Work Text:
Fours discovers Guard culture has rules nobody bothered to write down.
The written rules occupy twelve encrypted manuals and an annotated collection Thire guards like scripture. Fours can memorize regulations.
The unwritten rules are a problem.
“You can’t sit there,” Relay says.
Fours pauses halfway into a break-room chair. “Why?”
“That’s Ghost’s.”
Ghost isn’t in the room.
Her helmet is.
It rests on the table facing the chair, black-and-red visor reflecting Fours back at himself.
“That’s not the same as her sitting there.”
Relay gives him the patient look of someone supporting a difficult brother. “Sit there and tell her that.”
Fours chooses another chair.
Penny shakes her head.
“Thorn naps there.”
“He isn’t here either.”
“Do you want him sleeping on you?”
Fours moves again.
This one remains uncontested.
He lowers himself cautiously. “In the 501st, if you left a chair empty, somebody took it.”
“In the Guard, if you leave a chair empty, somebody is probably under it.”
A hand emerges beneath the table and steals a ration bar from Penny’s tray.
Fours jerks.
Penny kicks the hand.
“Ow,” Moth complains from the floor.
“You have your own.”
“Mine tastes like insulation.”
“They all taste like insulation.”
Relay sits beside Fours as though none of this is strange.
Everyone here acts as if strange things are normal and normal things are suspicious.
Yesterday, Fours offered to help a patrol trooper remove his armor after a seventy-hour shift. The trooper stared before asking what Fours wanted.
This morning, Ink handed him caf, then threatened to tattoo idiot across his back if he skipped medical again.
Fours still doesn’t know whether she likes him.
“She does,” Relay says.
Fours looks over. “Was that out loud?”
“Yes.”
“Great.”
“You’re getting better.”
“At losing internal monologue?”
“At asking whether people mean what they say.”
That lands closer than Fours wants.
He tears open his ration bar. The wrapper bears his new designation.
ARC-01-4444.
Fours.
Fives is dead. Officially, publicly, permanently. Killed while resisting arrest after attacking the Chancellor.
The 501st mourned him.
Rex mourned him.
Echo would have mocked the name before punching Fox for selecting it.
Fours bites into the ration bar and discovers Moth was correct about the insulation.
Across the room, Ghost appears without making a sound.
Fours chokes.
She takes her chair.
“Briefing in six,” she says.
Then she looks beneath the table.
“Moth.”
“I’m resting.”
“You’re assigned to Logistics.”
“I’m hiding from Logistics.”
“Five.”
Moth crawls out immediately.
Fours watches him leave. “Why did five work?”
“Ghost was counting how many seconds he had before she dragged him out,” Relay explains.
“She started at five?”
“She’s generous today.”
Ghost’s gaze tilts toward Fours.
“You’re on Senate patrol after briefing.”
Fours frowns. “I’m SpecOps.”
“When SpecOps isn’t deployed, SpecOps fills vacancies.”
“Senate patrol?”
“Under Thire.”
“You’re putting me near senators?”
Relay’s knee bumps his beneath the table.
A reminder.
Breathe first. Decide whether the danger is real second.
Fours forces air into his lungs.
The Chancellor’s office flashes behind his eyes. A needle. A drugged haze. Palpatine’s voice turning every true word into madness.
His fingers tighten around the ration bar.
Ghost notices.
“You won’t be alone,” she says. “Relay is assigned with you.”
Fours looks over.
Relay shrugs. “Emotional support.”
“You’re a sergeant.”
“Emotional support sergeant.”
Penny snorts into her caf.
Fours lowers his voice. “What if someone recognizes me?”
“They won’t,” Ghost says.
“You can’t guarantee that.”
“No. I can guarantee what happens if they do.”
The room quiets, not tense but certain.
Fours heard frontliners promise to die for each other. The Guard offers something different. Containment. Extraction. Denial. Security doors closing between him and anyone who tries to reclaim Fives’ corpse.
Relay leans closer. “First rule of Guard culture. We protect our own.”
“I thought Ghost’s chair was the first rule.”
“That’s survival. Different category.”
Fours looks at him.
Relay’s face tattoo makes anonymity impossible. His old name is dead, but the 501st would recognize Dogma instantly.
“How do you do it?” Fours asks.
“Badly at first.”
“And now?”
“Still badly. Just with better armor.”
Fours laughs before he can stop himself.
Ghost rises. “Briefing.”
The room empties. Moth reappears wearing a Logistics vest and spiritual defeat.
Fours stands.
His armor waits in the equipment bay, black and red where blue used to be. ARC-01-4444 is stamped inside the chest plate.
It still feels like wearing somebody else’s life.
Relay falls into step beside him.
Nobody here asks Fours to stop missing the 501st. Nobody tells Relay to stop being Dogma in the private corners of his own head.
The Guard understands ghosts.
It is full of them.
Fours squares his shoulders and follows Relay toward briefing.
Maybe adjustment doesn’t mean becoming someone new.
Maybe it means learning that the dead are allowed to keep living.