Fic: You Got To Serve Something (Ain’t That Right) (Star Wars)
Title: You Got To Serve Something (Ain’t That Right)
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: T
Genres: gen
Summary: Davits Draven hates Hoth.
A/N: Finally. This one was kinda hard, because I had a pretty hard time figuring out where I even wanted to go with this one but, as you might have noticed, as I'm following movie canon with this and writing these as vignettes for the Original Trilogy movies, I had to do one for TESB, if I wanted or not and yeah, here it is. Finally.
And yes, I shamelessly stole the song for this from the official Cassian Andor playlist on Spotify. As much as fandom sometimes likes to pretend, Cassian and Draven are a lot more alike than they think. They have to be, because Draven practically raised Cassian. If there isn't a bit of each of them in the other, I'll eat a fucking taun-taun.
( Take a Look at the Lawman (Beating Up the Wrong Guy) )
( Let Me Start Again (I Want a Face That’s Fair This Time) )
You Got To Serve Something (Ain’t That Right)
“You got to serve something, ain’t that right?
I know it gets dark, but there’s always a light
You don’t have to buy in to get into the club
Trade your worries
You gotta show up if you wanna be seen
If it matters to you ma, it matters to me.”
The Avett Brothers, “Ain’t No Man”
It’s going to be a clusterfuck.
Of course it is. As soon as the Empire finds you, and they will because they always do, it’s going to be just another clusterfuck. At least the Council’s off too warmer climes, you think and allow yourself to inject a sour note. You can’t even blame being stuck on this ice cube on anyone other than yourself because it was your vote that sent you here. All things considered, Hoth was the best pick and it’s been proven best by the fact that for the past two years, the Empire never even considered looking for you in this corner of the galaxy.
You have also been wishing Hoth hadn’t been the best pick for exactly those two years but then again, you can’t have everything. Besides, it could be worse. You could be commanding the combat engineering branch instead of military intelligence. Hoth is every spy’s dream for a safe house, and it’s an infrastructural nightmare. Small favors and all that.
But as safe houses go, you know better than anyone here that it’s they’re nature to be temporary. Safe houses aren’t homes. Safe houses are caves you use to lie low and to lick your wounds and patch yourself up well enough to be able to either finish the mission or make it to the nearest spaceport, because in the long run, inactivity kills. Two years is a long time for lying low and licking wounds.
Not that the Alliance has been inactive, but your professional paranoia keeps telling you that with every day you stay here and run your missions, skirmishes, battles from here, the greater the odds of one of your operatives not holding up under torture or one of your ships being tagged like Solo’s was when they escaped from the Death Star or just some dumber than shit low-level Imperial underachiever stumbling over your operation become. You know you’re the butt of a thousand and one jokes from regular infantry, support staff and the goddamn pilots but you don’t mind. For most of them, it’s probably better to dismiss you as some ever suspicious secretive bureaucratic pain in the ass who spends his day ordering his spooks around from behind his desk than to know only a fraction of the data that crosses that desk on a daily basis.
Most of them would get off this rock and surrender to the nearest Imperial garrison immediately, if they knew only half of that data.
The neks are closing in on this base. You find yourself wishing time and again it were just the ever-present paranoia every spy develops as an occupational hazard but it’s all in there, all in the reports you receive daily from your operatives, all in the briefs your analysts keep pushing at you with the relentless stubbornness you bred into them. You keep telling Rieekan and he keeps nodding and taking you seriously and ordering the infantry and sappers to make improvements on the base perimeter defenses. You appreciate the taking seriously and the nodding and the ordering around. Nothing of that changes the fundamental truth that the only thing that could save the Alliance from another Scarif scale clusterfuck would be abandoning this base ASAP and scattering the fleet, moving around headquarters as often and as erratically as possible, like you have been advocating for since long before Yavin IV.
Nothing of that changes the fact that of all the people who could possibly have happened on something like that, Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso managed to find a lead on something that punched you in the gut as soon as you read Andor’s message. You’re not easily spooked but a second Death Star sent you into a full-blown panic attack that lasted at least five minutes. It’s a good thing that one of the perks of being a general includes not having to share an office with anyone, even in the close confines of Hoth Base.
You didn’t freak out, you never were prone to that, not even back when you were hunting Separatists in your first command as a green second lieutenant in the GRA. You just sat there, quietly, struggling to get your breathing under control, to breathe at all and to keep the white, white walls of your cold and clammy prison deep beneath Hoth’s surface from closing in on you.
It’s not confirmed, not yet and so far, you have only shared it with Mon Mothma and she has finally learned when “need to know” isn’t just you trying to hoard and restrict an intelligence officer’s biggest capital - information, of course - and when she can push back against you and go ahead with it, anyway. You are one-hundred percent sure that right now, you, Mon Mothma and Andor and Erso are the only four people in the Alliance who know what the Empire plans to unleash on you, again.
You have considered pulling Andor and Erso off that mission - you’re still the only one who knows they’re alive, and you’ve had a bitch of a time concealing your source from Mon Mothma but she’d have wanted your head if you hadn’t told her and you would have given it to her on a silver platter yourself, just this once - to order them to stand down and get the hell out of wherever they currently are but you realized it would be pointless because Andor never changed, not even after Scarif.
Andor is like a dog with a bone when he picks up only a whiff of something being not quite right, and Erso - tenacious, fierce, stubborn herself - working with him didn’t do anything to change that. So you let them keep on investigating, going against your deep seated instinct to save a pair of good operatives from themselves.
A popular rumor about you has it that your devotion to your job makes you ruthless enough to regularly sacrifice operatives for the greater good but that’s only half the truth, like all good rumors are. You do sacrifice operatives for the greater good, but you care. You care enough that you know every name of every operative that ever died in service to you, even those no one but yourself will ever know and remember. You don’t even need a list or a directory or a file to remind yourself of their names. They’re right there in your head.
You could easily stop that rumor, and you wouldn’t even have to expose yourself for that because you could truly be the puppet master they all see in you, if you chose so. You could stop it but you care enough about your dead operatives that you’d rather have everyone think of you as ruthless and cold-hearted than come to you and ask you for those names, demand them to be made public knowledge, endanger their family, their sources, their contacts. You’re their keeper, even after they’re long dead and gone, and you take your job very seriously.
It’s just a little too painfully ironic that of all your dead operatives the ones that are being remembered most - Andor and Erso - are still very much alive. You’d like to keep it that way - deep down you know that isn’t just for strictly tactical reasons, deep down you know that it’s about more than that - but they’re making it exceedingly difficult for you.
One of Andor’s greatest strengths was always surviving deep behind enemy lines, longer than any other of your operatives ever managed. You’d like to credit it to your training but the truth is that you’d never have made it even half as long as he usually did. You were good at field work but you were always better at the big picture, at analyzing and strategizing and pushing figures on a war board. You never had that last bit of skill, of grit, maybe even luck that Andor always had and something tells you that even for Andor, skill, grit and luck won’t last forever. You have a nagging fear that Andor and Erso used up all of theirs on Scarif and are living on borrowed time. And yet you know that pulling them off would just make them push deeper into Imperial space, farther away from you.
So you keep hoarding information, distributing it into carefully tailored bits to your analysts, to give you back the pieces you need to puzzle together the big picture, to figure out how to tell the rest of the Council about a fucking second Death Star without compromising your original source. Without having to sacrifice them.
You also keep your lookouts and listening posts sharp, your trackers on target, your early warning systems honed because sooner or later, the Empire will find you and your most important job is still to be one step ahead of them, in everything you do. You…
“Sir?” You turn towards the source of the voice, low enough to only attract your attention. It’s Lieutenant Gre’kala, a Bothan female you tasked with commanding the group that monitors Imperial fleet movements. You can see the bristles in her fur, running down from the back of her head towards her neck, disappearing into her uniform collar. She’s worried. You nod for her to continue. “Several battle groups just changed course. Nav projection gives one end point for all of them.” She points towards her screen and turns to you, silently. The Executor.
You’re not a Jedi. But you have instincts that have been honed in over twenty years of military service. You don’t doubt the Lieutenant’s conclusions for a minute. You nod at her again. “Notify High Command. Quietly.” The one thing you don’t need right now is panic, and thankfully Gre’kala is smart enough to realize that, too.
Across the room, you see Rieekan interrupt the conversation he just had with one of the logistics field grades, probably alerted by the padd he pulled out. After only a few seconds of reading, he looks up, right at you and even in the dim light of the ops central, you can see the grim, determined look on his face. He nods at you, taking you very, very seriously, as he should, and starts giving out orders, as calm and quiet as he can. You appreciate that.
As for you, you’re determined, too. But you’re not grim. Instead, you’re relieved because even with the clusterfuck this is going to be, you’re glad to be on the move again. Hoth has been the Rebellion’s safe house for far too long, and it has made a lot of people far too complacent. And complacency is the last thing you all need, if Andor’s and Erso’s information pans out as correct. You’re almost happy the Empire found you.
While over at Combat Command and Starfighter Command, levels of activity and noise are rising exponentially, you just gesture for your XO, quietly instructing him to trigger all necessary protocols for base abandonment - destroying equipment, erasing data, notifying operatives, sending out scouts - and then go to execute your personal protocols.
When you get to the point of notifying Andor and Erso of the coming “change of scenery”, you get an almost instant answer, consisting only of a short coded one-liner. You don’t even need to decipher it because it’s the same thing you’d have said, and you nearly grin. About damn time. Andor might strain and push and pull away from you and you might keep telling yourself it’s all about the bigger picture, but that’s never going to change the fact that birds of a feather never quite leave the flock.
So it’s going to be a clusterfuck, and it’s only going to get worse, and you will have to remember so many more names when all this is over - if you survive until it’s over - but right now, you still have your two most valuable assets and you’re on the run again and you finally get to leave this damn ball of ice. You still have a fighting chance.
And a fighting chance is all you need right now.
~*~
TBC in If I Can't Get Clean (I'm Gonna Drink My Life Away)
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: T
Genres: gen
Summary: Davits Draven hates Hoth.
A/N: Finally. This one was kinda hard, because I had a pretty hard time figuring out where I even wanted to go with this one but, as you might have noticed, as I'm following movie canon with this and writing these as vignettes for the Original Trilogy movies, I had to do one for TESB, if I wanted or not and yeah, here it is. Finally.
And yes, I shamelessly stole the song for this from the official Cassian Andor playlist on Spotify. As much as fandom sometimes likes to pretend, Cassian and Draven are a lot more alike than they think. They have to be, because Draven practically raised Cassian. If there isn't a bit of each of them in the other, I'll eat a fucking taun-taun.
( Take a Look at the Lawman (Beating Up the Wrong Guy) )
( Let Me Start Again (I Want a Face That’s Fair This Time) )
You Got To Serve Something (Ain’t That Right)
“You got to serve something, ain’t that right?
I know it gets dark, but there’s always a light
You don’t have to buy in to get into the club
Trade your worries
You gotta show up if you wanna be seen
If it matters to you ma, it matters to me.”
The Avett Brothers, “Ain’t No Man”
It’s going to be a clusterfuck.
Of course it is. As soon as the Empire finds you, and they will because they always do, it’s going to be just another clusterfuck. At least the Council’s off too warmer climes, you think and allow yourself to inject a sour note. You can’t even blame being stuck on this ice cube on anyone other than yourself because it was your vote that sent you here. All things considered, Hoth was the best pick and it’s been proven best by the fact that for the past two years, the Empire never even considered looking for you in this corner of the galaxy.
You have also been wishing Hoth hadn’t been the best pick for exactly those two years but then again, you can’t have everything. Besides, it could be worse. You could be commanding the combat engineering branch instead of military intelligence. Hoth is every spy’s dream for a safe house, and it’s an infrastructural nightmare. Small favors and all that.
But as safe houses go, you know better than anyone here that it’s they’re nature to be temporary. Safe houses aren’t homes. Safe houses are caves you use to lie low and to lick your wounds and patch yourself up well enough to be able to either finish the mission or make it to the nearest spaceport, because in the long run, inactivity kills. Two years is a long time for lying low and licking wounds.
Not that the Alliance has been inactive, but your professional paranoia keeps telling you that with every day you stay here and run your missions, skirmishes, battles from here, the greater the odds of one of your operatives not holding up under torture or one of your ships being tagged like Solo’s was when they escaped from the Death Star or just some dumber than shit low-level Imperial underachiever stumbling over your operation become. You know you’re the butt of a thousand and one jokes from regular infantry, support staff and the goddamn pilots but you don’t mind. For most of them, it’s probably better to dismiss you as some ever suspicious secretive bureaucratic pain in the ass who spends his day ordering his spooks around from behind his desk than to know only a fraction of the data that crosses that desk on a daily basis.
Most of them would get off this rock and surrender to the nearest Imperial garrison immediately, if they knew only half of that data.
The neks are closing in on this base. You find yourself wishing time and again it were just the ever-present paranoia every spy develops as an occupational hazard but it’s all in there, all in the reports you receive daily from your operatives, all in the briefs your analysts keep pushing at you with the relentless stubbornness you bred into them. You keep telling Rieekan and he keeps nodding and taking you seriously and ordering the infantry and sappers to make improvements on the base perimeter defenses. You appreciate the taking seriously and the nodding and the ordering around. Nothing of that changes the fundamental truth that the only thing that could save the Alliance from another Scarif scale clusterfuck would be abandoning this base ASAP and scattering the fleet, moving around headquarters as often and as erratically as possible, like you have been advocating for since long before Yavin IV.
Nothing of that changes the fact that of all the people who could possibly have happened on something like that, Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso managed to find a lead on something that punched you in the gut as soon as you read Andor’s message. You’re not easily spooked but a second Death Star sent you into a full-blown panic attack that lasted at least five minutes. It’s a good thing that one of the perks of being a general includes not having to share an office with anyone, even in the close confines of Hoth Base.
You didn’t freak out, you never were prone to that, not even back when you were hunting Separatists in your first command as a green second lieutenant in the GRA. You just sat there, quietly, struggling to get your breathing under control, to breathe at all and to keep the white, white walls of your cold and clammy prison deep beneath Hoth’s surface from closing in on you.
It’s not confirmed, not yet and so far, you have only shared it with Mon Mothma and she has finally learned when “need to know” isn’t just you trying to hoard and restrict an intelligence officer’s biggest capital - information, of course - and when she can push back against you and go ahead with it, anyway. You are one-hundred percent sure that right now, you, Mon Mothma and Andor and Erso are the only four people in the Alliance who know what the Empire plans to unleash on you, again.
You have considered pulling Andor and Erso off that mission - you’re still the only one who knows they’re alive, and you’ve had a bitch of a time concealing your source from Mon Mothma but she’d have wanted your head if you hadn’t told her and you would have given it to her on a silver platter yourself, just this once - to order them to stand down and get the hell out of wherever they currently are but you realized it would be pointless because Andor never changed, not even after Scarif.
Andor is like a dog with a bone when he picks up only a whiff of something being not quite right, and Erso - tenacious, fierce, stubborn herself - working with him didn’t do anything to change that. So you let them keep on investigating, going against your deep seated instinct to save a pair of good operatives from themselves.
A popular rumor about you has it that your devotion to your job makes you ruthless enough to regularly sacrifice operatives for the greater good but that’s only half the truth, like all good rumors are. You do sacrifice operatives for the greater good, but you care. You care enough that you know every name of every operative that ever died in service to you, even those no one but yourself will ever know and remember. You don’t even need a list or a directory or a file to remind yourself of their names. They’re right there in your head.
You could easily stop that rumor, and you wouldn’t even have to expose yourself for that because you could truly be the puppet master they all see in you, if you chose so. You could stop it but you care enough about your dead operatives that you’d rather have everyone think of you as ruthless and cold-hearted than come to you and ask you for those names, demand them to be made public knowledge, endanger their family, their sources, their contacts. You’re their keeper, even after they’re long dead and gone, and you take your job very seriously.
It’s just a little too painfully ironic that of all your dead operatives the ones that are being remembered most - Andor and Erso - are still very much alive. You’d like to keep it that way - deep down you know that isn’t just for strictly tactical reasons, deep down you know that it’s about more than that - but they’re making it exceedingly difficult for you.
One of Andor’s greatest strengths was always surviving deep behind enemy lines, longer than any other of your operatives ever managed. You’d like to credit it to your training but the truth is that you’d never have made it even half as long as he usually did. You were good at field work but you were always better at the big picture, at analyzing and strategizing and pushing figures on a war board. You never had that last bit of skill, of grit, maybe even luck that Andor always had and something tells you that even for Andor, skill, grit and luck won’t last forever. You have a nagging fear that Andor and Erso used up all of theirs on Scarif and are living on borrowed time. And yet you know that pulling them off would just make them push deeper into Imperial space, farther away from you.
So you keep hoarding information, distributing it into carefully tailored bits to your analysts, to give you back the pieces you need to puzzle together the big picture, to figure out how to tell the rest of the Council about a fucking second Death Star without compromising your original source. Without having to sacrifice them.
You also keep your lookouts and listening posts sharp, your trackers on target, your early warning systems honed because sooner or later, the Empire will find you and your most important job is still to be one step ahead of them, in everything you do. You…
“Sir?” You turn towards the source of the voice, low enough to only attract your attention. It’s Lieutenant Gre’kala, a Bothan female you tasked with commanding the group that monitors Imperial fleet movements. You can see the bristles in her fur, running down from the back of her head towards her neck, disappearing into her uniform collar. She’s worried. You nod for her to continue. “Several battle groups just changed course. Nav projection gives one end point for all of them.” She points towards her screen and turns to you, silently. The Executor.
You’re not a Jedi. But you have instincts that have been honed in over twenty years of military service. You don’t doubt the Lieutenant’s conclusions for a minute. You nod at her again. “Notify High Command. Quietly.” The one thing you don’t need right now is panic, and thankfully Gre’kala is smart enough to realize that, too.
Across the room, you see Rieekan interrupt the conversation he just had with one of the logistics field grades, probably alerted by the padd he pulled out. After only a few seconds of reading, he looks up, right at you and even in the dim light of the ops central, you can see the grim, determined look on his face. He nods at you, taking you very, very seriously, as he should, and starts giving out orders, as calm and quiet as he can. You appreciate that.
As for you, you’re determined, too. But you’re not grim. Instead, you’re relieved because even with the clusterfuck this is going to be, you’re glad to be on the move again. Hoth has been the Rebellion’s safe house for far too long, and it has made a lot of people far too complacent. And complacency is the last thing you all need, if Andor’s and Erso’s information pans out as correct. You’re almost happy the Empire found you.
While over at Combat Command and Starfighter Command, levels of activity and noise are rising exponentially, you just gesture for your XO, quietly instructing him to trigger all necessary protocols for base abandonment - destroying equipment, erasing data, notifying operatives, sending out scouts - and then go to execute your personal protocols.
When you get to the point of notifying Andor and Erso of the coming “change of scenery”, you get an almost instant answer, consisting only of a short coded one-liner. You don’t even need to decipher it because it’s the same thing you’d have said, and you nearly grin. About damn time. Andor might strain and push and pull away from you and you might keep telling yourself it’s all about the bigger picture, but that’s never going to change the fact that birds of a feather never quite leave the flock.
So it’s going to be a clusterfuck, and it’s only going to get worse, and you will have to remember so many more names when all this is over - if you survive until it’s over - but right now, you still have your two most valuable assets and you’re on the run again and you finally get to leave this damn ball of ice. You still have a fighting chance.
And a fighting chance is all you need right now.
~*~
TBC in If I Can't Get Clean (I'm Gonna Drink My Life Away)