#rh rex

[republich]

Rex hasn’t been back on duty in the ER for all that long when Windu makes his monthly check on student rounds. He’s actually kind of glad for the distraction, seeing as he’s still experiencing some shortness of breath and fatigue - because there’s no better entertainment in his world than seeing his attached residents getting their asses handed to them on a very polite, chilly, utterly correct platter.

It always starts with the hiding. On this particular occasion, it’s Tup and Ahsoka who have taken refuge under the intake desk, frantically gesturing to Rex to Oh my gods just SHUT UP as he grins down at them. 

When Windu breezes in, he’s already got a flock of unfortunate students under his wings - they all look petrified, because why wouldn’t you, when the Dean of the College of Medicine and one of the most famed cardiologists of his generation is personally overseeing your rounds to make sure they’re satisfactory? - and it means Rex can turf out his own disgruntled protectees, sniggering all the while as Tup and Ahsoka sulkily join the back of the queue with their clipboards and badges. He has no real fear for them, knowing their skills - he can already see the rest of the class watching them with solemn, hero-worshiping attention as they talk a resolutely silent Windu through the first few beds - but damn, it is still hellishly funny.

“Hey, man,” he adds, finishing his notes on a new case and flipping shut the folder as he looks up at Windu’s personal assistant, who has his head buried in a smartphone schedule as per usual. “How’s it going?”

“As expected,” Ponds says calmly. Rex has to give it to the man - as far as assistantships go Ponds probably has the toughest job in the entire hospital complex, and he somehow manages to do it without a shred of the backstabbing or unpleasantness that Tarkin takes pride in. “These students will have to finish their presentations in the next seven minutes. He’s due at a fundraiser.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” Rex says, grinning, as Tup manages, while in the middle of a very complicated speech about stents and shunts, to trip over his own feet. “I have a good batch this semester.”

“So I see,” Ponds says, one eyebrow slightly raised at the distant sight of Ahsoka’s flame-emblazoned chucks under the hem of her scrubs. “And yourself?”

Rex is kept from answering by the sudden appearance of Windu himself at his elbow - damn the man is stealthy - and the repetition of the question in a slightly different form. “Mr. Fett,” Windu intones, with the students clustered in a nervous huddle at his back. “I trust you are fully recovered?”

“Quite, sir. Thank you.”

“Perhaps we might find time later to discuss your experiences in the containment unit,” Windu continues, looking sideways at Ponds with a brief nod. He really is very scary close up. “I am most interested in how you came to terms with the various symptoms of Blue Shadow.”

“Oh,” Rex says, somewhat nonplussed. “Uh - ”

“I’m afraid you are fully booked for this evening, Doctor Windu,” Ponds says politely. “Drinks with Dr. Yoda and the Board.”

“Later in the week?”

“Provost meetings wall-to-wall.”

“Hm,” Windu says, frowning slightly. “Well. To be continued, Mr. Fett,” he continues, straightening his immaculate coat. “I congratulate you on your oversight.”

“Thanks again,” Rex calls - he has to raise his voice to make sure Windu, who is already halfway out the door, hears him at all. He could swear, he thinks, with a smile, that he’d seen Ponds roll his eyes.

“That’s it?” Tup complains, sighing as he props himself up on the desk. The poor kid looks like he’s run a mental marathon in five minutes. “I actually prepared for this.”

“Trust me, you’re good,” Rex said, and grabs both of them up in a surprise, squeaky sort of bear hug. “Well done.”

“I need a drink,” Ahsoka says, and wobbles off towards the lobby and its vending machines.

It pays, Rex has always found, to give Windu the respect he so manifestly deserves. A week later, for example, he finds himself in receipt of another little batch of med students - they all look so small, but he knows that he’ll be treating them all as the adults they are - and, along with them, personally delivered by Ponds, a sheaf of paperwork saying that the Dean has just finished negotiating the approval for construction of an entirely new teaching wing of the ER.

It’s going to be a hell of a lot of work, Rex knows, as he gets down to the day’s tasks of making sure none of his new batch faint at the sight of blood, needles, or any of the other frankly-horrific possibilities the ER can throw at them on any given day. But that’s what he loves, and what he’s good at - and if Windu thinks he’s worthy of it, he’ll take the compliment every time. 

[republich]

Tarkin was a Little Shit, and no one had yet come up with a failproof plan to get around him.

Or to, you know, dump his body where it would never be found. That would’ve been good too.

You knew it was bad when Cody - Cody, the immutable rock, the bureaucratic newcomer who didn’t let crazed patients or supply screwups or disasters ever phase him (not that you ever saw it on his face, anyway) - started muttering vile things into his coffee about how a certain someone knew where to shove their paperclips. You knew it was bad when Rex, who kind of liked to shout when he was upset because damn it, you need to learn from your mistakes, regressed into a state of white-lipped, mad-grinning silence.

“I know a guy,” Rex was heard to say to Cody, one day, when his scheduled meeting with Palpatine ended up having been moved to a week next Tuesday on an apparent whim.

“Yeah?” Cody said back, and oh man, they were scary when they were in sync. “As in - you know a guy?”

“I know a guy.”

Unfortunately for everyone, said hit failed to materialize (the price was too high, Rex was heard to mournfully say to Ahsoka, who was incandescent with anger at Tarkin’s latest little put-down of her appearance and her skills and pretty much everything about her, really, because he was a Little Shit). The next target of Tarkin’s continual round of petty insults was Dr. Kenobi, who inexplicably lost access for his patients to a critical new drug trial; after that, it was the Board at large, who discovered that essential funding decisions had somehow been rearranged behind their backs thanks to an obscure bylaw whose origin no-one seemed able to trace.

“Are we sure some of this isn’t criminal?” Kenobi said lightly, one evening, over dinner with Bail Organa; it was easy to see, if you knew the signs, just how angry he was, and how much sleep he was losing in fits and snatches over having had to tell his patients that no, he wasn’t going to be able to get them on this new trial.

Gentlemen, he always said. “Gentlemen,” he drawled, while edging past Waxer and Boil on the pediatric ward and looking severely down his long nose at the affrontery that was the sight of children polluting his environment. It was a good thing, actually, that he was uninterested in the actions of others on that particular occasion, because the gestures Waxer and Boil immediately sent at his prim, retreating back subsequently got them into a lot of trouble with Mr. Bril when he realized where Numa had picked them up.

Various people had tried, of course - they’d tried to weasel their way around Tarkin’s position of constant vigilance at the front of Palpatine’s office and get directly to the Dean himself, and sometimes they’d even succeeded - only to hit a brick wall. And then they usually got reassigned, anyway, and no-one had yet figured out whether Tarkin’s influence really ran that deep, or whether Palpatine was that much of a Shit too. 

(Anakin tended to complain that he had no idea what the hell any of them were talking about, because he’d never had issues. The suggestion that he, then, should be the one to take up the problem of there being a slithering snake of a man bringing down morale at every opportunity was, however, mostly forgotten. Skywalker had more important things to worry about.)

(The investigative journalist recuperating on the third floor, on the other hand...)

[republich]

lizaleigh replied to your post “I am now (genuinely) taking votes from you all, Dear Readers, as to...”

I'd enjoy it either way, but it's a pairing I like to see when Ahsoka's been aged up a little as she is in this AU!

too-saxy replied to your post “I am now (genuinely) taking votes from you all, Dear Readers, as to...”

A+ on board with that ship because you wrote them so beautifully and also a whole new layer of spice to add to the hospital yay

agarthanguide replied to your post “Rex is slow to wake up, but he figures he’s earned it. Fuck, but it...”

yeahhhhh do the thing. throw this onto a ship. sail that ship into the sunset.

@tuntematonkorppi said:  I'd love to read Rex and Ahsoka as a couple written by you! I really like them together and I really like your writing so I'm reeeaaally all for it!

@kenobrea said: my replies aren't working so yASS

Anonymous said:  no Rex and Ahsoka hookup please no. I prefer the more mentor/cool uncle/big brother type relationship

Anonymous said: I am all in favor of Rexsoka!

It looks like the Ayes have it for now (apologies, Anon #1)! I’ll see what I can do with them down the road. :-D

[republich]

I am now (genuinely) taking votes from you all, Dear Readers, as to whether you’d like Ahoksa and Rex to hook up. I’ve never written them as a ship before, but as far as the overall vague plot of this AU goes I’m happy to write them any way you’d like. *G*

[republich]

Rex is slow to wake up, but he figures he’s earned it.

Fuck, but it had hurt. Whatever the hell cure they’d come up with had left him feeling like most of his veins had been stripped out of him and laid bare to a merciless sun, shriveling and pulsing at once. He’d taken refuge, for the most part, in not being conscious. Comas, he had decided, were underrated.

But now he’s vaguely awake, or at least he’s squinting just hard enough that he can start to take in the bright light of what looks like a very sunny morning, and to see that Cody is once again by his side. His brother is drawing blood from the inside of Rex’s now deeply-scarred arm, his movement calm and assured, and he has that particular sort of quiet content about him that lets Rex know that everything is alright, and that he’s gonna live. It’s rare that Cody gets to do basic nursing, now, Rex knows, given his administrative workload, and it makes Rex smile to see the pleasure inherent in the methodical, practiced motions of his brother’s hands.

“Hey,” he croaks, and Cody takes a moment to gently withdraw the needle and press a band-aid in its place before he replies.

“Hi. How are you feeling?”

“Sore,” Rex rasps, and then grimaces a little as he shifts and re-familiarizes himself with the shape and size of his body, and just how damn itchy the blanket covering him is. “Did it work?”

“Well, you’re still here,” Cody says, with a sideways grin. “There are chances of long-term side-effects from the reeksa root essence, but we’ll cross those bridges when we come to them.”

“Where’s my medal?”

“Your what?”

“Well, unless my memory also got fried, I’m one of the first out-and-out survivors of Blue Shadow, bro. I was expecting a parade.”

“Yeah, sure,” Cody snorts, rolling his eyes. “I’ll find you some confetti.”

Rex tilts his head sideways, peering at an empty, neatly-made bed on the other side of the room. “Where’s Dr. Tano?”

“Oh, she’s been up and walking for a whole day. Quite a talker, that one,” Cody says, and man, it really is nice to hear Cody’s relief winning out over what Rex is sure must be a deep strain of frustrated grief that he’ll eventually let loose. “I can page her if you want to see for yourself.”

Ahsoka is bustling and prim when she comes in, but sags into a slight slouch as soon as she’s gotten herself perched on the edge of his bed, grinning through a sigh. “Hey, Rex. I feel like shit.”

“You don’t look it,” he grins, and pats her knee and knows he’s lying for both their benefits - she’s definitely tired and brittle around the edges, and she shouldn’t be back at work yet - but if he’s reading Cody’s half-exasperated, fond look at them both right he’s pretty sure she must have insisted that she could go straight back into the OR the second she managed to totter out of bed. “I hear you beat me to the cure.”

“Wasn’t hard,” she says, tossing her head and neatly-wrapped scarf - she’s smiling at him, though, and reaches out to grab his still-fever dry hand. “Thanks. You kept me angry enough to fight it.”

“Wasn’t hard,” he parrots back, for which she punches him in the shoulder - which hurts way more than he’ll admit, but he doesn’t care.

You did good work this week, Rex, he thinks, as she leans more heavily onto her hand, clutched in the bedclothes, and starts to natter away about all the surgeries she’d managed to miss during her unexpected absence. 

She’s worth it.

[republich]

They manage to walk in circles together for three hours, hand in hand, before Ahsoka collapses.

“I can’t,” she pants, baring her teeth - she’d been leaning on him more and more heavily for at least thirty minutes as they tried to keep their blood moving, chattering away all the while about how much she fucking hates this fucking virus and coming up with ever more-inventive plans about what she’d do to it if she met it in a dark alley, and it hasn’t been enough. She’s in a cold sweat and slipping closer to a temp of 93, well past hypothermia, as she clutches the stand of her IV drip; they’d bagged each other, forcing an oxygen-rich slurry into their arteries, but the whole point was that their cells couldn’t take it up - and now her pretty, pale face is turning blue at its edges, cobwebs of blood vessels creeping darkly across her skin.

“One more lap,” Rex says, trying to ignore the bustle outside - Cody has given all the orders he can, and there are nurses and doctors running to and fro, shouting, not able to do a damn thing - as he clutches her forearms, feeling his own head start to lighten. There’s no mirror in the containment unit, thank the gods, because he thinks he’d lose it if he saw the same insidious darkness in himself. “Come on. One more.”

“Can’t,” she says again, breathless, and then she sits heavily on the edge of her bed and just wheezes. “You keep going.”

“Nah,” he says, trying to grin, and settles clumsily next to her, readjusting his own IV. “It takes two to tango.”

“Ugh,” she says, and wobbles, and her cheek comes to rest on his shoulder. “No tango. I’ll take you ballroom dancing.”

“Deal,” he says, and chokes, and it takes a worryingly long time for his breathing pattern to normalize (not being able to breathe fucking hurts, and it makes waves of incredibly rational panic beat at his throat, closing it just when he needs it the most).

When he next becomes aware of anything much, there are black spots dancing in his vision, and he’s curled fully around Ahsoka as she shakes through her chills, his hands around her wrists. When he tries to say something, garbled and low, she doesn’t respond.

There’s a tap on the glass, and he forces himself upright, and holy fuck, so cold - 

“I need you to hold on for two more hours.” It’s Cody, Rex just about recognizes, and this is the worst of it, this is the worst thing of all - the fact that he recognizes his brother is out there and is watching him die, and he can’t muster up the energy to try and alleviate his grief. “We have an experimental treatment being flown in.”

A pause. “I need you to do this for me, Rex.”

No emphasis on any particular word, of course. Cody wouldn’t put that burden on him, and it’s a common enough phrase, one they use all the time to urge their patients through one more surgery, one more round of chemo, telling them to open their eyes and focus and tell them where it hurts.

It hurts everywhere, Rex thinks, and then he blinks, and wakes up on the floor. When he gets a hand under him and manages to turn over, he sees that it’s almost entirely blue. 

Fuck this, he thinks - or maybe he says it out loud - and when he staggers to his feet, totally oblivious of whatever might be going on outside, the only thing he’s able to do is check and make sure Ahsoka’s still alive - she is, just, piled over with blankets (did he put them over her? he must have done) and her thready pulse weakly beeping - before he falls again and crawls, unashamed and totally uncaring, into the little bathroom attached to the unit.

If he’s going to die he’s not going to fucking do it on camera for the CDC to gawp at, that’s for fucking sure.

The tile wall should be cold, but to his frozen skin it feels like a warm bath. He wedges into a corner, nudges his head upright, and waits.

It doesn’t take long - and it’s kind of a relief.

No tunnel, he notices idly. Liars.

Cody’s a fucking asshole. Cody is barely visible in a massive orange biohazard suit, his gloved hands thickened almost beyond use, but Rex can tell it’s him. Cody has a fucking enormous needle that looks very disconcerting indeed in Rex’s arm.

"Shit,” he gasps, and then he screams, because whatever the stuff is feels like lava coursing through his circulatory system, burning and frying in its wake. “What the fuck is that?”

“You were never great at chemistry, vod,” Cody says, tinny through his radio, and oh man, he sounds fucking great. Hearing anything at this point, as Rex twitches and whimpers through the corrosive agent’s effects, feels amazing. “Save your questions for when you regain full brain function.”

“Will I?” Rex asks, pathetically, blinking haze out of his eyes.

“We’ll see. That was syringe number one,” Cody says, holding up the remainder of his boxed kit, which is covered in all sorts of stickers which say that Rex is being treated with something Very Not Happy-Making. “There are ten. Ahsoka’s already had two, so you’ve got some catching up to do.”

“I hate you,” Rex says lovingly.

“I know.”

[republich]

“It might not be Blue Shadow.”

“Save your energy and keep track of your vitals, Dr. Tano,” Cody is saying, tinny and muffled through inches-thick plexiglass. There’s the slightest of warps in it where Cody’s face should be, so Rex can’t quite tell just how worried his brother is - but if he’s feeling half of the trepidation Rex has sitting in his gut like a rock, it’s more than enough.

“It might not be Blue Shadow,” Ahsoka says again, needling and frustrated in the loose scrubs she’d been passed through the airlock and which she’d wriggled into in a corner as Rex turned his back. “I remember the day it was officially declared eradicated, it can’t just spontaneously reappear of its own accord - ”

“Yeah, and we’re old enough to remember what it was like before that announcement,” Rex interrupts, as calmly as he’s able. His memory of it is admittedly foggy, since the scourge had been nearly hunted into extinction by the time he and Cody were training up; he remembers vividly, though, the pictures in his textbooks and presentations, of patients formerly in perfect health whose blood had turned sluggy and thick in their veins, deprived of oxygen by thick clusters of virus spotted through their lungs blood vessels until they stopped breathing. 

The contagion was a slippery little bastard, and one which made little sense. The first symptom, he knew, would be their core temperatures dropping until they felt like they were freezing, and heat blankets wouldn’t do much good; they’d struggle for air and try to cough their lungs back from shriveling, but it wouldn’t help.

Damn it, he thinks, looking at Ahsoka, at just how disbelieving and determined she is. She doesn’t deserve this.

“You let the police worry about what that lab was doing with the strain,” Cody says, from outside; their containment unit is in the basement and gloomy with it, every hallway around them empty and practically devoid of anything besides a weak, greenish light. “For now, you need to rest and be vigilant. We’re already in contact with the CDC and your samples have been fast-tracked. In the meantime, our request for a rapid synthesis of the vaccine for prophylactic purposes is being considered.”

“I love it when you speak Management,” Rex says, grinning half-heartedly as he leans against the barrier, wishing more than anything that he could reach through and tell Cody through his grip that he didn’t intend to die. “Tell those bureaucratic bastards to hurry up.”

“I will,” Cody says, and then his blurry face definitely softens. “You did a great job with containing it at the infection point. Tarkin shat a brick, but even Palpatine has admitted we’re in the clear. There’s a rotating list of attendings who will be on call whenever you need anything - and I mean anything.”

“I need to get out of here,” Ahsoka grumbles as she hops up onto one of the two beds and crosses her legs and arms, scowling. “I was supposed to assist on my first quadruple bypass today.”

It goes very quiet, for a while, after that. Left to his own devices, Rex tends to fidget or otherwise physically fill his empty moments - he wants to sit and curl or make sure he’s not tired enough to do pushups, but figures that the sweat he’d build up would feel uncomfortably like a symptom, so he ends up on his back in his bed, staring at the ceiling while Ahsoka flips idly through a magazine (they kit out these rooms in the strangest ways). She coughs, once, but at Rex’s sharp look she just rolls her eyes and insists she has an itch.

“This might be the most bored I’ve ever been,” she says, roundabout the four-hour mark; she’s holding her fingers up to the bright overhead light and examining them critically, as though she’s looking for evidence of the virus on her skin. “Twenty questions?”

“Sure,” Rex shrugs, and only pauses briefly to glance at his vitals before he shifts onto his side. “Why surgery?”

“To work with Anakin. Why the ER?”

“Fixing things. What’s so special about Anakin?”

“Please,” she snorts, though she takes it a little more seriously after a moment’s thought, biting on her lip. “I don’t know. I suppose I aspire to that sort of brilliance. Shouldn’t everyone?”

“Gods, no. Not at the price of being as much of an asshole as he is,” Rex laughs. He likes her like this, he realizes - he likes these sorts of conversations, and it feels like a while since he’s had one with a colleague, rather than a brother or bosom friend. “Okay, next question, then - do you actually like surgery, or are you just chasing perfection? Because I think I should warn you, kid, that a perfect record doesn’t exist in our profession. You’ll be a miserable doctor if you make a bodycount of zero into the be-all and end-all of your career...”

She’s not listening anymore, just looking hard at him, her eyes gone slightly wide at their corners.

“What?” he asks.

“You’re shivering,” she says, quietly, and when he rolls over and looks at his screen he sees that his temperature has dropped to 97.5.

“Oh,” he says, and feels the minute tremor start to spread from his chest to his neck, hairs standing up on his arms. “Fuck.”

[republich]

She’s not supposed to be in the ER, but Rex can’t deny that she’s fun to have around.

Ahsoka has that Thing about her, that quick, fiercely happy energy which makes her an asset to whatever team you’re pleased to put her on. It makes her imaginatively efficient in surgery - where Rex hears she’s giving Skywalker a gleeful run for his money when it comes to completing her required docket of early-career training - and in the ER, it means she completes her rounds in half the time she’s supposed to and gets spectacularly angry with anyone who fails to keep to her pace. Most days, it’s just funny. Occasionally, it’s exhausting, and when it’s a Tuesday morning and he has a hangover because of the previous night’s staff poker night, Rex considers it to be one of those times.

“Sit down, will you,” he complains as she stands next to his chair behind the intake desk, looking with her crossed arms and pointed frown like she’s going to start fucking tapping her foot next. “You’re giving me a headache just looking at you.”

“Is every day here this boring?” she asks, fairly rudely, as though the normal chaos of the accident victims who come in every morning thanks to rush hour is child’s play. “You’re always selling the ER as so exciting.”

“It sure is,” Rex says, grinning over his coffee. “But believe it or not, it’s also a place - much like other places - where everyone has a job to do, and they end up doing it. We’re under control. If Anakin wanted you to do these hours I’ll just sign off on them for you.”

“He didn’t,” she sniffs, and sits primly on the edge of the desk in her pristine white coat and brightly-patterned headscarf, looking hungrily around as though all she needs to make her day is a gushing wound needing attention. “I requested the shift.”

“Ah,” Rex says, and sniggers as she glares over at him. “Felt like you were losing your common touch?”

“Surgery’s great,” she protests, sounding way too defensive for it to be true as her expression softens. “I dunno. Anakin’s kind of - ”

“You don’t need to justify it to me. We are glad for the help,” Rex says with a smile, and then he perks up, briefly, at the sound of the outer public door of the ER opening. “Hello. Fresh meat.”

“Nice,” Ahsoka says, with relish.

And then they wait - because the inner door doesn’t open, which is kind of weird, because Rex is pretty sure he had seen a shadow - 

Ahsoka looks down at him, and seems to have his idea at the same time. “Someone passed out?”

“Let’s take a look,” Rex nods, and loops a stethoscope around his neck as he stands and tosses out his cup.

There is a man in the entryway, as it turns out, huddled in a heap on the carpet, and when Rex kneels and turns him over Ahsoka is right next to him, pressing glove-clad fingers into eyelids and the corners of his mouth. He looks like a lab technician of some sort, his short white coat familiar from the hospital’s own labs, but Rex doesn’t recognize the lab name printed on the badge - 

- and every vein in his face and neck is a deep, dark blue.

“Fucking hell,” Rex breathes.

“Crash cart, please!” Ahsoka is calling, clearly more preoccupied with the fact that the man isn’t breathing - but that is so, so not their most important worry right now.

“Scratch that!” Rex bellows, and puts up a sharp hand towards the attentive nurses who had been hurrying towards them; well-trained, they stop immediately and just hover, peering down at the victim, whose skin feels clammy and slippery to the touch.

“What are you doing?” Ahsoka demands.

Rex’s mind races.

“Call code black,” he orders, and that makes its mark: two or three of the nurses blanche, and one, a new boy, takes an uncertain step back. “Get Dr. Palpatine and Cody in the loop. We’ll need level 5 containment and procedures.”

“Got it,” one of them - Hardcase - nods, and the little crowd promptly turns, ushering curious patients and staff far enough away from the automatic door that it swishes closed again, leaving Ahsoka and Rex in their little no-man’s land.

Somewhere, distantly, a klaxon starts to wail.

“Okay,” Ahsoka says slowly. She’s gone pale, Rex can see, but isn’t panicking - not yet, anyway, and for now Rex will take that as a good sign. “What’s happening?”

“We’re going into lockdown,” Rex says grimly, as he shifts the unknown John Doe onto his back and interlaces his fingers to start CPR. “Get ready, kid. You and I are going to have a lot of fun being the first people in ten years to go down with Blue Shadow.”