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99 never begrudges any of his brothers- how could he?
What happened with his body is…no one’s fault. A-99 is a simple failure. He’s not a complicated failure like A-Ø2- he just. Failed. He ages too fast (three times as fast as he ought to), his body’s weak in places it shouldn’t be, and his spine is not formed correctly.
His brothers have kept him alive in spite of the Prime’s feelings, in spite of the other trainer’s feelings, in spite of the Kaminoans.
His mental scores put him right at the top of his class, but they’re never included in the official write-ups. His strategies are some of the best in sims. His value, his brothers say, is his mind, it’s his heart. In how his larger form when the others were all still small, still young enough to want hope.
When they’re all considered old enough, it becomes their job to help train the next generation of cadets.
But 99 doesn’t get any children to look after, or teach.
He’ll never begrudge his brothers, he just, he wishes, he yearns.
His brothers first batch of CCs and CTs are well into their childhood, when the Kaminoan Chief Medical Scientist calls him to her medical lab. This is part of his work that he’s not allowed to talk about with the other Alphas, but it is his business, not theirs.
There are certainly things they do not share with him, right?
At her side is a small, blonde cadet. He’s seen her before. While he is sprinting through his life, she is crawling at a snail’s pace, destined to be left behind. She’s his elder. She’s all of their elders. She should be the same age as the Nulls, but instead she looks more like the Gen 5 CT’s they’re starting to see waddle around in their cadet blues.
“A-99,” Nala Se’s voice is calm, lilting. “I hope that you remember Omega.”
“Yes, Mistress, I do. Hello, little one.” He greets warmly, just a hair of a smile on his face as he looks at her.
She smiles at him, nervous, bouncing on her toes, before Nala Se allows the contact with a nod. Omega launches forward, and he catches her in an easy hug. 99, though, keeps his focus on Nala Se.
“I understand that you are the sole Alpha-class clone without a any cadets to look after.” The scientist says without taking her gaze off of Omega.
“That is correct, Mistress.” He nods, slowly.
“I would like you to help socialize a unique squad of clones.” She says, to his surprise. “That they will be your only assignment, in my professional opinion, is an ideal set up considering their…unique conditions.”
The Kaminoans know well that humans are social creatures, deny them adequate social bonds and you get individuals like the Nulls, disturbed in ways that 99 feels for, truly, even though he feels they look down upon the Alphas writ large and him, specifically. The Prime had trained him and his ilk, and 99’s advanced aging meant that he had been able to care for the other Alphas. This model had turned the Alphas into a more stable set of clones than their predecessors, and so, logically, if the model is expanded upon the full benefits of having connections with adults can be experienced.
Each Alpha had about 50 cadets under their sort of tutelage; the CC class had been determined to be the ones who would benefit the most from having the most additional socialization, but they weren’t the only ones. The model then suggests that those trained by the Alphas would also get younger cadets to help socialize, until it was a relatively self-sustaining model.
but 99 is not included in that model. He’s a failure, kept around because he is useful.
In a very real sense, because his aging was so much faster than his brothers, he was the first to be able to hold any of them. While originally he’d been kept around as a fluke, it’d been impossible to miss the ways that the Alphas in their younger stages of development had imitated him, sought after his attention and affection.
Indeed, 99 remembers the first time that the Kaminoans had directed him to get dressed, while explaining the steps to the gaggle of other Alphas around him, helping them do the same motion.
So he’s still kept around, as maintenance and in some documents, as an elder male role model, but he’d never been given another squad of cadets aside from his own batch, sprinting past them in age.
“I am excited for this assignment,” He accepts with a nod, holding Omega close to his chest, and Nala Se almost seems to smile at this, as she gestures for him to follow.
The thing that truly throws him, is when she tells him, that this batch had been named after him. The CT-99’s.
Their first introduction could have gone better, but it feels accurate to their numbers.
“What are those?” 17 asks him, eyes narrowed.
“They’re my cadets.” 99 answers, quite proudly.
“Cadets.” The word is strangled, disbelief laced over it like fingers around a neck.
99 can understand the confusion.
They aren’t even all the same size.
The four littles huddle together. The smallest of whom is practically tube-wet. 99 offers them his hand, and they gather around to hold onto him.
“They were named after me, they’re CT-99’s. Experimental clones.” He reveals, and his brothers, a gaggle of not yet-teenagers now, with the Prime’s face but none of his malice or apathy as they look towards him and then towards the kids and then back towards 99.
“Well,” 17 hums. “Under no circumstances can we let Fett see them.”
“Oh, forget him, this is longneck business— just imagine if Skirata finds out about them?” Sull shakes his head. “He’s already got his set of loons.”
“There’s only four of them,” Fordo notes, tilting his head. “They’re typically assigned in groups of five or six. Only ones that come in fours are Commandos…”
“Did the big guy eat the last one or something?” Spar asks, bewildered. “Are they even all the same batch?”
These are all very good questions, and 99 can even answer a few of them. “No, they’re all one batch, though Nala Se held at least one back.” There’s a choir of hissed intakes of breath. The implications of such a statement are not good, but, no, it’s not that, he just can’t mention Omega’s presence, he can only give the barest hint of Emerie. Supposedly the two girls are the 5th and 6th members of this unit.
“So, are they really Fett clones?” Stec asks, frankly disbelieving. “The tubie, yeah, sure; that’s a Fett clone, but the others…?”
“Maybe if we squint…?” 98 nudges 99 with an elbow, the motion gentle, including him in the physicality of their social group, the fact that they’re all now growing young men. “Ehhh, it’s hard to tell. The big guy’s got the right face shape, at least. Even if he looks like he ate their missing batchmate.”
The littles just gather together further around 99, wilting under the scrutiny of the other Alpha-class clones.
“17,” 99 asks respectfully as the child he’s referring to as Goggles tugs on his waistband. “Can you help me get them set up?”
Never let it be said that his Alpha-class brothers do not take care of him just has he had taken care of them when they were all much smaller, because even though it is 17 that agrees, and he was indeed the only one who he asked, he gets an entire gaggle of his fellow Alphas as his companions.
Nala Se had requisitioned a room for her experimental unit, isolated from the other cadets. It’s an old storage room, but it’s better than the sub-level medical facility.
“It’s even got windows.” 66 whistles as he glances about, picking up one of the boxes, moving it out of the way, where the beds have been built for the temporary task, at least until the more permanent structures were in place. “Sure we can’t steal this room?”
“There’s only four beds.” Spar points out, as they all work together to set up the equipment that 99 had been assigned by Nala Se.
“We could do it on a rotational basis!” 04 suggests, bright. “They’re so small they’d not even notice us in bed with them.”
“We have our own cadets.” 17 reminds, voice dry. “These are 99’s boys.”
And 99’s boys they are indeed.
99, of course, is supplemental to their main education; which is to say he doesn’t have his eyes on them all the time. However, he is the one they come back to when things are over, and he’s the one who checks them over for injuries, gets them cleaned up, into clothes, and does a lot of the basic care. It’s awfully clear, even at the start that the boys aren’t used to getting any sort of positive attention and they latch on tight to him in the absence of others.
Nala Se had said they were from the same experimental unit, but what experimental means isn’t really all that clear, beyond their general appearances. Little Omega and her elder, Emerie are both girls, but the boys’ appearances alone give away that they’re not normal clones. The fact that they’re numerically ordered betrays that they’ve learned from the Nulls. One can’t mourn those that never existed, who never had numbers to go with the grief.
99 does not begrudge the Nulls either, for all that the other Alphas make him swear that these little boys don’t run into the only other clones on base with such a unique designation. The Nulls have never seemed sure what to do with him the few times they’ve met, but they could break him easily and do not. It is more than some in Tipoca can say, and considering they already have a father figure, they could be harsher.
But in the few weeks that have followed since they’ve been entrusted to him... there is a lot of general confusion. A lot of strangeness. A lot of unanswered questions.
9901, the one who’s the smallest of the bunch, seems to pretty constantly be in pain, and the Kaminoans frequently send him back to 99 with sensory issues, never quite explaining what it is they mean when they say it. 99 takes his own pain medication, shows little 01 how to do it.
(The Alphas all designate him as Fussy.)
02 has a pair of goggles that he wears. He’s quiet, but very alert. For one reason or another the kid just can’t seem to get enough time in front of a pad, he always has his face in the datapads provided, but it’s not as though he’s doing some sort of sim, if 99 wasn’t entirely aware that he was far too young for such a feat, he’d say he was reading.
(“Maybe he saw some longnecks doing it and picked it up?” Is 30’s suggestion, and it’s not a bad one, considering how much time they’d spent with Nala Se)
03 is the big one of his batch. He looks much older than any of the others based on size alone, but his behavior betrays that he’s indeed their age. The kid eats most of the time, too, but the Kaminoans seem completely unbothered by this behavior, supposedly his caloric intake requirements are something they’re all quite aware of. He is giggly and veryenergetic, and of the four of them he seems to especially love to run around and get into things. Of the four of them, he’s already managed to break 99’s bones at least once. It’s an accident, of course, but his strength combined with their reevaluation of 99’s frailty does have his batch concerned for him.
(Though, Spar especially thinks he’s a funny boy, their one-man wrecking ball. There’s mischief in his brother’s eyes as he, wide-eyed and guileless, tells Skirata that the Nulls had to have broken that doorframe, even as 99 gently shepherds the lone cadet who’d run out of the training hall behind him, the child chewing on a toy.)
04, meanwhile, is hell on wheels. His Alpha siblings had all been well behaved children, with the extreme exception of Spar, (up until his initial reconditioning, of course,) but even compared to Spar at his worst, 04 requires a severe reevaluation of the phrase child-proofing. If there is, in some possible way, and indeed sometimes even if it maybe shouldn't be possible for him to see something—not only will he see it, but he will attempt to get it into his mouth.
(Trantos accuses the boy of an even stranger phenomena- that his eyes shine in the dark.)
99 brings them to their training, trusting the other Alphas to have his back on avoiding most other trainers on Kamino. Spar is his scout today, moving about 20 meters in front of them.
Dred Priest turns around the corner, now walking their way, and Spar’s body is a live wire of tension.
99 takes the boys to the wall, placing 03 and 01 in front of 02 and 04.
“Spar,” The Mandalorian greets, not kindly even in spite of the use of the name.
Spar has privately shared that it’s likely out of the need of the rat bastard to remind himself not to try anything with him, especially now that he’s old enough to really do damage.
Spar nods, tense, eyes flickering to 99, his worried heart betraying them at this critical juncture.
Priest spots him, and even with the bucket on, 99 can feel, instinctually, the way he reevaluates the scene.
99, a group of cadets, and Spar. All relatively isolated in the hall.
Spar could do a lot of damage to Priest even at this age, certainly, but only if Priest does something first.
There was one particular incident that did a lot of damage to 99, once upon a time. He’d been told by Priest relatively early on, before any of them knew what was happening, that he’d needed 99’s help to train the cadets.
The cadets, all of 2 and a half cycles, had stared at him wide eyed and terrified as Priest had shoved him forward, and explained that it was a day of learning how to take down opponents bigger than themselves. That using 99 was just the primer to fighting Priest and Reau themselves.
He remembers coming home to his batch, all of three cycles, their small bodies distraught at the damage done by their youngers, by this one trainer.
His face right now looks like the Prime’s, at his peak. He’s got a head of brown hair instead of black hair, though. Not unlike Goggles.
Priest stalks, slow, purposefully down the hall.
Spar cannot act until given reason to act, the same limitation as Mij Gilamar when the medic had made his threats to kill the other Mandalorian trainer. 99 feels it’s an unfair ideal of justice. That by the time it happens it cannot be undone no more than the damage to his body was not able to be fixed following that fateful night. Spar looks even younger now than 99 had looked at the time, and it shows in the way his baby fat sort of furrows, the fear he's not quite willing to show on his face.
99 wishes he were stronger, often, but he’s never wished that more powerfully than in this moment, when his dark visor looks like the eyes of some great beast, preying down upon them.
“I had not realized that had given you cadets, 99,” He comments, looking down at the boys. “I certainly don’t think that you could be training them well enough, considering…” He trails off, his disparaging implication making 99 glower.
“Perhaps I should invite them to my circle,” He remarks. The implication clear. 99’s stomach drops.
Priest’s cadets are no longer the scared little boys he remembers. They’re now nearly the size the Alphas are right now, puberty has hit them in full force, and they are angry.
“And aren’t they an odd bunch.” His cruelty in the phrasing is obvious. He reaches to grab at 9902’s goggles, 02 frozen in place, and then he starts to take them off his face, when suddenly 03 surprises them all when he grabs Priest’s wrist himself.
“No,” The cadet says, voice high. “S’ not nice.”
That’s the phrasing 99 has to use when 01, 03 and 04 want to see what it is that 02 is playing with, quiet and in his own little world. His heart still feels like it’s going to burst, of pride or of fear though, he’s not quite sure what’ll kill him first.
Priest starts to laugh, he starts to pull away, but they’re all left quiet as he suddenly screams in terrible pain.
03 let him go in shock, and they all have to stare in bafflement as Priest falls to one knee in pain, his vambrace, beskar-durasteel combination vambrace, has been crunched in on itself like it was made out of a sculptors dough, little child’s fingers left indented like some great beasts teeth or else a bruise.
“We’re leaving,” Spar says, damning protocol as he scoops up 01 and 02, 04 grabbing hold of his back and climbing on him like some sort of cat or else a monkey, while 99 takes the hint himself and takes hold of 03’s hand with an iron grip as he starts moving as quickly as his legs can, his limp (inflicted by Priest himself all those years ago and never fixed) the only thing slowing them down.
And it is at that moment that they all come to realize that 99’s boys, defective as they were at first glance, had something else going on about them.
That night, when the cadets are in bed and 99 has returned to his own quarters with his brothers tucked into bed, he writes under his notes for the biggest of his cadets, enhanced strength.