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"It's just a machine," Echo said upon waking. "It's all just one big machine, and we're all just a part of it."
It was the most coherent he'd been after a nightmare in - ever, really. Most of the time he just woke up saying his own number on repeat, like some dim demented echo of reality; it had been what had given him his name, this time.
...he didn't know why he'd said it like that. This time - it wasn't as though he'd gotten named before. He'd never been anything but Echo, unless of course you counted being half of 'Echo and Fives'. (Or 'Fives and Echo', which was a far stupider arrangement of words, Fives.)
"You've got that right, at least," Cody said bitterly. He said most things bitterly, or so it seemed to Echo. It wasn't exactly what Echo had expected from him, based on his reputation as the golden boy of the CC class. But then again, surely a real golden boy would never have bothered to look down so low as to pay attention to a handful of CT screwups like Domino.
Former Domino.
"I don't know why I said that," Echo said, and Cody just gave him that unreadable look again, the one that was part pity, part envy, and part something wholly unknowable, something tired and miserable. Something older than it should be.
"It doesn't matter why," he finally said. "It's true, isn't it?"
"What's true?" Fox asked, and Echo startled to hear him, having not heard him coming. He never did, unlike Cody, who seemed to have a sixth sense for Fox's presence. Or, well - less of a sense and more of desperate grasping unquenchable need to know where Fox was at all times. As if he thought that something terrible would happen to Fox the first moment they were separated.
Maybe he did.
(By all accounts that Echo had ever heard, it had not always been like that. Once they had been rivals, avid competitors for the title of the best, maybe also friends, but not - whatever they were now. Rumor said that Fox had been extremely confused by Cody's suddenly changed behavior when it had started, but Echo had no idea if any of that was true. If it was, it wasn't anything he'd seen in person. By the time Cody had arranged for Echo's transfer, Fox had adapted, and now treated Cody's nearly obsessive focus on him as if it were only normal. How much of that was true and how much was for Cody's sake, well, Echo wouldn't dare to speculate.)
"We're all part of a machine," Echo said. "Or I am, anyway."
""No, it's all of us," Cody corrected. "You especially, yes, but not exclusively. The chips are in us all."
The chips, right. Cody's weird pet conspiracy theory.
"Parts of a machine," Fox said thoughtfully. "Interesting. I wonder if we can do something with that."
"The machine is already in motion. You can't stop it." Cody rubbed his face, looking suddenly even more tired than before. "The Jedi will never refuse the opportunity to help the innocent, not even if they were told of the danger they risked in doing so."
"We're innocent too, you know," Fox said dryly. "Or at least we are by the definition you've given me. But if course clones don't count, then there's not much...anyway, that's not what I was thinking. I agree, there's no diverting the Jedi. But - a machine. Maybe we could do something there."
"Like what? I told you -"
"The machine is running, yes. But it's only a machine. At some point the machine must stop. All machines eventually stop."
"Well, yes. It does stop. But it only stops when it's too late. Fox, don't you remember? I told you about it all at the start, me and Rex -"
Echo flinched.
Cody faltered when he saw it, a look of shame stealing into his features. Wrongly, since he had no reason to be ashamed. It was Echo that was the problem. Echo, not Cody.
Just like it had been Fives, not Echo, that Rex had taken with him when he had run away.
(Deserters, someone had whispered, sounding awed by the notion of something they'd only ever been warned about and never expected to actually experience. Cowards, both of them...
Echo had hit them for saying that. Gotten his ass kicked immediately after, of course, but he hadn't been able to help himself.)
Echo didn't understand himself why it felt like such a betrayal. Losing Fives, his virtual twin and ever-present shadow (though Fives would be the first to say that Echo was the shadow, not him), had been bad enough, but somehow that hadn't been the worst of it. It had been Rex that Echo's hurt feelings had focused on. He had felt, in some way, as though Rex owed him better than that. After all they'd been though together -
Except they hadn't, of course.
Echo had only met Rex once, briefly, and it had been very shortly before his daring escape from Kamino. There was no history, nothing between them. No interaction between screw-up Domino and Rex, capable commando that for some reason Echo kept thinking of as a captain even though he wasn't being trained for that.
No reason for Echo to feel the way he felt about it. No reason to be offended.
Now Cody, Cody could reasonably claim offense. He had had that big thing with Rex, hadn't he? Even Echo had seen that one, albeit from a distance. Hugging and nearly crying with relief right in the major mess hall, both of them babbling bizarre words about being glad the other was there too even though as far as anyone else knew they'd never even met before that moment. They had been close, close enough that one would have been far less surprised if it had been Cody that Rex had taken. They had been close, close in a way very few clones ever got to be. They had been friends.
Of course, whatever it was that had driven that very first interaction, it hadn't lasted. It hadn't been all that long between that and the big blow up: the you can't solve things the same way twice and the there are things you never knew from Cody, the equally poisonous just because you never had the courage to try doesn't mean I don't from Rex.
Less than a week after that, Rex had gone, and Fives - who Echo thought would've at least told Echo about it - was gone with him.
Gone to try their best, in their own way. Alone.
But none of that was Cody's fault.
"Yes, of course, I remember what you told me," Fox said impatiently, riding roughshod over the awkwardness of the conversation as always. Echo had always appreciated that about him. "There's no room for clones in the Empire."
Echo shivered.
The Empire. He didn't even like the sound of it.
He liked the thought still less.
"And you know what, they're right, too."
"Fox!"
"They are, though." Fox crossed his arms over his chest, pretending to ignore the distraught expression on Cody's face. It was almost convincing, except in all the ways it wasn't to anyone who knew Fox past the superficial layer of bravado he usually donned. "We clones are creatures of the Republic, not the Empire."
"They're one and the same."
"Not to everyone. Not now. Not without the war."
Cody paused. "What are you suggesting?"
Fox shifted very slightly. Not much, but now it no longer looked as though he was crossing his arms with full defiance and bravado; instead, it was as if he had wrapped his arms around himself and pressed tight: not in an aggressive way, or even confident; more as if he wanted a hug but was too proud to ask for one. "We don't have many options," he said. "I won't leave my boys, and you won't leave me -"
"My boys, too. Boil and Waxer and Longshot and the rest. I wouldn't. I thought I could, but - no. I can't. I won't."
"Yes. I know. We can't do it. Not you, and not me. And we can't change it by staying, either, since the Kaminoans would object to an unauthorized run of brain surgery, even assuming we could find someone to do it. We can't stop the machine. But the machine will stop, eventually. It stops when the Empire starts, because there's no room for clones bred to protect the Republic in the Empire."
"Oh," said Echo, and now it was his turn to try to hug the fear out of himself.
Cody was by no means slow, but at times he could still be blinded by the sheer enormity of his thoughts and feelings, all the things he knew and had to remember because no one else did. He glanced between them, frowning. "What does that signify? I don't understand. We can't stop the Empire, we can't stop the clones from being demobbed after the Empire forms...so what can we do?"
"Do what we were made for," Fox said. "Or at least what we were told we were made for."
"Save the Republic," Echo said. He was afraid. But also, somehow, a little excited. Like this was what he'd been waiting for all his life: a branching point, a path forward, something to do that might actually mean something that wasn't wasting a lifetime all over again. "We need to save the Republic - from the Empire."
Cody stared.
"But they're the same," he said hesitantly. "One and the same. Aren't they?"
"Not," Fox said, "necessarily."
"Battle strategy 31-12," Echo said, and Cody's eyes went wide. "Lure the enemy out before launching your attack."
"You can't be serious," Cody said, but his protests were only pro forma now; he had gotten it now, and the idea was already in him. He could see the way forward. An once you could see it, you couldn't see anything else. "You want to make Palpatine Emperor early?"
"We could use the Seperatists to do it," Fox said, already moving ahead to tactics. "They're not Seperatists yet, just dissatisfied. If they found out that their secret ally Sidious was secretly also the Chancellor...we could convince them that the deception was all a scheme to further their joint interests, and all they need to do to win is to give him enough power to give them what they want. With the full force of the Trade Federation and the mega corporations pushing for it, plus all the systems that support Palpatine-as-Palpatine because of corruption -"
"Even he won't be able to stop it or slow it down. Not without breaking with all of his supporters. But where do we come in?"
"We support the loyalists, of course. The Republic."
"Which way will the Jedi go?" Echo wanted to know. He didn't want to fight against them. Putting aside the emotional unpleasantness, it wasn't a good idea if they wanted the clones to survive. He could remember the way the Jedi used to slice through droids -
That wasn't a memory. Or, well, it was, but only the memory of a dream. It had to be, because Echo had never met a Jedi. None of them had.
No clone on Kamino had.
Not yet.
"They're loyal," Cody said confidently. "Too loyal, loyal enough to be blind, but there are limits to that. If the rot comes out into the open where no one can deny it, they'll see it, recognize it, and act on it. They didn't even like it too much when they were stuck having to listen to the ineffective Chancellor Palpatine, but Emperor Sidious? Darth Sidious? No. They would never agree to that. Not even -"
Cody cut himself off.
Echo didn't know what he was going to say. Cody had never completed the thought, had never completed any sentence like that that he started every time the subject of the Jedi came up. Never in Echo's presence. Only once, behind closed doors that stymied Echo's best attempts to listen, a time when he'd been alone with Rex -
And look how that had gone.
"It's too early, anyway," Cody murmured, more to himself than anyone else. "Palpatine hasn't dug his hooks in as deep as all that, not yet. This early on...he hasn't even met the Senator again. He'd pick Obi-Wan. He wouldn't - he'd pick Obi-Wan. I'm sure of it."
"The chips are coded to respond to the Chancellor of the Republic," Fox said, already a thousand parsecs ahead of the rest of them as always. Even when he had started some ways behind, he found a way to get to the front. "Not an Emperor. Once there's war, the loyalist side will elect a new Chancellor -"
"Organa, if I had to bet. He nearly clinched it the first time."
"Fine, Organa. Can we trust him with the chips?"
"We can't trust anyone with the chips," Cody said. "They're an abomination. But as much as anyone could be trusted with such a thing, yes, we can trust him. And we're going to have to."
"He'll do right by us," Echo said, and did not know where his steel-solid confidence came from. "Don't worry, Cody."
"Cody doesn't know how not to worry," Fox laughed. "But he can at least save it till tomorrow. It's almost lights out."
That surprised Echo, though it shouldn't have. He'd been asleep just recently, but then he was always finding himself falling asleep at awkward times these days. Anyway, that was Echo's cue to go, so he hopped off the tube cot, hitting the ground a little too hard. He wished, as always, that he could just fast-forward through his stupid final growth spurt already. Even putting aside the random bursts of sleepiness, his body just felt wrong at this height, and he'd had enough of feeling divorced from his own body already.
Once standing, though, he hesitated. Glanced back at Cody. "Can I...?"
Cody smiled and nodded.
Delighted, Echo rushed forward to climb right back up, curling himself into the warm spot at Cody's side. The safest place in the galaxy, as far as Echo was concerned.
"Tell me the story," he demanded, as if he was far smaller than he was now. As small as he might have been if he'd been a natborn, perhaps. He'd always been like that when he was with people he trusted, but it had never bothered Cody. Not the way it had bothered the other Dominos, excluding Fives.
"Once upon a time there were a group of clones," Cody said as the lights dimmed around them. "They were survivors. They'd made it through everything, outlasted even the Empire, but they weren't satisfied with that. They wished things had been different from the start. So when they heard about a way back, they went to find it. All of them together: the rebel leader who'd won the cause, the former commander who'd lost his General, the strategist without limbs or friends, the madman who howled at the moon, the one-handed former traitor -"
"And Gregor, too!"
Cody didn't quite sigh, but Fox definitely laughed.
"Him, too," Cody agreed. "They all went together. But the World Between Worlds wasn't easy to reach, not even for them, not even with Palpatine gone. There were many enemies, and many dangers, and the clones didn't all make it. One by one, they sacrificed their lives for the cause. And in the end there were only three: the rebel leader, the commander, and the strategist. They were so close, nearly there, right at the edge of the gate that held all their hopes, but there was an enemy chasing them. An enemy they couldn't allow to find the gate. And the strategist said -"
"You go. I've got this."
"And he did. He fought an enemy impossible to defeat, and he showed that it wasn't impossible at all. He stopped them. He stopped them for long enough. And in the enemy's rage they threw his broken and dying body after the fleeing clones, threw him at the gate that was closing behind them -"
Echo made a chopping gesture with his hands. It was too dark for Cody to see it, which was good: Cody didn't like the imagery of it, the gristly reality of what happened when a trans-dimensional portal shut with someone not all the way inside. Just like a set of blast doors, and no less merciless.
Still, it wasn't like Echo wasn't used to leaving parts of himself behind.
"The World Between Worlds was unlike anything else. Impossible to describe -"
"Certainly by someone as unpoetic as you," Fox interjected, like the giant hypocrite he was.
"But what it was didn't matter," Cody continued, pointedly. "What mattered was the result. All of those sacrifices had been worth it in the end. They were able to achieve their dreams: they had gone back. Weakened, and their plans all asunder, but they made it. And then..."
And then Cody had seen Fox, Fox and his men and all the rest of them, and he had refused to follow Rex off planet to try to find a way to save them from the outside. He'd stayed. Stayed with Fox, stayed with Echo, who at the time they had not yet realized had half a soul in him that both was and wasn't him, stayed on Kamino even if it meant giving up hope.
Except maybe it didn't mean that.
Echo smiled.
He smiled, and smiled, and thought to himself that this time, this time, the story would end differently. This time it wouldn't be a tale of tragedy and loss, bittersweet victories that felt hollow because there were so few people left to celebrate with. This time, they would change it. This time, things would change. This time, things would end differently.
This time, they would end with: And they lived happily ever after.
They'd got this.