#foxechofives

Echo’s face remains blank, eyes sharp and knowing. It’s one of the few things that hasn’t changed.

“I shot him here,” Fox says and touches the point on his own armour—high up on his chest, just to the left of centre. “In case you’re planning on being poetic about it.”

Echo doesn’t smile. His right hand hangs by his holster. Fox is a quicker draw. He could get himself the complete set. He’d made that joke before, sweaty and panting, Fives and Echo’s limbs tangled around his own. He can’t remember if he’d said it aloud then, but this time decides against it.

“Rex told me what happened,” Echo says.

Fox scowls. He’s sure Rex told Echo everything. How long would he have waited? How desperate would he have been to turn more people away from Fox.

Echo pushes away from the wall. He’s taller, not by much, but his new legs don’t match the length of his old ones. He’s in borrowed armour, white and untouched, not even kama to break it up. Does Rex know that Echo came looking for him? Would he approve?

“I wouldn’t shoot you,” Echo tells him. He takes a step closer and then another, and then the fog of his breath is mixing with Fox’s. His voice hasn’t changed either, but the way he uses it with Fox has. All the familiar warmth has gone, drying up into something frigid and wary. “I’d choke you. I’d want to feel it.”

Fox lifts his chin, daring Echo to prove it.

That gets a smile. Echo’s hand closes around Fox’s throat, tendons sharp lines through delicately thin skin. The pads of his fingers drag over Fox’s pulse and then his arm drops.

“Rex doesn’t know you,” Echo says, the rest goes unspoken. “Did you kill Fives?”

“Yes.”

Something too terrible to name flashes over Echo’s face.

“Why?”

“I’m sure Captain Rex has already told you. He went mad. He had to be stopped and the captain had already made a mess of it.” He’d told Fives not to talk to Rex, but he’d insisted. It might not be fair to be bitter towards a dead man, but Fox is very bitter—there’d been no need for it to be so public.

“I know you, Fox.” He does. That had been a mistake, but one it’s far too late to undo. Fox would, if it were an option. He’d have never let either of them into his life.

The air this deep is stale and polluted. It chokes up Fox’s throat and burns his eyes.

“He told me to,” Fox croaks. “The chips… The chancellor…” He doesn’t know where to start. He can’t say too much. Not here.

Echo nods like he’s already said enough, the brain that made him so valuable racing. “You needed space to work.” It’s not a question. “You needed the chancellor to trust you. If Fives escaped you’d be watched too closely.”

Fox nods. He’d thought it might be easier to have shared this awful secret he’s been carrying. It’s not. Fives is still dead.

Echo kisses him, lips cracked and dry, the shape of his face all wrong. His eyes are wet when he pulls away, but there’s a determined set to his jaw.

---

Fox gives one last tug at the tarp and steps away. The bike is half-hidden by the bins at the end of the alley, the thick tarp taking care of what’s left. It won’t stop any determined thieves, but it’ll do for a while. Fox stuffs his hands in the pockets of his leatheris jacket and starts making his way to the neighbouring street, his boots sinking slightly in the mix of trash and mud that covers the ground. The flashing neons of the ad boards slick off the shoulders of Fox’s jacket and the windshields of the speeders overhead. Fox blinks the light off his eyes, momentarily blinded, and doesn’t allow himself to stop. Across the street and down a set of crumbling duracrete stairs and into a different, crowded, crooked little street, loud with music and speeder engines and the general noise of the crowd. 

Fox keeps his head down and doesn’t look anyone in the eye. He knows himself invisible: everyone’s gaze slides right off him, their eyes looking through him and around him. He’s deep enough under Coruscant’s surface most of the people he crosses paths with have never seen a bare-faced clone trooper, but he doesn’t want to risk it. 

They don’t seem to care.

He finds Torrent’s ARCs in one of the smaller pubs along Hangsman’s Creek. They’re sharing a booth at the back of the bar, snickering at each other over empty shot glasses. They’re on the same side of the booth, their shoulders together, the low light reflecting in their dark eyes. Fives sees him first through the windows, his eyes widening in recognition, and when Fox steps into the bar Echo’s already turning to look at him.

They look very different: it’s not Fives’s beard and tattoo, or Echo’s shorter hairstyle. It’s in the way they talk, the way they hold themselves.

They are also perfectly identical, and the moment Fox bites the bolt and crosses the pub, the moment he stops in front of the booth—well. 

Fox frowns and folds his arms, not bothering to speak. It’s too loud in the bar, and his throat hurts, and anyway—it won’t matter. It never does with these two. 

For a long beat, they stare at each other. Fives’s elated smile slides off his face, and Echo tilts his head, his bright eyes turning knowing and sly, and Fox waits them out, the eyes of the whole room on them, burning a hole into the back of Fox’s head. Fox jerks his head towards the exit and then leaves them there, starts making his way back across the pub to the street. 

There’s a small, run down park around the corner. It’s walled off, but the gate’s busted, and it gives when Fox pushes it open. Dead grass covers the ground, and the trees reach out to the bellies of the speeders over Fox’s head with gnarled, bare branches. He’s not the only one there: Fox zips down his jacket, lets the butt of his deecee reflect the light.

The voices precede them. Echo and Fives appear a few minutes later, still flushed and sweaty and bright-eyed. Echo’s hair is a mess, and there’s a new, angry-looking red mark on Fives’s neck, right under his jaw. 

“Well,” Fives starts. He makes a show of looking around himself, hands in the pockets of his trousers. They’re both wearing civvies, well-worn and perfectly forgettable. “You always take us to the nicest places.”

Echo rolls his eyes. He stays where he is while Fives steps closer to Fox.

“I told you to wait in the safehouse,” Fox reminds them. Fives knocks his boot against Fox’s but doesn’t reach for him. He wants to.

“You were late,” Echo says. He’s crossed his arms: he’s annoyed. “We’re shipping out again in two days.”

Something came up. Fox doesn’t get time-off—not really. He has an off-shift, but he’s on call night and day.

The park is very quiet. The noises of the street outside fill the gaps between the dead trees and the dead grass. Fox looks away, lips pressed tight; he listens to Echo’s sigh, to the crunch of gravel under his boots. Fives hooks his fingers around Fox’s belt and pulls him in.

He tastes of liquor, but he’s so very warm. Fox opens under him, heat rolling down his spine and down into his belly, hands moving without his input to grab at Fives’s shoulders, hard and dense through the soft fabric of his jacket.

He doesn’t hear Echo coming. Fox opens his eyes to a hand on his jaw, and then Echo’s kissing him too, long fingers tucked right under Fox’s ear in a careful hold. He tastes like Fives.

There’s a bench there, half-hidden from sight by rotten vegetation. It’s made of concrete, cracked and pockmarked and overgrown with mold, but Fox’s missed them and—

“I need to leave,” he says. He leans away and hides his face in Echo’s warm neck, Fives’s hand under his shirt and rubbing his spine. “Senate emergency. I have—had—an hour and—”

“And you just wasted it looking for us,” Echo finishes for him, voice bitter. Fox says nothing. 

He can’t just ask them to wait for him. 

It should be harder to know whose hands are on him, but Fox knows it’s Fives the moment he cradles Fox’s cheek with his warm dry palm. 

“We’ll spend the night,” he says, dark eyes warm. His gaze flickers in Echo’s direction. “Right? We’ll sleep at the safehouse and meet you tomorrow for some—breakfast. Lunch? I don’t know. Food.”

Fox snorts. He nods.

He wonders: when did sleeping around become this?

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.