was an anonymous donation?”
There’s a moment where he goes very still, assessing his system capacity before declaring, “Yes.” She touches a hand to the side of his chassis and stands. “Do I ha-have to?”
“I’d like you to try.”
One more sad whir and – “O-okay.”
They’d figure it out easily enough. But it doesn’t seem worth trying to explain to the droid how complicated feelings might make them reluctant to accept such a sum, if she were to deliver it personally. “Thank you, B2EMO.”
She watches him roll away and out of sight before turning to make her way back to the room she’s rented, carrying nothing now but the names in her head and the kyber heart pendant around her neck.
Two days later, she hovers in the shadow of the memorial and watches while Brasso mounts the brick bearing Cassian’s name as the keystone of the entry arch to the old hotel. It’s a fitting resting place; the heart of the old city, watching over and welcoming any who entered the place a lesser people would have torn down, built anew.
But not Ferrix. Not the city built with the very ashes of its dead.
It’s a quieter affair than she’d expected, but somehow fitting. A fitting tribute to a quiet hero who worked in the shadows and did what must be done to put others on the path to glory.
She spares herself a few minutes to have a cup of caf and watch the small crowd disperse. To watch the children run around shrieking, playing with the droid. To take solace in the closure she could offer so few. So few of them left come the end, to carry the names of the dead.
She leaves a credit chit, draws her cloak around her against the chill of the settling dusk, and makes her way past the memorial. A voice calls out from the shadows, halts her in her tracks:
“You could stay.”
Kleya turns and meets Brasso’s uncertain eyes. Glances over and sees Bix watching from the archway, Jezzi at her side. “Cassian’s name was but one of many I carry. I’ve done my duty by him, and will leave you to your peace.”
Brasso glances pointedly up at the monument. “There’s worse places for remembering, than Ferrix.”
“They aren’t your burden.”
A gentle smile tugs up one side of his mouth. He pulls in a deep breath and lets it out slow, lets his eyes rove over the square, the memorial, the old hotel a lesser people would have demolished. “It may be a work in progress,” he acknowledges. “But the city has strong bones. It can take the weight.”
Ferrix. The city built on the ashes of its dead. Strong bones; its long memory imprinted within its very walls.
But also the city that took in a boy from a forsaken world, asked no questions, and embraced him as one of their own. A city now taking the building at its very heart, a building that could have stood for the evil that once occupied it, the evil they’d enacted upon the city and its people and, instead of demolishing it as a lesser people would do, set to reclaim it, rebuild it into a place of hope for the future.
And the keystone of its entryway, standing watch, bearing witness, the strongest brick in all of Ferrix; a quiet strength, subtle, set back in the shadow. But here, now, in the waning hours of the day, the sun makes one last desperate gasp to break free of the clouds, and rays speckle across the square and catch and glint off the kyber dust mixed into the stone.
And then the light shifts, there and gone. A brief moment cast into full brilliance and just as quickly cast back into shadow, waiting for circumstances to again conspire just so.
Kleya draws her cloak tighter about her to ward off the coming chill and carries her names up to the precipice of peace; stares over the abyss and searches for the courage to put down the fight.
The kyber rests warm against her heart.
She smiles.