#foxives

“General Kenobi knew some people, and they knew some people,” the 501st captain—Rex, his name was Rex—said from behind him. “General Skywalker kept him alive after your shocktroopers cleared out, and we managed to get him into bacta in time.”

Fox stared at the gash across Fives’s chest. The muscle was mostly knitted shut, but the skin was still healing. Who the fuck knew what kind of moonshine bacta cocktail they had him in. He whirled around. “Why isn’t he in a GAR facility!”

Rex stood unmoved. “He tried to assassinate the Chancellor. So I hear.”

That drew Fox up short. He’d said as much to himself over the past week; said it so many times it had almost lost meaning. He’d made the right call; he’d gone over it a dozen times in his head, even checked his helmet footage to make sure he wasn’t rewriting it in his memory, but it stayed the same: Fives had pulled a blaster on them and ignored direct orders to stand down.

Rex was right. No GAR facility would take him, unless it would be for immediate transport to Kamino for reconditioning. Maybe to a penal colony, if they felt generous. If not outright destruction.

He turned back to the tank, his fingers spread wide to try and touch Fives through the glass. “Why didn’t you listen?” he said quietly. 

“Commander, you should probably know. The doc here ran a blood test before they dunked him, and he came up positive for voladizam.”

Fox stared up at Fives’s sleeping face, half-covered by the oxygen mask. “I don’t know it.”

“Apparently they give it to psych patients. Side effects can include paranoia, aggression, and anxiety if the dosing isn’t done right.”

Fox forced himself to look away, frowning at Rex. “Are you saying he was drugged?”

The mutie captain stood at ease, his thumbs tucked in his belt. He watched Fox carefully. “There’s a lot of unanswered questions floating around. Kamino won’t let us look into their files on the biochips. The helmet footage was erased from Fives’s armor; he didn’t do it, I didn’t do it. We were told his aggression and paranoia was caused by the removal of his chip, but then his blood tests positive for psych drugs?” He shook his head, looking past Fox to the body of his trooper bobbing in the tank. “I’m saying I’ve got some suspicions, Commander.” 

Fox turned back to the tank. To Fives. They hadn’t seen each other in over three months, since the last time Fives had been called to CLONINT for a briefing. He’d only been on-planet for a single night; barely enough for Fox to reacquaint himself with the feeling of Fives’s hands on his skin.

And then, a week ago, Fox had been sent to apprehend a rogue ARC trooper, and his world had tilted sideways down the garbage chute.

For now, Fives was sleeping. But eventually, he would wake up. And when he did, Fox had some questions he wanted answered. Questions he had a feeling he wasn’t going to like the answers to.

Fox gazed around at the narrow walls of the refurbished supply closet. Cleaning supplies had been replaced with tattoo supplies, and a repurposed barber’s chair was shoved in the center, where the droid charging station used to be. Flimsis of Widowmaker’s work were taped to the shelves. “How’s this work?” Fox asked.

“Well, first you tell me what you have in mind.” Widowmaker set the needles aside and propped his forearms on the back of the chair.

Fox tapped his breastplate, left of center but not quite over his heart. “Want a five. Here.”

“How big?”

“Size of blaster hole,” Fox snapped. “The fuck does it matter?”

Widowmaker shrugged to hide the creepy crawlies going over his skin. He’d heard the commander had had to shoot a brother a couple days ago. Looked like Widowmaker had drawn the short straw and got to handle the fallout.

“Just making sure you get what you want,” he said as calmly as possible.

“S’what I want.”

“Sure thing, boss. Cop a squat and we’ll get you started.” He slapped the chair. “Need help with your armor?”

“I got it.” And he did, mostly. Haphazardly shoved his helmet on one of the shelves Widowmaker had left empty for that purpose, then started stripping away his upper body plates. The only trouble spot was the cuirass; he got the clasps uneven, and they jammed. Widowmaker helped him out of it without making a fuss, and the commander got the rest. He sat heavily in the chair, and Widowmaker noticed, though he wished he hadn’t, the way the commander’s hands shook before they gripped the armrests.

“Just gonna shave the skin before we get started,” he said, and went about stropping his razor. Clones usually didn’t have more than a few wisps of chest hair, but any hair was a bad mix with a tattooing. Not that Commander Fox would be getting a tattoo tonight.

He shaved off Fox’s few wisps over the site he’d indicated, then sat back. “A five, you said? Which alphabet?”

Fox swallowed. “Aurebesh.”

Widowmaker held up his thumb and forefinger in a circle, about as big around as the entry wound left by DC pistols, which Widowmaker had heard through the grapevine was Fox’s weapon of choice when he wasn’t rocking a rifle. “This big?”

Fox just nodded.

Fucking grim as all nine hells. Widowmaker got up to the workstation behind the hot seat and did not crack open a fresh set of needles, but instead pulled out a cluster of old ballpoint cores he’d eviscerated and glued together for situations exactly like these. He slid it into the handgrip he used for his work and went back to pull up a stool in front of Fox.

“One Aurebesh five coming right up,” he said, and started poking at Fox’s chest like he did with actual needles. Just… not permanently.

“Huh,” Fox said. “Doesn’t hurt.”

“With respect, sir, but you’re so wasted I don’t think you can even feel your face, right now.”

Fox tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. “Yeah. M’drunk.”

Widowmaker suppressed a snort of laughter. It wasn’t too hard. Drunks could be entertaining, when they weren’t puking all over your floor, but this was more pathetic than funny. And it only got worse if he actually sat and thought about what it would feel like to shoot a fellow clone.

It was quiet for a while, Widowmaker occupied with his phony tattoo, Fox blinking up at the ceiling. But then Fox started talking.

“We were fucking,” he said baldly, his voice hard and aggressive, like he was daring Widowmaker to make an issue of it.

Widowmaker pursed his lips. “You and the ARC?”

“Yeah.”

Fuck almighty. If Widowmaker were a less principled man, this would make the absolute best gossip fodder. Commander Fox, notoriously hardass about brotherfucking, was fucking a brother on the side. The universe laughed.

But then Widowmaker remembered the whole story, and his sliver of nasty vindication shriveled up in shame. He wouldn’t wish this on anybody.

“What happened?”

Fox sniffed, a little more wetly than Widowmaker’s conscience could bear. “Don’t tell me the gossip hasn’t already said.”

Widowmaker shrugged. An ARC going rogue, taking out his inhibitor chip, and trying to kill the Chancellor? Obviously it had made the BBN. But this was hardly the first time Widowmaker’s chair had turned into a confessional, and if he was honest, he was a little curious.

“He—he didn’t listen. I told him not to go for the blaster, but he’d already—” Fox paused to take a steadying breath. “He’d already attacked the Chancellor and imprisoned a Jedi general, and I fucking told him not to—”

His words choked off, and the sound of him swallowing down his emotions made Widowmaker’s heart break. Not even the commander’s white-knuckled grip on the chair could hide how he was trembling.

“I don’t know why he did it.”

His voice was a cracked whisper, and Widowmaker figured it was past time he said something.

“No way to retrace his trail?”

Fox shook his head. “Just conspiracy theories and paranoia. His friend had just killed a Jedi, he… He probably just couldn’t accept the truth. That his friend went crazy, that there wasn’t some elaborate conspiracy.” His brow wrinkled, as though he didn’t like that answer but didn’t have anything better at hand. “Took out his chip and everything tanked after that.”

“Shit,” Widowmaker said lowly. “Hard to think, that we’re all so close to the edge. Thank the Force for the chips, huh?”

“Yeah,” Fox said, looking away. “Thank the Force.”

***

He woke in the middle of the night, his leg cramping. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he whispered as quietly as he could. Fives was still asleep, his head half buried under the pillow; Fox couldn’t appreciate the sight, not when the burning throb in his leg almost drove him to tears.

The first handful of months after the accident had been the worst in terms of pain. The medics and PT specialists had reassured him that it would fade in time, as his nerves rerouted and healed; mostly, they’d been right. There were still a few triggers, however, and changes in barometric pressure—like when the Coruscant WeatherNet planned for rain—were one of them.

He tried to ignore it. It would fade eventually, a couple hours after the rain stopped. Mental calculations ran through his head without him: if his prosthesis was hurting badly enough to wake him, then it might have already started raining; the report said it would be for two hours, then another two or so hours after that for the nerves to settle down… that would leave him, if he was lucky, with an hour of sleep before his alarm went off.

“Shit,” he muttered again, and carefully pushed aside the covers to sit up without waking Fives. Sometimes he could get it to ease off if he rubbed it. Painkillers didn’t usually do anything; it wasn’t a problem often enough for him to get a scrip for an anticonvulsant, and regular painkillers didn’t target the right receptors. He bit his lip through a spasm, hunching forward over his leg.

“S’amatter?” Fives asked, stirring.

Fox tensed. “Nothing, go back to sleep.”

But of course, Fives ignored him. He propped himself up, sleep fading fast. “No, something’s wrong.”

Fox sighed, his shoulders tense. He could shove Fives off out of pride, but that would do absolutely nothing but start a fight, and then Fives would figure it out anyway because he was smart and an asshole. “It’s just phantom pain,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

“I’m awake now. Is it your leg?” He sat up next to Fox, and Fox found himself leaning into him despite himself.

“Yeah,” he said into Fives’s shoulder. “My leg.”

“Okay.” Fives rubbed Fox’s back. Fox bit his lip against how good it felt. “Anything I can do to help?”

It had been so long since a brother had asked to help him. Fox wasn’t sure what hurt worse: the pain in his leg, or the pain in his heart. “Just—just rub my leg,” he said. “Massage the muscles in the stump, as much as you can reach, that’ll distract the nerves.”

“Sure.” Fives reached forward, and his hand was so gentle on Fox’s skin. Fox never seemed to remember how gentle Fives was with him; it was a surprise every time.

As sweet as it was, though, it wasn’t enough. “Like this,” Fox said, digging his fingers into the fascia just below his knee. The docs had told him he was lucky it was below the knee; that his long-term complications would be less severe, and the prosthesis wouldn’t be as complicated. Fox didn’t feel too lucky, but he guessed he was lucky the speeder had only crushed his foot, not the rest of him.

Fives picked it up quickly. He worked his fingers around the pickups and as deep beneath the lip of the prosthesis as his fingers could fit. Fox sighed raggedly as his nerves eased up against the conflicting signals.

“Can it come off?” Fives asked, knocking his knuckles against the prosthesis.

“Yeah, but it’s a process. Just leave it.”

“Sure.” Fives smiled wistfully, just visible in the lights of a passing speeder. “Just like when we were cadets, huh? Rubbing out growing pains.”

Fox sighed against Fives’s skin. “Been a long time since I was a cadet.”