Even though Bail was the senator from Alderaan, his chambers were only about twice the size of Ava's. Every morning he had free since she'd arrived, they'd spent there having breakfast while he tried to make sense of the scraps of memories that had come to her mind. Possible scraps, she thought. They didn't seem all that reliable even when he tried to give them context. While he sat across from her with excitement and energy for whatever she would say, Ava felt more and more useless. She didn't see how being able to hum the tune of what was an apparently popular cantina song was helpful but he just took it as a sign that her memories were returning and pressed for more. If he hadn't been so kind about it all she might have found it annoying.

Bail picked through his breakfast, some kind of scrambled eggs but they were jet black and strangely sweet. "What about Kenobi? Did you dream of him again last night?"

"More of the same." She never saw his face in her dreams, it was always more tactile than visual. The feeling of his robe clutched in her fist was particularly strong for some reason. "Just a jumbled mess of sounds and feelings, nothing tangible. Besides, I didn't know enough then to stop what happened, what good would it be now?"

"Master Yoda thought you were knowledgeable enough to house you in the Jedi temple all those years, likely there is something even if we don't yet recognize it."

"Bail, don't get me wrong, I'll always be grateful for what you did by sending Cassian to come and find me, but if you're doing all of this in the hopes that I'll give you some previously unknown intelligence about the Empire then I think we'll both be disappointed."

Bail set down his silverware. "I will not lie, I do have hope that you will remember something that might help the Rebellion, but that is not why I sent Captain Andor to find you." He took a deep breath and sat back, readying himself to launch into a story. "The day before the Jedi temple burned was the last time I saw you. Master Kenobi and I feared you had been taken by the Emperor but we received intelligence that they too were searching for you and we had hope again. I promised Master Kenobi I would continue to look for you and when I found you, raise you on Alderaan. Perhaps it was something I should have tried to do long before that night but I can't change that now." He picked his silverware back up to continue eating. "Now, do you believe I care about more than just your knowledge?"

Ava wasn't sure what to believe most of the time anymore, but she did believe him. "You would've raised me?" Something swelled in her chest, extreme gratitude and a fondness that didn't feel all that new. "Why should you have tried to do that before I disappeared?"

He sighed. "When Master Kenobi found you wandering the streets on Coruscant and brought you back to the temple, the Jedi Council decided you were an asset and a risk. You were a very young child, you didn't know what you were doing or why you were confined to the temple. As far as I was made aware, all the Jedi knew was that you spoke of things you had no business knowing."

"Was I happy there?" She was still failing to see what he was getting at. Sure, some sort of monk like childhood in a temple seemed a little…different from how she remembered her childhood but it hardly sounded like she'd been mistreated.

"You were not unhappy." He said carefully. "However I've always wondered if it would have been better for you to be raised like a normal child. As well, if I had taken you from there sooner you may not have disappeared at all. Do not mistake my friendship and support for the Jedi as approval of all of their doctrine."

"What kind of doctrine?"

"They eschewed attachments to others. There was a sort of kindness about them, and a true compassion. You were well taken care of, but a child needs to know that they are loved."

"I'm sure you did all that you could at the time." She shrugged. Based on his actions now he either felt intense guilt over giving her a cold shoulder when she was five that he didn't want to admit to, or the man really had been ready to all out adopt her twenty-some years ago. She knew in her heart it was the latter.

He sat silently in thought, picking at his food. "Perhaps. Perhaps not."

Something about General Draven's voice always stood out to Cassian, especially when he was angry. That was probably the only reason he even noticed something going on over in the X-wing bay. Ava's voice rising to match Draven's was what made him investigate.

"-can see why it would look like you were trying to escape!" Draven said accusingly.

"So not only do you not believe me when I said I wasn't trying to escape but you also think I'm stupid enough to do so by sitting in a ship for fifteen minutes AND NOT GOING ANYWHERE!" Ava bit back.

Cassian tried to suppress a grin as he rounded the back of the X-wing and saw Draven towering over her next to the ladder leading to the cockpit. "General?"

"Captain Andor, did you need something?"

"I heard Ava yelling, I came to see if everything was alright." He nodded to her, checking to see if she was okay. By the sound of things though, she had General Draven well in hand.

"I found her sitting in the cockpit, when I questioned her about it she wouldn't give me an answer. For all she'll tell me, she might have been trying to escape and lead the Empire back to the base."

"Are you always this dramatic? Because I'm already exhausted and you've only been here for five minutes."

"You do not have free reign of this base simply because of your relationship with Senator Organa. The flight bay is-"

"Off limits, yes, I didn't know before you told me. Now are we done?"

Cassian coughed to interrupt them. "General if I may?" he didn't wait for Draven to approve. "If she wanted to reveal our location to the Empire, stealing a ship and hoping to get past flight control...she is smarter than that. Perhaps if you're still worried you should bring it up to Senator Organa personally."

"You wouldn't be trying to give me an order would you, Captain?" Draven threatened.

Cassian innocently shook his head. "Not at all, General. I was just trying to resolve the situation." And stop him from yelling back and forth with Ava until he locked her in a cell.

"Good. Then I expect you'll see she finds her way back to the appropriate areas of the base. And you," He turned back to Ava who was still glaring. "If I find you in the flight bay again-"

"I'm sure you'll throw me right into the brig where my traitorous ass belongs." She drawled. "Understood, General."

General Draven bit his tongue. "Captain Andor." He said as a goodbye, offering her nothing but a glare in return.

Cassian watched him leave with a sigh and when he turned back around, Ava was staring at the X-Wing again, the side of her fist pressed against her lips in thought. "The General is a cautious man, I wouldn't take it personally."

"Do you think Bail is right about me?" She blurted out, hand falling to her side. Out of everyone on base aside for Bail, Cassian was the one person who had some inkling of who she could possibly be. Bail believed it almost blindly it seemed, but she was afraid it was out of emotion more than evidence. Making up for the guilt of not being able to rescue a child twenty years ago. Ava wasn't sure whether the part of her that believed it only did because of his faith and her need or answers, or because there was really something there.

He came up beside her, looking at the ship and trying to see whatever it was she was seeing in it's bulkheads. To him, it was just a ship, no different from any other. "I think...if he believes you are, then there is at least a possibility. Do you think he is wrong?"

Ava sighed, having no good answer for his question. "I don't know what to think." It was hard to explain, one moment she was sure that everything around her was new, and the next something would feel familiar, comforting almost.
Confident that Cassian wouldn't react with the same fervor that General Draven had when he'd found her in the cockpit, she climbed back up the ladder and peered down at the X-Wing's controls. "I had no idea how to work a shower, but I can look at these controls and I know what half of them do and I don't understand why."

Cassian frowned, as confused as she was if what she was saying was true. "Is that what you were doing when General Draven found you?"

Bracing her hands on the top of the ladder she hopped into the cockpit. He scaled the rungs and watched as she scanned the controls.

"I can hear a man's voice saying what these buttons and switches do, like he was teaching me. But it's not Bail, it's someone else." The voice was younger and a bit scratchy. "There's nothing like this where I grew up so how do I know about it?" She knew what Bail would say, that she had lived there for a time so presumably one of the Jedi at the temple had shown her. But she still couldn't reconcile that with the memories of her childhood that she had.

"Couldn't the Senator offer an explanation?" Cassian supplied. The man, after all, seemed to know more about Ava in some ways than she did herself, or at least he thought he did.

"Maybe." She puzzled over the console a bit longer and eventually pointed at a square panel of six buttons. "This is wrong. It's supposed to be two switches."

"It's predecessor is built in that configuration, but they haven't been used much since the X-Wing came out. They were used during the Clone War…" She knew unimportant details about the inner controls of an ARC-170 starfighter? "Isn't that when the Senator believes he knows you from?"

"It is. But I would've been a child. Why would somebody be teaching a child how to fly a starfighter?"

"I was a child when I began to learn some of the basics. Maybe it was the same for you?

"Maybe." She groaned. "Is there a place to get a drink around here?"

Cassian chuckled. "To forget today or to remember your past?"

"If I'm lucky? Maybe both…"