letitrainathousandflames:

Remembrance – A Fives Minific

“Echo.”

The name flows out of Fives’ lips like a whisper. He’s sitting in the mess, surrounded by his brothers who are also saying whispered names of their own, each one focusing in their own task and keeping their voices down not to disrupt their brothers.

Remembrance Day is deeply important for all clones. The younger ones take a couple of minutes to remember the ones they’ve lost, and the really shiny ones just make a small prayer for their brothers’ safety, as they hadn’t lost anyone yet.

The older clones need to take a lot longer in order to remember everyone. Despite a few vode’s reluctancy to accept it, some of them started using data pads to keep up with their lists, too long to be memorized after so many battles, so many squads and platoons. So many losses. Others prefer to keep things the old way, try to remember them all from heart.

It’s important, to remember. A vod can only keep marching away in peace while others can remember him. If he’s forgotten, then he’s gone forever. The ultimate death – the one that scared them the most, as death in the battlefield would loom over them so often it was almost no longer a concern to some.

Captains and commanders have is worst, of course. Every single trooper, lieutenant, sergeant, ARC, pilot. All of them in their own personal body count. Fives felt particularly bad for the Wolffpack remnants and their commander. They would sit there the whole day long and they’d keep going through their names as they’d eat and even on their way to the barracks. He would hear Boost and Sinker discreetly murmur the very last names on the following morning during breakfast, when they would be finally finished.

Things weren’t easy for ARCs either. Fives knew it very well. He had made sure that he remembered every single trooper lost under his charge before moving on to his batchers, leaving Echo for last as usual.

If you truly knew the vod you were remembering, saying their name seemed a little too simple, so Fives would think about all the memories he had shared with Echo, no matter how it would make his heart clench painfully in his chest.

“Remember when I smuggled a cat in the base?” He mouthed quietly, lips curling in the smallest smile “Yeah you do, you even helped me feed her later. Oh, what about that time when I drew angry eyebrows on Hevy’s bucket? You laughed about that for a week.”

He keeps remembering, projecting it in the universe as hard as he can. I remember you, vod. We will meet again someday. Wait for me.

Very far away from there, two droids are curious about readings on a screen.

“What’s the matter with his signs? What’s going on?”

“No idea.” The droid looks up to a tank filled with bacta where a scarred, mutilated man floats with wires digging into his skull “he’s unconscious but…”

“But…?”

“It’s almost like he’s crying.”

Once I said that reading fics like this had broken my heart in a million pieces. Now the little part that was intact and also the broken pieces have turned into dust! Thank you! I don’t have a heart anymore. AMAZING WRITING! But I’ll go back to crying now.