AS LONG AS THE STARS ARE ABOVE YOU [A CASSIAN ANDOR x READER STORY]

CHAPTER SEVEN: PEACE AND PURPOSE

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Everything was cold. The air was so freezing around you that even as you wrapped your arms around yourself, it couldn't hold any warmth to you. Which was odd, because you were standing on the familiar sands of Tatooine in the middle of the day. The suns were at their highest point above you. Like always, you were blind from their light, but you couldn't feel an ounce of it on your skin. 

Before you could ponder that too much, a sudden darkness fell over you, blocking out both of the suns. Your heart sank, because whatever you were looking at wasn't a moon, although it loomed over you in the sky like it was. It overshadowed everything that surrounded you, threatening to swallow up the entire planet. 

As you could only stare at it as it became the only thing you could see. It was too large to be a moon, too large to be a space station. It turned slowly as it grew nearer and you just knew that it was the planet killer.

Wake up! you screamed to yourself. Just wake up! 

You couldn't. Trapped, you started to back away from the Death Star, as if that would make any difference whatsoever. You started to hyperventilate as you stared into the eye of the giant object. A beam of green shot out of it and you yelled, dropping to the sandy ground just to feel it crumble beneath your body in a deep rumble and cracking noise.

A second later, you were no longer on Tatooine. You were on the cold floor of an unfamiliar, dark room with a man that you didn't know, watching him sit at a desk with his head in his hands. His trembling bony fingers gripped his tangled, greying hair as he let out a gutted sob of anguish. You stood up slowly, as if moving too quickly would alert him of your presence, but you knew that you weren't really here --- and that the man was absolutely real.

Galen Erso!

His head turned at the sounds of a shout of his name. Galen Erso was a stranger to you --- you couldn't find one familiar thing in his sad, sickly face. You had no idea who this man was or why you were seeing him until you glanced at the screens above his head and saw that he was working on the planet killer itself. He was designing it and it was killing him inside.

And then you could hear them. Screams. Shouts of agonizing pain that hadn't happened yet, but would soon. You turned quickly, your hands going over your ears in shock at the amount of them. They were piercing, they were horrifying, and they blinded you. All you could see was darkness and you weren't sure if your eyes were just squeezed shut or if your sight had really been stolen away, but you were so alone and right in the middle of all of this death. 

When your sight returned, it didn't know what you wanted to see, which was anything but darkness. You wanted to see your father. You wanted to see Cassian.

But you could only see destruction. And you watched as the Holy City of Jedha and the entire planet of Alderaan were destroyed with a single blast from the Death Star.