Chapter Text
He almost doesn’t take it.
The bundle is small—too small to matter. Wrapped in worn cloth, tied with a knot that has been pulled and retied too many times. It looks like something forgotten at the bottom of a supply crate, not something carried across camps and years.
The woman holding it does not lower her arm.
Cassian glances at her, already half-turned away. “If this is some story—”
“It’s not.”
Her voice cuts clean. Not loud. Not sharp. Just final.
He stops.
She is older than most who still linger in the camps. Not frail—Illyrian women rarely get the luxury of becoming fragile—but worn in the way of stone shaped by weather. One wing sits slightly lower than the other, healed wrong. Her gaze doesn’t waver.
“I knew her,” she says.
Cassian’s jaw tightens.
He doesn’t ask who. He doesn’t need to.
There is only one her that matters enough for strangers to approach him like this.
“I know how she died,” he says, flat.
A lie, and not one he’s ever bothered to examine too closely.
The woman tilts her head, studying him—not with pity, which he might have dismissed, but with something far less comfortable.
Assessment.
“No,” she says. “You know what they told you.”
Something in his chest shifts—small, sharp, unwelcome.
Cassian exhales through his nose, already reaching for irritation to steady himself. “And you think you know better?”
“I don’t think,” she replies. “I was there.”
Silence stretches between them.
Around them, the camp continues as if nothing has changed—training calls in the distance, the steady rhythm of wings cutting air, the low murmur of voices that have learned to stay just below notice. The wind threads through it all, tugging at loose fabric, carrying the scent of leather and smoke.
The same wind.
Always the same.
Cassian looks at the bundle again.
It hasn’t moved.
“Then say it,” he says. “Whatever version you’ve been carrying all this time.”
“I could,” she says. “But you wouldn’t listen.”
His mouth pulls into something that might almost be a smile, if there were any humor in it. “Try me.”
Her grip on the bundle tightens—not possessive, but deliberate.
“This,” she says, lifting it slightly, “is hers.”
That lands.
Not cleanly. Not clearly. But enough.
Cassian’s gaze sharpens. “I buried her.”
“No,” the woman says, and there is no hesitation in it. “You buried what they let you see.”
The wind shifts.
For a moment—just a moment—he is not standing in the open air of the camp. He is smaller. The world is louder. Hands are lifting him, pulling him away from something he doesn’t understand enough to fight for.
He remembers fabric.
Rough. Damp. Wrapped around him.
He remembers a voice—low, steady, saying something he can’t quite grasp anymore.
He does not remember her face.
Cassian’s fingers curl.
“That’s not how it happened.”
The woman steps closer.
Not enough to crowd him. Just enough that he has to acknowledge her presence in full.
“She worked after they took you,” she says. “Harder than before. They made sure of it.”
He says nothing.
“She didn’t last long.”
Still nothing.
“But she lasted long enough to write.”
And she presses the bundle into his hands.
Cassian takes it before he can decide not to.
It’s lighter than he expects.
The cloth is coarse beneath his fingers, edges worn thin. The knot gives easily when he pulls at it—too easily, like it’s been untied many times before, by hands that weren’t his.
Inside: leather.
Old. Cracked. Carefully mended.
A journal.
He stares at it.
“This isn’t—” he starts, then stops.
His mother had never owned anything like this. Not that he remembers. Not that anyone had ever said.
“She couldn’t write,” he says instead.
The woman watches him, something almost like weariness passing through her expression.
“She learned.”
The words settle heavily.
Cassian turns the journal over in his hands. The leather is uneven, patched together from scraps. There are faint stains along the edges—water, maybe. Or something else.
His thumb brushes the corner.
Hesitates.
“This doesn’t change anything,” he says, more to himself than to her.
“No,” she agrees. “It doesn’t.”
A pause.
Then, quieter:
“It just tells you what it cost.”
That lands deeper than anything else she’s said.
Cassian exhales, slow.
He opens the cover.
The first page is rough, the ink faded but legible. The handwriting is careful, uneven in places, as if each word had been learned rather than practiced.
He expects—
He doesn’t know what he expects.
Something soft. Something broken. Something that matches the version of her he’s carried all these years: gentle, worn down, already fading.
Instead, the first line reads:
They say the wind here makes warriors.
His brow furrows.
The next line:
I think it just teaches you how to stand still long enough not to be knocked over.
Cassian goes very still.
Behind him, the woman says nothing.
He reads the final line on the page.
The girls learn that first.
Something in his chest shifts.
Not breaking.
Not yet.
But moving—just enough to make space for something unfamiliar.
Cassian closes the journal.
Not because he’s done.
Because suddenly, he understands that he isn’t.
He looks back up to the woman and nearly startles at how for a second she looked like a face he had thought he had forgotten.
“Who were you to her?” He asks carefully.
The woman rolls her shoulders before she responds, “She was my sister, making you my nephew”