#fidar

There’s a lot of it, everywhere, dark and sticky and covering Darman’s gauntlets. He’s red up to his elbows, which he shouldn’t be able to see on black.

The rubble is red. Their armour is red. The whole damn planet is red.

First it’s Qiilura, and Niner is screaming, and Atin is dying; then it’s Coruscant—Etain, bloodied on the safe house carpet, Sarge, shot down in a dingy, good for nothing warehouse; and now it’s Gaftikar again, inside that Force-forsaken broadcast studio. Or outside—inside—under—on top of?

But Fi is lying in the rubble again. This time he doesn’t have his katarn, and Darman knows all of the blood is his. A big pool of it, spreading on the floor. A lake as far as he can see. All of Fi’s limbs are red and Darman doesn’t know what’s not hurt.

Fi bats his hands away but doesn’t stay conscious, not even long enough to get up. Dar is shouting, and Atin is trapped, and Niner is gone.

Darman wakes up with a choked gasp and nearly concusses himself on the bunk above.

“Fuck,” he breathes. Chokes. Probably cries. His face is wet. Thank goodness there’s no one else in here—he’s sure he was shouting in his sleep. His heart rate is slowly coming down as he breathes, in, out, in, out…

In. Out.

When they get enough racks to be picky, Niner and Atin always take the top two. Fi usually takes the lower left, so Dar takes the right. They’ll end up in the same bunk anyway at some point, if they can, but now that lower left spot has Corr sleeping in it and Dar can’t make himself look for too long.

It’s becoming a prayer, these words he comes back to whenever his thoughts stray. To himself, to the Force, to Fi. Whomever will listen.

Wake up, he thinks. You have to wake up. They’ll fix you, the Jedi will fix you and then you’ll wake up.

“There’s no way it’s that easy,” Fi is saying. He looks over at Dar, lifting his eyes from his datapad, and Dar smiles at him and raises a brow. “Look—come on, I’ve seen you burn caff.”

“Accidentally,” Darman says. But he doesn’t really care about that. Fi’s eyes sparkle with his mischief and his eyelashes are—long. Darman bets that he could kiss all the way down his throat and he’d taste sweet.

But some unvoiced thought makes Fi’s lips twitch and then he looks back down at the cooking program they’re watching. He shifts his hips, sprawling even more across Darman’s bunk, and they might both be in their blacks but the heat of his thigh pressed to Dar’s is a constant burning point of contact.

He doesn’t—it’s not. These are all things he sometimes thinks about… but it’s. Different.

The point is, Darman knows what he’s thinking. These are not unfamiliar thoughts. It’s just… that they’ve never been about a squadmate, before. They’ve never been about Fi.

Back on Coruscant, Darman had heard Atin’s voice in the ’fresher just a moment before one belonging unmistakably to Delta Squad’s Sev. He hadn’t thought much of it at the time; as long as the two weren’t trying to off each other, it wasn’t his business. And besides, he’d been preoccupied. He’d had his own intimate encounters in that ’fresher, so who was he to say anything?

But now his thoughts have halted and tumbled over each other just because of one stray curl of hair behind Fi’s ear (his pierced side, the ear Mereel had cradled and punctured and “kissed better” afterwards because he likes a lark) and all Darman can wonder is what it was like. What would it be like if he—

“Dar?” Fi asks, and Darman had barely noticed him pausing the holofeed.

“I’m here,” Dar says. He breathes and he meets Fi’s questioning look and he doesn’t read into the light flush of his cheeks and he makes himself think about nerf, and salad, and tubers, and whatever-may-you that famous holonet chefs like to adulterate with too many preparation steps.

Darman’s is the lower right bunk. He’s sitting on it, legs kicked out when Fi finds him. His bucket is on top of his adjacent kit locker and he has a creased, worn-to-ruin flimsi holo held preciously between his hands.

Nobody has to ask to know what’s on it. Just the thought of it makes Fi’s heart ache behind his ribs. Makes him feel sick to his stomach.

Darman is so… true. Honest. Loyal. Trustworthy.

He’s capable to a fault, patient with brothers, possibly too forgiving of some things even if he rides hard on others.

Fi knows he admires that as much as he admires Niner’s brutal pragmatism and Atin’s unwavering hold on his focus. He admires Darman’s smile, the way it dimples more than his own and slants just a few degrees differently to... well. He can’t help but compare his new squad to his old, but that path leads nowhere but despair and sombre moods.

Sometimes Fi feels like all he has is his good cheer and his medkit, but more often than not these days he feels like he’s left only just clinging to his kit by his fingertips.

“Two hours to infil,” he says, taking the bare few steps needed to cross the room and lower himself onto Atin’s bunk, opposite Darman. He puts his helmet on the floor with a quiet clink.

Dar glances up with a quick grin. “You gonna get some shut eye?”

Fi tries to smile. “Might as well, unless there’s anything more interesting to do.”

Shrugging, Darman folds his flimsi and runs absent fingers along its frayed creases. He stares off into the distance instead, now, one boot tip swaying as his outstretched leg leans this way and that.

“Do you love her?” Fi asks eventually. The words fall from his lips as if said by someone else, drawn on a breath that hurts to leave his lungs. Do you love her, he asks, because he’s not sure if hearing the answer to anything else would be more or less painful.

“Yeah,” Dar says. He smiles a little dreamily, that uptick in the left-hand corner of his lips almost hidden from Fi’s view of his profile. “I do.”

Fi nods. He turns on Atin’s bunk and kicks up his feet, lying flat on his back. The familiar sight of the underside of Niner’s bunk above doesn’t lessen the burning sensation in the back of his throat—the one his quiet resignation says is far too much of an overreaction—but it does give him something to focus on that isn’t his thoughts.

No more seems to be forthcoming from Dar, so, eventually, Fi turns towards the wall and closes his eyes.