"The misfortune to be born when I was, where I was. That was a piece of bad luck."—Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
15 BBY
BAKURA
Cassian woke to the sound of coughing.
Ben was wheezing his name. He shot up in bed. Dawn light was just filtering in through the curtain, but the bedroom seemed dimmer than usual. He glanced about in the semi-dark, puzzling. When his eyes found Ben, she was doubled over on the edge of her bed, hand held to her stomach. Coughing fits were a rarity in their house.
"Ben? What—" Then he choked on the air too.
He glanced at the door. There was smoke pouring in from the edges.
"Ben!" He jumped up and ran to her. "The house is on fire."
Her hazel eyes met his and she nodded. She understood. He 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 their skin with searing teeth.
He pulled her back. The front door was not an option.
Down at the other end of the hall, there was the back door. Daylight and the promise of freedom from this burning prison taunted them 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 their vision, filled their lungs, stung their eyes. The heat nipped at their bare heels, bellowed at them with its hellish breath. Ben leaned more and more into Cassian's side. He braced his hand against the wall with each pained step closer to that door, trying to see through the tears that streamed from his eyes. The inferno chased them all the way down the hall, erasing any memory of the lives they had lived there, until all that remained was the door at the end and the promise of the other side.
The doorknob seared Cassian's palm when he gripped it, but he held onto it and twisted hard.
They fell through the back door and out into fresh air, scrambling back to their feet as smoke poured out behind us. He heard a familiar droning sound and turned in time to see two stormtroopers tearing away on their speeder bikes. Behind them, the roof of their house was already collapsing in places. In a few minutes it would be ashes. He looked up to see more smoke columns rising all along the horizon. The Empire was burning lives.
At the edge of their vegetable patch, they had to stop because of the smoke in Ben's lungs. She coughed until she spat blood.
"Come on," Cassian whispered in her ear, and then they were moving again. He wanted nothing more than to let her rest, but they would be back, he knew. They would be combing the forests and fields for stragglers. The two of them needed to be as far away from civilization as they could get.
He urged her into a sprint and after a few moments of struggling, she matched his strides with her little legs. They ran until they hardly recognized anything. Then they saw a small ruins ahead of them.
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 Cassian saw was a hiding place.
He dragged her into the cool shadows. There in the darkness, struggling for air, they soon filled the place with the smell of smoke. It clung to their clothes and hair like unwanted memories. She crouched in a corner of the stone frame, while he leaned against the flimsy metal wall a couple feet away. After a few minutes of steady breathing, they locked eyes, searching for comfort or relief that just wasn't there. Reality was setting in slowly for both of them.
"Cassian," she whispered.
"What?"
"Are we going to die?" He 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. He had grown up with those sorts of questions asked of him.
Before he could respond, footsteps sounded outside. Whoever it was, they were in a hurry. Shoes slapped concrete as the newcomer came to a halt just on the other side of the metal sheet. They heard gasps for air not three feet from where they were hiding.
Ben braced herself against the metal and began to stand. She was ready to run again. Cassian immediately pushed her back down, knowing they needed to stay and be quiet. It was harder than he 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 him. No pain in those eyes. Not this little girl.
The heavy breathing outside had stopped at the sound of her fall. Someone was listening.
Cassian laid a finger on his lips to keep her silent. After a moment, she mirrored him 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 his.
A few minutes passed in silence. They heard a few clicks and beeps from outside, and then the footsteps finally faded away.
Cassian immediately ripped a piece of his tunic off and began to bind her hand as best he could. She watched him with something close to fascination. Then he remembered she had asked him a question.
"Ben." Her head snapped up, eyes calm. "Everything is going to be alright." He said it as confidently as he could.
"But home is gone," she reminded him. "Where will we go?" The blood was already seeping through his meager efforts. "We're going to die, aren't we?"
"Hey." He grabbed her shoulder with a blood-caked hand. "There is always hope, remember?" He offered a weak smile. "Just like Papa used to say."
Her smile was stronger, gap-toothed in the front. It filled him such that he began to believe his own words. He began to hope that they were true.
"Buckethead," he said.
She opened her mouth to respond, when something exploded just on the other side of their flimsy wall. The metal sheet blew right off and slammed into Cassian from the right and that was the last thing he remembered.
He didn't know how long he was out, but he woke up choking on dust. Every part of him burned. His vision was spotty, his ears stuffed with cotton. He tried to sit up, move even the smallest part of his body, but he couldn't. He was paralyzed.
"Ben?"
The muffled word resonated through his skull. He was answered by a high-pitched ringing that caused his head to pound. It hurt so badly, he nearly blacked out again. After a few minutes lying there, he realized he wasn't paralyzed, but rather trapped under the metal sheet that had just previously been their refuge. It took him nearly half an hour to squirm out from under it, scraping every inch of exposed skin in the process. When he looked around, Cassian found that he was ten feet from the place he had started. The flimsy metal wall had carried him with it through the air and pinned him to the ground.
He stood, ignoring the black spots in front of his eyes and the throbbing in his skull.
"Ben?"
He said it a little louder, holding a hand to his head to keep it from splitting in two. His hair was matted and sticky. He glanced down at the metal sheet that had nearly killed him.
No, it had saved him. The side that had been facing the blast was scorched and pitted. He bent to try and lift it, thinking she must be under there as well. Then with a wrench he remembered she had been in the corner. She had been next to the stones when the bomb went off. He 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 imagined 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, nor to my father's friends. 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.
