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Echo knew he was dreaming when he recognised the bright white hallways of Tipoca City, which in the waking world sat submerged in the Kaminoan oceans to fade into rust forever. The hallways were as familiar to him as the curves of his face, memorised and so burned into his memory it was no real shock that he could navigate them as he did now in his sleep.
Echo walked through the corridors, passing what he knew were squads of his fellow troopers with faces identical to his, except his dreaming made them blurry, not fully formed. He passed the gangly Kaminoan’s, their large eyes prominent in the haze of their figures, which seemed to blend with the clinical white of the walls. He didn’t exactly know where he was walking until his feet took him to the junior cadet barracks, the ones he and his brothers shared in their brief childhood.
It was surreal seeing it now, as he walked in, the shapes of the beds and the curves of the walls more defined than the hallways, more distinct in his mind. He took it all in, breathing in the scentless air. The last time he was here, he didn’t even have his name yet – none of them did.
The beds were so much smaller than he remembered. He smiled and sat down on one. He ran a hand he shouldn’t have over the cloth blanket, its fibers feeling as familiar as his own skin. An ache formed in his chest for all he had lost.
The door whooshed open, and his head shot in the direction of the noise. It was then he saw himself run in and climb onto the nearest bed, pulling his knees to his chest and burying his face in his arms.
Echo blinked in surprise.
His child self was curled into a ball, as tight as he could manage, and Echo could only see the curly dark hair of his head. He remembered he used to do that when he got overwhelmed, but he couldn’t remember when he stopped. He watched his child self grip onto the sleeves of his standard issue cadet uniform tightly, the knuckles on his little hands white.
His child self didn’t see him and made no moves to show that he knew Echo was there at all. It was strange to see himself like this. To see a snapshot of the person he was for a short amount of time.
Echo slowly stood up, the urge to know what it was that made his child self cry when the door opened again, and his breath got caught in his throat and his eyes stung when he saw who it was that stepped in the door.
This was not just a dream, but a memory.
Fives’s tiny face was the same as his had been, except his brother’s seemed to be perpetually twisted into a smirk, and if it wasn’t, it itched at the corners of his mouth, ready to bloom at a moment’s notice. But his face now held no impishness, instead, his small brows were furrowed as his gaze landed on his brother’s curled-up body on the bed.
“Hey, 21-0408, why the long face?”
Echo had to sit down and cover his mouth with a hand to stop the sob that dared to escape his throat. His brother’s voice, albeit that of his child self, felt so incredibly comforting. He thought he’d never hear it again, even if it was that little boy’s voice that all clones had as young cadets. To Echo, it just sounded like him; like Fives; like it did in his fuzzy memories.
His childhood had been a fleeting blur of training programs and accelerated growth, so he didn’t remember much of it. But he didn’t forget moments like this, where his brother’s love had engulfed him.
Echo watched his child self slowly peek his eyes out from his arms at his older brother.
“Go away,” Little Echo mumbled.
“Come on, 21-0408,” Little Fives said and climbed up onto the bed next to him, trying to pry open his arms. “What’s wrong?”
Little Echo ripped his arm away and wiped his tear-stained face and nose with his sleeve. Echo grimaced as he saw the dark line that now appeared on the red fabric. He forgot kids could be gross sometimes, even himself.
“I said, go away, 27-5555,” Little Echo grumbled. “I want to be alone.”
Little Echo had no idea just how much time he would spend alone.
“Why?” Of course, Fives never let up about anything, even as a child.
Little Echo scowled at his shoes on the bed. “I…I keep messing up…”
“This module is hard, vod’ika,” Little Fives placed a hand on Little Echo’s shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze.
Fives was barely older than Echo, but his older brother never let him forget it. With the Mando’a nickname ‘little brother’ sticking to Echo for practically as long as he’d known Fives. He pretended to hate it, and he’d give anything to hear it again. So, hearing it now, Echo’s heart seized. He wanted to grab his younger self by the shoulders and tell him to treasure the nickname; to never roll his eyes and pretend to hate it; to call Fives ori’vod in return because he knew he’d get a kick out of it.
“But everyone’s good at this module except me…” Little Echo voiced quietly, not entirely convinced.
Echo tried to wrack his brain for what module his younger self was talking about, but his dreaming made it too hazy to pinpoint; like if his subconscious ventured too far away from the scene in front of him it would fizzle away, and his dream would move onto something else. And he wanted to stay in this for as long as he could.
“You’ll get it eventually; it just takes practice,” Little Fives reassured.
“I’m going to fail…and never be a soldier…” his younger self sniffled. Echo saw his eyes gloss over again with unshed tears.
“Don’t talk like that,” Little Fives chastised, punching him lightly in the shoulder, a furious look on his face. “You’ll be fine. I’ll help you.”
Little Echo’s face lit up with hope. “You will?”
Little Fives nodded. “That’s what brothers do. We look out for each other; have each other’s backs.”
Echo watched his younger self sniffle as he looked at his older brother, who gave him a reassuring smile.
“Promise?” he said.
“Promise,” Little Fives said with so much conviction, that it made Echo’s heart squeeze again. He was always so sure of everything, never faltering – not even for a second. Once Fives believed in something, he didn’t waver. Ever.
Little Echo smiled, and wrapped his arms around his brother, who hugged him tightly. Echo watched them embrace, anchoring themselves to each other. He didn’t realise he was crying until he felt a tear fall on his hands in his lap. He reached up to wipe them away, scoffing lightly at himself.
“Hey, Echo, why the long face?”
Echo’s heart seemed to expand and stop as he turned around, seeing Fives standing there behind him several metres away. He turned back to where their younger selves sat on the bed and saw they had vanished, that the room had melted away into a long bright endless plane.
“Fives?” Echo wiped his face again and he saw Fives grin at him, before walking over. Echo blinked around the tears to take the sight of him. His figure was much clearer than anything else he’d seen so far in his dreams. Fives was adorned in his ARC trooper armour; helmet tucked under his arm with a proud smile stretched across his face. He willed his subconscious to stay in this moment, that it would be cruel to rip him from it with no warning. He needed time with him.
“Don’t look so happy to see me,” Fives joked when he came closer, his mouth quirked in that smirk that was so incredibly familiar seeing it felt like coming home.
Echo laughed tearfully. “Your ugly face is just so scary, I can’t help but cry.”
Fives threw his head back in a loud guffaw before punching Echo lightly on the arm. “It’s good to see you, vod’ika.”
Echo’s heart filled with so much warmth at the affection. “Good to see you too, Fives.”
Fives smiled at him before Echo asked, “What are you doing here?”
Fives didn’t respond, he just looked at Echo thoughtfully. Echo cleared his throat and shook his head. “When they found me on Skako Minor and you weren’t with them…”
He felt Fives’s heavy hand land on his shoulder, squeezing it gently. “I know. But I’m here now.”
Echo felt his lip tremble and he willed himself to take a breath. “I missed so much time with you.”
Fives shook his head. “Don’t think about that.”
“How can I not? I missed everything. I missed…”
“I wouldn’t have wanted you to see that anyway.”
He didn’t need to say the words for Echo to know what he was referring to.
“I…I would’ve believed you.”
“Then you would be dead too.”
Clones were conditioned not to linger on the losses of their fellow brothers. It was the nature of what they were bred for. Born knowing they would die. They were taught to take a moment to mourn, then to keep going. There was no time to let the grief linger in war.
But this was much harder than Echo had been conditioned to think.
Echo’s grief for losing Fives was too complicated for that. Echo lost Fives after the fact. He was mourning him outside of the mourning period, outside of the war. And it was something he didn’t know how to handle. The grief could sit for longer, dawdle almost now that there wasn’t another mission to focus on instead. And it was painful. A never-ending agony that oscillated between a dull ache to suffocating sharpness in the hole of his chest.
Fives had been a constant in his life, from cadets to losing their squad on Rishi Moon, to joining Rex in the 501st, all the way until the fateful night of the Citadel rescue. Fives had been there for all of it. Even thereafter, in the brief lucid moments in cryostasis on Skako, his thoughts would drift to his ori’vod. So, to be released into that mourning, to realise he was free, but without his beloved brother by his side was lonelier than stasis had been.
And hearing how exactly Fives met his end had not made it any easier. It was the unfairest of deaths, and that knowledge almost hurt more. That he wasn’t there. How if he had been, it may have gone differently.
There were so many moments where Echo would think of something he wanted to tell Fives, only to realise a moment later that he couldn’t. It was a cycle of remembering he was gone. Those milliseconds of bliss, before he remembered, were bookended by the searing hurt. And there was no one to share that hurt with.
Rex was elusive in his hiding and had gone through his mourning period. And though Clone Force 99 had provided him with a home, a comradery, that he was grateful for, they had not lost anyone the way Echo had lost Fives. They didn’t fully understand.
Echo just wanted the one person who understood him, who knew him inside and out.
In other, much less complicated words, Echo missed Fives so, so much.
And at those lowest moments when he missed him; when the aching felt never-ending and moving forward felt futile, Echo imagined what it would’ve been like had they both found their ends together. How much easier it would’ve been on his heart, to know that his brother was with him even in death. That if there was an afterlife, it would be spent together. That their hearts had stopped at the same time, one not forced to go on without the other helping keep it in rhythm.
The galaxy had not been so kind to grant him that.
“I…I know,” Echo replied quietly, his throat thick.
He watched Fives’ face study him for a moment before his brow settled into a crease, and his hand tightened on Echo’s shoulder. “Echo…don’t be sad.”
Echo looked at him with disbelief. He could see all the texture in his face and feel the puff of breath against his nose. It was as if he wasn’t dreaming at all. “How…how can I not be sad? You’re not here.”
“No, but you are. You have a second chance, Echo. A second chance to live.”
Echo shook his head. “You should be here too.”
“Maybe. But my path was different to yours. You finally get a chance to choose what you do with your life. Nobody else; you, vod’ika. That freedom I was fighting for? You have it now. You have for both of us. Do something good with it. Something we’d both be proud of.”
Echo looked at his brother searching his face for something he couldn’t name. Maybe he wasn’t searching at all, but memorising. Memorising the look Fives was giving him now; the pride, the unwavering belief he had in him. He hadn’t seen it in such a long time. No one had expected anything of him in just as long.
“Promise me you will, Echo.”
He didn’t even need to think about it. “I promise.”
Echo could feel the waking world calling him, so before Fives faded away, he wrapped his arms around his brother. Fives dropped his helmet and didn’t hesitate to embrace Echo back. Arms tightly holding each other, hearts pressed together and beating in time. Echo could feel Fives’s solid chest and his warmth as if he were awake. Everything felt right in the brief, brief moment. That anchor had returned. That pain in his heart had dulled in his dreaming and been replaced with the warmth of his brother he’d been wishing for. He gripped the edges of his brother’s armour, afraid to let go, to leave this moment. But knew he had to. He’d made a promise.
“I love you, Fives,” he choked out.
He felt Fives’s palm run over his hair as he spoke against his ear. “I know. I love you too. Remember, I’m looking out for you.”
Echo jolted awake. His chest heaved as he tried to remember where he was, and his body ached like it just run a marathon. Across the small corridor, Wrecker slept, soft snores sounding. The nightlight in Omega’s space glowed softly through the curtains, and Hunter had fallen asleep on the floor, his back leaning on the wall next to the ladder, no doubt guarding their sister’s bad dreams. He could hear Tech tinkering away in the cockpit, on watch as they flew through hyperspace. Where was Crosshair?
Oh. Right.
Echo ran a hand over his face and turned towards the wall, his eyes stinging with tears. He curled in on himself, wrapping his arms around his middle, ignoring the bulk of his scomp. He tried to preserve the warmth he felt from his dreams which threatened to evaporate in the chill of hyperspace. He pressed his eyes shut, willing himself to go back into that dream, to return to Fives and get one last look at him, but it was no use. He was here. And Fives was there, or somewhere.
It could’ve been a few minutes or an hour when he heard a voice. “Echo?”
He turned to see Tech looking down at him in his bunk, adjusting his goggles. “What is it, Tech?”
“I’m afraid it’s your turn on watch.”
“Great. Thanks,” Echo grumbled.
He tried to inconspicuously wipe his eyes as he swung his metal legs out of the bunk and stood up, stretching his neck. He watched Tech remove his goggles and rub his eyes and sat down on the edge of Echo’s bunk. They had limited space, and Echo didn’t mind sharing.
“Sweet dreams,” Echo told him as Tech lay down, falling asleep almost immediately, as he tended to do.
Echo walked to the cockpit and shut the door so the light from their travels wouldn’t disturb the others. He sat in the pilot’s seat and sighed, putting his head in his hand, no hair on his head to clasp as he tried to recentre himself. He took in some steady breaths, focusing on a screw in the floor panelling. He did everything he could to quell the turning of his stomach and the throbbing in his chest. Just as quickly as it had filled in his dream, the waking world had returned that giant hole in his chest, seemingly aware that something had filled it again briefly, and now it felt the absence more.
When would this feeling of emptiness end?
The Marauder shifted in its hyperspace travels, tilting off course slightly, triggering some alarms. Echo immediately sprang into action, and his hand and scomp grabbed the controls to steady the ship. With a frown, he checked the stabilisers and saw they needed recalibrating. Didn’t Tech just deal with this mere hours ago? He tried and failed not to get annoyed – he just needed to fix this, and quickly so they didn’t veer off course and fall into a star. He sighed, knowing they’d have to come out of hyperspace for these repairs. Maybe the ship had been more damaged than he thought.
Echo slowly pulled back the hyperdrive lever and the ship came to a halt in open space. He hoped no one woke up with the disturbance and that this wouldn’t take long. They didn’t have time to waste. He placed the Marauder in idle whilst he scomped in and started recalibrating. It was a lot easier now that Tech had upgraded his cerebral interface, so there was less strain on him. He was able to scomp in and load up the commands without much effort. As the commands processed through the system, he watched the stabilisers respond and recalibrate in his mind’s eye.
It was then he felt a shiver run up his spine.
A monitor beeped, interrupting his realignment, and Echo looked at a screen searching for the alert among the pop-ups when he noticed the time.
05:55. Echo’s breath hitched.
He heard the door behind him slide open but didn’t look away from the monitor. He couldn’t.
“Everything okay in here? I felt something,” Hunter’s voice thick with sleep asked.
Echo kept his gaze on the numerals, and he allowed himself to smile, that warmth he’d been longing for slowly filling the hole in his chest.
“It will be,” he told Hunter.
Fives was keeping his promise, so Echo would too.