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Rex is alone.
After the war, after the promotion and the chip and the crash and the escape and the hiding and the all-consuming grief, when he finally, finally gets a moment to rest, the realization hits him like a punch to the gut. He is alone.
He’s never been alone before. Not like this. His skin aches with the isolation. His heart is clogged with grief, with the utter certainty that everyone whose touch he would welcome is either dead or worse than dead. The silence is so oppressive, it threatens to consume him.
But Rex knows loneliness, far better than most.
On Kamino, a lifetime ago, he knew what it meant to be alone. Nobody wanted to get too close to a mutant like him. Why would they bother, when he’d likely as not wind up dead soon enough, when his proximity could draw the wrong kind of attention, could put them all in danger.
It’s all so stupid looking back.
They lived completely at the whims of their creators. For any reason, at any time, a Kaminoan could snatch them out of a lineup for further testing. “Testing.” It’s too kind a word for the cruel experiments the Kaminoans seemed to delight in.
They claimed they needed the data, to test just how resilient their products had become, to see how long a cadet could survive in the worst possible situations, to artificially recreate the horrors of the war they’d one day face. Maybe you’d just get dumped on a nearby moon and told to fend off near-certain death as long as possible, but the Kaminoans always prized their controlled environments. They wanted to know precisely how long their products could last under extreme duress, heat, cold, hunger, thirst. How various poisons could affect them. If you were lucky, maybe you’d only be drafted into their prosthetics studies and wind up with a perfectly healthy limb surgically removed, or sometimes hacked off in an intentionally sloppy manner to mimic the chaotic conditions of a battlefield.
Once they’d gathered whatever they needed from the experiments, they’d bring in cadets on the medic tracks and let them try to save you, with shaky hands and watery eyes and no instructions. How else could they learn to piece someone back together, if the Kaminoans didn’t take them apart first. And then the lucky few who survived would be thrust back into regular training under even more intense scrutiny. The Kaminoans were happy to wait and watch for any sign of deficit.
It was research, they said. Cold, clinical research that would save more lives than it cost in the end. And the trainers… well, if some cadets went missing in the course of ‘extracurricular’ training activities, then that was just the cost of doing business with the scum of the galaxy.
And it was always the cadets who were lagging behind who were taken. The deviants, the mutants, the stubborn ones, the soft ones. If they weren’t needed for any experiments or trials, if they didn’t catch the eye of any trainer first, the Kaminoans had no qualms about culling their livestock. They had plenty to spare after all.
Rex lived his life in terror and determination. Every missed point on a test, every time he lagged a little behind in training, every lost spar, pushed him closer bit by bit to that fate.
He doesn’t know how he survived long enough to make it off Kamino, but he does know who he owes for it.
Cody was the best of the best. Easily in the top handful of commanders to ever train on Kamino. The rumor was that he’d even trained with Prime himself. He was still a clone, but his future rank provided him with more protection than the rest of them. And luckily for Rex, he never seemed afraid to push his luck.
There was a spar one day, a few command class clones against Rex’s extended training squad. Cody won every spar easily, as was expected, but it was almost jarring to see how advanced and competent the CCs were compared to everyone he had trained with before.
Rex kept his head down and tried to blend in. A futile effort, but that never stopped him from trying. It came as very little surprise then when he was called into the ring. From the snickers behind his back, he knew it was meant as a humiliation, as a way to watch him fail, rather than for any helpful training.
Rex approached the spar like he did everything else, as a fight for his life. Because that’s what it was. That what it always was.
Cody still won in the end, of course he did. But it took him ten times as long to take him down, and he’s breathing hard and sporting just as many new bruises as Rex by the time it’s done.
“What’s your name?” he asked, extending a hand to help Rex from the ground.
Rex took his outstretched hand carefully, watching for any sign of trickery.
They were separated before he could answer, but Rex saw him talking to an Alpha class clone later, gesturing in his direction.
He felt a strange stirring in his gut, something not quite dread and not quite anticipation. Hope, maybe.
His world started moving very quickly after that. He was transferred to an advanced training class with other high-scoring cadets, some of whom had slight mutations as well. He made friends. He trained regularly with the CC classes. He got to know Cody and his friends better. Everything changed so fast that it made his head spin.
He wasn’t alone very much after that. Hell, there were times during the war when he’d complained about it! Complained about Fives and Echo and Hardcase and Jesse and all the others they’d rope into their schemes.
He wishes he could take it all back.
He never imagined that he’d find himself nostalgic for the tragedy of war or the uncertainty of Kamino. But then, he could never have imagined a tragedy like this.
It’s like he doesn’t even exist now that there’s no one around to tell him that he’s real.
The loneliness makes his skin crawl with desperation. The silence rings deafening in his ear.
He picks a fight in a seedy dive bar, just to feel the skin on skin contact of knuckles against his face. He fucks the first person who lays a gentle hand on his shoulder. It only leaves him hollower, but it doesn’t stop him from trying it again.
It’s stupid, so fucking stupid for someone doing his damndest to avoid the Empire, but he can’t seem to make himself stop.
He’s glad that Ahsoka’s gone, because he can’t quite forgive her right now for saving his life and then abandoning him to this all-consuming loss.
Seeing Echo again, safe, despite everything that’s been done to him, despite every way that Rex has failed him, helps. A little. But Rex is a coward when it comes to Echo. He can’t be near him without feeling overwhelmed by the good memories, the aching nostalgia of EchoandFives, the little shits who wormed their way into his life and refused to leave. Laughter always followed them, along with the promise of a good time despite the inevitable regrets and demerit points the next morning.
He doesn’t want to think about Echo, because thinking about Echo inevitably leads him to thinking about Fives. Fives, who was right about everything and died for it, while Rex just stood there helplessly and watched.
So he keeps moving, keeps fighting, spurred on by the desperate hope that somebody, anybody is left for him to save.
Cody. He just needs to find Cody.
Cody saved his life once, and Rex vows to keep living until he can repay that favor. If he can just managed to find him, to save him, then Cody will know what to do.