A touch to the arm. They grab him, drag him onto a ship. It’s cold. It’s dark.
Listen to me, trooper, they say. Listen to me.
Eye contact and quiet hands, Tup reminds him, giving him a painfully tight hug before sending him off to the one-on-one interviews. Eye contact and quiet hands is how you listen.
They are sending you back to the 501st, they tell him. Your General wants you back, they tell him. Go and show them what you’ve learned. Show them how well our facilities deal with genetic aberrations.
Dogma has nothing to show them.
They slap him across the face and call him stupid, tell him to stop fucking around and listen. Dogma checks his hands. He checks his eyes. He is listening.
Go and be with your men, she says. They are gone and she tilts her head when she looks at him. She didn’t do that when she talked to them. Go and be with your men, Trooper.
The lights in the hangar sound different. On Kamino, they were more efficient, vibrating faster and faster until Dogma’s teeth drilled into his skull and the world went white. Here, on the Resolute, the lights are a bit older. He read that in a book once. One of the tech manuals, maybe? He got bored a lot, sitting on transports, so he’d scare up whatever reading material he could from whoever was willing.
Dogma’s head hurts. His body feels bad. His lips are chapped.
“Dogma!”
That’s loud. Doesn’t the trooper yelling know that he’s loud?
Oh. It’s Tup. Funny. Tup always has to remind Dogma to talk more quietly.
“Dogma!”
Dogma. That’s his name.
Out of the corner of his eye, Dogma sees someone (Fives, he thinks) grab Tup by the arm. Closer to him, Kix is talking with them, the people that brought Dogma here. The woman is gone now.
Status? Kix says. Alive, they tell him. Reconditioned to ensure optimal functioning. Then: Are you sure you want it back? With more time, we could make it perform better.
Sign here, please, Kix says. He sounds flat. Dogma wonders if he’s tired, too.
“Dogma,” says Tup again, much quieter and much closer. Then, he’s rushing forward with his arms out and Dogma is much too heavy to move out of the way in time.
He won’t hit Tup. He will never hit Tup, no matter how much it hurts when Tup touches him or how scary it is to have him breathing Dogma’s air, taking Dogma’s space. He won’t hit him, but he will push him away.
He is very tired, but the bad pushing on the inside of his skin is much bigger.
Kix won’t let him in the medbay, and now fucking Fives won’t let him out of the barracks. Tup is going to start screaming soon.
“Let me go see him,” he demands, planting his feet and crossing his arms at the doorway Fives and Jesse have barricaded.
“Nope,” Jesse chirps, popping the p. “Not yet.”
“Fucking—let me through.” Tup makes another break for it, grabbing Jesse in a headlock and kneeing him in the balls. He’s almost to the control panel when Fives grabs him by the back of the blacks and holds him up like a wet kitten. “Fives! Stop, just let me—”
He thrashes, trying to kick something sensitive, but Fives carries him to the nearest bunk and dumps him there, dropping on top of him and pinning him. Jesse drops across his legs.
“Stay down,” Fives warns, pressing Tup’s face into the pillow. “Kix and Dogma need to be able to concentrate for a few hours. You know that.”
Why? What’s wrong with Dogma? he wants to scream. No one will tell him anything and maybe Tup’s young but he’s not stupid. He’s known Dogma his whole life and something is very, very wrong and Tup needs to be there, Force-dammit. Kix doesn’t know Dogma like Tup does.
Fives is right, though, the rational part of his brain reminds him. He’s right and Tup knows it.
Deliberately, he relaxes into the mattress, taking a deep breath.
“You going to stay down?” Fives rumbles.
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
“...up. Tup? Hey, vod, up and at ‘em.”
“...Kix? Time is it?” Tup peels his face away from the sheets, rubbing at the smarting lines on his cheeks. It’s dark in the barracks, and Kix is whispering. “Is Dogma…?”
Kix takes his hands and pulls him to his feet. “Dogma’s fine. He’s ready to see you, and I figured you wouldn’t want to wait.”
Tup straightens, rubbing the last of the sleep out of his eyes. “Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Now?”
“Now,” Kix confirms, starting for the door. “But Tup, he’s not doing well.”
Tup frowns, closing the door behind them. The night-cycle lights are on and the halls are empty, so he speeds up, half-jogging towards the lift. “You said he was fine.”
“He’s stable, he’s just not doing well.”
“How?” The lift is on level 204. Tup bounces on the balls of his feet as he watches the numbers change.
They step inside and Kix presses his wrist to the control panel, keying in a medical override to take them straight up. “He’s not talking.”
“Okay.”
“He’s not responding to me at all.”
“Okay.”
Kix rubs his forehead. “Tup, I just don’t know what to do. I don’t know what they did to him and I don’t know how to fix it. He’s in a bad place, mentally.”
They tried to fix him again, Tup realizes. It must have been another round of whatever they did in Dogma and Tup’s fourth cycle that made Dogma stare into people’s eyes without blinking and eat his food in a certain order and periodically burst into hysterical tears. His stomach turns. “Okay.”
Kix leads him back to one of the ‘private’ beds, tucked in the back corner and hemmed in by sheets and machinery. He holds the curtain open and Tup steps inside and realizes that whatever they did this time is much worse than the fixing.
Much, much worse.
Someone’s changed Dogma into one of the flimsi-thin hospital gowns and it hangs loose and semi-translucent on his gaunt frame. He’s lost a good bit of weight, weight he couldn’t afford to lose. It’s probably why he’s shivering so godsdamned hard.
He’s curled up in a sitting position against the wall, legs up so his knees tent the sheets. Tup wishes he could get a look at his face, but he’s covered it with his hands. No matter. Tup can see the top of his head, see his scalp, and that’s enough.
They’ve shaved him bald, rough and quick if the tufts of leftover hair and browning scabs are anything to go by, and he’s covered in new scars: surgical, neat things edged with the pockmarks of old stitches. Some of them have started to go silvery-pink, but most are still inflamed.
“Dogma?” Tup whispers, stepping inside the curtain. Kix closes it behind him, leaving them alone. “Hey, you awake?”
Dogma doesn’t respond, but then, he doesn’t always respond to his name. It doesn’t mean anything. Tup pads across the cold floor and perches at the edge of the bed by Dogma’s thigh, far enough away to avoid touching. “Dee? It’s me. It’s Tup.”
Dogma’s fine trembling shakes through the bed and into Tup. He does nothing.
“Dogma?”
Softly, from the depths of his skinny arms, Dogma sobs.
“How are they doing?” Jesse settles next to Kix, toeing his boots off and tucking his feet up onto the bed.
Kix sighs, staring across the barracks at Tup’s bunk. He’d discharged Dogma earlier that day. There was nothing more he could do, not with someone higher up denying authorization for a level five brain scan. He could set up a therapy schedule, but he’s a medic, not a neuroscientist, and it’ll take him days to pick enough brains to scrape something together. In the meantime, he just wants Dogma to sleep, hence the discharge.
All of them had some sort of medical trauma by virtue of growing up on Kamino, but Dogma could barely stand to be in the medbay now, let alone submit himself to the kind of tests Kix wishes he could do. Kix held him for three scared, sleepless nights, monitoring vitals and checking on scars and getting some liquid nutrients in him, but Tup was right when he said Dogma would recover better in the barracks.
“Okay,” Kix sighs, leaning on Jesse’s offered shoulder. “Dogma’s still not talking, but he’s responding, at least.”
“That’s good. And he’s autistic; from what I’ve read, him not talking doesn’t necessarily mean something’s wrong.” Kix gives him a sideways look. “What? You’re not the only one with a holonet connection! I’m allowed to know things.” Jesse kicks his ankle.
Kix shakes his head, pinching Jesse’s leg in retaliation. “I don’t think it’s brain damage,” he clarifies. “He’s doing fine with the sims Tup set him up with.” He smiles for a moment at the image of Dogma propped up in the gurney, tongue between his teeth and brows furrowed with concentration as he sped through a matching game. “I’m just worried about his mental state. He was talkative. Before, I mean.”
“He was?”
Kix laughs. “Around me, yes. He was just fucking terrified of you, Jess.”
“What?! Why?” Jesse scrunches his nose.
“I don’t know. He’s just nervous, I think.”
Jesse doesn’t respond, just follows Kix’s gaze back to Tup and Dogma. They’re tangled up in a mess of limbs and blankets and hair, out cold with the rest of the second-shifters. Above them, Twitch snores into his pillow.
“You know,” Kix starts, but he’s cut off by a priority alert from Captain Rex. He picks up, answering Jesse’s head tilt with a shrug. “Captain?”
“Kix. I need you in the medbay now. Be ready for emergency surgery.”
He shoots to his feet. What the fuck could’ve gone so wrong on a scouting mission?
“We found Echo.”