Tears spilled down Thirteen's cheeks.
From the other side of the cell, Five-Oh frowned at him. He'd left him there, in that hole. He'd left him alone. He'd left him behind.
You were dead.
Five-Oh only stared back at him, frowning and silent, and for a moment Thirteen could see the crater again, Resistance swarming over it, he imagined them finding Five-Oh, taking him prisoner, imagined them doing to him what they'd done to Thirteen.
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry!
But Five-Oh's eyes had turned blank and lifeless, the way they'd looked when Thirteen had removed his helmet that last time.
No.
Thirteen choked back a sob. If he had got there faster. If he had done more, if he had done...something. If he hadn't given that last syrette. But there was so much blood. It happened so fast...
Still, he had left him there. He'd been ordered to. He hadn't had a choice. But there had been a part of him that had been relieved, that had balked at the heavy fire and the distance to their fallback position and the weight of his friend's body. And not for the first time he wondered if that order wasn't just covering his own cowardice.
But Thirteen wasn't a coward. Or he hadn't been. Not then. Now was another matter. Now… He felt anger and revulsion rise in his throat like bile. Now he was filth. Now he was nothing. But back on the outpost planet he'd still been brave.
He opened his mouth to speak, but Five-Oh was gone. The fever was getting worse. A trickle of sweat ran down his face and he pulled off his helmet.
"Uniform violation," Dubs called out, but she was already removing her own. Thirteen tore the stock from his neck and flung it down with relief. The air felt good on his face.
He saw the lieutenant pause, and Thirteen thought he looked torn between rebuking them and following their example. In the end he did neither. He was a decent sort, for only having been with them a few weeks. Better than the few they'd had before him, for all his inexperience. He listened to his non-coms and he understood the value of cutting a trail. It might not have sounded like much, but it made a world of difference.
Their platoon had been sent ahead and tasked with holding a small, but strategic point until a larger force could be brought up. They'd been given supplies for five days and assured that reinforcements were only a couple days behind. Even their green-as-grass lieutenant hadn't trusted that and they'd done their best to ration the supplies, but it had now been ten days, and more distressing than the lack of food was their steadily decreasing supply of ammunition. And the rebel attacks were only growing more aggressive. They'd repelled one the night before, and another just that morning.
Thirteen peered out from cover. He could see movement in the trees a little ways off, but it was too far to waste charges on.
"You got any spare energy cartridges?" asked Twenty-Six, sinking down next to him and handing him her canteen, "Trade you."
Thirteen unclipped one of his last cartridges and handed it over, before taking a gulp of the warm, flat tasting water. "How are you for plasma?" he asked, handing it back.
Twenty-Six snorted. "I've got plasma coming out my ears," she said and waved off the canteen. "Finish it."
"Fucking energy clips from the last resupply are so old they're starting to bleed. Speaking of..." She glanced pointedly at the dried blood on his armor. "Yours?"
Thirteen's face clouded and he shook his head. "Lucky - Seventy-Seven," he corrected himself, the nickname seemed perverse now. She'd been one of the new kids. Almost as green as the lieutenant. He opened his mouth, shut it again, the scene from the night before replaying itself in his head.
"Don't," Twenty-Six said suddenly, forcefully, reading his thoughts. He looked up, searching her face for a moment, then he nodded and reached for his helmet.
Instead of the viewscreen display, however, the wall of his cell stared back at him, bleary and indistinct. He shivered, which made no sense, he remembered the heat, the sun beating down, the rocks radiating like an oven, remembered the damp, suffocating air in his helmet, the hot, leaden weight of his own armor. But the cell felt as cold as Starkiller.
Thirteen raised a hand to his neck, tracing the long, discolored scar of a blaster burn. He knew he'd gotten it at that crossroads, though he had no memory of it. He remembered very little of that last fight. It was as if linear time ceased to exist and he had only a collective sense of it: the heat, the heavy fire, and the fierce, inexplicable joy he had felt. The realization that despite fairly certain death there was no place in the galaxy he would rather have been than right there at that moment.
He remembered the sound clearly enough, though, low and deceptively soft. "Mortar!" Niner's voice screamed into the comm and, curled in the corner of his cell, Thirteen felt his whole body jerk violently. Suddenly the memory was no longer vague, but sharp and hard as glass.
For an instant the world was reduced to sound and light and raw, terrifying force, and then there was nothing, no sound, no light, no air. He felt the impact as the blast flung him against the rock, felt something inside him crack.
He was lying on his stomach when the air came rushing back into his lungs with a pain like a blade between his ribs. He struggled to rise. He needed to find Twenty-Six, needed to find his rifle. He tried to call out, but his voice made no sound. All he could hear was the ringing whine inside his own skull and all he could see was dust and the shattered remnants of his visor.
And then from within the cloud he saw the bright, flickering bursts of blaster fire. He staggered. It didn't hurt, not at first, there was only the terrible sense that something was wrong as each bolt punched through his body. His side. His chest. His shoulder.
He hit the ground and this time there was nothing shielding him from the pain. His vision whited out and he tried to scream but all that he had breath for was a feeble cry. He gasped, but it didn't help. He couldn't get air and at every breath it felt as though something in his chest were ripping apart.
It had been bright afternoon a moment ago, but now the sky was darkening and the temperature was dropping like a stone. Panic washed over him and he struggled to sit up - he needed to find the others, he needed to find Twenty-Six - but his limbs didn't respond. He could feel something thick and warm collecting in the back of his throat and he tasted iron.
"Thirteen!" Twenty-Six's voice sounded strange and far away, but he'd have known it anywhere. She was alive. He let his eyes slip shut. She was alright. Everything would be alright. Twenty-Six would know what to do. She always did. He could hear shouts, distant and indistinct, and then, just as he slipped from consciousness, the roar of a TIE fighter engine overhead.