Work Text:
He hears it in a moment of hazy lucidity.
Kix is a muted presence in the Force that winds around his ribs, sinking into his lungs, keeping a piece on his pulse as if even in the strange ether, he seeks to heal even if he is forced to wound. He stands at the apex of Anakin’s hospital cot, and he emits lurid ocean blues and merlot reds of anger and resignation. The sedation Kix had forced upon him gives everything a dream-like quality, though it leaves the Force moving fluidly, unhindered by the medications Kix had forced upon him, and that he allows to pull him under.
Anakin has never done well with sedation, nor painkillers. As a child, Gardulla would never waste bacta on a child, and Watto would never have been able to afford it, let alone the expensive sedation and painkillers that Coreworlders had access to. He sometimes has vague visions, dreams, of a child, a baby screaming on a metal, sand rusted table. The child’s mother is as quiet as a lamb, watching with stormy eyes as an injector is pressed against the wailing baby’s skin, never any painkillers, as a painkiller on a slave is a waste. Anakin can never be sure if it is a childhood memory that he can never escape from, or it is a way to show him every moment, every minute in which he has failed his duty to his mother, to his people.
He wanted to become a Jedi to free the slaves, and yet the Force have given him an army and expected him not to cradle them to his breast, to not see himself in every single one of them until he has to look away or burn up with the shame, with the anger that feels like a krayt dragon has become his heart. He is selfish in this, he knows. At least he has the option to look away. To this day, Anakin will never say yes to a painkiller unless under duress. He makes sure they go to his men, his troopers. He gives them everything he can, pushes them until they know their worth, and Anakin can never claim a piece of that confidence, but he glows bright with pride in the Force all the same.
Each single trooper may know their weight in credit, but he wants every single man to know their worth as a person.
Kix attempts to talk quietly, with a fire burning bright next to him that is Captain Rex, a fire that burns as bright as the one in Anakin’s breastbone. He could set himself alight with the Force of Rex’s presence, and often wants to slip his hands into that feeling, wanting to see if he can burn his hands against it or if it would welcome him. He remembers covert nights beneath a desert sky, huddled into his mothers side around a sputtering fire, hearing the roars of creatures deep in the storming dunes, and wonders if he would be devoured by the fire or the krayts. He wonders what Rex would say if Anakin called him akin to a Krayt Dragon.
“-taking Brush back to Kamino, effective immediately,” Kix is saying quietly, though Anakin would know his voice, any of his men’s voice dumb and blindfolded. Even helmeted, stripped clean of identifying marks; blind him, and he would know who had moved, who had talked. “Apparently this isn’t the first time he’s failed to follow orders whilst on the battlefield, he did so in another legion, but the Kaminoans thought being able to see the consequences would help but-”
“Kark,” Rex hisses, and there’s a splutter of anger, rage that builds and then fades into a learnt sort of helplessness that has the dreamy like quality of the sedation breezing away slowly. A brush of resignation, of disappointment. “They’re gonna decommission him, ain’t they?”
Anakin rouses, breaks the surface of the Force like he did when he first learnt to swim, a toe at a time and then all at once, near drowning and with his Master’s panic and distress an alarming scarlet and purple in the force, heavy and distracting. Decommission is a word that Anakin has only ever heard, hushed beneath armored hands and helmets, a strange sort of grief that puts Anakin in mind of obedience , and never enough . He knows decommissioning, perhaps not how the troopers do, but nevertheless, that Krayt Dragon he calls Rex so akin to rises into his chest, jaws wide open, slavering with hunger, with anger. On Tatooine, surrounding the squat slave quarters, they would keep anooba’s, slavering dogs kept mean with hunger, ribs ballooned around emptiness when they’d try to eat the others, with jaws that could swallow a child whole. Anakin had watched a child be thrown to them, torn apart, screaming, crying. They’d begged for their master to save them, even as they’d been the one to throw the child to those dogs, watching blindly by. He’d often wondered, even know, how Gardulla would have eaten him as a child.
Gardulla had used to say he had tender flesh as a child, just enough fat on the bone even as hunger had hollowed out his cheeks and ballooned his empty belly. He still closes his eyes sometimes, and wonders if she would have torn him to shreds like those desert dogs, if she’d have had mercy on him and beaten him to death before eating him. Anakin has never had a good grasp of mercy, even as a Jedi, where the Force swallows whole chunks of him and he is expected to let it. He thinks Gardulla would have swallowed him whole, as the Force does, as Obi-Wan’s disappointment does, as the learnt obedience his men give him does.
He likes to think that he’s never left the sands of Tatooine, as if he’s remade himself anew into an anooba, with spittle flying from his jaws, ribs spread wide around a hungering emptiness. He is an attack dog, with a leash that’s around his throat only because he’s never been without one and thinks he doesn’t know how to survive without one.
Kix sighs, a ragged sound. The Force wavers, a ripple in the surface, and Anakin can feel how the sedation lifts further.
“I can’t think of a way to stop it,” Kix admits, and never once has Anakin heard his chief medic office that particular type of devastation, of grief . Anakin has seen this man elbow deep in another brothers guts, bloodied and screaming to keep breathing, and even then, even then , Kix had been as cold as ice, even as the Force flooded with his fear, his terror. Steady hands, Kix sometimes mutters to himself, and Anakin opens himself up, feels as a collapsing star flickers and dies in the same moment he takes a breath, feels the Force, the way it calls to him, screams at him. “They’re going to decommission him and I can’t do anything, Rex, I don’t even know where to begin -”
“Can Cody-” There’s a thready hint of desperation in Rex’s voice too, and Rex falls closer, braces his weight against Anakin’s hospital cot. He would kill for these two men, would kill for every single man in his company, in his Legion. He thinks he would kill for every man in the GAR. They may not be his men, but he is theirs's.
“Cody can’t do fripp.” Kix hisses, and Rex rages too, Anakin can feel it, the way his body tenses, the twist of his hands as he balls them into fists. The Force lets him see this, and Anakin will do anything to soothe it, would take it into himself if it wouldn’t be a disservice to his men.
“I’m not going to let them kill a brother,” Rex growls, quiet and mournful, a lothwolf on the verge of losing a pack member. Anakin has heard stories, folktales of them, how they’d howl the moons down, would leap onto the surfaces and bury their claws into it if they thought it would keep their pack together. Each man, each trooper is a pack member and a wolf in turn, a claw sunk deep into the moons’ surface that keeps them together. “Even if I have to storm the kriffing city-”
There is a price, Anakin knows, to every piece of violence that is committed. Whether it is a piece of yourself that you leave behind in the brutality committed, or if it is because you so easily give yourself over to the need of it, it leaves a mark, takes a bite out of you for every time. Anakin himself is a piecemeal of every act of violence he has committed in this war, and though he often despairs of the violence he cleaves without any hesitation across the battlefield, every meal sized bite mark he carries from protecting his men is a bite he carries with pride. He is a part of his battalion, of his Legion, as they are a part of him. He would gladly give any one of them his lightsaber, his weapon, his life. He owes them everything. Anakin would never dare take the opportunity of freeing themselves from them, no, he could never, but to save his men, his family the burden of doing it by themselves, of facing retribution, Anakin would take it upon his shoulders, would kneel like he never does, would beg, would plead. They wouldn’t even have to ask, would never have to.
The Force cries, howls, it slips across his ribs, into his belly, spindles around his spine. It lays heavy across the slowly rotting chip at the base of his spine, inert, inactive but still present. He has never been allowed the remote, and wonders if he would find it amongst his Master’s things, a pride of place in the Council Room. He uses it to crawl up, each vow to his men a foothold that sheds the dreamy sedation haze, like flesh that sloughs off after being exposed to Tatooine sand storms.
He holds an armored wrist in his metal hand, squeezes gently, and when he blinks glassy eyes up, the medbay bright and fluorescent, it is to his Captain blinking owlishly down at him, as Kix stares flummoxed at him.
“General?” Kix hisses. “You shouldn’t even be awake, how the kriff-”
Anakin however, doesn’t look away from how Rex stares down at him. Anakin is lying prone on a hospital cot, tucked like a loth cat beneath three blankets in a stray pair of regulation trooper blacks, yet Rex is staring at him with those eyes, amber and burning. He stares unblinkingly at Anakin, and Anakin stares right back, calm, placid, even as a fever burns him up from the inside out, even as lava drips through his veins, even as anger knots into the back of his throat and leaves him thinking he could throw it up. There are two blasters at Rex’s hips, ever present, Anakin would know them as well as his own lightsaber, and yet Rex hasn’t touched them.
“I would do it,” Anakin says, and it’s as if they’re picking up a conversation they never had. “I would give myself to you, to you all. I would be the weapon you needed and I would gladly be so.”
His lightsaber is a heavy weight, tucked beneath the covers by his thigh, in easy reach because Kix might be a medic but he is a soldier first and foremost. He goes to sleep with an array of weapons, two of which are his own hands, and he knows. Anakin would give his life for each of these men.
Rex is silent still, and though something is lurking, quiet and dark in his eyes, he steps back. He lets Anakin rise, throwing his legs over the cotside. Even with his helmet on, Anakin would know every expression on this man’s face, and would know his footsteps in a darkened room. Now, bare faced and expression hardened, Rex is open, the Force slipping through him, presence heavy. There is the faintest hint of distrust, but something soft and barely there threads through it. Anakin wants to nurture it, hold it close like he used to the little trembling bodies of babies in the creché, would shush them quietly, singing lullabies from a life he was ordered to be detached from, as if it wasn’t the very essence of his existence, as if he could shake slave from his bones, as if he could shake a chip from his spine and spit upon it.
Stillness, silence, and then Rex bursts into action. A DC-17, immaculate, powercell shining in the fluorescence of the medbay, and Anakin breathes through the action as Rex presses the barrel of it to the underside of his throat. A sweet breeze, a steady drumming that matches the quiet pace of Anakin’s heart and Anakin leans into it, eye to eye with his Captain, his second in command for all that Ahsoka is Commander.
“Captain!” Kix hisses, and a scalpel is there then, poised across Rex’s radial artery, pressing sweetly through regulation blacks.
Anakin only reaches, and in his hand he clasps his lightsaber. He presses it to Rex’s chest plate.
“My life is yours.” He says earnestly. “I would kill and die for you, my Captain, my men, my troops, my Legion. Let me do this for you, let me take the heat, the burden.”
Rex is quiet for several long minutes, and the Force centers him, leaving him adrift in the eye of the storm that Rex is slowly becoming. He is magnificent. Anakin has never wanted a hand on his leash, but he would gladly give it to this man, to this Legion, after all, they have it already.
“We’re going to kill every single one of them,” Rex tells him, matter of factly, and here is the fangs and venom, the Krayt Dragon roar that Anakin has felt deep in his bones every time Rex so much as stepped upon the battlefield. Anakin burns like a furnace, he has a thousand suns made molten in his veins, but Rex is a Krayt dragon, a volcano oozing magma that refuses to be destroyed. “We’re going to march on that city, and I’m going to raze it to the ground, and every single cadet and brother will finally be safe.”
That DC-17 is pulled away from his neck, and some part of Anakin that has long been set ablaze misses it, but it is when Anakin takes his lightsaber, holds it to his chest, and gives Anakin his DC-17 in turn, that Rex truly relaxes, pulls free.
“Are you with us, General Skywalker?”
“I became a Jedi,” Anakin tells him. “To free the slaves. I become a General, to free my brothers.”