#that maarva is supposed to be like

[rotzaprachim]

maarva andor and cassian andor in the andornatural au 

he’s nineteein and draining the bottom half of the milk container when Ma finds him bent over the sink and informs him that she hopes he’s got Tuesday evenings free for the rest of Lent because she’s volunteered  him to be Jesus. 

“what?” he sputters out, certain that he heard that one wrong. two percent splatters disgustingly into the sink. 

“Just for the Tuesday evening rehearsels, and then for the Daughters of Ferrix community pageant on Easter Sunday. Oh- don’t give me that look, Cass! The Daughters of Ferrix- well, it’s all daughters, so we have to take turns volunteering our sons for the part, an, well, Luz’s boy Rodrigo is at univeristy, see, for pre-law, and Andy Fleishmann is in trade school in Pueblo at trade school, and Sarah’s boy Michael- well, we don’t talk about Sarah’s boy Michael- but the point is that you’re still here and I told the Daughters-” her chest puffed up with pride and Cassian felt his entire soul sinking down, down, down - “I told them you would do a marvelous job dying on the cross.”

[frostbitepandaaaaa]

Aphelion - a soulmate AU

PREVIEW

“Jyn—“ he croaks. “Jyn Er—“ he stops short, now unsure if it was safe to say Jyn’s full name. Ferrix had fallen hard under the Imperial heel after the riot at Maarva’s funeral nearly five years ago. Cassian hadn’t kept up with how it had fared since. He couldn’t be sure if this woman is an Imperial sympathizer… or worse. He couldn’t be sure of anything. “My… my partner. Where is she?”

The woman takes him gently by the shoulders, urges him to turn back to the room he had just exited. “C’mon… back to bed. The doctor will be back in the morn—“

“My partner,” Cassian repeats heatedly. He looks around, over the woman’s head, as if Jyn would just be napping on the tumbledown couch. “She has to be here, please—“

The woman looks at him sadly, pats his shoulder. “I’m sorry, dear, but all I found was you.”

“Found?” Cassian repeats dumbly. He supposes it makes a strange sort of sense… even if nothing about this situation makes sense. He wouldn’t just… appear in some bed in some house on Ferrix. But then again, it was his house—

The woman nods. “Aye, you were nearly dead, but I found you in the old salvage yard… to the east.”

His head spins. He has to clutch onto the meddrip stand as the world tilts around him.

Found. Like some piece of scrap.

read it on ao3!

[jynjackets]

I’m sorry but you don’t understand. Andor audiences are accepting an indigenous-coded child kidnapping story because it was aesthetically pleasing.

It’s a story of how people rationalize that it was right to colonize us all along. “That there was no other choice,” that these people are “saving us” from a greater harm whether it’s from a larger threat or from ourselves. That there’s a “moral complexity” to white saviorism and where people gaslight us by asking “well should they have just left you there to die?” when the issue is infinitely more complex than that. That people will justify their own choices because they don’t understand me, or that my English wasn’t good enough. That we should be thankful and that’s “why Cassian loves Maarva.” Does a child ask their own parents to do better? No because the child will always blame themselves. Until they learn better on their own.

If there was real value to this, Cassian would learn to not blame himself so much. He would be more open to Maarva to understanding why she did what she did. He would push her, be allowed to beg for answers. Maarva herself would talk about it, maybe properly apologize. If none of these things happened Maarva shouldn’t be the hero that radicalizes her home planet, it would be the migrant that learned from his home culture what life is like under oppression and how to fight it. He would be doing his best to make sure that what happened to Kenari doesn’t happen to another home he has learned to love.

So im just supposed to accept horrific cultural trauma to be appropriated because it looks cool? I’m not mad at anyone for liking the show and appreciating the shoot and production. And who knows maybe I’ll go along with the gaslighting and convince myself this isn’t a big deal. But to hear people call this deep or nuanced or creative when it’s people’s literal entire lives, my own entire life, being shallowly represented for no apparent reason other than to justify an accent, it is so deeply disturbing.

I’ve taken so long to bring this up because Cassian has been a favorite since rogue one. And wrestling around my feelings with this show, I still feel so hurt.

[moragmacpherson]

Okay, now that I've watched it again, I have some feelings about Andor. Heavy spoilers ahead.

When it debuted, I have to admit: I was deeply annoyed. We knew exactly two things about Cassian's past. He was from Fest and he had been in this fight since he was six years old. And instantly, in the first episode, that one thing we knew, we discover, is a lie. He's from an even more obscure planet, Kenari, and unless he was a very overgrown five year old, he wasn't in any apparent struggle against the Empire when he was six years old.

After so many random retcons and deus ex machinas and "somehow, Palpatine returned"s, I was genuinely miffed. Cassian Andor was an entirely new canon character. How could he already need a retcon? We don't even know that much about Fest, what was the point?!

After the other D+ series, I honestly didn't have much faith in this one. And I definitely didn't believe they could justify this seemingly gratuitous rug-pull.

I was dead wrong.

Throughout the series, we watch everyone around him misjudge who Cassian Andor is. Skeen thinks Cassian is a true mercenary like himself. In all fairness: so do Luthen, Vel, Cinta, and Kleya. Even more laughably, the Empire convinces itself that Cassian Andor is some kind of Rebel mastermind, maybe not the 'axis' they're looking for, but clearly vital to the operations of the entire Rebellion.

And we, the audience, believed that Cassian Andor is a hardened rebel spy, willing to sacrifice everything for the cause.

We were wrong too. The audience can be wrong, and we were.

Instead, we meet Cassian Andor, a man who loves and cares maybe a little too easily, and does a piss poor job of keeping his guard up to stop himself from loving and caring for more people. He's a man who cannot bring himself to say goodbye or let go of the people he cares for. He holds onto Nemik's manifesto. He would have gone back for Kino. He goes to check on his mother and Bee and Bix every damn time.

Was the audience wrong about him to the point where we were fooled by the title? That we all believed he was that Andor, while in reality it was Maarva the whole time? Is that theme song her funeral march, or the one that will never be played for him?

There's certainly an argument to be made there. Because while Maarva was sparking that rebellion we all believed Cassian had dedicated his life to, he was just using it so that he could rescue Bix from the hotel.

If Cassian wasn't the Andor of the title this season, he will be next season. He's done running. He's taking up the mantle Maarva held up for him, being the force for good she knows he can be. Luthen had him pegged from their first meeting: "You and I both know you're going to wind up dying fighting these bastards."

At their last meeting, Luthen says Cassian is a hard man to kill, and Cassian replies that he's going to make it easy. Seemingly offering Luthen a choice to either kill him or bring him in. But it's not. Either way, he's choosing death. Cassian knows he will die fighting these bastards.

But to keep the people he loves safe, he'll do it.

And at the end, he'll be with someone he loves. She won't be safe in his arms, but he'll hold her all the same. He doesn't know how to let go.

How am I supposed to know all of this and feel anything other than unwell?

[someinstant]

Brutalism and High Modernism in ANDOR's Production Design

So about a week ago I wrote about how the production design of Ferrix was clearly coming from a Bauhaus school of design, and I might have threatened to write about the use of Brutalism on Coruscant, and some of you fools have encouraged me. So you have only yourselves to blame for this.

I hope you're happy with yourselves.

First, the disclaimer: while I have taught AP Art History in the past, and am a nerd about architecture, I am mostly an autodidact about this stuff. My areas of expertise are in history, anthropology, political science, and education. So please understand that I am not specifically trained in this, and when (not if) I get something incorrect, I'm always open to friendly and helpful correction.

Now. ONWARDS TO CORUSCANT!

I will admit, friends, that I am very much Not A Prequels Person, and I haven't watched any of the animated Star Wars series, so I can offer no points of comparison between ANDOR's depiction of Coruscant and other SW media. I can only work off of Luke Hull's vision of the galactic capital, and-- damn, that is no bad thing.

We'll start with an aerial view from episode 7. As the camera soars over a portion of the endless city, we see the occasional building with strong geometric shapes-- such as the one on the above right-- that look like nothing so much as the Chrysler Building in New York City. I mean, look at those stacked triangular corner pieces and the metallic cladding on some of those curves! It's such a strong, unmistakable reference. Now, if you know your architecture, you'll be like, "But SomeInstant, this rant is supposed to be about Brutalism and High Modernism, and that's clearly an Art Deco reference!" AND YOU ARE CORRECT, MY FRIEND. Good eye!

Art Deco is an international style-- one of the first!-- that developed following World War I, reaching its height of influence in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was associated with style, glamor, craftmanship, rich materials, and a sense of technology and progress. And it shares a common ancestor with Bauhaus designs-- they're both strongly influenced by the Vienna Secession movement. But while Bauhaus was about the accessibility and utility of design for the Common Man, Art Deco was fancy. The materials weren't your common brick or tile: it's chrome and ivory and inlaid tropical woods. Mon Mothma's apartment has some serious Art Deco references in it, if you want to look-- those pretty geometric white screen things between rooms? That's what I'm talking about.

So what we have here is a building that is speaking the same stylistic language as the buildings on Ferrix, but with a VERY different accent, and to a totally different audience. I would like to think that both the building we see here on Coruscant and, say, Maarva's home on Ferrix were built around the same time-- but the language of power and privilege and the physical reality of each are totally separate.

But what happens if we move lower? What if we stop just looking at the skyline, and adjust our gaze down a little?

Now, this is Brutalism. (And also a killer shot, god damn.)

So. As an architectural and design form, Brutalism has its roots in post-World War II Britain, and is marked by a reliance on the plain, unadorned exposure of building materials such as concrete, steel beams, plate glass, exposed pipes, and bricks. In its emphasis on common materials, Brutalism is closely related to Bauhaus design. But Bauhaus uses more rounded shapes, and plaster or tilework to turn everyday materials into decoration. Brutalism foregoes that finish, however-- and it has a certain stark, clean appeal, especially when its done thoughtfully.

Brutalism is a style of design that is often associated with public constructions: mass transit, public housing, libraries, universities, government offices. If you've ever been to Washington D.C., the Metro is a great example of this-- that coffered cement curve of the ceiling? Pure Brutalism. And this is because Brutalism could be a form of design that was simple and cost effective. At its best, Brutalist designs offered simple, affordable housing, and could be constructed relatively quickly. Personally, I really dig a lot of Brutalist architecture-- it can be amazing!

But there are many, many criticisms of Brutalism as a design form: it can feel impersonal, cold, and flattening. It's very strongly associated with forced population movements: that is, the destruction of existing neighborhoods, and the mass relocation of people for convenience's sake. (That is, for the convenience of the state. We'll come back to this.) Take a look at Soviet-era apartment blocks, or the forcible relocation of the Inuit in Greenland in the 1950s-- the housing that was provided was typically Brutalist in its design. Thus, Brutalism has become historically associated with totalitarianism and the strong hand of the state, and the loss of individualism.

Another reason why some folks object to Brutalism as a form is the exposure of construction materials like concrete can mean that the surfaces can become stained and discolored, or wear unevenly in some climates. The broad, flat surfaces can become the target of graffiti-- I mean, if you have a problem with that, which I don't, because it can be amazing and the only difference between graffiti and public art is usually the zip code and price tag. Actually, a lot of very cool Brutalist buildings are beloved not because of their designs, but because of the fact that they're perfect for murals. Check out much of downtown Atlanta or Mexico DF (especially the campus of UNAM) for evidence of this.

But I haven't seen a single mural or tag on any of the shots of Coruscant thus far: it's just sterile, industrial concrete as far as the eye can see. That's state control for you.

So, anyway-- that's a Very Good Thematic Reason to use Brutalism as the main design influence on the lower echelons of Coruscant. If the Art Deco skyscrapers are coming from the same lineage as the Bauhaus design on Ferrix and speak to the Empire's surface-level ambitions, the Brutalist underpinnings of the galactic capital show its organizational power.

Which leads us to High Modernism.

High Modernism comes out of Brutalism, historically-speaking-- but as you might be able to guess, the materials used in its construction tend to be more polished than the unrefined, simple finishes of Brutalist architecture. No vast planes of concrete here: no, bring on the sheets of glass, the slabs of polished stone. There's still a strong geometric language at play, a lack of ornate decoration-- but there's a degree of sterility in High Modernism that isn't present in Brutalism.

High Modernism is associated with the Cold War era of the late 1950s and 1960s-- and is therefore a DAMN good style choice for the ISB. My god. It's a design school that is all about technology and control: control over the environment, control over civic spaces, control over labor-- you name it.

The thing I associate with High Modernism above all else is the notion of state legibility: the idea that populations and spaces are organized into a structure that the state can read and therefore control. James C. Scott has a whole book about this, called Seeing Like a State. It's not my favorite of his works-- that would be Weapons of the Weak-- but his overriding thesis about how state policies of legibility are often destructive to culture and communities are worth coming back to. I mean, think about city and civil engineering, housing laws, city grids-- or Imperial sectors.

In our world, maybe the best example of High Modernism would be the work of Le Corbusier and his followers-- I mean, consider Brasilia! It's an artificially planned city, designed to reflect the aspirations of a growing nation: Ordem e Progresso, right? High Modernism tends to disregard historical realities, cultural practices, and the way people actually use spaces-- which, again, is exactly why Luke Hull is giving us this:

It's almost like these folks at ANDOR are good at their damn jobs, or something.

(Join me next time on SomeInstant Talks About Architecture in Andor: Wait, Is Niamos Space Acapulco, or What?)

[lesbianrey]

okay so i have to speak my truth. andor is incredibly good so i feel like a dick even bringing this up but since no one else has said anything…does anyone else feel like maarva’s character was ass. the relationship between her and cassian was not believable at all and is kept weirdly vague. they also stop the flashbacks right after cassian is taken by her so we don’t really see them actually together in any capacity during his childhood. and it’s annoying because this relationship is supposed to be the emotional lynchpin of Andor and…it’s bad? it’s not fleshed out? i would love to care more but honestly who is this character… 😭

[littlecarjaflame]

Just a couple of Andor-related thoughts I need to get out of my head (don’t mind me :))

1) The sheer brilliance of having Maarva deliver her rousing speech from beyond the grave. If she did this while alive, the Empire would’ve been able to hurt her, break her. But what are you going to do to her now? She is already dead. She is a ghost. You can’t hurt her. (Also ties in beautifully with what Nemik says about freedom being an idea)

1a) Brasso using Maarva’s brick to hit an Imperial in the face was tacky and on the nose, and so, so satisfying.

1b) Kino Loy was the parallel to this. He knew he was already dead when they started the prison break. Once he realized they were not letting him go, he was dead. So, like Maarva, he went all in.

2) I still believe that Han shot first. On that note, there is no doubt that Cassian always shoots first. It is remarkable, how absolutely ruthless all the supposed good guys are. Cassian kills almost as an afterthought, he rarely knocks people out, he goes in for the kill and does it with terrifying efficiency - his first scene in Rogue One was not an exception stemming from desperate measures, it was his standard MO. Look at Skeen. Even at Maarva’s funeral, there is no scene of him stopping what he’s doing to listen to his mother’s last message. He just keeps going, because he has a job to do. Cassian looks hot and cute and burns with love for his friends, but he will not hesitate to end anyone in his way. Not for a second.

2a) Cassian is not the only one. Vel is pretty much the only person who does not have laser focus on the cause and everything else be damned. Luthen doesn’t even try to hide it. Kleya is so cold and calculating, she puts Luthen to shame. Mon acts high and mighty, but in the end, she throws her husband and her daughter under the bus. Cinta barely even looks at Vel when there is work to be done. And once again - this is the same franchise, which had Luke quitting his Jedi training and racing off to save his friends, which had Anakin abandoning all his beliefs for love. I have not seen every bit of SW media out there, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the sheer coldness and ruthlessness of Andor characters is unprecedented.

3) Cassian is not the hero of this story. He is the protagonist (or one of the protagonists, maybe?), but he is not the hero. I fully expected him to have a big moment in the finale, showing up, leading a riot maybe? But they went a different route, and one much more fitting to the character. When you think about it, in the end the Empire doesn’t even have proof that he actually was on Ferrix, except for what someone told them. Cassian stays hidden, ties up the loose ends, and slips out of Ferrix as if he had never been there.

This is an origin story, but not one of a hero. Cassian is not a leader, he never takes the front seat. He is the grey eminence, the person behind the Kino Loys and Jyn Ersos, not necessarily manipulating the leaders themselves, but pulling the strings, so that the leader figure can (that is, has the soldiers and a ship to go on Scarif) and will (that is, asking him is that the best you have to spur him on). From a writing standpoint, this is difficult to pull off, because a character like this is, by definition, not in the spotlight. But even though it wobbles slightly (for a show named after him, Cassian gets surprisingly little screen time and at the beginning he is rather passive protagonist), the writers come through in the end.

3a) Sometimes, I like to think that the titular “Andor” is actually Maarva.

4) Once again, I haven’t seen all the SW shows, but what I love about Andor is that they show us the Empire side of things. Not only the big players, the villains, but ordinary Imperial officers. And they are human. They have loyalty to each other, personalities, nagging mothers, obsessions, dreams. Even though they are still at core bad people, they are people. There is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot during the prison escape, when a bunch of guards is cowering in what looks like a utility cabinet, keeping as quiet as they can, sweating and trembling, while outside the door, the prisoners are running. You know Syrill - he is the guy which makes the hair on the back of your neck stand. For Dedra, I loved a little scene in one of the early episodes, where she was going over some reports with one of her underling, and the underling suggests that they can stay a little longer to work some more. She doesn’t bully him into staying late, she doesn’t even hint that he should. And yet he offers. A nameless, completely unimportant person shows agency, making him, with one line, more than an anonymous extra.

5) The irony in this show is something so darkly hilarious, I can’t help to chuckle at points. Sometimes it can be a little heavy-handed, like Nemik being literally killed by the stolen money or Cassian building parts of the Death Star, but this show has so many subtle ironic moments. Cassian taking part in the Aldhani heist, so that he can escape Ferrix with his mother, is exactly what motivates his mother to stay. The prisoners are able to orchestrate the escape, because the working program forces them into cooperating - you can see it, they work as a well-oiled machine. The Empire looking all over for a man who is sitting in one of their own prisons. And so on and so on...

5a) Syrill and Dedra are absolutely played as a twist of the stalker-y Twilight-y kind of romance, complete with the lines like I’d never lie to you and just being in your presence, I realized life was worth living. Look me in the eye and tell me that it is not straight out of a trashy romance - and Dedra reacts to him the way any sane woman would. That wasn’t a conversation, you were brought in for questioning. They are highlighting how creepy some of these romances are, and I am here for it.

5b) The irony, along with the main theme of the show (”the surprise from below”), climaxes beutifully in the finale. Everyone is so obsessed with Cassian, where he is and whether he is coming, that they don’t notice the rebellion brewing under their feet. Dedra says she wants a funeral, without realizing it is the last thing she needs. Even when it starts, she is running around, looking up where she thinks Cassian is, and not looking down. And for this exact reason, I think the most potentially dangerous antagonist in the show is Syrill. Because he is the only one who looks down, who recognizes the danger of Cassian Andor (partly because he is also one of the ordinary people). He is set up to be mocked, with his obsession with Dedra and his mundane job and his nagging mother, but I think that makes us overlook the terrifiying idea of what Syrill Karn would be like if he actually got the resources and authority to do something. Like Cassian said, power doesn’t panic, and who is the only Imperial in the riot who kept a cool head? Not Ice Queen Dedra, not the local officers, but wimpy-looking, played-for-laughs Syrill Karn. Dedra sees the big picture, can connect the dots where noone else can, and Syrill understands where to look for those dots. Those two together - terrifying. Without irony.

Anyway, rant over, move along.

[incognitajones]

A short post-episode vignette for episode 7 of Andor, based on a weird prompt I came across that grabbed me and wouldn’t leave me alone. I’m posting it mainly because it’s already a week late, and because I’m curious whether it makes any sense outside my head... 

[thank you, everyone who commented on this, reblogged, or liked it! I posted a cleaned-up version on AO3]

we will not meet in this world

Cassian wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

Something was off—he could tell, even with his eyes closed. It was too cold and quiet, for one thing, and the sheets weren’t silky smooth. When he opened them, it was darker than the tourist strip ever got, no lambent background glow.

A power outage? No, he could just make out the shadows of a low wood-beamed ceiling overhead instead of the duracrete arches of his hotel room.

This wasn’t where he’d fallen asleep. Shit. 

How the hell had he wound up here? He hadn't taken anything last night, but there’d been a lot of spice floating around at the club... Still, there was no way he could have absorbed enough to black out just from breathing. Someone must have slipped him something, if he was losing time. He closed his eyes again and retraced his steps at the end of the night once, twice, but that only brought him to the place he should have been: in bed with Windi at the hotel.

Someone murmured sleepily, and a body rolled over, away from him. Cassian turned his head and discovered a tousled head of straight hair and a pale-skinned shoulder that definitely didn’t belong to Windi.

He’d fucked up big somehow.

His clothes weren’t on the floor beside the bed, but at least he was wearing someone else’s soft sleeping pants. Another change he didn’t remember.

He slid noiselessly out from under the thin blanket, shivering as his bare feet hit the floor and the chill crept over his bare chest. When had the temperature dropped so low? No window in this bedroom, so he couldn’t tell where he was. Underground, maybe… he’d heard the seedier parts of town were dug back into the cliffs.

The single door opened into a tiny kitchen. One small window showed a square of lights: a glittering grid of city lights below and stars above, divided by the sharp black silhouette of a mountain range.

Mountains? There were no mountains in Niamos—

A dim light flicked on behind him, and he jumped.

“Cassian?” a soft voice mumbled around a yawn. “What’s wrong?”

Fuck. Normally Cassian was an expert at getting out of bed without waking his partners. Another sign he was fucked up. And he’d be fucked over worse if he didn’t figure out who this was and why the hells he’d told them his real name.

He turned, slowly, to look at the woman whose bed he’d woken up in. She was small, wiry muscle and loose brown hair falling into a face that was sweet, pointed chin and snub nose. She could have been any age from twenty to thirty, and she wasn’t wearing anything but a long-sleeved shirt that hung to her thighs and a pair of thick socks.

She knew him, even if he had no idea who she was. He hadn’t blacked out in years. This was not good.

She shuffled across the floor straight to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, laying her head on his chest. Cassian froze, pinned against the counter by her negligible weight. He could feel her breath stirring the hair on his chest, giving him goosebumps. The last time someone had hugged him—just held him—when had it been? Maarva, maybe, the day he got back from prison, or Bix the last time she’d dumped him, when she’d told him he was a mess and needed to get himself together before anyone would want him long term.

“Couldn’t sleep either?”

He gingerly rested his fingertips on her shoulders, trying to seem relaxed. “No.”

“Is it your back?”

There was nothing wrong with his back, never had been, but her casual certainty almost made him doubt. Cassian swallowed. “No,” he repeated.

“I’ll make some tea, then.” The woman released him and moved over to the other side of the kitchen. She reached automatically into the cupboard for a canister of tea and two mugs—her home, then.

Cassian’s eyes jerked around the small space, searching for any other clue, but it was just a kitchen, clean but shabby. He turned his head to look out the window again and his reflection stared back, cast on the dark glass by the light behind him.

That wasn’t him. It looked like him, but the beard he’d shaved off was back again. His hair was longer, brushing the sides of his jaw. And that looked like strands of grey in both.

Cassian exhaled as relief washed over him. A dream, then. Just a dream that was way too convincingly mundane, and he’d wake up in a few minutes only half-remembering it.

The woman sat down at a wobbly table and pushed one mug over to the other side. For lack of anything better to do, Cassian sat down across from her and sipped at it. He wasn’t much of a tea drinker, but it was strong and sweet. Under the table, a pair of feet wound casually around his ankles. His hand jerked, slopping more into his mouth than he could swallow, and he coughed.

She grinned at him and he smiled weakly back. He looked down at his hands wrapped around the mug and his fingers twitched again at the sight of dark lines tattooed around his left wrist, with a coiled knot over the pulse point. A Kenari lifebraid… he hadn’t seen one of them since his parents died.

“You’re really not okay,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. Cassian only shrugged. His brain wasn’t functioning well enough to come up with an excuse that would work. Not that he had to, for a dream.

“Come back to bed,” she said, reaching out across the table and taking his hand. “Staying up all night won’t help.”

She had a matching lifebraid on her own wrist, just visible under the loose cuff of her sleeve.

Cassian hid his face behind his mug and took another swallow of tea. This bizarre dream had turned too intense, giving him what felt like a home and someone who he’d trusted enough to tell about his past—to marry, by the custom of his lost family. Who the karking hell was she? She had enough scars that she could have been a bounty hunter or an ex-gang member, but she didn’t have any visible tattoos except the one on her wrist.

A thin wail came through the closed door and she winced. “I had to jinx it, didn’t I.”

With a sigh, she got up and slipped through the door, leaving it open a crack behind her. She didn’t turn the bedroom light on, but Cassian heard rustling blankets and a soft shushing, interrupted by indistinct hiccuping cries.

Cassian blinked. That noise could only come from a kid—a young one. There was a baby in the other room and he hadn’t even noticed it.

She came back into the kitchen holding a bundle of patchwork blankets with a tuft of dark hair. “There’s dada,” she crooned. “See?”

The bundle looked at him and if he’d been standing, Cassian would have fallen to the floor. Kerri’s dark eyes looked at him out of a scrunched up face that resembled her so strongly it took the air out of his lungs. He didn’t know exactly how old he’d been when Kerri was born, but he’d been old enough to remember her just like this: a chubby, scowling baby with skeptical eyes.

He pinched his wrist under the table, hard. This dream wasn’t entertaining anymore. A quiet life in a small plain room on a cold planet, a spouse… both of them were laughably off base, but a child? That was disturbing.

“Now that she’s seen you, she’s not going back down.” She pushed the bundle at him, setting it in his arms, and he had to accept it or let it drop. He stared down at the baby, its unblinking stare focused somewhere around his chin. Tiny fingers latched on to the edge of the blanket and then splayed out, reaching for his hair.

He didn’t react quickly enough and the baby got a fistful of the ends with a yank. He hissed in pain and grabbed the fat little hand, gently prying it open. The kid wouldn’t let go, but clamped around his index finger and held on. With a bubbling sigh, the heavy head drooped onto his chest.

The woman laughed softly, cupping the back of the baby's head and stroking its back before lifting her hand to push his hair out of his face and behind his ear. Her hand lingered on his cheek. She leaned down and kissed him at the corner of his mouth. “Come back to bed,” she murmured against his beard. “Lie down and stay warm at least. I’ll rub your neck. And if we’re lucky, maybe she’ll sleep…”

Cassian stared down at her. His mind turned over and over itself in a useless circle. He could always come up with the right thing to say, to make people see what he wanted them to, but he was lost. The affection in her eyes and her touch didn’t match anything he was, anything he deserved. Who was she seeing?

The dark lines woven on his arm curled around the baby caught his eye again. A dream, that’s what. No-one else in the galaxy knew what that design meant, no-one would have their love for him etched on their body. Cassian was lonely and stoned and his mind had constructed a flimsy fantasy to comfort him. He might as well sink under and enjoy it before he woke with the worst hangover of his life.

He followed her to the rumpled bed. She sat with her back against the wall and Cassian inched carefully on to the bed beside her, trying not to jostle the baby. She drew him down until his head lay on her shoulder and the baby was nestled between them, fenced from the edge of the mattress. “Rest.”

Cassian wasn’t sure he wanted to. The sooner he did, presumably, the sooner he’d wake up. But his body was already relaxing into the warmth of hers.

She pressed a kiss to his forehead. Cassian could have pretended to be asleep, but instead he turned his head and let his lips brush the skin over her collarbone. The baby snorted in its ball of blankets.

*

The next time Cassian opened his eyes, it was late morning: the fierce sun of Niamos was already lancing in through the half-open blinds. His head ached, his arms felt empty. He rolled over, and Windi was there, asleep with one hand caught under her face.

Things made sense again; his brain wasn’t telling him impossible things, and the hollow carved in his chest was normal. He glanced down at his bare wrist before he got up and went into the fresher. It was time to check on practical things: weapon, credits, anything else that might be useful. The water on his face was cold and bracing, and if he looked worse than usual in the mirror that didn’t mean anything. This was where he belonged.

* * *

The title is from this poem, and the prompt (in case it didn’t come through at all) was “a time travel AU where one character goes 10 years into the future for a night; as soon as they wake up, they’re back in their own timeline”

[andorerso]

A YEAR IN FICS - 2022

time for one of my favorite New Year’s tradition: taking stock of all the fics I wrote this past year!

Operation Midnight Kiss: Jyn has a plan for New Year's Eve but an eager new recruit complicates things... (1/1)

i’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife: Holy shit. She fucked a hitman. Released from prison after three years, Jyn Erso is just trying to pick up the broken pieces of her life. But the man who catches her eye might not be exactly who he says he is. (1/1) Good Behavior AU. technically written in 2021 but I didn’t post it until later, so now I have to file this under 2022 which annoys me a bit because it skewed my word count for both 2021 and 2022.... but it is what it is

The Replacement Cass: Jyn has a new boyfriend which would be fine... if not for his name. (1/1)

touching the sun: After Jyn and Cassian escape Scarif, they're in limbo. Neither of them really know how to be close to each other. But when Jyn notices a strange bond developing between them that she can't explain, it forces them to acknowledge their true feelings... OR, the AU that's not quite soulmates, not quite not soulmates (2/2) Written for the Rebelcaptain Big Bang project, only second chapter was written in 2022.

Blood Red Rose: 1920, London. An unknown creature dubbed 'the Beast' is terrorizing the streets at night. Vampire hunter Jyn Erso and recently turned vampire Cassian Andor might just be the city's only hope to catch the monster... (22/26) chapters 18-22 written in 2022

home we’ll go: Cassian Andor only comes back to Ferrix for two things: to get Maarva and Bee, and to say goodbye to the people he cares about. Neither goes the way he expects it to. AU for episode 7: what if Jyn had grown up on Ferrix? (1/1)

Amas Veritas: Jyn's a young witch who's just trying to keep her head down. But when Orson Krennic returns to town years after he allegedly killed her father, she can't help feeling like this is her chance to get some payback. What's supposed to be a harmless hex quickly turns deadly, and Jyn must now make sure no one ever finds out what she did or risk going to prison. But the pull she feels towards Cassian Andor, the private investigator the Krennics have hired complicates matters, and it doesn't help that she's sworn off love years ago due to a nasty love curse that sits upon her family. On top of it all, Krennic's ghost might be haunting her... This Halloween is shaping up to be the worst one Jyn's ever had. (5/7) Practical Magic AU

fighting dragons with you: Jyn is injured during a dragon fight, and Cassian is not happy about it. (1/1) Written for the Rebelcaptain Trees exchange

a wolf at heart: She kinda wished she could take him home with her. Jyn, the wolf-tamer. How cool would that be? OR, Jyn's a college student with a crush but Cassian has some secrets (1/2) Written for the Rebelcaptain Secret Santa exchange

always, someday: Sleep… He wants to sleep so badly, but if he does, it means he’s failed. They promised him they’d let him rest if he just gave them the answers they wanted. But that’s not a price he can pay. He can’t betray the rebellion, he can’t give up their secrets, their names, their locations, their weaknesses, he can’t, he can’t, he can’t — He can’t say anything. And he can’t sleep. They won’t let him. (1/1)  Written for the Rogue One Crew exchange

Prompts, requests and drabbles:

I’ve made so many mistakes, but you’re not one of them

I need you to help me reach the top shelf

you’re worth any fight

can you give me a ride?

the lights don’t shine as bright when you’re not here

firefighters AU

single parent & teacher AU

Total works: 17 (15 new ones)

Total wordcount: 104 087

And I outdid myself again this year! I don’t think I’ll be able to replicate it again this year with my new job, but my writing goal for 2023 is to finally finish Blood Red Rose. wish me luck!

[colleybri]

Kenari Blow-Gun

Maarva reflects (internal monologue from this scene at the end of Andor episode 3).

https://archiveofourown.org/works/56262217

Has anyone ever made a weapon that wasn’t used?

This wasn’t the ceremonial kind. This was the real thing. Possibly you had already tried to kill some small creature to eat, but more likely it was the first time you had ever wielded a weapon. The first time you had taken up arms. You were trying to be a child of peace, despite what had already happened to you. What had been taken away before you had even started. 

You did not use it on the Republic Officer. Not that it would have made any difference, if it took many darts and many seconds to bring him down. 

So you could not have saved her. 

You didn’t use it later, either, despite the looming threat from two more armed strangers. Despite being trapped, helpless, hopeless. Even in your desperation you could not bear to try to kill. 

Not then. 

I had no such squeamishness or indecision or whatever it was. I was quick to pierce you as you could not bear to pierce me. An ugly, bruising grip, the sharp prick, the drug working far faster than your own would. Sometimes, you see, you need to pierce, to wound, in order to save someone. Sometimes you need to choose, and act immediately upon that choice. 

Because you were not really even trying to save yourself. 

You could not have saved her either.

They would have still come for you and they would have killed you. Killed you both. Killed you all. 

Their weapons are always used. Even against children. 

But yours wasn’t. 

And -  poor, reckless boy - you didn’t use it on the Troopers but chose instead to wield a clumsy stick in the face of blasters and hard armour and cold, indifferent hate. At least you were acting, at least you were fighting. Standing up. Not running. Not hiding. 

Like we have been, ever since. You. Me. All of us. 

But you could not have saved him. You could not even avenge him. And ever since you have tried to hide from the pain of this piercing and the poison of the punishment you received simply for trying to do the right thing. Poison that is slowly, inexorably, wearing you down. 

Yet you did use this weapon. Of course you did. A weapon, if made, is always used. 

You used it on yourself. To beat and smash and distort what you saw looking back at you.

Again - you did not want to save yourself. 

And this weapon has been used on me, also. By you, unwittingly. Yet with the efficiency of an assassin, nonetheless. 

But by me too. Every day, my heart is pierced anew by the toxic darts of ‘What if’s and 'If only's. By your silence and lies. By my guilt. By your half-hearted secret searches and your need for something more than what I have been able to give you. Whatever it may be that you are really looking for. Perhaps it is yourself, the man you are supposed to be. 

I hope you find him, if you live. 

I wonder if I will ever see you again. That was the worst, the last time. Not knowing if or when you might ever come back.

The fretting. 

But even when you were here… the fretting. 

Always the fretting.

The actions we are forced to take. 

The choices we make. Whether forced or not. 

The poison. 

Slow to work, but so very painful - and deadly enough, given time.

It is strange and sad that the most potent poison of all is just love.

……

“I’ll be worried about you all the time.”

“That’s just love. I’ve never loved anything the way I’ve loved you and I’ve never fretted on anything more either.”

[jeckilon]

so interesting that the acolyte shows a person (sol) taking a child from her home (osha) and doesn’t try to make it a good thing (every though he feels like it was right) and then in andor we have a person (maarva) kidnapping a child from his home (cassian) and it’s never addressed like a bad thing and we’re actually supposed to cheer for her and support her decisions 💀

[sesamestreep]

Jyn/Cassian, 14

14. All my days, I’ll know your face. (from this prompt list) cross-posted to ao3 here, with content warnings and tags galore, since this one gets a little heavy... It's a Cloak & Dagger AU, it's for Zainab's birthday, it's almost a year since she sent me this prompt, just go with it! If you want to know what you're getting into beforehand, read it on AO3, please! Much love and happy belated birth to you, @firstelevens, you are theeeee best!

xvii. the moon

Jyn wakes up from the dream again. The one where she’s drowning. She’s ten years old, still wearing her clothes from ballet class, sitting in the back of her father’s car, which hass just gone off the side of the bridge into the water and it’s starting to sink. Her father is already dead in the driver’s seat and she’s never been able to tell if that’s a mercy or not, that the dream doesn’t even allow her the fictional opportunity to save him. It always starts with them already in the water. And then it ends with the same fade to darkness as a hand reaches out and pulls her to safety.

It’s a dream, of course, but it’s also a memory. One largely influenced by her childhood imagination and fears and flights of fancy and therefore pretty untrustworthy, as far as she’s concerned, but a memory nonetheless. She and her father did get in a car accident, one where he died and she survived. The rest probably doesn’t matter much, she tells herself as the gurgling waters of her dream melt into the sounds of her alarm and she finally, fully wakes.

She nearly smacks her phone off the crate she’s using as a makeshift nightstand in her hurry to get rid of the noise. She would never have set the damn thing to “relaxing” babbling brook sounds knowingly. She’s not fond of water and doesn’t find its noises soothing, for obvious reasons. She’d rather wake up to the most obnoxious beeping known to man than this shit. No wonder she’s having nightmares.

She grumbles as she rolls herself over in the sleeping bag she’s using in lieu of an actual bed while she stays here. According to the signage posted out front, this building is technically condemned, but it suits her purposes just fine. She is always welcome at her mother’s house, or so her mother says, but being welcome somewhere isn’t the same as being at home, she’s realized. Staying with her mother means supporting her mother’s bullshit, and dealing with her disappointment, and putting up with her questions. It’s better for everyone if Jyn lives on her own, even if it’s in a condemned shithole like this place. What little of its original architecture that remains suggests it used to be a church, which is pretty bleak, but the price (free of charge) is right, so she pretends not to care.

She might start giving up these afternoon naps, if she’s just going to have bad dreams all the time. They’re supposed to help her so she can stay up late and work and make more money—maybe even enough to afford a real apartment with an actual shower—but lately they’ve been leaving her more drained than if she hadn’t even slept. She’s got to get ready now—the idiot rich kids going out on the town tonight aren’t going to rob themselves, after all—but she can’t bring herself to move. It’s only when she realizes that going back to sleep might put her back in that sinking car that she manages to convince herself to get up.

vii. the chariot

Cassian stares at the ceiling of his childhood (and current) bedroom and thinks, not for the first time, of how they missed a few glow-in-the-dark stars when he decided such things were for babies and told Maarva they could take them down. She’d hidden her expression of disappointment under something more bright-eyed and understanding quickly but not fast enough that a twelve year old Cassian hadn’t seen it. Before he could take it back, she was already moving briskly to get the step ladder. That’s how Maarva handled everything after his father’s death: briskly and head on. Even when she hated what she was doing. Every challenge in life was like getting a shot at the doctor’s office: just a quick pinch and then it’s over.

It’s that kind of attitude, he knows, that’s made her so successful and transformed her into a sort of pillar of the community. She started as a member of a variety of citizen’s action groups and a leader for the local chapter of NOW and then moved her way up up to a seat on the city council. Cassian admires her for that, the way she’s turned grief into purpose, but he’s always felt less adept at it than she is. Sometimes he’s consumed with guilt that his grief has mostly just stayed as grief. He knows he could be doing more, and he knows she wishes he was too. It’s a lot to bear. It’s a lot of emotion for a couple of glow-in-the-dark stars.

He decides to get out of bed and do something with his day rather than sit here and contemplate any of this further. Downstairs in the kitchen, he 's alone just long enough to pour himself a glass of orange juice before Maarva appears with her phone pressed to her ear. She kisses him on the cheek as she goes by and Cassian hears hold music on the other end of her call, which means he's in for it.

"Did you sleep well?" she asks pleasantly as she moves to pour herself some coffee.

"Well enough," he replies, because anything else will be met with a deluge of concern that he doesn't want right now. He leaves out the part where he dreamed about the night Clem died—the one where Cassian himself almost drowned—again. He'd gone years without having that dream, to the point that he'd thought himself past it, only to have them come back with a vengeance when he moved home again after graduation. The superstitious part of him wants to blame New Orleans, with all of its supposed mystical powers, but rationally he knows it's just being back at home with reminders of his father everywhere. He didn't have this problem at school in New York, but he'd made the choice to come back and this is the cost of that decision.

Maarva nods approvingly and takes a sip of her coffee. "I assume that means you'll be working on internship applications today."

Cassian sighs. He has only been done with his summer internship at the state house in Baton Rouge for a few weeks and his mother has been on his case about what's next since the moment he got home from his last day. "I'm trying, Ma, honestly, but nagging isn't going to make an opportunity instantly materialize. You know that."

"Neither will loafing around the house," she counters. "When you decided to take a year off between college and law school, you promised it wasn't an excuse to sit around and do nothing. I just want to be sure you're keeping up your end of the bargain."

Cassian knows a lot of parents who would have been thrilled to have their kids choose to come home right after college, but ever since he was young, the plan for him was that he'd get into a good college—Ivy League, preferably, which he'd managed—and then he'd go straight to law school and follow in his mother's footsteps to a career in politics. She'd always instilled in him that it was his responsibility to help make the world a better place. And after everything that had happened with Clem, it was the only path that made any sense. But his senior year at Columbia, after spending months studying for the LSAT, he'd found himself unable to go through with the exam. The idea of law school started to fill him with dread and he'd begun to miss deadlines. Eventually, he'd been forced to tell Maarva the truth—or, at least, part of it. He said that he wanted to take a gap year to volunteer and do internships to gain practical experience and figure out what kind of law he was most interested in. She'd taken the news better than he expected, but still with the vague attitude that he was only delaying the inevitable, which, in Maarva's world, always meant agreeing with her. She still fully anticipated he'd come to his senses and follow her into politics at the end of all this. And maybe he would, but he'd like to decide something—anything—for himself, for once. He told himself over and over that this was the point of the gap year, but in his heart, he wasn't truly convinced and clearly neither was Maarva.

"Yes, I promise," Cassian says, wearily. "I'll get some applications submitted before I go out tonight."

"What's tonight?"

He hesitates before answering but he doesn't love lying to his mother, so he prepares himself for an argument. "Bix invited me to a party that some friend of hers is throwing and I promised I'd go."

Maarva looks displeased, as expected. "Is that really the best use of your time?"

"If I get my work done today then, yes," he replies. "It's a Friday night. No one's going to be reading my applications after business hours anyway."

"You're not taking up with that crowd again, are you?"

"If by 'that crowd', you mean my friends from high school, then yes," Cassian says. "They've been giving me grief for being home all summer and working only an hour away and still never seeing them. They're going to be insulted if I don't go."

"That girl's a bad influence," Maarva says, shaking her head.

"And yet she's the only person you trust when your car starts making that weird noise," Cassian points out, rolling his eyes.

"She's a wonderful mechanic, I will give her that. But I never liked you dating her."

"We've been broken up for four years now! You don't have to worry about that anymore."

His mother raises an eyebrow at him. "You're sure about that?"

He groans in frustration. "Yes, I'm sure. Bix and I are just friends these days. And if I want to keep her—as a friend—I can't keep bailing on plans with her. Besides, didn't you raise me to be a man who honors his promises?"

Maarva smiles, reluctantly. "That is an ambitious argument for going to drink cheap beer in someone's basement ."

"You're the one who wants me to become a lawyer," he says. "Arguing is a pretty important part of the job, as I understand it. Besides, I think the party is in someone's backyard, not their basement."

"Good to see that Pre-Law program wasn't for nothing, " Maarva remarks, amused.

"You could also try to remember that I'm a responsible adult and you trust me," Cassian says, crossing his arms over his chest.

"That is true," she says, reaching out to squeeze his hand. "But it is my job to worry about you, as your mother."

"I understand that, but we've talked about reining in your expectations for me a little."

Maarva looks like she wants to argue with that, but a soft, tinny voice comes through the speaker of her phone, demanding her attention once more. "Yes, I'm still here," she says, to the person on the other end of the call. "Actually, give me one moment," she adds, putting her hand over the speaker. "Whatever you end up doing, don't drive home if you drink."

Cassian suppresses another eye roll. "Obviously not. Give me some credit, please!"

"Fine, then. Oh, and be sure to reply to your mother's email sometime today. She sent us that nice picture of Kerri at the state championships, remember?"

"I replied last night," he replies, exasperated. "Go back to your call."

Maarva nods, then, and gives him another kiss on the head before wandering off. Before she's even out of the room, she is already deep in some important conversation with the person on the other end of the phone, like nothing had interrupted her in the first place, and Cassian is left to finish his orange juice in relative peace.

i. the magician

The crowd at the club tonight is decidedly lackluster in Jyn's professional opinion. There's not enough trust fund kids partying alone for her usual grift and for whatever reason, any viable targets are looking right past her. She might as well be invisible. If she wasn't already planning on returning this dress (the tags are still on and tucked away so no one will notice them), she'd definitely be considering it now. It's clearly not doing her any favors.

Maybe she's just not in the right mood for this tonight. Her mark from last night had been a piece of work and said several vile things to her before the sedative she'd slipped into his drink took effect. Then again, she had turned around and robbed him of most of his valuables after that, so maybe they were even. If she didn’t need the money, she’d already be on her way home, but most of the things she fenced from last night didn’t net her much profit, so she’s got to find a way to turn this around.

At the exact moment she’s beginning to despair of her prospects, her phone lights up with a text from Bodhi. 

wyd?

Bodhi works security at one of her usual nightclubs and she’d much rather be there tonight, except it’s his night off so there’s no one to get her on the list without paying the cover charge. This place is her second choice—one of the bouncers accepts the adderall that she liberates from her marks as payment—so she’s happy to hear from Bodhi instead.

at the second best club in NOLA rn, hbu?

Bodhi responds with a pinned location. It’s in the middle of the woods on the other side of town. Friend of a friend of a friend is throwing a party out here. Take a night off playing Artful Dodger and come hang...

can’t take a night off, but I’ll come steal where you are, if it’s all the same

just don’t get caught, okay? I can’t keep hooking you up if people catch on

be there soon

Jyn’s phone dings with a thumbs up from Bodhi as she finishes her drink and heads for the exit. At the coat check, she makes a fuss that her number wasn’t put on the correct hanger and leaves with a more expensive jacket than she came in wearing.

x. the wheel of fortune

Cassian takes a sip of his beer and surveys the scene in front of him. The party turned out to be less of a backyard affair than a middle of the woods rager, which is a piece of information he's absolutely not going to volunteer to Maarva later. There's a large bonfire in the middle of the area the hosts (whom he still hasn't met) cleared for the party and then a spot not far off where someone's pickup truck is parked with a keg in the bed. Cassian is probably done after this drink because four years of college parties didn't cure him of his anxiety about getting caught drinking by his mother, even if it is entirely legal for him to do now, but most of the people here do not have his qualms. The guy manning the keg is keeping very busy and, since they're charging for drinks, he's also flush with cash.

On the other side of the bonfire, he can see Bix animatedly telling a story to their friend Xan and a guy from the body shop Cassian's never been formally introduced to. He's glad he came out tonight, even if all it accomplishes is getting his friends off his case. Still, he can't help feeling like he shouldn't be here. Maarva is right that he needs to stay focused on his future. Meanwhile, his friends that stayed in New Orleans together while he was away at school have bonded and put down roots in a way that makes him feel like an intruder.

It's while he's having these morose thoughts that a drunk girl collides with him and drenches him in beer, which is probably what he deserves for being so somber at a fucking party.

"Woah, sorry," she says, stumbling to a stop. "Shit, I really soaked your jacket, didn't I?"

"It's fine," Cassian says, wiping at his jacket with his hands rather ineffectually.

"No, that was super uncool," she replies and even standing completely still, she looks unsteady on her feet. She reaches out to swat at the stained fabric with her hand uselessly before she seems to catch on that it won't accomplish anything and pulls off her knit beanie instead. "This...isn't actually helping, is it?"

He laughs, unexpectedly. "Not really, no. But it's fine."

"I'm so sorry," she says, miserably, as she continues to try to soak up the beer with her hat. "I'm really not this much of a klutz normally."

"Not your first stop of the night, I'm guessing?"

She groans. "I don't look that wasted, do I?"

Cassian tips his head to the side, trying to equivocate, but it's a hard thing to walk back now. "Well, it's partially that and also you're a little overdressed for this party."

The girl looks down at herself like she forgot what she was wearing: a simple but tight black dress and heels that would do better on a dance floor than in the woods and a trendy, expensive looking jacket. He realizes, a little belatedly, that she's pretty, which is something he's going to have to ignore considering how over-served she is. Still, even in the half light of the bonfire, her eyes capture his attention.

"You got me there," she says, rolling her beautiful eyes like they're in on the same joke. “I had to put in appearance at my stupid cousin's twenty-first, which she just had to have at some bougie club with loud, shitty music and expensive drinks. But this was where I really wanted to be all along."

That last part was said flirtatiously enough that Cassian's entire train of thought slams to a halt. The effort of getting through college in one piece and with a GPA that could get him into a good law school had clearly done a number on his social skills, because high school Cassian would have been able to knock a serve that easy back over the net with little trouble and now he was just staring blankly at this beautiful woman. He tells himself that it's her state of inebriation that gives him pause and not an utter lack of game on his part.

"Uh…I'm not one of the hosts," he says, weakly, "so, you don't need to flatter me.”

"I guess not," she says, with a smirk that tells him his deflection was obvious but that she also didn't take it too personally. She holds up the beanie with grim amusement. "And this is clearly not doing anything. I'm going to see if I can find…napkins? Paper towels? Something useful for absorption at least?"

Cassian snorts. "Don't hold your breath," he says, trying and failing to imagine the hosts of this kegger having something practical like that on hand.

"Yeah, well," she says, with a rueful shrug, "a girl can dream, right?"

''I suppose so."

She nods and starts to wander away. "I'll be back. Don't move," she says and then offers him an ironic little salute.

Cassian laughs to himself as she goes and then pivots his attention to survey the damage to his jacket. The thing is made of wool, which means it's absorbing the beer quite admirably, against his wishes. He probably should have told her not to bother with the napkin hunt since he'll most likely have to get it dry cleaned anyway just to get the beer smell out, but she'd seemed determined to help somehow.

A few minutes after his mysterious friend departs, Bix materializes at his elbow. "Man," she says, stepping back immediately to cover her nose, "You smell like a bar floor. I thought you promised Maarva you'd go easy tonight!"

"I did," Cassian says, scowling at her. “This is someone else's beer, unfortunately."

"Tough break," Bix replies, casting a sympathetic eye over him.

"Probably a sign to call it a night, though."

"Boo," she yells, not entirely sober herself. "You can’t go now! You said you'd buy me a drink!"

"I can do that before I leave," he says. "I just don't want to pay for a cab home and I will definitely need to if I have another drink."

"You used to be fun, Cass," she says, morosely, and he ignores how much it hurts to have his fears about himself voiced by another person.

"Do you want your beer or not?" he grumbles instead, because he knows it's not something she would have said sober and that's enough to soothe him for now.

"Of course," she says, rolling her eyes, and loops their arms together.

Before they can get very far, Cassian pats his jacket pocket to find his wallet and comes up empty. He stops himself and Bix in their tracks and searches the pockets of his jeans too, finding his car keys and his phone but nothing else. He turns around to see if his wallet is on the ground somewhere, like maybe he dropped it, and pats his jacket one more time for good measure. His hand comes away wet and he remembers, suddenly, that someone else recently did the same thing. His head whips around as he searches for her in the crowd.

"Cassian," Bix says, plainly worried. "What is it?"

"My wallet. Beer girl...she must have taken it..."

"Wait, what? Who the fuck would do that?"

"A thief," Cassian says, as he spots her on the other side of the clearing. "Hey, thief!" he calls.

Her head lifts at the raised voice, and she looks around, bewildered, before her eyes—the ones he'd been admiring not that long ago—land on him and go wide with surprise. Before he can formulate something clever to say, her face clears of its confused expression and turns ice cold before she takes off at a run.

"Son of a—!" he mutters and follows. He doesn't even think twice about it, like he probably should. For whatever reason, this stranger stealing from him tonight feels like a very personal betrayal and chasing her down doesn't register as the ludicrous idea it obviously is. He vaguely recognizes Bix calling after him in alarm but he ignores it. The world narrows to just him and his pickpocket.

xvi. the tower

Jyn has got to be more discerning about only stealing from people who can't keep up with her on foot. If nothing else, she should have given this guy a kick in the shin when she had the chance because he is fast. She's not doing her best work in these heels either, but she hadn't planned to run through mud and wet leaves when she got dressed this evening. She was supposed to be at a nightclub. Bodhi is in for it when she gets a hold of him. She hadn't even seen him at this party he invited her to before this dude caught her lifting wallets. What sort of Sherlock Holmes wannabe was she even dealing with here, anyway?

A lucky break presents itself in the form of an entrance to an old graveyard at the edge of the woods. There will be more places to hide there, she reasons, and most people are irrationally superstitious about graveyards, especially after dark. She's willing to bet Wallet Guy is no exception. She ducks through the barely open gate and sprints down a row of tall headstones, feeling the gazes of granite angels on her the whole way.

She eventually hides herself in the shadow of an ostentatiously large gravestone (or maybe it's a very tiny mausoleum) and holds her breath when she hears footsteps approach. Sherlock Jr. clearly isn't afraid of graveyards like she’d hoped. With her luck, he'll probably camp out here all night, waiting for her, completely unbothered.

"Listen," his voice rings out, echoing in the stone aisles, "Beer girl, I'm not going to call the cops or anything. That's the last thing I want, okay? Just give me the wallet back now and we're even. I'll forget your face. You have my word."

Jyn is almost tempted to snort at that but her muscles are tensed up so thoroughly, she couldn't do anything involuntarily at the moment. Still, the audacity that she should trust this guy to be cool, to bet her actual life on it; he must be joking. This is the moment she decides she's going to have to sacrifice the heels in order to get out of there, which she does not want to do because it means spending money she doesn't have to replace them. She can't think of a better plan right now, though, and she's absolutely willing to ditch them if it means giving this guy the slip. Jyn slowly and quietly toes them off so she's ready to run, while he is distracted trying to reason with her.

"I'm serious," Wallet Guy announces, like that wasn't obvious from literally everything about him. It's part of why she'd zeroed in on him in the first place. He seemed so serious that she was sure a little mishap and some light flirting would completely throw him off and make her grab for his wallet virtually undetectable. She'd only been a little wrong, to be fair. "I don't want trouble any more than you do!"

But that had always been Jyn's problem: she's never minded trouble. She can get herself out of it just as easily as she can get herself into it. Some rich kid from the right side of the tracks is no match for her in the trouble department, she thinks, and so she ducks out from behind the headstone and tries to make her escape. In doing so, however, she accientally kicks some gravel loose as she takes off running, which gives away her location. It also turns out Wallet Guy was much closer than she'd originally thought and his reflexes are better than anticipated too, because it only takes a quick heel turn and a few strides before he's caught up with her and reaching for her wrist.

"Please," he says, before there's a bright flash and a lurch like a train picking up speed too quickly and then she's being wrenched away from him with enough force that it launches her across the graveyard.

iv. the emperor

When Cassian was eight, he'd watched his father die. He'd watched him get shot by a police officer, while his hands were up in surrender, because the officer had been startled by an explosion nearby. Cassian always forgets this part—the Imperial Gulf oil rig explosion happening the same night as his father's murder—but one of those things actually materially changed his life and the other was just a thing from the news grownups were worried about. If he hadn't been right there when it happened, he might have forgotten about it entirely, for all people in New Orleans still talk about it all the time. People don't forget here, he's found. The city has a good, long memory.

There is a chance that if not for the explosion, his father might not have been shot, but even as a kid, Cassian knew the odds were bad. Clem was a Black man caught holding a stolen sound system, the one Cassian had stolen on a dare from some older boys at school that he was desperate to impress. He was ten years old and the only thing that ever seemed to matter to him in those days was seeming grown up. Clem had come looking for him when he was late getting home from school and found the stolen stereo in his hands. He'd insisted they bring it back and try to make things right with the owner.

It didn't matter to the police that Clem hadn't stolen it, that he was just trying to teach his son a lesson. Cassian's adoption had only been finalized the year before and he was still acting out sometimes, pushing the limits of his parents' patience in what a counselor would later explain to him were attempts to see what it would take to be sent away again. There was no easy way to explain to a little kid that his birth parents hadn't "sent him away" for being bad, but because they couldn't keep him, or that his adoptive parents wouldn’t do the same thing someday for some minor infraction. He just didn’t understand that back then. Still, Clem was trying to teach him right and wrong without triggering his fears. It was even starting to work. If only he'd never stolen that car stereo, everything would have been different.

But he did. And the police found him and his father trying to return it. And while Clem tried to surrender, the explosion had happened and one of the officers panicked and fired his gun. They'd been down by the docks when the police found them and, when Clem was shot, he'd fallen into the water. Without hesitation, without any thought at all, Cassian had jumped in after him. Maybe it was from a misguided place of hope, believing that something could still be done to save his father. Maybe it was out of fear, knowing that he wasn't safe with those cops after what he'd seen. Or maybe it was a death wish. Maybe in that moment, losing the man who'd been so kind to him even when he hardly deserved it, he just didn't see any reason to try to survive so he followed his father into the water because he wanted to follow him into death.

Under the water, though, he'd seen that there was no helping his father and the oil rig's collapse was only getting worse. He tried to make his way to the surface but it was impossible to see anything more than a few feet away. Everything was dark. He'd been so consumed with fear when he dove into the water that he had no clue by then how far he'd swam from the docks. He was never going to find his way back now. Just when he was truly starting to despair, there had been a sound from the direction of the rig and a pulse went through the water that hit him like a slap across the back of his head. When he opened his eyes again, there was something glowing in the water ahead of him, a pure white light he reached for instinctively. He'd felt sure in that moment, despite everything, that the light would save him somehow. He'd never felt faith or hope that certainly in his life before, and he sure as hell hasn't felt it that way since. Then again, he hadn't seen that bright light again since that night either. Until he reaches for the girl in the graveyard, that is.

xi. justice

Jyn's shoulder throbs in pain. It's the part of her that had made contact with the headstone that broke her fall, so it makes sense that it hurts, but it's going to be a problem if this guy decides to fight her. Then again, judging by the look of him right now, he's not in any condition to fight either. Whatever force just threw her back did the same thing to him. He's still conscious, though, which is only good because she doesn't feel like dealing with a dead body right now. There's something wrong with him, though. He's looking down at his body in alarm—inspecting himself for injuries, she suspects—but he freezes in horror when he sees his hands. It takes Jyn a moment to realize why but when she does, her heart nearly stops.

There's smoke coming off his hands in tendrils, but nothing's on fire as far as she can tell. It's like the smoke that comes off of dry ice except it's pitch black. From any further away, Jyn's not sure she could convince herself it wasn't the shadows moving of their accord. Based on the expression on the guy's face, he's never seen this before, but she has. On the night of the car accident, after her father died, she'd seen it.

She'd been trying desperately to get out of the sinking car, but the water was coming in too fast and the windows were all sealed shut. Then there had been an explosion underneath the water and a ripple went across the bay, knocking her backwards into the seat. When she opened her eyes, there was black smoke pouring through the windshield. It looked like someone had dumped ink into the water, the way it moved and spread its way into the car. She'd reached for it, more afraid of staying still there than whatever the black smoke could do to her. She had expected her palm to find the window when she did, but there was no glass there anymore. The smoke had dissolved it or replaced it somehow and Jyn didn't stop to rationalize how or why that happened. She swam towards the shadows and felt a hand clasp around her own and pull her to safety. And now that same smoke was pouring from the hands of the boy who'd chased her down in the graveyard.

"What the hell was that?" she calls out, shaking (she tells herself) with anger and not with fear. "What did you just do to me?"

"Me?" he fires back. "I didn't do anything! That—that wasn't you?"

"No! I couldn't—how could I do that?"

"Your hands," he says, voice shaking. "They're glowing."

Jyn looks down, then, to find he's telling the truth. Her palms are glowing with a bright white light. This is...definitely a sign of concussion. There's no way any of this is really happening.

Before she can get too far with that denial, the guy is gingerly standing up and brushing off his clothes with shadowy hands. “I've seen it before," he says, carefully. "Once."

Jyn shakes her head, still hoping to write all of this off as a side effect of a head injury. "You've…what?"

"I've seen something glow like that before," he repeats, patiently. "It was you, wasn't it? You're the girl from the beach, the night of the oil rig collapse. You saved me."

Jyn swallows hard, so that she doesn't say the first thing that comes to mind, which is that he's got it all backwards. As she remembers it, he was the one who saved her that night. She knows it's been twelve years but she can't believe she didn't recognize him immediately. His face has been haunting her dreams her entire life. She should have known him.

"That was you?" she asks, uselessly. Who else could it be? Who else would even know about that?

He holds up his hands tentatively but they're answer enough. That night was the one and only time she'd ever seen smoke like that.

"We must have—something happened to us," he starts to say, far too reasonable and certain for her taste. "Back then, or ...just now, I don't know."

Panic rises in Jyn's throat, threatening to choke her. She starts shaking her head before the actual thought has even articulated itself in her mind and she picks herself up off the ground feeling like her body is made of lead.

"I can't do this," she says, still looking at her glowing hands and beginning to back away.

"Please," he says, starting to come closer, "don't leave. I just want some answers."

The light grows brighter as her panic sharpens. "I don't have any," she shouts, over the roaring in her ears, “I’m sorry.” And then she runs.

The boy from the beach calls after her but she doesn't stop running until the light coming from her hands fades completely and she has to pick her way through the woods by the light of the moon. She puts a healthy distance between herself and him, between herself and the party and anyone who could recognize her, and gets back to a main road somehow. She decides to literally go for broke and hails a cab. Once she's given the driver a respectable residential address near enough to where she's illegally squatting, she settles back in the seat and tries to close her eyes. Something pokes at her side from her jacket pocket, though, and she remembers that she still has the wallet.

Tentatively, like she's handling something unstable and potentially explosive, she pulls the wallet out and opens it. She finds a handful of small bills, a debit card as well as a credit card, a library card and a membership card to a local grocery chain. Boring stuff, mostly, but there's also a student ID and a driver's license, which tell her what she really wants to know: Cassian Andor. She'd always been curious about the name of the boy who saved her life all those years ago and now she has it. Her hands shake with the possibility that this knowledge offers. She even has his address, if his license is up to date. She could find him again, if she really wanted to. The problem is that she has no idea what she actually wants.

xvii. the star

Cassian doesn't bother going back to the party. He skirts around the clearing and finds where he parked his car without saying goodbye to anyone. He's not even sure what he would offer as an explanation for his disappearing act if people asked. Instead, he avoids everyone and their potential questions and just goes home. It’s late enough when he gets there that his mother is already asleep, which is just as well, because he doesn’t want to deal with her questions either.

There’s so many things he doesn’t understand right now and so many questions he wants answered and the only person who could even begin to help him ran as fast as she could in the other direction. He didn’t even get her name, which is somehow the most disappointing part of all. He’s spent more than half of his life dreaming of that night and remembering her; it’s only right that he should have a name to go with that memory. Cassian sighs and wills himself to forget about it, even though he knows that’s a lost cause. He takes off his stained jacket and his muddy shoes and heads upstairs, where he doesn’t bother undressing any further before slumping down onto his bed. He tells himself he’ll actually get ready for bed in a minute, but he knows this is also a lie. After a few aborted attempts to get back up, he commits to sleeping in his clothes and pulls a blanket over his head to block out any remaining light. It feels like only a few moments later that the sound of birds chirping and singing wakes him. He wouldn’t normally notice such a thing, but these birds are loud. They must be right outside of his window, he thinks, as he throws the sheet back to welcome in the morning sunlight. He gets the surprise of his life when, above him, all he sees is the faded pink skies of dawn. He lurches up to a sitting position and looks around and finds himself on a rooftop downtown.

It must be a dream. He’s still asleep and that’s the only explanation there is. He hadn’t dreamed of Clem or the oil rig explosion or the girl from the graveyard and he’d thought it was a mercy, but this is…weirder. And it feels real. He can feel his heart beating wildly in his chest and the humid, dewy air of early morning on his face. If it’s a dream, it’s a completely new kind for him. He’s even wearing the same clothes he went to sleep in, and he can feel the bruise on his shoulder from when he fell in the graveyard. And his hands, where they’re still clutching the blanket, have the black mist curling around them again.

He might not be dreaming after all, he realizes, watching the shadowy tendrils twist delicately around his wrist and into the open air. Maybe this is his reality now. Maybe he can—what? Teleport? Travel places in his dreams? What exactly did he do to get here of all places? Where is here, anyway?

A glance over his shoulder reveals the answer to many of those questions. Behind him on the roof, he recognizes a downtown landmark: the old Imperial Gulf Oil sign. The building below had housed the first offices for the later-rebranded Imperial Energy back in the day. Years ago, they’d built a huge, expensive facility across the water where their employee offices were now located and sold this building to a developer, who wasted no time turning it into expensive condos no one here could afford. They’d kept the enormous neon sign on the roof as a nod to the neighborhood’s history and probably because it’s exactly the sort of aesthetic nonsense their ideal buyers would shell out extra for. If there was any chance Cassian still believed his appearance here was pure coincidence, it was gone now. He had said he wanted answers and the universe sent him a literal neon sign. Imperial Gulf is where all of this started and it’s where he’ll get his answers.

He just has to find her first—the girl from the beach, the girl from the graveyard, the girl from his dreams.

[giveamadeuschohisownmovie]

I’m starting to think that Syril Karn is supposed to parallel Cassian Andor, rather than just be the typical villain of the show. You have Andor, the thief who doesn’t care about the rebellion but is now forced to work for them due to circumstances out of his control. And then you have Karn, the chief inspector who cares greatly about the Empire but feels he’s not being rewarded for his efforts also due to circumstances out of his control.

Andor is fighting for a cause he doesn’t believe in (yet), Karn is fighting for a cause he does believe in (for now). Despite that, both of them feel like disposable pawns to their respective faction. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but, it feels like “The Wire” in a way. Two men who don’t feel like they’re in control of their own destiny and are being used by powers bigger than them.

And let’s not forget the introduction of Karn’s…mother? That feels like a deliberate attempt to parallel his character to Andor, especially since episode 3 was all about Andor’s relationship to Maarva.

[echinocereus]

Andor: An Analysis (aka AAA)

Andor (2022-), a Star Wars show based around Cassian Andor, a rebel who appeared in the movie Rogue One (2016),  has taken my mind by storm, leaving me with too many thoughts to keep without documenting. This will be my best attempt at a comprehensive analysis of Andor (7450 words), there will be spoilers, and likely some edits. And a quick disclaimer, no, these are not all original ideas, I am writing this as a combination of both my own brain and the brains of tumblr.

To begin, Andor, in my opinion, is not just a good Star Wars show, but a good show in general. The characters are well written, the pacing is well-executed, and it makes a clear argument. What truly satisfied me about Andor was the fact that it brought politics back to Star Wars. After the sequels (which didn’t happen, okay, they’re not canon, they didn’t happen, I think we as a society should just erase it from our memories), the shows Disney was putting out were decent, but despite the lore being entrenched in politics and political allegories, somehow managed to not really be political. Kenobi follows what happened to Obi-Wan, but doesn’t explore the early growth of the Empire. Boba Fett gave us what could’ve been a cool story of a power vacuum in a criminal underworld, if it was executed properly. It mostly fell flat and was all seemingly surface level thoughts. The Mandalorian was a compelling story about the importance of family, but something of a missed opportunity in The Mandalorian is the exploration of the consequences of a rebellion. Andor says “screw all that, Star Wars is political” and brings in everything the Star Wars canon gives us. According to the creator of Andor, Tony Gilroy, it’s allegedly “not supposed to be political.” Now whether this means that Andor was a fluke or if he said that simply to avoid being under fire from unhappy fans is a mystery (I personally think it’s the latter since… well you’ll see). 

Cassian Andor:

To begin, Cassian Andor. The focus of the show and the central character. Even though he is the main character and the show’s namesake, he never makes an attempt to make himself the center of attention. Time after time we see Andor hand off the spotlight of rallying people together (Kino in the prison, Maarva’s speech, Brasso leading the charge against the Empire). His main purpose is being a spy: this is how he is introduced in Rogue One and we see that that aspect of his character is true and constant (@kanansdume on tumblr). 

Cassian’s character arc has been of some discourse among some Star Wars fans. Some say that him starting off dismissive of the rebellion like Jyn is in Rogue One undermines his line in which he says he has been fighting for the rebellion since he was 6 years old. However, I disagree. I think Cassian’s character development makes his statement in the movie all the more meaningful. I will come back to this at the end of this section, but first I need to explain what this character journey was. 

“I think it’s all useless…It’s better to live. Better to eat, sleep, do what you want. You don’t know me. I fought in Mimban when I was 16.” - Episode 4, Cassian to Luthen. This quote shows Cassian in the beginning of the series, jaded by the Empire that he sees no purpose in fighting. He is self-centered and for good reason: all he’s ever known is struggle, all he is ever trying to do is survive. He is disillusioned by the fact that he feels as though he does not have any effect on the Empire at all. Even when he eventually does agree to work for the Rebel Alliance, he is working as Luthen’s mercenary. 

However during that heist, he witnesses the deaths of more than half the team. He still takes the money and leaves with his cut, but he kills Skeen. Skeen who seemingly has a very similar ideology to Cass. Skeen says that his rebellion is himself against the world, that he’s not one who has taste for the actual Rebel Alliance. From what we see in Episode 6, Cassian is the same way, so why does he kill Skeen? I think Cassian got spooked from how much he saw himself in Skeen. He saw the danger that Skeen proposed, realized this and ran from it because he didn’t quite know how to deal with it. But these little moments are so important to his overall development because they help explain the switch and changes in his character. 

So he goes back home and meets back up with his family to check back in. To his disappointment, Maarva says that she is not going with Cassian (something that will be further discussed in the Maarva section down below). He doesn’t understand this and voices his concerns but still he walks away without Maarva; he should not be judged for doing so, Maarva certainly doesn’t. He tells Maarva that he’ll be back, which becomes somewhat of a catchphrase. Cassian starts to establish that if there is someone his family and friends can rely on, it is himself.  Cassian has been looking for a vacation, a break from a war he never chose to enlist in since he was a child. He finally gets this opportunity and he seizes it, but the tragedy of his story is that the Rebellion is not something he could choose to escape, the reality of his situation of experiences is that he does not have the privilege to step away. He gets caught in a charge that has nothing to do with him, is imprisoned with a ridiculously long sentence, and he is not allowed to protest. 

Cassian gets shipped off to Narkina 5, a planet where the Empire has decided to keep some of its prisons. The prison he is sent to is a manufacturing one, later revealed to be building the Death Star (significance of this is discussed below). There the prisoners are forced to be barefoot, for the prison exerts control on its inmates with electrocution through the floor. The guards all have boots on to protect them from this, but they force all inmates to give up all of their shoes. I mention this because it adds to the futility of Cassian’s predicament. The significance to Narkina 5 and the prison arc as a whole will be discussed in greater depth later since there is a lot more to these three episodes (Episodes 7-9). The most important thing for now is that it is in this prison where we see the distinct turnaround of his mentality when it comes to fighting the empire. “I’d rather die trying to take them down, than die giving them what they want.” - Cassian to Kino, Episode 10. Here Cassian finally understands what Maarva was getting at when she refused to leave with him, what Luthen was trying to explain to him, what Nemik died for. This sentence is the thesis of Cassian Andor’s story, something we see even through Rogue One. Ultimately, Cassian dies for something he will never see come into fruition, and we see here how he gets to that point of faith. 

At the very end of the series, Cassian once again sets up everyone for success, leaving to deal with his own loose ends. As he is leaving, Bix reminds everyone that Cassian will come back and he reaffirms this. At this point of the story, Cassian is no longer a nuisance, but someone that the people of Ferrix can safely rely on to protect them. That, ultimately, no matter what happens to them, Cassian will find a way. This is Cassian’s M.O. He works in the shadows, he is there for Bix when she needs him, he makes sure everyone is set up to do what they need to do, and he makes sure everyone has enough information and resources to reach their destinations and goals. Cassian is a representation of the truest friend. 

Now to connect back to earlier about how this works for his story in Rogue One. Cassian has been fighting against the Empire since he was 6 years old, he just hadn’t realized it yet. That was what this show was for, we see him go through the process of realizing that the rebellion was something he was born into. In Rogue One, Cassian is a zealot, willing to do anything for the rebellion. We now know why. He’s lost so much to this cause, he’s lost so much because of the Empire. Jyn, on the other hand, is nearly apathetic. She doesn’t understand his passion. Just like Cassian didn’t understand the passion of Nemik or Maarva. I think in order for Cassian to understand and connect to Jyn he had to go through the same process of finding his belief as before. His radicalization is so important because politically, he was already radicalized, it was his faith in himself and humanity that he needed to learn. 

Brasso:

Brasso is the man in the background, a constant, a pillar of the community and a man the characters can consistently rely on. Brasso is the role-model for Cassian. From the beginning he is to his people what Cassian becomes: a man of reliability. Cassian comes to him in the first episode to use him as a cover story, an alibi. We never see Brasso need to do it, but we know that he would cover for Cassian in an instant. When Cassian is away, it is Brasso (and Bix) we see taking care of Maarva. When the Imperial officers zero-in on Bix, even then Brasso risks himself to urge Bix into action, to run. When Maarva dies, we see Brasso handling her funeral, making sure everything is running smoothly. When all the others don’t know how to comfort Bee, it is Brasso who’s there for the droid, being patient with Maarva’s grieving friend. Brasso is the one to lead the fight against the Imperial soldiers in Episode 12. 

There are dynamic characters and static characters, and I would argue that Brasso is a static character. However, that is not necessarily a bad thing—if done right, there is a place for static characters like Brasso. In Brasso we see the good of the world, we see that not everyone is bad, not everyone is corrupt. In Brasso we see strength in the devotion and loyalty towards family and friends, the power that small acts of rebellion can have. 

Brasso never does something completely outright aggressive until the time is exactly right, he waits for Maarva’s go to attack, but it’s his small actions that no one really sees that I think have the most meaning. He is the one to tamper with the ship in the first arc, that small bit of tampering sent home the message to the Corporate soldiers— never underestimate the power of community.

Luthen:

A man living two lives, one as a rebel and another as an eccentric shop-keep, Luthen is forced to make the difficult decisions. He is the one forced to call a hit on Cassian (at this point of the story, for all Luthen knew, Cassian could very easily take the vital Rebel information he had to the Empire, jeopardizing the movement). Luthen makes the decision to allow a group of rebels to die in order to protect the insider that he had within the ISB ( basically the Star Wars version of the CIA, further discussion of this provided below in the U.S. Government section).  Luthen is such a vital character for the Rebel Alliance, while I just discussed how Cassian plays puppet master and makes things happen, Luthen does just that on a much larger scale. 

Luthen doesn’t try to be palatable for the more moderate. When Mothma comes to him upset about Aldhani, he doesn’t flinch. When Lonni comes to Luthen, one of the first things he does is mention his daughter to him. The thing about Luthen is that if we didn’t know for a fact that he was on the good side or see any of his intentions, he could be an antagonist. His ways are not the cleanest, but he knows this. This is what he talks about for his sacrifice: in probably one of the best monologues of the show, Luthen explains how he has sacrificed everything from his potential happiness to his morals for the rebellion. He knows how far he’s gone and what that means for him, but we also know that if it’s not Luthen, then it’ll be someone else making those difficult decisions and living with the guilt. Andor doesn’t have morally gray villains, but it does have morally gray protagonists. Luthen and his operation is a prime example of that. Andor shows that, as aptly put by @captjynandor on tumblr, “when you live in a world where existing incorrectly can get you killed, sometimes you have to make the bad choice to survive.” We see this with Cassian, some of his first scenes showing him killing two Pre-Mor employees in order to survive. We see this most strongly with Luthen’s plan at Aldhani, his motivation to kill Cassian, and how he treats Lonni - objectively seen as immoral, but with a glimpse of the bigger picture, we see that it’s necessary. 

For all that makes Luthen great, some argue that one of his greatest flaws is thinking similar to the Empire. Meaning, he tends to look over the smaller people. He only looks for people that have larger personalities, like Mothma or Cassian. The realization of his flaw hit him during Episode 12 when he saw that simply the speech of an old woman brought down the strength of an entire town. He saw that the little people can make so much of the difference and saw the power of community. However, there is a different viewpoint on this scene provided by @kanansdume on tumblr. Luthen knows what he’s doing, he knows that what he does on Aldhani will anger the Empire, he knows that the Empire will cause more people to suffer, and he knows that means more people will be angry. He says this explicitly. What he saw in Maarva and the townspeople was not that she was able to accomplish what he didn’t, but rather showing him that his work and sacrifice had paid off. What truly shook him was that he never expected to be able to see the effects of his actions on people. He doesn’t know that Maarva was directly inspired by the heist on Aldhani, but here he sees that impact. It’s not that he never expected the common people to fight back or that he underestimated them, but rather the opposite. He was fully banking on it. He knew what the common people could accomplish, and for him to be able to see that first hand was likely unexpected. I personally like this interpretation better because it makes more sense for his character and story and the ideas that Andor is trying to present. 

Maarva: 

Maarva, the best mother Cassian could’ve had, is arguably the strongest woman portrayed in the show. She decides to stay and fight, she is the one that makes the decision that Ferrix needs to fight back, and she decides it when she knows she will not have the strength to see it through. Maarva is old, she says this herself, she can no longer afford the time to run, she’s too tired. At the very end, she’s had enough, and she is the one that rallies the town to fight the Empire. The last thing Maarva told Cassian (through Brasso) was “Tell him none of this was his fault. It was already burning. He’s just the first spark of the fire. Tell him he knows everything he needs to know and feels everything he needs to feel. And when the day comes and those two pull together, he will be an unstoppable force for good.” Maarva knows Cassian on such a deep level, she knows what he’s gone through and what he’s capable of. Maarva knew deep down that Cassian would be important to the rebels, and here we see a reference to what he is in Rogue One. Andor is before he realizes his full potential and before he “wakes up”, as Maarva says. In Rogue One, we see him take advantage of both his knowledge and emotions and is shown to be the zealot we know him to be. 

“Tell him I love him more than anything he could ever do wrong.” She gives Cassian unconditional love, showing him what love and safety feel like. Maarva took Cassian from Kenari to save him, then proceeded to show him what a home was. 

While similar to Brasso in passion and reliability, Maarva’s characterization happens most through her words whilst Brasso’s was through his actions. Maarva’s speech and her words to Cassian tell us so much about her and her relationships, as well as her importance to the story. She speaks out to the crowd, telling them it’s time to wake up. It’s a metaphor she uses often, she says “The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness, it is never more alive than we sleep.” Her point is that for the oppressed, they cannot afford the time to relax. In order to win their freedom they need to use every chance they get, because the Empire will never stop. They are the oppressors and as Nemik says, it is unnatural and it requires constant upkeep (more on this later in the Nemik and Skeen section). There will never be a time where the Empire takes a rest because it knows it can’t afford it, so the only way to counteract that is by making them sweat, by stretching the Empire thin. 

Bee:

Bee, the lovable droid who means so much to those around him. He has been with Maarva as a companion since the beginning, and his physical deterioration reflects  Maarva’s as well. Maarva tells Cassian that she’s gotten tired and she can’t move around much anymore. We see that in Bee as well, he has aged and now constantly needs to recharge. I really like this aspect they show about the droids, because in the world of Star Wars, droids are basically another race. It ties into how they respect and acknowledge the emotions of the droids and treat them with dignity. It is clearly shown that the Empire only really respects humans. Any other species, including droids, are neglected and disrespected. Not even all humans are treated properly; we see the way the Empire treats the indigenous people of Aldhani, commenting on their smell and talking about controlling them. What Andor shows with Bee and how he is treated by those around him is that discrimination is something of the Empire. This is really important to show in Andor because in Rogue One, K-2SO was one of the main side characters who was pushing for the rights of droids. Here, with Bee, we see that Cassian and the Rebellion are always ones to respect other people. (Bee is not the only example of this, Commander Gorn’s treatment of the same Aldhani natives that the Empire disregarded is another good example.)

Bee is the one Cassian relies on, when everyone else relies on Cassian. When he tells Bee, “I’m counting on you,” Bee responds, “You always say that.” What does Cassian say? “And you always come through.” Cassian knows how important having someone who holds the heart of the group is. He saw how quickly Skeen fell awry when Nemik got gravely injured, and for Cassian, Bee is that heart. He is the one that keeps everyone going, the one that grounds everyone. When everyone is looking to Cassian for solutions and for help, Bee is the one he goes to to make sure that everybody he cares about is safe. Bee is the one he trusts. 

Nemik and Skeen:

Nemik’s one of the truest believers in the cause. When he said “Tyranny requires constant effort. Authority is brittle. It breaks, it leaks. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.'' (Nemik’s manifesto, Episode 12), he was calling ordinary people to arms. Not ordinary people the way Cassian or of the others in the official Rebel Alliance are ordinary, but ordinary people who are not affiliated with any sort of organization. One of the beautifully shown parts of Andor was the way the small people did their own little things to fight back. From the sign language on Narkina 5, to Brasso tampering with the Pre-Mor ship, to the people of Ferrix making noise to psych out the Pre-Mor authorities, to Wilmon Paak building a pipe bomb to use against the Empire, none of these connected with each other besides fighting the fascism of the Empire. Nemik understands this, because he, like all of these people, have been radicalized from their experiences of just simply trying to survive the oppression (@spicysucculentz on tumblr). 

One of my favorite lines from Nemik is one of his last lines where he says in his manifesto, “Remember this. Try.” It juxtaposes one of the more famous lines from the franchise, from when Yoda scolds Luke, “Do or do not. There is no try.” Likely, the reason for this difference is in the supernatural. Yoda and Luke are connected to an external, supernatural entity— the Force. But for people like Nemik, normal people who don’t have access to the Force, they can’t afford the binary, the finality of “Do or do not.” They are simply trying to survive, to get through (@killsandthrills on tumblr). In fact, it is because of the average people that the Rebel Alliance was able to become what it was by the time of the original trilogy. The reason why Luke had the cushion of support was because of the efforts of people like Nemik. Luke needed to be able to succeed, fully, but the only way he was able to have that opportunity to finally win is because the Rebel Alliance was already built up by the people who were just trying to do whatever they could to survive. 

Skeen was fascinating to me. I originally wrote him off as a kind of bully: the man who would butt heads with Cassian, the guy who wasn’t fully bought into the Rebellion quite yet. Part of that ended up being true, he wasn’t bought in. But we only truly see this part of him that places himself against the world after Nemik is shown to be near death (with slim chances of surviving). We see a sibling-type dynamic between Nemik and Skeen where they’re friendly and playful. And maybe Nemik was helping Skeen start to believe in the cause near the end, but the thing that ripped it away for him was Nemik’s fatal injury.  We see their banter, but when Nemik gets hurt, Skeen starts to panic. He is the one cradling Nemik’s head and the one to convince Cassian to go for the doctor. “This kid— he is the reason why we are here” (Episode 6); Skeen knows that Nemik’s passion and ideas are important for progress, he knows that Nemik is the heart and soul of the group. When he started to believe in the cause, Skeen started to feel hope again after a long period of time. But Nemik’s death brought him back to his childhood of pain and fighting. This happens so clearly in front of us, where he went from panicking to cynical when Nemik’s at the doctor’s. Skeen says, “Yeah, luck. It’s what drives the whole damn galaxy.” He references how he doesn’t choose his life, the life of struggling when others were born into wealth and privilege. This is the moment where he goes back to what I imagine would be a younger, angrier Skeen. Convinced that he can’t do anything to change the world he becomes selfish, saying that the only rebellion he cares about is his against the world.  Even as he tries to convince Cassian to take the money for themselves, it sounds like he’s also trying to convince himself of what he’s doing. 

Mon Mothma:

Mon Mothma is a perfect example of someone who chose the rebellion. She was not born into it, she was raised privileged in a system that married her off young. Mon Mothma used the tools of the Empire against them, using her power to advocate for those being hurt by the Empire’s laws. She used her family wealth to donate to the rebellion, and she faked evidence of her husband’s gambling problem because she knows they’re listening to her.  On top of this, as @kanansdume on tumblr pointed out, neither Perrin (her husband) nor Blevin realize that Mothma could be lying. She has put up this front of being just a general nuisance, of being very worrisome and concerned about her image. “She showed the stone in her hand, but everyone missed the knife at their throat, just as she said they would.” 

Aside: The Empire is listening to Mothma but none of the smaller people because they make the mistake of forgetting that the small people can make a community and fight back. They don’t listen in to the conversations of the prisoners because, as Cassian says, they don’t need to. They have such a strong grip on the prisoners that they believed that they didn’t need to worry about them or listen to them. But that’s not the case with Mothma. She is a Senator, to their eyes, she poses the most danger. She has money and influence, and to the Empire that’s all that matters. However, in reality, the smaller people ended up being more dangerous to the Empire’s rule than Mothma did. Yes, she was funding the rebellion for some time, but when that fell through, Luthen made a way to get the money anyway. 

Mon Mothma is shown to reject some of the traditional values of her culture. Originally following these values, she married young to a man that she is now constantly butting heads with, stuck in a unsupportive, unhappy marriage Because of this, she has tried to encourage her daughter away from those values, but because she’s a Senator and almost always busy she ends up being a distant mother, and her daughter rebels against her. Instead, she is actively moving  towards those same values Mothma tried to pull herself away from (@rebelsofshield on tumblr). It clearly hurts Mothma to see her daughter doing this but she knows trying to further control her would also not work. And while she tries not to encourage it, her financial position and the rebellion have all but forced her hand into making a decision that she was not prepared to make. 

Kino and Melshi: 

We see Kino’s radicalization happen in the span of a single episode. Kino tries so hard to be an ideal prisoner, he follows the rules, keeps his men in line, and is banking on getting out of there alive. He has built his mind completely around the fact of obeying the Empire. He is so concerned about even talking about breaking out or musing about it because he’s worried that someone is listening in. The use of the line, “How many guards on each floor?” is used to show the process of radicalization. In the beginning of Episode 9, he refuses to respond or even humor Cass. The last lines of the episode are exchanged between Cassian and Kino - “How many guards on each floor?” “Never more than twelve”. Here we see a man angry and broken. He tried so hard to be a good prisoner but with the knowledge that they were never getting out, that when a man’s sentence is up they just send him to the other side of the prison, that is the thing that crushes Kino and makes him turn. He realizes even when playing with the rules of the Empire, there is no winning. When in a game where the other side is an empire, an organization so big as a government, playing by their rules means nothing to them. They will continue to hurt and commit atrocities and do injustice, and it’s only the act of disobedience that brings change. Going on peacefully changes nothing, it just makes you all the more easier for them to ignore. But if you cause a problem? If you are even a bit of nuisance, the slightest bit of a thorn? That is when change will come. 

Kino in the end never made it out of the prison, when all was done and everyone was running out, we find out that Kino can’t swim (we know that the prison itself is in the middle of a lake). He goes through everything, he rallies the entire prison, but in the end he can’t swim, he doesn’t make it out of there. It’s the theme of the show, sacrifice for a sunrise they’ll never get to see. This is Kino’s. 

Melshi, a man we see from the beginning who is already radicalized. He tries to give Cassian a reality check, which was so jarring especially after the introduction to the system, the game that was the prison. That the floors and tables that did the best would get flavor with their food instead of bland food. It’s portrayed as an upside to the prison, to make us think, “Oh this isn’t so bad, it could be worse,” until Melshi comes in and grounds Cassian. He tells him to never look at the numbers, because that is the way they control their prisoners, by giving them hope of freedom, by showing them the days passing and the number going down. Kino pushes Melshi back and tells him to shut up, because Kino is afraid of what those ideas will bring. As far as we see, Melshi is the only one besides Cassian to make it out alive, and we never know if Melshi was able to tell more people about the injustices of the prison. 

Syril and His Mother: 

Syril grew up in a system where he’s been so blind-sided, so steeped in propaganda, he genuinely thinks he is the good guy. Syril and his mother are examples of people who have bought into the lies of the Empire. He is one that believes that the Empire has genuinely brought peace, and that he is protecting that peace. He hasn’t known difficulty the way Cassian and any of the other rebels have, because his entire world was entrenched in the Empire and he’s known nothing else. Even when he gets screwed over by the system he is working so hard to protect, he still doesn’t try to think critically about this system. 

The way he latches on to Dedra in his mind as the one person who has saved him is telling. He is craving for someone to lead him and becomes near obsessed with her. He starts basically stalking her, and there’s some weird tension between the two of them in several scenes. (I have no idea why or what to say about this, it was an observation and an uncomfortable one. I have an idea for nearly everything else, except for this.)

Something that @captjynandor on tumblr points out is that those of the Empire aren’t morally gray. Typically, villains in these types of stories are morally gray, shown to have some other motive or intention that is better, but we don’t see that in Star Wars with the villains. Syril  grew up in an emotionally manipulative household but that isn’t portrayed as an excuse for his actions. He is very clearly shown to be an awful person because he wants that power and control over others and because he enjoys it. 

As Ben Lindbergh on The Ringer mentioned, Syril is a zealot who wants to stand out in a uniform for an Empire that stresses conformity. For most of the season, Syril doesn’t seem to be going in any direction--all we know about him is that he’s incredibly passionate about what he does. It makes us wonder: if Syril happened to be born to a different family, maybe one outside the Empire, how likely is it that he would’ve become a rebellion? If he hadn’t been born into a family and indoctrinated into the Empire, would he have been against the Empire? There was a period of a few episodes in the middle of Syril’s arc in which it seemed as though it was possible that he may become radicalized. We see him fall due to corruption (he knows it’s corruption), and we see him relatively unhappy in a job that is the definition of a corporate nightmare. But because he has a one-track mind (like Cassian sometimes tends to have), he doesn’t try to question the system but rather throws himself right back into it and begins to climb once again. Syril is a symbol of blind faith, the product of indoctrination and manipulation of the Empire. 

The Significance of Narkina 5:

The purpose of the prison was to bring down the prisoners to be only focused on fighting each other instead of the system, but it doesn’t work. Narkina 5 was built to control its inmates. They had several modes of this, the most obvious one being that prisoners were forced to walk barefoot on a floor that could be triggered to electrocute them at any point in time. However the other ways they tried to control were more subtle and  nefarious. First, they made a reward system to benefit  the most efficient inmate, in order to pit them against each other. The reward system? The winning table would get flavor. Flavor. Not something necessary, not something they cared about. All it was, was psychological manipulation. Not only this, but they would display each inmate's running total of how many days left in the prison they had. As they later learned, this number was arbitrary, once your number went to zero they would just put you on another side of the building. Seeing this number go down by one each day would give them a false sense of hope, some motivation to keep moving forward. 

However, this all failed. It didn’t work. The inmates figured out the prison system, then worked together as a cohesive unit to break out. No one turned on each other, they all knew one vital thing and that was that they were all either going to live together or die together. I think the fact that Andor did this, undermining all the prison tropes where the prisoners have to prove themselves, is wonderful (@horatio-fig on tumblr). There are no gangs, just a sense of brotherhood. And this is where the show disproves Skeen’s assertion. Skeen claimed that the way someone survives in an unwelcoming environment is by “climbing over the other guy to get out.” But with Narkina 5 we see that, no, in times of difficulty, the way to survive is by climbing out with the other guy, so that you both get out (@tiarnanabhfainni on tumblr). The prisoners all support one another, and that is human nature. It is not natural for humanity to fight one another, however it is natural for humans to bond with any group they can. 

Quick aside about Narkina 5, the planet itself. When Melshi and Cassian are escaping, they catch sight of an alien aircraft and they make a run for it to steal it. They get caught very easily by said aliens, but instead of them being hostile, they help the pair escape. This is such a good detail because it shows that Narkina 5 wasn’t always a place fit for prisons, it was once someone’s home. We don’t see a lot of aliens in Andor but this is such a beautiful representation of the fact that anyone who is not part of the Empire is against it (because the Empire has screwed over so many people) (@kanansdume on tumblr). 

The Significance of the Construction of the Death Star: 

As @captainofthetidesbreath on tumblr explains, “Yes, Cassian was forced to make parts for the weapon that would ultimately kill him,” but he also had a direct hand in subsequently destroying the very thing that would’ve wrought destruction, the thing he was forced to build against his will, and the event that turns the tides in favor of the Rebel Alliance. The time that he managed to stall the construction was crucial. In Rogue One, the margin of error they had was like threading a needle. The time that Cassian was able to stall the production of the Death Star, even unknowingly, was likely crucial in providing the time for the Rebellion to get the Death Star plans off of the planet. 

The Portrayal of Capitalism:

We see the importance of money from the beginning; in this system, no one can do anything or go anywhere without it. We see people in jobs, having schedules working around those jobs and still making time to fight a rebellion in between the times where they have to make a living. One of the first major objectives for Cassian is to get money.  Yes, in previous star wars movies they did mention money, but it never seemed to be much of an issue for the characters. It was never a legitimate barrier they had to cross. 

Not only do we see the effect of capitalism, but we also see the institutions. The place that Syril ends up going to for work has all the tell tale signs of a corporation. Hell, even before that, Syril worked for Pre-Mor whom everyone called the “Corpos”. He then goes on to work for the Empire in an environment that is so stereotypically corporate: “Everyone matters”, the cubicles, the monotony of the design, everyone wearing the same outfit, they’re all being constantly supervised, using previous familial connections to gain an upper hand, etc. Even the apartments that Syril and his mother live in have the signs of a capitalistic environment. The whole show is a testament to the consequences of oppression and this is one of the best ways they show that. The oppression of  capitalism is about benefiting the big man on top by using the time and labor of the little people below. It is a system built on keeping those born without privilege disadvantaged. And so how do we see them fighting back? Brasso using his job in the shipyard to tamper with the Pre-Mor ship, Salman Paak using his storefront as a cover for Bix to signal Luthen, Bix using her business as a cover for the fact that she’s buying and selling stolen Imperial parts - to name a few. They use the system that screws them over to fight back against the same people stepping on them. 

Similarity to the U.S. Government: 

Here is the illusion of choice, being told that you are in a democracy while there is a facet of the government that is essentially left unchecked.  The Senate in the Star Wars government is really interesting, because it is revealed that the people vote for those in the Senate, and while the Senators are allowed to make noise and advocate for change, we don’t see how they truly have any effect. Who has the most power? The ISB. And is the ISB regulated in any sort of way? Not at all. So what would the ISB equivalent be? The CIA. The CIA, something the people cannot control, known to have actively traffic drugs into black communities in order to control them (similar to the ISB leading along cultures in order to control them) and have recruited Nazis (similar to ISB and the Empire in general in how they treat other cultures and races that they see as “other”, and the genocide of several societies). When all’s said and done, if the government wants something done they go to the CIA (ISB) to do it, since they are technically not controlled by the people. 

If you do not let your prisoners vote, those in power now have strong motivation to imprison their enemies. This is a very basic rule in civics, something we see in both the United States as well as The Empire. The Empire is actively sending out people to capture Rebels and anyone who is remotely against the Empire, since they don’t let any news of what happens inside the prisons reach the outside and because they don’t allow their prisoners to vote. The reason why the levels of incarceration is so high in the United States is because slavery is legal in prison— this loophole in the 13th Amendment provided ample motive for the US government to imprison people of color or those who would stand against them. In a similar line of thought, the portrayal of the prison-industrial complex in Andor is brilliant. The prison-industrial complex is the idea of the relationship between a government and the various businesses that benefit from the institute of incarceration. We see that the government directly benefits from having people incarcerated, and not just because they are keeping supposed criminals, but because they are attempting to build something they will profit off of. They have incentive to imprison people for more petty crimes for longer sentences because they need to generate a self-replenishing workforce to build the Death Star. This sounds somewhat familiar because that is similar to what the CIA did with black communities. 

As mentioned previously, the 13th Amendment provided the loophole that slavery was legal in prison. Because they still wanted to use slavery, they needed to get people into jail. So they trafficked drugs into black communities, which destroyed them and stunted their ability to grow and heal. But the CIA didn’t stop there because they needed a workforce, so then they went on to criminalize drugs, and imprison anyone who was involved with anything drug related. But even if people make it out of prison, getting a job is near impossible at that point, and so they fall back onto crime in order to survive. And then they go back to prison where slavery is legal. It is a  vicious circle meant to cripple a population and profit the government. 

Not meant to be political, eh Gilroy?

The Tragedy of Rogue One

Cassian Andor goes through hell and back, orphaned at a young age and taken from his sister and home planet while the rest of his people are killed. His life is nowhere near easy, and time after time he is roped into rebel activity.  Eventually working for the rebellion on his own motivation, he goes through a whole character arc; again and again, he watches people die for a cause that they will never see come to fruition. He makes bonds with these people and gets close to them, only to see them die. Despite this, he learns that it’s worth it, is prepared to do the same (“Kill me or take me in”), and he realizes that everyone makes a difference, all of the small and big acts. And in the end, he does die for it. At the end of Rogue One, he dies. All of his friends die.

But the tragedy? He had finally, finally, reached happiness. After years of running and fighting in a war that he had no choice but to participate in, he finally finds love: Jyn Erso. And something we’re shown in the show is that he goes through trial after trial, just barely surviving. He survives the attack on his planet, then the attack on his home, then the prison break, then the manhunt- no matter what, he always survives. He always finds a way to keep going, even when things seem dire. Every single time. Except for one. Except for that last time on the beach, when they knew they were about to be killed by the Death Star, what did he do? He sat on that beach with Jyn Erso, and they held each other, knowing that this is the only time that they would be able to spend with each other as a couple. They sat there on that beach and faced death, together, peacefully, after succeeding. They won and they knew it and they knew they would never get to see it and they knew that they would never truly get to be together and that was okay.

[mosylufanfic]

5 Things That Remind Cassian He's Human (and one thing that makes him wish he wasn't)

Hi hello is time for more Sad Andor Reaction Fic? Yes I think yes

Spoilers for 1x11 I guess

5 Things That Remind Cassian He's Human (and one thing that makes him wish he wasn't) 

1. Blankets

The Narkinian says to them, "You look like shit, humans. Six hours to Niamos. Get some sleep." And he tosses them a couple of blankets.

For a moment Cassian doesn't know what to do with his. It hasn't been that long, but for all that time, sleep has been a matter of lying down on a hard bench and closing his eyes.

"Kriff," Melshi mumbles, spreading the blanket over himself, pulling his ragged and filthy feet under its protection. "Kriff."

He curls into one of the tattered seats in the back of the quadjump, but just before he shuts his eyes, Cassian sees tears in them. 

The blanket smells like old fish and it's riddled with holes, but it feels like the softest of feather pillows as Cassian wraps it around himself.

2. Food

When they wake, the Narkinians give them food, too. Some kind of dry biscuit. Stale and tough. Against all odds, it tastes like fish.

Melshi wolfs his biscuit and then has to lay down, holding his stomach and grimacing. Cassian eats his slowly and carefully, experiencing food with texture, weight, flavor. Even if all of them are bad. 

His stomach cramps too, shocked by something different than bland mush delivered in a tube. His jaws ache from the action of chewing and his throat from the effort of swallowing, but he welcomes all of it.

3. Clothes

The Narkinians drop down just outside of town and let them off with some farewell in their own language that could be "now get out of our sight" or "blessings upon you, strangers." It's hard to tell. 

It's not a far walk, and as they get further into the chilly and deserted town, it's obvious this is the off-season for Niamos. Cassian struggles with whether this is good or bad, but ultimately decides that it is what it is.

They steal some clothes off a line, tearing the flimsy, grimy, stained clothes from Narkina 5 off their body and chucking them into the sea. The new clothes are damp from washing and don't fit quite right, but they're better than the prison clothes, and less noticeable.

After he retrieves his money, they head out to get real clothes, ones that fit, from one of the hundreds of second-hand stalls around town, where gamblers down to their last chit trade in their extra clothes for a few more credits.

Unimpressed with the selection at their first stop, Melshi moves on to the next stall down the street, but Cassian picks through the racks until he finds things that suit him. 

The being running the stall gives him a bored look when he sets down pants, shoes, vest, shirt, belt, bag. "Fifty credits."

He almost hands it over, but even in a tourist trap like Niamos, that's too much for Maarva Andor's son to stomach. "For this shit? Ten."

"You picked it out, my fine son. Fine, I'll do you forty-five. Those shoes are in perfect condition."

"These shoes are older than I am," Cassian says. "Fifteen."

"Forty if you really feel like robbing a poor old shopkeep today."

He snorts. "Twenty-five and that's my final offer."

"You want the shirt off my back too?" They slap down his change and wave him away. 

There's something about the exchange that makes him intensely happy. 

He puts on the shoes immediately, barely pausing to brush sand and dirt from his filthy feet. He'll have to take them off when they find someplace to clean up.  He put them on anyway.

They feel strange. Tight in some places, loose in others, and the insoles rubbing at his feet.

He stomps gently on the sidewalk and listens to the thud, and doesn't feel cold metal. Just the thickness of the soles. 

When he meets up with Melshi, the other man has put on shoes, too.

4. Privacy

There are beach showers, five minutes for a credit. They're supposed to get sand and salt off your skin. Cassian stands under the spray, face tilted into the water, and feels the walls around him. Just him. Not forty-nine other men standing beside and in front and behind.

The water shuts off and he stands considering whether he wants to give up another credit for more. He decides yes, and plugs it into the slot to get the water running again. He has no washcloth and no soap, but he uses his hands to scrub at the filthiest parts of his body.

He imagines his mother's voice, fond and scolding. Look at the state of you! Something hot burns at the corners of his eyes. 

He rarely allowed himself to think of her in prison, just like he rarely allowed himself to think of anything else outside the walls. Thinking of her now feels like a luxury on par with ragged blankets and second-hand clothes and cheap beach showers.

5. Names

"I need to make a call," he says to Melshi almost as soon as he walks out of the shower, his still-damp hair plucked by the wind, chilling his scalp. 

Melshi looks skeptical. "Sure that's the best idea?"

"I'll be careful. It'll be fine. I just - there's someone I need to talk - to get a message to. There's public comms up there." He jerks his chin. "Watch my back, would you?"

Melshi shakes his head, clearly still in doubt, but humors him. 

Hearing anyone's voice from Ferrix, even Xan's, makes his throat knot up. He whispers to disguise his voice and also because the knot is so big he can't speak any louder.

"Cassian?"

His name. His own name. The skin of Keef Girgo, tourist and convict and prisoner, falls further behind.

"No names," he said, not entirely meaning it, but trying to remember that he had to be careful. "Tell Maarva I'm okay. Tell her I'm thinking about her. She'd be proud of me."

He wants to tell the whole thing. Kino echoing his own words back to him over the intercom, the yells of the men breaking out, the thunder of bare feet on metal decks and the Imperials with their hands on their heads. 

He wants to tell his mother that he’d changed his mind, after arguing with her that rebellion was stupid and would get them killed and that she should come with him. And she turned him down.

He wants to tell his mother he rebelled.

But they don't have the time and he doesn't particularly want Xan to know first because he'd tell the whole town, and his mother should hear it first. So he finishes up, "Tell her I'm thinking about her. And that I'll get back as soon as I can. Can you remember that?"

"Cass, hang on," Xan says, his voice weirdly solemn.

He can't hang on, he doesn't have the time, Xan just needs to pass on the message - 

"Cass, I'm sorry. Your mother's dead."

+1. Grief

It's like a stone dropped from high up, crashing through the top of his head, slamming all the way through to the bottom of his feet, leaving him shredded in between.

He barely understands the rest of the conversation - she wasn't taking her medicine, her heart gave out, the Daughters are looking after her, funeral's tomorrow, I'm sorry, Cass, I'm sorry.

He ends the call and stands hanging on to the public comm booth, the wind off the sea battering at him, howling in his ears, until he feels like he's going to tip over onto his face.

When did it happen? When he was asleep? When he was working away at one of the endless pieces of machinery? When he was sitting in that hallway watching Ulaf's body cool? When he was holding a gun to the guards' heads? When he was crashing into the bitter cold water and swimming for shore? 

Did it matter?

Your mother's dead.

For one long frozen moment, he wants to be back in prison, locked away from everything, told what to do and when to do it, a mindless drone with no heart to break. 

He should have known. He should have felt something. Don't you feel a punch to the ribs? Don't you feel a tooth breaking out of your mouth? But he'd felt nothing.

He should be used to this. He’s lost three parents already. But he isn’t.

One step, two, the shock of his shoes hitting concrete rattling up through his body. He lurches from foot to foot, not walking so much as catching himself from falling, over and over again. 

"You got through?" Melshi asks him. "It's okay?"

He looks away, to the sea, lying on instinct. "Yeah, yeah. Everything okay."

Melshi says some more things, but they disintegrate into buzzing in his ears. He tries to think of his mother, in her bed maybe, eyes closed, face slack, heart still. Some of the Daughters washing her body. Sewing her into her shroud. Riding away from the house on the salvage loader, decked with what withered greenery Ferrix could offer this time of year, that he’d seen carry so many other shrouded bodies. Her friends and neighbors pausing in their work to witness her passage, faces solemn, hands folded. Her son not among them.

It wouldn't go. The holo in his head wouldn't run. 

How could Maarva Andor be gone?

"How many made it out alive?" Melshi asks him.

And before he forces himself to remember what they've been through, and what they'd talked about in the long walk into town, Cassian lets himself fall into the thought: Nobody. 

Nobody makes it out alive. 

Isn't that the way life works?

FINIS

[quarantineddreamer]

Synchronous Scars (click for AO3)

A RebelCaptain centered Andor AU

The night the garrison on Ferrix is blown up, a strange girl arrives on the Andor's doorstep, and Cassian receives a strange, new mark -a scar in the shape of a star. ~~~ When Jyn awakes in an unfamiliar place, a strange boy sleeping by her side, she discovers a scar from a blaster wound she can't remember. ~~~ There's no time to think about any of this when you're always running -chasing after some semblance of peace, desperately searching for a lost fragment of home and a path forward. 

Maybe one day.

I am nervous, crying, screaming, throwing up, and excited to start sharing this fic! It will be updating biweekly on Sundays (though if chapter 1 gets enough of a response I might be tempted to post chapter 2 sooner, because...Jyn ♡). 

I am going to be fully cross-posting the fic here on top of posting on AO3 so people read on whatever platform they prefer. Hope you enjoy! 😱

Chapter 1 

“She was all alone?” 

“There were others –already running by the time I got there- they didn’t look back.”

“Who do you th-…with…” 

Cassian scowled from his hiding place behind the living room wall as Maarva’s voice grew fainter. How was he supposed to know what was going on if Clem and Maarva insisted on speaking so quietly? 

Nevermind that it was late and he was meant to be sleeping and that Maarva had swiftly locked his bedroom door the moment Clem had burst in from the cold, calling urgently for medical supplies. Whatever was happening the couple clearly did not want him involved. 

Which, of course, only intensified the curiosity surging through his fifteen year-old mind. 

As soon as Cassian was sure the entryway was clear, he had made quick work of the lock on his bedroom door –Maarva didn’t yet realize he’d picked up that trick- and crept quietly through the hallway to spy on the action. 

But the brick wall he leaned against was thick and a pile of crates was obscuring his view of the cot Maarva had hurriedly laid out and whatever, whoever was resting on it. 

Cassian knew he needed to get closer if he stood a chance at gleaming anything informative from the hushed conversation Maarva and Clem were having. He eyed the space between himself and the tower of crates, recalling faintly games of lost and found with Kerri back on Kenari. She had forced him to learn quickly how to move silently along the forest floor –she had always been the expert at the game, always craving a greater challenge. ‘Too easy, Kassa, too easy!’ she’d laugh, before dashing away to take her turn to hide. 

Cassian shook his head to clear away the memory, swallowing against the choking sensation that always seemed to settle in his throat when he thought back to his old life. The life of a different person. 

He slowly stepped forward, careful to keep his eyes on the shadows of Clem and Maarva in case they came his way. Several hammering heartbeats later he had made it safely to his new perch behind the crates and was fighting the urge to release a sigh of relief. He knew Clem might hear it. The man had ears like a scurrier. 

“She doesn’t look much younger than Cass,” Maarva was saying. 

Cassian wrinkled his nose at the nickname, but fought a small smile. He hated when Maarva and Clem used it in front of any of the other kids on Ferrix, but a small part of him appreciated the sign of affection, familiarity. 

“She’s not,” Clem agreed, and Cassian thought he caught the posture of the man’s shadow crumple slightly. 

Maarva sighed. “Then how did she get tied up in all of this?”. 

“You’ve heard the stories, it’s becoming more common. Orphans with hatred for the Empire and nothing left to lose make perfect recruits…” 

There was silence for a moment, and Cassian knew Maarva and Clem were probably having one of those strange wordless conversations they sometimes had, where nothing was said aloud, and yet Cassian sensed there was always an exchange of something between them. 

“I’ll go get more bacta pads.” There was the sound of Maarva’s feet scraping the floor. 

“We’re out,” Clem said grimly. “She’ll have to make do with the bandages we have.”

“I could go check with the Caleen’s-”

“No. Too far –the patrols are on edge tonight. They’ll take any excuse…”

“You think that has anything to do with her and her friends?”

“Maybe, I did find her by the wreckage, but I-”

“C-C-Cassian, what are you d-doing?”

Cassian swore and turned, without hope, to shush B2EMO –knowing it was already too late. The droid had not bothered to use any semblance of stealth. At least he did Cassian the courtesy of a low hum of apology as Maarva and Clem rushed over. 

“Cass? How did you-”

Hoping Maarva might not think too much about the implications of a certain bedroom door mysteriously unlocked if he spoke first Cassian cut in, “I heard Clem come home and he sounded worried so I came to see if everything was okay.” Not a complete lie… 

Crossed arms and a quirked eyebrow told Cassian that Clem bought none of this explanation. “Did you see much from down there?” he asked. 

Cassian hurriedly came to his feet, brushing dust from the knees of his pants. “I had just…dropped something?” he offered.

Clem’s mouth twisted in a way that suggested his careful mask of stern disappointment might have had an amused rival. “You’re a terrible spy.”

“Everything’s fine, Cassian, it’s just been a long night. Back to bed you go.” Maarva always was the stricter of the two. Motherly in a way that was both familiar and distant to Cassian –a tickle of a memory that stretched even further back than his days playing lost and found with Kerri.

But as Maarva moved towards him, hands prepared to usher him away, Cassian stepped back and his eyes sought an ally in Clem. “Who is ‘she’?” he asked quietly. 

Clem glanced at his wife, and there it was again, that silent discussion between them. 

Cassian tried to be patient and not feel left out, but out of the corner of his eyes he could see a small, mud-crusted pair of boots curled at the end of the cot. Who did the boots belong to? And why were they here in the Andor household in the dead of night?

Something must have been decided between Clem and Maarva, because when Cassian pulled his eyes back to them, Clem was watching him. “We don’t know her name, and we’re not certain where she’s from,” he told the boy honestly. “But she needed our help, so I brought her here. Do you understand?”

Like you brought me here? Cassian wanted to say, a brief flash of resentment rising in his chest, that familiar desire to tug on the string of what if creeping into him –cold and fierce in such a way that it hurt to resist. What if I hadn’t gone on that ship? What if I had gotten away from Maarva? Would I still be alive? Would Kerri be with me? What if Maarva hadn’t decided to play ‘hero’ and left him alone like he’d wanted…  

His eyes wandered back to the muddy boots. He wondered if the stranger had people waiting for her at home. If Clem’s ‘rescue’ of her had been consensual, or if she would be as confused as he had been to be ‘saved’. Lost and lonely and angry and afraid…

Clem was watching him, Maarva too. Cassian forced himself to set aside his own issues and focus again on the mystery in front of him. Now wasn’t the time for another fight. Besides, they’d all been getting along recently; Clem was even showing him how to refurbish old parts, teaching him the way a father would his own son. And truly, he had no one else. 

When he’d managed to taper his bitterness somewhat, Cassian gave a brisk nod and waited for Clem or Maarva to speak again.

Clem placed a hand on his shoulder and offered a small, sad smile. “She’s hurt, and she won’t be awake for awhile,” he explained. 

“And we’re out of bacta pads,” Cassian murmured regretfully. 

Maarva shook her head and buried a hand in her curls with a chuckle. “You’ll listen when you should be sleeping, but when I ask you to tidy your room you’ve got dust in your ears, huh?”

Cassian shrugged.

Maarva rolled her eyes in mock exasperation, giving in. “I’m going to go get more supplies,” she declared, and B2EMO followed her as she made for the hallway and its storage closet. 

To Cassian’s surprise, Clem also followed, leaving him alone in the room. The faint light of a lantern cast a halo of white onto the figure on the cot. It called to him like a beacon. 

Dark splatters of blood marked the floor, Cassian followed them until he was standing beside the mysterious girl.

Maarva had been right. She looked to be about his age, maybe a year or so younger. Her dark hair was slipping free from a ponytail, errant strands laying across a too-pale face. Dry blood accompanied them, smudged on her cheek, but there was not enough light for Cassian to tell whether or not the blood belonged to her.

Maarva or Clem had placed a blanket over her, but it had slipped, revealing a bandage wrapped tightly around her torso. Blood was already beginning to seep through, a crimson flower blooming on the left side of her thin frame.

The girl’s face began to contort, her brows knitting together, a deep frown settling. She muttered something indistinct –maybe a name. 

Cassian felt a pang of sympathy.  When she began to tremble, he reached to reset the blanket. 

A hand seized his wrist in a vice-like grip. Eyes, green as the trees of Kenari, caught his, wide and panicked. She was upright, panting as though caught mid-sprint, and her skin was clammy and feverish against his. 

“You’re okay –it’s okay,” Cassian murmured, hoping she could understand him, trying to convey as much calm as possible –a challenge, considering his heart had nearly leapt out of his chest when she startled him. 

“Where am I? What’s happened?” The emerald eyes were flicking about the room –assessing, preparing-  settling anywhere but his face. Her fingernails had begun to dig into his arm.

Before Cassian could form a reply, the girl began to tug at his wrist. “Let go of me!” she demanded, spitting fury, an injured animal caught in a trap.

“Careful!” he said forcefully. Then, with more gentleness, “Careful…you’re hurt.” He tapped his fingers against her forearm. “And you’re holding onto me.”

The girl blinked at him, some of the wild confusion beginning to fade from her face, replaced by a deep, deep exhaustion. Her hand loosened somewhat on his wrist. “Who…” She blinked again, her eyes struggling to keep focus on him, stubborn, determined, even as she began to sway. “Can’t st…” 

He could tell her instincts were waging war against the weight of the blood loss and using his free hand, he began to gently guide her backwards so she could rest her head on the cot’s pillow. He could see the helplessness on her face as she looked up at him, the fear. “You’re going to be okay,” he promised. “You’re safe... We’ll take care of you.” 

She shook her head. “That’s a lie,” she muttered. “No one cares…”

“I do,” Cassian insisted, even though he wasn’t sure why he should, just knew that the girl’s hand was still at his wrist as though to anchor herself there, and that, whoever she was, whoever she had been until arriving in Ferrix, she was alone now. He knew what that felt like. To be alone and afraid and forced to put your trust in the hands of strangers. 

She stared at him, and for a few seconds he thought she may hang on to consciousness, as she scanned his face for signs of dishonesty and seemed to decide, with some surprise, that there were none. 

But then her head hit the pillow in earnest and she was gone again. 

Her fingers dragged across his wrist as the last of her muscles relaxed. 

Where her hand had been Cassian felt a sharp chill as night air settled against his skin. 

Her arm dangled off the cot now in a limp, lifeless manner he found upsetting.

“Cass? How’s she doing?” 

Maarva and Clem had returned, fresh bandages, an ancient-looking pharmpac, and sewing kit in hand. 

Cassian glanced at his adoptive parents briefly before turning back to the girl, taking her elbow, and settling her arm in a more comfortable position. “We should hurry,” he murmured, feeling oddly tense. 

He allowed himself to be nudged aside as Clem and Maarva sprung back into action, peeling away bandages and wiping away blood. Cassian watched from a distance, barely hearing Clem when he expressed concerns that the expired pharmpac would not be sufficient to hold the girl under; he caught himself flinching as Maarva set to work stitching the girl’s wound, his stomach twisting until he forced himself to look away. 

When they had done everything they could for their patient, Maarva and Clem stepped away. They didn’t appear confident in their work, and Cassian felt a shiver run down his spine. His skin was prickling. Had been prickling since the moment the girl’s hand had left his skin. 

“We should try and get some sleep. There’s nothing more to be done tonight… I’ll beg a bacta patch off of someone in the morning,” Clem said. 

But what if that’s too late? Cassian shuffled his feet, feeling unsettled. Sleep seemed about as ridiculous an idea as inviting an Imperial officer over for dinner. 

“What’s the matter, Cassian?” Maarva asked. 

He itched at his wrist, feeling as though he had waved it through an electric current. “I want… Can I sleep out here? In case she needs m-us?”

Clem and Maarva shared a glance, confused, but to Cassian’s relief they seemed too tired to argue. “Fine. Grab a spare blanket from the storage closet so you don’t catch a cold,” Maarva instructed.

Cassian nodded mutely, but did not move. Clem squeezed his shoulder good night. 

Minutes later, the room was silent, but for the gentle buzz of the lantern and the shallow breathing of the injured girl. Cassian was still rooted in place.

The problem was, for some strange, irrational, completely insane reason he did not think he could leave the room, could leave her, for even a second. The storage closet was just around the corner, but even that was too far. 

So, instead of the comfort of a blanket, Cassian found his jacket in its usual place –flung over one of the crates. He pulled it over himself as he settled into Maarva’s armchair, directly by the girl on the cot. 

He watched, and waited, and counted every breath. 

Until eventually, sleep pulled him away…