Chapter Text
The nightmares, they’re over.
The relief in Fives' voice was genuine. He’d done his best. It was up to Rex to do as he would with the information Fives had given him. It was out of his hands now, and he knew he should care more about that fact, but everything just felt so… far away.
He surrendered to the current he felt tugging at the very core of himself. From a great distance, as if he were underwater, he could hear his brother’s voice, tight and panicked. He wanted to comfort Rex, but his hand felt numb and unwieldy, heavy and disconnected from his mind.
It’s ok, he wanted to say. He was pretty sure he had, but he could faintly make out Rex's eyes above him, welling with tears, so maybe he hadn’t said it out loud.
Dimly, he could feel the Coruscant guard gathering around him where he was cradled in Rex's arms. Their grief was a palpable thing.
He closed his eyes, and he knew no more.
Fives floated for what felt like eons, cradled in a warm darkness. He wasn’t afraid or in pain. He wasn’t happy or sad. He just wasn’t.
It could have been seconds. It could have been years. He was ageless and dreamless.
He drifted.
After minutes or centuries or millennia or nanoseconds of darkness, a bright pain exploded in his chest. He gasped for breath, using lungs he didn’t have. He felt his consciousness rushing upwards, breaking the surface of the still water his mind had sunk into. No no no this wasn’t right-
It burned. He was pain, a phoenix consuming itself in its own rebirth. It felt unnatural, and every cell in his body fought tooth and nail to escape his resurrection, to return to the dark water where there was no burning, no ash, only stillness.
It was a losing battle. Pain streaked across every nerve, leaving life in its wake. Blood began flowing through his veins once more. It felt like acid.
Slowly, the cinders of his rebirth faded, and he became somewhat aware of his surroundings. He registered a weight around his wrists first, then cool metal under his back. He pressed into it gratefully, the chill of it leeching the feverish heat from his muscles.
His skin was hypersensitive. The air against his bare chest felt like sandpaper, and the cuffs and steel at his back and hands felt like razor wire being dragged across his skin. It was agonizing.
He opened his eyes dully, squinting. The harsh fluorescent lighting of the room was unbearable and he wanted nothing more to close his eyes and sink back into the dark water, but he hadn’t been made an ARC for nothing.
He strained to remember his training. The memories were hazy, but sharpening every second. What the fuck just happened?
He took stock of his surroundings in a haze. He was strapped and cuffed vertically to some exam table.
The walls were steel and permacrete, harsh and windowless. The floor was the same dull gray, but covered in old, dark brown stains. Great.
The only light came from the strips affixed to the ceiling. He couldn’t turn his head very far, but from what he could see, he was in a lab or a medbay.
On another table in front of him, were medical tool, scalpels and needles, along with several softly beeping machines covered in multicolored LED lights. Never a good sign.
He had no weapons, his hands were bound, he was half naked, and, oh yeah, he was supposed to be dead.
He wasn’t completely sure of who he was or what was going on, but the sound of a blaster going off and the feeling of a bolt going through his chest was something he doubted he’d ever be able to forget.
He looked down at his chest and swore softly. A blaster burn streaked across his chest, red and angry on the edges, black and charred in the center.
He’d been a soldier all his (admittedly) short life. He knew what a fatal wound looked like.
Now that he was aware of it, he could feel it throbbing with pain, matching his heart beat for beat. Every time he shifted, he could feel the skin on his chest strain and crack, shiny and tight from the burn.
How was he alive?
He heard a noise behind him, but no matter how far he craned his neck, he couldn’t see around the edge of the table. The metal was cold and the corner dug into his cheek, but the only thing he could make out was a dark, humanoid shape.
“Ah, you’re awake! Good, good. Now we can get started.” The voice was high and nasal, and Fives’ newly circulating blood froze in his veins. It was him.
Horror rose in his throat, a tangible, choking thing tasting of bile. He wanted to struggle, break free, rip the shackles off his hands and this man’s head from his shoulders. His knuckles tightened as his hands clenched into fists. He could feel his nails digging into the meat of his palms, and soon he felt blood running down his fingers.
“Oh, you’re angry,” said Chancellor Palpatine, stepping around the edge of the table and into Fives' field of vision. He sniffed the air as if he were savoring a fine Alderaanian wine. “Good.”
“What do you want?” rasped Fives. His vocal cords sounded like they’d been ripped out, used to string a drunk Weequay’s fiddle, and then surgically reinstalled in his throat.
Palpatine studied his face with a cold, reptilian detachment. It was the look a sand viper gave before it struck, the look of a creature who had never shown mercy and never would. “I want answers.”
“For what?” His voice was still raspy, but stronger. He winced. Every breath he drew tugged at the burn on his chest, sending lightning bolts of pain coursing through his body. The air scraped his throat, as if he were inhaling sandpaper, not oxygen.
“You figured out the plan,” said Palpatine. “No one has ever done that before.”
His gaze changed from emotionless to fanatic. “I have been playing the Jedi for over thirty years, and those blind, arrogant fools have never once doubted me or suspected that I was ever anything more than the kindly old senator from Naboo.”
His voice went from mocking to hissed and frenzied. “But you! You came closer to figuring it out than anyone ever has. And you’re nobody! A clone. Disposable.” He spat the word clone out like it left a bad taste in his mouth. Fives tried to work up the energy to feel offended, but he was mostly just terrified.
The Chancellor had brought him back to life to question him. Sith hells, what was this man?
Palpatine continued.
“You figured it out. You almost stopped me. You almost did what no one in the entire combined forces of the Republic and the Seperatists could do. And I want to know how.
“What makes you different than the other clones? I want to know, and I couldn’t find out if you were dead, now could I? I’m going to take you apart, CT-27-5555, and I’m going to see what makes you special.”
He picked up a scalpel and twirled it carelessly, flipping it over his thumb and across his knuckles with the practiced ease of someone who had done it many times before. It gleamed in the harsh lighting, silver and deadly.
Fives lifted his chin up as far as he could go, forcing his fear down. He smirked as casually as he could, as if he were talking with the vod'e over a tumbler of Corellian whiskey at 79’s, not trapped in a madman’s nightmare lab.
“Maybe I am special,” he drawled. “Or maybe, you’re just not as clever as you think you are.”
Palpatine’s face turned an interesting shade of purple. Fives decided to go all in.
“And my name,” he growled, “is Fives. Not ‘clone’. Definitely not ‘CT-27-5555’.”
“Let’s see how long you can hold on to that rebellious spirit, shall we?” asked Palpatine, a manic and gleeful gleam in his eyes.
….
Fives had run out of defiance five hours and six tests ago, but the frustration in the Chancellor’s voice lifted his spirits ever so slightly.
Sue him, he was taking all the enjoyment he could out of the situation.
“No, no, no,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “There has to be something.”
He turned back to Fives. “You’re average in every way, for a clone. You’re not special, you’re nothing. How did someone like you discover me?”
Fives didn’t have enough energy left to speak, so he settled for glaring at the Chancellor balefully. Palpatine continued, unaffected.
“Unless,” he began, eyes widening, then narrowing just as quickly. “No, no, no, that’s impossible. Of course, there’s only one way to test…”
He trailed off, turning to rifle through the assorted medical equipment on the table. Fives closed his eyes again, resigned. The burn on his chest was aching worse than ever, and the electrodes Palpatine had taped over his pulse points were irritating it. They chafed against his sensitive skin unbearably.
His whole body ached. Palpatine’s test were invasive at best and agonizing at worst. He was covered in small burns, punctures from IV lines pumping manda-knows-what into his bloodstream, and shallow cuts. There had been a headache budding behind his temple for the last hour, and it had recently blossomed into a full migraine.
He couldn’t wait for Palpatine to finish running the stupid tests and finally come to the conclusion that, yeah, a useless, defective, disposable clone had done what the entire Jedi Order couldn’t.
He was so engrossed in envisioning the exact shade of red that the Chancellor’s face would turn upon the discovery that he almost missed the feeling of the thin needle that Palpatine slipped into the juncture where his forearm met his elbow. To be fair, it was the fourth one he’d been stuck with in that spot in the last eight hours.
Fives had no illusions. He wasn’t making it out of this one. The only solace he could take would be using his last hours to make Palpatine as miserable as he could, and the knowledge that, soon, he would see Echo once the Chancellor killed him. Again.
An inarticulate cry of rage and shock drew him out of his morbid thoughts. The Chancellor was staring at a reading on a datapad like it had personally killed his mother. The datapad was hooked up to another machine, which was hooked to the vial of blood that had been drawn from Fives' arm.
“Impossible!” Palpatine cried. “The Kaminoans personally assured me that this couldn’t happen! Clones cannot be force-sensitive!”
What? Force-sensitive? Fives ignored that world-shattering revelation in favor of coaxing a dry laugh from his abused throat. “Oh, Kaminoans. Take it from me, those longnecks are some lying bastards.”
Palpatine honest-to-god snarled at him, a sickly yellow light flickering in his irises. Fives looked back at him, unfazed, a reverse of their earlier positions. Posturing was much less impressive when you had made peace with the fact you were minutes from death.
“Now what?” asked Fives. “You can kill me, but you still have to live with the knowledge that you were beaten by a clone.” He injected the same amount of vitriol that Palpatine had used into the word. It sounded like a curse. He matched Palpatine’s gaze, a self satisfied smile crawling across his face.
Force-sensitive. He did his best to hide it, but anxiety and adrenaline churned in his stomach, a combination that simultaneously made him feel nauseous and ill, and also like he had just finished his seventeenth cup of caf.
He couldn’t be force-sensitive. He’d know if he was. But remember, a traitorous voice in the back of his mind whispered, all those lucky saves where a blaster bolt almost got you, but you ducked before they even fired?
Fives had always prided himself on his quick reflexes and sense of timing. It was part of everything that had launched him to ARC status. He’d always been attuned to his brothers, always there to lift their spirits when they were upset. He had a knack for helping the shinies out of battle-shock after their first encounter with the enemy. What if those skills weren’t products of training and discipline, but something else?
He shook himself out of his thoughts and turned his attention back to the Chancellor.
Slowly, the rage and frustration was bleeding from Palpatine’s wrinkly face, replaced by a mask of glee and anticipation. Fear curdled in Fives' guts, but he resolutely pushed it down, looking Palpatine in the eye. A slow, manic smile was spreading across the man’s face, erasing any trace of the kindly old man the Chancellor masqueraded as.
“Now, now,” he said, “I’m sure we can find some use for you, my boy. After all, you’re one-of-a-kind.”
Osik. That definitely hadn’t been what he'd been expecting Palpatine to say.
Palpatine stepped closer, electricity curling around his palms. What the fuck, thought Fives for the sixtieth time that day.
The last thing Fives saw was the Chancellor’s frenzied yellow eyes looking down at him. Then lighting flooded his body, and he knew no more.