Summary: Cassian Andor remembers Fest. The snowflakes on Hoth taste wrong.
Notes: Written for Day 1 (Favorite Character) of Spacelatinxs Week on Tumblr.
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The Taste of Snowflakes
by Artemis1000
Cassian loved the way snowflakes on his face made him feel.
He tilted his head back, let snowflakes catch in his eyelashes and melt on his lips. If he weren't huddled in a heavy, hooded coat, his dark hair would be capped with a thick layer of white by now.
His tongue darted out and licked away the molten snow.
The taste jarred him out of his tranquility, it returned the familiar scowl to his face.
Hoth's snow tasted wrong.
Cassian opened his eyes. Standing at the top of the mountain, he had a breathtaking view on untouched white spreading out far below him. White, nothing but white and above it a grey sky promising more snow and storms.
It was beautiful, like something out of a fairy tale for ice planet boys like him. But it was all wrong.
There shouldn't be untouched white as far as the eye could see, and what nature there was should not be endless windswept plains dotted by the occasional mountain. It should be all rugged mountains and dizzying gorges like knife wounds stabbed into the landscape – terrain too rough and wild to ever be tamed and covered with duracrete streets or skyscrapers.
His comrades thought he liked Hoth because it looked like Fest. They couldn't have been more wrong.
When people heard ice planet they thought of something impoverished and quaintly low-tech, some snowy twin to rural planets like Tatooine.
It was true the Empire cracked down hard on them for their defiance, but densely-populated, urbanized Fest's heart beat to a different rhythm. When Cassian thought of Fest, he thought of a maze-like pattern of streets snaking through a labyrinth of skyscrapers – a thousand hiding places, a thousand crannies for ambushes, and well-hidden secret paths or sewer shortcuts which had helped the streetfighters turn Fest into a nightmare for every army that tried to hold it with tanks and guns.
He also thought of voices blurring together into something so familiar that he ached with the absence of it sometimes when he sat in the mess hall of Echo Base, or of food that smelled like home before you had even taken the first bite. It was never quite the same when he tried to recreate it with the generic ingredients provided on rebel bases scattered among the stars. But Cassian Andor was a soldier first and foremost, and to a man like him the greatest comfort of home was to know all the best places to stage an ambush.
On Hoth, Cassian felt dangerously exposed – and the snow still tasted wrong.
He resolutely turned his back on the picturesque wilderness and focused on the communicator array he had to set up.
Work went quickly, he had spent all his life doing delicate tasks wearing the thick, insulated gloves which other Rebels had scoffed at and likened to welding gloves. They weren't. Cassian had scoffed right back at their complaints.
A Wampa's roar echoed in the distance, soon followed by another.
Night would fall soon, it was time to return to base before the icy storms became so unforgiving that even his thick coat couldn't protect him against the cold anymore.
Cassian let his gaze linger on Hoth's untouched wilderness.
It wasn't Fest. It would never be Fest – would never be home – and the snow tasted wrong.
Yet icy winds whipped at him with every step he took, and snowflakes clung to his lashes.
It wasn't Fest. But it would do until the war was won, and the soldier could return home.