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If that’s where you feel your place is, then that’s where you belong.
Echo repeated Rex’s words over and over to himself that night, occasionally wondering what Fives or Cutup would say. He smiled, remembered when “Echo” was a mockery and not the name he looked forward to hearing from his squad, remembered why--oh, Cutup would absolutely destroy him for repeating the mantra, and Hevy and Droidbait would laugh. Just like old times. Just him and his batchers.
His batchers. If he was with Clone Force 99, and they called themselves the Bad Batch, did that make them his batchers now? Not technically, that wasn’t how batches worked, but he had a feeling they weren’t really all batchers either. Such significant mutations didn’t normally occur in multiple clones from the same batch. So maybe he did belong.
If that’s where you feel your place is, then that’s where you belong. And the cycle would start over, all night. When he heard Wrecker stop snoring and start stirring in the bunk beneath him, he realized he hadn’t slept a wink. Just… thought.
He slid down from the middle bunk, sort of an awkward position to be in with his new height (though, he mused, at least he wasn’t Wrecker’s size in these tiny accommodations), and landed on the floor with a metallic thunk.
Hunter grunted from the top bunk, just above his head. “Wrecker?” he groaned, his voice as asleep as the rest of him.
“No.” Echo kept his voice low. “Just me.”
Hunter stirred a little more before he turned to actually look at Echo. “Ah,” he said, a little more cognizant. “How’d you sleep?”
Echo shrugged. “I didn’t, really,” he admitted.
“Yeah,” Hunter chuckled, dropping down from his bunk and landing on the balls of his feet right beside Echo. He looked very different in his blacks and without the headband. “You get used to Wrecker’s snoring after a few months. They engineered it out of the rest of us, but look at the size of him.” He laughed again. “It has nothing to do with his size, actually,” he added at Echo’s concerned look. “Just some of our mutations are less desirable than others. But at least we survived, right?”
Echo nodded and gave Hunter a sad smile when he remembered 99. “And ended up in the field.”
Hunter’s face fell a little. “You were close to him, too, huh?” He put an arm around Echo’s shoulders and led him out of the little cabin that housed all five of them.
“He helped us get through the last of our training. We would have been put in the kitchens or on janitorial duty without him.”
Hunter smirked. “That bad?”
Echo couldn’t tell if he was about to be teased maliciously or just made fun of by a brother, so instead he shrugged, accidentally dislodging Hunter’s arm. “Bric didn’t like us much,” he decided by way of explanation.
“Bric. He one of the Mando instructors or one of the ones who came later?”
Echo tilted his head. “You don’t know Bric?”
“No.” Hunter turned toward a door on the right--the galley, Echo remembered from his tour yesterday--and opened a cabinet to pull out four mugs. “Er… you probably don’t have anything of your own yet, do you?”
“I don’t drink caf,” Echo said. “I’ll get one for if we ever have chocolate on board, though.”
The thought tugged at him, like it was wrong. No Jedi, no commanders or captains on this ship--just the Bad Batch and whatever they wanted.
“We don’t drink caf, either.” From the next shelf of the cabinet came a box of some sort of hot drink mix. “Crosshair and Tech can’t drink it. Heart problems, you know? So Wrecker and I stopped drinking it too.” Hunter seemed to produce a pot out of nowhere, then found a glass bottle of blue milk in the cooler. “Ugly color when you mix it with chocolate,” he muttered, “but it tastes better than water.”
Wrecker found his way into the room next, rubbing his eyes blearily. “Hey!” he cried, drawing out the word. “We have milk?”
“Wrecker, you asked the longnecks for it,” Hunter said, a little exasperated.
“Oh.” Wrecker’s voice came out in a huff of laughter. “I remember now.”
“‘Sall right, buddy.” Hunter turned to Echo and added under his breath, “He doesn’t always remember things, especially when he wakes up. He was always a little behind as a cadet.”
Echo nodded.
Wrecker came closer to Echo and Hunter, grinned in that mischievous way Echo already dreaded, and wrapped his arms tight around both of them, lifting them off their feet. “Mornin’!”
Echo turned to give Hunter a bewildered look.
“Wrecker, Echo’s still a little fragile right now,” Hunter reminded him.
“Sorry.” Wrecker put the pair down gently, still grinning.
“It’s fine, Wrecker,” Echo absolved. “I don’t think you broke anything.”
“You’d know if Wrecker broke something.” Crosshair leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, toothpick in its usual spot on the left side of his mouth. His hair, though short, was mussed from sleep. “Mostly ‘cause when he breaks something, he usually breaks everything.”
“Hey!” Wrecker cried, this time indignant.
“It’s part of your name, di’kut.”
Echo furrowed his brow, looking back and forth between the pair as they bickered.
“It’s my whole name!”
“You’re not helping yourself out.”
“It’s not fair when you speak Mando’a.” Apparently Wrecker recognized when he lost one argument and moved on to the next thing he could fight Crosshair over. “You know I don’t understand it.”
The tiniest of smirks graced Crosshair’s expression. “It’s a term of endearment,” he explained, speaking just a little slower than he had a moment earlier.
Echo narrowed his eyes at Crosshair. Di’kut could be used as a term of endearment, but that wasn’t what it was.
Crosshair caught Echo’s eye and flicked his eyebrows up for just a moment before turning his attention to Hunter, who had raised one brow of his own. Echo knew that look from the Mando instructors who caught older cadets telling tall tales to their vod’ike. Or better yet, teaching the younger cadets swear words in all sorts of galactic languages.
Finally, Hunter turned his gaze away from Crosshair, back to the pot of warming milk. “Tech still asleep?”
“This early in the morning?” Crosshair scoffed. “On the way back to Kamino? You know his sleep cycle runs later than ours.”
“Just making sure. You think he’ll sleep long enough that he won’t know Echo’s drinking from his mug?”
Crosshair nodded, impressed. “You really do think of everything, don’t you?” he asked drily. He came forward and clapped Echo on the shoulder. “Glad you came with us, buddy,” he muttered right next to Echo’s ear, with more emotion than in all of Echo’s other interactions with him combined.
Echo couldn’t stop a smile from spreading across his face, but instead of speaking he just nodded. Somehow, inexplicably, he was glad he came, too.
:::
On the way to Kamino, Echo learned several things.
Wrecker loved hugs almost as much as he loved throwing things. He would throw his brothers, droids, weapons, explosive charges. Echo quickly grew used to the thunk thunk thunk of the tiny elastic sports ball Wrecker threw methodically, with perfect aim so that it hit the floor, the wall, the floor, and landed back in his hand to throw again. Just as quickly, Echo grew used to being lifted bodily off his feet without even realizing Wrecker was in the same space he was, to being held until someone reminded Wrecker we haven’t gotten to Kamino yet and he’s still fragile.
Crosshair and Wrecker got along like a house on fire in all the most obnoxious ways. Though they didn’t keep tallies on their helmets, they each had a note on their personal datapads of the missions where they had taken out the most droids (Crosshair was winning by about a mile, but Wrecker didn’t know that). Crosshair goaded Wrecker by insulting him in Mando’a and then giving false or half-false translations, but only when Tech wasn’t around, or Tech would correct him and there would be about an hour of Crosshair finding increasingly creative ways to hide from Wrecker’s fists. The bigger clone didn’t seem to fully grasp the concept of Crosshair’s sarcasm and dry humor, and Crosshair took full advantage of it.
With the other Bad Batchers, though, Crosshair didn’t seem as ready to pick fights. His humor was dry as ever, but that was all it was: humor. He was quiet, except for his jokes, and rarely poked fun at Hunter or Tech. He never made fun of Echo, and Echo spent more time than was probably necessary wondering whether that was because he didn’t know Echo’s limits yet, because he didn’t like Echo very much, or because he liked Echo a lot. He wasn’t very tactile, often fighting off Wrecker’s hugs, though he did clap his batchers and Echo on the shoulder when he passed. He seemed to enjoy reading, and in particular reading with a font so small no one else could see what it was. “Not hiding anything,” he explained to Echo once, “just like showing off.” It was about the most straightforward Crosshair ever got.
Hunter kept Crosshair and Wrecker from killing each other, which seemed to be his only activity on the ship outside of cooking. He often asked Tech or Echo to keep him company, and he and Echo traded stories about training on Kamino. Echo’s experiences, though he had learned they were not ideal childhood scenarios, were nothing compared to the Bad Batch’s. Watching brothers decommissioned as soon as the Kaminoans found a flaw in their otherwise desirable mutations, constantly worried they could be next--Echo shuddered just thinking about it. Hunter had taken up the position of leader and protector then, and never really gave it up. He fought harder than the Mando instructors for his brothers’ lives, which was saying quite a lot, and Tech backed this up.
Tech was uncomfortable in just his blacks. Everyone else, Echo included, chose not to wear their armor on the trip from Anaxes to Kamino, but Tech was in full armor before he left the shared cabin every day. He stayed up late into the night, lying on his bunk reading about a new language to practice and program into his computer, and slept well into the morning. Everyone else got up within a few minutes of each other, the end of Wrecker’s snoring as much a wake-up call as any, so Echo normally had breakfast with the rest, using Tech’s utensils and dishes and washing them before Tech even woke up. As a result, Tech ate on a completely different schedule from the others, and he and Echo settled into a routine of sharing. “Hopefully, the Kaminoans will give you your own while we’re planetside,” Tech said, “but if not, this will work.” If Tech wasn’t talking to someone during the day, he was usually programming something, and he often became so focused on his work he didn’t move for hours on end.
Echo also learned that everyone, except Crosshair, loved to cuddle.
One night, after making a stop to refuel on the way to Kamino and launching back into hyperspace, the group watched a holovid together, some sort of thriller about a serial killer in Hutt Space.
“How’d you get permission for this?” Echo asked.
Hunter, who was searching for the holovid, replied, “Since we travel alone and don’t have a big enough ship for a gym, the Kaminoans allow us other ways to entertain ourselves.”
“As long as you all participate in a thirty-minute exercise routine at some point during the day.” Echo was beginning to learn how the Bad Batch operated.
“We,” Tech corrected absentmindedly from his spot lying on his bunk. It was the only time he ever didn’t wear his armor.
The little thrill of inclusion that Echo had begun to notice over the past week of travel ran up his spine, and he smiled to himself.
“Exactly,” Hunter added. It seemed he had finally found what he was looking for, and he grinned wickedly at Echo. “This one is Wrecker’s favorite.”
“Why?” Echo asked, though he wasn’t exactly sure he wanted to know.
About halfway through, when Tech had gotten scared enough to come down from his bunk (still without his armor, which Echo thought might be some sort of progress), Echo figured out why.
Wrecker didn’t pay attention to the plot or the acting. He was only mildly frightened by the jumpscares. No, he loved this particular holovid because it meant he was able to pull his brothers into his arms and spend the next hour or so holding all of them.
He pulled Crosshair in first, and the skinnier clone wriggled away indignantly but stayed close to Wrecker’s side.
Then he grabbed Tech, who had settled next to him. Tech squirmed under Wrecker’s arm and pressed his face into Wrecker’s side, barely even watching out of the corner of his eye. Their positions switched for a moment or two when the holovid showed something from an extreme height, but for the most part, Wrecker comforted Tech.
A few minutes later, Hunter jumped and reached instinctively for where his knife would be, and Wrecker took that as an opportunity to heave Hunter up and set him down across his lap. He stroked Hunter’s hair, but Hunter batted his hand away. Still, he leaned into Wrecker’s body.
Echo assumed Wrecker must be a comforting presence. Probably warm, too. His personal temperature regulation wasn’t quite what it used to be, and he shivered even in the blacks he had been given after his rescue on Skako Minor. Or maybe that was just the adrenaline, the anticipation of the serial killer’s next move. Regardless, he shifted closer to Wrecker, hoping for the same comfort the rest of the Bad Batch received.
Wrecker, though he was not one for nonverbal communication, seemed to understand the gesture immediately; Echo thought this might be due to growing up with Tech. He lifted his free arm for Echo to lodge himself under.
After a few moments in the warmth of Wrecker’s body, he found himself drifting off to sleep.
He woke up in the morning in his own bunk, an extra blanket tucked around him, and when he slid down with his regular metallic thunk, he saw that Wrecker’s blanket was missing. He smiled to himself.
Maybe this is where I belong.