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“We need to talk about the thief.”
The back of the shop was secure; there was no compelling reason to avoid names. Simply Kleya’s ongoing expression of pique – her own personal rebellion – at the abrupt change of plans on Ferrix.
It had been ten months.
Kleya’s pique was not a thing to be trifled with.
Six months, they’d kept Andor lying low. Getting the better measure of him, his knowledge, his skills, filling in any glaring gaps, teaching him some new tech. Getting him three square meals and as regular sleep as the demons living in his mind would grant.
His was a quiet discontent. No sense complaining, when sleep was elusive, no sense wasting the wakeful hours tossing and turning, and it was not an altogether rare occurrence to find him in the quiet of the night, when Luthen’s own fears and regrets and what-ifs had him wandering about the apartment as if he could pace the mood away. Would find him curled up with some caf, deep in a language drill, or studying up on sector politics, Senate legislation, fleet developments.
A great many words Kleya had to say and spit and shout at him when he turned up and confessed his decision to let Andor live; they were perhaps best encompassed in her breathless, “You’re mad,” when, after easing her into the idea that Andor wasn’t dead, he admitted he had, indeed, brought him along to Coruscant and tucked him away safe and out of sight in his own home. “The ISB -”
“The ISB,” Luthen interrupted her smoothly, “wants him to lead them to me. If they find him now, they’ve already found me, and the point is moot.”
A muscle in her jaw twitched. “Are you at least going to let me meet him?”
“What, so you can shoot him?”
The look she shot him was pure ice. “More likely to shoot you, at this point.”
When they did finally meet, after Luthen gave Andor some time to settle and Kleya some time to reconcile the about-face, her only input to Luthen’s lie-low-and-study-up scheme was, “He’s going to have to lose that accent.”
Andor laughed in her face.
Perhaps for the best that actually liking one another was not and had never been a baseline around which Kleya managed her operatives.
After six months, they deemed the ISB investigation suitably cold, an embarrassment to the bureau shuffled to the bottom of the ever-growing pile of concerns, to risk moving Andor to an active status. At which point Kleya took over some of the more technical aspects of his training, the rules, however quaint they might seem after six months underfoot, the protocol for making contact, the procedures for sending messages up the network.
She took him off-world on a business trip, so to speak. They made contact with a budding insurgency group on Ord Mantell, were gone three days, came back with a new artifact for the shop, which Kleya passed on to him with a clipped, “He’ll do.”
She paused before disappearing into the back and shot him a glance and added, “He really needs to lose the accent.”
Luthen shrugged. Andor had demonstrated no qualms learning any of the material they’d presented him, displayed no particular self-consciousness admitting where the gaps in his knowledge and skillset lay, was obviously willing to go to great lengths and sacrifice a great deal. “You might simply be asking for the impossible, on that one.”
“It makes him memorable.” The greatest sin imaginable, for a spy.
“So don’t put him in a room full of senators and fleet commanders and elite bureaucrats who’ve mercilessly stripped any element of otherness from their presentation and he’ll be fine.”
She glanced pointedly around the ostentatious shop before vanishing.
He didn’t see Andor for the next four months. And then Kleya came in one morning and, with no greeting or preamble, informed him stiltedly, “We need to talk about the thief.”
“We have customers in a quarter hour,” he reminded her.
Said customers took an eternity, eventually leaving with a pendant around the wife’s – mistress, actually, Luthen decided some minutes into the appointment – neck that belonged in a museum on Bre’tak and was so inconceivably invaluable as to render the credits exchanged for it well past absurd.
Once they were alone, Kleya led him around to the back and started, “He was tasked with surveying and assessing the R and D offices for the engineering firm we’ve linked to the massacre on Avlir Seven.”
Probing for an opening to sneak a man inside, or blackmail someone already there; just another day’s work. “And he failed to glean anything of use?”
“Hardly; he set up a drop last night and produced a copy of the chief engineer’s entire data drive.” That grabbed Luthen’s attention. He quirked a brow and waited for her to elaborate. “Aside from not being the assignment he was tasked – he won’t reveal how he got it.”
Ah. “You’re worried he’s acting recklessly.”
“I know he’s acting recklessly,” she fired back. “What I need to know is just how reckless and what sort of damage control needs doing.”
“Are you certain this isn’t just you looking for an excuse to finally shoot him?”
“Luthen.”
He raised a hand, as though to fend off her censure. “I know. You’re right. Call him in.”
Once the call went out and Andor received the message on his own fractal radio, there was protocol for signaling his readiness to meet, a preassigned place and time of day where either Luthen or Kleya would rendezvous and have a discreet chat.
It surprised him not one bit that Andor ignored these protocols entirely, simply appeared in the apartment where he’d spent the entirety of his first six months on Coruscant.
He did mark the corner of the inside of the door of the turbolift that took Luthen up to his penthouse suite though, because at heart he was still inclined to buck against all forms of authority, not just that of Imperial control, and be a smartass about it along the way.
Luthen also liked to imagine that he feared his unannounced presence would lead to getting unceremoniously shot, and then he spent the rest of the lift ride trying to decide if he was only humoring and flattering himself.
“You know,” he announced to the dark, quiet space as soon as the door slid shut behind him, “part of having a handler is, necessarily, letting oneself be handled.”
“Yes,” Andor answered from the threshold of the salon, dark amusement in his tone and a darker gleam in his eye when Luthen cast a glance over his shoulder as he hung his cloak by the door, “It was my agreeable nature and aptitude for taking orders that caught your attention.”
“You’re part of something bigger now.” Andor hummed noncommittally as he led the way to the kitchenette, started up the kettle; Luthen’s precious half hour to relax after closing shop, before settling in with the night’s real work, the routine well engrained in Andor’s mind. “Is this you being agreeable?”
“Yes, is it working?”
There was a restlessness about Andor; subtle, but evident once he ran out of things to occupy his hands, thumbs tapping rhythmically on the counter while the water boiled. “Honestly? Quite the opposite. What did you do?”
“I got the intel Kleya wanted. It’s all there – communications and contracts and blueprints and field tests…”
“Yes, it’s a veritable wish-list come to life. How’d you get it?”
Frustration started to creep into Andor’s eyes, the set of his mouth, the tension in his posture, as Luthen poured the hot water over his tea pods, Andor’s playacting at attentive host apparently at its end. “I saw an opportunity and I took it. Nothing will get back to me, or you.”
The trouble was, Luthen was inclined to trust him. Kleya, on the other hand, would say, “Information too easily won is too often information that wants to be found.”
Andor chuckled, like he found some unintended joke in Luthen’s words. “Let’s just say I did some thinking on my feet.”
Luthen studied him some more, bought himself time to think by making a cup of caf – Andor had never been much of one for his evening tea routine. Reconsidered his fidgeting, the way his eyes wandered around the space, anywhere except Luthen’s face.
Restless, yes. With a strong current of something he might have called self-consciousness in anyone else, except this was Andor and thus far he’d demonstrated little capacity for it.
Perhaps he was capable of shame, however.
He didn’t kill anyone, of that Luthen was certain. Violence was messy and loud, if not in the moment then in the fallout, and not the order of this particular job. And Andor had no qualms about killing when the circumstances called.
But. “Are you quite certain it was your feet you were thinking on?” Andor’s tapping stilled. Luthen leaned around him to reach up into a cabinet for a second mug and murmured quietly at his ear, “I’ll give you another thousand if you tell me how you got it.”
A shudder rippled across Andor’s shoulders at the taunt. “You know,” Andor confirmed.
“Hm.” Luthen pulled back, poured the caf, and carried both mugs through to the salon, a silent command to follow that only took Andor a few contrary seconds to grudgingly acknowledge. He took Andor’s preferred spot for himself, the wide chair where he’d too often found him on those restless nights; forced Andor to take up the sofa across the low table made from Lorazun crystal, the mesmerizing whirls always a compelling conversational topic or, in this case, distraction from actual eye contact. “Tell me.”
Andor cleared his throat and swallowed down his pride. “I watched him for three weeks. Saw the places he frequented; the liquor he drank; the men he took home; how long they stayed, the condition they left in.”
“A paragon of self-preservation,” Luthen snorted inelegantly into his tea. As though Andor had ever been accused of minding his own well-being.
“I took note of his favorite tapcafs and took three attempts to preempt his choice of establishment, so I would be there when he arrived. No chance to fret he was being followed.”
“That only works if he noticed you on the way in.”
“Oh,” Andor’s gaze flickered up fleetingly to meet his intent stare, before diverting back down to the table, “he noticed.”
“You’re very self-assured.”
“I know when a man is looking.”
If that was meant to inspire any amount of self-reflection or consideration on Luthen’s part, Andor didn’t have nearly so good a read on him as he liked to imagine. “Do you?” He stared until Andor’s eyes flickered back up to his, and continued until Andor finally forced himself to look up and hold his gaze. Luthen sat back and took a slow sip of his tea. “Tell me.”
“We drank. I invited him back to my hotel, with regrets that I had an early transport back to Deris-plata.”
Luthen couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s an obscure choice.”
“My impression born from surveillance and the conversation to that point was that he enjoyed younger men with a certain… wide-eyed naivete. Who he could impress with his cosmopolitan lifestyle.”
“Ah; and thus he would insist on returning to his, instead.” Clever. Didn’t alter the fact that it was foolishly done. “Still; unpredictable, high risk. It’s not a tactic we encourage. Not a position I’d ask you place yourself in.”
Andor laughed. Drank his cooling caf, mulled Luthen’s words, and rose with his empty mug to return it to the kitchenette, or really just to escape the scrutiny. He paused though as he circled around behind Luthen’s chair, leaned down and murmured close by his ear, “Sure you would. If it suited your ends. If you thought I could pull it off.”
Luthen reached around and seized Andor’s wrist, tugging him to a halt. “I’ll smooth it with Kleya; don’t do it again.” Andor twisted his wrist around in Luthen’s grasp; Luthen held fast. “We have process and protocol for good reason. The progress we’ve built and continue to build upon has not come through reckless disregard for common sense. However skilled you may be at thinking on your feet. Or anywhere else.”
He let him go. Andor huffed out a mirthless laugh, pivoted and placed his empty cup carelessly on the crystal table with a sharp clinking rattle. And then he maneuvered himself between Luthen and his very expensive table and sat on the edge of it, the irreverent reprobate. “Perhaps it is not in me to be handled.”
“Perhaps,” Luthen drawled, leaning forward so that there were scant few centimeters between their faces, keenly aware of the way Andor’s legs slotted between his own, the heat of him, the sharp gleam in his eyes. “Perhaps you’ll continue to demonstrate that impressive capacity to learn and adapt. And in the meantime,” he leaned around the body crowding into his space to place his own cup – gently – on the crystal-top and then curled his fingers around Andor’s thin wrists. “Get off my priceless table.”
Quite predictably, Andor took that cue to simply slide down to his knees, and then sat back to rest his weight on his heels, which had the – probably intended – effect of knocking his back into said priceless table and making it scrape back across the floor.
He wasn’t wrong – Luthen was looking. Luthen tilted his head, considering Andor as he peered up from his knees, and curled a hand under his jaw – not quite at his throat. Let his thumb brush over his bottom lip, there and gone, elicited one of those little tongue clicks that always betrayed the rare moments Andor was caught off his guard. “What business did you claim brought you to Coruscant?”
“He didn’t ask.”
Volunteering excess information was one of the best ways to broadcast that a web was being spun; Luthen nodded slowly. “Good boy.” One side of Andor’s mouth pulled up in a lazy smirk. Luthen tightened his grip, briefly, and then let him go. “Time to get to work. If you have no pressing obligations, you can put that agreeable nature to further good use.”
He wouldn’t let Andor touch the radio. However much of a hypocrite he was, that line had held firm. But he did set him up with a datapad containing Luthen’s current count of their stolen Imperial tech and its present status and the latest series of decrypted messages reporting new acquisitions from various divergent threads of the network spidering throughout the galaxy with instructions to start sifting through and updating the log.
When Luthen emerged from the better part of two hours listening to the day’s contacts and any follow-up with Kleya that couldn’t wait until morning, he found Andor back in his preferred chair frowning at the datapad, thumbing through the logs, and muttering under his breath, “What are you up to, old man?”
Luthen plucked the thing from his grip. “I see we’ve made little progress on the incessant need to overstep the task at hand.”
“You’re building up something big.”
The initial wariness was instinct more than rational response; if he’d truly wanted Andor kept in the dark, he’d not have handed him the damn thing in the first place. “You’ll know, when the time is right.” The threads were pulling together, faster and faster; that time would come sooner than any of them were truly prepared for.
To Andor’s credit, he dropped it.
And maybe he was right; maybe he was too sharp and versed in the ways of the galaxy for simple surveillance and reconnaissance, for the endless string of rendezvouses they sent some of their people on, because a face-to-face conversation that took weeks to arrange and thirty seconds to complete would always be infinitely more secure than the comm.
His ability to read a room, a person, a job gone wrong, to think fast and improvise and salvage a win from a hopeless situation – it got them Aldhani. It got Andor out of the prison factory where he was meant to toil until his body gave out, if his mind didn’t go first.
It got him out of Ferrix, past the ISB and Luthen’s own hunters.
It brought him to Luthen. A much-needed spark to rekindle the dying embers of hope in his compromised soul.
It was why Kleya, who never wavered in her steadfast determination, struggled to comprehend his allowances for Andor. She trusted her mind and knew her limits and required no external validation of the decisions she made, even the ones she wished were unnecessary.
Luthen, however, could look at Andor and be reminded of his ability to admit error, his courage to turn back.
It was no small thing.
“Come,” he said at last; suddenly aware that he’d been staring for longer than was probably comfortable.
Andor didn’t move a muscle. “Where are we going?” Luthen didn’t answer, simply moved around the space dimming lights, organizing the scant clutter, and then headed back towards the private chambers while fussing with his cufflinks. “Are you sending me to bed with no supper?”
“You could have been eating instead of snooping,” Luthen called back to him, “Do not blame me for your poor time-management decisions.” Andor relented, got up and trotted dutifully along after him but then, absurdly, tried to sidestep and continue on to the guest suite where he’d stayed those long months. “No,” Luthen laid a firm hand on his shoulder, let his fingers press in, and steered him around. “Come.”
Once given the opening, Andor wasted no time seizing on it. Was on him almost before the door closed, pressing into Luthen’s space, hands fumbling at the complicated folds of his tunic, pressing his face into the crook of his neck, something desperate and almost clingy in him.
Of course, theirs was a lonely way of life; and Andor’s tendency to substitute fleeting physical connection for any real intimacy in an effort to assuage poorly-repressed feelings was one of the first things Luthen had learned about him.
Luthen let himself be maneuvered against the wall, but then grappled for Andor’s wrists and stayed his frantic efforts. “Stop.” He released one and mirrored his earlier hold, curled a hand under Andor’s jaw and around, gripping him by the nape. “Calmly.”
He tasted like stale caf and desperation and the faintest lingering hint of the expensive Cardellian caramels Luthen kept stashed for rare moments of indulgence.
Audacious welp, he thought, and, How fitting.
Once the needy edge wore off, he relinquished his grip long enough to work the fastenings on the front of Andor’s shirt, just at the collar and down to his sternum, just enough to break up the armor, his only concession to comfort since entering Luthen’s home thus far being the removal of his boots, because Luthen did at least have some standards Andor was willing to adhere to.
Still in a pair of thick socks though. He’d always hated the cold marble in the main living spaces. Too reminiscent of the tunqstoid floors in the uniquely brutal lockup he’d landed himself in after Aldhani.
He held Andor at arm’s length to get a better look at him, considered, rucked up the hem of his shirt, and then pushed him backwards, got a firm grip on his shoulder, and shoved him down to sit on the edge of the bed. “Perhaps you simply prefer a different handler.”
“Or a different method of handling.” He smirked, suggestive, self-assured; like he thought it would actually work.
“I’ll be sure to let Kleya know,” Luthen retorted drily, and the corners of Andor’s eyes crinkled in the briefest display of genuine amusement. “Tell me.”
The confusion that creased his brows, pulled down the corners of his mouth, was short-lived; as was the wide-eyed mortification, before Andor tried to duck his head down and hide the flush staining his cheeks. Luthen gripped his chin and forced his face back up. “Look at me,” he commanded softly, “and accept this – you’ve taken a vow, and offered yourself, mind and body and soul, to something bigger. Your deepest thoughts and secrets and memories are scarcely your own; the details of how you accomplish a task for us most certainly are not. We do not build on luck, or recklessness, or desperation, and this episode exhibits the hallmarks of all three.”
Andor worked his jaw and swallowed, and continued to grasp for any futile measure of control, forced back the anger and quipped, “Do you always start the night with a scolding when you bring someone home?”
As if that were something even remotely feasible, amidst the landscape of priorities constantly clamoring for his attention. As if Andor hadn’t brought himself here, against any and every rule and iota of common sense.
“I’m not going to fuck you, Cassian.”
That persistent little tell of his, the way Andor clicked his tongue and betrayed his surprise; for all of Kleya’s fretting over his accent, that was something they would need to drum out of him. “No?”
“Hm. At the risk of sounding rather quaintly upstanding, you don’t truly want to, and I daresay you have enough regrets already about our acquaintance to be getting on with.” Andor huffed out a reluctant laugh. “Now – tell me.”
Andor cleared this throat and averted his eyes; Luthen let him that time, and Andor’s gaze settled somewhere over his left shoulder as he gave his debrief report at last. Terse and clipped and all business. How long they remained at the tapcaf, what they ordered, what Andor actually drank and how much he managed to dump when his target’s attention was diverted elsewhere.
The route they took back to the apartment Andor had bugged weeks earlier – the same route the target had taken every time Andor had trailed him home. No sign of suspicion; a creature of such shockingly mundane habit as to render even the most minimally security-aware person appalled. A creature of simple pleasures and mundane vices.
Andor agreed. “You would never know,” he broke from the stoic, clinical recounting and shook his head. An echo of something truly disturbed in his voice, and Luthen carded a hand through his hair, stroked a thumb across his cheek. “His complicity. The blood on his hands. If you’d told me he was the useful fool of someone else at the firm, ignorant of the true nature of their contract with the Avliri government… I could have believed it.”
“But that’s not what you found,” Luthen surmised. Soft, soothing, nails scratching idly across his scalp and sending a shiver rippling through him.
“The Avlir Seven files weren’t even protected on a separate server.” Technically, Kleya would complain, actually sifting through the data he collected was also not part of his mission parameters, but well – Luthen could hardly claim surprise. “The contracts and the weapon designs. Tests. Holos transmitted back by the Avliri government. Documenting…”
“Put it out of your mind,” Luthen instructed. Easier said than done. “It’s not your fight.”
Maybe Andor would have found the words cold and callous, once.
It didn’t take long in this business to recognize that the ability to compartmentalize was among the greatest self-preservation tools at one’s disposal.
He curled his hands along Andor’s jaw and tipped his face back to meet his eyes. “Tell me.”
“I slipped a half gram of Dymathicin root into his drink at home.”
“A smart choice.” A slow-acting sedative sourced from Qhulosk; in humans, was accompanied by mildly unpleasant side-effects that closely mimicked those typical of excessive alcohol consumption, with a slightly heightened effect on memory when actually consumed with alcohol. Just enough to render the night’s recollection irritably fuzzy.
It was one of the first tools with which they acquainted their agents.
“We had another drink, and then another. After.” He swallowed, hard; Luthen felt his throat bob under his hands. “Once the root took effect, I got to work.”
As though the whole night, the whole duration of the time he’d spent surveilling the office and finding his opening, concocting his plan, had not been some form of work or other. “Tell me,” Luthen leaned down and murmured, lips barely brushing over Andor’s ear, “was he gentle with you?” Andor shuddered. Luthen let his hand wrap around his throat, the faintest pressure, mimicry of danger. “You’d have preferred he wasn’t.”
Andor let his head fall forward to rest on Luthen’s shoulder and answered muffle into his tunic, “It’d have felt better earned.”
Luthen threaded careful fingers through the hair at the back of his head and assured him, “You did well.” He held him there, pressed against him – kept his other hand at his throat, thumb stroking over the pulse point in his neck – until his breathing slowed and his shoulders visibly relaxed, tension bleeding out of him as he accepted whatever twisted comfort or absolution he read in the exchange.
Luthen wasn’t particular to which he chose, so long as it yielded a lesson learned.
“Go wash up,” he instructed eventually into the silence. “Stay until the start of morning rush.”
He let Andor interpret that invitation how he would.
Too few hours of sleep later, he glanced at Andor, preparing to quietly slip into the bustle of the Corsucanti morning crowds, and asked, “Is there anything else I should know?”
Andor finished affixing the last buttons up to his collar, and turned to meet Luthen’s gaze, expression blank. “Yeah,” he said. “You can tell Kleya she was right.”
“About?”
Andor took one last careful look at his appearance in the mirror, tugged down his hem to smooth out his shirt, opened the door, and paused at the threshold. “The target,” he elaborated. “He was looking; but it was my accent he liked.”
He left Luthen staring as the door slid quietly closed behind him.