Elian Abrantes
Character
The lake wind moved softly through the broken reeds along the edge of the impact site, stirring ash that should have settled days ago but somehow still refused to rest. Elian Abrantes stood at the perimeter markers the Republic engineers had left behind, their clean white stakes already leaning slightly into the damp Naboo soil as if even they were tired of pretending the investigation was finished. Cassian's ship had come down hard here, too hard for an accident and too precisely for chance, and the silence around the wreckage felt wrong in a way Elian could not explain. Naboo was supposed to be gentle ground, but today it felt like a grave pretending to be a garden.
The hull fragments had already been hauled away, the larger debris cataloged and removed by Intelligence teams who had combed the area with scanners and drones and careful boots that left neat patterns in the grass. They had called it thorough and professional and complete, and Elian had nodded when they told him that because it was easier than arguing with people who believed paperwork meant truth. Cassian did not simply vanish into clean reports and sealed evidence containers, and he did not crash without fighting back, and he did not disappear because he chose to. Someone had taken him, and Elian could feel that certainty settling into his bones like cold iron.
He crouched near the shallow scar where the ship's forward section had carved into the earth before breaking apart, running his gloved fingers through soil that had already been disturbed too many times by strangers pretending to care. The ground still held faint impressions beneath the official tracks, small inconsistencies that scanners ignored but instinct noticed, and Elian trusted instinct more than any Republic sweep. Cassian had been ambushed here, cornered here, and dragged away from here by people who expected no one important to come looking after the noise died down.
For a moment the thought crept in uninvited, ugly and persistent, carrying Aurelian's voice with it like a bruise that never quite faded. Maybe Cassian really had been exactly what Aurelian said he was, reckless and useless and destined to disappear into the kind of trouble no one would come look. Elian's jaw tightened as he stared across the quiet lakeshore, and he forced the thought out of his head before it could settle anywhere permanent.
He had learned about the crash almost a week after it happened, first from Sibylla and then from news reports as he wnet back to see them.. By the time he understood what he was seeing, reading, the search teams had already come and gone, the official conclusions already written, and his siblings already grieving in their own separate ways without him. He knew that should have mattered more to him than it did right now, but grief had a way of narrowing the world until only one thing remained visible. Right now the only thing that mattered was Cassian.
Elian rose slowly and looked out across the water again, studying the shoreline as if the land itself might finally decide to speak. Intelligence believed there was nothing left here worth finding, but Intelligence had not grown up with Cassian and they had not spent years learning how often he survived situations he never should have walked away from. Somewhere between the broken reeds and the quiet surface of the lake, something had been missed. Elian intended to find it, even if it meant tearing the truth out of the ground himself.
Unfortunatley there was only so much a one armed eighteen year old kid could do.
Yes, that one arm issue needed to get fixed in a hurry.
