Aftermath

Title: Aftermath (also on AO3 here)
Fandom/Canon: Star Wars (Legends)
Author:

sharpiefan
Word count: 2424
Rating: 15
Spoilers:
Pairing/Characters: Wedge Antilles, Luke Skywalker, Airen Cracken, OC medic
Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars - if I did, I wouldn't have sold it to Disney. I make no money from writing anything in the GFFA
Author's Note: Inspired by

ohhaypsy's fic Wake. Can’t get Wake out of my head. It led to this.
Warning: Contains references to torture, though nothing is shown or described in detail; character has injuries to his wrists from being restrained for a period of time with his hands behind his back
Summary: Sometimes being rescued is just the beginning.

This is set after the Assault on Kile II and Rescue on Kessel missions of the Rogue Squadron N64 game. No knowledge of the game is needed. Just know that Wedge gets shot down and captured, and was later rescued. If you're a non-gamer and want to watch a long play-through of the Rogue Squadron games, Moldy Gameplay has a longplay vid on Youtube here.

Someone had told him, once, that nightmares only start after the event that precipitated them was over. Something to do with needing to survive the horrible thing before you can have the luxury of waking up shaking and scared because your brain can't let go of the horrible thing.

It's not until the second night after he arrives back with the Rebellion that the nightmares come. He still has enough residual pain from what he went through, despite a ten-hour bacta dunk, and he keeps expecting to wake either strapped down to the table facing the torture machine, or on the floor of his cell, hands bound behind his back as Corriss watches him struggle to sit up, to maintain any kind of dignity in the face of the Empire’s treatment of him.

It's night as he struggles awake, screaming as if he hasn't screamed enough over the past week or so, pulling at the tightness on his wrists, finally able to free them. He's sitting up in bed, a proper bed, with pillows and sheets and everything, with his heart racing, slowly coming back to the present, holding his hands to his chest the way he's been prevented from doing till two days ago. He's not wearing the filthy boxer shorts and undershirt the Empire had so graciously left him with after stripping him out of his flightsuit, he's in a clean set of underthings. He can still vaguely smell the detergent on them, even. It's not sweat, at least.

Everything hurts, the deep residual ache that bacta can't deal with. His heart is racing, he's breathing hard, as if he's just run twenty kilometres with no warm-up. He keeps expecting armour-clad helmeted stormtroopers to burst in and drag him back to the cold grey cell he's spent the last… indeterminate amount of time in.

He nearly screams again as someone jolts him from behind, scrambling up onto the clean white bed and wrapping strong arms around him, surrounding him with warmth he didn't know he needed.

"Ssh, ssh, easy, it's OK, you're awake, you're safe, you're with the Rebellion, I'm here." A voice full of sunshine and hope, a voice he had thought he would never hear again. The shaking eventually begins to subside and he's able to breathe again. Awake… He'd only been here in his sleep, when they'd let him sleep at all, actually sleep rather than slip into unconsciousness.

Awake.

He doesn't want to be weak, doesn't want to look weak to anyone around him, but if there's one person he minds less with, it's Luke. Luke, the sunshine to his shadow. Luke, the commander to his XO. Luke who he would follow to the darkest heart of the Empire because Luke is a blazing light and he can't not.

If Luke is here, then he really is home and safe.

He leans back against Luke's solid comforting warmth, desperate to just absorb that into his being, needing it to be real, needing Luke to be real.

"You're awake, you're here," Luke keeps murmuring, his breath stirring Wedge’s hair.

It takes time, far longer than Wedge is happy about, but the shaking eventually subsides and he manages to calm his breathing. He's still looking at his hands, his wrists, that are red raw even now from where he kept pulling at the binders, and the restraints holding him to the table when he wasn't in binders. He'll be surprised if he doesn't have scars later.

"Sorry," he manages eventually, his voice wrecked from screaming and lack of use in simply talking recently. "I'm fine, it was just a nightmare."

He's not fine, he knows that, but it's as much as he can do to admit that to himself, there's no way he's going to say anything even to Luke.

"I could feel it, in the Force," Luke says, sounding sad and worried and other things Wedge is too tired to attempt to name.

Wedge is staring down at his hands. At his wrists, rubbed raw and angry, scabbed in places where he bloodied himself in struggling against the binders, pulling at them every time he had to try to sit up or just pulling futilely to try to free his hands. He'd pulled against the restraints when they'd cuffed him to the table, too. He'd spent ten hours in bacta since his rescue, since returning home to the Rebellion, but his wrists are still raw and tender. They must have been bad before that – he ought to remember what they looked like when he'd got into his X-wing, even when he'd climbed out of the X-wing down in the hangar, but he can't remember. Can only remember the futile pulling at the unyielding binders.

Luke reaches around him to cradle one hand in his, even the gentle whisper of his cuff against Wedge's wrist making him hiss at the touch to raw wounds.

Wedge hates feeling weak, hates showing weakness to anyone, but if there's one person in this whole galaxy he can be vulnerable with, it's Luke. (There's one other person but she's Force knows where and he would hate for her to see him like this, so that's a moot point anyway.)

"They kept the binders on, all the time, unless I was unconscious. Behind my back," he says, quietly, still looking down. If he looks up, he's going to see the look on Luke's face and that will completely do him in. Best not see it. The hiss of indrawn breath nearly did him in anyway and it's a moment before he can carry on. "I talked… I don't know what they asked me, or what I said, but I talked. I – I betrayed –" An indrawn breath that was far too close to being a sob. "I betrayed the Alliance."

He knows, as well as Luke does, that he doesn’t know anything high-level, doesn't know anything operationally risky, that they will have been able to work around anything he does know and would have told his interrogators, but it's still a fact. That he wasn't strong enough not to. He's not Special Forces or anything, he's had no training in holding out against the things he was put through, but that hardly matters.

"General Cracken says that everyone talks," Luke says, still holding his hand so softly. "That even he talked, when they got him. Don't blame yourself for… for not being stronger than everything they threw at you. You survived."

It's ridiculous, that that's a comfort, but it is, somehow. He draws in a shaky breath – and another as Luke gently kisses the inside of his wrist.

They eventually end up lying down facing one another. The medbay cot isn't meant for two, of course, despite being wider than a standard bunk, but neither of them is large and they're on their sides with space between them. Wedge doesn't like asking for help, doesn't like looking helpless to anyone, but Luke is so hyper aware of that that Wedge finds it easy to reach across the tiny space between them to rest his hand on Luke's chest. He's always been thin, small-boned with wrists that he can encircle between thumb and middle finger, but after what he's gone through, somehow he feels even more fragile. It's fine, though; Luke carefully reaches to clasp Wedge's slender hand with his own, both of them calloused from their youth. Luke is the strength Wedge desperately needs right now and he shifts without realising it, pressing against his sturdier friend, tucking his head beneath Luke's chin and holding on as if he would die otherwise. He's finally able to fall asleep again, a proper sleep, Luke's presence enough to keep the nightmares at bay for the rest of the night.

When he wakes again, after an actual real proper, undisturbed, sleep, he's alone in the narrow cot. Standing next to the cot is a purple-skinned Nautolan wearing a medical aide's jumpsuit, who nods as he blinks awake. He's tensed as he shifts from asleep to awake but relaxes instantly on seeing the non-human face and Rebellion medical jumpsuit. Both are signs that he's safe, home, away from everything he's been put through. He hurts a lot less, even the residual ache in his shoulders is mostly gone, and he shifts his arms, proving to himself that he is no longer in binders.

"Oh, good, you’re awake. How do you feel?"

There's probably a bank of instrumentation they could look at if they chose, but Wedge isn't hooked up to any machinery or anything, which is another point that makes him feel safe.

"I… thirsty?" He takes careful stock. No pain – not like there has been, nothing like there has been. He can breathe, so his ribs must be mended. There's only a slight ache in his shoulders. His wrists… Well, they're going to be scarred but he can't have anything on them that's tighter than the cuffs of his clothing, they tried that and he pulled the bandages off, and to have anything stiffer than a bandage, such as bacta cuffs, sent him into an instant panic attack the one time they tried. Not that he remembers much of that.

The medic gives him the control for the cot so that he can sit up at whatever angle he feels most comfortable at, which instantly helps him feel more himself and then fetches him a cup of water. Wedge is humiliated to realise that he needs to use both hands to lift it to his mouth but shakes his head at the first hint he's going to be offered help to hold it. It's going to take work to get back to where he was before, but work is the one thing that he’s never been afraid of.

He carefully sets the cup down on the table that’s wheeled over for him and leans back, shutting his eyes for a moment to breathe.

"They told me you were awake, I hope I’m not disturbing anything?"

He startles, jolting awake. This voice is familiar, a soft Contruum accent, not the harsh Coruscanti accent of his Imperial interrogator. The person standing by the bed is dressed in the tan and blue of the Rebellion. About twenty years Wedge's senior, with red hair scattered through with grey. Eyes that are a pale green and miss absolutely nothing. The last time Wedge saw this man, he was wearing the rank pin of an Army Colonel. This time, the rank is the five red dots of a full General.

He shifts, feeling awkward to be in bed with a full General standing there, but Cracken puts a hand on his shoulder, waiting until he subsides before finding a chair and settling in, with a datapad on his lap.

"I hope you don’t mind if I take your debriefing," Cracken says, obviously aware of the protest Wedge is about to make. Surely the head of Rebel Intelligence has better things to worry about than debriefing one lowly X-wing pilot? Wedge seems to be Cracken's special project and doesn’t want to be Cracken’s special project; he's become intimately, painfully, familiar with being the special project of an Intelligence agent.

Wedge tries to get comfortable. He hasn't written a report, hasn't been awake long enough to even begin to write a report yet, but getting his thoughts in order is settling and familiar. He narrates what he remembers of the mission where he was shot down (and swears that if he never drives a Y-wing again it'll be too soon). Waking up in the dirt with a knee in his back. The cell. Corriss.

"COMPNOR – specifically, ISB." No, he wasn't given a rank other than 'Agent'. No, he never saw a rank pin. Similar age to Cracken. Coruscanti accent. Yes, it could have been an assumed accent. Yes, the Imperials all adopt Core World accents. No, he saw nothing else of where he was held than his cell and the interrogation room. Yes, there were drugs used. No, he can't remember what, doesn't think he ever knew what, even.

He clenches his fists tight under the sheet, fights not to squeeze his eyes closed. Yes, he talked. Yes, he gave away what he knew. Doesn't matter that he doesn't know much, only being a Lieutenant and all, he still gave it all away.

How does he know that?

Wedge gives him a dumbfounded look. Because he does, all right, sir? The Imp gloated over it, whether it was useless information or not. Gloated that he'd told them, gloated that they were going to… going to… He swallows. Going to re-educate him.

They tried. He can be proud that they tried but failed, signally failed. Failed so good they were shipping him to the mines in Kessel to spend the rest of his life in the dark, digging for spice.

The Rogues can’t have staged the rescue just for him, there were other prisoners on that train with him who must have been just as happy to be rescued from a dark painful mining career. But Wedge will always be grateful to the Rogues, whether they had official permission or not.

"I understand the permission was granted… retroactively."

Good for the Rogues. It's just like them, to go anyway.

Cracken puts his datapad away and leans back in the uncomfortable duraplast chair. "There’s no shame in talking, Antilles. Everyone talks in the end. I did."

Wedge boggles at him, there's no other word. "You what? Sir?"

"I was captured on Quanton. They dosed me up good and well and I talked. What matters is not dwelling on it, that was out of your power. And you've had no training in resisting an Imperial interrogation."

Wedge doesn't want to ever know what that sort of training looks like.

Cracken gets up and turns towards the door before pausing to pat Wedge on the shoulder. "What matters is what comes next. Get back in the cockpit, Antilles, that's where your skills are best employed."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

Wedge is left staring at the door after Cracken leaves. As soon as he's allowed out of the bed, he's going to start working towards flying again – he needs to be back in the cockpit. And maybe they can go and blast that detention centre into rubble?

He falls asleep, still propped up in the bed, a small smile on his lips as he dreams of sending a full payload of torpedoes into the building where they put him through hell.