Does anyone else get a lot of feels about Cassian as a child throwing rocks and bottles at Republic tanks and soldiers? His father peacefully protested the Republic’s militarism and look what they did to him. Can you imagine that angry, hurt child flinging rocks because he had nothing else, maybe delivering messages and carrying supplies for the Separatists because he could hide better in the rubble and was less suspicious than a grownup or older kid?
In our world children have been shot for throwing rocks at occupying forces. Did Cassian watch kids, kids he knew from his neighborhood being killed? Did he run away and hide, too scared to even cry, still clutching his rock and wishing it were a blaster, or a bomb?
By the time he was seven the Clone Wars ended and the Republic was replaced by the Empire. His enmity simply transferred to the Empire, a logical if extreme continuation of what the Republic had become.
Yet even in the Rebellion it was the Senators who called the shots, the Senators who told him to get blood on his hands, grinding him down to be harder and sharper until he hardly felt like a person. Even the name was cruel; the Allience to Restore the Republic. To restore what? Repression and destruction, children dying in the streets? The Senators promised things would be different this time, but that’s what they promised the first time around.
Did he think about taking up arms against the Republic, too, giving them more than rocks and bottles if the Alliance won and the demands of the downtrodden were not met? Did he think to live that long?
Perhaps his victory lay in this small, hard fact: The Senators might have had his life, but his death was his own. It wasn’t some Senator or General who told him to go to Scarif, he went against direct orders for the conscience he found still beating in him, for the wisp of a hope that he could protect other children from the fires of annihilation.
So Cassian Jeron Andor went to Scarif a free man, though freedom demanded an unfairly high price. He had known that already, though, from the moment his father’s lifeless body came home. Freedom was a mean, demanding bitch and he reached out and grasped her with both hands. He died in that embrace; it was all the choice he had in a broken universe.
Tag: Cassian meta
Fic-Never Just You
Written for the prompt Sacrifice
Draven never talked about sacrifice but Cassian knew from a young age that he would die fighting against the Empire. The closest he ever came to hearing someone else say it was when Draven gave him his lullaby pill and said, “Remember, its never just your life or your secrets.”
Cassian never forgot that as death had always been around him, now he just carried a death he could choose.
A ficlet for @siachti and @englishable, who probably weren’t expecting something quite this grim. I’d apologize, but well… this is where the prompts for Day Three (Alliance Intelligence/Fulcrum, “collateral damage”) and Four (“silence”) of Cassian Appreciation Week led me.
Your mistakes aren’t the worst of it, other Fulcrum agents had warned him. You might expect that, but no.
They sting, they wound—how could it not, knowing that your error, your wrong choice, led to people dying?—but they also reflect imperfect knowledge. Time pressure. Not seeing the terrain clearly through the fog of war. Things that, as clichéd as it is to say, could happen to anyone.
Other times, it’s been the harsh demands of self-preservation. Tivik was bad, but at least he’d done his own killing that time. Looked the man in the eye. Had a reason more pressing, less abstract than the calculus of what was to be gained in future.
No, the deaths you let happen with clean hands and clear sight are the worst.
Every time he leaves a city knowing exactly when it will be bombed. Every time ships jump straight into an ambush because warning them would be too obvious. Every time he and Draven agree they can’t act on intercepted intelligence yet, because it could give away their source and choke off the flow of valuable information. Standing aside, watching the numbers on a screen tick up and up.
Cassian’s silence has killed more than his hands ever will.
he comes home ever six months or so. the house feels empty, but it always has, ever since the day his father didn’t come home (a little light protesting, he says, leave the dinner warm) and there’s his sister Lupe, off running rifles, and his sister Niambh, still not much more than a teenager, with fingers clever enough to put those weapons together blindfolded.
and there’s a woman who’s seen more ghosts in her life than anyone should, who gets up in the morning and does her duty because there’s bloody well nothing else to do aside from get a move on with things, another mission another weapons run, though she’s older now, mainly just organises things, keeps tabs on the stock and guards it, if necessary, with a very quick hand
but every half year or so, her son come home, every time with a few more ghosts in his eyes and unspeakable things in his heart, every time a little more like his father, like Cezar was,
and every time she puts the kettle on and makes a cup of tea and holds him while he cries
and then one day, it’s a holo and not a son that’s sent home
I sometimes wonder how the aftermath of Scarif would have affected Cassian, had he lived, in the sense of how the events that transpire and his own emotional turmoil may affect his decision on which terms he will remain on Alliance Intelligence.
It is clear, of course, that all he has done and some of the lives he has been forced to take weigh heavy on him, the guilt, pain and regret tear him apart. One could argue that, given the choice, he would settle for not taking those kinds of missions anymore.
However, I believe that it is worth considering he may have thought upon whom that responsibility would fall. Because even if he doesn’t do it, someone would invariably have to be in charge of that. Who? Another fellow rebel? One of the new recruits?
Imo, I think Cassian would have to end up choosing between two options that, still, tear him apart.
On the one hand, he refuses, the job falls upon another Intelligence member. Best case scenario, someone that has been with the Alliance for quite some time takes up the responsibility. They have gone through similar hardships, they likely feel the same mixture of emotions he does, they likely are as damaged as he is. Worst case scenario, it goes to a new recruit, who hasn’t gone through everything he has yet, suffered what he has, broken like he has. The guilt is knowing he burdened someone else.
On the other hand, he keeps on taking those missions. And the burden keeps piling up guilt on him, tearing him apart. But is the alternative truly better? Considering Cassian’s selfless and self-sacrificing personality, he might even end up considering it is his duty. He has already been scarred and damaged, he can spare someone else such a burden (especially the young).
Personally, I think he would have ended up choosing the latter.
All of this!
I would like to point out one thing that maybe helps mitigate the pain: the nature of the war changes after Scarif, after Alderaan and the Death Star burn and the very economic and political landscape of the galaxy shifts radically to account for those huge losses of influence, resources, and lives. The Galactic Civil War officially begins, brought from stealing secrets and sabotaging political movements to front line battles between cruisers and destroyers and actual ground troops with defensive lines. What has been a shadow war fought in back alleys, or via propaganda and stolen data, or “police actions” on backwater planets where hardly any media coverage happens has now become the forefront of every planet’s news cycle, is now full of explosions and missiles and AT-ATs stomping across the surfaces of hundreds of worlds. That does not, of course, mean that spies are no longer necessary (on the contrary, I bet Rebel Intel is now busier than ever), but the types of missions change. We need this person to die? Well, when before they would have been hanging out at fancy balls and hi-tech office buildings, now they are probably in a fortress or on a Star Destroyer somewhere that it would be advantageous for us to occupy instead, and so we can just flat out attack instead of infiltrate. (Yes, yes, the Allliance Fleet is still a vastly inferior force, but plenty of sources discuss rebel bases full of fighters, and there are open aerial/space engagements happening on multiple planets during the OT timeline). I’m no expert, but I do know that spy work shifts when the war is in the physical battle space and not primarily in the cyber/information battle space.
All this to say that while Cassian would absolutely chose to keep the burden of those uglier missions on himself rather than refuse them and let the pain fall elsewhere…the necessity of those missions might be somewhat more rare. Now they need to cut supply lines. Now we need to persuade not just agents but whole planets to the rebel side (actually, recruiting probably takes one a whole new level of necessity and urgency in the Alliance after the loss of Alderaan). Now we need to know troop movements, which are much easier to discover than movies like to make you think, and we need resources, which involves less murder and more theft. So yes, Cassian Andor would probably still struggle with the darker aspects of his work…but there would, perhaps, not be nearly as many moments where he has to stare into the distance and try not to smell the cooling corpse at his feet. Not nearly as many times where he must befriend and then betray someone to get what his side needs. And certainly not as many times where he would find himself the sole linchpin on which the operation hangs because he’s alone with the knowledge of what the Empire is trying to do, and therefore he must temporarily prioritize his own survival above anything else (a choice which probably chafed him worst of all).
So hey! There’s that, at least.
Rebellions are built on hope 