Anakin X Fives

  Echo's always been good with programming, but Fives is better with the actual building. He's not any good with inventing, maybe, but putting things together? Opening them up and knowing immediately what's wrong? Fives would even say he enjoys it — and being able to talk shop with Skywalker like they're nobody mechanics from the Outer Rim instead of General and Soldier makes the long hyperjumps between missions actually bearable. 

  How that led to him sitting in a rarely used hallway on the Resolute with Skywalker ("Anakin," he keeps insisting with a smile), both leant over a mouse droid in pieces on a drop cloth, Fives isn't really sure. It probably had something to do with Skywalker's excited bounce when he'd come to ask if Fives wanted to help him, the sparkle in his eye reminding Fives just how young the both of them are. How, technically, he's older than Anakin.

  Because, yeah, he is Anakin, not Skywalker, when they're like this. With his growing knight cut a curly untamed cloud around his ears, grease smeared on the underside of his jaw, with Fives stripped down to his blacks from the waist up, with even his blasters set on the floor next to them. 

  With it quickly becoming clear that Anakin doesn't actually need help to rewire the mouse droid, but had asked for Fives to join him anyways.

  They've been at it for a few hours now, their jokes winding down to companionable quiet as they both work on separate parts of the droid. It honestly might have been easier to start from a scrap droid than try to rewire this one correctly, but it's easy work Fives could do blindfolded, and sharing the mutually-focused silence is actually quite nice.

  Anakin is elbow-deep in the outer casing when he finally asks, "Do the clones feel love?"

  And Fives almost gets up and walks away. He knows not every battalion ended up with a good Jedi, that the 212th and the 501st had been so kriffing lucky to end up with "The Team", but sometimes he forgets. Maybe that's the worst part of it: slow, personal moments like this, Fives forgets he's not natborn and bearer of a face shared with millions. Being around his general makes him forget, and maybe he had taken that for granted until now.

  Or maybe it's for that reason that he hesitates from storming off, because Anakin had been the one to name Alpha, to insist on giving them proper leave, to defend them from anyone who talks down at them even if they're a planetary leader. And Rex had said something, once, about Anakin’s brain working in either/ors, being hardwired in some way to only see in black and white and believing that if you're one thing, you can't be another. That what Anakin says isn't always what he means.

  So instead, he asks, "What kind of love are we talkin'?"

  Anakin refuses to raise his head, and Fives can almost see him stressing about how to phrase this.  "Y'know, grand romance and stuff. One-and-onlys and holodrama romcom propaganda and imagining growing old together."

  "'Not quite sure what you're asking, sir." He takes a deep breath. "The short answer is yes, we can and do feel that, but the long answer is I can't speak for every brother, and I would not want to. Some of us don't feel that." Shrugging, he passes Anakin a socket wrench before he can ask for it. "But it's not because we can't, not because of the longnecks. We're bred to be obedient, sir, not emotionless."

  Quiet settles over them again while Anakin processes this, his mouth twisted rather horribly. Fives starts to think he would do a whole awful lot to turn that frown back into a haughty smile. 

  "What do you really want to ask, General?"

  "I'm married to Senator Amidala."

  Now, everyone with eyes knows that. Maybe Torrent knows even better, when they've been covering for their general for over a year now, and clearly the Jedi just aren't doing anything about it — but Fives also knows Anakin has never actually told anyone about this, not even General Kenobi. Rex says Anakin still thinks they've been discreet.

  "If I may be blunt, sir, this is not news."

  And Anakin actually laughs at that, shaking his head as he tosses down his tools to stare at the opposite wall instead. Fives watches his gaze go distant, somewhere far away from the Resolute lost in the middle of space. “I’ve loved her since I was nine years old, Fives. I loved her through not seeing her for a decade, through her assassination attempts and the First Battle of Geonosis and becoming a knight, and I...”

  Fives sighs once. “No one said you had to stay in love, sir.”

  “But that’s just it,” he groans. “I’ve never known how to do anything else, how to be anything else. I don’t... know who I am without it.”

  He has to look away from Anakin, then, because he’s seen brothers go stupid for people they meet on campaigns, or for their Jedi, and Fives isn’t nearly as young as some of the shinies out there, but he knows what it looks like, when they leap in without thinking. He lets out a long, slow breath, his eyes falling on the ‘saber at Anakin’s hip. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

  Anakin blinks at him, and nods.

  “That’s too young to decide what you want to do for the rest of your life.” Fives raises a brow at his general’s startled expression, which is maybe more amusing (endearing) than it has any business being. “General, you’re barely an adult, just the same as the vode. If my mental timeline is right, you weren’t even twenty standard when you married Amidala, which, frankly, was reckless and unfair on her part.”

  “Padmé would never–”

  “I don’t mean intentionally, sir. The fact of the matter is, no wonder you don’t know who you are without her, because you’ve always had her.” That decade of no contact notwithstanding, considering Anakin didn’t not have her, either. “Senator Amidala knew who and what she was before you, and she’ll know who and what she is without you.”

  “That’s not quite fair,” Anakin grumbles, but his throat is flushed in what Fives hopes is entirely appropriate guilt, or at the very least embarrassment. “It was my idea to get married after Geonosis.”

  Fives snorts. “The idea of a child thrown into war, afraid to lose anything.”

  “You’re being uncharacteristically candid, Fives.”

  “Respectfully, sir, the last thing you need is to be coddled.” His general laughs again, this time good and bright in a way he hasn’t heard before; and then Fives can’t help what he admits next. “We weren’t allowed toys, or anything.”

  Laughter cutting off abruptly, Anakin’s eyes grow haunted instead. There might not be anyone else in the galaxy with quite the same experience as the clones, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t those that understand.

  “Hevy made me and Echo– Well, he said they were mythosaurs like Kal taught us about, but they looked more like sad loth cats. He cut up his own bedsheet to make ‘em, and couldn’t tell the longnecks what he’d done with it, so he just slept on the bare mattress.”

  “Fives...”

  But it’s clear Anakin doesn’t actually know what to say, so Fives pushes on. “Some of Fett’s instructors tried to teach us Mando’a, you know? I think Spar is the only brother that ever got fluent, the rest of us have been making up words and combining them with Basic and Kaminoan and whatever else the Cuy’val Dar spoke that sometimes we don’t even remember what language they are anymore.”

  “I didn’t learn Basic until I was five.” Anakin thunks his head onto the wall behind him with a sigh, the mouse droid forgotten at his feet. “Other padawans always told me I was lucky Master Obi-Wan knew Huttese.” Ahh, kark, his general had been a Hutt salve; at least the spice runners made sure their slaves could communicate with their customers. “I couldn’t read a word of Aurebesh when I first came to the Temple, though to be fair, I couldn’t read anything else, either.”

  “You grow up around other kids?”

  “Yeah, my mom and I lived in the biggest slave slum on Tatooine.”

  Fives doesn’t need to tell him how lucky he was just to have had their own quarters. “I think, sir, that the vode know better than you think, what it’s like always standing on the edge of losing everything.”

  Squeezing his eyes closed, Anakin inhales sharply and clenches his fists over his knees. “What happened? To your mythosaur toys?”

  “One of the longnecks found them while we were in training, ‘threw them out before we got back. I think Hevy was even more upset than we were.”

  The leather glove over his prosthesis creaks as he tightens his grip on his own palms. “Was it easy? To just... forget about them?”

  “Of course not,” Fives snorts and crosses his arms, “we were the equivalent of eight standard at the time, but we honestly didn’t have a choice. As we got a little older, we stopped trying to put meaning in things, because we weren’t allowed things. Our names are our only real possession, even our armor can be taken from us, but we will not, cannot, let anyone take our names.”

  Groaning, Anakin scrubs his hands over his face before pushing himself up to finally look at Fives properly. He still doesn’t speak for a moment, just watching him, then teases flatly, “You’ve been spending too much time with Cody and Obi-Wan, you’re starting to speak in riddles.”

  “They are riddles only to you, sir.” He offers a small smile, and is only slightly disappointed when Anakin doesn’t return it.

  Instead, he lets out a winded breath. “So. You’re saying that it’s not easy to let go of even small things, but we must. And then there are things that we shouldn’t let go of?”

  “Some things aren’t ours to keep.”

  Anakin swallows. “Like Padmé,”

  “Like any person, no matter what sort of love we have for them.”

  Groaning, Anakin pulls his knees back up close and drops his face into his arms. “But I still love her.”

  Knowing that this is not a new problem, that General Kenobi has been trying to teach his general this for as long as they’ve known each other, Fives takes a moment to consider. “You don’t really have to stop loving her.”

  “But you said–”

  “You think I stop loving my brothers when they die?”

  Whether or not it’s healthy to hold onto affections for someone after a romantic relationship is a conversation for another time, Fives decides, and leans over to pick up where Anakin had left off with the droid.

  “General, it sounds to me like you already know all this,” he says, twisting a wire into the grip of his glove to yank it from the motor. “And  that you’re digging your feet in — which is the crux of the problem, isn’t it?”

  “You sound like Obi-Wan,” he groans, but doesn’t deny it.

  “Hmm, well, at least we’re still just kids.”

  Anakin very slowly looks up from his arms, just enough for Fives to see his wide eyes. “What do you...?”

  “Well, we’ve still got time to learn, don’t we?” Fives raises his eyebrow as he fits the new wire into the motor and starts to close all the panels back up. “I still think about Hevy and Droidbait and Cutup, and honestly, I still think about Echo’s and my mythosaurs. That’s not a bad thing, I don’t think, not even the Jedi would think that’s bad. I’m still angry when my vode don’t get funerals and I honestly hold that against the Chancellor and the Jedi both. But I don’t get to go back to Kamino and take my anger out on the longneck that took our toys, and I’m... working on it, not being so angry with the generals. I’m still angry. But I know the Jedi have about as much say in all of this as we do, and I know burying my brothers won’t bring them back. So I’m working on it.”

  “I... don’t have to be good at it all at once.”

  “Great Maker, General, just because you’re the Chosen One doesn’t mean you have to actually be good at absolutely everything from the start. You just have to try, and you still have time to.”

  He looks up and finds Anakin already smiling back. “Fives, I could kiss you.”

  “Considering it sounds like Senator Amidala just divorced you, I think that’s a very bad idea, sir.”

  “Bah, you’re no fun.”

  Fives feigns offense, “This mouse droid we’ve rigged to follow Captain Rex around and scream says differently.”

-

  The night the 501st returns to the Resolute after finally (kriffing finally) leaving Umbara, Fives finds a hand-sewn stuffed mythosaur on his bunk, with a string collar and a dogtag etched with CT-782.

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