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Rex isn’t sleeping.
Kix has his suspicions from the moment they leave Umbara, but it’s not until they’re back on the Resolute that he’s sure, when he gets woken in the middle of the sleep cycle by a brother telling him that Rex needs medical attention. It’s perhaps the only thing that stops him rolling over and snapping at them to comm the karking medbay.
He blinks at the chrono on the wall and groans, swinging his legs over the side of his bunk. It has only been two hours since he got off a long, gruelling shift trying to treat the lightsaber wounds Krell left behind. He can still feel his brothers’ feather-light breaths under his fingertips, still smell the cloying wave of burning flesh that hit when their field dressings were unwound. It makes bile climb hot and horrible up the back of his throat, and for a moment he has to drop his head into his hands while the barracks stop swimming. Then he scrubs his hands over his head and hefts himself up, wincing as his spine cracks. When he’s done, he glances at the trooper shifting restlessly next to his bunk.
“Where is he?”
“In the training rooms on deck 3.” The trooper eyes him warily. “Sorry, Kix. I’ve got Wister waitin’ with him, but didn’t seem like he’d stay long and you were closest.”
Kix waves him off with a yawn that feels like it might split his skull in two.
“You don’t gotta tell me, kid, I know what he’s like. Let’s go.”
Kix doesn’t pretend to put his armour on, just grabs the medkit he keeps under his bunk for emergencies and heads out. Even the dim night lighting in the corridors outside burns his eyes, the metal grating of the floor harsh against his feet.
He prides himself on knowing most of his brothers’ names, but it takes him several moments to place this one, thoughts slipping away from him like smoke. Eventually the memory surfaces, breaking through the fog like an aiwha breaching water; he sat on a vibroblade as a shiny and had to have ten stitches in his left arse cheek. His first scar, he’d admitted somewhat despairingly, while his batchmate clutched the bed railing and howled.
“It’s Sleet, right?”
The trooper nods sheepishly. “Was hoping you’d have forgotten me.”
Kix musters a smile. There’s a tightness around Sleet’s eyes that he doesn’t like, but that in itself isn’t special. All of them are strained around the edges, grappling with the silence that has seeped in everywhere and made them all brittle. What is special is the way Sleet keeps hurrying ahead, checking himself when he realises he’s setting too fast a pace. Kix feels himself hasten in response, his pulse climbing steadily, his hands shaking with anticipation. The corridor sharpens around him, everything coming into pinpoint focus.
He licks his lips and tries to keep it casual as they come up to the deck hub.
“If it’s any consolation, took me a while to get your name. You’re part of Hammerhead, right?”
Sleet nods, but doesn’t look up as he slams the elevator button. Kix surveys him silently for a moment, then takes a deep breath.
“Be level with me, kid. What’s got you so rattled? You said he’d just smashed his hand.”
Sleet sighs. “The Captain, he just...he don’t look right. Don’t know how else to put it.”
Kix’s stomach plummets. He’s heard that far too often on a battlefield, turned his back for two seconds to patch somebody else, and looked again to find the brother marching on. How long has it been since he actually saw Rex? One cycle ago in the mess perhaps? Several hours earlier in the barracks? When he realises he isn’t sure, ice slithers through Kix’s chest. They haven’t been able to schedule post-campaign physicals yet due to the sheer number of casualties, so unless he has taken himself to the medbay - something unheard of - nobody will have looked Rex over. Three full cycles is a very long time to be bleeding into your own skull. If that sha’buir has a concussion, and hasn’t told anyone...
“What did he look like, Trooper? Was he confused? Any slurring speech, dizziness?” Kix doesn’t realise that he’s stopped dead in the corridor and is clutching Sleet around the elbows until he starts to shake him. “Answer me!”
The trooper’s eyes are wide and frightened. “I - I don’t - I don’t think so?”
Kix lets go and breaks into a jog as the elevator doors slide open. He doesn’t remember Rex sustaining a head injury on Umbara, but then, he is actively trying not to remember most of Umbara. The medkit feels too heavy in his hands as he rounds the corner and comes up to the training room, charging through the door just shy of a run.
The room inside is dark apart from one glowlight in the corner, two figures illuminated a soft orange. It glints off Rex’s hair where he is sat, head bowed, stuffed between two weights machines. In the time it takes him to cross the room, Kix is able to notice that Rex is still in full armour from the waist down, purple dust still caked in the creases. Another trooper, who must be Wister, is standing above Rex with his arms crossed, but he has the sense to veer out of the way when he sees Kix coming.
Kix sinks down onto his knees and grabs his brother’s chin, tilting it up into the light. The relief he feels when he sees that his pupils are the same size is dwarfed by his alarm at the broken slump of Rex’s shoulders, the listless eyes that will not meet his own. He doesn’t look like himself at all.
“Tell me your name, designation, date and time.” Kix says roughly, keeping one hand on Rex’s chin and feeling across his scalp. There aren’t any obvious lumps or abrasions, just hair that is growing out a little too long for Rex’s preferred buzz cut, a small but significant sign of self-neglect that deepens Kix’s fear.
“Kix? Why’re you –“
“ Answer me.”
Something about his tone must get through, because Rex’s eyes clear a little and he snaps off the information. His words aren’t slurred and he is holding himself steady, no shakes. His skin is a little cool – but space is cold, the Venator ships especially so, so in itself it’s not something to worry over. Kix lets go of his chin and sits back on his heels.
“Do you remember hitting your head during the campaign? Any stiffness, dizziness?”
Rex huffs and rolls his eyes, which does more to reassure Kix than anything else so far. He feels the frantic race of his own pulse dull a little, and the wave of sheer exhaustion that collapses in afterwards makes him sway where he sits. He has been riding the edge for too long, and he knows it, but for maybe the first time he does not know how to climb down. Some part of him is still stuck in Umbara’s strange iridescent gloom, being forced to leave bleeding brothers behind.
He will not leave another.
“I’m not concussed, Kix. It’s just my hand,” Rex croaks. The hand in question is vambrace-less and curled up protectively against Rex’s chest, like a baby bird with a broken wing.
Kix scowls at him and pops open the medkit, picking up the penlight and clicking it on threateningly.
“Just answer the questions.”
Rex does not answer the questions. Instead, he shifts his glare to Wister, who is still hovering nervously above them.
“Thought I ordered you not to fetch a medic.”
The trooper clenches his jaw and looks his Captain straight on. Kix blinks and for a moment he is staring at Fives and Jesse backed against a wall with that same look in their eyes, and there is a gun in his hands. He blinks again, and really there is only the penlight, held in fingers that will not stop shaking. He takes a deep, gulping breath and clenches his hands together.
How is he supposed to treat someone else when he’s barely fit for duty himself?
“You only told me I couldn’t get anyone from the medbay, Sir,” Wister says.
Kix watches as something unnameable flashes across Rex’s face, and then he crumples inwards. There are many words one could use to describe their captain - stubborn, iron-willed, loyal, dauntless. Kix would never, ever have called him small before, but this war just seems to keep digging, pulling out parts they never knew were there. It’s the most naked he’s ever seen Rex; they’ve all seen each other in the shower block, but this is a different kind of exposure.
Kix is suddenly too aware of the other brothers in the room.
“You can both get back to your patrol now, boys. I’ve got him.”
Wister visibly sags in relief. Sleet nods.
“Hope that hand ain’t too bad, Sir.” Sleet says, before he catches Wister around the elbow and steers him towards the door.
When they’re alone, Kix sighs heavily, scrubbing a hand over his stinging eyes. Rex has gone back to staring at the ceiling like he might be able to climb right through it, straight out into open space. Kix knows a fight or flight response when he sees one - trouble is, there’s nothing physical that Rex should be running from.
He taps Rex’s shoulder, not hard enough to jostle, but pointedly. Just giving him something to try and ground him in the here and now. “Right, now come on, talk to me. Did you hit your head?”
“No more than anyone else,” Rex mutters, then huffs when Kix scowls at him some more. “What d’you want me to say? They were throwin’ grenades at us.”
Kix flashes the penlight in Rex’s eyes, studies the way his pupils contract and dilate, then has him track his finger. The reaction times are decent for a man who looks like he’s been hit by a speeder. He asks a few more questions; there’s no dizziness, no stiffness, he hasn’t had any unusual headaches.
There really isn’t much cause to worry, physically, but still Kix lingers over the possibilities.
“Great so, good news, you’re probably not concussed,” he says finally. “Bad news is you now have no excuse to explain that hand away. What the kriff were you doing?”
Rex scowls at him, but there’s no heat in it, like a dying ember. His head hangs forward. “I was using the punching bags.”
Kix stares at him.
“It’s 0300 hours, Captain.”
Rex’s smile is a knife-edge.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
Kix does not tell Rex how kriffing obvious this is, but takes his injured hand as gently as he can, wincing when his CO hisses and drops his head back with a grunt. A quick scan with the medisensor confirms what Kix suspects – underneath the split skin, Rex has cracked two knuckles. He sighs heavily before ripping open an antiseptic wipe with his teeth.
“Have you actually tried going to bed?”
And yeah, okay, he deserves the scowl that gets him. It quickly morphs into a grimace of pain when Kix presses the wipe into the deepest part of the cuts. He doesn’t believe in starting at the edges; it only smears the dirt around. Best to jump straight to the root of the problem.
“And keep staring at the ceiling? Least this way I’m doing somethin’ useful.”
Kix raises an eyebrow before he can help himself, pointedly staring at the split skin, at the sallow tint to Rex’s face, the way exhaustion makes his breath come too quick and shallow. He silently notes the way tremors shake through Rex’s hands.
“What about this is useful? C’mon, vod, you’re a mess.” He pauses and tilts his head. “Maybe you just need to talk about it.”
He’s not even sure he’s ready to talk about it. There’s not a single brother on this ship equipped to carry out a psych evaluation right now; not with a Jedi corpse in the hold and half the bunks empty and the knowledge that they have all done this to each other.
Rex scoffs audibly, but if Kix is honest, it sounds more like a sob. He watches his ori’vod’ s shoulders hunch up around his ears and feels his stomach sink at the way he curls in, shuts him out. Then he sighs and keeps cleaning. He’s too tired for this; Rex is too tired for this. But still somehow they have to be what the other needs.
The silence that falls is too full. Kix feels the anticipation crawl up his spine and moves cautiously, holding his breath in his throat as Rex shifts and his gaze skitters. If only Commander Cody was still here instead of on his own flagship. He can reach Rex on levels that Kix just can’t, even on his best days.
Then all of a sudden Rex speaks, the words leaking out, rushing into the jagged spaces between them.
“I couldn’t even shoot him. Krell. That shabuir . He killed so many brothers – murdered them – and – I – I helped him – couldn’t even – fuck –“
Rex breaks off and Kix sees his jaw clench, nostrils flaring. His gaze skitters over Kix’s face, over his shoulder and beyond the training rooms. His uninjured hand curls into a fist over his knee. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, audibly swallowing down words, and before Kix can even try to process what he’s said, the walls come back up.
“Forget it,” he snaps, sucking in another shallow breath. “It doesn’t matter.”
Kix is frozen, the antiseptic wipe still pressing into the split skin of his brother’s knuckles. It has to hurt, but Rex doesn’t say a word. After a moment he resumes, dragging the wet sheet carefully over the peaks and valleys of the thin bones. He can’t say anything for a long moment. He doesn’t want to remember the mud, the dense air, the smell of charring and fresh corpses and sharp, stinking fear, but they’re there regardless, hovering on the edge of all his senses.
“Kinda sounds like it matters,” he gets out eventually, voice shaking. Kix feels the way Rex coils up and tries to gather himself, despite the way his thoughts have scattered. How can Rex think – how can he believe –? “Talk to me, vod .”
Rex’s jaw winds tighter.
“It’s fine, Kix,” he says, but his voice cracks.
“Rex -”
“I said leave it !” He barks, and Kix flinches. Rex has not looked at him once. It takes the sting out of his voice, takes away some of the compulsion to snap to and follow orders and leaves him with just enough bite to keep going.
“What do you mean you helped him?” he asks, putting down the anti-septic.
“ Kix –”
“No!” Kix hisses back. Maker, his head aches. He thinks longingly about his bed, about the minutes slipping slowly away from him, then looks back at his patient and steadies his voice. “I will not ‘leave it’.”
“ Why not? ”
“Because this isn’t normal, Rex.”
Rex lets out a hollow laugh, his gaze settling on one of the racks in the other corner. “Gee, Kix, what gave it away? Was it arresting our senior officer for treason? The firing squad? The way we massacred our own brothers? The way nobody will look me in the face any more?”
Kix sucks in a deep breath and swallows the acid climbing up the back of his throat, gritting his teeth against the words and the memories. They’re all such a mess. He keeps getting woken up by Jesse whimpering, flinching against the bunk above like he’s dodging in his dreams. Fives has barely spoken, simmering and devastated and caging it all behind his teeth. Tup keeps looking for the space where Dogma used to be, and that silence deafens them. It has sunk into the bones of the ship and poisoned it with ghosts, curling in the empty bunks and resonating where voices should be.
He lets Rex have his moment, daubing bacta over his wounds and setting the bones in a soft splint that will fit under Rex’s gauntlets in a pinch, though he doubts it will come to that. There are so many empty bunks that they won’t be fit for active combat for some time, not until another few batches leave Kamino and bring gleaming white among faded blue. They all hate that stark brightness, the way that new plastoid looks like Kamino and death.
He feels a flash of pity for the new troops that will filter in, too young, too innocent. Kix doesn’t know what’s more painful - seeing it, or seeing how quickly it fades, the moment they stop playing at war immortalised in sprays of red against white.
“Nobody blames you, Rex.”
Rex scoffs and looks down at his lap. Kix sees him blink rapidly.
“Now that’s not true,” he says, then presses his lips together. “Look, it’s none of your business.”
Kix snaps his mouth shut and flings the bacta tube into Rex’s lap. He gestures at Rex’s hand, at the splint holding it together, at the dim room around them. “Not my - this ? This shit? This makes it my fucking business. The moment you start hurting yourself I can stick my nose in as far as I damn want.”
Rex’s jaw flexes again. “I didn’t mean to break my hand.”
Kix scoffs. “Yeah, but if you’d slept at all you wouldn’t have made that mistake, and then we’d both be in the racks.”
Rex’s gaze skitters over Kix’s face like oil on the surface of water, his body taut and furious. But then he slumps, going limp in Kix’s grip, and he just looks small again.
“I didn’t want them to call for you.”
Kix can’t help wishing, just a little bit, that Fives was here doing this instead. He wants to help, of course he does, but...he’s never seen Rex like this. Has never seen the fire in his eyes run cold. Fives would know what to say - Fives is never cowed by anything.
Or, at least, he wasn’t before. Kix thinks again of the thunderous, silent shadow that Fives has been since they took off dirtside, sticking close to Jesse and interacting with precious few others, and feels tears prick at the corner of his eyes.
He just feels so heavy. But this is his brother. And Kix does not walk away from open wounds.
“I’m glad they did. Don’t want you being alone like this,” he forces out after a moment, still perching awkwardly on one knee. He finally stops fussing with the splint. “How does that feel?”
Rex flexes his hand and sighs through his nose.
“Good,” he croaks. “Feels fine.”
They lapse again into silence, staring at each other, sizing each other up. Kix’s knees are starting to hurt, but he doesn’t twitch, doesn’t dare break the impasse.
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” Rex whispers eventually, staring down at his hands. “All the things I just - let him do. Fives was right.”
“Fives,” Kix breaks in softly. “Is only used to having to account for himself. Yeah he’s your second, but - he’s an ARC. He doesn’t have the weight of a whole Company on his shoulders.”
“You heard Krell, Kix,” Rex whispers. “Fives was right. He was using me. I…I ordered our brothers to their deaths even when I knew what was facing them.”
Kix finds the words easily this time, indignation pulling the thread of them from his chest. “What was facing us , Rex. You were on that battlefield same as me, same as them. Jesse told me what you did. When they got in those fighters they knew they were on their own and you still tried to take the blame anyway.”
Rex swallows and his shoulders hunch, like the burden there is just getting heavier.
“You didn’t have a choice,” Kix says, prodding gingerly, trying to clear out the dirt here the same way he does with a physical injury.
Rex laughs. “Sure I did, I was just too much of a coward to make it. Fives and Jesse…they did what I couldn’t.”
“And look where it got them,” Kix fires back. “Stood in front of a firing squad. What good would you have done us there, Rex?”
“What good did I do?” Rex mutters, then shuts his eyes and tilts his head back. The thunk of his skull against the wall is too loud. “Just did his karking dirty work -”
“You saved who you could,” Kix cuts in, aiming for firm and landing with a wobble.
Rex laughs and cracks his eyes open to fix Kix with a mirthless stare. “C’mon, Kix, you don’t gotta hide it from me. I sounded like Krell out there: you said it yourself.”
The bottom drops out of his stomach. He had said that, hadn’t he? Kix swallows, past the rising tightness in his chest and the way the air feels too thick in his mouth. Those memories already feel like a dream, in all the worst ways. He can’t imagine talking to Rex like that now.
But he did. He has. And what an awful thing, to have discovered that their relationship can be stretched so far out of shape.
That’s perhaps the worst thing about Umbara. The way, even afterwards, it just keeps taking.
“Rex,” Kix chokes, sinking fully onto his knees. “ Osik , I just - there were so many of them. So many dead. And I couldn’t - You were so calm, I -”
He cuts himself off, caging the dam of words. They won’t help Rex, so he doesn’t say them. And he can’t afford to trap himself in that moment again, that helpless rage and desperate fear, the way he could feel every second like a knife as lives winked out all around them. Instead he reaches out and hauls Rex in by the back of his neck, cramming their foreheads together.
“I’m sorry, ori’vod . I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve - I didn’t mean -” he feels a sob choke in his throat, everything going tight and stinging. “ Ni ceta .”
Rex’s breath shakes out of him, and then Kix hears him sniff. After one hesitant moment, Kix feels a hand come up to cradle the back of his head. He can’t quite hide the sob that comes out. Against his face, he feels Rex’s eyebrows pull in tight. Then his brother sniffs. He breaks away from Kix’s grip and leans into his shoulder instead, turning the keldabe into a loose approximation of an embrace.
“Yeah,” he says, and Kix feels the side of his neck dampen. “I’m sorry too.”
“I didn’t mean it,” Kix whispers.
“I know,” Rex says, though Kix wonders if he really does. “Lotta things out there none of us meant to happen.”
He lifts his head back out of Kix’s shoulder, his eyes reddened. They sit in silence while Kix reassembles his medkit, the motion soothing the remaining tremor in his hands. He helps Rex put away the equipment and wipe down the surfaces, then personally turns down the lights and doesn’t take Rex to task when he realises he never clocked in.
“You should come bunk with us,” he says instead, while they’re waiting for the elevator and the quiet starts scratching in the back of his head, too loud, too big. He can’t imagine lying in Rex’s private bunk, the walls closing in around him. “Plenty of empty beds in the berth. Maybe it’ll help.”
Rex’s mouth twists. “Yeah...maybe.”
The elevator arrives and dings open, flooding the corridor with light.
They step in, the doors close. Kix’s eyes drift shut as they drop, the ground swaying under his feet like they’re on an ocean.
“Would you have shot him?” Rex asks into the silence.
Yes , Kix thinks, remembering again the screams of the dying, the bodies in the mud.
“I don’t know,” he says, meeting Rex’s eyes. Rex nods, once, and then they face forward as the floors descend.
The night rolls on.