#aka the one where rhese has the horrifying realization he's doc's brother now

[hydrospanners]

every doubt we had

like a scene from a nightmare he'd never admit to having, darth marr's ship goes down and takes his sister with it. rhese velaran has never had to live in a galaxy without nirea, and he's not sure he knows how. he leans on an unlikely shoulder while he figures it out. SWTOR genfic. M!Jedi Knight & Doc friendship (fraternity?) fic. Background Established F!Jedi Knight x Doc. Grief & angst. 3300 words. AO3.

The chrono reads 0300 hours. 0400 hundred until their arrival on Coruscant. 17 minutes since he checked last.

 Rhese turns his eyes back to the ceiling. Landing prep starts at 0600. He could still get three full hours of rest if he could just get to sleep.

 He draws in a slow, deep breath, willing his racing heart to slow. There is no emotion, he reminds himself. There is peace. No emotion. Peace. No emotion. Peace.

  Peace, peace, peace.

 Peace is a damned lie. There’s only war, constant and consuming. War, where the players may change but the game never does.

 He’s fucking tired of war. Tired of running and killing and being too little, too late. Tired of leaving people behind.

 Marr’s flagship explodes in his mind’s eye. Again and again, a bloom of sparks and flame stretching up and out until it’s nothing, fizzled out. Until the space where she was is nothing but dust and cannonfire and distant winking stars.

 Blood rushes in his ears, the pounding of his heart the only sound in the heavy quiet of simulated night.

Dammit. Rhese taps the comm by his bed, wincing away from the bright blue-white gleam of the indicator light. Teeseven answers immediately, chirping a greeting that’s no less cheerful for having possibly lost his master. His friend.

 “Any communications?” Rhese asks, and the comm terminal flashes, hundreds of messages flooding the screen. From the Council. From the Senate. From SIS. Saresh. “Anything from--” Even if she had survived, she would have had no way to send word. Not yet. “Any new information on Nirea?”

 “Jedi = still missing,” the droid reports.

 It’s what he expected, but knowing the knife is coming never made the cutting hurt any less. He swallows his disappointment. “Keep an audio sensor to the ground. Let me know the second you hear anything.”

 “T7 = Looking. // Jedi = Still alive.”

 “I know, Teeseven.” He’s reasonably sure, anyway. “Thank you.”

 The indicator light blinks out, leaving Rhese alone with his thoughts.

 He remembers a time when he would have killed for this kind of quiet. A chance at sober reflection. Isolation. When he believed peace could be achieved from structure. When a steady heart and an ordered mind were still his best chance at salvation. Or absolution. He’s still not sure what it was he spent all those years looking for, but he’s pretty damned certain it’s gone now.

 Ringing fills his ears again. Someone’s talking shit about you, Ranna used to say. An old Corellian superstition, or maybe a spacer’s. She had so many superstitions it was hard to tell which was which.  Either way, he didn’t inherit Ranna’s penchant for mysticism and the only person who’s ever cared enough to talk about him anyway is--Well, the point is that it’s just a symptom of his hearing giving out. He’s been meaning to have Doc look at it for a while now, but there never seemed to be any time.

 Rhese glances at the chrono. 0321 hours. 21 minutes since he checked last.

 He gets up and dresses quickly, trying not to think of all the shit Rea would give him for picking the robes. The ship is dark and silent, the passageways empty this deep into the night. Not that anyone is actually asleep. Rhese can sense the crew in their quarters as he passes them, all awake despite the hour, all pretending not to be.

He senses Kira’s restlessness. It’s familiar to him as his own anxiety, and he can almost see the defensive hunch in her shoulders as she paces back and forth in the too-small space of her bunk. He can see the little wrinkle between her brows as she kneels, trying her damndest to meditate. He can see the tremble in her hands as she opens up her saber, taking it apart and putting it back together as many times as she has to for the adrenaline to fade.

 Rea would have gone to her. Would have laid upside down on her bed while Kira ranted, absorbing all her rage and being the soft place to land once it was spent.

 Rhese keeps walking.

 He senses Rusk’s tension. How tightly he’s coiled, primed and ready to strike at the first actionable target. He pictures Rusk standing at his worktable, the lines in his forehead cutting deep as he methodically disassembles his cannon. He pictures his hands, rough but nimble as he cleans every part, as he sets the chrono to time his reassembly. He pictures the way he keeps glancing at the comm, twitching at every noise like it might be the news he’s waiting for.

 Rea would have offered to spar. She would have worked him until his muscles were loose and warm and tender, and then she would have worked his mind, cracking open some shitty beers to swap stories about the stupid shit they did when they were young and green. He would have laughed like only Rea could make him laugh. He would have slept a little easier.

 Rhese keeps walking.

 He senses Scourge’s fury. It’s a raging wildfire, consuming everything it touches and Rhese can almost hear the groan of metal bending beneath Scourge’s fists as he burns, feeding everything around him to the furnace of his anger. He is hungry to destroy, to quench the flames in his heart with carnage and violence. He wants a fight.

 Rea would have given it to him. She would have poked and prodded until he lashed out, swinging his lightsaber at full limb-severing power, nothing held back. She would have let him. She would have matched him blow for blow until his fury burned itself out and when it was done, she would smile and complain at the scorchmarks in her deck.

 Rhese keeps walking.

 He senses Doc. Alert and focused, thrown completely into some project or the other. There’s none of the usual thrill he feels from Doc when he’s working, none of the anticipation or pride. The purpose of his work doesn’t matter right now as long as the work is consuming him, leaving no room for other thoughts. For worries.

 He feels clear and steady in a way the others don’t right now, and Rhese sees, just for a moment, what it is that Rea must see in him. What it is that draws her to him.

 Rhese enters the medbay without knocking, his left ear ringing.

 “You should be asleep,” Doc says, not looking up from the viscous green liquid he’s measuring. Beneath the goggles Rhese can see his eyes are puffy and shot through with red. “Got a long day ahead of you.”

 “And you don’t?” Rhese raises a brow, folding his hands in front of him. He tries not to think what jokes Rea would make about his posture. Something about the stick up his ass.

 Doc just snorts. “I’m not a Jedi. Nobody cares what I think. Here.” He puts the green liquid down and pulls a small metal tube from his pocket, tossing it to Rhese. “Take one of those. It’s a low dose; should only put you down for an hour or two.”

 “You carry sleeping pills in your pocket?”

 “You’ve met my wife, right? About this high--” Doc raises his hand a foot over his own head “--brown hair, blue eyes, great ass. Only sleeps if you make her.”

 Rhese smiles, feeling none of the usual discomfort and inadequacy he feels when he has these chats with Doc. For once he doesn’t mind being reminded what a giant Rea is in everyone’s mind, how much taller she seems despite being shorter than him by four inches. For once he isn’t embarrassed and annoyed by the reminder of his sister’s very active sex life. For once, he just feels… fond. “I may have seen her around,” he says.

 “Well if you see her again, you tell her to come home. Her family’s worried.”

 Do you hear that Rea? Your family is worried. Rhese wonders if she can feel their concern. He wonders if she can feel anything at all. He can’t feel her. She’s always been good at hiding, and there were years on Tython when he couldn’t separate the feel of her from the rest of the Force, but he could still feel that she was out there somewhere, could still feel their connection. This is the first time she’s ever just been gone, a hole in the Force where the tingle of her warm, fervent energy is supposed to be.

 He reaches for her on instinct, and the void he finds in her place leaves him cold. For the first time in his life, he feels really alone. Careful what you wish for, Liss always warned him. You might just get it.

 “You okay, kid?” Doc, with his bloodshot eyes and exhausted pallor, is watching him carefully, his brow furrowed in concern. Rhese can only think how he’s going to get wrinkles, scrunching his face up like that. How Rea’s going to kill him for aging her husband prematurely. ‘I only married him for his looks,’ she’ll say. ‘Now I’ll have to trade him in for a younger model.’

 Rhese laughs a short, humorless laugh. Is he okay? “I’m going deaf,” he says. “In my left ear.”

 Doc sighs. “Sit down.”

 Rhese does as he’s told, climbing onto the exam chair and pushing his shoulders back, trying to keep his chin up. Trying to hold it together because someone has to now that Rea’s gone.

 But there’s no point. That pinch in Doc’s brow says he isn’t fooled, that he knows too many of Rhese’s secrets, sees too much through Rea’s eyes. It says there will be no fooling him and Rhese can’t find the energy to try. He tips his head back against the chair and lets his shoulders sag, only a little embarrassed by his ragged sigh of relief.

 “Ringing?” Doc asks, wheeling over one of his scanners. He pulls a headset with an alarming number of wires from the drawer.

 Rhese nods. “Started a couple months ago, but things have been--” He thinks back to Ziost, to Tython, to Manaan. To all the blaster fire and running and death. “Well, you know how things have been.”

 “No kidding. I’m surprised your ears lasted this long, the way you Jedi go on.”

 “You mean the way Rea goes on.” She’s had cochlear implants almost as long as she’s been a Jedi. Went in for her first operation the day the treaty was signed, not even a year after Marefka scooped them up on Corellia. He’d been on Tython at the time, but he’d read the reports from her surgeries. It had taken six. “Most Jedi don’t spend so much time getting blown up.”

 He sees the explosion again. Marr’s flagship consumed by inferno, sparks and flame spitting from the cracks in the hull, a ring of fire expanding slowly around the whole fizzling mass. The only sound the static of the comm crackling over the speakers, the echo of her last words ringing in his ears. His own voice, shouting Rea’s name.

 Rhese flinches.

 Doc’s hand settles on his shoulder. “She’s gonna be fine,” he says, and there’s something in his eyes, in the warmth and certainty of his voice, that makes Rhese turn away. It feels too familiar. Too much like--Rhese can’t feel her in the Force, but he can feel her in the tender way Doc is looking at him, in the way Doc is caring for him, gently and thoughtfully, like family.

 Stars. They are family now, aren’t they?

 Doc’s hands are steady as he lowers the headset onto Rhese’s forehead. The nodes are cold but Doc’s fingers are warm as he massages them into place along Rhese’s forehead and around the delicate insides of his ears. And if he notices the way Rhese shivers, Doc is merciful enough not to mention it. “I know you’re worried, Junior, but this is Rea we’re talking about. She’s survived way worse.”

 If anyone knows what Nirea Velaran can survive, it’s Doc.

 “But it doesn’t take worse,” he argues. “One stray blaster bolt. One piece of shrapnel. One mistake.” Force knows she makes mistakes, no matter what she’d have people believe. “She’s not indestructible.”

 Doc says nothing. A stream of rhythmic beeps fills Rhese’s ears.

 He knows she’s alive. This nothing--the gap in his consciousness where she’s supposed to be--it’s not what death feels like. Rhese has felt death before. He’s felt it in strangers and in allies and in friends. He’s felt it in family. In Ranna. In Qarric and Daeleth. He would have sensed his sister’s death. He would have felt a piece of himself die with her.

 Hell, if she was really dead she’d probably be here, complaining about it. She’d be haunting him the way Master Orgus Din haunted her, refusing the peace of death just so she could pester him.

 Rea has to be alive. But for how long? And where?

 Doc lifts the headset, gently peeling back the little nodes as he goes. “How do you feel about implants?”

 Rhese sighs. “Resigned.”

 “I’ve got a friend on Coruscant. She might be persuaded to do it for free.”

 “Persuaded?” Rhese raises a brow, very nearly smiling. “Just what kind of a friend is this, Doc?”

 “Don’t get your panties in a twist, that was a long time ago. I’ve got no interest in persuading anyone but your sister these days.” He pauses, considering. “Well, no interest in persuading anyone without her, anyway.”

 “Ugh.”

 Doc laughs, and it’s an effort to not laugh with him.

 He feels better. No one is more surprised by it than Rhese--if you’d told him back on Balmorra that Archiban Kimble would ever make him feel anything other than annoyance and disgust, he’d have laughed you into the next sector--but here he is, sitting in the medbay and feeling better for having Doc there with him.

 Here he is, sitting in the medbay because it’s where he wanted to be. Because it’s where his feet carried him when he was feeling lost and alone and there was no Rea to collapse into.

 He’ll have to tell her when he sees her again. That she chose well. That he loves this little family she’s built. That he’s grateful and he’s happy and if she ever leaves him again he’s going to lose his starsdamned mind because he can’t keep doing this--

 “Hey.”

 Rhese blinks and finds Doc’s eyes boring into his. Dark and bloodshot and so, so serious. Worried. Scared. For him.

 “Breathe, kid.”

 Rhese realizes he hasn’t been. He gasps, once, twice, until his lungs remember how they’re supposed to work. He tries to recite the Code, but the words keep getting jumbled in his head. It’s like everything he’s been trying not to think and not to feel is breaking free and rushing over him all at once. “I feel like I’m drowning,” he confesses, voice tight like it’s trying to hold onto the words, trying to keep that truth hidden. “I don’t know what to do.”

 “Must run in the family,” Doc says, surprising a small, shaky laugh out of him. “Now c’mere.” He opens his arms and Rhese only hesitates for a second before sitting up and leaning into him, his forehead pressed to Doc’s chest, hot tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. They start to fall when Doc’s arms wrap around his shoulders.

 At least it isn’t blood. Doc’s always complaining about how many shirts he loses to bloodstains; tears should be easier to clean. Rhese doesn’t know why he’s thinking so much about Doc’s shirts, but he can’t seem to make himself stop. And he can’t stop thinking how that’s a stupid thing to be thinking about at a time like this. Can’t stop thinking how he’s blowing this out of proportion. Can’t stop thinking he’s not taking it seriously enough.

 He can’t stop thinking. Thinking, thinking, thinking.

 His breaths are coming too fast and too shallow, desperate, ragged things just barely escaping the tightness of his throat, and his skin feels so hot. Too hot. He wants to climb out of it. He wants to climb out of his whole body and just--He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what he wants but he knows everything is too much.

 Doc pulls him in tighter, blunt nails scraping gently at the nape of his neck, and it’s so much like--His mind swims with memory, of nights spent curled into Rea’s lap, of her body wrapped around his like a shield, of her fingers in his hair, her kisses on his forehead, her voice in his ear, whispering how she’ll protect him, how she’ll always be there no matter what, how it’s the two of them against the galaxy.

 Where the fuck is she now?

 “Me too, kid. Me too.”

 “I don’t want to lose another family.” Rhese whispers the words into Doc’s chest, his eyes squeezed tight against the brutal truth of them. A brutal truth he’s been hiding from for years now. Years of keeping people at arm’s length, of reciting Codes and turning his back and telling himself he’s above it all. Years of trying to keep himself from connecting with anyone because he was so fucking scared of having another connection break.

 You can’t lose what you never had, he reminds himself, thinking of the rest all locked away in their cages, drifting to their own orbits in the absence of Rea’s gravity to draw them together. They were Rea’s family. They’re always just Rea’s. Never yours.

 But then Doc is kissing the top of his head, just like Rea would, and holding him just like Rea would and he can’t be doing it for her cause she isn’t here to see it. He can’t be doing it for any reason but--

 “You aren’t losing anything,” he says, with so much conviction that Rhese almost believes him. “I don’t know where Rea is or what she’s doing, but I know her. I know she loves you more than anyone in this galaxy, and I know she won’t let anything keep you apart for long. She’s coming back, kid, and we’re all gonna be here when she does.”

 Rhese thinks of Tython. Of ten years’ worth of secondhand reports and unanswered messages. Ten years of lonely nights and insecurities. Ten years of waiting.

 “It could be awhile,” he says.

 “We’ll wait.”

 “I waited for ten years last time.”

 “We’ll wait.”

 Rhese lets his eyes fall shut, tilting his face up to the ceiling as breathes a long, shuddering breath. “Okay,” he says, his throat a little looser, his chest a little lighter. “Okay.”

 He sits like that for a long time, listening to the slowing rhythm of his heart and the quiet gurgle of Doc’s equipment, bubbling away on some experiment he doesn’t want to know the particulars of. Listening to the distant ringing in his left ear. He flexes his hands against the exam chair, feeling the cool, smooth fabric shift beneath his fingers, and with each slow breath he feels the sharp sting of chemical cleaner burning his nose.

 Doc is still standing there when Rhese opens his eyes, the little tube of sleeping pills back in his hand. “You’ve got a long day ahead of you,” he says again.

 This time, Rhese takes the pills.

 He curls onto his side on the exam chair, and when Doc lays his lab coat over his shoulders, Rhese pulls it up to his chin and breathes deep of the cologne that always seems to rub off, just a little, onto Rea’s clothes. It makes him feel warm and the drugs make him feel hazy and Doc, steady, certain Doc, shuffling around the medbay behind him and never leaving him alone--Doc makes him feel safe.

 By 0430, Rhese is finally asleep.

#swtor #swtor fic #jedi knight #swtor doc #archiban kimble #rhese velaran #velaran legacy #hydrostuff #hydrofic #hydroswstuff #hydroswfic #aka the one where rhese has the horrifying realization he's doc's brother now #and maybe like six different breakdowns in a row #or the one where the author maybe projects a little too much on her character #but this is my blog and i do what i want #and what i want to do is deposit my feelings in this pile of words #and also cry a little #sometimes a lot #whatever one day at a time