#daceymormont

Amaya dug her claws into his shoulder, buried her face in his neck, and he clung to her tightly as he stared at the horrific scene before him. Mama dead, golden dust coating her like snow. Tia dead, a pile of dust at her feet like ashes. Papa dead, a trail of dust from Mama to him. Amaya was the only daemon in the house left. All the others had been reduced to nothing but what stars were made of.

And when the people saw him stumble out of the house, so tiny and fragile, shivering despite the heavy coat, his daemon’s head peeking out, they knew.

Settled, they whispered to each other, and only six. It was unheard of. Fest was by no means a comfortable place and they were in the beginning stages of a rebellion, but no one had ever known a child’s daemon to settle so early. Instead of reaching out to comfort the small child, people stepped away from him, giving him a wide berth, as he wandered aimlessly in the street.

Only when Amaya bit his hand did Cassian finally stop and look down at her. It was then that he noticed that she hadn’t changed for a while, despite her current form being something that he’d only seen once before.

“Oh,” was the only thing he could think to say.

Brown black eyes with a hint of red gazed up at him. “Cassian.” She curled up against his neck and he could feel her little heart beating against his skin. She was warm, her fur coarse and stiff like the brush his mama would chase him around the house with. “You’re tracking blood and dust.”

It had nothing to do with what was transpiring between and inside of them and yet the statement was the final nail in the coffin. He knew in his bones that she had settled and so, in a way, had he. Nothing would ever be the same. There would be no coming back from this.

*

It was strange that life on the run was better than life on Coruscant. On Lah’mu, the Erso struggled and toiled in their attempts to completely reinvent themselves – Galen and Lyra were not natural born farmers despite their backgrounds in science – but it was somehow easier there. It was nicer to stress over plants than political intrigue and insidious whispers. They were still looking over their shoulders, of course – that would never go away – but smiles and laughter came easier to them and more frequently in time.

Jyn’s Felix was a burst of energy, a bright spot on an otherwise dreary and rainy planet. After leaving Coruscant and landing in their new home, he was filled with joy, bringing smiles even to his parents’ tired and battered daemons. Before, he had been so timid that he very rarely spoke unless he was alone with Jyn, but on Lah’mu, he ran around the house, slipping into one form after the next, causing Jyn to laugh delightfully and her parents to smile and touch each other.

Somehow, in the darkness, her daemon brought them all together again, reminds them what they were fighting for. Running and hiding didn’t seem so bad when a child was happy.

While her parents slept, Jyn sometimes liked to crawl outside to look at the stars. Felix always encouraged this slightly rebellious nature of hers. They had to tiptoe silently around her mother’s Leopold and father’s Evangeline, both of whom slept in different places of the house, but they’d learned how quickly. Back on Coruscant, they were kept away from everything and everyone. It was a luxurious place that the two saw little of. Not so much here. There were very few people, but Jyn had always tended to stay away from others out of some ingrained cautious nature anyways.

The stars though… The stars took her breath away. She could stare up at the night sky for hours and feel like she was up there with them. They were the same and yet always different. Some nights, she swore that a star that was once there was gone the next. It was magical. She could not remember the stars ever being so bright on another planet. Maybe it was because there weren’t nearly as many buildings or blinding lights on the ground.

Felix would shift into a bird, flying higher and higher, pushing their bond to its limits, a black speck in the sky, hiding lights as he passed over her head, before bulleting to her and practically crashing into her open arms and nuzzling into her chest.

Pressing her face into his fur now that he was a black cat, Jyn smiled proudly. “You went so far!”

“It hurt,” Felix whined, but that never stopped him. He was as adventurous as she was, ready to push everything to the limit as much as a child could. “Evangeline can get much further.”

“She and Papa have had more practice,” Jyn pointed out, though she wasn’t sure that was the reason.

Back when her father was working on Coruscant, his and Evangeline’s bond seemed different from her mother’s and Leopold’s. While her mother and daemon stuck close to one another, her father’s relationship with his daemon felt almost…distant. Not cold, never like that, just like something was coming in between them. They were getting better now though. Sometimes, Evangeline curled up on his collarbone to sleep at night. She never did that before as far as Jyn could remember.

“Do you think we’ll stay here for long?” Felix asked abruptly. He shifted into the form of a Rottweiler puppy and laid in a ball at her side.

Jyn laid back down in the dirt so that he could prop his head on her stomach and smoothed a hand down his back. She loved it when he was soft and dark like this. “Papa says the plants should appear soon.” She gazed up at the stars. “We’re going to be farmers. They plant their roots and stay, so we will too.”

But she couldn’t help but feel like she was being drawn upwards into the stars, like she could reach her arms up and be pulled to them. As much as she liked it here on Lah’mu compared to Coruscant, as happy as she was, she still had trouble with the concept of home. They’d gone to a lot of places. Maybe a part of her would never feel like she had stopped running. Maybe it was why Felix had so much energy in him.

*

It struck Cassian as both curious and suspicious that he was one of the few children in the small orphanage set up by the Rebellion whose daemon was already settled. All of these children had lost their parents somehow, hadn’t they? And yet, for the most part, their daemons weren’t settled. In fact, at nine, he was the youngest one with a settled daemon. The closest one to him was eleven and he found out that her daemon only had settled a few weeks before.

For the first time, it occurred to him that what happened to Amaya might not have been normal.

On Fest, he had been around children whose daemons were settled. None as young as him, of course, but daemons tended to settle quickly on harsh planets like his. The time to grow up came before any of them knew it. Nine or ten was a common settling age. It had never been an issue with the other kids on his home planet. Despite his age and size, they saw him as stronger, fiercer, although it helped that he was willing to pelt stormtroopers with rocks at only seven while other kids scampered.

Here though, his Amaya caused people to look at him warily. He didn’t like it. Whenever they were in a large group of people, he clung to her closely or she would hide under his shirt. It wasn’t cold here, not like Fest, and he felt strangely bare without a jacket. Amaya could hide easier in a jacket or even rest partially in his hood with her front paws and head resting on his shoulder. They had to learn new ways, although Cassian  had always been quick at adjusting and changing tactics.

But when he was surrounded by other children, Cassian couldn’t help but notice the way adults’ eyes would jump right over him, like he and his daemon were a sore spot that they didn’t want to see. It only took a few months for him to realize that he wasn’t going to be adopted. He watched other kids come and go, swooped up into a family, while he stayed behind. It should’ve made him bitter, but he had Amaya. She would whisper things to him in Festian that made him feel a little more at ease and never strayed far from him.

By the time Cassian was twelve, he was already doing odd jobs around the base for the Rebellion. He was too young to go on actual missions, despite insisting that he could do it, so he did whatever he could. Too many years had passed for him to believe that he might one day have a family of his own again. His family was dead and their daemons were dust. Already he was beginning to forget simple things about them. It was the price of getting older. Besides, he couldn’t look back. There wasn’t the time.

Also at twelve, he could blend in easier with the other kids on base. A lot more kids had settled daemons at that age. People didn’t look at him like he caused them pain. He and Amaya were just two more victims of collateral damage from the war. They didn’t see a damaged kid. They didn’t know when Amaya had settled, just that she was, and no one questioned it and he never said.

It was the beginning of his understanding at how easy it was to trick people.

All he had to do was smile and deflect and soldiers saw a child growing up under some difficult circumstances that was trying his best. They didn’t know that his entire family had been slaughtered and he was only alive because he’d forgotten to come back home for lunch while playing with some other kids. They didn’t know of how he’d tracked his mother’s blood and her daemon’s dust for a quarter of a mile after he’d found their bodies at home.

They didn’t know anything about him. He could make up whatever he wanted to and they’d believe it. He told people that Amaya was all sorts of things and because they didn’t know any better about the animals they believed him. The two of them would speak only in Festian sometimes, convincing people that she had never learned Basic, and they believed it every time. He told people that she settled when he was nine, ten, eleven. No one even blinked.

“Isn’t lying bad?” Amaya asked once. “That’s what your mamá said.”

She’s dead, Cassian couldn’t help but think and Amaya never asked again.

But not them. Their family was gone, their old life gone, Fest gone, everything – but they were still alive. They had survived. It had to be for something. He could feel it in his bones.

*

Jyn had to flatten herself to the ground and hide amongst the tall plants to avoid being spotted by a swooping owl. It was only thanks to Felix tugging at her that she noticed the daemon in time. He curled underneath her in the form of a gecko as she laid belly down in the dirt, his little heart beating fast. The owl flew over them though and landed gracefully on the shoulder’s of the man in white.

From where she was hiding, she could only see her papa, but she knew that his Evangeline was with him. A part of her wanted to ask what the salamander had whispered in Felix’s ears, but she didn’t ask. She and her daemon never kept secrets from one another, but whatever he had been told had made him shift into a quivering mouse and it had frightened her more than she wanted to admit.

When she saw her mama running up to them, Jyn’s heart leapt into her throat and she nearly jumped up. Only Felix’s insistence kept her down. The pack her mama was carrying made it awkward for her to run but allowed Leopold to keep up with her much more easily. He slipped through the plants, a furious snarl on his face, and Jyn knew – she just knew in her heart – that something awful was going to happen.

“Oh look, Lyra, back from the dead!” the man called out dryly. “It’s a miracle.”

Her father’s eyes closed, tired, defeated while her mother wore a defiant look on her face still. She was never one to give up. Stubborn and prideful, she would fight until the very end.

“We won’t let you have him,” Leopold growled, just loud enough for Jyn to hear. He had such a bold voice, the kind that could still Jyn and Felix when they were about to do something that they shouldn’t.

It didn’t have quite the same effect on the man in white and his white-faced owl daemon. The two looked at each other, almost pityingly, before turning back to her. “I’m not taking just him, Lyra,” the man said. “I’m taking all of you. Where has that child of yours run off to, hm?”

If the owl had been closer to the ground, Jyn was almost certain that Leopold would’ve leaped to attack it. She was too young to remember their time in the prison where the honey badger daemon had snapped at any other daemon that got too close to Felix or Jyn, but he’d never lost his fierceness or protective nature.

Instead, her mama whipped out a small blaster and pointed it at the man in white. The Death Troopers guarding him all jumped to aim at her and their similar daemons aligned in attack form, but she didn’t hesitate or drop the blaster. She glanced from Jyn’s papa to the man in white, breathing heavily through her nose, and proclaimed defiantly, “You’ll never win.”

“I already have,” the man in white told her with a slight smile on his face.

Her mama shot the blaster at him; the Death Troopers shot theirs at her. Everyone’s shots connected with their designated targets, but only one daemon burst in a cloud of dust.

Jyn startled in her hiding spot, eyes wide with shock. A terrible scream rang in the air that she dimly registered as Evangeline’s, something she’d never heard before, and she watched, trembling on the ground, as her father rushed to her fallen mother. It was too late though. Shiny dust glittered in the air and slowly fell to the earth where Leopold had once stood.

He was gone. Her mother was dead.

Felix let out the tiniest whine as he buried himself into her jacket. She didn’t have time to process the sudden shift in him – a warm tingling feeling that went from her toes to her head – not when the man in white barked out orders to find her and the Death Troopers started to scan the area.

Instead, she crawled backwards out of sight, pulled herself to her feet, and ran as fast as possible, clinging to Felix as tight as she could. He didn’t seem capable of running himself to follow her and so she had to drop her favorite toy Stormy in order to keep a grip on him. When she finally reached the bunker that her father had built for this very reason, she convinced him to wrap around her neck so that she could pull the hatch open, climb inside, and shut the door.

The two of them watched as a pair of Death Troopers swept the cave where she was hiding, her green eyes and his yellow ones, until the hunters left. Only when she was certain that they were gone did she finally climb the rest of the way down the stairs, her legs wobbly and hands slick with sweat and dirt. She banged on a lantern until it came on and then set it to the side to illuminate the small space.

It took Saw Gerrera two days to find them in the hidey hole.

It took her a full day to realize that Felix had settled.

A long, thin, scaly snake with red, yellow, and black bands, all she could think was that he was beautiful, but it confused her as well. He’d never played as a snake before. Some people said that snake daemons were a sign that a person was dangerous or that there was something wrong with them. They couldn’t be trusted. She slid her small hands down his back and he curled into a ball in her lap. She trusted Felix with her life.

He was the only one that she would ever trust fully again because she knew that he was the only one that would never leave her. He would die before he even tried and as would she. They would both be dust before they left the other’s side.

“His daemon--” Cassian paused and pressed his lips together. Amaya walked over to him and cocked her head to the side, the look that said she was listening carefully. “That’s what happened to my parents’ daemons. They didn’t just die; they turned into...nothing.”

It felt worse than death. It felt like a complete erasure of their person, just as his memories of them were slowly beginning to fade over time. Seven years had passed since their deaths, longer than he’d known them alive. There were nights when his memories didn’t feel real, as if his mother and father had only existed in a dream and he had only ever known the Rebellion and Amaya.

“Does that scare you?” Amaya asked.

Cassian dropped his eyes and tucked the blaster gun away. “It doesn’t really make me feel anything.” It felt strange to admit that, like there was something wrong with him, but once the shock had worn away, there had been nothing to take its place. He glanced down at her. “Does it scare you?”

“It’s hard to be scared of nothing,” Amaya replied.

He frowned, feeling a hint of resentfulness at her own evasive nature even with him, but then the warmth of her comfort poured over him through their bond and it went away. They were both secretive due to the environment that they had grown up in. Sighing, he let an arm fall to his side so that she could leap onto the sleeve of his jacket and crawl onto his shoulders. She nuzzled the side of his face with her head.

After taking one last look at the man, Cassian slipped through the alleyways in order to link up with the rest of his squad. There were some parts of the mission that he was better equipped to take on than grown men. But that Imperial soldier had been wrong. Cassian wasn’t a mere boy. He hadn’t been a boy for a very long time. His soul had been settled for too long to still be considered one.

*

The words, “Wait here,” came out of Blair’s mouth, and so Jyn trusted them.

Saw might’ve kept things close to the vest, especially when it came to her, but his Blair had never lied to her. She was reticent except when she was angry, which was getting more and more with the passing days, so Jyn had come to listen carefully whenever the lynx daemon did speak. She let Saw do almost all of the talking, even keeping her distance from the other Partisans’ daemons, not as if she was above them but more like she could not afford to open up to them.

A leader had to be one step apart from the rest. She and Saw could not be on the same levels as the other Partisans and still be considered their leader. Even Jyn, who had been with him since she was eight, could not stand on the same pedestal as him.

But Blair indulged Felix in a way that she did not other daemons. She let Felix curl up around her, greeted him almost warmly whenever they arrived back at base camp, and even licked him on the head when they came back covered in dirt and blood. While many of the other Partisans and their daemons were wary of Felix, only because of what he was capable of, she was not. She didn’t see something dangerous or broken. She saw him for his clever mind and usefulness. She liked his fangs.

It was easy to look into the lynx daemon’s eyes and believe her.

“Wait here,” she said, as Saw handed her a blaster.

Jyn nodded her head, but it was Felix that asked the question, “When will you be back?”

“When we can,” Blair replied. It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was enough.

Saw and Blair had both taken them in after her mother’s death and father’s disappearance. They hadn’t had to, but they had. Growing up under them and their tutelage had been rough and painful more often than not. Saw wasn’t one for comforting and Blair was aloof. But bits of warmth bled through every now and then and it was hard to begrudge someone that had taught her how to fend for herself. She was stronger than most, fiercer than many, and a force to be reckoned with -- and that was without the threat of Felix’s deadly bite.

It had been eight long years since her family had been ripped apart by the man in white, the same amount of time she had lived with them. She’d forgotten her promise to Felix and herself.

Later, when the bitterness didn’t burn so hotly through their bond, when Felix opened his mouth to speak to another daemon instead of just hissing, Jyn would think about the look on Blair’s face. Had there been any pity? Any sorrow? Any longing? Saw was a cold man. A decent man, she had thought, but cold and unaccustomed to being anything else. Cutting her off like a dying limb had been the logical choice for him concerning the Partisans, even if it hadn’t been an easy one. But Blair? How had she felt? Did she see other snake daemons and think of Felix’s red, yellow, and black bands?

I don’t miss her, Felix would viciously think, but Jyn always knew that it wasn’t true. Felix held onto the memories that she couldn’t bare to take. She locked them away and he took them for her, carried their weight, cradled their grief. Through flashes of hurt and betrayal, he did miss Blair, just as he missed her mother’s Leopold and father’s Evangeline. He missed not being shunned by everyone else but her.

But back in that bunker, Jyn looking up at them, Felix wrapped loosely around her neck, she made the stupid mistake of trusting them. She had sworn that she wouldn’t -- she had promised Felix that she would allow no one else in -- and yet she had. It had been foolish and the days she spent in that bunker would turn her heart cold. Felix alone burned hot while she did everything she could to lock her thoughts and emotions away.

Never again, she promised and Felix agreed. Never again.

*

It started when they were young, as a game, to pass the time and to make life on base more bearable. Whenever people would ask him what his daemon was, he usually told them the truth, but sometimes, he would say something else. To the unsuspecting person, he could pass her off as a binturong or a falanouc, but more often than not, he would list a different type of mongoose. There were so many kinds. No one questioned him.

After all, why would someone lie about what their daemon was? What kind of person would do that?

What a daemon settled as represented who the person was on the inside, or so everyone said. Cassian wasn’t sure why this specific type of mongoose fit him when he had never heard of it before and so it was easy to tell people that she was something else. Amaya reveled in it. She loved the trickery. It was fun when very little was fun on base. She was so straight-faced whenever he lied about what she was, only grinning and snickering after the person had walked away.

Neither one of them expected it to become a part of them.

Cassian was walking through the hanger as he flicked through the pages of the datapad detailing their upcoming mission, his nose buried so deep that it was a wonder he didn’t bump into anyone or anything. He kept a slower pace than normal without thinking as Amaya scampered at his side in a playful, energetic manner. They weaved their way through the expansive room as one despite their extreme different in size.

Slinging his pack further over his shoulder, Cassian finally paused when he found what he was looking for. “You’re going to be a ruddy mongoose this time.” He spun around and sat down on a crate, giving Amaya time to climb her way on top and step on his thigh before showing her the picture on the screen. “Not much of a difference.”

“A bit bigger,” Amaya noted as she peered at the datapad curiously.

“Well, you’ve always been small for your size,” Cassian pointed out with a grin on his face as he slid a hand down her slender back.

Amaya wiggled out from underneath his hand and shot him a glare. “That’s because you’re so scrawny. You haven’t been eating well.”

Cassian shrugged his shoulders. “Rations have been shorter than normal recently.”

“No, you gave some of your ration cards away,” Amaya countered. “I saw you.”

He rolled his eyes, but he didn’t look back at her. It was easy to lie to everyone else -- it just came as second nature to him by now at only eighteen -- but it was downright impossible to lie to his daemon. Not just because she was a part of him, his soul, but because it was her. She had a way of drawing the truth out of people.

“I wasn’t hungry,” Cassian grumbled, thinking of the hollow look in those children’s eyes. He remembered that look well from his time as an orphan on Fest and his first few months with the Alliance. Not many of his memories from that time had lasted throughout the years, but that feeling had. It was overwhelming even now. He hadn’t been able to stomach seeing it on other children’s faces. He wasn’t cold enough yet. “They needed it more.”

“You need to keep up your strength,” Amaya told him, pulling up on her hind legs and pressing a little paw softly against his chest. “It’s important that you look after yourself as well.”

Cassian said nothing in response because there was nothing he could say. Amaya knew how he was. He fought and fought and fought until there was nothing left in him. Old enough to no longer be a child, but still too young to be considered a man, he was still fighting for his place in the Rebellion, even though he’d already established himself very well in the Intelligence division.

He could no longer be considered innocent. That was for sure. Innocence had been burned out of him a long time ago; he’d put the torch to it himself.

When he finally glanced back down at her, Amaya was giving him a sad look, but she kept quiet as well. She knew when to speak and when not to speak. Besides, more often than not, she didn’t have to say anything. Their bond was strong. When she wanted him to know, he could feel everything she was thinking and more through it. Right now, it was as open as could be and he soaked it in.

Sometimes, he forgot what comfort felt like. The Rebellion was not good at it and the two of them had learned to always be as hard and jagged as they had become the moment she had settled when he was six. Every now and then though, he felt it with her and he gathered that warmth in his heart. It was the only thing that could settle him some nights after certain missions.

But sometimes, it was like Amaya didn’t even know what to do with it. Cassian couldn’t help but wonder how long it would be before she too forgot what comfort was.

*

The first time Jyn’s bond with Felix was truly strained, it hadn’t been of her own doing. Most prisons kept them together, as the taboo surrounding daemons was strong throughout the entire galaxy. Guards didn’t touch any daemon that didn’t belong to them, instead using their daemons to corral the unruly ones. Most of them had large, burly daemons anyways, and troopers almost always had dog daemons large enough to take control.

Wobani was different though. Harsher, colder, much less thoughtful. The first thing they did upon bringing her to the prison planet was tear Felix away from her. It was only then that she knew that she was going to die here.

The shock of having Felix ripped off of her arm by metal claw caused Jyn to stumble backwards into her cell. The door was shut before she could even regain her balance. She landed hard against the wall and bounced forward, throwing herself at the metal bars and reaching out as far as she could. It took her a solid few seconds to realize that the screaming she was hearing was coming from her mouth.

“Give him back, you bastards!” Jyn howled. “Give him back!”

Felix fought hard, his body thrashing wildly in the air, but the metal clamp was tight around his head and neck. It must’ve been built specifically for snake daemons. He couldn’t even open his jaws to scream in return, but she heard him in her mind. His shrieks ricocheted throughout her skull, making her feel dizzy, and she waved her hand frantically through the bars as if she could reach him.

Instead of giving him back to her though, the troopers took him farther and farther away from her, until it felt as if her very being was being ripped apart. Jyn panted heavily, gasping for air, as the stitches that made up her body were torn piece by piece. Her legs buckled underneath her and she slid down to the ground, unable to remain standing. It felt as if someone was physically ripping her heart out of her chest.

“Give him back!” Jyn cried out desperately. “Please!”

Only then did the troopers stop. They looked at one another and then down at Felix, who had gone limp, his body swaying in the air. Jyn was still clawing for him, but her fingers were digging into the metal floor. Sweat covered her entire face. She was surprised that blood hadn’t started pouring out of nose or eyes.

Finally, they brought Felix back to her and she almost cried in relief. Instead she bit her lip hard enough to make it bleed, her eyes focused only on him. They released the metal contraption and he dropped to the ground. In a sluggish, almost drugged manner, Felix slithered back into her hand, but didn’t seem to have the strength to wrap himself around her arm like normal. She jerked him back into the jail cell like they might try to snatch him again and held him tightly against her chest, her heart beat hard and loud enough to cause him to stir.

“Don’t cause anymore problems again, Halik,” the stormtrooper warned her, “or we’ll really see how far your bond can stretch.”

Next to them, their daemons watched silently, their dark eyes equally dull and emotionless. They never seemed to move at the same speed as their humans, like there was some sort of delay. Severed, she couldn’t help but think with a shudder and she smoothed a hand down Felix’s shaking body. Stormtroopers weren’t connected with their daemons like everyone else. Some were surprised that they even had them. To become like them was one of Jyn’s greatest fears.

I’d rather die, Felix said, his voice strong despite the weariness in it.

We will die, Jyn thought and tried hard to squash the feeling before it flittered over to Felix, turning it into rage as quickly as she could.

It was too late though. The moment she had thought it, he had heard it. Nothing escaped either one of them. Their bond was always open, a constant flow of emotion and thoughts. Felix slithered up her neck and pressed his head against her pulse point and she closed his eyes. Already, his heart was steadier than hers. She wished, if only for a moment, that she was as strong as him.

You are though, Felix told her. You always have been.

She couldn’t help but be afraid that, if they were separated in any way, that he would be able to handle it while she would break. She couldn’t let that happen. For once, she couldn’t fight their prison and she hated it. Anger burned brightly in her, but there was nowhere to put it, not in this cage. She longed to lash out again, but the idea of Felix being taken away from her again was too horrifying and stilled her when nothing had before.

*

K-2 was different. Amaya could touch him, but not really touch him.

The droid seemed at a loss with her for many years, flickering between curious, irritated, unconcerned, and even a hint protective at times. Cassian could still remember Amaya’s laugh when Kay had touched her nose and nothing had happened. It was strange -- feeling nothing when the anticipation had caused his heart to race -- but the absence of a reaction was still felt.

She liked to perch himself on his shoulders so that she could see farther, looking as alert as a hawk. He could hear the scrape and click of her claws as she scampered up the metal and then Kay’s long-suffering robotic sigh -- or at least Cassian assumed it was a sigh. Like many droids, Kay had something of a personality of his own, but it did seem stronger than most. He spoke whatever came into his circuits, even if it upset people.

Cassian’s reprogramming of the Imperial security droid had not been his best work, but he had done it quick and under a lot of pressure. He’d been grounded for nearly a month following his reckless behavior, but he knew that it had been worth it, if only because of the delight it caused Amaya. She had always been curious of droids, prodding and sniffing them, much to most of their detriment. Apparently most daemons ignored droids, though no one really knew why. Maybe it was because of their almost-but-not-quite sentient behavior.

However, Kay was unique in his own way. His surly behavior caused Amaya to cackle, every grim statistic making her even worse. Cassian loved it, though he never said anything aloud. It had been a long time since he had seen Amaya like this, so long in fact that he wasn’t sure that his mind had made up the memories. Fest was another lifetime ago. Gone was the boy and unsettled daemon that found their family dead and dust. The Rebellion had carved him into a man and a cold one at that. Seeing Amaya like that with Kay though brought something back to him that he’d nearly lost.

“Don’t you think it strange?” Kay asked him one day while they were flying back to Yavin IV.

Cassian kept his focus on the panel in front of him as he flew the ship. “Think what strange?”

“Daemons,” Kay replied matter-of-factly. “You keep your weaknesses on the outside for everyone to see and yet no one goes for them. It would be easier to take a person out by hurting their daemon.”

“You don’t do that,” Cassian told him, pulling his concentration away from the panel and focusing it on Kay. There was the same neural, robotic expression on the droid’s face and yet somehow it was as if Cassian could pull some sort of emotion out of it. Curiosity today, he thought. “You don’t mess with someone’s daemon.”

“Why? Because of some arbitrary rule?” Kay questioned, like it was the most logical thing in the world.

“You just don’t,” Cassian said in a harder tone. “It’s a taboo, one of the most horrific things a person can do.”

Kay shook his head and went back to checking their flight route. “You’ve done a lot of things that one might consider horrific, Cassian, though they were for the good of the Rebellion.”

They weren’t meant to be harsh or even a bad reflection of him, but Kay’s words cut Cassian right to the bone. He glanced down at Amaya, who was curled in a ball at his feet. She was pretending to be asleep, but he knew that she was awake and listening to the conversation. Daemons slept with their partner’s slept, although Amaya had had him convinced when he was a child that she could do otherwise. He clenched his fist tightly, his blunt nails digging into his palm, and then released it.

However much that Kay’s words had struck him, they weren’t wrong. The droid spoke the truth. Cassian had done a lot of bad things for the Rebellion. The only line he refused to cross was that taboo. A spike of fear that it would one day be asked of him shot through his mind, only to be replaced by Amaya’s soothing touch.

You’re a good man, Cassian, she told him without looking up at him.

He closed his eyes. It had to be enough. She had to be enough.

When Cassian opened his eyes, he turned to face the droid again. “Promise me you’ll never hurt another person’s daemon, Kay.”

“If you insist on civilities,” Kay said in a manner that was as close to huffing in irritation as a droid could get. “But if anyone or anything tries to hurt your daemon, my hand will be forced. Your safety and health is more of a concern than a taboo.”

Cassian smiled very faintly and he heard Amaya chuckle low under her breath. But the fear was still there, hiding in the back of his mind, like a ticking time bomb. Some things were impossible to bury. As a man who had been forced to bury a lot over the years, he knew this all too well unfortunately.