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the wreckage of you

Summary:

"It’s easy to survive. It’s easy to breathe and put one in front of the other.

It’s hard to live, though."

 

part 37 of domino

Notes:

title from noah kahan's halloween (which i have used for these two before in this series but damn yall. this song belongs to them)

 

But the wreckage of you I no longer reside in
The bridges have long since been burnt
The ash of the home that I started the fire in
It starts to return to the earth

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

They are Fives and Echo–ARCs of the 501st, two faces in a sea of mirrored men, two men who have stood central to the wars of the galaxy, who have reshaped the world with their hands, digging their teeth in and never daring to let go.  

 

They are twins, they are eyayah’e of one another–rayshe’a’e and eyayah, born together, buried under the same war, brought forth in the same hours. Some of the jettise who see them see also that connection, that deep-rooted thread between the two ARCs of the 501st, between two men who are alike in so many ways–not limited to the impacts that they have had on that war that sought to bury them both, once upon a time.

 

They are two men who both should have died. 

— — — — —

Fives remembers getting shot in a series of hazy, half-released pieces of his memories. The bolt coming towards him, Fox’s face shifting, Rex’s intelligible scream, the sight of the bolt tearing through the plastoid over his chest and–

 

The pain, of course. 

 

Agony is the truest memory of it. Just this brief, indescribable moment of raging, awful pain that threatened to consume him whole. Then it did and he fell under black waves, his fingers reaching out to brush death. Then he was pulled back.

 

The aftermath is strange. He feels pieced together, staring at the walls of the room he’s been sequestered into by the Jedi. He’s about to crawl at the walls and lose hold of what little sanity he thinks he has left to him. But he does not.

 

He recovers. He’s let out into the world, let out into a world that has been shattered under him and entirely remade before his eyes. He keeps on going, keeps on surviving, keeps on doing as he’s done for months on end, like a sort of robot. But he learns a lesson, in that time. 

 

It’s easy to survive. It’s easy to breathe and put one in front of the other. It’s easy to go through the motions, stuck in some infernal loop of maddening monotony, pierced by promises of contentedness and reassurances as to your state. It’s easy to play a game of pretend where your audience is deluding themselves just as much because it’s not bitter to swallow.

 

It’s hard to live, though.

 

Even when Echo comes back.  

— — — — —

What Echo recalls is a long, drawn-out, and painful saga of blood and gore. 

 

Oh, he remembers the explosion. He remembers gritting his teeth and planting his feet with only the thought of what was ahead for him filling his mind. But he remembers the aftermath, too. He remembers the whirring of saws, mechanical voices, remembers the inferno of pain that became the only reality left to him.

 

He remembers a sea of numbers. He remembers the cold and he remembers the rescue, too. No one had ever accused him of being forgetful, but in this matter, it has become his curse. Damned to recall it all, in both mind and body. The aches still remain, tearing him apart when he’s got his guard down.

 

Some days, as he lays in his bed, feeling agony course through him like the waves of Kamino, crashing against the pillars that uphold those white halls, he thinks he’d be better off in an endless oblivion. He thinks of all the ways he could make it better, thinks of all the ways he could taper it off or even just end it all.

 

But he does not.

 

One, because the Jedi are smart. They’re not going to give him a bag of narcotics and just cut him loose. Any and all meds he takes are regulated, and he’s not stupid enough to not know it comes from one man in particular.

 

Rex knows him well. He knows Fives, too, knows his weaknesses. And they are twins–rayshe’a’e and eyayah–and the Captain of the 501st is not stupid enough that he cannot see how one’s tendencies might manifest in another. So he sits there and he comes to realise, each and every time, that he can either wallow and die or find a way to go forward.

 

And so, in comes his second reason.

 

Eyayah?” Fives asks him as he cracks open the door. Echo looks towards his twin in the doorway, eyes dark and half open, mirrors of the eyes that are looking over him with worry and love and care. Fives comes sweeping in, a smile playing across his face, the planes of his face highlighted by the light bleeding in from the crack in the curtains. 

 

Echo intertwines his hand–his good one, the one that is flesh and bone–with Fives’s the second his twin sits at his bedside. Fives runs the calloused pad of his thumb over his knuckles, looking down at him with a smile. And somehow, Echo finds a way to smile back at him.

 

Fives has some meds. He sits him up, watches with his ARC eyes as Echo swallows them down with the proffered water. And then, when he is done and the meds are done, Echo leans forward, resting his head on Fives’s shoulder, feeling his body relax, at peace at last.

 

“I’m glad you’re here,” Echo says. Fives’s eyes flicker down to him, gaze dark and heady, a thousand galaxies and a thousand thoughts behind them. Sometimes, Echo considers he’s the only person who can truly puzzle out the mystery and the pattern of Fives–and Fives is the only one who can return the favour to Echo. 

 

Today is not an easy day. His body feels like it’s all on fire, misaligned and disconnected. He doesn’t have the implants on, so the fact that he could hear Fives means his twin was talking loudly–because he already knew. Fives is just like that–kind and knowing what Echo needs even when he can’t put it into words.

 

They’re close enough now, though, that Fives’s voice is clear even though he’s not speaking all too loudly.

 

“I’m always here, aren’t I?” Fives replies.

 

They do not think of the months apart. Of the blood and the pain. It’s nothing, now.

 

“Yeah,” Echo says, already drifting asleep. 

— — — — —

God, what isn’t there to say about Echo? Saviour, saint, his better half–the one man who can pick him apart one moment, who can hit where it hurts, but the one man who can also pick him back together. It’s part of the nature of who and what they are, part of them being twins, being eyayah’e.  

 

Fives thinks about all the things he could say as Echo pries the drink out of his hand, as he scoops his arm around his shoulders and hauls him up with the strength befitting of an ARC. Echo may be narrower than him–all lithe and corded muscle, whereas Fives has always been broader, even before it all–but his strength has never been in question.

 

Echo gives a lazy salute towards the bartender as he slaps down some credits to cover Five’s tab. He’s in armour waist down, kama and all, but he’s got his blacks up top. Not unlike Fives, although he’s got a nice jacket on top as well. Or, he did.

 

“Jacket,” Fives manages to say before they go out. Echo’s eyes flicker over 79’s– ARC eyes, eyes like bullets, never to miss their mark or much of anything else –until they land on the droid manning the coat closet. A new addition, certainly, but it has, reportedly, resulted in a lessening of the objects in the lost and found.

 

Echo leaves him to lean against the wall as he grabs his jacket. When he comes back with it, he helps Fives shoulder it on. He’s stone-cold sober and he’s acting more like an ARC than just another brother now, but he’s still Five’s twin. And that’s why he can see the worry and the care and put it together that it was not just by chance that Echo came by to pick him up right as he was getting deep in the drinks.

 

Someone called up. Someone always calls up. The vode know one another and look out for one another, and he’s got a growing suspicion that in the scene of guys who go to 79’s with regularity, there’s a group who they all know to watch. They know to slip a tip to someone who can call, so their vod doesn’t end up somewhere they can’t crawl out of.

 

The Corries know, as well. He’s been picked up by Thorn and Sye more than once and they hadn’t been subtle about it any time. The Corries know the drunks, know the faces who colour their drunk tank with regularity. And if it's a void in that cycle of regulars, you can be damn sure they’ve got their sites on him.

 

Fives will feel agitated about this later. Right now, he’s just glad that Echo’s here and he’s taking him home. He could do it a hundred and one times and it will never not feel like a blessing.

 

Echo is brusque and to the point when they get home. He deposits him on his bed, throws a towel at his limp form and tells him, in no uncertain terms, to take a shower. Fives peers up at him through half-lidded eyes and gives a little smile that Echo responds to with a wry grin.

 

It’s just how they are, really. Echo is straight to the point, full of hard edges and conviction. Not a single breath is wasted or a word minced. He says what he means and means what he says. Then there’s Fives–who someone once said was like the wind. Going with the flow, rubbing elbows with anyone he could, with a laugh that did little to hide the glint in his eyes.

 

They’re both dangerous. They’re both cunning and sly in their own ways, but Fives’s reputation as a friendly man (as a drunk, too) softens the edges for the people who look at him. They don’t always register the truth of his danger until they see the cold mask of an ARC come hard and heavy over him. There’s no doubting the danger of Echo.

 

Two ARCs. Two twins, spinning around the same axis of reality and sanity. Picking one another up in the darkest moments, teaching them what it's like to live, filling in the gaps.

 

There’s no replacing ARC pairs when they’re twins. Colt said that to him, once. He looked at him and then at Echo, in the middle of a spar with Commander Havoc. He’d put his hand on his shoulder and looked at him with those dark, fierce eyes and said, You lose him and you won’t ever get it back.

 

And he didn’t. Echo died at the Citadel and Fives marched on alone. A lone ARC. A tragedy. 

— — — — —

There is a difference between who they are to one another, to the people they’re close with, and who they are to the rest of the GAR. Fives and Echo are very different people from the twin Lieutenant ARCs of the 501st, because they have to be. Those ARCs are like walls of beskar–impenetrable, unbroken, unbeaten.

 

Fives and Echo, the people they are in truth–the people behind the plastoid and the kama and the pauldrons and the paint–on the other hand…

 

Echo does not say anything as he wraps his twin’s knuckles. Fives’s head is tilted back so it rests against the wall, bearing his throat to the stale air of the refresher. In the harsh lighting, the beads of sweat and the dried tracks of blood are made all that more clear against his brown skin. Echo does not look at it, does not say anything, for if he does, he may just weep. 

 

So, silence reigns over the pair of them. Fives’s eyes are on the ceiling, dark and indiscriminate, caught on something Echo does not care to know about, right now. Right now, his mind is bent on the wrapping in his hand, on the warmth of his twin’s hand in his. 

 

When all is said and done, he sits back. Like this, his knees bracket one of Fives’s, and the light of the refresher makes the metal joint stand out all that much more. Echo takes a deep, calming breath and then leans forward so his brow rests against the cold metal.

 

Then Fives shifts. Echo does not look up, does not so much as move as his twin moves closer. Then Fives’s chin is resting on the top of his head, his hands are gently ghosting over his shoulder blades and well–Echo thinks he can be content with this. 

— — — — —

The loneliness is what almost killed him, in the end.

 

Not the alcohol. Not the shot in his heart. Not any of the other things that came after The Citadel and the numerous times the world seemed to end before he could do anything about it. No, it was the absence and the aching within him, the distant longing for something he would never get back that almost broke him in two.

 

He’d been careening for a long time. Rex and Kix knew it, of course, but he’s no fool and he could see behind Cody and Jesse and Hardcase’s gentle prods and worried looks and hands on his back. He knew what they were looking for every time they looked into his eyes, knew why he could see desperation and love in the eyes he shares with them.

 

And then, like a miracle, out of the dark and out of the nightmare, there came a ray of hope. There came the whisper of four numbers that struck him right into his heart–1409, the number in tandem with his soul, the exact value and shape of the man he’d lost. 

 

And now Echo’s back. Now Fives’s loneliness may just be able to abate.

 

Echo isn’t awake. A heart monitor beeps quietly in rhythm with his twin's heart, in a rhythm Fives thinks he could pick out from a crowd. His hand–his good hand, the only limb that his little brother has left–is intertwined loosely with his, wires and tubes coming out of it, making Fives’s stomach roll.

 

The heart monitor woke him up last night. But tonight, he’s still on anaesthetics from his last surgery, and he’s going to be out for a little while, still. Kix’ll have it out of here long before then. For now, though, Fives calms himself with the gentle rhythm and with the impossibility of what he’s holding in his hands.


He presses a soft kiss to his twin’s hands. The moon shines outside, bright and beautiful and as real as anything, casting the world in silver. Fives sits there, waiting and watching.

— — — — —

They are twins. They were born together and then separated by fire and flame, both of them reborn and remade by blasts from another gun. Brought together again in a flurry of tears and blaster fire, brought back to the only place they belong in.

 

Some nights, they sit and look out over Coruscant, counting stars and telling of dreams. Some nights they sit together on the floor of the refresher, one of them nursing the aftermath of their own choices, the other watching on with eyes dark with worry and love. Every night, even when they’re separated by stars and the emptiness of space, they carry one another.

 

The galaxy did not manage to break them. Even destruction could not destroy them. And so, here they remain–twins. Dominoes. Fives and Echo. 

Notes:

i miss domino guys. like i have missed this series so so so much and i was at the point in the last week or so where i was like i need to put something out or i may just go insane. i may have other wips to update for...but hey, a little domino never hurt anyone. and if i can work through my Feelings with a series that means so much to me...hell yeah. at any rate, here's a little bit on our baby boys. just some introspection, really.

I am now also on tumblr

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