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Sister knows a disaster when she sees it; she's been through enough of them with the 212th. It's just that she's never had a disaster of this magnitude happen to her.
There's so much blood. It slicks her gloves until they're soaked, streaks across her armor until the pink and blue brushstrokes are entirely gone. And her heart. It's pounding in her ears so fiercely that she can feel the veins there ticking, feel her skin pulsating with each beat.
She scrambles out of the wreckage, but she's dizzy and her visor's busted, and everything feels wrong. Everything's too tight, too constricting. Her body's hot and cold all at once. And her head hurts like a kriffing clanker just walloped her in the face.
The helmet comes off and clatters atop the cobbles she's crashed upon. Then her knees give out.
The world is hazy now, distant and far away. Something in the back of her mind screams that this is bad, but she can't find it in her to care. Somehow, that seems bad too.
With the last of her strength, she forces her eyes open and fixates on the burning wreckage of her ship. Hardly a ship now when it's busted into pieces and melting all over the forest floor. But she made it, she realizes in a moment of clarity, and that makes her smile. Even if she dies here, even if this is the end of her story, she's proud to have made it this far. She escaped the Empire and that was all she wanted.
Well. Almost.
A breeze comes drifting through the leaves then and as it stirs her hair, Sister finds herself regretting just one last thing. She wishes she could have seen you again.
"We need a medic!"
Whatever was left of your tiingilar goes spilling across the table as Samson, Greer, and Koa breach the main entrance, half tripping over themselves as they carry a- is that kriffing body? Fireball swipes the remainder of his shit off the table - a data pad, his helmet, his own empty bowl - while you run for the nearest medpac.
"She's bleeding out. I need gauze!"
It doesn't hit you until the moment you return, when you see her, what he's said. She.
The body. The body wearing clone armor, painted blue and pink at the joints and chest, covered in blood. Is it her own? Utterly frozen, your eyes drop to the chestplate that's scored with dirt and vibroblade marks, chipped with paint that you know like the back of your own hand. Maker help you, you know that armor. You know her. Even without the armor, you'd know her.
The medpac is ripped from your hands and someone's grabbing you, shouting at you, but you can't hear a single thing they're saying because she is everything - everything you see, everything your universe contains - and she is bleeding out on the table where you take your meals each day.
You reach for her, but you never manage to grab hold. "Sister," you say, but the word is gritty and raw, dry in your mouth. "Sister. She's..." You don't even dare to say it for fear of speaking the nightmare into existence. But she's bloody and pale, and she's not waking up. And you know she's probably going to die. "Help her."
It's then that you realize why you can't reach her. It's Echo. He's holding you back, a hand wrapped around your elbow and the scomp on your back. You turn to him, but you don't see him, can't see him. All you see is her. Her hair, her eyes, closed but you know they're dark and warm beneath the lids. You know the path of her scars and the shape of her callouses, and she's here and you can't find her, and you can't see Echo, and it's all too much because it's all so wrong.
"Echo," you start. You're squirming as he fights to hold you back. "Echo, she's, she's not... She's bleeding. Help her."
"Samson's got her taken care of," he assures you. "You need to give him room to work."
But you shake your head. "No." That's not right either. "She needs me."
She's dying. Why else would there be so much blood?
"What she needs is for you to give them space to save her. She'll be alright."
And maybe she will be. Perhaps in some other dimension, she makes it out of this alive, but that's not here, that's not now. Here and now, you're watching the woman you love bleed out on the dinner table and it's the first time you've seen her since before the Republic collapsed. And you'll be damned if you're not by her side the entire time.
Echo doesn't seem to see it the same way, and that's what gets you detained in a holding zone for the next hour.
"She's stable now," he tells you once he returns to let you out. "You okay?"
Kriff no, you're not okay. Your stomach is churning and the whole inside of your cheek is raw from chewing on it, and your leg won't stop bouncing nor will your heart stop pounding. Because you really thought you'd lost her.
But for his sake, you attempt a polite grimace. "Yeah. Can I see her?"
His palm flattens against the door controls. Heart in your throat, you follow him across the compound to the table she rests on. All of her armor's been removed and stacked in a vaguely neat pile along the nearby supply crates, but it's still stained with blood, all crusty and rusted pink. Her body is crisscrossed with gauze strips and bacta patches, her blacks torn to shreds to the point where they're hardly useful anymore. But she's there, alive, and realer than any dream you've had before.
"Cyare."
Your hand finds her jaw before you even realize you're doing it. And for a moment, one singular, fleeting moment, it's as if you're back on Coruscant, as if this war had never happened, as if she's just got back from deployment and you're welcoming her into your flat. The way it used to be. The way it should have been.
"What happened to you?" you ask, though there's no one to answer you. Sister may be alive, but she's thoroughly unconscious and likely will be for a while if her injuries are anything to go by.
Your hands find one of hers and lift it to your mouth to press a kiss there, like you always used to do, but your lips are met with gauze. And it breaks your fucking heart.
"It's okay. It's okay, baby." You kiss the wrinkled slip of gauze across her knuckles. "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."
Keeping busy is the only thing you can do. Your mind is too scattered to be of much use to anyone, so your usual duties are taken over by Greer, and the time spent anxiously waiting for Sister to wake is used on other things that won't drive you mad - checking her injuries and changing her bandages, scrubbing the blood from her armor, quietly whispering all the things you've longed to share with her in the year she's been gone. You tell her how you found Rex, the work you did in the early days of his rebellion shuttling food and clothes to the Martez repair shop. You tell her about the brothers that were lost and the brothers that were found, how every day you hoped and prayed you'd find her among the clones fleeing the Empire. You tell her that you never gave up searching, never stopped believing you'd find her again. You tell her you love her, but it's not enough to wake her.
Rex takes the empty end of the bench. "How're you holding up?"
The truth is too painful to verbalize, so you opt for a half-truth instead. "I'm okay. I'm just glad she's here."
He nods, almost smiling, but it doesn't reach his eyes. "You want me to watch her for a while?"
"No," you say far too quickly, and with a frantic urgency that should be embarrassing. It's not. Not when it's her. "Sorry. I just, I wanna be here when she wakes up."
A dozen different strings of thought seem to cross his mind then, though he doesn't speak any of them. Whatever he's thinking, he ultimately chooses to keep to himself. "I understand. It's not easy being the one who has to wait."
No, it's not.
"I'd suggest you take a break and get some sleep, but you're not gonna listen. Are you?"
You could apologize for it, but you'd both know it to be a lie. Instead, you offer Rex a smile that says everything you don't know how to say. He sighs.
"Once she's up. I promise."
"Alright." His hand rests gently on your shoulder and then he's gone.
Your attention returns to Sister, to the gentle rise and fall of her chest that marks a rhythm so familiar it might as well be carved into your very bones. "You'll be up soon, huh?" You lean in to nuzzle your cheek against the upper swell of her arm. "It'll be okay, cyare. I promise."
But by now, you're not sure if it's a promise you can keep. The Empire has taken so much from all of you, it would make sense for it to take her too. If you had never known she was still alive, it might have been easier. If you had been forced to endure the rest of your days believing in a dream that could never be, it might have been endurable, but now that you know she's been alive all this time, now that you know she tried to come to Teth and join the uprising, you're not sure you could ever know a moment of peace if she died here.
She has to live. There is no other option.
Hope comes late at night when the stars are out and your body has given in to exhaustion. You're stirred from your slumber when your head thunks solidly on the table. Still half asleep, you jerk into a sitting position and look around in an attempt to assess the situation. Is it an attack? Is something wrong? Is Sister alright?
"Mmh, where... am I?"
That voice. Oh Maker, that voice, you'd know it anywhere. You fear for the longest moment that it's a figment of your imagination, the product of your sleep-addled mind conjuring hallucinations, that this is all just another dream, but no. No, it's real. She's awake and blinking, frowning. She's alive.
You're so frantic to stand that you nearly trip over yourself trying to extract your legs from the bench. "Sister? Baby, are you-?"
"'s so dark," she slurs. "Can't... Where...?"
You're shouting before you even realize it. "Rex! Rex, she's awake!" You're so happy, you could cry. You are crying. "Cyare, honey, it's okay. It's me."
Her head tilts to one side, then the other as she tries to assess her surroundings, but it's clear she's struggling. A concussion, one of her brothers had said, a side effect of the crash that had nearly cost her life. Between that and the dimmed lights, it would be a miracle if she could make out anything in the entire compound.
Her furrowed gaze settles on you a moment later, only without a shred of recognition. "Who, who are you?"
Your heart is shattering. Every broken shard of it is piercing through your skin, ripping you apart from the inside out. Does she truly not remember you?
You press one of her hands to your face. "It's me, Sister, your..." Her what, exactly? There had never been a true label on the thing that simmered between you. In your head and in your heart, she had quite simply been yours as you had been hers. Now, though, you wish for a word deeper than girlfriend and more vibrant than lover. "You remember me?"
Rex, Nemec, and Samson come running in then with a couple of spare medpacs and wide, frantic eyes. Rex wordlessly asks for your hand - to take you away, no doubt, to let their brothers check her over. You know they need to, you know she needs the medical attention more than she needs you, but you hate having to leave her.
"No, wait, Rex, I can stay. Let me stay."
"That's not a good idea," he answers with a shake of his head. He's already starting to pull you away. "She'll be fine. Let's just give the boys some space, alright?"
You lunge for her hand as you're maneuvered apart. "Cyare, cyare, it's okay! It's okay, just stay awake for me, baby, okay? Rex, lemme-"
"Is that...?" It's as if your voice is a magnet, drawing her up until she's sitting upright, blindly searching the room for - for you? Your name is desperate on her tongue in the worst possible way. "Can't be..."
"Easy, vod," says Samson with a hand at her collarbone. "Lay back. You're still pretty roughed up."
Nemec leans in with a bacta stim. "Talk to me, Sister, okay? Can you do that?"
She frowns as she's laid back down. You've stopped struggling by now, but it's more from your own shock than anything else. This all feels too real and somehow not real enough. You're watching her as if through a lens, as if she were far away, as if your reality has ceased to exist while she wades through her the uncertainty of her own.
"What's the last thing you remember?"
Sister grunts when Samson starts swiping disinfectant over one of her wounds. "My ship... They shot me right before I, I went to hyperspace, and then..." She starts to sit up again, but Nemec holds her down. "Where is she?"
"Your ship crashed in the jungle. Not much of it left, I'm afraid."
"No." She says your name again, softer this time, as Rex's arms tighten around you. "She was here, but... She can't be." You know the separation is for the best, that you'd be little more than a distraction if you were free, but it kills you just the same.
The two brothers exchange looks.
"Made sure of it," she mutters, and her head falls back against the table. "'s not safe."
You strain against the press of the Captain's vambraces, but he holds fast. "Rex, please."
Nemec offers her a comforting pat on the shoulder. "It's alright, vod, you're safe now. The Empire's not gonna find you here. We'll get you all taken care of."
But she keeps babbling, mumbling half-finished sentences that don't make any sense, about Kamino, Coruscant, the Empire, you. She keeps asking for you as if she were indeed still stuck in a dream, caught somewhere else where the world is vast and hope is a sure thing.
"Promised her I'd come back. Never, never did. Now she's far away." She smiles in the prettiest way she ever has, half delirious and broken, and you swear nothing's ever hurt so much as this does. "She's... she's like, like starlight."
Samson's head tilts in your direction, eyes dark and tired, but you think he might be inclined to smile. He applies another bacta patch to the worst of the wounds with gentle, steady hands. "Tell us about her."
"She's gone," she laments. "She'll forget about me. 's, 's for the best..."
Later, though, when the boys are gone and she's lucid, you'll tell her just how wrong she is. You'll tell her how you would have waited a lifetime for her, you'll tell her that she's too deeply imprinted on your heart for you to ever love another. And you'll hold her 'til the stars fall from the sky, 'til the universe crumbles around you. You'll tell her that she is the truest starlight you've ever known, always illuminating the darkest night with her brilliantly shimmering heart and her undying hope. You'll tell her that she walks in starlight in another world, and you're simply blessed to follow along in her wake.