atticusprior
He doesnât have to try, he doesnât have to do anything at all to see her as she was then. To see the memories flicker across her face. As one of the last of his childhood left alive. As one of the last that will get to know each other through most of their lives. Miraculously still alive, and even moreâin front of each other. All he knows is desperate hope in every part of life.
But, he can suppress the memories, tell all to pause in his mind so he can watch her. Notice the steadiness, the way it hits her limbs, maybe notice it before she does. The persistent trembling. Blame it on the trained eye.
âThatâs all you needâto promise yourself to something.â A half-smile her way, genuine. Whateverâs enough. Enough to be spoken about. Enough to face. âNo one will make you stay on Yavin, if you donât want to. If you donât want to stay, after this.â A beat. âI wonât make you.â
Heâd tell her, she doesnât have to say it, or anything, if she doesnât want to. She can just stay, and heâd know what it means. Know itâs maybe not for a Rebellion by the look in her eyes, the way she holds her shoulders. The silence is easier anyway. To tell a person by the way they hold a blade, the way they hold their back, itâs deeper than any conversation. âBut I might ask you to.â
And just like that, he accepts her promise to him in that not-quite way Atticus tends to work around things rather than try to bind them to a formal logic. He operates in the realm of intuition, feeling. She has always tried to build systems around him, translate his moral compass into rules she can understand, a dependency of sorts. How utterly foreign, how completely like they were.
His face does a strange thing, and she nearly cannot map it until she realizes â oh, Atticus Prior is smiling at her. Automatically, she calculates the years she has spent forgetting that smile. Like so many other tiny joys, this one slipped away from her, replaced by the curious blankness of a drug-induced amnesia.
But seeing it again, she locates that smile across time, charts its evolution and moon phases until she lands here again. Not quite a grin, never a smirk, dancing on the edge of alien but always superhuman in warmth. She remembered him in thought, in battle, in pain, but never like this.
And Orion laughs, because he slipped that tiny clause into their contract, because he smiles at her, because laughing is the only way she can expel the lump from her throat after accepting that even after, even now, someone still wants her, that she too can want.












