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He had always found a certain solace in the quiet.
Even so, there’s something about this kind of stillness, no matter how injudicious he knows it to be, that makes his flesh creep. He is alone out here - truly alone, with nothing but the breeze to keep him company.
He’s moving too noisily. Every ragged breath that tears from his throat, every grating scrape of his armour as he half-drags his malfunctioning leg across the forest floor, it’s like a homing beacon for anything else that might be sharing his solitude.
The soft rustle of the wind almost reminds him of laughter as it rushes past, stirring the decaying leaves at his feet.
Too slow, it seems to chide him. Too slow.
He knows how foolish it is to attempt to walk in this condition, what kind of further damage he is undoubtedly doing to his fractured bone. If his years of medical research hadn’t told him that, the searing pain shooting up his leg every time he dares to move certainly would have.
Echo is faster than him, even with both of his legs functioning. Agony has unravelled his thoughts into a fog thick enough to bar him from any kind of calculation, but nonetheless, he is fairly sure that Omega should have been found by now.
By Echo, or by the Empire? whispers the little voice at the back of his mind, and it’s not the chill wind seeping through the chinks in his armour that sends frost through his blood.
His inability to reason almost pains him more than the vicious pang in his leg. It’s irrational, he knows it’s irrational. They have been hurled into situations far more perilous than this and made it out alive, and yet he can’t help the spike of fear that is slowly eating away at him.
Maybe it’s the pain that has him so on edge. Maybe it’s how close they are to the Empire once more, how close they are to having freedom snatched from their grasp now that it is finally in reach.
Maybe it’s the fact that, since Kamino was lost to the tides, the gaping hole left by the man who would have sneered at his fragility and then offered him a shoulder to lean on has never felt quite so boundless.
There is a part of him that pleads to just give into the fog. He’s tired, he’s so tired, and it feels as if his energy is draining more and more with every excruciating step.
And still he pushes forward, forcing himself to focus on putting one foot in front of the other.
He won’t stop. He can’t stop because Omega’s out there, because his vod’ika is out there , and not one of his calculations can tell him how he is meant to go on if anything happens to her.
Tech doesn’t believe in miracles, but the fact that he makes it to the cliff’s edge without his legs giving way is about as close to one as he’ll get. Any small measure of relief he might have felt at that is scattered by the sight that greets him.
Soldiers . Soldiers, only three of them, but nonetheless three more than he feels capable of taking on, and no sign of Echo or Omega anywhere.
He practically collapses against the tree shielding him from view, his breathing uncomfortably loud in the hush. He has to concentrate if they’re to survive this. The ringing in his ears can wait.
The clones are positioned as if they’re waiting for something, or someone . It would have been impossible for them to have moved the war chest by now, and the only place they could possibly be staking out is over the cliff edge.
That leaves Echo and Omega balanced on a shelf of rock eye-wateringly far from the ground, surrounded by Imperials who have undoubtedly called for backup by now, and their only hope of rescue is a man who suddenly finds it difficult to tell whether there are three or six troopers guarding the edge.
It’s not ideal.
Pain and fear and the sinking knowledge that he may as well be signing his own death warrant by engaging in combat when he can barely stand holds him back, and he hesitates for a fraction of a second before he raises his blaster. Not for the first time, he finds himself longing to have the others by his side. He’ll never be as selfless as Wrecker, or as valiant as Hunter, or Crosshair, or anywhere near as unshakeable as karking Crosshair -
And yet he has his intellect, and his blaster, and the fire inside him that will torch a thousand Empires to ash before it sees his family hurt.
That will be enough. He’s seldom wrong about such matters, after all, and that remembrance restores just a little of his spark.
Many lifetimes ago, back in the bleached corridors of Kamino when everything had just made sense, he had never cared for excess shows of emotion. There was no need, after all, despite the sneers it earned him from some of the regs when they thought he wasn’t watching. Not when the only three that mattered could always understand what he was thinking without him having to display it.
His world has been uprooted by the hurricanes more times than even he could keep track of since then, warped into something fragmented and unrecognisable, but some things never change. And that was one of them.
All the same, even concealed behind the comforting mask of his goggles, there’s a certain glint of flame to his eyes as he takes a step away from the safety of his tree and lets his blaster fly.