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Luthen keeps finding rations. Rations hidden in storage boxes, placed on top of hard to reach architecture, and in the pockets of coats near the back of closets; rations collecting dust in the ventilation ducts and hidden behind furniture. Andor knows where the food is and knows he can have as much as he likes whenever he wants, but still he hides provisions away like contributing to and accessing the pantry is a privilege that will be taken from him at any moment.
It's not just calorie bars, either. Credit chips, ranging from a few clips to a hundred credits (illegally marked and scratched from constant circulation—most likely won in a game of some kind,) taped under chairs and behind a loose tile on the balcony. Bandages and bacta, stashed wherever they could be hidden, along with antiseptic hypos and liquid stitches. Other medicine too, like the tablets Kleya needs for her migraines crammed into the base of a lamp, the blister pack dented and bent from the stress of folding. He didn’t take it from their medicine cabinet; Luthen suspects a pharmacy in the lower districts had a surprise inspection from an officer who failed to follow up with them.
(He hears them whispering about it late in the night, in the kitchen, when Kleya finds she's run out of her medication.
"What exactly is the point in hiding this?" She's annoyed by his behavior and not bothering to hide it. Luthen can hear her open the pack and then open the tap to fill her glass. This is the closest Andor is going to get to a 'thank you.'
"You never know when you might need some." He's trying to sound unbothered, non committal. The kind of tone you use when someone sizes you up in the prison yard. It almost works.
"Then put it in the cabinet."
"This is better."
"Why?"
Quieter, almost hissed:
"Because only we know where it is."
Silence. Then Kleya, incredulous and not at all sharing his paranoia:
"You're hiding them from Luthen."
"Keep your voice down!"
"You are aware that I could go out and buy more, right? He couldn't stop me from having medicine."
"For now, but what happens when you start to get your own ideas?"
"Do you honestly believe he'd keep me in pain if I disobeyed him?"
"Even good people will hurt you if they think they need to."
Kleya makes a noise like she's about to start arguing but then sighs, long suffering. Her head must be getting to her. Luthen can see her in his mind's eye, hand on her forehead and the other on her hip.
"Look. Put it under the lamp if it makes you feel better, but consolidate your stashes. Finding your calorie bars in every nook and cranny is driving me insane."
Luthen hears Andor shuffle his feet. He must be moving away from her—he's miscalculated Kleya's degree of solidarity.
"How many can I have?" He's back to being quiet and still, shields up and unsure of her.
"How ma—Three. You get three. Use the bags from storage, not your pillow cases."
"...Yes, ma'am."
He doesn't agree. Kleya sounds too tired to let him bargain, not that he would try.
"Go to bed, Cassian.")
Luthen even found Andor's primary walk away bag when the comlink inside started complaining of a low battery. It was shoved under his bed along with a crumpled pile of sheets he had "borrowed." Even after being given his own set, Andor doesn't seem to believe they won't take his bedding from him. He still doesn’t sleep on his mattress, but it hardly matters as long as he sleeps. Luthen added a flask of mednog to the kit and replaced the comlink once it had charged.
He's not upset. It's irritating at times but never truly bothersome. If it makes Andor feel safer to have escape routes and preparations for punishments that aren't coming, Luthen doesn't see the harm in letting him stash away the odd calorie bar or bandage roll. He finds the new stashes, neat and tucked away, and then makes a point to ignore them.
Luthen knows he poses a bigger threat than Kleya. That's why Andor is so cautious around him and why he was so worried that Kleya wasn't adequately protected. It’s kind, in a way, for him to make sure she isn't trapped. Cassian is beginning to trust despite his anxiety; he doesn't hide his injuries from Luthen anymore and occasionally adds his opinion. Luthen feels that was inevitable. There's a gentleness under all the artillery and armor that can't seem to help itself. Andor can be as mild as a house tooka, when given the occasion to be so. Regardless, Andor's lack of trust hasn't affected his ability to follow orders. His unease doesn't bother Luthen as much as it bothers Kleya.
---
Andor cannot stand to be touched. Luthen suspects that he’s always been touch adverse—unsurprising given the amount of violence he was probably exposed to in prison and then in conscripted service. He stays out of hands reach constantly, adjusting as needed, and never so much as allows his clothes to brush another person's. He doesn’t shake hands with clients or courtesans, barely speaks unless spoken to. That's fine. Luthen doesn't keep him around for his personality.
Andor is rewiring one of the old meshcom relay nodes in the back of the art gallery, his borrowed tools spread on the workstation and various parts stacked precariously in piles around them. He's good at comset repair, and would be happy to work on equipment all day if he was allowed. Granted, leaving him to his own devices often means enduring his sudden absence when he sets himself a task that takes him to yet another roof top or control tower. To his credit, he marks the coordinates of each of his work sites and makes an equipment list for each of them should they need to fix it without him present. Luthen thinks privately that if he survives all of this, he would not want for work on any world.
Kleya mentioned once that her signals were weak in a particular area and Andor must have taken it as an order. He doesn’t seem afraid when he works with her on the mesh, just focused. Mechanics are just as second nature to him as blending into crowds and evading conversation.
(“You met me on Fest,” Cassian tells Luthen quietly at the opening of a new art exhibit in Calocour Heights, close enough to spit and hit the senate building. They’re surrounded by enough credits to feed entire star systems. The lights are slightly too bright on the eyes. Luthen turns to him, eyebrow raised and the flimsy-thin crystal of his champagne flute held delicately between two fingers.
“Did I?” he asks, indulgent. Cassian has his eyes on someone else in the room, locked in like a cross-hair. He leans subtly closer and turns his head towards him just a fraction. He’s combed his hair back the way he does for this persona—the opposite from his usual loose waves. They aren’t as different as Cassian thinks.
“Mhm. I was working security but I wanted something more and—”
“—And I noticed your talents in security well as your expansive knowledge of the galaxy from your travels.”
“Exactly. I was in the armed forces before this but changed careers early on.”
That’s an interesting detail, one that affirms Luthen’s suspicions. Cassian is remembering himself more, if only subconsciously. Luthen tries not to feel pleased but fails immediately, ego preening a little at the success. What a waste it would have been to leave him with Ghyron. Cassian still isn’t looking at him. Luthen follows his gaze to Mon Mothma and her husband, and immediately understands that this story is more than something to say to get him out of a conversation.
“Imperial or Festian?” Luthen asks around a sip of champagne. He feels his tone change but he keeps it out of his body language. A veteran of the Imperial armed forces would garner considerable respect in this crowd, but would immediately embitter Mothma towards Cassian. That would be costly in the future, unless Luthen explained the situation enough to put her at ease.
“I left it up to interpretation,” Cassian answers.
His hands are clasped at his back, the fine silk of his tunics like an ocean on his shoulders. Luthen sees Kleya’s touch in the choices made: the deep blue fabric loose enough to move in but modest enough for him to feel secure; no bulky clasps or buttons, no jewelry or accessories at all. He looks stunning but practical. It was the perfect choice for him. She’s protective of him too, even if he doesn’t notice.
“Good,” Luthen says. “Who will be asking?”
Cassian points with his lips to Perrin Fertha. The gesture is decidedly un-Festian but Luthen doubts very much that Fertha knows where Festian System is, let alone what specific mannerisms Cassian does or doesn’t have. His accent is close enough, if the listener has only heard a Festian person speak in holofilms. He doubts very much anyone in this room will know the difference.
“I didn’t expect Fertha to take a shine to you,” Luthen says, amused. Cassian’s face darkens with annoyance.
“He kept asking me questions,” he grumbles. He can withstand any discomfort aside from irritation. “Has Kleya made her first check in?”
“Not yet,” Luthen answers. Cassian looks away. He doesn’t like her being on her own despite how well he knows she can handle herself. “Its early yet. Give her some time.”)
Luthen walks to the back from the gallery floor and immediately the hair on the back of his neck stands up, years of field experience triggered by the tension in the room. Kleya is standing close to Andor, close enough to touch her shoulder to his, her face set like it is when she knows she's right about something. Andor looks like a coiled spring. He's stiff and frozen in place; his hands twitch minutely with potential energy.
"Kleya, step back," he's saying. His voice is low and even but not calm. He sounds like a civilian at blaster point. "I don't want to hurt you but I will, step back."
She does, standing at the very edge of Andor's forcefield. Luthen sees his mouth twitch.
"You need to trust us. This doesn’t work otherwise,” Kleya tells him.
"I do trust you."
He's not looking at her straight on, keeping track of her in the reflection of the table. The component in his hands isn't broken but he keeps adjusting it. He scans the room and his eyes catch like a splinter on Luthen but he doesn't acknowledge him. Kleya continues, unrelenting. She can’t see Luthen standing in the doorway from her angle.
"No, you don't. You looked like you were about to bolt."
He looked like he was about to strike, Luthen thinks. Like all badly trained attack hounds, Andor bites when he's afraid. Dark eyes flick back Luthen, not to his face but to his hands. Andor's breathing deliberately, self-soothing as he tries to ride out the stress without shutting down. His gaze snaps back to Kleya's reflection when she starts talking again.
"Luthen's never hit me," she says with surprising gentleness and suddenly Luthen knows exactly what Andor's problem is. He's waiting for them to discipline him for failing—when he says "failing," what he means is "aborted the mission when it was clear the payload was not worth dying in agony over."
Kleya had told him to pull out. Luthen had not. He didn't think he had needed to. If he had disagreed with Kleya he would have stopped her before she made the call, but Andor has decided that Luthen is the high authority here and his absence on such an important order distressed him. He needs rock solid consistency these days and now he's waiting for the fallout.
Luthen thinks about the scars over his back and the misaligned bones in his fingers. He thinks about how Andor never allows more than his hands and head to show, preferring loose, layered clothes to form-fitting, and only makes eye contact when he absolutely has to. He thinks about how he knows at what level a nerve inductor renders him unconscious, how his threshold is significantly higher than most beings, and how stun blasts are useless against him. Luthen still has the remote for his disciplinary chip hidden deep within his ship where it can’t be stumbled upon. The page with the trigger words was recorded into a datapad and then destroyed, never to be used on him again except by accident or absolute necessity.
"He's never hit me and he won't hit you either," Kleya tells him firmly.
"I'm not afraid of being hit, I'm not a child," Andor lies, low and frustrated. Kleya doesn’t let him go. She pins him down with her attention like a specimen to a tray.
"He would never starve you. I wouldn’t let him."
"I can cope with being starved."
"I know, I found your ration stash." Luthen chooses this moment to enter the conversation because he can't stand to let the woman who's life he's saturated with violence reassure this broken man that he won't be beaten.
Its the wrong thing to say. In the past Luthen is sure Andor would have fired back or stood defiant. Now, all the blood drains from his face and his frame is still. He blinks, coal back eyes sharp as broken glass. Luthen can see him trying to calculate the consequences of having personal effects but before he can reach for the worst possible conclusion, he interrupts.
"Smart," Luthen praises. His tone has no warmth, just practicality. Andor is suspicious of gentleness; Kleya keeps setting off his proximity alert when she tries to speak to him like he's sentient. "If you let me feed you, you run the risk of letting me starve you. This way you can remain at full strength and not risk more errors and more punishment."
Ghyron is good at what he does. What he does is cruel, but he is exceptional at it. He took a perfectly good saboteur and thief, and twisted him into something ruthless and cunning. Luthen would be more surprised if he didn't have a few caches hidden away. Andor lowers his chin a fraction. The collar of his tunic is high and the long fabric of his sleeves is pooled at his wrists.
"The medkit and bacta are good additions, although I'm not sure how well you'd be able to suture your own skin if came to it," he continues. Andor presses his hands to his thighs, gaze lowered. He's still waiting for the blow. "I added mednog to your kit. You'll heal faster if you aren't in pain."
Andor's eyes narrow a fraction as he tries to pencil out what Luthen's angle is. Luthen waits for him. He appreciates this is difficult information to absorb after the way he was treated before. Ghyron would not have been so generous. Ghyron would have him writhing on the floor by now, screaming himself hoarse. It’s an awful feeling, having no way to win. Ghyron punished him if he failed because of the training and the conditioning, and then punished him if he took steps to mitigate the damage.
"It's not necessary," Andor finally says. "I can still function without it."
"You were trained for efficiency," Luthen states. He doesn't actually know this but it's safe to assume. "Not being in pain makes you more efficient. Keep the mednog."
"We work together," Kleya tells him. "We won't leave you on your own."
Andor doesn't argue further.