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When Rex comes back from Umbara, you know something’s different.
You’ve been with him long enough to know when something is wrong. Every mannerism, every tick, every meaning behind every variation of the smile he gives you is pressed into your memory. You know him better than he knows the back end of his own blaster, maybe better than he knows himself. The furrow of his brow when he’s caught off-guard by something you say, the quick twitch of his fingers when the upstairs neighbors accidentally drop something, the way his hands always find your pulse while you’re curled up together on the couch watching a holodrama, the clench of his jaw when he gets the call that his leave is over and he’s needed back on the battlefront.
He carries himself differently after particularly hard missions. It’s subtle, the little changes that you learned pretty early on in this thing that you two share. His shoulders curving inwards the slightest bit once he closes the apartment door behind him. His smile not quite crinkling around his eyes when he sees you. His fingers clenching into the back of your shirt once you’re in his arms. The unshaved stubble along his jaw catching against your hair.
You don’t tell him about these things, about how deeply you know him. But, he’s always called you observant, and the fact that he never seems to need to ask for your comfort before you give it is perhaps telling enough.
You know him, in every way you could possibly know another human being.
Which is why you know something’s different when he comes home this time.
The smile he gives you barely finds purchase, looks fragile on his lips before you’re wrapping yourself around him, the near-blackened plastoid armor digging hard into your ribcage and dirtying your shirt, but he’s anchoring himself to you like you’re a lifeline, his face buried in your neck and his palms flat against your back and almost shaking with how tightly he’s holding you.
You both stay like that in the entryway for a long while, long enough that the food you’d been reheating in the nanowave goes cold again and winds up forgotten. Long enough that, when you both finally let go, it almost feels like you’re prying yourselves apart from one another, your body formed perfectly snug to his, rigid lines of his armor pressed into angry red marks across your skin.
He’s quiet. It’s nothing new, especially after the hard missions, but this time it’s near suffocating, palpable. It’s the heavy kind of silence, the distance of his gaze, even as you’re tangled in one another on the couch long after you’ve gotten the armor off him and ushered him through the ‘fresher. His arms are around you again and your forehead is pressed against his chest, holo playing something softly over your shoulder, but when you shift to look up at him, he seems like he’s a million parsecs away, eyes lost in something impossibly far.
He won’t talk about it. He never does, no matter how much you wish he would. It weighs on him, the things he’s seen, the things he’s done, the things he’s survived, the things his brothers haven’t, and you want nothing more than to lighten that load off his shoulders, but he refuses to let you.
“It’s what I was made for,” he tells you, voice hardened durasteel, practiced and forced neutral, a tone he adopts only for these conversations, one that slips under your skin and itches. “It’s what we were all made for.”
“It might be what you were made for, but it doesn’t mean that’s all you’re meant to be.” The ghost of his breath against your skin, the dig of his fingers into the softest pieces of you like he’s looking for something, for answers, for reason. “You’re worth more than what the war takes from you, Rex.”
He doesn’t respond, never does. Just presses himself further into you like one day he’ll disappear into you altogether, and maybe that would be a relief, never having to watch him walk out the door again and wonder if it’s the last time. Never being afraid that, instead of the door sliding open, you’ll be greeted by the sound of knuckles rapping on metal, finding men with his face, with his voice, his armor in their hands, expressions somber for a brother they didn’t know, not like you knew him, no crinkles around their eyes even if they smiled at you, voices telling you he died with honor, for the Republic, for a system that doesn’t even pretend to treat him as human, for some bigger picture, some grand concept that means he doesn’t get a chance to live for you, with you. Afraid that you wouldn’t even get that much, that he’d just never come back and you’d never know for certain why or how, his death lost amongst the hundreds of his other brothers, each one’s name buried beneath a CT number and forgotten, if even that.
Afraid that one day you’d lose him, and you’d have to see him everywhere and never again.
You bury your face back against his chest, silent tears spilling over your cheeks and soaking into the soft fabric of his shirt. And you might know him, but you tend to forget that he knows you too, one of his hands slipping from your waist and his fingers carding up through your hair instead, grounding, familiar, careful, his thumb settling gently at the subtle pulse-point just behind your ear, holding you against him, where you can feel the steady thrum of his own heart behind his ribs.
“You’re not just a soldier. Not to me.”
He doesn’t say anything, but you know he hears you.
You know.
The first time you’d said you loved him, it was practically an accident.
Too early one morning, you’d been woken up by a bright beam of the rising sun slipping through your closed blinds and landing perfectly across your eyes. Blinked once, twice, eyes squinting against the small gap between the curtains as your sleep-heavy brain processed it. You’d been too tired to get up and adjust them, opting instead to take the easier solution and turning over in bed, ready to sleep off the rest of the morning with Rex’s arm slung easily across your waist.
You’d blinked once into the darkness, readjusted to get comfortable again and then…
He’s always up before you, rising at the crack of dawn and either slipping out of bed to make breakfast or staying under the covers with you held tight against him until you wake up too.
That morning, though, through some combined miracle of him sleeping in and your curtains not being fully closed, you’d somehow caught him still asleep.
It’s a rare thing, seeing him like that. Soft and vulnerable, lips parted around slow breaths and brow smooth, not a semblance of tension to be found anywhere in his body, that same strip of light catching the curve of his nose and highlighting the contrast of his brown skin and his light hair. It had caught you a little off-guard, seeing him so utterly relaxed and at peace for once. You hadn’t been able to look away, to close your eyes and find sleep once more, transfixed by the steady rise and fall of his chest, the tranquility of the moment, the stresses and horrors that always follow at his heels seemingly gone for the short while as he slept, perfectly calm.
You’d been staring for too long, and that alone must have been enough to wake him because there was a slight shift in his breathing, a small crease of his brow before his eyes blearily blinked open, once, twice, three times. You’d watched as he’d slowly pulled himself awake, not quite fully there, but just at the edge of it before he’d seemed to realize you were up too. You’d seen the quiet recognition, the flicker of it in his sleepy gaze, watched as his lips quirked up into a smile, a soft thing, gentle, warm, beautiful, one of the ones that travelled all the way to his eyes and crinkled the lines there.
It had stolen your breath, made your heart seize up in your chest with something so tender yet so sharp that you’d thought, if you died right then, it would be alright, because at least you got to witness that smile, got to be the one the universe decided to gift it upon. That otherwise mundane moment, there in your bed, in the midst of a galaxy at war with itself, and it was all yours.
It had taken you a moment to put a name to that flicker of something in your chest, to recognize it for what it was and—
“I love you.”
The words had spilled out, a hushed whisper into the air between you, one that you hadn’t particularly meant to let out but… but didn’t regret. Once the words had left your lips, you’d known almost immediately that you meant it, that you’d wanted him to know, just hadn’t expected them to come out so easily. The release of them burned like relief in your bones, sang beautifully in the quiet.
His smile had faltered, then, brow furrowing in that deep confusion, and the response, the reaction, it would have hurt anyone else, but not you. Not you because, well…
You know him.
You’d seen the disbelief, the doubt, the confusion for what it was, not a reflection of you, but a glimpse of everything he was afraid of, of the conflict written into his very DNA. The deep sense of honor you adore so greatly at war with his wants, his desires, his craving for identity, for purpose. A constant battle you know he carries with him every single day, caught up in that voice that barely sounds like his, that reminds you that he was built to be collateral in this war, that he’s not really meant to have a life on the other side of it, even as he crushes you against his chest in some attempt to stop you from slipping through his fingers.
You don’t know how to explain to him that you couldn’t care less about the Republic and its fight, that the only war you need him to win is the one raging inside his own head.
But in that moment, you’d said the words you’d known he couldn’t say back, not yet, and that was a fact that you didn’t mind. You know him well enough to know he loves you too, even if he doesn’t realize it himself, is too afraid of the implications if he does, even if he’s too trapped in that fight to recognize it when you see it plainly written across his face every time he looks at you. You know, and it was enough for him to have just heard the words, for him to know you meant them because he knows you too.
In that moment, you’d pressed your forehead against his own, letting your eyes close, feeling instead of seeing his brow soften against yours as you breathed into the small space between you.
“Yeah,” you’d said, the small brush of a smile flitting across your lips. “Yeah, I love you.”
A shuddering breath, and then his lips had met your own.
The first night that he’s back is always the hardest, as counterintuitive as it seems. He’s always still so keyed up from the fight, his mind caught up in the restlessness and rush of it all that it takes him a day or so to find some semblance of calm again. And you, you’re just so relieved he’s back that your brain seems to refuse to waste a moment of it, clinging to wakefulness with a willful stubbornness that you can’t find it in you to fight.
That first night, after you seem like you’re asleep, he’ll slip out from under the covers and pad silently over to the couch, picking up his discarded armor and setting to work. You’ll lay there and watch him for hours, the diligence with which he cleans off the worst of the soot and dirt, the soft scratch of his vibroblade as he adds tallies on his helmet or vambrace or some other piece where he can fit them.
You never asked what the tallies were, never needed to, not when you watched the sad reverence with which he carved them, the way his fingers would pass over the divets in the smooth surface after he was done, eyes tracing every single one like he knew each of them by name.
There’s not a point in asking when you already know the answer.
“We’re expendable. Replaceable,” he’d said once before, a while back now, after one of the harder campaigns. And it had stuck with you, the mechanical way he had said it, the way it shot through your chest and ripped through your insides.
He probably knows you’re awake, knows you’re watching as he stares down through the helmet in his hands, mumbles something in a low, practiced voice that you can’t hear before carefully piling his armor back up in the corner.
“I know you don’t believe that.”
His fingers ghost across the tallies one last time before he turns off all the lights and climbs back into bed behind you, finding you again as his body, warm, presses up against yours, not a word spoken.
After Umbara, that first night, sleep evades you both, which is no surprise. But this time, he’s a bit more pensive as he looks over his newest tally marks, fingers tracing them over and over again, his mind racing with quiet thoughts you can’t begin to decipher. And when he finally comes back to bed, you melt easily into his embrace, like you always do. But that same something, that difference, lingers in the air, and this time, instead of the night drifting into silence—
“If I’m not just a soldier, then what am I?”
A whisper so soft you can barely hear it. But you do, and he knows you do, and maybe that’s why he says it at all. Something about tonight, about this mission, about the struggle and confusion and pain in his voice.
“What am I when this all ends?”
“You’re you,” you say, voice matching his even in the otherwise empty apartment, like speaking louder will break this already fragile moment. Your hand finds his where it wraps around your middle, fingers threading together, not slotting perfectly, but familiar in the way they fit. “You’re whoever you want to be.”
“And what if all I want is to be yours?”
You smile into the darkness, fingers squeezing his softly, reassuringly, his nose nuzzling into your hair.
“Then you’ll be mine. And we’ll figure out the rest together.”
You tell him you love him every chance you get, in every way you can. At one point, you even learned it in Mando’a, surprising him with it one morning after waking up in his arms, even if you garbled your way through it with what you’re sure was the worst pronunciation he’s ever heard. His laugh had been warm, affectionate, a perfectly content little thing as he’d pulled you to him and pressed his lips to yours, the pay-off well worth the flush of embarrassment across your cheeks.
He still hasn’t said it back, even if he’s gotten more comfortable hearing it so regularly from you. And you know it’s still that same fear, that same struggle, the one you try to help him through with every whispered confession and every reverent touch you can possibly give, trying to convey your love at every imaginable opportunity, even when you don’t have the words to express it, don’t necessarily need them.
You’re more than a soldier, when you lean into his side as you stand in line at the store, him chatting and laughing about some mundane thing with one of his brothers you’d bumped into, his arm absently slipping around your waist and holding you there.
You don’t have to give them everything, when his head is on your lap on the couch and you’re running your fingers across his freshly-shaven hair, missing the tight, blond curls, but appreciating the soft tickle of the fuzz against your palm anyways, the content hum that rumbles through his chest.
You’re important to me, when you’re watching the holonet together, and a broadcast goes out about a recent Republic victory, hardly mentioning the hundred clones lost to the fight, the entire segment spent mourning and memorializing the loss of a single Jedi commander, the private funeral date being discussed in detail before you change the frequency.
You’re allowed to want more, when you trace lazy shapes into the expanse of his back late at night, fingertips catching on the scars littered across his skin, new and old, finding patterns in them like they’re stars in this little universe you’ve created for yourselves.
You deserve a future, when you stand over him, his face framed between your hands, kissing him with a scared desperation that takes hold sometimes, refuses to shake free, finds release in the clash of lips and tongue and teeth and whatever follows.
Your life is not theirs to take, when he wakes up in the night with a sharp gasp, hands reaching blindly for you in the dark, but you’re already shifting into his grasp, his arms locking around you like a vice as you hold him against you, his ear pressed to your sternum as you murmur soft assurances until his breathing evens out again.
You’re allowed to be happy, when you’re walking through Coruscant’s upper levels together, hand in hand, talking and cracking bad jokes and watching the way his eyes sparkle under the city lights when he looks at you with nothing but adoration etched into his features.
I love you, when he first walks in the front door smiling, bruised and maybe covered in bacta patches, but alive and here and all yours for a short while, coming back to you again and again and again and I love you I love you I love you please just—
…
Please just, if you can’t stay, just keep coming back.
You never have to say it, but every time, when he looks into your eyes, you’re sure he knows.
Almost two weeks later, you’re in the kitchen throwing together something for dinner, Rex stubbornly trying to wheedle his way in-between your arms to get a “taste test”, regardless of how much you shoo his hands away. He manages to snag a spoonful and, despite your warnings, proceeds to burn his mouth on it, the exaggerated panting and fanning that follows making you laugh, contagious as he eventually devolves into a fit as well, leaning into you. It’s a nice moment, one of those ones that will stay with you while he’s away, the press of his body against your side, both of your frames shaking with laughter, the sound unbridled and warm.
It only follows that it’s then that his comm chimes. He steps out of the kitchen to take it, and even if you can’t hear the voice on the other end of the line, you know it’s the call because you see the way Rex’s jaw tenses, his shoulders straighten, his voice shifts into something clipped and short as he says he understands and then disconnects the comm.
You’re used to it, honestly surprised it took them this long to call him back to begin with, that warm, fuzzy feeling of happiness in your chest from less than a minute prior fizzling out, pulling the easy smile from off your lips.
Barracks tomorrow morning at 0600, shipping out to Kiros at 1300.
You’re used to it, but it still twists something sharp in your chest every single time, the harsh slap of reality the moment you start to forget, the moment the armor still piled in the corner of the room gathers its first speck of dust.
The rest of the night, well, you wouldn’t say the mood sours, because it never could when you’re with him. But it certainly becomes more subdued, heavier, the call a reminder that these days you cherish so dearly are ultimately fleeting and always doomed to end too soon.
Dinner is a quiet affair, dirty dishes left in the sink to be dealt with tomorrow so you can instead spend that time on the couch in his arms. Habit alone made you turn on the holo, some Rodian comedy playing that neither of you is even pretending to look at, tinny voices in another language filling the dead space between your breaths. You’re chest to chest, your weight pressing down on him and legs tangled together, one of his hands slotted into the divot at the base of your spine, the other smoothing up and down your back in slow cadence. Eyes locked, your chin pressed into his sternum as you look up, his head propped up against the armrest tilted down, the both of you just drinking each other in, securing every feature, every breath, every flutter of lashes or twitch of lips to memory until the next time he makes his way back to you.
At some point, his hand drifts up the back of your neck, fingers curling into the softer hairs there, and he finds little resistance as he tugs you up the short distance, lips finding yours and kissing you earnestly, carefully, deeply, pouring in every bit of love he’s too afraid to voice. You melt into it, hands fisting into his shirt, finding purchase, leaning into him and the devastating heat burning through your chest.
The rest of the night is spent in hushed devotion, searching hands mapping every dip and curve, mouths to skin, cataloguing every taste, gentle and bruising in beautiful juxtaposition. And he’s everywhere, pressing into you at every angle, pieces of him carved into your very bones, dizzying and grounding all at once as you both take and give every piece of yourselves that you can. It’s a night dipped in a soft sort of desperate longing, a muted remorse, a deep-seated anxiety that you tell yourself you know well at this point, reminding yourself again and again that he hasn’t failed to come back yet, no matter how much you swear these final nights seem to foreshadow a last goodbye every single time.
They never seem to last long enough, either.
It’s a familiar pain, a routine sadness you tell yourself over and over again that you’re used to at this point as his alarm chirps at 0530, long before the sunrise. You both reluctantly drag yourselves out of bed, you slipping on one of his shirts before padding out to the living room after him, standing off to the side and watching as he pulls on his blacks and mindlessly starts reattaching the armor that had rested in the corner of the room for so long, untouched. You tell yourself it’s the same as you pick up his helmet from the pile, your own finger momentarily brushing against the harsh indents of those tallies before you slip it over your own head, cracking some joke about not understanding how he could hit the broadside of a bantha wearing it, earning a light chuckle that maybe feels a little forced, but neither of you will comment on it.
You tell yourself it’s alright as he steps towards you, slips the helmet off your head and holds it against the crook of his hip, standing tall and confident and every bit the picture of a perfect soldier save for the slightest tinge of regret, sadness, loss coloring his expression, the quirk of his lips just slightly wrong, the crinkles around his eyes half-formed. The look of a man torn in half by what he wants in this world and what the world wants of him.
You know he would stay if you asked.
You know, just like you know the breath of his laughter, the press of his skin, the taste of his lips, the quirk of his brow, the warmth of his gaze and the curve of his jaw and the flash of his confidence and the depth of his loyalty. All universal constants, things etched into your very being that you don’t think you’d ever be capable of separating out again even if you wanted to, each one permanent, real, as sure as the very air filling your lungs. As sure as the sun rising over the Coruscant skyline.
As sure as you know him, and he knows you, and you know…
You know…
And a part of you, a part that’s far bigger and louder than you’d ever want to admit to him, begs you to do it. To say it. To ask and just end it. To search for a new life that you can both share, to leave the Republic and its wars and its unfair politics behind and just find something for yourselves, something small and calm and beautiful. To say the words that sit frozen on your tongue every time he turns and walks out that door, to confess again and again in the millions of ways you have and haven’t before, to ask him to stay just one more night, one more week, just a little longer, just this one time, just tell them no, just tell them you’ve given them enough already, just tell them you deserve to have a fucking life, just tell them you deserve something more, just—
Just…
Brown eyes, familiar and flaked with gold and perfectly unique, watching you from beneath a carefully furrowed brow, confused and concerned and it’s only then that you realize your vision is cloudy, distorted and heavy. You blink hard, the moment clearing, choking out a wet laugh as you wipe at your eyes with the back of your hand before anything can truly fall.
Like every time before, the words wither and die on your tongue, a hopelessness that you swallow back because as much as you want him to stay, you’re too afraid to be the one to stop him from going.
You tell yourself that, as dangerous as his life is, he at least finds some sense of purpose in it, some feeling of pride or duty that goes beyond basic programming, some fundamental part of him that’s loyal to a fault and as honorable as any Jedi.
And you tell yourself you’re more afraid for him, for the repercussions it would bring, for the life it would lead to, for the guilt he would surely feel. You tell yourself, as much as he loves you, you know leaving like that would rip something at his core, tear something irreparable and essential to who he is and leave him broken to some degree, lost, a disgrace to his own code.
You tell yourself that, but that small voice in that back of your mind whispers that you’re really just terrified of being the cause of it all, a little afraid of the power that gives you, the knowledge that he’d give it all up at your word, go against near-everything he believes and lives for just for you.
And you can’t do that to him.
So you keep the thoughts to yourself, even if he can surely read them on your face, and you wipe at the unshed tears one more time before stepping forward, fingers finding either side of his jaw and pulling him to you, lips meeting in a gentle kiss that aches something tender in your chest. A temporary goodbye, short in nature as you pull back, afraid of making it feel too permanent.
His eyes search yours, something that almost reads like appreciation in their depths that makes your chest feel like it’s caving in on itself, crushing your insides.
You’re used to it.
“Come back home in one piece, alright?” you say, hands still framing his face, and he leans into your touch, that self-assured smile you adore sliding into place.
“Haven’t found a fight I can’t win yet,” he says lightly. And it’s wrong, it’s not what you meant, and you can’t stop the way your fingers tense against his jawline, pressing slightly into the pulse just behind the bone, a steady thrum.
“I don’t care if you win,” you say, and that smile slips, his expression drawing back up until, “I just want you to come home, Rex. No matter what.”
There’s a flicker, a flash of something across his face that’s too quick for you to identify, an emotion you swear you’ve seen a couple times before, always fleeting, something you would call happiness if it didn’t look like it hurt him to wear, something pointed and jaded and harsh. It lands, maybe a tic longer than usual before it’s washed away by a conflicted twist to his expression, one that you have the urge to smooth away with your fingers but then there’s the thud of his helmet hitting the ground and you barely have enough time to react to that before—
He’s on you, his hands tangling into your hair and pulling you to him, his mouth meeting yours with an unexpected desperation that you find yourself reciprocating in kind, letting him crush you to him as his lips slot with yours, your hands slipping to the back of his neck to steady yourself to him, holding tight like you’ll slip away if you don’t.
It’s messy and heavy and bordering frenzied, your body pressing uncomfortably against rigid plastoid, but you don’t care because he’s kissing you like his life depends on it, and maybe, you think, there’s a part of it that does. A part of it needs it to so he has a real, tangible reason to fight tooth and nail to make it back. More than honor, more than courage, more than duty and pride and strength of will.
You.
He has you.
He pulls back all at once, both of your ragged breaths filling the space between you as he presses his forehead to yours, brow creased and fingers clenched so tight in your hair that it almost hurts. You feel rather than see that constant conflict inside him bubbling to the surface, know he broke the kiss because any longer and he might have been tempted to stay, you might have been tempted to finally ask him to.
But neither of those things transpires. Instead, he gives you something else, whispered words into the air between you, fanning warm against your cheeks.
“I love you.” It’s soft, full of that same desperation, but now laced with a promise, a prayer, an assurance. And you’ve known, you’ve known for so long, but hearing the words, finally knowing that he isn’t afraid of this anymore, isn’t afraid to maybe want more from the life he was given, isn’t afraid to picture an after anymore. It makes something swell in your chest, pulls a smile to your lips even as the tears you’d been fighting off finally slip free. His hands are there in an instant, wiping them from your cheeks, pressing a gentle, lingering kiss to your forehead before his touch finally leaves you, warm spots in the shape of his hands against your skin as you will your eyes back open.
“I’ll be back in a couple weeks,” he says, making quick work of scooping his helmet back up, casting one last look at you, stretching one last moment, and then he gives you a short nod, a soft smile before he turns, and then he’s out the door and gone.
And then you stand there, staring at the closed door, a longer moment as his footsteps retreat down the hall before you’re left in silence, caught somewhere between that same grief you know too well and… something new. Something bright, and promising.
Something that feels like hope.
“I love you too,” you whisper into the empty air, and there’s a closed door and too much distance between you now for the soft words to reach him, but they don’t need to, not really.
You’re sure he already knows.