Fic: Let Me Start Again (I Want a Face That’s Fair This Time) (Star Wars)
Title: Let Me Start Again (I Want a Face That’s Fair This Time)
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: T
Genres: gen
Summary: Yavin IV didn't become the clusterfuck it could have been but Alderaan is gone. Davits Draven tries not to care.
A/N: Whoops, wrote another Draven piece. Kinda not the fix-it I'd intended when I'd been mulling over Rogue One bunnies but yeah. There it is, anyway. And yes, it's a follow-up to Take a Look at the Lawman because why the hell not. And oh, look, it's a series now because apparently, I'm still not done with Draven. Ugh.
( Take a Look at the Lawman (Beating Up the Wrong Guy) )
Let Me Start Again (I Want a Face That’s Fair This Time)
“Then let me start again,” I cried,
“please let me start again,
I want a face that’s fair this time,
I want a spirit that is calm.”
Leonard Cohen, “Lover, Lover, Lover”
It could have been a clusterfuck.
Another one, worse than Scarif, worse than anything that ever happened before in your career. It could have been a clusterfuck, and it ended up in a medal ceremony for a boy less than half your age from a backwater world and a smuggler completely lacking conviction. You even got a nice commendation from Mon Mothma yourself, honoring your part in the entire affair and both of you know it’s not meant as a compliment or friendly gesture. You can live with that.
It could have been worse, you’d like to say, only that Alderaan is gone and no medal or commendation will ever be able to change that. No one has said anything but you know well enough that Alderaan is gone because you haven’t done your job. You’re not playing martyr, you just look at the facts and it’s right there. If you had done your job, you would have never lost the Death Star’s tracks and you would have known that it’s heading towards Alderaan. You would have been able to give out warnings, issue evacuation orders, save at least part of the population, if not the planet.
You didn’t, though. That’s a fact. You selected the wrong operatives, activated the wrong sources, searched the wrong sectors. Those are facts, too.
It’s painfully ironic, then, that you had the right operative, who knows all the right sources, and you chose not to activate him. Not for that mission, anyway. Too many people involved, too many loose lips, too many incalculable risks.
Too many reasons why it would have been highly inadvisable to advertise that Cassian Andor is alive. You’re still not one-hundred percent sure, having decided against sending out operatives for visual confirmation of the impossible, of Cassian Andor still being out there, against all odds. But you have cracked enough coded messages from the source claiming to be Andor to notice that his signature is all over them. Slicers, even the best, even the most careful ones, all have unique ways of coding, quirks and idiosyncrasies all over their code that make it easy to distinguish them from each other, if you know what you have to look for.
You have been receiving coded messages from Cassian Andor for nearly twenty years, enough to know his coding inside out. Enough to know his coding better than his voice. You wouldn’t bet your life on that source really being Andor because you’ve been a spy long enough to know that bets are for idiots but you’re damn near sure that you’re almost tempted to do so, anyway.
You could have put him on the Death Star’s trail, should have put him on the Death Star’s trail but then you would have had to explain where your information came from, to Mon Mothma at least because of all the council members, all your superiors, she never lets you get away with your need-to-know spiel and years in the Alliance have taught you not to fight her on that. You would have had to reveal that Andor is still alive, and that would have put him in very real danger.
Him and Erso because something, a hunch, a gut feeling, call it what you will, tells you that Andor isn’t out there on his own, that at least one of those who went rogue with him are out there, too and you can’t shake the feeling that it’s Erso. You’d like to put it down to a stupid bout of hope, something Andor always clung to so desperately, something you never had the heart to train out of him. Something you haven’t let yourself believe in because hope never got you the same results that reliable sources and hard work did.
You’d really like to blame irrational, sentimental hope on your suspicion that Jyn Erso managed to escape Scarif, as well because that would make it easy. Jyn Erso actually being alive and still working with Cassian Andor complicates everything a hundred fault. Andor always worked best when he worked alone or with his droid. Andor working with Erso nearly got him killed.
So you decided not to tell anyone, instead logged the first transmission you received shortly after Scarif as an error, an attempt to use Andor’s identification code for some advantage or other from an old source of Andor’s and kept the truth to yourself. You’re still in contact with him, have him running a mission for you behind enemy lines right now but as far as the Alliance is concerned, he’s dead, and Erso’s, too, just like the rest of them. It’s better that way.
You’re still not sure what made him contact you of all people. You who have been his mentor, his superior, the holder of his leash in equal parts. You who have used his utter loyalty in any way you could, in any way you had to; until he discovered that the person he truly needed to be loyal to was himself. He could have stayed dead, could have stayed invisible, could have stayed free and yet he still came back and asked you for a new assignment.
You gave it to him, after thinking about it long and hard, after considering to tell him to take Erso and run as far as he could, to stay the hell away from this war but you realized that he wouldn’t when you realized that you wouldn’t. For all his fierceness at breaking away, at leaving the confines of his service to the Alliance, his service to you put him in, he’s still too much like you to do the smart thing. Andor might hate you, might even hate the Alliance for what you did to him but he’s too much like you to hate the cause. So you took him back and didn’t use him like you should have.
Ultimately, though, all of that is useless overthinking. You didn’t put him and whoever he’s working with on the Death Star’s trail, and Alderaan is gone. That is what it always comes down to, and that is what you will have to carry around with you for the rest of your life. It’s not the only thing, not by a long shot, but it’s going to be a little heavier to carry than most of the rest of it, you know that, and you decide not to care. Not right now, anyway.
You’re on the run again, and it’s your job to make sure that you’re not leaving anything behind that the enemy could use against you - not like Solo who didn’t even think to check for anything they could have put on the heap of junk he calls his ship, Gods, that still pisses you off to no end - and it’s your job to find your forces a new home that won’t get shot up three days after setting up camp. The council finally listened to your incessant nagging about not putting all of them in the same place so often but that won’t save the troops you will inevitably lose as soon as the Empire finds your new base.
So you have Andor and Erso listening to chatter, listening to leads on where the Empire will be most likely to expect you to set up shop next and you have parallel missions running to verify because that extra bit of paranoia never hurt anyone and you have a million other things to overlook and supervise and Alderaan is still gone and won’t come back, so stop dwelling on it and get to work. You can go back to mulling it over when you have the time for it, when everything else is said and done but that’ll be a long way off, that’s always a long way off when you’re on the run. There’s a war on.
Thank the Gods that there’s a war on.
~*~
TBC in You Got To Serve Something (Ain't That Right)
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: T
Genres: gen
Summary: Yavin IV didn't become the clusterfuck it could have been but Alderaan is gone. Davits Draven tries not to care.
A/N: Whoops, wrote another Draven piece. Kinda not the fix-it I'd intended when I'd been mulling over Rogue One bunnies but yeah. There it is, anyway. And yes, it's a follow-up to Take a Look at the Lawman because why the hell not. And oh, look, it's a series now because apparently, I'm still not done with Draven. Ugh.
( Take a Look at the Lawman (Beating Up the Wrong Guy) )
Let Me Start Again (I Want a Face That’s Fair This Time)
“Then let me start again,” I cried,
“please let me start again,
I want a face that’s fair this time,
I want a spirit that is calm.”
Leonard Cohen, “Lover, Lover, Lover”
It could have been a clusterfuck.
Another one, worse than Scarif, worse than anything that ever happened before in your career. It could have been a clusterfuck, and it ended up in a medal ceremony for a boy less than half your age from a backwater world and a smuggler completely lacking conviction. You even got a nice commendation from Mon Mothma yourself, honoring your part in the entire affair and both of you know it’s not meant as a compliment or friendly gesture. You can live with that.
It could have been worse, you’d like to say, only that Alderaan is gone and no medal or commendation will ever be able to change that. No one has said anything but you know well enough that Alderaan is gone because you haven’t done your job. You’re not playing martyr, you just look at the facts and it’s right there. If you had done your job, you would have never lost the Death Star’s tracks and you would have known that it’s heading towards Alderaan. You would have been able to give out warnings, issue evacuation orders, save at least part of the population, if not the planet.
You didn’t, though. That’s a fact. You selected the wrong operatives, activated the wrong sources, searched the wrong sectors. Those are facts, too.
It’s painfully ironic, then, that you had the right operative, who knows all the right sources, and you chose not to activate him. Not for that mission, anyway. Too many people involved, too many loose lips, too many incalculable risks.
Too many reasons why it would have been highly inadvisable to advertise that Cassian Andor is alive. You’re still not one-hundred percent sure, having decided against sending out operatives for visual confirmation of the impossible, of Cassian Andor still being out there, against all odds. But you have cracked enough coded messages from the source claiming to be Andor to notice that his signature is all over them. Slicers, even the best, even the most careful ones, all have unique ways of coding, quirks and idiosyncrasies all over their code that make it easy to distinguish them from each other, if you know what you have to look for.
You have been receiving coded messages from Cassian Andor for nearly twenty years, enough to know his coding inside out. Enough to know his coding better than his voice. You wouldn’t bet your life on that source really being Andor because you’ve been a spy long enough to know that bets are for idiots but you’re damn near sure that you’re almost tempted to do so, anyway.
You could have put him on the Death Star’s trail, should have put him on the Death Star’s trail but then you would have had to explain where your information came from, to Mon Mothma at least because of all the council members, all your superiors, she never lets you get away with your need-to-know spiel and years in the Alliance have taught you not to fight her on that. You would have had to reveal that Andor is still alive, and that would have put him in very real danger.
Him and Erso because something, a hunch, a gut feeling, call it what you will, tells you that Andor isn’t out there on his own, that at least one of those who went rogue with him are out there, too and you can’t shake the feeling that it’s Erso. You’d like to put it down to a stupid bout of hope, something Andor always clung to so desperately, something you never had the heart to train out of him. Something you haven’t let yourself believe in because hope never got you the same results that reliable sources and hard work did.
You’d really like to blame irrational, sentimental hope on your suspicion that Jyn Erso managed to escape Scarif, as well because that would make it easy. Jyn Erso actually being alive and still working with Cassian Andor complicates everything a hundred fault. Andor always worked best when he worked alone or with his droid. Andor working with Erso nearly got him killed.
So you decided not to tell anyone, instead logged the first transmission you received shortly after Scarif as an error, an attempt to use Andor’s identification code for some advantage or other from an old source of Andor’s and kept the truth to yourself. You’re still in contact with him, have him running a mission for you behind enemy lines right now but as far as the Alliance is concerned, he’s dead, and Erso’s, too, just like the rest of them. It’s better that way.
You’re still not sure what made him contact you of all people. You who have been his mentor, his superior, the holder of his leash in equal parts. You who have used his utter loyalty in any way you could, in any way you had to; until he discovered that the person he truly needed to be loyal to was himself. He could have stayed dead, could have stayed invisible, could have stayed free and yet he still came back and asked you for a new assignment.
You gave it to him, after thinking about it long and hard, after considering to tell him to take Erso and run as far as he could, to stay the hell away from this war but you realized that he wouldn’t when you realized that you wouldn’t. For all his fierceness at breaking away, at leaving the confines of his service to the Alliance, his service to you put him in, he’s still too much like you to do the smart thing. Andor might hate you, might even hate the Alliance for what you did to him but he’s too much like you to hate the cause. So you took him back and didn’t use him like you should have.
Ultimately, though, all of that is useless overthinking. You didn’t put him and whoever he’s working with on the Death Star’s trail, and Alderaan is gone. That is what it always comes down to, and that is what you will have to carry around with you for the rest of your life. It’s not the only thing, not by a long shot, but it’s going to be a little heavier to carry than most of the rest of it, you know that, and you decide not to care. Not right now, anyway.
You’re on the run again, and it’s your job to make sure that you’re not leaving anything behind that the enemy could use against you - not like Solo who didn’t even think to check for anything they could have put on the heap of junk he calls his ship, Gods, that still pisses you off to no end - and it’s your job to find your forces a new home that won’t get shot up three days after setting up camp. The council finally listened to your incessant nagging about not putting all of them in the same place so often but that won’t save the troops you will inevitably lose as soon as the Empire finds your new base.
So you have Andor and Erso listening to chatter, listening to leads on where the Empire will be most likely to expect you to set up shop next and you have parallel missions running to verify because that extra bit of paranoia never hurt anyone and you have a million other things to overlook and supervise and Alderaan is still gone and won’t come back, so stop dwelling on it and get to work. You can go back to mulling it over when you have the time for it, when everything else is said and done but that’ll be a long way off, that’s always a long way off when you’re on the run. There’s a war on.
Thank the Gods that there’s a war on.
~*~
TBC in You Got To Serve Something (Ain't That Right)