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Echo has never liked the cold. For as long as he can remember, Echo has always preferred the missions to hot desert planets, no matter how sweaty and sticky he got, he’d always take that over venturing into some ice planet. Fives, on the other hand, adored the cold planets. He’d throw snowballs at the Captain and make snow angels with Commander Tano and Echo has never understood it.
It’s cold here, colder than anything Echo has ever felt before and he can’t stand it. Can’t stand the goosebumps he feels on his skin or the way his bones feel like they’re about to shrivel inside of him. There’s no light either, no indication of day or night or if there’s someone nearby or if Echo is completely alone. It wouldn’t matter anyway. Echo will always be alone now.
There’s no way they made it out alive, no way they could have escaped the Citadel. They were surrounded, last Echo remembers, commando droids on top of them, tanks attacking from all sides. Echo can’t let himself hope, can’t let himself feel anything.
All he can feel now is the unforgiving confines of the pod he’s in and the wires that seem to go deeper than skin. He wonders if this is how he felt as a baby, trapped inside an incubation tube for months. No wonder all his brothers are born insane, Echo reckons he lost his sanity a long time ago.
Because for all his insistence that his friends could never have survived that fateful mission, they certainly visit him an awful lot. Ahsoka swung by earlier, grinning from ear to ear and explaining all about her latest training session with Anakin. Rex joined her as well, floating towards him in the dark abyss that surrounded them.
There’s nothing to see here, nothing to smell, nothing to taste. He hasn’t eaten since the Citadel, though doesn’t think he’s ever felt so full. Rex was talking to him about battle strategy, getting him to recite their plans over and over to be sure they were clear on them. It felt more like an interrogation than a friendly planning session, but Echo knows that Rex has been stressed lately with the war in the Outer Rim worsening by the day.
Now Fives is here, he’s smiling and he’s laughing and Echo tries to do the same but when he smiles, his head hurts. Like something is pulling at his scalp every time his muscles move. So he sticks to listening to the man rambling his bullshit about the girl he had in the bathroom of 79’s last time they were on leave.
‘Love of my life, I’m telling you, Echo. As soon as this war’s over, it’s gonna be me and her,’ Fives is saying with the same look in his eye he gets every couple of months when a new girl catches his eye.
‘I thought that was Sali?’ Echo deadpans and waits for his brother to react, a scowl on his face as he shakes his head.
‘No, no. I never said that,’ Fives insists vehemently. Echo snorts.
‘Sure thing,’ he responds lightly. ‘If it helps you sleep at night,’
Silence.
Echo isn’t sure what he’s said, but it shuts Fives right up. In all his years of knowing his brother, he never knew that Fives had an off switch, but it seems Echo has found it. He’s not sure how.
‘Are you sleeping at night?’ Fives asks suddenly. Now it’s Echo’s turn to scowl.
‘Who are you, my mother?’ he jokes. Fives is meant to laugh at this, but he doesn’t.
‘Are you sleeping at night, Echo?’ Fives repeats. Echo tries to shift away from his brother, only to find that he can’t move in the darkness. It’s holding him in place, pinning him down with invisible hands that he can’t feel but knows are there.
Where is he?
And why is Fives here? Fives is dead, isn’t he? Fives died at the citadel and Echo is starting to think that perhaps he did too. Is this death? Where is everyone else? Where’s Cutup and Droidbait? Is Hevy here?
No, it’s just him and Fives in the darkness. Just him and Fives who want to know if he’s sleeping. And honestly, Echo doesn’t have an answer. He’s always sleeping now, or perhaps he’s always awake. It’s hard to tell the difference, to know when he’s dreaming of his brothers and when they’re actually here with him. It’s all blurring into one.
‘I’m fine, vod. You’re the one who died,’ Echo mutters, trying not to look at the weird way Fives’ eyes are swirling about in his head. There’s something just not quite right about him, but Echo can’t put his finger on it.
‘I’m still here though, aren’t I?’ Fives smirks, proud to have cheated death in Echo’s mind. Or perhaps they have cheated death together. How can anyone tell in this darkness?
‘Always have been,’ Echo grins, holding up his arm, ready for Five’s to meet his hand with his own as he always does. But Echo’s arm isn’t moving, it tries but there’s something metal blocking it and Echo can’t move at all.
He looks down as if he’d be able to see his arm if he tried; the darkness is too thick to see a thing. When Echo looks up again, Fives is gone.
Echo calls for him, over and over, begging for his brother to come back. There’s panic in his chest, gripping his lungs and squeezing the air out of them until there’s nothing left.
There’s nothing left. Echo isn’t moving, isn’t seeing, isn’t breathing. Echo isn’t anymore. Everyone’s dead and Echo can’t tell if he’s there with them and if he isn’t he prays he will be soon. Let this be over, let it all end, he’s ready for it to end. Ready for it to all be done.
Echo just wants to be done now.
***
The darkness stretches on in front of Echo and it doesn’t end. It never ends. It goes on and on and on, second after second, minute after minute. Time doesn’t exist here. Nothing exists. It’s just darkness and his friends. They still visit, in fact, they rarely leave him alone. Echo thinks they’ve learned that he doesn’t like it when they leave him alone. If none of the others are around, Fives will always make sure to be here with him. Even if he doesn’t say anything, he’ll just stand there with his swirling eyes and too many fingers and Echo will know that even in this endless expanse of loneliness, he isn’t alone. He’ll never be alone as long as he has Fives.
And then Echo is falling. Lurching forward blinding light streams in, attacking his eyes with a brutal force that has him crying out. There are people talking all of a sudden, Echo can see things but he doesn’t know what they are. People? Lights? Wires? Echo doesn’t know. He wants his darkness back. Where did Fives go?
Echo calls for Fives again, he never strays far anymore, so where is he? Where’s Fives? Why is he not here?
The light doesn’t last long. It’s soon enough that the strange shapes moving about fade away and the darkness returns, pulling Echo down with it and he goes gladly.
Echo wakes up in a hospital bed, thin sheets laid over top of him and bright lights beaming down on him once more. A hand comes up to shield his eyes, it’s silver and shiny and surely not his, but upon further inspection it is, in fact, attached to his blurry shoulder joint.
‘Easy, soldier,’ a voice says and the lights grow dimmer. Echo lowers the arm. ‘You’re safe now, back at base. Kix has patched you up,’
Rex is back. Rex hasn’t come to visit in a while. Ahsoka comes a lot, often with Anakin, and Jesse is often with Echo. Still, it’s normally Fives. Fives isn’t here.
‘No, vod, Fives isn’t here,’ Rex tells him. Rex can read his mind now? ‘There was, ah… an incident… it was a while back now, yeah. He didn’t make it, Echo. Fives is gone, I’m sorry,’
It’s cold again. Echo doesn’t like the cold. He can’t really see, either, everything’s blurry and simultaneously too dark to see yet too bright to focus. His head hurts. Everything hurts.
Fives is dead.
The words roll around his head for a while, he tries to say them over and over so he can believe it. But it’s hard to believe a man is dead when he’s always following Echo around. He laughs when Echo does stupid things, when other people do stupid things too. He laughs at everything just like he always has. And he talks a lot. Fives makes inane comments about passing officers, pokes fun at shinies who get lost in the hallways. He tells Echo to get a grip when his new mechanical hand can’t quite grab a hold of something.
Learning to walk is difficult. Rex is there with Kix and a specialist physiotherapist they’ve brought in from Kamino, but Fives is the one who cheers him on the loudest. And also the one who laughs himself silly when Echo falls flat on his arse.
Echo tells him to shut up and everyone else exchanges weird glances that Echo doesn’t understand. Once Echo gets the hang of it, which he does quite quickly, walking becomes easy again. He quite likes it now, after not being able to move for what Rex tells him has been over a year, it’s nice to choose where he gets to go. To choose what he wants to eat after not needing to for so long. Rex has to remind him to eat, though. He forgets that he needs to now. The doctors say that he should be gaining weight, not losing it.
He’s only been home a few days when Hunter offers him a new squad. Echo can see himself being a Bad Batcher. Fives will love going on missions with them. Even if he’ll never admit it, he can tell that Fives admires the way Crosshair can handle a sniper rifle.
So Echo goes with Hunter, slots himself into a crew who already work together seamlessly, and tries to find his place with them. It doesn’t get easier, but having Fives helps. Echo still wants it to just end, often wishes his darkness would come back. Fives doesn’t talk to him about it, they mostly talk about the rest of the Batchers. Wrecker and his snoring, Crosshair and his borderline obsessive gun cleaning, and so on. Of course, these conversations are not any that the others can hear, though Echo often catches them staring when he’s talking to Fives. Their mutations don’t involve being psychic, do they?
They often play Sabacc too and he thrashes Fives every time with shocking ease. The only game Fives wins is the first game, but when Echo reminds him that he always loses, he never wins again. Although, one night when he looks up from the soft glow of the holotable, he finds Fives looking at him strangely. He doesn’t look like Fives in this light. His hair looks browner and he’s wearing Tech’s weird fuckass glasses. He doesn’t question it.
Hunter tries to talk to him sometimes, asks him what it was like on Skako Minor, and tries to say that it will get better. Echo knows he means well, but there’s only one person he needs and that man is always by his side. So Echo’s doing just fine.
Maybe he’s ready for it to be over, for the darkness to return and take him and Fives far far away, but Echo is fine. He never fails a mission, hits every target he needs to, and learns to live with less than half of his original parts. It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t want to do this anymore. It’s what he was born for, and it’s what he’ll do until the day he dies. And when that day comes, he’ll return happily to the darkness, with Fives at his side for evermore.