The Truth Lies (In An Unmarked Grave)
On some days, Rex is certain the grief is going to kill him. There's only so much a person can take, and he reached that limit long ago-- reached it, then vaulted straight past it. Echo is alive, and that's fantastic, but... Fives isn't, and he's only the most recent on the long list of people Rex has failed to save. On some days, Rex is convinced that he's just walking wounded, that it's only a matter of time before his injuries catch up to him and put him in the ground.
That's... not what happens. Instead, Rex wakes up with Fives, and General Skywalker years in the past, back before Fives' death, before the Citadel, with their memories of the future intact. Instead, Rex finds himself caught between a rock and a hard place as he tries to save his family, with the constant threat of the Chancellor hanging over his shoulder.
After working with The Bad Batch– after finding Echo and losing him again, after punching Crosshair and forcing himself to work with him anyway– Rex finds himself sitting on a log, staring at the bonfire in front of him.
The roaring fire illuminates the darkness of the night sky, and Rex can feel the heat from it on his face, warming up his knees. Despite that, his fingers feel cold around his beer bottle as he stares down the flames, a shade short of tipsy, not quite tipsy enough.
He feels… almost isolated, with the way the sky stretches out above him, vast and endless, twinkling stars bright against the darkness of the night. But he’s not alone– far from it, in fact– Jesse’s sitting on his right, and Kix is on Jesse’s right, and Ridge on Kix’s right, and Sterling on Ridge’s right, which brings him all around to being on Rex’s left.
They’re a lively bunch. It’s not quiet around the campfire– far from it, in fact. If Rex felt a little less detached, he knows he’d be right there with them, laughing and joking. But the events of the last few days, months, years, weigh on him, and it’s easier to let himself be mesmerized by the crackling flames than putting in the effort to be engrossed in conversation.
Jesse, however, is not one to be upstaged by a firepit. He leans forward, grins, waves his hand in front of Rex’s face. “Hey Cap,” he says, ignoring Kix’s facepalm. “How do you know if there’s a member of the Bad Batch at your party?”
Rex sighs, looks up at the sky. Prays for some sort of divine intervention.
No divine intervention arrives. Rex sighs, loudly. “How, Jesse?” he asks, half certain he already knows the answer.
“”They’ll tell you,” Jesse replies, and despite the fact that Rex had been expecting that exact answer, he still finds himself snorting at the accuracy of it. “Hey, how would the Bad Batch kill a space snake?”
Rex sighs again, louder this time. He definitely knows where this one is going. “How?”
“They make contact with it, ignore all Judicial Department directives and build a rapport with the snake, train it to kill other snakes, then return to Kamino to file a requisition of GAR resources form and take in the snake.”
Rex… shouldn’t ask. They’re all feeling weird after their last mission, every single Forcedamned clone is a raw nerve at the moment. He really shouldn’t ask.
Kriff it. He might as well ask. “Is the snake in this metaphor meant to be Echo?”
“Of course not sir, Echo was– is about as sneaky as a reg manual to the face.”
“Big words coming from you,” Kix chimes in, taking advantage of Jesse’s temporary distraction to steal his beer and finish it off.
“Kix, I’ll let you know that I’m an ARC trooper, actually,” Jesse defends. “I absolutely know how to be sneaky.”
“Well, since you’re a high and mighty ARC trooper, I guess that means that you’d just kill our metaphorical space snake by accident, and it would turn out that this metaphorical snake was sacred to the people there, and the natborns would then demand the removal of Republic forces from the planet.”
Rex chokes on his beer, coughs as Jesse sputters. Kriffing hell, someone decided to go for the throat today. “Oh, kark off,” is what Jesse eventually says in response, and Kix shrugs, looking all too smug with Jesse’s bottle in his hand.
After he finishes restoring the air to his lungs, Rex finds himself looking down at his hands, letting the conversation fade to a dull roar in the background. He looks down at his right hand, forms a fist with it, frowns. Unrolls his fingers one by one, flexes them once, then twice, then three times. The memory of punching Crosshair is all too present in his mind, as is the memory of liking it. Of wanting to do it again.
For all that he knows that he was made for killing, Rex has never thought of himself as an inherently violent person. But right now, there’s a part of him saying otherwise, a part of him that’s determinedly whispering what might even be the truth in the back of his mind.
He’s realized recently that he’s changing. And it’s because of the war, yes, but it’s also because of other things, and that… worries him. Scares him, almost, though he’ll never admit it out loud. Rex is a clone. He’s not made for change– the opposite, really. He’s been designed not to evolve past his programming.
But Crosshair had said that they should’ve left Echo behind, and Rex had seen red. For a second, all he’d been able to think about was Fives’ anguish at the Citadel, Fives’ grief in the aftermath, Fives’ rapidly cooling body in his arms, and–
Yeah, Rex had punched him. The shabuir had deserved it– deserved worse, an insidious voice inside him whispers.
(Rex at the beginning of the war never would’ve done that. Rex doesn’t know if his past self would even recognize the man he’s become now.)
Anyway, General Skywalker may not have liked that punch, but Kix and Jesse were on his side, and that was good enough for Rex. It had to be.
He glances down at his fist once more, sighs, and picks up his beer again, finishing it off. He probably should get started on those reports and finish filling out Echo’s transfer forms, so Rex opens his mouth to excuse himself when General Skywalker comes out of his tent, holding something strange and triangular, something that’s glowing red, and suddenly–
Dimly, Rex hears alarmed shouts of his own name, feels the beer bottle slip from his hands, but all he can focus on is the nauseating roil of his own stomach, and the way that General Skywalker seems to have lost his balance too, and is clinging to a tree for support. Rex blinks, tries to focus, tries to marshal his thoughts into something coherent, then–
Fives lays on the cold floor of a warehouse on Coruscant, and knows he’s dying. There’s a blaster bolt in his chest, and Rex is holding him– oh, that’s nice of him– and he’s dying.
Fives blinks his eyes. Speaks.
He wakes up to an insistent hand on his shoulder, shaking him in a way that no one has done in years.
“Did you kriffing steal a sedative from Coric’s stash or some shit, asshole?” Echo demands as soon as Fives blearily opens his eyes, and Fives coughs, relishes in the ability to freely breathe, and– wait.
“Fives?” Echo asks, a hint of worry coloring his tone, but Fives can’t concentrate on that, because this is Echo talking to him. Echo, who’s dead, and that must mean Fives is dead, and he’s with Echo again–
He’s crying before he can even fully process it, ignoring Echo’s surprised exclamation as he pulls Echo down on top of him. Fuck. He’s dead, Force, he didn’t want to die, but he did, and now he’s with Echo again. He’s in the afterlife, and he’s with Echo again, and that alone is enough to undue him.
