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Fox wakes up in a place he did not go to sleep.
He knows, more profoundly than he knows his own bones, that he is not meant to be here. Somehow, he knows that this room does not exist.
He jerks upright from whatever emptiness he had been lying on, a gust of stagnance following him. His eyes don't fill the gaps in the space around him as they scan and calculate; there's something there, he's sure, he's just not sure what. His hands ghost the space across his chest, miraculously free of shrapnel and viscera, miraculously free of—well, most anything at all.
The body that he drags his eyes down to is not one he immediately recognizes, but he understands through the lack of primal panic that it is meant to be his own. His eyes move of their own accord as they flick and stutter and drift from patch to patch of skin and scar that shift as he does. The floor beneath him feels… not cold, but absent of warmth. Something distantly familiar. He curls his fingers and the nails catch on nothing. His heart—the space where his heart once was?—starts to race.
There had been—there had been something else. Something he was doing. Something he had seen. His chest—where had it gone, in this room that doesn't exist? It's in his hands, now, and it doesn't hurt like every rib had been shattered and started to dig into his lungs and tendons and arteries. Where had it gone?
Fox shakes his head. The roaring in his ears grows louder.
"Hi, Fox."
Fox whirls around. The wave of nausea that slams into him is almost a relief. The vomit that threatens to make its appearance feels real. What he sees is not.
Thorn sits across from him, his legs carefully folded. Oh, how cruel this empty room is, to give him something to put in it. The bile climbs in Fox's throat.
Thorn looks as real as the day Fox had last seen him. The few flyaways from his loose braid are unflatteringly limp like he'd been wearing his helmet for a few hours, as he so loathed; briefly, Fox wonders if the spray bottle full of water that he had used to style his hair is still under the sink in the commanders' quarters. He can't remember ever removing it. Thorn smiles at Fox and the pores in his skin stretch and crinkle as he does; the small scar under his right eye pulls tight in a way that Fox remembers Thorn claimed people found charming. Fox's eyes are trained on Thorn's, and though he tries to escape the murky intensity, he can't quite peel his flickering gaze away.
"This isn't real," Fox says.
"Probably not," agrees Thorn.
Probably not, he says. A damned dead man coming back to life—or just Fox finally going insane. Probably not . Fox tries to recall the last time he slept; it really wasn't that long ago. He'd just gotten a crisp six hours before the start of his shift. He'd felt better rested than he had in a long time. He'd rested and eaten and then he'd gone to work, and there were patrols that had needed to be done, and there were angry natborns with screams and burning metal and… and….
"Go away," Fox bites. "I don't have time for this. I have to—I have to—" He has to work. He has mouths to feed. He has hallucinations to stop having. He has a room to get out of.
"I can't really do that, Fox," Thorn says, his voice just edging on sympathetic. "You're the one who's come to me. Sort of."
Fox shakes his head. No, he hasn't come here. It's a room that doesn't exist, but every room has a door. He scrambles to his feet and ignores the way that they sink into the void below him. Not a darkness but an absence of light. His hands trace along the walls that don't reflect enough for his eyes to catch and spoon up. His feet stub the cobwebbed corners. He does rounds, tracing fractals that don't loop but still put him in the same spot every time all over again. There's a way out. There's always a way out.
"Not this time, vod," says Thorn.
Fox whips back around to look at him. He's not sure what path he's traced around the room, but Thorn is facing him now, in that same cross-legged lounge. His ease is infuriating. "Shut up. You're dead."
"Well, so are you!" Thorn retorts indignantly.
Fox stills. "What?"
"Alright, you're not—you're not dead. Not like me," Thorn amends, lurching forward to pull himself to his feet. He crosses the gap—a three feet wide, a mile?—"But you're… lingering. Somewhere halfway."
Fox can't pretend that it's the craziest shit he's ever heard. His face twists and his hazy eyes follow the arcs of Thorn's impossibly familiar hands as they twist and pick at his braid, doing and undoing and redoing the meaningless twists. "Where is here?" He wonders, mostly to himself. Here, in this paradox with two eyes and one and a half ears and a smile brighter than the sun.
Thorn pauses his ministrations and tilts his head, his eyes gazing around the room as he thinks. Really, there's nothing to see, but Fox can feel it at his back, he can hear the soft wheeze of Thorn's breath getting caught in the dark corners; but if he shifts his gaze just a little too far from Thorn's face his head will start to thrum so distractingly that he forgets what he was trying to find in the first place.
"It's something like—like the dark spot on a sun-bleached wall where a picture used to sit, I think," Thorn muses, sounding like he is not unsure of himself so much as he is unsure of Fox's capacity to listen. But Fox is listening, Thorn, he swears. "It's the form not of what you are, but of what you used to be."
"Oh," Fox answers. He doesn't understand. Thorn chokes on a laugh, knowing. "So… I'm dreaming, then."
"Well. That's putting it lightly, I think." Thorn mutters.
Questioning eyes sweep to Thorn from where they had wandered.
"You're not dead yet, but you are dying, Fox."
Fox can't bring himself to feel panic. In fact, he can't bring himself to feel much more than shame. He feels exposed: here is Thorn, burrowed like a tick inside his head. Does he hate what he sees as much as Fox does? Fox is dying, Thorn says, and yet Fox is too busy worrying about his false brother's eyes to worry about his flesh.
"So this is… this is what's waiting for me." He hums, staring down at his gloved palms. It is a question and it isn't. He wonders if the fuzzy outline of the shape is a result of his bleary eyes or his newfound immaterial existence. He supposes he could get used to the quiet.
"It's not so bad," Thorn promises. "You and me now, this isn't—this isn't what it's like. This isn't what I am now, Fox, this body," he taps on his chest and the sound echoes as if Thorn is just an empty shell of armor. "You're making this. You're turning me into something you can understand, even if you think you can't yet. Me, now, it's—I'm the empty space in the atoms, I'm what's just past the event horizon of every black hole. I'm here with our brothers, Fox. We're not in the spaces between, we are the spaces between. We're the everything in the nothing. Do you understand?"
Fox is silent. He doesn't want to understand. He doesn't want Thorn to be the spaces between. He wants Thorn to be the hard presence behind his right shoulder. He wants Thorn to be the mysteriously clean desk after a week of piled-up caf mugs. He wants Thorn to be the soft hand ghosting over his hair when he finally crashes in his bunk after a double shift. He wants Thorn to be the blinking light on his wrist comm. He wants Thorn to be alive.
"I know," says Thorn. Fox does not need to say something aloud for Thorn to hear it. He never has. It is a small comfort to know that, even in this horrible, dark, deeply wrong place, some things never change. "But I'm not."
Fox grasps fruitlessly for the end of the conversation thread he's meant to follow. What meaningful response is he supposed to pull together? What words could make any of this make any amount of sense?
"Being dead sounds boring."
“What, you think I don’t know how to have fun?” Thorn laughs. “I’ve seen things you can’t even imagine, Fox. I’ve seen the births of stars and the deaths of the divine. I've seen gravity beating on the fabric of time itself. I’ve seen warriors and poets and kings; children and sages and harbingers of war. I’ve seen everything that comes before and everything that comes after. There's lots to do."
“Sounds like you're trying to tell me that you're God," Fox snarks.
"What do you think God is?" Thorn asks, always just as quick as Fox. He does not break eye contact. Thorn's eyes had been just as deep and dark and soft as Fox's own when he was alive; out of all of the brothers Fox had, it had always been Thorn that made him feel like he was looking in a mirror. It had never mattered when Thorn grew out his hair and bleached it blond until it fried where Fox's had tangled and streaked grey, or kept a carefully manicured beard where Fox had only managed patchy stubble. Fox's face had twisted with scars and a grimace he never really knew how to relax, and it had started to droop a little on the left side after he'd had his face mashed into the pavement by an angry Devaronian. Thorn's had grown more lined and his cheeks had set deeper and his head had always cocked a little to the right after standing a bit too close to a rioter's explosive and losing his hearing on one side. They didn't look the same with their helmets off and they didn't look the same with their helmets on, but Fox was Thorn and Thorn was Fox. That much, when nothing else was, had always been clear.
Fox doesn't answer.
"For whatever it's worth, I don't know either," Says Thorn, after an impossible-to-determine amount of time. "I suppose I should, but it's not something I'm all that worried about."
"So what are you worried about?" Fox asks quietly. The empty space still buzzes above his head, aching to be filled.
"You, mostly."
Fox feels that shame again. It burns him. He imagines an indignance that he would have once felt—probably would still feel if it was anyone other than the ghost of his best friend saying that—but feels only the exhaustion of its absence. Once again, he's at a loss for words.
"I'll be alright," he settles on.
Thorn smiles that smile again. Even if it's just the smallest twitch of a smirk, all of him smiles. His cheeks puff up and his eyes pinch at the corners and something about the way he holds himself changes. He had felt joy so freely. He had been joy in a way Fox could have never hoped to understand. "I know you will. You always have before. I see no reason for that to change now."
For some reason, at that, Fox's mind drifts to the brothers that exist where his heart had still beat and his ears rang in the quiet evenings. Where the delicate machines of their bodies are held up by bones and fed with blood, where their eyes are dark and hungry. Where, in the darkness, something glints.
"I don't fear that changing. I fear that which must be changed."
Fox fears little. The tender animal in his ribcage has grown quieter and quieter over the years, not sated but silent for the sake of survival. When it thrashes, the wire around its neck grows tighter; it has been caught for so long that the flesh has started to grow over. Soon, there will be no trace of any wrongdoing at all. Soon, he will just be the clone he was meant to be; quiet, caught, caged. Fox does not fear this outcome for himself. He has always been slated for this fate of groomed domesticity. From conception, he was under countless thumbs. It has never really been a battle, and it never will be.
What Fox fears is the gentle, quiet hearts. He fears the hands that itch to create. He fears the eyes that flash in the shadow. For they, without remorse, will be destroyed. Fox's little siblings, the ones who still carry their pieces of Thorn's joy. There will be no recourse for them; either they will die or the light in their souls will. He knows what they burn for, because that was him too, so long ago; he knows the way their chests feel like cages.
"You're thinking of Thire, aren't you?"
Thire. Their youngest commander, something still sparking within him. Fox bows his head and though he knows he could never shed tears here, because his tear ducts don't exist, something inside him still aches. He does not have to respond.
Thorn nods. His smile dims somewhat. "I know you fear for him, Fox; you say you don't, but I know you fear for all of them. You don't have to. They have more figured out than you realize."
Fox scoffs and glares in a vaguely downward direction. There's nothing but his own fear beneath his feet.
Thorn, for some reason, tilts his head back and laughs. It's just like Fox remembers. It's just like the laughs he hears around corners deep in the bases but never sees before his eyes. It's deep and throaty and rolling and it's fucking enraging.
The marshall commander sits there, fists clenching and unclenching in his lap, starting at Thorn like he's grown another head. His breath catches in his chest. "What the fuck are you laughing at, you shabuir?"
Thorn catches his breath after a moment. "I'm laughing at you, Fox. I'm laughing at you. All these years, and you still don't understand that we're cemeteries. We're wounds. We're scars. We're clones, Fox. We are fear. Our little brothers know that. Thire knows that. You would kill yourself trying to change that."
Fox does not meet the dead man's eyes.
"He's your shadow, Fox." Thorn continues, something gentler crossing his expression now. "He's your epitaph. He's something between sho'cye and kebii'tra in a way we can never hope to be. Have faith in him, Fox. Have faith in our brothers. They know bravery in their pain, too.
"Let me ask you this," Thorn continues. "You think they are so unprepared. Raw. What makes you different?"
Something tugs in Fox's gut. "There's nothing raw left about me. I killed. I killed it and I buried it all."
"That's where you're wrong, ori'vod," Thorn says, something hushed in his tone, as if they are cadets whispering in their pods after lights-out all over again. "You haven't killed it. You tried. But you only managed to paint over it. Paint flakes, Fox. It can be sanded away. Fox isn't gone." He leans forward, the blond plait slipping off his shoulder and settling somewhere past his sturnum. Fox hadn't realized how long it had gotten. Thorn presses his hand to Fox's chest, and it's warm; it's warm and it's burning and it hurts, but it's the first real thing Fox has felt in so, so long.
"Fox isn't gone," Thorn repeats, pressing harder. Fox feels like his chest is caving in.
Fox is not settled. He is not satisfied, but he doubts there will ever be a time that he is. His reservations cling to him like leeches, bleeding him dry. Fox has all the faith in the galaxy in his brothers. He just does not trust them to abide by the will of the war. He does not wish to see those muraled walls painted over as he himself has become. He is not settled, but there is nothing left to say.
“I'm not dead," he murmurs. "But you’ll be… waiting for me?”
“Of course, Fox. I've always been waiting for your slow shebs to catch up. But—" Fox's brother pauses, his touch slipping away and his smiling frame fading back to something a little more melancholy. “Take your time, okay ori’vod? You've got others waiting on you, too.”
Fox is silent. He glances over his shoulder, around the room that doesn’t exist, as if the specters of his obligation will be there. Fox has not been Fox in a long time, but he has always been that which was required of him. This room waits for him, but his duty does not. He rests his chilled palm against the roiling, bloodied imprint of Thorn's.
“Okay, Thorn. Okay.”
Thorn will wait for him at the door like an old dog. His eyes, dark and round and pinched at the corners, will always linger on the old hinges, waiting for them to whisper Fox's arrival. But for now, Fox has a job to do.
Fox turns and traces the no-end, no-beginning wall again. This time, his fingers catch on something. He digs and tugs and pulls , and the buzzing that had quieted grows into a roar again. He bows his head as if against a gale and feels the not-cold air of the room press in on him, shrinking his lungs and ravaging his heart. There's something behind him. A hard presence behind his right shoulder. A body that smiles in its entirety.
And then the lack of anything at all.
—
Thire sighs into his lukewarm cup of caffeinated sludge as he trudges through the poorly-lit maze of the Fourth District Coruscant Guard Headquarters. Architecturally speaking—not that Thire has all that much experience in such matters—this complex is his least favorite. There's always a lingering scent of mildew and the cleaning agent they had tried to fix it with in the stale air that gets pumped in from some distant reoxygenation plant and the walls creak like they're still new and settling, even though the building has probably been here for a few centuries. This building feels alive, but not in a good way—it feels like it had been dozing for eons before the Guard ever arrived, and now it's roiling and raging at the parasites crawling through its guts. It unnerves him.
Now, the first district—Senate district, upper levels—that base is nice. They even have some scraps of carpet in the rec room there, and the air in the barracks doesn't chill you to the bone. The cheekier troopers call the base the 499 Republica. Real hilarious, those few. Nothing so luxurious here.
Still, even with the quivering walls and the chemical-sweet scent that lingers without fading, this base is… home, for many. The base, Headquarters to the Guard's 8th and final battalion, is the farthest from prying eyes, buried the deepest in the lower levels. It's falling apart and on the edge of too cold and damp more often than not, but every inch of these stained walls is covered with marks made by the troopers scutting hastily through its halls like ants through tunnels. Patterns of painted handprints belonging to the less artistically inclined among them form dizzyingly colorful murals spanning dozen-meter-long stretches of duracrete, hand-made tapestries and quilts hang nailed to walls, and flowering weeds break through cracks between floors and walls; nurtured, not plucked. They call this base The Hole, for its claustrophobic and distinctly pit-like nature, but there is no limit to the comfort to be found in its depths.
He loses track of how many dusty corners and smears of amateurish color he tracks past before the swinging doors of the medbay come into view. Scratched-up white plastoid with a hand-painted medic's sigil, they are, with a blurry and dented transparent panel on each side. They're not mechanized, as with most of The Hole, but the hinges are smooth and well-oiled, probably thanks to the affectionately regarded neuroticism of one of the facility's senior medics, Woozy. Thire's steady pace slows as he grows closer to the doors as if they're the wrong end of a magnet pushing him harder and harder away the closer he grows.
They'd lost Fox and his squad in the crowd, somewhere between a gathering and a riot. It had already been buzzing with some energy, a tension that had only rocketed in intensity when the Guard'd received their orders from on high to "keep things quiet". The lower levels were a rough place, and the people here knew the struggle of circumstance better than most, but they were hardworking and dedicated to their communities. Violence was rarely the result of the people, even those beleaguered; violence was manufactured by the groups that took advantage. Typically, the Guard merely chaperoned, following orders and keeping their buckets forward. They never missed the looks thrown their way—they knew their presence was not wanted, nor was it helpful—but this was routine. These people—students, parents, laborers, Coruscantis— knew their route, knew their speeches and chants, knew their purpose. They knew how to ignore their bloodied shadows.
That day, for some reason, they didn't.
Thire remembers stifling a yawn under his helmet. He remembers cursing the boredom of routine, lamenting the ease. He remembers catching the glint of his elder brother's distinctively red helmet on the other side of the crowd and then looking away—he remembers a squeal, a shout, and an anger tearing through the gathered crowd like a shockwave. No one had seen the epicenter—no one knew who threw the vitriol first—but the crowd rapidly devolved. Guards were shoved away, beaten at with bricks and pipes and whatever debris the angry natborns could get their hands on. Fox's voice had crackled over comms demanding non-lethal de-escalation from his men.
Thire doubts that the rioters had known about the wrecked generator tucked into a pile of garbage still containing fuel. He knows that, when they (fearfully, with thin and shaking arms, like animals in a vice) hurled a piece of metal debris at the vode holed up behind the pile, they did not intend for it to strike another piece of metal and spark. They did not mean for the fuel in the generator to catch and boil and explode, sending shrapnel and burning debris directly into the chestplates and helmets of his fellow Guards. But still, even knowing this, he could not help his rage when he saw Fox (and other vode. And protestors. And the person that had thrown the metal in the first place. But Fox ) drop like an abandoned toy with gaping shreds torn into his plastoid cuirass visible from a dozen meters away.
Thire had ordered the arrests of every person present. Fox and the other injured vode had long since been evacuated to the nearest base by the time Thire had the last natborn on their knees in cuffs. Even with their shadowed eyes slanted away from him, their tired head bowed, he still blazed. His heart had not slowed since the explosion had first gone off, and all he could hear over the ringing in his ears had been his orders: keep it quiet, keep it quiet, keep it quiet. Keep your vode alive. Keep your vode alive. Keep your vode alive. Fox is not here. Fox took four shards of heated metal to the chest at point-blank range. Keep your vode alive.
He draws back to himself suddenly. He's been standing a meter from the medbay doors for… some amount of time, and he finds himself grateful that it's the middle of the graveyard shift and that every trooper is either passed out in their bunk or out doing rounds on the streets. Still cleaning up Thire's mess.
"You're here to see the Commander?"
Thire jumps hard enough that his armor clacks loudly, like a stack of dominoes falling. He blinks at the face that has appeared through the swinging doors: weary, scruffy at the chin, and with a shaggy mop of curls kept clear from the eyes with a folded headband. Woozy.
"Yes. How is he?"
Woozy's eyes flick away from Thire's as they twist back around to retreat into the medbay. Thire catches the light door in his hand before it can swing shut again, following the medic's tired steps deeper into the room. Guard medbays are all identical in layout and setup so that medics visiting or swapping between battalions never have to re-familiarize themselves in the middle of an emergency. It's efficient, he's been told. So, despite the fact that he has not been a medic a day in his life nor spent any amount of time in The Hole's medbay, he knows the route that Woozy's slow pace takes them on with dread sinking deeper and deeper into his gut. They wind past beds half-filled with bruised, sleeping brothers, and with every bed they pass Thire prays harder and harder that Woozy will abruptly pull to a stop in front of the next one.
They pass the last bed. Through one more set of flimsy plastoid doors lays the ICU. Woozy pulls to a stop a short distance from it and turns to Thire, that same exhausted look in his eyes as before, but this time something sympathetic pulls at his mouth. "We've done what we can," says the medic in that long-suffering voice of his. "We extracted four shards of debris from his thoracic cavity. He had hemopneumothorax as a result of lacerations to his right lung and several fractured ribs. We had him intubated for the first day, but he's on a non-rebreather mask now. Beyond that, concussion or other minor brain trauma that our scans didn't pick up is possible, and severe internal bruising is expected. He's taken three blood transfusions so far."
Thire feels like he can't breathe. He doesn't understand half of the words Woozy's said to him. "But he's stable." It's a prayer as much as it is a statement.
Woozy glances away again. "We're giving him everything we can. His injuries were severe but treatable. Beyond the blood loss and potential head trauma, he should be stable, yes, as well as responsive to stimuli by this point. But he's not."
Thire can't meet the medic's eyes. He studies the grey, pock-marked floor under Woozy's boots, splayed a little outwards at the toes. It's probably the cleanest surface he's seen in this goddamn base. He admires Woozy's tenacity. He wishes Woozy was a better medic. He wishes they could work miracles. "Will he live?"
"He might. He might not. At this point, it's up to him."
Thire nods. He wishes that Woozy would care a little more about the fact that the world is about to end.
"You can go see him if you want."
The beast nestled between Thire's heart and lungs cries just a little louder than it had been for the last two days. He breathes deeply, hoping the stale air will sate it, but it only sinks its claws in deeper. He pushes through the doors, leaving Woozy to watch his distorted silhouette disappear through the semi-clear plastoid.
This ICU here is not as large as the one in the 499 Republica, which is the first thing he notices. The second thing he notices is Fox in a bed directly to his left, another medic in scrubs fiddling with some machine at the foot of it. Fox is only half-visible amidst the bulk of the wires and tubes disappearing beneath his blankets and his skin, and he seems to melt into the off-grey sheets stretched tight over the mattress below him. Bandages cover what little of his chest Thire can see, and an oxygen mask obscures the lower half of his face. But his eyes are there, and even closed and bruised, Thire draws peace from the sight of the lash-lined shadows. Fox is still here.
Thire draws closer but stops before truly nearing the still frame of his brother. His hands twitch at his sides, longing for… something. His attention is drawn by a soft cough—the medic that he'd seen, this one in scrubs. The CMO, he gathers from the ranked armband around their left bicep. He should know them. Valor? Vault? Something victorious. Something hungry.
"Woozy filled you in, Commander?" They ask. Thire only nods. The beast has sunk its teeth into his throat.
The CMO turns their gaze back to Fox. Their eyes are heavy and shineless; something uniquely bone-weary. "The machines will keep his heart beating. We've made sure of that. We just hope the rest follows." Thire nods again. The CMO rubs at their eyes and checks their wrist-comm for the time. It's somewhere in the early hours of the morning in this hemisphere. "You can sit with him if you want. I'll give you two space."
Thire does not trust himself to speak. He hopes the CMO finds his gratitude in the shaking of his hands.
Just before the ICU doors swing closed behind the CMO, they catch it with a deft hand. "Call me if anything changes. Someone will hear. My name's Vanguard."
Thire closes his eyes and whispers it like a prayer. Vanguard. Vanguard. Vanguard.
—
Fox surfaces to sound before he surfaces to sight. It's like drifting to shallower waters; the surface tension doesn't yet break over the planes of his face, but it yields to him, and he can taste the cold air just beyond, can hear beeping and mechanized wheezing muffled and distorted through layers of water and murk.
Breath not his own meets resistance as it creeps through him, painfully dry on his lips and in his throat and in his lungs. An ache, quiet but piercing, warms his chest, half-there like a low-volume radio transmission in a way that could only indicate heavy medication. He supposes he probably could have guessed that by the thoughts that sluggishly pass him by like buildings out of a shuddering transport's window, too. Another breath. Another ache. This time, it lances through him sharply, and he doesn't have the mind to hold back a garbled whine. Thankfully, though, for the sake of his dignity, the arid state of his throat levers the noise out as more of a crackling wheeze.
He doesn't process the sound of his name being spoken until several moments after he first hears it. The word doesn't sound real, but he tilts his head towards the desperate sound of it. His eyes are still shut, feeling like they're glued in place, sticky at the corners, but he furrows his brows at the light that pierces through.
"Fox? Fox, wake up."
Maker. Give him a second. He scrunches up his face again, noticing for the first time the plastic digging into his nose bridge and cheeks, and pulls away from the pressure. A bright flare of pain and a series of alarmed beeps follow him as he twists and he gives a voiceless wheeze of pain into the mask. Pressure appears—hands steadying him, holding him still—and he tries to move from those too, some animal panic fluttering in his gut.
"Fox— Fox! Calm down! It's me!"
That voice—something familiar. His chest aches, but it's different from before.
"Th'rn?" He wheezes, the noise barely sounding like his brother's name. He clumsily brings a hand up to swipe at his eyes. He hisses at the sudden burn of artificial lights as they crack open and immediately squeeze back shut, but a familiar silhouette leans over him, blocking out the worst of it. The shape freezes as he croaks.
"N-no, Fox, it's me, it's Thire. Open your eyes, Fox."
"They are open," he lies. They're screwed shut, but he pries them open once more; the lights seemed to have been dimmed. His vision is indecipherably blurry, and he can only barely make sense of the shape that lingers above him. It's his kih'vod, half-out of a plastoid chair, clutching onto his hand with a desperation that brings a different piercing ache to Fox's chest. We are cemeteries. We are fear .
Thire settles back into his chair, never letting go of Fox's hand, and scoots the chair a bit closer. It screeches horrifically against the floor. "I should call the medic," he mutters after a moment, rummaging around for his comm.
"I'm fine," Fox grunts. "What happened?"
Thire levies a glare at Fox that rivals the intensity of his own, but breaks it after a moment and rolls his eyes. He leans back, loosening his grip on Fox as if to let go before Fox clings feebly, indulgently. "There was—a riot. It went bad. A generator sparked and went off. You and some others were standing too close. You've been here—" he breaks off, glancing at his wrist comm—"two days."
"The others?" Fox rasps.
"They're dead," Thire doesn't shy away like Fox had expected him to. It terrifies him. "I'm sorry, sir."
Fox heaves out a long breath. He'd known, he thinks. He wonders if they were brothers from his battalion or the lower levels'. He stares at the ceiling, searching for some comfort in the cracks that trace their way through the duracrete, but finds none. We're cemeteries. We're wounds. We're scars.
"Sir… Fox?"
Fox's eyes flick back down from where they'd wandered, settling on the brother beside him. He seems to have wilted. "'Lek, vod'ika?"
Thire bows his head and tilts it away. He bites his lower lip, worrying the flesh between his teeth, and it's only the overpowering weariness that stops Fox from cupping his chin and lifting the younger soldier's eyes to his own. "It's… it was my fault, sir. I'm sorry."
"The riot?"
A frustrated sound leaves Thire's mouth as he shakes his head. "No, it was—after the generator, after you—I was in command. I was in command and I was so angry, Fox, angry like I'd never felt before. We arrested every natborn there, and now it's—it's all over the news and the senators are breathing down our necks and it was my job to stop it and I failed ."
The marshall commander nods. "Yeah. You did. I'm proud of you."
Thire's head shoots up, fixing Fox with an incredulous stare. "What?"
"I'm proud of you, Thire. You did good."
Thire stands suddenly, the chair making another unpleasant noise as it kicks back a few inches. He runs his hand through his short curls and Fox notices for the first time that he's got a ragged shadow on the lower half of his face; Thire has always looked distinctly younger than the rest of the commanders, something youthful remaining in his sullen glare even as the years passed. He supposes Thire isn't all that much younger than the rest of them, maybe a year or so, but he has always filled that role of the tender, childishly resentful one. Fox has never expected to be so thrown off by beard stubble.
"I fucked up !" Thire explodes. "Don't you understand, Fox?" He paces back and forth beside Fox's bed, momentarily distracted, and Fox shuffles an elbow underneath himself. There's a horrible half-there pull in his chest as his abs tense and the marshall commander slows, easing out a quiet hiss of air as he levies himself into more of a sitting position. "I don't know what the hell I was doing," Thire rants, not yet noticing Fox's movement, "and I don't know why you keep trusting me! " The younger man whirls back around to face Fox, his teeth bared and what Fox is sure is days' worth of exhausted tears threatening to spill over, but deflates when he sees Fox's pathetically half-up hunched-over position. He hurries over, muttering to himself and pressing his hands against Fox's shoulders, trying to get him back down. Fox swats his attempts away, instead hooking a finger under Thire's chin and tilting his bitter face back up.
"I trust you because you fuck up, Thire."
Thire stills. "What?"
Fox sighs, scrabbling tiredly for the words spoken to him in another time and place. They're fleeting. "Thire, I… I'm lost to myself. I think—" I've been told— "I think it's still there. That part of me that is angry. But it's been very quiet for a very long time. I had forgotten it was there."
Thire sits slowly in the chair he'd abandoned, his face still twisted unsurely.
"But in you , Thire, it's so bright. That angry part of you. For a long time, it frightened me." He takes a deep breath, or as deep as the bandages and sutures swathing his chest will allow. "Not anymore. It makes you strong. It makes you mandokarla. It makes you a leader."
After Fox's rasped words, there's a long of silence broken only by the beeping of the machines still connected to him. Thire stares vaguely downwards, but Fox knows he's not looking at anything at all. Fox takes in the exhausted slump of his shoulders and, again, the stubble on his face; two or three days' worth that certainly had not been there the last time he'd seen him. His eyes are ringed by bruises and he has eyebags that rival Fox's own. He's a sorry sight.
The silence is broken by a hushed question, barely audible. "Can I ask you something else?"
"Always, kih'vod."
"Why did you call me Thorn?"
Fox turns his head, wincing at the way his knotty hair whispers along the scratchy pillow, but meets Thire's eyes regardless. They're searching his, looking for something he'll never be able to give. Fox can tell Thire that he was confused, coming out of a drugged stupor—that he just made a mistake. Can say it was a slip of the tongue. Can say that he'd had a dream—that he didn't quite remember it, but remembered the warm weight that had settled into his gut at the sight of a body that smiled in its entirety. But he doesn't.
"You just—remind me of him. You're more like him than you realize."
Thire breaks the eye contact, his flicking down to stare at his hands resting in his lap. "I don't think so, Fox."
Fox's head tilts some, as much as it can in this oddly half-reclined position, and fixes Thire with a wryly amused stare that the younger clone squirms beneath.
"You don't have to think so. I know so." Thire is already shaking his head and rolling his eyes, but even he can't hide the grudging smile on his face.
Fox is painted over. Layer after layer after layer. He knows that Thire is too, but there will always be remains below the scarlet. It may be excavated or it may lay silent forever, but it's there. And for now, that's all Fox needs to know.