rex

when accelerated aging has been making your joints creak for years now, and your hands tremble when you aren’t focused on making sure they remain steady, you sit by a fire that dances into the air like it can hear the fireworks above you. your liver probably can’t take the celebrations, but you don’t think it would be right, to send off your general without a proper goodbye. it was never the way of the 501st, and even if there is nothing left of it but you and the smoke that stretches towards the stars and the worn plastoid on your arms, that is enough, here and now.

the young man standing across the fire from you has familiar eyes. they only meet yours for a second.

in the years to come, they will talk about anakin skywalker like he was something more and less than a man. it’s not something new. not to you. when the empire had been the republic, and there had still been enough jedi that they were thought of as a fact of the galaxy, rather than a story, or a piece of history, he was talked about as more than a man then, too. and sometimes, he was. you knew him through those moments. but you knew him as a man, too.

it was always the dichotomy of what he was.

you shared a bunk with him, sometimes, when there was only enough space for so many tents or when the climate demanded it. you could never remember the dreams that you had on those nights, just that they tore through you like a ship punching into hyperspace, and left the afterimage of light behind your eyes and the taste of ozone in your lungs.

you woke up with his hands jammed into your armpits because he got cold too easily, and you watched him curse under his breath as he tried to comb tangles out of his hair in the ten minutes before you both had to head to the command center.

( you want to tell him, once, when you share a tent but different bunks, and you watch him twist and frown at something behind his eyes, that you have nightmares every night, too. but it feels like a step too far. like it would be breaching some kind of trust. so you simply shift your bunks closer together, and keep the watch. )

you know yourself well enough that you can call yourself a coward. he calls you one of the bravest men he’s ever met.

by his side, you think sometimes that it could even be true.

cody told you once, when the two of you are packed side by side into a booth at 79s, that he told skywalker about what it was like to be sun-stunned. paralyzed by the light where you stand. he has the rising sun painted on his armor, and a scar tearing from his forehead to his chin to match, and maybe you’re just too many drinks in, but you tell him that in your head, you always call skywalker tranyc - star-burning.

( did you know? could you have? could you have done something to change it, even if you did? )

the fact that you were never sun-stunned is a point of personal pride to hold against cody, in the rare-and-then-rarer moments where you just get to be brothers, rather than captain and commander, so you don’t tell him that it’s just as much because the first time you saw skywalker cutting through the enemy in front of you, you were sun-stunned yourself, for a moment. he was a much worse fighter then than he was by the end of the time you knew him, but even then, there had been something that almost trapped you in that blur of blue light.

tranyc means sunny, too.

there are posters with his face emblazoned across them - the hero with no fear. there’s a prophecy somewhere out there, too, about the light inside of him, but that’s never been something you know anything about. you tell him as much, once, when he mentions it.

with all due respect, sir, it doesn’t make much of a difference to us, either way. we know you’ll lead us right. he smiles at that like he’s not sure what to do with it, and you rest a hand on his shoulder. maybe it’s not how the galaxy works, or how he’ll be remembered, but to you he was always your general, and your friend before he was ever the chosen one.

you watch his son, now, as he slips through the trees, eyes caught on something you can’t see.

you remember when crybaby asked him for a favor. the surprise in his eyes that was immediately followed by delight, that was later followed by an ache of something like homesickness, whenever his eyes caught on the horizon of the coastal town you’d set up base camp in, the lake that danced there with the shore and the people who made their life in it.

crybaby and his riduur had stood in front of him, and he’d passed crybaby a paper cup of water that you had watched him stir salt into until it was cloudy. some marriages on tatooine weren’t binding, either, he had said. they would fling sand over their shoulders, to show that together, they would leave the desert behind them. i thought you could do the same.

you remember his grin at the moment the two of them pressed their foreheads and then their lips together, bright enough to burn, just as well as you remember the ache of longing in his eyes at crybaby’s vows — i have nothing to give you but my name, my armor, and my heart, and those i offer willingly.

i needed to tell someone, rex, he’d said to you, that night, and the air around the both of you felt like when the gravity generator was on the fritz, like you were too heavy for your body and apt to float out of it all at once, as he rests his hands on your shoulders, eyes meeting yours with a desperation that you can almost feel in the back of your teeth, your mirror neurons sending the ache of it crawling up your throat in empathetic reflection. in case something happens to me. she needs to know.

you don’t tell him the number of people that you suspect already know, or that you’d suspected ever since the first time you worked on a mission with the two of them, watching the way their fingertips reached for each other in the moments when they thought nobody was looking. there is a difference between knowing and skywalker wanting you to know. trusting you to.

as a jedi, from what you understand, it isn’t allowed. as a general, you should tell him not to involve you in this.

but as his friend, you just rest your hand over one of his wrists and thank him for telling you. you promise to keep his secret, to talk to amidala and try to protect her if you should somehow outlive him, and to yourself, you promise to keep your speculations on how much of a secret it really is to the confines of your own head.

depending on who tells the stories, you will hear him talked about as a monster or a martyr.

but you remember the feeling of his pulse under your hand, and the look of relief to his face and the weight your promise takes off his shoulders, and you always remember the man first.