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[seenitbefore]

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in space, no one can hear your parrot demanding breakfast.

[seenitbefore]

He wakes up in the dark, which isn't remarkable; he's usually up at least once in the night, ever since he was a kid. But he wakes up somewhere dank and stuffy, in a basement room, maybe, and he wakes up alone.

For a confused second or two his groggy brain tries to work it out - is he at Granddad's? Did he pass out doing the laundry? - and then registers the shape of the dark around him, the wholly unfamiliar echoes, the ambient noise muffled by the walls: distant voices, footsteps, electronic warbles, occasional dull clangs. Like a hospital, or an airport, or--

Panic hits him like a bullet from behind. He flails upright, groping for a light switch, for anything recognizable. His hand meets empty air, but the lights flare on anyway, a sullen glow illuminating a small, spartan, windowless room. Featureless furnishings. A small screen set into the wall, and a door with no handle.

"Jesus." His own voice sounds small and stifled, a frightened wheeze. Cassian knots his hands in the weirdly-textured bedclothes beside him and breathes in deep. Breathes out, deliberately. And again. On the third breath he manages to say aloud: "Jyn? Bodhi?"

No answer.

"Jyn?" he tries again, louder. Djem, is his next natural thought, but no, no no no, he's not going to think about the kids right now, whatever's happening can't touch them, even inside his head, no. No. "Hello?"

The door shoots open and someone - something - looms in the doorway, a huge distorted figure like an armored insect, easily eight feet high. It cranes toward him, and he flinches backward but there's nowhere to go, just the bunk behind him and the wall behind that--

"Oh," it says. "You are conscious."

The voice is crisp, resonant, but not quite human, and he'd know that put-upon note anywhere.

"K," he says blankly, and without missing a beat the thing - the robot - fires back: "Who were you expecting?"

He's dreaming, then. Clearer and more detailed than any nightmare he's ever imagined, but still. Cassian scrubs a hand across his face, trying to believe it.

The K-thing draws itself up a little, whirring, and demands, "Are you all right?"

Which is a good question. "I don't know where Bodhi and Jyn are," he tells it with the simplicity of dream-logic.

"High probability that they are in their own quarters." The smooth head cocks at a familiar angle. "And that comms are functioning normally."

He almost laughs. Looks the K-thing in its cold-glowing eyes. What the hell. "Can we go there?"

in space you don't have parrots, you have Hondo Ohnaka's weird monkeybird thing

[callsign_rogueone]

The dim glow of the hallway runninglights draw Bodhi back to his quarters. He's on second shift for the next eight rotations, barring mission deployment, and he doesn't much mind; breakfast, lunch, and dinner are interchangeable anyway - reconstituted protein blocks supplemented by whatever edible forage the quartermaster's staff can scare up - and he likes the muted activity level of the late afternoon and deep night. If there's any downside, it's that Jyn and Cassian both have first shift: Jyn to run the new recruits through drills (occasionally aided by Chirrut, who keeps to no schedule but his own) and Cassian to sift through piles of intel for useful nuggets. Their days only overlap for the few hours before Bodhi's due in the hangar, and he'd be lying if he said he didn't feel the isolation.

Color him surprised to round the final corner to his quarters and find K and Cassian approaching the door from the other end of the hall. Bodhi raises a hand in puzzled greeting. This planet has a 34 hour solar cycle, and it's well into hour 28. Shouldn't they both be asleep? Or, well, charging, he supposes.

"Cassian, Kuh-K," he nods, "I was j, just--just getting--just finishing up."

[seenitbefore]

Bodhi is Bodhi - looking exhausted and worried, not to mention nonplussed, but wearing his own face above that institutional-looking jumpsuit - and the flood of relief is so strong that it threatens to knock Cassian's feet from under him. He lets it carry him forward instead, out of robot-K's shadow to his husband's side, reaching for his arms - God, he's thin; how long have they been here, what have they been doing to him? "Are you okay?"

[callsign_rogueone]

Cassian touches people, sometimes. Bodhi's even been on the receiving end once or twice. But outside of tense moments, skin-of-their-teeth-survival, Cassian always has a reason for reaching out to others. This is a thing Bodhi knows, without really having to think about it.

What, then, is Cassian's reason for taking him by the forearms and stepping right up in his space? The careful clasp of his fingers immediately sets Bodhi looking around for flashing alert lights, canting his head to catch any distant alarms.

Nothing.

"I'm--yes?" he blinks. "Is. Is something wr-wrong? You should be as-asl-asleep, it's late, you've got fir-firs--early shift."

He casts over to K for insight before he can dig this babble pit any deeper. If they've been given a sudden assignment, or if Bodhi had somehow forgotten that he wasn't okay (oh, stars, was he not supposed to go on shift? Has he been put on enforced leave again?) K will know. K will chime in.

[seenitbefore]

It's one thing for Bodhi to turn twitchy about physical contact; they all have days like that, and Cassian doesn't hesitate to let him go. But the stammer, the darting eyes, the way his eyes go straight to the towering robot-form - that adds up to something else again, and Cassian goes cold all over. He catches himself before he follows Bodhi's glance over his shoulder, but the shiver is less easy to control.

"I," he says haltingly, almost at random, "I was. I just..."

K isn't exactly built to shrug, but the cant of his upper body conveys the same general impression. "That's what I told him."

[callsign_rogueone]

Bodhi's heart takes a tumble when Cassian pulls his hands back. The sensation is familiar enough, now, that he doesn't even try to tell himself otherwise, merely swallows it down. The sucking quicksand of his feelings finds no purchase anyway when faced with a stammering, uncertain Captain Andor.

K's put-upon response at least assures Bodhi that there's no general alarm or obvious emergency going on. For a droid who claims to be puzzled by human behavior, he's gotten quite good at determining when Bodhi's having an episode and reminding him of the parameters of reality. So his brain is working about as well as he'd assumed. What does that leave him with?

"Are you..." hesitation, this time, not a stammer, "Are you okay?"

A question no one asks Cassian often enough, in Bodhi's opinion. In fairness to everyone else, Cassian doesn't much invite those kind of inquiries, and no one can be blamed for being put off by his glare. Still.

[seenitbefore]

"Yeah," Cassian says, and swallows in a dry throat. "Fine."

"That's what you told me," K says, sounding even less impressed. He pauses, peering down at them. "You are aware your current behavior is unprecedented?"

Cassian doesn't attempt to answer that one. He shifts his feet, trying to angle away from those expressionless LEDs for all the good it may do him. His eyes fixed on Bodhi's face, he signs, quick and careful, "Is it safe to talk?"

[callsign_rogueone]

Unprecedented? Unprecedented is a terrifying word coming from a droid whose primary function is analysis. Bodhi rocks back a bit, frown crinkling so tight the band of his goggles pinches at strands of his hair. K sounds...not worried, exactly, but that oddly tight shade of annoyed he gets when faced with things like vaporized cities or platoons of stormtroopers.

Not good. Not good at all.

Cassian shuffles closer, the movement drawing Bodhi's attention back with a snap. Something about the other man's posture directs his attention to his hands. At first he thinks they're twitching, jerking with strain or whatever's unsettled Cassian's mind, but then he picks up a pattern to it, an intentionality.

He's a pilot. He knows a series of signals when he sees them, even without a key. "I don't--?" Bodhi starts to shake his head, but then he asks himself: does K know these signs? Is Cassian afraid of K interpreting them?

Something awry with K would explain why Cassian seems--well, in any body else, Bodhi would call it 'upset', but considering how little Cassian lets slip from behind his tightly sealed mask, this borders on 'hysteric'. Frowning, he steps in and carefully, carefully reaches out to curl his hands around Cassian's.

"K, cou-could you go find Jyn, please?" he asks, already taking a step back toward his door. "I-I-I'll help Cassian get settled."

[seenitbefore]

For a being incapable of facial expressions, it's remarkable how judgmental K can look when he wants to. "I don't see how that will help."

Cassian blinks, trying to sift through these new developments as rapidly as possible. Bodhi's baffled, worried face. Bodhi stilling his hands to silence him - no: to calm him down; it feels like that, as if Cassian's flailing himself into a panic over nothing. Bodhi giving the K-thing directions, the way he might to Neph - and that realization hits him at the same moment as K's sulky rejoinder. He blinks again, his head clearing a little. His breath comes back under his control, and with it the Dad Voice. "K," he says. "Go on."

There's an ominous whir. His heart jumps.

But the voice echoes, "Go find Jyn," in exactly the precise, resentful tone he knows so well, and the massive shadow moves past him, eerily light on its mechanical feet, and stalks on down the corridor. Cassian draws another, shaking breath, and doesn't watch it go.

[callsign_rogueone]

They'll pay for that one later. Bodhi's never met a droid that holds a grudge quite like K2 - eternally and with lots of meant-to-be-overheard muttering. The grumbling recedes as K rounds a corner, and Bodhi punches his passcode into the doorlock with a sigh.

He has a single to himself, though he's unsure whether that's down to luck, Rogue One's hypothetical clout, his own screaming nightmares, or the fact that half of Rogue Squadron needed somewhere to stash their spare parts. Cassian's seen the ever-shifting mess before, but Hobby and Jek moved a partially disassembled Quadex power core in shift before last, and it's...leaking, a little.

"S-sorry about the ev-everyth-thing," he offers a wincing smile as he leads Cassian around the new landmark and over to the bunk nook. A desktop folds out of the wall near its head, combination table and work surface, currently littered with smaller, fiddlier projects, a stack of holo manuals, and the remains of a ration bar. He must've gotten into a project halfway through munching, as he doesn't remember leaving it there.

Bodhi gestures Cassian toward the sole chair and sinks down on the thin mattress across from it. "What, um, what's going on? Is K okay? You looked, um, you were edgy around him, just, just now."

[seenitbefore]

Three quarters of what's in here Cassian couldn't even put a name to, but at least the place looks lived-in, unlike the barren cell he's just come from, and Bodhi moves through the clutter like he's comfortable in it. The knot in his gut loosens, very slightly. He eyes the thing in the middle of the floor - is it oozing? - and skirts it as widely as possible in the cramped space.

What he wants is to tuck himself up on the bunk next to Bodhi, ground himself with an arm around his waist, breathe in the sweet gritty scent of him. But he gets the feeling he wouldn't be welcome, just now. He sits instead where Bodhi points him, folding his arms against a shiver.

What's going on? he wants to say, but Bodhi beats him to it, throwing him right back off his balance. For a moment he can only stare at him while thoughts whirl like moths around a porch light.

"Where are we?" he asks finally.

[callsign_rogueone]

"What."

It slips out without a stammer, Bodhi too surprised for anything but pure exclamation. Where are they? Of all the possible--

--okay, no, that's not fair. His shock isn't fair to Cassian, not after all the times he and Jyn have patiently helped Bodhi reorient himself. It's unexpected, to be on this side of it, and worrisome in a way he can only compare to laser canons mounted on moon-sized ships, but he can put that aside long enough to help. His friends do it for him all the time.

They're probably better at keeping their internal panic from splashing all over their faces, though.

"We're in the--the Bheriz system," he begins, "On an un-unn-am...on a piece of rock moon around a planet that's just a des-design-um, an ID number. Its core is, uh, it's some alloy that puts out a scan-dampening field, so. It's miserable, but, but safe. Sort of." Could that field be messing with Cassian's head? But, no, none of their tech's come up funny, except the lifeform scanners. K seemed to be operating normally, just now.

He reaches for Cassian, since he'd reached out first back in the hallway, carefully touches his knee. "What's the l-last thing you remember?"

[seenitbefore]

Without thinking he unfolds again, settling a hand over Bodhi's. "I don't know," he says, trying to beat down the panic with exasperation. "Going to bed. Listening to you snoring. Not being on the moon! What do you expect?"

[callsign_rogueone]

Reciprocal touch still summons up the urge to scan their surroundings for threats, but Bodhi's as safe, in this room, as he's ever been anywhere. He breathes against the fear and watches Cassian's face, stunned and a little alarmed at how much he's letting slip: irritation, fear, but also familiarity. He seems used to this, sitting with Bodhi and spilling all over his hands.

"You remember m-me, snoring?" They haven't shared quarters on an extended mission for a little over two standard weeks, and they've been on this particular moon for about three times as long. That's a lot of missing time. Bodhi squeezes Cassian's hand and searches his eyes for any of the drifting he sees in the mirror after a bad spell. What does brain damage look like from the outside?

"I, uh. I haven't kn-known what to e-e-ex--what's going to happen since...since Jedha," his mouth twitches, a weak smile. "But, um, I think I've got, ah, may-maybe two more shifts to strai--to fix the comm array. And I ex-expect you're going to, to spend that time going through reports and, and, and running interference on Draven and Jyn. And then? I don't know. A new...a new mission."

[seenitbefore]

Bewilderment. On who? he almost says, a second before he places the name - God, he hasn't thought of that guy in years, what is his brain trying to do? His bird's a giant robot, his husband's a nervous wreck, their wife is off picking fights with his old advisor, apparently, for all he knows their kids have turned into mermaids - the kind of thing that makes perfect sense in dreams, except that none of it makes any sense. His fingers tighten convulsively. "I don't-- Bodhi, I don't know what any of that means, I'm not following you. Help me out here. What am I--" fighting to keep his voice reasonably steady "--what am I missing?"

[callsign_rogueone]

A stream of invectives that would shock his father half to death (and probably manage to impress Baze) go off inside Bodhi's head. This isn't--he doesn't--and Cassian sure as hells wouldn't want to be seen like--

But he's here, in Bodhi's room, and he's falling apart. This is happening, and he had better pull himself together and...and be half as solid as Cassian and Jyn have been for him. Even if he didn't want, with an aching fierceness, to do that for him, he owe Cassian that.

"Your name is, is Cassian Andor," he says, and now he's holding Cassian's hand between both of his, not just pressing reassuringly at his knee. "You're a captain with the Rebellion to re-restore the Republic. C-Captain Andor. You're, um, Rebel Intelligence, a spy, so I don't--I don't know all the th-thi--the details you know."

"On paper you're, well, you're our CO," there's that mouth twitch again, a little less strained now that they're not on the topic of Jedha. "B-but in reality we, we, we plan missions together, be-because Jyn's, uh, Jyn, and Chi-chirrut and Baze aren't, tech--nically with the Rebellion and I'm, I, I need to think them through. Orders, I mean. You, you let me."

You're Bodhi Rook? You're the pilot?

Bodhi strokes at Cassian's white knuckled fingers and sighs. "Does that--does any of that help?"

[seenitbefore]

In a way it does help. As he listens, with rising incredulity, Cassian can feel reality steadying under his feet, grounding him in what he knows for truth. He listens quietly until Bodhi's finished, and then he says, with absolute confidence, "No. That's not me."

He has no way of knowing that it's the same voice, the same level, clear-eyed look, that's lied to Bodhi before; but his grip relaxes a little, and his free hand comes up without his thinking about it to settle over Bodhi's, running a thumb over his knuckles in gentle counterpoint.

[callsign_rogueone]

"U-uhm," the stammer has nothing to do with nerves or holes jabbed through his psyche; this time, it's pure confused. "It's, it's not?"

All right. Sure. That might not be how Cassian sees himself. Bodhi's never tried to describe his squadmates as people before (he's given Jyn's physical description to law enforcement officers on half a dozen different worlds, but the less said about those instances the better), he may have put his foot in his mouth. A dark flush climbs up his neck, spurred on by the unusually pleasant sensation of trigger callouses sweeping over his scraped knuckles.

"I'm sorry. I don't--I haven't known you that long. If I got somethi-something wrong, I..."

[seenitbefore]

"I've known you for twelve years," Cassian says steadily. "You and Jyn and me, we're partners. You know? Our son's in high school. I'm a programmer. You run a garage with my youngest uncle. No space, no spies--" with a half-laugh, "no army anymore."

His hand stills then, though he doesn't pull away, and he draws a slow breath. "But that's not you either, is it."

[callsign_rogueone]

They are partners, him and Cassian and Jyn (and K and Chirrut and Baze), or at least he's hoped as much. Bodhi's tries to reconcile how it feels to hear that said aloud with the extreme time discrepancy Cassian seems to be struggling with, draws a breath to point out they were both children twelve years ago, when Cassian says:

Our son

He chokes on nothing, shoulders hitching forward as though absorbing a blow to the chest. The rest of Cassian's factoids register, but get shunted aside like debris from a deflector shield. A programmer? A garage? No Rebellion? By extension, no Empire?

"I--" he doesn't mean to snatch his hands away, exactly, they come up on reflex to grab at his temples. The dull ache constantly hunkered down behind his eyes stirs at all the uproar, pushing at the thin stitches of his psyche. "It's not, I don't, I don't think it is, but I--I have--trouble, with, with remembering what's r-r-real, where I--am, sometimes." His vision blurs, overlaps, Cassian's outline peeling into two separate silhouettes. Bodhi screws his eyes closed. "Buh-but I have to think I'd re-re--I'd know if there were a kid. If we were..."

Oh, this is bad. This is bad, he's meant to be holding himself together right now, for Cassian's sake, but what if it's all an extended episode of his own? All of it? Everything? Which 'all'?

He would know if he had a son, he tells himself. He would know if Cassian's touch on his knuckles were familiar. He would. He would.

[seenitbefore]

"Hey, hey, hey, Jesus, it's okay," and he's on his feet before he knows it, pure reflex, moving to sit on the bunk after all but not too close, not crowding him. "I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to - it's okay. No. You would. You would know. You wouldn't forget a thing like that, I know you wouldn't. That - that wasn't you," his voice going a little husky at the last. "It's okay, I'm sorry."

[callsign_rogueone]

I'm the pilot. Jedha's gone. I delivered the message. Galen's gone, but Jyn's alive. I'm the pilot. I got us off Scarif. We're alive. I'm the pilot.

These facts ring through him with the familiarity of long repetition. He was supposed to pick things that were true, things anyone around him could confirm if he slipped. These days, he doesn't need random rebels to confirm Jedha or Scarif or Galen, and piloting lives in his tendons and nerves. He picked these things because they were true. If he'd had any children or--or spouses, he would have picked those, too.

Bodhi drags his hands down his neck, fingers curling in the collar of his flightsuit. That wasn't so bad; he hadn't slipped as far as rocking or counting his breaths. The urge to physically hold his skull together has mostly passed. He can swallow and look around for Cassian, and be grateful that he's a little too tired to jump when he finds him at his side.

"You--you're sorry?" he rasps. "You're never sor-sorry. Not in so many words." His mouth twitches again, a little dry this time, a little sharp in ways Bodhi himself doesn't quite realize. "What's happening? What are--you're--all these things you're s-saying? What?"

[seenitbefore]

Cassian looks a little spooked himself - he's walked Bodhi through plenty of bad days, but never this bad, never with that kind of absolute, lucid horror in his face. He tucks his hands back under his elbows, to hold in his own shaking, and also to keep from reaching out and hauling not-his-Bodhi into his arms. "I don't know. I don't know what. But I am sorry. I didn't-- I should have stopped to think. I wasn't trying to mess with you."

A deep breath. "I mean, this is pretty sci-fi anyway, we're in Starbase Whatever The Hell and K's a giant robot for some reason. There might as well be a mirror universe."

[callsign_rogueone]

"Wh-what's a robot?" the idea of K as anything other than an eight foot tall, spindle-limbed hulk is as alien as anything else Cassian's said so far. Bodhi doesn't quite grasp the whole meaning of terms like 'sci-fi' or 'mirror universe' either, but the overall intent carries: Cassian is somehow as unmoored from this reality as Bodhi fears finding himself.

"I might...might know someone we can ah-ask," he straightens, hands slowly lowering to his lap. Someone who can read Cassian in ways Bodhi can't. Someone who might know what's wrong outside of a med-scan. "C-come on, we need to find Chirrut."

[seenitbefore]

"Who's that?" and for the first time in the past hour there's something distinctly Cassian-like in his expression, a wary reserve. (He's quite positive he doesn't know a "Chirrut", and now that he's reminded of the K-thing, he's a little afraid to ask who - or what - Bodhi proposes dragging him in front of.) "What are they going to do?"