Archive of Our Own

The first priority was getting off Ferrix, away from prying Imperial eyes and ears.

The wisdom of what to do next did rather start to break down after that. There’d always been a danger in traveling, away from the security of the shop, but it was a mundane sort of vulnerability until now. Having one of the most wanted men in all of Imperial space – and that only because the Empire thus far had little apparent luck identifying Luthen himself – did cast a different sort of shadow on their second flight from the planet.

Andor watched him like the hunted creature that he was. A cornered wariness, and never mind that he’d backed himself into it all on his own. The weight of what he’d offered fully sinking in, perhaps, he hardly seemed the type for second-guessing.

He’d initially thought to rendezvous with Vel and Cinta, start formulating the next step, but Andor’s surrender both negated and complicated the need for that conversation.

There could be no moving forward without a thorough discussion with Kleya. A discussion sure to veer quickly into heated argument, and he admittedly struggled to organize the best approach to counter the easy surety of her conviction.

A discussion that could not be held in clever code, and he didn’t dare comm in again until after the whole array had undergone a thorough refitting. Which meant he needed to return to Coruscant before Kleya’s nerves escalated into drastic action after their interruption over Segra Milo, after the reports started trickling in from Ferrix.

And there was Andor – eyeing him like some haunted, hunted thing.

Luthen readied the jump manually, without reactivating the mod to full capacity. A lesson well-learnt from Aldhani, though there would be no repeat of these past weeks’ frantic worrying.

Andor would be theirs, or he would be dead. As offered. Still – there were better ways to be going about it than waltzing him into their base of operations with a whole welcoming fanfare.

The starlines stretched into the hypnotic swirl of hyperspace and Luthen sighed as he spun the chair. Met those wide, searching eyes for a moment, rose, and jerked his head towards the aft end of the ship. “Come.”

Andor rose and followed. Softly, at Luthen’s back, he spoke the first words since offering up his death or his life. “I kept my end of the deal.”

Just as quietly back, damningly, Luthen replied, “I know you did.”

Andor let out a breath that might have even been relief at the tacit confirmation that the vast sum of money he’d left in Vel’s hands on Frezno had, indeed, made it to the intended destination.

Left unspoken were the hanging questions: what if Skeen hadn’t survived to make his pitch, tip his hand? What if Nemik had died before the detour? What if this, if that, if circumstances had conspired just so and brought Andor to the natural end-point of the operation – was he ever meant to walk away with his promised money?

“I broke the rules,” Luthen found himself justifying – as close as he’d find his way towards an apology. “I was desperate; wanted it too much.”

Andor glanced pointedly around the small galley where Luthen nodded him down onto a bench. “And now?”

He took his time in answering. Stalled with digging out some rations packs, the mednog. Andor wasn’t carrying any obvious hurts, but he accepted the quick swig of the foul stuff without hesitation before eyeing the proffered rations somewhat dubiously.

Not suspicion over Luthen’s motives, or he’d have rejected the drink before the sealed foodstuffs. The weight of the day’s horrors, grief of his mother’s death, the constant adrenaline spike of the stalked, any and all of the above stunting his appetite. Still – “When’d you last eat a proper meal?”

“Proper?” Andor echoed, a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, some secret amusement in the question. But he took the hint and took the package. “About forty days, I suppose.” A rather specific response to a mostly rhetorical question, and Luthen settled himself on the bench along the opposite wall in the cramped space, studying his impromptu travel companion closely. He withdrew a strip of leybin jerky and began the rather tedious process that was tearing a bite-sized chunk of it off with his teeth.  

“Well, I suppose it’ll be more like forty-one, then,” Luthen conceded, earning a wry snort from Andor. “Have you been cowering in a hole in Ferrix all the while?”

“Does it matter?”

The Andor with whom he’d fled the first time would never have dared show the raw emotion now warring across his face, and it suggested the answer well enough. He’d been too late. Just in time to see his mother’s self-eulogy. Possibly. “Where were you today?”

Around the jerky stuck in his teeth, Andor told him flatly, “Cowering in a hole.”

From which he’d obviously spotted Luthen staking out the hotel. “I’m sorry for Ferrix.”

“Are you?”

“I am; but the Empire needs to learn that the galaxy is willing to push back. Change won’t come through polite petitions and Senate inquiries.”

“Will it come through eighty-million stolen credits?”

Luthen huffed out a laugh, braced his hands on his knees, and pushed slowly back up to standing. Exhausted, still coming down off his own adrenaline from the riot, the explosions, the intruder aboard his ship. “It’ll help, anyway.”

Through the funding itself and the brutal response to the theft, he did not elaborate. The effect of the latter assuredly outstripping that of the former.

He didn’t bid Andor to follow, and he stayed put. Luthen returned to the cockpit to check on their progress before grabbing the medpac from the shelf by the retractable wall he’d very nearly revealed to Andor before the mod’s silence caught up to him.

Taking a minute to game out a bad option amidst a host of bad options, he sighed and secreted away an item from the bottom of the kit in the same pocket holding Andor’s Bryar.

Back at the galley, he hovered in the doorway and watched Andor suck down a hydration pouch, toss it in the disposal chute with the empty jerky packet, and take a moment to lean against the counter and pull a couple of deep breaths.

“Now get yourself cleaned up,” Luthen instructed him, waiting until he turned and nodding across at the cramped cabin, the attached washroom. “You smell like detonator powder – and you have glass in your hair.”

It wasn’t until Andor stripped down and disappeared to shower, until Luthen was going through the scant things he’d come aboard with, that it caught up to him – Andor smelled like detonator powder, and had glass in his hair.

He’d been closer to the cascading explosions than Luthen himself had. And neither he nor the whole of the ISB team of hunters had spotted him.

Time for answers was not on his side, priorities being what they were. He found a spare jumpsuit in a stash intended for an aborted mission drop that would do for the moment. Simple and nondescript, albeit a far cry from the layers the man seemed to prefer, armor against the Ferrix chill, armor against a hostile galaxy.

He laid the outfit on the bunk, trusting Andor to take the hint, and returned to the cockpit to pull them out of hyperspace. A manual command to the mod had them on their landing course, and by the time he returned to the cabin, Andor was sealing up the collar of the suit. Luthen took in his scraped and blistered feet as Andor sat to tug his socks back on, but he waved him off when he reached for the boots. “You won’t be needing those for now.”

A morbid sort of a smirk settled over Andor’s face, sitting there on the edge of the bunk. “Have you decided then? Which it is to be?”

He’d fed him, dressed him, offered him meds and a wash – if summary execution it was to be, it was certainly shaping up to be a gentle one.

“I broke my rules because I wanted Aldhani,” Luthen repeated quietly. “And now? Now I want you.” A slow brow crept up Andor’s forehead. “I’m not at liberty to make that call on my own. I have an associate in deepest confidence – if she will not budge in this, I won’t go against her.”

“And, uh,” Andor’s tongue darted out to wet his lips. “And the rules?”

“Do you remember them?”

“I’m not going to change my mind.”

Never carry anything you don’t control. Andor wasn’t his, wasn’t theirs, when he’d ferried him to Aldhani in his desperation. Whatever Luthen might have hoped the mission would bring forth from deep within him.

Now…

Kleya wouldn’t trust it, so it didn’t much matter what Luthen believed. Still – he withdrew the drowser hypo from his pocket, turned it over, and pointed out, “The second one presents the greater complication.”

Build your exit on your way in; in this case, his exit strategy from Kleya’s ire, should he find himself unable to talk her down and around.

Keeping Andor’s exposure limited to the ship he’d already seen. No names, no places, no faces – and no possibility of running, fighting, creating a scene, should negotiations go sideways.

If Andor’s death was the inevitable outcome of the conversations ahead, the least Luthen could offer, after everything, was a merciful end.

Andor watched him from the bunk, that look of wary prey about him once more but offset by calculation, staring at the hypo, following the trajectory of Luthen’s logic.

When a minute passed and he didn’t speak, didn’t move, Luthen stepped into the room, came slowly to loom by Andor’s side. “Are you going to fight me in this?”

Andor stared up at him for a long moment, eyes flickering over his face. “Suppose you win. Alliance, Sep, guerilla – whoever, whatever winning looks like.” Luthen didn’t move, watching and feeling for any tension before instinct won out and had Andor panic at his proximity, the hypo in his hand, the threat of the unknown; on the contrary, he relaxed his shoulders and steadied his breathing. “How many do you think survive? Hm? One in a hundred? In a thousand?”

It wasn’t so simple as that. As was assuredly true of all of history’s great conflicts, the weight of the burden would be unjustly imbalanced, born the heaviest by those whose suffering was already greatest. Plenty would wield the advantages of privilege and stand back until a clear victor proved imminent; more still would carry on uncaring, so long as their own lives and livelihoods remained unthreatened. The notion of government of little interest beyond how much it demanded of them in taxes.

Ferrix had by and large enjoyed such an envious position within the greater galactic concern, until recent events. And he was sorry for it, in his way. However much the people needed waking.

The best answer he could conjure to Andor’s question was a quiet promise of, “Not us, you can rest assured.”

Andor accepted that, tipped his head and bared his neck. He winced only slightly at the bite of the hypo, and slumped against the hand preventing him from cracking his skull against the bulkhead.

x---x

It was difficult to faze Kleya, and even harder to identify those times when she was, but finding her awake in the shop in the dead of night glued to the radio was a pretty significant tell.

She’d have heard the alert when the Fondor pinged the code for the landing berth, and at least restrained her nerves enough not to storm the ship immediately upon its arrival. Which gave Luthen time to put the finishing touches on his costume and never mind the late hour.

One final glance at Andor laid out on the bunk and looking deceptively peaceful in his slumber, Luthen shut him in and sealed the cabin.

“Well, you haven’t torched the place,” he commended her as the lift opened behind the workroom. The sound of the radio drawer clattering shut was her only response and he braced himself as he came around the corner.

Sure enough – “I told you not to go.” And then she backtracked, “What happened over Segra Milo?”

“Standard patrol. Comm jam.” She stared, brows creeping up her forehead until he conceded, “We’ll want to swap out the chip log and comm array just to be safe.”

“What have you done?”

“A great many ill-advised things for which you’ll be sure to castigate me in due course.”

The frustration faded away as quickly as it came on. Kleya sighed and set about tidying a last corner of the work station where she’d clearly been attempting to funnel her restlessness to good use to little effect. “I’m glad you’re safe.” He hummed, acknowledgement, assurance. “Vel’s already sent up a flag. I don’t know what to tell her. If Andor was foolish enough to go back to Ferrix before, he most certainly isn’t now. We’ve no other leads.”

Luthen cleared his throat. “Tell her to stand down. Mission’s done.”

She opened her mouth, ready retort on her lips – and then read something on his face and hesitated, considered him another moment. “It’s done? You found him?”

“Ehh…”

“And the body?” He thought about Andor in his drug-induced slumber back on the Fondor, and Kleya straightened, cautious wariness settling in her expression, and repeated her earlier question with a new underlying dread in her tone. “Luthen, what have you done?”

He jerked his head back towards the lift. “He’s here.”

“And…?” He blew out a heavy breath. “And? What? You want to leave his body on the ISB’s doorstep, what?”

“I want to bring him in.”

“You’ve already done that, apparently!”

But Luthen shook his head. “No, Kleya. I want to bring him in, properly. Into the circle.”

The audacity of that drew her up short. A far cry from recruiting an unknown quantity for a job more like as not to be a suicide run; a far cry from their sprawling web of scavengers happy to take a paycheck without asking questions that ran deeper than simple logistics. The way she stared at him, she clearly thought he’d lost his mind.

And if he were anyone else, she’d be wondering right at this moment if she wasn’t being played. “Luthen…”

“He found me, Kleya. Watched his mother’s funeral, watched his home devolve into a riot well on its way to a massacre, and came to me. Got the drop on me,” he elaborated, admitted.

“Luthen.”

“Gave me his weapon and gave me a choice. I told him that choice wasn’t mine alone to make.”

She set to nervously pacing about the workroom while she fought to reconcile this about-face. Luthen just stood and tracked her progress, let her work it through. “Even if – even if – he could be trusted, he’s a liability.”

“Yes.”

“They know his name, his face, his connection to you.”

“Yes.”

“You should have shot him at first opportunity and left his body in the Ferrix dust.”

He tipped his head consideringly. “Maybe so.” She threw up a hand, desperate to understand. Admittedly, he hardly did himself. “He gave us Aldhani, Kleya. He gave us Aldhani, and we thanked him with a price on his head.”

“Then he shouldn’t have run!”

“Would we find ourselves in an altogether different place today, if he hadn’t?”

Taking the meet had been the original mistake, knowing Pre-Ox Morlana were on to Andor.

From there – if this, if that, if Andor might have been willing to make the leap were it not for the incident on Frezno – it was difficult to envision a fundamentally different dilemma to the one facing them in this moment.

Would he have had it in him to put Andor down upon receiving Lonni’s information, if Andor had already committed to the cause?

They’d been hiding too long. The calculations, where the benefit of the risk outweighed the need for secrecy, would need to change sooner or later. An inevitable consequence of moving so boldly.

Kleya rubbed tiredly at her face, let some of the tension and ire bleed out of her posture. “He’s on the Fondor?”

“Sedated and locked in. Doesn’t know where he is, my name, this face.”

“Can I speak to him?”

“I won’t wake him for a debrief and a knife to the throat; if there’s no changing your mind, we’ll kill him and be done with it.”

She worked her jaw and took another lap of the workroom, and another. As she passed him by the second time, she pointed out, “Vel was never happy about the idea.”

“Well, I daresay she gleaned something of his character through it all.”

“Maybe we should take him to her, then.”

“You’re stalling.”

“He shouldn’t be here, Luthen! Whatever the outcome.”

“How do you figure that?” She stopped all at once and turned to stare at him, brows furrowed. “He’s the only link they’ve got. If they find him now, they’ve found us, and without his help. There’s no better place for him to be.”

x---x

Cassian drifted on the edge of dreams and reality as he came to, until he came to enough to remember the events of the past few days, at which point he jolted into wakefulness with an altogether unwelcome rush of clarity.

Of course, waking meant his host’s associate hadn’t decided to execute him in his sleep, so it wasn’t all bad, however much such a fate would certainly be a mercy kill at this point.

The door was open, and he could hear faint sounds echoing back from the cockpit, the clanging of metal-on-metal. Another rehydration pouch sat on the shelf at the head of the bunk, so he sat up and sucked it down while he tried to parse through whatever new game was at hand.

The sounds continued after he finished the drink and crumpled up the bag. So he dragged himself to standing on his aching, stocking feet and noted that all of the scant personal items with which he’d come aboard had vanished. No surprise there, really, though he hoped some of the things might make their way back ‘round to him if his stay of execution extended any significant length of time.

Cassian slipped into the washroom, splashed cold water on his face, took a minute to study his haggard reflection, and went off in search of his host.

Except the pair of boots extending across his path belonged quite decidedly to somebody else, somebody stretched sideways across the deck of the cockpit staring up into an open panel under the portside console. He watched her tighten something, slap a hexspanner down on the deck, and then she shifted her attention long enough to jerk her head towards the pilot’s seat and tell him, “Hand me the micropoint, would you?”

He obliged and then settled in to wait while she did whatever fine tweaking on the comm wiring. The indifferent inattention an act, a test, call it what you would, but he just took the opportunity to do what he’d do anyway and glean any information about his surroundings.

Outside the cockpit, there was precisely no information, apparently parked in an enclosed berth. Nothing except duracrete walls illuminated by the dim glow of the emergency panels.

The cockpit itself he knew well enough, and he did note that the droid mod had been brought fully back online. A glance at one of the panels suggested it was running a diagnostic in tandem with whatever fixes or adjustments were being made.

Probably for the best, he couldn’t imagine the thing was particularly pleased with him.

The woman finished affixing the last panel into place and slid forward enough to sit up and grab a cloth from the chair. “Hello, Cassian Andor.” She wiped at her hands thoroughly, efficiently, eyes never leaving his face. “Excuse the mess.”

He watched her climb gracefully to her feet, toss a wave of dark hair over her shoulders, and lean against the console she’d just finished working on to mirror his posture. She was younger than he might have expected, much younger than her so-called associate. “Where’s your friend?”

“Upstairs, working. His day job,” she elaborated with a darkly wry twist of her lips. “The drowser wore off hours ago.”

“You could have woken me.”

“You certainly seemed to need the sleep.” It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t go looking for one. And sure enough – “What is it that you want?”

“Right now, or… more broadly speaking?” A cool brow arched slowly up her forehead, utterly unimpressed with his cheek. “I want to be useful; whatever that looks like.”

“And if it looks like killing you to be certain the ISB doesn’t get its hands on you?”

“Well, then I’d want you to make it quick.”

“So noted.” She tapped her fingertips idly against the console, assessing him, and then nodded towards the back of the ship. “Want some caf?”

And so he found himself back in the galley, nerves winding tighter as he struggled for purchase against the woman’s continually shifting demeanor. Politely curious one moment, generous and accommodating the next, interspersed with none-too-subtle reminders that the best service he could provide for this budding rebellion was a hasty death.

But she did give him a sweet roll that didn’t come out of a field rations pack, filled with some kind of jam from a fruit Cassian had never tasted before, and it struck him all at once, the fate he’d been slated for. Eating paste from a tube until the work claimed his body or his mind, day after day, year after year.

He sipped at the tin mug of caf that might’ve been made fresh and not from the quick powder more likely to be found in the ship’s stores – or maybe his taste buds would require some more time to appreciate anything more nuanced that the presence of actual flavor. And he asked the woman sitting across from him at the table she’d folded down from the wall, “Have you heard of Narkina 5?”

“It’s been mentioned in government bulletins for the past three or four days.” The question sparked some measure of genuine curiosity in her though, by the way she tipped her head consideringly and mused, “There seemed little appetite for pushing that news out to the HoloNet.”

Cassian shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.” Not surprising, maybe. The balance between getting the word out about escapees, against surely wanting to avoid pointed questions or scrutiny. “I was there.” She shook her head, uncomprehending. “That’s what you want, right? To know where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, who I’ve been talking to? About,” he waved demonstratively around the galley, the ship, “this, about Aldhani… I went home. Fought with my mother, fought with Bix. Left to find somewhere comfortable to hide from the Empire, from you,” he glanced towards the ceiling at whatever work was supposedly happening upstairs, “from your friend. Got rounded up on Niamos under a fake name.”

“You’ve been in prison.” He grunted his acknowledgement. “The ISB tore Ferrix apart looking for you, and the Empire already had you.”

“Maybe it’s a little funny, you put it that way.”

She wasn’t laughing as she demanded, “Does Luthen know that?” His brows pulled down; she blinked, and then sat back and schooled her face as she remembered herself, but it was too late, another rule broken. Pushed out that much further on the ledge, his balance wobbling precariously as her nerves rose in response to the slip. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

She reached somewhere in her cloak and tossed the manifesto on the table between them.

Another pocket produced a blaster, which she leveled at his chest. “That’s Nemik’s,” she twitched the barrel down in a vague gesture at the leather case. “Let you keep a rallying cry for open revolt in prison, did they?”

“I stashed it with the credits. Went back.”

“Convenient. Where’s the money?”

His frustration was at least outweighed by an incredulous sort of hysteria, that this should be what damned and condemned him. “Gave it to a friend.” Left it in his coat pocket really, something to offer them any hope of a chance once they reached Gangi Moon.

No sense carrying it with him to confront his hunter; even if he didn’t kill him, he’d already given the man and his cause eighty million credits.

They sat there like that for a long time. No proof Cassian could conjure, no one to corroborate the story, what if it’s just us?

He hoped idly, somewhere in the back of his mind, that Melshi had found what he was looking for. Found somebody to listen.

Heavy steps echoed up the ship’s ramp, cut into the silence, and a gruff voice broke the impasse. “Glad this seems to be going well.”

He turned and looked – at Luthen, apparently. Found a wholly different image framed in the doorway than the one he’d last seen as he slipped into a med-induced sleep, and it at least distracted from the weapon in his face, taking in the hair, the jewelry, the flowing overcoat and burgundy suit, comfort over function right down to the soft slippers on his feet. “What are you supposed to be?”

“Hm.” He didn’t even spare a glance in Cassian’s direction, some silent conversation with his partner, its inevitable conclusion written in the press of Luthen’s lips, the hard set of the woman’s eyes. “So be it.” Cassian didn’t think he was imagining the reluctance in the man’s eyes, his stiff movements, when he finally turned to meet his steady gaze. “Would you have chosen differently on Ferrix, knowing this outcome?”

A curious question. Stalling, though for what Cassian couldn’t say, considering the weapon already pointed point-blank at him. Not her burden though, he supposed, however eager she seemed to see the deed done.

Perhaps Luthen’s own twisted sense of honor to see it through personally. Broke the rules and broke them again. Cassian considered his justification, desperation for Aldhani and Now I want you, and couldn’t help but wonder, “Would it make it easier? If I said yes?”

It might have even been regret that flit across the man’s face as he pulled Clem’s Bryar from the folds of his robe. “Perhaps,” he conceded, and Cassian didn’t miss the sharp look his companion shot him.

Cassian let out a slow breath and turned his gaze to Nemik’s manifesto.

Easier to put down an unwilling prey than to stare into someone’s eyes and see your own convictions reflecting back at you as you pulled the trigger.

His promise to Bix had always been an empty one, something to get them moving, to offer whatever small comfort in the wake of her ordeal. He’d known then the likeliest outcome of his detour across the wasteland was a quick death, and the one awaiting him now promised to be kinder than the one he’d envisioned as he went in search of the haulcraft’s hiding place.

Still – the grief managed to push through the numbness that settled in somewhere between hearing Maarva’s last words echoing out over the square and changing the plan up on Brasso, shutting the last pieces of his heart on Pegla’s ship and sending them off with the thought that at least they’d be safer without him.

And it occurred, if he was sincere in his conviction, to serve the cause as best he could alive or dead – he did have one last thing to offer before the end. “There is something you should know. About Bix.”

“We know about Bix,” Luthen told him quietly, with a look that told him well-enough they’d assumed her dead since Paak’s body went up in the square weeks ago.

Cassian shook his head. “The ISB has a man – she called him Gorst, but her memory…” Luthen looked quickly to the woman and then back to Cassian, the Bryar still held loose in his grip, incomprehension written across his features. “They called it interrogation but it’s just torture. Effective torture. She couldn’t explain it, not in words – at least not ones that made sense. She wasn’t… right.”

“Andor?”

“They’re looking. Know your methods, know about the games with the bribes. They showed her a holo that she said wasn’t you, but she couldn’t remember if they told her a name.”

“She’s alive.” He swallowed around the lump in his throat and nodded.

A progression of complicated expressions shifted over Luthen’s face not wholly dissimilar to the visible calculations he’d undergone upon receiving Cassian’s offer, his death or his life in service. Something to use and use up to whatever end, something he could control.

“You went in and got her. Your own mother’s funeral as cover, all eyes on the street…you were inside the hotel.”

“…yeah.”

An incredulous laugh slipped from Luthen’s lips before he shook his head in defeat, dropped the pistol unceremoniously on the tabletop and looked at his partner. “Kleya,” he prompted, simple, chiding.

She lowered her weapon and shoved back to climb to her feet. “On your head be it,” she snarled at Luthen as she stalked past.

Cassian hovered there in halting uncertainty while they listened to the quick clip of her heeled boots across the haulcraft’s decking until it faded off down the ramp. “She’s mad because she knows I’m right,” Luthen told him in the ensuing silence. “Come then, quickly, before she changes her mind.”

Part of him had expected to be ferried off again, handed off to some intermediary like Vel, away from whatever homebase they operated out of, whatever front it was they put on. Tucked away in some obscure hideaway while they monitored the fallout from Ferrix, taught whatever methods to their madness, forged into whatever Luthen next needed him to be, his skills already well-apparent, Aldhani its own high-stakes job interview.

Instead, he led him off the ship, through the dim berth and past a set of doors that slid apart upon their approach with a quick wave of Luthen’s hand. A small box of an entryway on the other side led to a lift on his right and another set of doors ahead, which parted as the first closed behind them.

“Get comfortable,” Luthen told him, hovering back while Cassian took in the space. Something cold in it, the sharp lines and edges, the bright white of the walls and gleam of metallic fixtures. Something detached, unnatural, in the careful design of the geometric patterns in the flooring, the sharp corners extending deeper into the apartment. The pristine order of the foyer before him, not a thing out of place, no sign of habitation or hobby, not so much as a decorative plant. “No telling how long you’ll be stuck here. Hopefully a gentler prison than the one you’ve apparently just escaped.”

Gentler, maybe; aesthetically, not altogether different. “You were listening,” he surmised.

“Rule number three – what Kleya knows, I know, and the other way ‘round. You’ll have no secrets here.”

Easy enough to read the deeper implication – he’d have no secrets at all, not now, not anymore. Not least given how unsettlingly expansive Luthen’s knowledge of his life was even before they met. The full accounting of his time since they parted ways on Aldhani sure to come due soon enough.

He thought about the lift, about Kleya’s reply, upstairs working, glanced over Luthen’s updated accoutrement, and pointed up at the ceiling. “And up there?”

“Not your concern.”

Cassian supposed rule number four could be left unsaid – there would be no rebuttal, no pushback, to Luthen’s instructions, his word the law.  

Rules might be made to be broken, but he had the strong inkling that Luthen only made such allowances for himself.

“And… where are we?”

A small chuckle and Luthen beckoned him onward, past the next partition wall to where the apartment opened up into a more functional living space, a few more signs that anyone actually occupied the place. An empty mug on the long counter separating the kitchenette. A datapad sitting on the low table in front of the sofa.

Daylight spilling in from a high and narrow window that extended across the length of the far wall. Luthen gestured him over with a gracious wave of his hand. “Have a look and see.”

Few places were identifiable on sight, if one were not already familiar.

Coruscant was one of those places, and Cassian felt the breath leave him all in a rush at the scale of it, the scope, just from this one quick glimpse. More people flitting across his line of sight in ships and speeders in ten seconds than occupied all of Ferrix.

He felt more than heard Luthen’s approach until he came to hover at his side, follow Cassian’s outward gaze. Once he shook off the morbid fascination at the brutality of the thing, the city forced to constantly consume itself in the quest for more, he turned and took in Luthen’s impassive stare out the window, eyes fixed at some distant point in space and time

“You wanted to be brought in,” he murmured, “and here you are, in the very belly of the beast.” He shook himself out of whatever reverie and spared a sideways glance. “Would you have chosen differently on Ferrix?”

But that? That was the wrong question.

Was it easier to condemn the innocent, collateral damage, cost of war, than to toss a single willing martyr on the pyre?

Was it easier to cut off a loose end with a shot through a scope than to see true conviction reflecting back at you in the moment you pulled the trigger?

“Would it make it easier? If I said yes?”

Because the choice he’d offered Luthen was no choice really at all. Death by his hand, or death at his behest, and one of those options assuredly the kinder one.

Luthen turned his gaze back out the window and did not answer.