"The misfortune to be born when I was, where I was. That was a piece of bad luck."—Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
15 BBY
BAKURA
I woke to the sound of coughing.
"Cassian," Ben wheezed. I shot up in bed. Dawn light was just filtering in through the curtain, but it seemed dimmer in here than usual. I glanced about in the semi-dark, puzzling. When my eyes found Ben, she was doubled over on the edge of her bed, hand held to her stomach. Coughing fits were a rarity in our house.
"Ben? What—" Then I choked on the air too.
I glanced down at the door. There was smoke pouring in from the edges.
"Ben!" I jumped up and ran to her. "Ben, the house is on fire."
Her hazel eyes met mine and she nodded. She understood. I pulled her, still coughing, to her feet and led her to the door.
The flames were ravenous. They consumed the table and the cabinets and the doorway to the kitchen. They danced down the hall uninvited, setting light to the drawings Ben had made and hung there. They hissed and cracked and lashed at our skin with searing teeth.
I pulled her back. The front door was not an option.
Back down at the other end of the hall, there was the back door. Daylight and the promise of freedom from this burning prison taunted us from the other side, spilling in from the tiny glass window. It couldn't have been more than a few yards away, but it seemed to take an eternity to get there. The smoke screened our vision, filled our lungs, stung our eyes. The heat nipped at our bare heels, bellowed at us with its hellish breath. Ben leaned more and more into my side. I braced my hand against the wall with each pained step closer to that door, trying to see through the tears that streamed from my eyes. The inferno chased us all the way down the hall, erasing any memory of the lives we had lived there, until all that remained was the door at the end and the promise of the other side.
The doorknob seared my palm when I gripped it, but I held onto it and twisted hard.
We fell through the back door and out into fresh air, scrambling back to our feet as smoke poured out behind us. I heard a familiar droning sound and turned in time to see two stormtroopers tearing away on their speeder bikes. Behind us, the roof of our house was already collapsing in places. In a few minutes it would be ashes. I looked up to see more smoke columns rising all along the horizon. The Empire was burning lives.
At the edge of our vegetable patch, we had to stop because of the smoke in Ben's lungs. She coughed until she spat blood.
"Come on," I whispered in her ear, and then we were moving again. I wanted nothing more than to let her rest, but they would be back, I knew. They would be combing the forests and fields for stragglers. We needed to be as far away from civilization as we could get.
I urged her into a sprint and after a few moments of struggling, she matched my strides with her little legs. We ran until we hardly recognized anything. Then we saw a small ruins ahead of us.
The foundations were made of stone, probably the bones of an ancient shrine, or a Guardian's dwelling. Whatever its original purpose, it had since fallen into disrepair and much less respectable hands. The frame was still stone, but the gaps where the walls had been were draped with sheets of old metal. An anachronistic patchwork. Remnants of cooking fires and bedding were strewn about within. An outpost or a rebel camp. All I saw was a hiding place.
I dragged her into the cool shadows. There in the darkness, struggling for air, we soon filled the place with the smell of smoke. It clung to our clothes and hair like unwanted memories. She crouched in a corner of the stone frame, while I leaned against the flimsy metal wall a couple feet away. After a few minutes of steady breathing, we locked eyes, searching for comfort or relief that just wasn't there. Reality was setting in slowly for both of us.
"Cassian," she whispered.
"What?"
"Are we going to die?" I would have expected something along the lines of 'keep me safe,' or 'I'm scared' from an eight-year-old. This question bordered on pragmatic. Imagine growing up with those sorts of questions constantly asked of you.
Before I could respond, footsteps sounded outside. Whoever it was, they were in a hurry. Shoes slapped concrete as they came to a halt just on the other side of our metal wall. We heard gasps for air not three feet from where we were hiding.
Ben braced herself against the metal and began to stand. She was ready to run again. I immediately pushed her back down, knowing we needed to stay and be quiet. It was harder than I intended. As she fell, her left hand slipped and caught on a jagged edge. She didn't seem to realize at first what had happened, not until the blood began to flow. She stared down at her sliced hand for a moment, then looked up at me. No pain in those eyes. Not this little girl.
The heavy breathing outside had stopped at the sound of her fall. Someone was listening.
I laid a finger on my lips to keep her silent. After a moment, she mirrored me with her left hand. A stream of blood from the gash drew a dark line down her arm, but she didn't seem to notice. Not once did her eyes leave mine.
A few minutes passed in silence. We heard a few clicks and beeps from outside, and then the footsteps finally faded away.
I immediately ripped a piece of my tunic off and began to bind her hand as best I could. She watched me with something close to fascination. Then I remembered she had asked me a question.
"Ben." Her head snapped up, eyes calm. "Everything is going to be alright." I said it as confidently as I could.
"But home is gone," she reminded me. "Where will we go?" The blood was already seeping through my meager efforts. "We're going to die, aren't we?"
"Hey." I grabbed her shoulder with a blood-caked hand. "There is always hope, remember?" I offered a weak smile. "Just like Papa used to say."
Her smile was stronger, gap-toothed in the front. It filled me such that I began to believe my own words. I began to hope that they were true.
"Buckethead," I said.
She opened her mouth to respond, when something exploded just on the other side of our flimsy wall. The metal sheet blew right off and slammed into me from the right and that was the last thing I remembered.
I don't know how long I was out, but I woke up choking on dust. Every part of me burned. My vision was spotty, my ears stuffed with cotton. I tried to sit up, move even the smallest part of my body, but I couldn't. I was paralyzed.
"Ben?"
The muffled word resonated through my skull. I was answered by a high-pitched ringing that caused my head to pound. It hurt so badly, I nearly blacked out again. After a few minutes lying there, I realized I wasn't paralyzed, but rather trapped under the metal sheet that had just previously been our refuge. It took me nearly half an hour to squirm out from under it, scraping every inch of exposed skin in the process. When I looked around, I found that I was ten feet from the place I had started. The flimsy metal wall had carried me with it through the air and pinned me to the ground.
I stood, ignoring the black spots in front of my eyes and the throbbing in my skull.
"Ben?"
I said it a little louder, holding a hand to my head to keep it from splitting in two. My hair was matted and sticky. I glanced down at the metal sheet that had nearly killed me.
No, it had saved me. The side that had been facing the blast was scorched and pitted. I bent to try and lift it, thinking she must be under there as well. Then with a wrench I remembered she had been in the corner. She had been next to the stones when the bomb went off. I snapped my head up only to see that the ancient frame had crumbled to a pile on the ground. She was nowhere to be seen.
"BEN!"
I searched for hours, digging through the rubble. I kept expecting to see pieces of her lying about, but all I found was blood. It was everywhere. I screamed for her over and over again, screamed long after my voice had failed and her name was just a croak in my parched throat. She was just gone. I could only imagine her small, pale body buried somewhere beneath me. Broken and cold. Hazel eyes flung wide in surprise. Some response to my insult frozen on her blue lips.
Soon after, a few men found me lying in the ashes, too tired to move, still croaking her name. I don't know what would have happened to me if they had been Imperials, and from what I've seen of the Empire, I don't much care to think about it. If stormtroopers had arrived while I was out, I would have been concealed by that metal sheet anyway. As fate would have it, the Rebellion got to me first. Rebel guerrillas. No affiliations to the Alliance. Just angry men with bombs.
I found out later it was one of theirs that had blown us to hell. They set it off as a distraction, to draw off troops from their primary target. It didn't work, they told me. All I could think of was that little girl with a finger pressed to her lips and blood running down her arm. If we hadn't been so quiet, they would have found us both and perhaps helped us. If I hadn't kept her from running, we both would have walked out of there that day. If…if…if…
If there wasn't a war, children like her wouldn't be blown to pieces by bombs.
Affiliations or not, it was the Rebellion that lost Ben to me. I have never forgiven them for that.
I do not believe that time heals all wounds. I've seen some people use their trials as opportunities to grow, to tear down walls.
Me?
I built them. They started that day on Bakura. Block by block they rose around my heart. Impossible and terrible. Impenetrable. I built them because I didn't know what else to do. Because I thought they were my best shot at living something resembling a normal life. Because I never thought in a thousand light years that I would ever need to feel again.
Yeah, total bantha shit.
Life turned out to be so much crueler than even I could imagine. Those walls truly were impenetrable; years of building and fortifying had made sure of that. No one could bring them all down. Some just remained, long after they were welcome.
For years, they haven't budged. Until yesterday, when I met Jyn Erso.
Ewwwwww rusty metal? Get that girl a tetanus shot!
Also I apologize for any inaccuracies. I'm not well-versed on the mechanics of explosions, and for all I know, that one could have been fatal regardless of metal or stone or whatever, but please just bear with me.
Also, just so you don't have to do the math, Ben is eight years old (which I thinkI mention in there) and Cassian is eleven.
You're welcome.
Hope to post next chapter by Wednesday so keep your eyes open!
