Thirteen was shivering. After the summer heat of the village, the cell felt ice cold. A trickle of sweat ran down his face and he tried to curl tighter into the corner, but the concrete walls which had burned such a short while before were now cold and clammy, leeching the warmth from his bones.
"What the fuck did you do that for?" Dubs' voice snapped in his head. He shut his eyes and could see her again. They stood there, their blasters still warm in their hands, and on the ground between them a dozen dead civilians, and neither of them felt anything.
"Fucking idiot. The fuck did you have to open your mouth for?"
His helmet hid his face and only his awkward stillness betrayed him. He did as he'd been told. He'd followed orders. They couldn't punish him for following orders.
He'd questioned orders.
But he hadn't! He'd only... They hadn't been combatants. They'd been hiding in the temple during the fight. The CO had come up late. Thirteen had only thought...
Pain flared in his side, knifing straight through to his back and for a moment reality, the cell, the numbers on the wall flickered into sharp relief. But the memory still lingered, like a slick of oil on water. Stupid. Stupid mistake. He was always making mistakes. Always making stupid mistakes.
He could feel himself slipping, feel everything slowly, helplessly splintering apart again. It hurt. Everything was glaring light and black shadows. They towered over him, dizzy, lunging, snarling. He couldn't move, couldn't breathe. One of them pressed something into his hands. A blaster. And when he looked down he saw his hands were small, child's hands. The blaster was heavy, unwieldy, almost as big as himself. He was soaking wet, freezing, water running down his face. The shadows were drawing in, pressing closer. There was something with them, inside them. Something faceless and bound. He pulled the trigger.
The shot scattered the shadows, flushing them like a flock of carrion crows, and leaving him in the cold light of the cell, shivering, his face wet with tears.
He had followed orders. He always followed orders. The lieutenant had thought that was enough, but the CO wanted an example made and once they returned to the ship, Thirteen had been sent for reconditioning.
He had no clear memory of what happened there, only fragments, perhaps that was by design, or perhaps he had simply blocked them out. But he remembered the empty, disconnected feeling afterward, the horrible sense of having been hollowed out. He barely spoke for days.
Twenty-Six watched him with concern, every time he glanced up her eyes were on him, but apart from asking once if he was alright - and receiving a vague affirmative - there was nothing she could say. Neither of them had the right words.
It was shortly after this that the nightmares began again. He hadn't been troubled by them for years, not since he was small and used to slip into Twenty-Six's bunk whenever he was too frightened to sleep. He'd always felt safe with her, even when they were children. But he had grown beyond the threshold where that sort of thing was acceptable, and getting into bed with someone meant something rather different now.
Still, he remembered one night, a week, maybe two after he'd returned from reconditioning. He remembered waking abruptly, disoriented in the pitch dark of the barracks room, remembered the paralyzing stillness, not daring to breathe as the horror of the dream slowly faded, until he was sure it wasn't real.
No one was cursing him to shut up, and he thought that for once he had managed to wake only himself, but then in the darkness nearby, he heard Twenty-Six stir and sit up. There was a light touch on his arm, nudging him to move over, and then the soft wave of cool air as she lifted the covers and slipped in beside him. She did not say anything, but he could feel the warmth and pressure of her back against his and for the first time in weeks, he felt safe. He shut his eyes, feeling the tension slowly drain from him, and for that night at least, he slept soundly.
x
He tried to hold onto the memory, to the warmth of it, but he couldn't hold things in his head anymore. It slipped through the cracks like smoke and he was alone in his cell once more, with nothing but hard concrete at his back.
Thirteen shut his eyes, hot tears spilling down his cheeks. His world had been a small one, it was no Hosnian Prime - it wasn't even a concrete place, he'd never known 'home' in the geographic sense - but it was all he had. And it was gone. He turned his face into the wall, his thin shoulders shuddering silently, too afraid to cry out, his chest heaving with each strangled sob, thrusting angrily against broken ribs. He uncurled his right hand, its nail beds purple and raw, his swollen finger tips finding the numbers on the wall through the blur of tears. He should have been there. He should have been there with them.