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It’s not anyone’s fault that his mind comes and goes, nothing anybody could have prepared him for. And if he didn’t have his squadmates to cover for him when the glitches come, they would have done away with him long ago. The Grand Army of the Republic, the genesis of his existence, would not have spared the credits to have someone pick apart his brain to find the severed threads between here and now and somewhere else, a place he does not know— or worse, there and then. Now, there is no grand army. No republic. And no reason for him to expect that anyone will ever learn how to stitch his mind together again before death comes back to finish what it started.
Such was the bitter truth he’d had to eat, and in the wake of the order it turned to ash in his mouth.
Echo’s memories are sunken with potholes, and some edges of ones he’s lost are chewed raw with the overwhelming hunger of wanting them back. The ones he finds himself unwilling to seek come to him of their own volition, moments of visceral terror and helplessness that grow like tumors on his nightmares. Or, on days like today, they sidle up quietly to sit on his chest and remind him of everything he’s lost.
“Oy. Come to mourn a proper breakfast, brother?” comes a voice from behind him, bigger and fuller than the others he knows without looking. Wrecker is like a boulder encroaching, a heavy presence even when he’s excited.
“Yeah,” Echo replies, voice hollow. “Something like that.”
“I thought dry rations were bad,” says the big clone as he takes a seat, letting his legs dangle off the edge of the open hatch where Echo has made his perch. “These block things they got us eating are way worse. So kriffing chewy.”
The sun on Dantooine is climbing, burning off the early dew. The ship is still misty where the trees shadow it. Creatures of the cusp of night and morning are tucking themselves away, and the daywalkers have begun to wake up. It’s beautiful, and Echo can see none of it. With a long, thin tree branch in his hand, he’s making lines in the sandy earth before his feet.
“You having a gray day?” Wrecker asks, not too loudly.
The gray, as he’s taken to calling the empty otherwhere to which his consciousness retreats at intervals he cannot predict, is much preferable to bad memories. But it’s maddening, when it disrupts his work. There was no reason that the other members of Clone Force 99 should have endured it.
(How could he call them the bad batch, when nothing bad had ever come of their namesake who he’d held in his arms, a lifeless and broken shell, whose one great mercy in this life had been the chance to die a warrior? No. He does not brandish his shame so publicly. He only carries it in his guts like stones, knowing that he is the only one among them who does not quite… function. Not anymore.)
He’s still waiting for the day they give up, break under the moments under fire when he has to fight tooth and nail to complete a task, finish a slice job— but shooting is never a problem. His body remembers how to do that even if his mind is not with it.
“No,” Echo replies, belatedly. His squad cannot always tell the difference between grayness and remembering, as they both look so similar on his ashen face.
“Something else?”
Instead of speaking, because tears have wrapped themselves around his throat suddenly, he draws a wobbly symbol on the ground.
5.
“Oh,” Wrecker says, shoulders sinking. “One of those days, then.”
Echo nods, then furiously wags the end of the stick to wipe the number away. The tears he so often longs to shed have finally come, and he weeps soundlessly as he continues to scrawl without aim or intent. Wrecker, so often rowdy and relentless with need to cover his own fears and doubts, just watches the end of the stick. He’s never known what to say, Echo realizes, and that’s why these moments of quiet between them are so rare and precious. It reminds him of Fives, who knew how to shout in defiance and knew how to laugh even with the gallows in sight. But he never quite knew how to speak in grief, or how to share it; only to shield himself and his vode from it when such ponderous silences loomed, because wasn’t that his job? To protect these men? Was that not what he died trying to do?
He had known how to tell Echo when he’d been brave, which of course was how Fives said you inspire me, vod, and I am grateful you are still here with me. That is something that Clone Force 99 hasn’t learned how to do yet; they know only how to say good job, kid. For Wrecker to be here and be silent is something Echo tries not to take for granted.
“Hey, that’s pretty good,” says Wrecker suddenly; Echo looks down and realizes that he’s drawn a loth-cat, crude lines but still clearly so. Fives kept one of his loth-cats in his bunk, stuck to the wall. For once the haze appears to have connected two lines, a furtive link beneath his awareness between now and then.
“Thanks,” he says.
“You draw a lot?” Wrecker seems more interested than he would’ve guessed.
“Used to.”
“Me, too!” Now the big clone is pulling his datapad out of one of the pouches on his belt, turning it on to show it to Echo, who blinks for a moment. There before him is a drawing of a krayt dragon, maybe not as practiced as Echo once was but still recognizable.
“Oh, you’re pretty good, too,” Echo says, raising his brows. “The others know you’re an artist?”
“Yeah, I did all their armor and helmets,” Wrecker replies cheerfully. “And mine, ‘o course. You oughta draw more.”
“Don’t really get the urge to.” He looks at the lines in the dirt, bittersweetness in his salty tears. “Not since…”
“Well, look,” says Wrecker, and starts to swipe through images with his massive finger. “I got this drawing thing Tech made for my pad since flimsi is hard to come by. Can’t draw but with your finger, since I lost the pen, but still. I just think you should draw how you feel sometimes. ‘S what I do.” He’s still flicking, looking for a certain drawing, but Echo sees him turn the screen away a little when he passes over a drawing of a round face with six eyes and mandibles.
The chill that passes over him at that likeness is only mitigated by the fact that his squadmate has the salience to try and hide that image, knowing it might cause an avalanche that nobody wants to inflict that morning in the pastoral grace they will be departing soon enough. For a moment, Echo fears it may come anyway, but then there’s another image before him.
It’s more rushed than the krayt dragon, and it looks like Wrecker taking a club to Hunter’s head. “He was gettin’ on my nerves, that day,” the big clone explains, chuckling. “And this one.” He flicks the screen again, showing a drawing that’s just scrawls, furious and spiraling and exploding from the center of the page. “I reckon I just wanted to blow something up,” he says.
Echo realizes he is smiling. “Can’t say I blame you for either one,” he says.
“You can draw on here if ya like,” Wrecker offers, tapping the screen until a fresh white page appears.
“Oh, thanks, but—”
“C’mon!” Now he claps his hand on Echo’s shoulder, predictably, and shoves the datapad in front of the smaller clone’s face. “Just the once. If you like it, we can make Tech put it on your pad too.”
“I…” But it’s in his hands, and he drops his stick to stare down at the daunting blankness he is now responsible for. The massive hand on his shoulder slides away, and some other weight goes with it. “I guess we’ll see.”
It takes a moment, but Echo’s finger makes its first tentative strokes. The lines have their own purpose, driving his hand until a familiar helmet emerges from the white blank page. Flowers trail around it. A memorial, he realizes; a place carved out of the sorrow between his ribs for his brother to rest. He wonders what semblance the gray bears to whatever realm departed souls go to dwell in, how close his numbness is to peace. No clone has ever known unbroken sleep, after all. He hopes the endless mission they all nightly endure finally winds its way to rest, but dares not hope that the dreams that follow death are joyful.
Rest… rest is enough for any soldier.
“‘S good. You’re really good, vod,” Wrecker says as the last marks of Five’s ghost leave their imprint on the waking world. “You sure you don’t wanna draw anymore? Looks like you almost enjoyed yourself.” He’s grinning in a way that’s getting to be familiar.
Echo looks between his squadmate— his brother, one of the men left to this galaxy who carries him through its bloody haze— and the drawing. Maybe enjoyed himself wasn’t the way he’d describe it, but for the first moment since Anaxis, he can breathe. He looks back at Wrecker, and smiles.
“Maybe I’ll try and start again.”