Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

No other way.

It rolled through his distracted mind like a chant, over and over again, reminding him that he had made a decision, made the only decision, and now he had to live with it until the mission was over.

Hunter sighed and tried to focus.

Of course he hadn’t wanted to leave his brothers. He didn’t like going off on his own any more than they liked staying with Rex and the 501st back at the camp. Especially when this was supposed to be a three-day covert assignment – go in, get the data, blow up the compound, leave. Simple.

Except it hadn’t been. They were six days into a humid, endless jungle that was far different than the (wholly inadequate) briefing they had been given had described. Tech had been able to pinpoint the location of the compound, but even that wasn’t where the intel had specified – not unless the higher-ups had just conveniently forgotten that instead of an isolated compound in the middle of nowhere, the data was being held in a state-of-the-art bunker in the middle of a heckin’ city.

Oh, and they were nearly out of rations and water. Once they had been dropped off onworld, Squad 99 quickly realized that the supplies they had been given weren’t going to be enough. Having far more experience than most other squads with long-term missions and pathetic rations, the five of them had come up with a plan to make the stores last and Tech had quickly convinced Rex to implement it. But even with splitting allocations in half for the past four days, and limiting water on the ruthless hike to the bare minimum for even a non-intensive movement assignment, they were almost dry.

Which is why Hunter had made the hard decision to leave the four of his brothers behind with Rex, and strike out into the strange jungle on his own in search of game.

Crosshair had argued with him. Echo had tried to talk him out of it. Wrecker had grumbled and Tech had merely sighed in defeat. Deep down, they knew he was right. The 501st was amazing in combat, but they were not cut out for the life the 99 had led for so long – solo, with few rations, and fewer friends in expansive, hostile territory. They were used to quick missions with backup and resupply runs. They needed the sharp eyes of Crosshair, Wrecker’s muscle, Echo’s resilience, and Tech’s ingenuity to survive and stay undetected until Hunter returned with food and water.

Hunter needed all those things too, but while he needed them more in many ways, he didn’t need them as badly in others. He could hunt on his own because he didn’t have to rely on Crosshair’s vision – he could sense most things before they could affect him and could react before the rest had time to think about it. He was resilient, in part due to the tortuous cadet-hoods all four 99’s had experienced on Kamino. He was strong enough to deal with most obstacles, and sly enough to get out of others.

But he wanted them to be with him. He didn’t like being on his own any more than the rest of his brothers did. And that was why he was trying to get back to them as soon as possible.

He stopped in a depression in the forest floor, taking in the varied scents of the pollen in the breeze, the rotting leaves on the ground, the musk of distant animal life, and the close air that was trapped beneath the tree tops. He could feel three winged creatures perched above him, their shifting wings a telltale sign that they were uncomfortable with his presence and about to fly to a different, more secluded roost for the night.

He had chosen to embark on his hunt close to dusk. He was looking not just for some kind of edible game, but for water. And the bigger prey went to watering holes at night to escape the immediate notice of their predators.

If he was quiet, in tune with his enhanced senses, and just a little lucky, he could snag enough food for at least a day and leave a tracer by a water site so they could fill their canteens and storage vessels.

Hunter breathed deeply again and felt his senses taking the reins from his mind. His sight was as good as touch and his smell was as good as his sight. He sensed the movements of the trees in the breeze and caught the faint scent of water. Not murky, stagnant water like he had been unfortunate to find this morning in the ditches along the fields they had traveled through. This was the clean, light scent of pure, drinkable water. Water they needed, and water he was going to get.

He shuddered, as if throwing off the last bit of whatever civilization he possessed, and let the primal part of him take over. The part that was never what his creators had wanted it to be, and yet had slowly and surely evolved into something much more than they had ever imagined. The part that could smell the water and hear the fluttery breathing of the birds perched nearly five hundred yards above him in the trees, the part that knew he had to find food or watch his family go hungry. Somewhere deep down, he could remember Rex and the others, but they were only extensions of that core unit, faint forms on the edge of the firelight where he and four others like him – the only others like him – sat and laughed and survived.

He took a long breath of the water scent and plunged ahead through the brush.

~~~~~

“Does it always take this long?”

Hardcase had been pacing for two standard hours when Tech heard his barking question. The engineer sighed and glanced at the three of his brothers who were still with him in the camp. Wrecker and Crosshair were playing cards near the edge of the firelight, seemingly carefree – but Tech read the tightness around Wrecker’s formidable shoulders and knew there was a reason Crosshair’s FirePuncher was still strapped to his back.

The sniper always sat at the edge of the ring of light for two reasons. One, he was never willingly unable to see everything that was going on around him. Two, the light and heat, not to mention the ample smoke that still lingered from the regs' first attempt to build a fire, affected his photosensitivity and enhanced eyes more than he cared to admit. He had ignored most of the regs after Hunter had gone off on his hunt, but as soon as Kix had piled wet leaves on an already smoking fire, the sniper had immediately risen to rectify the “unconscionable fire-starting skills” of the 501st. A smokeless fire now warmed the campsite, and Crosshair had once more retreated to remain with Wrecker.

Tech’s gaze met Echo’s, and he received an eye roll in response to Hardcase’s question. The cyborg was in no mood to argue with the regs, not with his slightly pessimistic mind undoubtedly parsing out as many dangerous situations as he thought was possible for Hunter to get in on his own.

The thought made Tech smirk a little. Hunter might have the reputation of the responsible brother, but he was in no way incapable of getting himself into a load of duse he hadn’t planned on.

“Hey, cool off, Hardcase,” Rex mediated, hands up as if he were going to press the other clone back into his seat on a downed log. “Hunter will be back as soon as he can. Until then, we wait here for him. Period.”

It made Tech's heart swell a little to know that over the course of only a few short missions together, Captain Rex had come to trust his brothers and him so implicitly. He kept his features carefully schooled to their usual deadpan expression, but inwardly he was smiling. The Bad Batch had many acquaintances, but not many friends, partially due to their different origins than regular clones, and partially due to the usually less-than-regulation way in which they executed their assignments.

But it seemed that after their last few meetings (and, Tech secretly supposed, some encouragement from Commander Cody) the blonde clone captain had welcomed them into his circle and decided that the once four, now five brothers were just as trustworthy and capable as his own men. Only months after first meeting them and four missions together, Rex was defending Hunter – his own personal example of what a sergeant of the Republic should not look like, and often act like – against the complaints of one of his own. And he was doing it without frustration toward the tracker, or his methods. He actually seemed more irritated with Hardcase than any of the five brothers.

The Batchers may have outwardly appeared uncaring toward those sentiments, but deep down, they all knew it mattered. It mattered a lot.

Tech noticed Hardcase’s shoulders slump a little and recognized it as the posture of a man who knew he should shut up. He breathed out a breath he didn't know he had been holding and went back to his datapad.

Right now, he was trying to focus on the latest Republic upgrades to armor sights and scopes. While anything spoken about in the articles would be vastly inferior to that with which he had been outfitting Crosshair for years, he never knew when he might come across inspiration for a new design. His silver-haired brother’s eyesight was getting better if anything, and there were always minute corrections that Tech had to make, problems that would not have affected an unenhanced being's sight through the scope but that to Crosshair were huge dips and cracks along his line of fire. His own goggles could always be enhanced to be more accurate in scans or include more capabilities for the field as well as his work while on the Marauder. Echo's scomp arm had been giving him some unexplained, unexpected issues after their last long mission, to the point it was beginning to interfere with a couple of his neural connections when he patched into the Marauder and other targets. If he could get to work on the prosthetic he had been crafting, his brother would perhaps not have to go without an arm while he initiated the repairs on the scomp.

“Stop it, Tech.” Echo's bored baritone broke into the engineer's thoughts. He turned to look at his slightly older brother with a tilted eyebrow, which in turn resulted in a tilted head due to his goggles.

“And what action am I supposed to be ceasing?”

Echo smirked at him, like he usually did whenever Tech purposefully dragged out his sentences to irritate him. “Overthinking.” He settled his shoulders against the rocks he had apparently claimed as his territory for the remainder of their vigil. “Hunter is likely spilling blood already and getting ready to head back here.”

Tech afforded his brother a small smile. “I am not worried about Hunter, necessarily. His enhanced senses allow for much more warning of impending danger than the rest of us would have in his place.”

“What, are you saying we're defenseless and exposed without our ferocious ori'vod?” Echo smiled to soften the words. “The man needs to get away for a couple of hours or he'll go crazy babysitting us.”

Tech fought the urge to snort in amusement. “I agree. Hunter is very attuned to our individual idiosyncrasies and ferocious does apply rather aptly to his tendencies of overbearing protection.” The engineer's brown eyes, usually softer than his brothers’, softened even more as he glanced back to his datapad. “And yet – that is how he has always been. Since our earliest days on Kamino, Hunter has taken his protection of us very seriously, and has never once failed to fight on our behalf should he feel it is required.”

“And then I came along and gave him another problem child to worry about.” Echo's words were meant to lighten the conversation, but there was a dark, contemplating look in his eyes as he watched Tech.

Tech shook his head, smiling again. “If anything, Hunter has to worry less about you than, for instance, Wrecker or Crosshair. Wrecker is prone to underthinking his actions, and Crosshair can usually start a fight with merely a well-placed glare. In comparison, you have been the cause of very few, as you say, problems since you joined our squad.”

“And where do you fall in the rankings, vod’ika?”

Tech straightened his goggles. “I like to think that I solve far more issues and dilemmas than I ever cause.”

Echo gave him a snorted laugh and an amused look. “Well, aren't you an angel.”

Tech would have retorted with an equally wry reply, but his thoughts suddenly snapped to Wrecker's startled yelp and Crosshair's sudden movement.

The sniper had sprung straight up from his immediate position, managing to dump all his cards into the pile of matches he and Wrecker had been absentmindedly playing for. His sharp eyes were trained outside of the ring of firelight, beyond what the others in the camp could see.

Tech could see Echo’s entire body tense up, cybernetics reacting to the spike of adrenaline in his organic systems. The engineer inventor breathed out deeply and tried to scan the treeline through his visor. With the thick foliage and distortion from the fire’s heat and flames, it was difficult to see anything beyond the edge of the camp.

“What is it?” His voice is low and steady. He could see that Rex had stopped cleaning his D-17 and now had his eyes trained on Crosshair, watching the sniper’s motionless form as the seconds dragged on between answers.

Crosshair was indeed still, his silence only making the foreboding cold in Tech’s stomach move to his veins as he realized that something was very wrong. His brother was not one to overreact to anything, much less noises in the night. If the sniper was this bothered by whatever he had seen in the shadows, there was ample cause for alarm.

When Crosshair finally speaks, his raspy voice is almost a growl.

“We’ve got company.”

~~~~~

The leaves rustled faintly under Hunter’s combat boots, much more quietly than they crunched under the hooves of the deerlike creature he was stalking. The animal was oblivious to its pursuer, drinking serenely from the small lake that was sheltered from aerial view by the thick canopy of treetops. Its hide was a dark brown, mottled all over with white and gray spots that helped it blend into the twilight hours.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Hunter remembered what Tech had told them of the wildlife on this planet, including what this creature was called, but at the moment he couldn’t recall it. He was too focused on making minimal sound as he approached within striking distance, and he was pretty sure that he wouldn’t get too many complaints from the hungry crew about eating it, anyway. It was three standard hours after nightfall and nearly pitch black, which had led him to leave his shoulder and torso armor behind with a tracer in a hollow tree and proceed in his blacks, trying to avoid any glints or reflections that would give him away to his prey. He continued wearing his boots and lower body armor only because it wasn't so quiet in the forest tonight that he needed to discard those as well, as he had on other hunts.

It was dark enough that Hunter could only see the outline of the creature’s back against the shimmering water. Still, he was not in the least bit of doubt about taking it down. He could smell its every breath, and its electromagnetic field was constantly updating him on its slightest movements. The twitching of its ears was peaceful and unalarmed. It hadn’t seen him, nor would it.

Just five more paces.

He crept closer by the second, patient in his stalking. He didn’t want to miss this opportunity, since that would mean delaying his return to the others. His mind tugged him back to the camp a little harder with every moment that passed, and he was quite eager to leave the tracers by the water hole and retrace his path to the fire and his brothers.

One more pace.

Hunter crouched in the foliage, his eyes glowing almost golden in the faint light as he angled his knife in his hand. The vibrodagger he carried on his forearm at all times had been the end of many a game animal for him and his brothers, and he intended to add this deerish one to the list.

He waited until the creature was looking away, preoccupied with the bits of green that dotted the water’s edge. He waited until the pulses of its shifting muscles calmed his nerves with their own steadiness, telling him that it was still unaware of him and unprepared to dodge.

He breathed in, then breathed out.

And he sprang.

~~~~~

Crosshair’s words had not even completely escaped his lips before shouts and people exploded from three different places along the treeline.

Wrecker pounced up to stand beside his brother and brandished his massive fists. Tech and Echo went for their blasters as Crosshair swung the FirePuncher to his shoulder, tracking the movements of one of the two dozenish figures darting toward them. His finger pressed to the cool trigger and…

“Wait!”

Hardcase’s voice rang out over the clearing in the midst of the chaos and brought a brief halt. Crosshair’s eyes found the reg first and he snarled.

Hardcase was currently being held in a headlock, a powerful arm wrapped around his neck beneath his jaw as if ready to snap up and break his neck. A blaster barrel was pressed to his head, and the Zygerrian who held it sneered.

“We wouldn’t want this one to lose his head, now, would we?” the sentient canine purred, his horns looking sharp and dangerous in the moonlight. “Why don’t you just set down your weapons and we’ll talk this over?”

Rex looked at Crosshair and the other batchers. He and his own men had frozen, weighing the odds of freeing their comrade while keeping him alive.

So far, those odds didn’t look so good.

Kix glanced at Rex, and with a sigh, the blonde clone set down his blaster. The medic, Livewire, Sparks, and Jesse followed suit.

The horned attacker smiled snakily as the weapons clattered to the dusty ground, then turned his attention to the four brothers who were off to the side. “Would anyone else like to surrender before I blow his brains out?” He tightened his grip on the blaster and Hardcase grunted, the cold barrel squeezing against his temple.

Echo was the first to react. He slowly bent down, his cybernetic legs making the slightest creak as he lay his gun gently on the dirt. Wrecker lowered his fists only after Tech had done according to Echo’s example.

All eyes went to Crosshair.

The sniper’s face was stony and furious at the same time. He could easily pull the trigger on the FirePuncher and hit his target, maybe several of them, before Hardcase’s dead body hit the ground. By that time they could have the other slave traffickers on the dirt in surrender.

Crosshir felt the stares of his brothers, with Tech’s almost pleading look being the loudest. But dang it – they were why he didn’t want to lay down his rifle. They were nothing to these slavers, and unlike Rex and the others, there was no one who would come after them if they ended up in some Zyggerian chain gang. He wanted to shoot these vile creatures and be done with it, end the threat to his family before things got any worse.

“Crosshair.” Rex’s voice sounded hoarse, but maybe that was because he was keeping his tone so low.

Crosshair tried to imagine that it was Tech or Echo in the Zyggerian’s grip. Tried to imagine what he would want Rex to do in this situation, if the roles were reversed and it was his squad member being threatened with a gun.

He couldn’t.

He dropped his rifle barrel anyway.

He could practically feel Hardcase’s sigh of relief as he carefully lowered the gun to the ground, as his finger reluctantly left the trigger. He straightened back up with a glowering rage that should have struck the slave trader down in his tracks.

The Zyggerian’s smile widened. “Good.” He pushed Hardcase forward and entered the ring of light around the fire. His followers did the same and Crosshair quickly tallied twenty-six Zyggerians total, not including the aakhounds that they held on leashes. Undoubtedly they had used the dogs to track them.

“My name is Zol.” The chief slaver sat down at Rex’s former place near the fire, blaster still in hand as his friends trained their own weapons on each clone trooper. His canine eyes glowed with glee.

“And as of right now, you all belong to me.”

~~~~~

The water was pure, cool from the night air and cleaner than what they had been given in their canteens at the last resupply. Hunter drank enough to slake his thirst and went to a different spot on the bank to wash the blood from his hands.

The deerlike creature had gone down with not very much of a fight. Virtually as soon as his feet had left the ground his left hand had closed on the animal’s hide and his right hand had driven the blade of his knife into the soft flesh on the underside of its throat. He had taken it to the ground and finished it immediately and mercifully, with a stab to the heart.

He had felt the creature go limp under his knife and had been glad when a sense of remorse flooded his heart. He had not wanted to kill this animal for the sake of killing, or the pleasure it brought. He had killed it only for the purpose it would serve in keeping his family alive. His skills that had been so honed by the Kaminoans, the senses they had forced him to live with, had never given his creators the monster they wanted, one that killed on command and for the joy of it. Whether it was his own stubborn ideas about life or the relationship he had with each of his brothers, a close bond that not many others experienced if they were clones who were shifted from squad to squad, he had never devolved into the mindless killing machine the Kaminoans had desired. If it was up to him, he vowed again, even as he stood near his latest kill with blood still running down his arms and knife, he never would.

The animal lay gutted and ready to be packed back to camp, the hide draped over the open chest cavity to keep out any vermin. His sharp eyes gauged that the meat would last his family of five and Rex’s own six-man squad for two days. Now all he had to do was plant the tracer by the pool for Tech to track later, quarter up the deer, and start moving.

He wiped his knife on the grass and pressed the point into the deer’s shoulder joint. The faster he worked, the faster he could get back.

~~~~~

“What brings Republic troopers so far out from their safe fleets?” Zol hissed as he helped himself to the scant water left in Rex’s canteen.

“What brings Zyggerian hunters so far from your filthy dens?” Echo snarled back. His metal arm didn't feel uncomfortable from the position he was in, but his remaining human wrist was already bleeding from his attempts to grind the electric cuffs down on the rocks he was leaning on. So far, he didn’t think he had even made a dent.

The others were similarly secured by their captors, bound and forced to sit where they had been standing. Luckily, that meant that the four remaining members of the Bad Batch were close to one another. Unluckily, Wrecker was close enough to headbutt the first Zyggerian that tried to get a better look at Echo’s cyber implants. They had placed another set of cuffs on the muscled clone and also found a similarly restrictive collar to fit around his neck. The canid who had been tasked with the job would have probably been missing a few fingers – or an arm – had his friend not had the foresight to place a gun to Tech’s head to prevent more such outbreaks.

Crosshair was fuming, his anger so palpable that Echo absentmindedly wondered how much smoke would billow out if the sniper opened his mouth. His eyes had analyzed each Zyggerian until they had finally fixed themselves on Zol and refused to look away, as if he could glare the man into submission.

Zol laughed under his breath and pointed at Echo. “You are not the friendliest of creatures, cyborg.” His eyes darkened. “Yet you are likely the most valuable out of this lot. What are you, some…experimental droid?”

Echo bristled but remained silent, hoping he didn’t bite his tongue off before they figured out a plan.

Tech had no such intentions of letting the insult fly. “Echo is an ARC trooper and has been a member of several elite squads,” the engineer spat more maliciously than Echo thought he ever had. “If you are in any doubt, you should uncuff him and allow him to prove it.”

Echo’s pulse beat faster at the retort, worried about the repercussions, but his heart also warmed. Tech was amiable enough if left alone – he was certainly less openly hostile than Crosshair. But like his silver-haired brother, the inventor was fiercely protective of his vode and would not hesitate to defend them. Verbally or otherwise.

“I believe I will take your word for it, defective,” Zol yawned.

Tech’s eyes took on a hard glint. “Oh. Are you capable of understanding my words? I was about to resort to primitive sign language to get my point across.”

Wrecker groaned softly at his younger brother’s snap. Crosshair didn’t even flinch.

Zol’s eyes glazed over with hate, but he didn’t move. “I will take great pleasure in making you regret your insults, clone,” he growled.

“Do you speak in words that are comprised of more than three syllables, or is that your limit?” Tech grunted as the Zyggerian closest to him punched him square in the mouth. Blood trickled from his split lip and his goggles hung slightly sideways from the impact.

“Hey!” Wrecker began to stand up but was arrested by a jolt of electricity shooting through his nervous system. He staggered, forced to sit back down as his legs locked up from the current.

Crosshair snarled as two of his brothers were assaulted and shot a dagger-like glare at the Zyggerian who had struck Tech. “You should throw that rifle as far away as you can,” he growled darkly, his raspy voice very much like a snake’s. “That way you get to run a little, before I wrap the barrel around your neck.”

The Zyggerian laughed and raised the rifle butt to smash into the unflinching sniper’s face.

“Zod.” Zol’s drawl made the other slaver stop and look at his boss. “Do not damage the merchandise more than is necessary. Especially that one’s face. I would imagine his new owner would like to have his sniper’s eyes intact.”

Zod obeyed, but not without sending a deadly look at Crosshair.

The sniper smirked back with murder in his eyes.

Echo growled deep in his chest but felt Tech nudge him gently with his elbow. When he looked at his vod he could have kicked him and himself. Tech’s eyes shone with a calculating gleam, the kind they only held when one of his projects had worked or an idea had proven true. It didn’t take many of his excessive brainwaves for Echo to figure out Tech had planned the outburst. The Zyggerians were known the galaxy over for their criminal activities and would have likely identified the work of the Techno Union if they had looked too much closer at Echo’s prosthetics. Even though Tech had reinvented nearly all of the mechanics, the fingerprints were still there. If Zol had realized what a black-market prize he had in the form of Echo, the ARC trooper probably would have many more problems to worry about than a wounded ego.

The former reg elbowed Tech back, giving his brother a knowing but sad look. Tech shrugged as if to say it was nothing and returned his gaze to the head of the operation.

Zol had now turned his attention to Rex, irritated at not receiving an answer to his earlier question. “I will ask one more time.” The words slithered off his tongue. “What are Republic troopers and their captain…” He nodded to Rex's shoulder pauldron, which bore his emblem of rank. “...doing in the Outer Rim?”

Rex looked furious, whether because of their predicament or the blows that had just been dealt to his friends, Echo couldn't tell. All he knew was that the blonde clone was angry. Very angry. And worried.

“I'm not at liberty to divulge that information,” he said sternly. His hands were clenched within the confines of the cuffs. “But I will tell you this. If we do not return to our posts, within a few days there will be Republic ships raining fire on this planet unlike anything you have ever seen.”

“Let them,” Zol smirked. “By then you will be sold. And I have many other hunting grounds, besides this one. It will not be a great loss to me if Navi goes up in smoke.”

Echo saw Rex's eyes widen at the word 'hunting.' Just a little, just enough that the ARC trooper could tell, after countless missions with the captain had taught him his quirks and expressions. And he knew why. He read it in his former commander's eyes when Zol turned away to argue with one of his underlings and Rex chanced a look in the Batch's direction.

His brown eyes shone with one word.

Hunter?

Echo glanced at Tech. The engineer shook his head slightly at Rex to let him know that Hunter had not returned, then settled back beside Wrecker. Despite the blood trickling from his lips and his sideways eyewear, where a frame had sliced into his flesh, Tech looked surprisingly calm.

Echo knew why.

“Do ya think he knows what's going on?” He whispered as the Zyggerians gathered around the fire to talk.

“Not yet,” Tech answered in the same whisper. “He is likely still on the hunt.”

“But he will.” Crosshair's raspy voice was low and dangerous. Echo noticed that he had still not taken his eyes off the slavers. He wondered why until the sniper spoke again.

“They’re planning on taking us to Kenajib at dawn.” Crosshair's sharp gaze never left Zol’s doggish face as he continued to read the conversation. “He says he can get a better price in the capital for Echo and Rex, but wants to be rid of us as soon as possible.”

“Better price? For Rex?” Wrecker scoffed in an approximation of a whisper. “Huh. They don't know who we are yet, then!”

“Dawn, huh?” Echo's mind was already turning. “That oughta give Hunter plenty of time to get here, right?”

Tech shrugged. “He could be here now. We will not know until it is too late.” He glanced at Echo with a knowing, almost amused expression in his light brown eyes. “For the Zyggerians.”

~~~~~

Something didn't smell right.

Actually, nothing smelled right.

Hunter paused and let the rope holding the deer carcass roll back on his shoulders, half the quartered prey animal hanging at each of his sides as he sniffed the air. There was a tang to it, tension, that hadn't been there before, not even when he had left the camp with Rex's men fuming about the change in plans. It smelled foreign and new. When he gathered enough of it to taste, it was sour and salty, a mouth-twisting sensation that sent the hair on his neck up.

It smelled evil.

He was a standard mile from the campsite. The wind was to him, so it wasn't hard to get a full palate of what smells were in the last place he had seen his brothers. There were the new smells, the ones that were evil, but then there were familiar smells that sent a red veil in front of his eyes.

He felt his pupils dilate as his brow furrowed. His fingers dug into the rope and his palms as he gripped the sling in an attempt to hold back a growl. One still muffled itself in his throat.

He smelled electricity burning in the air. He smelled blood.

And if that familiar, family scent was anything to go off of, it belonged to one of his brothers.

The quartered deer thumped to the forest floor, the sound drowned out by the irrepressible snarl that bared Hunter’s teeth and made them glint white in the moonlight. He left the carcass where it lay and stepped to the right, into the wind’s now more direct path, to get a better idea of how much blood there was and how many newcomers were in the camp.

A lot of them. He smelled so many new signatures that it would have made his head hurt if he wasn't so mad. The new smells were basically the same, with just a hint of personality distinguishing them as separate. They smelled canine, all of them, even the more animal smell he gathered that probably really was an animal or two.

It was in instances like this that he had to grudgingly admit that whatever else the Kaminoans were, they were thorough. Part of his training – experimental testing, was the official term – had included daily visits to a pristine lab where he was blindfolded and told to identify several different smells based on a quick whiff from a sample. It wasn't exactly normal training for a young clone with the development of a five-year-old child, but it had served to ingrain in his consciousness the distinct odors of thousands of species throughout the galaxy, sentient and otherwise.

The one he had always hated the most had been a doggy scent, one that made the hair stand up on his neck and smelled just plain foul to his young nose. It was also the one he had always gotten right, even from the first attempt on his first day in the lab.

Zyggerian. Sentient canine creatures, more like jackals than aakhounds, who liked to bite and torment and just generally bring pain and misery to anyone they deemed conquerable. Maybe it wasn't a surprise they were mainly known as slavers and mercenaries.

And now, they were in the camp. With his brothers.

Hunter saw red.

Chapter Text

Echo had given up on trying to escape his wrist constraints and turned his attention to the others. Wrecker was surprisingly quiet, only grumbling about popping heads off every few minutes instead of incessantly like the ARC trooper had expected, and at a much lower tone than he had anticipated. Tech looked like he was bored – actually, Echo knew for sure he was bored, since they had gone more than two hours now without anything interesting to engage the engineer's mind.

Crosshair surprised him the most. Especially after the incident when Hardcase had been hostage, Echo had expected his silver-haired brother to be a snarling, insult-flinging animal of rage toward the Zyggerians. But at the moment, the sniper was almost docile. After lip-reading as much of their captors' conversation as he thought was necessary, he had leaned back against the rocks until he was nearly lying down, his head and shoulders settled on rocks just high enough to keep his eyes on the firelit Zyggerians. Echo had to look hard for a few seconds to make sure the sniper was still breathing, until he was able to pick out the gentle fall and rise of his chest and the barely visible movements of his eyes.

Crosshair was looking for something. Or maybe he knew that something was already there.

Echo let his gaze bore holes into the sniper's lean-boned face until Crosshair flicked his dark eyes over to him. The sniper's lips turned up in a slight smile, and he nodded almost imperceptibly.

Echo's heart jumped in his chest, feeling like it should have slammed into his durasteel ribs. He forgot about his bleeding wrist and his soul felt lighter.

Hunter was there. He was there and he was going to get them out of this mess.

Echo just wasn't sure how.

~~~~~

A few minutes earlier….

Hunter had to fight the urge to spring directly into the camp as he crouched ten yards into the trees. From his vantage point, he was safely shrouded in the shadows and foliage, hidden from view, but his keen eyes picked out every detail available from the distance. He saw Rex and his squad bound by the sleeping area to the left of the fire, but his attention was zeroed in on his four vode handcuffed to the right of two dozen Zyggerians. He could see Echo's bleeding wrist, a kriffing collar on Wrecker's neck, and the dried blood that had trickled down Tech's cheek and jaw.

His blood ran like molten lava through his veins and his fists clenched of their own accord. It took all of his willpower to keep from attacking at that moment – willpower, and the knowledge that he needed a plan before waltzing into a hostile territory with hostages involved.

Crosshair looked unhurt, but Hunter could practically feel the heat from his brother's hateful glare at the slavers.

Then the sniper's gaze suddenly swerved to the right and locked onto Hunter's.

The tracker couldn't keep a smile from his lips as Crosshair raised one eyebrow in a silent greeting. The silver-haired clone deliberately rolled his eyes toward the Zyggerians, then gave a quick motion with his cuffed hands that could have been taken for brushing away a fly.

Thanks to Hunter's sharp eyes and a secret hand signal code, the tracker knew it meant 26.

Twenty-six hostiles. Great.

Crosshair darted his eyes over towards the fire again, this time farther to the left.

Hunter realized the reason immediately when he saw the four aakhounds lolling in the fire’s warmth – the animal scents he had detected. Owned by Zyggerians, they were nearly undoubtedly trained to attack whomever their masters indicated.

So, he would take them out first.

~~~~~

Crosshair leaned almost imperceptibly toward Wrecker and Tech. “Hunter's here,” he drawled blandly in an inconspicuous whisper.

Echo heard Wrecker's heavy but measured breath.

“Finally.” The massive brother shifted uncomfortably against the collar and cuffs.

Tech merely glanced around, pretending to be bored out of his mind. “Did he tell you anything?” he asked calmly.

“He's got a plan. Starting with the dogs.” Crosshair purposefully did not look in the direction of the hounds.

“But he doesn't have his blaster,” Echo hissed. “Said it'd be too loud for a night hunt.”

Tech turned his steady gaze to his cybernetic brother with a hint of amusement behind his goggles.

“And?”

~~~~~

Hunter quickly maneuvered to his left, placing himself in the middle of the treeline parallel to the camp. As he stopped in the brush he reached down and snatched the vibroknife held in the vambrace on his calf and held it in his left hand, a mirror of its twin that was currently gleaming in his right, ready for blood.

He raised his foot a few inches from the ground and crashed it down onto a perfectly available stick.

~~~~~

A crack resounded in the quiet and sent the aakhounds bawling at the trees, held back only by their handler’s leashes as Zol and the other Zyggerians lurched to their feet.

“What was that?” Zod hissed, his yellow eyes scanning the treeline.

Crosshair’s smirk was not lost on Echo, nor on Rex who jerked his head around to look at the Bad Batch. The blonde clone captain seemed to relax a little when he realized that even Tech was unbothered and that Echo was fighting a grin.

“It is likely nothing but animal life.” Zol’s words held tension nonetheless. He looked over his shoulder at the dog’s handler. “Danu! Set the hounds on whatever is out there.” Canine fangs punctured his sneer. “They have not tasted game in some time.”

Danu knelt down to release the hounds and spoke to them in a rough voice. “Smoke it out, boys,” he snarled with glee as he let them free.

Crosshair watched the dogs shake off the leashes and bound toward the treeline, a dark, knowing glitter in his brownish eyes. “Oh, please do,” he drawled.

~~~~~

Hunter watched the hounds streak toward his position and tensed. There was no need to relax to let his more primal, senses-driven side take over. He was so deep already that his wilder side only needed the sight of the bounding attackers to completely seize control.

His mind was clear and his eyes nearly glowed with anticipation as he tightened his grip on both knives. He was human and yet not human – something enhanced and something primal, all at once. Whatever the scientists at Kamino had intended to create in their labs, that was not what he was. He was a protector and now was the time to protect.

The hounds breached the trees and he waited for the moment to strike.

~~~~~

The dogs crashed through the woods and alarmed barking filled the clearing…followed closely by the ear-wrenching screams.

Zol snarled and whirled toward the trees as the unmistakable sounds of snarling, growling, and the tearing of flesh flooded through the symphony of terrified barks and squeals. It sounded like madness, as if some huge animal was tearing apart many smaller ones at once.

“What is that?” he hissed, a tint of fear coloring his eyes more yellow than before.

Zod raised his blaster. The action was repeated by a few of the other Zyggerians as the barking and screaming and snarling died down into silence.

Absolute, unnerving silence.

Rex was shifting restlessly now, stealing glances at the four brothers as Crosshair allowed a smile to lightly curve his thin lips. Echo’s eyes darted from place to place along the treeline, eager for some sign of what had happened to Hunter. The dogs hadn’t come back, so that was a good sign…right?

“It…got the hounds,” one of the younger Zyggerians stuttered. His grip tightened on his gun.

Zol looked furious. “Zod! Fire into the treeline!”

Zod raised his rifle and pressed his finger to the trigger.

A blaster bolt erupted from the end of the barrel and lit up the shadows as it sailed along its path. There was a searing thwack as it struck earth and not flesh.

Quiet.

“Did you hit it?” Danu asked lowly.

Zod was about to answer, turning from his line of fire, when the treeline seemed to explode with a thunderous crash and a furious, hair-raising roar.

A few of the Zyggerians shouted as the fire’s flickering amber light lit up a figure springing from the woods, a wild look in its goldish eyes and white glinting where its mouth should be.

Even Rex was stunned into motionless shock.

Time seemed to freeze as Hunter threw himself from the treeline and into the camp, directly into the light of the fire. The flames reflected off his skin and illuminated his face, the dark ink of his half-skull tattoo shining through the wisps of heat like a wavering face of death. Two knives gleamed in his hands like daggerish claws, light dripping from their silver blades. His blacks were shredded and blood coursed from his arms and chest, but that was only his second most arresting attribute.

His left side, nearly completely exposed waist up by the torn blacks, was skeletal. Rex’s stunned mind eventually registered that the blackened, rotten bones were ink like the one on his face, but in the fire’s orange flickers, the tracker looked like a half-dead demon of vengeance rising from the shadows.

And his wrath was turned on the Zyggerians.

Zol was the closest to the fire and therefore was the first to fall under the slashing blades. There was a sound of sliced flesh and blood spurting just as the slaver choked and fell on his face by the coals. Three of his howling followers met an identical fate within seconds.

Crosshair snarled and grappled with Zod for his rifle, his manacled hands still strong and practiced in hand-to-hand combat as the Zygerian screeched in anger. Wrecker stood, popping off both sets of cuffs, and reached for the collar but was nearly sent to his knees by a bolt of electricity that ripped through his body.

Hunter’s roar was deafening as he turned on the Zyggerian with the remote, his knives finding their mark in his heart and shoulder before the canid’s finger had even lifted from the switch. Rex realized that the tracker had probably felt the pulse before it had sent the punishing round of current and had already been turning to avenge the blow.

Wrecker was back on his feet in an instant and ripped the bonds from his other two brothers, wisely leaving Crosshair to his own battle as the sniper cracked off his cuffs on Zod’s skull. The massive clone sent his fists crashing into two of the slavers as Echo and Tech freed the rest of the clones to join the fight.

But by the time Rex was freed, before any of his men had even had their cuffs unlocked, it was over.

Twenty-six dead Zyggerians lay on the ground, blood spilled everywhere and the fire scattered from the chaos. Hunter was stalking over the bodies, his eyes wild and searching for any continued life among the ones who had hurt his family. His knives dripped with blood and his arms were covered with it, red streaks painting over the black skeleton that ran from his face to his waist and giving him an otherworldly, hellish appearance in what remained of the firelight.

“Uh, is he okay?” Kix managed to say as Echo freed him. He stood and rubbed his wrists, his eyes on Hunter. “Like…is he still with us?”

Hunter shook his head, as if he were clearing it or merely shaking his hair out of his eyes, and turned his gaze to the troopers. Echo couldn’t help but notice that many, even Rex, tensed when his eyes fell on them. But when the golden, bloodshot gaze locked onto each of his brothers in order of their proximity – Echo, Wrecker, Tech, and Crosshair – none of them flinched.

The tracker huffed and rolled his arm, still holding his knives tightly but seemingly a little more human by the moment. There was a large gash on his collar and his shoulders and chest were littered with scratches, along with a good-sized bruise that was forming on his left cheekbone, but otherwise, he looked without serious injury, despite all the blood. A low growl escaped his throat as the coals shifted and a log fell in the fire.

Echo cleared his throat dramatically. “Alright, uh…Bad Hunter. Nice to see you, but the party’s over. If we can have him back now, that would be great.”

Hunter shot the cyborg a deadly look, one that lived through his wild shudder and another snarl as he looked over the group of corpses once more. His voice was hoarse and growlish when he spoke, but it was human.

“Stop being an idiot, Echo.”

Echo grinned as enthusiastically as Rex was bewildered. Hunter nudged Zol with the toe of his boot and huffed again.

“Zyggerians,” he spat, venom lacing the word.

“In case you’re still seeing red…” Crosshair’s raspy voice made them all look at him where he stood, yards from Zod’s twisted, still body. The bolt of his rifle clunked into place with an ominous thud. “Don’t bite me.”

As soon as the words fell from his lips bullets spat from the FirePuncher’s barrel and riddled the Zyggerian’s torso. Ten or so shots came in rapid succession until wisps of smoke rose from the canid’s flesh.

Kix glanced at Crosshair in confusion as the sniper walked away from Zod’s now-bullet-torn corpse. The barrel of his Ryloth rifle was still curled around the slaver’s neck like a hangman's noose. “Uh…was that necessary?” the medic ventured.

Crosshair rechambered a round in the FirePuncher and glared meaningfully at the reg. “He punched Tech.”

Hunter grunted, but Wrecker hummed approvingly at the rifle’s destroyed barrel. “When did ya do that?”

“How did you do that?” Hardcase echoed.

Crosshair scoffed. “When you were freeing the regs,” he answered his brother. Hardcase thought he would pass by him without an answer until the sniper’s raspy voice sounded again.

“We were all enhanced for strength,” he drawled in his usual tone. “Wrecker just got the size for it.”

“Anyone hurt?” Hunter’s voice sounded more human than before and Rex breathed a sigh he didn’t realize he had been holding in.

“No.” The captain watched Hunter carefully, with something like respect and maybe awe as he answered. “They were planning on selling us, so I guess they didn’t want to damage the merchandise.”

“Except for Tech,” Wrecker said before Tech could dodge Hunter’s searching eyes.

The engineer sighed in annoyance as the tracker approached him with a glint of concern in his blood-stained face. “I am fine, Hunter.”

“Yeah. You’re the one covered in blood,” Kix reminded him. The medic was already unpacking his first response bag by the rejuvenated fire.

Hunter looked down at his chest as if noticing his wounds for the first time. He looked back up with a slight shrug. “Not mine.”

Echo snorted. “Yeah. We know.” He waved to the seat. “Sit down before we get Wrecker to make you.”

Wrecker looked hesitant. “No, I don’t think so. Not after the last time Bad Hunter showed up.”

“Most of it’s not yours,” Kix muttered under his breath as he examined Hunter’s grudgingly extended arm and his bloody collar. “This gash almost went to the bone!”

“Eh.” Hunter kept scanning his brothers with his eyes, the wild look not quite dissipated completely. “Dog got a lucky hit.”

Hardcase looked thoroughly impressed. Rex was already whirling to stare at Hunter.

“Hold on…last time this happened?” the captain repeated.

“Technically, this time was the last time. The event prior to tonight is now the second to last time the phenomenon known to us as bad Hunter has occurred.” If Rex wasn’t guessing with the firelight, he would have sworn Tech was enjoying his explanation and their subsequent shocked looks.

“Not a phenomenon,” Hunter growled. “Knew what was happening.”

“Yes, and yet you cannot deny the fact that during these violently protective shows of prowess, you succumb to your inner impulses and become a raging force of nature.” Tech was cut off from saying more by Echo’s insistence on cleaning the cut on his face.

“Give him a break, Tech,” Echo commented as he opened the antiseptic from his own pack. “It only happens when there’s no other option.”

“The other option was to pick them off from the trees, but Hunter doesn’t like to hunt with a blaster,” Crosshair scowled.

He and Hunter held each other’s gazes until finally, Wrecker broke the silence.

“Oh, come on, Cross. You like watchin’ ‘im scare the crap outta people same as we do.”

Rex and the others looked at each other as Crosshair and Hunter relented with matching, knowing smiles.

Hunter huffed. “You looked a little scared there, Rex,” he said, his voice smoky but no longer tight and muffled. “Thought I was gonna eat ya?”

His r’s were blending with his vowels in a way that Rex hadn’t heard since their first meeting, when the droids had shot down their ship and Hunter had stopped a brawl between the two squads while he and Kix had tended Cody’s wounds. It was a strange accent that he noticed came out only in instances like that, when it was dark and the adrenaline was high with danger lurking in the shadows.

He wasn’t entirely sure what it sounded like, other than just 'Hunter.'

“For a minute, it looked like you might eat all of us,” the captain returned rather quickly.

“I was about to jump behind Wrecker,” Hardcase laughed. “At least then you’d have something to chew on for a while, before you got to me.”

Wrecker shook his head with a correcting laugh. “Nah, not even Bad Hunter would take a bite out of one of us.” He gestured with his huge arm to himself, Crosshair, Echo, and Tech, who was finally free of Echo’s medical ministrations. “Not even if he really does go crazy, like last time.”

“When was the last time?” Rex demanded again, remembering to be insistent.

“Before we met you, on the mission to retrieve Echo,” Tech said bluntly. Rex would have been reluctant to mention that mission on Skekko Minor around the cyborg, but Echo was unbothered when Tech did. “Wrecker, Crosshair, Hunter, and myself were separated during a stealth operation to demolish a Separatist base on Kerab Prime. The ensuing fight saw the arrival of droid reinforcements and several large Nexu which had been trained for battle.”

Wrecker laughed. “And Bad Hunter!”

“Yes.” Tech straightened his glasses and cast a look at his oldest brother. “That was also a bloody, unnecessarily wild event.”

Hunter scowled back but it was obvious that it was insincere.

“Can we at least just burn the bodies this time?” Wrecker pleaded. “Because I had clean up last time and Zyggerians smell way worse than droids and those kriffin’ cats.”

“We'll stow ‘em in a pile outside camp and light 'em off in the morning when we move out,” Hunter answered instead of Rex. He seemed to still be the one in charge, even as Kix finished bandaging his slashed collarbone. He stood and rolled his arm, grunting as he stretched the bandage to accommodate movement, much to the medic’s displeasure. “Might even be a good distraction if someone's on our tail by then, with all the noise.”

“Or a calling card!” Jesse said enthusiastically.

Hunter smirked but otherwise ignored him. “Tech, Wrecker, help Rex's boys clean up this mess. Crosshair, Echo. With me.” He waved the sniper and the cyborg over and they immediately followed. “Grab a few canteens.”

“Hey, where are you going?” Rex stood not quite in front of him, but enough to make him halt.

Hunter's eyes narrowed at him more questioningly than hostilely. “I've still got a quartered deer and my armor back in those woods,” he said steadily. “Unless someone else feels like tracing ‘em in the dark.”

Wrecker laughed and elbowed Hardcase. “Well, that means we don't have to eat dog, at least!”

Hardcase looked just as thrilled about it.

“There's a lake not far past where I left the carcass,” Hunter went on. “If you feel like carrying another water tank, we can fill up and not have to stop tomorrow.”

Rex shouldered another large canteen and a light smile seemed to illuminate his face up as much as the fire. “Well then.” He gave Hunter a cocky upturned eyebrow and a grin. “Onward, Sergeant.”

Hunter subtly smiled back and looked over his shoulder to the other Batchers. “Be back in a mike, boys. Don't get captured while I'm gone.”

Echo rolled his eyes and Wrecker shot the tracker an amused look. Tech straightened his goggles. “Technically, since we have already been taken into captivity once tonight, the probability of being the victims of yet another kidnapping are…”

“Yep.” Hunter started forward through the brush and Crosshair's low, rueful laugh wasn't lost in Rex as they left their rambling brother in the firelight.

~~~~~

Rex watched his squad and felt a sigh of relief unburdening some of the stress from his lungs and shoulders. His guys were fed and not in the hold of some slaver’s galley, so he thought he could take a breather.

But, none of that had been because of him. He hadn’t even been freed of his cuffs before Hunter had basically cleared the area and left bloody corpses in his wake. Even the deer that had been skinned, roasted over the fire, and promptly devoured by the hungry clones had been because of the tracker.

Rex wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Right now, he convinced himself to be content with the knowledge that the mission was still on and his squad was alive.

He glanced over to the farther side of the camp, where Hunter was leaning back against a tree trunk. To the untrained eye, he would have appeared asleep, but the fire glinted minutely off his golden, searching eyes as they scanned the edges of the clearing. He was still on the alert, still ready to jump up and do it all again if he had to.

“He won’t let us out of his sight for a week now,” Echo complained. He was not far from Rex, but his relaxed form was closer to his brothers than his former captain. Crosshair was asleep nearby – at least Rex thought he was – and Wrecker was close to it with Tech still busily reading. The cyborg, however, was watching Hunter.

“What do you mean?” Rex asked, turning slightly to nearly face his former comrade.

Echo snorted. “He’s going to be all mother mudhorn until it finally gets out of his system.”

“What gets out of his system?”

“That whole 'protect' thing. It’s there all the time, but it’s on steroids after something like this. Tech got hit in a firefight right after I joined them and I thought Hunter was going crazy, checking on him every five seconds, double-checking the bandages every half hour, keeping a perimeter watch the whole time.” Echo smiled. “Then Wrecker informed me that he always gets that way after one of his vode gets hurt, and Crosshair told me to suck it up and live with it.”

“No one got hurt, though,” Rex said. “He got here too quickly.”

“Well, Tech did get punched and Hunter saw blood. That’s probably why he was so animalistic when he busted in here…he either smelled it or saw it from the tree line and when they sicced the dogs on him, that was just the invitation to the fight he was already prepared for.”

“So you’re telling me he could smell that the blood was Tech’s?” Rex’s eyes widened.

Echo laughed softly. “I don’t know really how he senses some of what he does, Rex. What I do know, is that those Zyggerians aren’t the first to meet an angry Hunter when he thinks it's time to protect his brothers. I wouldn’t want to be the next person or thing in his path, the next time that happens. Cross says it tends to get worse every time.”

Rex looked over and realized in an instant just how much he respected Hunter. At first glance, the tracker was a deliberately wild, intentionally rebellious man who did not conform to any of the expected attributes of a sergeant, or even a clone in general. Yet he had consistently thrown himself into the fire, onto the spears, for the sake of his own squad and even that of others he barely knew. His brothers would follow him against an entire army if he ordered them to – Rex had witnessed that – and he only ordered because he knew they would never think of abandoning him. He protected them and they in turn protected and followed him, in the wildest, most death-defying symbiotic relationship Rex had ever witnessed.

He didn’t say any of that out loud. He had a feeling Echo could read his estimation of Hunter from just a glance. He smirked. Hunter himself probably smelled it or something.

Rex raised his canteen in a mock toast and smiled back at the ARC trooper.

“Noted.”

Chapter Text

The Republic’s goal was to destroy the data center, cutting off its ability to relay resupply orders and updates to the Separatist fleet that kept half the forces on the planet in full fighting strength. Their chosen strike team for the mission was Clone Force 99. One reason for the choice was the squad’s engineer, who was known for being able to access otherwise impossibly encrypted information with relative ease. The commanders knew that if it was possible to grab the valuable data before taking out the small base, Tech would do it.

The other reason was that the squad contained – or rather, semi-contained – a well-known demolitions enthusiast. Apparently, Commander Cody had been clear in the strategy planning that if anyone could make the data center completely and utterly disappear in the short window of opportunity they had, it would be Wrecker. 

One data center. Probably two hundred droids, maybe more. They had the element of surprise and no reason to avoid razing the place to the ground as quickly as Tech could get out with the data. To Wrecker’s ears, that meant business as usual .

And for one moment, it was. 

The next, it was chaotically and unequivocally not.

One moment, Wrecker had been doing what he did best – destroying stuff. In particular, Separatist stuff. He’d already mowed through three dozen droids in the short amount of time that had elapsed between the current moment and when they had attacked the data center. He was running high on adrenaline, the thudding of his own massive heart thumping in his ears with the sound of a war drum.

The next moment, he was sheltered behind the back wall of the data center, laying charges for the continuation of the aforementioned destruction. He’d brought enough explosives to blow the building so high into the planet’s misty atmosphere that Count Dooku himself could see it. 

Wrecker smiled as he worked. This was going to be the galaxy’s most impressive bomb.

That’s when he realized someone else had already set one.

His hearing was sharp and trained to his craft, or what some might call his obsession. Even over the sounds of battle raging beyond the alloy wall, around the side of the building, he heard a telltale tick . And then another. It was coming from the scanner on his belt, the tool that detected and measured the electrical pulses of his own devices once he’d armed them. 

But he hadn’t armed any yet.

The demolitions expert’s muscled bulk whirled around with alarming speed. His eyes scanned the area, quickly picking out and then passing by first Hunter and Crosshair, fighting droids side-by-side, and then Tech as the genius dual-wielded his D-17s, the data stick safely packed into one of the leather holsters on his armor. They were drawing the droids’ attention away from their brother, allowing him to set the bomb unmolested as they attracted all the fire to themselves.

Where could it be? It was close…where was there an obvious lack of movement, a conspicuous absence of droids…

He found it, in a patch of ground not far from where his brothers were, clear of all droids, machinery, and even the scattered debris that had been strewn everywhere else around the data center. First Wrecker had assumed that the droids were just trashy, leaving discarded parts and pieces lying about. Now he realized it had been intentional, a visual reminder of the safe zone. A way to discreetly indicate and avoid the area and keep from setting off the proximity bomb nestled beneath some of the scrap.

Wrecker’s deep amber eyes darted back to the rest of Clone Force 99, gauging the distance, estimating the time it would take to warn them. Probably too long to still have time to activate his own bomb before he was forced to turn and face the droids that would surely swarm his position, once they realized where he was and what he was doing. 

Hunter, Tech, and Crosshair were still a good three standard meters into the scrap-littered area and outside of the bomb’s sesnor range. As long as they stayed there, and nothing else set it off by stepping inside the ring and tripping the invisible trigger detectors they would be fine.

The line of reasoning took just under two seconds. The regs, the commanders, and even the Kaminoans might think Wrecker was dumb but he wasn’t. He was just smart in different ways than his brothers, in the way of destruction and explosives rather than abstract mathematics and military strategy. Right now, he knew the best way to end this less-than-optimal situation was to set his own explosive, complete the mission, and drag his brothers out of the immediate vicinity before it didn't exist any more.

Wrecker turned back to the bomb he was working on. It was one of his own invention, one of the many he built on the Marauder during their downtime between missions. The thick, specially-designed alloy housing protected the explosive inside, and only he and his brothers knew the codes to arm or disarm it. It was more complicated than that but that was the basics. He'd liked tinkering with the designs of bombs since their cadet days, making them better as he got access to more and better supplies once they left Kamino, and he knew this one was probably the best he'd ever made. One more adjustment and he'd set the code, and they'd be out of here.

Then something made him look back to the left. His amber eyes locked onto the two droids slinking close to the proximity bomb's sensor range. The one with a streak of yellow paint down it's face was holding the leg of one of their dismembered (death by Hunter, then – Hunter cut and slashed, Crosshair and Tech just shot) comrade's in its hand, and as Wrecker watched the droid reared back to throw it. It didn't take a genius to figure out the plan was to set off the bomb by triggering the sensor field.

One thought suddenly tore through the fog of battle and smacked into the part of Wrecker's brain that remained clear, the part right behind his eyes.

His brothers.

His brothers were still over there.

A roar broke loose from the giant's barrel chest with a force that should have rattled his armor. He saw surprised droids turn at the tremendous sound and raise their weapons but he didn't care. Only one thought tore through his mind as he leapt over the short wall and plowed toward the bomb and the droids planning to use it to kill his siblings.

Oh no you kriffing don’t !

He vaguely heard Hunter shout at him, probably asking him what he was doing or if he was ready to go. He ignored him. The sergeant’s senses were otherworldly but he wasn't omniscient, and with all the maverick energy flying through the air and radiating from the data center itself, Hunter wouldn't feel the bomb until it activated. Crosshair couldn't see it since it was behind him, and Tech was too busy shooting the steadily advancing enemy to pick up on any signals his scanners might be giving him. It would be too late by the time his brothers knew what was happening.

There was no way to defuse it. No way to stop it. So almost without thinking about it, Wrecker did the next best thing.

He blocked it.

Rather, he blocked part of it. Even his bulk couldn’t contain the full force of the explosion if he threw himself on top of the bomb itself, and he was probably too far away for that anyway. Instead, he quickly calculated his stride and launched himself forward and to the side, straight at his brothers.

His outstretched left arm wrapped around Hunter’s neck – an unfortunate handhold but better than grabbing his hair, Wrecker guessed. His shoulder caught Crosshair square in the back and the rest of him smacked into Tech. He slammed them all to the ground in what would have been an impressive three-in-one takedown had they been in the training room, or even in one of their hyperspace sparring/wrestling matches on the Marauder. 

Wrecker hardly had a heartbeat to spare that thought before he felt an incredible pain in his face, back, and left side. He heard a thunderous explosion and the shrieking sound of metal flying through the air, but it all quickly faded to a dull roar that rattled his eardrums and hurt his brain.

He saw a flash of orange and black and then the world went white.

Chapter Text

“ Wrecker !”

Crosshair was jolted from a peaceful unconsciousness by Hunter’s devastatingly agonized roar. 

For a moment, his murky mind assumed the sergeant was hurt and calling for Wrecker to help him. Then Hunter screamed their biggest brother’s name again, and the sound was so raw and desperate, so hurt , that Crosshair’s blood froze with the realization that it was definitely not Hunter who was wounded. Their ori’vod only sounded that pained when something had happened to one of them.  

And since he could hear Hunter, was lying on top of a stirring Tech, and didn't feel like he was badly hurt himself, that left only one brother as an option for the casualty. 

The sniper tried to move and couldn't. It felt like his legs were pinned beneath something very heavy. He squirmed to pull himself free, in the process reaching back with a sore but fortunately still-working arm to push against whatever was holding him down. His long, pale fingers met a warm body and a thick stickiness he immediately recognized as blood.

Fear shot through Crosshair's heart when he realized that the body was Wrecker . His big brother was the thing pinning him to the ground, pinning all three of them down, as if he were a five-ton boulder or a shield….

Shield . 

The last few seconds of consciousness before he'd taken his abrupt nap washed into Crosshair's brain and sent him spiraling into a panic. Wrecker had shielded them from a bomb or an explosion or something and now he wasn't moving. Wrecker was never still and the fact that he was now turned the sniper's blood to ice.

“Crosshair…” Hunter's voice wasn't its usually comforting smoky self anymore, but hoarse and tense. Who knew how long he'd been screaming for Wrecker to get up, trying to get free, trying to wake up his other little brothers so he could help the one who had protected them. 

Crosshair felt his head turn before his frightened vision cleared enough to see Hunter’s face clearly. His brother’s expression was as agonized as his voice had been, splattered with blood but there wasn’t any obvious wound it could be coming from. Hunter’s deep golden eyes were boring into his own with a serious kind of fear that Crosshair knew he had never seen his oldest brother display. That scared him almost as much as Wrecker being sprawled on top of them after an explosion and not moving .

Hunter’s voice shook him out of those black and swirling thoughts once more, like hands on his shoulders jolting him awake. “Help me…if I push up on him, help me and we can get Tech out…” Hunter sounded disjointed, his words unusually urgent and wild – wild like the eldest 99 only got when things went very wrong. “He needs Tech .”

Tech was the medic. Not officially certified, of course, being a defective clone, but he was all they had. Crosshair also wanted to mention that last time he checked Tech was hardly conscious , but his statement was caught in his throat when he felt the engineer of the batch move more adamantly in their thrown-together pile. When the sniper looked down, Tech was looking back at him, goggles askew and blood dripping from a gash above his eyebrow where the frames had cut him, but in control of his faculties. 

“On three,” was all Tech said. It was clipped and abrupt as usual, but far more cold. Tech was only cold when he was scared .

Crosshair didn’t think Hunter had ever counted to three so fast in his life, even when they were cadets and their ori’vod had picked up the counting tactic from Cody to make them do what he wanted before bringing out the big guns of headlocks and disappointed gazes. He braced his long arms against the droid-strewn dirt in front of him and heaved up with his back and legs the same instant Hunter did.

Tech scrambled out from beneath their behemoth of a brother so fast that Crosshair hardly realized he had escaped. He heard Tech unclipping his scanner from his belt, heard it click on and give a little whirring noise to let the user know it was working.

He wondered how loud that was to Hunter’s ears, at the moment. Their oldest had probably been virtually deaf for the first few minutes after he’d woken up, given his past experience with the bad relationship between enhanced hearing and loud explosions. He was likely already getting a migraine and yelling for Wrecker at the top of his lungs probably hadn’t helped his skull feel any less like it was exploding.

Wrecker .

Crosshair shook his addled mind – he probably had a concussion – and squinted into the dirt to relieve some of the pain in his eyes before he shouted up to Tech to check on Wrecker.

Before he could shout, though, he heard Tech curse.

His heart nearly quit on him altogether. Tech never cursed. He said it made one sound “unintelligent” or at the very least “uneducated.” Crosshair never was sure which one Tech thought would be worse.

As Hunter went to work fighting his own way out from beneath Wrecker’s limp body, the sniper forced his heartbeat to slow down and convinced his lungs to expand and contract at a more normal rate than they wanted to. Wrecker was still warm so he was still alive. Tech was going to keep him that way until they called for a medical evacuation or whatever they could get, and Wrecker would be fine.

If he wasn’t , Crosshair would personally murder him.

Suddenly Hunter was on his own two feet and yanking Crosshair out from under the heavy bulk of their other brother. The white haired sniper stumbled to his feet and turned with the sergeant to see Tech pulling apart the med kit he usually kept on his side, frantically looking for something to use for the wounds on Wrecker's face.

Or what was left of it.

Crosshair's stomach churned and his veins ran chilled again when he realized that the blood he had felt on his hand, the crimson splattered on Hunter's face, and the red marks streaked over Wrecker's gray armor had all come from the giant's head. The right side of the biggest batcher’s face didn't look great , covered in blood and gashed across the cheek, but the left side was destroyed. Blood clotted thick over blackened, melted flesh, and the sniper nearly lost his last meal when he realized he couldn't see Wrecker's eye under the mess of skin the explosion had left. The demolition expert's shoulder pauldron had been ripped from the rest of his armor and lay on the dirt, stained with blood and smoking from the heat damage it had sustained along with the rest of the protective plating around Wrecker's left side. His blacks were melted and smoke rose off of them, like he was still smoldering from the blast.

While Crosshair stood staring, desperately hoping he was still unconscious and would wake up in a minute, Tech was applying any knowledge he had to the situation at hand. Hunter was hovering at his side, trying to give him room to work while his own gaze stayed fixed on Wrecker. The young sergeant's eyes were even wilder than his voice had been a moment before, and when they briefly met the sniper's Crosshair understood with shocking clarity that Hunter was terrified.  

His oldest brother's greatest fear had always been that one of them wouldn't make it. When they were young cadets, a small but still overprotective Hunter had worried each time that the Kaminoans took them for evaluations that someone wouldn't be returned to their isolated barracks. When 99 had been killed, the tracker cadet had been nearly unbearable for months, unwilling to let his remaining brothers out of his sight without being practically peeled away from them, kicking and snarling like the feral thing he sometimes turned into. More recently, once they'd been cleared for battle, Crosshair had seen his oldest sibling become worn and matured far too quickly, within a matter of months, as he existed in constant conflict between his duty as an officer of the Republic and his duty as a ori'vod, struggling to keep his brothers safe while also keeping them so useful to the GAR that there would be no talk of decommissioning the four loner clones with dubious enhancements.

And now one of those brothers lay terribly wounded, maybe dying. And he had gotten that way, at least in part, to save Hunter. Crosshair knew that would be what kept his ori'vod awake tonight.

Tech was talking. “Fortunately the explosion semi-cauterized the wounds. Otherwise there would be little I could do.”

Crosshair nearly snapped that those kinds of thoughts weren’t helping when he noticed the frightened, almost detached look in Tech’s eyes. Talking about things was how Tech coped with everyday life as a socially awkward humanoid, and with something as shattering to their usual routine and lucky history, the engineer was probably going to fly to pieces himself if he didn’t start saying something clinical. The sniper bit back his remark and let the frustration simmer deep in his chest, hoping it would convert itself into some kind of raw power for when they had to move their heavy brother away from this mess.

Tech kept working, his first aid skills better than Crosshair’s and Hunter’s but desperately inadequate for what they needed. Wrecker hadn’t moved the whole time, and his only sign of life was that his barrel chest was still rising and falling. 

After a moment, Hunter couldn’t watch anymore. The smell of his brother’s burned flesh was nauseating to his enhanced senses, the metallic scent of hot blood so strong he could taste it at the back of his throat. The only thing keeping him from falling apart was the uneven but still existent thump of Wrecker’s heart. The bomb expert’s heart was like the rest of him – huge – and therefore his heartbeat had always been the easiest for Hunter to find and focus on. That sound had kept him from going into a panic attack once he’d woken up and realized Wrecker had shielded them from the blast. It had given him enough of an anchor, something to ground his fritzed senses, so that he could focus on how to help his biggest little brother. And right now, it was the only thing keeping him from screaming angrily at the sky as he watched, helplessly useless for once in his life, as Tech tried to stop the bleeding and catalog what kind of other injuries Wrecker had sustained to save them.

Hunter had kept his senses aware of their surroundings since he’d cleared his mind enough to remember that they were still in enemy territory, but it didn’t appear that there were any droids left to worry about. He didn’t think they had fled, not with four prime targets sprawled unconscious on the ground. They’d likely been destroyed in the explosion. 

He found himself strangely not caring. As long as they were gone , as long as they weren’t a threat to his family, he really could not find it in himself to worry about where the clankers were. Not now. 

They did still need to destroy the data center. It was half-blown up on the side nearest to where the proximity bomb had been set, but Cody had wanted it gone. 

Hunter realized that the other bomb, the one Wrecker had been in the process of setting, hadn’t gone off. That was a miracle. He’d yelled at the giant to ask if it had been set, but that had been when Wrecker had stared running toward them, and he hadn’t gotten an answer. 

The sergeant shuddered as Wrecker’s heartbeat stuttered. It sounded like the biggest batcher was waking up. 

Hunter wasn’t sure if that would be good or bad. 

“Crosshair, go get the Marauder .” He heard his own voice before his brain had caught up with his vocal chords. The modified Omicron shuttle wasn’t too far away, and the sooner they got Wrecker there the better – the sooner they could leave and get him real help. “We’ll get Wrecker onboard as soon as Tech gets him stable.”

As Crosshair ran off on his long legs, not even giving a salute in reply, Tech spoke up from behind Hunter. “We need to get him to a medcenter as soon as possible. The closest one appears to be on Alba-16.” 

Hunter nodded numbly and chanced another look at Wrecker, his stomach having decided to settle once he’d purposefully stopped breathing through his nose. He could still detect all kinds of things when he breathed through his mouth, but the blood didn’t smell quite so strong. He could not get sick now…not when his little brothers needed him. “How is he, Tech?”

Tech took a moment to answer. “I do not believe he will be able to see out of the left eye anymore.”

Hunter’s heart almost stopped.

Tech’s voice wavered a little as he went on. His hands were gentle and careful as he applied bacta patches and anything else in the medkit that might help his older brother. “He will also likely be deaf, at least in the left ear. The burns are…significant. But as long as there is no swelling on the brain or other injuries I cannot see, he does not appear to be in danger of dying. At least, not as long as we can get him to Alba-16.”

As if to soothe Tech’s tense voice, the Marauder ’s engines roared overhead and Crosshair lowered the landing gear. It was a fight to get Wrecker on the ship, even with all three of them trying to manage his dead weight. When the biggest batcher was finally lying on his bunk and Tech gave the all-clear, Hunter set the bomb using the codes Wrecker had taught them and Crosshair took the Marauder into the atmosphere at a far-too-fast but surprisingly smooth pace.

Ninety seconds later, Hunter heard a buzz humming at the back of his brain. He looked out the cockpit window just in time to watch Wrecker’s bomb send the remains of the data center flying, catapulting with orange and yellow comet tails into the clouds.

~~~~~

Everything felt…heavy. 

Wrecker was used to feeling like he was clumsy and massive – because he was – but at the moment it seemed that there were very heavy weights strapped to each of his limbs and he couldn’t move. He looked down to see what was holding him down but realized it was dark. There was a delay, but he eventually remembered he needed to open his eyes and did so with great effort that almost didn’t seem worth it. Especially since all he saw to begin with was a plain white ceiling and blindingly bright lights.

He tried to open his mouth and say something – Hunter was the first name on his list – but something pulled at the skin on the left side of his face and it hurt. Not an unbearable pain. It was kind of far away, like the memory to open his eyes if he wanted to see anything . But it was a decent enough kind of hurt that he yelped rather humiliatingly.

“Hunter!”

Wait, that wasn’t his voice. That was a raspy, kind of snarly voice that sounded more scared than he liked. Flashes of white hair and piercing brown eyes and something like tiny sticks of wood (toothpicks? Why was he thinking about toothpicks?) entered his mind and he blinked.

He must have blinked for a while because when he opened his eyes again, he saw three fuzzy things above him, just hazy outlines against the ceiling. One had something over its eyes, the other one definitely had white hair, and the other one was close enough that he could see a big, dark splotch coloring half its face.

Hunter’s eyes were shining but hard to focus on as Wrecker realized he was staring at his brothers. 

“Wrecker?” the sergeant’s voice was soft but worried.

Wrecker hated that. Hated people worrying about him. He probably didn’t even need Hunter to be worried about him, anyway. He was strong enough to take care of most things on his own and scary enough to frighten the rest away. Even when he’d seen that stupid proximity bomb near the data center about to blast them sky-high, he hadn’t thought he couldn’t handle it…

Oh.

“He may not be able to hear you clearly.” That was Tech’s comfortingly normal voice. “While the right eardrum was not damaged to the extent of the left, he will need time to adjust.”

Well, yeah. He couldn’t really hear anything in his left ear – or see anything out of that eye, either, come to think of it – but he had basically taken an explosion to the head, so wasn’t that expected?

“Plus, the doctor did not follow my advice upon our arrival, and dosed him for his weight and not his tolerance for medication.” Now Tech sounded annoyed.

Yeah, that might be why he couldn’t really feel anything. It was a concrete fact that Wrecker did not need much medication, despite his size. A normal dose of sedative that would allow his brothers a few hours of relaxed sleep while they were injured would send Wrecker on a day-long trip to dreamland and leave him wondering what year it was when he woke up.

Hunter looked even more worried after Tech gave him that tidbit of information, though, and even though Wrecker could only see through his right eye, he had seen enough of that expression for the day. He tried to make his mouth work, but the bandage or whatever was wrapped around his head pulled again and he huffed in annoyance. Finally, he forced a single word off of his painkiller-addled tongue.

“Hi.” 

Tech snorted and Hunter laughed softly in his chest. Wrecker was still adjusting to the lack of sound from his injured side, but he could have sworn he heard Crosshair sniffle.

“Hey, big guy.” Hunter’s hand was on the right side of his face, running his thumb lightly over his cheekbone. The touch was welcome, but it was like Hunter thought he might break Wrecker if he wasn’t careful.

The thought made the giant huff again, the only thing close to a laugh he could muster. The day one of his brothers hurt him would be the day Crosshair dyed his hair pink – only in their dreams. 

“How do you feel?” Tech asked, his scanner in its usual place in his hands. He was likely taking notes, or maybe even scanning Wrecker himself. The genius was rarely satisfied with second-hand information, especially regarding his brothers’ health.

“Weird.” Wrecker could feel his mouth now, which was good. But he could also feel something covering the left side of his face, something that itched. He didn’t like it. “Sore.”

“Yeah, you got blown up ,” Crosshair hissed. 

Wrecker surprised himself by being able to move his right arm. He couldn’t seem to get the left one to lift, even though he could feel it. The extra weight on his whole arm felt like a cast, so he didn’t push it. Instead, he reached for his face with his working hand.

Three voices suddenly protested, but when Wrecker scowled at them they quieted. Hunter reached over and helped the biggest batcher drag his fingers over his face, from his surprisingly bare forehead where his hairline used to be, to down over the thick cocoon of bandages and finally to his very sore jaw.

The painkillers were still inhibiting his speech. “Wha’s the damage?” 

Hunter bit his lip. He used to do it a lot when they were cadets, but he had kind of stopped as they got older. Seeing it now made Wrecker confused.

“Well…good news is, the doctors here say you’re on the road to a good recovery. We’re on Alba-16, by the way,” the sergeant told him. “The not-so-great news is that you’re blind and deaf on your left side.”

Well, Wrecker had figured that out.

“Your shoulder and side took some bad hits, between the burns and the shrapnel, but you should be cleared to leave here in another day or so. The bacta’s helping a lot.”

“How long…” Wrecker felt his good eye start to go all fuzzy again and he closed it. 

“You have been unconscious since the explosion, except for a brief moment before we disembarked from the Marauder ,” Tech informed him. “That was three days ago.”

“About time you woke up.” Crosshair had his arms folded in front of him, like he was cold. He probably was, with his cold-natured body and chilly med centers not really getting along too well.

“It was a miracle that the bomb didn't set off the one you had started on,” Hunter said suddenly. The thought of what could have happened if it had – the thought of all of his brothers being either terribly wounded or possibly incinerated – had probably been bothering him the whole time.

“Not a miracle,” Wrecker muttered, feeling half-indignant that luck was being praised for something his own skills had brought about. “Never armed it. Shieldin’ on the shell….keeps out all the shrap. In case o’ things like this .”

Crosshair snorted. “You're not as dumb as you look.” 

Wrecker grinned at his little brother, hardly registering the scoff when he could see the fondness and the residual fear mingled in their youngest’s sharp eyes. “Huh. Yeah.” He yawned and felt the bandages on his face resist the movement of his jaw and skin again. Now that was going to get old fast. 

“Rest is required for optimal recovery,” Tech said flatly. Wrecker didn't miss the shine of his brother's eyes behind the goggles, but didn’t say anything about it. If Tech wanted to cry, he definitely got a pass to cry, since he didn’t do it that often. Probably even less than Crosshair, who would rather stab himself in his enhanced eyeballs with one of his toothpicks than let someone see him teary-eyed.

Hunter’s hand had briefly left Wrecker’s cheek but it was back now, and his touch wasn’t quite so cautious. “Go back to sleep, Wreck’ika ,” his ori’vod told him. He cracked a grin that Wrecker could quite easily see through, the light in his amber eyes only illuminating a glow of tears lingering on the surface. “That’s an order.”

Wrecker scoffed but closed his eye again. He heard a few quiet shuffles and thought it sounded like chairs scraping against the floor. The sounds were muted on his left but it was coming from both sides of the cot he was on. 

The mattress dipped a little on his right, and he peeked out of his undamaged eye to see Tech, arms folded beneath his head as he settled them near Wrecker’s shoulder. Two similar movements and mattress dips on his left were undoubtedly Crosshair and Hunter doing the same.

He could hear Tech’s even breathing, and if he moved his left arm just a little he could touch something that was next to his elbow. From the startled scoff, he could tell something had been Crosshair.

Wrecker grinned and closed his eye, feeling sleepy even as he enjoyed the feeling of being awake and in a quiet room with his brothers. He moved his right hand to lay on Tech’s shoulder, waiting.

After a moment his younger brother’s own hand found his and held on tightly, just like Wrecker knew it would. 

Now he could go to sleep, because he had his brothers, and they were all okay. Deep down, Wrecker knew that was all he would really ever need.

Chapter Text

Tech’s fingers drummed restlessly against the Marauder ’s smooth instrument panel, beating a rapid, tuneless rhythm on the alloy as he waited in the cockpit. His chrono was on the dash, and though he had been counting the seconds since he had last checked it and therefore didn’t need to look at the timepiece to see how many had elapsed, he glanced at it again. It read 1804.

Hunter had been supposed to give a sitrep at 1800.

Hunter had missed the sitrep.

That was…unusual.

He would wait until 1805. Then he would enact the backup plan.

The engineer was used to the strategies he and his brothers concocted not going according to plan – on the contrary, he was more aware than most of how many things could and likely would go wrong during even a simple operation, because he ran countless calculations to determine them in advance. However, that habit also made him the most insistent of his siblings when it came to developing alternatives for each plan, should one or more of those hiccups actually occur. In this situation, of his three brothers and Cody going as a group into one of Florrum’s smaller compound cities after a missing informant, the alternative plan had been rather simple and foolproof – if for some reason Hunter was unable to report at 1800, Crosshair would do so in his place. If Crosshair was unable, Wrecker would do it for him. If all three of his brothers were somehow incapacitated or unable to sitrep, Commander Cody would make the communication.

Tech’s comm unit channel had been clear and ready to receive a message for the last ten minutes, even before the deadline. He had not received a single transmission.

With his brain working at an unhealthily fast pace to unpuzzle the problem, Tech was certain that something had gone very wrong.

And that was just it. Nothing was supposed to go wrong, not this time. It was a simple mission, in and out of a generally accessible city of thugs and pirates. All of Tech’s calculations had that slim percentage of possibility for issues, but most of the problems he had foreseen were technical in nature and certainly not of the caliber that would have kept Hunter from communicating their status. Even with Florrum’s reputation and the planet’s less-than-welcoming environment, the engineer had expected this to be one of their more “relaxing” trips to the Outer Rim.

So far, everything had gone according to that expectation. Commander Cody was with them, which obviously added another person to affect pre-thought-of plans and increase possibilities for error, but if anything it was nice to have him along. 99 had been the only other clone Hunter had ever called ori’vod , and Tech doubted that would ever change with how close the tracker had been to their oldest sibling before his death. Still, the genius was aware that if Hunter did regard anyone else as that sort of guiding, paternal figure that 99 had tried to be, it would be Cody. The scarred commander was easy to be around. He had known them since they were cadets on Kamino and had learned early on that they were…for lack of a more polite term, weird . Unlike other regular clones, though, he had accepted their differences, and he rarely seemed to be shocked by anything that the four brothers did or said anymore. 

But sometimes he was. Tech’s lips twitched upward into a slight smile as he recalled just a few hours prior, after they had first landed on Florrum. The Batch could still be considered rookies in some regards, but the last time they had worked with Cody, they had been fresh off Kamino and still adapting their sometimes frustrating mutations to real battle scenarios. In the time since, though, the four brothers had become more comfortable with their enhancements and their place on the battlefield and had gotten better at controlling their talents and gifts for what they each did best. 

Cody had first seen that displayed when they had found the informant’s land speeder, tracking fob and all, sitting outside a dilapidated shack that served as a sort of outpost. Upon speaking to the proprietor – who Tech would have easily mistaken for a drunken bum had he not shouted his title several times as they had walked through the door – they discovered that the “snitch” had pawned everything but his blaster and clothing and disappeared. Cody had been slightly agitated at the news, no doubt imagining the hard it would be to track down their target now, with no homing device. 

And it would have been an arduous task – had Cody not brought along the squad whose sergeant was practically a humanoid bloodhound. Tech had certainly enjoyed the commander’s surprise as Hunter took a knee outside the outpost and scooped up a handful of the dry dirt to raise to his nose. The tracker had snorted comically at the sharp-smelling, trace amounts of acid left in the soil by the planet’s geyser sprays, but once he had gotten a solid scent and a sense of direction, his eyes had narrowed to amber slits and he had stalked off, motioning for them to follow. 

The Marshal Commander had glanced at Tech with raised eyebrows and more than a little concern in his brown eyes. 

Smiling internally but keeping his features schooled to their usual deadpan state, Tech had straightened his goggles and followed his ori’vod , leaving Cody to ask Wrecker what Hunter had just done.

Wrecker had laughed boisterously, the only way he knew how. “Your snitch must not be on the clean side,” he had explained good-naturedly. “Usually takes Hunter a couple o’ minutes to pick up a cold trail. That was like, two seconds.”

Cody had received a friendly shoulder slap as Wrecker passed but looked no better informed than before. Crosshair had elbowed Tech on his way past, smirking as they both heard the commander mutter something like “nose like a kriffing Kaadu.”

Tech had smiled then, too. He was less outwardly emotional than the other members of his batch – even less than Crosshair, since he usually didn’t show irritation quite as easily as his youngest sibling – but he felt things just as strongly as any of them. And one of his strongest emotions was certainly the pride he felt regarding his siblings. He knew logically that all of them had been engineered to be what they were, to have the abilities that set them apart from the other beings that the Kaminoans manufactured, but in his heart, he chose to think that had the past worked out differently and other clones been granted those same abilities, they still wouldn’t be as good at their jobs as his brothers were. 

Hunter’s protective nature and inborn ability to lead hadn’t been bred into him – even if the Kanmioans had found a foolproof way to engineer those qualities into their clones, 99 had been the oldest and therefore would have been the leader of their squad had he not been malformed when he was decanted. Hunter had never been created to be their leader, but he had nonetheless shouldered the responsibility with tenacity and he had never let his little brothers down. His enhanced senses were biological, but it took tremendous willpower to both determine important from unimportant input and to not be overwhelmed by the constant feedback. 

Wrecker was meant to be a bruiser, for lack of a better term – he had been created to destroy, born to kill. Tech highly doubted that the longnecks had intentionally grafted a gene into the giant’s DNA that lent him exceptional empathy, and yet out of all the 99s Wrecker had always been the most emotionally intelligent. From the time they were cadets, he had been able to sense when one of his brothers was having a rough moment and what they needed. Sometimes the solution was one of his rib-cracking yet strangely comforting hugs; sometimes it might be an affectionate punch to the shoulder or a headlock that would shake said sibling out of whatever unacceptable emotional state they were in. But it always worked, and not just for the giant’s siblings. No matter where they went, children flocked to Wrecker while their parents hung back, terrified at their first glance of the scarred unit of a man. Even animals seemed to get along with the demolition expert.

Crosshair was the most outwardly icy and offish member of their batch. He was conditioned to be that way – a sniper was aloof, distant from his fellow soldiers, picking off the enemy from far away with silent accuracy rather than working in tandem with comrades in arms. But each of his brothers knew that the white-haired clone was internally vulnerable, completely unlike what the Kaminoans had hoped he would be. All the 99s were tactile and could even be classified as “clingy,” but Crosshair had always been the most in need of affirmation and comfort, even as he grew older and vehemently denied it. Nala Se and their other handlers’ constant harping on the fact that some of his enhancements did not work as planned, that some had not worked at all , had exasperated the problem, but Tech was of the opinion that his youngest brother would have struggled with his own self-worth anyway. Logically, he knew that doubt was nonsense. As Crosshair’s brother, he hated the system that created the sniper to be outside of its own parameters and then punished him for outperforming in some areas and not in others. Even 99 had worried about the little sniper cadet, with his prematurely white hair and his thin, perpetually cold frame that never quite got through an exam without a new monitoring tag added to his file, his young mind polluted with the clinical diagnosis of not quite “failure” but far from “success.”

Tech saw the other side of the equation, though, and it balanced perfectly. Crosshair was intensely aware of the body language of those around him, from shifting eyes to ticks and tells that hardly anyone else would be able to notice. On the one hand, this made him keenly feel every disapproving look or malicious gesture thrown his way; on the other, it enabled him to immediately know when something was wrong with one of his siblings. His need for validation and physical touch made him feel needy and embarrassed, but somehow he always noticed the more reluctant moments when one of his brothers needed help or comfort and didn’t want to ask. There were many times that Tech had been nearly beside himself with worry or fear – emotions he still felt quite overwhelmingly at times but tried to conceal – and felt like his overpowered, never-slowing brain was about to fly apart, only to feel a light touch on his shoulder or hand and look up into the sharp, amber eyes of his baby brother. Crosshair was the youngest of their batch but in a way, he had been watching over them since their first sim tests, his eagle eyes always sharply on the lookout for anything that could come between him and the few beings he loved. And force help the fool who dared to try.

Yes, Tech thought with warmth spreading in his heart. There certainly was a soft side to Crosshair that the Kaminoans had never meant for him to have.

As for Tech himself…

Well, he knew he was smart. Brilliant, actually. He’d never seen the point in hiding his intelligence, even when it caused some ruckus between his squad and the regs. He had been engineered to retain enormous amounts of information, to learn at a rate that was certainly unhealthy and nearly impossible. When he was a cadet, he had trouble keeping the huge, swirling storm of information from tearing apart his mind. Eventually, he came up with a complicated but workable categorization method. As soon as he learned something, no matter how seemingly insignificant, such as the type of flower that grew in a specific region on one planet or how many flat head screws were included in the frame of a standard Lamda shuttle, it was carefully filed away in one of the folders in one of the boxes on one of the shelves that made up the complex labyrinth of knowledge that was his exceptional mind. In that way, he was very much like what the Kaminoans had wanted him to be. In another way — a much more important way – he was not. 

His photographic memory could be a curse at times, because he never forgot anything, like the time that he had been caught in the hall alone with a squad of regulars. Luckily he had escaped that time without any physical violence, but the hissed words “ walking computer ” would never leave his mind. 

He knew differently, though. He was emphatically not a computer, not in any sense of the word. He had habits – admittedly rigid, predictable-to-a-fault ones – but not programs . The mutations to his DNA had never taken away his humanity, even if that had been the Kaminoans' goal. Though he preferred logic over emotion, he possessed both and shunned neither. His brothers had seen to that, even without meaning to. How could the nerdy little cadet have become robotic, when he had a brother who was the equivalent of a giant tooka ready to bear-hug him at the first sign of distress? How could he have become emotionless with Crosshair’s watchful eyes on him at every moment, alternately searching for any aberrations in his behavior or pleading for attention? 

And Hunter would have never allowed them to turn him into a droid-like, fact-spitting machine, anyway. Hunter had never let anything really hurt him, and Tech was a firm believer that he never would.

Another side effect of his enhanced mind was that Tech thought quickly . He had just completed the train of thought concerning Hunter’s protectiveness when he watched the chrono’s numbers flicker into 1805.

He reached for the dial and breathed evenly as he put through a transmission. “Havoc Three, requesting sitrep. Havoc One, do you copy?”

Silence answered him, laced with just a hint of static from the atmospheric disruptions to the channel.

He pressed the next button on the small panel, his focus narrowed to just the four on that strip of the instrument dashboard and ignoring the three hundred and nine other lights in the cockpit.

“Havoc Three, requesting sitrep. Havoc Two, do you copy?”

No answer, again. So Wrecker was also radio silent.

Yet Hunter had not given the command. It was highly unlikely that the sergeant would either neglect the “fourth sun setting” callsign or that all members of the squad would be simultaneously unable to answer a communication from their brother at their base of operations. 

In fact, Tech reminded himself with growing discomfort, it had never happened.

He tried Cody next. 

“Havoc Three, requesting sitrep. Ghost One, do you copy?”

Pause. Now Crosshair.

“This is Havoc Three, demanding sitrep,” he said into the mic, adding an extra clippiness to his tone for good measure. That would get Crosshair’s snarky answer even if the sniper was fatally wounded, buried under a ton of rubble, fighting off a Sith Lord left-handed. “Havoc Four, do you copy?”

The silence was expected this time. That didn’t make it any less disturbing.

The engineer calmly rose from the pilot’s chair and walked back to the armory. The panel that slid away from the Marauder ’s wall to reveal a small but lethal collection of weaponry could seem insignificant or even embarrassing compared to the weapons stores to which other soldiers in the GAR had access, but to the Bad Batch, these few extra blasters and other arms were their only backup. Most of the time their missions were not disclosed to anyone but themselves and whoever had orchestrated it, negating the possibility of a quick rescue should something go awry. Some of the weapons in the case had been picked up from their fallen enemies, with the justification that they certainly wouldn’t be using them again. A few of the more exotic ones had been purchased or bartered for on different planets, something that the Batch kept on the down-low as much as they could.

Tech’s hand went immediately to the center of the case and the WESTAR-M5 blaster that gleamed there in all its polished glory. Crosshair had won the weapon in a sabacc game on Nevarro, which Tech clearly remembered Hunter had told him not to participate in. Back at the ship, Hunter had justified his order by pointing out that the two humanoid men who would be his opponents were obviously eager for someone to challenge them (increased heartbeats and respirations at the opportunity) and smelled like liars (because why else would they have the scent of snake?).

Crosshair had justified his actions by flaunting the blaster and reminding his ori’vod that he’d won , cheats, liars, and all. That had led to a whole different problem, as Hunter was left to ponder in horror just how good of a liar and a sabacc cheat he had allowed his youngest brother to become.

The M5 felt heavy in his hand but not too much more so than his DC-17. Tech wished he had two of them, but this one would be enough. As he was going in alone, he would also have a few other surprises sheathed at his side for the proper moment, whenever and wherever that was.

He wished Hunter was with him. Not merely because if the sergeant was there he would not even be going in alone, but also because he really hated tracking. 

~~~~~

Cody didn’t really know why he had expected a simple mission. Sure, the whole thing had seemed very “simple and easy” when he had gotten authorization from General Kenobi. He was to accompany a single squad, preferably a skilled strike team, onto the desert planet of Florrum in search of a valuable informer who had disappeared. Cody hoped their information smuggler had merely misplaced his holotransmitter and slunk into the lawless population of the Outer Rim outpost, rather than the alternative of being dead or captured. If it was the first, then they would “escort” the informer back to the fleet and make sure they didn’t disappear without warning again. If it was the latter…he might need the skills of said strike team to get back alive.

Small strike team. Highly skilled. Willing to infiltrate a planet of dangerous and likely hostile criminals and thugs. Kenobi had asked him directly which squad he thought would be best to take along.

Obviously, the commander had chosen the Bad Batch. 

The Batch was a year into their battlefield experience, but they were still, in most officers’s minds at least, rookies. Cody, on the other hand, knew better. The four remaining 99 clones had been thrust into the Clone Wars at a slightly younger age than their unenhanced counterparts, and while their records did indeed show that they had completed all the advanced training at accelerated speeds, Cody wondered how much of their early release into battle had been due to the Kaminoans not being able to handle the special beings they had created. With Wrecker’s immense size and strength, Crosshair’s mathematically exact strategizing and ability with weapons (and that besides his attitude), Tech’s insatiable genius, and Hunter’s sheer otherness , the Marshal Commander was actually surprised that Kamino had put up with them or been able to control them for as long as it had. For scientists and trainers who were used to the usual copy-and-paste faces, attitudes, and learning ways of the run-of-the-mill clones the water planet normally produced, the four superhuman commandos were different animals to tame indeed. 

Having known the 99s from their cadethoods, Cody had always suspected that “taming” was not an option for the defectives. Even 99, their oldest batchmate, had been unconventional, in more ways than one. He seemed to have passed that down to his younger brothers before his death, and Cody highly doubted there would be any changing those baked-in against-the-grain tendencies now. But that wouldn’t be a problem, not on this mission. Because it was supposed to be relaxed. Easy.

One simple recon mission. That was all this was supposed to be.

Then everything had to go to complete osik.

The more Cody thought about it, the more he suspected that the Batch’s unconventional methods were really the only reason they were still alive. If he had gone in with any other squad, that small compound would have looked perfectly normal. Hunter wouldn’t have been there to tell him that everything smelled like they should be cautious, though at that time Cody had precisely zero idea what that was supposed to mean. Come to think of it, Hunter wouldn’t have been there to track the informant’s scent to that compound, once Cody’s data trail ran cold and they’d been stuck at the small outpost where their target had pawned all his stuff. Wrecker wouldn’t have been supremely helpful in frightening the bartender or whatever the Weequay was to speak up about their information’s whereabouts, which Cody appreciated because he really disliked it when interrogation got messy. Crosshair wouldn’t have realized there was a secret door to the back of the bar because he spotted the scuffs on the threshold, which was nearly perfectly concealed as metal trim along the wall. They wouldn’t have had that split second of warning before said hidden door slid open with a hiss and released a dozen armed mercenaries into the bar. 

But because he had brought the Bad Batch, the sniper had noticed in time to signal his brothers. Before Cody even registered the hand sign’s meaning, the 99s had drawn their sidearms. Before he had blinked, they had fired.

Hunter, Wrecker, and Cody all fired once and downed one bad guy apiece. Somehow Crosshair fired only once as well and still got two. 

Those four shots were the only ones fired by the Republic troopers before the mercenaries got the upper hand. Between the electric whips and the barrage of stun rounds, there wasn’t much the three enhanced clones and one commander could do. Hunter’s strangled roar of pain still rang in his ears as he remembered how many of the paralyzing bolts had struck the EM-sensitive clone. 

Hold on…why was he still hearing Hunter’s voice…

Cody sucked in a sharp breath and coughed as his eyes shot open. He’d been asleep? But they’d just been captured…stunned and then everything had gone dark…

Oh.

The commander breathed in and convinced his heart to stop pounding so hard against his cuirass. He stared at the strangely damp-looking, concrete ceiling for a moment before taking stock of what was around him and maybe where he was.

There was concrete. A ton of it. And mold. The room or building he was in was basically a cement box, with water stains trickling down the walls and green and bluish fungi dotting the moist surfaces. It seemed big, even the little he could see in the dimness, so he guessed it was likely a warehouse or maybe an abandoned factory. 

He tried to move his hands and heard a heavy, metallic rattle. It felt like there were ten-pound weights on his hands and feet.

So he’d been electrocuted, then he’d passed out, then he’d been shackled and dragged off to some smelly abandoned warehouse on a planet populated by thugs and wanted criminals.

And somewhere nearby, Hunter was still screaming in pain .

Cody rolled onto his side, hauling the thick chains with him, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness as he looked for the 99s.

His ears adjusted from their stuffy feeling, too, and as the thundering ringing in his brain subsided he realized that Hunter was really screaming. It was a terrible sound that ran shivers down the commander’s bones and made him want to claw at his ears. Suddenly it stopped, and he glanced frantically around to find the source now that his indicator was gone. He heard labored, ragged breathing and in the same general area there were huge-sounding footsteps crunching against the gravel-strewn concrete floor.

“Where’s the spice?” someone demanded. Their voice was like sandpaper, coarse and rough.

Spice ? Cody blinked, confused. Why on earth would these di’kuts think they had spice? 

What kind of terribly incorrect information did the Weequays have?

There was a snarl, low and animalistic. It was hurt and defiant and snapped a few sharp words in reply to the question.

“We don’t have any,” Hunter’s voice spat.

There was a loud zap and sizzle, and the scream erupted again. Cody found the glowing stream of electricity and in the dimness he could pick out the forms of two of their captors, ugly-faced Weequays with long braids, standing over a man who was sitting against the wall. The light from the prod illuminated Hunter’s face, and Cody saw pain freeze his features as the mercenary jerked his arm and the weapon back, then jabbed the prod right back into his ribs.

“Don't like electricity, does it?” The second Weequay sounded like he was grinning and Cody almost saw red. 

“I'll get it out of him,” his companion answered gruffly. “If it takes too long you can start on the scrawny one.”

That would be Crosshair, Cody guessed. He forced his eyes away from the interrogation to look for the other two Batchers. He spotted them to the left, bound at the wrists and maybe the ankles and thrown in a heap with his and Hunter’s gear. They were still unconscious. He was pretty sure he remembered seeing one of their captors injecting Wrecker with something before he completely passed out, but he couldn’t be sure. Fog still lingered on the edges of his consciousness and he wouldn’t trust too many of his memories from the last few minutes, or however long they had been out.

Thankfully, Cody soon heard the electricity stop crackling. The next moment the fetid air of the warehouse was disturbed with the sound of Hunter’s gasping breaths. It was as if the tracker couldn’t draw enough air into his lungs. The commander winced as he thought of Hunter’s enhancements and how sensitive the sergeant was to electricity in any form. He would definitely be getting a thorough report from Helix on the tracker’s state of health when they got back to the 212th, no matter how much the 99s hated going to medical.

There was a solid thud that sounded like a boot striking flesh, and Hunter’s snapping growl turned almost into a bark. There was enough fury in it to make Cody breathe a little easier regarding the sergeant’s condition, even though he couldn’t see him very well without the light from the prod. From the startled yelp that followed the outburst, the commander assumed with a smirk that Hunter had lashed out with the one unfettered weapon he had left – his teeth. He hoped the Weequay had dodged the lunge in time. Not because he didn't want the chakkar to lose a chunk of his leg – he was far more worried about how sick the tracker would get from biting one of them.

Still, they were captured. By very stupid mercenaries or pirates or whatever they called themselves who thought they had something they did not and weren’t taking no for an answer. The muscle of the group was unconscious, and so was the sniper. Hunter wasn’t completely out of commission, though he was probably in a lot of pain, but Cody highly doubted that just the two of them could somehow overpower their captors while bound.

Only one bright thought interrupted Cody’s gloomy assessment of the situation, and it was only one word.

Tech . 

They had captured him and three of the Bad Batch brothers, but they had apparently not realized they’d missed the fourth one who had stayed behind as what Wrecker had dubbed “the insurance policy.” Either these Weequays were working on their own and didn’t have a clue, or whoever had hired them had been grossly inadequate with the briefing. 

Cody had never truly seen Tech get angry before, but the engineer had likely already deduced that something was wrong, especially if more time than Cody thought had passed and Hunter had missed the call-in to let Tech know they needed a pick up. The commander couldn’t imagine that Tech would be happy when he discovered that his brothers were being held captive by a motley assortment of pirates or whatever they were. 

In either case, these thugs were so screwed .

Chapter Text

Big, gray, and abandoned. That was the immediate description of the warehouse or whatever it had once been used for that popped into any passerby’s head when they saw the cement structure that sat squarely in the center of the compound city. Tech’s assessment was more technical, even clinical, as he glanced over the building’s nearest corner again through the lens of his visor. He saw a large concrete cube that was structurally only semi-sound and windowless, a padlocked docking bay set high in the street-facing side acting as the only entrance or exit other than the door that was at each of the end walls. The building could easily be used as a place to discreetly store any number of illegal, smuggled, and/or unsavory items. 

Or captives. 

The engineer was actually surprised at how easy it had been to find the place. It hadn't taken very long for him to pinpoint the signal still pulsing from Hunter's comm unit, which was still apparently powered up and operational, judging by the readings the engineer’s data pad had immediately displayed when he had called up that frequency.

That discovery in itself had twisted his gut a little more with worry. If Hunter's comm unit was still working, the only other option for his ori'vod’s failure to answer his call was that the tracker was physically unable to. Since placing a comm transmission only required the movement of maybe two fingers and the mouth, Tech’s mental assumption of what his brothers’ conditions must be at the moment was rapidly deteriorating.

Which was all the more reason for him to complete this objective as quickly as possible. The two Weequay guards he had spotted near one of the stalls across from the building had been no problem. Two muffled stun blasts and both had crumpled to the dirt street, unaware they had been caught lollygagging by the very person they were supposed to be on guard against. The three that were stationed along the building itself, however, would be a little more tricky. One was standing at each of the two doors, and another was standing in the building’s shadow, his own silhouette bisecting it directly beneath the docking door. 

That door…

Tech’s nose scrunched in thought and his brows drew together. He pulled his visor back down and zoomed in on the top of the structure. The warehouse was dilapidated, and the buildings in the immediate area weren’t much better, but if he was careful, it would likely work. The chances of success were well over 60% and even without a lot of time in which to do more thorough calculations, he might even hazard to say they were good . 

He’d never know if he didn’t try it. The relentlessly burning sun was going to set soon and he certainly didn’t want to enact his rescue plan in the dark.

Especially when it involved climbing.

~~~~~

Crosshair had just begun to stir, but he was pinned beneath his much larger brother’s dead weight and unable to do much more than raise his head to look at Cody. It would have been nice if he had had the decency to make a little noise when he woke up or moved, though, or at least given the commander a hint of warning. Cody had absentmindedly glanced to his left and jumped in spite of himself when he’d seen the sniper’s eyes shining through the darkness at him, two glittering crimson orbs thanks to his enhanced tapetum lucidum . 

The sniper gave Cody a cursory kind of glance that glared a sarcastic good morning and proceeded to scan their surroundings with the slow, thorough look of a predator. He was likely seeing far more than Cody had been able to in even the brief seconds of light that elapsed when the pirates had entered through a door at the end of the building. The commander had never pried too deeply into the details of the Bad Batcht’s mutations, but he had seen Crosshair blow up a tank by shooting down the gun barrel while it was six kliks away, and he was pretty sure that even in the darkness, the sniper could have counted the cracks in the far wall if he had wanted to. 

Crosshair looked back at him and spoke quietly. “Ten.”

Cody blinked. That was two more pirates or criminals or whatever they were than he had counted. 

Then again, he wasn’t Crosshair.

The sniper kept his voice low, just loud enough for Cody to hear him with the distance between them soaking up some of the volume. “Probably more outside.”

Well, Cody had guessed that. Contrary to the way they were acting, he didn’t believe their captors to be entirely stupid. There were likely guards outside and maybe a few stationed in the street, depending on how much spice the pirates assumed they had and how cautious the kingpin was.

Since whoever it was had had them drugged and bound, Cody had a feeling he was pretty cautious. 

With the only thing he could do now done, Crosshair seemed to resign himself to being an inadequately sized pillow for his still-unconscious big brother and waiting for a rescue. There was no point in trying to break out. Hunter was in rough shape, Cody was incapacitated, he was quite irreparably stuck, and Wrecker was not doing anything for a while, including making his way out of whatever chemical-induced dreamland the lead pirate had sent him to at their capture. All they could do was wait for Tech and hope he arrived sooner rather than later, and that the dozen or so pirates didn’t get the drop on him.

After the short conversation, the Marshal Commander tried to keep his gaze on Hunter. (He wasn’t playing favorites with the 99s, he honestly wasn’t. He was just more worried about the tracker at the moment, because of the electricity and his trouble-attracting, defiant kind of attitude when it came to the wellbeing of his squad.) The young sergeant had received a pretty good kick to the head from a second Weequay after he’d nearly bitten the first one and looked like he was only half-conscious, with his eyes alternating staring at the floor or closing briefly before their owner’s face twisted in pain. Hunter wasn’t normally one to show discomfort, so if he was allowing himself that small outlet now he was either really about to pass out or he thought it was dark enough that no one could see him.

But Cody could see him in the dimness, just barely, and every grimace made him that much more eager to get out of this concrete cage and haul Hunter to a medical examination a la Helix so he could find out what all that electricity was doing to his enhanced vod’ika . (Scratch all of that about favorites. He was their brother, not their progenitor or parent or whatever natborns called them. He was allowed to have favorites and Hunter was his favorite.) The commander wanted out of this mess and he was about two seconds away from finding out how well his not-inconsiderable strength combined with these heavy cuffs could knock a pirate’s head off his shoulders.

Then he heard a whistle. A short, high-pitched whistle like one of the birds on Trandosha – one of the owl things that Gree had told him about once but he hadn’t paid attention. Hunter flinched visibly at the sound but Cody was relieved to see his eyes blurrily turn to look at him. At least he was awake.

The sergeant seemed to be having a rough time focusing his vision, but his amber gaze was brighter than it had been moments before. Cody read the message plainly.

There he is .

~~~~~

Tech was not afraid of heights. He was a well-known wizard in the pilot seat of the Havoc Marauder and while he did not enjoy climbing for its own sake like Crosshair seemed to, he had never struggled with the same discomfort regarding high places that Wrecker did.

That being said, he was concerned about the stability of this roof – this one, and the last three he had traversed in order to get to it and escape the notice of the Weequays below. He hadn’t expected everything to be up to snuff, as they were currently in a city full of criminals who were into far worse things than defying building codes, but he had anticipated that the buildings would be at least marginally better than rotten sticks or damaged cement thrown together.

For once, he had been wrong.

So now he was taunting death or serious injury, picking his way across the damaged and dilapidated rooftops as quickly as possible. He had successfully evaded the attention of the three Weequays, and even when a Nikto – who was obviously of some importance by the way he breezed past the guard – entered the building from his left, he had gone unnoticed. He only wished he knew how many hostiles were inside the building. With the three guards at the entrances and the two he had taken out already in the streets, it was safe to assume that there were likely twice that many at least within the building itself, perhaps more. 

The M5 was still at his side, sheathed over his shoulder and resting at his right hip alongside one of his DC-17s. Tech liked the feel of the automatic in the sling, comforted in the fact that he had what was likely an unexpected advantage, even if he didn’t know how many enemies he might be about to face. His combat skills were often underestimated by the regs and even by the Batch’s rotating commanding officers, his abilities in a fight mentally knocked down to “average” or worse as soon as someone set eyes on the more intellectually-based skills listed on his file or the thick goggles he was never seen without.

It was an easy mistake to make, but not one that anyone made twice.

He was on the warehouse roof now, moving across the cracked and cratered surface with as much grace as he could manage to conjur. He sometimes envied Crosshair – all the 99s were agile, but their youngest was practically a feline. If it were he instead of Tech picking his way across this rooftop, he’d likely be on the other side by now, or balancing on the deadly edge for kicks and giggles. Tech was just trying to avoid breaking his own bones.

After a moment the engineer made it to the streetside wall of the building, right above where the large docking bay was set high in the concrete, and peeked over the side. The Weequay below was still at attention, but it was a rather relaxed one. He was yawning as he stood with his feet apart, rifle loosely held in his hands, his braids thrown over his shoulders and his sagging shoulders betraying his boredom. 

Tech could have stunned him from the eight or so meters distance from the roof to the ground, but that might alert his two compatriots and they in turn might give a signal to those inside. And anyway, he really just wanted to get inside the building. He could deal with the guards after he found out where his brothers were and what condition they were in. Getting them out of the way for the time being was the real question this time. 

He could have spent the next few minutes formulating a complicated or genius plan to neutralize them. There were at least three that he could have called up from prior situations that would probably work in this one.

Instead, he crouched down and selected a fist-sized chunk of concrete that had come loose from one of the crater-like dents in the roof’s surface. Still on his haunches, being careful not to bump the rifle barrel against anything, Tech pulled back and catapulted the rock into the alley to the right of the guard. It hit something – likely the other wall – with a hollow clunk .

The Weequay’s head snapped toward the sound and he looked around warily. Then he called to the guard at the corner to his right, and they both took off toward the alley, rifles raised to a low ready.

Tech smirked as he secured his grappling line firmly on the roof. Sometimes, the solution wasn’t as cerebral as he could make it.

He dropped quickly over the side of the building and repelled to the bay door. Like the rest of the structure, it had certainly seen better days. It was also made nearly entirely of wood, something Tech had hoped for but had hesitated to count on until he was close enough to be sure. Now he could see that the wood was rotten and made brittle by the desert planet's ferocious sun, ready to break at the first major disturbance. 

There were already a few hand-sized holes in the vertical planks. He looked through them, his helmet’s visor pulled down in front of his goggles, and let the night vision setting do its work. He could see ten more Weequay-ish-looking figures inside, with the taller Nikto standing near one and speaking to him animatedly. There were two seated figures a few yards from each other – a couple of his brothers, or one of them and Cody – and an indistinguishable pile of living beings a little farther from them, closer to the Nitko and his companion.

The inventor glanced around once more before cupping his hand around one side of his mouth and whistling through the hole. He used the high call of a convor, hoping at least one of his brothers was conscious to recognize it. All four 99s knew each other’s bird-sign by heart, but Cody was probably not aware of each Batcher’s unique whistle.

He didn’t hear the guards returning yet, and he didn’t expect to for another forty-five seconds at least. He’d counted on their taking their time to sweep the alley and the street behind it, knowing that if their objective was serious enough to capture and guard four armed soldiers they’d want to check out any possibility of a breach in their security. Their misdirected attention should give him enough time to break in and handle the majority of the inside hostiles before they returned to make a nuisance of themselves.

Tech threw his weight back against the grapple line and pushed off the door with his legs, propelling himself into free space with the cable holding tightly to his belt. He swung out as far as the line allowed, then came rushing back toward the rotten door.

He kept his legs slightly bent and braced for impact. Hopefully, the door was even weaker than he thought, and he’d break it down with no more trouble than a few bruises. 

He really didn’t want to rescue his brothers with two broken legs.

~~~~~

Cody hardly had time to contemplate the whistle or Hunter’s cryptic grin any further before he was shocked by a loud thud from almost directly above them. Splinters and chunks of rotten wood rained down on him and Hunter, forcing them to duck to avoid being blinded by the shards. He heard the zipping sound of a cable being released and looked up just in time to be blinded by sunlight flooding in from where the docking door used to be.

 A human figure was outlined in the darkness. It fell and stuck the landing perfectly, rolling to its knees and slinging a rifle to its shoulder. The commander saw white and gray armor and that unmistakable, decked-out helmet just before the Weequays did.

“What?” roared the chief pirate, the one Cody had heard called Yirk. He and the Nitko spice-buyer whirled around toward the noise, the sunlight making them squint and revealing the anger and surprise flashing on their faces.

That’s when Tech fired.

Cody jerked back at the rapid, automatic blaster fire that spurted from the end of the rifle. Yirk and his companion screamed and cursed before they were cut down by the line of unrelenting blue bolts that raked their torsos. 

That set the other pirates off and brought them running to the fray. They were closing in from the sides of the warehouse and converging on Tech, slinging shots as they sprinted or ducked behind cover. But Tech’s visor was down, granting him the ability to see and aim far better than his attackers could in the gloom that was now full of sawdust and smoke. He’d ducked out of the sunlight and left that one spot of visibility bare, backing into the shadows and firing over Cody and Hunter’s heads at the incoming criminals. 

Cody was trying to avoid getting shot, copying Hunter as the sergeant hunkered down against the wall, making himself as small as possible until some of the pirates were taken out. That lasted for about one kriffing second, because Cody blinked and suddenly Hunter was springing at the nearest Weequay who had ventured too close to him and aimed almost too well at his little brother. 

Hunter launched himself from the ground, chains and all, snarling as he seized the pirate’s rifle with both hands and forced it back against his skull with a sickening crack of bone. He was in the process of yanking the gun from the Weequay’s grasp when another came up behind him. Light burst to life near the pirate’s face and Cody realized he was gripping one of the prods.

“Hunter!” he called.

The tracker was already turning, sensing the sudden jolt of electricity, but it was too late. The Weequay jabbed the end of the prod directly between Hunter’s shoulder blades and the purple threads of electrical current spiderwebbed over the sergeant’s body. Hunter’s bellow of pain echoed against the walls and Crosshair shouted from where he was still pinned beneath an unconscious Wrecker.

Cody saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned back to his right. With five Weequays dead around him, Tech had stepped into the sunlight and was aiming at two more who were too close to Wrecker and Crosshair. The commander stared in shocked silence as the goggled soldier absorbed the M5’s kick and watched the two pirates fall. 

Tech was no longer the quiet engineer, the scanner-wielding brains behind the other batchers’ brawn. He didn’t even seem like Tech. This man was an insanely fast-moving war machine, slinging plasma bolts from an automatic rifle as he cleared his own path through the pirates. 

Cody bore witness to the exact moment that the other brother of the batch whirled at Hunter’s scream. He locked his gaze onto the two of his siblings and realized that they were shackled. His eyes scanned instantly to the slight left where Hunter was now on his knees, still fighting the prod and the Weequay holding it, getting shocked again for his trouble. The tracker’s cry as the electro-prod jabbed into his side again seemed to shake the warehouse and rattle the acrid air.

The commander’s blood went cold as he saw the light in Tech’s amber eyes change to dark, merciless steel. He realized with jolting clarity that the moment before, Tech had been angry.

Now, he was pissed .

The light-haired batcher swung his body to the left and dispatched the three pirates charging at him from the side, then snapped off two rounds to the right that took out the heavier-set Weequay who had apparently had illusions of sneaking up behind him and using a dagger or breaking his neck. The three guards had just burst through the door and had not been expecting what they found.  One of them screamed horribly as Tech cut him down.

Cody couldn’t bring himself to feel bad for them. Not when they were so eager to cause this much harm for personal profit. Not when Hunter was writhing in pain, his eyes bloodshot and his hurt roars splitting the smoky air, the smell of burning flesh and crackling electricity making Cody want to vomit.

Actually, the commander mused as he watched the scene play out, it was rather enjoyable to watch Tech massacre his way through his foes.  

Immediate threats handled, the engineer spun back around toward the Weequay who was shocking Hunter, bringing the rifle level with the pirate just as he pulled his arm back and gave him a clear shot. He riddled the pirate with a burst of bolts that would have been enough to take down a decent-sized bantha, and watched as he dropped to the concrete floor.

Within a minute and a half, it was over. 

Cody slowly breathed out and watched anxiously as Tech set the M5 down and knelt beside Hunter. The inventor’s emotions weren’t always visible on his face, and even if they were at the moment Cody was looking at his back, but his worry was definitely audible in his voice. “Hunter?”

The tracker was panting hard and more than a little disoriented, but a smile graced his face. “Glad you could make it,” he croaked, his throat raw. He tried to get to his hands and knees but Tech’s firm hand on his shoulder arrested his efforts.

“Stay where you are,” his goggled brother hissed. He had already retrieved a small laser tool from his belt and was tracing around the locking mechanism on the cuffs. The thin beam of light left a red-hot trail in the alloy. “I will free the others and come back to you.”

To Cody’s surprise, Hunter didn’t argue. He obeyed almost meekly, remaining exactly where Tech had told him to as the cuffs on his wrists and ankles were popped off and the engineer moved to Cody. 

“He must really be in bad shape,” the commander commented, more than a little concerned, as Tech went to work on his own shackles. “He didn’t even argue.”

Tech’s goggles lit up his eyes a little in the remaining shadows, but Cody could have sworn there was a glint of satisfaction there too. “My brothers have learned through much trial and error that in medical matters, I am not to be crossed.”

“Also, the rescued obey the rescuer,” Hunter grumbled hoarsely. He noticed Cody’s confused eyebrow arch and gave him a wan smile. “Rules.”

“How many times do you guys have to rescue each other to need rules about the aftermath?” Cody grunted as the cuffs fell off his wrists. Good riddance to the uncomfortable things. 

“One of our squad has been the sole rescuing force for the rest exactly eighteen times since our entrance into combat,” Tech answered in his clipped way. He started on Cody’s ankle shackles next. “Three of those instances the force has been me. ”

“I’m sitting on four, di’kut ,” Crosshair muttered from his place on the floor. 

“You should refrain from calling your savior unpleasant names,” Tech quipped back. “For I am now also at four and dangerously close to overtaking you in the rankings.”

“Wha’s goin’ on?” Wrecker slurred, his numb tongue sounding too large for his over-large mouth as he began to wake up.

Crosshair bit back a yelp as his much larger sibling shifted and nearly crushed him. “Wrecker!” he hissed, more desperately than dangerously. 

Wrecker’s bloodshot eyes rotated down and then widened when he realized Crosshair was pinned beneath him. “Sorry,” he rumbled apologetically.

“I will be with you in a moment.” Tech pried the cuffs off the commander’s combat boots and left Cody to coax circulation back into his tingling feet as he made his way to Crosshair. 

“What about the guards?” the white-haired batcher asked, squinting and looking away as the laser scalpel ignited a tad too close to his enhanced retinas. 

“They will not be awake for another hour at least,” Tech replied casually.

“Those weren’t stun rounds you just ran through my M5.”

Tech blinked at him owlishly. “Oh. I was referring to the individuals I rendered unconscious in the streets outside.” His mouth twitched slightly. “And Hunter confiscated the automatic due to the dubious circumstances in which it was acquired. Therefore, it belongs to all of us.”

Cody heard Crosshair murmur something under his breath – likely a curse regarding overbearing and stick-in-the-mud older brothers – then the sniper went silent as Tech continued to work on his bonds. Wrecker was waking up more thoroughly, trying not to squish his youngest brother any more than he already inadvertently had, and Hunter was breathing much easier, resting his head against the cool cement and closing his eyes.

The commander breathed a deeper, less tense sigh of relief. This had certainly turned out better than he had thought it would.

~~~~~

“So,” Hunter began. “Is hitting the trail at first light agreeable to you, Commander?”

Cody blinked back at the sergeant from over his cup of cooling caf. They'd been back on the Havoc Marauder for approximately five seconds before Crosshair had dug out the caf machine and started a brew of the strong liquid. As soon as it was done, the youngest batcher pushed a steaming mug into the commander’s hands and glared him into the chair, though the older clone couldn’t tell if it was because Crosshair could see how bad he wanted the caf, or if he just wanted him out of the way so Tech could spread out his equipment to check over Hunter more thoroughly. Either way, in spite of himself, the sniper was beginning to move up in Cody’s Bad Batch favorites rankings. 

“First light?” he repeated, eyebrows arching.

“It’ll be harder to follow, but we can still likely catch up to your snitch before sunset tomorrow. Or at least before he causes any more ruckus.” The tattooed tracker took a sip from his own cup, which Cody could tell from across the cockpit did not contain caf. It smelled more like one of the exotic teas that General Kenobi indulged in. General Skywalker had commented once that Kenobi either had an extremely sensitive or an extremely deadened palette to enjoy the stuff, and from his generals’ comments on the tea’s flavors, Cody had assumed it was the former. Hunter’s sense of taste was certainly more sensitive than Kenobi’s could possibly be, but the two men might have at least one thing in common. For a moment, Cody allowed himself to smirk at the thought of two of the most deadly men he knew – a Jedi and a half-feral clone – bonding over steaming cups of floral-smelling tea.

Then he turned back to the issue at hand. “Hunter, you were just electrocuted multiple times. Wrecker was drugged silly.”

“He’ll be sleeping the rest of it off all night.” Hunter shrugged. 

Cody gave him a pointed look.

Hunter's eyes narrowed slightly in an almost-wince at the sharp glare. The uninked side of his face was turning a light bluish purple, the color forming the pattern of a remarkably clear boot print on his skin, but other than a few other inconsequential wounds the tracker sported no other signs of being injured. “Tech said I'm fine.” 

“No, I said that your immediate death was relatively unlikely, ” Tech corrected coolly. He was still at the chair behind them, bandaging Crosshair's wrist that had been sliced by the cuffs. Cody assumed it had happened when he and Wrecker had been tossed into a pile with their weapons and packs. “That is not the same thing as fine. ”

“Anyway,” Hunter said calmly. “There's no reason we can't head out at dawn and be headed back to the Negotiator with Kenobi's informant by late meal.” 

Cody considered it for a long beat, taking another draw from his caf before he answered. “I don't want to risk you boys getting into more trouble when you're already wounded,” he insisted. 

“Ah, this ain't wounded!” Wrecker contradicted from his bunk, where all three of his siblings had banished him as soon as they'd half-dragged him onboard. “This is just a lil’ setback. I'll be good as new in the mornin’ and Hunter'll just be sore.”

Cody shot the tracker another look, this one more questioning than accusatory. 

Hunter gave him a subtle smile. “Scans say there's nothing wrong with my heart or other organs. No reason to sit around for something that only left a couple of burns.”

The commander sat back in the chair, thinking in the back of his mind that it was almost more comfortable than the bunk in his barracks where he was usually stationed. He might even just fall asleep here tonight. “None of this is changing your minds, is it?”

He didn't want to leave Florrum without their target. But he also didn't want to lead 99’s boys – who he had mentioned he'd keep an eye on, the last time he'd seen the maintenance clone – into what might be an even bigger pile of duse if they were actually hurt.

In contrast to his own hesitation, Tech actually looked surprised, if not slightly offended. It was rather endearing to Cody, who enjoyed any chance to see emotion show on his little brother's usually unflappable face.“We will not give up our current one hundred percent success rate due to a simple misunderstanding with primitive spice runners.”

A smile lit up Cody's face. “Oh, so this is about being competitive, then?” He remembered something. “Speaking of...” He turned in the chair and slung his arm over its back, craning his neck towards Wrecker's still-ish form. “Wrecker, how many times have you rescued these knuckleheads?”

“Three,” the bruiser yawned. 

Cody glanced at Hunter and the tracker grinned. “Seven.”

Crosshair scowled and Tech huffed. “You are older,” the engineer said. “Therefore it's more expected of you.”

Hunter snorted. “Three minutes longer out the tube, and somehow I get saddled with most of the responsibility?”

“Yes,” Crosshair drawled, flicking a toothpick at his ori'vod. “You do. Because Wrecker got the muscle and I got the looks.”

Hunter aimed the toothpick back at the sniper but Crosshair ducked before it hit him. It glanced harmlessly off the wall behind him.

“What did Tech get out of the deal?” Cody asked quickly. If he wanted an answer he'd have to get it before someone threw something more substantial than a toothpick and caused a friendly brawl. 

All four 99s, including Tech himself, answered at once, with zero hesitation. 

“The brains.”