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Fox’s right hand spasms, fingers twitching in towards his palm. The sound of them dragging over the table is so soft to be almost inaudible, but it rips violently through the oppressive silence of the room. If it were anyone else Fives would pretend not to see, avert his eyes and ignore the involuntary twitch.
It spasms again and Fives stares.
Fox curls his hand into a fist, knuckles stark through his skin, but it only partially conceals the continuing spasms. He won’t take his hand off the table, not while he knows Fives is watching. It’s too late to hide the weakness but not too late to disguise how much it torments him.
Fives already knows. He knows because he wears it with the same stubborn resentment Fives bares his own lasting injuries.
Not like Echo though, Echo is a different matter entirely. He wants people to have to look.
“This isn’t sustainable,” Fox says at last. He speaks like it hurts, like his voice scraps raw across his throat. Did he ruin his voice the same time he ruined the nerves of his hand?
“Neither is any alternative." Echo sits straight, hand and scomp on the table. Fives leans back in his chair, slouching deeper the straighter Echo sits. Across from them Fox doesn’t move.
“For you,” Fox says. He manages to wrap so much inside so little, more than Fives wants to untangle. How many men has he ordered to death with as few words?
He hadn’t needed any for Fives. He’d taken that shot himself.
“For how much longer do you think you can keep this up alone?” Fives asks. They’ve all been running from the Empire for a long time, but it gets harder every day, gaps they used to slip through tightening like nooses around them. Fox might have the ship, and the connections to the Bounty Hunting Guild, but he doesn’t have anyone to watch his back. Fives and Echo have that, even if they don’t have the rest. Separately they’re vulnerable, together they stand a chance.
Even if the Empire is almost more of a preferable option to Fox. The issue is in that almost.
“Fine,” Fox agrees. He uncurls his fist, nails leaving crescent moons marked onto his palm, hand finally still again. “But you earn your keep.”
Sometimes, Fives hopes whatever caused the nerve damage hurt.
He tries not to hope it too often. He’s not very good at it.
—
Echo and Fox are going to fuck. Fives sees it before either of them do. They’re two astronomical bodies in a decaying orbit around each other. Their mutual destruction is inescapable even in the moments they circle further apart. They prowl around each other, a fight brewing in the silence, something vicious that won’t be satisfied with just cruel words. It might not truly be satisfied with both of them still able to walk away from it, but on that point they’ll have to settle.
If anyone is going to kill Fox it will be Fives. Echo can’t take that from him, no matter how much he might want to. So they’ll fuck instead and it will change little or it will make everything so much worse.
Fives fucks Fox first. It’s going to happen, he can’t stop it, and this might make it easier to accept.
When Fives imagines Fox he’s always in full armour. The familiar, comforting silhouette twisted by blood red paint into something dangerous. Fox sits cross-legged in the pilot seat of his ship, minding the controls that don’t need minding, in a grey flight suit buttoned right up to his throat. It’s a little tight across the shoulders material stretched taught, but too long in the arms, the cuffs hanging down to the first knuckle of his thumb.
The bright lights of hyperspace cast the cockpit in a pale blue. They wash Fox out, deepening the purple under his eyes and the pasty quality of his skin.
It taints the image of the armour that Fives hates so much.
Echo and Fox are inevitable, he and Fox aren’t. He chooses it, even knowing he’ll regret it. Echo is in the tiny fresher, the sonic rattling. There’s no hiding anything on a ship of this size, but by the time Echo hears what’s happening, he won’t be able to stop it.
Fives closes the cockpit door, but doesn't lock it. Fox’s mouth curls, ready for a fight. Fives sinks to his knees and takes Fox in his mouth and it might just be worth it for the look of shock on Fox’s face. He finishes Fox off in the cockpit and then presses him down into the bunk. The bunk Fives has been sharing with Echo since they got here. Fox’s bunk.
He regrets it more than he expects.
He fucks Fox from behind, but it’s a preformative position. The rasp of Fox’s voice is mirrored in how he moans, and the weakness of his right hand revealed in the contrast between the bruises it marks on Fives’ skin in comparison to his left hand. Fox will notice how quickly Fives gets out of breath. He’ll know why. He’ll picture the shot. Fives does. He fucks Fox and remembers dying.
Fox doesn’t say anything after. He watches Fives get dressed with an unreadable expression, but he can’t hide how much he enjoyed it. Neither can Fives.
Maybe that’s why he pauses in the doorway.
“You always had a twitchy trigger finger,” Fives says, and leaves without caring if that breaks Fox’s expression.
He doesn’t regret the words until later. He hates who Fox turns him into.
—
Echo doesn’t bring it up, but it chokes up the space between them, and sparks new malice to his interactions with Fox. In return, Fox has a new air of self-satisfaction. Fives can’t decide if he regrets either of those and eventually decides he doesn’t care. For now, they all have to work together, they don’t have to like each other.
Echo and Fives sleep in the only bunk, Fox sleeps in the cockpit, sitting in the pilot seat with his feet up in the co-pilot seat. The streaks of hyperspace would bother Fives, but Fox never complains. Fives doesn’t take that as confirmation either way. He already looked like he slept like shit before he gave up his bed. He probably has nightmares. Maybe he’s haunted by the ghosts of all the deaths he’s caused, directly and indirectly. Maybe Fives used to be one of them before he found out Fives had lived. Does he wonder how that happened? He must. Fives will tell him if he asks. It’s an easy promise to make when he knows Fox never will.
Echo fucks him in the same position he’d fucked Fox, except he leans down over Fives’ back to kiss his neck and shoulders, and, when Fives twists, the corner of his mouth. Echo covers Fox’s bruises with his own, but Fives has already let Fox into their bed, and there’s nothing either of them can do to remove him.
Fives only did what Echo was going to.
Fives stirs when Echo gets out of the bunk, just enough to see the dark shape of him pulling on his trousers and boots. He’s already asleep again by the time Echo leaves the room. He doesn’t know how long passes before he’s woken again, by crash and the first syllable of a yelled curse.
For a second Fives is somewhere else, somewhere long ago, and then he’s up, wrenching the door from the bunkroom open when the automatic machinery sticks.
There’s blood all across Fox’s mouth and chin, his already crooked nose snapped out of place, but he has Echo pinned to the floor, his weight across Echo’s back. Echo fights like a man possessed, like if he kicks Fox off and kills him he can reach back through time and undo everything that Fox has ever done.
There’s no knowing what Fox fights for, but it’s enough to keep Echo pinned.
“Get off him!”
Fox doesn’t. He does when Fives grabs him. Fox is solid, still in peak fighting condition, still a commander, still a soldier. Fives grabs him but Fox doesn’t let Fives hold him for long. He’s off Echo in a flash, shoving Fives away from him before Echo is even up. He puts his back to the cockpit, a locking door right behind him if he needs to retreat and no way for Fives and Echo to flank him.
It doesn’t take grabbing Echo to stop him, just a touch to his arm and Echo stills. He spits blood onto the floor and doesn’t go after Fox, trembling with barely suppressed rage.
Fox is still, unnervingly still. His chest doesn’t visibly rise or fall, and too long passes between each blink of his eyes. His hand twitches and blood drips from his broken nose down to the floor.
Fox could let this go. He must know that. The shreds of their truce are in his hands, and he gets to decide what to do with them.
“You’d have done the same,” Fox rasps. He doesn’t sneer or glare or yell. What he does is worse. He says it like an officer laying facts out before his subordinate.
Echo lunges, but Fives is ready. He gets an elbow in his gut for his trouble, but Echo doesn’t make it to Fox before he lets Fives pull him back. Fox doesn’t flinch.
“Done what the same?” Fives asks. Fox doesn’t answer him, he doesn’t take his eyes off Echo, lips slightly parted so he can breathe through his mouth instead of his clogged up nose. “Done what the same?” Fives repeats. Echo tenses under his hands, jaw clenched tight. “Echo?”
Finally Echo looks at him. He’s in better shape than Fox, even if he’d been losing, just a split lip and a bruise across his neck.
“He thinks I’d have shot you,” Echo says. “If I’d been in his position.”
Fives is cold. Icy cold. The sort of cold that makes you mad and feel too hot. He swallows, his throat burning with bile. “You wouldn't have,” he chokes out.
Echo looks away.
Fox lets out a bitter bark of laughter. “Of course he would. He has. You have. You don’t get to choose which orders you follow. We’ve all acted on bad intel and hidden motives. It’s what we are.”
“Is that what you tell yourself to sleep at night?” Echo demands.
He says it loud and mean, and for a moment Fives hopes it covers what he says. “Then why aren’t you still sitting at the Emperor’s feet like a loyal little massiff?”
It doesn’t. Fox hears it, and his face twists into something Fives takes a moment to recognise on Fox’s face. It’s grief. It’s something deep and terrible and familiar and Fives doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to think about who Fox might mourn for. He doesn’t care.
“Come on,” he says to Echo. Echo hesitates and then turns, following Fives back into the bunkroom. He doesn’t look back until the door is shoved closed behind him. He wishes it looked.
Fox deserves whatever pain came his way while he was too… Too what? Blind? Stupid? Arrogant? Cruel? He deserved whatever happened to him while he was with the Empire, no matter what kept him there.
Echo sits seething as Fives rubs bacta over his lip and throat and massages some of the strain out of where Fox had twisted his arm up his back. Fox will need to set his nose. He can do that himself.
Only right at the end, while Fives is putting the bacta away does Echo speak.
“Why the fuck did you sleep with him?” he asks.
Fives doesn’t want to fight with Echo, and the truth would lead to a fight. He shrugs. Echo looks at him, and some of his anger at Fox slips out into that glare. Fives turns away from it.
Fox was right: this isn’t sustainable.
—
If the ship was bigger, they might try to avoid each other, but with only five rooms including the tiny fresher and half height storage space under the floors, there’s a limit to how much space they can take. And neither Fox or Echo are willing to give up any ground. Fives doesn’t have to decide if he is, letting Echo decide for them.
Fox works on piecing a broken droid back together at the small table in the main space, barely a metre away from where he’d pinned Echo. His nose is still swollen, the purple bruising flaring out across his cheeks. At least the blood is wiped away.
Fives and Echo take up the other corner of the room, talking between themselves, pretending that Fox isn’t watching them and they aren’t watching Fox in return. No one admits that trying to make this work was a mistake, that Echo and Fives should leave the next time they’re on a planet big enough to disappear into. If Fox has changed, it’s not enough.
At night, Echo and Fives fuck again, reopening Echo’s split lip. Echo falls asleep after, head on Fives’ shoulder, the bolts under his hair digging into Fives skin. Fives doesn’t sleep. He stares up at the bulkhead, fidgety and restless. Echo sleep through it. He sleeps through it when Fives gets out of bed, and through the scraping of the door opening and closing.
There’s no being alone on a ship like this. There’s no being alone in a life like theirs. Clones were born side by side, grew side by side, died side by side. The moments Fives has been alone have been the worst of his life, but sometimes he longs for it, the stillness, the freedom from observation.
Fox is awake, the cockpit door open, the light of hyperspace somehow kinder than the light from the bulbs. Fives’ feet take him across the main room to the cockpit door. There’s grey in Fox’s hair, far more than Fives has. It probably bothers him.
There’s a bottle of sharp smelling whiskey in with a label Fives has never seen before wedged into the flight controls and a half empty glass resting on Fox’s leg. Fox looks at him and swings his feet down from the other chair. He holds out the glass. His hand trembles and the whiskey trembles with it.
Fives takes the seat and the whiskey. It tastes cheap. He drinks it all the same. Fox reaches into a crate under the console, pulls out another glass, and fills it.
“Cody and I split one of these the last time I saw him,” Fox the rasp in his voice is worse for his broken nose distorting it further. Fives doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to care. “He mixed it with some even shittier soda and drank until he threw up.”
Fives never really liked Cody, and had only really known him because of Rex. He’d have liked to see how that played out, after Fox shot him. Had Rex made Cody pick? Had Cody broken Fox’s heart and gone with Rex?
“Is he dead?” Fives asks.
Fox shrugs. “I fucking hope so.”
Fives doesn’t. He hopes Rex found him and they’re happy. As happy as any clone can hope to be. Happier than the three of them are.
Fives holds out his glass and Fox refills it. He’d take some soda to mix it with. It would have to be better than taking it straight.
The door to the bunkroom scrapes open. Echo’s metal feet are loud even with socks to dampen them. There’s nowhere else to sit, so Echo sits on the floor, back to the door frame. There’s no more glasses either. Fox fills his and holds it out to Echo with his left hand, the one that doesn’t tremble, and Echo takes it with his left, the one that isn’t his scomp. Fox drinks from the bottle.
“He’s not,” Echo says, and doesn’t elaborate. Fox doesn’t ask. It’s almost an apology. It’s more than Fives thinks he has in him. There’s no such thing as a fresh start. The rot is there, permeated into everything. They could dig out the worst of it but spores would remain and grow again.
And they’d have to want to dig out the rot in the first place.
Fives sips at the whiskey and imagines what pretending it could sanitise his insides would feel like. Better, maybe. Naive. Impossible.
“I hope they’re all alive,” Fives says. Every last fucking one of them, especially the ones who are already dead.
Echo taps his foot against Fives and Fox lifts his bottle just a touch towards Fives before draining it. Fox and Echo glance at each and do nothing. They’ll still fuck, trying to kill each other didn’t get it out of their system. Fives might fuck Fox again too. Eventually they might stumble into the circumstances that would get them all into bed together.
“I hope the people who killed them burn,” Echo says. Justice seems even more unlikely than Fives’ fantasy. Fox doesn’t hope for anything.
Fox shakes the bottle. It sloshes loudly, too little liquid in too much space. Fox splits what’s left between them. He downs his mouthful and puts the empty bottle back in the crate.
He leans back in his chair, legs stretched in front of him. He looks at the flight controls, then out in the abyss of space. He doesn’t look back at them, his dark eyes reflecting the lights of hyperspace. He looks old and tired and sad. It’s kinder than he deserves. It’s also a sort of stillness that is almost like being alone.
They were made from the rot of Kamino and tempered in the decaying Republic. What was a little more shared between them?