Sorry this one took so long! I've been chipping away at other bits of the story ahead of time, trying to explore the relationships I want to communicate early on.
AN: I will be referencing one of the missions Ben mentioned in the previous chapter, so I hope you were paying attention!
Anyway, I hope you enjoy!
3 BBY
GEONOSIS
Cassian abhorred disguises. He hated the insinuation, like he couldn't just blend in as himself, like his own identity hung in the balance. Like each time he donned another's skin and then shed it, he would not be the same person.
What he hated most, though, was Imperial disguises, particularly the one he wore now. It had been procured through disreputable means before they had arrived on planet. If anything, he thought it made him more conspicuous. The officer's uniform was so inflexible, he might as well have been wearing a straightjacket. It afforded him nothing resembling a full range of motion, and as he crossed the hangar, he felt as if even his long strides were hindered. The fabric seemed to be airtight as well. Geonosis winds gusted sand and warm air into the hangar, and under all his stiff layers of clothing, Cassian was beginning to sweat. The rough grey material chaffed at his neck.
"Why do Imperials have to put so much damn starch in their collars?" he grumbled, tugging at the abrasive fabric.
"To keep their inflated heads from rolling off their shoulders," the voice said in his right ear. He grinned, but quickly straightened his face at an odd glance from an Imperial pilot. He nodded as officiously as he could and continued across the hangar. Somewhere behind him, Ben sat concealed—albeit grudgingly—in a Lambda-class T-4a Imperial shuttle. She would mark his progress and provide a quick escape route if necessary, though they hoped to get in and out without setting off any alarms. The comlink channel was secure from this distance, even here in the heart of Imperial territory. They had made sure to triple check that. Ben had thought it was all a bit of overkill, but that was mostly likely due to the fact that she was being left behind.
"Come on," he heard her mutter as he reached the door. "We can take them all if we do it together. I can set a diversion elsewhere—"
"That's not going to fly."
"Why not?"
"Because I know." He stopped just inside the door and glanced down the hall before walking on. His words were greeted with an irritated silence. "This isn't just one of our usual blue milk runs," he went on, trying to move his lips as little as possible. "This is central Imperial territory. We need to take all the precautions."
"What's the point, anyway? What's so important about these files we have to find?"
"The General wouldn't say, but it seemed pretty important to him." Cassian stopped as unit of stormtroopers passed by him. "Personally," he continued when they were beyond earshot, "I think he's just paranoid."
"Takes one to know one."
"Dirtball."
"Nerfherder."
Cassian stifled the smile this time as he turned the corner and started down a different hallway. Behind him, he heard another set of footsteps. He glanced over his shoulder to see a man in a uniform much like his own, eyes latched onto a datapad in his hands. When Cassian turned his head back to the front, he saw second man rounding the corner at the other end of the hall. Blue eyes. Salt-and-pepper hair. Crisp white uniform. His stomach dropped.
No. It was not possible. For just a heartbeat, he was in another place. Dark and wet and cold. His flesh screamed. His bones were melting. His mind was on fire. There was no escape.
What was he doing here? Cassian whispered as much as he ducked into the nearest open doorway.
"What are you talking ab—No, not in there!"
"I know what I'm doing." He caught a fleeting glimpse of scrap metal, piled up all over the place before pressing himself against the wall.
"That door locks from the outside, Fulcrum."
"So I won't let it close," he rasped under his breath. He glanced upwards to a small blinking red light in the corner. No camera, just a sensor. His lifted his gaze further still to see a distant square of sky where the ceiling should have been. A disposal point? The room stank of rust and battery acid. This must be where droids came to die.
"Why are you even hiding?" came the voice. It was oddly short-winded.
Because he knows my face, Cassian wanted to say. A cold sweat was beginning to leech into his clothes.
"What was the point of getting you that disguise if you're not even going to use it?" She really did sound out of breath.
Is she doing push-ups in there? Cassian wondered vaguely, but kept his mouth shut.
The two sets of footsteps halted right outside the doorway.
"Lieutenant Commander Krennic." That was the man in grey.
"Sergeant Cohl." The second voice sent shivers up his spine. "You have secured the plans, then?"
"Yes, sir. They have been extracted and sent off-planet. They will be halfway to base by now."
Which base? Cassian wanted to scream. Which base?!
"Excellent." He paused and sniffed. "What is this door doing open? It reeks."
"My apologies, Commander." A few short beeps and the door hissed shut, plunging the room into darkness. The only living inhabitant stood frozen against the wall as the footsteps outside faded away.
After a moment the voice spoke in his ear. "What the hell was that?" Cassian clenched his hands into fists to keep them from shaking.
"Krennic," he whispered to the darkness.
"…Sweet mother of the Void…" the voice exhaled. He didn't dare to say anything. "The files?"
He shook his head, knowing that she could sense it even though she couldn't see it.
A heavy pause. "We have to abort the mission."
Cassian allowed himself a humorless smile. "About that…"
"What?" said the voice in his ear.
"You any good at picking locks?"
This pause was much more exasperated. "You let the door close, didn't you?" He could still hear a faint breathlessness in her voice.
"HEY!" the shout filled his ear, causing the comlink to squawk.
"Who was that?" Cassian hissed.
He heard only the crackle of interference on the other end. He tapped the comlink.
"Ben?" he tried again, mentally kicking himself for using her name.
Nothing but static.
His heart began to sink. He started looking frantically around the room for something, anything, that could help him get out. His eyes flitted over a plethora of mechanical arms and legs and heads, before resting on one body that seemed remarkably intact.
It was a KX-series security droid, slumped against one wall. The symbol of the Empire was branded onto each dark grey shoulder in white paint. A control panel on the back gave it a hunched appearance, and antennas jutted up from between the buttons like spiky appendages. The barrel chest was connected to the hips by a slim abdomen. Its long and spindly limbs were slack, resting on the ground at odd angles. With legs like that, Cassian estimated it would stand at about seven feet tall. A few metal vertebrae sufficed as a neck, running from the broad shoulders to the underside of the flat-bottomed jaw. Two light receptors were set into the rounded metal head like some pretense of eyes. They were dark, probably had been for a while. Slouched over like it was, with its head lolled to one side, it looked like a child's toy that had been thrown into a corner and forgotten.
Not knowing what else to do, he stepped over to the droid and started pushing buttons on the control panel. Nothing. He cursed under his breath, mind racing. He couldn't hear it, but somewhere inside that gray skull, the little metal parts began to whir.
Suddenly, he heard the garbled voices of two stromtroopers as they turned down his hallway.
"There. The scrap room. That's where the motion sensor went off."
"Anything in there that could have triggered it?"
"Just parts, mostly. Except for one. Powered it off ages ago. Kept glitching all over the place and mixing up where to put cargo. Do you know, at one point I had to sort five power packs out of a case of five hundred grenades? Five hundred."
"Unbelievable."
The door to the room slid open, flooding it with light once again. A stormtrooper stepped in.
"I can't imagine what could have set it off, but—" He was interrupted by a single blaster fire that blew through his back and straight out of his chest. Crouched to one side of the door, Cassian watched him fall facedown.
A burst of static in his ear. "Not the quickest draw in the galaxy, was he," she said.
"No." Cassian straightened, eyeing the prone form on the ground. "No, he wa—." He froze. "Wait. What happened? How did you know that?" Another burst of static as the comlink shorted out again.
"I watched the whole thing," came a garbled voice behind him. He spun around to see another stormtrooper standing in the doorway. It put its hands up and twitched to one side as he lifted his blaster and fired. The shot glanced off the shoulder, leaving a blackened semicircle in the white armor and a smoking hole in the wall.
"Son of a—" The trooper tore the helmet off.
The girl underneath glared at him with piercing hazel eyes. Tawny hair was plastered to her forehead. Scars laced the left side of her face. Shallow crevices in the skin, like the faint impression of streams flowing over the smooth terrain, long since run dry. One streambed reached the edge of her mouth. One brushed around the corner of her eye, cutting a path through the middle of her left brow. The rest tangled in the hollow of her cheek, winding jaggedly over jaw and down neck. The left ear had suffered as well, the upper cartilaginous curve split nearly in half. She usually kept it hidden.
"Ben," Cassian hissed, glancing into the hallway behind her before pulling her into the room. "What in the blue blazes are you doing here?"
"Saving your ass."
"I told you to stay on the ship—"
"Well I thought it was boring, and you were in trouble. No brainer really."
"By the authority of the Empire," said a calm, tinny voice behind them, "I command you to surrender yourselves now."
In all commotion, they had not noticed the droid come to life and stand up. It loomed against the wall, its light receptors twitching from one face to the other. In the darkness, they emitted twin beams of light. Cassian swallowed hard. His height estimations had certainly been accurate.
Ben's eyes widened. "What did you do?"
"What was I supposed to do?" he shot back. "I was stuck in here."
"Surrender yourselves now," the tinny voice repeated.
The towering droid took an arthritic step forward, rust raining from its knee joints. Without hesitation, Ben slipped around behind it and launched herself at its back, still wearing the stormtrooper armor. It turned around, rotating its head to and fro as if wondering where the girl had gone. She began pushing button after button on the panel. It only seemed to make the droid mad. It began to twitch and spin around, trying to shake her off.
"Sod it," Ben said through gritted teeth. She grabbed the metal plate on the back of the cranium and pried it off, reaching a hand immediately inside. The droid's head jerked back reflexively, smacking her squarely across the left temple. The blow almost threw her off, but she held on by the hand that was inserted into the droid's head. After a moment, she redoubled her efforts, wrapping her legs around its narrow hips. The droid spun and twisted, trying desperately to fling off its unwelcome passenger.
Cassian had a hard enough time avoiding being hit by the flailing limbs, metal or not. He had no chance between ducking and rolling and dodging to help the girl as she clung doggedly to the droid's back.
With a yell, Ben finally succeeded in yanking a tangle of wires out place. The back of the droid's metal skull spat sparks into her face as the light faded once again from the two receptors. The knees buckled and the metal frame toppled backward towards the wall, bringing Ben down with it. They hit hard, metal scraping flesh scraping concrete. Despite the clamor of the droid's body, Cassian swore he heard the back of her head as it cracked against the stone.
Ben was on her feet in a heartbeat. She still held the wires in her closed fist, a chaos of blue and red and yellow and pink. A small gray box gathered the opposite ends into a neat and colorful twist of rope. Effectively, the brain, and its nerve endings. They stood there for a moment, panting, listening for any sounds coming down the hall. When nothing happened, they glanced at each other.
"We need to get out of here," Cassian said between breaths. Ben tilted her sweaty head to one side.
"Aw, really? I was just getting comfortable here." She bent over the droid as he rolled his eyes and began fiddling with the back of its head. After a moment, he realized she was reconnecting the wires.
"What the pfassk do you think you're doing?"
"We're taking him with us."
"I'm sorry, what?"
"I said we're tak—"
"No."
"Cassian—"
"No!" He pulled her up into a standing position, looking her straight in the eye. "First of all, it's not a he, it's an it. Second of all, it is dangerous. Or have you forgotten what happened a moment ago?"
She nudged the head with her foot. It rocked limply to the side with a hollow clank.
"Looks pretty harmless to me."
"Ben—"
"Cassian!" She spun on him suddenly, excitement blazing in her hazel eyes. "Think about it! A reprogrammed Imperial droid? Think of the places we could sneak into! With something like that"—she waved the black box toward the pile of metal on the ground—"no Imperial base is off limits. We would be invisible."
He looked at the lifeless droid. One last spark sputtered from the back of the head. He looked back at Ben. Her cheeks and nose were peppered with spark burn. Redness was quickly spreading. Blood dribbled from the fresh cut on her temple, tracing out the network of crevices on her cheek, like those dried streambeds had been revived in red. Whether from that blow or the crack to the back of the head, she looked dazed in her fervor.
Fearing the worst, Cassian reached up a hand and gently pulled the skin beneath her right eye down to get a good look at her pupil. She immediately flinched and slapped the offending finger away. Not gentle enough. She held a hand up, palm close to her reddened skin, hardly daring to touch it herself.
"Sorry." He dropped his hand. "Ben, reprogramming a droid is difficult, especially when it wants you dead or captured." He watched her move her hand from in front of her face to the back of her head. It came away bloody.
"It won't be a problem." She said with a grimace, then wiped her hand on the white trooper armor and looked at him again, her face a mask. No pain. "What have we ever tried that we couldn't accomplish together?"
Cassian knew there was no use in arguing, not when she had already chosen a side. He flung his arms wide in resignation and then placed his hands on his hips. "Then how do you propose we get it back to the ship?" Perhaps that would dissuade her from carrying out this ludicrous scheme.
She grinned, unperturbed. "I have an idea." She glanced down at the stormtrooper on the floor and then back up at him, still smiling. "Are you ready to do things my way?"
Ten minutes later, a bomb went off somewhere inside the base. Everywhere, sirens began to wail. (So much for not setting off any alarms, Cassian thought to himself.) All available forces were called inside to secure the area and investigate the damage. A few moments after the blast, two stormtroopers and a K-2SO unit walked out of the base, and into the emptying hangar.
No one paused long enough in their rush to see that one of the troopers was significantly shorter than the other, or that the short one had a smear of red on its white armor and a stream of it coming from beneath its helmet, or that the taller one had a hole punched through his chest, or even that the K-2SO unit lurched slightly to the right every few steps, loose wires poking from the open back of its skull.
"Bucketheads," the shorter one gibed as more troopers jogged past in the other direction.
"You're a buckethead, Ben," said the taller one.
"So are you, White-hat." There was a Delta-class T-3c Imperial shuttle just ahead of them, its hatch already open. They walked quickly toward it, the taller one shooting down the black-armored guards that stood on either side of the boarding platform, the shorter one glancing behind in case of followers. Lieutenant Commander Krennic would later emerge from the base and wonder who had killed his guards and taken his shuttle.
"The-the base is under atta—under attack," said the droid, the words halting and inflected in all the wrong places. "All units must report—units must report to the left quadrant-ant-ant-ant and await ord—await orders." Once Ben had more or less plugged his brain back in, he had been cognizant enough to recognize the stormtrooper masks they wore. He followed commands like a well-trained dog.
"Those orders aren't for us," said Ben as she guided him up the walkway and onto the ship. "C'mon, you rusty bag of bolts." She sat him down on the floor as Cassian removed his helmet, stepped into the cockpit, and started powering up the shuttle. Ben closed the hatch and pulled off her own helmet. "Suffering Siths," she swore. "We're gonna have to program some of this obedience out of you." The shuttle began to lift from the ground as she bent over the droid's open skull.
"The Emp-Empire—the Empire will exterminate all—exterminate all efforts at ins-ins-ins-insurrection."
"Same goes for you, Glitch-head. You're one of us now." She pulled the black box out of the metal cranium once more and the light in his receptors began to fade.
"Welcome to the Rebellion."
I wondered when I saw the movie where exactly Cassian found K-2SO and how he managed to bring him back. I thought perhaps there was a story somewhere in there waiting to be written. So, here it is! I intentionally will be putting some of K-2 into my character, Ben, since she has a hand in reprogramming him. His mouthiness has to come from somewhere, so maybe he just hears the things she says and parrots them back.
Also, despite the fact that they reprogrammed Kay, I like to think there was rebellion deep down in his circuits all along. Something that caused him to malfunction and be decommissioned in the first place. In a way, I wanted to show with this chapter how the Empire views its armies and forces, whether living or not. They are not treated as individuals. There is a depersonalization there between the masters at the top and all the subordinates scurrying around beneath. They may as well have been talking about Bodhi Rook when they said he "malfunctioned." Indeed, they use the term "defected" to describe the pilot's betrayal.
PS: This is a precursor to the Scarif mission we see in Rogue One. Ben and Cassian just don't know it yet.
PSS: I will be using name-calling quite frequently, if you haven't already guessed. This is my disclaimer: I own none of those names. They belong to the Star Wars franchise, courtesy of Wookieepedia.
