Chapter Text
The chain reaction of the brittle, decaying skeleton of ancient caverns collapsing, succumbing to gravity and pulling more destruction in its wake lasted longer than Crosshair expected. Long enough that he started to worry they’d been overambitious, as he knelt half-curled over Omega, whatever fleeting protection his body might offer standing between her and the rock above them giving way, as he felt the rumbling under them and waited with baited breath to feel the rock start to crack apart.
But it held; the cacophony slowed and stopped, leaving behind it the roar of hovering repulsor engines, the cloud of dust starting to creep its way into their semi-protected hideaway.
He shoved up and away from her and she sprang into action behind him, faces half-hidden under the masks they’d fashioned out of pieces cut from the spare bodygloves in the packs. Packs stripped down to the bare essentials, rifles in hand, they pushed past Batcher growling at the entrance into their little hideout, took a fleeting moment to ensure the stability of the ledge just beyond.
It would be some time before the dust cleared enough to assess the remaining threat from below; instead, they took up position, Omega kneeling half-tucked behind the scant cover offered by the rock slab half-blocking the cavern entrance, Crosshair standing behind her with the macrobinoculars scanning through the haze towards the ship hovering above a marginally flatter and wider expanse of the ridge twenty meters on, searching, searching…
At the first hint of disoriented trooper still attached to a rappel line, Crosshair wasted no time taking aim. The shot went wide, as did Omega’s blind-fire in the same direction. But the answering flurry of arcing blue stun bolts betrayed the relative positions of the squad, and after ducking down and taking a moment’s shelter against the wave, they fired off long volleys in a coordinated sweep that he was confident in the likelihood took out at least a few of their pursuers.
“Any chance of another Seventy-Two?” Omega shouted up at him over the roar of engines.
He let out a mirthless chuckle. The question, if not quite rhetorical, was a fantasy and she knew it. Visibility limited, mobility restricted by the treacherous terrain that was at once an asset and a severe disadvantage. Protected them right up until the moment it trapped them, when they ran out of surprises and could do little but sit back and wait.
A smaller wave of stun bolts dissipated against the rock face around them. Crosshair rose out of his crouch to send another spray of live fire back against the constrained troopers, and then was falling back against just as fast and yanking Omega back with him to curl protectively against the granite slab as an echoing explosion rent the air, shook the ground beneath them, sent a fresh wave of rockfall rolling down the ridge.
“Was that us?” Omega gasped, trying to wriggle out of his grip and then falling back just as fast when a clatter of gravel descended on their heads.
By the fireball rising through the dust, by the shock and heatwaves that swept over them in a quick one-two-punch…
Crosshair scrabbled for the macrobinoculars and peered through the haze towards what could only be the ruins of the two carriers near the base of the ridge. The dropship above them pivoted suddenly with a whine of its engines, and he followed the direction of the lancing shots.
He only caught a glimpse of a wing.
A glimpse was enough. “The cavalry has arrived.”
Omega scrambled free, caution utterly forgotten. Crosshair swore and rose to lay down a quick burst of cover fire in the general direction of the dropship, and then swore harder when an answering live-round exploded the rock less than a meter from his head, sending molten splinters scaling across one cheek.
Tantiss might want her alive, but the retrieval team seemed to have just reached their limit. “Pull back,” he barked, futilely wiping at dirt and dust in his eyes, running quick reassessments on the chances of a second plan 72, if only to distract its flight crew long enough for Hunter to get in close enough to pick her off the ridge.
Another shot burst against the ledge where Omega had just been standing, and their cover was increasingly making the turn to trap. “We need to get higher.”
Wide-eyed, one arm curled around Batcher’s nervously growling form, the hound keen to protect but utterly lost as to how, Omega said, “I think we might be past that point?”
Admittedly, the chances of making it this far, this long, had seemed slim to nonexistent when they conceded the limits of the climb. “The Marauder can’t get to us with the dropship there, and the dropship knows the Marauder can’t shoot them down without risking us. Whatever troopers are left will be closing on this position and we’ll be pinned.”
The logic of it settled fast and hard behind her eyes and she twisted around and dropped her pack to the ground, sorted through quickly for the grappling attachment.
It wouldn’t do much good if she intended Batcher to follow, but he quirked a brow and followed suit. And while they were at it – “Grenades,” he stacked his small cache by the mouth of the cavern. While she dug out her own, and then hurriedly changed out the power packs on both their blasters and connected the grappling attachments, Crosshair ducked out and blindly hurled the first explosive in the direction from which the dropship troopers had been approaching.
The dust was cleared enough that he could see a trooper go tumbling off the ledge in the wake of the muffled, thudding boom and fall helmet-first onto the tier beneath them. He did not get up again. “Go!”
A deafening roar of approaching engines precipitated a decidedly non-Imperial regulation ship closing in on their position, kicking up dust and debris and forcing them straight back along the ridge face, eyes watering. Crosshair had his blaster rifle trained up, waiting on whatever new force was about to descend from the hatch, when Omega tugged his arm back and shouted over the roar, “It’s Rex and Echo!”
The ship – transport of some sort, heavily modified – swung towards the dropship. A shot rang out, two, the sound of laserfire pinging the hull barely audible over the engines. Crosshair was trying to figure out where to maneuver them to any façade of safety when one or both of the ships inevitably careened down in a fireball of superheated metal and fuel, when the transport, rather than shoot, rammed the dropship off its post, sent one of its wings swinging down to gouge into the top of the ridge as it scrambled to recover.
The transport repositioned itself with impressive precision on repulsors in between Crosshair and Omega and the disoriented dropship moments before the Marauder came screaming up and over the ridge and started descending towards them with painstaking care.
As the hatch started opening, Crosshair kept a staying hand clamped firm on Omega’s shoulder, like the call of home was physically pulling her forward and never mind the treacherous footing and the vast meters still separating her from rescue.
Or the blaster fire from the trooper closing on their position, gouging the rock centimeters from where her head had just been. Before Crosshair could even react, he glimpsed an arm that could only be Wrecker leaning out from the open hatch, spraying a line of fire before smacking the release to drop the cable.
The repulsors kicked up wind and dust and grit, and Crosshair wiped at his watering eyes very determined that’s all it was. He reached up and snatched the cable as it came within reach, and spied for the first time a series of ever-growing specks on the horizon making fast for their position.
He didn’t dare hope that Hunter had brought yet another surprise. Which meant their window was rapidly closing.
Ignoring Omega’s increasingly desperate demands of how, how were they going to get all three of them up, how would Batcher make it onto the ship – he dropped his weapon and looped the cable under her arms, clipped it back over itself and drew it tight against her chest.
White-hot pain erupted in the back of his shoulder and it was a near thing, avoiding sending them both off the narrow ledge. Omega ducked under his staggering form and got off three shots at the flanking trooper, sent him tumbling down into the half-collapsed strata below.
Ignoring the pain, he plucked her blaster from her hands, held out the cable, and shouted over the chaos of the noise around them, “Hold on.”
She caught it in a white-knuckle grip, staring at him. “But how -?”
He didn’t let her get the rest of the question out before giving Wrecker an all-clear signal.
Omega was yanked up on the retracting cable in an instant, Batcher barking at her retreating figure, her outraged cries dissipating in the scream of engines and repulsors and –
The world went silent and still around him as the dropship finally maneuvered itself out of the corner Rex and Echo had forced it into, their shot missing the Marauder by scant meters and slamming instead into the rockface a level or two down.
The Marauder jerked up and away even as Wrecker hooked a hand under Omega’s arm and hauled her aboard. Somehow now slammed back against the rock with no clear recollection of how he got there, Batcher whining at him and sniffing at his face, Crosshair tried to lift an arm and wave them off, eyes settling on the fighters growing larger by the second coming fast up the horizon.
Hunter, stubborn as he was, only set the Marauder on another careful descent. Crosshair swore, fumbled for the blaster that had clattered a meter away, and set up the shot with the grappling attachment, eyeing the ramp’s hydraulic post.
Deep breath through the pain, he let it out, blinked through the grit, willed his hand steady, willed back the burning agony spreading out from his left shoulder – and fired.
It missed by a meter.
And then the dropship got off a second shot past the Marauder’s wing and the ground disintegrated out from under him.
His last impressions were of tumbling down in an avalanche of collapsing rockface, the Marauder rapidly rising up away or perhaps him rapidly descending, or perhaps both, and then Batcher licking his face as he choked on dust and succumbed to exhaustion and pain.
x---x
The relief of Wrecker’s triumphant, “Got ‘er!” was muted first by the sounds of Omega’s frantic and breathless cries as she was pulled aboard.
It was muted second by watching Crosshair get pushed back with the force of a blast from the Imperial dropship’s cannon and go slamming back against the cliff face.
It was drowned out utterly by watching the world crumple around him scant seconds later.
By watching another brother fall. By the sounds of Omega’s screams here and now mixing and overlapping with the haunting memories from Eriadu, from Ord Mantell and her desperation to go back, go find him.
“…Hunter!” Echo’s voice snapped on comms, in a tone that distinctly said it wasn’t the first time. “We got their engines, the dropship’s going to ground. But the fighters are closing.”
He already had the Marauder descending on repulsors, recklessly fast and far too close to the unstable ridge. “Wrecker, I need a visual. Echo, Rex, see if you can’t scatter those fighters and buy us a few seconds.”
The Remora peeled off and away. The scamper of quick feet preceded Omega bursting into the cockpit and how he wished he had more than a fleeting split-second to take her in, dust-covered and wild-eyed, while she climbed up to kneel in the co-pilot’s chair and peer out the viewport, searching, searching -
“There!” she gasped. “There’s Batcher.”
They’d have missed Crosshair entirely were it not for the baffling hound kicking up a wave of gravel to uncover his half-buried figure. “Wrecker,” Hunter snapped back towards the open hatch, “Hook in, but I’m maneuvering in close as I can.”
Too close, by the scrape of the wings gouging into the half-collapsed remnants of the ridge. Omega started to scramble down again but Hunter stopped her before she could dart straight back out into harm’s way. “Omega, I need you on the scanner; how much time do we have?”
She studied the grid while he fought to keep the ship level, listening to Wrecker’s grunts of exertion on the open comm. “Thirty seconds. And multiple carriers inbound.”
“Wrecker…”
Twenty seconds later, Wrecker gasped, “Got ‘im.” Five seconds after that, the first wild shots at range were gouging out the ridge around the Marauder, and he could only assume they were still desperately trying to avoid blowing the lot of them up, to return the prisoner in one piece who commanded such drastic measures. No way of knowing if she was on the ship that had already fled, or on the one they were too damn close to boxing in.
Three seconds later, there was a series of bangs and thumps and barks from the back of the ship. Wrecker barely had the first syllable of, “All clear!” out before Omega was smashing the control to close up the hatch and Hunter had them peeling away from the ridge to follow after the Remora.
“Wrecker, tail gun,” he hollered towards the back.
“He’s hur -” Wrecker started to protest even as the first shots zinged off the hull. “Right.”
“Omega, go an -”
She was already off like a shot.
The next few minutes were among the longest and most harrowing of Hunter’s life, right behind that fateful trek across the canyon on Eriadu and the desperate minutes fighting their way towards Hemlock’s shuttle only to see it rise up and away and ferrying Omega off into the unknown alone.
When the Marauder and the Remora finally made the jump to lightspeed in quick succession, dodging the last of their pursuers’ fire, Hunter was up and out of his seat in an instant.
There’d been no time to secure Crosshair in a rack, and he found Omega and the hound crouched next to his bruised and unconscious form right there on the floor near the hatch, silent sobs wracking her body while she fumbled with a medkit.
For a terrible, sinking moment he thought Crosshair was dead – but the breath mask Omega had secured over his face was rasping out faint sounds, too faint, and his chest was rising in short, stuttering breaths.
Hunter moved to lift him off the floor, and then took a step back when the hound started growling low in its throat. “Batcher,” Omega hiccupped, placing a staying hand on the thing’s flank, and Hunter was able to hoist his wayward brother’s too-frail form up just in time to hand him off into Wrecker’s sturdier grasp.
Omega trailed after with the medkit, rattling off the concerns she’d catalogued while they were fleeing, and Wrecker wasted no time propping Crosshair’s limp figure over to get access to the charred blaster wound at the top of his left shoulder.
“Omega,” Hunter said quietly once she trailed off, eyes dazed and fixed on the unconscious form.
Wrecker nudged her with an elbow, a quiet, I’ve got this, and she turned and met Hunter’s gaze with a desperately lost look. “You got the message,” she choked. “You came.”
He knelt down and raked his eyes over her, looking for hurts first, taking in the passed time second. “’Course we came,” his voice caught. “Never stopped searching. Never gave up on you for a minute, kid.”
The only forewarning was her composure finally shattering the rest of the way, and then she was crashing into his arms, shaking with the force of her sobs and desperately clinging like she’d never let go.
x---x
Crosshair came to coughing dust and grit up out of his lungs, aching and pinned under the weight of rocks and debris, and the gross but somehow touching sensation of Batcher licking his face.
He remembered the sensation of falling. The deafening crack of a cannon shot breaking the ground apart under him, and he’d think his hearing was still gone except he could hear the whining snuffles of the hound and he was torn between shoving her off and digging frantically for the blaster, for the explosives, but one of his arms wasn’t working and the one that wasn’t in agony was caught up in – something soft and –
A soft whistle cut through his awareness and a quiet, somber, familiar voice – “Down, girl, it’s okay.”
The weight of the hound lifted from his torso and he forced his eyes open at last at the same moment he sensed more than heard a body descending into a seat by his side. Brown eyes stared back at him, his eyes set in a face he was never supposed to see again, not since the parting of ways on Kamino, not since he lied to Rampart about their deaths to ensure he’d never again be sent after them.
And he looked somber, so somber, someone might have died.
Someone must have, Crosshair thought wildly. “O - ” he coughed some more, lungs fighting desperately to clear, “Omega.”
“Crosshair -”
The flashes of images came in chaotic order, blaster fire and explosions, the long hike over the steppe, the failing ship, the dash through the kennels… “I tried – I told her – I promised her that – ”
Hunter’s hand came down firmly on his good shoulder. “Take a breath, Crosshair. Omega’s fine.” A chuckle escaped him that sounded more like cover for a sob than true amusement. “More than fine.”
He glanced meaningfully over to Crosshair’s other side. With effort, he turned his head and spied the girl curled up in a chair on the other side of the bed, fast asleep. “
Oh. “Did someone die?”
“You, nearly, for starters.” Crosshair turned back with effort and blinked at him once, twice, before deciding even that hurt. “AZI got you sorted best he could. Omega said she wasn’t leaving until you woke up,” he glanced away to watch Batcher make a circle around the bed and go nuzzle at Omega’s leg, “and she’s barely moved in two days.”
Crosshair stared at her as she shifted without waking. Something raw and undefinable settling in his chest – or maybe that was just the gunk still clearing from his lungs, he decidedly wryly as another coughing fit sent pain lancing down his left arm, down his sternum, arcing across his ribs.
When it subsided, he just murmured quietly, “She got me out.”
“And you got her home.”
But that wasn’t really true, either. Hunter brought her home, Wrecker, Echo, Rex.
Crosshair bought her time and promised her she’d die before letting Hemlock have her back.
He looked at her, peaceful in sleep, even curled up in her awkward position. No thermo-foil and dirt-streaked face, no tattered and grimy Imperial uniform. No blaster rifles and explosives she should never have had to use, and that she was already well-trained to handle.
Just… a kid, a stubborn kid planted in a chair, waiting on a man who’d promised she’d die before letting her go back to Tantiss to either wake up or stop fighting.
He looked at her, peaceful in sleep, and wondered at what point his promise had likely become an empty one.
Watching her doggedly keep up and push on, never complaining. Watching her comport herself with echoes of his brothers in the way she thought, strategized, fought. Maybe even as far back as her calm news about Tech.
All those pieces he’d ruthlessly carved out of himself in the aftermath of his brothers’ defection, of Bracca, of the death of Kamino; stitched back together unwillingly, unwittingly, by the girl he’d derided and despised and her simple refusal to humor his fatalism and leave him to rot where he belonged. Where he deserved.
That raw, nebulous thing inside him started to take shape as grief and then slowly morphed into fury.
Or maybe fury was just how he deflected the pain all this time when no other outlet was at hand.
“Hunter, I don’t…”
He trailed off, working through myriad conclusions to that statement. I don’t know what to do; where to go. I don’t belong here; don’t want this.
So long he’d spent burying the pain at their perceived betrayal by doubling down on his decisions. His penance in the message he’d risked everything to send; six months lying on a hard slab in a cell waiting to die.
The only thing worse now than being offered a second chance was the breathtaking fear that they weren’t offering one at all.
The grief and directionless rage clawed up his throat, stung behind his eyes and without the dust and dirt kicked up from repulsors to blame for it. He thumped his head back against the pillow, too soft after so long in a cold, comfortless existence, and shrugged off the hand Hunter lay back on his good shoulder so he could press his hand over his face while he fought to steady his breath.
“Crosshair?”
He lowered his hand again just as fast at the sound of her voice. Tired eyes blinked blearily at him while she unfolded herself from the chair; while she scrambled over to sit on the edge of his bed, assess his condition.
The wet sheen of her eyes raised the question straight back to the forefront of his mind – Who died? – but her accusatory tone left no room for doubt as to the source of her upset. “You fell.”
Hunter cleared his throat. “Omega, why don’t you take Batcher outside for a little bit?”
She shot a protesting look at Hunter; Crosshair didn’t see what expression he gave her in turn, his own eyes fixed on Omega. But when she started to reluctantly shift, he grasped for her hand and held her there.
And he thought about undeserved compassion, sitting in a cell on Kamino soon after she’d tracked them down and wormed her way into Hunter’s heart. Thought about her refusal to let him wallow in self-pity – or at least her refusal to let him wallow alone, despite his snide rejection of her outlandish hope.
He thought about I wasn’t going to leave without you.
Thought about You’re still their brother; you’re my brother, too.
He didn’t feel it.
Or maybe… he just wasn’t sure anymore, what it would feel like.
“Thank you,” he whispered, squeezing gently at her hand. She squeezed back and beamed through tears.
He wasn’t sure – but it was starting to dawn that it probably felt like this.