Posting this first scene from a post-Andor story as a commitment to keep working on it even when writing feels like pulling teeth. It takes place in the same continuity as A Common Language, so hopefully (I really, really hope) working on this will unblock me enough that I'll finally be able to finish that too...
Bridges (are for burning)
The downpour cut out as abruptly as it had begun.
For a moment she almost didn’t notice, the drag of her boot-heels and the resurgent dull pounding in her feet and neck and head drowning out the sudden silence in her ears, but then heat surged up through the floorboards to fill the hut, thick as blood and stinking of rot, and choked her to a halt. She stood, stock-still, and fought to breathe as sweat began a sticky crawl through her hair and along her neck and down between her shoulder-blades, trickling down her breastbone and spine and under the waistband of her pants to pool behind her knees and plaster heavy fabric hot and tight against her skin.
Something scraped at her scalp, faint, insistent, infuriating. It wasn’t until she was able to force a hand up to her head against the weight of the hot air at last that she realised it was a hairpin, slipping loose – looser – amidst the snarl of hair that two days ago, or three, or maybe none at all, had been a nurse’s tidy bun. Under her fingertips the strands felt damp and rough, almost frizzy, from the humidity –
She’d stripped every last hint of curl ruthlessly out of it for the first time the night before they’d moved to Coruscant for good; Luthen had grumbled down the Fondor’s short corridor as she’d worked, something about inventory and time, but she’d ignored him, every pass of the smoothing iron a reminder to herself of what she needed to be for as long as they were there: sleek, shining, smiling, silent, a glossy empty mirror for the Empire’s great and greedy to see themselves reflected in and so see nothing at all.
The pin dropped from her fingers. The knot of hair slid further down her neck, but didn’t unravel; there was another pin in there somewhere, holding what was left of the tangle together, and she dug her fingers into the mess after it, wrenched the thing free and heard it skitter and bounce across the floorboards behind her, but it still wasn’t enough, there was still something –
There.
Hair tumbled loose, over her shoulders, down her back; suddenly she could breathe again, hear again, move again, and she wheeled around sharply towards the door. Somewhere outside – not close by, not this time – there were voices shouting and a platoon’s worth of boots sploshing down muddy tracks, and beyond them…
Her fist closed tight around the last pin.
Beyond them were the low grumble and rising whine of engine after engine as transport ships and fighters came and went from the base on Yavin IV.
Stay here, okay? Vel had said before she’d left, smiling that moist-eyed, pitying, patronising smile. There are no maps of Yavin Base, and no trail markers either. We don’t want you getting lost again, do we? I’ll show you around properly when you’re feeling better, just as if she hadn’t been finding her way through fields and trackless forests since before she was old enough to do up her own fucking shoes.
She flung the pin away hard behind her, hoping spitefully that it’d break something Vel cared about, and stalked out into the jungle without even waiting to hear it fall.
