transboba:

when dogma comes back to the 501st, they almost don’t recognize him. 

his slicked-back hair has been buzzed down to the scalp, cropped short, and his nails cut to the quick – it seems like they’ve cut down everything deemed unnecessary. his flesh clings to his bones, illustrating each curve or jut of his skeleton. they’ve added some things, too – metal ports on the inside of his wrists or into his vertabrae. layers of scar tissue, in precise incision lines. 

the tattoo is the most recognizable thing about him, but even that looks faded, washed out, seemingly just an oddly shaped shadow cast across his face. an echo of its former self; the tattoo and dogma both. 

it takes him four days to be able to even do anything but lie in the medical bed and shudder, curled into the fetal position and shivering like he’s been left for dead on an ice planet no matter how many medbay or contraband blankets kix wraps around him. his teeth chatter, and sometimes he cries out, terrified. 

on the fifth day, he’s eerily silent, staring blankly at the wall. 

on the seventh day, kix manages to get about a third of a bowl of soup in him before he vomits it up, but dogma had been sitting upright, leaning heavily on him, but still upright, and it’s some sort of progress. 

his eyes don’t have a purpose to them any longer. dull and glassy and easily spooked, darting across the room like a scared animal. 

it takes until the tenth day for him to say anything more than the incoherent jargon he mumbles while asleep, twisting and turning and mangling the words for mercy in basic and mando’a both. they have to take what progress they can get, even if it came in the form of dogma directing those blank eyes towards kix’s blaster and whispering please. 

four days later he breaks down and cries, and it seems like the words had collected in his chest – coming out in an uncontrollable flow as rex tries to help him walk, picks him up when his knees buckle again. half of it isn’t even understandable, but the parts of it that are make rex’s chest ache, and for a moment, he almost gathers his younger brother into his arms, holds him tight. 

it takes another three days for that, when dogma admits that the closest thing he’d had to touch in months was a medical droid checking his vitals. he clings to rex, still shaking, still bone-thin, and kix hovers like a protective watchdog – manda knows he’s been doing all he can to patch their brother back together. 

he still can’t eat. it’s been three weeks, and he still loses whatever’s put in him. they’ve had to use an iv, and all of them flinch when he shrinks away from it, fights the needle with as much strength as his fragile form can call upon. 

why bother? shouldn’t we send him back to kamino? can’t they treat him better there? skywalker asks with a frown, watching dogma try and fail to hold a gun again in the training room, his hands shaking too much to keep a grip. something in rex’s chest smarts at that. 

( does skywalker know how he sounds, sometimes? )

he’s all of us, fives says once, when rex passes on the question, the lingering why bother. the answer comes easy to him. we’ve all got scars left from umbara. they both look over to where dogma is taking a few shuddering steps, still clinging onto kix’s arm, but shuffling across the room nonetheless. if we can help him, it proves that couldn’t break us.