This was the situation Cassian deserved. For being so good at his job, for being so ruthless. He told himself a thousand times a day, turned the words over in his mind, that this was what he’d signed up for, that it was worth it. All that nervous handling, though, had only taken the sharp edges away from his thoughts. It was now more of a comfort than anything else to think on the sacrifices he’d made. It didn’t make him bleed to imagine the suffering he’d inflicted over the years. All of this is for the Rebellion, he told himself. It’s not me. I’m not the very worst of my actions, not when I do it for the cause of right.
Sometimes, he even believed it.
That was the worst part of all. These reminders were not supposed to be comforts. There should have been nothing in them that soothed. And yet the pounding, plodding, endless self-admonishments served as well as a winter blanket served against the cold.
He hated it.
He hated it almost as much as he hated standing here, surrounded by Director Krennic’s things in his home with a glass of wine in one hand, his ears and eyes looking out for treasure that wouldn’t even be there. Oh, this wasn’t a part of his job. The Rebellion never asked for this kind of information gathering from its operatives, though they never went out of their way to dissuade them either and some—the ambitious and the zealous alike—went out of their way to target Imperial officers in this fashion. It was a game to them. A very profitable game. A savior’s game. Because how often had good, solid, reliable intelligence come from between the sheets, shared accidentally in moments of intimacy? More often than Imperials cared to believe.
If only it were that simple.
If only he could tell himself he was here because he wanted to pin Krennic for his crimes, get his hooks good and messy into the sinew of Krennic’s many lies and plans and pull him apart with them. That, at least, might have been noble. It might have been worth it.
“How’s the wine?” Krennic asked. “Too dry?”
On the contrary, Cassian found it far too sweet, but he was playing a boy from Cadahire, where the alcohol burned going down and tasted like nothing so much as hyperfuel might. To him, this would be nothing, like crisp, cool water, hardly notable one way or the other. Krennic knew that; he was, perhaps, trying to show Cassian a courtesy. Still, it was probably the driest he could find in all of Imperial Center, when Cassian knew already the wines Krennic preferred and they weren’t anywhere in the same class. See, Krennic didn’t have to say, I pay attention.
“It’s fine,” Cassian answered. It was easier than he would have liked to dredge up a smile. “Thank you.”
Krennic rolled his eyes with proprietary fondness. “One day I’ll find one you like,” he said, like the only thing in the galaxy that mattered was unlocking this one piece of Cassian that remained hidden to him. “So you won’t always have to dive immediately for the hard liquors.”
The day he avoided that fate was likely the day he quit working entirely. “You say that like you wouldn’t rather be drunk through ninety percent of interactions with your peers.”
It had taken a while for Cassian to figure out how best to approach Krennic. He’d hated Cassian on sight for what his uniform represented. When ISB officers were afoot, that meant someone didn’t trust you, maybe even thought you were hiding something. And Krennic despised not being trusted and caught out in such an obvious manner. But he was drawn, too, because everybody knew that getting in with an ISB officer could smooth the way elsewhere.
That made it easier, but not easy.
Because Krennic liked a fawning crowd, liked recognition, but he’d learned in the Imperial Court that only sycophants would give you that devotion and they were at least as likely, if not more so, to stab you in the back.
A small degree of insouciance, Cassian had found, was the key. Not too much though lest he feel slighted and mocked. A disdain for Krennic that came with a core of admiration, that was what got him. It helped that Krennic saw Cassian as principled, a little stodgy. Cassian might snark and bite behind the scenes, but he played by the rules and, best of all, his ambitions never interfered with Krennic’s. Krennic didn’t have to lose in order for Cassian to win or so Krennic must have thought. There was something seductive to him in that. At least that was what Cassian assumed. He’d never really asked what Krennic got out of this arrangement other than a good time and Cassian’s dubious company.
Laughing, Krennic lifted his eyebrows and took a sip, barely able to bite back a grimace. “You’re not wrong.”
Cassian smiled more brightly because that was what the boy from Cadahire would do. “I’m usually not.”
A pair of coasters hit the low, thick metal of Krennic’s kaf table with a dull clang. Silver, they almost matched the table, but not quite, almost displeasing, but also not quite. He took Cassian’s glass from his hand and placed it on one of the coasters and gestured for Cassian to sit. The thin, white cushions of his couch were somehow plusher than they looked, but Cassian was always a little uncomfortable sitting there anyway, like the whole thing was built specifically to get people off the couch and out of Krennic’s apartment.
Or maybe Cassian was just projecting and he was the one who always wanted to be gone as soon as possible. As long as he didn’t stay too long, he could pretend this was less than what it was.
“No,” Krennic agreed, though he rarely let himself agree with anyone unless it served his own ends. Which made Cassian special. After all, there was no unique benefit to Krennic playing nice.
They’d already established that the boy from Cadahire didn’t like nice. Boys from Cadahire who were nice didn’t make ISB agent younger than anyone else in the program. They didn’t claw and knife their way up the ladder to the weighty, important assignments quicker than their more senior colleagues. Nice boys from Cadahire got shunted off to the worst of the war fronts where they rotted and died. So Cadahire’s pride and joy got along just fine with Krennic.
Cassian didn’t like nice either, but Krennic didn’t need to know that.
He was just doing it because he wanted to. That should have raised a red flag, but the alcohol was good enough and Krennic’s company was interesting enough that Cassian didn’t relax exactly, but he did something akin to it. Something worse.
He let himself see in Krennic what the boy from Cadahire would have seen; he let himself want what that boy would have wanted. Had wanted, the anticipation building in the base of his spine and working its heated way up the back of his uniform jacket to settle in a knot in his hind brain for all the months they’d worked together. That ancient bit of cerebral matter where all bad decisions lived.
Cassian would have torn it out of himself if it wouldn’t have made him useless to the cause.
Krennic, cleverer sometimes than others thought he was, but never as clever as he believed himself to be, noticed the change almost immediately. His gaze grew languid, haughty. The ice-chipped blue of his eyes burned and melted and reformed into something as intimidating as glaciers, crystalline and deadly big, poised to split in two and send a tsunami crashing toward the shore. As Krennic took a seat next to Cassian—far closer than normal, his hand wrapping around the end of the couch cushion in such a way that his pinkie finger brushed against the outside of Cassian’s knee—Cassian knew there was no turning back now.
It was dumb. The dumbest thing Cassian had ever done. Jumping off a precipice without a parachute might have been less dumb. Presenting himself to the Emperor as a Rebel spy might have been the smarter decision.
But Cassian didn’t stop the boy from Cadahire from being the reckless man he so wanted to be.
“Kiss me,” he said, wine-rough, low and hoarse and so stupid he couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of his mouth. They almost didn’t feel like words he’d said even after they were out.
Cassian could have justified it to himself in a million different ways, could have called himself a honey trap and at least pretended this wasn’t just a bit of selfishness in the midst of a bad situation where he had no options, no room for touch or truth or caring. Maybe Krennic would become a useful tool. People did, sometimes, when things like sex and love were on the table.
Krennic’s lips curled up, pleased, smug. It was an ugly look for him, even if a compelling one, too, and Cassian might have slapped it off his face if he thought he could get away with it and not turn this into something he didn’t want. His attention raked, sharp, over Cassian’s body, like he wasn’t sure Cassian wasn’t just a toy in the maw of a predator. If looks could draw blood, this one would. But that was okay. Cassian knew the truth.
It was Krennic who was the toy, who was lucky that Cassian wasn’t interested in playing this particular game in that particular way. It could end messily for Krennic if that were the case. It could end messily for Cassian, too, but that was just the reality of his entire life. It wasn’t the same threat to him that it was to Krennic.
If Cassian failed, the Rebellion would be out an excellent spy. It would be a loss, but it was nothing that would keep them down for long, no real tragedy. At this point, Cassian was just treading water as a deep undercover operative. At this point, if he found out anything new, it would be a great and shocking boon.
The same was true for Krennic, though he liked to pretend he was more important than he truly was. If his life was destroyed by bad behavior, it would be bad for his ego, but the Empire would find another project manager to run his precious program.
As Krennic leaned back, Cassian reached for his uniform coat, grabbed at buttons and clasps that were more familiar than they should have been. Krennic didn’t stop him, turned into it, and finally brought his mouth close enough for Cassian to reach with his own. They lingered that way for a moment, one final chance before everything and nothing changed.
The boy from Cadahire won in the end, got exactly what he’d asked for and more, just like Cassian knew he would.
Just like Cassian knew he wanted.