Chapter Seven: ETU: Going Along the Lines

Just like he'd done on Jedha, he willed his slipping mind to focus on her footsteps, shaky as they were under his weight, their knees collectively stumbling with the effort to keep his battered form walking. He tried to pick out which staggering treads on the sand were hers, to stow away all thoughts of the past and future and focus on the here and now. On her. The intelligence assignment that had lead to a revolution, a leap for the Rebellion to strike against the Empire.

The things they had accomplished. It was enough knowledge to die with.

They were headed as far away from the data tower as possible, far from the waves that were suddenly in a mad rush, battering against the rocks and chopping in the wind like they were trying to escape this fate. It would all be in vain in a moment's time. But it felt right, better, safer, to get as far from the maddening sea and shuddering tower as possible.

They halted their stumbling footsteps abruptly, but at a mutual arrangement- her arm slipped from beneath him and helped him lower to the sand. There was a gentle thump as they both sat. Calm, strangely collected, and almost ready to embrace this death.

He didn't throw the covert glances of the spy he'd been for a lifetime. He turned to face her openly. To take in with his eyes her face, the eased crease of her brow, the expression of peace and fulfilment that somehow brightened her features more than the cruelly timed sunset over the collapsing horizon.

"Your father would be proud of you, Jyn," he said, and meant it. He had no more walls up to hide the way he felt, or the authenticity of his words, or even the gentle affection that cracked through his voice.

I wish I could get to know you better.

She smiled. It was a shaky sort of smile, slow-forming and heavy, but in no way was it reluctant or a mask of something else.

She didn't say anything, but she might as well have also burnt her walls to the ground. One gloved hand reached into the distance between them and clasped his. He held on tightly. This was more than enough, for the moment.

There was the silently screaming waves and the blinding light, a burst of sunlight over a decimated horizon and the green glow of the Death Star's fire.

She turned to him and they embraced. He held her like she was everything to him, in this moment. He would be lying to himself if he said she wasn't.

He clutched the back of her jacket, crushed his arms around her small, strong frame, pressed his chin into her shoulder as if that could bind them together like this, forever, as if that could keep their embrace and halt their fates at the same time.

Death. Death was here.

His eyes shot open with that harrowed, delayed realization and his heart lurched to his throat in panic.

He wasn't ready for this.

Four months previously.

Cassian had heard horror stories of the victory celebration that had given Skywalker, Solo and two of the last remaining representatives of the Rogue One crew their medals. There had been more drinking than had ever been permitted on Base before, the results of which included people waking up to different species in their beds, drunken fistfights ending in broken ship parts and the medical personnel ordering strict monitoring of the blood-alcohol levels of even some of the staunchest councilmembers.

On one hand, he was glad to have missed it. On the other, he hadn't been in a position to watch Jyn and Bodhi's backs and give them a little much-needed protection considering the position in the Alliance that he had and they didn't.

He altered course for the main meeting room, the limp in his leg growing heavier, the cold of Hoth Base stinging in his ankles and his more vulnerable joints. He had considered bringing the crutches along, but the whim had died down fast. No. He wasn't going into a damage-control meeting looking like a part of the damage himself.

Kaytoo now walked with perpetual disdain for his new surroundings, proving every bit as petty as from the original reprogramming, even though his metal chassis was well-equipped to withstand Hoth's weather conditions. What didn't facilitate Cassian's efficient functioning, he supposed, the droid wasn't willing to put up with. The droid wasn't too happy about waiting outside the room either, but he was told that his input would not help Cassian's case in the meeting, and so he'd grudgingly agreed to stand by the door with the lowly security droid who was long overdue for a service of parts.

Walking into High Command's room on the new Base triggered in him a deep-veined chill that had nothing to do with the cold.

This wasn't the same room the life-changing decision of not sanctioning the Scarif mission had been made. This was still the committee that had made the decision.

Cassian's expression was neutral and professionally straight-faced, prepared, sufficiently polite. Heads turned and eyes darted in his direction as he strode across the threshold to take up a position beside the main table serving as holoprojector- deactivated at this moment except for dim, pulsating green lights- and subtly leaned back on his good leg. All eyes, even those that had been less obvious, turned back to the door. Waiting for more required personnel. Except for five pairs from various places around the room.

Aren and Liowa stood at the helm of the table, two steps in front of the other bodies clustered there, their gazes apprehensive and trained on him. It required no effort to read their expressions- they were worried, up to the extent of anxious, and anticipated the worst while hoping for the best.

He bowed his head slightly in half-acknowledgement, half-reassurance. The junior officers visibly relaxed, some of the tension in their shoulders dissipating.

Melshi stood apart from his longtime friend and comrade Sefla, entirely out of place in this meeting room meant for strategists, politicians. His features were much less open than Aren or Liowa's, but the Sergeant had never looked so detached from his element without a rifle slung across his shoulder or a blaster of considerable size clipped to his belt.

Sefla stood somewhere in the vicinity of General Draven, and so Cassian didn't communicate anything across the table to him knowing full well that his best effort wouldn't go undetected.

The four of them, who belonged in the rebellion, among the ranks of the Alliance, Cassian could take in perfectly well. The wariness and instinctive protectiveness he felt on behalf of his team was a confined, niggling emotion somewhere in the back of his mind. But one glance at Bodhi Rook, defensive and fearful in the shadows, and the sharp sting in his gut almost broke his collected demeanour.

"The purpose of this meeting here today is not to debate over the rightness of the actions of the unit known as Rogue One," Mon Mothma's voice penetrated the heavy air of the room, prominent yet not commanding, tired, weary. Nobody said anything. Several gazes bored into the Senator's white robes. "Rather, it is to come to an agreement with what should be done with the members of this unit aside from court-martial and punishments, as Command ruled the Scarif mission as sanctioned and pardoned these actions." She nodded towards a Sentaor's aide by her side, and the younger woman picked up on cue.

"A special unit with combined forces- intelligence, piloting, retrieval and recruitment- is to be formed out of five of the remaining members of Rogue One, or the unit must be dissolved completely."

The room broke out into strings of murmuring and hushed discussions. Cassian shifted his weight, recalibrating the balance on his legs, and stood silently in his corner, watching covertly. Not the groups of discussion or the snappish objections being made. He watched the probably deliberately separated members of his crew, read instead what they wanted.

The survivors of the Scarif mission had been pardoned on individual grounds, seeing as the politicians of High Command couldn't afford to be too generous, or to let themselves look too foolish for not approving the mission in the first place. For Cassian, a long-ago approval from Draven that improvisations were allowed in the most extreme of circumstances, and action was preferred over inaction, was recalled despite how far-fetched and unbelievable an excuse it was. Jyn and Bodhi had gotten off on the grounds that they hadn't officially enlisted in the Alliance and therefore weren't within the Council's jurisdiction- only a slightly better reason- while Aren and Liowa were simply following direct orders issued from superior officers. And of course the dead among them had been given complete honours posthumously and the whole operation was made to look less like the unsanctioned mess it had really been.

Cassian was fully aware as to how things should have been by this stage in the proceedings. Their unit should have been called a one-time deal and dissolved immediately without question. If there were questions now, second thoughts, it very likely wasn't for their benefit.

Bodhi didn't want separation from his first team and only comrades. He was an outsider, and despite the few times he'd made small talk with other pilots in the hangar he still remained one. Worry, fear and desperate hope were all evident in his wide-eyed glances around the room, the uneasy shifting, fidgeting.

Sefla and Melshi, like Cassian, had enough firsthand experience with bad-to-worse scenarios to recognize what was really going on and not want the Council to stitch them together as a unit. They saw or at least suspected the political agenda underlying the move- Scarif had turned the galactic conflict in a different direction. If it ever turned out to be the wrong kind of direction, the blame could be specifically pointed out if all of their team were in one place.

When Jyn came back- if she ever came back, he corrected himself, feeling unprofessional- she would want them to stick together, too. He couldn't imagine her agreeing to serve without getting what she wanted.

Draven had launched into a discussion with Mon Mothma. Perhaps negotiating on behalf of his prized intelligence operative, explaining why Cassian's role required him to work alone or with other operatives of the same field. He couldn't pick up the words and he didn't dare eavesdrop. He wasn't allowed to play a part in the decision anyway.

People meandered their way towards the front of the table and offered their concerns in hushed voices. Aren and Liowa disappeared somewhere behind the crowd, and Bodhi was lost completely. Cassian regarded the entire situation before him with an air of inaction that felt unnatural.

The discussions stopped, eventually. The room decended into a fragile silence, pierced by the occasional whisper.

Mothma called the room's occupants to attention.

"A decision has been made with a fractional difference in the votes," she announced, her voice somewhere between exhausted and remarkably sharp. Cassian kept his gaze straight and attentive. Either way, he wasn't about to react.

"A majority of this Committee dictates that five of the survivors of the Scarif mission- Captain Andor, Lieutenant Sefla, Sergeant Melshi, Bodhi Rook and Sergeant Erso- continue service as a single special unit, while Corporals Aren and Liowa are allowed to complete their preliminary training and join whichever field then deemed most suitable." She seemed to be avoiding many faces in the room as she spoke. "This Council's well wishes go out to all of you."

Despite his contemplative mood and purposeful pace, Bodhi fell in stride beside him after a quick jog and spoke excitedly while trying to catch his breath.

"I was...I was worried that they wouldn't want us working together, that they'd...that they'd assign me with people who aren't all that trusting of Imperial defectors, and I worried about Jyn-"

Cassian thought about it, but decided against telling him the grim reality of their situation. He did not believe in considerate dishonesty, but some still-recovering part of his mind insisted it was wrong to burst the bubble of men like Bodhi, who'd been through too much in too little time and were in desperate need to find security, any kind of security, reality be damned. Ever since their perfectly-timed jaunts to various off-world blackmarkets in search of a replacement for Kaytoo's chassis, he'd found that if there was one thing that started to anger him far easier than most others, it was the prospect of the Imperial defector getting hurt or even upset. It was inexplicable, the feeling of responsibility, and over the past month it had only served to remind him of Jyn. Of what she was getting herself into, of how little he could do to help from where he was.

"What do they mean by a special unit?"

Cassian took on a patient and easy expression, tucking away his actual thoughts that ran on the negative line. "A strike team made of operatives from different divisions of work, enabling the team to act across a range of different assignments. We execute our orders as soon as we get them, because only the most difficult, unexpected or unpredictable situations will come our way to be dealt with."

Bodhi nodded in understanding. "Because we're made of operatives from various fields and so should be able to handle anything."

"That seems to be the popular belief," Kaytoo chimed in from beside Cassian. "Statistically it is not always true."

"Statistically," echoed Bodhi.

"Statistically is nearly always closer to realistically," said Kaytoo in his most offended tone.

Cassian shook his head. "The Council has made a decision and it's not one we can ignore. We might as well accept the work handed over to us and meet their expectations rather than disappoint."

Bodhi frowned, confusion weaving its way into his features. "Wait, isn't it a good thing-"

He didn't get to finish his question, because Cassian came to an abrupt halt just as they passed one of the many corridors that passed through the broad path they took, Kaytoo stopping shortly afterwards. Bodhi turned just in time to see a white jacket-clad young woman, probably younger than even Jyn, walk out into the main path without breaking the streak of fiery argument she held with a man he recognized as the honoured smuggler from the Death Star victory celebration.

There were about six more seconds of shouting from both parties before the woman- Princess Leia, he realized, remembering the celebrations- noticed they were being watched and froze, turning her head in Cassian's direction. The Captain responded with a rare, genuine smile that extended to a glint in his eyes.

The Princess smiled and approached him, all anger suddenly dissipating.

"Cassian," she said, the greeting as affectionate as those between siblings, or very close friends. "I haven't got the opportunity to talk to you in months."

Cassian inclined his head. "Princess," he replied in formal address.

Leia narrowed her eyes but playfully. "Two can play this game, Captain. Still confined to Base?"

Cassian didn't make an effort to hide how he really felt about being confined to Base. "Yes, unfortunately. You don't suppose I could call in a favour and get an early release approved?"

Leia scoffed. "I'd do a lot for your sake, Captain, but defying doctors' orders is simply too much." Her features softened. "Wasn't there a meeting today...?"

Cassian nodded, and started explaining in a lowered voice, head bowed and hands in his pockets to avoid the attention of the few passers-by who drifted along the path and across corridors. Bodhi found that Han had already stalked off and was nowhere to be seen.

Kaytoo tilted his head in his direction, noting the dozen questions he wasn't asking. "Cassian was one of the Princess' handlers for three years. During her time with the Senate she reported directly to him on most occasions."

"Oh," said Bodhi simply, not knowing what to make of that. His tenure with the Empire had seen a couple of recruits fresh from the academy talk of the Princess with unending adoration. He still found it difficult to wrap his head around the fact that she'd been a rebel collaborator all this time, and trained in those arts by none other than Cassian himself.

Leia's eyes flickered towards him, and the pilot felt suddenly self-conscious. Maybe it had to do with actually being in the presence of one so celebrated and well-liked, maybe it was because while the Princess had been denied her request to meet the survivors of Scarif, she had anyway met with all of them except for him, because he'd launched into work as quickly as possible to distract himself from everything and hadn't had a lot of extra time on Base.

He could pretend to be a nobody- he certainly always felt like one, and couldn't believe there was really anything to celebrate about his role on Scarif- but it wouldn't slip past her unless she happened to have an exceptionally bad memory for faces.

"They may have had underlying motives," she said, picking her words out carefully as she looked between the two of them. "But strategically it isn't a bad decision, keeping your team together. You've accomplished more than anyone else ever thought possible before, and we had a solid victory to show for it." She straightened. "I don't doubt Rogue One will have future successes."

So she remembered him, then.

"Bodhi Rook? May I have a word with you?"

Bodhi startled, but managed to calm his nerves just as Cassian inclined his head in subtle reassurance. He looked at the Princess and realized it didn't appear he was in trouble- she had on a small smile, a sad kind of smile, and he didn't have the nerve to read into it. He followed the short distance behind her while Cassian and Kaytoo stayed where they were.

Leia took in a deep breath before speaking. "I wish I could have met you sooner, Mr-"

"Bodhi," he blurted. "Just...just Bodhi, please."

Leia smiled wearily. "Bodhi. You would've heard this a couple of times, but I don't feel the Alliance is expressing enough gratitude for what we owe you. It takes exceptional bravery to make the decisions you made, Bodhi, and those decisions lead to finding the plans and destroying the Death Star. Essentially saving the rebellion, really."

Bodhi could feel the beginnings of a flush creeping up his cheeks. "I'm not...I mean...thank you, Your Highness."

"Leia," insisted the Princess. Then her expression took on a greater softness, tiredness, and she looked like someone who had seen far too many horrors than befitted her age. "There is no...need anymore."

He didn't have to think for long. It hit him. Alderaan.

"I'm sorry-" he began, guilty and wide-eyed.

"No," Leia snapped, shaking her head. Then, gently, "No. The Rebellion owes you everything. It's because of what you did that...Alderaan, Jedha...they won't happen again. It's unfair that they haven't even given you a rank yet, and I promise I'm going to see to it soon."

Bodhi felt a horrible churning in his gut, dreaded that emotion was threatening to break out in his face. "I was from Jedha," he said, sounding quieter than he ever had to his own ears.

Leia looked up at him at once and her own features suddenly threatened to betray too much. He couldn't tell if he was shaking or she was.

Unexpectedly, Leia reached out and drew him into a loose, careful embrace. He could no longer think of the girl before him as the well-trained spy who'd remained in the midst of the Empire's top officials for years without notice. Gently, he returned the hug. This was a girl who'd lost her home, just like he had, but lost everything else along with it. He thought of Jyn and all the losses that had shaken but never broken her, thought of Cassian and the

very little he knew of the Captain's terrible past. Realized that in the rebellion, they had all lost something to the Empire, and it was that common calamity that allowed them to work together at all.

When Leia drew back, she was as composed as earlier, the suffering in her eyes a distant and overcome memory.

"You're a good man, Bodhi," said Leia, nodding slightly, clasping her hands at her front. The faintest of smiles twitched at the corners of her lips. "You'll make an even better Sergeant, don't you think?"

Bodhi returned the smile with rare easiness, like an enormous burden had been lifted off his shoulders with finally getting the opportunity to express the sadness still lingering after Jedha. "Thank you, Leia."

Present day.

"I'll go check up on Jyn," said Cassian, releasing the latch of his harness as he switched the status of his dashboard to auto. "If the Dimoran facility makes contact, don't say anything. Call me."

The droid made an indistinct sound of begrudging acknowledgement, and then made his disdain with the mediocre task even more obvious by shifting the gears up to manual so he'd have at least the task of piloting to bide his time.

Knowing full well that Kaytoo would grumble verbally if he did, Cassian refrained from making a comment and ducked out of the cockpit door to the narrow but not uncomfortably cramped aisle of the shuttle.

Jyn was seated on the extensive leather-padded bench to his left, knees drawn close to her chest. Her expression was blank and her gaze was distant. The Imperial uniform, so carefully pleated this morning, had lost a lot of its regulation tidiness.

He was momentarily taken aback. A dozen possibilities flickered through his head. None of them seemed formidable enough to cause this reaction in Jyn Erso.

"We have a few hours to prep," he said as if he hadn't noticed instead of searching for comforting words. Sometimes drawing the preoccupied mind right out of the situation was a better approach than comfort. "Reading about the role you're supposed to play and actually implementing it are vastly different things. A little extra practice never hurts."

Jyn blinked, once, twice, then rapidly as if suddenly waking up to the present. She shook her head, snapping out of the trance, but the blank stare of shock was back as soon as her gaze turned up to his face.

Now a half-frown really did crease the space between his brows.

"Are you alright?" he ventured, leaving room for a lie, a denial, a way out if she didn't want to trust him with the problem. And it would simply be too much, too wrong to force trust between them, not when himself and two others on the crew hid a vital and chilling truth with regards to the current mission that neither she nor Bodhi so much as suspected.

But Jyn Erso let her walls down. Didn't put up a struggle to keep them up. She looked at him with an utterly alien fear in her eyes and said in a voice that barely carried, "It has to stop."

Her answer was vague and indecipherable, but he'd never before seen her beaten. Not even when they'd embraced for death on Scarif. Not like this.

"What has to stop?" he asked gently, lowering what was obvious of his own defenses like when questioning a fragile victim. He settled on the padded bench opposite. A narrow space of aisle streaked between their knees.

Jyn's reply was a hoarse breath. "The war."

His frown deepened, his puzzlement increased. "The war, Jyn?"

Her eyes caught his and they were bare, naked, betraying the dazed horror behind them. "You were six," she said in a breath. She'd let the first words out and now let them continue with rapidity. "I was...eight, I was eight. It's been going on for too long. And her...Magna, she's young, she's six, probably. It's been too long. We have to stop it. We can't let another generation go through this."

Cassian had leant back, stiffly pressed his spine against the leather, and the quaver of fierce determination that snuck its way into her voice towards the end went unnoticed because all of his walls, all of them, were up again and blockaded.

He studied her with a forced face of calm, a spy's face, while memories from a long-abandoned life turned his resolve cold, stirring anger and animosity close under the surface.

Jyn looked up at him again and didn't flinch, even though she could probably read him. She could and she didn't care. Her expression was laced with furious purpose even though her voice hitched.

"She wanted to be a rebel," exhaled Jyn, her hands coming between her knees, fingers clenching. "She wanted to fight in this war."

And it all made sense to him. Cassian sighed, eyes dropping like lead, and his defensive anger dissipated to nothing. The tension in his shoulders eased. He was not being needlessly reminded of his past.

In the heavy silence that settled between them, Cassian raised his eyes a fraction to where their knees rocked from a slight spot of turbulence, and reached out for Jyn's clenched fists.

"Then we'll see to it that this war ends during our lifetimes," he said, an assurance, certainly not a promise, but a call to action. And from the steel in her tone and her eyes, she wanted more than empty promises to fight.

The taut lines stretching across her knuckles loosened somewhat, and he shifted his hand slightly, bringing his other one to rest weightlessly on top of hers.

"Yes," her fingers twitched, ever ready for action, for fight. "We'll see to that."

He admired the fire in her eyes. He admired that nothing, not the Empire, not the Alliance, had managed to douse that fire after all this time.

"Jyn, about the mission," he withdrew his hands, slowly, bringing them to rest between his own knees. "Our current situation, Rogue One's. I don't think anyone's filled you in on the details yet."

She did look up sharply at that, once again alert to the present. "Details?"

Cassian leant further back against the seat, allowing his neck to curve slightly where the body of the shuttle swooped in an upward curve. "The actual reason we're in one team."

Jyn narrowed her eyes, any hint of easiness around her lips twitching and dying down. "You said you were told to pick whoever you wanted. Bodhi said a lot of people on Base wanted us working together."

Cassian shook his head. "Not wrong. To a lot of people, we're heroes and it would be a waste not to make us a team. High Command has different reasons."

"And you?"

"I was told to choose from among us. I persuaded them that Aren and Liowa be allowed to complete their training and join whatever division they're best suited for. I said that you'd be a part of my team if you agreed to it."

"Cassian," Jyn was staring straight through his mask of calm, straight at the things he wasn't saying. "Why did High Command make us a team?"

He didn't want to keep yet another truth from her, and the consequences would be dire if someone as central to the whole affair as Jyn didn't know the actuality of their situation. "What we're fighting, it's always been war," he started to run his fingers through his hair before he caught himself. A nervous habit lost a long time ago. Nervous habits didn't serve well in his line of work, but ever since he'd broken his back and a leg... "But what happened on Scarif gave that war a direction. The Empire built the Death Star and we took a stand against it. We infiltrated a Base and did a lot of damage, destroyed the superweapon itself. It left the Empire disoriented, lost them a massive investment. What happened with the Senate..." He clenched his fingers together again, not meeting her eyes. "The whole galaxy knows now that there's a war being fought and sides have to be taken. People are looking for a root cause to blame this war on. It is the Death Star. But there are others who think this state of things started with our attack on Scarif."

Jyn snorted. "That's ridiculous."

"It is. But it's easy. It's straightforward. And if we are all together in one place, like we are now, there is a specific direction in which to point the blame."

"So that's what all this is?" demanded Jyn. "A twisted blame game? Are we the Alliance's bargaining chip if they ever decide they can't fight anymore?"

Cassian didn't say anything for several drawn-out, tense seconds. He might as well have just said yes.

"I don't want you to feel uncomfortable with this arrangement, Jyn," he said instead, lifting his gaze to hers again. "There may be threatening incentives behind keeping us together as a unit, but don't let it get in the way of what you'd otherwise do for the cause. We've brought this war a couple more steps closer in the Rebellion's favour...and we can see it won, I believe that."

Another few seconds of silence. At the end of the stretch, though, the Sergeant's expression softened somewhat.

"Our unit are the only people in the Alliance whom I trust," she said simply. "I can't feel uncomfortable with it."

Her arm extended, the tips of her fingers lightly brushed his, a gesture of assurance, trust. Cassian repressed the shiver that ran through his entire being at the touch.

What was he doing to her? What would she think of him if she learnt of his lie?

"Let's get that uniform back in order," he said with a taut smile. "The next two hours we can spend perfecting your cover."