Sometimes it's all you can do. Cassian ripped the final pieces into strips and looked up at her, somberly nodding. A crinkle of a laugh for 'Beany'—mentally confirming the embedded fact: when we left Coruscant.
He threw the strips into a pile and doused them with oil. Unceremoniously, only with enough care not to smother the fire, Cassian threw the strips one at a time into the flames. They flared and changed color as the strips caught, crackling and curling. Flames in his eyes, Cassian wanted to reach for Jyn's hand… but what had become the only fact in his mind stayed his own.
"…I didn't live on Yavin alone," he said at last. Fair was fair. "I was sort of married. We were on-and-off-again for years. At last, she left me. That was for the best."
So far, everything he'd told her had been new information, or at least filling out context for the odd shred of background she had managed to coax from him before. She hadn't done anything like this fact-trading with him then. There wouldn't have been much of a point, when he already knew the details of her life and she hadn't wanted to press for his. Out of all she had learned over this past little while, though, this was the first thing to bring Jyn up short, leaving her suddenly grateful for the distance between them and the crackle of the fire masking the slight catch in her breath.
Why hadn't she known this? Why did it matter? It didn't change anything that had happened between them here, and it wasn't as if she cared that he'd had previous relationships. Something about it, I was sort of married, left her feeling unsteady anyway, even less sure of where they stood than she had been moments ago.
As usual, it was her instinct to mask vulnerability with a sharp retort. She had to physically bite her tongue to hold back the response that threatened to follow: You were married here, too. It wouldn't have been fair to take this out on him, for him to find out something so big in such a flippant way, when she hadn't even actually told him that they had been together.
"'Bout a year and a half ago, a train derailed out at the edge of the city," she said instead. "I was stuck inside. Piece of metal debris through my shoulder." She gestured toward the once-injured shoulder in question, then began adding her own scraps of fabric to the fire. "I still feel it sometimes, when it's damp like it was today."
The feeling of new distance between them at his fact made him wish, stabbingly, that he hadn't said it. But, again, fair was fair; all the more reason he had to. Get such things out of the way. If they were going to go anywhere he wanted to go, and hope she did too, it had to be honest and transparent. They were being very ambitious, though, doing this so fast. It was so hard not to.
He decided to step it back, be more of a mirror to her pace. This one was easy, even as he winced at the thought of her being so hurt—nightmare fuel, at how easily, again, she could have died.
"I was shot in the shoulder," he said, commiserating. "I also still feel it sometimes. It didn't heal on its own… a Force-healer helped me. Which drove me crazy because…" So much for mirroring, here came the real fact: "I was raised not to trust Force users. Or really believe in the Force. Not that it cared or took sides."
Jyn thought she remembered having seen a scar there, though it had been so long now that she wasn't sure if that was a product of her imagination and this new fact she had been given. That, too, made her somewhat uneasy, though less so than a moment before. She just didn't like not being certain of or able to trust her own memory. After years, though, of course some details were bound to have blurred around the edges, while others were as vivid as if they'd never been separated.
The important thing now was that, whether she actually recalled having seen any sign of that wound or not, the accompanying story was a new one. It was a tidy segue into a fact she could give, too, one that she knew wouldn't have been included in any Alliance dossier on her.
"The last words my mother said to me were 'Trust the Force,'" she replied, fingers idly brushing the cord at her neck. The kyber crystal that hung from it sat below her shirt; tied beside it was the ring she had been given the day she got married, as was custom here. "She believed in all of that. I never really did. Right after she said it, she went and got herself killed for no good reason, so."
Again, so much he wanted to ask, suspecting she wouldn't have even said this much without knowing he wouldn't.
One thing that fact did show was how even more heroic it had been for Jyn to tell the others, May the Force be with us. Cassian looked at her with a fire that wasn't reflection.
He thought he wouldn't mirror this time. A fact about Maarva might seem to be competing. But of course, now all he could think about was…
"My father—adopted father—was lynched by Stormtroopers," he said. "Also for no good reason. He'd been trying to calm down rioters, instead they blamed him for their actions. They hanged him in the town square. In my dreams, I keep him from getting involved. I keep him on the side street with me."
This fact, once again, stole the breath from Jyn, made her stomach lurch uneasily, though for entirely different reasons now. Maybe it was selfish, to hear something as weighty as that and think of herself. She knew from experience that an argument was nothing next to such a loss. She still didn't believe she was entirely wrong in the point she'd been making. That didn't change the fact that, wounded, she'd wanted to wound him too, turning words into a weapon and stabbing with them, not knowing exactly what she would be striking but that it would be likely to do a good amount of damage.
She hadn't known this, then. She hadn't even known it when they talked about it before. That conversation, like so, so many they'd had, was faded in her mind now, something that she remembered happening but in no detail. It didn't matter anyway when it wasn't one she'd had with him.
"I'm sorry," she said, fully turning toward him, her eyes glassy in the firelight. Saying so like this may have been a departure from the format of the game, but it was still true, a fact of a different sort. "For what I said to you. After Eadu. I didn't even really... I wanted to say the worst thing I could think of. I didn't know. About that."
Eyes locked with hers, Cassian leaned forward, elbows onto his knees, shaking his head and reaching out his hand. Past the uniform burning before them. "No… no… I understand. I'm so sorry for what I said to you. It still haunts me, things I said. So what you said…" He knew what she meant. You might as well be a— "Thank you, but I understand. I understand, Jyn."
Exhaling slowly, Jyn rested her hand in his offered one, fingers curling gently around his. "I don't think that about you," she said, still holding his gaze. She wasn't good at this, mostly because she'd never had much of a chance to get experience with it, but it was worth trying to find the words with him. "I didn't even think it then. I want you to know that."
She would have wanted him to know it anyway. This new information she'd been given about his past just made it that much more important. "I guess neither of us was at our best then."
Brown eyes fixed on green eyes, Cassian nodded with all the weight of agreement. Not letting go of her hand, he reached down with the other and picked up his own tunic, the one he'd lived in for much longer than their joint mission, stained with his blood and Krennic's blaster. He didn't tear this one apart. Hefting it once, he threw it in one piece, still folded, onto the flames. As an afterthought, he dumped some of the remaining oil after it.
"Fact," he said. "…Is it okay to talk about your father?"
With her hand still in his, Jyn turned her gaze toward the fire again, watching the fabric blacken and fray. Again, she thought that there was something oddly comforting about it, and not just because she knew the clothing to be what he'd died in, the trousers, now scraps, Imperial. She wasn't sure what that said about her, but at least they were doing this together. At least, no matter what came next, he was here at all.
"Yeah," she answered after a moment, nodding, the motion slight but sure. With him, there was nothing she could or felt the need to keep off-limits, least of all when he was being so open with her. "It's okay."
He felt the same way. He hoped he wasn't about to push it too far. But he felt she had a right to know what he'd seen.
"On Eadu. On that platform. When I had your father in my sights. I saw it all at once. How your story made sense and ours didn't. How you were right that extraction would be so much worse for them than assassination. …How you and he have the same eyes." Not that that should have been a factor, but it had been there.
"Then I saw the Man in White kill the rest of the science team and strike your father down. Why would he have done that, but to make your father's last moments filled with despair?"
(It was no comfort to Cassian that, between the Alliance bombers and Krennic's blaster, Galen Erso would have died then no matter what. The fact remained it had been the Alliance that killed him and Cassian hadn't been able to stop it.)
"I saw you and him at the last and saw the look on his face. You gave him hope.
"It doesn't make up for how it went down, how we betrayed you, but I know: you didn't fail him. You transformed his last minutes from despair to hope. That means so much. That can be everything. You saved him. I know because it's what you did for me."
Jyn listened as he spoke, taking in this information with as much care as she had anything else he'd told her thus far. The overall facts of it were less new this time; she'd been there, after all, on Eadu, saw the other bodies and the Man in White surely about to kill her father.
What she hadn't known was how close it had been when Cassian decided not to pull the trigger, that he had changed his mind before the Alliance ships dropped their bombs and rendered that decision null. For that matter, it was news to her that he'd seen the two of them in those last moments. She half-remembered Cassian dragging her away from her father's body, but she'd been out of her mind with grief and confusion then, unable to think clearly enough to connect those dots. A little while later, it had sunk in that he'd come back for her and taken such a risk in doing so, even after she was no longer strictly needed for the mission. In the haze of everything else, it had been hard to appreciate that in full.
"I didn't save anyone, Cas," she murmured, glancing over at him, taking in the way the light from the flames illuminated his features. "I didn't even know what hope was until you reminded me." At the time, she'd thought it sounded utterly ridiculous. That she learned otherwise in time to help anyone else was because of him. "And my father... Well, fact: I spent most of my life hating him. For leaving. For going with them. I had a whole list of things I'd call him in my head. Coward, bastard, traitor... I don't even know if those were wrong."
Cassian accepted the correction… and didn't, because he knew what he'd seen on Galen's face through the blastershots and bomb fire; but he wouldn't try to speak for anyone else any further. Definitely not for Jyn herself.
So, in acquiescence, Cassian went for: "Fact. …I'm just gonna call my adopted parents 'my parents'. They're the ones I knew. So: My parents had a droid with a stammer."
Jyn smiled a little at that, both for the thought of a droid with a stammer and the similarity between them inherent in his statement. She, at least, remembered her parents, for better or for worse, but she'd spent most of her life trying to distance herself from them, from the fact of her identity. It wasn't a one-to-one comparison, but there was some connective tissue there, something she could understand even if their lived experiences weren't quite the same.
"Fact: I can get that, sort of. Saw was more of a father to me than my actual father was. I thought of him as one. He called me his daughter. He wasn't exactly the nurturing sort, but... I do think he did the best he could, for a while."
Of course, then he'd left her, too. That was the only constant in her life: people leaving.
The first thought in Cassian's head, of course, was but he left you too…
But who was he to talk? He'd chosen to leave Maarva. Not once but many times. He'd chosen to leave Kerri—he just hadn't known it would be for good. He'd left Bee.
He'd apparently left Jyn…
A pain struck him and, somewhat against his better judgment, he couldn't stop himself from saying, "Is this a good game? Or do you know everything I'm telling you already?"
Whether it was rational or not, Jyn felt a stab of guilt at that. She should have told him as much outright instead of leaving him to wonder. None of this came with any sort of guidebook, though. The very idea of it — meeting someone again, starting from scratch after having known them before — ought to have been impossible. All she could do was fumble her way through it and hope she didn't do any irreparable damage.
He may have told her that she could tell him anything without worrying that he would leave over it, but it wasn't as if she could blame him if that changed.
"I don't," she answered, looking up to try to meet his eyes so he would know she was telling the truth. "I would tell you if I did. I never wanted to... to push you to tell me anything. This is new."
He wondered what that said about the other him.…No, no, don't start thinking that way. That way lay madness. He tried to put it out of mind.
"Okay," he said, running his thumb over hers in the flickering light. "Thank you."
So, it was his turn again. He tried to think of something and not worry about it being something the other him would or wouldn't have already told. Just be in the moment. Here and now, in front of the fire, holding her hand. The trousers were proving recalcitrant but were blackened and curling. The tunic had all-but burned away.
"There was a short time when Kaytoo became fascinated by organic humor and insisted I tell him jokes."
"Of course," Jyn murmured, easy and almost without thought, focusing more on the way his thumb brushed against her skin than what she was saying. As far as she was concerned, there was no reason for him to thank her anyway. It was the only thing that made sense. Anything else would have been too dishonest, too unfair. Lying wasn't generally something that caused her discomfort, but as so much else, it was different with him. She had never wanted so much for someone to know her, and never been so afraid of being known.
She smiled faintly at this new fact, tucking it away with the others. It was one more thing she hadn't heard before, and yet, brief as her acquaintance with the droid had been, she could easily imagine that of Kay.
"You know now I'm going to want to hear some of those jokes," she pointed out, although that wasn't a fact in keeping with the game. Between this one and the mention of his parents' droid with a stutter, she had what seemed like a decent one in mind, a detail that seemed unlikely to have made it into any file. "When I was really little — mostly before I can remember — we had a nanny droid, Mac-Vee. I think I spent more time with him than either of my parents. He didn't make it off Coruscant with us, either."
And I didn't even try to bring Bee with us off Mina-Rau. He didn't want that to be his fact.
A nanny droid was a fascinating choice, after the event in Jyn's file with Separatist droids. Maybe Galen and Lyra Erso had been trying to override the bad memory of droids with a good one. On the other hand, it was just common practice on Coruscant. It could go either way. Cassian was glad he wasn't called upon to judge the Ersos. (As he had before and fouled it up.)
He'd been trying to think of something light-hearted, and abruptly failed. He bit his lip, trying to resist, then gave up. Honesty.
"I've been in prison twice. The first time, when I was thirteen to when I turned sixteen. The second time, it was an Imperial facility. I was there much shorter because we broke out. They would have never let us go."
Perhaps there was some irony in Jyn, who had been in prison more than twice, being so struck by this fact. Thirteen was so young, though, younger even than the approximately sixteen she'd been during her first stint in prison, and three years was such a long time. Her heart ached for the boy he must have been, the childhoods that were stolen from both of them. With as emotional as the day had been and as raw as she felt, she had no doubt it was written all over her face when she looked at him.
"I have so many things I want to ask you," she admitted. That wasn't the game, though, and in spite of every instinct that told her to do otherwise, she let herself hope that they would have time to eventually circle back and discuss some of these subjects in further depth.
"I'm not actually sure how many times I've been in prison. I do know that I would have died there, if the Alliance hadn't broken me out." Six months into a twenty-year sentence, in a place where people didn't tend to live more than two years. That was easy math.
Their joined hands threw dancing shadows in the firelight.
"We can change the rules whenever we want," said Cassian with a small smile. To prove it, he cleared his throat and started on—"Kay's favorite joke.
"A crew's separated from their ship and make camp in a field. The captain wakes them in the middle of the night. She says, 'Look up at the stars. What do they tell you?' "The navigator says, 'We are currently near the equator.' "The ambassador says, 'Their constellations reflect a matriarchal mythology.' "The pilot says, 'The universe is larger than one being could ever explore.' "The mechanic frowns at all of them and says, 'That somebody stole our tent.' "
After a pair of matched facts that were so heavy, the joke and its levity were a welcome change of pace. Jyn didn't try to hide her smile, or the soft fondness in her eyes that no one but him had ever brought out of her so effectively. If it weren't for everything else — how absurdly complicated this all was, how utterly draining the day had been — she thought it might well have been a romantic moment, trading deep personal truths and jokes while holding hands by the fire. She couldn't let herself go down that road, though. Just this was enough, and so much more than she ever thought she would get to have again.
"I can see why that's his favorite," she said, laughing quietly. "It's a good one." She wished she had a joke she could offer him in turn, but she couldn't think of any. "Does that count as a fact? Is it my turn or yours?"
Rules or lack thereof be damned, she wanted to hear whatever he saw fit to tell her.
It was so good to see her laugh. She looked so wonderful, here in the firelight, free and safe and smiling. I wish you the universe.
"It was my job," he said, (Fact,) "before Melshi and Kay extracted you from Wobani, to build a profile on you. Even though we had all your files, some physical details had got lost.
"When I finally saw you in person, most details were right but I felt in some intangible way I'd gotten you completely wrong. And one tangible thing. From the amount of damage you've caused others, we assumed you'd be tall. I loved that you were short."
Belatedly, his face flushed. "I don't know if that really counts either."
"That I'm short?" Jyn echoed, laughing again, soft and amused in her incredulity. With practically each moment that passed and each word exchanged, it felt as if the odds of her surviving this without getting her heart broken again diminished substantially. Not for the first time today, and probably not for the last, either, she told herself that the smart thing would be to give herself some distance, to sever this attachment before it could take root again. She had forgotten how good it felt to be around him, though, easy and right.
In a way, it felt like coming home. It shouldn't, and yet she savored it, warmth suffusing through her.
"When I was young," she said, another fact of her own, "right around the time I realized I wouldn't be getting much if any taller, I hated being so short. Hated that people would look at me and just see a scrawny little girl. Saw taught me that being underestimated could be a strength, and how to use it to my advantage."
"I had that," said Cassian, the same warmth in his eyes, "for being scrawny. I was never going to bulk up, be broad and muscular like my friend Brasso. But Saw's right. I thought fewer people would mess with me if I looked intimidating, but some people mess with you because of that. It helped to be secretly…"
His voice died because the real end to that sentence
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He threw the strips into a pile and doused them with oil. Unceremoniously, only with enough care not to smother the fire, Cassian threw the strips one at a time into the flames. They flared and changed color as the strips caught, crackling and curling. Flames in his eyes, Cassian wanted to reach for Jyn's hand… but what had become the only fact in his mind stayed his own.
"…I didn't live on Yavin alone," he said at last. Fair was fair. "I was sort of married. We were on-and-off-again for years. At last, she left me. That was for the best."
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Why hadn't she known this? Why did it matter? It didn't change anything that had happened between them here, and it wasn't as if she cared that he'd had previous relationships. Something about it, I was sort of married, left her feeling unsteady anyway, even less sure of where they stood than she had been moments ago.
As usual, it was her instinct to mask vulnerability with a sharp retort. She had to physically bite her tongue to hold back the response that threatened to follow: You were married here, too. It wouldn't have been fair to take this out on him, for him to find out something so big in such a flippant way, when she hadn't even actually told him that they had been together.
"'Bout a year and a half ago, a train derailed out at the edge of the city," she said instead. "I was stuck inside. Piece of metal debris through my shoulder." She gestured toward the once-injured shoulder in question, then began adding her own scraps of fabric to the fire. "I still feel it sometimes, when it's damp like it was today."
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He decided to step it back, be more of a mirror to her pace. This one was easy, even as he winced at the thought of her being so hurt—nightmare fuel, at how easily, again, she could have died.
"I was shot in the shoulder," he said, commiserating. "I also still feel it sometimes. It didn't heal on its own… a Force-healer helped me. Which drove me crazy because…" So much for mirroring, here came the real fact: "I was raised not to trust Force users. Or really believe in the Force. Not that it cared or took sides."
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The important thing now was that, whether she actually recalled having seen any sign of that wound or not, the accompanying story was a new one. It was a tidy segue into a fact she could give, too, one that she knew wouldn't have been included in any Alliance dossier on her.
"The last words my mother said to me were 'Trust the Force,'" she replied, fingers idly brushing the cord at her neck. The kyber crystal that hung from it sat below her shirt; tied beside it was the ring she had been given the day she got married, as was custom here. "She believed in all of that. I never really did. Right after she said it, she went and got herself killed for no good reason, so."
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One thing that fact did show was how even more heroic it had been for Jyn to tell the others, May the Force be with us. Cassian looked at her with a fire that wasn't reflection.
He thought he wouldn't mirror this time. A fact about Maarva might seem to be competing. But of course, now all he could think about was…
"My father—adopted father—was lynched by Stormtroopers," he said. "Also for no good reason. He'd been trying to calm down rioters, instead they blamed him for their actions. They hanged him in the town square. In my dreams, I keep him from getting involved. I keep him on the side street with me."
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She hadn't known this, then. She hadn't even known it when they talked about it before. That conversation, like so, so many they'd had, was faded in her mind now, something that she remembered happening but in no detail. It didn't matter anyway when it wasn't one she'd had with him.
"I'm sorry," she said, fully turning toward him, her eyes glassy in the firelight. Saying so like this may have been a departure from the format of the game, but it was still true, a fact of a different sort. "For what I said to you. After Eadu. I didn't even really... I wanted to say the worst thing I could think of. I didn't know. About that."
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She would have wanted him to know it anyway. This new information she'd been given about his past just made it that much more important. "I guess neither of us was at our best then."
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"Fact," he said. "…Is it okay to talk about your father?"
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"Yeah," she answered after a moment, nodding, the motion slight but sure. With him, there was nothing she could or felt the need to keep off-limits, least of all when he was being so open with her. "It's okay."
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"On Eadu. On that platform. When I had your father in my sights. I saw it all at once. How your story made sense and ours didn't. How you were right that extraction would be so much worse for them than assassination. …How you and he have the same eyes." Not that that should have been a factor, but it had been there.
"Then I saw the Man in White kill the rest of the science team and strike your father down. Why would he have done that, but to make your father's last moments filled with despair?"
(It was no comfort to Cassian that, between the Alliance bombers and Krennic's blaster, Galen Erso would have died then no matter what. The fact remained it had been the Alliance that killed him and Cassian hadn't been able to stop it.)
"I saw you and him at the last and saw the look on his face. You gave him hope.
"It doesn't make up for how it went down, how we betrayed you, but I know: you didn't fail him. You transformed his last minutes from despair to hope. That means so much. That can be everything. You saved him. I know because it's what you did for me."
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What she hadn't known was how close it had been when Cassian decided not to pull the trigger, that he had changed his mind before the Alliance ships dropped their bombs and rendered that decision null. For that matter, it was news to her that he'd seen the two of them in those last moments. She half-remembered Cassian dragging her away from her father's body, but she'd been out of her mind with grief and confusion then, unable to think clearly enough to connect those dots. A little while later, it had sunk in that he'd come back for her and taken such a risk in doing so, even after she was no longer strictly needed for the mission. In the haze of everything else, it had been hard to appreciate that in full.
"I didn't save anyone, Cas," she murmured, glancing over at him, taking in the way the light from the flames illuminated his features. "I didn't even know what hope was until you reminded me." At the time, she'd thought it sounded utterly ridiculous. That she learned otherwise in time to help anyone else was because of him. "And my father... Well, fact: I spent most of my life hating him. For leaving. For going with them. I had a whole list of things I'd call him in my head. Coward, bastard, traitor... I don't even know if those were wrong."
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So, in acquiescence, Cassian went for: "Fact. …I'm just gonna call my adopted parents 'my parents'. They're the ones I knew. So: My parents had a droid with a stammer."
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"Fact: I can get that, sort of. Saw was more of a father to me than my actual father was. I thought of him as one. He called me his daughter. He wasn't exactly the nurturing sort, but... I do think he did the best he could, for a while."
Of course, then he'd left her, too. That was the only constant in her life: people leaving.
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But who was he to talk? He'd chosen to leave Maarva. Not once but many times. He'd chosen to leave Kerri—he just hadn't known it would be for good. He'd left Bee.
He'd apparently left Jyn…
A pain struck him and, somewhat against his better judgment, he couldn't stop himself from saying, "Is this a good game? Or do you know everything I'm telling you already?"
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He may have told her that she could tell him anything without worrying that he would leave over it, but it wasn't as if she could blame him if that changed.
"I don't," she answered, looking up to try to meet his eyes so he would know she was telling the truth. "I would tell you if I did. I never wanted to... to push you to tell me anything. This is new."
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"Okay," he said, running his thumb over hers in the flickering light. "Thank you."
So, it was his turn again. He tried to think of something and not worry about it being something
the other himwould or wouldn't have already told. Just be in the moment. Here and now, in front of the fire, holding her hand. The trousers were proving recalcitrant but were blackened and curling. The tunic had all-but burned away."There was a short time when Kaytoo became fascinated by organic humor and insisted I tell him jokes."
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She smiled faintly at this new fact, tucking it away with the others. It was one more thing she hadn't heard before, and yet, brief as her acquaintance with the droid had been, she could easily imagine that of Kay.
"You know now I'm going to want to hear some of those jokes," she pointed out, although that wasn't a fact in keeping with the game. Between this one and the mention of his parents' droid with a stutter, she had what seemed like a decent one in mind, a detail that seemed unlikely to have made it into any file. "When I was really little — mostly before I can remember — we had a nanny droid, Mac-Vee. I think I spent more time with him than either of my parents. He didn't make it off Coruscant with us, either."
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A nanny droid was a fascinating choice, after the event in Jyn's file with Separatist droids. Maybe Galen and Lyra Erso had been trying to override the bad memory of droids with a good one. On the other hand, it was just common practice on Coruscant. It could go either way. Cassian was glad he wasn't called upon to judge the Ersos. (As he had before and fouled it up.)
He'd been trying to think of something light-hearted, and abruptly failed. He bit his lip, trying to resist, then gave up. Honesty.
"I've been in prison twice. The first time, when I was thirteen to when I turned sixteen. The second time, it was an Imperial facility. I was there much shorter because we broke out. They would have never let us go."
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"I have so many things I want to ask you," she admitted. That wasn't the game, though, and in spite of every instinct that told her to do otherwise, she let herself hope that they would have time to eventually circle back and discuss some of these subjects in further depth.
"I'm not actually sure how many times I've been in prison. I do know that I would have died there, if the Alliance hadn't broken me out." Six months into a twenty-year sentence, in a place where people didn't tend to live more than two years. That was easy math.
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"We can change the rules whenever we want," said Cassian with a small smile. To prove it, he cleared his throat and started on—"Kay's favorite joke.
"A crew's separated from their ship and make camp in a field. The captain wakes them in the middle of the night. She says, 'Look up at the stars. What do they tell you?'
"The navigator says, 'We are currently near the equator.'
"The ambassador says, 'Their constellations reflect a matriarchal mythology.'
"The pilot says, 'The universe is larger than one being could ever explore.'
"The mechanic frowns at all of them and says, 'That somebody stole our tent.' "
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"I can see why that's his favorite," she said, laughing quietly. "It's a good one." She wished she had a joke she could offer him in turn, but she couldn't think of any. "Does that count as a fact? Is it my turn or yours?"
Rules or lack thereof be damned, she wanted to hear whatever he saw fit to tell her.
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"It was my job," he said, (Fact,) "before Melshi and Kay extracted you from Wobani, to build a profile on you. Even though we had all your files, some physical details had got lost.
"When I finally saw you in person, most details were right but I felt in some intangible way I'd gotten you completely wrong. And one tangible thing. From the amount of damage you've caused others, we assumed you'd be tall. I loved that you were short."
Belatedly, his face flushed. "I don't know if that really counts either."
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In a way, it felt like coming home. It shouldn't, and yet she savored it, warmth suffusing through her.
"When I was young," she said, another fact of her own, "right around the time I realized I wouldn't be getting much if any taller, I hated being so short. Hated that people would look at me and just see a scrawny little girl. Saw taught me that being underestimated could be a strength, and how to use it to my advantage."
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His voice died because the real end to that sentence
(Morlana One)
was …deadly.
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