Notes:
Spoilers end with Innocents of Ryloth. I haven't seen the whole series yet. I do know most of the spoilers, but I apologize for any glaring inconsistencies with canon in this fic.
Content Warnings: Death, war, dehumanization, blood, combat, injuries, hospitalization, broken bones, dislocated shoulder, suicide (not discussed outright but there's enough stuff implied that it could be uncomfortable or triggering, I think? maybe?), food, grief, ptsd, guns, murder, child endangerment, pain meds, generally this is not a happy fic.
!
"So the marks on your bucket, are they kills, or missions, or what?"
Maybe it's too personal. The thought is a strange one, which is probably why it occurs to Boil about half a second too late.
He likes Waxer. He's not sure he's supposed to like anyone, particularly, but there's nothing saying he shouldn't, which is enough. Just.
Friendship isn't exactly discouraged. It's just… not taught. Boil is never sure where he stands on things he hasn't been taught. He doesn't encounter them often.
Waxer doesn't laugh at the question, which is something, at least. He is barely any older than Boil, has barely any more combat experience, but barely is more than enough for plenty of the others to laugh about all the things the naïve little shiny doesn't know yet.
Waxer just grins. "You think I could fit my droid count on one helmet? I'm insulted."
Boil grins back and sets his tray down to join the lunch table, shoved tight in the middle of about seven other clones for the sake of sitting across from Waxer, who is similarly confined.
They are all well practiced at honing in on their own conversations.
"I didn't say droids. For all I know you've been out killing Sith Lords while I'm not looking."
"There's no use trying to rescue yourself with flattery, the damage has been done. I'm wounded."
Boil rolls his eyes. "Fine, I'm sorry, I'm sure your droid count would take up twenty helmets. A hundred. I bet allyour armor used to be a different color and you've just covered it in white check marks."
Everything devolves from there into a string of jokes that they both laugh at even as they get progressively less and less funny.
Boil thinks that possibly this means Waxer likes him, too.
Boil has not been reprimanded for disobeying lights out since he was six.
Waxer is across the bunk room from him and neither of them is saying anything but they both keep breaking into completely unprompted fits of laughter, muffled uselessly into their arms and pillows.
Three voices snap at them simultaneously to shut up and go to sleep, and the hot shame that instinctively flushes through Boil's entire body has to war with unexpected satisfaction at something he can't quite grasp.
Waxer laughs again and Boil hears someone throw a pillow at him.
Boil has spent the aftermath of five different battles holding the wounded in his arms, too late for medical attention, wrenched the helmet off of three of them when they begged to die like men, not suits of armor. He keeps the count etched in every part of him, every scrap of his existence, every night that he becomes suddenly aware of no longer being asleep, no memory of his dreams as he stares up at the ceiling or the bunk above him and wonders how long it will be before he is someone else's corpse to tally up.
Once Boil's mind is set on the task, making a friend is surprisingly easy. Waxer seems to enjoy their conversations, even though Boil spends most of nearly all of them grabbing desperately for something funny to say to keep him interested. Eventually it occurs to him that Waxer might be doing the same thing.
The thing is, there's not a lot of choice. There's not a lot of time. Boil knows only one thing for certain, the same thing he has known for certain almost every day of his life: he could die tomorrow.
Any of them could die tomorrow. Companionship is easy, almost unavoidable, a welcome thoughtless relief to chat about nothing in particular between orders and before curfew. Friendship is a decision. A way to spend time that they all know is limited. It's a choice to make, he's learned, and plenty of them don't.
He doesn't think he could stand that. Funny, that difference. Funny, really, all the little differences, when he lets himself think about them.
Find a friend, keep that friend, don't change your mind and don't mess it up. Smile and make jokes. You could die tomorrow.
"The first two were droids," Waxer tells him quietly, breaking the near silence of a painfully empty mess hall. They are the only two at their table. Several rows down, the only other noise is a sobbing shiny and the quiet words of comfort his squadmates have to offer. Boil can feel an argument brewing between the more battle-hardened veterans. He could almost have the whole thing himself: The new kid needs to toughen up if he wants to survive. The new kid had never seen real combat before yesterday, give him a break. The mess hall is too empty. Boil was that new kid once. Most of them were that new kid, once. Twice. Three times. Most of them had enough sense to hide. Kind words won't keep them alive. A pat on the back won't keep their reflexes sharp. Boil clenches his fist on the table and realizes he hasn't responded to Waxer yet.
"What?"
Waxer looks tired. He keeps his eyes on his tray and says, "The first two marks on my helmet were droids. Thought I might as well keep count."
"Oh."
Boil knows this is the part where he is supposed to ask for more information. He can't summon the energy. The shiny is still crying.
Waxer takes a bite and makes a face at it. Boil can't blame him. Mess hall grub is a step up from ration bars in that it requires utensils, and therefore feels slightly more like food, but that's about it. Most of the time it doesn't bother him.
Sometimes it's the one last thing he can't pretend he doesn't notice.
The mess hall is too empty.
Waxer sets down his fork. "They were both on my first mission. On my second, I… D'you actually wanna hear this?"
Boil blinks. "What?"
"I won't tell the story. If you don't wanna hear it. I just thought."
"No, yeah, go… Go ahead." Boil feels strange. He realizes, suddenly, that this is the first time they have both been too tired to try to be funny. "I wanna hear it."
"Okay. On my second mission, I heard a droid scream."
"…Yeah, they do that," Boil says, cautiously, wondering what point he's already missed.
Waxer shrugs. "It just… Screamed. For mercy. It said please."
"Oh."
"It… I felt cold. Really cold. Didn't have time to think about it. Just kept firing."
"Right. Yeah. It's… what you have to do, isn't it."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
For a short eternity, they eat in a small bubble of silence. The noise across the room is far away and dim. Boil chews and swallows and thinks, Just a shiny. Waxer sets his fork down again and says, "There's never time to think about it. You always just have to… keep firing. So. I just… don't count them. Kept the first two tallies as my first two missions and kept going."
"Yeah?" Boil is painfully aware that he is not holding up his end of this conversation. His tongue feels too heavy to wrap around full sentences.
Waxer looks back down at his food. "Yeah. I… tell most people who ask that it's for droids. Most people don't ask, but they probably think it. That's fine by me. Sometimes it's not even missions. Sometimes it's just… bad days. Long days. Meetings I really don't want to go to." He twitches into a half smile and drops it almost instantly. "It's… I don't know… A reminder to myself, I guess, or just… Proof. That I can survive. That I have survived. That I can keep on surviving."
"'s a good idea," Boil mumbles.
Across the room, someone slams down their tray.
The bunk room is more than half empty. Everyone changes in silence: the shiny doesn't sleep in here, but a chunk of both sides of the fight about him do. No one wants to restart it.
Waxer looks at Boil for a long moment, and then wordlessly lies down beside him.
He doesn't move. Boil thinks tiredly that that is his way of asking silent permission to be here, because speaking will break something. Boil answers in kind, shoves himself back against the wall to make room and throws an arm over Waxer's stomach. Waxer takes his hand. They breathe together and wait for someone to yell at them.
No one does.
The lights go out.
(the new kid needs to toughen up if he's going to survive.
does he, really. will it matter, in the long run.
Boil wakes with no memory of his dreams. He shuts his eyes against Waxer's shoulder and goes back to sleep.)
"No, okay, look, what I mean is – " Boil rechecks his position behind their cover and casts about for an innocuous enough subject to make his point without derailing the whole thing. "Okay, what's your favorite color?"
Waxer checks and rechecks his blaster. "I dunno. Blue, maybe."
"Right. Well. Mine's green. I think."
"So?"
"So how does that work?"
Which is, roughly speaking, when the droids arrive.
And when it's all said and done, neither of them can even say for certain that they havea favorite color, so the conversation comes to a rest.
"What do you see in me, anyway?" Waxer asks, and Boil has to stop and consider several things about that.
For one, the context: he has no idea what it is, or if there is any. They have been occasionally sharing a bed for the sole and literal purpose of sleeping together, and occasionally holding hands, and more than occasionally chatting about both inconsequential and increasingly consequential things. If pressed, Boil would probably name Waxer as his favorite person, blue and green irresolutions aside, and he likes to think Waxer might say the same of him. That is, basically, the extent of things.
Also, they're in line with about fifty other clones for the mess hall. No one is paying them any particular sort of attention, but it's still not the best place for a lengthy, serious discussion. A fact which Waxer is definitely aware of.
Also, he's smirking.
Boil shrugs and tries to sound disinterested. "You're not half bad looking."
Waxer laughs, and Boil considers the interaction successfully navigated.
It's very difficult to focus on his food.
Boil has never seriously wondered about the meaning of life. Not his life. He knows what that's for. He's heard some of the others discussing it. Most of the discussions come to an end when one or both or all of the participants don't come back from a mission, and Boil can never help but think: well, there you go. No point talking about it in the first place, is there.
So he's not actually prepared for the feeling that events have suddenly led to the current moment, which is, basically, that he is definitely about to die, and so is the man bleeding out in his arms.
The man bleeding out in his arms is Waxer.
"Helmet," Waxer croaks, scrabbling desperately at the side of it, and Boil pulls it off of him with his good arm. The other is dangling from a dislocated shoulder that he could reset himself, but, what's the point? He's dead. Waxer's dead. They're both dead.
He pulls his own helmet off. Not a suit of armor. He's not bleeding, but his blaster is broken, and so is his ankle. Every instinct and every bit of training is screaming at him to drop Waxer and make his way to cover, but there isn't any, and Waxer is gasping his name.
"Boil." Waxer's hand, clutching his bad arm, and it hurts, but he can't bring himself to say so. "You – take a shot?"
He shakes his head. It makes him dizzy. "Ankle's broken."
Waxer gives what is probably his current best attempt at shoving him violently away. "Crawl, then! Get the hell out of here!"
"Nowhere to crawl to," he mutters, but starts moving anyway, dragging Waxer with him.
"Stop that," Waxer snaps. "I'm dead, Boil, now move." Boil remembers a hundred training exercises, instructors snapping at the more hesitant cadets when their partners fell to hypothetical blasts: he's dead! move!
There is an art to knowing who is dead and who is injured. The dead can keep screaming. The injured can give up. Instructors were never lenient when it came to determining between the two.
Boil has been grateful for that, several times over.
His head is swimming. There is so much blood and none of it is his.
He staggers to his feet, manages to half convince himself he's wrong about his ankle, and takes three steps before he collapses to his knees. "I'm not goin' anywhere," he bites out into the dust cloud his impact has raised. "Rather die here than alone."
"Boil, please, you still have a chance." There is nothing of those instructors, those exercises, those hypotheticals, in Waxer's voice: he is dead and he wants Boil not to be.
Boil takes a breath, ignores the blaster fire above him and on all sides, grits his teeth, shoves his helmet back over his head, and stands back up. With his good arm, he reaches behind him and grabs Waxer's hand.
"Move as best you can," he grunts. "I'm not leaving you here."
"Boil -"
"You want me to move, move."
Both of them are being cruel. Selfish. They both want the other to live and they both want to have some hand in that. Cover is yards away on a broken ankle and Boil's shoulder throbs waves of agony that drown out the sounds of battle. Waxer leaves a trail of blood in the sand and his screams are high and formless, the kind that only come of a pain that whites out pride and stubbornness and any idea of putting on a show.
Hours later, they are still not dead.
Boil sits outside the mass hospital room, already deemed mended enough to only be in the way, bandaged ankle propped up and shoulder twinging a dull ache. He is clutching Waxer's helmet to his stomach and waiting for his mind to catch up with his body and realize he is holding still, no weight on broken bones, no hot dust flying into his eyes, no screams clawing at him and begging him to let go.
Waxer did his best not to be a dead weight. Kicked at the ground behind him, dragged himself with the arm he wasn't being dragged by. He kept his helmet with him, somehow. When they finally reached cover Boil saw it kicked up between his chest and his knees, covered in blood.
The medics have already cleaned it. 'Disinfected' it, along with the rest of their armor and everyone else's. The medics were clones and they said it the same way Boil will always think it: quiet with the knowledge that the blood will always be there.
Curfew is called. No one will tell him how Waxer is doing, only that he isn't dead. Boil can't tell if he is imagining the yet that no one says out loud but that he thinks he can hear in their voices.
He says nothing to his bunkmates, goes straight for Waxer's bag and searches methodically – folded uniform, folded pajamas, folded civvies, notebook he definitely isn't going to look at because even discovering its existence makes his stomach lurch with guilt, zipper pouch – red marker.
He doesn't think about what he's doing. He can't think about what he's doing. Not if he wants to sleep tonight.
He doesn't want to sleep tonight.
But he has to.
(he's not dead yet, neither is Boil, neither are any of the rest of them.
this is what their lives are for.)
Waxer wakes up with the distant awareness that he has already done so several times. This time feels a bit more permanent, but he might well have thought that last time, or the time before.
The bacta-treated bandages on his stomach itch like hell. He is definitely awake.
"Hey."
…He is awake, in an infirmary, with someone at his bedside. Someone who isn't launching into a hundred clinical questions about how he's feeling and what he remembers and can he follow a light with his eyes. This is a distinctly new experience. Commanders often make a point of visiting their injured troops, but there has never been anyone but medics with him when he woke up.
"Hey," he tries to say back, and grimaces. He clears his throat and tries again. "How long have I…" His voice and his brain falter simultaneously. He knows what he wants to ask but concepts are too foggy to force into words, and his throat aches.
"Couple days," says the voice at his bedside.
Waxer takes a deep breath and cracks open his eyes.
Then he has to turn his head, which takes considerably longer.
"…Boil," he croaks, and hopes desperately that he's right, for several reasons. For one thing it's always embarrassing and briefly, deeply unsettling to get a fellow clone's name wrong, and for another, the fogginess of his recent memory is at least very clear on the point that Boil is, for important reasons he has yet to recall, definitely supposed to be dead.
Boil smiles. He looks very alive, if also very tired. "Yeah," he says.
Waxer smiles back. He tries to reach out a hand. It wrenches something all the way down his shoulder to his side and through the bandaged expanse of his torso, and in an agonized wince the memory floods back: They are both, definitely, supposed to be dead.
"Guess we made it to cover, then," he wheezes, refusing to shut his eyes. The pain isn't as intense as it should be and he doesn't want to fall back to sleep until whatever it is they've got him on absolutely demands it.
He lets his eyes roam, desperate for something to focus on. He finds something.
"That my helmet?" he asks, surprised. He thought for sure he'd lost it in that last stretch after the unpleasant business of being dragged through small rocks.
Boil's smile wavers. "Yeah," he says again, and holds it out for inspection.
Waxer blinks at it, more slowly than he'd like. Something's off, but he can't place it. "Uhm…"
"I, um. I already." Boil clears his throat. "Already marked it off for you."
"…Oh."
"Sorry, I – I shouldn't've, I know it's not my – I know it's… your helmet, I just."
Waxer really wants to tell him that it's fine. He can't find the words and isn't sure he could say them. Boil keeps talking. "I just… You were – so you would definitely... They wouldn't tell me how you were doing and it just. You had to. I. It needed… I needed… I needed proof."
Waxer braces himself for the pain and stretches out his arm, brushing his hand against Boil's on the scuffed helmet. Boil shuts up. Waxer hopes he is still smiling at him, because he can't really feel his face.
"Thank you," he murmurs, and his eyes close.
"What do you even see in me," Boil mutters, not entirely joking, sitting on the edge of his bunk. They are alone, but not for long. Skipped out early from dinner for a tiny moment of peace and quiet.
Waxer pauses, sets down the pajama shirt he was about to put on, and crouches in front of Boil with a startlingly solemn expression on his face. "Mostly," he says, "what I would look like with a mustache."
Boil squawks indignantly and hits him with the pillow.
"No, wait a minute!" Waxer laughs, tackling him and grabbing for the weapon. "Hold still, let me see you in a better light, I'm seriously considering it!"
Civilians are another thing Boil was never taught, and, luckily, another thing he doesn't encounter often. He has civilian clothes, because they're all issued them, and they make for a very useful layer of padding whenever he needs to pack something fragile or dangerous in his bag.
He knows the very basics: don't hurt civilians, don't let the enemy hurt them, if at all possible don't destroy their things. He can't help but think that somewhere in there lies an inherent don't let small children follow you around in a war zone.
But when the only alternative is leaving that small child to wander around alone, he has to admit that Waxer's plan of bringing her along at least… feels a lot better.
He has to admit it to himself. Not to Waxer.
Especially not when Waxer runs right after the girl into danger.
"I'm just trying to keep you alive!" he shouts, and runs right after him.