Work Text:
He never knew how alone he could feel surrounded by his own face.
He thought he had known, in those rare times when he was separated from his twin, from the man he had been attached to at the hip, but there had always been this quiet, unshakable hope that they would see each other again. That they would run at each other and hug in a tremendous clatter of plastoid plates, laughter bubbling up around them from the vode who knew exactly how much they meant to each other.
He hadn’t really known. He can see that now. There’s loneliness and there’s being alone, and he may have felt the first again and again throughout this stars forsaken war but the second is so new to him that it aches. It probably will for a while.
“Eyes up,” comes Hunter’s voice, quiet and firm and commanding, and Echo drags himself to the present with a difficulty that scares him. Hunter is crouched in front of him, penlight in hand, and the expression held in the pinched skin around her dark eyes is the kind of concern that would make Echo bristle if it didn’t remind him so much of Kix’s looks before he left the medbay to head off with his new squad. Two days with them, two days since leaving the 501st behind, and he’s been asleep or in bed for most of it, right underneath Crosshair’s own bunk, right across from Hunter and Tech. Wrecker is sleeping on the floor for now, and the care that single action shows makes Echo ache all over again.
“I’m here,” Echo says, opening his eyes wide for the penlight.
“I know.” One eye momentarily blinded, then the other. Echo winces and rubs at them once he’s done. “But I don’t think you really believe that.”
Echo winces again, and rubs at his left eye a little harder to pass it off as something physical. “I’m not…”
He doesn’t know what to say.
Hunter straightens, putting the penlight away, and waves a hand at him — lie down again, it says, and Echo immediately does, tired despite only sitting up while Hunter did a series of tests and checks on his amputation stumps, the ports that the dark, fuzzy beginnings of hair do nothing to hide yet, and anything else she could think of to do now rather than later. He’s spent the last few weeks either naked or dressed in a medbay gown for ease of access to his many injuries, and he’s quickly learned that the Havoc Marauder gets cold easily. He pulls the colorful, non-regulation blanket back over him and tries to relax into the thin mattress.
“I’m gonna go make some caf,” Hunter says, eyeing him with something Echo can’t read. “And tea for you.”
“See, that’s the real torture.”
Hunter snorts and turns to go. “Sure. Which one do you want?”
“Jogan.”
“Coming right up.”
Echo wakes up. Not in the middle of the night, because there is no night in the starry void of space, but at a time when the ship’s lights are anywhere between low and completely off, only motion activated ones at their feet to light the way through the dark. His eyes are adjusted, from so long sleeping, and he feels groggy in a way only sleeping for too long or in a way his body doesn’t like does to him — given the lack of activity throughout the ship, he can safely assume that he’s been asleep for at least ten hours, a far cry from his old normal of six to eight. The quiet sounds of breathing around him soothe him more than many other things can.
Curious, he looks around. He can’t see into the bunk above his but the sounds of breathing from that direction tell him that Crosshair is fast asleep, and there’s a lump of blankets in the bunk across from him that looks to be vaguely Hunter shaped. Tech’s bunk above hers is empty — probably slumped in the pilot’s seat either asleep or reading one of the books on his datapad — and Wrecker is here too, sprawled across the makeshift mass of spare blankets and pillows that he’s dubbed his nest, one hand loosely curled around his hard cock. His eyes are closed, his breathing labored but quiet.
Echo turns over to face the room and Wrecker, and he opens his eyes, flicking toward Echo in the dark. His thumb is slowly caressing the underside of his head and it’s distracting, a little nostalgic.
“Did I wake you up?”
Echo shakes his head, a faint smile grazing his lips as he adjusts the way his head sits on his pillow — wherever they got these, they’re sure as kark better than any the 501st ever got. “I don’t think so. What time is it?”
“About 0200, I think. How do you feel?”
Echo takes a moment to consider the question, pursing his lips and tracing the pattern of one of the blankets beneath Wrecker with his eyes. His body has felt strange lately, a little disjointed, a little disconnected, a lot not his. Everything aches, some things sting, some things burn, and even before moving from a real medbay to the Havoc Marauder he quickly realized that where he once ran a little warm like the vast majority of vode now he runs cold.
“Tired,” Echo settles on, struggling a little. His eyes trace the pattern again, then flick up to watch as Wrecker’s hand slowly pumps his shaft once, easy and unhurried and unashamed. “Tech okay?”
“He wanted to be in the cockpit when we left hyperspace.”
“Soon?”
Wrecker shrugs, glancing over at Hunter when the lump of blankets shifts slightly. “If Tech’s right, four hours.”
Echo huffs. “Tech is always right.”
His hand rises up the shaft, and Wrecker shoots Echo a lazy, amused little grin. “Four hours, then. You’re catching on quick.”
“It doesn’t take much catching on to know a nerd when I see one.”
“Nah, but we’re all nerds. All different kinds, sure, but it takes more than a wild guess to know which kind each of us is.” Wrecker rolls onto his side to face Echo better — and to put his back to Hunter so the noise between them is less likely to wake her up, if he had to guess. He gets a better view of his cock like this, and as Wrecker eases the foreskin back off of the head he swears he feels an echoing little twinge in his own groin. It looks like it feels nice. It looks like it feels nice, familiar enough for Echo to remember but too distant for him to really feel it on himself. Wrecker is bigger all over, proportions the same as most other vode — just scaled up and wider — and Echo is almost vindicated to know that the same applies to his dick. Definitely thicker than his, a little longer than his, but taking up roughly the same space in his hand as Echo’s does in his own. Their differences aren’t quite as intense when he remembers that he’s used to being nearly identical.
“Are you cold?” The question catches him off guard, and he’s sure the look he gives Wrecker says as much, because he tilts his head a little as his hand continues to slowly guide his foreskin up and down, up and down, up and down. “You were shivering a lil’.”
“Oh. No, just— it’s been a while.”
“Since you jerked off?”
“And since I watched someone else.”
Maybe it’s the way Echo says it, or maybe it’s the way he’s been slowly shifting a little closer to the edge of his bed with every sentence that passes between them in the dark, but Wrecker gives him a contemplative look that wouldn’t be out of place on Rex’s face. “You miss it?”
Echo shuts his mouth tight before the resulting peal of surprised laughter can escape him, but the bitten back smile on his face says enough. “A little bit,” he admits. “It’s… comfortable. Proof we’re alive. Proof we’re people who can want things just to want them.”
“I like that.” Wrecker sits up, hand leaving his cock, and Echo watches it bounce against his thighs with quiet amusement bubbling up in his chest — it’s such a human motion, so simple and yet somehow so effective at lightening his mood a little where it was already light enough for him to be satisfied with its current place. “Can I join you?”
Echo scoots over to the other side of the bed so fast he almost gets tangled up in his own blanket and almost hits his head against the wall. Wrecker just laughs as he shuffles in with him, barely more than a puff of air and a shaking chest — the two of them are already toeing the line of enough noise to wake Hunter up, but if she’s using those new noise canceling earbuds Kix gave her before they left the 501st behind then maybe they’re safe for a little while longer. They’re all lucky they can fall asleep and fall back asleep at the drop of a hat.
“C’mere,” Wrecker whispers, despite how close the two of them already are in a bunk only made for one very large vod and not another, smaller one on top of that. He shuffles his arm under Echo’s neck and settles his warm hand against his back, fingers splaying until Echo swears they reach across the entire span of his ribs. Familiar callouses set him a little further at ease and he curls closer without question, his hand smoothing briefly over the meat of Wrecker’s shoulder before he sets his head there. His cybernetic legs sit by the foot of the bed, the better versions he was given through the seemingly endless and yet never-enough funds of the GAR, and his cybernetic arm right next to them. He shifts so that his arm stump doesn’t get caught under his own weight, does the same for his thigh stumps, and one shifts to settle on top of Wrecker’s hip, Echo’s chest flush against his side. They’re both shirtless, and the warmth Wrecker exudes makes him shiver again as it quickly warms him where the blanket is just barely resting atop him in a way almost identical to Echo. He’s sweating a little.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Wrecker murmurs, knocking their heads together — Wrecker’s cheekbone against his hairline, more like — in the clumsy mimicry of a friendly Keldabe kiss that Echo swears every cadet learns before they leave Kamino. He wonders where Wrecker learned it. He wonders when Wrecker learned it.
99, maybe? He knows exactly why this squad is called what it is.
Echo shifts a little closer. From this new angle he can stare down Wrecker’s body as he takes himself in hand again, just as unhurried as before, and he makes a quiet sound of appreciation that he feels, rather than hears, Wrecker echo in his chest. This level of rumbling is unfamiliar, much greater than any vod he’s known before, but certainly pleasant — and it happens again when Wrecker brushes the pad of his thumb across the head of his cock, his hips rocking a little and shifting Echo’s thigh in the process. It’s a pretty strong reaction for such a small motion.
“How sensitive are you?”
Wrecker hums under his breath. “I was edging,” he says, which clears things up in an instant — Echo had assumed that he was just starting, but he hadn’t been close enough to see the sheen of slick wetness coating his length, probably precum and maybe a little spit. “So a lot, I guess.”
“Instead of sleeping?”
Wrecker gives him a funny look, his hand returning to an achingly slow stroking pattern that Echo can already see on his face a little — he wonders how many times he’s edged already. “You really are an ori’vod, aren’t you?”
Echo flushes, ears finally warming up only out of surprise and a little bit of embarrassment — though it’s not unpleasant. “Sorry?”
“I heard you making sure Crosshair ate yesterday. Thought you were asleep, an’ I think he did too. Worked better than Hunter’s try would’ve.”
“It worked?” Admittedly, he sounds a little more pleased than he maybe should.
“Mhm. Ori’vodyc, see?”
“Oh, kark you.”
The snort Wrecker lets loose is a little too loud for comfort — they both freeze, eyes wide as they stare at each other, and then Wrecker slowly turns his head to the side to eye the lump across the way. Echo can’t see Hunter well from his current position, and he tries not to laugh even as he holds his breath, heart caught in his throat and finding the entire situation both amusing and relieving in equal measure. It’s not every day the most terrifying situation he can find himself in is trying not to wake someone up.
“We’re good,” Wrecker whispers, turning back to him, and Echo lets loose a breath of relief into his chest, his own shaking with stifled amusement. “Must be sleepin’ pretty deep tonight.”
“You need to finish up before it doesn’t matter how deep she’s sleeping,” Echo says, a playful edge to a serious comment, and pretends he doesn’t notice the amused face Wrecker makes at another moment of ori’vodyc concern. “Do you just edge, or do you come too?”
“Depends,” Wrecker says. The hand on his cock begins to speed up a little, and Echo’s ears catch the nearly inaudible noises that come from the slick slide of fingers over wet skin. “You think I should do one over the other?”
“Yeah,” Echo says, and how easily the response comes to him surprises him a little, curling that impossible millimeter closer and looking up to watch Wrecker’s face. His eyes drift shut with pleasure and a soft little sound escapes his lips, and Echo knows from a wealth of experience that if Wrecker is anything like the rest of them he’s already close again. “I think you should come.”
Wrecker bites off what sounds suspiciously like a whimper and Echo feels himself twitch — he wasn’t even sure he could get hard anymore, but he’s definitely starting to chub up against Wrecker’s side, slow though it may be. It’s a nice feeling to return to after so long, even if he does nothing about it.
“I’ll do that, then.” Wrecker’s cock is flushed, the warm brown color warmer still at the head, and Echo watches him stroke himself a few times, watches as more precum beads at the tip only to get swept away by his thumb alongside a quiet groan. “The least I can do, really.”
Echo huffs and bumps his head against Wrecker’s a second time. “You’re sweet.”
“I don’t want you to get cold,” Wrecker hums, but that wasn’t even close to what Echo meant and they both know it. Wrecker is kind, just like all the others, but unlike Crosshair or Tech he’s more forthright with it. His warmth is out in the open for anyone to see, right there next to his incredible knowledge of explosives and heavy machinery, easily given and openly shared. He doesn’t hesitate to be both inescapably blunt and inescapably inviting, has never hesitated, and for that Echo is endlessly grateful.
“Maybe I’ll be warmer once you come,” Echo says, not caring how little it makes sense. Tech would hate it, would get flustered until he had no choice but to stutter through an increasingly fervent explanation of how scientifically improbable such a thing would be, and Echo would have to fight back the distinct urge to coo at him as the rest giggled and listened to his charming — and distinctly amusing — rambling. The ori’vod classification would just hold even more weight if he succumbed to his natural instincts with that one.
But Wrecker isn’t Tech, and he takes the silly undertones of Echo’s rusty dirty talk in stride, chuckling a little as his hand obediently speeds up. His fist is gentle, loose, but it’s fast to make up for it — even if he hadn’t outright told Echo he had been edging, the way he’s treating his cock now might have tipped him off anyway.
“Almost there,” Wrecker promises, voice tight and thin, and barely a moment later he muffles an almost wounded noise of pleasure behind tightly shut lips, hunching forward as cum drips over his knuckles in pulses that echo through his body so clearly Echo can feel the strength of them. His chest heaves, breathing as quietly as he can when his body wants him to do anything but, and Echo stares at the cum clinging to his head for a long moment, stark against his brown skin even in such low light.
Something across the room makes a half-asleep grunt. “Are you done yet?”
Echo muffles a sudden peal of giggles in Wrecker’s chest, his own shaking with mirth even as the faint chub in his underwear refuses to abate. He remembers, graphically, being on the other end of the exact situation a few times when he was still a standard ground trooper and then a standard ARC Trooper, waking up to someone being a little too loud with their orgasm or maybe with the sounds of skin slapping or sliding against skin. Shinies tended to be the worst about it, used to the sealed pods they all grew up in, but even Kix had his moments. He’s still proud of the time he threw a pillow at the offending parties through the dark and actually managed to hit someone he still thinks might have been Jesse.
“I’m done,” Wrecker whispers, sounding suitably apologetic. “Sorry.”
Hunter huffs, but she doesn’t sound mad — it must be hard to be, when it’s such a small ship and they’ve all got, from what Echo has gathered of them so far, relatively similar urges. This can’t be an uncommon occurrence.
“Echo?”
Echo considers her question. “No promises,” he eventually says, and it doesn’t take super hearing to catch Hunter’s exasperated snort.
“I’m gagging you next time if you wake me up again. Both of you.”
“Sir, yes sir.”
Hunter snorts and rolls back over. For a minute, then two, they just lay there, waiting for her to fall back asleep, waiting to see what else happens, just waiting. Echo’s come to appreciate the moments in which nothing happens, in which things are quiet and peaceful and — for the first time in a very, very long time — the only pain and terror he feels are residual.
“No promises?” Wrecker finally whispers, gentle and unassuming. He can’t have missed the semi pressing against his hip, but. Well. It would also take a similarly total lack of awareness to notice that Echo’s been a little busy redefining his normal bodily functions for himself over the past few weeks, to varying levels of success. “You want any help figuring that out?”
“Maybe,” Echo admits, face still buried in his chest. He’s warmer than usual but not uncomfortably so, the thin layer of sweat across his chest not pleasant but still something wholly familiar. A sign of life. “I’m not sure how well it’ll go. But you’re welcome to…”
He waves a hand vaguely southward, an unspoken invitation, and listens to the quiet sounds of shuffling as Wrecker wipes his hand off — probably with a tissue from the box Crosshair all but threw at him yesterday when he ran out. He pulls the blankets over him, joining Echo in the cozy warmth beneath, and then a large palm settles on his hip, heavy and solid and deeply comforting just in presence alone. It trails down his thigh, careful to stop safely above where the nerve damage and tight scarring spread out from his amputation site, and Echo shivers again, the mixture of cold air where the open room meets his shoulders and the warmth Wrecker exudes almost dizzying.
“You’re so hot,” Echo mumbles, and immediately flails an arm to smack Wrecker under the blanket when he snickers. “Not like that.”
Well, okay. Yes like that, but it still wasn’t what he meant.
Wrecker’s fingertips wiggle their way under the waistband of his boxers, careful and insistent all at once, and Echo shifts his hips away from his body to allow a little more access as they trail low through his happy trail. Wrecker’s grateful hum warms him almost as much as his body heat. There’s a pause right before they reach Echo’s semi, so brief Echo might not have noticed it if he was focusing almost all his attention on Wrecker’s attention, and then a gentle thumb smooths over the skin of his shaft, finding which way his cock has angled itself — towards the bed, settled comfortably in the valley between hip and thigh — and following it all the way up.
Echo’s breath hitches as Wrecker thumbs the slit with a special sort of patience, hips shifting. Wrecker takes him in hand between two fingers and his thumb and slowly eases his foreskin down away from his head.
“You’re responding well,” Wrecker muses, and Echo distantly realizes that his hand is stroking over the short, fuzzy hair on his head, shaved almost to the skin back when he was still stuck in the medbay with electrodes and ka’ra knows what else stuck to his skull and the metal permanently attached there. Unsafe to remove without risking further brain damage, Kix had said, and Echo was smart enough to want to avoid more of what he was already barely stumbling his way through. He thinks he’s gotten better at his stumbling technique by now, but… still.
“Because it feels good,” Echo says, such a simple victory aching deep in his chest, and makes no move to stop not-quite-suffocating himself.
“That’s good.”
Wrecker keeps at it, slow and steady, glancing touches and slow caresses that make the ache in Echo’s chest sink deeper, spread further. He can feel himself getting hard, slower than he used to but still relatively steady, and it blooms bright in his chest but even that bright bloom still deepens the ache in a bittersweet sort of way.
He’s as hard as he thinks he’ll probably get, not nearly as hard as he used to manage but still clearly not soft, when he realizes — upon a soft sound of concern from Wrecker and an extra comforting pass of his hand over his hair — that he’s crying.
“Kriff,” he breathes, squeezing his eyes a little tighter shut and drawing in a shaking breath. The air is warm in his lungs and cold on his cheek, cold where tear tracks have blossomed across the bridge of his nose and down towards the bed, and he can smell soap and sweat and something spicy, maybe something Wrecker ate. He mentioned candy that Echo could try in a few months, maybe, once his digestive system hopefully recovered enough. Something with cinnamon. “I’m fine, I’m— it’s fine. It’s not you.”
“Okay,” Wrecker murmurs, so devoid of any form of doubt in his words that Echo kind of wants to kiss him. There’s a gentle brush of lips against his hairline, pressing there in comfort and affection, and Echo burrows deeper into his arms, the ache in his chest ready to swallow him whole. “It’s okay.”
His hand echoes the sentiment, gentle and steady and reassuring. A brush of thumb pad against frenulum, a careful squeeze near the base, a momentary redirection to fondle his balls instead, feeling and squeezing and caressing so thoroughly that Echo can’t even be embarrassed by the choked whimper he lets loose into his skin. Wrecker just chuckles and doubles down on rolling his balls over his fingers, carefully pulling them away from his body, carefully pushing them close. His hips jerk at that, and the noise Wrecker makes under his breath — inquisitive, the sound of someone who’s found a potentially delightful surprise — spells only the best kind of trouble for him.
Slowly, almost gingerly, Wrecker cradles one testicle in his fingertips and eases it closer, higher, searching for something that Echo knows he’s heard of but can’t quite bring to the front of his mind.
It slips inside. Echo chokes on his own breath and then a second later on an unexpectedly loud moan, one that Wrecker quickly muffles with a small adjustment of the angle of his head. It trails off but the sensation of fullness doesn’t, the sensation of penetration where no outward hole exists.
“Wrecker,” Echo gasps. He doesn’t care if he wakes Hunter up — or at least he tells himself he doesn’t even if he’s still making a concentrated, though less consistent, effort to remain quiet.
Wrecker hums, sounding overwhelmingly pleased by his reaction. “I learned that from Hunter,” he says, slowly easing his ball in and out in micromovements that really shouldn’t feel as large as they do. “Makes her feel more feminine, she said, and even now that I’ve gotten real good I don’t like it for myself, but… I figure you might want to know about less common options, now that they might be your better bets.”
“You’re right,” Echo all but wheezes. His digestive system is fucked up, leaving anything anal strictly out of the picture for who knows how long, and he can’t not get hard but he still doesn’t know if orgasms are possible anymore, and the feeling of penetration like this is— it’s not anal but it’s nice in a different way, wholly separate from anything he’s tried before, by himself or with partners. It’s nice. It’s the kind of thing he could see himself doing without orgasms as the end goal and that alone immediately shoots it way high up on his newly shortened mental list of pleasurable activities.
“Wanna try some more?”
“Yes.”
Wrecker huffs a silent laugh that would have ruffled his curls if he still had any. The hand cupping his balls — one held in place inside him with his fingers and the other resting on his palm — moves again, in gentle, rolling waves, and Echo feels himself twitch against Wrecker’s forearm as the rhythmic motions begin to mimic, in some strange new way, the distinct feeling of getting fucked in the ass. He isn’t but it’s still familiar enough to make him moan, head tilting up towards Wrecker’s face in the dark as his eyelids flutter, tears all but forgotten. He wonders if it feels closer to having a vagina, and then wonders if that’s exactly why it appeals to Hunter enough for her to teach someone else how to do it to her — it makes perfect sense when he spares it more than a second of thought. The thought sends a wave of quiet affection through him at the thought of his new Sergeant and his new sister. She deserves to feel good in the ways that make her most happy.
Then his other ball is being carefully positioned, similar enough to the process with the first that Echo focuses again, waiting, breathing shallowly as he anticipates the feeling of that first press inside. Wrecker’s hand cups the back of his neck, squeezes, and the second presses up inside of him with an answering whine. It’s overwhelming with two. It’s amazing with two.
“More?” Echo breathes, not quite sure what he wants more of — there are quite a few good options right now, both of his balls and for his cock itself — but implicitly trusting that Wrecker will have a good feel for what might make him feel best. He hasn’t steered him wrong so far, after all.
Wrecker’s hand shifts, keeping his balls in place inside him with his palm, and his knuckles graze his perineum, pressing with barely any pressure but still making Echo’s breath hitch. Another slips under his waistband to join the first, all four fingers curling around to hold his semi-hard cock in his fist, and Echo blows a sudden breath out through his nose, hips shifting to follow the sensation.
“Easy,” Wrecker murmurs, and presses his knuckles up against his perineum just as he strokes slowly downward with a steady grip, pulling his foreskin down off of his head. Echo whines — triple sensation, something around his cock and something inside him and something pressing at his prostate from the outside, it’s almost overwhelming in a bad way but not quite and that small difference is everything, causing his hips to jerk and the warmth through his stomach to flare brightly. Wrecker’s thumb brushes over his slit and comes away wet, uses that wetness to slick up his frenulum, and then does nothing to stroke him, just rubs in small little motions over the sensitive underside of his head. Just presses with even pressure against his perineum. Just keeps his balls tucked up inside himself and lets them back down a little and then back in with barely any movement at all.
It’s overwhelming and distracting. It’s gentle and slow and careful. It’s incredible.
His orgasm sneaks up on him, not quite weak but close. His cock pulses with his heartbeat and his cum and so do his balls, and the feeling of that inside him reminds him, just a little, of the feeling of someone else coming inside him. Cum escapes from his cock to trail down Wrecker’s hand in long, lingering bursts, too weak to shoot anywhere but much better for cleanup, and he shakes apart in Wrecker’s arms, face streaked with tears, abdomen tightening and releasing and tightening and releasing until slowly, slowly, the longest and easiest orgasm he thinks he’s ever had fades away completely.
“How was that?” Wrecker murmurs into the warm, humid space between them, Echo struggling to regain his breath. His balls are still tucked inside him and he almost doesn’t want to let them go, wants to keep this gentle feeling of fullness as a reminder that, even if it’s different now, even if it may stay different, even if his ability to get hard or orgasm comes and goes in waves, he hasn’t lost the ability to feel good in more ways than one.
“It was nice,” he says, sinking deeper into the mattress asWrecker carefully lets his balls back down and removes his hands one at a time to clean himself off, the other keeping his underwear away from his cock. A clean tissue carefully wipes the residual cum away from his quickly deflating cock and he smiles, leans his head close without looking to blindly knock his forehead against what he’s fairly certain is Wrecker’s cheekbone. “Vor entye.”
“N’entye,” Wrecker says with a little shake of his head, giving his soft cock one last affectionate squeeze before removing his hands from his underwear. “Can I stay?”
Echo huffs, tugging him a little closer, sated and safe and warm even despite the chill of the wider space. “Please.”
Wrecker just tucks his head under his chin and pulls the blanket up around their shoulders. Clearly there aren’t any more words needed beyond those few, a concept Echo understands all too well and treasures even better. He hasn’t felt alone since before he fell asleep, and the realization isn’t so much startling as it is soothing, his eyes drifting shut as he settles further into Wrecker’s arms.
Across the room, Crosshair begins to snore.