#foxecho

Echo opens his eyes to a dark, quiet room, what’s left of his dream melting away into the shadows like ice in the midday sun. The air is cool and still, and he sighs into his pillow, closing his eyes again. His hips aren’t too happy with him, what’s left of the joint throbbing with a kind of well-worn pain, like the dull edge of an old knife. 

There’s a hand tucked under his shirt, palm against his belly. Fox is awake.

Echo licks his lips and clears his throat. “Did I wake you up?”

Fox hums: that’s a yes. Echo sighs again, annoyed with himself, and opens his mouth, an apology already rolling off his tongue, but Fox’s quicker.

“You were talking in your sleep,” Fox says, his lips moving against the skin of the back of Echo’s neck. The mattress shifts, and then he’s rolling away: Echo shivers in the sudden cold and turns to look at him.

It’s late. A sliver of orange light slithers through a crack in the curtains, and slowly Echo starts being able to make bits and pieces of Fox’s silhouette: his bare shoulders and the curve of his spine when he bends down to pick up his shirt, the slope of his nose, his eyes, reflecting the light.

“Where are you going?”

Fox doesn’t reply. He finishes getting dressed, and then sits on the edge of the bed to put on his boots. He’s close enough to touch: Echo would just need to—reach out across the bed, across a sea of slowly cooling sheets.

He turns the other way while Fox makes his way to the door, trying to find a better position for his hips. He suspects he won’t be able to fall asleep again that night: something awful and knowing and familiar is uncurling within his chest.

He thinks he dreamed of Kamino. Water and light; wind and thunder. 

He wants to go back to the front. He never loved Coruscant, and the experience of having to actually work in the city is making him hate it like he hates very few things. It’s loud, it’s smelly, and it’s insanely expensive. Fives keeps pestering him, asking for updates, telling him to visit this place or another, and Echo’s running out of ways to tell him that living in it is more expensive and more boring than spending your two-day leaves there now and then. Their respective schedules are so off it’d be funny if Echo was in a better mood: they talk little and not very often, and Echo misses him so much sometimes thinks he’s going to die from it. 

The jacket smells like him. Echo doesn’t sigh, quietly judging himself and his own banthashit, and forces his mind back on track.

He was told to take one of the suspiciously ample number of unmarked Corrie speeders and drive down to one of the lower levels, and to do it out of armour. He’s to pick up someone else—they didn’t tell him who, or why. 

Echo dislikes not knowing, dislikes the vagueness and the surety on his handler’s part that he’ll just yes-sir and do as he’s told, but by now he knows that’s how it goes. He will get the job done, and then he’ll go back to Arca—he’s been spending so long in the range there that his scores are within the ten highest on the list. 

The coordinates take him down the nearest chute, many levels below the surface, and to a small landing pad close to one of the entertainment districts. Echo parks the speeder and then stays inside, leaning in his seat with the engine off. He’s sweating under his leather jacket: it’s warmer than up top, and the air stinks of speeder exhaust and cooking food, the lights and the music that come in from the nearby streets distracting and alluring at once. 

One minute becomes two, three. Ten. echo’s impatience grows sharper and more bitter.

His comm beeps in his ear. Echo accepts the call with a scowl.

“1409,” a voice says. They sound like a clone trooper, but—off. Hoarser, lower.

“Copy.”

“Two levels down, next to Herrik’s garage. Get the speeder as close as you can to the wall and wait there. Five minutes.” 

The call ends. Echo lifts an eyebrow and starts the speeder again.

He can see Herrik’s from where he is, the shop’s neon boards shining poison green in the murky dusk of the chute. Echo drops across skylines, ducking under the top-heavy freighters floating their way back up to the surface, bored and impatient and already thinking about dinner, about taking a shower and maybe trying to call Fives again, and then—

Blaster shots, the noise unique and familiar and somehow comforting, and then a flash of dark clothing and dark eyes, and a smothering and sudden weight. One arm around Echo’s neck, warm breath against the side of his face, and

“Drive,” the clone trooper says. 

What the fuck.

Echo swerves away from the wall of the chute, the motion of the speeder pushing them back against the side, the other man heavy in his lap. He’s wearing civvies, and he stinks of tibanna discharge, and instead of moving off Echo’s lap he stays, looking back, deecee in one hand. There’s blood on his face.

“This’ll be easier if you get off my lap,” Echo says. 

The trooper blinks. He shifts and settles on the copilot seat, breathing hard. Echo doesn’t roll his eyes and pulls them higher, ignoring the skylanes, just pointing them towards the upper levels. 

They’re being followed. Lights, too far away to count properly, moving too fast. Echo scowls and switches gears, gets them under one of the big freighters, hides them in its shadow, and blaster shots slide uselessly over its hull, showering them in bright hot plasma.

“This won’t last,” the clone trooper says. “You should let me drive,” he continues. “I’m the better driver.”

He sounds so—sure of himself. Confident in his own abilities, or maybe just distrustful of Echo’s. He’s very—standard. Hair regulation short, no tattoos, no facial hair. Just scars, and that hoarse voice. He looks exactly like Echo, except in all the way he does not.

“No,” Echo replies. “I have my orders.”

“I can make it an order, then” the trooper says. 

It takes Echo longer than it probably should.

He has met Thire and Stone. Fives has met Thorn. Echo doesn’t know enough about Commander Fox to know if he’s the kind of man to pull rank just because he wants to drive a shitty speeder. 

“Of course, sir,” Echo replies. Not too slow, perfectly bland. The commander sighs, exasperated. He doesn’t move, and neither does Echo.

Echo shifts his grip on the controls, checks the rearview, glances up: he sees lights, lights, lights, and then a patch of orange sky. The sun’s setting on the surface. 

Fives would love this. He can never know. 

Echo feels the commander’s eyes on him all the way back to the surface, while they fight their way back to the Corrie barracks, and then on the Corrie medbay, Echo being treated for a nasty blaster burn on his back, the commander bleeding from his nose and his mouth and sitting on the cot next to his.

Later, he’ll wonder about Fox. He’ll find himself wondering about what kind of man jumps on moving speeders from great heights, Coruscant’s endless void under his feet and blaster shots at his back, about his flat dark gaze and his breath on Echo’s throat, but that night—tired, hurting, hungry, missing his friends and missing Fives—Echos ignores him the best he can. This is it, he believes. Fox’s already just another story.

It’s cold. Fox shudders, his undershirt and his leatheris jacket lying on a bloody mess on the floor, and doesn’t move while Echo places the so-hot-it’s-cold tip of the thermal mender on the gash high up on his back. Fox exhales between clenched teeth, keeping himself still while the mender seals the broken skin together, while Echo digs up one bandage from the small kit by his legs on the bed and slaps it on the wound. 

His bedside manner could be maybe described as reassuringly to the point, but Fox is too tired to lie to himself. When Echo clicks his tongue at him, he dutifully stands up from the bed with a groan and starts struggling with his trouser closures with numb fingers.

Echo snorts. Fox turns to look at him over his shoulder: Echo rolls his eyes at him, fondness badly hidden behind the impatience, and when he sheds his surgical gloves and he tugs on Fox’s trousers Fox turns with the motion, and when he slaps Fox’s hands out of the way he sighs and lets him take care of things.

His mechnohand is a new acquisition. Not as fancy as others Fox has seen, but certainly a step up from his old scomplink. He doesn’t wear gloves, and the touch of his metal fingertips, the brush of the back of his fingers against the thin skin stretched tight over Fox’s hipbone—they feel earth shattering in a way Fox has had to learn to ignore. 

His bloody trousers slide down his thighs, getting caught around his knees. Echo looks up at him from where he sits on the bed, eyes dark and fixed on Fox; his mouth ticks up on a crooked, knowing smile. Fox turns away to sit back down on the bed, Echo’s hands hovering around his hips, and kicks his trousers the rest of the way down.

The bolt went through his left thigh. He packed the wound, and by the time his pick up got there it wasn’t bleeding anymore. Echo pokes at the dirty bandages there and hums, the worried scowl back on his face. He clicks his tongue again, but by now Fox’s learned to tell what that one means: he’s frustrated, with himself and with Fox, but mostly with himself. He looks up at Fox, dark lashes brushing the tops of his cheeks, lips pressed tight.

“That one’s too much for me,” he says. He’s left his metal hand where it rests on Fox’s thigh. “You should ask Hello to look at it.”

The metal’s cool, reassuringly heavy. Fox should shift away.

At first Fox thought was reading into things—then came the certainty Echo was fucking with him. It took him embarrassingly long to arrive at the conclusion that Echo means it: that he means every single thing. He means it, because Echo hides little if he can help it—he’s blisteringly honest, his sharp tongue always truthful and to the point. 

Fox grunts noncommittally. He’ll go to the medbay when he’s ready. Cody’s old CMO is an asshole, because of course he is: he was Cody’s.

He always liked Echo very much.

Echo’s lips are chapped and dry against his. Fox brushes a kiss on his mouth, there and done, and draws away. Echo’s staring at him, eyes wide, flush crawling up his neck.

“Can I nap here first?” Fox asks him. Echo blinks. He clears his throat, and his fingers twitch where they still rest on Fox’s bare thigh. 

“It’s your leg,” Echo replies with a snort. 

Echo looks him in the eye in that way he has of looking through you, familiar face wan and too pale, and then it’s—easy. Echo pays his tab and follows him out of the bar and into the crowded streets of what used to be Coco Town, raw sewage in the water of the artificial beaches and armed droids patrolling the street. Fox finds a way through the force shields and the walls and even deeper under the planet’s surface, and Echo follows, hyperaware of the noise of their footsteps through the now abandoned arcades and boulevards.

Most of the districts still have power: Coruscant’s infrastructure is its own thing, self-sustaining, older than the oldest inhabited levels of the planet, and after inhabiting its circuits Echo knows it is a terrible thing, too big and complex to understand. 

Fox’s safehouse looks barely used. Dusty and dark and cold, with black mold growing on the fresher’s ceiling and nothing in the conservator. It’s not the one Fox is using, that’s obvious and insulting, and Echo might not be that sure he is glad to see him but the distrust hurts in a way he didn’t quite see coming, because there was a time, not that long ago, when Fox looked at him like couldn’t quite believe he existed, like he would do terrible, painful things for Echo if given half the chance.

But then again, that was before Fives.

Echo has seen what happens to the infected. He’s had to put brothers down himself. But he knows, in his heart of hearts, that he would have never been able to do that to Fives. He knows he would have waited it out with him, and he knows that Fives would have hated him for it; Echo knows that he wouldn’t have regretted a thing.

He can’t tell what hurts worse: the fact that Fox loved him enough to kill him before the fungus took him, or the fact that he didn’t love him enough, and that he pulled the trigger anyway.

After Echo steps inside the apartment, Fox closes and locks the door at his back. He unholsters his blaster and looks into every single room, shoulders loose, and Echo watches him in silence, feeling the way his patience runs out.

Fox called him to Coruscant. After years of silence, Fox somehow found a way to send him an encrypted comm through their old channel: Echo can’t quite believe he did as he asked.

He used to think he hated Fox. He was so sure of it: how could he not? He loved Fives and killed him anyway.

The building settles and resettles all around them. Echo folds his arms and eyes the door, Fox’s back, the dusty surface of the couch. He thinks he might remember this place, from back before the war ended and he got caught. It bothers him the fact that he doesn’t know for sure. His once perfect recall, scrambled by the implants and time and all the awful shit he’s seen and done in his life.

Fox exhales. He holsters his blaster and stops in front of Echo, the weak light from the ceiling lumas washing him out. He opens his mouth, closes it again, and then—he sighs. He sounds exhausted, and that part of Echo that is not as dead as it should blooms, reaches out, wanting to comfort and touch and just be with him, because Echo might miss Fives more than he misses his own limbs, but sometimes it’s like he misses Fox more just because he’s still alive. He still remembers the way Fox tasted, the sound of his sighs and his groans, the dorky, unexpected little snort he made every time they made him laugh.

He watches Fox, and Fox watches him back, longing sudden and awful in his dark, familiar eyes, and then he looks away. He clears his throat.

“Fives was right.” That croak of a voice, low and creaky. 

It takes a second to register. Right about what?

“Fives was right,” Fox says again. “He was—he was immune.”

What?

Echo’s shaking. He can feel it, but he can’t stop it. He sees Fox’s hand reaching out for him, and he’s too slow to move back: by the time it touches him, warm and sweaty and heavy, resting awkwardly on his shoulder, it’s too late.

Echo pulls his headset down and rubs at his face. His flesh palm is damp and too hot, and he grumbles and runs the fingers through his hair, trying and failing to take care of the knots.

At his side, Fox exhales softly. Echo glances at him: Fox is staring back, head tilted, the harsh blue light of the holoscreen coating his skin and his hair and his clothes, reflecting in his dark eyes. He blinks at Echo and looks away, back at the screen, a slight frown on his brow and his lips pressed tight. His shoulders are very tense: he hasn’t moved since Echo bullied him into sitting down, his hands gripping his own legs and his back tense.

There’s a shadow of a bruise on his face and prickly stubble on his jaw, and Echo—he doesn't fight it as he would have done once. He leans over the space between their chairs and kisses him there, low on his jaw, right on the bone, and when Fox shivers he tucks his smile there, hides it away against the warm skin of Fox’s throat, before moving away.

Fox clears his throat. He turns on his chair, hands now gripping its arms, and tilts his head at Echo, eyes bright. He licks his lips, and when Echo’s eyes flicker to his mouth he smiles, tiny and knowing and still disbelieving. 

“Are you done?” he says, voice low. Echo sighs. He throws a last glance at his workstation—he’s mostly there, mostly done reviewing Tech’s numbers. 

“Yeah,” he replies after a beat. “Yeah, I think I’m done.”

Fox stands up from his chair and stretches his arms over his head until they both can hear his back crack; Echo snorts, and then accepts Fox’s hand, lets Fox pull him to his feet. 

“Hip all right?” 

Echo frowns and shifts his weight. He changed the cuff, so it should be alright, but—yeah. He still feels like something’s wrong, though he knows very well nothing is. He fixed it, it’s fine, it shouldn’t feel loose but it does.

“Yeah,” he tells Fox. Fox’s face does that thing it does when he wants to let Echo know he knows he’s lying but he doesn’t want to talk, and Echo rolls his eyes. “It is. It’s just—it’s kriffing psychosomatic.”

“Oh well if it’s psychosomatic,” Fox drawls, his voice lower than usual. Echo rolls his eyes. 

He takes off the scomp link and reaches for the prosthetic arm, clicks it on, moving through the unpleasant buzzing when the wires connect with the ease of familiarity. He clicks his fingers, makes a fist, opens it, and then turns to Fox.

“D’you mind if—?”

Fox never does.

The new arm has heat, pain, texture receptors. It’s a nice bit of engineering, and Echo doesn’t even mind the few seconds he wastes on recalibrating the whole thing every time he takes it off and puts it back on.

Fox’s hand is very warm. Echo closes his eyes and they stand like that in the small, stuff room, Echo’s slick black synthskin palm against Fox’s callused one. The connections burst to life in Echo’s brain, first slowly and then all at once, and then it was like the hand was always his, like it’s the one he lost a lifetime ago.

It goes for a beat too long, and then Fox’s moving into Echo’s space, warm and present, the familiar smell of his skin mixing with the stink of hot rubber and hotter metal of Echo’s small workroom in this safehouse, and Echo lets Fox crowd him against his own desk, eyes still closed, hands still clasped. Clever fingers make their way under the hem of Echo’s tank top, brush the scarce hair on his belly, and then they’re gone. 

Echo opens his eyes again. Fox is watching him, eyes dark and hungry, slick blue light dripping down his cheekbones and pooling in the dip of his collarbones, and now and then it hits Echo, how incredibly impossible, improbable, their clasped hands are. How they shouldn’t be but are, despite everything—despite themselves. Despite Fives’s ghost, whose absence Echo will carry around in his chest until the day he dies, and despite the world, who would see them dead.

Fox scoffs softly. He drops to his knees, easy and liquid, and Echo blinks, eyes wide, and—door’s locked. Black synthskin fingers find themselves buried in Fox’s growing curls, and then Fox’s making quick work of Echo’s pants, and—

“Careful with your hip,” Fox says, lips already spit-slick, blue light in his eyes, and Echo snorts, chokes on his reply when Fox ducks his head to suck a kiss on the patchy skin around the prosthesis, mouth smiling around Echo’s reaction.