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There’s no peace in a bottle, Rex knows. Perhaps the hollow illusion of it at the top, the faint hope that maybe this time it will come; by the bottom, only the deep ache of knowing that if it exists at all, it’s found somewhere he’s never been.
He turns the bottle in his big, restless hands. 79’s is quiet, and he hasn’t even put on civvies or anything comfortable. Just shucked the top half of his armor like a shell that no longer quite fits, so the stone in his shoulders can sag beneath his regulation blacks as he leans onto his elbows, eyelids heavy as he glances around the bar. His brothers think of this place as a safe haven, away from the rigid and gruelling things they are so finely crafted to do. They come here to laugh, dance, drink, chase tail, meet people. Have fun.
Rex knows he’s no fun. Or at least that the only place he can have fun seems to be in the thick of what he was bred for. A joke in the middle of drills, a wink around the holomap on the bridge, a laugh as he surprises his enemy, something suspiciously lighthearted as he carries the lead weight of a badly injured vod towards a medic station or a gurney after battle. Something that sounds like laugh it off, trooper, you’ll be fine in no time but means please, brother, don’t go.
Fun is not what he is looking for, and peace is beyond his grasp. War is in his bones, even on leave, even at rest. His nightmares have sharpened in Umbara’s wake, and he finds himself staving off sleep with the wan light of the bar digging past his sight to pierce the ceaseless dull ache in his head. The second beer does not prove a better compass than the first. It cannot tell him why he’s so conflicted, now. Why every order that’s issued to him reeks of death, why he’s waiting even for General Skywalker’s face to darken as Krell’s had when Rex issued the grounds for his arrest. Shame pools sour in his cheeks; his jedi would never do such a thing, he knows it. Yet the fear is still there.
He is not used to fear. Even the ubiquitous fear of losing his brothers is too dull to be anything but waiting sorrow, inevitable as the void between the stars.
It doesn’t grab him by his guts until he’s asleep. His body will not yield in any other state; even now as the wraiths of Umbara linger behind his weary eyes he does not feel it, not really. His body seems as stoic as ever. His mind darts between futures, all of them terrible, desperately seeking a way to prevent those abominations from ever happening again. In his mind, he is relentless. He finds a way, by Jango’s bones, to protect these men.
In his dreams, he fails.
Upon waking covered in cold sweat, heart a punishing hammer between his lungs, he hears it. The fading voices of the brothers he failed on that mission, lost to the gloaming by his hesitation. You should have done something, they wail. You followed broken orders when you knew something was wrong--
But I didn’t! he thinks. I disobeyed them. I found a way around them. I adapted on the field, I risked my assignment, made every call I could--
It did not save us.
“Sir?” The voice shakes him from the thrall of his guilt. He realizes his head has sagged onto the bar between his crossed arms, beer bottle still loosely in his grasp. Rex’s eyes snap up, wide and sharp as they fall on the man who spoke.
“Fives,” he says as though he can chase away any semblance of vulnerability with a stern, quick lash. The ARC trooper’s brow is knit as he regards his captain with eyes that promise to hold what he can see plainly on Rex’s face in unshakable confidence. The man is less opaque than he tries valiantly to be, after all.
“You having trouble sleeping too, sir?” Fives asks coolly as he takes his seat and accepts a bottle from the barkeep with a familiar nod. Rex watches him a moment. His determined brother, so boisterous and brave, is here with the same shadows under his eyes as his captain. He takes a swallow of his drink.
“Yeah. I am.” But it sounds like thank you, vod.
For the first time since they lost Echo, Fives sits quietly beside his brother, ranks fallen from the air between them. In that silence is the gift of forgiveness. Whether he deserves it or not, Rex has yet to decide.