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Whenever Torrent parties they fill the unfortunate site of their revelry to the burst with Mayhem. On a night like this and a festivity like tonight, the party will go through the night by inertia, by one moment stringing itself to the next as if they were neon lights swinging from the ramparts, it starts spilling out, more often than not. Someday it will take a whole planet to house the spillover.
Not tonight though.
Tonight, there is a ship hanging in space by a thread made of what can only be the general’s pet engineering team’s hopes and dreams. Well, their best efforts and what Dogma can only describe as a physiological need to party.
Anakin has not been too forthcoming on why today needed a party, only that it was a new cycle on Coruscant yesterday and they completely missed it while in hyperspace. He had only confessed this after Fives had gotten tired of seeing him stare mournfully into the stars, in between placidly levitating objects to ponder at.
He'd tattled not to the Captain, but to Hardcase, who had suddenly found a critical error in the ship’s central hyperspace drive that needed immediate standby to prevent total function collapse. No need to be a specialist to know that was banthashit, but it helped to notice the Captain didn’t even read the report before approving. Something hard to do if you were distracted by Ashoka’s excited carousing towards Domino squad in an instant effort to begin the planning of all night shenanigans when she was communicated the news. That the Wistie lights had already begun to be spread by off-duty vode before the order had being placed was a detail everyone, most of all of the brass, had decided to forget.
Dogma did say to pay attention to details though.
Which is why Echo finds himself locking eyes with Kix as their medic tries to ease the tension around Jesse’s eyes. Stands up and does what can only be called a show in front of Rex that will get Fives nothing short of not-jealous, which will assure that they are paying attention to each other and not him as he slips through the less perceptive vod’ikase and Hevy’s tracking eyes. Hevy only needs some subtle “back later, preventing shenanigans” sign and Echo is out the door before Attie and the rest of Crest Squad can start a proper man hunt. He does spare a reassuring neck squeeze to Tup who was looking not properly placated by DB’s efforts of distracting comradery, who looks at him more thankful than he should be on a night like this.
The hallways of the Resolute have the light levels appropriate for the night shift, somebody has turned them magenta.
Echo checks all the usual haunts, finds a delightful bit of blackmail on the barracks, nothing on the closets, is just about to start a grid when Crest squad’s logistical quarters are empty when he thinks about who he is hunting.
Pay attention to details.
Echo finds the quietest part of the docking bay and looks up.
“Evening, Second Lieutenant” says Dogma.
He’s perched on the tallest rampart, holding a datapad, with a drink sitting next to him. Dogma thinks the ARC is attempting to apply training on his face. Moderately successful.
“It’s more morning at this point Specialist”
“Really,” Dogma puts aside the datapad, and tilts his head pretending he needs to hear carefully. “I don’t know the vague booms in the distance might have deceived me.”
Echo rolls his eyes, if there’s still that sense of humor present it can’t be that dire. He starts eyeing which Larty is closest to a support beam.
“Don’t climb this” says Dogma, Echo would be so proud of his observational skills if Dogma hadn’t been decanted incapable of ignoring a vod about to make a bad decision.
It’s the central pavilion of the ship. The support beams crisscross all around, it will be trivial once he is up there.
“You don’t have to go up, you can have whatever speech you had prepared from the ground.” Dogma insists, the wavering tone of somebody who knows they’ve committed a mistake beginning to enter his voice. Echo is about to truly start laughing in his face. He climbs the Larty.
“We could have the argument on the ground” Echo takes two steps back. “But it’s you, and I know you, if you have a problem with a party we are at the stage were you tell us all to jump into a rancor pit and go to sleep. So, it’s something else”
Crouches down to the ground
“So I do kind of have to do this.”
Three strides and Echo has crossed the top of the gunship, Impulse with one leg. Dogma thinks his fingers are not going to even scrap the lowest handhold. Echo’s chest hits the support beam, and he heaves himself up it.
Dogma scrunched up his face behind the hand covering his eyes. “You didn’t need to do that and there doesn’t have to be a problem “
The look Echo throws Dogma as he get up on his feet was deeply popularized when the marine came to stay with them, he shot it once at the captain and every single Torrent has been utilizing it liberally with not an ounce of self-consciousness.
Dogma is Torrent, will not dignify a response.
Echo starts climbing, and it is trivial, he’s using his whole body. Centre of gravity down and jumps from beam to beam only when he’s sure Dogma can see it. Careful with his arms straight and wide while he is walking through one of them.
“Dogma”
“The ramparts are comfortable”
The danger of falling at this point is not so much from the twisting paths of the beams than it’s from Echo’s laugh.
“Dogma vod’ika I’m so happy you are an analyst and not the actual spy” answers Echo with poise. Dogma breaks his gaze, Echo softens, sharp words can push through barriers, but he remembers when they also made them go higher.
Echo stops climbing for a second, considers his brother. Not a tremble to be found but holding himself in, he looks tired more than anything else. He quickly starts again.
“You wouldn’t be in the ramparts if it was just the noise, we know you know you can just leave, but you also know we are going to worry if you don’t tell us.” It used to be a couple of them got twitchy, it’s more than a couple nowadays.
Dogma blows air through his mouth, straightens and takes a drink.
He thinks of Anakin, at ease and in his element in between Echo’s batchmates, with Ashoka doing her best to keep up with each individual conversation in the room. Echo once asked her about it, she said if she kept up well enough it was just one conversation.
“I didn’t really mean to leave,” confesses Dogma. “I was thinking, just kind of wandered out, couldn’t make myself go back in. Didn’t want to make Jesse’s com sound in the middle of it all.”
The beams are cold where Echo is gripping, this didn’t seem like the night to bring gloves to the rec room, he thought he was well past rookie mistakes like that.
“You’ve been talking about me.” Dogma words it a statement not a question.
Echo heaves an assent as he presses up a beam. Closer to the top the beams are further away, thicker, some of them could almost be walkways once he’s gotten himself into solid ground, but the paths to them are less clear.
“To be fair we talk about everybody. Strengths, weaknesses, have to keep up to date” Echo says once his feet are on the next level. Dogma thinks he has walked himself into a corner, but Echo just walks the length of it while looking up for an opening.
He leaps suddenly. Down not up. Not a dead end but the long way round.
“Why did you take that route?”
“Why Dogma questioning an officer’s decisions, didn’t think you had it in you” Echo is almost to the top, one level below him but a walk away. Dogma can almost see him eye to eye from his position sitting down.
“You talk with the general” starts Dogma, that he knows for a fact considering their sleeping arrangements and Anakin’s level of subtlety “you and Jesse have been talking about me specifically.”
That he knows because he caught them in the act. Whispered words in a hallway he should have walked down hours ago. He only heard his name, any closer and the Arcs would have heard him, but the tone was one of agreement between the both of them. Dogma thinks he can still make an educated guess on the topic.
“Both you and Jesse know I’m past doing something just because it’s what I’m told to, and I know you know that, because Jesse asks you what you used to do when you wanted to hide that you were only doing something to seem like you’d learned and of course you had to confess that you don’t know because your issues and my issues are actually diametrically opposed, considering you would go against several superiors if they went against the regs and I used to be capable of going against every reg if a superior asked it of me.” Dogma is quite done being polite and putting up with the Domino’s double speak. He's also perfectly willing to loose breath before an argument can really develop. “so why did you take that route.”
Echo flashes an expression Dogma has seen in the Captains face when Sgt Hevy manages a particularly percussive throw, it doesn’t have any teeth to it. It does contain the delight of finally finding somebody up to a challenge you had considered yourself unparraleled in.
“Well sometimes we reach dead ends, happens to the best of us” Dogma appreciates his datapad very much, Tinker modified it and it took several favors to get him to only add the improvements Dogma wanted. He is seriously considering throwing it at Echo’s head.
Instead, he just refuses to look at Echo once he finally gets his hands on his level.
Dogma hasn’t more than shifted since all of this has started, deflated slightly after his tirade. Echo tries the final approach to be casual, and it would be had he not being conducting this conversation like a hunt. The sit he takes is the quietest he can make it.
“I don’t think either of us has ever gotten over what made us who we are, I think we just changed the parameters of what we consider important rules and people worth following”
Dogma’s hands when Echo grabs them are softer than any other brother’s, it’s not saying much but it still makes something like pride curl around Echo’s chest.
“There’s nothing happening you know” Echo stares at him skeptically “I mean it, Anakin was sad and be honest you all are in such a short fuse it would be hard to keep these things from happening without causing other types of damage, I wanted you all to have a nice night, even if I had gotten caught up in my own head. The only thing that happened was that I forgot how much of a bunch of mother nuna’s you all are.”
Echo sees him rub his eyes and lay his head on his other hand. Echo probs up a leg in a way that will prevent any fall. Dogma’s face is still capable of saying “I told you so” even when tired, even when he doesn’t notice himself inching closer to the brace.
“It’s been 4 years Echo,” Dogma says with a little laugh that seems to escape against his will. “I’m as old as the Captain was when he started Torrent you know.”
He says it without looking at Echo. With a hand half up on his face. Echo suspects it’s a line he has been thinking about for a long time. Echo is surprised to notice that it’s true, shocked to know what that says about him, how he is probably older than the Commanders where when the war started.
“I’m sure the CC’s worry about Rex as well,” says Echo “especially if they had all lost eyes on him at the same time.”
Dogma groans, stretches, kicks Echo’s bracing leg of the walkway.
“It’s about that,” Dogma punctuates with a shove at his thigh. “Where are we Echo?”
Echo can banthashit with the best of them “Too high above the loading bay, in trouble with the mechanics if anything falls from up here, in a lot of trouble with the medics if somebody falls from up here, but I think you could angle it to not fall on top of the ships.” Echo stares down and sees the path he took up here, it looks silly even to him.
Dogma looks down with him and he does look older, his tattoo is not a flight of fancy anymore, it’s been his face for a long enough time that it’s stopped being shocking, just a warning of how sharp he is. Dogma is right, if somebody had asked it of him, he could be a captain right now.
“We are on the Resolute, on neutral space, safe. If we are honest with each other the war is even winding down one way or the other.” That surprises Echo, Dogma can see it “It shouldn’t surprise you; you are the one on the field getting intelligence for me to process.”
“It’s hard to think about,” whispers Echo, lets the veneer he was building drop. “After.”
“Really?” Dogma lets a whisp of air escape through his teeth. “It’s the only thing I can think about.”
He looks it, Echo thinks. He’s found the limit of himself here, and he’s beautiful in it.
“It’s this year,” Echo promises, even though those are not promises he is capable of making.
“I know” Dogma can promise, not because every piece of intelligence and logistics goes through his desk, though it does, but of the inherent knowledge of who his vode are. “We won’t hold still for another year, something has to break.”
There’s hope in his voice and just the slightest tremor in the back of it. Echo thinks Dogma has been ready to be a Captain. He also thinks of long missions with just Fives at his back. Thinks of the Captain, of Rex alone, of all his Ori’vode letting him be alone, on whether any of them had a choice on the matter. He’s thankful Dogma has never had that choice, hates himself a little for the thankfulness.
“I mean it though,” says Dogma, circling back to the reason they are both perched on what could be a very fun fall. “There’s nothing happening, it’s 0400, none of you are shutting up for at least two hours more. I just wanted to be alone for a bit and the barracks are not particularly habitable at the moment.”
Dogma throws his empty paper cup over the beam. The throw is flawless, perfect flick of his wrist. It placidly sways down. Echo burst out laughing.
“Kriff off,” Dogma bites his lip and his tattoo softens around his eyes “ After, I’m going to get a whole house for myself. Just close enough that when you need me you’ll need to take a hike and if I think you are being annoying, I won’t open the door.”
Echo can feel tears in his eyes as he tries to breath without starting to laugh again. “You won’t last a week” he promises and this he can promise “You’ve never been by yourself that long; you think you want it? You won’t know what to do with yourself”
“You won’t last a week,” Dogma says while rolling his eyes “none of you know how to think without me anymore.”
He's got a glint in his eye, Echo believes him when he says he’s not been able to think about anything else. He also knows they are both lying, either of them could last years if they needed to. After is not going to be about what any of them need to do.
Dogma could be a captain right now, if he needed to. Someday, Echo is going to have the honor and the pleasure of seeing what else he can be.
“Anyway” Dogma turns and looks Echo dead in the eyes, with the most telegraphed mischief that betrays the things he will always be, a Torrent and his vod’ika “there’s a ladder if you push the maintenance button.”
Echo pushes him off the walkway.