#pocho

There’s a big amount of similarities between these games and their characters, not surprising I’m a big fan of both lol

Weird enough, my first time ever drawing sans despite knowing about him since 2018 (he’s wearing one of these shirts with skeleton ribs printed on them btw)

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.