Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Echo had never had any particular talents. Nothing which others hadn’t shown two-fold more than him, at least. The one word that had appeared again and again in his performance reviews was ‘workmanlike’. While others would have been damned by such faint praise, Echo had always treated it like the compliment he’d always felt that it was. 

There was no shame in being workmanlike. Workmen were skilled and competent and thorough, quietly putting in all the nuts and bolts in a system that no one ever missed until they weren’t there anymore. Among thousands of troopers who were all so basically the same that individuality was a precious reward and a lofty goal, Echo was one of the rare few that had never wanted to stand out. He’d wanted to do a good job and nothing more.

Perhaps it was the company he kept. Fives had been born to stand out. He’d always been so wholly himself, so completely and fiercely certain of everyone’s right to be who they were and not be dictated to about it. Even Echo, who compulsively sought out the safety of structure and hierarchy for the better part of his early life, could not help to be drawn to such a flame. 

Fives had always known exactly who Fives was and to hell with everybody else. Echo had just been Echo. He’d gone by the book because he knew he had no specialness to speak of, no individuality like he saw in so many of the others he admired. If he could not be set apart, what else could he do but blend in as hard as he could?

He was never made to stand out. He was made to follow those that did for as long as he could. The chances of him surviving the entire war without the ingenuity, the genius, the resourcefulness of his far more talented brethren were low.

He never expected to wake up one day and find out that he was, in fact, the last of them.

Funny old galaxy, really.

*

His new transfer into Clone Force 99 was perhaps less jarring than most others would assume it would be. He’d stood in the shadow of standouts his entire life and no squad the GAR stood out quite like the infamous 99. In a way, it was familiar ground.

He was out of step with his new squadmates, of course, but he hadn’t expected better. They didn’t know him and they were a tight unit in and of themselves. They didn’t exclude him, but including him took extra effort neither side was used to having to put in. There was nothing Echo could do about the awkward missteps. He’d just have to keep moving until he was in synch, or could fake it well enough. It was just a matter of working at the problem and developing adjustment protocols to suit.

The squad didn’t make it easy. Just when he thought he had their rhythms figured out, a massive curveball would come at him from a blind spot, forcing him to go through the adjustment protocol again. 

And again.

Like their SERE training drill on Aleya. The training itself hadn’t been a problem, although Echo admitted there was a certain unprofessional thrill in going up against the still-running, live ammo security net of a long abandoned temple. He could see why Clone Force 99 had gained their reputation for being the wild cards. For any other crew, infiltrating here would have been a mission. For them, it was just training. It was a brilliant, real-world problem that offered real-world field experience you didn’t get in a droid sim. The Batch took it in stride and Echo was pleased that he’d managed to both keep up and contribute meaningfully.

That had been the smooth part. 

The curveball came later on, when the drill was done and it was that brief, golden time where they were free to rest before heading back to Kamino to get assigned their next mission. While he was confident enough in his abilities in the field, Echo was less certain of correct protocols when it came to downtime with the squad. The others all had their own things to do for leisure, both separately and as a team and Echo was less certain here when to engage or to be engaged. It seemed like they were too. 

Crosshair disappeared into the woods once they’d rested, rifle in hand. Wrecker amused himself using one of their spare mines to blast a small crater in the planet’s surface, cackling madly as he did so before wandering into the woods himself. Tech dug around in the ship's guts, removing heat units and plunking them outside the ship for unfathomable reasons. Hunter appeared to be sharpening knives methodically taken from a leather roll bag. For all their disparate activities, there seemed to be some sort of uniform method to this madness. Their synchronicity was wordless but Echo didn’t feel comfortable enough with asking for an explanation.

Finding himself at a loss with how to occupy his time, he thought maybe he should just go lie down for a while. The constant, low key aches he lived with since his body had been modded beyond recognition were legion, and he was still getting used to them. Maybe he could read something, he mused. His personal effects from the legacy archives were still finding their way back to him through layers of bureaucracy but his data account had been reopened and there were still books he’d wanted to read lined up on his datapad. It was as good a time as ever to delve in.

“Echo, can you grab the red pack-box from the cooling unit for me?” Hunter asked absently as he fiddled over some of the boxy components Tech had removed from the ship. The genius himself was heading out over the fields, waving to their returning teammates.  

“Sure thing,” Echo said, putting a minor hold on his plans. 

He found the box as promised. Someone had scribbled open this and you're on scrub duty for a month, Wrecker across the lid along with a skull motif, which made Echo blink slowly. Deciding to leave that where it lay for now, Echo went back outside the Marauder...

… and nearly dropped the box in surprise.

Later he wouldn’t have been able to say what surprised him more; the sight of Crosshair, Wrecker and Tech in a distant clearing efficiently butchering some sort of ungulate species which he didn’t know the name of but which was clearly recently deceased, or the sight of Hunter, their commanding officer and the coldest and most lethal knife wielder Echo had ever seen standing at a trestle table peeling a bunch of freshly uprooted native tubers with far too much skill to be new at it.

“Over here,” Hunter said, removing tuber skins with lightning fast hands, one long peel per tuber. 

Echo regained enough equilibrium to deliver the box which, to his astonishment, contained what looked like a full set of spices, salts, breads, other fresh produce, nuts and various cheeses. Echo helped lay out the trimmings with increasing bewilderment, and was witness to his commanding officer setting a pot of broth on the field stove to, apparently, get started on a marinade for the game.

Finally, he had to say it. “Sarge, you cook?” And instantly regretted it. The Batch weren’t exactly adherents of military correctness, but the words had sounded rude even as he’d said them.

Hunter, thankfully, only looked amused. “That surprises you?”

Wondering just how big of a bantha’s ass he’d just made of himself, Echo hedged. “Yes, but, in my defence, when I think of Clone Force 99 the word ‘domesticated’ isn’t the first one that springs to mind.”

Hunter looked to where Echo was looking. They watched as Wrecker, wearing a pair of ungulate antlers as a helmet, tried to mock charge Crosshair who obligingly flailed him with disemboweled giblets and they both nearly knocked Tech into the pit Wrecker had made, which had been filled with wood and lit ablaze while Echo hadn’t been looking. 

“...fair point,” Hunter sighed, and went back to peeling tubers with master-level precision. “It’s not really a big mystery,” he added as the awkward silence stretched and Echo fumbled for something more diplomatic to fill it. “We,” he pointed the knife fearlessly at his own neck. “Are Clone Force 99. We’re supposed to be nothing but a rumour. A lot of our work is covert ops well off the grid.”

“Yes, I know,” Echo frowned.

“So,” Hunter shrugged, dicing tubers lightning fast. “We spend most of our time trying to make sure nobody knows where we are. It’s not like we can just stop in at any forward base for resupply or to visit the mess,” he said archly, reaching into a bag of what looked like alliums, peeling and slicing them without pause and without looking as he talked. “We’re off the grid, so we live off the grid. We have to supply for ourselves. We buy supplies, sometimes, if we can get away with it quietly, and sometimes we might be able to arrange a dead drop, but otherwise we’re scavengers and gatherers for everything; food, medicines, parts, you name it. The GAR money helps, but it can only go so far in the middle of nowhere or out in some uninhabited wasteland where the Seps have set up shop. After all, droids don’t need to eat.”

Echo nodded. At the end of a long day’s slog through Force knows what the only things you wanted were a warm bunk and a hot meal. If those weren’t in your regular supply chain then it was logical that you’d damn well learn to do them yourself. Even Echo, infamously hidebound as he was, or had been, had learned to improvise comfort where he could. Good morale beat out reprimands any day of the cycle. It beat out almost everything, in a war.

Still… “I wouldn’t have expected you to be the cooking type,” he murmured to himself, watching with keen interest as Hunter sauteed sliced alliums in an oiled pan over the second camp stove, adding spices and broth from the ration kits and flipped the mass of it with careless ease.

Hunter’s damnably sensitive ears had caught the observation. “Who would be the cooking type among us, do you think?” he smirked.

Caught out, Echo shrugged awkwardly. “Crosshair, I suppose?” He looked over in the field where the lanky clone idly watched Tech and Wrecker bicker as he enjoyed the fire roaring up from the fire pit. “He doesn’t strike me as the type to live with substandard fare if he can get better.” He’d learn out of spite, if nothing else, Echo added inside his head. 

Hunter barked a laugh. “Astute observation, shiny,” he replied, for a moment the gentle derogative pulling a hook in Echo’s chest; not quite painful, not quite not. “But never, ever let that man cook for you unless you are tired of tastebuds, gut health and life.”

The skewering of their loyal sniper was so unexpected that Echo snorted a laugh. “That bad?”

“Once done, never forgotten,” Hunter’s face pinched. “By all the gods, we tried though. He’s got no kriffing taste. In any sense of the word. Which, incidentally, is how I ended up on permanent KP,” Hunter continued, turning up burners and tossing cream into the pan, greens into the big, bubbling pot. “The rations are kinda hit and miss with me. Some of ‘em are… okay. I can eat them. Others I can’t kriffing stand . It’s not just the flavours or salts and sweetness or textures - though it is sometimes that too - it’s also that if there’s something rancid or mouldy or if there's been an infestation in the processing plant, I can taste that shit,” Hunter was gloomy. “Sometimes literally.”

Echo stared at him.

“Oh yeah,” Hunter said to his aghast look. “They test ‘em to make sure they’re good for consumption, obviously, but you’d be amazed what contaminants they let pass through so they don’t waste the food or the money. After all, nobody will be able to taste the ones that are slightly off. Except me, of course.”

Echo gave an internal shudder and tried not to think too hard about any of the rations he’d ever eaten. That was knowledge he had a feeling would be following him into every mess he walked into from now on. He wasn’t generally squeamish, but ick.

Hunter grinned at his now doubt slightly greenish tinge. “Don’t worry, if there’s a problem like that with the chow, I’ll let you know. Tech scans everything we eat anyhow. A bunch of the standard troop rations cause anaphylactic reactions for me in any case, and oh what fun we had finding out which ones. The ones that I can eat are fine but kind of… bland,” Hunter made a face, tattoos pulling at the lines. “That’s where I got into the herb and spice game. It’s amazing what a difference a little extra flavour makes. I guess this,” he gestured to the full kitchen he was running. “Spun out of that. Plus,” he spun the knife like a credit on fingertips, before slicing tubers into flimsiplast thin slices in a hyperspace blur of movement, no hesitation, no fear. “Anything to keep the skills sharp. Hey!” he yelled over to the other three. “Is the pit oven ready yet?”

“Temperature nearly optimal!” Tech yelled back. 

“You better have made that sauce!” Crosshair added from wherever he’d secreted himself amongst the long grasses.

“I don’t take requests!” Hunter yelled back, shaking the pan of sauce as it thickened nicely. “Make it yourself if you want it!”

Crosshair’s response was drowned out by a frantic, tandem “NO!” from the other two, followed by yelps and swears as Crosshair answered their criticism with finely aimed knuckle sized seeds pelted with deadly precision from the long grass.

Hunter chuckled to himself and even Echo cracked a grin. Then Hunter shoved a spoonful of sauce into Echo’s mouth. “Good?”

Echo didn’t answer right away. He was briefly at one with the Force. 

“Good,” was his eventual response, so inadequate it was nearly a lie. “Very, very good,” was his best follow up attempt to get even close.

“Good,” Hunter grinned at him. “How’s your mixing game?” he asked, getting out some big silver bowls from their supply box.

Echo blinked at him, then looked down at his scomp link, whirring it back and forth a few times. “I do alright, sarge,” he deadpanned.

Hunter laughed again. “Then come closer and I’ll teach you how to make stuffing.”

“Are we ready to cook yet?” Wrecker shouted to them. “I’m hungry!”

Chapter Text

It got… easier, after a while. Routine was where Echo sought and found comfort and, wildly off-the-wall as the squad was, they did have their patterns, after a fashion.

Hunter ducked reporting to his superiors more often than he could actually get away with it, so Echo was ready with his pack the minute they heard a summons come through, because that would be their cue to light out the door as fast as the Havoc could take them.

Crosshair always got the top bunk or the high ground of the camp, no exceptions allowed. It was his habit to be the forward scout on the way back to their temporary basecamps or to the Havoc in the same way that Hunter was their scout going out. There was scarcely a mission where the squad wouldn’t be trudging back, achy and weary, to see Crosshair perched atop the ship like a gargoyle, waiting impatiently with a thousand yard stare. Wrecker said he was just sleeping with his eyes open and Echo wouldn’t be the one to test it if you paid him in fine Corellian brandy.

Tech never stopped moving; ever if he could help it. At any one time he might have fifty different projects going in all manner of regulation and decidedly non-regulation areas, spinning from one to the other in a state of barely penetrable chaos, to the point where it was just easier to assume Tech was always busy and plan accordingly. Echo genuinely wondered if Tech even slept, or merely just plugged into a charge station at night.

Wrecker… well, Wrecker was harder to get a bead on, pattern wise. The others at least found comfort in rituals. Wrecker was chaos personified, and chaos glorified. He was big and loud and had no sense of the long term, to the point where he had almost no rituals; he didn’t think far enough ahead to need them. He bounced around the galaxy like a rogue moon, a happy slave to whatever forces pulled him along and not even the slightest bit afraid he couldn’t handle what he found once he got there.

And to be fair, being big and loud and almost indestructible had been a pretty winning strategy so far, scars notwithstanding.

Echo liked Wrecker, almost in spite of himself. Maybe it was because he reminded him, in an odd way, of Fives. Wrecker never hid who he was. He didn’t even grasp that it was a thing that he could do. He was about as fiercely himself as it was possible for anyone to be, always completely existing in the moment he was in.

Still, he could be a trial. With the squad his demeanour was manageable and even commendable and in the field he was never anything but effective but put him on, say, a star destroyer with a battalion of regs on board and suddenly he could not stop picking fights. ‘De-escalate’ was not a word Wrecker had any truck with.

Which could be a problem in those instances the Batch ended up as guests aboard a GAR convoy, like they were now. After one too many times getting Wrecker (and usually whatever poor sap he’d fought with) out of the brig, Hunter basically ordered Wrecker to shadow Echo around until the Marauder had been restocked and had basic maintenance overhaul, which, thanks to damage from their latest caper, would take several more days.

Echo wanted to protest essentially being Wrecker’s babysitter, but Hunter was stuck talking to the brass like they were crechelings explaining that their latest success was a success, Tech was overseeing the maintenance crews and as sour as a gundark with a toothache about them touching his handiwork and Crosshair had been swallowed up by the R&D division who wanted a new long range rifle tested, although Echo resentfully floated the notion that he’d allowed himself to be taken to get out of Wrecker watching.

But, new man on the team and therefore the low man on the totem pole, he accepted the scut work assignment. Force, it really was just like being a shiny again.

Honestly, it wasn’t too bad. Echo had a bunch of PT milestones to still hit anyway and Wrecker was a man happy to spend hours in the ship’s gym. Echo just had to steer him away from any potential challengers in the fighting ring. For variety, they’d go down and see what was cooking in the explosive ordinance end of the R&D labs. The researchers there would likely never forgive Echo for bringing Wrecker into their midst, but if they didn’t want to know what happens when you wire a Tudarian daisy-cutter with a flitter-drone, well, they probably shouldn’t be in military weapons development.

The important thing was that the hull wasn’t breached and nobody died. At least, that was how he’d spun it to Hunter, whose face was pinched with an oncoming migraine.

Rising probabilities for total annihilation notwithstanding, it was fascinating to watch Wrecker in his element. Everyone on Clone Force 99 had a genius and Wrecker was, demeanor aside, no exception. His smarts came out in unusual, hyperfocused ways that tended to catch the dismissive off guard. Wrecker could only barely hit the lowest standard for reading and writing, but he came alive around explosives. There was almost nothing he didn’t know about what they were, or what they could potentially do. He could name ways to use a stun grenade that the researchers had clearly never even thought of, judging from their gobsmacked expressions. 

It was a joy to watch him work, because Echo had always found joy in watching his brothers be smart. It also kept him in the one area he was unlikely to start picking fights, which was nice.

It would have all gone fine, if not for the message he got from the quartermaster three days in.

“Where’re we going?” Wrecker huffed as they went further into the bowels of the ship. “I thought we were going to the gym!”

“We are Wrecker,” Echo sighed. “But I’ve been tracking some packages of mine. The quartermaster on this ship logged some of my effects that were passed to them from the last cargo runner ship to onforward to Kamino. I can pick them up here instead.”

“So?” Wrecker’s brow wrinkled. “Just let them take it to Kamino for ya.”

“Have you seen the state of the general post?” Echo retorted. “That’ll take weeks.”

Wrecker frowned, then nodded. “Yeah. I’m still waiting for the Devel-Class ship mines. It’s been months since I recced them.”

Echo had a moments unforcely terror of just what Wrecker would take it into his head to do with a grenade that could take out a cruiser, followed by some careful consideration into whether some brave and wise quartermaster clerk had looked at the requisition form, looked at the squad number and then just quietly decided to lose them for the sake of the greater good.

Odds were high, Echo thought.

Still, it got Wrecker to quit griping and follow him down to the ship’s cargo warehouse to talk to a store clerk and, as it turned out, wait an interminable amount of time proving that, yes, the system still thought he was dead but he was actually very much alive, thank you, and for them to please track down his package from the racks. Even pulling rank, it took so long Wrecker stole a bunch of flimisplast forms from the clerks desk and a graphite stick and began scribbling away. Maybe a new attempt at requisitioning a Devel ship mine. The big clone appeared to be having trouble with his writing on the ‘reason for request’ section, because the floor was soon littered with screwed up pages.

Echo was bored and impatient enough to lean in and blinked. Wrecker wasn’t filling out forms.

Wrecker was drawing.

They were… well, Echo was certainly no art connoisseur by any stretch, but they certainly looked good to him. Huge hands that could literally rip droids into pieces gently traced out the most delicate strokes of graphite on the page. 

Surprised, Echo scooped up some of the abandoned ones and straightened them out.

The subject matter was varied. Some of it Echo might have at least guessed; guns, bombs, ships of various caliber, including the Marauder . They weren’t… true to life in the sense that they were what you’d see on a still, but they weren’t little cartoons or doodles either. There was a stylized element, like Wrecker was trying to capture the feel of them, rather than the look. 

Others were more esoteric subjects. Buildings they’d been to planetside. Base camps and forward recon stations. Tech’s goggles, laying on a countertop like they were waiting to be collected. A surprising number of genuinely accurate looking birds and insects and other flying creatures.

Echo looked back at whatever the bigger man was currently sketching and found himself looking at a charred old tree stump at the bottom of a crater, the bomb damage that had caused it rendered from intimate knowledge. At the half upended root system in the middle of the jagged mess was a tiny flower, almost lost in the tangle, a carefully eked out spot of white in the stark blacks and dirty greys surrounding it. 

The sight unexpectedly brought a lump to Echo’s throat. 

He was genuinely shocked when Wrecker shrugged and screwed it up, tossing it to the floor.

“Don’t do that!” Echo admonished, bending down to grab it. “Why would you do that?”

Wrecker looked surprised. “Why not?”

“It’s good!” Echo protested, smoothing out the page on his metal knees.

“It’s jus’ something I do when I’m bored,” Wrecker shrugged. “I never did too well on them written test things. The trainers didn’t think I understood, but I did! I just wasn’t too good at the written tests. But I could show ‘em I knew what they were talkin’ ‘bout if I could just… you know, draw out what I meant. Guess I just got a bad habit out of it. It’s just… it’s not actual art or anything,” the big man denied in a mumble. “It’s not, like, good for nothing ‘cept wasting flimsi and time.”

Echo had never once seen Wrecker downplay anything about himself before, and found he didn’t like the look of it. “But… I’ve seen art in actual frames that isn’t that good!”

Wrecker stared at him, before breaking into a huge laugh, slapping Echo so hard he nearly jolted off the bench. “Nice one, Echo! That’s pretty kriffing funny.”

Echo gaped. “I’m actually being serious. It’s good! Well,” he hedged because he couldn’t honestly claim to be an arbiter of good art versus bad art, or any art in general. “It looked good to me, anyway.”

Wrecker snorted. “It won’t take out a clanker or bomb a Sep base or anything like that. That’s what I’m good at,” Wrecker jerked a thumb at himself. “It won’t help us get chow or fix injuries or nothing like that. I mean, I just use it to pass the time. What use is it but that?” 

Feeling like he was edging a little out of his philosophical depth, Echo tentatively essayed “I don’t think art is supposed to have a use exactly…”

“Right,” Wrecker nodded. “There you go. If it ain’t useful, then what’s it good for, right? We don’t need all that kriffing kooky wooky stuff. We’re soldiers.”

“Yes but,” Echo searched wildly for some kind of argument for the existence of art for art’s sake, not something he was well equipped to do. “We paint armour, don’t we? You draw squad skulls on the bunks. That doesn’t have a use, exactly, but…”

“Who said that hasn’t got no use?” Wrecker challenged irritably. “It’s useful for people to know who we are. We’re Clone Force 99 and they ought’na forget it! But this stuff?” Wrecker’s nose wrinkled in distaste. “It ain’t for soldiers. I shouldn’t do it, really,” he swept up the mess of discarded drawings. “I just get so bored.” And then unceremoniously dumped the lot of them in the trash can next to the clerk’s desk before Echo could stop him. “There,” he grinned. “All gone. Good riddance, I guess.”

Echo stared at him. “You don’t… like them?” he asked slowly. “Why not?”

Wrecker shrugged uncomfortably, fidgeting with his big hands in his lap. “It’s a distraction. I get distracted too much as it is. I oughta stop, but I never seem to be able to do it, proper-like. Ah, never mind,” the big man waved it all away. “It’s not like it’s anything special.”

Echo opened his mouth to violently protest , but the door to the storeroom finally swung back open.

The clerk came in dragging a small footlocker on a dolly; probably only for regulations sake, because when Echo went to lift it it barely weighed anything at all.

“Hold on,” Echo called the clerk back before the reg could make his escape. “This isn’t mine. My personal effects should be in one of the legacy boxes marked with my number.”

The clerk sighed tiredly. “Your legacy box was claimed by your next of kin, according to my system. That is all of his personal effects. The automated system sent them out to your home address when you were re-logged into the system, since you were his next of kin. CT-27-5555, personal effects, flagged as property of CT-21-0408, as per the last will and testament on your Legacy files.”

Echo felt the kick straight in his guts, ice spreading throughout his limbs. Without thinking he put the footlocker down and clawed it open.

It opened up to reveal a set of patched blacks. An unopened bottle of century-old Correlian brandy. A handful of trinkets, the origin of which Echo could name, every one, including the dusty lumenlute laying on top.

These weren’t his things. They were Five’s things.

Echo felt the kick in his chest this time, running his fingers over the familiar lumenlute. “I… where’s the rest of it?” he croaked out when he could find his voice.

“That’s everything,” the clerk shrugged.

Scarcely knowing what he was doing, Echo rocketed to his full height. “What do you mean that’s everything? What about his field pack, his tags? His helmet, armour? He…” Echo’s throat closed over on the words died wearing it. “All of that should be included in his personal effects!”

The clerk, his face familiar but absolutely unfamiliar, stared at him, wide eyed. “I don’t know, okay? All I know is this is all that was manifested. You need to put an information request in with the Legacy department if you think something’s missing.”

“If I think…! ” Echo started, astonished at himself, as he was nearly yelling.

“Who do we complain to about broken stuff?” Wrecker’s angry voice cut across Echo’s rising panic and rage. His big hand lifted the lumenlute out of the footlocker.

Echo gasped to see it properly in the light. Jagged shatter marks spiderwebbed one side of it, the neck wobbled, clearly cracked in it’s moorings. The delicately gilded crystal lens bridge was long gone, snapped off entirely, and the kyber-tipped pegs of the laser array were bent and loose. It looked like someone had smashed it against a wall. 

Echo made an inarticulate sound as he cradled it.

“Hey, we didn’t break it!” the clerk protested Wrecker’s furious glower. “It was received that way, see?” he showed them the manifest. “Signed for as damaged on receipt. They found it that way!”

Echo looked back at the lumenlute. Fives had loved it, loved it, even though the rest of the 501st had hated him for it. What happened?

Wrecker was building a head of steam up and Echo was suddenly a hundred percent not in the mood to deal with his temper. “Wrecker, drop it!” he snapped. “Just…. It doesn’t matter. Drop it. Let’s go.”

He signed for the half empty footlocker will ill grace and marched out like he was at a drill parade, back straight and stare about a thousand light years long. It took him a moment to realize Wrecker was worriedly hovering behind him, looking uncertain.

Echo forced himself to relax slightly. Echo’s scars weren’t Wrecker’s to contend with. It wasn’t the big man’s fault. “Look, I should just… drop this off at our temp quarters,” he tried to keep his voice as level as he could. “You want to just head for the gym? I’ll meet you there,” he offered.

“Um… if you’re sure,” Wrecker shifted his weight. “I can stick around if you want.”

Echo found himself warmed by the offer. Wrecker wasn’t always the most obliging personality, but he always meant well. “Nah, it’s okay,” Echo dredged up a faint smile. “I’ll just go drop it off. I’ll see you in a few.”

“Sure thing!” Wrecker brightened.

But when Echo got back to their shared temporary racks he lingered running his fingers over the broken instrument as if he could somehow heal it. Making a split second decision, he grabbed a holostill of it and hotfooted down to the comms room, where a slight pulling of the Hero-Of-Anaxes card netted him brief access to the priority subspace array. He wasn’t so selfish as to take up precious signal space with a long message. He just sent the still marked as priority to Rex, along with a brief message.

What happened?

He earmarked the reply message to be sent straight back to his datapad on receipt and headed for the gym, mind awhirl and looking for distractions.

Wrecker was there, already gathering an admiring crowd for his feats in high grav weights - the regs might be leery of the Batch but they admired sheer physical feats, at least. Echo didn’t feel up to a crowd so he skulked over to the crunch machines and started working his core; just about the only part of him he could, theoretically, work at with any real effect, and had to. Lugging around all the cyborg parts of him took muscle. 

He dropped into a trance-like state as he worked at it with his usually steady, workmanlike drive, trying to square the raging circle in his mind.

Fives’ lumenlute... although really it had been both of theirs, because Fives had been the one gifted with it from a grateful instrument maker on Ralu’uyani but Echo had been the one to actually look up how to play the laser-based instrument, because playing that lumenlute was literally the only thing Echo had even seen Fives incurably bad at. But it had meant so much to him. He used to beg Echo to play.

What the kriff had happened? Had Fives got drunk one night and stepped on it? Had he gotten into a fight?  Fives had been passionate where Echo had been steady; sometimes he’d needed Echo to cool him off but Echo couldn’t imagine a world where Fives would have reached for his beloved lumenlute as a weapon of choice. He had adored it; a gift from a civilian, grateful for rescue from the GAR forces. Despite all the propaganda singing their praises as a fighting forces, the clone troopers rarely got thanked in person very much. And they weren’t, generally speaking, supposed to accept gifts in any case, as per regulations.

Fives had gotten around it because he’d found the thing, abandoned in the mud when the dwellers had fled the Separatists in Ralu’uyani. Troopers definitely weren’t allowed to loot anything either, but lumenlutes were rare and valuable. Most light-based instruments were. They were torture to make, fussy to maintain and incredibly difficult to master. There were regulations which stated Clone Troopers should, where they could, try to preserve valuable cultural heritage, so Fives had scooped up the lumenlute intending to find its owner later, once the planet was freed from the Seps grip, which ended up taking weeks.

The instrument maker who owned it was adamant Fives keep it, once they’d located them. In gratitude, they’d said. Echo had been of the opinion Fives should turn it over to the Heritage Department like all the rest of the art and texts that had been salvaged from battlefields, but Fives had already figured out how to make it make noise and wouldn’t be convinced to turn it over. Faced with either going with it or reporting him, Echo had conceded. 

Echo started to push harder into his workout, trying to outrun the twang in his chest. 

Fives had loved the lumenlute, but the thing had not loved him back in any way. After weeks and weeks and weeks of him caterwauling on it to the point where the squad was about ready to arrange a training accident, Echo started looking up playing guides in sheer self defence, because he knew Fives hadn’t bothered. How hard could it be, Echo? He’d said with all that unassailable self-assurance.

Very hard, if the technical specs Echo had gotten were to be believed. But he was, or had been at the time, a believer in the importance of reading the manual, so he’d spent sleepless nights aching from training reading technique books until his eyes felt like sandpaper, trying turn the knowledge over in his head and regurgitate it to Fives in a way he’d understand. Echo had become expert on the technical specs of lumenlutes. It was either that or let Hevy beat Fives senseless with it.

He remembered painstakingly trying to teach Fives that his fingers had to move right here and his other hand had to slide the kyber-tipped pegs this way so the lasers hit the lens bridges and resonated the right tones through the sound box and the amplifier. He did it like it would save his brother's life; which it sort of had.

Fives insisted on carting it around wherever they went. Through ARC training. Through Torrent. Into the maw of the 501st. Playing it, experimenting with it, became something to do with Fives in the wee hours, when their nightmares came for them.

Honestly, Echo had probably actually played the stupid thing more than Fives ever had.

Echo stopped dead on that thought, frozen in place on the machine, heedless of his heaving sides and sweat drenched body, aches and pains screaming at him shrilly, but through a thick fog.

“Echo, you okay?”

Echo turned to blink owlishly at Wrecker’s worried face. 

“‘Cause you been at it for, like, an hour and a half now,” Wrecker pointed out.

Echo blinked again. “Yeah,” he fumbled his way out of the abyss his mind had just dropped into, with indifferent success. “Fine.”

“Wanna go to the labs?” Wrecker asked hopefully. “Some of the demo disposal boys are going to run a test sim, they told me,” he waved at a loose back of cadets at the back of the gym.

Honestly, spending the rest of the day around loud noises - both bombs at the shouts of the lunatic bomb disposal teams (and Wrecker) - sounded like a version of hell right now. “I still got a few more dailies to hit before I finish up.”

“Oh, that’s okay, these guys just wanna show off the new flitterbangs in the testing range,” Wrecker beamed, enthusiasm shining from every pore. “None of that boring research stuff. I’ll hang with ‘em for a bit while you finish.”

Echo sent a look over at the grinning squad. They seemed awfully shiny. Good news was that Wrecker did have a slightly better attitude towards shinies as long as they showed a good attitude back. “You promise not to pick a fight?” he raised an eyebrow at Wrecker.

“I won’t,” Wrecker promised. “I don’t pick a fight with every reg I meet,” he added in a grumble.

Wisely refraining from pointing out the evidence to the contrary, Echo clapped him on the shoulder. “Have a blast, big guy,” he said.

“‘Course. That’s the point, Echo!” 

Echo managed to crack a grin at Wrecker’s broad, departing back. 

Once he was gone, though, Echo couldn’t make himself focus. He lasted about five minutes on a treadmill, thoughts running in futile circles a thousand times faster, before giving in for the day. He played with the idea of following Wrecker to see what kind of merry hell he and the shinies were getting up to, but his moping steps took him back to their temporary racks, back to the box with everything left of Fives that still existed. Echo knew, realistically, that he’d probably never see any of the rest of it, no matter how many requests he filed. Whatever was left was probably sitting in an evidence locker somewhere, or had just been straight up destroyed.

They’d said it was a virus. That Fives had gone mad.

Whether Echo was willing to believe that or not, it wouldn’t get any more of Fives back to him.

Echo extracted the half shattered lumenlute from the box again. Hours upon hours of work had gone into it, each one hand made and bespoke. He didn’t know enough about the varieties of them to know if this was, or had been, an especially beautiful one, but who cared? It had been Fives’.

Almost automatically he raised it into the playing position, soundbox tilted down, neck crossing up towards his shoulder. But when he raised his right side to position his fingers, the scomp link whirred back at him.

Right. No two-handed instruments for him anymore. 

As if he could ever forget that.

And it was broken beyond his skill to repair anyway.

Despondent, he put it back in the box. 

His datapad beeped. He shoved the box next to his rack and fumbled for it. A message, priority sub-space, with Rex’s comm code. He must have gotten lucky and caught Rex while he was off mission, or in the vicinity. Covert ops on both sides of the line, it was difficult for them both to keep track of one another. Echo was sometimes ashamed of the relief that was.

His thumb hovered over the datapad, but his muscles knotted in repulsion. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Was it just some stupid story about Fives being careless, or some shiny dropping a box? Had it been dropped over a catwalk? Had Fives given in to his darkest desire to beat a Coruscanti Guard over the head with it in a vain attempt to break their sense of self-importance?

He suddenly, viscerally, just didn’t want to know. It wasn’t his memory. He had so few clear ones left from Before that weren’t a muddled haze, disconnected and shattered bits that he felt would never be whole enough to piece together again. Why torment himself with the fact that others had gone on to make memories without him? What did it matter? They weren’t here to make memories now. Why remind himself of them in such a haphazard and meaningless way?

He threw the datapad away, feeling the crack of it hitting the wall. The regulation on care of personal effects flashed in front of his eyes, like a taunt. As if any of those rules had saved him, or Fives, or any of them. Sometimes he felt it was better that he couldn’t see his past so clearly. A clear view of his past self would likely only engender contempt and disgust.

Echo snorted cynically in the silence of the room, artificial feet shifting and scomp link whirring. His present self wasn’t exactly winning any beauty contests either, inside or out.

It no use standing here, getting into a lather, he told himself, trying to break free from the helpless anger that gripped him and keened. He should go and… do something. Something useful. That was his way. He didn’t run to his passions. His pace was a slow plod towards whatever work was to be done. He was a pair of skilled hands and nothing more. 

Not even that now.

But nothing less than that, either.

Desperate for a distraction that didn’t land him inside his own murky thoughts, Echo marched down towards R&D to do what he’d been ordered to do and keep Wrecker in his sights. He’d been given a mission; seeing it through was, apparently, his calling in life. To the bitter end.

Finding the explosive ordinance R&D sector was easy enough; he just followed the bangs. A demolitions testing ground on a starship seemed counterintuitive, but the war never stopped and transmissions were so easily intercepted. It was safer, up to a very carefully tested point, to conduct research aboard the big vessels like this one. Few dirtside bases could ever be rendered fully secure. 

There were a bunch of shinies whooping and yelling at the viewport into the appropriately named Bang Bay. Echo squinted at them. They might be the loose affiliated knot of demolitions trainees Wrecker had gone with before, but it was hard to tell. Shinies all looked the same. Yes, clones, but the more time you spent on the field the more your individual tics and markers started showing. These guys were shiny virgin metal, almost nothing to separate them from each other. All hollering at the next big explosion like crechelings. The noises and lights were fun for them. It clearly didn’t trigger memories of the smell of charred flesh or the white noise ringing in the ears or the battle droid steel-kick to the chest and the gut as the shockwave hit and you prayed that this time you were far enough from the heatwave to keep your blacks dry down south.

Good force, Echo suddenly felt old.

“Hey,” Echo cut across their hoots with cool authority. “I’m looking for Wrecker.”

“Oh, the big guy,” one of the shinies beamed. “Yeah, Grass and him made a bet on who could disable sonic speeder mine the fastest under pressure. He got it too. His and Grass’. Well, Grass kind of kriffed his up…”

“Shut up, I was doing fine!” someone piped up indignantly. 

Oh, Echo thought. You could tell them apart. This one, as least, had an identifying mark. Someone had slathered a bacta paste over the red scald marks on one side of his face. The shiny looked hilariously disgruntled about it. 

“I was,” he grumbled when his squad all laughed at him. “The big dumb clod didn’t have to snatch it and throw it away. I had it!”

Echo, who was less than pleased about the ‘big dumb clod’ comment, narrowed his eyes. “Oh yeah? How long from discard to detonation?”

More grumbling.

“About point oh-two seconds,” another one said smugly.

“Then you didn’t have it, kid,” Echo told him. “Wrecker did. Speaking of which, where is he?” If the blast had been close enough to singe the shiny, no way had Wrecker escaped unscathed. “Did he report to the med bay?” he asked seriously. Force, Hunter was going to kill him.

To his surprise and increasing concern, the shinies all snickered. “Nah man, he just went to the fresher to tidy up,” one sniggered. “Guy his size? Nothing could hurt ‘im. He’s a freaking bantha’s ass.”

Their next wave of sniggers trailed off in the face of Echo’s cold silence. It might have suddenly dawned on this batch of idiots that Echo was, in fact, a superior officer. “I see,” the delivery was like ice. “Which way?”

“Uh, I’ll take you, sir,” one of them who wasn’t Grass (and really, what an excellent name for a shiny that green). “This way.”

The cowed cadet hastily led him to the quadrant’s shared fresher, babbling “He was fine after the blast, sir, honest! He shook it off like it was nothing!”

Echo ignored him.

They burst into the fresher to find Wrecker sitting on the floor, breathing hard. Echo raced for him. “Wrecker? Wrecker, are you okay?”

“Oh ‘ey, ‘co,” Wrecker slurred, eyes still closed. “Sorr ‘m a bit dizzin righ’ now. Jus’ gimme minun’,” he coughed.

There was reddening around Wrecker’s closed eyes that Echo really didn’t like. Cursing, he gently tilted Wrecker’s head up with his scomp link and peeled back one eyelid.

The sclera was blood red.

“Fuck me,” Echo cursed.

“What is that?” the shiny gawked from behind.

“It’s fucking barotrauma is what it fucking is, cadet!” Echo shouted. “Caused by close fucking proximity to a kriffing explosion, which you shinies would know if you’d bothered to study the safety protocols like they would save your life, as the regulations say you should! And a med team would have karking spotted it if you’d bothered to call them in, also like the regulations say you should! Why the hell didn’t you? Who goddamn well trained you, you mis-sequenced, badly decanted failure?!”

The shiny stuttered. “I… I… he was fine, though! He looked fine!”

“Oh, are you a medic?” Echo snarled while the shiny went bright red. “Speaking of which what the kriff are you doing just standing there, call a fucking med team, stat!” he roared.

The shiny fled.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, kriffing fucking hells, Echo cursed at himself. You fucking failure of a squadmate, CT-21-0408. You help the fucking living, he told himself savagely, the dead are past caring. He’d been trained for that.

Feeling the weight of guilt on his chest, he gently shook Wrecker. “Wrecker? Wrecker, can you hear me? The medics are on their way, just hold on,” he said, almost pleading. Not one more death, he thought. Not again. 

“Y’ loud, ‘co,” Wrecker mumbled. “Nev’ her y’yell ‘fore.”

“You’ve never seen me around dumbass shinies before,” Echo muttered, which made Wrecker snort with laughter and then start coughing like his lungs were about to come up.

There was actual blood on his lips.

Echo felt his insides lurch.

The medical team stampeded in.

As they bore Wrecker away, Echo dogged their every step, mired in helpless guilt.

Chapter Text

Echo notified the squad on the way to the infirmary and was greeted when he got there by two furious glowers, which was bad, and Hunter’s disappointed look, which was worse. 

Hunter didn’t let Crosshair punch him, which the sniper was clearly itching to do, so there was that. He instead sent the mismatched pair into the medbay to watch over Wrecker while they bacta’d him back to health and turned to face his newest squad mate. “What happened?” he asked. 

His voice held no censure, but Echo found himself standing at parade rest anyway. “I got distracted, sir.” He didn’t offer any excuses. He had none to offer. He should have done the job he was assigned. He hadn’t, and Wrecker had been hurt. If Echo hadn’t pulled himself together enough to go find him, he might have legitimately died.

Echo felt a sense of panic tighten his chest and breathed through clenched teeth to relieve it, with indifferent success.

Hunter was searching his face, more penetrative than critical. Echo wondered what the hell Hunter was picking up from him, from his heartbeat or scent or goodness knows what else filtered through his enhanced senses. He wasn’t going to ask. If Hunter wanted to rescind the offer for a place on the squad, it was a punishment Echo had more than earned with this kind of egregious failure.

Hunter surprised him though. He clapped him on the shoulder. “Calm down. This is partly my fault. Wrecker-watching is usually rotated through the squad. We shouldn’t have dumped it all on you the first chance we got. I love Wrecker, but he can be a lot when he’s in close quarters with people he knows hate him.”

Echo blinked. “They don’t hate him, surely?” The regs didn’t exactly like the Bad Batch, it was true, and they mostly stayed on their side of the fence, but full on hatred? Echo had always believed the reg’s problem with the squad was more envy than hate. It hadn’t even been system wide. The 501st had loved hearing about what 99 got up to, so he’d never heard anyone ragging on them with true viciousness. Neither Rex nor Cody, nor any of the Generals for that matter, would have stood for that sort of thing anyway, even on the quiet.

Hunter shook his head at Echo’s naivete. “I keep forgetting you weren’t always a useful misfit. Most of the regs can’t stand us up close, Echo. Not all,” Hunter allowed. “Some of ‘em are okay, some of ‘em don’t actually care but to some of ‘em - most of ‘em - we’re an insult to the natural order of things. We didn’t work our way up like all the others did. We didn’t earn a place in a squad. We never had to slog through scut work in a battalion like the shinies. Plus we routinely blasted past all the other cadets best efforts in training which was good for our rep but bad for making friends. That kind of thing breeds a certain amount of resentment, especially since it looks to them like we coasted. This is one thing you’re going to have to get used to,” Hunter warned him. “A lot of the regs you meet now might not like you because of the company you keep. Honestly, we don’t come into contact with the main forces very much anyway, so it's never really a huge problem, but you might have to get used to that… contempt. There’s not a lot we can do to fix it. Wrecker is… he’s not always good at recognizing social cues but he’s dead on accurate when it comes to reading atmospheres,” Hunter sounded tired. “He knows when people don’t like us. It gets his dander up, especially when it’s directed at any of his vode. Underneath all that knuckleheaded bluster, he hurts. He’s much more easily hurt than people think. He’s a sensitive soul.”

Echo thought of a tiny white flower trying to grow in the middle of a devastation, rendered with such thoughtless care, with only the dimmest insight into the feelings that must have inspired it, deep down, and felt his shame crash down on him anew. Even though Hunter was giving him an out, Echo felt the indictment nevertheless, the clear and deserved chastisement regarding his lapse in judgement. Hunter was right; Echo hadn’t seen it, hadn’t allowed himself to see it before. The squad was respected, but not liked. Being liked, especially by comrades-in-arms in a war, wasn’t a small concern. Would any of those shinies have dared levy such brazen insults against another reg to the face of the reg’s own squadmate? Would they have left another reg to shake off close contact from an explosion and showed no concern about their wellbeing? Would they have issued such a stupid, careless challenge at all, with another reg?

Of course not. There were remedies for that kind of behaviour that would have been delivered with extreme prejudice from other soldiers. But other soldiers didn’t include the Batch, did they? Even the command corps didn’t know what to do with them.

No wonder the squad was so tight. All they could rely on was each other. 

And Echo had just fucked that up well and good.

“I’ll go find the Accommodations Officer,” Echo offered. “Tell them we need the racks for a few days longer.”

Hunter looked him over. “You don’t want to go in and see Wrecker?”

“I do. I just don’t think the other two want to see me right now,” Echo replied levelly.

“Okay,” Hunter sighed eventually, taking Echo’s point. “I’ll talk to them. They’ll get over it,” he promised. “Just… try not to get distracted next time.”

As floggings went, it stung less than he deserved and more than he expected. “Yes, sir.” Was his only possible response, before he turned and left. 

Echo all but sprinted through the decks the minute he was out of sight of the medbay, back down to the warehouse where he thoroughly bewildered the poor warehouse clerk by clawing at the trash can bolted to his desk, which, unfortunately, turned out to be an actual chute. 

Cursing, he left the clerk staring after him as he headed for the nearest port where he could use the scomp link, hurriedly downloading the information he needed from the ship’s ever recording internal security banks. It still felt weird, but it was becoming less so. 

Then he tore down to the bowels of the ship, down deep where there were no personnel, because only droids could happily do a job down here. But as a bonus, nobody stopped him as he linked up to the systems down here and double checked the times and locations before girding himself and jacking open the door to the garbage bay.

The stench was hideous, mostly because of rotting food going into the dehydrator to be sterilized. He thanked the force that this wasn’t where they handled any of the biowaste, though you could definitely smell the sewage treatment plant nearby. 

Some unsung hero had at least thought to honeycomb the garbage bay into small sections, with bits large and small continually raining from above while droids sorted recyclables onto conveyor belts for reuse and the rest for compression and eventual ejection into space at the next hyperspace jump. And thanks to his mass download of the waste system metadata, he knew exactly which compartment to look in too.

It was mostly flimsiplast and packing materials. Mostly because the clerks who worked there were clearly not up on the regulations governing where food waste ought to be disposed of. But Echo’s research and a bit of dumb luck meant he didn’t have to deal with too much moldy filth - he found all of Wreckers discarded drawings right about where his calculations put them at.

Clutching his prize with somewhat bitter triumph, Echo departed the low-lower decks just as the warning alarm sounded for vacuum dumping, carefully closing the massive doors behind him. 

Then, well aware he wasn’t precisely as fresh smelling as a Naboo rose, he went double time to the Ship Exchange.

The on board general store could be a mixed bag at the best of times. Troopers were supplied with things they needed from the quartermaster corps and it was, technically, against regulations to drink alcohol aboard a starship (although if this juggernaut didn’t have at least a dozen illegal stills running somewhere Echo would be amazed). So the SX didn’t have much to offer troopers in the GAR that they couldn’t get elsewhere. They usually stocked some non-regulation junk foods and drinks, confectionaries, actual physical books (safer in the field than the light from a datapad sometimes), sabacc sets and other games and various other trinkets and bits and pieces not covered by the regular supply. The GAR wanted it’s soldiers to have some luxuries and leisure activities to keep soldiers from getting bored, because bored soldiers were not, in a sense, something any commander wanted to deal with. Especially when they started to look for creative ways to not be bored.

(The 501st still, to this day, never spoke of the jet-pod-parachute incident on Illsad III. The locals still talked about it, quite a bit. Probably because of their new crater.)

The SX had a virtue in that they also ended up with a bunch of esoteric things that nobody knew what to do with. Corporate and governmental goods donations, odds and ends that were ordered then found to be not what the quartermaster actually needed, parcels that never got picked up or wound up in the dead letter office, bits and pieces sent by grateful citizenry to the GAR at large that nobody had an immediate use for but felt wrong to just discard. Echo didn’t know quite what he was looking for until he found it, but he absolutely knew it was right when he saw it. Then he spotted something else, quailed a bit at the price and then girded himself and grabbed it too.

The clerks running the counter wrinkled their noses at the state of him and rushed him through the cashier and out the door.

Then Echo finally got back to their temp quarters, took a hurried sonic scrub in the fresher to get the stank off. His box and damaged datapad caught his eye, but he just shoved it under his rack and out of sight for now; a problem for the future. He had work to do now.

He changed into fresh gear and grabbed his packages before darting off to do what he said he’d do and log their extended stay with the Accommodations Officer. By the time that was done shift change had happened, and he could get lost in the crowd in the corridors on his way to the Marauder , still being worked on in it’s repair bay, and went in. He used his time there carefully smoothing out the flimsies he’d rescued on Tech’s workbench with a heavy length of pipe, taking the most delicate care he could with them. Once they were arranged and placed to his satisfaction he turned to leave, turned back, grabbed Lula from Wrecker’s bunk and then hiked back to the infirmary where the systems said Wrecker was checked in for the night after his bacta bath.

He entered - not with trepidation because those kinds of nerves had long been trained out of him - but certainly with caution. The infirmary was never really empty, see aforementioned bored soldiers, but Wrecker had been given a berth well at the back. Sequestered from the regs, Echo supposed, and didn’t like the taste of that thought.

Echo had never feared confrontation in his life and wasn’t about to start now, but there was a healthy measure of relief to be had in a battle unfought. The rest of the squad was camped out around the bed, or had summarily annexed the beds next door. They were all fast asleep amongst various ration bar wrappers. It took Echo a moment to remember they’d missed scheduled meal time. 

Wrecker was awake, though. Echo could tell because, even though his eyes were closed and his chin was against his chest he wasn’t rattling the room with his trademark snores. He always claimed he never slept well near anything medical.

Echo sidled up with all the quiet stealth training could grant him. “Wrecker?”

The big man shivered out of his resting state. “Oh, hey,” he croaked, sounding like he’d gargled kyber shards.

Echo winced. “How are you feeling?” he asked softly.

“‘M fine,” Wrecker grouched. He brightened as Echo handed him Lula, smuggling the plush under the blankets but firmly cuddling it to his side. “Honest. I’ve had worse in the field.”

Echo, running his eye over the spiderweb of scars wrapping around one side of Wrecker’s head, didn’t doubt it. “What do the medics say?”

“Got bacta’d. Now they say I gotta rest. I could rest jus’ as easily in the racks or on the Marauder, ” he griped. “Better, even. But they said I had to stay for ‘observation’. Observing what , I’d like to know.”

“They’re just trying to make sure you’re okay,” Echo said soothingly. “A night here won’t do you any harm.”

Wreckers snort told Echo exactly what he thought of that.

“I’m sorry I didn’t go with you to the lab,” Echo continued, feeling an awful snarl of knotted feelings rise in his chest. “I should have gone with you. I could have… gotten help sooner.” Stopped you would likely not go over well. 

Out of the very corner of his eye, Echo saw Crosshair twitch minutely. It could be just him moving in his sleep… or possibly not all of the squad was quite as asleep as they were pretending to be.

Wrecker snorted like a congested bantha. “No you ought’na. You ain’t my keeper. You had your own stuff to do. Besides, I had to go with ‘em. Those idiots were talking about running a disarm challenge using live ammo and not one of ‘em knew that the sonic charges had a massive redesign last cycle. They were still talking about disarming via the Grodin switchover method, not the Sabutu drain method. Bunch of karking shinies would have wound up dead and taken a lotta the labs with ‘em if I hadn’t offered to go with ‘em.”

Echo was aware that he was staring with his mouth open, and closed it hastily. “Why didn’t you say that, then? I’d have come with you!”

“‘Cause you ain’t my keeper, like I said,” Wrecker repeated. “I c’n handle a bunch of shinies. Honestly, it was kinda fun just hanging with you for a change. Usually I’m stuck with the others and trying to keep ‘em out of trouble. No one tries to push them around when I’m there, but they can be a bit hard t’ keep in line, yeah?”

Oh, that was definitely a twitch from the other side of the bay. It might have been Hunter. 

“At least I know you won’t land yourself in a mess,” Wrecker continued blithely. “You’re smart enough not to swagger around like you own the joint, askin’ for a fight.”

Twitch.

Wrecker turned his still slightly bloodshot eyes to Echo, and gave a wink.

Echo gawked.  

Then he sucked in a breath and frantically began silently reciting the entire series of regulations for filing of income support amendments in triplicate with special taxation exemptions, trying not to die laughing inside.

Wrecker was far smarter than he acted.

“Well, I’m sorry anyway,” Echo said when he could speak without telltale breathiness. “I shouldn’t have left you all by yourself. I’m not your keeper, but you are my squadmate. I should have stuck with you,” he added earnestly. “I should have gone and watched your back. That’s what squadmates are supposed to do. I’m sorry, Wrecker. It won’t happen again,” he promised.

“I’m sorry, too,” Wrecker replied unexpectedly. “I’m sorry ‘bout your vod. You must have been real close. I bet he was a good guy.”

Echo felt a lump in his throat. “He was,” he agreed. “The best. The very best.”

“I never lost a vod, ever,” Wrecker stared down at his big hands. “I mean, we’ve lost regs on the same mission and soldiers from other forces and Jedi and… and sometimes civilians and things. But that’s different, isn’t it? It ain’t the same. Well, maybe it is, but I wouldn’t know, would I? None of us would. We always had each other. We always came back alive. Sometimes it’s close,” Wrecker idly ran fingers over his scars. “But we ain’t never lost like that. Like you did. Sometimes I think...” Wrecker said. “I think that we ain’t just good. We’re lucky. Maybe that’s why the others don’t like us so much, I don’t know. We keep yellin’ in the face of death and we keep gettin’ away with it. I dunno what I’d do if Hunter or Crosshair or Tech didn’t make it back. Don’t like to think of it.”

“You’d go on,” Echo shrugged. “You’d get up every day and remember and then go on. It’d never be the same again, but you’d still do it. What else could you do? What can anyone ever do?”

Wrecker looked at him. “Hm.”

Feeling this had strayed into territory too maudlin, Echo gently steered them away from that conversational black hole. “So, uh,” Echo cleared his throat. “I thought you might be bored while you were stuck in here, so I got you something.” He hastily dumped his cargo in Wrecker’s blanketed lap, well aware that his awkwardness could probably only be measured on galactic units of scale.

Wrecker was nonplussed. “What’s this, a book?” he wrinkled his nose at it, lifting it up gingerly with two fingers. “I don’t really read things this thick. You could probably break a droid head with this… hey, the pages are blank! What is this even for?”

“For building a hyperdrive,” Echo deadpanned while rolling his eyes and thrust a case of graphite sticks at him. “For drawing, of course. What did you think it was for?”

“For me?” Wrecker stared at him like he’d grown a second head. “They make books just for drawing in?”

“Sketchbooks. Yeah,” Echo shrugged. “They make books for almost everything.”

“What ‘m supposed to do with it, though?” Wrecker leafed through the blank pages, neither for nor against. “This is a lot of pages. I’ll never fill it all.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not on a deadline. And you’ve already got some pictures in there,” Echo was determined to reach Wrecker with this. He wasn’t giving up. “Look, see.” He leafed back through the blank pages to the start where he’d carefully inserted the ones he’d rescued from the void of space. “So now it’s yours. You can just use up the rest of it.”

Wrecker blinked. “Where’d you even get those?”

“I found them,” Echo’s firm tone neatly closed off any possibility of questions as to where. “I think they’re good. You should keep them.”

“I told you, they ain’t anything really,” Wrecker grumbled, ears turning red, but Echo noticed his big fingers trailing over the rescued pages almost reverently. “They ain’t art.”

“Who cares if they’re art,” Echo retorted even though he kind of thought they were. “I think they’re good. Better than some other pictures I’ve seen. What even is art, anyway? Look,” he got out the tiny holostill projector he’d wasted an obscene amount of his meagre savings on at the SX along with the sketchbook. Why the hell was an art catalogue, probably lost in the post in any case, worth so much money? He turned it on and leafed through holographic representations of pieces until he found the one that had bewildered him the most. “See? Someone thinks that is art.”

Wrecker squinted at it. “That’s a dot on a canvas. Where’s the rest of it?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?!”

“That’s it.”

“That can’t be it!”

“Guess how much someone paid for it?” Echo said with gleeful relish. He had him. He could feel it.

“I dunno, half a credit,” Wrecker guessed wildly, still turning the still this way and that, trying to see if there was anything he missed.

“Try half a million, ” Echo grinned.

Wrecker’s jaw dropped. “HALF A MILL-!”

The med droid monitoring the infirmary gave a shrill noise. “Noise level is not within acceptable parameters for rest!”

“Sorry,” Echo called over.

“Half a million credits,” Wrecker hissed like it was a classified secret. “For that? You’re kriffing with me!”

“Nope,” Echo pointed to the valuation down the bottom.

“ I coulda made that!” Wrecker was all hushed outrage. “In my sleep! In the creche!”

“Rich people are weird,” Echo agreed amicably. “I like yours better. I’d pay for them.”

That seemed to take the bigger man aback. He flicked through a couple more options in the catalogue. “Some of this stuff,” he declared with all the authority of a newly minted art world cognoscenti. “Is garbage. I like that one,” he allowed, looking at a painting of a Mon Calamari child perched on rocky shoals while dark waves roiled and sprayed around her, weaving what looked like corals and pearls and seaweed in her hands. Even in the full-colour holo-still the waves looked so real that Echo was almost surprised they weren’t moving.  

He spent so long parsing out just what the child was weaving in her hands that he almost missed the sound of the graphite stick scratching across the paper. Echo glanced at the page Wrecker had started; even though it was only a few faint lines, it was already clear he was doing his best to copy the masterpiece he saw before him. 

Echo smiled. “Well, anyway, it’ll keep you from being bored, at least. That’s useful, right?”

Echo could definitely feel a lot of watching eyes on him even though the rest of the squad was supposedly asleep. He ignored it. He wasn’t doing this for forgiveness from them, he was doing it to make amends to Wrecker. 

(But if this was a step towards earning forgiveness, he’d take that too.)

“Yeah,” Wrecker said absently, scribbling away. “Thanks, Echo,” he added offhandedly, already absorbed.

“Your welcome, Wrecker.”

The others joined them later on, after Echo and Wrecker got into a sotto voce debate on whether the brutalist ink drawings of an artist whose medium appeared to be architectural style blueprint-like works was actually art, or if the actual buildings that inspired them were the art. Not being art connoisseurs themselves, no conclusion was reached by asking the rest of the squad to be the tie breakers, though the debate got quite a bit louder as a result.

It got loud enough for them to move on to the next piece in the catalogue to avoid being kicked out.

They all agreed the painting of naked Twi’lek’s bathing definitely counted as art.

Chapter Text

I didn’t take Echo long to realize that Hunter’s aversion to reporting to the higher ups had a legitimate trigger behind it. He’d assumed at first, not without evidence, that Hunter, much like the rest of his squad, didn’t see the point of all the rigamarole of military protocol in the same way that they did see the point of military strategy. Strategy had a use where debriefing in triplicate didn’t.

But Echo, from whose mind had sprung predictive battle algorithms, spotted the flaw in this reasoning pretty quickly. They were clearly fine with field reporting, which was usually briefer than full allocution to the brass but could be just as onerous. The longer hearings and performance reviews, however, happened on Kamino - that was the source of the problem. The squad didn’t like to stay on Kamino long term, home base or not, because whenever they were stuck on Kamino, the higher ups would invariably split them up to take on extra training - ie, testing their limits as far as they would go - or extra duties - ie, getting stuck training the newest shinies before they get shipped out to their first assignments.

After the second time it happened even Echo, the most traditionally military of all of them, felt like someone had dropped a rock in his gut at the thought of being trapped on Kamino running endless tests or, worse, endlessly testing the cadets who had inherited the average reg’s bad attitude towards the squad via the eternal gossip grapevine in the ranks. Training with know-it-all shinies was tough enough; doing it when they held you in contempt just made it that much harder.

The squad didn’t like the extra testing, they didn’t like being press ganged into being training officers and they emphatically did not like being separated. A couple of rounds in and Echo found himself wholeheartedly agreeing with the sentiment, if only because he was never on training officer duty. Thanks to the Techno Union’s tinkering, the command on Kamino were always trying to find new ways to test or break his limits. The longnecks had an endless fascination with what had been done to him that bordered on ghoulish and he was not pleased to be the focus of their attention. At least if he’d been stuck on training cadets he could have skated on his Hero-Of-Anaxes cred, the respect engendered by it in the ranks something which may have possibly made the chore somewhat more bearable.

Then again, looking at the wide eyes stares he got in the halls some days, he thought that maybe it would have been a whole lot worse. Why, he thought despairing, couldn’t the Galactic Senate have followed the Mandolorian view of heroism; ie, there were none. Not for doing the job he’d done.

But no, CT-0409 was always handed over to the Intelligence department to get grilled and roasted on each side learning to parse massive amounts of metadata and crack enemy encryptions via scomp linkup, the mass influx of information being downloaded into his brain making him feel more droid than man every day.

The more hours he spent ported into the system, the less human his brain felt, the more messed up his normal, limited human senses got. The Techno Union, may they rot in the Sith Hells, had bolted so many alien things into his fleshy human brain that it was now stuck trying to parse out information it received in ways evolution had never designed it to do. Echo lived in terror that he would wake up one day and see a droid in the mirror, the imperfect meaty bits of him burning away under the insidious infiltration of the technology bolted to him as it advanced through the synapses of his mind, rewiring him. Rewriting him. His body had never been stronger than this half metal shell that he now occupied, but his soul had never been more fragile. He felt like all his precious memories and drives and joys were all at the knife edge of being wiped away like data on a badly made chip with one wrong move.

It wasn’t like he had a cure for those fears. Who could he even go to with them that would even understand the vague horror he felt, like he was a wisp of a ghost grimly hanging on inside a machine that was taking him over? Who could even fathom it? He was all but unique in the universe. All that time of hiding behind a face shared with thousands of others and he was now, uncomfortably, one-of-a-kind.

But Echo was also a soldier, so he reported to the Intelligence division as ordered every day and did his best to grit his teeth and make it through his re-training. He couldn’t deny some of the things he’d learned to do, how he interacted with the systems, was useful and had been used in the field, so it wasn’t like there wasn’t a silver lining. It was just that when he ported out at the end of the day he was so crosswired mentally that sounds had colours and times had directions and his brain was stuffed so full he felt like it was one wrong move away from exploding, leaving only the machine bit to go on. The nightmares always came for him when he was on Kamino. He was sure they came for the others too. What few times they did see each other in their dorm - their schedules rarely synched up when they got stuck in this hellish between-mission purgatory - they were all wrecked with exhaustion or frustration, or both, impatient to get back out on the field and do the job they’d actually been trained for and away from all the insolent cadets, immovable bureaucracy or damn mad scientists and their prodding fingers.

Still, there were some compensations. Echo was getting so good at living in that cyber world, his consciousness direct-lined into the systems, that he could teach himself home surveillance on the sly. It gave him a chance to keep an eye on his squad - on his brothers - as long as they hadn’t been shipped out for field tests with the cadets on the advanced track. It meant he could sometimes hack a sim and render it easier for a tired Wrecker to finish, or automatically mis-record Crosshair’s stats on the marksmanship range when he was so tired his hands shook or arrange a blackout when Hunter was grudgingly taking cadets through their urban survival course when he was clearly fighting off one of his migraines.  

Echo helped people wherever he could. He was always at his best quietly working in the background, being useful.

Tech he didn’t help very much, but that was only because Tech tended to get swallowed up by the Intelligence departments too. He was in the even more classified areas of building the big code-cracking AI machines, or teaching the up-and-coming would-be field splicers how to use them correctly. He didn’t need Echo’s help. He was far more well-equipped to cause chaos on his own with the equipment and resources he had at his fingertips than Echo could dream of. If Echo was going to be useful to Tech, it would only be because Tech had found a use for Echo.

Like now, diving through layers of encryption and firewalls running the big power substation under the base. Echo had been tasked by his handlers to find and fix the cascading failures occurring in the big wave converter generator turbines, which meant parsing through a load of environmental data and sensor information that he barely understood and had to engage parallel processing in order to access the information he needed from manuals and databases. It was a heavy, ugly, writhing mountain of data and he was running a mental marathon trying to keep ahead of the cascades - no doubt the point of the test. If he glitched out, all he’d be is a useful datapoint in somebody’s research paper. 

Only, there, in the shifting morass of colour-sound and floods of numbers, was a music file spelling out a jaunty little tune in code, the system bleeps and beeps were the instruments, the machine hums the heavy bass beat.

There was only one man Echo knew smart enough to a) guess which system he was currently uplinking to and b) able to theorize about how sound and sight would appear to him when he was scomped in and c) successfully program a hidden request by synthesizing something Echo would recognize - ie, an earworm tune that had played on repeat in the last bar they’d had post-mission celebrations in before returning to Kamino.

Curious and a little bit awed at the sheer magnificence of that level of intellect, Echo shoved a couple of data scanning bots into the fray to make it look like he was still parsing data and accessed the program. He doubted his handler had even noticed. 

It was, once decrypted by his brain, actually a rather simple set of instructions. Copy-paste code line, use passcode to slip into the base IT infrastructure servers, access drive, use second and third pass codes to access files, slip code into system-generated report program, send program to command head marked urgent, use trigger pass code to wipe trail, exit.

Echo allowed himself to breathe through the flood of information and lined up the instructions, letting his systems side take over from his flesh brain. He was in and out of the relevant systems in, to an outsider, a blink.

Actually, doing his little side mission allowed him to really see how backdoor-riddled the systems were. Which gave him an idea of how to solve the wave conversion generator problem too.

On his side view of the surveillance in the Advanced Encryption lab, Tech side eyed a camera and winked at him.

The second Echo ported out, the entire base went into almost full blackout.

Echo sighed.

Thankfully for reasons like security and base operations, the blackout was short. Fifteen minutes of calming harried Intelligence wonks and annoyed longnecks was more than enough. He gratefully embraced the end of his shift, the supervisor's dismissal coming at him in a blur of irritated geometric reds as they tried to find the source of the shutdown. 

Echo carefully didn’t look at anyone closely as he made his way to the mess hall. Seeing colours bursting around every sound and voice and feeling like he was heading to Wednesday via 0500 hours was disorientating enough. It felt like this whole… cross wiring of his senses thing was getting worse every time he scomped longer. He suppressed the gnawing thought that one day it would be permanent.

He double buried the thought that one day everything could look like code to him.

He felt that familiar, annoying kick of panic and lengthened his stride. Food was a reliable way for him to put these anxieties to bed. Droids didn’t eat, among other things. Taste was just about the only sense he had that hadn’t been spliced, dialled up or twisted sideways. It was moments like this he selfishly missed Hunter’s cooking skills. That man could make a meal that would leave the eater in no doubt that they a) had human tastebuds and b) were fortunate to have them.

He kept his ears on a swivel whenever he was on base. It was just good sense on a military complex. Gossip travelled faster than hyperspeed and you had to know what was going on in the zeitgeist. There was a surprising amount of grumbling going on due to the blackout, Echo noticed. And a lot of resentment towards the Intelligence division. Echo wondered if they’d kriffed some mission up badly; it happened.

He took his seat alone at the Batch’s regular table. If he ran his fingers underneath it he’d feel the jagged lines of the skull Wrecker had carved there. It was comfortingly territorial gesture that Echo was beginning to understand better now. It wasn’t like he couldn’t feel some of the unfriendly looks at his back. The feeling of eyes on his misshapen self at any point was not a happy one, doubly so when their intent was deliberately unfriendly. Yet another reason to want to be off Kamino.

He was almost but not quite startled when a tray was clunked down next to him. “Tech,” he smiled in greeting. Even though both he and Tech were on the same base and in the same division, Tech usually couldn’t be wheedled out of Encryption until the wee hours, making his presence at late meal a welcome surprise. 

“Echo,” Tech said absently, his voice a vivid starburst of oranges. He was furiously hammering away at a datapad, eyes narrowed behind his goggles. The tray of food appeared mostly for show; he wasn’t even reaching for it. 

Echo sighed and, with one swift move, disarmed his opponent. 

Tech glared.

“Eat,” the former ARC said levelly, nudging the tray in front of his squadmate and tucking the datapad out of immediate reach. “Or I’m telling Hunter you skipped meals.”

Tech scowled at him in a way the promised bad destinies for any of his saved data, but the threat landed. He grudgingly started to eat, pouting like a spoiled crecheling. 

Echo grinned, unintimidated. “So, just out of curiosity, am I ever going to find out why I aided and abetted major sabotage on an active intelligence hub?” Echo took a bite of his meal and tilted his head just so to avoid the gaze of the surveillance scanners in the hall. “Which I’m pretty sure equates to treason in a time of war.” It said a lot about his changed priorities - and his faith in Tech’s genius - that Echo was not actively concerned about this.

“Ridiculous,” Tech snorted. “They’d have to prove you were willingly aiding the Separatists to make the charge stick.”

“I’m pretty sure the firing squad wouldn’t care, Tech,” Echo said dryly. “So?”

“It’s hardly a mystery,” Tech took a careful mouthful of his drink, neatly hiding his lips from view. “The newest batch of cadets are finishing final training before they go off to their assignments. The ones tapped for encryption and splicing work in Intelligence have their final exams right now.”

Tech didn’t elaborate any further. Echo waited him out patiently.

Tech huffed. “How do you think splicers get tested, Echo, running combat sims?” he asked sarcastically. “It’s a splice-a-thon. Teams against teams. They’re seeing just how deep they can get into the systems and how much control they can take of them.”

“And you’re participating because…?” Echo trailed off.

“How do you think they’re marked, on an A to F scale?” Tech was exasperated. “All the active splicers on base participate. The trick is to stop anything the field experienced splicers could or try to do. It's the most accurate fieldwork-level challenge available that isn’t actually putting them in the field.”

Okay, that made sense. But only if you ignored the wildly chancey premise of letting a bunch of absolutely mental young splicers free rein to go nuts on data infrastructure that ordinary base people needed to… well, survive. 

“Granted, I don’t know very much about the splicer methodologies,” Echo edged out over this abyss with his usual mild manner ringed by nerves of pure kyber. “But isn’t getting me to do your dirty work cheating?”

“You’re right,” Tech snorted acerbically. “You don’t know very much about splicer methodologies. Otherwise you’d know that cheating is the only way we can win. We use what assets we have available to assure victory. For me, that was you.”

“Flattered,” the irony in Echo’s tone was repelled by Tech's sheer self assurance. “Is that why that bunch at our eight o’clock are glaring at you like you just pissed in their rations?” He’d noted their looks only because they’d increased tenfold with the presence of Tech. People, in general, looked away from Echo. He couldn’t blame them.

Tech didn’t so much as flicker a glance in the direction indicated. “I imagine so. Sergeant Byte has been the deputy head of the forward command encryption squad for the last year. He’s an excellent splicer and is responsible for cracking a few of the Separatists' most highly encrypted transmissions.”

“And he’s got a problem with you,” Echo surmised.

“Who do you think cracked all of the rest?” Tech said smugly. “He wishes to win the splice-a-thon this year; he may have done so, but for me. He’s got some skills, but he’s not me. No one is. He’s distressingly and boringly workmanlike in his field.”

Echo winced slightly. “There’s nothing wrong with being workmanlike, Tech,” he said, tone almost aggressively mild.

Tech blinked at this, apparently fully engaged with Echo since the first time he sat down. Echo didn’t answer his look, merely calmly continued his meal. 

“I would like your detailed analysis of mission report ARCB501-61-2497822, if you would be so kind,” Tech announced after the silence had stretched almost too far to be salvaged.

Echo’s brow wrinkled. “Which one?” 

“I just told you.”

“No, you gave me a mission record number,” Echo snorted. “Appearance aside, I’m not actually a droid. I don’t memorize those for fun. Give me a planet name.”

“Galvadore,” Tech answers promptly.

Echo made a face. “You want to know about a failed mission I had two years ago?” he asked sceptically. Honestly, the question had come out of nowhere but Echo was used to this by now. Tech’s mind operated like one of those cascading gravity lottery machines people poured their money into on casino planets. He hit them all with questions or theories about the most bizarre and esoteric subjects apropos of nothing at completely random moments, including at two am when the squad was trying to sleep.

Crosshair could nail him in the mouth with a rolled up pair of dirty socks in pitch darkness at twenty feet.

“That’s correct. I understand if your memory is not clear on the events,” Tech allowed. “But any details you remember might prove useful.”

“Why ?” Echo stared at him. “Galvadore was a complete failure.”

“Not a complete failure,” Tech argued. “That is a vast oversimplification, unworthy of intellectual rigour.”

“Tech, we went through an entire urban maze and broke into a palace to end up with a chest full of seeds for our trouble,” Echo waved his hand. “Moldy seeds. We were the laughingstock of Sep propaganda for weeks. ”

“So? How does that pertain to your memory of the mission?” Tech said, brow knotted.

Movement flashed in the corner of Echo’s eye, distracting him from his bewilderment with the randomizing algorithm that apparently ran Tech’s thought processes. “Only that I never want to think about it ever again,” Echo replied absently, shifting so that his legs were out from under the table. Yep, the pack of them were definitely heading their way. He was an ARC; he’d learned to read predatory intent.

“You cannot value all of your experiences by personal beneficial emotional outcomes… yes?” Tech blinked owlishly up at the shadow looming over them.

“CT-9907,” the other clone glared down at Tech, his face tight and his voice a kind of blue-grey. “A word.” He was pretty standard base model, as clones go; Echo couldn’t see any scars and his hands weren’t callused like a combat soldier’s would be, so he might be pure Intelligence. There was a loose gaggle of various clones behind him, too distinctive to be shinies, but much the same type.

“Yes, that is a word,” Tech said after a slightly too long pause. “I fail to see the relevance.”

Echo bit back a grin. When were people going to learn? Tech did not play by arbitrarily constructed social mores. At all. “His name’s Tech, by the way,” he broke in, smiling ever so faintly in a way that had once made aggressive drunks take five steps back behind the invisible line. “I’m Echo. Nice to meet you…?” he trailed off, because Echo did play by arbitrarily constructed social mores. 

Up to a point, at least.

The unknown clone’s eyes flickered to him. “I don’t converse with murderbots.”

It was the sheer, matter-of-fact rudeness of the comment that took Echo’s breath away. No one had ever referenced his time captive to the Techno Union, and all the vode he’d unwillingly helped to kill because of what they’d done, before this. No one had ever out-and-out shoved his face in his shame, although Echo wasn’t blind; he knew that he occasionally attracted nasty looks from random regs with the look of battle fatigue heavy in their eyes.

There was no point in telling them he’d have died rather than help the enemy, if he’d had the slightest opportunity to do so. He knew those who had to live with the deaths of their brothers because of the stolen algorithm wouldn’t take any assurances from him as long as they lived, and Echo would not demean their feelings by offering any. But they’d never ask anyway, because you just didn’t do that kind of thing to another clone. It’s not that clones never picked fights, but they always remembered in the end they were on the same side. And even when they did hold a grudge, some subjects - like capture and torture - were taboo. Off the table for discussion or as insults entirely. Even the Coruscanti Guard respected that unwritten rule.

Some respected and admired him for coming back. Most just steered clear altogether. Both sides of the spectrum had kept their silence. 

Until now, apparently.

Hunter had warned him, hadn’t he? The Bad Batch was exempt from the rules, and the automatic courtesies they sometimes afforded.

“His name is Byte,” Tech interjected without looking, stealing back his datapad from Echo’s custody and starting to tap away, absently chewing as he did so. “His squad is the 34 - Intelligence Corps. Members: Gig, Tera, Kilo, Mega… I think you can spot the theme. Rather unimaginative, but I suppose I’m not one to talk,” he waved a fork absently, writing the group glaring at his back out of his personal universe. 

Echo sighed internally as the tension ratcheted up. He was beginning to think that no one on this squad knew what de-escalate meant. Oh, Hunter talked a good game but he was usually the one throwing the second punch if he hadn’t already thrown the first.

“Can we help you, Byte?” Echo showed all his friendliest teeth. He shifted his weight, silently counting heads and noting possible weaponry.

Byte had dismissed him as beneath notice though, pointedly facing Tech alone and not deigning to include Echo in his line of sight. 

Like Echo was a droid, which irked.

“You are interfering with vital work on the base encryption machines,” Byte bit out through clenched teeth to a supremely unconcerned Tech. “Your little stunt cost us weeks of-”

“Oh, don’t be boring,” Tech cut him off, his tone detached but annoyed. “My little attempt at testing the cadets is hardly worth all this posturing. The point is to give them a challenge, after all, and see how they respond.” His tone was absolute disdain. “Their response times are eight-point-oh-three percent down from the last cycle. That’s hardly praiseworthy, especially considering the war is being fought on a uniquely cyber-centred strategy. If they can’t beat a mere flesh-and-blood human, what are their odds of going up against a tactical droid, who can do a million times the predictive coding a person can do in a fraction of the time?”

Byte scowled impressively. “You broke the exam parameters,” here he shot a nasty look at Echo. “The challenge is supposed to involve splicers only!”

Tech turned around and shot him a long look. “Ah,” he said with a certain measure of sarcasm. “I see.” He turned back to his meal. “Forgive me. I did not know that the rules had changed to accommodate an easy victory. That seems shortsighted. I may need to speak with command.”

Byte spluttered angrily. “They haven’t! They’re the same as they ever were!”

“Really?” Tech’s drew the word out. “I didn’t know we were ever in the habit of teaching cadets that the enemy is going to fight fair. Speaking as one who has actually been on the field,” Tech sipped his drink with maximum obnoxiousness. “I can assure you, the Separatists’ splicers will not be doing things nearly so obvious as my juvenile little prank.”

Byte swelled up like balloon-fish, going red. “Prank? Your little stunt cost us weeks of work! There are battalions waiting on encryption code cracks right now that were obliterated by you and that… that thing!” He jabbed a finger at Echo.

Tech side eyed his furious opponent, a glint of ice in his gaze. “His name is Echo. And if you’d bothered to check the backup drives in their third redundancy security layer, like you’re supposed to do after a catastrophic security event like, say, a blackout of the base, you would have found every scrap of data you supposedly lost.” Tech went back to eating. “You may deride my methods, Sergeant, but at least admit I don’t use shoddy ones.”

Echo could see the exact second when Byte’s temper snapped. Tech’s attitude did have that effect on the unprepared, and Echo was still figuring out if it was deliberate or it was just Tech being Tech. 

Lucky for Tech, though, he had brothers willing to step in when he drove someone into frothing rage. Echo was on his feet, under Byte’s guard and between the reg and Tech’s unprotected back before Byte could do more than jerk a hand towards Tech’s shoulder. His gaze bore flatly into Byte’s blazing one. “You’re going to want to walk away,” he intoned very softly. “You don’t want trouble here.” His eyes flickered briefly to Byte’s loyal entourage, who seemed to be gearing up to follow his lead. “None of you want trouble here. Am I right?”

Tech snorted.

“We certainly don’t,” Echo rolled his eyes slightly at his intransigent squadmate, who shrugged, unconcerned, the master of passive aggressiveness. 

He felt rather than saw Byte’s hands twitch. “You don’t want to do that, either,” Echo warned him quietly.

“You really don’t,” Tech added mildly, still not turning around. “Echo is not some wayward encryption splicer. He’s an ARC. Front line combat commando, multiple commendations for bravery under fire. You lot,” Tech’s lips peeled back with distaste. “Barely ever fire a blaster on the range, let alone physically engage an enemy.”

Okay, Tech’s methods were snide, but they worked. Echo could see the ripple of hesitation that ran through the line of cronies. These guys weren’t front line troops; they were Intelligence. While all clones were trained to fight, actual real-world experience counted for a lot on the ground.

“Multiple commendations,” Byte sneered. “They’ll give those out to anyone these days, even murderbots.”

“You say that like it’s supposed to mean something to me,” Echo ground out, not budging.

“It should,” Byte snapped. “You’re a fucking abomination, walking around wearing medals like some kind of hero. Do you know how many vod you murdered when you gave up that algorithm to the Techno Union? I can give you the number, if you like! I can name all the cryptos who fucking died because the algorithm you gave the Seps gave them the means to target them and leave out Intelligence network in tatters.” Byte shoved at him.

Echo gritted his teeth. He hated to admit it, but the words struck a weak spot deep inside of him. He didn’t like to think about just what those savages had mined from his brain, how they’d turned his desire to keep his fellow soldiers alive and used it to kill them. No blame had been assigned to him, and he knew, intellectually, that he’d been powerless against them, but that didn’t mean that, deep down, there wasn’t a small lump of shame lodged inside his fleshy parts for not being strong enough to fight them.

“Echo had three separate non-surgical amputations, a multitude of internal injuries, a compromised spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries,” Tech’s icy summation sent yellow-orange tendrils through the air, cutting away at Byte’s grey-blue angry spikes. “What, precisely, did you expect him to do? What would you have done, I wonder?” he added in a yellow sneer.

“I wouldn’t have used my one good arm and put myself out of everybody’s misery!” Byte snarled. “As any real soldier would have done!”

Tech’s incredulous retort of “Real soldier?” was drowned out by Echo’s “You think I didn’t try? ” The words came out thinner and higher than he’d meant them, feeling the kick in his chest at the memories of all that sterile metal and that fucking tube, feeling bits of himself slip away and vanish with every bit bolted onto him by the enemy. “You think I didn’t fucking try every chance I got? Why do you think they put a fucking metal plate over my kriffing heart?!” He felt his breath speeding up along with his sheltered heart. Was that what they really thought? That he’d just let them do that to him? That he’d given up and gone along?

He remembered grabbing for whatever sharp thing he could, when his arm finally worked. He remembered breaking his wrist fighting restraints, he thinks, and he remembered clawing for something, anything, with a point or an edge, anything that he knew would make him bleed. 

It had happened. It was real. It had to be real. He felt it playing out in his mind right now, the thunder of the mess hall slowly getting swallowed up by the whine of saws and the buzz of electricity. He’d fought, he had, with everything left in him, knowing Fives and the rest of the vode would be in the firing line if he didn’t.

Tech’s sharp intake of breath behind him broke through the choking fog smothering him. It reminded him to calm down, to breathe.

“Yeah, I can see how hard you tried with the death rolls as long as they are,” Byte looked him up and down in contempt. “Look at you. You’re not even human anymore. You could be hacked as easily as a mouse droid.”

Echo felt a lump lodge in his throat, robbed of all speech.

Tech rose up beside him, slowly pushing his goggles up his nose. “If you want to save any of your personal data from now until the end of time I suggest you walk away right now,” he said, his tone soft and deadly in a way Echo had never heard before. 

Byte, who was regulation size at least, and therefore bigger than Tech, scoffed. “Or you’ll what, sic your pet droid on me? I’ve got ways of dealing with droids, CT-9907, even if they pretend to be human. Look, I can prove it.” Quick as a wink, he reached into his utility pouch and drew out what looked like a tiny box with a button on it-

“Byte, STOP!”

Something buzzed.

Echo couldn’t move. 

He couldn’t move. Something was jamming up his servos, locking his feet and his scomp arm in place. The world glazed over as his eyelids froze and his eyeballs dried slowly in the air, every sound vanished under the harsh metallic buzz coming from his head implant as it fritzed. Lines of shattered, unfathomable code overtook his thoughts and his concentration as his brain - what was left of it - frantically tried to make sense of input it either wasn’t getting or was receiving wrong.

Someone in the middle of this eternal hell, Echo felt his panic rise up inside him like a beast with vicious claws, because he couldn’t move, he couldn’t make his body respond, the machine was in control and he was trapped in the tube and he couldn’t get out, he couldn’t move, what else would they do to him, he had to get out, he had to fight he couldn’t move he couldn’t movehecouldn’tmoveheCOULDN’TMOVE…

Sound washed back in a rush, but it came to him delayed, like it had to run to catch up to him.

He was in the labs, the evil, metal labs, but he could move, he could move now. There were bangs and thumps and the scatter of random things, there might have been voices or hands but sound still wasn’t hitting him right. There were no colours, just the blurry greys and whites and hard edges oh force the sound of those ugly machines cutting into him.

Someone was saying “CT-0409, Echo. CT-0409, Echo. CT-0409, Echo,” like a droid stuck in a looped glitch.

It was him. That was him. CT-0409. Echo. That was him. He had to remember. He had to keep his name. That was the only thing a clone trooper had that was ever really theirs.

“CT-0409, Echo,” he could hear himself now, at least, his voice a wheezy croak, but he could feel the air clicking out past his too-tight throat, the physical, fleshy sensation of sound being made.

“CT-04-”

“Echo!”

An orange starburst cut through the grey fog like a supernova.

Echo blinked. He was in the lab. He was in the lab but Rex had found him, he remembered. Rex and “Tech?” he whispered.

“Yes, indeed,” Tech’s voice was calm, if flat. Echo blinked and the bespectacled clone was right up in his face, so Echo had to track him with his eyes. 

“Unhook me,” Echo wheezed. “Get me out. Don’t leave me in here.”

“We are not. We will not,” Tech promised swiftly. “You are disconnected, Echo.”

“I’m not going back,” Echo insisted, because this was important for some reason. “I’m not going back. My name is Echo.”

“No, you are never going back.” Tech assured him. “Not at long as we are here.”

The sheer confidence of the words was what pierced the last layer of Echo’s panic. Sound came back, a glorious, angry, confused hubbub of many people, more people than could ever have been in that Sith-cursed lab. It was a welcome mess of colour, that noise, a firework display celebrating the return of reality.

“Echo,” Tech stepped up so close they were nose-to-nose, his tone weirdly gentle. “Please give me the knife.”

Echo blinked. Then he looked towards his left shoulder where his one remaining original-equipment arm was holding a sharp knife, point pressing against his neck where a lot of combat masters had taught him the carotid artery was. He didn’t even remember grabbing it, or where in the mess he’d grabbed it from. The last few minutes were a blur in his memory; he remembered movement, but not what the movement contained.

He blinked again. Tech waited patiently, with the air of a man prepared to wait until a supernova swallowed Kamino whole.

Echo handed him the knife.

There was a subtle breathing out. Not from Tech, who was about as stone faced as it was possible for a living thing to be, but from the room at large. There were several random troopers around them, dozens more hovering in the background, their eyes wide and round, a couple of them had their hands outstretched towards Echo. He’d somehow pinned his back to a wall in the mess. 

It seemed the general contempt of the reg for 99 didn’t extend to actually being happy with them dying. Or wishing death upon them. Good to know.

Echo felt the tension leave his body in lopsided ebbs and flows. He saw colour, but it was hyper saturated and glaring, noise was shrill and grating. His eyes tracked the trail of destruction he’d left in his mad, panicked dash for cover or escape or whatever the kriffing hells had been going through his brain. He must have mowed through people like a pneumatic train.

All those eyes on him when he was like this. Looking at his broken pieces on display, inside and out. Echo wanted to curl up and die.

Tech hadn’t taken his eyes off Echo. The look was penetrative but not pitying, which made it far easier to face than the stares he knew he was getting from the others. Tech abruptly appeared to come to a decision. “I believe we should dine in our quarters. The company here is hardly scintillating.”

The thought of going into somewhere safe and familiar where Echo could, maybe, spend about twenty minutes shaking to pieces in the fresher sounded close to paradise right now. “Sure.” The word came out flat and dull, all the crumpled dents of high impact emotions hammered out of it.

Tech nodded decisively. “Shall we?”

“Regulations say he needs to report to the medbay,” Byte’s voice jabbed Echo’s brain with blue grey spikes. “He suffered a psychotic episode. Reconditioning is mandatory, per regulation six-two-dash-”

“He suffered an assault from a fellow soldier,” Tech whipped his head around to glare at Byte, voice going a dark ochre, nearly red. “By all means, you make the report first.”

“I didn’t assault him!” Byte protested as he came too close and his cronies all came up behind him. Echo could barely tell any of them apart. “A gel processor disruptor wouldn’t have even worked on him if he was human!”

Echo flinched, suppressing the action as it tried to ripple down his machine-riddled spine as best he could.

Tech, however, jerked his head ever so faintly to the side. His eyes took on that special, distant look, which meant he was running a complex calculation in his head while blasters were flying in the field.

Echo’s eyes widened. “Tech, don’t…!”

Too late. Tech spun, shot out a foot, hooked Byte’s knee, grabbed his elbow as he staggered, wrenched his arm up and back and then, expression not shifting from cool calculation, grabbed Byte’s short hair with his free hand and rammed the other clone’s head into the nearest table so hard that it bounced.

The crunch of a nose breaking was audible.

Then Tech rammed it down a second time before letting the hapless Byte drop to the floor. It all happened so fast the Intelligence officer didn’t have time to make a sound. 

“And you would have seen that coming,” Tech’s voice was like ice. “If you were a real soldier.”

 Byte gaped at him, blood cascading down his face in sticky strings.

“Hey!” one of his posse yelped and lunged forward. His swing missed because Tech ducked, but the rest of the squad was piling in behind the front runner and Tech couldn’t possibly dodge them all in the narrow alleyways between tables. Another one grabbed him as he ducked another swing and yanked him off balance long enough for another one to land a wildly undisciplined haymaker across the smaller clone's jaw.

The others saw their opening to dogpile even as shouts and cries of other troopers trying to break up the fight rose up around them.

But the surrounding attackers were suddenly not quite so confident, because a furious former ARC was suddenly going for them at full throttle, swinging a swept up commissary tray with tooth-loosening force.

Food sprayed everywhere. Two of the pack went down like skittles.

Then all hell really broke loose. 

Chapter Text

The brig was, actually, not the worst place to be. Echo wasn’t a connoisseur of brigs in general, but this was one ranked pretty high on the ones he had seen. Four stars, would probably recommend.

It also smelled better than Echo’s current quarters on Kamino, which was probably a bad sign.

“What does someone do in here anyway?” he mused idly as he took in the entire, let's face it, box and single bench that, if you turned your head and really squinted, could possibly pass for a bed in a pinch. 

“Most are expected to sit quietly and contemplate the wrongness of their choices and all the consequences therein,” Tech supplied helpfully, sitting down on the bench and running his fingers over the back edge of it, where it nearly touched the wall. 

“Most?” Echo picked up on the word. You had to watch how Tech phrased things.

“Most,” Tech nodded amicably, digging what looked like a tiny rifle laser sight out of the thin padding of the bench, from a subtle rend in the material at the back. “I’m going to order dinner.”

“You what?” Echo blinked.

Tech squinted at the security scanner, made a motion like he was typing, which he sometimes did when he was running numbers at double-time, then held up the sight and clicked out a brief, seemingly random string of flashes right in the eye of the scanner lens. “Interesting fact about food services,” he lectured. “The kitchens on Kamino are all automated. One hundred percent droid operated.”

“Yes, Tech, I know,” Echo sat down, watching him curiously. “So does anyone who’s eaten here. So?”

“So, fooling an automated system is child’s play,” Tech tucked the rifle sight back into it’s hidey hole. “Especially when all the systems are integrated. All you need is to plant a virus that uploads data into the system once triggered.”

“Triggered by, say,” Echo summarised. “Laser stimulus to the security scanners. I’m impressed. What is that?” he gaped as Tech dug out a thin but perfectly serviceable datapad from the inside of the bench padding. He gave Echo a speculative look, then dug around and withdrew what looked like a red, flat circle which instantly inflated into a small, squeezy red ball. “There. Your PT record indicates they want you to hit certain markers in hand-eye coordination since you are now using your non-dominant hand as your… well, hand.” He threw it at the forcefield, where it ricocheted wildly, bounced in quick succession to the floor, wall, ceiling, wall, door, forcefield before it was stopped by Echo’s hand.

Echo was so astonished that he didn’t even see the point of remarking that Tech had accessed his private medical records. “Tech,” he asked. “Have you outfitted the entire brig with… survival caches?” 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tech snorted, switching on the datapad. “Outfitting them all would be far too complicated, and would exponentially increase the chances of such caches being found. It is far simpler and safer to ensure that whenever our names are entered into the disciplinary system we automatically get assigned the same cell, and outfit that.”

“You guys have your own cell?” Echo asked, eyebrows raised.

“As far as the system is concerned we do,” Tech replied, still typing away. “The guards never seem to see the pattern, or if they have they have dismissed it.”

“And they never spotted that?” Echo asked sceptically, pointing at the datapad.

“I took the precaution of making sure it was not actually networked,” Tech allowed. “Those scanners are too finicky to work around long-term. But it allows me to keep myself occupied. I am not,” he pushed his googles up his nose, and they briefly flashed in the dim light of the forcefield. “At my best when I’m bored.”

And didn’t that statement bring out a cold sweat on the face of men and gods. Echo decided to just give in and roll with it. He’d already had one break with sanity today, there was no need to compound the problem. He lay on the floor with a sigh, propped his feet up on the bench to give his core muscles a break and bounced the ball off the ceiling a couple of times. 

There was a little skull drawn on it.

“How long do you think we’ll be in here?” Echo mused as he measured a tricky wall-ceiling ricochet and let fly. Nothing wrong with his ability to calculate trajectories, even with his non-dominant hand, thank you very much.

“Unclear,” Tech said absently. “Protocol dictates that we are released into the hands of our commanding officers.”

Which, in theory, was the base command that had lined Echo, Tech and the Splicer Squad up against an office wall for about an hour, curdling the very air with a blistering tirade on decorum and behaviours unbecoming of soldiers and the sanctity of base morale, but in practice meant that Hunter had a priority message waiting to be read whenever he could get away from the shinies and back to semi-civilisation. 

We could be here for days, Echo thought dismally. The insult was made worse for the fact that the Intelligence command corps had effected the Splicer Squad’s release almost immediately, since they were based on Kamino. They had tried to swagger as they were released from their punishment with barely any time served, but it’s pretty hard to swagger when you’re covered in the remains of dinner and were sporting a lot of black eyes, bruises, and, in Byte’s case, carrying a magnificently expansive bacta patch over the majority of his face. 

They’d flinched when Echo and Tech had cheerfully waved them goodbye.

Echo bounced the ball again. He ought to be sorry.

He really, really wasn’t. 

“Thanks for,” Echo couldn’t find the words so he settled on. “You know. Before.”

“We’re going to have to look into shielding for your implants in the field,” Tech noted in response. “A pulse generator is a common enough weapon.”

Echo tried not to be irked. Tech was right; if he could be affected by that anti-droid gadgetry then it was a liability in the field that they had to deal with. That was all Tech meant by it. “Right.” The word came out flatter than Echo meant, and he bounced the ball wildly to cover himself. 

Tech gave him that penetrative look again, which Echo ignored like a champion.

Tech was either very bad at reading social cues or very, very good. “It is illogical to resent upgrades to your modifications. They will make them easier and safer to live with.”

“Yes, I know, Tech,” Echo said irritably. “They’re a reality I have to live with. Doesn’t mean I have to kick up my heels and celebrate them. Not that I have those anymore anyway,” he added sourly. He missed the ball that time, and irritably watched as it bounced away from him.

“Hm,” Tech idly collected the ball, still scanning Echo. “You believe you are a liability in the field as you are?”

“A splicer who doesn’t even know how to throw a punch just took me out with a remote control the size of a thumb,” Echo snapped. “You tell me.”

“Hence, shielding,” Tech informed him, puzzled by the attitude. “We are fortunate that Byte was such an egregious idiot and we found out about that problem here. It would have been a lot worse finding out about it on the field. That is to our advantage.” Tech voice had an element of a teacher explaining a basic fact to a particularly dimwitted student.  

Echo sighed. Much as he hated the humiliation, Tech wasn’t wrong. “Embarrassment ain’t fatal,” he intoned, feeling some of the sting of it leave him.

Tech blinked. “There have been no recorded deaths directly as a result of it alone, no,” Tech agreed in a slightly baffled tone, rolling the ball back to Echo.

“It’s something Rex said to us,” Echo explained. “After Galvadore. ‘It may be bad, boys, but embarrassment ain’t fatal’. I think he was sick to death of us moping around like we’d lost the war.”

“Ah, yes, Galvadore,” Tech adjusted his goggles and went back to the datapad screen. “I still have some questions, since we have ample time on our hands.”

“If I answer your questions, will you answer mine?” Echo asked.

“That is fair, I suppose,” Tech agreed, tilting his head. “The synchronized bulkhead doors to the vault,” he asked, all business. “How did you get through them? The after action report was not adequately detailed.”

“Uh…” Echo squirted at the ceiling as he tried to draw up the memory out of the fogbanks in his mind. For some reason an image of Fives swinging on a chandelier emerged from the mist. “Oh, we fooled them,” Echo grinned as he remembered. “We tripped them, of course, because we didn’t know they were there until we were three doorways in and then boom, all the doors slammed shut. So we had to trick the lock sensors into thinking we had the unlock key. Standard high frequency crystalline light spectrum lock triggers. I ripped the panel off, exposed the spectrum reader but we couldn’t get the right spectrum of light, right, because none of our equipment had the right crystal matrix to reproduce it. I said something, I don’t remember what, about being surrounded by crystals and none of them being the right crystal. That’s when Fives got the brilliant idea to use the chandelier; he figured the crystals in it must have been mined from the same source as the ones in the matrix. So he climbed up and started swinging from the chandelier, using the sun to direct light beams right onto the matrix. We all thought he was nuts, but it worked. Confused the scanner so much that it set off the automatic reset. Rex couldn’t believe something that stupid worked, especially since Fives managed to take down the chandelier when he got a bit too enthusiastic celebrating the door opening. There were shards everywhere. Honestly, we might have been fine if the crash hadn’t attracted the police droids. That’s when it really started to go bad.”

“Hm,” Tech was, apparently, noting all this down. “You did, I note, complete the mission objective,” he observed.

“No we didn’t,” Echo snorted. “Our mission objective was to retrieve beskar-pressed celubrium bars, which were actually worth something to the war effort. What we got was a trunk full of moldy seeds, because the Head Gavkaar had embezzled the celubrium years ago and never told anyone.” Funny, the memory of that awful, humiliating moment when they’d proudly borne the chest back to base only to find out they’d netted nothing for all their efforts wasn’t quite as corrosively embarrassing to think of now as it had been. In fact, looking back through the lens of hindsight, the whole thing was kind of hilarious, if farcical.

At the time, it had been one of the worst failures they’d ever suffered. The other squads had all sniggered about it. The Seps propaganda machine had had a field day, with their unholy moment of fame seemingly recorded for all of history to laugh at. They’d stewed in bitter resentment about it for weeks. 

Now, though? All Echo could think was that they’d all made it out alive, and that made it a good mission.

Force, they really had been a bunch of arrogant young fools, hadn’t they? Moaning about a mission that everyone had walked away from, while the other troopers on glorious missions they had resentfully compared their failures to had counted their dead as well as their shiny medals.  No wonder Rex had lost all patience with them. If Echo’s worst mission had been Galvadore, he’d have been a lucky man indeed.

“Which just goes to show,” Tech summarized primly, tapping at the datapad and bringing Echo out of his epiphanous musings. “No amount of external security can protect against an internal threat.”

“Preach,” Echo muttered. “My turn. What’s the deal with Wrecker’s art?”

Tech started. He clearly hadn’t been expecting that, much to Echo’s amusement. He stared. “I… require clarification.”

Echo tossed the ball again idly. “He acts like it’s something to be ashamed of. Personal shame comes about as easily to Wrecker as altruism comes to a rabid nexu. Someone must have taught him that his art was stupid. I just wondered why anyone would do that.” Echo had wondered, watching Wrecker scribble away in the long interminable transport legs between missions, why anyone had been that thoughtlessly cruel. He was still trying to understand the Bad Batch and their prickly relationship to the side of the war they fought for.

“Ah, I see,” Tech hummed. “What you must remember from the outset is that Wrecker isn’t stupid.” There was a thread of kyber running through the words.

“I know, Tech,” Echo assured him. “I never thought he was.”

“Yes, well,” Teach appeared mollified. “It’s an easy assumption to make, mostly because he is, at heart, a very direct thinker. He doesn’t believe in making things needlessly complicated, or complicated at all. That’s not the same as stupid, but others often make the mistake of thinking that. But it does have to be said that Wrecker has a fault, in that he believes what he’s told if someone he trusts tells him so.”

Echo caught the ball again, turned to look at Tech’s weary face, lit from beneath in the lights of his illicit datapad. “Someone he trusted told him his art was stupid?” he asked incredulously.

“Someone he trusted told him his art was a distraction,” Tech corrected. “In this case, 99.”

Echo blinked, half sitting up. “99? 99 said that? I knew him! He was a good guy!”

“He was,” Tech said heavily. “A good man. More importantly, he was also the first progenitor of the number 9-9 batch. Throughout our growth cycle 99 took an avid interest in our development and training. He was our ori’vod, in a sense. His… enhancement went awry to the extent he never got his chance to see the battle. At least…”

“Not until the end,” Echo left a stone lodge in his throat. 99’s death had been a noble one, but it had stung losing someone with such grace inside. He was a good soldier and a better man. 

“Yes,” Tech agreed. “But I will not diminish his sacrifice by lamenting it. He deserved a chance to do what he was built for. He earned a legacy, and his legacy was us. Clone Force 99. We bear it with the respect it deserves.”

Echo nodded. “I still can’t see the connection, though.”

“As I said,” Tech continued. “99 took interest in our development especially. He understood better than anyone that our enhancements were a double-edged saber. The only way we would ever see the field is if we could prove that the advantages our enhancements granted us mitigated the disadvantages. Hunter and his migraines. Crosshair’s insomnia and photosensitivity. My… general physical lack compared to the regs. And Wrecker’s ability to focus. He’s a good fighter, but he can get distracted. His strength is an enormous asset, but only if we could prove that it could be steered in the right direction. 99 worked extremely hard to help us find ways around our… shortcomings, so the Kaminoans would not find enough fault with us to recommend decommissioning.”

“You think they really would have done that?” Echo asked, dumbstruck with the implications. 

He’d heard about it in the early days, from the Gen-1’s; the sudden and swift act of decommissioning an unsatisfactory soldier. They made jokes about it. Not very funny ones. Don’t break it, or we’ll be decommissioned. Don’t eyeball the command, you’ll be decommissioned. Don’t fail, or it’s decommission time. They’d known it happened during training accidents when the injuries were of a magnitude too great for meaningful recovery sometimes, but Echo had never felt that knife hanging over his head the way Tech implied it had hung over the Bad Batch’s. 

“They no longer needed to for regular clones,” Tech nearly read his mind. “All of the genetic flaws in your makeup had long been ironed out prior to your decanting. With the exception of devastating injury, there would be no reason to simply decommission a normal trooper, even if they failed a few tests. They could just be moved into the lower-skilled fields of use. Various differences in talents and ambitions aside, your design, in and of itself, was a proven success. We, however, were experimental. Experiments often fail. You do them to see if they do fail.”

“You’re saying they actually would have…” Echo trailed off, stuck with the sheer, merciless brutality of it. Especially since he knew the Batch; they weren’t just faceless ideas, they were real people, distinct and unique.

“We cost money to make and more money to upkeep,” was Tech’s coldly rational response. “Why spend that money on a product that doesn’t work? The Kaminoans are practical.”

The Kaminoans are fucking sane, Echo thought. But they’re cold bloodedly sane, untouchably sane, the kind of sane that makes one long for the rich, chaotic warmth of insanity. To the Kaminoans, everything was just a number. “So 99… told Wrecker not to draw,” Echo’s brow furrowed as he followed the thread. “He told him not to get distracted. Because he was worried that he wouldn’t pass the tests?” Echo’s voice climbed higher with disbelief.

“Correct,” Tech nodded. “Wrecker was the one that worried us the most. All of our other enhanced mutations would be difficult to replicate in the field if you took into the account the added advantage of human intuitiveness and inventiveness. Wrecker’s strength could be duplicated by technology; like exosuits and heavy artillery. The Kaminoans could make an argument that Wrecker’s experiment was a failure if he couldn’t meet minimum cognitive requirements which, I state again, he can do, just not with the systems the Kaminoans use to measure. 99 wasn’t trying to be cruel,” Tech added when he saw the look on Echo’s face. “He was simply trying to make sure that Wrecker passed muster. What he was actually telling Wrecker was not right now. But Wrecker trusted him, and what he heard was…”

“Not ever,” Echo finished, feeling something sour rose in his chest. Honestly, he might have preferred some awful tale of bullying or other trauma, some garden variety malice. This was worse; this was a cruelty inflicted out of kindness, a lesser of two evils to defend against an even greater threat. He could see so clearly the reasons why it had been done, and hated them all with breathless anger. All he could think was that Fives would have been incandescent with rage over it all.

“Indeed,” Tech cool diction washed over Echo’s temper. “By the time the danger had passed Wrecker’s ideas had become rather… fixed. I suppose some merit is to be found in your gift to Wrecker, in that it allowed him to change his mind. 99 would have thanked you for it.”

Honestly, that was probably the best compliment Echo had ever gotten. He smiled.

“The police droid blockade,” Tech said. “How did your team circumvent it?”

Echo blinked at the non sequitur, then remembered; Tech wanted to know about Galvadore. He guessed the conversational drift had washed them to shores uncomfortably sentimental for the logical Tech. “Uh… I might be remembering this badly but I think we ripped a spectrum reader out of one of the door locks and cross wired it to break into the security kiosk in the forward tower of the castle. From there it was just a matter of stealing all the access keys in the safe and finding which one opened up the vehicle bay. I think…” Echo’s face screwed up as he tried to tease out the memory from the haze. “I think we stole a wedding speeder. Or something. There were a lot of frills on it, I do remember that. Yeah, Fives and I switched the bells on the ceremonial trail out for remote detonated concussion grenades. Great big tail of booms.” Echo grinned at the memory. Force, but that had been fun. 

“That should never have worked,” Tech observed primly, still jotting it down.

“It shouldn’t have, but it did,” Echo shrugged. “Most of the stunts we pulled shouldn’t have worked. Or gotten us court martialled. Guess we were lucky.” And luck eventually runs out, he added privately, the thought bittersweet.

“Hm,” Tech mused absently, before looking up. The poor saps stuck on brig duty were talking in low murmurs out in the corridor, and the object of their attention soon rolled by. A small service droid, nothing more than two slanted wheels and a box rolled into the outer chamber. It moved smoothly into a position by the door and beeped at them.

“Dinner,” Tech nodded with satisfaction, discreetly handing Echo the datapad while he volunteered to get scanned to verify the droid was in the right place and collect their food boxes. The guards at the door were peeking in, no doubt extremely confused as to why the two in here ranked the privilege of hot meals. Usually soldiers in the brig weren’t fed unless actually awaiting a court martial. Probably because they mostly wound up in here while drunk and no one wanted to clean up more mess from that.

Echo sat up to block their view of the datapad in his arms. Out of curiosity he read the screen.

And frowned. 

Tech’s notes were much like the man himself - logical, dry, and on the edge of incomprehensible if viewed without explanation. Echo could barely read the notes. There was the arrow diagram showing the timeline of events on Galvadore, his own contributions laid out in neat dot points. But as Echo scrolled up, there was more. They looked like… mission parameters, in a briefing packet. Or maybe an after action report, where you went through events step by tiny step, every relevant detail outlined. But this wasn’t a mission they had been on and wasn’t, as far as Echo could tell, a mission they were going on, either. 

Echo scrolled up. There was a tabulation there. It looked official enough. Mission Parameters. Object Of Interest. Equipment. Obstacles. Enemy Specs. Character Sheets.

Echo blinked. Character sheets?

He hit the file link.

A flood of names, neatly listed with detailed biographies scrolled past. Name, rank, known skills, past plot points. He knew some of these names. He’d read them before. “Squad 49?” he sat upright as Tech came back with boxes. “You wrote the Squad 49 series?”

“Most of them,” Tech handed him a ration box. “The publisher has been taking some liberties with the rights and letting other people write them too. I would protest, but as the original series was published anonymously they have, regrettably, a good case for ownership.” Tech peeled back the film layer on his box. “Honestly, people have no respect for copyright these days.”

He was a good quarter of the way through evening repast before Echo could pull himself together from having the universe tipped on its side. “I… you really write them?” he asked again incredulously, just to be sure he’d heard right.

Tech raised a smug eyebrow at him. “Is there an echo in here?” He smirked through tendrils and starbursts of orange.

“At least one, and he can punch your lights out,” Echo retorted on autopilot, still flipping through the datapad. “The 501st would go through the Squad 49 books as soon as the new ones came out. Fives loved them. Couldn’t get enough.” Which Echo had always found slightly odd. After all, they were fictional stories about a fictional squad completing fictional missions, where they were actual people in an actual battalion doing actual missions. He never understood exactly why Fives liked more of the same in his downtime.

“I infer from your diction that you yourself did not?” Tech raised an eyebrow.

“Did I say that?” Echo raised one back. “I read a few. More than a few, since there were so many copies available. And Rex did put a couple of the required reading list. Said it was a good thought experiment for innovation in the field.”

“Good. That’s mainly who I wrote it for,” Tech declared with satisfaction.. 

“The 501st?” Echo blinked.

“Soldiers in the GAR in general,” Tech corrected. “Although certainly aimed at the front line troops.”

“Why?” Echo asked. “I mean, I’m not disparaging your motives or anything, but caring about what the regs do with their downtime really doesn’t seem like it would interest you much. And you didn’t do it for the attention if you’re publishing anonymously.” He picked up his box to eat while he listened because this ought to be a hell of a story. 

“Of course I don’t care about the regs leisure activities,” Tech seemed almost offended at the thought. “They are meant to be educational texts. As your former commander said; they are meant to inspire innovation in the field. Our strategies are disgustingly hidebound, and our ability to fight effectively is hampered as a result. The regs reward obedience over creativity,” Tech chewed on a mouthful of food irritably. “And that is no way to win a war.”

Echo felt the sting of friendly fire in that indictment; nevertheless, he couldn’t say Tech was wrong, either. “You didn’t bring that up with command?”

He knew that was stupid the instant he said it, but Tech’s look of disdain was an extra brand of idiocy on his forehead. “Of course. But why would they listen to me?” Tech said mockingly. “I was only bred for extreme intelligence. They told me I was a field combat agent, meant for small mission support and could not possibly understand the overarching complexities of the war. As if I can’t do both,” Tech sniffed. “If they had at least listened to me about the holes in our security here, 99 might still be alive,” he added darkly. “So would others. Command may be willing to let preventable deaths slide, but I wasn’t. If I am going to waste my intellect in a war, I refuse to be a part of the war that is incurably stupid.”

“So, you started writing books?” Echo raised his eyebrows, puzzled.

“I actually started writing fake after-action reports and adding them to the intelligence records,” Tech. “You can describe a great deal of innovative techniques in an after-action report. Methods of escape. Means of locating the enemy. Creative use of field equipment. Unorthodox mission completions. The intelligence chain of command reads them all. Sometimes they even take on board the possibility of rethinking their strategies faced with examples of successes completed via methods previously not deemed acceptable. Not always,” Tech’s quantifier was sour. “But sometimes. It’s better than nothing. But I couldn’t keep doing it, obviously. Too many interesting reports on the system may have led them to seek out the squad members in question for in depth analysis, which would prove impossible, as the squads on the reports did not, in fact, exist.”

“Suspected deliberate misinformation on the intelligence drives?” Echo took a speculative bite of food. “Yeah, they would have shut you down extra hard.”

“Please. They would never have traced them back to me,” Tech declared loftily. “But you are correct in the sense that all the effort would have been for naught if they wrote it off as an attempted enemy intelligence infiltration. I could not, even with my skill, keep them from asking inconvenient questions forever.”

“So you made them into fiction,” Echo beamed, waving the datapad. “And slipped it right into the hands of the soldiers who would need it. That’s brilliant!”

“Yes, well,” Tech was rubbish at pretending not to preen. “It started as a mere thought exercise on public forums that clone troopers frequent. I would post a scenario under one log on and then posit various solutions under another. They were quite well received, minus the usual anti-clone chatter. But even that became too troublesome. The censor droids keep getting upgraded to look for unlawfully posted classified information and, well, most of my examples did come directly out of mission reports. That’s when I looked into self-publishing. The veil of fictional story telling allowed me to write both question and answer in the same text without suspicions being raised, as long as the details were cloaked well enough. Thus, Squad 49,” Tech shrugged. “I was surprised they did so well, but I did not take into account the average civilian’s insulation from the war at large. At least, those not on disputed planets. Texts about the war are a source of some fascination for those not in the thick of it.”

Echo looked back at the notes on the datapad ruefully. “That’s why you wanted to know about Galvadore. It was a failure to be fixed.”

“Strictly speaking, Galvadore was not a failure,” Tech took back the datapad. “You were assigned to retrieve a chest, and you duly retrieved the chest. The contents were not your concern. But even had it been a failure, it’s the failure that makes it interesting, because I can take it apart and see exactly which part failed.” 

“So, you’re teaching regs how not to fail?” Echo said wryly. “Glad I could be of some use as a bad example, then.”

“You have misunderstood entirely.” Tech tapped in a few more things idly. “Yes, the main objective was not reached in the end, but your unorthodox method of overcoming the bulkhead door issue was absolutely successful, and an excellent demonstration of the value of understanding native resources and application of materials science. How many other squads might find that knowledge useful in future, given that we are often tasked with breaking into strongholds and then breaking out of them again? Maybe some cadet will read this story and wonder if such a solution will work again, given the resources they have. And they will find it does, because this has been tried and tested in the field, only they don’t know it. I use the successful pieces of the mission, Echo, not the failed ones. The failed parts failed, so what use would they be?” Tech looked at Echo thoughtfully over the light of the datapad. “Throw away the broken part, not the whole engine, as it were.”

Echo felt a smile stretch his lips unexpectedly. It was good advice. “Anything else you want to know?”

“Why do your eyes track around me when I talk?” Tech asked.

Echo blinked. That wasn’t a question about Galvadore. “What?”

“Your eyes,” Tech squinted at him. “They flicker around my mouth when I make sounds. Movement tracking.”

Tech sounded so certain that there didn’t seem much point in denying it. “It’s just something weird my brain does when I port in for too long,” Echo waved his scomp arm. “Sounds make colours. Times have directions too. It fades. Eventually.” Eventually . Eventually, maybe not. Echo covered the dysmorphic lurch in his stomach by adding. “It’s a line of buggy code in my cerebral nexus or something,” he tried for joking.

“That is improbable,” Tech’s yellow-orange statement was a starburst in the dim brig. “It’s more likely a result of the traumatic brain injuries you received. Your cerebral modifications were designed to delete any superfluous stimulus from your awareness so as to allow you to focus, at least where the Techno Union wanted you to focus. The emergence of the synaesthesia is therefore probably the result of your organic neural pathways repairing themselves after being forced into submission to the supercomputer they wanted to run you off instead. It happens after you port in because the cerebral nexus is too busy processing data and must necessarily shut down all minor systems - such as stimulus blocking - in order to process efficiently.”

“Wait,” Echo frowned. “Your saying that sound colour thing - synaesthesia,” the unfamiliar word tripped over his palate. “That’s my flesh brain, not the machine?”

“Of course,” Tech replied. “Machines do not suffer from synaesthesia. They do not crosswire input the same way an evolved brain does. Programming is too… rigid to do that unless it’s specifically made that way. And why would they do that? It would not be of any use to them.”

Echo felt a burgeoning swell of relief. So he wasn’t turning into a droid. He was turning into a human. A damaged one, but he’d take that over droid any day. “Do you think it will become permanent?” he asked with a smile.

“Highly probable. The human brain adapts,” Tech shrugged diffidently, like that wasn’t the best thing Echo had heard all day. “A machine can only be upgraded. Your… flesh parts are adapting to your machine parts constantly as the damage heals. Slowly and inefficiently,” Tech grumbled. “But that’s nature for you.”

Echo beamed quietly to himself. Maybe it didn’t make up for everything, but the knowledge that the human part of him was not only still there, but would grow back was a warm little thought at the center of his being, driving the fogs of anxiety away. At least, for now.

Echo acknowledged, ruefully but graciously, his fleshy brain had pitfalls all of its own.

Tech appeared to hesitate over something. “I have another question,” he said carefully. “You inferred that Squad 49 series wasn’t to your taste before,” he said carefully. “What precisely did you not like about them?”

“Hold on, I never said I didn’t like them,” Echo protested. “I liked them just fine. I didn’t have a problem with, like, the writing style or the subject matter or anything. They just weren’t the kind of books I read. I’m already in a war,” Echo shrugged. “I don’t know that I want to spend my time out of the war reading about more war.”

“Hm,” Tech tapped things on the datapad screen. “That is a valuable observation. Since my aim is to reach as many of the regs as I can, what genre did appeal to you?”

“I don’t think you could write the kind of book I was interested in, Tech,” Echo said dryly.

The unholy gleam of a challenge thrown lit the fire in Tech’s begoggled eye. “That is a sweeping statement. My works can cross many genres - horror, espionage, heists, political drama and at times comedy, especially when I draw research from the Bad Batches reports. What makes you so sure?”

Oh ho, he looked so ready to tear Echo’s pretensions regarding the boundaries of his literary skills to shreds. Well, Tech may be a genius but Echo had the high ground this time. “Because I read romances, Tech,” he deadpanned.

Slowly, Tech’s eyes lifted from the datapad and turned towards Echo in utter astonishment. His eyes narrowed. “You mean melodramas?”

“Sweeping epics? No,” Echo smirked. “I mean those bodice rippers you get at the SX sometimes.” His smirk widened. “The trashier the better.”

“For pornographic reasons, no doubt.” Tech said dismissively.

“Uh, excuse me, yes doubt,” Echo protested. “I go for sweet over smut, thank you. If I want porn, I know where to get it. I’m a front line soldier, for force’s sake.”

Tech looked bewildered, like Echo had just announced he wanted to convert into being a Hutt. Echo kind of wished he had a holostill camera. “Why?’ the genius asked eventually. “Those are formulaic garbage that could be concocted by plot bots. And are.”

“Hey,” Echo jabbed a finger at him, offended. “I don’t cast aspersions on your literary leanings, don’t cast aspersions on mine, number one. Number two, they are actually written by actual people, mostly marginalized groups and women trying to shine a light on the sides of life that get forgotten in a universe that is still over fifty percent patriarchal, and number three,” Echo said more plaintively. “What’s wrong with cracking open a book and knowing that the characters are going to have a happy ending? Happy endings are so rare in real life,” he smiled wistfully. “Rare and fragile.”

Tech appeared to consider this with some thought. “It could be argued that my books always have a happy ending,” he pointed out. “The mission is always successful and the characters always survive.”

“Yes, but that’s all they want,” Echo retorted. 

“Yes?” Tech blinked. “They want to complete the mission, why wouldn’t they?”

“Well,” Echo fumbled for a way to explain this. “Okay, you and I want to complete our missions too, right? But that’s not all we want all the time though, is it? We want other things too. Like books in downtime and Hunter’s cooking and… I don’t know, games of sabacc and drinks and getting out of the Marauder for a while. People want things. Silly, tiny, meaningless, irrational things, sometimes, but we still want them. That’s why I like romances. It’s about… longing, and admitting that you long for things for yourself and finding the courage to get them if you can, when you get the chance. That’s what sentient people do. Otherwise… we’re all just droids, completing tasks.”

Tech looked down at his datapad, nose scrunched up. “You are saying my characters don’t read as human?”

“No, not that,” Echo shook his head. “I’m saying the few I read I couldn’t get into like I do other stuff because I couldn’t really understand who Squad 49 were. I understood what they were, I knew what their goal was, I understood their skill sets but… I never got a glimpse of the kind of people they really were deep down. The missions aren’t personal to them, so I never got how they felt about being on them.” Echo shrugged uncomfortably at Tech’s oddly downcast look. “But then again, your stories were more about plots than characters,” he added, trying to be fair. “And I read stories with a lot worse examples of both. Besides, I’m just one guy. The whole 501st would have fought me on it. Fives was my brother and he would have led the pack too. He loved them all.” Echo patted Tech on the knee. “I’m not sorry I read them, Tech. I’m only sorry I couldn’t tell Fives I met the author. He’d have lost his damn mind. He’s probably have pestered you for an autograph or something.”

Tech smiled faintly. “Your brother had good taste, at least,” was his rejoinder. 

“Eh,” Echo wobbled his hand in the air to demonstrate the chances of proving that statement. “You wouldn’t say that if you heard what he thought counted as music.”

Tech snorted. 

Echo decided to finish up eating, leaving Tech to do his notes in peace.

“What would you write?” Tech asked abruptly. “If you were going to write a Squad 49 story?”

“Me?” Echo blinked. “I’m not a writer!”

Tech waved this off as inconsequential. “Narrative forming comes naturally to the pattern recognition-based cognitive functions of sapient species. Your ability to write a story with any skill may be subject to things like inclination and practice, but your ability to form stories as a way of explaining your reality is the basis of intelligence as a concept. You can, absolutely, think of a story. So, if you were going to write one, what kind would you write? Keep in mind my plots are not invented by me,” Tech added when Echo made to protest again. “I merely write about other things I have either read or experienced directly. So if you could take a mission like Galvadore, let’s say, and make it into a Squad 49 book, what story would you pick?”

Echo considered that monumental task. If he was going to write about something he’d experienced, what story would he pick? Why him? He wasn’t very interesting until half of his body had been replaced.

Then he thought; if I was going to write a story about Fives, what story would I write?

Suddenly, he realized there were so many of them. So many planets, so many missions. Fighting against the odds in training. Rishi. The siege of Kamino. Galvadore and Luleinarcc and all their wild escapades on dozens of different soils. Slices of life aboard the Defiant, even, there’d been interesting times there, too.

“I guess I’d write about the time Commander Tano and Fives and I blew up an enemy destroyer,” he said, smiling. “With an illegal still. Sort of by accident. Oh, and that was the first time Commander Tano got drunk but that was kind of an accident too because she mistook the water filter for the moonshine dispenser and… yeah. If we hadn’t managed to eject it in time and blow up the enemy ship with the still I’m pretty sure General Skywalker would have spaced us. For getting his padawan drunk, mind you, not for nearly blowing up our ship along with the enemy ship. Although the rest of the 501st was pretty mad about losing the still. Apparently that one was the one that made the best quality stuff. Kix cried for a week.”

Tech stared at him. Slowly, like a man reaching for his blasters in an imminent gun fight, he raised the datapad up. “I believe,” he said very slowly. “I may need clarification on some details.”

By the time he’d finished that story, and another, and another, they’d somehow leapt headlong into a brainstorming session about possible plots for the latest Squad 49 book. 

“You know what these guys need?” Echo declared after they’d hashed out a possible labyrinth of political intrigue and high stakes escapes on some fictional world. “They need a civilian. Like, they need someone who’s not a soldier to bounce off of.”

“I am not falling into the trap of romantic interests,” Tech snorted. “It adds nothing to the plot.”

“It adds something to them, though,” Echo said. “It lets them act more like… people. Like, they have their mission and they also have to protect this… you know, let’s say it’s a kid. There is a kid there and they have to protect them and at some point they have to decide if the kid’s life is worth more than completing the mission. That would be an interesting conflict wouldn’t it? I mean, they’d never had to choose between a mission and something else before. I think that might, I don’t know, reveal some hidden depths in their characters.”

“Or… maybe the child is the mission?” Tech tried out the idea, faintly sceptical. “They have to protect and deliver them to… somewhere, while others try to stop them.” Tech frowned. “I don’t know that it would be believable that a young child would get caught in a war like that.”

“Look around, Tech,” Echo said heavily. “The war’s full of ‘em. My Commander was literally fifteen. That’s less than eighth cycle for us. And she’d been trained to wield a deadly weapon since she was seven, our three, and that was back in a time when the galaxy that wasn’t at war. Having a kid running around with the squad is hardly farfetched. A lot of your target audience will get it, trust me.”

Tech pondered that silently. “There is something in what you say,” he said eventually. “Please elaborate on the character of your Commander. It will assist me in framing an accurate portrayal of a child fighting in a war.”

Well, if he wanted anecdotes about Ahsoka, Echo could give them to him for a year or more, both his own and things he’d heard. He only got about an hour's worth, though, before Tech abruptly stood up, snatched Echo’s idly bouncing ball out of mid-air and shoving both ball and datapad back into their secret hidey hole. “Proximity alert,” he informed a puzzled Echo.

Which was all the warning Echo got before the door hissed open and the lighting level was raised high enough to make him blink. “Ten-hutt!”

The reaction was Pavlovian for Echo; he stood and straightened. It was probably less so for Tech, but the other clone did follow suit, no hint of their illicit brig contraband showing on his face. 

In marched what was possibly a command adjutant, judging by the shiny armour, and after him some member of the base command whose name Echo wouldn’t be able to speak to even if he guessed for a week and finally, unmistakably, their erstwhile squad sergeant, whose bearing was on the very cusp of insubordinate without actually crossing the line.

“Well Sergeant,” the command officer gestured to the imprisoned pair, as if no other explanation was required, which, to be fair, was kind of right.

“Yes Commander, those are mine,” Hunter’s voice could have been used as a laser level, it was so flat. “I’ll take it from here.”

“See that they are adequately punished,” the Commander Whatshisname barked, which made Hunter wince. 

“They disrupted operation of the base, put three men in the infirmary and had me yanked out of a training exercise mid-run,” Hunter growled, eyeing them. “Don’t worry. They’ll get what’s coming to them.”

Tech and Echo side eyed each other. Uh huh.

“Good! See that you do!” Commander Whocares snapped. “The whole matter reflects badly on your leadership, Sergeant, and you’ve got enough problems with your so-called squad as it is. Get them out of my sight!”

“Yes, sir,” Hunter growled, eyes not leaving them.

The adjutant hit the door release.

“You two, with me. Double time,” Hunter didn’t wait for a salute, just turned on his heel and stalked out, leaving the pair to follow his quick-march past Commander Nobody and out into the corridors of Kamino, a thundercloud nearly visibly forming over his head. 

It really was like being back in the 501st. Hunter had the same pulsing veins near his temples that Rex had. Echo discreetly field-signed command status at Tech, and got a surprising all clear back. 

“I don’t appreciate being talked about behind my back, gentlemen,” was Hunter’s acerbic interjection, which he made without turning around or halting his stride.

They made their silent march through the mostly silent halls of Kamino. Echo had lost track of time in the brig, but they clearly hadn’t been there the whole night. The base was never inactive, but this was it at its most dormant, the wee hours when the majority of the population was sleeping.

Even though it was under these circumstances, Echo felt some knot inside him unweave when they finally got to their quarters and all their familiar chaos. It suddenly hit him that he’d been up close to a full cycle at this point, and the knowledge crashed down on his bones like one of Wrecker’s punches.

Tech had halted at the central table while Hunter had gone past to rifle amongst the madcap sprawl of storage boxes that made up the landscape near Echo’s hammock. He was watching their squad leader with curiosity, not trepidation, which Echo had to admire. Hunter’s pinched temples meant he was definitely in the mood to yell at somebody.

Honestly, Echo was so exhausted right now he could probably take a blistering tirade as long as no one minded him falling asleep on his feet in the middle of it.

But Hunter was not the blistering tirade kind of leader; at least, as long as no one had pulled a stunt that got them close to dying. “I read the medical reports. Two concussions, four torn ligaments, one dislocated knee, three broken toes - on one foot, mind you - a dislocated shoulder, uncounted and sundry bruises, fifteen various dental injuries and, here’s a kicker, a fully deviated septum with associated shattering of the maxilla bone, orbital cavity and added nerve damage, because why not? Does that sound accurate, gentlemen?”

Tech and Echo looked at each other. “That does sound accurate, though I would argue the dislocated shoulder was the result of haphazard blocking during a fall,” Tech reported.

“And, in fairness, the guy with the broken foot should really have known better than to try to kick me in the shins,” Echo added. Maker, he needed sleep.

Hunter twitched from where he crouched over a multitude of open boxes, still digging around. He appeared to be sniffing. “It was a hell of a mess you made.”

Echo had to own that, because some poor cadets were now in charge of cleaning it up which he did feel guilty about.

Tech, however, asked in a tone of slowly coalescing bafflement. “What relative scale of ‘mess’ measurement are you using, exactly? Normal Republic standard, cadet training exercise, general regs, Command Corps, the Jedi, Master Yoda or the Bad Batch’s?”

Echo had just enough time to mentally agree that, yes, Master Yoda should have a category all of his own, when Hunter’s heartfelt sigh rang out. “Never mind. I’m too tired to do the arithmetic. Ha!” He apparently found what he was looking for. He turned around to face them while they both stood there like sheepish shinies. 

“Gentlemen, I’ve been pulled off duty mid-mission, which I hate, been reprimanded by the brass, which I hate, and found out my two steadier squadmates provoked a brawl in the mess hall, which I don’t like very much either.” He looked at them both sternly, halting any protestation that the provoking hadn’t been on their account. “Command has essentially ordered us off Kamino and into the field ASAP in order to not start a full-on war with the Intelligence department, and don’t expect any useful help from that quarter in the near future, by the way. I ought to have you on scrub duty, and I’m sure the commanders here would praise the Maker for it, however,” he rose up and dug around in the mess on the table. “Wrecker and Crosshair are on their way and we have a new briefing packet to go through and we don’t have time for any of that karking nonsense if we want to get the kriff off this rain soaked hell so, ” Hunter slammed down three regulation tin mugs down. “Your punishment is to have your grog rations be the worst rotgut moonshine for a week. Unfortunately,” Hunter grinned at them, pouring the bottle he held out, the scent of pure liquid ambrosia wafting up. “We don’t have any rotgut moonshine so you’re going to have to make do with some of this old Corellian brandy instead.”

Echo swallowed his laughter as he took a mug from his squad leader.

Hunter tapped mugs with him. “Drink up. And don’t do it again.”  Then he knocked his mug back in one swallow.

“Yes, sarge.” “Yes, sir.”

“Ye gods,” Tech added sarcastically, taking a slug. “That was awful. This is cruel and unusual punishment, sergeant. Same again, I suppose? We may require more discipline.”

Echo downed his, feeling the burn pleasantly cut through the general chill of Kamino. “I don’t think I’ve learned my lesson, sarge,” he added, holding out his mug without batting an eye.

“I must be a failure as a leader,” Hunter said, pouring out more. “I ought to put myself on the charge for that.” 

He’d gotten the second round dispensed when the doors opened, bringing with them a weary Wrecker and a grouchy Crosshair, still covered in filth from field training with the cadets. Crosshair’s eyes narrowed at them. “Did someone forget to invite us to the party?”

“This is a punishment,” Echo explained, saluting with his mug. 

Wrecker was confused. “Punishment for what?”

“For starting a brawl,” Echo said.

“And getting us kicked off Kamino,” Tech added cheerfully.

Crosshair blinked. Then he stalked forward, raised a hand, and clipped Hunter on the back of the head.

“Hey!”

“I just struck a superior officer, sarge,” Crosshair deadpanned, shamelessly whisking the mug out of Hunter’s hand and downing the entirety of it in one gulp and thrusting the empty mug back at their glowering sergeant. “What? I deserved to be punished. I’ll be in the ‘fresher. Nobody will disturb me for at least twenty minutes and kiss goodbye to our water rations.” Then he gently placed his gun case on his bunk and stalked off to the fresher without another word.

Wrecker sniggered. “He’s like an angry tooka when he gets all muddy.” And then stole the entire bottle off Hunter, downing a fifth of it in one pull.

“Hey!” Hunter barked.

“Punishment,” Wrecker shrugged.

“For what?!” Hunter irritably tried to get the bottle back.

“Generally being Wrecker, sir,” the big man placidly held it out of reach.

Echo bust a gut laughing at the look on Hunter’s face.

“That’s certainly a court martialable offense,” Tech said, idly sipping his.

Echo took pity on Hunter and proffered his mug.

“Practically a war crime,” Hunter muttered in agreement, drinking again.

*

It was while Echo was dozing on the Marauder on their way to somewhere else that the urge hit him. 

The ship was quiet. They’d pretty much lit out the minute the bottle was emptied, too worried about being recalled if they stayed for a more conventional mustering out time. Everyone was sacked out and sleeping off their various levels of brandy-induced buzz, except for Wrecker, who had the capacity of a star destroyer for booze and therefore was on watch at the helm, probably scribbling away in his sketchbook. 

Echo got up and dug around under his designated rack. There wasn’t much storage space that wasn’t used on the Marauder but this box had been tucked away without comment from the squad for months, serving as nothing but a dust magnet. With a heavy heart, he drew it out and took it into the aft section, where he wouldn’t disturb the others with any noise.

The Corellian brandy bottle was missing - Echo was pretty sure they’d just drank it. That was alright though, he hadn’t expected that to last very long anyway. It had been a fitting enough send off; Fives would have laughed his ass off at the spectacle of his rule-following, never-put-a-foot-wrong, regulation-spouting disaster of a twin being such a rogue and starting a mess hall brawl. 

The thought brought a brittle smile to Echo’s lips. Hell, if Fives had still been here, he’d have thrown the first punch well before Tech would have gotten the chance, and shaken Tech by the hand for his righteous grievous bodily assault on that uppity Intelligence officer. He’d probably have broken out the bottle himself to celebrate, grinning like a nexu.

Echo gently pulled out the rest of it. Old blacks that Echo had despaired of, because Fives insisted they were his favourite even though they’d been patched to hell and back. He laid them out carefully and turned to the little that was left.

A shard of crystal chandelier; from Galvadore. A woven band made from their climbing ropes in training on Kamino. A thick mollusc shell, from Rishi. A little tchotchke that had once belonged to Cutup made from bent flimsi pins in the shape of a trooper that Fives had ended up with, Maker knew how. A thumb ring that Hevy had bought once but had never been allowed to wear because the damn thing wouldn’t fit under or over armour. A figurine from the markets of Petell, a polished stone from the siege of Kandoor.

All failures, Echo realized. All the failures we had up until then. There were less than he thought. Less than what Echo would consider failures, considering what some of his failures now looked like. If everyone comes back alive, then Echo wouldn’t call anything a failure anymore.

He wondered why Fives wanted to immortalize those in his things, but even as he had the thought he knew why. Fives always kept pushing himself to do better, be better. To be more. He took failures harder than anyone Echo had even known. Of course he’d keep these reminders; he’d never allow himself to forget and make the same mistakes again. 

Echo pulled out the broken lumenlute and cradled in his metal lap, wondering.

Echo dragged his old datapad out of the box too. He’d all but forgotten about it when he’d shoved it away with all the rest of his ghosts, filled it’s need with other things and ignored the weight of it sitting in the back of his heart. He plugged it into a nearly socket; the screen was cracked, but it flickered to life.

There was the reply that Rex had sent him, whose intelligence Echo hadn’t been ready to know. He accessed it, heart hammering under his chest plate.

It was, like Rex, brief and to the point, conveying maximum information with minimal words.

He didn’t take your death well.

And a file attachment that looked like an official medical report. When Echo accessed it, it looked at first like a report into the current status of immunizations, but Echo wasn’t fooled. There were discreet ways to file an official report that made a possible demotable infraction not get flagged on a trooper’s file, something which they would do for each other if someone had a bad night and the officers didn’t think punishment was really warranted. Usually drink would be involved, or spice, coupled with a bad mission.

This was too. There was no video - that file was ‘corrupted’, but the written report, coached in careful, AI scan dodging terms, was stark enough. Fives had come back from Lola Sayu, where Echo had been lost, gotten blackout drunk, flown into a rage and torn through the barracks like a madman.

Fives, who was such a bright light, who jutted his chin out at any challenge. 

Fives had done a lot of damage on his rampage; to the barracks, to other troopers trying to calm him down, to himself. Somewhere in the midst of his breakdown he’d smashed the lumenlute hard enough to leave it as Echo now found it. The report indicated, even in opaque terms, that Fives’ rampage had ended there, the only observation noted was that Fives only became violent after that if anyone dared approach him.

The end of the report was a brusque notation and signature from Rex, indicating he’d been summoned and that ‘events had come to a satisfactory conclusion’ and that ‘no other investigation was required at this time.’ Echo could just imagine what it had taken from Rex to get through to Fives in that state.

Echo heard an unexpected blue starburst rise up from below. He looked down to see his own tears hitting the lumenlute, the damaged sound box still intact enough to resonate the sound of them landing.

More tiny blue starbursts joined in as Echo looked down at the lumenlute, and finally allowed himself to have the thought that he’d not let himself have all those months ago when he first saw what had happened to it.

The lumenlute had been Echo’s. Fives had cunningly slipped it into his hands, another strategic maneuver in his endless quest to draw Echo out of his regulations and books and into the wonder of the wider galaxy. He’d wanted Echo to engage. He’d wanted Echo to stand out, like him.

And Echo had never known it until this moment, crying over the broken avatar of all of Fives grief and regrets, knowing that his brother had carried Echo’s death with him as his greatest failure. Echo wished more than anything else in the galaxy that there was some way to tell Fives that it wasn’t his fault, to take some of that agony away from him.

“Oh, Fives,” Echo whispered, pressed his one hand over his mouth and finally letting the tears pour out like rain.

Chapter Text

They were tensely waiting near the power station for the go-ahead when they heard it; their sarcastic shadow on overwatch suddenly turning the comm channel blue with virulent swearing, backed with the rain of blaster fire.

“Crosshair, report!” Hunter’s bark was low, but not as subvocal as he’d probably have wanted it to be.

“Position kriffing compromised!” Crosshair snarled. “Native guerilla scout patrol with the most force-damned karking luck! I’ll take care of them and rendezvous to-” The comm cut off with startling abruptness.

“Crosshair, come in,” Hunter sunk low to the ground in the shadows, blending so perfectly with the environment that if Echo hadn’t known for a fact that the man was at his ten, his eyes would have skipped right over the clone sergeant.

“Analysing comm feed,” Tech’s cool voice cut across the line, his voice detached as he worked the problem. “It’s not signal strength. Something may have damaged Crosshair’s comm hardware.” Or Crosshair was damaged, which remained an unnamed worry. Tech dealt in absolutes where he could.

“We gotta go and find ‘im,” Wrecker hissed, which was as close to an indoor voice as he could get. “He could be in trouble!”

Echo could see Hunter’s brow pinch, even with the helmet on, by the way his head moved. They were so close to completing the infil and shutting down the Sep’s power supply for their droids on this planet. The mission was a time crunch, since a pitched battle was due to be waged between GAR forces besieged at the planet’s capital city and the invaders. They needed this hydropower plant down yesterday.

Tech and Wrecker were in no position to help. They were currently cooling their heels on the big convoy ferrying indentured workers into the plant for the day's labour, either working the turbines or hammering away at the surrounding forest with the ecosystem stripping big chippers. The clankers liked flat terrains; they were easier to scan and secure. The planet’s hydrodam was now a Separatist asset and they were terraforming the neighborhood to their tastes.

That left Hunter and Echo skulking on the perimeter of the denuded forest, prepping to do a more traditional smash-and-grab infil to distract the Seps from an already in progress covert infil. Echo was here as technical support to shut down the dam’s systems. Unfortunately, his… rather unique appearance meant he couldn’t be on the covert end. He and Hunter were stuck doing things the hard way.

Echo could see the decision forming on Hunter’s shoulders and decided to get ahead of it. “I’ll go,” he offered.

Hunter’s helmet flickered to him, a mere glint in the shadows. “We need you at the consols,” he shook his head.

“You have Tech for that,” Echo argued. “This place wasn’t purpose-built by the Seps, it belonged to the native government. The systems aren’t protected against enemy incursions like a proper war set up would be. Tech should be able to get in, easy.”

“That is true,” Tech said over the comms, the roar of the convoy hopefully keeping in him blowing his cover. “It should be relatively simple if I can access the right terminal.”

“Negative,” Hunter returned stonily. “I’m the fieldcraft specialist. I’ve done this before. I’ll go.”

“You’re also the leader,” Echo insisted. “And when things start going off in there there’s going to be a bunch of press ganged workers panicking all over the place. They’re going to need someone with authority to keep them from getting themselves killed.”

“I know the terrain, Echo,” Hunter argued quietly, shifting in place impatiently. 

“I studied every probe drone’s intel and all the points of interest marked by the Intelligence wonks,” Echo retorted. “I’m anal retentive, surprise. And also, I am an ARC. This ain’t my first grav-ball game, sir, with due respect.”

Hunter, who had very nearly cracked a laugh at Echo’s bullheaded self-deprecation, flitted his gaze to the powerplant. He didn’t have time to argue the point and neither did Crosshair; they both knew it. “Alright, get going. Check in regularly, that’s an order. Fuck radio silence.”

Echo gave a half salute and sidled back into the brush, moving slowly at first because of the damn motion detection net, and then ever more quickly as he moved deeper in the green, re-running the route in his head as he moved. 

The powerplant was perched at the bottom of the dam that gave it power, a massive wall that stretched up well over three kliks between two narrow cliff faces, keeping the water at bay. The valley they were in remained quite narrow for some time; it had been the bed of quite a deep river that had bifurcated the mountains that towered up even higher than the dam either side. Narrow was relative, though; it was still a couple of kliks across before you hit a wall of grey stone either side. The intervening centuries of growth in the fertile riverbed soil post the dam building had turned the valley into a densely packed fjord of green, a bright splash of colour on the satellite feeds, surrounded by the grey of the high alps before it cut down to the lowlands and civilization. 

Echo kept parallel to the river as he moved, slightly cursing but mostly in awe that Crosshair could be so certain of his coverage at such a distance from them. His choice of perch had been a gnarled, ancient tree growing out of a stony hill, jutting up into the sky to lord over it’s brethren and incidentally giving an excellent view of the powerplant and its various coming and goings from a sheltered little nook in the branches. Crosshair had selected it for maximum field of vision and minimum chance of detection.

At least, that had been the plan.

Echo travelled about two thirds of the way to the tree before making the call to cross the river. Before that he was too close to the scanners running at the plant, but after that he’d be vulnerable to whatever guerilla fighters might still be lurking at this end of the valley. He was out in the open from either direction as he crossed in any case, field pack and guns balanced precariously on a scomp link that wasn’t designed for this and steadied with white knuckled fingers as he waded. Thankfully the water wasn’t too deep; the dam works held it at a steady trickle, only high enough to hit Echo’s waist. It was going to be sith hells on thrusters carting someone back across it, though, with all their field gear and weaponry in tow. Echo hoped Crosshair was ambulatory when he found him.

He hoped more than anything else Crosshair was alive.

Echo didn’t have to parse his concern for Crosshair; Crosshair was a squadmate and a brother and that was the only bar anyone had to hit to make it personal to him as far as Echo was concerned. Beyond that, Echo just cared, relentlessly, and was one of those rare souls that genuinely didn’t hold it against anyone who didn’t care back. It was nice, but it wasn’t necessary. Which was really just as well for Crosshair because Crosshair was just about the prickliest, angriest, touchiest nexu that ever skulked through the universe, taking offense at everything, up to and including existence for existing. 

But he was, Echo admitted, given a hell of a counterweight to such an abrasive, blood drawing character flaw; he was a supernaturally good shot. Echo was reminded of this when he found his first guerilla fighter still over a half a klik from the perch, stone dead from a neat plasma hole through the helmet. Echo tried to sightline and couldn’t even parse out a single clean line of fire through the trees. How the hell had Crosshair even managed to see them?

The entry wound was in the back of the head. The fighter had been hit running away from the perch. All things considered, Echo couldn’t blame the poor bastard. 

There were more as he warily followed the trail devastation back to origin, keeping his eyes on a swivel while he looked for anything suspicious. Only the white noise of the greenery met his senses, the woods preternaturally quiet and, at this altitude, slightly hazed with fog.

There was another fighter. And another. All dead, single shot, no fuss, no mess, no misses.

Echo pressed on. 

He was no tracker like Hunter but he had enough know-how to guess that it had only been a small group here. He found more of them, littered like broken dolls amongst the ferns and brush, including one collapsed with a gaping hole bigger than Wrecker’s fist right through the torso. That was an armour-busting round; the still cooling Firepunch rifle laying on the bed of pine needles right next to the body. 

Echo charged forward and hauled the corpse off the prone, armoured up figure beneath it.

“Took your sweet time, reg,” Crosshair ground out irritably, moving feebly on the tree roots he’d landed on.

“Nice to see you too, Crosshair,” Echo replied. “Stop karking moving and let me check you over.” 

Crosshair’s comm was busted; it looked like he’d slammed it on something on his way down. And it had been a hell of a drop; when Echo looked up he saw broken branches and scrapes in the bark all the way to the perch he’d set up.

“Are you blind as well as slow?” Crosshair snarked irritably. “My leg is broken, or I would have walked away.”

Echo hissed in sympathy. Even under the armor he could see the wrongness of the line of the long limb. He carefully released Crosshair’s helmet. The view window was seared with an ugly blotch from blaster fire but it had done its job protecting its wearer. Still, Echo needed to check Crosshair’s tracking because a head injury would be the icing on the cake at this point. Crosshair blinked at him, face pale and clammy, but his eyes were as sharp as ever. “See anything you like, reg?” he spat grumpily, teeth still clenched around the pain.

“Not for all the beskar in creation,” Echo deadpanned, and activated his comm before Crosshair could launch counterfire. “Hunter, do you read?”

“Copy. Status?” Hunter’s voice was tense.

“One sniper, successfully located,” Echo was pleased to report. “He’s out as far as the mission goes. His leg is busted. I’d say he fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, but we already knew that.”

“Oh, fuck you!”

“He’s also conscious,” Echo added dryly as Hunter’s quiet snort of amusement came across the line. “I’m giving him my comm and doing a quick perimeter check to make sure there are no enemy combatants in the vicinity. Then I’ll see what I can do about transport.”

He unclipped his comm, handed it to a grudging Crosshair, risked sudden death by hauling the taller man to sit up against the tree while he hissed and swore virulently, and left his rifle in easy reach. 

Then he left. He knew how this worked. Crosshair would spit and growl like an angry nexu and wouldn’t admit to bleeding to death if Echo fussed, but Hunter would get the truth out of him. Echo just had to give them enough space.

He did a careful sweep, but even in his methodical heart Echo knew there were no other fighters nearby. He didn’t know if any of them had gotten away - this is where his average tracking skills completely failed him - but they clearly hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near a lethal sniper holding a grudge.

Mindful that it would be wiser to assume that some had, and therefore alarms could be being raised as they speak, Echo got out his field knife and started hacking away at some promising looking saplings.

By the time he dragged his bounty back to his wounded squadmate, the fog haze had thickened nicely and Crosshair looked nearly as grey in the face as the air, forehead beading and clammy. “You must be joking,” he hissed as he saw what Echo was laying out on the ground.

“I’m not carrying you out of here in my arms, am I?” Echo retorted, laying out the poles on the ground. “You’re heavier than you look even without the armour and I need to have my one hand free in case any of your new friends try for a second meet-and-greet and a trigger needs to be pulled. What did Hunter say?” he asked, unwinding a length of rope from his field pack. They’d rappelled into the valley with their mountaineering field packs so they had plenty of cord to use, at least.

Crosshair made a sour face. “The Marauder won’t be able to collect us through the foliage cover - not without serious difficulty. Hunter wants us to rendezvous back at the powerplant, they can bring the ship more easily in the deforested area once they’ve completed the mission. Tech and Wrecker are almost to the gate; they should be going in soon.”

“Then we’d best hustle,” Echo said. “Wouldn’t want to miss our ride.”

“You are an obscenely determined optimist,” Crosshair grunted, wincing as he shifted and jarring his bad leg. “I would call it your only stand out talent, but I don’t consider it much of a talent.”

Echo gave him a bright, cheery smile, all teeth, and then completely ignored him as he assembled the travois. He was rewarded with Crosshair’s annoyed huff. Crosshair hated to be ignored almost more than he hated the regs. 

Getting Crosshair on to the travois proved a far trickier problem than fashioning it. Especially since Crosshair had his own ideas about acceptable field medical treatment. “Hold on, I’m going to lock my knee joint,” Crosshair grunted as Echo lined up the makeshift stretcher next to him as best he could on the uneven ground.

“Whoa, wait a second!” Echo jumped in. “That’s going to kark you right up, pain wise. And we don’t even know where it’s busted! You could be making it a lot worse!”

“It hardly matters,” Crosshair snapped. “Locking it will immobilize it. I don’t particularly like the idea of feeling like I’ve been set on fire from every bump we’ll cross in that thing,” he sneered at the travois. “Besides, taking the armour off to splint it properly would be a waste of time we don’t have. Some of the fighters got away. Unless you feel up to a pitched gun battle while surrounded with no close range backup on hand…”

“Okay, okay,” Echo gave in. He didn’t like it, but unfortunately Crosshair wasn’t wrong. “Fine. Let me just straighten it up first. It might help.”

The joint locks were meant to be for unconscious troopers being hauled off a battlefield, because moving a soldier in heavy armour is already enough of a problem without wildly flopping limbs adding a layer of difficulty and potentially compromising the spine. They turned the armour into its own backboard and splints, of a sort, but all the various complications that could and would arise from being locked inside your own armour meant they were only to be used as a very last resort.

Apparently, Crosshair’s temper got them to the last resort pretty quickly. Kix would’ve bitten through his medical scanner if he’d ever found out Echo had been a party to this.

Once again, though. Crosshair wasn’t necessarily wrong. Time was of the essence, and their backup was a long way off and had things to get done first before they would be in any position to assist.

“Ready?” Echo asked as he manipulated the limb into the straightest line he could while Crosshair’s pupils shrank from the pain.

“Oh, no, let’s go dancing first,” Crosshair ground out sarcastically. “On three.”

“Two,” Echo nodded.

He hit the knee joint lock switch.

The leg armour snapped into a fully straight and locked position.

Crosshair went as white as snow, an aborted scream whistling out between clenched teeth, before his preternatural eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped into unconsciousness. 

“Awesome,” Echo muttered, checking the joints for any sign of blood. Force help them if the fracture was comminuted and there were bone shards sticking out under there, slowly bleeding him to death. Field scanners indicated Crosshair’s blood pressure was average, but it was normally higher than average because his enhancements had done a number on his thyroid. It didn’t seem to be dropping, which is the best Echo could probably hope for.

Loading the sniper onto the travois took several sweaty, grunt filled minutes. For all that he looked like a starving acklay, Crosshair had some weight to heft and shifting a body with only one working hand was tricky to say the least. Echo put Crosshair’s helmet back on him when he managed to load him up and strap him, because they needed all the protection they could get at this point.

After that it was just a brutal haul through the trees back towards the river, rope straps pressing his cuirass against his chest and his legs joints whining slightly under the strain. Echo hated to admit to any advantage the Techo Union had bestowed upon him, but synthsteel legs and the power of articulating servo joints came in handy right about now.

There was a moan from the back about ten minutes in. “Crosshair? Echo craned around. “Can you hear me?”

There were several seconds of laboured breathing before he was rewarded with an “Unfortunately, yes. How long?”

“Fifteen minutes of swooning like a Coruscanti society dame,” Echo told him. “Pain level? Any numbness? Dampness?”

“Searing, unfortunately no, and no,” Crosshair grunted. “I can feel my toes moving, at least.”

“That’s something. We should be at the river soon, and then we get to have a fun problem solving workshop about how to haul you across it.”

“Lovely,” Crosshair snarled, patting his rifle, running his fingers over it like it was a set of prayer beads. 

Or, maybe, like Wrecker might squeeze Lula. Echo had a sudden vision of Crosshair cuddling his gun on his bunk, and was disturbed at how easily the image came to him. 

“How’d you pick the Firepunch over all your other options, anyway?” Echo made a game attempt to fill the silence, since the dragging sound and the trail left by the travois meant that stealth was not on their side. 

“I am not,” Crosshair snapped. “In the mood for scintillating conversation, especially considering a reg barely knows how to spell it, let alone perform it. Rally your factory-standard brain to keep lookout for enemy fighters; that might actually make you useful. Regs certainly exist to be useful.”

Okay, so there went that avenue of conversation. Echo’s philosophy about the receiving of gratitude was undergoing a slight rewrite in the face of Crosshair’s surly abrasiveness. Mind you, Crosshair could make a Jedi despair of the Force, so there was that.

He’s in pain, Echo told himself. He’s in pain, he’s not with any squad member he likes, and his attitude doesn’t change the job you have to do. As a balm to Crosshair’s corrosive disdain, the mantra held, at least for now.

All they had to do was get back across the river, back to the rendezvous point and wait for pickup. There were noises that weren’t the general white noise of the forest echoing through the valley now, so the fight was probably on as they speak. Echo didn’t have time to take issue with Crosshair’s personality malfunctions, so he didn’t.

Within sight of the river, though, Echo didn’t have time for anything.  

The comm, still in Crosshair buzzed to life. “Echo, Crosshair, respond!”

“We read,” Crosshair retorted, almost sitting up on the travois at the urgency in Hunter’s voice. “Status?”

“Evac, evac, evac!” Hunter yelled, sounding like he was at a full run. “The Seps are going to blow the d-!”

The last word was drowned out by an ominous boom from up the valley. Scores of birds took panicked flight as a plume of smoke and dust rose from the top of the dam, where it towered above everything.

Then came the roar of falling water.

Echo didn’t hesitate. He turned them around and hauled hell bent for plastoid away from the river even as the initial gush of water pouring over the damaged top of the dam rushed along the banks in a foamy, silty mess.

The dam wasn’t completely destroyed; they’d be underwater already if it had all gone at once. But it was compromised and Echo wasn’t about to test their luck staying put and praying it held. His legs pumped like pistons and Crosshair was suddenly as light as air on his back as they flew into the forest, heading for the nearest cliff face on their side of the valley.

“Downstream, reg, downstream!” Crosshair barked even as he gave their status and direction to Hunter.

“If that thing goes we won’t make it!” Echo retorted, his snap bracketed by the low, teeth rattling, angry groaning coming from the broken dam, rather driving home his point. Echo had never wondered what thousands of tonnes of rock sounded like screaming, and he didn’t cherish knowing it now.

“You’ll make it!” Crosshair gritted out. “Leave me!”

“Not happening!” Echo dug in his heels and hauled faster. Birds and animals, all the life tucked into this little green place was madly scrambling under his feet and all around them, desperate to get away. A four legged species the size of a ton-ton took a flying leap over their heads, the stink and heat of it close enough to feel, before it landed and disappeared into the trees beyond.

“What the actual kriff are you going to do when we hit a wall?” Crosshair bellowed. “Walk up it?!”

“Well, gee, I thought I’d use the mass of climbing gear we used to get into this sithpit!” Echo snapped back, stung into sarcasm. “Now will you… please… shut… up! I’ve got… to… save… my… karking… breath!”

Echo heaved the travois along to the sounds of the mass stampede of everything living here, the ominous, continual, mournful moaning of the failing dam and the ever rising sound of rushing water, which felt so insidiously loud that Echo was sure it was literally at his heels.

The world became a blur of slapping branches and stumbling over roots and the insidious fog that was pouring into the valley along with choking dust from the explosion. Visibility shrank to Maker-only-knows what. All Echo could do was grit his teeth and keep hauling, hoping they hadn’t gotten turned around in the haze.

He almost ran into the cliffs before he realized they were there, the sides so sheer that Echo nearly mistook the grey for a particularly thick bank of fog. Behind him, the dam howled.

“Hunter, do you read? Hunter?” Crosshair bit out over the comms.

“No good?” Echo lowered Crosshair as carefully as circumstances allowed and unstrapped himself.

“No,” Crosshair scowled at the useless comm. “Their line of retreat was probably back through the dam works and over the mountain path the convoy took to get in on the other side, especially if they’ve got a bunch of civilians in tow.”

“And I just bet it’s just our luck that this stone is dense enough to block out line of sight transmission,” Echo groaned. Great. They might be able to finagle something to access subspace transmission frequencies, but that would require time to tinker and time was not in surplus supply right now.

Echo grimly reached to disengage his field pack, and paused. Crosshair hadn’t been idle in their mad dash for safety. He’d managed to contort his long body to reach his own field pack strapped beneath his feet and get it open, all without falling off the travois. While Echo had been playing pack bantha he’d readied his climbing filament in a neat coil and made a little headway making loop knots in the line and lined up his collection of cams and his rappelling pulley. “I don’t suppose you can just shoot a line from the Firepunch?” Echo asked with little hope. Crosshair wouldn’t be messing about with their mundane field gear if he could fix everything using his beloved rifle.

“No,” Crosshair said tersely. “Even if the grapple was designed for something like that and the line long enough to reach, one of those kriffing bastards got in a lucky shot,” he turned the rifle, showing the warped, sunken panel of the top edge. “The fusion engine’s still clean enough for blaster fire but the filament reel is fucked to the sith hells and back. I can’t even crack it open to get the line out for manual use.” He sounded more pissed about the damage to his precious rifle than he did to his actual body.

Okay, Echo thought, hurriedly yanking out his own climbing set. Between them they had about sixteen cams. Twelve ordinary hammer-into-the-rock-face-for-a-hand-hold cams and four precious vibro-cams, which had a laser bore that would drill a neat hole into solid rock and then a couple of neat holes at right angles in the hole it already dug, forming a perfect anchor point that wouldn’t shift even if the entirety of the Bad Batch was hanging off it. 

They’d need three on the side of the travois, which was essentially going to be a rescue stretcher, Echo thought again as he worked. One pinning the safety line above, because the way their luck was going Echo didn’t particularly feel like staring down fate. And two rappelling pulleys - these were the real treasure. They were tough little motors that would wind anything fed through them with speed. If they anchored one above Crosshair and one below, they could attach a line to the travois, thread it through the top one, send the line end down to the bottom one and use them both like an elevator, lifting Crosshair in careful stages.

Of course, some poor idiot was going to have to spend a great deal of time hammering in ordinary cams to anchor both pulleys and endlessly forging up to place the top pulley and then down to reel the whole thing along from the bottom, before starting the whole cycle again. 

“Well, reg,” Crosshair gestured grandly, having wordlessly deduced their method of assent and currently working on a hanging rig to attach to all four corners of his harness by which to lift it. “It’s your party.”

Echo sighed internally, and kicked the cliff face hard with his boot tips to activate the crampon attachments under foot, and dug out his special climbing attachment Tech had made especially for his scomp arm from the bottom of his field pack and clicked it into place.

Then, after some mental arithmetic on just how much rope they had to work with, Echo started to climb, both his long line and Crosshair’s looped across either shoulder.

Remember, Echo tried to see the bright side. You don’t actually have knees to get strained.

It didn’t help. He had hips, core muscles and shoulders. All the prosthetics meant was that his discomfort was compressed into a tiny, tiny space. The only silver lining, then, was that Echo was long since used to ignoring that.

He didn’t go far up on the first section. If they were going to test this ridiculous idea, it was better to test it at a height where they would survive the fall. He affixed the safety line first with the disgustingly easy-to-use vibro-cam and then set to work hammering in a grouping of cams to hold the lifting pulley in place. The climbing attachment was a hook-and-grab claw on one side and a hammer on the other, because Tech was a genius and thought of everything. He hammered in at least four, which would seem excessive to take the weight of one guy in armour when any one of them could do that, but Echo was workmanlike and workmen didn’t take chances on maybes. Besides, Crosshair could get stuck carrying both their heavy field packs if Echo was going to be stuck going up and down the cliff like a damn spider.

“He was just threading the lift line when the groaning coming from the far end of the valley suddenly became a high, thin screech, with thunderous cracks acting as a counterpoint.

“Reg,” Crosshair yelled up to him. “Any kriffing time now!”

Echo was sliding down the line like it was on fire, the pulley not slowing his descent so much as his nominal grip on the safety line did. He landed hard with a tuck and roll, bouncing up and heading for Crosshair.

Echo could say this much for the sniper; he hadn’t been idly twiddling his thumbs. The three vibro-cams had been thoroughly affixed to the side of the travois, head, middle and feet. The field packs had been restacked and tied in place, with Crosshair’s precious rifle stored along the line of his good leg with a hastily assembled rope holster. The travois knots had been reinforced and a four-point lifting rig had been fashioned and firmly affixed to the corners of the travois and double tied to one of the large D-rings. 

Echo would have meticulously double checked the knots, but a thunderous boom briefly whited out all other sound, the fog itself jolting from the power of it.

There was no more groaning. Now it was a roar.

Echo didn’t wait. He grabbed the travois, hook and hand, and bodily hauled it into position. Even as Crosshair started to attach the lift line to the lift rig, Echo was hammering cams in like a madman to affix the lower pulley and thread the other end of the lift line through it. Even the sheer, heart pounding minute that took, the first insidious tendrils of water began creeping up on their relatively elevated position at the cliffs.

“Okay,” Echo panted. “That’ll have to do. Up you go!” He hit the pulley motor at full speed and listened to it whine as it reeled in the slack and pulled the lift rig to tent tautly over Crosshair’s midriff. 

And then the sniper was airborne, rushing up the side of the cliff towards the first anchor point for the lifting pulley.

Water crashed into Echo’s non-existent ankles.

It wasn’t much at first, but it was a relentless, unceasing gush, the pressure rising exponentially as the water level climbed. Echo could feel the current, even at this, it’s weakest point, steadily dragging at him like an iron chain. The pulley disappeared under the water and Echo was thrust by the rising tide hard into the unforgiving cliff face, struggling not to lose his footing. If he lost it, he knew there’d be no recovering it. The water wasn’t going to grant him mercy.

The rope pulled taunt, meaning the motor had either jammed or they’d run out of clearance above. He felt for the cams under the silty murk, trying to retrieve their precious pulley before the water swallowed everything whole. If he left it that was one precious pulley of two gone and a significant amount of their rope to use as well.

He felt the current trying to drag his feet out from under him as the water surged past his hips. He braced, trying to halt the slip as his fingers desperately dug into the rock face to get the cams to release.

“Cut the line, you karking idiot!” Crosshair bellowed down from above, the vibro-cams now pinning the travois partway up the cliff.

Damn. Echo snapped open his field knife and sawed through the line, wrapping it around his scomp arm as the water knocked him over.

For a moment, it was nothing but darkness, the water clogged with silt and impenetrable, sounds muffled and senses deprived of anything useful, including air to breathe. Echo desperately thrust his flesh hand up and felt it break the surface, grasping the line tight and hauling himself up and out of the muddy murk, flailing on the end of the line like a hooked fish.

He untangled his scomp prosthetic, rewrapped the grip end further up the line, and then stretched further up with his flesh hand. Four more hand-over-scomp pulls for him well free of the water, but his ascent was somewhat assisted by an incandescent angry and pale-faced Crosshair who had had the foresight to clip the rig to the well-secured safety line and was now hauling up Echo’s line hand over hand from above.

“Stay still!” Echo called to him as he braced his dripping boots against the cliff face to leverage his way up with a wall-walk maneuver. “If you drop, we're both in the soup!” He eyed the brown, rising muck below. “Literally!”

“You’re. Kriffing. Welcome!” Crosshair spat, keeping the line tight while Echo rigged a loop around his waist as best he could with one and a half hands and sheer grit.  

It took several minutes for Echo to make his way to Crosshair’s elevation, carefully bracing his feet and spooling up the rope as he went. By the time he reached Crosshair he was already panting with exertion, every joint where the prosthetics met flesh straining and screaming.

“My, my,” Crosshair drawled sardonically. “Where is that fabled ARC-trained endurance level?”

“In my other armour,” Echo wheezed out. He was going to let that blood insult against the ARCs pass, since Crosshair had just flopped back onto the travois, chest heaving and face grey with pain. Shifting around hadn’t done him any more favours than nearly being drowned had done for Echo. “Pain? Nausea?”

“Yes to both,” Crosshair hissed angrily. “I’d love to know what you plan to do about it, regardless.”

“I have painkillers in my pack,” Echo shifted on the line, freeing his flesh hand to reach for his field pack currently resting on Crosshair’s feet.

Crosshair’s hand swung down and knocked his helmet. “Don’t you dare,” Crosshair snapped. “I refuse to be dizzy on top of sick and in pain. Leave it. Get climbing.”

Part way up a cliff was no time or place to pick a fight. Echo did get a field scanner on Crosshair briefly; his vitals and general demeanor hadn’t tanked, at least not by his usual standards, so Echo was forced to be happy with this.

He took stock of what remained. One shortish safety line attached to their precious vibro-cam, one precious remaining motorised pulley and one significantly shortened length of rope to use as a winch line and whatever cams they had left. Okay, so, their climb would have to be in shorter sections up the cliff and Echo would now have the funtimes job of acting as a counterweight on top of everything else, but it was doable.

It would have to be. The steadily rising waters beneath them certainly weren’t.

“Anything on comms?” Echo asked as he braced his feet beneath the travois and risked his weight partially on it so he could reel in their climbing line.

“Unbelievable as it may sound,” Crosshair snarked irritably. “I am aware of the use of an emergency field beacon. Unfortunately for us, Tech was piggybacking our signal through the dam’s comm array to get past the line of sight issues in the valley.”

Right, the comm array that was either in blown up little bits right now or underwater. Either way, they wouldn’t be able to reach the others until they were at least close to the top of the cliffs and could get line of sight signals over the mountains. They were on their own.

Echo could just imagine Crosshair’s sour face under his bucket. Echo ignored it, worked his way around the travois, hooked up the sloppily coiled climbing line and left Crosshair dangling from the safety as he started to free climb up the cliff.

The whole affair turned into a grinding rhythm of affixing the pulley with every cam they had left, threading the lifting line and locking it in, sliding back down the lift line, hooking the rig to the lift line, tensely unhooking the safety line, scurrying back up to affix that to the next anchor point while the lift line played at being a safety line, then grabbing the threaded end of the lifting line and waiting for Crosshair to deactivate the vibro-cams holding him, before riding the line down as Crosshair was slowly pulled up between the pulley’s motor and Echo’s counterweighting efforts.

They made it in what felt like inches at a time, comparatively. The cliffs on this side were high, just their luck.

Eventually, Echo couldn’t stand the silence any longer, he needed something to distract him from his screaming, fleshy shoulders and their shrieking, fleshy muscles. He was due a long massage after this. Hunter was their go-to man there, on top of cooking and leadership. “What are your plans after the war,” he panted idly, because that was always an interesting conversational gambit.

Silence. Then an incredulous “What?” floated up from below.

“Did you have any plans for after the war?” Echo repeated, determined to not be put off by the scorn Crosshair had marinated the word in. “Your squads success rate meant the chances of you surviving were pretty high,” he added, because Crosshair was a prickly-ass nexu but he was a prickly-ass nexu who did respond to flattery.

“Are you actually trying to perform small talk right now?” Crosshair said with disdain.

“Well spotted, sniper eyes,” Echo gritted his teeth as he drove the cam home and then clumsily finagled the pulley loop through the cam loops. Force, but he missed having two hands some days. His helmet was currently resting on Crosshair’s stomach, because he needed his teeth for this. “So?”

“What plans?” Crosshair snapped belligerently. “Why the hell would I have plans?”

“Why not?” Echo triple checked the safety line would hold and that the upper D-ring was placed where Crosshair could switch it with the lower one and then threaded the lift line in a loop through the pulley. “Ready.”

Crosshair grunted as he disengaged the vibro-cams on the travois. There was always a heartstopping jolt on the line as the safety line and the lift line suddenly took a swinging weight, that fragile little moment where they found out if Echo’s work held true the hard way. “Lift,” Crosshair nodded his assent.

Echo hit the pulley motor. He dropped, knees hugging the surprisingly elaborate ball of knots Crosshair had helpfully added to the end of the lift line as a last handhold before falling. Partway down he swung out from the cliff as Crosshair came past on the travois, already propped up to reach up and switch the safety line from lower D-ring to upper D-ring and reactivate the vibrocams to pin himself in place.

They got the whole routine done quickly, which left Echo dangling beneath and slowly making his way back up the line to secure the lift line so it could hold Crosshair temporarily, move the safety line up, reattach Crosshair’s travois to it, go back down, retrieve the pulley and cams, go back up and hammer them in so they could lift again. 

“You didn’t have any plans for after the war?” Echo persisted as he hauled himself back up towards Crosshair.

Crosshair groaned. “Why do you insist on filling the silence with nonsensical blathering?”

“Well, it’s either that or think about just how much my shoulders have separated at this point,” Echo returned mildly. “So? Plans?”

“I don’t have any,” Crosshair retorted irritably. “What clone trooper in the right minds would?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Echo asked, surprised, as he reached level with the travois.

“Oh please ,” Crosshair sneered as he clipped and unclipped various lines. “You play the part of the good soldier well enough, but you can’t be naive to reality. Clone troopers don’t need plans for themselves. We’re disposable weapons in other people’s wars. We’re products, bought and paid for.”

Okay, that was above the usual level of vitriolic bile the sniper generally spat. “So, what, you think we should all act like droids? The war won’t last forever, you know. Don’t you have an ‘and then what’ for what comes after?”

“This war won’t last forever,” was the bitter retort. “There’s always going to be a war somewhere, reg. There’s always going to be a trigger that needs pulling. And guess what? The Republic has merchandise ready to deal with that.”

Echo stared at him. “Wow,” he said. “You really are a fatalistic son of a nerf herder, aren’t you?”

While Crosshair was spluttering in reply to that, Echo began yanking out pulleys and cams, readying to climb to the next lift point.

“It’s not fatalism if it’s what’s going to happen,” Crosshair muttered as Echo climbed past him. “We don’t have contracts that can expire, we don’t have citizenship, we can’t marry…”

“Didn’t stop Cut,” Echo pointed out as he locked his feet and went for another grip hold with his grip attachment. 

“And if any GAR Command ‘officially’ find him he’ll be shipped to a prison planet before the ink on the warrant has dried,” Crosshair snorted cynically. “The only reason they’ve let him be is because they’re too worried the ranks’ll find out that desertion is actually a valid life choice. Clones, making personal choices?” Crosshair sneered again. “Perish the thought. Or have it perished for you.”

“But you agree, it can be done,” Echo had no idea why this had suddenly become his hill to die on. Maybe because it was better than dying on a cliff face. “I’m not saying everyone needs to drop their blasters in the middle of the fight, but eventually they’re not going to have a war for us to fight in. Then we’re going to have to start thinking about what to do next.” 

“We, nothing,” Crosshair disdained. “Our masters will do that thinking for us. After all, we belong to whomever fronted the money.”

“Slavery is illegal in the Republic,” Echo pointed out mildly.

“When convenient,” was Crosshair’s silky reply. “And for given values of slavery. I don’t know about you, reg, but I certainly never signed an oath. I was just told where to point my gun.”

Echo wanted to sigh, but he hadn’t the breath to waste. “Point of interest; we do, actually, have contracts,” he said mildly. “The Clone Trooper Republic Charter clearly states that our service is only mandated until the Separatists conflict is over.”

“Oh, yes, politicians,” Crosshair drawled. “So good at keeping their word.”

“The Jedi do,” Echo argued as he hammered clumsily with his attachment. “I wouldn’t bet against their variety of stubborn. I’m just saying, there may, possibly, be a far side of this to reach. And that, statistically speaking, you personally have got better odds than most. What’s wrong with having a plan for after?”

“The wrong with it is that it’s a saccharine delusion meant to help you lie to yourself about what you are,” Crosshair’s disdain was at maximum. “Clone troopers are disposable. We don’t even count as people to most natborns.”

“We count as people to each other, Cross,” Echo said quietly as he worked.

“Do we now?” the words were bitter as winter on Hoth. “Somebody should make a press release.”

“Look,” Echo said, nettled despite himself. “You can wrap yourself in all the angry victimhood you like, but the vod care, okay? We all care about each other. Every clone, everywhere. What natborn can say that about their entire race? Most of the planets in the Republic don’t even care about everybody who’s on their planet. We’re far less disposable to each other than a natborn would be to another natborn, no matter what you think. Well, us lowly disposable regs , at least. Ready,” he added tersely as the line was threaded.

“Lift,” Crosshair disengaged the vibro-cams and they switched positions on the reel of the pulley motor, Echo swinging past Crosshair with practiced ease. It might be his imagination, but the process seemed to be getting smoother.

There was silence as Echo worked his way back up the lift line again.

“For your information,” Crosshair grumbled as Echo climbed. “I am not the one who treats regs as disposable. You treat yourselves as disposable. I am supposed to applaud it?”

“So you don’t see yourself as disposable and yet you don’t have a plan for doing something other than dying in a war?” Echo asked archly. “Something about that math doesn’t add up.”

“I am indisposable,” Crosshair said with no false modesty. “That doesn’t mean I’m free.”

“You could be,” Echo said as he got level with him. “You start with having a plan. Something that’s all yours, that isn’t put there by someone else’s orders.”

“Like you,” you could hear the sniper’s lip curling. “What were your fabled plans, I wonder? Opening a bar, no doubt. That’s what most of the regs yammer on about when they talk about after the war.”

“Kaffe, actually,” Echo replied levelly.

“What?!”

“We were going to open a kaffe,” Echo repeated, grinning at the sheer annoyance in the set of Crosshair’s shoulders, because to hell with it, he knew the survival value of sheer force-damned spite. “Not on Coruscant, obviously, the market was too glutted. We thought maybe Alderaan or Naboo or somewhere like that. Somewhere where the tea drinkers frequent. We figured there’d be a gap to exploit.”

“I don’t care.”

“Fives would be the front man,” Echo continued cheerfully. “He had good customer service skills. Hevy would be the barista; you can’t leave proper kaff to a droid, we all know that.”

“I do not care.”

“Cutup would work the register, he could tot up sums faster than anyone I’ve ever met. He didn’t even have to think about it. Droidbait would have been stuck on bussing tables, which, if I’m honest, was a disaster waiting to happen,” Echo grunted as he hauled himself up from another funtimes free climb up to the next lift point. The good news was, the water didn’t seem to be rising below them anymore. It was hard to tell. The mist still hazed everything. “I don’t know, I reckon we could have got him there will a little training. We sure as hell weren’t going to put him on cooking duties.” He started hammering in cams to hold the pulley.

“Shut up,” Crosshair snapped.

“You haven’t heard the idea we had for the menu, yet,” Echo teased.

“Shut up,” Crosshair hissed, his voice urgent rather than annoyed.

Echo froze. He hooked himself onto the pulley so he could look down at Crosshair. The sniper had yanked off his helmet and was squinting into the mist. Echo twisted around to see what he could where Crosshair was glaring. He was mildly surprised to find that they’d crested the tops of what was left of the trees; between the mist and the water drowning everything below, it turned the landscape into a surrealist painting, ringing with the shrieks of birds who had been lucky enough to escape the flood and were now angrily fighting for space amongst the few tree tops remaining that Echo could see, and probably the many he couldn’t. If Echo squinted up the valley he could just make up the broken shadow that had once been the dam through the fog, now a gaping, rough edged maw, the decayed gums of an old man.

He couldn’t see anything else of particular note, but no one in the Bad Batch distrusted Crosshair’s eyes. As Echo watched Crosshair slowly hit the silent ping on their one remaining comm. If whatever he saw were their comrades, they should get a response this close.

Nothing.

Echo signed status at Crosshair. Crosshair signed back movement, source uncertain and a subtle flash of fingers towards the opposite ridge. Echo wasn’t completely certain, but they may have gone high enough by now to be level with the lower opposite side; when he peered up the valley he could make out the gape in the dam top as the sun shone through it, and they were nearly level with that. He couldn’t see a damn thing across the way, though, past a couple of drowned tree tops which writhed with their contingent of shrieking birds. The fog was too thick down this end.

If Crosshair noted the movement’s source couldn’t be verified visually, it meant he couldn’t penetrate the fog well enough to be sure. Echo tapped his head; Crosshair did have enhancements in his bucket too; heat vision, electromag scanners, things that would ignore the obstacle. Crosshair made a sour face and flashed the front of his helmet up at Echo, showing the blaster burn across the visor. Echo grimaced; right, that was too damaged for anything other than a blast shield right now.

He signed hold at Crosshair, who shrugged sarcastically, because he wasn’t in a position to move and free climbing up here had been dangerous enough for Echo without risking going down without a line. They were both stuck. About the only thing Echo could do is hook onto the safely line’s vibro-cam and dangle to give his shoulders and hips a break.

Minutes passed, both of them nearly flapping their ears, straining to pick out anything above the riotous cacophony of birds and the now lower but still ever present rush of water from the broken dam. 

Eventually, Echo made an executive decision and started hammering in the cams again. Crosshair head whipped up to glare at him. Echo shrugged. “There’s no point in waiting. If there are enemy fighters on the ridge, we can’t hide. Even if they start firing on us our options are climb,” Echo shook the lines. “Or swim. And I didn’t bring my swimsuit today.” He also didn’t fancy their chances in that silt bath much. The pressure from the ruptured dam was still making for a strong current, likely way too strong to be survivable even if they could strip off their armor.

Crosshair snorted, and began unshipping his rifle from it’s rope holster. At least they had the power of firing back if it came to that.

Nothing happened while Echo hammered, every blow feeling like the noise cracked the sound barrier across the entire valley. Nothing happened when he threaded the pulley, unhooked, rehooked various lines and signaled he was ready to Crosshair. He nourished a tentative hope that whatever or whomever Crosshair had seen was either not an enemy, had left the area or simply could not hear their racket over the raucous chorus of birds.

Regardless, their only way was up. 

Echo dropped, Crosshair rose. Lines were switched and Echo was climbing back up again to meet the travois at the apex of the safety line. “We never did come up with a name for it,” Echo murmured, almost to himself. He wasn’t going to deny the sudden tension that gripped the air was gnawing at him. “We never could agree on what sounded catchy enough.”

“For the love of the Maker,” Crosshair hissed as Echo heaved himself up the line, trailing a loop of it behind him. “Are you still blathering on about that? It doesn’t even matter! Just shut your karking mouth, for once!””

“Why does the idea of having a life outside the GAR upset you so much,” Echo asked curiously. “It’s just a dream, Crosshair. Everyone’s gotta have something to hang onto in the middle of all this mess.”

“Because fooling yourself into believing a lie is just another way to get broken,” Crosshair snapped angrily. “Look at you, reg. Waffling on about kaffes and dreams. You do realize all the people you were going to make that dream with are dead, right?”

The words almost echoed across the water. Echo froze on the line for a heartbeat, before continuing his climb.

“Oh, no snappy comeback?” Crosshair said bitterly. “No wise sounding words spewed out to the hard world for the sole purpose of making yourself feel warm inside? Face it. You made yourself a fantasy that was never going to happen. You’re just too stubborn and too blind to admit it. Well, I’m not. I see everything. There’s no way out of this for any of us. At long as we can pull a trigger, that’s all the future we’ve got. Some of us are smart enough to acknowledge it. You would be too if you weren’t such a baseline. But of course, regs are built for mindless compliance.”

Echo gritted his teeth and grabbed the edge of the travois to swing himself up. “So that’s it?” Echo asked as his legs dangled and he rested on his folded arms. “We’re all just meat droids, nothing more.”

“Oh, is this the part where I’m supposed to be shocked and learn the error of my ways?” Crosshair smirked mockingly. “Give it up, reg. There’s no force in the universe that’s likely to turn me into a bleeding heart.”

“Force forfend,” Echo riposted. “I kind of would have expected you to be a better sniper though.”

Crosshair face drained of smug. “What?”

Echo smirked at him. “You don’t like the system. Well guess what, bantha ass? My brother was murdered. Straight up, murdered. One of ours, friendly fire isn’t, a guy more than good enough to know the two centimeter difference on the thumb safety between ‘threat’ and ‘kill’. No investigation. No court martial for criminal incompetence, even though he more than met the regulatory standard. Nothing. It was a ‘whoops, sorry’,” Echo sing songed. “And then an ‘oh well, let’s all get on with our lives’.”

Crosshair seemed taken aback by the sudden torrent of bitter anger pouring out of the usually stoic Echo. 

“I fucking hate the system too,” Echo smiled thinly. “I’m willing to bet I hate the fucking system more than anyone in the galaxy. More than you, for sure. You never believed, like I did. I found out the hard way how little all those regulations they buried us in actually mean to the people who wrote ‘em. But you know what, Crosshair? I can hate the system. I can rage against it, I can quietly hammer at it until it’s nothing but pieces. But I never,” he got right up in Crosshair’s face. “Take it out on the guys who are trapped in it with me. So do me a favour, sniper. When you want to give a grand ode to the futility of existence and fire rounds at the reasons for it, try to hit what you’re fucking aiming at. Hate the system. Not the brothers who are on your side.” Echo leaned back. “Not yourself, either.”

Crosshair’s mouth opened. He hesitated.

Then the round from the antitank railgun landed right beneath the travois in a shower of heat, noise and shrapnel, punching a hole an arms length deep into the stone and, incidentally, scything a chunk out of the side of Echo’s cuirass like it was made of flimsiplast. 

He dropped.

Chapter Text

Later they would realize literally the only thing that saved them was the damn fog and the guerillas so-so understanding of the Seps heavy artillery technology, particularly the thermal targeting function that they had, for some reason, neglected to use.

Echo dropped off his handhold on the travois, instinctively gripping the rope with his dominant hand, which was not actually a hand anymore, which is probably how his gripping attachment’s imprecise braking power on the line managed to send him into a tangling spin with the loop of the lift line that had been dangling beneath him, waiting to be re-coiled for the next use. Echo, in wildly trying to halt his drop into oblivion, managed to get a loop of rope tangled around his neck and it was probably only his incredibly robust spinal implant that kept him from breaking his skinny neck as his full weight was taken by the line and the rope tightened punishingly all around as a result, his scomp climbing attachment pinned at the elbow by another knotted loop above and his flesh hand digging frantically at the tight noose to try to loosen it even as he desperately choked for air.

He was vaguely aware of Crosshair cursing a storm above and wrathfully returning fire in a barrage of shots, but Crosshair couldn’t help him. 

The problem was that Echo couldn’t really help himself, either. He couldn’t loosen the noose to take even a little breath, his scomp arm was contorted in the wrong position for the gripper to grip anything unless he wanted to grip his own bicep and he couldn’t reach up far enough to grip a part of the line that would allow him to haul his weight off of it, because his scomp arm was in the way.

He could feel his vision darkening around the edges and his face bulging with the effort of taking in air. The sheer pain from the blaster graze in his side was a distant sensation indeed in comparison to the burn of suffocation.

Echo gave up trying to claw loose the loop from around his neck and fumbled for his field knife, tucked away in his kama and in easy reach like regulations said it should be in a climbing situation. 

Everything else that had happened and now fate wanted him to die by hanging while under fire in the middle of a cliff after escaping a cataclysmic dam burst?

Fate could go fuck itself.

Echo was workmanlike, meticulous and thorough. Which meant he’d studied exactly what the tolerances of his scomp arm was for combat purposes until he could recite them in his sleep.

He whirled the scomp to release the climbing attachment; it fell away with a distant splash. He extended the scomp, drove it into his own shoulder and pushed in hard enough to hurt. This gave him some slack on the arm-to-neck loop that he’d tangled himself in. Not much, but enough to slide his knife with shaky fingers underneath the damn noose line without slitting his own throat.

He sliced through the noose and used the one brief millisecond of hang time the unravelling rope gave him to drop the knife into a watery grave and dart his flesh hand above and grip the line before he followed suit. 

The Techno Union had nothing on millions of years of careful evolution, the longnecks genetic tinkering and sheer, desperate adrenaline when it came to gripping power, it turned out. Echo hung from the line immovably, sucking in great lungsful of precious, sweet air, until he was quite dizzy with it.

“-co! Echo!” Crosshair’s shout came at him from a long way past the ringing in his auditory sensors. “Echo, kriffing talk to me! Echo! Respond!”

Echo didn’t feel up to talking. He just wanted to hang here and be grateful for a little bit, especially since the pain in his side had ceased to be quite so distant now that more immediate problems had been solved.

“ECHO!” Crosshair yelling would bring in enemies for miles if he didn’t.

“You used my name,” Echo rasped out, because Crosshair wasn’t one for showing sentiment, even if he felt it. “You never use my name. Are you dying?”

“Cease trying to be a sparkling wit, you karking bantha’s ass, and get the kriff up here!” Crosshair shrieked angrily.

Right. Climbing. With one hand, one ersatz not-hand, and a line no longer long enough for him to grip with his metal knees. No problem, he’d get right on that. The rope length he’d cut off had slithered to a watery oblivion. It might be his imagination, but they were getting perilously low on rope at this point.

With a grunt of sheer effort, he planted his feet and his precious, wonderful crampons into the cliff face, sucked in a breath, pushed up, let go and hastily snatched a length of rope further up. Slow, steady and lopsided, Echo thought he could at least get up as far as the travois.

Another rail gun blast exploded the cliff face to the left of him, causing him to yell and Crosshair to swear like a member of the Corellian Navy. 

“They’re just karking playing with us at this point,” Echo moaned, gamely not budging his gripping feet as he shook off his shower of red hot pebbles. He wished he had been wearing his helmet; by some force given miracle, nothing had caught him in the eyes, but he could feel a couple of tiny burns peppering his face. 

“I don’t play,” Crosshair hissed from, above, before returning fire with extreme prejudice. Echo totally understood the urge; if his one good hand wasn’t keeping him alive right now, he’d have unstrapped his blaster and taken a few potshots just to relieve his feelings about this whole damn mess.

Echo made it two more plant-feet-and-jumps up the line when the return fire ceased and the line started pulling up of its own accord. Or rather, Echo realized as he looked up, Crosshair had managed to maneuver himself around into a sitting position, one locked joint sticking out hilariously straight and the other leg dangling, and was grunting with the effort of reeling Echo up towards the dubious safety of the travois.

“Keep firing,” Echo told him roughly. “Keep ‘em busy.”

“Shut up, reg,” Crosshair snapped back. “I’m working. I think I can take out the rail gun but I need you to do it.”

Echo’s side was on fire so he decided to save his breath and wall-walk as much as he could to spare Crosshair some of his weight. Goodness knows it would have cost a lot of pain for the sniper to get himself upright and turned around like that. Echo got to the edge of the travois, flailed his scomp arm over the lip of it and felt Crosshair’s - surprisingly - bare fingers grab at the elbow attachment end with a grip that could have rivalled Wreckers.

Echo groaned as he was hauled upwards, his armpits hitting the edge of the travois and legs dangling. He gripped the far side of the travois with white knuckles, half bent across it, panting and trying to think past the pain. He didn’t dare look at how big of a chunk of his side had just been cauterized. When he thought about it later, he was doubly pissed. He didn’t have much flesh to lose these days, Separatist bastards. 

Something hot speared past, far too close to the left of his neck. Echo nearly jumped before he realised Crosshair had somehow contorted himself around into an ersatz prone firing position, half curled around Echo. “What?” he wheezed.

“Shh,” Crosshair said. “I need a stand to lean on to make this shot count and the toe of my armour boot is too rounded to be stable. Necessity compels me to make you useful.”

“Oh good,” Echo said, faintly baffled and probably going into shock. “I do like to be useful.”

Crosshair cracked a smile. “I would have used my bare foot, but some idiot decided to lock my leg joint and therefore my boot.”

Echo was so gobsmacked by Crosshair actually admitting a failing that he didn’t realize the sniper was jinking the rifle barrel this way and that, searching for the sweet spot until he felt the heavy thing settle warmly into the crook of his neck.

“There,” Crosshair said coldly. “Don’t move. And hold your breath.”

Echo opened his mouth, saw the look of sheer, palpable death-to-mine-enemies radiating from Crosshair's eyes and wisely decided not to argue. He sucked in a breath and held it, even when Crosshair made a hilariously fussy noise and reset his barrel minutely because Echo’s shoulders moved with it.

They waited. And waited. Echo had good breath control but his sides still hurt and his brain was starting to loudly demand that his suicidal faith in his teammate give way to actual survival, when Crosshair eyes narrowed.

There was the shriek of birds.

Then…

The crack of the Firepunch and the subsequent boom from the explosion on the opposite side almost but not quite sounded in the same instant. 

It was too fast for Echo to immediately tell what happened, especially since he was facing the wrong direction. He did see his own shadow momentarily sharply painted on the cliff face as a white hot fireball plumed up behind, boiling away a lot of fog in its wake, and he felt the brief, but familiar, pressure of the shockwave at its weakest edge strike his back. 

“Crosshair,” Echo said weakly, trying to crane around and see. “What the kriff did you just do?”

Crosshair tossed aside his rifle and began hauling Echo up onto the travois properly. “I fired a blast right down that karking rail gun’s damn throat just as the blast generator opened up to fire. Judging by the size of the boom I successfully hit the fusion engine. Even Tech wouldn’t be able to rebuild what’s left of it now. The gun or anyone in a half klik radius of it.”

Echo stared at him.

“It’s not that difficult,” Crosshair was a blatantly bald faced liar. “The fog magnified the muzzle flash of the blast generator when the chamber opened up, right before the trigger fully depresses. I just had to dead centre the flash.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Echo said weakly. “But you’re karking scary, Crosshair.”

“Thank you,” Crosshair gave him a satisfied nexu grin, which made him not one jot less scary. “Come on, stop dangling there like a stunned womp rat.”

They grunted and heaved and maneuvered until Echo was a sweaty, shaking wreck sitting next to Crosshair on the travois, shoulder to shoulder and leaning against the cliff face. Crosshair was cursing virulently under his breath as he tried to dig out their sparse medical supplies from the field packs on the other side of Echo while Echo contemplated the cheery fire still lighting a signal on the other side of the ridge faintly, his mind a bit fuzzy around the edges from the pain in his side. He still didn’t dare look down, but the smell of burnt flesh was telling.

“Stay awake, reg,” Crosshair snapped as his silent daze went on for too long even for the reticent sniper.

“‘M wake,” Echo murmured then yowled through clenched teeth as Crosshair slapped a bacta patch over the worst of it, the pain briefly incandescent. “How bad?” he hissed out.

“Honestly, given that the blast could have literally vapourised your ribcage, you got off pretty damn light,” Crosshair said contemplatively as he tried to delineate the edges of the wound as best he could from the awkward angle. “Just a graze. You lost a little skin on top and you’re in for a fun session of debriding some of your armour and blacks that have melted into the edges, but it could have been a lot karking worse. I’ll say this much for you, reg,” Crosshair added as he sat back. “You are the most force damned lucky son of a nerf herder I’ve ever met.”

“Luck is relative,” Echo grunted, because it was. “How’s the leg?”

“Agony, thanks for checking,” Crosshair snipped, although his attempt at his usual levels of venom were half-hearted at best.

They sat back and rested for a while. There were problems that needed solving, but right this second they just needed a moment to get their heads on straight and come down off the adrenaline high. 

“We should have called it 99’s,” Echo murmured. “That would have been a good name.”

Crosshair didn’t offer anything more scathing than a mild grunt this time. He kept his eyes pinned to the opposite wall of the valley, though Echo would love to meet the guerilla fighter who had stuck around after surviving that, for novelty’s sake if nothing else.  “What would you have done?”

Echo came out of his trance-like haze of pain. There were actual system alarms scrolling frantically through the back of his mind, screeching about damage to various cybernetic parts. He couldn’t turn them off. All he could do was fall into the white noise of them. “What?”

“Your stupid kaffe,” Crosshair ground out irritably. “What was your job?”

Echo turned around to look at him blankly.

“Everyone else had a job in it,” Crosshair pointed out, still not looking at him. “What was the fabled Echo’s role in this chintzy little hole in the wall?”

Echo thought about it. He was sure, once, they’d had a job for him, insofar as the joke that had generated the dream itself had had any weight at all. He couldn’t quite remember what it had been, now. “Organising suppliers, I guess. Getting the licenses.  Doing the paperwork in the office round back. I was always the paperwork guy,” he smiled ruefully, surprised to find the observation didn’t spur the kind of self deprecation it usually did.

Crosshair gave a contemptuous snort, craning his head up to sight up the cliff in seeming despair. “You’re doing it again.”

Echo blinked again. “Doing what?”

Crosshair contorted himself around Echo to dig around in his field pack again  - and really, Echo had to check with Tech because no one’s spine should bend like that, no matter how stretched it was - and dug out what looked like a bag within the pack, his usual disdain re-inflated. “Making yourself disposable. You seem determined to be treated like furniture; or worse, like wallpaper. It drives me fucking mad.” He slammed the bag down on the other side of him and started to rifle through it. Echo couldn’t see what was in it.

“You want to make things run, someone’s got to sit down and do all the messy nuts and bolts work, even if it’s just paperwork. What’s wrong with that?” Echo asked.

“You mean, like a droid?” Crosshair asked archly.

“I mean,” Echo was nettled despite himself. “Like the Intelligence wonks who sent us detailed files of the terrain around her so I knew where to go when we ran for our lives. It was probably the most boring, unglamorous job imaginable, but without it we’d be stone dead. The world runs on guys like that, Cross. Being one of them’s no dishonour. What’s so wrong with being the guy in the back?”

“What’s so wrong with being the man up front?” Crosshair parroted back mockingly. He summarily grabbed Echo’s scomp link and imperiously maneuvered it into an upright position. “You make a career out of actively hiding your merits. What are you so afraid of? Hold that there.”

Echo made a face. “Why? And also,” Echo added irritably, feeling defensive. “I don’t make a career out of hiding, I made a career about being the best and not crowing about it.”

“Why not?” Crosshair demanded, looping something around his scomp link that looked, to Echo, like string at first. Deep brown string. “You clearly have talents. They required effort and dedication and a great deal of sacrifice to get. You shouldn’t act like it’s somehow shameful to own them. Spin.”

“What?”

“Spin,” Crosshair twirled a long finger impatiently. “I need you to wind it into a ball. It’s quicker if your arm does it.”

Bewildered, Echo turned the scomp. The brown thread started to wind onto it, slowly first, but gaining speed. “What is this?” he asked.

“It was supposed to be a jumper for Wrecker,” Crosshair sounded hilariously disgruntled. “I suppose it’s just as well, all the more yarn we can use. It’s a lot of karking work for me to re-do, though.” He angrily withdrew a pair of, honest-to-the-force, knitting needles and stabbed them with malice aforethought through the tangles of the knots holding the travois together as a secure place.

“No,” Echo gaped.

“What?” Crosshair side eyed him, amused.

“I refuse to believe that you knit!” Echo said stridently. 

“I don’t,” Crosshair replied smugly. “I knit, crochet, sew, embroider and I can tatt too, though I never found much actual use for lace.” He smirked into Echo’s open mouthed stare. “Keep winding, and shut your trap. You’ll let the flies in.”

Echo craned his head around and looked into the bag on Crosshair’s other side. There was indeed a mass of tightly woven brown wool garment, slowly unravelling under his scomp arm’s onslaught. He stopped. “But why? Why destroy it?”

Crosshair sighed impatiently. “Look up, reg.”

Echo did. To his surprise, the top of the cliff was a lot closer than he’d feared they could be, now that a lot of the fog had been boiled away. It wasn’t close , close, but it wasn’t a demoralizing summit either. 

“What would you say, another two hundred metres or so? Not even that,” Crosshair mused, craning his neck up. “We currently have about fifteen metres of rope left that’s holding us on the side of a cliff, and it’s our safety line. I’ll wager I can get another fifteen out of all this, and what’s in my pack, after proper weaving.”

“That’ll hold us?” Echo asked, peering at the slowly swelling ball of yarn on his scomp link dubiously.

“It’s Mulburian silk yarn,” Crosshair snorted. “It’s proportionally as strong as an iron chain, even at a single thread. Wrecker’s clothes have to be able to stand up to punishment, even if they’re for down time.” While he spoke, the sniper’s fingers were working feverishly fast on another yarn ball, expertly loosing a length of yarn, which he wrapped around his good foot, then used that foot to hook it around his locked leg’s toe boot, and then doing something to arcane and complicated for Echo to follow which somehow ended with him holding multiple strands anchored by the boot toe. The next minute Crosshair was braiding like a madman, hands a steady, ceaseless, unhesitating pattern, using his locked joint as a body loom. “Keep winding,” he grunted without looking up.

Echo kept winding. And winding. Crosshair hadn’t been joking, it was a lot of yarn. “I’m sorry, I’m kissing goodbye to all pretense of dignity and asking,” Echo gave in eventually. “But why knitting?” And why you? He added in his head.

The sniper radiated a faint smugness zone at Echo’s bafflement. “Have you ever tried fighting in blacks that were two inches too short in every direction? No, of course not,” he answered his own question with scorn. “You’re a reg. Everything in the quartermaster’s catalogue was designed to fit your body type.”

“Oh,” Echo blinked. “I see.”

“Do you?” Crosshair snorted. “Do you really? Can you imagine what it was like after finishing your growth spurts to realize that the general forces did not care about you enough to concern themselves with the fact that their supposedly prize elite force were marching into combat with their blacks either creasing into folds under their armour or stretching the seams to breaking point? It was a lot of raw skin, chafing and misery. Of course I learned to sew. I’d’ve done anything not to go one more day in the inadequate gear they gave us. They weren’t going to help us. We had to help ourselves.”

Echo was struck mute by Crosshair’s tone; not bitterness, but resignation. Crosshair had given up even being angry about it. “You make them for the others, too,” he observed carefully.

Crosshair shrug was the epitome of diffident. “It’s something to do when the insomnia strikes. Staring at a datapad screen doesn’t help any. I can knit in the dark, though, until I get tired enough. Foolish to waste the effort on… blankets and things.”

Echo carefully kept the smile off his face. Oh, he was fronting like a karking champion but Echo had his number now. Crosshair was a bleeding heart when it came to the team. He was as soft as the jumpers he apparently spent hours upon hours of effort on for the sake of their comfort, even if he’d go on a murder spree before ever, ever, ever admitting it.

Echo certainly was never going to point that out to his face. He liked his body without blaster holes punched through it, thank you very much. “Fifteen metres, you reckon?”

Crosshair gave him a narrow eyed side look, as if he knew Echo was laying the dreaded charges of sentiment at his feet. “Maybe twenty. Wrecker takes a lot of yarn,” Crosshair grumbled. “Shut up.”

“What?” Echo said brightly. “I’m not saying a thing."

Crosshair scowled at him in a way that made Echo wonder if a long swim wasn’t somewhere in his near future. 

What the hell. He was an ARC Trooper. “Crosshair’s Cross Stitch Emporium,” he murmured, grinning like a nexu.

Crosshair’s head whipped around and his  eyes narrowed, his fingers never ceasing their endless weaving.

“Oh come on, it’s right there,” Echo cajoled him fearlessly. “You could get one of those slingshots and take out any little old lady who tried to shoplift out at forty feet.”

There was a breathless moment of silence. Then “I do like those slingshots,” Crosshair allowed. “Can’t stand people in general, though.”

“Eh, most of your business would be on the subnet anyway,” Echo shrugged. “That’s where craftsmen make their money these days.”

Crosshair’s fingers hesitated on the weave for an instant.

“What?” Echo blinked, then realized. “Cross, you make things. You’re a karking craftsman, okay? That’s what craftsman do.”

“And what are you, reg,” Crosshair deflected like a champion. “Given that you’re determined to be the nobody in the back?”

“Workmanlike,” Echo said proudly.

Crosshair tilted his head up, silently pleading to the heavens for surcease. “You’re doing it again. Debasing your merits, cloaking your contributions. What is so wrong with standing out, exactly?”

“Nothing,” Echo shrugged. “I just never really did it.”

“Before, reg,” Crosshair retorted. “You never did that before. I can’t believe I actually have to point this glaringly obvious fact of life to you, but the ship carrying your ability to blend in anywhere has launched. Launched and been lost in quadrants unknown. What have you got left at this point but the ability to stand out?”

Echo opened his mouth, and closed it. It wasn’t a bad question.

“There, you see?” Crosshair shrugged. “Watching you try to hide in the background is like watching Wrecker try to parse four dimensional subspace vectors. Hilarious, but ultimately futile. Sorry, reg, but I only call you reg out of habit. You’ll never actually be one of them again, even if you try for a thousand years. It might be time to start embracing that reality rather than fighting it.”

Echo said nothing.

“Oh, don’t look so downcast,” Crosshair rolled his eyes. “It’s not the end of the universe to be different. We manage it just fine. Our differences are what make us effective. They also make us valued, which gives us a certain amount of freedoms the actual regs don’t enjoy. You should lean in, not lean out. Who knows,” Crosshair added sardonically. “You might actually discover that it’s a worthy thing, standing out.”

“And,” Echo replied quietly. “If I don’t?”

“I daresay you’ll still be on the squad,” Crosshair shrugged. “Hunter needs someone who isn’t wildly eccentric to deal with on occasion. But who says you won’t? You haven’t tried yet. If I were you, making sure I couldn’t be forgotten would be at the top of my priority list.”

“Why?” Echo asked, surprised.

“Because if you want to have any justice for your brother’s death, you’ll have to make sure he’s not forgotten first,” Crosshair retorted. “And, correct me if I’m wrong, but the only ones left who actually remember him personally that are still alive are you and Rex and maybe a few members of your former battalion. Rex is command corps,” Crosshair shrugged. “Politically speaking, his hands are tied. He can’t afford to make waves, that would reflect badly on the regs he commands. You, on the other hand, have either sunk beneath the notice of the movers and shakers by joining 99, or you’re too valuable to them as propaganda to be easily ignored. You’re outside the normal chain of command either way. You’re free to make a fuss, as long as you get noticed.”

Echo blinked at him. He’d never had it put to him in quite those terms before. He’d never thought of his position as being outside the hierarchy that he’d safely pulled around him his whole life. Could he really do that? Walk up to the command structure and just… demand justice for Fives? “That isn’t how that works,” he said aloud.

“Are you so sure?” Crosshair raised his eyebrows. “Look at us. We’re insubordinate, we disobey direct orders, we set our own plans and run to our own schedule. We are, in a sense, quite terrible soldiers. Didn’t you ever stop to think about why we keep getting away with things like that? It sure isn’t because the regs like us,” Crosshair snorted derisively.

“Because it works,” Echo shrugged. “Even the GAR isn’t so hidebound as to mess with something that works.”

“Right. Exactly,” Crosshair jabbed a thumb at him, still endlessly reeling lines of yarn over it. “We stand out. We’re the best. That makes us valuable. They can’t afford to disregard us, even though I’m sure some would dearly love to. Maybe if you stopped hiding behind that good soldier façade, you’d realize that you’re actually good enough that they don’t actually have any real power over you. And if they don’t, then you can demand anything you want, including looking into what happened to your squadmate. You’re wasting your time trying to play meek and uninteresting. You’re wasting your time hiding. To what end, exactly?”

Echo quirked an odd smile. “It’s what I’ve always done, Cross. I was the guy in the back, getting the little things done. That was what I was good at.”

“Once again, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, reg,” Crosshair bit back, exasperated. “But your days of blending into the background are over. Or haven’t you looked in the mirror, lately?”

Echo went silent for a while. Scathing insults about his looks aside, he’d never thought about his position quite in those terms before, as someone with the freedom to buck the hierarchy entirely. To be able to make demands. It couldn’t be that simple, could it? “They’d shut me down,” Echo said, almost to himself.

“The Hero of Anaxes? Good luck to them,” Crosshair snorted. “They can’t afford any propaganda errors now, not with the frontlines expanding every day. And besides, Rex would stand with you, I imagine. And if they try anything underhanded, well,” Crosshair shrugged. “The Bad Batch is known for a lot of things, but losing members isn’t one of them.”

That was probably as close to a declaration of sentiment as Echo had ever heard from Crosshair’s lips. He quirked a half smile. “Nice to know you have my back.” Because it was; scary sharpshooting skills and all.

Crosshair disdained the gratitude. “Please. I am getting sick to death of you acting like a coward when I know you’re not. It’s idiotic, and I don’t like idiots. Stop hiding, reg. You might actually get some closure out of it, who knows? I’ll settle for you being a shade less pathetic.”

Yeah, that was about Crosshair’s limit for mushy talk today. Echo busied himself with unravelling the yard into a neat ball and then helping Crosshair fix it up to what was left of their lift line.

He also disengaged one of the three travois vibrocams and got to work affixing it to his scomp arm by dint of careful rewiring and a tonne of spare cord. It neatly won him the argument on who would be struck doing the climbing again, much to Crosshair’s annoyance. They both knew he wasn’t climbing on that leg.

Eventually there was nothing for it; Echo, slightly hopped up on as many painkillers as he dared take, had to heave himself, grunting and sweating and the side of his torso burning in the breeze, up the line. The extra slack from Crosshair’s hastily woven yarn rope was maker-sent, especially since the pulley took the makeshift line like a breeze. Two lifts, three, four, and they were in sight of the clifftop, Crosshair regularly hitting the comm ping in the hope that some sort of sightline had been reached to the others. No dice, but they were getting more hopeful with every metre ascended.

Of course, on what Echo judged to be their second to last lift, everything went wrong. 

Crosshair’s eyes just managed to save them. “Echo, movement on the ridge!” was all he was able to bellow out before blaster fire strafed the cliff face, taking out one side of the travois. Their guerillas had regrouped.

Thankfully Crosshair had opted to remain sitting up, or he’d have been fitted for some Echo-style prosthetics soon enough. As it was, there was just enough hold left in the vibrocams for him to grab for the lift line and knot it into his utility belt before the whole structure collapsed, leaving him dangling while Echo tried frantically to reel him in. 

This time Crosshair couldn’t return cover fire; his rifle was a long barreled, two hands required weapon and while Echo didn’t doubt the sniper was both skilled and spiteful enough to finagle it for one hand, he was cursing and trying to reel it in where it dangled, caught on the waving, unweighted safety line.

“Bloody Sep karkers,” Echo hissed, wrapping his scomp arm into the loops Crosshair had helpfully put in and slamming the scomp into the cliff face to activate the vibrocam. Then he pivoted on the line, gritting his teeth as more fire rained above, slamming his eyes shut as clumps of dirt from the actual clifftop came down on him. The bastards were trying to take out the pulley; now their literal only lifeline. Lucky for them it was such a small tar-

Wait.

Dirt. 

Echo peered down at their attackers. Their elevation was across and below Echo, but the valley walls were pretty close together here. They were standing on an embankment of dirt; centuries of collected topsoil blown up from the valley they’d drowned below. 

What did Echo want to wager the boom that had taken out the dam had shaken more than just the wildlife loose from the valley?

Echo braced his crampons against the cliff face, ignored him screaming ribcage and twisted up shoulder - his scomp joint was now taking on a lot of weight - and yanked his blaster out of it’s holster.

He began blasting at full setting, stitching a seam of fire across the packed dirt of the opposite cliff, taking out a rain of loose soil and cutting into the embankment like a huge knife.

“Are you even trying to hit them?” Crosshair snapped as he finally managed to wrangle his rifle back into his hands, wrapping one arm around the line and hoisting his locked joint into position on sheer willpower. The rifle barrel could just sit on it, but the way Crosshair had to position it meant the recoil was going to hit him straight in the gut.

“No, actually!” Echo yelled back and kept on firing. 

“Kark it all!” Crosshair smirked as he saw the hole Echo was digging. “You’re fucking brilliant!” And added steady, if slow, rounds of fire to Echo’s. He could fire less, but his rifle packed a lot more punch.

The fighters were scrambling to get behind cover to start returning fire again. A couple of the brighter ones were backing away from the edge.

Too late; with an almost apologetic crackle, a massive chunk of the ground they stood on, already rattled loose, gave way and slid into the valley, taking the yelling fighters with it.

There was an almighty splash as they hit below. Then they vanished into the foaming brown.

Who knows? The current may have calmed down enough so they might make it with a bit of swimming and hanging onto tree tops. All Echo knew was they wouldn’t be having anymore problems from that quarter anytime soon.

Panting, he holstered, re-positioned and reeled Crosshair to him. They looked at each other; both pale, sweaty, and thoroughly fed up with this whole stinking dirthole of a planet.

They looked up. Fifty metres, and a lot of it was angled rather than sheer. 

“You be my legs,” Crosshair said, looping rope around them one handed while he held onto Echo. 

“You be my arms,” Echo nodded, and then helped secure Crosshair to his back, hips screaming in tune with his side. 

Thus, with Echo pushing and Crosshair pulling, and readily assisted by Echo’s vibrocam and the one Crosshair had just barely salvaged from the destroyed travois, they made their final ascent, operating on sheer grit, determination and spite.

Crosshair was a good one for spite.

Crosshair was a good one. Even though he lived to make that hard to believe some days.

Eventually, finally, they became gravity’s customer rather than gravity’s bitch, and bellycrawled their way to horizontal ground.

After that, Echo lay on his back and drifted for a while, listening to the distant, fuzzy sounds of Crosshair making radio contact in his own interminably scathing way, snarking across the line why yes, Hunter, we do need a pick up and what’s the hold up, did you stop for some mantell mix on the way?!  

Echo was in too much pain to concern himself. He let the world go for a little while, thinking about music.

*

At some point in the future, Echo found a hand knitted jumper on his hammock. It was ARC Trooper blue, sized for his now frankly appallingly lopsided proportions and just about the warmest, softest, most comfortable thing he’d ever owned to date.

He’d read the inherent warning in the stark silence of the gesture, and never said a word about it to Crosshair.

(But if he should just happen to know a guy who knew a guy that could get one of those bleeding edge rifle scopes out of R&D no questions asked, though... well, there was that.)

Chapter Text

Echo had a long convalescence to contend with after his little adventure with Crosshair. The blaster injury to his side got infected and he also suffered the indignity of a cold because his once robustly organized immune system was now a lunatic asylum of half evolved and half artificial parts living in a state of pitched battle on a good day. 

The others patiently waited for both him and Crosshair to heal well enough to get back out into the field. Well, truthfully Crosshair’s leg was fixed up pretty quick and he was grouching his way through physical therapy with Hunter to get him back up to Squad-99 field standards soon enough. They were actually waiting on Echo’s stupid-ass immune system to calm the kark down, so he got stuck on bedrest.

It turned out to be something of a blessing in disguise because it gave him an ironclad excuse to bury himself in research. He may have been through hell and back several times over but certain fundamentals hadn’t shifted in the slightest. If Echo was going to do a thing, he’d do it by the books. 

He coughed and sniffled his way through reams of technical specs, every one he could readily access. He found out, after several fascinating falls down various acoustic engineering exogorth holes, everything he’d ever wanted to know about lumenlutes and then some, including the fact that his lumenlute, essentially, didn’t count as one anymore. The damage was just too great, and lumenlutes were notoriously unforgiving instruments when it came to damage. If anything was even slightly out of alignment in the laser generator, the splitting prism, the crystal bridge, the sound box or the resonator, the things just would not produce sound at all. Well, the laser generator and splitter prism were still intact in the head of the shaft, but the shaft itself was completely awry, the sound box, which was made of delicate crystal, was a mass of barely holding together shards and cracks, the crystal bridge was snapped off entirely and the resonator all but destroyed, the small teardrop shaped finely cut kyber crystals were all that had survived Fives’ rage.

Echo couldn’t fix it. He’d never have that level of craftsmanship. But this didn’t dishearten him; after all, even if he could have fixed it, it’s not like he could have played it when working. The lumenlute required, at the very least, ten working fingers. He went looking through the scope and history of laser instruments in general, searching for a workaround alternative and stumbled, almost by accident, onto an historical record of a progenitor of the fabled lumenlute, which lead him into the fascinated and slightly weird subculture of historical recreationists, the more than slightly weirder subculture of droiders and grinders, and finally landed him in the realm of a little known but still extant member of the light instrument family; the lightbow harp.

The technical specs for those were a beast to find. Luckily he was something of a metadata expert these days. When he finally found them, Echo exulted; he could conceivably cobble together a lightbow harp with the pieces he had and a little ingenuity and time. It wouldn’t have the fine, ringing notes the lumenlute could produce but that was fine. He’d been reliably informed that lumenlutes acted more like bowed string instruments than fretted instruments in terms of sound. The bowharp would be less of a hum and more of a strum and the range of sound would be narrower but Echo had long since been able to work with what he had.

It was a long, grueling process. Designs were drawn up, then changed, then scrapped. More reference books were poured over with a gimlet eye. Various experts were carefully consulted over the subnet, with some well placed white lies and loco-blockers in place about who was doing the asking. Natborns could be weird about interacting with clones, and besides, Echo didn’t want Tech sticking his well meaning but thoroughly sticky beak into it. It’s not that Echo distrusted Tech’s skill or his willingness to assist, but this was something Echo needed to do on his own.

He did waver a time or two when it became clear just how much coding he was going to have to do to make a lightbow harp operating system from nearly scratch, as well as the hardware he was going to have to contend with. Tech could do in a day what would take Echo weeks to do. But Echo was determined; it was time to stop hiding, even from his own body. He had to learn how to adjust it for himself. After all, it wasn’t like he could go back to his old one.

For weeks upon weeks, the sum of Echo’s days were working on his project, sleeping and eating. When they were thrust back into the thick of it, thoughts about kyber resonance frequencies and generator wiring placements danced behind his eyes while they briefed and debriefed - only when they were on the job was when Echo really let himself stop. He didn’t think the rest of the Batch really thought about his sudden preoccupation very much. Echo was the quiet one of the Batch. Sometimes Hunter would come and sit with him while he furiously read about the changes in the process of the delicate reshaping of crystal bridges through history just for the sheer novelty of not having to talk, or shout.

Eventually, though, he couldn’t plan or procrastinate any longer. He had the design, he’d checked it a hundred times, he’d made detailed work lists showing exactly what needed to be done and in what order. He had to actually get to work.

The med-droids on Kamino weren’t a problem. Echo could program their silence, which was probably an abundance of caution on his part. All he let them do is the minor wiring tweaks and insertions he needed. He wasn’t going to let any Kaminoan anything start messing around with his body in any significant capacity. 

Implanting the laser generator and wiring it into the bicep connector of his scomp arm to make use of the kinetic generator batteries was a significantly more complicated process. He had the parts he needed fabricated to his exact specifications and added his painstakingly coded operating system to the generator itself, but implanting it was beyond his abilities. He’d have loved to find a proper bodymod shop - there were always a few on populated and industrial planets - but sadly their mission schedule took them to the Outer Rim where those services were chancier.

He did find a sort of bodymod shop on Tatooine, run by a Toydarian with artificial wings that buzzed like a yalbec’s. It was more of an ersatz clinic, since a lot of people living under the auspices of Hutts eventually needed new body parts. The good thing about Tatooine, though, was that they loved paying customers and no asking questions and Echo could front the money. So while the rest of the squad was off getting drunk or, in Tech’s case, digging through salvage yards for all the really interesting parts the GAR wouldn’t let them requisition, Echo sucked it up and rolled the dice on the risky proposition of Tatooine standards of hygiene.

Honestly, it wasn’t too bad. The Toydarian let him stay awake for the surgery and Echo had to admit his bias had been completely off base. She ran a tight, clean ship. When the bruising healed at the edges of the connector, you could barely tell anything had been implanted and she even calibrated the parts so Echo could tweak the line of fire if it needed adjusting. He’d paid extra for that, unasked for.

Taking apart his scomp link, rewiring it and adding parts turned out to be the most difficult hurdle, where Echo had thought it would be the easiest. After all, he could do all of that himself on his own time. 

The problem became this: there was absolutely no way to hide from Tech that he was tinkering with it and Tech was the curious and jealous sort when it came to tinkering. Echo sort of managed to keep his squadmate’s well meaning sticky fingers out of it by dint of claiming he wanted to learn how to field strip and maintain his scomp link himself in case he got caught out in the field, which wasn’t a bad excuse as excuses go. It even had the benefit of being true. It netted him a four-straight-hour seminar on the history and mechanics of scomp uplinks and a frankly appallingly long reading list to get through, but after that Tech seemed willing to leave Echo to his own devices, as it were.

Honestly, the seminar did prove useful when he was fabricating the resonator matrix. Getting the tiny kyber crystals positioned in the tiny circlet made up of delicate wire framework with nano-microphones that he was going to fit around the collar of his scomp link head in such a way as to a) make sure it didn’t interfere with the working of the scomp link any way and b) actually let the crystals resonate was a tortuous process that could and did nearly drive a hardened ARC veteran to karking tears. There was so much that could and did go wrong, so many times he was a hairsbreadth off here or a micron there, or the framework was too flimsy to hold it all, or too thick to let the delicate programs work. He couldn’t count the number of times he nearly swallowed his workmanlike pride and begged for Tech support.

It never once occurred to him that he could stop, though. Given what he’d survived, it was safe to say Echo was a galactic repository for stubborn.

Finally, finally, there came the day when he could activate the programs and feel the buzz of the strings coming to life. He couldn’t play them to test the sounds yet, but when the instruments gave him a positive read out exactly how he’d planned it, Echo actually cried a little.

Then he went to go punch some droids, because all that pent up frustration had to go somewhere.

He was peripherally aware of the squad watching him sometimes, off in his own world and tinkering with his own body. Echo tried not to worry them too much. He understood and was grateful for their variously expressed concerns - even Echo was worried about the threat that he’d eventually get trapped inside his own head and all the dark, hollowed out spaces therein. He made it a point to actively engage where he could; endless games of sabacc, various side trips and adventures they got up to, fully participating in prank wars (Crosshair still hadn’t figured out that he was the one who’d turned the sniper’s hair pink). Echo was amazed, once he started, how easy it was to slide into place among them. Hunter, intuitively wise as he was, had been right about Echo. He fit in with the Bad Batch, and Echo had to admit there was always going to be a part of him glad to fit in.

More than that, the work gave him something to do. Echo found meaning in having a purpose, and he was hardly going to prove himself a liar to Crosshair by only having a purpose in war. He might not know what after-the-war would look like for him anymore but for the first time in a long time he was beginning to gently sow the seeds of plans for it again. Maybe his old plans had vanished like a hyperspace trail into oblivion, and maybe there would always be that little regret in the centre of his heart that he never got to have them with the people he’d dreamed of having them with, but that didn’t mean he had to stop making them.

He was a soldier, but not just a soldier. He was a man too. Men have dreams where droids didn’t. He had to keep believing that.

His foray into instrument making had to come to an end, eventually. In this case, the final tweaks and touches before he found out just how far his workmanlike approach could take him into artistry would have to take place on the one planet he’d sooner avoid if he could.

The Bad Batch was sent to Coruscant. 

They didn’t go there very often. Coruscant wasn’t the kind of front that fit their skills particularly well; not if they wanted to remain a covert team away from the propaganda machine. The Bad Batch was put to far greater uses on other fronts. 

But it was the GAR’s command HQ, and there were only so many summons for citations and debriefings and official inquiries or whatever else the command corps needed their actual presence for that Hunter could reasonably lose in subspace transmissions. Timed right and with the maximum amount of innocently accidental comm malfunctions, the Batch could get away with reporting in maybe once a year to the centrepoint of the Republic’s war machine. This year would be Echo’s first with the Batch.

After twiddling their thumbs waiting for a berth in the shipyard, (and after Echo had recovered from dying laughing at the sight of the Bad Batch in karking dress uniforms) they finally got their clearance codes as well as a huge data dump of messages, schedules, alerts and other ephemera. Command knew how the Batch operated and weren’t about to let them lose their paperwork now where they could actually enforce it in person. Most of their wait time after that was them dealing with what they could.

Hunter’s sour face was a sight to behold.

“How many mandatory evals have you guys missed exactly?” Echo asked as he scanned the list of messages. It went on and on and on. If they’d printed up flimsi copies, they’d stuff the Marauder to it’s tail fins.

“Enough so you think they’d give up trying,” Crosshair hissed at his own personal list of urgently required late paperwork. “I’m not getting karking recertified on the stupid Thunderclaw Mark II LD-192. It’s a plastoid piece of bantha poodoo,” he scowled at the screen, offended. 

“Do not start another subspace war with the damned quartermaster corps,” Hunter told him, angrily deleting a bunch of redundant requests from his own screen. “They’ll start on the ordinance department and then they’ll both turn around and dump on us. Again. Do you want to have to fill out a separate form for every single piece of ammo we order? Because I remember having to do that last time you got on their bad side.”

“Aw man, they still won’t give me my ship mines,” Wrecker scowled, completely oblivious to his squad members all tilting their heads up and silently mouthing thank the Maker.  

“The Intelligence department is hardly living up to its name right now,” Tech muttered. “How many times do I have to fix the crypto machines? Do I look like a maintenance droid? Oh,” his tone turned more interested. He was, by virtue of his speed of reading, the one given the thankless task of sorting through the mess and delegating it to whom it belonged to. “Echo, there’s a personal message in here for you.”

“If it’s from Rex, I already got it,” Echo cracked a brief smile. “Looks like he’s in the neighborhood. Great! We can catch up after all the meetings are over.”

“No, this one is from the Coruscant Guard.”

Echo froze. “What?”

Tech accessed the message. “A request for a private meeting. The message is from a Guard Specialist, code name Clix,” his eyes darted to Echo. “Aide to Commander Fox.”

Echo coughed suddenly; the stupid cold he’d gotten way back how long ago had recurred a couple of times, thanks to his erratic immune system. It was annoying to keep having to deal with a minor sniffle, but right this moment he was grateful it gave him flimsy cover for the icy punch to the gut he’d just gotten. He doubted it actually fooled the squad, judging by the worried looks on all their faces.

They didn’t know it all, but they certainly knew enough.

Wrecker got as far as: “Wasn’t he the one-” before Crosshair drove a merciless heel into his instep. 

“Uh, yeah,” Echo tried to keep his voice level. “That was… yeah.” There was no time and no galaxy anywhere ever that Echo would be prepared to face his brother’s murderer with any semblance of calm. He got away with boxing and locking the maelstrom of emotions around that by, essentially, never getting in the man’s vicinity and therefore making it a non-issue.

Except now it totally was. And he had no fucking idea what the kark to do about it. There were too many impulses, pulling him to too many directions.

“Would you like me to erase the message trace?” Tech offered, gently for Tech. “It would be as if you never received it.”

Tempting, but they’d been on Coruscant for a few days. They could just send another and make it more strongly worded. But the good thing about being a regulations nut was that Echo had a fine tuned ability to make military bureaucracy work for him. “Who’s our commanding officer in the actual command echelons right now?” It changed, depending. Hunter was their leader but his rank wasn’t, strictly speaking, an officer’s rank. They followed him regardless, of course, but the Bad Batch’s official chain of command wasn’t well defined because of the work they did. They were on a long leash.

“Nominally, Commander Cody,” Tech replied promptly, because he kept track of these things. “An argument could be made for Rex.”

“Rex’ll be busy with meetings like us, he’ll have his own people to look out for,” Echo said, the epitome of virtue. “Send it to Cody. Regulation 4-42-792 says all requests for liaisons with soldiers outside a commander's direct chain of command have to be routed through their own commanding officer first.” Which was a nonsense rule; they were a damn army and took orders from anyone who outranked them. It was just there to nominally make sure everyone stayed in their own sarlacc pit. “Cody has to give me permission to respond, technically,” he shrugged in the face of the Batch’s blank looks. “By the books, anyway. If it takes him weeks to approve the request, it’s not really my problem.”

Hunter grinned. “See, that’s why we keep asking you to help with the paperwork.”

“No, you keep getting me to do all the paperwork because you lazy bantha asses don’t want to do it yourself,” Echo retorted without venom.

“Du-row-goo fruit, Du-roo-goo fruit,” Crosshair was supremely unconcerned with Echo’s plight. 

“Just for that, I’m not telling you how to file an annual recert exemption application. Just imagine never having to field those requests again?” Echo smirked. “You’ll have to, because you don’t know which forms to fill out to get the sniper certification board to kindly fuck off.”

Wrecker burst out laughing at the look of murder Crosshair lasered Echo with.

“Message rerouted with appropriate personnel copied in,” Tech reported from the main screen. “Last check ins have Commander Cody dealing with Seperatist offensives near Ryloth. I have coded it to the appropriate urgency level accordingly.”

Bottom of the pile, Echo thought. “Thanks Tech.”

Honestly, Echo ended up helping them anyway because otherwise it would just never get done and they had enough meetings to get through without having to dodge various admin wonks every step as well.

Plus, as an added bonus, volunteering for secretary duty netted him permission from his squad leader to rotate out of the last few meetings early, contingent, of course, on him picking up the booze and snacks for their post-Coruscant bureaucracy survival course celebration. It was just the opportunity he needed.

Free of the grinding boredom of being lectured on matters of which he was well informed, Echo slipped away and, technically, went AWOL from the Coruscant forward base. (He was of the opinion that this didn’t actually count, though, because actual commanding officers whose actual job was to enforce the perimeter had been the ones to show him how to slip the scanners and get out into the vast cityscape beyond. Also, he spotted, amongst others, five lieutenants, three captains and an actual commander slipping both in and out on the way. He gave them all a nod. They solemnly gave one back.)

The great thing about Coruscant was you could literally find anything on the planet, and anyone to do anything you liked to your possessions or your person. The GAR didn’t, surprisingly, have many restrictions on bodymods; after all, if they had, Hunter’s tattoo would have been lasered off a while ago. They were fine with just about everything on the proviso that nothing a trooper had done actually impeded their ability to fight or wear armour, although individual command troopers enforced this at their own discretion. Some of them disliked their men with tattoos or etchings or sharpened teeth, and would put bans on them. 

But if your commander was the easygoing sort, you could get away with getting just about anything done and Coruscant was generally the place to do it. Coruscant was the place where anyone could be anything.

Echo had done his research and put out a few tentative feelers on the subnet, looking for the right kind of place. Not one of the big corporate chains, he needed somewhere discreet and bespoke, and chiefly somewhere where clones were welcome. Natborns had some weird hangups where clones were concerned, even in the most esoteric subcultures.

He thought he’d found the right place in Moon Mods, down on the mid levels, parked jarringly next to a pneumatic rail station. At least it had been easy to get to on the public transport lines. It was a tiny little place, but the holo-art projection over the door was something else.

He somewhat wished he was in his armour and not civvies which, at best, barely and clumsily disguised the ravages of his misshapen body; nonetheless, he steeled himself and entered the shop. It was reassuringly busy; one Mon Calamarian was getting a phos-tattoo across one eyelid and there was someone in the surgery chamber getting watched over by a droid.

The receptionist was a Treg but Echo was intercepted en route by a red Twi-lek who was missing a lekku and a hand. She was also covered in tattoos, had an artful piece of sculpted wirework in place of the missing lekku and had a spider-claw prosthetic mod fitted around her wrist stub. “‘Sup. You Echo?”

“That’s me,” Echo nodded.

“Got your specs,” she said. “Looked interesting. I’m the hand job guy around here,” she waved her spider-claw prosthetic in his face, brutally owning the innuendo that came with it with a dark smirk. “So you're mine. Name’s Treena.”

“Nice to meet you, Treena,” Echo said politely, not even flinching.

Treena grinned at his sheer moxie. “Come sit at my station and show me your parts.”

“That would take all year,” Echo riposted, which pulled a snort from her. “But here’s what I want added.” He handed her a small case like it was precious, which it was. Getting the shard of crystal from Galvadore sliced and painstaking reshaped had been a nightmare, even with droid fabbers doing it to exact specifications. 

She opened the case. A row of carefully faceted and shaped crystals looked back at her, so well made they looked like actual fingernails. Which, of course, they would be. “And you want these fitted…?”

Echo wordlessly waved his last remaining hand. “I’ve left a little wiggle room in the sizing, you will have to shave them down. I’ve already had the stop-grow implants put in at the roots on the nail, so the extract should be nice and easy.” That had been a couple of weeks of ouch every time he pulled the trigger, but a little pain then would mean a lot less pain now. 

Treena stuck his hand on the holoscanner with an absent grunt, making a holodisplay of each layer of it, bone, nerve, tendons, muscle and skin. “Whoever planted them did good work,” she muttered absently, lifting each of the crystals in turn to place over the holostill and map out where shaving and shaping would need to happen. “The curvature of these ain’t exactly right, though. You want me to shave a little off the top?”

“No,” Echo told her firmly. “They’re exactly how I want them on top.”

Treena nodded. “Alright. Let’s get you under.”

“Locals only, please,” Echo told her. 

“You sure? This is gonna feel somewhat funky.”

“Funky I can deal with,” Echo replied calmly. “The people that put these in,” he whirred his scomp link. “Didn’t even bother with a local. I don’t do well in lab settings when I’m half awake anymore.”

That fully punctured her shell of city slicker indifference. She stared at him wide eyed, for a good minute and a half. “Noted,” she said eventually, and started pulling out instruments from her rolling cabinet.

“If I… if I freak out, just give me space,” Echo felt obliged to warn her. “Don’t come near me. I mean it. It won’t end well for you.”

“Relax, soldier,” Treena snorted. “You ain’t the first vet I’ve worked on. I know that drill by heart.”

“I saw on your site you get some clone customers,” Echo said softly, keeping his eyes resolutely off the instruments she was parceling out. He kept his eyes on the ceiling. It helped that someone had strung lines of beaded lights and done a mass of artwork all across it. It didn’t give the place a sterile feel like a medbay would. Or a lab.

“We get ‘em on the regular,” Treena nodded. “Mostly for tatts or cauter-patterning. To cover scars and stuff, you know. Sometimes for iris dyeing; even though it never lasts on a clone. Sometimes for teeth sharpening too, but they always seem to regret that after.”

Yeah, extra sharp teeth weren’t exactly fun when a sudden jolt from gravity braking made you bite your tongue. The instruments clattered. Treena readied the hypo with the anaesthetic. Echo tried not to think about it.

 “One guy wanted bone spikes on his forehead, though. That was an interesting day,” Treena continued.

“No kidding?” Echo coughed out a laugh past the tightness in his gut. “His CO must have made him run laps across all of Coruscant for that little stunt.”

“He was marched back here the next day,” Treena grinned. “With another clone who looked like he’d just eaten an entire bowl full of unripe ruruga fruit. Sour guy had us take out the spikes and tattoo the word idiot across the spike guy’s forehead. It was so sad, but still… kark, it was pretty funny too. Poor guy looked so despondent over it. I thought clones could mod all they liked before that.”

“His CO got mad because they don’t like troopers to get any mod that keeps them from getting their bucket on,” Echo explained. “He was just trying to keep the guy safe. We’re soldiers. Our art has to be… practical.”

“Huh,” Treena said as she shot him up with a local. “Never thought about it like that before.”

Echo focused on breathing calmly as his one remaining flesh hand disappeared off his personal radar. “Above the hairline or below?” he asked.

“What?”

“The idiot tatt,” Echo repeated. “Above or below?”

“Oh,” Treena smirked. “Above. We had to shave off a chunk of his hair for it.”

“The CO couldn’t have been too mad, then,” Echo grinned. “He gave the guy a way to cover it up. One’ll get you two the guy keeps it shaved, though.”

“You think?” Treena asked idly as her spindly spider claw prosthetic began the delicate work of removing his fingernails one by one.

Echo stared at the ceiling and reminded himself that it wasn’t torture, it was fine. “It’s...uh, unique,” he breathed out, forcing himself to focus. “Uniqueness is pretty hard currency for a clone.”

“Hm,” Treena’s grunt seemed almost absentminded. Echo thought maybe he shouldn’t distract her from her work but she came back with. “Good for you for taking back your body.”

Echo blinked. “I what now?”

“You implied your mods weren’t voluntary,” Treena said delicately. 

“They aren’t,” Echo agreed. “Well, except for what I’m doing now, of course.”

“Right. You’re taking your body back,” Treena said. “That’s how I got into this game. The guy who did this,” she jabbed an instrument at her own missing lekku. “And my hand and a couple of other things thought he had the right to do it because he owned me. Because hey, we’re Twi-leks, right?” she said with bitter cheer. “We’re everybody’s sex droids.”

“Kark, I’m sorry,” Echo said sincerely.

“Pfft,” she waved off his sympathy. “He’s not going to be a problem for me ever again. Or any other little girls, for that matter. I guarantee it.” Her face, what Echo could see of it, was more relieved than satisfied, though the satisfaction of a righteous kill was definitely there.

“I’d give you a fist bump but my hand’s kind of busy.”

She bumped his scomp link. “But afterwards, it was still all shitty and depressing thinking how easy it was to just lose my autonomy like that. How fast it happened too. I was so mad at myself over it, so I went to some shitty modshop and slapped on a cheap tattoo. I figured that it was so ugly now that it didn’t really matter what I did to it. But after I got it done, that’s when I started thinking about how it was my body and it was therefore mine to do what I wanted with. And the more I put back, or put in, or made into art, the more mine it was. I took my damn body back,” she grinned proudly. “Always good to see someone saying kark it and doing the same.”

Was that what he was doing? Echo mused as he resolutely stared at the ceiling and tried to to think about the gross pulling sensations on his fingertips. Well, he decided after some contemplation, it was not not what he was doing. Maybe it was a small part of it.

Then his damn throat tickled again. “Hold on, I’m gotta cough,” he got out before the choke bubbled up. Treena was kind enough to wipe his nose for him since his hand was strapped in. “Sith damned cold,” he grumbled. He was getting mighty sick of it squatting in his sinuses rent free.

“And here I thought clones were indestructible,” Treena quipped as she went back to work.

Echo waved his scomp arm and blew a raspberry, which punched an unexpected laugh from her.

*

It took four hours for him to return to the base; past lights out, but that was the most technical of technicalities. He knew for a fact troopers would be heading to 79s as soon as their shifts ended. The bodymod procedure had been surprisingly quick; shopping for the celebratory party most assuredly wasn’t. Echo had to rent an actual droid float to get everything on the squad's contraband wishlist. 

Damn Crosshair and his love of fruity, esoteric, caffeine and sugar free drinks, Echo grumbled. Why could he just mainline blaster buzz drinks like a normal clone? He’d had to dig around in about five different places across two districts to find that poodoo that literally no one else drank. Oh he said it was because he couldn’t afford to drink anything high sugar or high caffeine so as to spare his priceless sniper’s hands from trembles, but Echo knew he just lived to be a precious nuisance sometimes, the bastard.

Echo was pushing the droid float through the shuttle hanger - this was the smugglers entrance, since the troopers on watch here would let you pass for a six pack and a big bag of deliciously unhealthy tuber chips -  and planning a revenge on Crosshair suitable for an ARC Trooper when a familiar voice of command halted him in his tracks.

“It’s past lights out, shiny, what do you think you’re doing?”

Echo grinned. “Nothing illegal or against regulations, Captain. Domino’s honour.”

Rex’s snort told Echo just what he thought of that. Echo abandoned his loot to come around the float and face Rex in person. His scomp automatically started to rise in salute, but Rex caught him off guard by giving him a hug instead.

Echo froze for half a heartbeat, but then leaned into it. It had been a while and he felt vaguely guilty for passively avoiding Rex. Now faced with his past, it’s teeth didn’t bite viciously down like Echo had feared. He felt ashamed of himself for giving into that fear, because he found out in this moment he’d missed Rex. 

Rex thumped him on the back. “You’re looking good, kid.”

“You’re not a good liar, sir,” Echo snorted, letting him go. 

“Not a bit of it,” Rex chidingly poked him on the cheek. “You look parsecs better. You’ve put a bit of meat on your poor bones.”

“Have you ever tasted Hunter’s cooking?” Echo joked. “If I’m not careful, I’ll swing too far the other way.”

He smirked when Rex goggled at him. “Hunter? As in, sergeant to the Bad Batch? Appalling taste in tattoos, hair that’s just itching for a shiv, that Hunter? He cooks?”

“Cooking is too simple a word,” Echo said honestly. “He transcends. If he wasn’t a clone I’d say he’d missed his calling. The man should be a damn chef in one of those joints they charge a thousand a plate.”

Rex squinted at him suspiciously, looking for any sign Echo was pranking him; when he saw none, he shook his head. “Well I’ll be karked. Never would’ve accused the Bad Batch of being domestic before.”

“That was pretty much my response too,” Echo laughed. 

“What’s all this, then?” Rex poked curiously at Echo’s frankly excessive bounty.

“Supply run,” Echo deadpanned. He held his expression while Rex uncovered an entire case of Mandalorian ale and raised an eyebrow. “Vital emergency supplies, sir.”

“Uh huh,” Rex tugged out a bottle of fine Coruscanti blue milk. “I can see that.”

“Are you nearly done for the day?” Echo toyed with the idea of inviting Rex to their afterparty. The squad liked him well enough and it had been such a long time since they’d caught up. His fingertips were itching under the glove Treena had given him to protect her work until the bacta had done it’s regenerative work. He wanted to show Rex what he’d done. He thought Rex might understand it the best because he had history with Echo and Fives, although Echo was pretty sure his squad would get this in their own way too. They were, in a galaxy filled with combat engineers, all artists in their own way too.

Rex’s sigh was heartfelt. “Still got a briefing with the Jedi Council to go. With General Skywalker.”

Ah. Right. Which meant he was in for a long damn haul, because General Skywalker, Force bless him, could not seem to keep his mouth shut when it came to the Council's requirements and edicts, and this was before relations between them had soured with Ahsoka’s departure from the order.

Echo had been shocked to hear that, when the news had finally reached him. But now that Rex was here, maybe he could find out just where Ahsoka had landed. Echo wasn’t sure if she even knew that he was alive; he’d love to see the kid again, even though she wasn’t much of a kid anymore. He opened his mouth to make enquiries when he was interrupted by someone hurrying up to their position. 

Echo and Rex hurriedly covered up the float again; yes, practically any trooper would know exactly what Echo was smuggling in, but there were certain niceties of discretion that were observed in case some idiot in the upper ranks decided to crack down on contraband again. It gave everyone involved plausible deniability, which was only polite.

“CT-21-0408,” a trooper hurried up, carrying a datapad. Echo felt a roil in his chest when he saw the familiar red patterning on the Coruscant Guard, but relaxed slightly when we saw the rank designator; this was a Specialist First Class, not a Commander. “I wanted to speak with you about a meeting request that was sent to your message box…”

“Oh,” Echo blinked as he took in the general sense of shiny he got from the trooper. “You’re Clix.”

“Clix?” Rex’s brow wrinkled. “Fox’s aide de camp?”

“Yes, sir, Commander,” Clix gave a crisp salute. “Forgive me for interrupting, but Clone Corporal Echo never responded to my request for a meeting with Commander Fox,” Rex choked . “And when I saw him log in to the hanger bay entrance, I thought it best to try to schedule the meeting in person. The Commander is exceptionally eager to speak with you, Corporal.”

It was times like this Echo was reminded that the Bad Batch wasn’t the only misfit crew in the GAR. The Coruscant Guard was the best of the best, but sometimes best went hand in hand with wildly abnormal. They took in the geniuses and the logistics experts, not just the best fighters. Goodness knows where they’d found Clix, whom, while Echo had no doubt was a badass where it counted, still radiated the overzealous keenness of a brand new shiny in his first important job.

It said a lot about Fox that he commanded such loyalty. Echo didn’t like how that thought fit in his head. “I appreciate the Commander’s eagerness,” Echo tread carefully. There was no need to make this kid’s life difficult just because Echo would sooner saw off his one remaining arm than willingly be in the same room as Fox. “And yours. But as per regulations, if it’s not an urgent matter, my commanding officer must approve the liaison first. Which, as of this moment,” Echo added firmly when Clix’s helmet flickered to Rex. “Is Commander Cody. We have sent the request off to him; it’s up to him to approve it whenever he gets it.”

Rex was giving him a side eye, which Echo ignored.

“But surely that regulation can be waived under these circumstances,” Clix insisted. “It’s a personal matter.”

“If it’s a personal matter,” Echo didn’t snarl, but only by the very skin of his clenched teeth. “Then I’m free to simply decline. I’m sorry, but no regulation compels me to speak to Fox about personal subjects at all.”

“He’s right, Clix,” Rex said diplomatically. “Military matters are one thing, but even Commanders have to respect their subordinates right to privacy. Echo is under no obligation to speak to Commander Fox about private matters, even if the Commander has a pressing need. I suggest you report back to him and advise him of that. He can come speak to me about it, if he wants.”

Clix hesitated, not quite willing to nut up and disagree with a commanding officer. “It would be… beneficial for them to talk, sir.”

“Number one, kid, I’m standing right here,” Echo snapped, his temper fraying. “Number two, Rex isn’t my commanding officer anymore,” sort of, Echo added in his head, because he couldn’t imagine a galaxy where he didn’t follow if Rex asked. “And he hasn’t got the power to compel me either and, number three, we have established that I do have the option of saying no here. And guess what?” Echo loomed up on Clix. “I’m saying no. If Fox has a problem with that, he can come and find me himself. He knows where I am.”

It was hard to tell because Clix was wearing his helmet, but he looked as if he wanted to argue - not something many people did when Echo was really and truly holding his ground. However, his helmet flickered towards Rex and no doubt took in that special Commander face Rex made when he thought a trooper was dancing on thin ice in weighted boots and clearly decided that he didn’t like his odds.

“Very well, sir,” Clix said stiffly, and turned around and left.

Echo blew out a breath as he watched the other clone leave. “He’s got his loyalists, he does.” 

“He’s a good commander,” Rex was watching him with a look on his face Echo didn’t like. Rex hadn’t looked at him like that since he’d been a shiny, plain stupid out of the decanting jar.

“But a lousy shot,” Echo said bitterly, avoiding Rex’s gaze.

Rex’s face tightened with sympathy. “I guess he is at that. From a certain point of view.”

Echo let the silence hang for a second, but Rex could always outlast him. “You actually want me to talk to him?”

“I want you to do what you know to be right.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, sir!” Echo slumped down on a carton of Alderaanian spice wine, throwing up his hands. Or, hand, really. His scomp arm wasn’t very good at dramatic gestures. “You really want me to make nice with him? Fives was my brother, and...” Echo choked. What else was there to say anyway. “I woke out of a nightmare and into a karking bigger one. Only this time there’s no rescue, no surcease, nothing, thanks to him. Fives is gone. He’s gone, and it’s his fault! Am I supposed to go up and say no hard feelings? I know I’m trained to be the best of the best, but you’re asking for more than I got in me, sir, with due respect.”

Rex sat next to him, immune to Echo’s sour prickliness. “There’s a war on out there, kid. Life’s too short to hold onto anger. The universe is an endless font of tears, always has been. Letting it eat you hollow isn’t going to bring Fives back.”

“Yes, there’s a war on,” Echo snapped back. “It’s war and it’s death and it’s fucking injustice, all the way down. Why dredge all this up? What will it change? Can’t I have some peace, somewhere, where I can, when I can? Even here?”

“Yes, you could,” Rex replied. “And I’d accept that if you were, actually, at peace. But you’re not, and I hate to see it. There’s so much that happened to you that I want to change and can’t. I might be able to help you with this. Forgive an old soldier for trying to do what he can with what he’s got.”

Echo felt some of the angry, ugly fight drain out of him. “You don’t understand,” he muttered to his feet. “You don’t get it. For you this was aeons ago. A lifetime. For me, it’s been a blink. Some days it feels like I’m in some weird, twisted mirror version of reality. There was never supposed to be a universe where I survived and Fives didn’t. That wasn’t what was supposed to happen.”

Rex sighed. “It feels like a blink to me, too, some days. I’ll turn around and expect to see him there with that shit eating grin and then… then I’ll remember holding him in my arms as he marched onwards.”

Echo felt something icy and shameful grip his heart. His laments were selfish enough in their own way; Rex had, in many ways, had it worse.

Rex laid a hand on his shoulder and gave him a gentle shake. “None of that now. You’re right; the wound is still fresh for you.”

“I don’t think it’ll ever be a scar,” Echo said hollowly. “How do you heal from not being whole anymore? I can live with the droid parts and the aches and my messed up head. A world without Fives in it will never… it just won’t ever be right.”

“I know it feels that way,” Rex rubbed his back. “Feels that way to me too. But you’re still here, Echo, right world or wrong one. And one thing I know for damn sure is Fives would never have wanted you to mope on his account. He’d tell you to get on with the fight. Maybe, when it’s all over, we’ll all be marching together again. Maybe we’ll all get to go around again.”

“You believe that?” Echo croaked, clenching and unclenching his one hand helplessly.

“I have to, kid,” Rex replied heavily. “It’s what keeps me going, some days. The way I see it, we move on so we’ll have something to talk about on the other side. We go out there and experience everything we can, for those that can’t with us. We’re going to have some kriffing amazing stories to tell when we finally catch up with him, you and I.”

Echo managed a smile past the lump in his throat. 

“I made my peace with Fox,” Rex confessed quietly. “I’d already lost so much, I didn’t want to lose any more time to resentment. And hey,” Rex shook his shoulder, forcing Echo to look at him. “If you’re still angry, then by the Maker, you be angry, Echo. That’s fine. But you had a lot of good times, good memories, with Fives. Those are the memories that’ll keep you going, not rage. Take it from me. If holding onto your anger makes you lose the joy you get from those precious memories, if it destroys the last bits of Fives you can still hold on to…” Rex shook his head. “Then no amount of justice will be worth it.”

Echo took a shuddering breath, and scrubbed at his eyes. “I’m not ready yet, sir. Maybe I’ll find some forgiveness someday. Fives was the one who held grudges, not me. So, maybe. But not now. I can’t.” It felt like a dirty secret; like he was running scared from a fight.

“That’s okay, kid,” Rex read him like a book. “That’s fine. Just remember someday, okay? That’s all I ask. Doesn’t have to be today or tomorrow or next week. Someday’s good enough.”

“Not today,” Echo agreed, taking a breath. “If I met him today sir, I’m not sure what would happen. All I know is that when I’m angry I lead with my dominant hand,” he whirred his scomp arm. “I forget, sometimes. And I don’t want to find out if this thing really can crack a skull. Even Fox’s. That’s something, right?” he asked with grim humour.

“It ain’t nothing,” Rex agreed, stretching his arms as the moment drew to a close. “You do realize what just happened, don’t you?”

Echo blinked, eyes clearing of watery film. “What?”

“You,” Rex said with a certain amount of satisfaction. “Just got caught smuggling in contraband by a superior officer.”

Echo stared at Rex’s smirk until the credit dropped. “Oh no! Sir! You cannot be serious! You can’t…!”

“Command Tax,” Rex announced cheerfully, tugging off the tarp.

“Damn it!” Echo cursed, thumping his knees with his fist in despair.

Rex shouldered an entire carton of ale, a selection of sample packs, an entire bale of snacks was balanced on top of it all, and, to add insult to injury, selected one of the finer (read: most expensive) bottles of liquor as well.

“Oh come on,” Echo protested, but he was laughing while he did it.  “You’re not gonna drink all that!”

“You offend my mission statement, shiny,” Rex easily carted his looted treasure towards the base entrance, leaving a denuded-of-goods Echo staring after him like a stunned womp rat. “You want any of it back, come see me after the meeting.”

Echo smiled at his former commander’s departing back. He’d missed Rex so fucking much.

*

They were a case and a half in on their second grav-ball semi-final (it was a pile of poodoo trying to keep up with the league when they were on missions) when Echo decided he’d better go and see if he could find Rex before he’d moved fully into that nebulous zone between buzzed and blitzed. He didn’t think the others would mind; they’d already wrapped up their sabacc tournament for the night (it had been a massive shitfight between Tech and Echo because Wrecker never had any sabacc face at all, Crosshair got grouchy when they said he had to face away from the table so as not to have the advantage of enhanced sight and reflective surfaces and Hunter’s ability to read deception through his senses was an ever diminishing return as the alcohol factor went up, so it was down to Tech, who knew how to count cards, getting into a frothing rage when he couldn’t best Echo, who, unlike Tech, had learned the hard way the value in knowing how to read people). 

Honestly, it was either go find Rex or give in to the ever increasing urge to fire up his new additions and show the others what he’d done. There had been two scenarios when Echo had played the lumenlute; after a hard day, when his brothers had just needed to sleep past the rage and sadness and horror of war and… well, times like this, when they were relaxed and safe and unwinding inside. The thought of getting to go back inside that warm little bubble with his squad, where the war was somewhere far away and they could just drink and eat and just be - almost - normal young men plucked at the heartstrings of Echo, filling him with nostalgia.

However, when he idly curled his scomp into the playing position, he hesitated, confidence wavering. It had been quite a long time since he’d played. He remembered the notes - more clearly than he would have thought he did, actually - but this was technically an entirely different instrument.

Maybe, he thought ruefully, I should practice a little before I fire it up. No need to cease being workmanlike now, not at the very end.

He got up, nudging aside some spent bottles and weaving carefully through the rest of the mess to their party store house, which was, in fact, the barrack room table. 

“Bring me another!” Wrecker yelled without looking.

Echo opened his mouth to say sure and ended up coughing again. Sith damn it, it had been happening all night and his nose was red; not from the booze, but from constant wiping.

“For the Maker’s sake,” Crosshair rolled his eyes from where he was knitting. “Will you go to the medbay and get a decongestant before you drown us in mucus?”

“Got a decongestant,” Echo grunted out, blowing his nose yet again. Of all the mods the Techno Union had given him, they could have at least added a drying fan to his sinuses, the bastards. “And I hate medbays, thanks.”

“You sick?” Hunter squinted up at him. Usually he’d have been clucking around Echo like a mother bokka but a good amount of tipsy took the harsh edges off the Sergeant’s enhanced senses, which helped him unwind from his usual razor-edged alertness towards literally everything.

“I’m fine,” Echo snorted. “I think it’s just the Coruscant version of fresh air that’s set me off again. I’ll take a tab in a minute.”

“Honestly, where is that fabled reg constitution?” Crosshair grinned tauntingly.

“Who cares as long as it's carrying beer?” Wrecker made grabby hands.

Echo rolled his eyes and took two six packs from the table, lugging them over to the squad who were all sprawled out on the floor of their temp quarters against the racks, or in Crosshair’s case, laying across them knitting, watching the game on the holoprojector coming out of Tech’s helmet, placed on the floor. 

“This one’s for you,” Echo handed the bottles off to Wrecker, the others all pinching from the flimsy bottle holsters as he did. “And this one’s for me,” he hefted the other one in the crook of his scomp link.

Hunter raised an eyebrow. “You’re hitting the thruster fuel awfully hard there.”

“It’s not for drinking, it’s for a hostage exchange,” Echo grinned. “Rex told me to catch up with him after he got out of the Council meeting. I might be able to negotiate a return of one of the milks.”

“That doesn’t seem like the most even exchange,” Tech noted while he typed into his datapad, only half an eye on the game.

“Eh,” Echo shrugged. “Rex has been known to mellow a little when he’s sauced. Like, by microns,” he admitted when they all turned to stare at him. “He might go for it.”

“See if you can get the red milk back.” Wrecker requested while the rest of them all groaned. “What? It’s good!”

“You wouldn’t have had to trek all the way over there if you hadn’t let him abscond with our supplies in the first place,” Crosshair said sardonically, peering over rows of yarn in his hands like a lazy cat. Echo knew the sniper was good and soused, and he remained impressed at the man’s accuracy with the fiddly work even this deep into his cups. He also knew Crosshair was salty about Rex making off with a carton of fine cheroogee-grozet berry ale that was heartburn in a bottle, so naturally the sniper loved it.

“Hey, Rex invoked Command Tax,” Echo held out a hand to the cruel impulses of fate. “What was I supposed to do?”

“Punch him and run!”

“Okay, I don’t know what army you’re serving in, but striking a superior officer is still considered an actual crime in mine,” Echo snorted. “With pesky court martials and things that might put a tiny dent in our perfect record. And furthermore, Rex would have punched back and that nerf herder has a punch on him like a damn Wookie. You can try it out if you want, but I’ve had my fill of catastrophic concussive trauma in shuttle bays, thanks.”

Hunter spat out his beer, choking on laughter as Crosshair gave him a sour look.

“He makes a logical argument,” Tech allowed.

“Besides, everyone knows Command Tax is a grand old tradition and far be it for me to not participate,” Echo pointed out. “It means if I can’t get our booze back from Rex I can just go to the hanger bay and shake down some poor dumb shinies for their contraband instead. Coruscant-based shinies have the best taste in booze,” he smiled fondly. 

There was what could only be called a significant pause as the squad absorbed that little factoid. Echo kept forgetting these poor saps had largely been isolated, by both circumstance and by design, from normal military culture. Echo felt a pang of sympathy for them; that must have been very lonely, sometimes.

“Wait,” Wrecker was the first to pipe up. “Wait, wait, wait. Does that mean we can go to the hanger bay and… tax the regs?”

“Sure,” Echo shrugged, dimly aware that he was unleashing a horror unto the galaxy that would never know surcease by saying this, but was slightly too buzzed to worry about it. “The only rule is you have to outrank ‘em and it’s your responsibility to duck anyone who outranks you, because they can tithe your tax out from under you.” He thought about it, faint klaxons in the back of his mind well muffled by booze. “Hunter’d probably have the best luck there, honestly.”

The klaxons got slightly more insistent as the rest of the squad exchanged sith-evil grins, but the alcohol in his bloodstream made a good counterargument that the fate of random shinies wasn’t his problem. They’d have to learn sooner or later, the alcohol reasoned.

“I don’t know about you, boys,” Hunter said with a certain amount of relish. “But I could use some air.”

“It is rather close in here,” Tech agreed with perfectly innocent contemplation in his tone.

Maybe it would all work out for the best, the alcohol told Echo soothingly. This was a chance for the Bad Batch to participate in normal military rituals. Who’s to say it would improve relations on either side a little bit if the regs could see the Bad Batch acting like… well, one of them. 

“Well, if you don’t see me again tonight,” Echo washed his hands of it. “It’s probably because Rex and I got hammered and we’ve either passed out in the command barracks and we’ll see you at breakfast, or we’ve flimsi-pasted Skywalker’s entire office so we’ll be brunching at a kaffe to avoid his wrath, or, possibly, we decided to steal a Coruscant Guard speeder for a joyride. You know, again,” honestly compelled him to add. “In which case, we’ll be in the City Police drunk tank and will be awaiting the posting of bail at your earliest convenience, Sergeant.”

“Noted,” Hunter’s droll reply was drowned out by the sound of Wrecker dying laughing. “If you don’t see any of us for the rest of the night, we’re either in combat in the hanger bay with the regs, and we’ll see you at breakfast after we’ve kicked ass, or we’ve gone barhopping at the merc bars down on the lowest levels and we’ve probably had Tech hack the flight control grid to we can have an aerial drag race. Again. In which case, we’ll be waiting on bail too.”

Echo saluted. “I’ll be there as soon as the hangover’s worn off.”

“Wait,” Wrecker held up a finger. “What if we all end up in the drunk tank?”

Hunter’s expression didn’t waver. “Then we regroup, form up and take out the biggest drunks in the tank to establish dominance.”

“Oh,” Wrecker beamed. “Right!”

“Sounds like a plan,” Crosshair drawled.

“Certain details may still be pending,” Tech added dryly.

“I’ll leave the finer points to you,” Echo waved at them as he backed away from the oncoming catastrophe that was a tipsy Bad Batch loose on the playground that was Coruscant. “Night guys!” He activated the door and made his escape.

Honestly, Tech had been right. The room had been stuffy and the corridors of the base were nice and cool. Maybe he’d had a few too many if he felt this overwarm. He snuffled again, restraining the urge to snot up the sleeve of his jumper. (Not just because he was fastidious, but also because Crosshair would kill him in his sleep.)

Stupid cold. And he’d forgotten to take his tab, too, damn. Maybe he could raid Rex’s medical pack when he got to the man’s quarters; Rex had to take on a lot of shinies, so he was basically a Creche Master and had the first aid kit to match.

Echo would never, could never now, be drunk enough to switch off that tiny, paranoid part of himself that was forever scanning for enemy movement in the immediate vicinity, not even in the middle of the Coruscant forward base, surrounded by friendlies. But because he was surrounded by friendlies, he didn’t immediately react to the warning ping he got that told him there were at least two followers on his rear; they had the measured march step of the standard trooper, and troopers remained low on his threat assessment scale still. In fact, he’d almost dismissed them as random troopers that were merely going the same direction as he was when he got a ping from the front too. Two more troopers emerged from the doorway into the command quarters ahead, so abruptly and with such purpose that Echo knew there was no way it was random.

“Okay,” he made a sudden and abrupt stop, which certainly surprised the troopers at his rear into a stumble. “What’s this about? Did the deposit not go through for the room?”

The wry quip seemed to confuse them more; mind you, judging by the red accents these boys were Coruscant Guard and the lower tiers of that branch weren’t known for their sense of humour while on the job. Too many news scanners watched their behaviour too closely for them to interpret military decorum loosely like other battalions did. 

Off the job they were pretty charismatic drunks, Echo had been told.

“Come on, boys,” Echo said calmly, flicking his eyes back to the rear pincer and forward to the front pincer. “Either state your business or let me pass. It’s a nice night, let’s not ruin that.”

“Corporal,” yet another trooper emerged from the front, out of the command barracks main entrance. This one, at least, had the politeness to remove his helmet. Echo didn’t recognise the face, even with the distinctive and certainly traumatic looking scar running down the side of it from temple to jaw, but the slightly fussy tone was familiar. “I wanted to speak with you.”

“Clix, right?” Echo frowned. He looked around at the four Guard boys who had come with him, two to the rear and two to the front. They weren’t quite aggressively blocking him in, but they were quite emphatically not moving. “What the hell are you doing? Am I under arrest or something?”

For a moment Clix looked genuinely surprised by Echo’s assumption. “No Corporal. I merely wished to continue our discussion.”

“So naturally you bring a squad to ambush me instead of, for example, knocking on the door of my barracks?” Echo’s tone was unamused. “You’ve got some conversational opening gambit, kid.”

“I didn’t particularly want to have this discussion in front of your squad,” Clix explained stiffly. “They are not known to be the most… stable of troopers.”

Okay, Echo knew that the various prejudices clung to by both the regs and the Batch were based in a bunch of nonsense assumptions and misunderstandings and probably not a little bit of culture clash, but nonetheless Echo felt a little part of himself say fuck you, reg. That was his squad being badmouthed and Echo had never stood for that. “I didn’t particularly want to have this conversation at all, Specialist,” he replied, voice ARC trooper cold. “And I’m pretty sure I made my stance on this clear to you.”

Clix either had nerves of steel or the social acuity of a concussed bantha, because he didn’t so much as blink at Echo’s rapidly evaporating patience. “I realize the subject we are speaking of is difficult and… personal,” Clix allowed. “But Commander Fox has suffered a great deal over CT-5555’s death-”

“Fives,” you could have cooled a hyperspace engine with the subzero blast of Echo’s tone. “His name was Fives.”

That penetrated Clix’s impeccable military decorum, at least enough for him to say. “Fives. Yes. My apologies. His death was a tragedy for the GAR and for you personally. But Corporal,” his voice turned slightly pleading. “You are not the only one who it affects. Commander Fox has many regrets about it.”

“Fancy that,” Echo ground out. “So do I.”

“Yes I know,” Clix stepped forward and held out a hand. “I’m not saying you don’t, or that it isn’t painful. I’m just saying that the Commander was hurt too. It eats at him, every day.”

A viciously dark part of Echo spat out a good, and exulted that even a molecule of his own devastation was visited upon the man responsible. The confirmation didn’t feel quite as righteous as Echo had imagined it would though; it was a heavy, grey, slimy feeling sitting inside of him. For various reasons, Echo had never been the sort to delight in pain. Not even for the enemy. For a second he wasn’t sure whether that knowledge made him sad or angry.

“Look,” Echo was beyond frustrated with this whole karked up mess. “Whatever Fox-”

“Commander Fox.”

Echo rolled his eyes. “I’m off duty and so’s he, but fine, okay. Whatever Commander Fox feels and however he’s dealing with it is his concern. It’s not my duty or my obligation to interfere, any more than it’s his duty or right to interfere in mine. And like I said before, if Commander Fox’s need is really that pressing, he knows where to find me.”

“So you’re hiding,” Clix jabbed. “Like a coward. Hardly an attitude worthy of a decorated ARC.”

Echo bit back his first response to that slander, and after a second’s thought bit back the second as well. He settled for a grit toothed “I am doing only what is required of me as set out by the standards and regulation of the GAR. Nobody, not even Commander Fox, has the right to anything more. Certainly not a Specialist with delusions of grandeur.” Echo looked Clix up and down in that special way he’d learned from Rex, with the shrivelling disdain of one who finds every inch of the soldier in front of him wanting. “Now, if you don’t mind-”

“I order you to come with us.”

Echo blinked. And then he blinked again because what the actual kriff? “You can’t be serious.” His tone was as flat as the corridor floor.

Clix had a steely look in his eyes. “I outrank you, Corporal, and I am giving you a direct order. Come with me, right now.”

“Never heard of Regulation 89-22-55 have you?” Echo said sardonically, which made Clix blink. Then again, not many troopers on active duty had a good reason to delve into the 89s, so Echo couldn’t fault him for that, at least. “Look kid, I’m going to make this easy for you. You are not in my chain of command. The only time I must obey an order from you specifically is in an emergency or in combat situations. Any other time I do is merely a matter of respect and courtesy for the rank you’ve earned. And I’m not feeling particularly respectful or courteous right now.”

“Are you disobeying a direct order, Corporal?” Clix didn’t waver.

“I’m not on duty, but for clarity’s sake, yes, yes I damn well am,” Echo didn’t yell, but he could feel his temper fraying. “Take it up with my Commander. Or yours, for that matter. I can’t wait to hear what he has to say.”

Clix’s lips thinned. “I am not going to bother Commander Fox with such trivial insubordination.”

Echo’s eyes narrowed. “He doesn’t know you’re doing this, does he?” Because this whole thing was very odd. Whatever else Fox was, he was the poster child of military decorum. Sending inferiors to intervene in something Fox considered personal would be very unlike the man.

“Commander Fox has many responsibilities,” Clix answered without answering. “It causes him to overlook smaller matters.”

“Commander Fox knows that I have no desire to talk to him,” Echo snapped angrily. “I don’t want to even look at him! For kark’s sake, if he can respect that, why can’t you?”

“Because it’s not his fault!” Clix’s rigid military bearing finally cracked a little. “He was never the same after Fives’ death. I told you, it eats at him! He blames himself!”

“He should!” Echo shouted furiously, blood boiling. “He was the one who pulled the fucking trigger!”

“Fives’ was an ARC trooper, like you!” Clix argued. “He had all the same training, the same lethal potential! And he was raving like a lunatic and reaching for Captain Rex’s blaster with the intent to use it! What was Commander Fox supposed to do?”

“Let Rex handle it! Talk him down! Deploy a flash bang, call in reinforcements!” Echo listed them like they were a criminal charge sheet. “A thousand other ways that didn’t involve shooting one of our own! The Coruscanti Guard are supposed to be highly trained too, and Fox the best of them! And all he could think to do was pull a fucking trigger! I guess we all know what that says about the Guard then, doesn’t it?”

Clix went scarlet and his ambush squad who were ringing in too close now that Echo was shouting all shifted on their feet. They didn’t take any slander to their battalion any more graciously than Echo did to his squad.

Calm down, Echo told himself fiercely. Calm the kark down. His heart was hammering in his chest and his head felt too hot and the rest of him too cold, the pack of booze was being squeezed by his flesh arm nearly hard enough to break. Screaming into the face of this idiot wasn’t going to solve anything. He’d go and find Rex and… let him deal with it. Echo didn’t trust himself to keep a level head.

“You’d rather stew in your resentment than have a meaningful conversation with a suffering man?” Clix was derisive.

“I’d rather not pick a fight,” Echo said in a low growl. “Especially with a know-nothing over-zealous sycophant who sticks his bucket into things that do not concern him.”

“Then come with us, and we will not fight,” Clix said stubbornly. “Can’t you see I’m trying to help you as well?” he added, sounding baffled by Echo’s apparent ingratitude.

“I ain’t picking this fight, kid,” Echo snarled, turning his head to eyeball the two troopers too close to his blind spots warningly. “Finishing fights, that’s my speciality. I’m happy to finish this one too, if you like. So here’s what’s going to happen; either you karking well let me pass or I’ll finish it.” And, because Echo could be an asshole if he was provoked enough, he added. “I’m sure Commander Fox would love to see that disciplinary report on his desk in the morning.”

That, finally, made Clix hesitate. This op wasn’t sanctioned and Clix damn well knew that, good intentions or not, Fox wouldn’t be any happier about his aide taking it upon himself to interfere any more than Echo was now. 

The silence stretched as Clix tried to stare him down. He might as well have tried to outstare a supernova.

Echo shoved past him glaring at the two troopers up front like a synthsteel bar until they backed the kark back and gave him room to pass by.

“I don’t know what story you’re telling yourself in your head,” Clix said in a low voice. “But Fox isn’t some monster.”

“I don’t care,” Echo snarled while some urgent voice in his head chanted get to Rex, just get to Rex.

“You should,” Clix bit out angrily. “Fox is one of us too. If your brother can make a mistake, why is Fox any different?”

It was different, Echo thought. Because Fox was still here and Fives wasn’t. “Shut up.” Leave, leave, leave now said the voice in his head, getting drowned in a sea of visceral red.

Still, Clix persisted. “Maybe he pulled the trigger, but that was only part of it! You’re blaming him for the whole situation! It wasn’t his fault that Fives cracked under the pressure and went crazy-”

Echo turned around and swung.

He found out that night that the scomp arm may not be able to crack a skull, but it could definitely shatter a jaw.

Chapter Text

Echo stared at the wall of his cell dully. He’d lost track of time by now; not that he’d known exactly when he’d been thrown in here. Clix’s boys had stunned him but good, after dogpiling and doing their best to kick the poodoo out of him.

Jokes on them, Echo though with dark humour. There was precious little left of him to kick these days. Besides, they’d been on the losing end. Oh, he still felt the ache of his bumps and bruises, and definitely a sharp twinge from his split lip, but those boys were going to have a lot of explaining to do at the medbay when they staggered in there with Clix.

He had no idea what the hell kind of yalbec nest he’d kicked over. Once he’d woken up he’d gotten a single visit from a police droid, reading a dry list of charges he’d been incarcerated for. Requests to speak to his commanding officer had been summarily ignored, as was his requests for medical assistance - or, at least, some bacta for his damn lip because it was bugging him. Medical scans indicated his wounds were too superficial to warrant the privilege of an infirmary visit, apparently.

So Echo was trapped in the blindingly bright cell block, deprived of even the ability to see or hear any other prisoners, waiting for someone to come, with only his own congested wheezing and wet coughing for company. The cold had picked a hell of a time to flare back up.

He wanted his knitted jumper back.

All he could do was sit here and wait.

So he waited. And waited. And waited.

After trying to work out the seconds and hours, Echo eventually had to concede rescue was taking far longer than it should. Perhaps his paperwork had been lost or the usual procedure of advising the chain of command hadn’t been followed. Clix had struck him as slightly too rigid to be spiteful, but hell, losing teeth was enough to put any man in a temper.

Echo felt the keen sting of shame for his actions. Not necessarily for Clix’s sake, but for his own workmanlike pride. He’d been so proud to be an ARC Trooper, of surviving and pushing through the training and being counted amongst the elite in the GAR. With that authority came, to him at least, the obligation of self control. If he’d been thinking straight, if he hadn’t let the damn kid rile him up, as Clix shouldn’t have had the power to do to a veteran as seasoned as him, he’d have done the right thing and walked away. After all, what did it matter what some idiot young clone thought? He’d never known Fives. He was just parroting the rumours clones blathered to each other. His opinion had been meaningless.

He regretted his lapse. The authority of an ARC, which had been granted to him through Rex and his trainers' faith in him, should never have been wielded with such little self discipline. In a small way he accepted his incarceration and would accept whatever punishment that followed because he knew he’d been the one in the wrong.

He’d still argue a certain amount of provocation before the disciplinary hearing, though, by the Maker.

He wondered what was taking them so long. He’d have expected to see his hungover squad at the other side of the cell door bitching at him for extending their stay at the very least, while they waited for whatever procedures had to be completed for a hearing. At least at the hearing, he’d have the right to go to the damn pharmacy and pick up some antivirals. The cough wouldn’t stop, and having a cold on top of a hangover was a miserable experience.

With precious little else to do but hurry up and wait, Echo decided to at least be productive. He lay, half propped up in the wall so it was easier to breathe and practiced with his fingers. They’d ripped the bacta glove off (ouch) and the tips were still purplish and bruised, but yellowing at the edges, so they were probably fine. He ran the instructions he’d read again and again and again in the design phase, replayed all the holovids he’d watched in his mind, seeing the notes as clear as day. Despite Tech’s assertions, the synaesthesia had never lingered as long as he’d liked, but it had been helpful in teaching him correct fingering and fretting techniques. He moved his fingers in the air, playing the music in his head, trying to tease out all the old favourites and re-work them for this new instrument. He kept the system muted, but he did fire up the string projector, it’s buzz a soothing vibration across his scratchy chest. 

He did it for hour upon hour, until his arms and fingers became too sore. Then he dozed, or tried to doze past the coughing and the headache and the general feeling of malaise. Then he’d wake up, still in the cell, uninterrupted by another living thing, and would continue to silently practice.

At one point he woke up to find a meal tray left in the slot. He gratefully sculled the water but the food was unappetizing and his stomach didn’t like the look of it or the smell of it, so he left it be.

It had to have been a full day now. He wondered what was happening up there in the world.

Too tired to catastrophize any more worst case scenarios, Echo wearily practiced again, finding a certain amount of peace in the repetition. Then he dozed again, a more proper sleep this time for all that he felt uncomfortable and too hot and generally awful.

That turned into his whole world. Practise, sleep, practice. He couldn’t keep track of how time passed, but he felt the limp greyness of resignation fill him. This was how he’d survived the Techno Union. Retreating into the silence and darkness inside whenever we could. He gave up asking what was happening when there were periodic visits by custodial droids. They never knew anything anyway.

At least this time he had a little music to keep him company, he thought as he continued to strum silently, the notes dancing in his overheated head. 

I’m tired, Echo. Play for me?

“Okay, Fives,” Echo rasped to the dead air. He could see the memory so clearly in his head; Fives, slumped up against Echo’s rack, so close that Echo could reach down and run his fingers through his hair if he felt the urge, too wired and tired and caring so much that he couldn’t sleep, his perceived failures eating him alive inside, because Fives had a habit of doing that. Echo could almost feel the weight of Fives’ bowed head, tucked up against Echo’s knee, feeling a mere hands length away.

Play me a nice song. A lullaby.

Echo kept his eyes resolutely on the ceiling. He didn’t dare look down and see that Fives wasn’t really there. It was nothing but a memory, as clear and as sharp as a knife. But he ached for that warm little bubble of peace that they’d once made when they could, in the quiet hours when the war went away for a time.

Echo hummed out the tune as he strummed the air, his fingers falling into the correct pattern like he’d studied his whole life. The lumenlute came to life under his fingers, singing it’s crystalline voice just like he remembered. He played and he hummed and he didn’t dare stop, lest this golden dreamlike state burst and disappear. 

Lest Fives leave him again.

Echo couldn’t survive that twice.

There was a thundering bang and Echo, ARC Trooper Echo, the one that never really slept, came awake swinging and blinking in the harsh lights of the cell.

For a brief moment, the grief was too much to bear.

But the moment unexpectedly passed right by as Echo took in his squadmates all yelling at someone, he couldn’t see who, outside the cellblock. The bang had been the door releasing. The ugly greyness Echo had sunk into burned away; you’d have to go a long hyperspace jump before you saw anything as colourful or as real as the Bad Batch.

“There he is!” Wrecker bellowed, jabbing a mighty finger in Echo’s direction like the others couldn’t see him perfectly well. 

They piled in and hurried for Echo’s cell even as Echo stiffly maneuvered himself upright and then had to close his eyes until the spins died down a little. “Hey,” he rasped out, then blinked in surprise. Scarred, grey, non-reg, begoggled… either he was hallucinating or there was one too many heads in his squad headcount. “Rex?” he asked.

“Right first time,” Rex replied with grim humour. “Not where I would’ve expected to find you, but you always did manage to surprise me.”

“Heh, you’re definitely part of the Bad Batch now,” Wrecker said cheerfully. “We’re always in the brig, for some reason.”

“Not always,” Hunter muttered with the air of a man going down fighting.

“But a statistically significant amount,” Tech delivered a killing blow. “You appear to be in some distress,” he frowned at Echo through his goggles and whipped out his ever-present scanner.

Crosshair’s observation was more brutal, as was his wont. “You look like three day old poodoo, reg,” he crossed his arms over his thin chest. “And stampeded by a herd of bantha.”

“Thanks Crosshair,” Echo choked out. “Missed you too.” And then he bent double, coughing fit to burst. Suddenly being upright hadn’t helped his lungs any, apparently. He could taste blood in the back of his throat and pressed a hand on the bench to nominally stay upright.

“Kriffing shit!” Hunter exclaimed. “Tech?”

“Scanning now.”

“Release that karking door right now or I’ll make you regret it in real time!” the Commander barked over his shoulder to whatever warden droid was running the brig.

“I’m... I’m…” Echo dissolved into more coughing before he could get anything else out. It was like his lungs had just been saving it all up.

“If you say the word fine I will literally make you run laps until you throw up,” Rex jabbed the fabled Finger Of Doom at him just as the forcefield released. 

“It’s just a stupid cold,” Echo croaked out even as Hunter - mother bokka extraordinaire, no matter how much he might deny it - darted in and slid in under Echo’s armpit to help hold him up.

“The evidence begs to differ,” Tech retorted, holding the scanner and walking backwards with it still on Echo even as Rex took up Echo’s scomp arm. “Your immunological response, high temperature and breathing patterns indicate a serious bronchial infection. Do let me know when you’ve obtained medical certification so that you may argue with me.” Sarcasm was apparently added as a free service when one used the Tech Medical Corps.

“I can carry him,” Wrecker offered.

“Try it and die,” Echo croaked. “Guys, I can walk, for force’s sake.”

“Right,” Hunter tightened his grip. “And that’s what you’re going to do. All the way to the medbay, no stops. Keep pace with us. That’s an order, in case you were wondering.”

“Walk, medbay, keep pace. Understood sir,” Echo echoed, just to be an asshole. Rex snorted on the far side; he actually had context for the lame joke. “How long was I even in there anyway?” he asked as he was hauled to the elevator.

“Two days,” Hunter told him, disgruntled about it as they piled into the elevator.

“Two days?” Honestly, it had felt longer. “Where were all you guys?” Echo rasped.

Complicated expressions travelled across various faces, including Rex’s.

“Oh,” Echo croaked, coughing again. “This is going to be good.”

Hunter winced guiltily at the coughs. “We… might have gone a little overboard playing Command Tax.”

“You staged a siege in the middle of the hanger bay,” Rex gave him the stink eye, jabbing a button and punchline in an override code. “There were fortifications with rail guns involved. The hanger droids were declaring martial law!”

Wrecker’s cheerful “We were winning, too!” was drowned out by Tech’s “We did, but to be fair, Commander, you crashed a cruiser right into the middle of the field of engagement,” after which Tech sidled slightly behind Wrecker as Rex shot him The Look.

“....what,” Echo’s gaze flitted from one to the other, searching for the light of reason.

Rex squared his shoulders under Echo’s eyes. “General Skywalker dropped by after the Council meeting was over and we proceeded to get absolutely blitzed off your tax tithe. Then we decided to go flimiplast the entirety of General Kenobi’s office. In my defence, our infil was textbook. The exfil was was where we ran into trouble.”

“General Kenobi walked in on them,” Crosshair reported with a certain amount of relish.

“Yes, thank you, Crosshair,” Rex glowered. “The General did walk in on us and we subsequently discovered that the flimsi files General Skywalker had possibly ejected from one of the windows were… uh, very, very important and irreplaceable classified intel.”

Echo narrowed his eyes. “Intel from Duchess Kryze, perhaps?”

“Possibly. It was hard to tell,” Rex’s reporting face didn’t waver. “The General was swearing quite a lot.” He glowered at the rest of the Batch, who were all sniggering. “We opted to fall back and do a full debriefing at a later date. When the General wasn’t quite so ready to take our heads off with his lightsaber.”

“I’m not sure where the cruiser comes in…?” Echo said faintly.

“Actually, we aren’t sure about that either,” Hunter said frankly.

Wrecker scratched his scars. “Yeeeaah, one minute we were breaking the starboard defenses with the Marauders tail gun-” full combat artillery in atmosphere and in a confined space, oh joy, Echo thought inanely. “And the next thing BOOM!” His big arms nearly knocked both Crosshair and Tech down either side of him. They were lucky this was a big elevator. “There was this big cruiser doing a spark landing right in the middle of the firefight. It was a pretty good distraction, though,” Wrecker allowed. “We were able to take the entire starboard fort before the regs shook the ringing out of their buckets.”

“That was Skywalker,” Rex sighed. “He thought it was a brilliant way to escape Kenobi. I’m somewhat amazed he could pilot so well that hammered.”

“He crashed the cruiser into his own base’s hanger bay,” Crosshair pointed out disdainfully.

“You should have seen the stunts he pulled before that,” Rex muttered darkly, going faintly green at the memory. “There’s something about those Skywalkers. They’re insane, so they’re lucky. No one wants to kill a madman, not even the force-damned laws of physics.”

“I still have not ascertained why you were in the cruiser yourself, sir,” Tech observed curiously. “General Kenobi did not seem to be particularly angry with you specifically when he caught up. His wrath was directed at General Skywalker alone. In fact, he specifically stated it was irresponsible for General Skywalker to put your life in danger piloting while intoxicated.”

“Skywalker’s a General,” Rex and Echo said in stereo.

Echo looked at a panorama of blank faces. “Protecting Jedi in the field is our literal job out there. Rex wasn’t going to leave Skywalker drunk out of his mind at the controls of a cruiser. Of course he was going to follow him on board, and both Jedi knew it. Kenobi was pissed because he doesn’t like it when clones are put in needless danger.”

They looked at Rex. Rex shrugged. Water was wet, suns were hot, clones protected the Jedi. It was just one of those things built into the universe; or, their universe anyway.

“Regs,” Crosshair sighed in despair.

“So,” Echo coughed again. “It took two days to sort out that mess?”

Everybody winced. “No,” Hunter muttered. “It took a couple of hours to sort out that mess. It took another twenty for civilian rescue crews to cut through the fortified hanger bay doors to get us out.”

Echo coughed and stared. “.... what.”

“The cruiser crash triggered the automated defence system and put the hanger bay into full lockdown. All the blast shields closed down and locked, exterior and interior,” Tech explained. "General Kenobi made it through the trooper entrance right before they locked.”

“.... so?” Echo tried to get his fuzzy, tired, overhot brain to think the problem through. “You just override it, right? There’s a command console in the hanger bay. Regulations.”

Every single clone in the elevator turned and gave Tech a filthy look.

“Ahem,” Tech fiddled with his goggles. “I may have cannibalised parts from the console in order to make an improvised explosive device to achieve certain strategic advantages over the regs offensive formation.”

Echo stared, and then said weakly. “And you didn’t just comm the outer control station for an override because…?”

“Uh,” Wrecker sheepishly raised a hand. “I mighta taken out the main comm transmitter. It was an accident, and the regs tried to take it out first!” he explained.

“If they were trying to take it out, why did you take it out?” Echo couldn’t stop the words if he tried. It was like watching brandy tanker drift into an asteroid field. It was all going to end in tears and booze but he just couldn’t look away. He had to know.

“To beat them to it, of course!”

Tech sighed in intellectual pain.

“Anyway,” Rex shuffled. “It was only after the hangover had worn off that we realized we were all a man down, as it were.”

Echo was silent for a full minute.

“Let me get this straight,” Echo said slowly. “I spent two whole days in the brig while you guys managed to lock yourself, two generals and a bunch of shinies inside your own HQs hanger bay and had to be rescued by civvies because you,” he jabbed a finger at the Bad Batch. “Started a war with your own side. And you,” He jabbed his scomp arm at Rex. “Didn’t think to cut off a general before he hit stupid drunk stage, which you have a) seen before and b) know the consequences of. And none of you osik buy’ce realized I was missing until after this clusterfuck had been unfucked?”

“... sort of?” Hunter mumbled. 

A tiny piece of the sum singularity of sentience in the galaxy withered and died; most of it felt like it was in Echo. It must have shown in his face, because Wrecker rubbed the back of his head sheepishly while everyone else avoided his gaze.

There was no way he was ever going to be able to rationalize any of this, Echo thought, and quite frankly he felt too completely miserable to try. What a story that’ll make for Fives, he thought, half amused and half saddened. 

Still, there were actual, real, sane problems that Echo needed to deal with, and all of the above was a lot of white noise he was using to deflect the dark turns of his thoughts. Rex and Hunter were game to misdirect, but there was a tension in their shoulders that came from more than just the usual idiot shenanigans the various people they were responsible for - upper rank and lower - managed to club them with. He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Rex,” he croaked after getting a few more coughs out. “Exactly how much trouble am I in right now?”

Oh, direct hit. Rex’s face shut down faster than the hanger bay doors probably had. “None that a round of meds won’t fix.”

“Rex,” Echo was not in the mood to be coddled. He was never in the mood to be coddled.

“No charges were filed,” Hunter broke into their stare off.

“Yeah, and…” Echo had to stop to cough. “And the throbbing vein on your forehead tells me there’s more to it than that. Seriously, what in the sith-hells is going on?”

“Clix made a deal with command,” Crosshair answered, because he at least recognised when Echo was getting to the edge of his temper. “He won’t press charges as long as certain conditions are met.”

Echo was getting a bad feeling. “Conditions?”

“Nothing for you to-” Rex tried to get out but Wrecker, force bless him, couldn’t read social cues to save his life. “Nothing special,” the big clone shrugged. “Just an apology. What?” he said into the squad’s chilly stares. “It don’t seem that bad to me!”

Echo’s eyes narrowed. “An official apology, sir?”

“That’d be my guess,” Rex said with leaden flatness.

Echo snorted out a laugh and promptly choked on it. “Maker. That kid’s a better strategist than I gave him credit for,” he wheezed out bitterly.

“Huh?” Wrecker still didn’t get it.

“An official apology requires that commanding officers of both parties involved be in the room when the apology takes place,” Tech explained, voice stilted. “In Clix’s case, that means Commander Fox must be involved in the proceedings.”

Wrecker sagged. “Oh.”

Echo gave a sad approximation of a smirk. “He’s persistent, I’ll give him that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hunter snapped. “I’m your commanding officer by default and I watched the security scans. You were damn well provoked beyond expectations of reasonable behaviour. Fox’s boy was out of line and I’m going to karking tell him so in no uncertain times. If they want to make this a giant shit fight, I can identify more types of shit that they’ve even thought of.”

“That is certainly true,” Tech said primly.

“Shit fights are our specialty,” Crosshair smirked.

“Kark yeah, all the shit!” Wrecker crowed.

Honestly, his fever must be getting worse. That was how Echo explained the flush of warmth at the squad, all clearly ready to rally and go into the fight - for him.

That being said, Echo and Rex were more experienced in the complexities of bureaucracy than the Batch were and Echo could see the cynical expression on Rex’s face. He didn’t think their path out of this was going to be easy. He shrugged into Echo’s glance. “Fox isn’t exactly happy about the situation either. Clix has the right to ask in lieu of charges; I think Fox is trying to talk him out of it.”

Echo snorted. Clix was about fifteen different shades of stubborn if he was determined enough to try to ambush an ARC trooper with only four guys and a righteous attitude. If a shattered jaw wasn’t enough to make him stop, Echo didn’t think Fox would win that fight.

“What even would he charge me with?” he wondered, half to himself. “We were both off duty and provocation dilutes the assault charge. There’s no infraction serious enough to warrant a full court martial or an official apology.”

Rex shrugged. “Striking a superior officer was his claim, and disobeying a direct order, which is correct as far as the GAR legal code goes, so he’s got us there.”

Echo stared at the elevator door.

Then he burst into great, hoarse barks of laughter.

He laughed, but inside, it was annoying. It was annoying that this was happening, it was annoying that Clix was getting his way, it was annoying that Fox, by some twisted turn of fate, was on Echo’s side in this. It was annoying that Echo couldn’t sort out what he felt about it. It was annoying that in all this shoving and fighting, Fives was getting lost.

Suddenly, Echo had had enough. He was tired, he was sick, he was trying his best to be a good soldier and to pick up all the pieces of his shattered life and build a new one. He’d had enough for a lifetime, and he was on his second one of those. The thought caused another wet giggle, which triggered yet another coughing fit. Echo doubled over, feeling the salt of his tears brush his copper-tasting lips.

“Force kark it,” Hunter grabbed him by the shoulder. “Where is this damn medbay, Tatooine?” he glared at the elevator monitor.

“In the heart of the base, for security reasons,” Tech was thumbing his scanner again. “It’s better for us to go there than one of the smaller infirmaries; it will have every amenity.”

“Maybe we should have them meet us,” Rex said urgently. “He’s not looking so good.”

“What time is it?” Echo rasped, the worried babbling around him fading out into hazy white noise.

“What?” Rex blinked. “It’s 0700, or thereabouts.”

Okay, so, if Echo remembered the rigid routines of the Coruscant HQ base right, that meant Fox was in the daily security briefing with the Guard in the big meeting atrium. That was in the heart of the base too, since the bigwigs from the senate would sometimes pop in to watch and it was just easier to make sure they were somewhere secure.

His eyes flicked to the elevator monitor. They were still going up, but the brig, for obvious reasons, was deep in the sublevels. They were in high admin territory now. And oh look, there was a scomp port, like it had just been waiting for him to notice it. For once, just this once, Echo chose not to overthink it.

He slammed his scomp link into the port; lucky for him and his brain he did have security clearance. ARCs could go anywhere, and did.

Rex’s surprised shout of Echo! was a distant, muffled thing under the haze of data. Echo let the machine bits handle access to the emergency brake system because his fleshy human brain was floating somewhere in the upper atmosphere, detached from practical concerns.

The sudden stop sent the Batch and Rex all tumbling into one another as they tried to keep their footing, a logistical nightmare whenever poor Wrecker was involved. He took down both Tech and Crosshair in a wave of swears as he flailed for purchase.

Echo kept his feet by grace of the scomp arm and his braced metal legs. Scarcely thinking about it, he fuzzily withdrew the uplink, hit the emergency door release and then climbed out. Literally, in this case, as they were between floors and he had to eel out the small gap showing to the next floor, which he did with speed his trainers would have found commendable.

“Echo, what in the actual sith hells are you doing?!” Rex sounded more worried than angry.

“Sorry sir,” Echo croaked out. “Let’s just get this over with, shall we?”

Rex’s eyes widened in realization even as Echo hit the override button on the other side to slam the doors shut and send the elevator back on its merry way. Echo heard him yelling furiously from inside the elevator, the sound quickly passing and vanishing into the wall. Echo winced slightly; Rex was probably swearing like a Corellian navyman while planning an epic punishment for this level of crazy stupid on Echo’s part. Echo was going to be scrubbing latrines for weeks for this little stunt, if he didn’t end up arrested.

There were a couple of troopers in the corridor that Echo had just crawled into, staring wide eyes at the spectacle. Echo had no idea what they made of him; brig blacks, machine parts on full display and all, but clearly whatever they saw in his eyes convinced them not to argue with him, because when he hoarsely demanded directions to the Guard atrium room, they complied with haste usually reserved for Generals.

Then Echo was going through the corridors and halls double time; it wouldn’t take long for the others to catch up and whatever hot, sizzling, unstoppable sensation this was that was burning away all the usual concerns over consequences wouldn’t last. Echo hadn’t been decanted that way. 

But kick them hard enough, even a square stone will roll.

Ignoring the ugly, wet scraping from his lungs, Echo reached the atrium, sweating from where he could sweat. He felt like his very soul was on fire. His adrenaline pumped freely into his veins, but instead of making it shake or hesitate, it steadied and spurred him.

The big atrium doors were locked; the occupancy light showed a classified rating. There were none of the Guard outside the door; this deep in the base there was very little point. He shoved his scomp arm into the socket next to the door and hit the release protocols.

Then he stood back, squared his shoulders, tilted his chin to an impeccable, textbook angle and marched with every ounce of military decorum that he possessed into the room beyond. They could take issue with a lot about Echo, but it would never be said he faced any fight as anything less than a good soldier.

The atrium wasn’t as big as the one in Tipoca; then again, the Guard wasn’t as big as the main force. Still it was big enough to hold a battalion or so, and they all seemed to be here. They were lined up in neat, red painted rows like a grain farm; all exactly alike on the outside but peel back the plastoid husk and they were all very different underneath.

Their attentions were so focused on the speaking podium and whatever list of duties were being doled out that for a few seconds Echo went all but unnoticed. It was, ironically, Clix himself that faltered mid-word, choking on air to see an former ARC - really, half a former ARC - marching up the center aisle between two perfect formations for the spell to break. He could feel the ripple of attention hit him from all sides as he advanced. The thin brig-issue blacks didn’t do a thing to hide his ravaged body, lopsided and misshapen as it was now. For once all the gut curdling sensation of being seen like this was not present; their stares bounced off like pebbles off armour. Echo only had eyes for the podium and the cluster of people on it; specifically Clix, who had no doubt been performing the day-to-day clerical work that an aide to a ranked officer would do before the meeting started. Off to Clix’s left was the space designated for the commanding officer. Echo didn’t let his eyes touch it, even for a glance.

He squared his shoulders, brought his heels together with a metal click and fired off a crisp salute with his scomp arm. “Forgive me for interrupting, Specialist. I was advised that in lieu of having charges pressed, that you asked for an official apology for my misconduct. For the sake of efficiency and the reputation of the GAR, I thought it would be best to proceed as quickly as possible.”

He heard a choking sound from the commanding officer’s position, and didn’t so much as flick an eye in that direction. He kept his eyes on Clix, whose military decorum had been, right up until this point, almost unbreakable. The Specialist's eyes went wide, and he hurriedly flicked his eyes this way and that, at a complete loss for a response. “Uh… perhaps at a later date?” he essayed tentatively, looking at all the Guard watching. “There’s no regulation that specifically states the apology must be made in public.”

Echo had to hand it to him, the kid was trying his best. But no clone alive or dead could out-regulation CT-21-0408. “There’s no specific regulation that states it must be performed privately, either, sir. In fact, there’s quite a few clauses that indicate it should be performed publicly, for the good of morale.” This was a stretch of a sort, the regulations dictated the rest of the men should be made aware of the apology, not that they should witness it. Fire, boom, boom, fire. It all ended up in the same place. “I think it behooves me to make the amends I owe, for the sake of Guard morale if nothing else. As an ARC, my honour demands nothing less.”

Clix flailed without actually moving, his face becoming increasingly more panicked. “That does you credit,” he said with the slow, white knuckled deliberation of a man walking through a mine field. Where the mines were hunting him. “But your Commander is not here to witness it, as per regulations.”

“Commander Cody is busy at the front, sir,” Echo noted implacably, his fevered brain doing quick mental math. “His recall could take weeks, even if we were willing to pull such key personnel from a duty where he is clearly needed. In lieu of my official Commander, any officer of rank may take his place.”

Echo wondered if the Bad Batch’s sense of dramatic timing was really that good or they were just lucky that way. Whatever it was, the pattern held true; the doors to the atrium hissed open and footfalls of various weight and/or stealth ability thundered into the room. “Echo!”

“There,” Echo smiled with grim satisfaction, holding back more coughs by sheer force of will. “Not one, but two commanding officers under which I serve, or have served. I’m sure that will suffice.”

“Sirs, forgive the interruption,” Rex got in a hair’s breadth before Hunter could. “We were just-”

“Forgive me, but what is going on here?” A new voice broke into the atmosphere. It wasn’t a trooper’s voice.

Echo felt rather than saw Rex go to full attention behind him, and when he looked towards the source he could see why. He hadn’t given anyone else on the podium a second glance, mostly because they’d be irrelevant to the proceedings. The space on that side of the podium contained chairs for any Republic officials sitting in on the briefings, which did happen on the regular, depending on what was being covered. Usually it was some poor senator who got stuck on the GAR oversight committee or a member of the Judge Advocates corps. 

Today, it was no less than the Supreme Chancellor Palpatine himself, rising from his seat in his official robes, looking patrician and dignified.

That the actual leader of the Galactic Republic was in this room right at this moment and was looking him over with elegant curiosity about being involved in, what was in the grand scheme of things, a meaningless minor dispute between two clone troopers of the GAR should have ground the universe to a dead stop. 

Echo felt the knowledge hit him and… do nothing. No amount of repeating in his fevered brain Supreme Chancellor Palpatine elicited a single emotional response. He was in the battlefield now and no superfluous details would keep him from his mission. “Specialist Clix and I had a physical altercation wherein I struck him quite hard, sir.” He reported with terse but correct decorum. “Clix has requested an official apology, which he is well within his rights to do. I am simply here to deliver it.” He couldn’t quite strangle back the coughs that followed, but he did manage to keep them brief.

“I see,” Palpatine said delicately. 

“Sir, if we could just talk with our squadmate here,” Rex tried again, sidling closer to Echo while still maintaining attention. “He is not precisely in the best state right now. We apologise for the interruption…”

“Sir, I wish to make my amends,” Echo gritted his teeth, tugging his shoulder loose from Rex’s grip. “Not to cause trouble or embarrassment, but because they are owed. It is not my intention to be disruptive…”

“As well you should, I expect,” Palpatine said, gently chiding. “You’re that Corporal, aren’t you? The Techno Union’s secret weapon,” Oh, that right there didn’t gain the Chancellor any more give-a-fuck points. “I’m sure you have suffered a great deal and your emotional stability is difficult to maintain. However, there is a time and a place for such things, and there is no need for such a grand display, storming in here barely in uniform. There’s no need to disrupt the peaceful order of things. It hardly does the GAR you serve with such distinction any credit. However, the Republic appreciates your dedication and takes into account the suffering you endured in the service of it, so I will recommend this infraction be stripped from your record-”

“With all due respect, sir, that is not within your authority.”

Rex choked, Hunter hissed through his teeth and Clix’s eyes nearly popped out of his skull. “Corporal!” the latter yelped, scandalized.

Palpatine looked amused. “Do you know who I am, Corporal?’

“Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine, commander in chief of the Galactic Republic and all the worlds therein, sir,” Echo rasped out flatly. “And therefore, by law, you only have authority over us in external matters. The Republic picks the wars we fight and the weapons we use and the armours churned out by the lowest bidder. But in internal matters, including discipline for infractions, the statutes governing the regulations for both of our respective organisations specifically state that no member of the Senate has any right to command us. We are not slaves, sir. In certain matters, we have the right to dictate our own honour and our own fate amongst ourselves as we see fit. For the sake of our legal rights alone, I must kindly ask you to not invoke an authority you do not have. With due respect, sir.” Echo threw in that last one, because rules and who could break them got more badly defined the higher up the seats of power you got. Echo wasn’t quite so free of inhibitions that he couldn’t recognise a man with the power to make his life a misery if he really wanted to, with little effort.

But it had to be said. Sometimes the politicians forgot that clones weren’t droids. They presumed too much.

The Chancellor had an excellent politician's face. If Echo wasn’t seeing everything in hyper saturated clarity in his lightheaded, fevered brain, he would barely have seen the look of pure, offended astonishment flashing across the man’s face. But he locked it down as fast as hyperspace, lines folding back into their usual place of mild curiosity. “I do believe you are right, Corporal. Let it never be said I did not respect regulations. Please continue.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Rex was gaping like a fish, pale under his tan. So many latrines, Echo thought with a grim smile at himself inside.

“Echo.”

All amusement vanished like it had been vaporised in a thruster burner. 

It was a voice like Echo’s voice, like all their voices, like Fives voice.

Except it wasn’t.

Fox had come down off the podium. Echo, cursing his training, ws forced to turn towards the approaching movement.

He’d been prepared for military blankness. He wasn’t sure how to react to the worry he saw in that familiar unfamiliar face. “You need to go to the medbay,” Fox said. “You’re not well.”

“I’m better than dead, sir,” the words cruelly slipped out before he could engage his better nature. Dank farrak, he needed to get a grip and show some decorum. He was a soldier, he should at least act like one. “And that’s all an ARC really needs.” Was added to take some of the sting out, almost in spite of himself. “And Clix did request an official apology. Since we’re all here, I think it’s best if we just get this over with.”

Fox shot an unamused look at his subordinate, who, to his credit, didn’t squirm. “I am not entirely happy with this state of affairs as it is.”

“I’d sooner have no apology at all than this farce, Commander,” Clix was glowering down at Echo even though he was ostensibly talking to Fox. “In addition to the already quite serious charge of striking a superior officer and disobeying a direct order, the Corporal seems determined to make a mockery of the Guard as well with his undignified and unworthy display. You’re hardly acting as a credit to the GAR, and you are ranked the best of a bad lot amongst your squad.”

Someone must be grinding a hole through Wrecker’s boot at this point to keep his mouth shut, but Echo could feel the tangible heat of the Batch’s glares hit Clix in real time. Kriff, Echo was going to have to get them off the planet immediately after this. The Batch had both the skillset and the sheer psychological nerve to break an enemy combatant into their component particles if they felt so inclined, and Clix was now an enemy in their eyes.

And really, for that little sally, even Echo’s bottomless font of mercy went momentarily dry. 

“That’s quite enough, Clix,” Fox snapped.

“It’s alright, Commander,” Echo stepped forward to face Clix properly before Clix could respond. “He has every right to chastise me. So, Specialist,” he was careful to state the rank. “I am sorry that I struck you in anger. It was an act beneath my honour as an ARC and showed a deplorable lack of discipline. It will not happen again.”

Clix grimaced in the silence that followed because, Echo thought, he’d spotted the huge flaw in his own strategy. Having given an official apology, in public no less, Clix could not, in a sense, not accept it. No plan survives first contact with the enemy, kid, Echo thought wryly as he watched the realization steal over Clix’s scarred face. He knew that truth about war, surely?

Fox, however, was just about done with this whole affair. “There, you have your apology,” he rolled his eyes at his aide. “Can we put this to bed now?”

“I’m not finished yet, sir,” Echo said politely, before Clix could get a word in.

Fox stared at him. “Of course you’re not,” he said slowly.

“I say you are,” Rex growled at him. 

“Not quite, sir, not quite,” Echo smiled in such a way as to bear all of his teeth. “I have to answer for the actual charges levied against me. Which were…” he raised an eyebrow at Clix.

“Striking a superior officer,” Clix replied stiffly. “And disobeying a direct order given by a superior officer.”

“Right, well. I am sorry, Specialist. I am sorry that my personal grieving over the death of my brother - my twin - was so inconvenient to your Commander that I could not muster the necessary self-discipline to willingly be marched before the man who killed him with equanimity.”

“Corporal!” Clix snapped, going ruddy in the face.

“I am sorry that the aftereffects of the extreme trauma I went through make my emotional state and reflexes hard to control on a good day and I sincerely hope that I can gain more control over them as I heal what I can when I can.”

“Alright, that’s en-”

“I am sorry,” Echo talked right over him. “That I had the temerity to sit around and drink and relax with my squadmates while I was off duty, under the, I suppose, unreasonable assumption that I am ever safe from hostile threats, even in my own base and from my own people.”

“Corporal, I am ordering you to stop!” Clix’s face was a dull umber, his hands clenched at his sides in embarrassment and anger.

“And I am sorry that, in your zeal to defend your commanding officer from his own guilt, you dismissed, diminished and insulted the life, and the death, of one of your own, one of the best of us ever to march; an act so unworthy of your rank and station it quite beggars belief that you believe you speak for the Guard itself,” Echo held his iron gaze right on the furious Clix. “I am also sorry, Specialist, that in the face of all that I cannot possibly adequately answer to the charges you have set before me today.”

Clix looked enraged. “So you’d throw my compassion at my feet, even when I gave you the chance to amend, Corporal? You dare speak of acts unworthy of your rank and station? Maybe a court martial would knock some sense of respect into you, if not sense!”

“Specialist!” Fox roared at the top of his voice. “Enough! Please…” he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Enough. This has gone on long enough.”

“Sir, I am sorry, but the Corporal has no right to such disrespect! We are his superior officers and we should not be spoken to like that. His arrogance is appalling and unwarranted! So he lost someone! We’ve all lost someone! Most of us learn better than to take it out on the people left behind! Reminding him where he sits in the ranks may at least give him some much needed humility, if he can’t find compassion.”

“If you’re quite done,” Hunter broke in, ice cold. “You got your apology. That’s all you were owed. Not an explanation and sure as sith-hells not him on his knees, begging your Commander for absolution. As far as I can tell, he isn’t the one who’s guilty. So if that’s all, Specialist, we’ll be going.”

Clix scowled at him, but Hunter did outrank him, so he couldn’t retort.

Echo snorted. “You know what I’m most sorry for, kid?” he rasped. “I’m sorry for you. You’re earnest and loyal and have your head so deep in the books you don’t seem to realise you’re dealing with men and not machines. You’re like a version of me that I don’t like. Fives would have fucking loved you. I’m sorry you never got to meet him.”

Clix looked uncomfortable.

“And most of all? I’m sorry your near word perfect understanding of the regulations doesn’t seem to include the 89s. Specifically,” Echo took on his special reciting voice. “Regulation 89-22-55; Posthumous promotion of troopers who die in combat. I’m sorry that I can’t answer to the charge of disobeying a direct order or striking a superior officer because you don’t seem to realize that, as per reg 89-22-55, I KRIFFING OUTRANK YOU!” Echo’s shout briefly rang throughout the atrium. “And my rank is Sergeant, Specialist. Thank you very much.”

The effect was electric. Fox’s mouth dropped to the floor and while Echo was keeping his eyes pinned forward, like a good soldier at attention, he could feel Rex goggling spectacularly beside him. Hunter had had to deal with too many crazy, random surprises - his face locked down better than a General’s, but for a nanosecond he’d looked completely taken off-guard, not something that happened very often.

The rest of the squad was hovering in his blind spot, but he definitely heard a muffled noise that may or may not have been Crosshair stifling some kind of gleeful sound. He loved drama when it didn’t actively involve him, especially when the regs were at the wrong end of it.

But Clix had the best reaction of all. His eyes nearly popped out of their sockets and his mouth worked soundlessly in the air. He looked, in that moment, far more human than he ever had before. He turned towards his Commander, looking for any direction, at a loss at how to respond.

“Wait, that’s a thing?” Wrecker, bless him, never worried about telling people he didn’t know something. “You get promoted when you die?”

“Yes, Wrecker, that’s a thing,” Rex was beginning to grin madly next to him. It must have been just like the good old days with Torrent for a moment there, pulling some wild saves out of their shebs at the last possible second. Echo was sure he appreciated it for the thrill, if nothing else. “If you die on the front, your rank is posthumously bumped up. If you show bravery under fire as you do, regulations say you get another bump. Two whole ranks, at least, then. I commend you on your usual perfect recall of the regulations,” Rex smirked at him. “Sergeant.”

Yeah, Echo was never going to live this down. 

Clix spluttered from where he stood. Echo started to feel a little bit bad for him. Sure, he’d been a headstrong and presumptuous idiot, but his humiliated face was more than just down to being outgunned and, literally, outranked. The idea that he’d shown disrespect to a soldier of superior rank was genuinely mortifying to the young clone. He’d sooner have spat in a senator’s face than disrespect the ranks like that. Those things meant something to him. Echo would know; he’d been very much the same kind of person, a lifetime ago.

Fox looked at his aide and sighed. Apparently not so married to the idea of decorum that he wouldn’t step up to help one of his own, he laid a hand on poor Clix’s trembling shoulder and faced Echo with a kind of saddened resoluteness. “I apologise on behalf of my subordinate, Sergeant. No insult was intended. If you wish to pursue insubordination charges, levy them at me. I hope you will accept that, and allow us to close this matter for good.” In other words, Echo thought, take your anger out on me and leave the kid out of it.

As a plea for compassion went… well, Echo was hardly immune to it. 

“It’s fine,” Echo said, voice gruff from what he was telling himself was the stupid cold. 

“S-sir, I’m… I’m so sorry..” Clix stuttered out, looking like he wanted to sink into the floor and die a thousand deaths.

“Hey,” Echo stepped up on the podium and laid his hand on the kid’s still shaking shoulder, already regretting letting his anger take things this far. This was why he was the cool headed one to Fives’ hot. Fives knew how to control the effects of his temper better. “It’s okay. I forgive you, okay? We’re brothers, at the end of the day. You were trying to make something right for one of yours. I can’t fault you for your care, at least. So I forgive you, alright? Forgiving is what brothers do.”

“Yes, sir,” Clix whispered. “Thank you sir.”

“Alright,” Echo eyed the watching Guard coolly and raised his rasping voice. “If anyone feels they ever need to mention this again, they can come and talk to me about it.” Something in his tone made a variety of feet and shoulders shift slightly. Echo had no doubt none of them would dare give Clix a hard time over it with that in mind.

Might as well finish this off, Echo thought. The anger that had let him power through his discomfort had ebbed, and he felt like one big, mucus clogged, wheezing ache that wanted to sleep for a few hundred years. He gave a crisp near-texbook salute to Commander Fox. “I apologise again for interrupting your briefing Commander. Permission to leave?”

Fox’s eyes darted across Echo’s face. “As you were, Sergeant. Rex, get him to the medbay, please?”

“That’s the plan,” Rex sighed, climbing up to help Echo down. “I miss the days when plans worked. Come on, Sergeant, you’ve caused enough trouble for one day.”

Echo turned and marched back down the aisle in the ragged silence that followed, Rex in the lead and the Batch keeping in step with him, a proper, orderly formation which just went to show they understood and could perform military decorum just fine when the occasion called for it.

He just about managed to make it to the elevator before the coughs he’d stored up burst out in a heaving, spasming wave and he was forced to grab a hold of Crosshair to keep upright. 

“You,” Crosshair informed him as he grabbed him and held him up, furiously chewing on a toothpick. “Are karking mental, you do know that right?”

“Is that your…  professional… opinion?” Echo managed to get out between coughs.

“Grey hairs,” Rex hissed as he jabbed the call button. “Every one I got is because of either Fives or you. Every. Single. One.”

“Oh, come on,” Echo rasped. “At least some of them must be S-Skywalkers,” he said, coughing again.

“Generals are supposed to be wildly unmanageable and karking crazy,” Rex jabbed the Finger Of Doom at him. “We’re prepared for the osik they’ll inevitably get us into! You, on the other hand,” Rex shook his head. “I should have remembered you were the kriffing stand out amongst all my troublemakers.”

“Me?!” Echo squawked, shocked. “I was a clockwork soldier - once figuratively and now literally. Fives was the wild one.”

“Echo, I hate to be the one to point this out,” Tech said over the rim of his scanner. “But you literally just told the Supreme Chancellor of the entire Republic and appointed head of the GAR itself to… how can I put this?” he mused.

“You told him to fuck off,” Hunter said, face split into the smirk of once who is currently riding a adrenaline high. “You got right in his face and told him to fuck right off. I’ve been so-so about dealing with superiors my whole life but even I don’t have the stones to pull that off.”

“And you claim you’re not a standout,” Crosshair snorted.

“That’s not what made him a standout,” Rex threw up his hands. “Insubordinate spitfires I can handle, they’re a credit for a hundred in the clones. It’s the fact that Echo can turn around and make that kind of stunt seem normal and sane. His trick was that he always gets away with it!” Rex gave a snort into Echo’s open mouthed stare. “I was so fucking grateful there weren’t more of you, except I could have also used about a hundred more of you too.”

Echo gaped at him, robbed of all speech.

Hunter burst out laughing.

“You’re thinking of Fives,” Echo protested, wheezing. “Fives was the one who got into trouble like no one could believe.”

“Fives was a class all of his own, as far as spitfires went,” Rex allowed. “But when he found trouble you were always right there beside him and getting him out of it. Not only that, you always managed to do it in such a way as to make everyone think whatever shenanigans you got up to were perfectly logical and explicable. Believe me, kid, that was a fucking talent, and a fucking rare one.”

Echo had never quite had it put to him in those terms before.

“But he was right, though, wasn’t he?” Wrecker pointed out carefully from the back. “About the Chancellor? I mean, he didn’t have the right to just take over from us, did he?”

They all looked at each other. On flimsi, the answer was hell no. In political reality, the answer was hell yes. No one knew where the truth landed when the shuttles hit the landing bay. It was a new thought for all of them, the idea that their right to dictate the contours of their own lives outside of the rule of the Republic was a thing that had to be defended.

“I’m not sure how much we should push our luck, let me just put it that way, Wrecker,” Hunter told him.

“I dare say,” Tech added. “That it would be… wise for us to leave Coruscant expediently as soon as we are able.”

“As soon as we get this idiot to-” Rex stopped, watching Hunter as his head turned towards the corridor, frowning. 

“Someone’s coming,” Hunter said. “Dress boots, well polished. He’s coming in fast.”

One doesn’t run this deep in a forward base unless it’s an emergency.

Echo turned with the rest of the squad. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t Fox cornering the turn like the finest street runner, his pace headlong and resolute. “Wait!”

Suddenly Echo could see nothing but a wall of backs, mostly Wrecker’s. The squad had folded around him like a protective shell; even Crosshair had angled his lean body so that Echo was shielded by it. He could just imagine the cold set of their faces. The exception was Tech; who was using the cover provided to flat out yank wires out of the elevator control panel and slice into the system to get it here faster.

“Wait,” Fox said from the other side of the wall. “I need to talk to him.”

Echo felt his gut tighten. Kark.

“With all due respect, Commander, haven’t we already had this fight?” Hunter’s voice was colder than Hoth. 

“I know, but…” Fox sounded choked like Echo had never heard him sound. “Please, I just… I need to talk to him about Fives. It’s important.”

“Fox, he’s sick,” Rex sighed. “I understand, but now is not the time.”

“You and I both know,” Fox said in a low voice. “That there will never be another chance, for me or for him.”

That hit Echo right in his chest. Fox’s tone sounded so dead certain. Maybe he was right. Outside of this frankly tiny little drama, a big bad war was still raging on. His path may never cross with Fox’s again. And while a part of him rejoiced with that knowledge, there would always be a grain of dissatisfaction inside of him that Fox would never have to face the consequences of what he did, up close and personal.

And Echo would never know why.

He grunted and shoved past Wrecker and Hunter, grabbing Hunter’s shoulder for support. “It’s alright,” he rasped as he felt hands grab his shoulders. “It’s alright. I’ll talk to him, it's fine.” Echo tried to straighten up as much as he could but he could feel himself swaying, his head spinning. “Well, Commander,” he wheezed out. “Here I am. What do you have to say?”

He wanted to say he kept his voice level and calm, but there were too many shades of belligerent painting it. Looking at his face was painful. Echo couldn’t stop thinking of how Fox must have looked holding that damn blaster. Holding it on one of them, on Fives. Had it all just been workmanlike for him too, the faint satisfaction of a well made shot and the regret coming after? Was all this just Fox’s way of tying off his loose ends, neat and clean, the way Fox approached all things? Echo could believe it.

The agony in the Commander’s eyes, though, pulled him up short. “I don’t know what happened,” he said finally, after a long silence.

Echo blinked, startled.

“I mean,” Fox looked down at his hands. “I know what happened, I don’t remember how. I remember ordering more reinforcements and I remember… I remember standing there, with that blaster in my hands,” he clenched them. “But between those two points, there’s nothing. I don’t forget things, I’ve always had a good memory, but it’s like that part is just… just gone. No,” Fox added miserably. “Not gone. I see what happened, I witness it, but it’s like it’s a holoreel playing in my head. It’s like I’m not even in my body, like something else is piloting it. And… and no matter how hard I fight it, I can’t change what’s happening on the screen.”

Echo felt his insides lurch. Fox was staring at his own hands, fathomless and frightened, like he didn’t dare trust them any more. What was a soldier, what was a clone, without the assurance of controlling his own body, when they had so little other things that they could control about their fate?

“You mean you… you blocked it out?” Echo rasped slowly.

“No,” Fox shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t have done that. I’d have made sure I remembered. I shot one of mine. Not a clanker or a Sep. One of mine, Echo.” His face twisted up, like he was trying not to cry. “I’d never have let myself forget what I did like that. This was something else. I don’t know what it was,” he said helplessly.

“I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear,” Fox choked out. “I wish more than anything I could tell you something different. But I don’t know, Echo. I don’t know what happened.” Fox’s face dropped, and he stared at the floor, shoulders bowed and shaking. “I wish I did. Maybe I could have something to say that would make a difference to you, that would bring you some comfort. Maybe then the nightmares would stop.” A tear dropped to the floor, shiny and devastating as a cluster bomb.

Echo opened his mouth, but there was nothing. He couldn’t pull any words out. All the grief, all the loss, all the rage and bitterness and just plain exasperation that had driven him all the way to here like a molten wave of lava crashed against that falling tear drop and turned to stone, taking all the burning hatred with it. It had been so easy to resent Fox as some distant abstract, the one-plus-one simple truth of his culpability in Echo’s loss. Faced with the broken man in front of him Echo couldn’t find that anger anymore. All he could feel was the vice-like grip of grief that so much sadness and tragedy had been dealt to all of them when Fives had died.

Someday, he’d said to Rex. Someday, it turned out, was today.

Echo hauled himself upright on Hunter’s shoulder. A glance at his Sergeant showed the man watching Fox with sadness and pity in his eyes. Hunter took care of people; that was the core that spun his hyperdrive, whether he admitted it to himself or not. But no one could protect someone from their own demons.

Damn it if Echo wasn’t going to give it a proper ARC trooper try, though.

He pulled out of the grip of his silent squad and moved to Fox on swaying feet. Fox had just enough time to look up in shock before Echo lurched into him, wrapped his one good arm around him and held on tight. 

Fox went stiff as a board for a heartbeat, two, three. Then, hesitantly, he wound his arms tight around Echo’s back and held on like he was about to go over an abyss if he let go. “Ni ceta,” he breathed in Echo’s ear, tears soaking through his blacks. “Ni ceta.”

The apology didn’t do much for the horrible leaden weight on his chest. Echo was sorry it had even come to this. “It’s alright.” Echo straightened up out of the hold, butting his forehead carefully against Fox’s as he moved, the gesture almost accidental. “I forgive you. It wasn’t your fault. I’m the one who has to carry Fives’ legacy on until we all go around again. And I know… I know he would have forgiven you too. I can’t do any less.”

That’s when the spins hit him. Curse his stupid, badly made body, it never had the sense of a meaningful moment. Fox grabbed him to keep him upright. “For Force’s sake, soldier, get your shebs to the medbay,” he said gruffly, sounding closer to himself.

“Once again, that was supposed to be the plan,” Rex grabbed Echo, exasperated. “Come on, you damn troublemaker. Commander,” he nodded to Fox as he slipped a step away from the group, his usual military demeanor falling back over him like armour. 

“Commander,” Fox acknowledged the rank with a nod in return. “The rest of you… try to stay out of trouble,” he added to the Bad Batch, who were hovering in the background. “At least until we can come up with a sane explanation to the oversight committee for why our hanger bay is now full of holes.”

Echo snorted, then coughed. “Good luck with that,” he rasped.

“Impromptu war game was going to be my pick,” Rex muttered. 

“Echo,” Fox hesitated before he turned. “Why would you forgive me, of all people?”

Echo was too tired to unravel all the complicated reasons shoving for supremacy inside of him. He went with the one that was closest to his heart. “We’re men, not droids,” he said softly. “We make choices. Compassion is something we can choose to show to each other. And should.”

Fox went white as a shiny’s armour. Rex, just in his sightline, didn’t look much better.

“Well said,” Fox said in a low voice. “As you were, Sergeant.” He turned and marched with textbook crispness back the way he’d come.

“Rex?” Echo stared after Fox’s departing back. “What the hell did I just say that was exactly the wrong thing? Fox looked like he’d just seen a ghost.”

“He did,” Rex said tersely. “It’s complicated. Let’s just say you and Fives are a lot alike.”

Echo stared at him.

“In the service of Echo not actually ending up quite like Fives,” Tech cut across the frozen tableau. “We best get to the medbay urgently.”

“I’ll explain later,” Rex said gruffly, hauling Echo around and essentially thrusting him at Hunter and Wrecker. “Come on.”

Echo didn’t have it in him to argue. Tiredness punched him right in the gut, leaving him to lean on the warm stanchion that was Wrecker once they’d all piled back on the elevator. It had been a while since Echo had felt quite this drained. All we wanted was a rack and some peace. A bit of floor would do at this point.

“What happened to your fingers?” Wrecker rumbled from some fuzzy, distant place above him. “Some bantha ass stomp on them, or what?”

“What?” Hunter’s voice came from the other side. There was a distant sensation of his one flesh hand being grabbed in warm fingers.

Echo blinked slowly, trying to clear the blurriness from his eyes. “Twi-lek,” he grunted out. “Treena. One lekku, total karking badass. She pulled off my fingernails.”

“He’s delirious,” a blur that might have been Crosshair said.

Echo phased out a little after that, to the distant hubbub of noise that he couldn’t parse, although Tech’s voice bobbed up with understandable words like ‘not keratin’ and ‘crystalline substance’. Something about his nails then.

“Echo. Echo,” the voice cut through the fog. “Hey, stay awake,” Hunter tapped his cheek, but very gently, like he was worried Echo would shatter, as if Echo hadn’t been broken so many times by now. “Tell me why you replaced your fingernails with crystal pieces.”

Echo tried to assemble his brain into a coherent, functioning whole. Regulation 34-34-226 Troopers may get certain body modifications outlined as follows: 1) Tattoos 2) Scar removal surgery, 3) Scar replacement modifications 4)...

“Not what I asked,” Hunter sounded amused. “Why did you get your fingernails replaced? What are they for?”

“For the bow harp,” Echo mumbled, trying to fight his way through the hot fog.

There was another wave of incomprehensible noise. 

“F’ the music,” Echo slurred out. “Helps Fives sleep.”

Despite everything coming at him from lightyears away, he clearly heard Rex’s soft “Oh.”

Right, Rex would know. He could explain. Echo couldn’t assemble enough energy right now to tell the squad those nights, the bad ones and the good ones, where Echo would play, happily, precisely, desperately, trying to drive the nightmares away. There had been so many, an unfathomable ocean of darkness and one lumenlute blazing within it, like a tiny candle in the storm.

Play me a song, Echo.

Suddenly pain thundered in Echo’s chest, an eruption of coughing spewing out of it. His whole body convulsed with it, his legs lost all power and he slid downwards, grabbed at desperately by many hands. He tasted blood. He saw blood. A lurid red splatter turned space into a galaxy of ugly.

“Karking shit!” Someone yelled. “Grab him and turn on his side, now.” Someone else.

The darkness was coming for Echo. He could see it rising up to grab him.

Play me a nice song. A lullaby.

Echo dropped into it, hearing distant voices yelling his name.

Chapter Text

Echo woke up in the barracks. Hevy was snoring away and there were hints of others, somewhere, laid out on the racks in the gloom. It was one of those huge barracks where everyone slept in the same room. Back in the day they’d all be piled together, no one had an assigned bed, you flopped where you dropped.

Echo tried to parse out the thought back in the day when movement near his feet made him look over. “Fives?” he mumbled blearily. It was dark in here, almost pitch black, so well after lights out. He could barely make Fives sitting at the end of the rack illuminated as he was by the blue glow from… somewhere. “You should be asleep. Are you having nightmares again?”

“Play me a song, Echo.”

Echo blinked tiredly. He was exhausted, but Fives sounded so sad and he couldn’t just leave him like that. He sat up in the rack and felt around underneath it for the lumenlute. He always had it set to play at low volume, but the others never seemed to mind impromptu small hours concerts anyway, if you could call what simple tunes Echo knew concerts.

He settled it by muscle memory, left hand down at the body to move the resonator pluck up and down, right arm…

Echo stared at it. His right arm was a scomp link. He tried, in a hazy, surreal way, to remember whether it felt right or it felt wrong. Everything felt so different, so completely left of centre, but the wall of tired and the reassurance of his brother right there wasn’t letting any of the concern or fear in.

There was sadness though, which welled up, unexpected and devastating, inside of him as he cradled the lumenlute in his half-gone body. “I don’t think I can play,” he said, feeling the tears blur his already fuzzy vision. “I can’t play, Fives.” The thought made him weep, but he didn’t know why.

He felt the lumenlute slide from his grasp, even though he snatched for it, trying to hold on. Fives’ hand replaced it, running up and down his scomp link… forearm… Echo couldn’t tell which, it felt like it was both and neither.

“Shhhh, it’s alright Echo,” Fives face was a mere hint in the darkness. Echo could barely see him. “You don’t have to play. We can just sit here for a while.”

“But I can’t play,” Echo cried harder and tried to get his head in order. Everything was a tangled morass, filled with memories that made no sense. “It’s important, the music, it means something. Something happened with Fox,” the memory flashed through his brain, but with no beginning or end, a loose fragment with no context. “I can’t remember. It was bad. It was bad Fives and I don’t… don’t understand.”

Fives sighed, tucking Echo under his chin, and wrapping an arm around him. “Fox is a good soldier,” he said.

“I know,” Echo mumbled into Fives’ chest. Fox was a good soldier, a great soldier. Echo had admired him when he’d been younger and less hardened. He did. He would. He didn’t know which was correct anymore.

“Good soldiers follow orders.”

“I… I know,” Echo choked out, bewildered by the thread of ugly darkness running through Fives’ words when they were a clone’s most meaningful truth. 

“It’s not his fault, Echo,” Fives sighed. “There’s worse things coming. Poor Fox is stuck on the leading edge.”

Echo tried to turn those words around in his head in such a way as to make them make sense, but understanding wouldn’t come and neither would curiosity. Fives was warm, the barracks were quiet and all the aches and nightmares and worries were someplace else, far away. He fancied he could hear them rattling about in some distant place, strange thumps and the mournful sound of incomprehensible voices at the very edges of his hearing, but they couldn’t reach him here. His tears had all dried. He was at peace.

“‘S nice here,” Echo mumbled. 

“You can’t stay here, Ec’ika,” Fives’ voice was achingly gentle.

Echo hadn’t heard that name in a long time. For a moment, it was him and Fives as cadets, holding onto each other and wondering what their very first training session would bring tomorrow. He grabbed onto Fives and held on tight. “I don’t want to go. Don’t want you to leave.” He felt the tears start pouring out again. “Don’t leave me, Raayshe’vod,” he pleaded, scarcely understanding the well of grief and terror that rose up inside him at the thought.

He felt Fives’ hand run down his spinal implant, the feel of it scraping on the nodules jarring and strange. “I may not be able to come with you, Ec’ika, but I’d never leave you. You’re the only one who could get me to sleep. You’re the only one that could keep the nightmares away. And I miss you so, so much. But there’s something coming, Echo. You’re going to be needed for the fight. So you have to go. I’m sorry, but you can’t stay with me right now.”

Echo felt the blow hit him like the explosion had. “I don’t want to fight anymore,” he muttered resentfully. 

“I know,” Fives voice was heavy with that knowledge. “I wish you didn’t have to. But they’re going to need you. The Republic’s going to need you. And the Echo I know would never run from his duty, no matter how tough it was.”

“Can’t I have anything else?” Echo asked in a small voice. Can’t I have this? “You’ll be all alone.”

“I won’t be alone,” Fives smiled against his temple. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay for a while here. There’s no nightmares here.” 

“I’ll be alone,” Echo replied, agonized.

Fives released him a little, just enough for Echo to draw back and accept his brother’s forehead pressed against his own. “You’ll never be alone. There are people waiting for you, people who’ll need you to fight for them. And no matter what,” he said fiercely. “I will always be there, Echo. Always. We’re the Domino twins, remember? Us against the universe. Even if you can’t see me, you’ll never be really alone, I promise. Just promise me you won’t give up, no matter what. Don’t stop fighting, no matter what.” Fives grabbed Echo’s face in his hands. “I need you to do this for me, Ec’ika. Promise me. Please?”

It wasn’t enough, Echo thought sadly. Not nearly enough. But he knew in his heart that it was all Fives or he could do for now. Someday was for them too. “I promise,” Echo said. “I’ll… I’ll try.”

Fives’ smile was equal parts joyous and sad. “I know you will. You never stop trying. That’s what I love about you most.” He butted Echo’s forehead playfully. “Reg head.”

“Love you too,” Echo whispered.

Fives drew back, sadness in his eyes. “Play me a song, Echo.”

He didn’t want to. He recognised in some dim way that it meant he had to leave this place, leave Fives. But he’d promised Fives, there was no universe anywhere ever where Echo wouldn’t do what Fives asked of him. Still, he hesitated. There was so much he wanted to say, to hear. He wanted to make this last as long as he could. He didn’t want it to end.

“Hey Ec’ika?”

“Yes?”

Fives smiled. “It’s going to be alright. You’ll be alright, I promise. I love you.”

It was enough to give him the courage to face what was coming. He couldn’t find the lumenlute, but as he sat with his brother next to him in the dark, it almost didn’t matter. He felt the laser generator in his bicep hum to life and his scomp arm fall into position and his crystal fingernails ready themselves at the start.

And then he plucked out the notes as he fell from the darkness.

*

When Echo opened his eyes he was surrounded by harsh lights and cold and machines and for a moment of rage and terror had no idea where he was or what was happening. It was a blur of pain and pressure, the shards of reality stabbing in his flesh parts, a bloody ruin in their wake. Then his confused mind registered the presence of Rex and with Rex came the concepts of rescue and safety. Rex’s mouth was moving but there was nothing Echo could hear except the buzz inside his head. But he knew he was safe and that’s all it took.

The world faded out again. 

When he opened his eyes again, the ceiling was warping weirdly… no, it was moving, he was moving. He thought maybe he was seeing things; he saw Hunter talking to someone, and a flailing arm swinging in and out of his visual range that was definitely Wrecker’s, and Tech’s mouth, thin and tight in the way he got when he was seriously displeased with the general galactic trend towards stupidity.

He wasn’t sure if it was even real. It hardly felt real. He could barely make out any of the words being spoken and whatever he was laying on was jostled and rocked, distant from him. He was sure he was hallucinating when General Skywalker’s head popped into his line of sight, calm but serious.

The General said. “You need to go back to sleep, Echo.”

And Echo faded again.

The third time he came awake - properly, not just hazy, dreamlike, half remembered flashes - he was at least aware enough to notice that he was nowhere he’d ever been before, but also that he was still on Coruscant. Way up in the wealthy tiers, if the pink and orange tinted cloudscape panorama out of the very big window was to be believed. 

Echo blinked at the view for a moment, but then turned at the sound of Wreckers excited, and therefore booming, voice. “Hey, I think he’s awake!”

“Wrecker, shhh,” Hunter hushed him as he came over from the - Echo blinked as he realized it - from the kitchenette he was steadily working away in.

Echo looked around. It was a huge suite of a room, bedroom, kitchen, dining and living room all in one space, like one of the fancier VIP hotel rooms Echo had guarded various important people in a few times. Now that he grasped that, he noticed that the bed he was lying in would have been big for a Wookie. For someone his reduced size the thing was farcical.

The squad was all lounging around in various states of expectant ease on the chintzy furniture; or at least, they had been until Wrecker’s announcement. Now there was a steady wave of movement towards the bed which, Echo suddenly realized, he was propped up in, which is how he could see any of this.

Then he realized his chest didn’t hurt anymore. He didn’t feel like an aching, suffocating, badly made mucus factory. In fact, other than tired, he felt pretty great. “Hey,” he said to the others gathering around. “I’m not dead.”

“No, you’re not dead.” Echo craned his head around and found himself looking at Rex’s unamused face, since he was sitting next to the bed. Rex narrowed his eyes in such a way as to promise so much pain in Echo’s future. “You sure gave it a solid ARC trooper try, though.”

Echo winced. “I honestly thought it was just a cold?” he said weakly.

Crosshair snorted. “Your lungs were so full of fluid you nearly drowned, you idiot reg.”

“In fairness, the medical department completely failed to take into account how the chest plate over your heart would interfere with being able to perform complete scans of your lungs, thereby causing them to erroneously believe the virus had cleared from your system and ensuring they took you off medication too early, which allowed it to continually recur,” Tech explained, holding out a beeping scanner over Echo. “I have made the necessary modifications to our equipment and your medical file to ensure this doesn’t happen in future.”

Honestly, how many times was the Techno Union going to be allowed to almost kill him anyway, by accident or by design? Echo thought. He looked around the room suspiciously. There must be a reason he wasn’t waking up in an actual infirmary. “Scale of one to ten,” he rasped while Wrecker dug around on the bedside table for water. “How much of the med bay did I destroy from this flashback?”

Rex’s “Don’t worry about it,” mingled with Hunter’s “It wasn’t that bad,” but they were both unfortunately drowned by Wrecker’s “Yeah, you smashed a lot of it pretty bad,” which caused him to add “What? He did!” when the rest of them gave him a group glare.

“Lovely,” Echo mumbled around a straw.

“Hey, no one died!” was Wrecker’s cheerful rejoinder.

Hunter rolled his eyes. “You took out some equipment and droids and put the fear of the ARC trooper into a few of the staff.”

“And smashed through a wall,” Crosshair added, because he was a gleefully trolling piece of poodoo sometimes.

“And smashed through a wall, thank you Crosshair,” Hunter shoved him off his perch on the bed to thump onto the floor.

“Lovely,” Echo groaned. If he kept up this streak he was going to be blacklisted by the medical corps for all eternity. “Where are we?”

“The Temple,” Hunter replied and then sniffed. “Kark, hang on.” He hurried back to the kitchenette to see to whatever it was he was cooking. It smelled divine.

Then Echo absorbed what Hunter had said. “The Temple? You mean, like, the Jedi Temple?”

“How many Temples do you think are on Coruscant?” Crosshair snarked.

“Forty two million, nine hundred and sixty two thousand, five hundred and fifty four, including the entire religious quarter, counting only physical and not digital sites, and for a given value of religion,” Tech supplied helpfully.

“Forget I asked,” Crosshair rolled his eyes.

“What the hell makes for a given value of religion?” Rex’s brow wrinkled.

“Accumulated wealth,” Tech shrugged. “There’s a certain threshold that must be met in order to pass cult status.”

Rex sighed like he was sorry he asked too. “Anyway, yes the current Temple you’re in is the Jedi Temple. You were in a pretty bad way,” he added gruffly. “General Skywalker came by to see you and he saw how bad it was, so put you in some kind of… healing trance or something. I dunno exactly how it works for Jedi, I sure as sithspit didn’t know they could do that to someone not a Jedi, but there you are.”

“General Kenobi was the one to offer us the room after the unfortunate incident in the medbay,” Tech added.

“Kenobi?” Echo repeated, puzzled. He looked around. “This is no guest room. This looks like a diplomat’s suite.”

“He heard about what you said to Palpatine,” Crosshair grinned. “He was so impressed he gave us one on the VIP level.”

Echo groaned a little. Yeah, that was all coming back to him now. If he let himself, he’d be dying of mortification and not a little terror at the hellfire that Palpatine would no doubt rain upon him for that level of insolence.

If he let himself. He decided, for the moment, not to let himself.

“I gotta say,” Wrecker looked around, beaming, as he went to help Hunter with something. “Those Jedi sure do live swanky. I didn’t know they lived like this.”

“They don’t, actually,” Echo muttered as he wriggled to prop himself up better. Tech helpfully piled a couple more pillows behind him. “These are just to impress guests. Most Jedi I’ve met can use rocks for pillows. Skywalker prefers them, but he’s pretty weird.”

“So weird,” Rex sighed.

Echo looked down and blinked. “Where the actual kark are my legs? Tech?” he shot a look at the likely culprit.

“They’re here,” Tech started digging around. “They sustained some damage with your… unfortunate reaction to the medbay. Smashing through a wall was not exactly what they were designed for. After we settled here it became… prudent to keep them off until you were lucid.” Tech laid out the legs next to him.

“Prudent?” Echo grumbled, annoyed. People shouldn’t be allowed to just go around stealing a man’s legs.

Maker, his life was strange.

“You took to wandering in your fever,” Hunter called up from the kitchen where he was stacking bowls. “And tucking yourself into the most hilariously small places. After the third time of chasing your delirious shebs to force only knows what remote ceiling cavity or cupboard you’d managed to fold yourself into, yeah, prudence was the name of the game.”

Echo frowned. Had he done that? He didn’t remember any of it. He remembered… something to do with the lumenlute… something… it wouldn’t come. “Huh.”

“I have also added that you show a high probability of wandering while delirious to your file,” Tech noted as he began the laborious task of reattaching Echo’s legs. 

“Makes sense,” Rex grinned. “He used to sleepwalk too.”

“I did not!” Echo protested stridently, but he felt his scalp turning red.

“Fives used to share a bunk with you to keep you from wandering into an airlock. Which you did,” Rex pointed out, the sith damned traitor. “He did,” he nodded to the rest of the squad. “Almost managed to space himself while asleep. He nearly won the Backwards Bucket Award twice in a row. After that Fives would just flop over him like a weighted blanket, for all our sakes.”

Great, now all the squad was laughing at him. He took his lumps with dignity. “I’ll have you know,” he told them loftily. “It was not sleepwalking. I was just in a constant state of tooka-like readiness, even asleep.”

“Sure you were,” Crosshair collapsed onto the foot of the bed, laughing. “I joke about the average reg’s care for their own mortality, but you take the ration.”

“Speaking of rations,” Hunter came over with Wrecker in tow. “Here we go.”

“Ah, repast,” Tech abandoned his work - half finished, thank you so much - and took a bowl of what smelled like Hunter’s most heavenly comfort dish, the grain noodle one with the meat sauce. And it smelled like proper fresh meat, too, none of the dehydrated pap they generally got stuck with short of actively hunting.

Echo watched bowls get handed out and eagerly reached for… a mug.

“What,” he asked, looking appalled into the brown, soupy mess. “Is this?”

“Dinner,” Hunter said, cheerfully taking a spoonful of his ambrosia with a certain amount of spiteful innocence. “You’ve been sick. It’s a lightweight diet for you until you’re properly back on your feet.”

Echo sent him a look that could have reduced him to a wisp of vapour. The rest of them were all making exaggerated appreciative noises too, the complete poodoo chutes. He sent a look at Rex for his traitorous blissful moaning in particular. “I will make you pay for this,” he said in a low hiss.

“Comm me the second you’re not ignoring your own sickness enough to start actively dying,” Rex riposted, supremely unconcerned, taking an extra big mouthful as he did so. “Then we’ll see. And also, I’m putting in transfer papers for Hunter.”

“He’s not going to go on permanent KP,” Echo told him, exasperated. He took a sip of his broth. Okay, at least Hunter’s passive aggressive little revenge for Echo’s scaring the osik out of them didn’t extend to just shoving a salty dehydrated mix from the ration packs at him. It wasn’t terrible. “He’s a combat soldier.”

“I am definitely, absolutely not going into Food Services,” Hunter nodded. “Sorry sir. I’ll desert the army before I make dessert for the army.”

“Break a man’s heart why don’t you, Sergeant,” Rex muttered sadly. “Can I at least get the recipe?”

“Hey, I just remembered,” Wrecker jabbed his spoon in the air. “Echo, you know all the regulations right?”

Echo shrugged. “Mostly.”

“Completely,” Rex added.

“Word perfect,” Tech nodded.

“Like a droid,” Crosshair smirked. Echo hooked a pillow with his scomp link and threw it at him, knocking him off the bed.

“Kark you all,” Echo grumped irritably. “Yes, I do, Wrecker. And?”

“Well, I figured you’d know,” Wrecker said. “‘Cause I’ve been thinking on this. If you’re a Sergeant…”

“Considering I told the Supreme Chancellor where to stick it,” Echo cut in dryly. “I’m pretty sure my demotion is about to come down the pipe in five, four, three…"

“If he hates you that much, he’ll let you keep it,” Rex snorted. “There’s no more vile curse than to give a man a commanding rank. No more vile, no greater.”

“Thank you, Commander,” Tech said dryly.

“He’s not wrong,” Hunter muttered.

“And anyway,” Wrecker wrested control of the conversation back to him. “You’re still a Sergeant right now, so does that mean you’re the ranking officer of the Batch? I thought ‘cause you’re senior to Hunter, that means you’re ranked higher than Hunter. It’s like holding an Ace in sabacc.”

Hunter’s face went through a series of expressions in the spectrum of panic.

Echo blinked. Then his face split into an evil, evil, sith-like grin. “Do you want to tell them, or should I...”

Hunter glared at him. “Do you dare, soldier!”

“... Sergeant Major?”

Hunter scowled while the rest of the squad - and Rex too - turned to stare at him.

“Sergeant Major?” Crosshair gleefully rolled the rank across his tongue like a particularly toothsome sweet. 

Tech was frowning. “You don’t have the insignia on your uniform.”

“Kark no!” Hunter grouched. “I dump that osik out of the nearest airlock every time they try to send ‘em to me. I have no kriffing desire make a bunch of Captains or Lieutenants think they have to look for me for orders. I’ve got my hand’s full with you lot,” he added acidly, kicking Crosshair off the bed again since he was rolling around, dying laughing.

“How the kark did you end up with an officer’s rank?” Rex blinked. “You’ve gotta take exams. So many damn exams,” he said darkly. 

“I got the stupid rank because every time we won a medal some osik buy’ce of an officer with more insignia that actual kriffing sense would damn well promote me!” Hunter was so forlorn about it that the others all started to laugh too. “Me! It was like they thought it would somehow magickally turn me into a regulation soldier! In the end I told Cody to make it stop or I would literally punch him in the face to get demoted.”

Rex snorted. “Wish I’d thought of that.” 

“Well, I mean,” Tech blinked furiously. “If I’d been made aware I could have just changed your records for you.”

Rex shot him a narrow eyed look. “You can hack the rank records?”

“That depends,” Tech replied levelly. “How badly do you want to be a General?”

Rex shuddered.

“Wait, how do you know any of this, Echo?” Wrecker asked. “I mean, we didn’t know. I don’t even know my own rank.” he shrugged into Rex’s surprised look. “We were always just the squad. And we don’t mix with the regs very much, and when we do, Hunter’s usually the one stuck doing the talking.”

“I know this because I check things like this,” Echo rolled his eyes. “Honestly, doesn’t anyone here research their own files?” Tech opened his mouth. “Not for the purposes of illicitly changing them?” Tech closed his mouth.

“Who cares?” Crosshair snorted from the floor sardonically. “It wouldn’t matter if we were all Commanders, the regs wouldn’t take orders from the likes of us.”

“You earned your rank, Corporal,” Echo told him. “You should wear it proudly.”

Crosshair blew a raspberry.

“You do realize what this means right?” Hunter muttered spitefully. “If you keep your rank, you’re now my second-in-command for this insane asylum.”

Echo accepted the challenge in his voice levelly. “I can take ‘em, sir. I learned about troublemaker wrangling from the best.” He grinned at Rex. “Wait,” he frowned as he looked at the Commander. “How long was I down for?”

“About six days, thereabouts.”

“Six days?” Echo repeated incredulously. “Shouldn’t you be off Coruscant by now?”

Rex shrugged. “What are they gonna do, go without me?” he asked sardonically. “I will have to pull up stakes after tonight though,” he added. “The battle won’t wait for us any longer.”

Echo sat with that wistful regret all through dinner and the inevitable play-by-play he got for the Battle of the Hanger Bay, including the truce General Kenobi negotiated with an egregious amount of smuggled in contraband alcohol. Honestly, they would have probably gotten out of the whole mess a lot sooner had not every side ended up getting hammered on whatever stockpiles they’d fought over in the first place. Apparently one of the Lieutenants had managed to obtain twelve kegs of bootleg Corellian rum somehow, which had helped the diplomatic proceedings nicely, although there were a lot of shinies walking around with their buckets on days later, trying desperately to hide how hungover they were.

Echo just about died laughing. These guys were crazy, stupid, irreverant and to miltary decorum what a black hole was to a space station, but they were definitely Echo’s kind of people. He prayed that they and the 501st never actually worked together in any capacity; he was pretty sure no one would survive the explosions. 

At some point, still exhausted, Echo drifted off to the sounds of the others talking. In the warm darkness right before consciousness vanished, he thought of Fives.

Echo woke up. He tracked the sound of Wrecker’s thunderous snoring right by the bedside on the floor and the fainter whistling noise that Tech made when he was dead to the world next to him on the bed. Echo felt without knowing that Crosshair would likely be on the other side of Tech, but the sniper slept as silently as a corpse. It seemed the Batch wanted to try out the luxury appointments. He couldn’t blame them; it was a fantastically comfortable bed and big enough for all of them, although poor Wrecker probably drew the short straw for the floor spot with the snoring. 

That wasn’t what had woken him, though. It was the shifting sounds of movement somewhere in his immediate orbit, in his blind spot, that roused him. Hunter probably meant well, using field sign from where he sat next to the bed, but Echo had been trained to sense that stuff in his sleep. 

Rex was ferreting around in what looked like a pile of armour bits strewn out across the entertainment and dining areas, probably looking for his own amongst the mess. There was a shifting sound as Hunter got up to help him, stealth walking like a ghost and palming on the ambience screen as he did so, bathing the room in a soft, blue glow.

Echo watched the pair outlined in darkness and blue and felt something rend inside of him, painful and joyful both. Rex was leaving, to go off into the fight. The squad would leave soon too, and join another one. Who knew if any of them would make it. Here in the low blue light, it hit Echo just how fragile it all was, how one wrongly made blaster fire or one tiny flaw in a hyperdrive or any one of a thousand other small ways fate could conspire to make sure they wouldn’t see each other again for a long, long time. Until they marched onwards, to wherever soldiers marched.

Maybe, back around again.

How futile were their goodbyes, however terse and gruff, in the face of it. And how joyous their hellos.

How you had to make something out of every minute, like it was the last minute you would ever have with them.

Echo, still propped up to spare his healing lungs, moved his scomp arm into a curl, engaged it outwards and hit the laser generator in his arm. He felt the hum of his fill his bones, metal and marrow, all the way through his chest.

He felt the lasers, fanned out at the base but drawing inward towards the tiny target of his scomp arm headpiece, where the resonating kyber crystals sat. He couldn’t see the lasers, of course. One of the things that made light instruments so very tricky to play is that for many of them the player couldn’t see the strings until they were actually engaging them. The crystal bridge redirected the lasers via lenses to hit the resonator crystals at different angles and different light values, making them hum different notes, that transmitted via microphones to whatever sound box there was to bounce it into. The strings were a flash of light hitting the lenses and not much more. It was music from nowhere. 

Echo tried to remember the ones he’d played before they deployed. Going-to war songs were usually marching songs full of beat and cheer, but this one was a slower, more melancholy little tune, and relatively simple. Echo knew it had a name, but he’d never managed to remember it or perhaps had never known it. But it had been the one he’d played the nights before they all went marching again, for solace and sleep.

He closed his eyes and plucked out the opening notes, feeling his fingers fall into the rhythm like he’d played for years and not practiced for two days in a brig. It was a good song. One of Fives’ favourites. 

He felt a thump as someone sat on the edge of the bed next to him and some more rattling around as Tech and Crosshair stirred next to him. Crosshair bolting upright because he slept as lightly as a mouse and Tech rolling over to curiously stare at the instrument Echo had made out of his own body, head propped up on one fist, watching the scomp head twist and turn to get each resonator in the right place to meet a laser and hum a note.

Wrecker’s head rose from the floor past Crosshair, blinking and surprise. “Wha’s that?” he asked curiously. “Are you doing that?” he asked Echo.

“Shhh,” Rex said, not taking his eyes of Echo, his face blank in a way that suggested a lot was storming under the surface. “Let me listen. I have heard this one in… a long, long time,” he finished hoarsely.

His voice was so shaken that the rest of the Bad Batch clammed up and let the notes fill the dark, warm silence, but they all drew closer and closer as the song continued it’s melancholy journey to the end. 

Then Rex grabbed him and pulled him into a hug, fine tremors shaking his broad shoulders. “I missed hearing you play,” he said softly and if there was a little damp on Echo’s shoulder, well, Echo wouldn’t tell for the galaxy and all the worlds therein.

“Reg, you play music?” Crosshair’s face screwed up as the notes died away. “Since when?”

Rex and Echo looked at each other. “Since… Ralu’uyani, I think?” Rex said fondly.

“A little after that, yeah,” Echo grinned. “Honestly, I learned in self defence. Fives was so bad at it.”

“Oh, there was a man with a beskar karking ear,” Rex shook his head fondly. “We banned him from any and all musical instruments. There was a legit procedure guide written up about it in the 501st.”

Echo snorted with laughter.

“What is it, though?” Wrecker sounded awed.

“It’s a lumenlute,” Rex told him.

“It was a lumenlute,” Echo corrected. “I couldn’t fix it. It’s now a bastard version of a bow harp.”

“Installed in you?” Tech sounded fascinated.

“Yep. Generator,” Echo pointed to the edge of his arm prosthetic. “Resonator matrix with micromics on the scomp,” he whirred it. “Getting it to perform a playing pattern isn’t different from uplinking to a system.” He wriggled his fingernails. “Crystal plucks for lenses. Galvadorian crystal,” he added dryly, and Rex nearly fell off the bed, laughing until he cried.

“Does anyone else feel like they missed the punchline?” Hunter asked the others dryly.

“I didn’t,” Tech said primly. “I simply did not express my amusement physically.” he sounded so smug about it that Crosshair flicked him around the ear, which he loftily ignored. “Where’s the sound box?” he asked Echo curiously.

Hunter surprised them all by answering. “He’s the sound box. I could hear it resonating all over him. It looked like you were playing a rainbow,” Hunter added. “Like you were making it in the air.” He sounded awed.

Of course, Hunter was one of the few humans who could see the strings. Echo never envied Hunter his senses very much - they seemed to have slightly more pitfalls than benefits most days - but in this moment Echo could only admire his gift. He was sure with the right visor filter he’d be about to see them too, but it wouldn’t be the same as being able to see them with his naked eyes the way Hunter could. 

“I didn’t see that,” Wrecker said, shoving close enough that Crosshair gave in and perched on the ornate bedhead like a sullen gargoyle. “Show me.”

“You can’t really see it unless you’ve got Hunter’s eyes,” Echo told him. “You can feel it though. Here,” he took one of Wrecker’s enormous hands and lined his fingers up in the play position, layering his own fingers on top, crystal tips folded over Wrecker’s blunt ones. “Follow my movement, okay? That's A,” he moved Wrecker’s finger into the zone; he felt the buzz of the inert string pass over the crystal, redirect it and hum, the note rang out.

“I felt it!” Wrecker beamed. “Tingly!”

“B,” Echo smiled. “C. D. Thumb for E,” notes, rising in pitch, rang out slowly as Echo took them through basic scales. He didn’t even blink when Tech wriggled around to lay his head on the side of his ribcage to get a better gauge of the resonating frequencies in his bones.

“Fascinating,” Tech declared. “You turned your body into an echoing chamber.”

“Well, someone did,” Echo said, going through the scales again. “There’s lots of hollow spaces in there now.” Feeling that cut too sharp and too close for such a peaceful place, Echo shrugged. “Besides, I wanted to salvage something of the lumenlute and the sound box on that was good and karked. I used whatever broken stuff I had to make something new. I don’t know if it counts as real craftsmanship, but I never was very, you know, artistic. I’m practical. There’s nothing to say art can’t be practical, I guess.”

“Workmanlike,” Crosshair said from on high. It didn’t sound nearly as much like an insult as it usually did though.

“It’s nice,” Hunter proclaimed softly. “Not harsh like the other energy instruments. I think it counts as art.”

“It’s great!” Wrecker was beaming. “Can you play another?” he asked hopefully.

Echo looked at Rex. “Marching man picks the tune,” he said, because it was true. The next man on duty, the marching man, picked the tune; because no one knew if he was marching back… or marching on. “Unless you need to muster out,” he added quietly, because Rex did have responsibilities and he’d abandoned a lot of them for Echo’s sake already.

“Shove over,” Rex ordered gruffly, suiting words to actions and levering Echo slightly out of his comfy nook and hauling his armoured up self onto the mountain of pillows. “I can stay a while yet.” He settled into the mattress, hands laced over his stomach. “It’s a quiet night. Play me a song, Echo. Give me a lullaby.”

Lullabies were his specialty. “Lullaby. Yes, sir,” He wound up the scomp resonator and began to play one of the perennial favourites from the barrack days, simple enough that he could loop it for hours, which the others, which Fives, had needed some nights. He didn’t know if any of the Bad Batch knew the tune, but he doubted they’d mind if they didn’t.

Besides, anything would be worth watching some of the lines on Rex’s face ease in the warm darkness. To Echo’s surprise, when he reached the second go around, Rex started to sing in a voice roughened by time and artillery smoke. “Mirrorbright, shines the moon, its glow as soft as an ember…”

Tomorrow, they’d all go back to the war. To death and pain and hardship, and they’d never know where the end was or if they’d make it there alive. But for now, they were just here in the warm dark, pressed together and listening to a lullaby about losing and remembering, and the war was a long way away. 

Maybe it wasn’t everything.

But it was enough where it counted, just like Echo. And that was all that really mattered.