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Chapter Text

By the time the concept of the Sienar mission makes its way to Draven’s desk, it’s already been worked up in rather ambitious and audacious concept by their frequent collaborative partners on Atrivis and the fledgling Mon Cal flotilla.

Key word being concept. Atrivis has a contact inside Sienar R&D who can facilitate assets on-site. The Mon Cal have an engineer eager to get his hands on a prototype Sienar fighter vessel rumored to long be in the works, and a pilot willing to transport the ship to his uncle’s hidden research outpost, which is not the sort of intel the Mon Cal are yet willing to trust in Dantooine’s hands. Dodonna’s hope that such wary secrecy might ease in the wake of a successful venture is not subtle when he brings the proposal to Draven’s desk.

Draven skims the mission brief, if he’s feeling generous, and snorts. “This is a rousing fiction, General Dodonna, sir, thank you for the day’s divertissement.”

“Davi,” Dodonna chides, and he sighs and picks up the datapad once more. “This is precisely the sort of opportunity we desperately need, if we are to ever convince our scattered allies of the merits of pulling together in active collaboration and coordination.” Draven resists the urge to glance demonstratively about his cramped office in their cramped, disguised base, because Dodonna already knows that if they are to ever attempt such a thing it will certainly not happen here. “It’s an idea – tell me how we make it into a plan, and then tell me how we make it work.”

The instinctive response is the same territorial impulse at the root of the collective rebel dysfunction. “We’d be placing a lot of faith in the Atrivis cell’s man inside.” Not his source, not his operative, not a promising place to start. “If we were able to… make our own assessment and judgment call…”

Dodonna waves him on. Draven takes a few minutes to consider the information they have, and the vastly greater quantity of what they do not, and works it backwards. “We need precise information about the research facility. Egress routes for any contacts inside. Shift schedules and testing rotations. In a perfect op, we’d spend weeks laying the groundwork on-site for one asset to slip in and out in the span of an hour. As it stands, we have a projected development date – it’s not even remotely enough to pull this sort of scheme together.”

“Agreed; what else?”

“Schematics that can be translated into the flight simulators we have on-site, and ample time to train. Expecting a prototype TIE to handle like the standard variety is an obvious assumption, and assumptions are where active Intelligence goes to die.”

Dodonna’s lips quirk in wry amusement and he waves him on – what else?

The final crucial, key detail is so obvious that Draven assumes he need not voice it aloud. But, “We need a pilot. A human pilot. Ideally, one with some familiarity wearing an Imperial uniform.”

“It’s a Sienar facility.”

But the shape of it is already taking form in Draven’s mind. An obvious conjunction of timing and averting the inherent suspicion of new faces on-site. “You send a new face to steal a secret ship when they’re expecting a new face with an interest in the ship. The facility will be secure, undoubtedly – we’ll need Atrivis’s Sienar contact to bring us the procedure for moving test pilots on site. Swap out our own man –” he lets the implication therein hang unspoken, “bring him in according to schedule, move the vessel before anyone can catch the personnel discrepancy.”

“So we need a pilot,” Dodonna repeats.

“…No,” Draven corrects his own assessment, “we need a spy who also happens to be competent in handling an unfamiliar vessel with nothing but simulator training to prepare.”

He runs over the list of his own agents – it’s not long, and it’s not promising. Dantooine’s Intelligence strengths rest primarily in the scope of communications; their field game is comparatively wanting, and his best assets don’t fit the physical profile required.

He moves on to considering Merrick’s people, and suspects Dodonna does the same by the faint grimace that tugs down his mustache. Subtlety does not tend to be the average fighter jockey’s strong suit. “We might need to borrow someone,” Dodonna supposes.

Between Sienar, Atrivis, the Mon Cal, and Dantooine, “This is a crowded conversation already, sir.”

“And we aspire to one day grow into one cohesive and coordinated rebellion, Davi. A little good faith, hm?”

“I’m Intelligence, sir, we’re the bloody cynics behind every handshake made possible.” In the ensuing silence, Dodonna’s look is more expectation than annoyance, so Draven sighs again and scrolls through the write-up on the datapad. “Who do you have in mind?”

“I’ll reach out to our friend on Coruscant.”

Draven blinks and lowers the device, frowning. “Rael? He runs informants, not a ground game.”

Dodonna hums in a very noncommittal and therefore highly suspicious manner; Draven does his level best not to bristle at the tacit acknowledgement of what he’s long suspected – that some of what Dodonna communicates on that radio of his is too sensitive even for the ears of his Intelligence chief. Not least because the senator’s already made clear his skepticism when the man refused to fold more formally into their Fulcrum network.

Draven would have done much the same, in Rael’s position, which he does not in any way broadcast because it’s Senator Organa’s secret funding and organizational efforts that have allowed them to grow into the disciplined outfit they’ve become, without more than the occasional passing concerns between them and said friend on Coruscant.

~

Some four standard months later, Merrick’s programmers have adapted a training module to the prototype schematics passed from Sienar R&D by way of Atrivis. The Mon Cal have sent a nervous young pilot by the name of Por-Quar to do the first round of simulator trials. Slicers from Draven’s team have walked the Sienar contact through adjusting duty rosters to get an asset reassigned to the target test facility, 73, who has reported in turn a sympathetic technician with suitable access to the vessel.

Their friend from Coruscant sends a pilot. Whether he’s sourced from yet another cell or is a contact of Rael’s specifically is a vague unknown to Draven, and no matter Dodonna’s extension of trust here the nature of Intelligence means misgivings about the entire critical centerpiece of this operation. Which arrives in a battered old Dayvan, transmitting all the requisite recognition codes.

He’s nothing special to look at, the pilot, but he walks off the ship like he belongs, any other supply smuggler or messenger passing through. And falters a bit after all of about three steps, glancing up as the hangar dome closes over their heads and then taking in the flurry of activity around him, which is nothing special really, pilots running diagnostics and mechanics fixing up busted speeders, cargo droids hauling parts this way and that.

His shrewd gaze fixes on Draven and Por-Quar as they approach and he unsubtly takes in the uniform, the rank plaque it’s obvious he has no idea how to read. Ah. “You seem a bit out of your depth,” Draven remarks, and wonders where he’s come from.

Their pilot shrugs, clicks his tongue, and offers, “Clem,” by way of introduction, before pointedly turning towards Dantooine’s other guest. “You must be Porko.”

Well-played, Draven concedes, watching Por-Quar’s bearing shift in an instant and supposes that yes, he too would have felt out such a daring proposition from any angle he could work. They shake hands and chatter a moment, inane pleasantries, before Clem, whose name is assuredly not Clem, turns and deigns offer Draven his attention. “Colonel Davits Draven,” he offers drily, takes in the way their guest shifts his weight back, just a little, affecting a bearing just slightly, subtly more submissive. “Base Intelligence.”

Clem’s eyes dart about surreptitiously before he offers with surprising sincerity, “I haven’t met a cell so developed as all this.”

And I didn’t know Rael had tricks like you up his sleeve, Draven doesn’t say. “Day of surprises for both of us,” he offers instead, which earns him a strange look he cannot parse. “It’s almost mid-meal. There’s a billet set aside, unless you’d rather –”

“I’ll stay on my ship,” Clem cuts him off. Por-Quar shifts awkwardly, nictitating membranes flickering rapidly over his bulbous eyes, because while he is not under Dantooine’s authority he is part of a disciplined bunch that would never tolerate the abrasive attitude of their young visitor.

“Fine. Would you like the tour, or shall we get to work?”

Clem exchanges a look with Por-Quar, who spreads his webbed hands to deflect the question back. Clem smirks, shrugs, and supposes, “Let’s get to it.”

Clem spends three days on Dantooine base. Merrick’s XO gives the thumbs-up for his piloting skills after two rounds in the simulator and then he and Por-Quar stay in the training room long into the night after Vander’s squad has cleared out.

On the second night, he finds the two of them, two of Vander’s pilots, and two of his own agents engaged in a lively round of rianza aboard the Dayvan, placing bets with hex screws pilfered from somewhere in the maintenance bay. “Sergeants,” he sighs – he finds himself sighing a lot, inwardly at least, where this whole mission is involved – and cocks a cool brow when Kertas ignores him utterly to lay down a challenge and Rismor explains, “We’re about to wipe Porko out, he’s bluffing,” only for her sister to lose spectacularly seconds later.

On the third day, he realizes Clem is waging something of a charm offensive throughout Dantooine base, but he’s not doing it on his own behalf. “What’s Rael’s angle here?” he asks Dodonna when he comes to meet their loaned asset. Draven joins Dodonna in the doorway of the training room to wait and watch Clem flash roguish smiles at the technicians who help extract him and Por-Quar from the simulator pods.

“The Mon Cal have many reasons to be mistrustful,” Dodonna doesn’t need to tell him, and tells him anyway.

“I don’t like being handled,” Draven says flatly in reply.

They convene with their two guests in Draven’s cramped office afterwards, and all the joviality is dropped for serious consideration of the scheme at hand. At the end, Clem passes over a Sienar ident card complete with his own image and devoid of a name, which seems rather fitting. “I need to know who I’m supposed to be,” he says, because it’s the last piece they’ve yet to sort into place and they’re a matter of weeks out to the projected project completion date.

“We’ll have it,” Draven tells him, and holds Clem’s considering look until he shrugs and leans back against the wall again, arms crossed over his chest.

By the time he leaves, back aboard his battered Dayvan, shoulders hunched against Draven’s scrutinizing stare, Draven is torn between glad to see the back of him, wanting to know everything about him, and keenly jealous of Rael for finding him first.

~

The pieces fall into place flawlessly, all the way to facility 73.

It falls apart in the follow-through. “General Dodonna,” Draven murmurs into his comm in the dead of night, watching Nioma and Vienaris scan through radio channels with frowns tugging down their mouths to find nothing but dead air. “We have a problem.”

The problem is Yavin; there’s no denying that. Even if Clem, or test pilot Joreth Sward, and still Draven does not know the man’s real name, had experienced a ship failure upon departing the test site, Por-Quar should have checked in with his people to report the missed rendezvous and his late return. The fact that he’s failed to do so –  

“The team leaving Sienar reached their rendezvous?” Dodonna confirms.

“Sergeants Kertas and Rismor are escorting them to the prearranged safe point.”

“If your agents return to Yavin to scout out the meet site – ”

But the brutally honest truth is, “I can’t risk it, sir.” He grimaces at Dodonna’s quizzical expression and tells him, “I can’t raise Rael’s people either.”

If they were exposed – if Yavin’s been compromised – if Dantooine sends agents into the midst of a trap that may have already compromised Rael’s network, and the Mon Cal cell… it may well already be only a matter of time.

Dodonna follows the trajectory of his catastrophizing and wipes tiredly at his forehead. “Light lockdown,” he orders, and Draven can see his hopes for a new era of rebel cooperation evaporating before his eyes. “Warn Atrivis and Raddus’s people. All eyes on scanners and ears on comms.”

“Already done, sir.”

The situation resolves the better part of two days later with a terse transmission and, somewhat audaciously, a request for a favor.

Kertas and Rismor return to Yavin after all, and retrieve their wayward pilot from the shadow of one of the ancient Massassi temples dotting the western jungles. When he steps off of their light freighter, he steps off muddy and bedraggled, pale and haunted. He steps off slowly, reluctantly, keeping determinedly in front of two red-eyed and skittish companions like he fears for their safety, like he doesn’t want Dantooine to see them or them to see Dantooine.

He steps off and watches Merrick’s XO cart off the prototype’s flight recorder on a hovercart and barely registers Draven’s approach, shifts his gaze slowly, focuses it sluggishly, like he barely recognizes him after all of a month. Draven takes a moment to consider the young man at the back of the sorry line, little more than a boy, shoulders slumped, gaze cast down, mouth twisted in a scowl that’s covering for more turbulent emotions than anger; shifts his attention to the woman peering up at him with something like defiance in her eyes.

“Sergeant Poyle,” Draven beckons his aide up to his side. “Escort our guests to the infirmary.”

The woman catches Clem’s arm and mutters, “Cass…”

He jolts a little more into the moment and half-turns to reassure her, “It’ll be okay. You’ll be -”

“All of you,” Draven clarifies, and holds Clem’s gaze levelly when he whips back around and glares. “That’s an order.”

He has no real authority to issue one and for a long moment he thinks the man will argue. Maybe it’s testament to the exhaustion etched into his expression – maybe he has the good sense that it’s a fight he won’t win, not here, now, like this. Maybe he’s more cognizant that Draven would credit him for, of the appearance of the thing in front of a hangar-ful of Draven’s subordinates. But eventually he swallows, turns back and reaches for the boy, pulls them both along after Poyle, and yields.

Draven checks in with Dodonna, checks in on the flurry of radio transmissions ranging from confused to conciliatory to apoplectic, and gives things two hours to settle before following. A glance through the primary terminal offers first names and treatment concerns – aches, bruises, and a mild concussion for the woman and dehydration for Cassian, which might even be his real name Draven decides, and the boy only noted diplomatically as uncooperative – and a subsequent chat with the medic on-duty reveals:

“He snuck out. Clem. Cassian. Whoever. The others are sleeping.”

He finds him in the dark training room, wearing a standard-issue downtime jumpsuit, devoid of any name or rank or unit designations, sitting at the console connected to the one of the flight sims and scanning furiously through their schematics. Draven wonders if one of Merrick’s people set it up, or if he discreetly cut himself an access code during his earlier stay. “Cassian.”

“It was the wrong ship,” he mutters down to the screen without otherwise acknowledging Draven’s approach in any way. Like he can make sense of it if he studies the data hard enough, like he can somehow undo it.

“We’re running that down.” There’s not much else to say; a comprehensive review of the colossal mistakes plaguing the operation will likely take weeks to unravel.

“Porko’s dead.”

That, they knew from the eventual transmission from Coruscant; the circumstances therein are still vague. “You shouldn’t be in here,” Draven points out, and reaches past Cassian’s shoulder to close down the console; Cassian just sits back, shoulders heaving with a slow exhale. He should be back in the infirmary, if for no other reason than that Draven ordered it, but – “We can talk in my office, if you like.”

“We do supply drops,” Cassian mutters, glaring at the bottle of water Draven sets on the desk in front of him like it’s personally offended him. Normally, he’d offer something to take the edge off, but it seems rather counterproductive against the note in the infirmary file. “Dead drops. We switch it up but – that place where Porko and I met.”

Draven would guess the Empire, somehow, had Cassian not returned to Yavin to await a pickup after whatever side venture had collected his passengers.

“The Empire routed Maya Pei’s brigade. The ship that escaped, they must have archived the drop in their navicomputer. Safe place to run. Except. They were nervous; Porko panicked.”

“And then you turned up in an Imperial uniform.”

Cassian snatches the water up, eyes averted, and twists the cap off with vicious force. “We messed up,” he bites, “I – we shouldn’t have reused that spot.”

“Maybe so,” Draven allows, even if on balance it sounds weighted more towards phenomenally bad luck than poor strategic planning. Cascading failure starting with Maya Pei’s poor opsec discipline in not deleting the logs after pickup.

“They should know – Porko’s people. They should know it was my fault, that I –”

“No,” Draven cuts him off quietly but firmly, and Cassian’s gaze finally whips up to his, eyes bright and wild and desperately aggrieved with more than just Por-Quar’s loss. His whole galaxy come crashing down in the span of one op gone bad, and gone is the confident operative who’d charmed his way through Dantooine base a month prior. “That’s not how this works.”

“Owning up to your mistakes?” Cassian demands.

“The uniform. The rank. The mistakes bringing us to this moment are multifold, from Sienar to Atrivis, to whoever set your meet and me for not better vetting it, and my responsibility for this operation does not end at its failure. Our numbers are small – it may seem quaint. But how is the leadership to expect those under our command to undertake risk on our orders, if we shy away from responsibility when things go wrong?”

Cassian shakes his head, brows pulled down in consternation, and points out, “I don’t work for you, Colonel.”

Draven eyes his Dantooine-issue jumpsuit pointedly. “Nevertheless.” Cassian doesn’t seem to know what to say to that, settles for sitting back and finally drinking his water, which does rather bring up the question, “Your companions in the infirmary…”

“They don’t even know where we are,” Cassian cuts in sharply. Which he didn’t need to tell Draven, who trusts Kertas and Rismor more than that, but his guest’s defensiveness is telling in its way.

“Do they need anything?” Draven asks drily.

Some color rises in Cassian’s cheek as he shakes his head. “We’ll be out of your hair in the morning.” He drains the water and shoves to standing with an awkward mutter, “I should get back.”

Draven watches him go, frowning, and can’t quite suppress the sense that he’s missed a fleeting opportunity there. A moment’s vulnerability, a doorway cracked open just a bit, just for a moment, where he might have made his case. The merits of a more structured and disciplined rebellion, latest misadventures notwithstanding.

The thought feels unsporting, given the emotional turmoil clearly keeping the young man scattered and wrong-footed, but this game they play is inherently unfair.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. Dodonna sees them off in the dead of night, kicks everyone else out of the hangar dome when their ride comes to collect and that, Draven assumes, is the end of it.

Chapter Text

Draven and Sergeant Poyle go personally to meet the Mon Cal team that travels to Yavin to take possession of the Sienar ship at last. It’s a stiff and formal sort of occasion, all the requisite words of apology and regret and hopes for the future expressed in such vague terms as to steer well-clear of any hint of real commitment towards another attempt at partnership.

The last thing Ensign Shollan says, watching Ensign Caitken board the TIE before blinking his bulbous eyes up and around at the looming temple overgrown with flowering vines and thick moss under the eerie glow of the looming gas giant is, “Good spot,” before returning to the blastboat in which they’d arrived to fly escort for his companion.

~

Chandrila’s Senator Mon Mothma has long been known as a key ally of Senator Organa in both public and private political aspirations.

Draven learns upon his return from one of his semi-regular trips to check on the groundwork being laid at the Yavin temple eventually deemed most viable for retrofit and surrounding development that Senator Mothma has been funding Rael’s network along the way. In the next breath, Dodonna informs him, “The senator’s cousin has joined our ranks. She has some tactical experience at Rael’s behest but requested something lower profile for now.”

There’s a lot to parse in those two sentences and a great deal of it in simply reading between the lines. “Has she left Rael’s employ or is she here to keep an eye on us?”

“My impression was not of a friendly parting,” Dodonna offers delicately. “She’s been commissioned under Grafis’s command and prefers to keep her personal connections need-to-know.”

“Understood, sir,” Draven replies, but the truth of it is that there’s no real occasion for his path to cross Lieutenant Sartha’s, and he quickly drops his fleeting concerns that they’ve done little more than commission a rival agent in their midst when he it becomes apparent she spends vastly more time away from Dantooine running supplies than she does on-site.

Some weeks later, Dodonna puts out preliminary feelers for hosting an informal summit at their fledgling new base. Draven’s first opportunity to properly talk with Sartha face-to-face comes upon being summoned to a meeting in Dodonna’s office in which he informs them, “Senator Mothma would like Lieutenant Sartha to attend as her proxy.”

Sartha takes the request in stride. Draven suspects that somewhere beneath the tac jacket and the dark circles ever-present under all of their eyes is a member of the Chandrilan elite who can dress and talk and act the part and command a room as her circumstances require.

He thinks about their Sienar pilot for the first time in some months and wonders if his story is not dissimilar. Loyalty poached from one of Rael’s network of allies or informants or benefactors, though in Sartha’s case it seems he’s rather overplayed his hand.

Like she’s reading his mind, Sartha throws a proverbial detonator into the middle of the conversation with: “Are you going to invite Luthen?”

“Would he come?” Dodonna asks like he already knows the answer.

“Personally?” She pulls a face, shakes her head. “No.”

Draven hums, considers Senator Organa’s reticence over the man’s refusal to collaborate, and wonders if it’s not for the best. “Then I daresay any information of use might pass down the line from Senator Mothma, no?” Sartha and Dodonna exchange a long and complicated look; Draven feels his brows inch slowly up his forehead and he senses the looming edge of that precipice at last, whatever knowledge it is Dodonna has about their friend on Coruscant he won’t even share with his senior command. “Sir?”

“General Dodonna,” Sartha leans forward in her seat in front of Dodonna’s desk, eyes narrowed and intent, a hint of that authority her social position surely conveys, if she cared to wield it. “Are you going to let Senator Organa’s pride hold Yavin back from what it could be, and in a fraction of the time against the rate it’s going?”

Draven smiles sourly to realize yes, of course she was sent to keep an eye on them, she’s just been doing it through supply operations, filling in the negative space in Grafis’s shipment schedules, sorting out what’s heading to Yavin based upon what’s not coming here.

When he glances at Sartha, she’s looking at him, sees him understanding and just shrugs, not at all contrite.

Dodonna frowns and looks away, stares thoughtfully off into the middle distance. “Does the offer hold?”

“A conversation like this has always been the point, of everything he does.”

Which is how Draven learns at long last, over two years after the fact, that Luthen Rael was behind the robbery on Aldhani.

And that a sizeable portion of the credits attained therein have been cached all the while waiting for something like a proper united Rebellion to emerge and put them to good use.

Grafis adjusts Sartha’s supply routes and she’s waiting on Yavin when Draven returns a few weeks ahead of the planned gathering of scattered rebel leaders or their representatives.

Everything on Yavin is just a little more laid back – this is vital, he suspects, for morale. Sleeves rolled up against the jungle humidity or jackets and vests discarded altogether in the torrential downpours that come on quick and last anywhere from ten minutes to three days. Boots that will never again be clean. Enlisted and officers parked side-by-side at the long tables where field rations are dispersed, because they haven’t yet sorted out setting up meal prep and supply lines; or likewise gathered in clusters during breaks dealing out rounds of sabacc or hex’el or balaans.

He steps off the shuttle into the barely organized chaos of the landing field, but the base personnel merely spare distant salutes and continue on with their work on ships and generators, directing hauler droids this way and that. All of them except the newly-commissioned Lieutenant Poyle who hurries up, datapad in hand, and waits for Draven to gesture him on for the obligatory rundown.

Perimeter sensors finally wired and linked. Six-bed infirmary tent fully stocked but in want of a proper medic or, if they’re being truly ambitious, a surgical droid. Clearing project on target to make space for well more than just the half squadron they keep on defensive rotation. A space large enough to serve as a briefing room or council chamber enclosed and an alcove set aside for Draven to take as an office but, “The temple generator grid keeps shorting out and the techs are still arguing about where something got cross-wired.”

“Fine. Billeting?”

“With the perimeter sensors finally up and running, some personnel have turned to… creative solutions in the jungle, sir.” Draven turns a slow look down on his aide and raises a single brow expectantly. “Captain Seertay grew up in a rainforest, she doesn’t believe in pitching tents on muddy ground.”

That will take some investigating, for curiosity’s sake if nothing else. “Anything else?”

“Lieutenant Sartha wants a word.”

Sartha finds him in the space that will theoretically become his office, where he’s got a rickety table set up and two makeshift chairs from storage crates. On the table is his datapad, commlink, a cold cup of caf, and a portable lantern he resists the urge to reach for every time the glow panels flicker.

“Close the door behind you,” he murmurs, scanning his updated inventory list. She snorts, because there is no door, just the dusty shadows in the furthest recesses of the vast temple ground bay, and pulls up the other crate. “Word from Coruscant?”

“Luthen wants to send someone out early. Look around, help out, act as a go-between.”

“Is that not your purpose, Lieutenant Sartha?” There’s something quaint in the man asking permission now, not least because it’s not like he doesn’t know where they are already.

He’s not expecting the vitriol in her reply. “Luthen’s been propping up hopeless cases for years, General. I want this to work; I want Aldhani to mean something. You’re it. Dantooine, General Dodonna, Yavin. I’m here because you’re the best chance we’ve got if we’re going to finally pull together and fight to win.”

Draven considers her, the fire in her tired eyes, the particular furor of her determination and thinks about Dodonna’s claim, tactical experience. “You were there.”

The shadow that passes over her face is chased by a series of very complicated expressions, culminating in a simple, quiet, “I prefer not to discuss it. Sir.”

“Fair.” There’s perhaps some merit in taking the measure of Rael’s proxy before escorting them into a room that promises a contentiously-charged atmosphere. “Do you know who he’ll send?”

“I have a good idea.”

“And – considering your eagerness to part ways once and for all with Rael himself – you trust his likely intermediary?”

She holds his gaze and tells him sincerely, “Cassian’s the only one I trust.” Ah. And isn’t that interesting. A frown tugs down her lips and he has no idea what gives him away as she realizes, “You know him.”

“Our paths have crossed.”

The U-wing that settles down three days later is in decidedly better shape than the battered old Dayvan; the three beings who step off paint a complicated picture of a trying year since Sienar, but there’s something to be said for the fact that Andor’s held on to them at all.

It’s not the same temple where they’d taken the stolen Sienar ship to wait for their pickup – the survey team had doubts about the structural integrity if they started drilling into the stone – but they’re more or less identical. The boy, Paak, takes it in warily while Sartha and Andor exchange a long embrace. Caleen looks at Draven without the defiance but something still subtly haunted lurking behind her eyes.

She turns her attention away when Sartha greets her in turn, and Andor, true to form, finally finds his way towards acknowledging the ranking officer at hand. He accepts the handshake and peers a moment at the rank plaque and is spared the need to guess when Sartha pivots around again. “General Draven says you’ve met.”

Andor squints up into the sun hanging high over the temple and then around at the roar of the incoming X-wing patrol even as the ground crew dashes out and someone detours over to shoo them away, no time for proprieties of position or guests when it comes to landing field safety. “It’s not Dantooine,” Andor allows without further judgment to whether that’s a net benefit.

Draven recalls Andor, muddy and haggard and shaken after his brief captivity stint with Pei’s survivors and supposes it might take a little warming up. “The freedom to come and go and expand beyond the architectural footprint yields advantages enough to outweigh the – well.”

“Man-eating monsters?” Andor supplies flatly. Paak whips around to stare at the back of his head.

“We’ve installed a detection and deterrent sensor perimeter.” He watches Andor turn his head this way and that as they retreat from the landing zone towards the temple overhang, curious gazes following their small procession. “The energy project is, you might imagine, quite the resource and coordination undertaking, but it's coming along.”

On cue, there’s a sharp crack and a burst of sparks and a flurry of accusatory shouts from the cluster of technicians along the wall where they’ve got the temple’s central power hub anchored. “Some of it less than smoothly,” he allows with a sigh.

Caleen steps around and turns on the spot, looking up and tracking the maze of cables strung along above their heads, snaking down the walls to glow panels and computer consoles and further relays. “Wil and I can get you sorted,” she offers, except it’s not really an offer at all as Paak steps up by her side and follows her line of sight and starts murmuring and pointing at Force-knows-what well beyond Draven’s expertise.

“I’m not sure that’s…” Draven starts, but they’re already on their way to join the group of techs arguing over in the corner.

“Best let them,” Andor advises. Draven looks at him and finds the faint edge of a smile quirking the corners of his mouth that looks far more sincere than his affected good charm during his three days on Dantooine. “You’ve got a bunch of different systems trying to talk to one another,” he likewise turns to take in their infrastructure and apparently Draven has a whole host of unlooked for technicians on his hands. “Strong-arming usefulness out of scattered scrap is their specialty.”

“Welcome to the rebellion,” Draven snorts, and yields.

By the end of the day, the glow panels inside the temple are humming steadily along.

Draven doesn’t see much of their visitors for the next several days while he comes up to speed on the development progress in his absence and goes several rounds on the logistics of installing a grounded comm relay which is the crucial remaining step to the complete relocation of the entire Intelligence team. The glimpses he does get are of a very different asset than the one who came to Dantooine with the joint purpose of training for Sienar and nudging along the base’s relationship with the Mon Cal cell.

Paak still looks wary at all the strange faces but is quick to offer a hand, and he’s good at what he does. Caleen just has a particular skill, far as Draven ever sees, at homing in on whatever mechanical woes are plaguing Tech Supervisor Rill’s team at any given moment and jumping right into the fray.

Andor, from what Draven notices, spends a lot of time watching them rather than surveying Yavin for its own sake, and there’s something in his bearing that gives the sense of feeling the freedom to breathe for the first time in a long while. So it surprises him a little when Andor finds him after his daily comm conversation with Dodonna back on Dantooine and says, “Vel’s leaving on a supply run in the morning, I’m going with her.”

“Are you asking my permission?”

“I’m asking… a favor.” Draven pauses there in the middle of the landing field and quirks a curious brow. “Bix and Wil. I want them to stay.”

“…In the next few days, or…?”

Andor sighs and wipes his sweaty hair back from his forehead, turns and glances around but his companions are nowhere to be seen. “They were never supposed to –” He bites off a swear and tries again. “It will be better, for everyone. This work, this is what they know, they can be useful here, and not stuck in a box on Coruscant.”

It’s not hard, considering Sartha’s attitude, to fill in what Andor won’t say. They weren’t supposed to fall so fully into Rael’s orbit. And in Yavin, he sees a viable out.  

Maybe he should have nudged Andor in the wake of Sienar after all. “And yourself?”

Andor shifts his weight restlessly, props his hands on his hips and glares around, peeved. At what, precisely, is difficult to say. “A lot of the outfits about to descend on this base,” he mutters, voice pitched low while he tracks a pair of mechanics hauling tools out to a freight cart with a stuttering repulsor, “wouldn’t have made it this long without Luthen. His intel, his money. Senator Mothma’s money. And most of them won’t ever know who was at the other end of their radios. Sending them gear. Keeping them alive.”

“I am not at all denying that, Andor. But the fact is that we are coalescing at last – so where are you?”

“You know where I stand,” Andor bites before stalking off.

Andor and Sartha are gone for three days, during which Draven spends entirely too much time in his ship discussing logistics on comms and saying things like, “Please emphasize to Senator Jebel that if everyone descending upon our yet-developing base intended to park a luxury star-yacht we would quickly run out of room for our fighter wing and, indeed, other guests,” and, “You can assure the Bothan leadership that the council table is round and thus they needn’t concern themselves with how close they are to the head of it.”

“That’s good,” Dodonna assures him during their final check-in before he’s due to journey out with the rest of Vander’s wing. “If they’re this worried about the tedious minutiae, it means they’re taking seriously what it means and where it leads.”

Lieutenant Poyle comes to inform him on the second day that, “Tech Supervisor Rill has added Caleen to the duty roster,” which will please Andor and, “Paak has, ah – declined,” which will not.

He finds him on a break, grease-stained clothes and muddy boots just like all the rest of them crowded under one of the tarps in the day’s steady drizzle, blowing off some steam with what looks like a modified game of divot. A young private catches Draven’s pointed look and nudges Paak, who at least jumps up with a degree of decorum Andor’s never once felt the need to display, grabs his canteen and throws up the hood of his poncho to follow Draven back across the muddy freight path towards the temple overhang.

“I’m here to help,” Paak calls at his back as they splash through the last few meters. “I’m just not here to stay.”

“You’ve been of immense help; you could continue to do a great deal of good here.”

“Look,” Paak leans against the damp stone and crosses his arms, glaring out over the landing zone, “I know Cassian just wants us tucked away safe. But –”

“We’re building an army, Paak,” Draven cuts him off with a frown. “To fight a war. To support a fleet that’s already begun amassing. Safe is a remarkably relative term. And the backbone of any fight is maintenance and supply and logistics, which is a harsh reality too many aspiring outfits all-too-quickly encounter. Andor says this, here, this crucial work we’re doing to get ready, is exactly your specialty, and Caleen’s.”

He scoffs. “Sure. Family business. You know how it is.” But it’s bitterness there, no fond reminiscence about it, and Draven watches him swallow down a whole host of aimless rage before he turns and directs it up at him. “But that’s all gone. They killed my father and tortured Bix half to death and this is good for her, yeah? The fresh air, the work, the people. But I’m done sitting around waiting for the fight to find me and take something else.”

Part of Draven wants to know what happened, that brought them to Dantooine with Andor at all.

But everybody has their own tragedy. It’s the wielding it afterwards that matters. That gets people killed in a rage or drives them to turn away and pretend there’s such a thing as hiding or brings them into the ranks of some fight or another, and Wilmon Paak has quite evidently already decided upon his fight and quite likely had this argument with his companions countless times and Andor’s favor simply a desperate last bid to sway him with the weight of the rank on Draven’s chest.

Andor and Sartha return with the planned haul of basic sundries and smuggled munitions, as well as two crates of state-of-the-art comms equipment including top end encryption units up to current Imperial spec. “Gift from our benefactor?” Draven asks drily once the cargo teams have set off with the hover carts.

“Manifest mix-up,” Sartha corrects with affected nonchalance, because that’s how it works, Draven supposes, that’s why the secret’s been so jealously guarded, and it doesn’t even matter all that much in the end that it’s Rael, who Senator Organa does not particularly trust, who already has too many wary eyes upon him to even think about setting foot in the upcoming gathering.

None of the arriving leaders will feel they can negotiate in good faith if they’ve the sense their long and hard and blood-soaked work is merely being bought, and any council formed always bound to defer to the money. “So Luthen Rael gives the rebellion a secret, scattered shot of adrenaline and then steps away? Simple as that?”

Sartha shakes her head, shrugs, tracks Andor’s progress across the landing field to go meet Caleen; watches Paak approach from the other way and sees the tension that sets in quick to all of their bearings. “There’s always the radicals. Flames to fan. Sources to bleed dry.” She looks up at him and pulls a humorless smile and says like she’s quoting someone, “It’s the result that matters. He wants to win. Everything he does is for the rebellion; and he’ll do anything he thinks advances his cause.”

“Anything,” he echoes back, “sounds righteous in a rousing recruitment pitch and is the first conceptual compromise every time an idea evolves into objective evolves into mission planning.”

“And why do you think I’m here instead of still asking how high every time Luthen says jump?” He can’t help the instinctive look at Andor’s retreating back, which earns a pitying sort of laugh. “Don’t waste your energy, sir. You won’t steal him away.”

“He wants them to stay.”

“And Luthen assuredly does, too. Bix, anyway.”

“Ah.” Part of him will, one day, perhaps, be impressed at Luthen Rael’s skill at handling them all from afar, when he’s not so very irritated. “Why, then? What is it Andor owes him? Or thinks he owes him?”

Sartha shoots him an inscrutable look before scoffing and shaking her head, leaning against the ship with her arms crossed and her glower fixed on the fresh-set permacrete beneath their feet. “That’d be easier.”

“So it’s an honor thing?”

She takes a long minute to work that over and carefully weigh her answer. “Cassian suffers that unhappy habit of surviving against terrible odds again and again and compounding the guilt on his shoulders for who gets left behind. Luthen suffers that unfortunate quality of wanting to find meaning in the random luck of the universe. It’s a messy combination.”

“That’s dreadfully cryptic.”

Sartha visibly braces herself, looks him in the eye, and says bluntly, “Aldhani almost didn’t happen. It was an underprepared disaster we pretended we had under control for five months on-site, and it only succeeded because Luthen hired Cassian on five days before. He was desperate to make it work and got too reckless about it, left a trail the ISB picked up, decided afterwards we’d have to get rid of the loose end, sent me and the one other survivor to hunt Cassian down and do the job in the middle of an ISB occupation, and then couldn’t pull the trigger when Cassian found him first.”

It's possible Draven is beginning to regret asking.

“Cassian’s home suffered. People died. Bix and Wil are all he has left and mostly I think he just needs to keep proving to himself that it was the right choice, going with Luthen in the first place. And Luthen will keep trying to understand why he’s special, until he realizes luck is just luck and Cassian winds up just another fighter lost too soon.”

He’s still working out how even begin responding to that when Sartha adds, like an afterthought, “Unless he gets Wilmon killed first.” She straightens, lets out a long, slow exhale, grunts a vague, “Sir,” and starts making her way across the landing field, leaving him to his brooding.

Chapter Text

Cassian takes public transportation and another fabricated identity to the planet of Saffalore, which rests at a curious intersection of Corporate-managed and Imperial occupied. The Argenhald Proving Ground lies just outside the capital city of Lurark and, rumor has it, enjoys a mutually-beneficial relationship with the science and tech industries that have come to view the security situation as a discouraging place for trouble and therefore an attractive one for investment.

For Cassian’s purposes, all it really means is that once he’s past the scrutiny of the arrivals check, security patrols are routine, unobtrusive, non-threatening, and he can make it to his hotel with nary a stormtrooper in sight and only a few passing glimpses of the Lucaya corporate logo.

He leans in with a conspiratorial air and asks for a room with a canal-side view; he gets an eyeroll from the clerk that’s belied by the way he can’t quite suppress the edges of a smile quirking his lips before he relays, “Apologies Mister Willix – nothing in business, but I do have an economy room on the seventh floor and an elite on the twelfth.”

Willix has an accomplished background; Cassian decides Luthen can deal with the upgrade. “Elite sounds nice,” he winks, and leaves with that smile tugging up just a little more and a key chip in hand.

There’s a sign hanging in the turbolift he can’t see in full until the Devaronian couple in front of him gets off at the seventh floor.

In protest against the rising wave of anti-Imperial sentiment and rebel activity, this facility has removed all Ghorman-sourced garments from the lobby guest shop. Linens and service uniforms are, as always, produced from Saffalore homegrown textiles.

Cassian stares at it until someone has to tap at his shoulder and point out that they’ve reached the twelfth floor.

~

The last supply ship in for the night is late, coming up on oh-one-hundred local. Unscheduled but not unexpected, after a patrol had grounded them at the pickup and forced an abrupt comm silence that sparked a lively two hours in the comm center trying to determine if they’d been lost on the radio or lost to the Empire or lost in a wholly more definitive sense of the thing.

Draven wanders over with the overnight sentry patrol to greet them and to assess the state of the two-man team who’d eventually been forced to move to evade ground searches and enjoyed their first taste of space combat as a result – if they can call it combat in a sluggish and unarmed cargo freighter. But the pilots are at once exhausted and exhilarated and uninterested in any after-action hand-holding.

He waves them on with the pair of jubilant bunkmates turned up to welcome them home and makes a note on his datapad to follow up with their command teams, because the thrill of escape does tend to fade sometime between the first night’s sleep and the next mission assignment. A glance at the ship in the landing field flood lights and he likewise makes a note for Tech Supervisor Rill to do a full maintenance check on morning shift.

It’s somewhat jarring, consequently, to turn back towards the temple and find one of Rill’s most capable technicians standing in the shadows staring at the ship with a vague sense of discontent that could be for the carbon scoring or could be for the wind whipping through in the wake of the evening’s storms and has her drawing her oversized jacket tighter across her chest or, more likely, is for whatever has her traipsing about in the early morning hours.

“Technician Caleen,” he remarks as he approaches. She shakes herself out of her musings and snaps her eyes over to him, startled. “You are wandering about unusually late.”

There’s no curfew; this isn’t Dantooine, where the potential for planetary patrols dictated careful timing and handling of all activity outside the prefab modules cobbled together into a functional base while masquerading as something else entirely.

There’s a long pause while she works that fact over – it’s an observation, not a reprimand. A prompt for any concerns without overtly expressing worry.

What he eventually gets is: “That observation might say more about you, sir, than it does me.”

It sounds like something Andor would say, except he’d say it sans the sir and in far more smartass a tone. His answering chuckle is likely lost to the wind that’s whipping hair over her face, long escaped from her attempt to tie it back.

And what he eventually lands on to concede to her point is, “The overnight duty tent maintains a steady supply of surprisingly decent caf,” a suggestion that’s not an order, and steps around to lead the way if she cares to come get out of the evening chill.

The officer on duty is Lieutenant Grivhen, one of Raddus’s early transfers sent to help coordinate a ground complement relocation from their fleet. She offers Draven the overnight rundown, which is predictably dull excepting the cargo arrival from which he’s just returned. Caleen settles at the long table stolen from one of the dining tents with a cup of caf and a pack of assuredly stale biscuits opposite the sentry presently on break who greets her by name with a bright smile, because Caleen is varied in her skills and creative in her thinking and consequently winds her way around to just about every last corner of the base to sort the tech problems not one else can solve.

The private whose name escapes Draven has only a handful of minutes before he’s due back on shift, so he and Caleen start a lively lightning round of Corellian Strike while Draven peruses the next day’s traffic schedules in and out. Caleen loses in a dramatic final hand – the price is one of her biscuits she doesn’t look terribly upset to yield – and she glances around and catches Draven’s eye as her opponent hastens to reaffix the collar of his uniform and jam his cap back on his head.

“Sir,” he acknowledges breathlessly as he hurries by. Draven takes up his seat and the battered deck of cards and aimlessly shuffles them while Caleen drains the rest of her caf.

“Do you play?”

“Hm,” he shakes his head. “I’m afraid any versions I learned in my wayward youth have long since been buried under the dull weight of regulations and security protocols.”

“We should play,” is the conclusion Caleen reaches from that assessment. A faint smile touches her lips and the heater in the tent has faded the pink bite of wind from her cheeks, but her eyes are strained and finally she confesses at his questioning look, “I was hoping Vel might be coming in on that last run.” Which is clarifying, and not, until she adds with a glance at the lieutenant over at her station and a frustrated sigh, “Wilmon was due back on the transport two days ago. Just thought she might… have heard something. Have some ideas. Talk me down,” she adds last, rueful and a little embarrassed.

Draven nods slowly and doesn’t need to tell her it’s… a complicated problem. If only because it’s not Draven’s problem at all, officially, both Paak and Andor afforded a leeway in coming and going from the home they’d all built from scrap and scavenge tucked deep in the adjacent tree line that is not going to be a tenable arrangement indefinitely.

He thinks about some day on the not-so-distant-horizon, when they’ve finalized preparation and coordination for the relocation of larger cells and the running of Yavin inevitably becomes a touchier exercise all around than its present state being held loosely together by himself, Dodonna, and Merrick, and the coming and going of Luthen Rael’s agents will not go long unnoticed nor unremarked-upon.

The headache is preemptively brewing.

He doesn’t need to tell her, or she’d have come out with it in the first place, and she shrugs and looks away, forces a smile that comes off a bit self-deprecating. “It’s not the first time, it’s not even unusual, for either of them, it’s just… late nights and bad dreams.”

She does not add you know how it is but he can sense it wryly underlying her words anyway.

“Sartha,” he offers what reassurance he can, “diverted to support the fleet. No indication of any trouble. As for Paak…” He’s Rael’s concern, is the thing, but nor does their collective Cause stop at some arbitrary, territorial line between operations and agents and philosophies. “Come find me if he’s not on tomorrow’s transport. I’ll see if there’s anything Coruscant is willing to share.”

“Thank you, sir.” She lets out a slow breath, tosses her empty cup in a receptacle at the end of the table, and pushes to her feet. “I should get back.”

She refuses Lieutenant Grivhen’s offer to summon a sentry escort. Draven watches her until she fades into the shadow of the trees, lets out his own discontented sigh, and decides to make one last check-in with the overnight comms rotation before retiring for the night himself.

“Anything interesting?” he asks the shift team of two who have been with him long enough that the only reaction to him walking in the room is a vague sketch of a salute and something like a toast offered with a mug of caf.

“Clash on Dar’zym between Boycott Ghorman and Friends of Ghorman protests,” Finnilus hums absently. “Sector strike response deployed an hour ago.”

“Chatter about the Seventh Fleet undergoing a massive leadership and mission overhaul,” Qiv’ila adds from her own night’s notes. “Nothing firm.”

Nothing that couldn’t have waited ‘til morning, which he already knew, because he’d have been pinged otherwise. “Very well.” There’s no good reason for why Caleen’s worries should have him especially unsettled in turn, except that they come at a moment when it’s been quite quiet. Such moments are never particularly soothing. Only serve to make him wonder what it is they’re not hearing. “I’m going to sleep.” A glance at his chrono and he might make four hours rack, if the stars align in his favor. “Ping me if there’s any –”

A rapid beeping from Finnilus’s console cuts him off and has both of them jamming earpieces in and ignoring him utterly in favor of what’s coming over the waves.

“Chommell Sector,” Qiy’lya gathers first. “Bombing.”

“Where?”

It takes a minute before Finnilus reports, “Onoam. Moff Panaka.”

Andor turns up somewhere around daybreak. Judging by a glance at a chrono. Draven wouldn’t know the difference, tucked away in the stale air of the secure comms center with no view of the outside world, nothing but pinging radios and low murmured voices bouncing off the heavy stone walls.

And the sudden flurry of commotion as Captain Nioma moves to intercept their new arrival with things that don’t and have never bothered Andor such as, “You don’t have clearance,” and, “Who are you?”

He wasn’t due in, Draven would hazard, or Caleen would have mentioned it or more likely not been prowling the landing field at all. He’s here now because of the news out of Onoam, he’d hazard further still, by the barging into secure areas of the temple, but whether that’s because he’s heard about one of the near-victims or because he’s heard who claimed credit is impossible to say. “Captain,” Draven waves Nioma off. “Andor, my office, now.”

“The senator’s daughter,” Andor starts, hurrying along in his wake.

“Is fine,” Draven sighs.

“You’re sure?”

Draven stands back and gestures him in with a peeved look. “Yes, Andor, we’re sure, she’s back on Alderaan, she’s with the senator, who is predictably furious and has carved out a discreet detour here tomorrow, and what I need to know,” he barks as the door slides shut; neither of them make any move towards the desk to sit, “is if Rael knew anything about it.”

Andor’s good, is the thing, but the way he startles back, brows furrowed, uncomprehending, Draven is inclined to read authenticity in the reaction. “Luthen? Why?”

So he doesn’t know. “Partisans have claimed it. Quite loudly,” he flatly clarifies before Andor can work his mouth around another, you’re sure? “Quite proudly, with no comment as to the near-miss for both Naboo’s queen and Alderaan’s princess.”

“Luthen doesn’t give Gerrera marching orders. No one can do that.”

“Panaka is a…rather random target, at a glance, which of course means he was chosen quite deliberately.”

Andor stares at him for a long moment and Draven can’t decide if it’s good that he’s thinking about it as hard as he is or bad that he has to. Bit of both, in the end, as he wipes at his face and says, “I’ve been in the field. We should talk to Wilmon, he was with him last.”

Draven ignores the presumptive we. “You haven’t seen Caleen?”

“I just got in. Why?” Draven bites back the curse, because he needs Andor’s head on the one problem and it’s not going to remain there once he finds out. “What’s going on?”

“Paak never came back. I told Caleen if he wasn’t on today’s transport I’d send up a signal.”

Andor’s face goes through a complicated series of expressions from confused to worried to, worryingly in turn, very carefully put-on neutrality. He does not try to shove past for the door; turns away, tips his face up while he thinks and breathes and eventually says, tone eerily flat, “I need to call in. Right now.”

They use the unit in Draven’s office once Draven makes it clear in no uncertain terms that he’ll follow Andor right back to the U-wing and listen in there instead if it comes to it. The speed with which it connects, even while Draven is still positioning the second earpiece, might just be the most troubling aspect of the whole night’s developments.

“Coruscant forecast –”

Andor doesn’t let her finish. “It’s storming here,” he snaps. “I must have missed it on the latest report. No one likes getting caught in the rain.”

“No,” she pivots smoothly, tone level but firm. “We have likewise found ourselves… wishing for an umbrella.”

A small bit of tension eases from Draven’s shoulders; Andor’s voice is still tightly wound as he follows-up with, “My friends here say a radar’s gone offline. I can’t help but wonder if it’s related.”

Draven throws him a sharp look; Andor holds up a staying hand, listening intently.

“My colleague is… on his way to assess the damage and affect repairs.”

“He’d better,” Andor snaps and cuts the call. He yanks the earpiece off and tosses it down – “Sorry,” he grumbles at Draven’s unimpressed look – and wipes anxiously at his face. “Wilmon was with Gerrera. Luthen’s gone to track him down.”

The implications of the whole affair begin to take on a whole new troubling dimension as he sorts Paak into the picture, his upended timeline, Rael’s people caught off-guard and doing their own damage control.

“I take it Paak’s technical skillset is not limited to ships and comms.”

“Please,” Andor sighs, sounding suddenly so very tired, “You’re going to pretend you didn’t dig up all of our ISB files once Bix decided to stay?”

“I believe the warrant for Paak simply states assault on Imperial forces, which can mean so very many things.”

“They hanged his father; he built a bomb.”

“And I’m sure he built it well, but Gerrera hardly needs a specialist to blow up a speeder.”

Which isn’t to say Paak wasn’t involved, but Andor likely lacks the full context to appreciate what Draven is beginning to suspect is the real message Gerrera meant to send.

~

For all that they collaborate and coordinate and champion the same cause, Davits Draven meets Luthen Rael face-to-face exactly once; it seems somehow fitting that it should be in the shadow of the same temple, two hundred kilometers away, where Draven’s agents recovered Andor, Caleen, and Paak after the cascading failures of the Sienar job.

Rael isn’t what he expects. He’s not sure what he expected. Shrewd cunning or boisterous eccentricity or something harsh or cruel or brutally efficient in his bearing. What words needed spoken, guarantees given, passenger exchanged and business concluded. Something akin to the way business is conducted over the radio.

But he’s quiet, patiently waiting at the base of the Haulcraft’s ramp in the deepening dusk, bright, watchful, inscrutable eyes that track Andor’s quick approach, and voice a low, gravelly rumble that might even be reassuring removed from the present context when he attempts to preempt his ire with, “He’s fine, Cassian,” and expression unchanging when Andor demands in turn:

“How? How could you send him back there?” before storming past Rael and up the ramp in search of Paak.

Rael watches him go and turns back when Draven, approaching more slowly in the wake of Andor’s furor, is five paces away. “I’ve warned Saw off. For what good it will do.”

Draven nods slowly. Squints off into the shadowed tree line and up at the arc of the planet hanging over the horizon while he works his mind around what needs said here. “Does he know about Yavin?”

“Specifics? No. That there’s been a meeting? Almost certainly.”

“And does he target the rare moff capable of productive dialogue to protest the Rebellion coalescing around collaborationist traitors or does he drag Paak into it to protest you backing the play?”

The side of Rael’s mouth quirks up with a quiet huff of amusement and he fixes his fuller attention on Draven when he assures him, “Saw’s been slipping for a long time but it would be a mistake to assume he’s not quite capable of gaming out both angles.”

“Duly noted.” It’s not lost on him that the man standing before him has a longstanding relationship with Gerrera far beyond that of fractal radios and supply dead drops. That he’s nudged his cause on from any angle he could play, that he may have backed a winner but it would be a mistake to confuse pragmatism for philosophy.

He thinks about they hanged his father, he built a bomb and he thinks about Andor keeping himself between Caleen and Paak when they reached Dantooine like he feared the repercussions if they saw too much, thinks about Sartha telling him Bix and Wil are all he has left and Andor’s favor coming far too late, Paak already confident in his conviction to fight towards Rael’s ends even as Caleen eagerly took up the uniform and began building a home on Yavin.

Draven observes the man standing before him and wonders that he manages to leave such varied wreckage in the wake of his methods.

As if on cue, the clanking of heavy boots on the deck inside the Haulcraft precede Andor stomping along, Paak moving slow and wary a few paces behind. He’s red-eyed and furious, because the righteousness of anger is easier than guilt or grief or hopelessness. It’s a tool men like Gerrera are only too skilled at coaxing forth and wielding.

Draven wonders at the varied wreckage in the wake of Rael’s methods and wonders if he plays a subtler game, or if he’s less skilled at harnessing that rage, or if he simply spends it all too eagerly, a forgotten list of the young, nameless dead tossed on the pyre of his cause.

They come down the ramp. Andor hovering between him and Rael, scanning the quiet tree line. Paak halting at the bottom, over Rael’s shoulder, angry and scared and – “I’m sorry,” he manages, barely audible but he offers it up unprompted. “I didn’t know.”

“Did you ask?” Andor demands before Draven can respond.

Paak blinks at him, expression blank, dumbfounded, before he incredulously echoes, “Ask, Cass? Saw Gerrera? You don’t ask; I’ve seen him execute his own men for asking.”

Andor barks out a laugh, sharp and brittle, and gestures vaguely at Rael, shaking his head. “Seriously?” He stalks up close, leans up and murmurs, “What were you going to tell me, hm? The day Wil never made it home because Gerrera decided he looked at him wrong?”

Rael weathers his demands and his fury with an air of having done this before and being accustomed to waiting it out. Draven clears his throat in a futile attempt to interject, if for no other reason than to remind them that they have an audience; truthfully, he’d have half a mind to slink aboard the U-wing and leave them to it, except it seems someone ought to keep half an eye and ear out for the predators roaming the jungles.

"I didn’t have to go, Cass, Saw asked and I agreed. You want me to be some kid still, but I’m not, okay? You don’t need to save me, not from Saw, and not from Luthen. I can make my own choices.”

Andor whips back around and exclaims, “Well maybe they’re bad choices, Wil!”

“I know what I want.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Gentlemen,” Draven sighs. “We are losing daylight and are long passed the point of productive–”

“You don’t get to decide that,” Paak scowls while Andor viciously throws off the hand Rael lays on his shoulder. “Why do you think you get to decide any of that? You’re not my brother. You’re definitely not my father.”

“You think any of this is what Sal would have wanted?”

“I think,” Paak leans in close, voice quiet and shaking with rage or grief or some combination therein, “if you wanted to know what he thought, you should have come home sooner.”

Andor recoils like Paak landed the blow with more than just words. But it’s Rael’s sharp look that tells Draven just how deliberately aimed was the strike to wound.

The only sound for several long, long seconds is the wind rustling through the trees. Draven looks at Rael, who seems caught wholly flat-footed by the abrupt implosion and the calculations hard at work behind his halting gaze offering little by way of obvious forward trajectory.

Andor works his jaw and nods slowly, grimacing; throws a surreptitious look back at Draven who just stares at him, brows raised, idly wondering if he ought have brought Caleen along or if her presence would have simply added new and colorful layers to long-simmering tensions finally bubbling to the surface.

With a bitter scoff, Andor mutters, “Do what you want, Wil,” as he fishes a wrapped packet from an inside pocket of his jacket, turns back to Rael and shoves it at him. “Your intel, from Saffalore. Maybe don’t call for a while, hm?”

He pivots around, shoves past Draven, walks into the open hatch of the U-wing, and disappears into the cockpit. Draven blows out a heavy breath and glances around, takes in Paak’s wide-eyed stare fixed at the ship, panic and regret already crashing over him and adding to the chaotic cacophony of so much assailing him seemingly constantly, lurking just beneath the surface.

Neither Andor nor Paak are formally his problem, Draven finds himself marveling as he sighs and jerks his head back towards the ship and asks Paak, “Well? Are you coming?” because there’s a lot Paak apparently needs and none of it he can have considering of all that the Empire has ripped away, and the best Draven can offer is the unfazed and steady patience hard-won over too many years handling frantic and overwrought troops through all manner of crises.

Paak hesitates, and Draven thinks about Sartha’s clinical assessment of what it would take to break Andor’s complicated commitment to Rael.

Rael stares at the U-wing for a long moment before pinching at the bridge of his nose and sighing, “Wilmon.” Draven thinks about what Sartha said about Rael finding himself faced with his quarry and unable to take the shot, as Rael exchanges a few low-murmured words with Paak before prodding him along.

He thinks about the varied wreckage left in Rael’s wake as Paak steps tentatively past him to board one ship while Rael turns and sweeps alone up the ramp of the other, and marvels that he cannot discern if the nudge was an act of compassion or a simple equation in consideration for the long game.

And that is the only time Davits Draven meets Luthen Rael.

~

“Why does Rael stay on Coruscant?” Draven asks Andor one day, several weeks on, sitting in his office and skimming over Andor’s latest report while Andor throws back a shot of the good liquor Draven keeps locked in a cabinet for very good days, or very bad ones.

Andor grunts out a humorless laugh and asks, “Can you imagine him here?” which doesn’t answer the question.

"Not at all,” Draven hums as he reads and wonders if Andor won’t say or doesn’t know. “Is this the last one?”

“Hm,” Andor grimaces at the burn as he sets his cup down. “Wil’s contact in Gerrera’s outfit finally reached out. Kafrene. Three days.”

Most of the sources Rael’s been transitioning to Yavin’s handling have dealt with Andor before. The fact that this one hasn’t only exacerbates the complexity of the existing variables that are Gerrera’s paranoia and Andor’s reluctance to drag Paak anywhere near his orbit once more. “Is that wise?”

“Do we have a choice?”

Because sometimes, that’s all that Intelligence comes down to. “You could take a team,” he offers.

Andor braces his hands on top of Draven’s desk, leans in and tells him, “You used to be subtle about trying to slap a rank on my chest,” before pushing up to standing.

“You already have a rank on your chest, Captain.”

“Provisional,” Andor calls over his shoulder on his way out the door.

~

As weeks bleed into months, Andor never quite seems to fully settle on Yavin, but it’s a restless discontent that has him taking on more work for Draven as Rael’s calls come fewer and further between.

Naturally, it’s the night before the first mission he’s finally agreed to lead up properly that the radio, silent for weeks, starts pinging in Draven’s office.

He wanders out to the edges of the sprawling camp, as it were, where Caleen and Andor and Paak retreated to build their frame in the trees, and can’t help but notice it’s evolved significantly from the scrap and salvage and scavenge project cobbled slowly together in their free time during those early days – carved wood chimes over the door and plants in the window and the smell of the fresh-cooked meal he’s so rudely interrupting.

“Trouble?” Andor comes out to meet him at the top of the steps.

“They want you on Coruscant.”

Andor frowns, glances back at Caleen who’s stirring something over a cooking unit and most definitely listening in. “Right now?” Draven shrugs a shoulder. “If we postpone?”

“We’ll have to start from scratch with mission support, delivery schedules, shift rotations…” Andor swears and turns away, wiping his hands over his face. “The trouble with refusing to come fully onboard, Andor, is that I can’t tell you what to do. But I need to know, now, so I can notify the team already on-site if necessary.”

“No,” Andor sighs. “No. Luthen can wait. I’ll take Jenoport.”

“You’re sure?” Andor nods, mouth twisting unhappily, and they are simply fast-approaching the horizon at which this whole arrangement will become untenable, for him and – “Is Paak afield again?”

“Repair run,” Caleen offers without so much as turning. “Fleet support.”

Draven nods slowly, and takes his leave, and resolves to sort the matter with Andor upon his return, if he’s in or if he’s out and where they go from there.

The team returns from Jenoport with mission objectives achieved and a wounded Andor, carted off to the med tent with a blaster burn scorched down his shoulder.

Chapter Text

After all this?

It was bad enough when he thought he’d sent Andor at last to his death. All that he’d done and all he’d survived, something so ignominious as a crash in a storm, something so stupid because they’re rushing, all of them, racing against the fist tightening around their throats, weapon confirmed and nothing else until the scouts report in.

It was bad enough, until the radio crackles and the voice sounds tinny and wrong before he realizes it’s the damn droid and, “Captain Andor requesting delay –”

There’s relief, at first, beneath the whiplash of the surprise, and then the rush to, “Get the squadron leader on, get him on now!”

After all this? Draven had lost his calm with Paak, and hasn’t particularly located it since, the Rebellion fracturing apart in his hands to the discordant tune of comm chatter bouncing off the stone block walls that are beginning to feel like the tomb in which they’ll all be buried.

It was bad enough, when he thought Andor was dead, but Captain Vienaris reports with restrained regret in his voice, “They’re already engaged, sir,” and he realizes –

He hasn’t sent Andor to his death so much as outright killed him.

~

It’s a good thing Andor didn’t take him up on the offer to listen to Senator Mothma’s speech, because right now Draven isn’t sure he’d be able to look at him without hearing his own voice echoing mockingly back, It’s the result that matters.

He didn’t make this particular call, to ferry Mothma along to make her rallying cry over Dantooine before Gold Squadron finally escorts her home. But he has half a mind to throw up his hands in defeat and just give it up entirely if the detour ends up getting her killed.

She was right there in Andor’s capable hands. Could have been here, tucked safe in… well, some kind of living accommodations, once they’ve sorted just how adaptable she is to the rough life as traitors, fugitives. And instead, they’re desperately scanning Imperial channels and futilely pinging her escort ship, Sartha is pacing in between the rows of console stations and glancing sharply around at every door hissing open or datapad chirping an alert or –

“General Draven, sir,” Lieutenant Poyle sidles up by his side, voice pitched low amidst the sound of their useless not-knowing. “Technician Caleen asked if she might have a word.”

It takes his mind, submerged in all manner of worst-case scenarios, a few seconds to process the statement. "What –?” he glances at his chrono; it’s late, or early, two hours to sunup. “Now?”

“Sir.”

It occurs after another few seconds trying to slot this baffling request into the ongoing crisis – “Paak? Any changes there?”

“Ah…” Poyle taps around on his datapad and reports, “Sickbay sent an update on the hour, he’s out of surgery, stable, resting.”

“Fine. Tell Caleen –”

A sudden flurry of commotion from across the room snaps his gaze up. One of the techs is half-risen from her seat, one hand up for attention, or patience, the other pressing her earpiece close. “There’s a lot of interference, but I think I’m picking up…”

Sartha and Merrick descend. Draven blows out a slow breath that isn’t yet relief and tells Poyle, “Caleen will have to wait until we get this mess sorted.”

“Sir,” Poyle nods and slips away again just as quietly as he’d arrived.

She never does get that word. When the crisis has resolved and the survivors of Gold Squadron returned escorting a freighter that looks like it ought have disintegrated on entry, Draven finds Poyle hovering behind the gawking crowd assembling, their breakfasts forgotten, his aide’s exhaustion betrayed in the mildest slump in his posture. “What was it Caleen wanted?”

“I, um – I don’t know, sir,” Poyle admits. “But she’s… well…”

“Out with it, Lieutenant.”

“She left, sir.”

~

Someone – he can’t even tell who, amidst the flurry of traffic comms as the council descends upon the moon – shouts over the din, “Captain Andor’s leaving Eadu in an Imperial ship, requests not to be shot down in orbit.”

Whatever feeling washes over Draven is too muted to be called relief. It’s a correction, a ripple of the universe’s unseen and unknowable currents nudging him, rebuking him, warning him, you’re slipping. “Get orbital patrol,” he mutters to Captain Vienaris, “keep them on comms until that ship reverts and has an escort to bring it in.”

“Sir.”

“I need some air.”

The landing field is barely-organized chaos with the new arrivals, with disembarking passengers being unceremoniously shooed out of the way while the ground crews carve out as brutally efficient a block as possible for the next vehicle to set down.

A single unmoving figure stands framed in the temple overhang, watching it all unfold. Watching it all come undone. The last gasping breaths of a dying revolution, and he wonders what she has, if she does not have this.

They’d tried to run down any records; there are none, not really. She’s a specter, of who she once was, of Luthen Rael, and her refusal to offer anything like a real name or a homeworld are less, he’s come to concede, any particular caginess as a skin she’s long shed to mold herself into the shape of whatever the Cause demands.

“I can’t do this,” he finds himself admitting, or apologizing, or pleading, as he steps up by her side. “I can’t be Luthen Rael.”

“Cassian?” Marki asks.

“En route. I thought the mission killed him and then did my level best to kill him myself.”

“There, you see? You’re following perfectly in Luthen’s footsteps.” Draven swears and turns away, runs anxious hands over his face. “General,” she chides, and when he turns back she’s shifted his way to look at him. “He doesn’t need you to be Luthen. He never needed you to be Luthen, or he never would have left.”

He scoffs and shakes his head, glowers off past her shoulder, staring unseeingly at the ongoing commotion. “So he could bide his time here and jump at the first sign from Coruscant, and I can’t even be angry at the reckless shredding of our every last security protocol considering all that’s unfolded since.”

“It’s who he is, General Draven. And I don’t know it’s who he would have remained, had he stayed.” He can feel his brow furrow as he tries to decide what that says about him. Commanding with such tolerant indulgence that Andor would defy every last protocol without so much as blinking.

Or perhaps he’s just been frustrated all the while that Andor wouldn’t trust him enough to confide, rather than send Paak along to run interference. That after all this, Sartha and Paak, Caleen – Ghorman and Mothma, finally taking up the rank and his place as a leader – that it should become so glaringly apparent that Andor never truly stopped being Luthen Rael’s.

His comm clicks with a message from Lieutenant Poyle that Andor’s shuttle has reverted and an escort has formed up. He clicks back an acknowledgement and marvels that he’s survived this far, Jedha, crashing on Eadu, the strafing run Draven ordered himself, and supposes maybe he’s just bitterly resentful at the universe only reinforcing that very thing he’s striven to avoid in his handling of Andor, that the extraordinary happenstance of his continued survival has simply been because it is not yet time.

And yet, after all this… “The weapon is functional,” he tells Kleya Marki, who is untrusted by the council and banished from operations and not cleared to hear it. “Jedha City is destroyed. The High Command is descending, surrender is imminent, and there is nothing more I can do.”

“That’s never true.” He scans the horizon, looking for the first shimmer of approaches ships descending through the clouds. “Look at me.”

He glances sidelong and then turns more fully to see the raw emotion displayed across her face that carries not at all in her firm tone. Anger and grief and dwindling hope, but there is a glimmer of resolve as she nods her head back towards the side of the field where Paak and Pelgrin are hurrying up to greet Melshi and Sefla and Pao, a small cluster forming to await the ship’s arrival.

“All that Cassian has done – all he has yet to do – could not come without this place. People who love him, respect him. People who will follow him. And he will come back… fired up and frustrated, and if there’s a forward path he will come through and find it and damn the Council, General, do you understand me?”

Draven stares at this woman, this unfathomably young woman he’s known only by her crisp and efficient words across a fractal radio, assisting them, connecting them, pulling them together until they coalesced and left her and Rael behind. Colorful bruises still fading down the side of her face and something else behind the grief he finally recognizes as complicated guilt and he thinks about the scattered reports they’ve tried piecing together off Coruscant and realizes, “You killed him, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Does Andor know?”

She presses her lips thin and turns away, turns her eyes to the skies. “It had to be done.”

Which is no answer, but it is, and he wonders at the varied wreckage scattered in the wake of Rael's methods.

“Why did Caleen leave?”

A trio of ground crewman go rushing past and she waits, glances surreptitiously around and works her mouth around the admission for a long moment before stating simply, “There’s a child.” Does Andor know? he wants to repeat in the numb seconds that follow but no, of course he doesn’t. “This is what revolution looks like, General Draven. Dead worlds and families ripped apart and happiness sacrificed on the altar of greater good. He doesn’t need you to be Luthen, and whatever happens when they land, you can do for him what Luthen so long resisted.”

There’s a shout from the field, and he looks up to see the forward escort ship breaking down through the clouds. “What’s that?”

“You can let him go.”

~ 

“Sir,” Captain Nioma taps on the frame of his open office door. “The Wecacoe team is coming in hot and requesting medical meet them on landing. I’ve already sent word.”

They didn’t comm on departure, which means they left in a hurry. “Who’s requesting?”

“Er… the droid.”

Draven blinks up from his datapad, confused. “The droid needs medical?”

“No, sir, the droid… commed in.” A hint of pink rises in her cheeks and she adds, “I think he might have been, er… flying the ship?”

He growls softly under his breath and shoves to his feet. “Advising on Imperial protocols and slicing Imperial systems.” Nioma winces and backs out of the doorway so he can swoop past and then hurries along in his wake. “Those were the only functions the damn thing was to serve in the field!” She makes a vague sound as she trots to keep up with his longer stride. “Is the team intact?”

“Seems so.”

“Andor better have one hell of a compelling story.”

What Andor has, as the medic team hoist him from the deck of the U-wing, is an elevated heartrate and a spiking fever and a concerningly shallow rise and fall of his chest. Which is to say nothing of the colorful bruises erupting across his face or his bloody companions, Rismor with a haphazardly patched cut over one brow and green blood drying in her purple hair and Kertas and K-2SO with blood that may be Andor’s or someone else’s entirely spattered about them.

Or, apparently, the cocktail of interrogation drugs in his system. “We didn’t give him any pain meds,” Kertas rushes to fill in the medics. “They started him on skirtopanol and he, well…”

“He pissed them off so much they switched too soon to xebon and electro-shock and we weren’t sure he could handle –”

“You probably would have killed him,” the chief medic agrees far too nonchalantly as he attempts to affix a breathing mask over Andor’s face and sparks a vicious bout of thrashing for his efforts, knocking the thing from his hands and narrowly missing a clumsy fist to the chin. Rismor ducks the corresponding swing from the other arm with practiced ease and leans in close to narrate sternly their present safe circumstances, and Draven can perhaps see why keeping him secure was a two-man job.

“Bad luck?” he asks Kertas as she steps back and out of the medical team’s way. “Or…?”

“Oh, that was a,” he neither knows the curse she utters nor recognizes the language, but gets the picture just fine, “all the way down. Access codes were outdated, he tripped a flag the second he walked in.”

Draven’s gaze drifts from the departing cart to the droid lurking outside the ship, head turning this way and that like he’s not sure what to do with himself. “You utilized the KX for extraction?”

“Ohh, he insisted, sir.”

“There was an eighty-nine percent chance the retrieval agents would have likewise been detained, or killed, without my assistance,” K-2SO calls over, and then hunches over a little in a fascinating performance of abashed to be caught eavesdropping. And then can’t stop himself from adding, “Plus, even if they succeeded in retrieving Captain Andor, the chances of successfully exfiltrating with a compromised agent –”

“Fine,” Draven pinches at the bridge of his nose. “Do we need to be concerned?”

“About the droid?” He gives her a dull stare. “Kaytoo says no.”

“Kaytoo says –?” he demands, only for the thing to cut him off with:

“Upon recovery of the recording of Captain Andor’s interrupted interrogation, my analysis indicates that ninety-two percent of his utterances under the effect of chemical agents came in the form of expletives in four different languages.” A brief pause and, “I can include the file in my data transfer along with the classified intelligence from the Wecacoe facility mainframe.”

He really doesn’t want it. “Fine,” he grunts. “Go. You know the protocol.”

Except he thinks about he insisted and finds himself wondering how much K-2SO is particularly compelled by his programming to follow it.

When he finally makes his way to sickbay after doing his due diligence and confirming that no, there’s no reason to suspect an armada of Star Destroyers come to blow Yavin base off the face of the moon, they’ve got Andor stabilized and levelled out, a little, drowsy or hazy under whatever painkillers they deemed safe but, “He’s still working through the truth agent,” the medic tells him as she tends to the deep abrasions where he struggled against restraints.

“Captain,” Draven prompts; Andor’s head lolls over his way. “You find yourself in here far too often.”

“M’sorry, sir,” he mumbles. “It was the wrong ship.”

“Different mission, Andor, that was a long time ago.”

“…Oh,” he frowns vacantly and obligingly lifts the other arm for the medic.

She tries to distract him with simpler things. “Where are you from, Captain?”

He blinks around and starts, “Ken – or, ah… Fer – or.” He scowls down at his lap and Draven exchanges a frown with the medic, who shrugs and keeps at it, cleaning and bandaging his arm. “Fest,” he finally lands on. “My docs say Fest. S’posed to say Fest. Cassian Andor,” he smacks his lips and settles his head down into his pillow, “from Fest. That would be me.”

“Sorry,” the medic whispers at Draven, who just blows out a heavy, tired breath.

“Did’y’know,” Andor smiles vaguely at both of them and neither of them, “I robbed the garrison on Aldhani?”

“Yes, sir,” the medic assures him with an indulgent smile and a pat to his arm, “You and half of Yavin.”

Draven returns to the sickbay prepared to battle it out with Andor over mandated medical rest days and finds him already with his nose buried in a datapad, reading up on the captured Wecacoe files. “How in the name of…? Never mind. I don’t want to know.” Andor hums noncommittally under his breath and Draven just takes a minute to take in the picture of Andor, bruised and bandaged, work in his lap and uneaten meal on a tray by the bed, and supposes the image is the fairly logical endpoint to the last month of late nights and early mornings and barely hanging up one mission before asking for the next. “How do you feel?”

“When I went home after Mimban,” Andor murmurs without looking up, “I spent three days hiding and on the fourth I went looking for a drink and I feel right now like I felt on the fifth day.”

“Well, then you’ll agree you could use a few days’ rest.”

Not even so much as a pause in his scanning the mission report. “I promise to stay behind a desk,” he says, and probably thinks he’s being really quite reasonable.

“Andor.” He closes his hand over the top of the datapad; Andor’s grip tightens on the edges and he finally looks up with a peeved glower, its effect rather tragically muted by the bruises and the pained draw of his eyes. “There’s nothing else needs doing right now.”

“There’s always something to be done,” he mutters, but yields the device with a huff.

They’ve been heading for this impasse for a month, but the chaotic collision of happenings all at once meant that Draven didn’t entirely grasp until several days passed just how thoroughly Andor’s universe all came upended in quick succession. Witnessing the carnage on Ghorman, Rael’s refusal to remove himself to safety in the wake of Senator Mothma’s flight, even if not to Yavin; Caleen’s abrupt departure, and Paak’s injury necessitating less far-flung living arrangements. Draven feels like he’s walking on a thin edge constantly, tolerating the risk of Andor working himself to death for fear he’ll return to his empty home out in the jungle and drink himself to death instead, and staring at him now, subdued and avoidant, the damn interrogation file still sharp in Draven’s mind, something has to give.

He doesn’t make a habit of forming connections with his colleagues under Draven’s command, far as Draven can discern; probably out of self-preservation. But, “Your friend,” he prompts. “The Pathfinder. He and Paak were in here earlier.” Probably brought the meal Andor hasn’t touched.

“Melshi?”

“Acquaintance from home?”

“Ah… no, no, we met a few years back, we were… in prison together?”

His tone rises at the end like he’s asking a question, probably because he realizes as he says it – “That’s not in your file.”

“Well, they didn’t arrest Cassian Andor of course.”

“…Of course.” He’s not going to ask. “Would Sergeant Melshi be amenable to a change of billeting assignment?”

A complicated mixture of thoughts and emotions slam over Andor’s expression. Intrigue at the idea, resentment to be handled, aggrieved to be reminded why. “Major Seertay,” he points out evenly, “prefers to keep her Tracker squads bunked together,” which does rather betray that the question has come up.

Draven taps at his rank patch and points out drily, “The extraordinary privilege of this is that I get to overrule her.”

~

They’re not subtle about the hasty mission prep, it’s just that everyone is rushing about somewhere, panicking about something, Yavin is full of new faces descended for the meeting, and rumors spreading about surrender quickly override rumors about a weapon capable of destroying an entire city and no one’s paying attention to the particular storm brewing in Andor and Erso’s orbit.

Except Sartha, who stands out because she stands still, affected nonchalance surveying the activity in the landing field and the cleared land beyond where they’ve managed to fit more ships than ever set down for that first meeting of scattered cells to decide their united future. She’s got a comm in her ear and a datapad in her hand he’ll bet has the rapidly changing schedule for departures as the ground crews do their level best to balance a semblance of order with the impatience of self-righteous politicians.

He watches long enough to see her tap at her ear and Marki and Paak cross to the Imperial cargo shuttle where they make child’s play of the impound seals ground crew placed on the hatch.

“I suppose it seems fitting,” he murmurs as he steps up by Sartha’s side, “that Luthen Rael’s legacy should be a rebellion against the Alliance itself.” Her hand pauses halfway to tapping the comm while she looks at him and decides. “Where is he?”

Another long moment and she lowers her hand, squints off at the yacht rising up from the edge of the clearing, and admits, “Looting the auxiliary armory.”

He supposes the rest of them won’t be needing it.

They only keep small arms in the auxiliary armory, a reinforced cavity drilled into the exterior stone; by the time he reaches it, he’s also gleaned some sense of the numbers recruited for this mission, and that most of them are raiding the munitions bunker built well-clear of the temple and any other structures.

As he approaches, he sees Lieutenant Sefla duck away with the Erso girl and fade into the crowd of personnel darting this way and that, leaving at the open entry only Sergeant Melshi, who opens his mouth and visibly searches for some sort of excuse or explanation or distraction. “Go,” Draven snaps.

“Sir,” he coughs and scurries in the others’ wake, tapping his comm as he goes so that when Draven steps into the doorway Andor is standing up and whirling around to meet the threat and laying a hand on his holstered weapon.

Whatever he’s expecting, it’s not Draven. Straightens and clicks his tongue consideringly, more curious than defiant but plenty bitter when he does remove his hand from the grip of his blaster and tells Draven flatly, “Either kill me right here, or move out of my way.”

“It’s the same thing, isn’t it?” Andor scoffs and looks away, and Draven resents this, he decides. Resents the galaxy for driving Andor to the edge again and again only to spare him, resents the sense here and now that Andor was never his at all, only trusted to his safekeeping to bring him here and now so he can let him go in a last desperate bid to see Luthen Rael’s final mission through.

Resents feeling as though he’s done little but raise him for slaughter. “We lost comms, thought you were dead.”

The huff of laughter is entirely devoid of humor. “No time for that.”

“I thought I killed you.”

Andor’s jaw works tersely for a moment before he shakes his head and forces his eyes back to Draven’s and supposes, “You made the right call.”

Except he didn’t, the whole way down, did he? “It was never the right call, was it? Erso.” He was rushing, panicking, desperate to seize the quick fix, the easy fix, kill him and make it all go away.

“It never mattered,” Andor bites. “They knew. The Empire knew. They destroyed Jedha to silence one man. They were already onto Eadu. There was never going to be an extraction.”

But that’s not how it works, there’s no absolution found in it. “It matters to me.” His responsibility for the operation doesn’t end at its failure, except, in this case, it’s all come undone, in a meeting where Andor couldn’t even make his case because all his presence would do is remind the intractable politicians there that –

“He sacrificed… everything. For years. So we might have hope here, and now, to fight. And they’re going to throw it all away.”

Draven takes in Andor’s wild, red-rimmed eyes and wonders, “Are we talking about Galen Erso or are we talking about Luthen Rael?”

Andor snarls and shoves past; Draven catches his elbow and holds him firm. “Spare a minute, Andor, pretend that you have ever so much as humored the illusion of this uniform, of your rank or mine, and listen to me.”

Andor jerks his arm against the hold and twists his face up to scowl at him.

“I will keep the necessary eyes averted.” The unhappy twist of Andor’s mouth eases into something more warily neutral. “Admiral Raddus is already en route to his flagship and he will defy the council at the first sign of clear mission objective. We’ve had the whole base on high alert since Kafrene and most commanders here will not stand down easily upon hearing the word surrender. We’ve come too far, built too much.”

“Just need someone crazy enough to try it first?”

“Well, someone has to break the siege, and sometimes we are rather our own worst enemy.”

A reluctant chuckle slips past Andor’s lips and he nods. “Sir.” Draven lets him go and he takes two steps past before turning and sighing, “Could use some help pulling out of here.”

They’ve already cracked the lock on the ship; it’d be easy as anything to add it to the outgoing manifest. Except, “No,” Draven refuses, and cuts off the outraged protest with a reminder, “You asked me a favor, once.” The way Andor’s anger morphs into confusion and then into stricken understanding, like it’s not yet occurred that a bad leg won’t stop him, not for this. “He got you off to Coruscant just fine,” he reminds Andor drily, “he can do it again.”

Andor wipes at his eyes and sucks in a slow, ragged breath and nods. Draven thinks about Marki and the question he wishes now he had not asked, thinks about that favor and Paak already in too deep, thinks about that moment on the precipice, Rael’s pragmatism or compassion or perhaps, he dares suppose now, a careful balance of both, when he told Paak to stay rather than let that burgeoning rift widen to the point of impassable.

“There’s – I left a message. A datapad. Will you make sure Vel gets it? She’ll know how to…” Draven resists the urge to remind him of all he’s survived. It’s sheer audacity; a last, desperate gasp of a dying Rebellion. And there’s no choice but to try. He nods; Andor extends his hand and he shakes it. “Thank you, General.”

“Go,” he tells Andor, and after all this – Sienar and his unhappy introduction to Yavin, Jenoport, Ghorman, Wecacoe – he hurries him along at long last to die.

~

He finds Andor lurking about the comms center late one night, no one else but the overnight radio operators and Draven, working through his endless files of reports and communiques and galactic news-bursts.

It’s a rare sight these days when he’s not mission-prepping, when there’s not an active emergency, but not unexpected tonight as Draven steps up to the station where Andor is absently scanning radio channels. “No word yet from Sefla’s team?”

“No,” Andor glances up and lowers the headset with a soft exhale. “But it’s still early.”

He’d urge him along home with promises to comm, but the Pathfinders took the droid, too. “We can wait in my office, if you like.”

He pours them both a small drink; Andor pulls a deck of sabacc cards from inside his jacket, starts shuffling them, and notes, “Bix said you don’t know how to play. Anything.” He’s not sure he’s heard Caleen’s name from Andor’s mouth since Lieutenant Poyle told him she’d left. “We’ve been teaching Kay rianza. Tiles are easier for him, he kept dropping the cards.”

“I’m still not quite clear when, or how, the droid was permitted to deviate from the very clear protocols we set in place to keep it and the base secure.”

“Would you know,” Andor muses with a small smile turned down to the desk as he works the cards with practiced hands, “I’m not sure the reprogramming worked exactly how Drolla imagined?”

“That’s not a comfort.”

Except that it is, because it brought all three of them back from Wecacoe and has helped slip Andor in and out of a dozen tense situations since. Keeps him from brooding about his empty house when Sergeant Melshi is on overnight rotations or when the Pathfinders are afield, most of the time.

He wonders on occasion, quiet idle nights, what it was that Caleen wanted to tell him, or ask of him, before she left.

 “Fine,” Draven relents, “teach me to play.”

“Which variation?”

Draven blinks and pours them both another drink. He holds his, frozen, while Andor rattles off ten or twelve absolute nonsense options, throws it back once he’s done, grimaces and informs him, “I’m demoting you.”

Andor grins, mischievous spark in his eye, and starts dealing cards.

The next pour comes when he starts explaining the conditions under which the scoring objectives shift mid-hand. “This is the basic version?” Draven demands, and, “You can’t change the rules in the middle of the game.”

Andor shrugs, supposes, “Can’t you?” and carries on after a brief glance caught somewhere between wondering and worried and wistful at the fractal radio collecting dust at the corner of the desk.

~

Senator Mothma finds him in the surreally quiet comms center, except most of the equipment has been packed into crates and hauled up for loading. Most of the people are up at the top of the temple in the grand chamber, and Draven turns on the spot and takes in yet another duty station to be left behind, like so many others since that day he’d left home to join the Republic’s great war and never went back.

“I suppose it doesn’t really feel like our moment, does it?” Mothma muses.

He scoffs and shakes his head. “A very grand Rebel victory, and despite the Alliance’s best efforts.” And then his brain catches up and he looks sharply up at her and realizes, “You should have been on the first ship out of here, ma’am.”

She smiles; it’s a sad, brittle thing, but she smiles, and hooks her hand around his elbow and guides him away from the empty tomb that this place is about to become. “Not just yet.”

The deeper they trek along the jungle path, laden with obstacles as people ready crates of gear and supplies and what precious few personal belongings they can carry on, the more reluctant he is to reach their destination. Couldn’t bring himself to face it before – sent Lieutenant Poyle to retrieve the datapad left behind in the home Andor built with Caleen who left and Paak who grew up, where he lived with Melshi and K-2SO who followed him to die.

He cannot fathom the point, until they’re climbing the steps and the low chatter of voices and soft bursts of laughter greet them, and there sitting around the table are Marki and Sartha and Paak with a game spread out before them and two seats left open and set with cups ready and an unopened bottle.

Before they’ve even taken their seats, Marki is spreading tiles out – rianza, because the droid couldn’t handle the cards – and he makes a pathetic attempt to beg off. “I don’t know how to play.”

“You’ll be Vel’s partner, then,” Paak snickers.

“Oy,” Sartha protests, reaching over to snatch up the bottle and pop it open so she can pour a small mouthful apiece in each of the empty cups set out.

Draven looks around the space while Paak and Sartha make a chaotic attempt to explain the rules. It’s been tidied a bit, some things packed up, he suspects to fall into Sartha’s care until she can pass them on. It’s a nice home, a sturdy one that’s withstood time and the elements and he wonders if the jungle will reclaim it or if the Empire will simply bombard the base to make a point and be done with it.

“After all this,” he muses.

Paak looks at him. Picks up his cup and swallows thickly and says, “To Melshi and Kay.”

“Jyn,” Mothma adds softly, “and everyone who stepped up to follow her and finish what her father started.”

Sartha exchanges a look with her cousin and breathes out slow and shaky. “Bail and Breha,” she murmurs. “Alderaan.”

Draven picks up his cup and catches Marki’s eye and says simply, “Luthen.”

She taps his cup with her own. “Cassian.”

They drink their toast. “After all this,” he repeats, staring unseeingly down at his tiles.

Mothma lays a gentle hand over his own and tells him firmly, “We make it worth it, General Draven.”

He spares a look around at all their faces, grief and resolve and desperate hope and supposes, “Just so.”

They play a round.

And they push forward.