“Come along, Kay,” Cassian said, heaving his bag higher onto his shoulder. By rights, he needed a proper backpack, something that would better distribute the weight he carried, but this was the Rebellion. Everything truly useful had been appropriated away long ago and Cassian couldn’t bring himself to waste resources just to requisition one. Not when, for once, what he was doing had nothing to do with the Rebellion at all. “You’re not regretting this already, are you?”
Turning on his heels, he grinned down at K, who stared back up at him, baleful. How Cassian knew that, he couldn’t say, given K was still such a recent addition to the base. In any case, K’s ocular sensors looked no different than usual, but Cassian saw judgment there all the same. And when K opened his mouth—figuratively anyway—he confirmed it. “When I said you needed to get out more, I didn’t mean it literally.”
“Then you should have specified.”
“Most people don’t need specifications,” K said, tromping up the hill behind him. Given the length of his legs, he should’ve beaten Cassian up this rise five times over. Ten maybe, because unlike Cassian, K didn’t have lungs and muscles that burned, a heart that pounded, furious and free, in his chest. “Even I know that.”
“I’m not most people,” Cassian replied, simple, spinning back around and striding upward as though to illustrate how hiking really worked. Or what hiking could be done around the base. These weren’t exactly the mountains, which would’ve required signing out a shuttle and explaining to Mon Mothma why he wanted to go out of immediate comms range. But a short flight—just far enough to get out from underneath the tall, green canopies of the jungle surrounding the Massassi Temple—that he could swing without inspiring too many questions. “Perhaps next time you’ll tell me what you really mean and save us all the trouble.”
“For a spy,” K called up after him, “you’re not very good at subtext.”
Cassian rolled his eyes, ignoring the jibe. He was in a decent mood for once and didn’t intend to let K spoil it with his complaints, not least when those complaints were lazy and unworthy of K’s finest achievements in that regard. “So what would you have me do instead?”
“I’m not human; I don’t know what you should be doing.” K’s stride lengthened, the clomp clomp clomp sound shifting so something slower, if more deliberate. And after a moment, he caught up with Cassian, could have exceeded him if he’d wanted to. “Maybe you should talk to people.”
“I talk to you,” Cassian said as they reached the top of the hill. He glanced backward, the Massassi Temple visible from behind the thick foliage around it. In the other direction stood a deep, gouge-like depression in the ground, a standard mile wide or thereabouts, and mostly free of green. Instead, the hard-packed dirt was brown laced with gray; what trees remained pointed toward the sky, black and charred and defoliated. They were now little more than planted spears awaiting a chance that would never again come to them, standing sentinel for nothing.
“This is unexpected,” K said, letting Cassian’s prior comment slide entirely, his hands catching on what passed for his hips. “Do all humans exhaust themselves just to look at… destruction?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask them?” Exhilaration flooded his body, the wind chilly around him, but incapable of touching him in this state. He was always so when he had the chance to get away from the base and come here. He felt shielded, comforted almost. Nature would not judge him for his actions and inactions. It remained as it would regardless. “And look a little closer, huh?” His hand swept to take in the entirety of the vista. “It’s not all ‘destruction.’”
The metal of K’s spine squeaked as he leaned forward, an affectation as far as Cassian could tell based on what he knew of K’s construction. “Are you trying to teach me something, Cassian?”
“No,” he said, exasperated. “It’s just that sometimes I like to have a reminder.” Though a wide swath of the forest surrounding the temple had been burned down—before the Rebellion’s time, though if Cassian had to guess, he would have said it had been ten years give or take since it happened, not that long on a galactic scale—already green saplings were pushing their way through the ashes of their predecessors, ferns and bushes and whatever else managed to crawl its way out of the dirt. A few bright wildflowers dotted the area in small patches, attracting a handful of native creatures.
“A reminder of what?” K asked, dubious.
“That not even the universe can destroy itself permanently.” When you were burning through the atmosphere a hundred times a day in starships, the risk of starting a fire became a real possibility. If even one of them failed, if there was a crash in the wrong place, you could end up with more than a wreck. It wasn’t easy to burn down the forests of Yavin 4; it rained more often than not and dry seasons were nearly unheard of and that was why they chose this forested planet over any of the others they could have picked. But a convergence of unfortunate events meant that this section of forest faced a conflagration in its distant past and survived. “So what can the Empire throw at us that we cannot handle?”
K was quiet for a moment and Cassian wanted to believe it was because his words had had an effect on the droid. Cassian wasn’t given to many sentiments, but this one… this one felt true to him. It made him feel a little better anyway.
“Star Destroyers,” K said finally with the deeply profound sense of certainty that only the doomed and the optimistic felt. He nodded a few times, getting into it far more than Cassian thought necessary. “Lots and lots of Star Destroyers.”
“Kay!” And the only thing that stopped Cassian from socking K in the arm was the twinge of remembrance from the last time he’d tried punching him. It hadn’t felt good and he’d had to have a hairline fracture on one knuckle healed for the trouble.
“What?” K shrugged. “You asked.”
“I didn’t actually.”
“Oh.” K exhaled. “That was a rhetorical question.”
“Yeah, Kay. It was a rhetorical question.”
“One day I’ll figure out how you distinguish between the two.” K shifted slightly, his feet squelching in the dirt and muck. “It’s very nice,” he added, awkward, “for a burned out husk of a forest anyway.”
Cassian glanced at him, sidelong, as he rummaged in his pack for his canteen. In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to have brought K along. There was no reason to think he’d care or appreciate what Cassian was doing—and no reason to fault him for that opinion either. Still, he’d wanted… he didn’t know what he wanted.
“You can go back if you want,” Cassian offered, twisting the cap on the canteen. Shrugging, he tilted his head back and took a swallow of tepid water. His eyes refused to skim higher than about K’s knees though and it wasn’t until he turned away entirely and allowed himself to focus on the scene in front of him that he felt comfortable again. Rubbing at his shoulder, he returned the canteen to the pack and retrieved the tarp he’d liberated from the hangar bay earlier today.
“After all that time we spent getting here?” K said, taking the pack from Cassian’s hands and holding the straps loosely between his fingers.
“It took an hour at most.”
“It felt longer.”
“Now you’re just mocking me,” Cassian said, more amused than hurt. Not hurt at all in fact, though perhaps he’d hoped… well, K was nothing if not always surprising. Maybe that was why he’d brought K. He wanted to see what K would do. Or maybe he just wanted someone else to know and K was the one being he trusted above all others. Cassian didn’t allow himself to think about it too closely.
“I wouldn’t.”
A hint of a smile tugged at the corner of Cassian’s mouth; he could have smothered it easily, but he chose to let it remain instead. Rather than retort—they could snipe at one another all day if he didn’t stop it—he unfurled the tarp and stared pointedly at K. “In that case,” he said, “you won’t mind if I rest awhile.”
If K were capable of narrowing his eyes, he could be doing so now. “No, I don’t mind, Cassian,” he said. And though an overblown sense of persecution clung to K’s words, maybe they were true, too. They sounded true.
Either way, he didn’t leave though Cassian had granted him his blessing in the matter, even if he did the droid equivalent of squirming the whole time, head and body creaking and squeaking as he shifted and turned. Probably it should have bothered Cassian, who was more used to being alone than he was to having backup and more often than not preferred it that way.
“Let’s head back,” Cassian said once the sun had crept a little ways across the sky, now almost directly above them, and warmer than was comfortable. K nodded and got moving immediately, far faster than he’d been coming up, that was for sure.
“The trip wasn’t entirely devoid of value,” K said gamely. Cassian had heard better peace offerings in his life, but he preferred this one; it felt earned for all that it was begrudging. “I think I understand you better now.”
“Kay, I could’ve told you.” Cassian, barking a laugh, clapped K on the shoulder as best he could. The Massassi Temple cut through the trees ahead of them, a beacon point to guide them home.
“There’s not a whole lot to understand about me.”