#twtas sneak

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🌈🌈🌈

🌈 Share something soft/fluffy from your WIP.

“You’re hard to get gifts for. So I panicked and got you a coffee mug, which is… arguably worse, but –“

She pushes a mug with a lopsided bow around it into his hands, with a nervous, apprehensive look on her face.

It’s black, or very nearly black in the dim light of the kitchen lamp, and dotted with tiny stars. He smiles, turning the cup around in his hands, and feels instantly transported to a freezing cold November night in the middle of nowhere, side by side on a blanket, staring up into the cloudless sky.

It might be his favourite memory in twenty years.

“It has stars on it,” he says, brilliantly, and she smiles.

“Uh-huh. It shows constellations when you put hot coffee in it. So you can learn them, for next time.”

He considers the cup a moment longer, then puts it down on the table and attempts a smile in return. “I liked learning them from you, though.”

“God, you’re such a sap,” she mutters, puts her arms around him and rolls her eyes at him for good measure. But he doesn’t miss the faint blush on her cheeks, and he knows she relished in it – she likes teaching, generally, and the stars and constellations, all those names her father taught her as a child, are clearly something she treasures, despite everything. She looked so proud there on that blanket, tracing Cassiopeia in the air for him with her finger. (Stardust, her father called her.)

He pulls her close, just for a moment, digging his fingers into her soft sweater. The world outside the window is still dark and quiet, and the kitchen smells like coffee and toasted bread. His back hurts, the meds haven’t kicked in yet, but still. This is gift enough. He won’t say that, she’ll only roll her eyes at him again, but it’s enough to know it.

Ask for a sneak preview!

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Sneak for TWTaS's final chapter (!!!!)

“Full disclosure, this is a weird gift. You’re hard to get gifts for. So I panicked and got you a coffee mug, which is… arguably worse, but –“

“You didn’t have to get me anything.”

“Yeah, I know. But you got me something for Christmas. And I wanted to. So –“ She pushes a mug with a lopsided bow around it into his hands, with a nervous, apprehensive look on her face.

It’s black, or very nearly black, in the dim light of the kitchen lamp, and dotted with tiny stars. He smiles, turning the cup around in his hands, and feels instantly transported to a (freezing cold) November night, side by side on a blanket in the middle of nowhere, staring up into the cloudless sky.

It might be his favourite memory.

“It has stars on it,” he says, brilliantly, and she smiles.

“Uh-huh. It shows constellations when you put hot coffee in it. So you can learn them, for next time.”

He puts the cup down on the table and tugs at her hand, pulling her closer, and smiles down at her. “I liked learning them from you, though.”

“God, you’re such a sap,” she mutters, puts her arms around him and rolls her eyes at him for good measure. But he doesn’t miss the faint blush on her cheeks, and he knows she relished in it – she likes teaching, generally, and the stars and constellations, all those names her father taught her as a child, are clearly something she treasures, despite everything.

“It’ll be a refresher, then.” She winds out of his arms, curls up on her rickety chair and pours coffee for them both.

“And this is a weird gift?” he asks, still smiling softly down at the mug.

“No, that’s the normal part. Look in the bag.”

He picks up the small satchel on his plate with a frown and shakes out a simple, coin-sized pendant. It’s an unremarkable thing, not much to look at, really, just a brown-grey speckled splinter of stone enclosed in clear resin.

He takes a moment to inspect it, trying to decode its relevance, before ceding defeat and asking, eyes still on the stone: “What… what is that?”

Jyn truly blushes, this time. “It’s a piece of – of metro tile. They’re… they’re doing renovations on Line 2.” She shrugs uncomfortably and rearranges the pieces of toast on her plate. “A friend of a friend of one of Saw’s old guys knows the contractors, they grabbed a piece for me. Ermita station, I think he said. Like I said, it’s – this guy probably thought I was insane for asking, but –”

“I remember them,” he says softly, turning the pendant in his fingers, watching the flecks of brown shimmering in the light. “The tiles.”

“I wanted… It was the only way I could think of to get you something from the city. Food would’ve just gone bad and –“ She shrugs helplessly. “I guess it was this or one of those stupid tourist t-shirts. Like I said, it’s – it’s weird, I know, but I… I thought it’d be like, a piece of home, right? I know you don’t have much.“

This is an understatement. He has a novel with the pages cut out, some pictures, a list of names, an army knife, a gun, a passport, and the shoes that he wore the day he left. Everything else he owns, he bought in the States.

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Sneak for the epilogue of TWTaS, which i swear i'm writing!!

Still tinkering with this goddamn scene. 2018-me decided it had to be a birthday party because apparently I hated myself. Here's a sneak, might actually keep this scene:

At some point, Antilles drops onto the empty seat next to Cassian’s, clearly in a show of goodwill. His colleague is the kind of person who considers talking to the quiet person at the party a public service of some kind.

“Are you doing anything fun for your birthday, Andor?” he asks and Cassian shrugs. The gesture is still a little stiff, but he’s excited every time he does it and it doesn’t hurt.

“I’m doing this.”

Antilles grimaces. “Well, alright… Are you allowed to drink again yet?”

He doesn’t really feel like it, but he appreciates Antilles’s efforts. The guy can talk to just about anyone – born to play good cop, Kay said once – but Cassian hasn’t made it easy for him. There’s been a little spite in it, maybe, some of it deserved, some probably not. So he relents and says: “A beer won’t kill me.”

“Excellent.” Antilles disappears around the corner, returns with two cans of beer and shoves one across the table for him. “Here’s to your – how old are you?”

“Twenty-eight today, apparently.”

Antilles’s easy smile slips for a moment. “Jesus, really?”

“Yes?”

“You’re younger than me?”

Cassian shrugs again. “Always have been, Wedge.”

“I – huh. Anyway,” he nudges his beer against Cassian’s, fixing the smile on his face again, “many happy returns, and all that.”

To Cassian’s surprise, the phrase doesn’t rankle. He supposes, if they’re like this one… he could call that happy, probably.

He smiles faintly and opens his beer. “Salud.” (Alright, maybe he’s not done being spiteful quite yet.)

His colleague ignores the lazy jab, leans back in his seat, takes a few sips, and asks: “So, is this… everyone? You at least get a call from home for your birthday?”

Cassian shrugs, and something – maybe the beer, maybe the smell of the food or the sound of Bodhi and Luke laughing over something Kay said – makes him say the truth. “There aren’t a lot of people left. Just one, really, and he… he thought I was dead until a month ago, so…”

He can feel Jyn’s eyes on him across the table, but she doesn’t say anything.

Antilles has a look of mild concern on his face that doesn’t work well with his trademark grin. “He thought you were dead?”

“It’s a long story. Not very exciting,” Cassian says, taking pains to sound convincing because Antilles is, despite appearances, very perceptive, and much harder to fool than Kes. Not outright lying is one thing, but he’s not about to actually talk about Gael at this table. “A misunderstanding.”

“If you say so,” Antilles mutters, still with a raised brow, and gestures at him with the beer can. “You’re an odd duck, Andor. Do you know that?”

“Sure.”

His colleague eyes him for a moment longer, then shakes his head to himself, empties his beer and gets to his feet. “Well, I gotta go. Thanks for the food, man. Happy birthday.”

“Thank you.”

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In honour of me once again making progress on my WIPs at the most inopportune time ever: A sneak for Chapter 42!

(at least I think this will go into that chapter. Who am I to know. This bitch has been fighting back for two years.)

---

“I mentioned… my friend, from the orphanage?”

“Yes, uh –“ She trails off and looks at him expectantly, like she can’t remember the name.

Cassian raises a brow at her. “Are you seriously pretending you didn’t write his name down?”

She shrugs and gives him a faint smile. “I figured it would set you on edge. Gael, was it? He’s been on your mind? Why?”

“He thinks I’m dead. He found – doesn’t matter, the point is he thinks I died during my undercover work.”

Mothma pauses, then says slowly: “You’ve known this for a while?”

“Yes, a while,” he mutters, then adds, despite himself: “He puts down flowers. For me. Every year.”

“Seems like a thing you’d want to tell your friend. That you’re not dead.”

“Yes.”

“Why haven’t you?”

He grimaces, shrugs. “I guess I assumed it would probably be true sooner or later. And besides, I just… He always thought he was – that he was supposed to protect me, right, because he was older, and less of an idiot. And as far as he knows, I went and got myself killed and he wasn’t there. I’m afraid that it… broke him. Like it broke me. And I…” He pauses, feels a humourless smile pull at his lips, then adds carefully, quietly: “I guess a part of me is even more afraid that it didn’t.”

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Talk Shop Tuesday! Do you fully delete everything you cut out of your drafts, or do you save all your scraps even if you know you're never, ever, ever going to use them? (And if the latter, would you consider sharing anything?)

Ooh, what a fun question!

My usual MO is to just delete. I tend to write myself into corners because i'm such a pantser and never know where the story is going, and a lot of times i just have to come back, delete like a full page and restart. And, knowing myself, if I saved everything I'd deleted, I'd probably end up putting it back in.

But for The World Through a Scope I do keep a scrap doc - I've only started it up like a year ago so most of the fic still didn't get its scraps saved. But I've been tinkering with the ending of this fic pretty much since I started (in 2017, God help me) and adding and adding to it since then. And now that I am *so* close to actually getting there, I've had to kill a lot of darlings. Some of them I may still tinker with and put back in, but here are some scraps that probably won't make it:

“Stop.” She frowns at him, with the hard look in her eyes that she could probably take on the whole world with. “It doesn’t have to hurt, okay? If the thought of you doesn’t make him feel like shit, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about you. It just means that he loves you, and he’s happy you’re alive. And that’s still love.”

Her hand digs into his leg so hard it takes effort to keep quiet.

“Try to remember that,” she says, in a flat, hard voice. “I’m trying, too. If we’re gonna be happy, we have to want it first, right?”

“I guess,” he mutters and leans his head against the wall. He’s not convinced. Mothma seems to think this is the way to happy, and he can’t exactly describe it as painless. He feels drained, and a little dizzy. If Mothma gives him homework again, he doesn’t know if he’ll do it.

(He’s still grateful. But he wouldn’t tell her that. She’d only ask why, and he’d have to admit that his clearest memory of his mother’s face, his brother’s, his grandmother’s, was that of them cold and bloodied and torn, and he used to be so scared the photos would only remind him, but that they didn’t. And that that feels like a mercy he never thought he'd be granted in this lifetime, and probably not after that. He wouldn't tell her that. It would only make her ask about religion again.)

.

“What would you tell your mother, if you could tell her something?”

“Just that…,” his voice falters and he shrugs, casts his eyes down with an embarrassed smile, “… that I’m gonna be okay.”

He doesn’t think he’s ever cried in this chair before, and he wouldn’t have thought it would be the thought of his mother that would do it. But it makes sense – with her, there’s nothing mixed in, no shame or guilt or disappointment, just –

He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, takes a breath, puts himself together. “Sorry.”

Mothma shakes her head and offers him a tissue. He declines.

“It’s a good thing. Allowing yourself to feel it is important. The idea is to live with your pain, and not in spite of it.”

He smiles wrily. “That’s very clever.”

Mothma raises a brow at him. “Thank you, detective.”

“Actually, detective isn’t really… well, it’s not really the right title. I was never an American cop.”

“It takes you ten months to tell me I’m addressing you incorrectly?”

“’s not a big deal. I know what you mean, but… you can just use my name, maybe.”

“Alright.” She reaches for her book and makes a note, then looks up and adds: “You held off on telling me that so you could distract me with it when you needed to.”

He shrugs.

“Very well,” she says with a slight smile.

.

“Didn’t you get shot like, last week? What on earth are you doing here?”

“He also fell from a first-floor landing onto concrete,” Kay says flatly. “That will probably be the larger issue going forward.”

Cassian slowly lowers himself onto his chair with clenched teeth. There’s no denying he feels like shit, and probably no hiding it, either. “I’d say it’s a draw for now.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” Kes repeats, his tone now one of open concern.

“Probably not,” he says, attempting a shrug and regretting it immediately.

“You should go home, Andor,” Kes says, in a voice that reminds Cassian instantly that Kes has become a father while he was gone.

His head is still pounding, and he is almost ready to admit defeat. “Alright. Catch me up to speed and I will.”

“I would not trust him on that,” Kay says, still without looking up from his monitor.

Cassian catches himself thinking he may have missed these idiots after all.

.

“You seem… better,” Kes says slowly. “Better than before, I mean.”

“I seem better since I nearly died?” Cassian gives back, raising a brow at his colleague.

Kes blushes a little, but then throws Cassian a sharp look and nods. “I… yeah.”

Cassian considers denying it, then allows himself a grim smile and gets to his feet. “Well, Dameron. We’ll make a fed of you yet.”

.

“You… you said you don’t have a lot of pictures of your father, right?”

“Only the ones Saw had,” she says quietly, frowning at him. “Why?”

“Because I’ve been thinking… The DEA does. From a few years back. They’re in the file.”

“Right.”

“I wouldn’t… They are not good pictures. I mean, they are bad quality, but they’re also… He doesn’t look well in them. But still, they… they exist.”

“Draven would kill you if you tried anything, Cassian,” she says, but it doesn’t sound like her heart is in it.

“Kes would do it. He feels bad for you. Actually, he asked if he could do anything. Kay would, too.”

She scoffs, but smiles a little.

.

oh, and way back when I did post some snippets under #from the cutting room floor

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Sneak AND an outtake?

So this paragraph was supposed to become part of chapter 43 (the penultimate chapter) and contains what I still consider possibly the funniest bit in the whole fic (not that that’s hard). Alas, I probably won’t need it after all. But I’ve stared at this snippet for many a year now and it reveals my main plan for that chapter and I’m trying to keep myself and the readers a little hyped about this old fic so here is the snippet:

Kay comes into the office Friday night two minutes before nine – everyone else long gone home – closes the door behind him and leans against Cassian’s desk with an expression that says he’s expecting pushback on whatever he’s about to say. He reaches into his jacket for a small burner phone, dials a number and shoves the phone across the desk.

Cassian frowns down at the number – a Mexican number – then back up at his friend. “What is this?”

“Someone I think it’s about time you should call. There’s a Mexican sim card in it, nobody will trace it back to you.” His partner gives him a pointed look. “I see why you didn’t try to reach out, at least I believe I do, but I’ve been over the situation several times and the risk of him drawing the wrong kind of attention is much higher than someone happening upon one call. Also, letting both of you nurse this guilty conscience for another few years doesn’t seem very sensible to me. He’s a dentist in Monterrey, by the way. Daughter’s seven, the son is five. Wife’s named Isabel, corporate lawyer. Balance of probability, they met on campus.”

Cassian glances down at the display of the phone and swallows heavily. He feels dizzy, and like his heart is trying to pump something more solid than blood. Hearing his voice is a possibility he hasn’t contemplated in so long and what if – (a fucking dentist, though?) –

Kay sighs. “This is his private number. You really should call. You’re welcome,” he says flatly and leaves without another word.

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Sneaks galore

anywho, I was tagged by @cats-and-metersticks in this last-seven-lines meme, so here, short sneaks for all three of my current WIPs...

The World Through a Scope:

“El Paso was different, though. I was scared, but I also… I – I told her it was alright, that I was… ready, I guess. That it was fine. And it… it was a lie.” He shrugs and adds quietly: “It was never a lie before.” 

Cold Comfort:

“Jyn,” he said gently, carefully, “I’m… I’m a spy. Did you really think that if we – that… that I would go around telling everyone on base about –“

“No,” she cut him off bitterly. “Obviously not. I don’t want you to tell anyone, I just didn’t…” She broke off, gnawed at her lower lip, then resumed in a small petulant voice that betrayed more than she was prepared to reveal: “You laughed.”

Spiel ohne Grenzen:

By all accounts, it had been a magical place once, before the Allies had set it ablaze. And maybe it still was, though Cassian wasn’t sure how benevolent that magic was these days. He wasn’t usually given to superstition, but after all, stories of ancient curses on ruined cities ran in his blood, and it seemed absurd to think that this city of all places should be exempt - this city with all its ruins, and all its hills and riverbanks that were really overgrown heaps of rubble, and the pale skies above.

I can’t think of anyone to tag - @moonprincess92, you working on anything rn?

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Last lines tag

Tagged by @imsfire2​, thank you!

I haven’t written much lately (evidenced by the fact that my main WIPs were last updated more than *checks notes* one and two?? years ago, respectively...) BUT. I did write a few lines for both so here’s a snippet from both:

“I did take my meds. Relax. I’ll live.” She glowers down at him. “That’s not fucking funny.” That gets her the frown again. He links his fingers with hers, slowly and deliberately, and says in the same gentle tone: “Jyn. I’m alright. We’re alright.” “You are so far from alright,” she grumbles, but lets herself be pulled back onto the warm heap of covers. Something she’s almost tempted to call a smile ghosts across his face. “Yeah, I guess I’ve been better.”

.

He fished through his coat pockets for his gloves as he made his way down the steps. He found a handful of loose coins in there as well, so he decided to cut across the square and get some bread for dinner. It might serve to endear him a little to his flatmates, and in any case, he was getting hungry. There was a short, orderly line of people waiting outside the bakery door – the premises were small and wouldn’t allow for more than three customers, and the street was busy now with workers on their way home. The woman in front of Cassian cast him a nervous glance when he joined in line behind her, and moved a few steps closer towards the customer in front of her, hugging her purse tightly to herself. He pushed his hands deeper into his pockets and tried not to take it personally.

Not tagging anyone, I can’t keep track of which of my mutuals is writing anything anymore at this point - but do consider yourself tagged if you’d like to share with the class!!

[ruby-red-inky-blue]

Sneak for the inconsequential yet elusive Chapter 42

Jyn is still clinging to her cup like a woman drowning.

“How early did you get up?”

She shrugs. “I couldn’t sleep, so I walked around town for a while. Wasn’t much point in going to bed by the time I got back.”

Cassian sighs, and Jyn throws him a dark look. “What, are you gonna tell me off for taking poor care of myself? You look like you’re about to pass out.”

He doesn’t reply and sips at his coffee. It’s watery and it tastes burned, but it gives his senses something real to cling to, which is something. He still feels like the airport is very slowly rotating around his chair, so he supposes she might have a point.

(Out of the corner of his eye, he spots a guy in a baggy jacket, both hands in his pockets. Who doesn’t carry a single bag in an airport? Why would -)

“Cassian, take your meds,” she says quietly. “We’re in the clear.”

Are we?, he thinks bitterly, tearing his eyes away from the man who has disappeared into a duty-free shop. He wonders if there’ll ever be a time when he’ll know the difference between instinct and paranoia again. Right now, much as he wants to believe her, much as he’d like to relax and let the painkillers make his situation bearable, try to be like any other person at the airport at seven in the morning… he can’t. He just can’t. Not yet.

He stares at the geometric pattern on the metal tabletop until that, too, makes his head spin. When he raises his eyes, she’s still looking at him, waiting. Asking.

She looks so tired. And she’s not asking much, compared to what she’s put herself through for him those last few weeks, nothing really.

The noises of the airport turn a little louder still. There’s no quick exit from this hall, none that he could reach quickly in this state, anyway. No real cover except for the coffee stand, and he’s lost track of the guy from earlier who – Stop. Stop that.

He can’t.

“On the plane,” he offers with a grimace, and she sighs.

“Will you make it to the plane?”

He grips the table a little tighter, and the spinning stops. “Yes.”

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sneak for chapter 41

“I told you so,” Kay says suddenly.

“What?”

“I told you, when you met her. I told you you would get shot.” He pauses, waiting for Cassian to interject, but there really isn’t anything to argue with, so Cassian doesn’t bother.

“I was right,” Kay insists bristly.

“Yes,” he concedes with a sigh. “You were.”

“I would have preferred not to be,” Kay says after a brief pause, and Cassian smiles faintly.

“I’ll try not to do it again.”

Kay scoffs. “That seems highly unlikely.”

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The Tiniest of Sneaks for Ch. 42

The sun is just rising at the end of the road, bathing the silver pendant dangling from the rear-view mirror in pale light. Jyn’s eyes are closed against the glare, or maybe she’s dozed off – she’s been up for hours, and even in the warm glow of the sunrise, she looks exhausted, worse than him.

He feels like hell still – all but collapsed onto the backseat of the uber as if he’d run a marathon instead of taken an elevator and walked a few meters across a parking lot – but he’s wide awake, drinking in the run-down houses by the road, the little hints of the desert he can glimpse on the horizon, the humming of the motor and the generic music on the radio, turned down to almost nothing. The glass beads and the battered silver crucifix sway gently behind the windshield when the driver stops at a red light. The world seems still and quiet, at least halfway asleep still, and Cassian feels so alive in it again, feeling the sun on his face for the first time in two weeks. That’s not a thing he’s let himself miss, not for a long time, but now he lets himself bask in the sunrise for a moment. He can’t mistake the quiet for safety, of course – but he can admit it’s nice, the warmth and the light and the faint smell of spiced coffee in the car. It’s a faint memory of home, faint enough to be faceless, painless, and he can allow himself the indulgence.

“Accident on your vacation, yes?” the driver asks, catching his eyes in the rear-view mirror, and Cassian almost laughs.

“Yeah. Just my luck, you know.”

The driver nods, taking a sip from the coffee mug in the rickety cup holder. “You visiting family here?”

“No, they’re all back in Mexico,” he says lightly – the guy has clearly clocked him as a fellow immigrant already, and he’s too tired to make something up.

The taxi stops at another red light. The crucifix sways. The driver nods. “I came alone, too.”

“From where?”

“Culiacán.” There it is, that same brief sharp ache in the man’s voice that feels so very familiar to him. Cassian turns his eyes back to the drab little houses by the road, and says, before the man can return the question:

“Well, I’m gonna miss this weather in Cleveland.” He checks his phone and asks, for good measure: “How much longer to the airport?”

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A snippet! Because this story isn't dead!

She watches Bodhi out in the hall pocketing his phone, stitching a smile on his face and turning to the officer by the door.

“Kid, I told you I can’t let anyone in –“

“I – I know. But you’ve let Jyn in already –“

“Yeah, because keeping her out would have taken up too many resources,” the man gives back gruffly, and Jyn scoffs. That’s cute.

“Yeah, well, I also have nowhere else to be, but instead of being rude, I’ve brought you coffee,” Bodhi says patiently and hands him a cup and a handful of creamers and sugar packets. “So, um… enjoy. I’m gonna go in.”

Jyn feels a fond smile tug at her lips. His voice is so soft, but there’s steel underneath. She’s halfway to her feet to save the poor cop when Bodhi slips through the door, still with a polite smile on his face, and holds up the coffee.

“I come bearing gifts.”

She manages to keep the smile up long enough for him to see and vacates the chair for him. “Don’t argue, just sit, okay?” she says and installs herself cross-legged on the floor. The chair wasn’t too comfortable anyway, and like this she gets to rest her head against the bedframe. Wins all around.

Bodhi sighs. “It’s gonna be bad,” he says softly when he hands her the cup. “That kid couldn’t make coffee for shit.”

She knows he’s putting up a show to make this feel more normal, but when she rolls her eyes at him, it’s mostly because the one thing he can muster genuine condescension about is coffee. “It’s the middle of the night, Bodhi. Don’t expect a career barista on the night shift,” she mutters and takes a sip. It’s gone a little cold, but she’s had worse.

Bodhi shrugs and sinks down on the chair. “Luke says most places hire baristas for looks, ‘cause more people come back for a hot server than for good coffee. This one – this one definitely wasn’t hired for his skill.”

She grins. “I think that was a backhanded compliment, you know.”

“Yeah. I know.” He smiles fleetingly and takes a sip of his coffee. “But I also make good coffee.”

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Sneak for Chapter 40

She swirls her coffee in her cup and sighs. “What did you talk about?” she asks after a while. “You and… you and him?”

Bodhi shrugs. “Just… I don’t know, I didn’t make much of it at – at the time.” He digs a sandwich out of the paper bag and passes it on to her. “He was… kind. Patient. And I… even afterwards, when I… I mean he was trying to hear about you, I guess, when he asked about what I was doing in my spare time and how you and I were getting on and everything.” He smiles and fiddles with the paper wrapping. “But still, he was… it was never like I annoyed him or, or – he seemed to care, you know? Like he was… looking forward to hearing from me, almost.”

If he was home when she came back from school, papa used to sit her down with biscuits and ask her about her day, as if it was the most important thing in the world. As if he couldn’t possibly go on with his day before he’d found out if Tina Daniels had finally returned George Hamilton’s favourite pencil.

Five hours ago, she handed his pictures and documents over to a stoic DEA agent. She’d grown strangely attached to them over the few hours she’d had them. They belonged to her father. She doesn’t know when she last held something in her hand that belonged to her father, except for that rambling letter, for his disembodied voice on her answerphone and in her nightmares.

She takes a deep breath and fishes a sandwich out of the paper bag, not so much to eat it but to hold it and feel like a person. Just someone having dinner with a friend. That is normal.

It can’t make her feel normal and it can’t shake her out of the haze in her head and it can’t tell her who her father was. But that’s probably a lot to put on a ham-and-cheese sandwich.

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another snippet

(this isn’t really a sneak so much as a bit of therapy session that never made it in. There’s a chance I’ll still find a way to add it later, but since there won’t be any sneaks for the next chapter because of spoilers and since I’m very fond of this bit, have it here for now!) TW BLOOD and DEAD BODIES under the cut

.

“What I want to talk about is… that every time you talk about that day, the only two people with any agency are you and your father. You don’t think about anyone else in terms of what they did, just in terms of what was done to them.”

“They did nothing to deserve it. Nothing.”

Mothma gives him her infuriating patient smile. “That is not what I mean when I say you’re denying them agency. You think of them as though they were… helpless.”

“My brother was a child.”

“Yes. But your grandmother and your mother were adults.”

“They were unarmed!”

“So was your father,” she says gently. “That’s what I mean. You understand that the choices your father made put them in harm’s way, but you can’t think of your grandmother and your mother the same way.  Do you see what I mean? In your head, somehow, your father’s death is connected to the life he led, but there is no connection between the lives of your mother and grandmother and their death.”

“Because there isn’t one. They were innocent.”

“Mr Andor,” she says again, in the same gentle tone, “it’s not a question of guilt. Not at all. I’m trying to explain to you that you have a tendency to put people on a pedestal. And that is understandable. But it is harmful, to you and to others, and it makes you diminish the people that mean the most to you.”

“I’m not… I’m not diminishing anyone,” he gives back hotly. “And I’m not… There weren’t any choices for them to make.”

“Do you think they weren’t aware of what could happen?”

“To a journalist? Of course they did, you just had to watch the news.” Cassian shakes his head. “I didn’t say they didn’t know, I mean there wasn’t… there wasn’t anything they could do.”

“They were grown women, detective. They were complex, able-minded adults, and your father didn’t make all their life choices for them.”

Cassian scoffs. “Not to insult your modern worldview or anything, but… he did. Of course he did. It was Mexico in the Nineties.”

Mothma sighs. “But your mother knew what career your father wanted when she married him, right? He did not make that choice for her.”

“She married a student,” he replies. “I don’t think anyone knew he’d wind up going after the cartels at that point.”

“You said they talked about what he was writing about. She still chose to stay by his side.”

“Again. It was Mexico in the Nineties.”

“So you’re saying she would have left him if she could have? Or that he would have stopped her from going away with you and your brother to keep you safe?”

He wants to snap back at her again, just to make her stop, make her stop seeing it all again, the dark red rosary almost the same shade as the blood he found it in, and his grandmother’s half-finished hairdo; the way the flowy fabric of his mother’s shirt had turned stiff as a board around the edges of the stain where the blood had already dried, how her earrings and her eyes had caught the light through the kitchen window and –

But then he remembers something else, something small and innocent in the corner of his vision: the sheets tacked onto the fridge door with heavy, kitschy magnets. Some were school stuff, a handful of drawings – Marco’s, Cassian never really enjoyed it – but most of them were pages torn out of notebooks, often stuck down by two or more magnets because they kept wanting to fold the way they had been to fit into his mother’s pockets, the pencil writing on them slowly fading over time. Cassian only had a vague idea of what it said on most of them, because his father’s narrow handwriting had been too much of a challenge for a first-grader, but he still tried, every time his mother added a new one. Sometimes, she took a few down and put them in a box in the bedroom when she ran out of magnets.

Cassian didn’t care much about poetry as a child, or really any time after that, so even if he could have read them, he wouldn’t know if they were any good. But still, his father wrote all those little poems and snuck them into his mother’s pockets before he left for work, and she put them all up on the fridge and kept them there until he’d written so many that she ran out of space.

His grandmother had some, too. She kept them as bookmarks in her cookbooks and folded up in her purse, next to cutouts of his latest articles and the pictures of Cassian and Marco, to parade around the neighbourhood on Sundays after church.

“No. No, she would have never left him,” he mutters, takes a deep breath and looks up at Mothma. “They were proud of him, of what he was doing.” He takes a deep breath, lets his eyes drop back to his hands in his lap, and adds softly: “I was, too.”

[ruby-red-inky-blue]

TWTaS sneak for Chapter 36 (yes i had to look that number up)

Jyn sits bent over her empty cup of coffee, fixing the reflection of the passing cars in the windowfront on the other side of the street. She doesn’t strike him as absent, though, just tense, like a cat watching birds, lying in wait. There’s a thrill in it all that he thinks she can taste, too, in the hot sun and the waiting and the air shimmering over the burning asphalt.

He can’t say if it’s the desert air or the uniform, but he feels the state of mind rushing back that he’s spent the past two years chasing, and he recognises the same feeling in her eyes as she spins the empty paper cup between her hands. It’s relief, a twisted, destructive relief, because this is what they know. However afraid they were, however much they hated this world, this is the familiar ground they’ve lost.

It’s a relief after all these months of nerve-wracking idleness, to feel the suffocating anxiety fading to an afterthought, and he very suddenly remembers why he keeps doing this, keeps putting his life on the line for just the sliver of chance. The quiet in his head, the electricity in his veins, that view through the scope that doesn’t allow him to look back - it’s better than a drug.

For the span of a breath, he allows himself, not without cynicism, to wonder if Mothma has him down as the addict he is. Probably.

He reaches for the last bite of the bagel. He’s not hungry, and the bagel is too dry, but it gives him something to do, and if it convinces one more person of his cover it’ll be worth it.

The screen of his phone lights up with a new message.

“Is that Kay?” Jyn asks softly, without raising her eyes from her paper cup.

“Uh-huh.” He shoves the phone over to her and finishes his coffee. He allows himself to watch her, he’s supposed to be her boyfriend after all. He didn’t like that part of the cover, it seemed reckless, advertising a weakness like this, but he’s glad for it now. Hiding it would have taken concentration he can’t spare.

Over the past months, he’s learned to spot the signs that tell him she could kick his teeth in with mathematical precision and very little effort, just from the way she moves. But for the first time, he can see the other, perhaps more dangerous thing: Jyn as a sixteen-or-so-year old somewhere in the desert, freckled and dirty with eyes lined dark against the sun and a gun in her hand. This woman was raised on guerrilla warfare and could probably disassemble an automatic rifle before he’d ever even touched one, and was building bombs before that. Where he has survived most of his life without really meaning to, she fought for it at every turn, and came out alarmingly unscathed. She doesn’t look nervous, not even to him.

He has never doubted that she knows what they’re doing, how dangerous it is, but if she’s afraid, she’s hiding it better than he is. It seems almost laughable that Kay thought she might not be up to this – Cassian is pretty sure if either of them will mess this up, it’s going to be him.

They should be afraid of you, he thinks grimly.

Her green eyes find his, clear and bright like steel. There’s the hint of a smile playing around her lips, a feral thing that clashes with her soft sweater and neat eyeline. “We should go,” she says, her voice quiet and firm, and hands him the phone back. He knows that look on her face – it’s what he’s been chasing for so long now, that fight that isn’t all desperation, that isn’t blind panic. But hope.

Still, before he hits ‘send’ on his reply to Kay, he offers: “Last chance.” He knows the answer, but the selfish part of him has to try.

Again that wolfish smile. She shakes her head. “I’m good. Let’s go.”

“Alright. Let’s see what your dad left you.”

It’s more for the benefit of passers-by than actual conversation, but he can hear a touch of something else laced through his voice. Maybe it’s a bit of a Hail Mary, really – that her father kept his promise.

That, if he’s putting her life in the hands of a god who has failed him at every turn, it will at least be worth something.

[ruby-red-inky-blue]

Sneak for Chapter 41

“…Kay?”

“Oh good, you do recognise me,” Kay says snappishly and puts down the file he was reading.

“Where’s… Luke?”

“The boy that was sitting here? He was annoying. I sent him away.” Kay pulls a face. “He made me call the pilot before he would leave.”

“What’re you doing here?” Cassian manages, though slightly croaky. He sits up a little and reaches for the glass of water on the bedside table.

“I came with Draven. I told her. I told her to tell you.”

He decides not to address the tone with which Kay speaks of ‘her’, or point out the fact that none of that answered his question. “Draven still with the Federales?”

“No. He went to get her statement. He’ll be back for yours next. I offered to do it, but since I was implicated, he wouldn’t let me.”

“He’s inte – she barely got any sleep, he can’t –“

“He said you would say that, and he said to tell you to be grateful he isn’t arresting her to do it properly.”

Cassian scoffs. “Arrest her? On what grounds?”

Kay throws him a sharp look. “Well, purchase and use of false identification, if nothing else. Multiple ones.”

“Since when is that the DEA’s job?”

His partner sighs. “He’s already there, and you know he should be. So drop it. That nurse told me not to upset you.”

“Which nurse?”

“The one who left you that,” Kay says, pointing at something on the bedside table.

Cassian slowly turns his head and finds a cherry red rosary curled into a little heap on the tray with his breakfast on it, the cheap ones they sell in church shops and on markets.

He frowns. If this is a message, he doesn’t get it. “Some nurse is trying to save my soul?”

His partner shrugs. “Apparently. Again, play nice, I do not want her to try and save mine.”