Tasia Merro has never had any allusions about what life would be like as an intelligence operative for the Rebel Alliance. She knew it would be difficult and dark. The ones who thought the life of a spy was glamor and glory and witty one-liners were quickly weeded out of the training pool for Rebel Intelligence. Tasia, who'd grown up in the Core on a world that had once been the heart of Republic and had become staunchly Imperial in the earliest days of the Empire, knows from long experience that any glamor associated with the Empire was only a thin façade hiding the rot underneath.
None of that — not her knowledge, not her training, not her repeated mantra that she could handle it — had prepared her for the hammering blow that was her first failed mission.
She'd made it through the debrief, but while walking back to her quarters she'd caught sight of the dried blood under her fingernails. It had all come rushing back to her, burning through the numbness that had carried her from Rivel back to Yavin 4. The smell of blood in her nose, the staticky charge of blaster fire, cooling flesh under her fingers. Brown eyes staring in empty shock at the smoke-filled sky.
She doesn't remember how she ended up here, pressed in a darkened, abandoned corner of a room overlooking the jungle, her arms curled around her knees and her face damp.
The soft scrape of boots on stone jerks her to awareness and tells her she's not alone.
She looks up to find a man standing in the door. As he shifts into the light, Tasia recognizes him immediately. Captain Cassian Andor, notorious in Rebel Intelligence for his unswerving loyalty, cool demeanor, intense appraisal, and seemingly undaunted ability to accomplish his mission whatever the obstacles. She'd never spoken to him, but she'd heard the stories during her training and on base.
He'd been at her debrief, Tasia remembers. Though he hadn't said a single word, she remembers seeing him watching her from the back of the room. She'd been distantly proud to have not broken down in front of him.
Look at me now, she thinks miserably. She can't meet his gaze; she doesn't want to see disappointment in the eyes of the man she'd wanted to be since she joined the Rebellion.
She wipes the tears away with angry movements, then starts to push herself to her feet. If she's about to get a dressing down, she'd prefer to do it with a little dignity.
But the captain holds up a hand and gestures her back down. Warily, she settles back against the cool stone. Wariness turns to shock when Andor slides down to sit next to her.
She watches him from the corner of her eye, but he isn't looking at her. She expects him to begin speaking, but he doesn't, instead staring quiet and still out over the green foliage stretching out to the horizon.
Slowly, Tasia feels herself begins to relax. The warmth of another person at her side, someone who's there but not expecting anything from her, is soothing. The weight around her heart feels just a little bit lighter.
They sit is silence for a long time, long enough that Tasia is able to let her mind drift, finally calm her racing thoughts, and think of nothing for the first time in days. The oppressive jungle heat serves as a blanket that makes everything feel slow and the buzz of insects and birds in the wild just beyond the temple's boundaries is a soothing white noise.
The sun slowly slips down the sky, leaving only the glow from the gas giant Yavin itself to cast dusky shadows across the jungle. This is when Captain Andor finally speaks.
"I could tell you that it wasn't your fault," he says. His voice is low, sliding softly into the evening stillness. "I could tell you that there was nothing else you could have done. I could tell you that you pulled a partial success from a complete failure, and that that's nothing to forget."
Tasia turns to look at him and finds him watching her. The light of the gas giant casts soft reddish shadows across his face.
"But in the end," he says, "it doesn't matter what I tell you. Or what command tells you. Or even what the Council tells you. Because in the end, the only person who has to live with what you've done, is you."
Tasia can feel a sudden tightness in her throat. Andor watches her for a long moment, then turns back to the jungle, but there is something softer in the cant of his body. Like he will welcome questions if Tasia asks.
She turns his words over in her head.
He's right, she thinks. More right than anything anyone else has said to her. Telling herself that she'd succeeded in part of her objective, telling herself that the death had been necessary, telling herself that it had been the only option… none of that mattered in the face of having to live the rest of her life with those choices.
It feels… good… to have someone else say it.
"Does it ever get easier?" she asks.
"No," he says without hesitation. "It gets harder."
She glances over at him, but he's staring into the distance. The look in his eyes is an echo of the tight pain Tasia feels around her heart.
"How do you handle it?" she asks.
He blinks and looks over at her. For a long moment, she thinks he won't answer.
"Find something that helps you live with it," he says finally. "Something that makes it worth it."
She thinks about her family. Her parents and the tense, late-night conversations they had every time another of her mother's colleagues from the university had disappeared without explanation. She thinks about her sister, who'd grown up wanting to save lives and now found that dream smothered under the Imperial "greater good." She thought about the folded flag sitting on the mantle instead of her brother, killed in a "training accident" and not enough left to bury.
They were why she fought.
And maybe, when the war was over and the Empire destroyed, she could finally go home and see them again.
That would make what she does for the Rebellion worth it.
She nods.
"I can do it," she says.
"I know," he says.
Tasia's feelings are still a hurt ball inside her chest, and she doesn't expect that to go away for a long while. She doesn't expect it to ever go away, if she's honest. But she feels, in this moment, that she might be able to handle it.
She looks over at the captain, but he's returned his gaze out over the forest. His expression is complicated and she suddenly feels like she's the one intruding on a personal moment.
Quietly and carefully, she picks herself up. She's nearly out of the room completely before he speaks again.
"Lieutenant Merro?"
She turns and looks back at him.
"The day it gets easy," he says, "the day you can look someone in the eye, someone that trusts you, and pull the trigger without regret. That's the day you stop."
His dark eyes are intense. Tasia feels like they're reaching into her soul, stripping away the masks and seeing her for who she truly is. Still sitting braced against the wall, he looks smaller than the legend that she still sees in her mind, but there's a hardened fire there that makes his words feel like they're spoken from the Force itself.
Mouth dry and a sudden chill down her spine, she can only nod.
When he looks away, she feels like a great weight has been lifted from her and she lets out a shaky breath.
As she walks away, she wonders how the captain lives with what he's done. And if he can.