Work Text:
Left
Every Star-Destroyer is the same.
Right
Venator-class. 9,200 troopers and crew aboard
12 steps
The smell of jet fuel, plastoid, and burning… other won’t leave his nose.
Left
Forty-one trips and counting.
12 steps
The smell of brother won’t leave his nose.
A door.
-
For as much chaos as Maul and the moon's surface were able to impart, the hull of the Victorious was left remarkably intact. The hyper-drive room was predictably wrecked, and the bridge had been shorn from the body sometime in the descent, but parts of the hangar and many of the halls were left unmarked.
Save for the bodies.
It was easy to tell who had been where. Victims of Maul seemed almost carelessly created, flung here and there with entertainment, rather than true determination, whereas brothers soldiers found adjacent were finished from the crash, not a blade.
It didn’t make it any easier to step over their crushed forms, to move between shattered helmets and bracers, to pray to any deity known that when Rex looked at their faces they wouldn’t be staring right back.
-
Ahsoka had insisted that it be made, deemed it a fitting tribute to brave men, and a way to throw the newly formed empire off of their trail. Venators have crashed before, and it’s common practice to send scavenger teams to delve into burnt hallways and echoing rooms to find cargo, supplies, and what machinery was salvageable. In that day and age, it could mean the difference between winning a battle, and needing a new battalion of shinies.
It was also common practice to make those same ships the graves of 9,200 brothers troopers and crew
Rex steps over another arm.
A door.
The smell of brother won't leave his nose.
"They may be willing to die, but I am not the one who is going to kill them," had been a touching mantra Ahsoka had stood by, but in the end it didn't really matter. They were dead anyway.
Dead as they laid there when she finally got the hangar entry open, dead as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder in silence, staring at the wake of orange and blue and white and red before them, dead as she didn't comment on the steady stream of tears that made their way down his face as he lifted every soldier, every brother, every vod in his arms and laid them in the shallow pits they dared to call graves. Dead as Rex stepped down for his forty-first trip into the hangar,
steps echoing like the weight that hit when they found Denal's body,
like the sinking in his chest as Fives hit the floor,
like the knowledge that Echo wasn't coming back when the gunship door closed behind him,
down to the maintenance bay where he knew the eyes that would find him would hit like that too.
The thing he's noticed throughout his wartime experience is that no two deaths are ever the same. Some are quiet, like how he never knew who took the shot ending Waxer, where others are loud, like how he knew exactly who took the shot ending Krell.
Jesse is deafening.
His helmet came off sometime in the tossing, but blunt-force trauma has a funny way of getting around petty things like plastoid, or so says the shattered indentation in his chestplate and all Rex can do is hope it was quick.
There's always a morbid peace in wrecks. The noise of the crash and the burning and the death is over and all that is left is the silence that swallows the screams that once pierced recycled air, so Rex sits, pulling the broken form of his brother-in-arms into his lap. It doesn't change anything, really. Doesn't change that his brother is lying motionless against him, that the droop of his eyes could be mistaken for his sleeping on the job. Rex would know. He's doled out lap after lap to both him and Hardcase for finding them in the exact same position he's in now.
But Jesse is deafening and the silence is stifling, and the hole in both of their chests isn't getting any smaller, so he sits and he closes his eyes and he lets the silence break, ugly, wretched, choking sobs wracking two forms as CT-7567, Clone Commander Rex allows himself to grieve.
-
Hours later, Ahsoka will find him in the exact same position. He doesn't look her in the eyes as she gently lowers herself beside them.
War does not determine who is right.
Only who is left.