Archive of Our Own ^beta

The crack of thunder cuts through the roar of blasterfire, torrential rain, and grinding machinery with none of the grace of a lightsaber, only a boom and a blinding flash of light that’s far, far too close for comfort. It rattles through his teeth and he grimaces, grits them, squints through the torrent — the irony hasn’t escaped him, even if he’s too cold to laugh — as the hairs plastered to the back of his neck try desperately to stand on edge and he tries to figure out exactly how dangerous this new element may be in the chaos around him.

“Sir!” comes a shout through the comm buried in his ear, tinny and distorted — the rain has been ruining connections, getting everywhere, making the ground less dirt and more sucking, grabbing, clinging mud that refuses to let go. Multiple vode have lost boots to it by now, even barely 24 hours in. “Sir, the clankers are retreating!”

Not yet, the Force whispers as he rises halfway from his crouch, watching the soldiers surrounding him slowly, carefully advance in the silence between rounds of blasterfire, and he breathes in wetness, trying not to choke on the scent of blood invading his nostrils. He shouldn’t be able to smell it like this, the rain should be washing it away or at least drowning it out, but the Force has been clinging to him not unlike the rain, soaking him to the bone, making him know.

He’s so tired of knowing.

A distant boom, not that of thunder, not that of nature, and the Force screams. “Take cover!” Anakin shouts, shouts so hard his voice cracks, shouts to hard his voice goes hoarse halfway through, and hopes against all hope that the Force will carry his voice to those who won’t hear him over comms. He scrambles to the nearest trench himself, sliding over the muddy ground until he falls into the water-filled trench with a splash, followed closely by the slamming boots of a dozen troopers from every direction.

A moment later: death. The noise of the explosion is deafening, the mix of rain sizzling and metal tearing and people dying a cacophony both out loud and in his chest that makes him want to shriek. He covered his ears too late, so focused on preparing as many as he could that he didn’t think to prepare himself as well, and the impact shakes the very earth, shaking him until he falls onto his side in the muddy puddles that make up the entirety of the trench’s floor.

He thinks he loses time for a second. When he opens his eyes again there’s a plastoid face above him, thick-gloved hands turning his head to face the endless, cloud filled sky that it’s blocking, a soothing voice with an accent from Concord Dawn filtering through crackling bucket speakers. He can’t make out the words but he can make out the cadence: slow, steady, scared.

For him?

“I’m okay,” he rasps, voice seeming to have finally given up the ghost after hours of shouting and screaming. He’s honestly surprised it lasted this long. “I’m fine, Rex, I’m—”

Thunder cracks again and he flinches, full body, his eyes flying shut as he curls around himself. Someone swears, violently, and someone else whimpers.

Hands curl over his, around his, careful and insistent, and slowly pull them away from his ears. He whimpers again — that was him before? — and Rex shushes him, soothes him as he turns him over, props him up against the wall, says something he can’t even try to make out. Everything is so loud, the rain crackling and sparking against his bare flesh, the momentary head of the blast quickly chased away by the biting chill of midnight rainfall, the—

Something is pulled down over his head and with it comes silence, so sudden and unexpected that a sob escapes his lips and echoes back to him within the unexpected confines of the helmet. It doesn’t fit quite right but it’s still blocking the downpour, the clack of thunder, the way the sky lights up when lightning strikes. He’s drenched, getting the inside of the helmet wet, making everything damp and slick, but even that amount of added discomfort is negligible in the face of quiet for even one sliver of a moment.

“Well, you look like it helped,” a wry, hoarse voice says, muffled through the helmet — the speakers are off and, when he takes further stock of himself, his earpiece is gone.

“What—” he starts, and the wetness that drips onto his tongue is salty, only very subtly different from the rain but not so much that it escapes his notice. “Rex.”

“Sir,” Rex replies, eyelashes already wet with rain, soaked from the neck up. His expression is unflinching, unapologetic, and it makes some aching sort of warmth bloom fiercly within his chest. “How do you feel?”

Anakin gives him a look and then remembers, belatedly, that he can’t see shit. He clears his throat and winces when it stings. “I’ve been better — you know how it is.”

“I don’t think I do.” Rex acknowledges the tilt of his head, the way Anakin tries to squint hard enough to him to be felt through the bucket, with only a faint little smile, grim if only for their surroundings. “I never had issues with the thunder on Kamino, but I know people who did. Panic attacks at the start of bad storms weren’t all that rare.”

“I was crying.”

“You were.”

“Did I scream?”

Rex shrugs with his eyes. “A little. You weren’t the only one.”

Because the explosion caught at least one vod in the blast, Anakin completes in his head, and tries not to feel sick.

“Why’d you give me—” He waves a hand at his head, swallowing around the lump in his throat, and the way Rex stares at him after he finishes makes him feel as if he isn’t wearing his helmet, isn’t wearing anything at all. His eyes are endless brown, dark and darker still in the gloom with only a few half-dead lights lining everything in a weak red. Rex glows, almost, and Anakin genuinely can’t tell if it’s from the Force or from something else.

“So you’d stop screaming,” Rex says, blunt, and then pauses and tries again. “So you’d stop needing to scream.”

There are a few things Anakin has learned about the vode in the first few months of the war: that they’re fiercely loyal and fiercely competent; that they have so, so much to teach him, and that one of the best things he can do with them is shut up and listen; that their armor is intimate and personal, a second skin, a second expression of self; that self is one of the most highly coveted concepts they have, something Anakin understands so deep it aches in all of his old scars and especially the one on the back of his neck where the Temple Healers cut a tiny little explosive out of a spot near the base of his neck.

Rex may have his hair bleached, may have a few tattoos Anakin has caught glimpses of throughout the months spent nearly attached at the hip, may have a name he wears with pride and confidence, but his bucket is still a part of his identity — and he just gave it to him. For noise canceling.

“Oh,” Anakin says. He knows how blindsided he sounds, but he can’t find it in himself to care.

“Keep it until you can take it off without needing it again,” Rex says when it’s clear that Anakin doesn’t plan to add anything else, his voice so low and gentle he almost feels like craning his head to hear him better. It’s nice. “I have your comm, I’ll keep us safe until you’re ready to go again.”

Anakin’s gaze flicks to the side of Rex’s head and he stares, briefly frozen, at the proof that oh, yeah, he sure does have my earpiece. He really shouldn’t let it get to his head, but. Well. The thing is, it‘s Rex. Their friendship started out rocky, both of them out of their element in nearly every possible way both with each other and with the 501st at large, and it had taken two months for the tension to begin to ease, another two for them to really become comfortable with each other. It’s been seven now, and Anakin would like to think that they’re in this together, that they understand each other, even if they don’t always get each other, that they’re— something. He doesn’t know. Something good.

This right here? This is undeniable proof that he’s right.

“Thank you,” Anakin croaks, weak and hoarse and sounding like he might start crying again, even if he doesn’t quite remember crying the first time. The sound bounces off the inner walls of the helmet but that’s fine, because Rex’s hand settles on his shoulder and he swears he can feel the warmth of it even through his armor and Rex’s glove. A faint smile flits onto his face and that fierce warmth blooms brighter in his chest, burning, aching.

“Just rest, sir,” he says, so steady that Anakin can’t help but believe him. “I’ve got your six.”