Chapter Text
Ponds leaves.
Rex doesn’t blame or resent him for it— it’s been a long time coming. Ponds' constant frantic tapping has been skipping around the small bunk for ages. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it.
Ponds probably waited far longer than he should’ve to leave, but he was looking out for his little brother. It took weeks before Rex learned how to sleep alone again. About as much time before he could attend his first AA meeting. Past that, twice as many weeks before he stopped absently following Ponds around the wood shop and, with Ponds’ help, got himself a job assisting a natborn information systems architect working with the growing Aid Corps.
One night at dinner Ponds asked him, with no real intentions behind his words, if he planned on moving up from assisting one day.
Rex said, that’s the future. I don't think about the future.
Ponds had looked into his bowl of soup and shrugged.
Really, Rex doesn’t hope for much; he doesn’t even know how to hope for anything more than the status quo. During the war, all he hoped for was a glorious death, and maybe after that, to see his vode in Manda. He never thought of a bright future like so many of them did; it wasn't guaranteed so he didn’t look at the possibilities for fear of relying on them too much. Then the future came, and his tenuous grip of control over his present and past unraveled with the chips and the end of the war and no more brothers screaming at each other across a roaring battlefield.
The future is too quiet, Rex has decided.
He fills it with little discs that are scratched with the imprints of music. They are an inefficient resource for him to allocate funds towards, but he finds the disc player in a scrap yard and after he listens to the intro drumbeat to the Kinship disc for the first time, he has a hard time stopping the music. The music fills the gaps in his fingers that are used to clutching a bottle, they fill the abcesses in his bones before Rex can drown himself back into alcohol.
After Ponds goes off-world to lead a part of the Aid Corps, things get quieter and his disc collection grows louder. He doesn’t have a preference for the shape of the sound or the anger behind the song, just wants to capture the rhythm that used to thrum in his bones when he marched in a line.
For years, there’s been a rampant rumor that the Kaminoans wanted Rex decommissioned for his hair discoloration. This rumor is wrong. The Kaminoans did want Rex decommissioned, but rather because he bit clean through three of his brother’s fingers. Obviously, the narrative got some things wrong.
There’s not much more to the story— they were on the mats for sparring, and Rex had the habit of snapping with his teeth despite regulation behavior. (He still does. This bad habit really doesn’t help with Cody’s admiring ‘feral vod’ika’ comments that Rex always snaps at him for.) He was barely saved from a quiet fate by an Alpha who’d been watching the cadets around the room. The ori’vod had essentially dragged Rex from the queue by the scruff of his neck and into the Kaminoan offices. Rex doesn’t remember that Alpha's name or number at all, but he distinctly remembers going to sleep that night in the shiny, officer-cadet barracks. He woke up the next morning, still in disbelief, and accidentally stepped on a CC’s toes as he scrambled to get changed for meal. Said CC looked down at him and grinned. Said CC summarily declared Rex as his vod’ika and proceeded to be a bad influence on him for the rest of his life.
The hair, though— they hadn’t given two kriffs about the hair. Rex followed orders and could pass every physical and emotional exam they threw at him with flying colors. They weren’t stupid; they weren’t going to throw him away for color.
There was a very, very brief phase where they tried to dye it black but it was too hard to maintain and left him with blonde roots that curled around and into black tips.
Since then, it hasn’t been touched. It was nice to have something that spiked his individuality among his sea of vode, but with the end of the war it’s almost become senseless to care about the difference. Some of his brothers are becoming sisters, some have more tattooed than bare skin, and some have even scrounged up enough sympathy credits to get synthskin surgery to look entirely different from hundreds of thousands of brothers.
There is a kind vod working with the crèche that has a vibrant trail of frizzy neon pink hair braided into a rubber band at the bottom. Rex sees them occasionally as he brushes through the halls, since the crèche is on the way to the private exit where he can take the rail to work. He thinks of them as Pink, and finds a gentle sort of envy in himself for the ease that Pink smiles.
Pink grins at him after the first week or so once they recognize him as a Temple regular, and even trades long-suffering looks with him the time a few crechelings decide to cling to them like koalas on a tree.
Rex never approaches, since he didn’t know the vod then and doesn’t want to crowd them now. His fingers still curl on empty air for a bottle, and even as he collects chips he feels stiff when speaking to people he’s never known.
Pink is the one to approach him, the first time. They’re out of their usual chair and instead hold tight to a rollator covered in swaths of paint and stickers.
“Hi,” Pink says. “I don’t think we’ve met, yet. I’m Mercy! She/her.”
Rex stares at Mercy until his brain reboots and his lips twitch upwards. “Rex,” he says hoarsely. “Uh, sorry if you thought I was, staring, or— I just thought your hair looked cool.” If Jesse were here, he’d be laughing his ass off at Rex’s poor ability to hold a conversation.
“It is, isn’t it?” she agrees. “You’re lucky with your blonde hair. You don’t even have to bleach.”
“Bleach?” Rex asks slowly, absently running his hand over the spiky fuzz. The memory of curdling skin and the smell of spoiled flesh floods his senses. “Like, the chemical?”
“In low concentrations,” she clarifies. “It takes the color from dark hair so you can dye it anything you want. But it’s kind of a hassle— so you’re lucky.”
“Where do you…” he taps at his head. “Is that something you find in the market?”
Her grin is wide and contagious. “Nope!” She smacks the p, and leans in conspiratorially. “We found an abandoned shipment of the stuff for one of the senators and hid it in our quarters. Got a good distribution system going in the past month or so. I have to say I’m never going back to the old drab black.”
“We…?”
“The Coruscant Guard,” she responds, and for the first time her apparent ease gains a film of discontent. “I know the GAR had a problem with us, but—“
“No problem,” Rex says quickly. The sheer amount of devastation that emerged from the release of the videos of Palpatine committing horrendous acts towards the chipped Corries was enough to wipe out the feud. It was… still perhaps the worst news to come out of the fall of the war.
He brushes past the hiccup and repeats, “No problem. Do you happen to sell them?”
Mercy beams. “Well, I’m glad you asked.”
Within the hour Rex is introduced to Blaze and Spark (or maybe Spark and Blaze) who reveal an entire hair-dye scheme they’ve been running for months. It’s mostly circulated among vode for currency or trade, but apparently the occasional Jedi or natborn will poke in and obtain the dye.
“Is this legal?” Rex dares to ask, and Blaze and Spark burst out laughing.
In any case, he walks away with a box of bright blue hair dye, “on the house,” Spark said with a pat on his shoulder and a wink. It matches the 501st’s color, and Rex finds himself spinning the box in his hands with wonder as he treks back to his quarters.
He pretty much beelines towards his refresher when he gets in the room, only stopping to play his Kinship disc on full volume. The box says to do a swatch test, but they all basically have the same skin and the same allergies, so he forges ahead.
It’s cold, is his first thought, and second is this is a sensory nightmare. Rex remains very brave, though, as he smears the goopy shit backwards along the thickening buzz of his scalp, and pulls it back around in a thick circle. More than the sensation on his head, he feels his heart hammering in his chest, an adrenaline spike from exerting control over the final thing the Kaminoans tried to take from them.
He looks back at the label clutched in his clean hand. He’s probably using too much. Whatever. The gel looks way darker than what he’s hoping his hair will turn out to be, but he tries to trust the process and lathers it all over his buzzed hair. He waits the proposed hour, and then an extra hour after that.
When he washes it off and looks in the mirror for the first time, he actually gapes like he’s been socked in the stomach.
“Oh,” Rex says as he runs his hands over vibrant blue, and thinks how he carries the 501st’s colors with him now despite the lack of painted armor.
Mercy sees him the next morning and, despite her tight grip on the armrests of her chair, breathlessly laughs. “Rex, that’s wonderful. You look wonderful!”
Rex shrugs one shoulder, the other a little stiffer from the years of his pauldron’s weight. “I have to get to work, I just…”
“No, no, of course,” she says, still beaming. The bruises under her eyes ease with her smile. “Just— how does it feel?”
“It feels good,” he admits, shifting from foot to foot. “I… think my brothers would have loved it.”
She doesn’t comment on his use of past tense, just softens her grin into a kind glance of understanding. “I think so, too.”