Chapter Text
Echo groaned and rolled over on the bunk, his metallic legs giving two soft thuds as he lay on his other side. Just like the first night he’d been with them, Hunter had given up his bed and bunked with Tech to give him his own space. The cyborg felt terrible about not being able to make good use of the offering, but he just couldn’t get his mind to stop spinning long enough for his body to sink into sleep.
Part of it, he grudgingly admitted, was likely his prosthetics. He couldn’t get comfortable in the narrow bunk with the still-awkward metal devices attached to what was left of his three amputated limbs. But he also couldn’t handle the cold, absolutely terrifying thought of taking them off. The very idea washed over him like the icy fog of that stasis chamber he’d been stuck in for months, freezing the horror of being helpless again into his bone marrow and nearly sending him into a panic attack. No matter how annoying the metal limbs might be, or how sore his stumps might be or how bad he might want to actually curl up in a comfortable ball instead of continuing this tossing and turning with what felt like heavy, dead weights bolted to his bones, that other feeling of being only half a person, unable to fight back or even walk, was worse – infinitely worse. With it lurking in the shadows and ready to seize him at any moment, there was no way he’d be able to sleep even if he did take the prosthetics off. He might as well suffer a sleepless night without feeling as defenseless as a newborn kitten.
He also might as well do something useful while he was awake. Like help keep whoever was on watch awake…or something.
The cyborg stifled a moan as he turned over again, this time letting his legs slip off the bunk and hang over the edge. The two wide metal forms that acted as his feet came in contact with the Marauder’s cold floor and left a quiet clack echoing through the bunkroom and the open cockpit.
He closed his eyes and sat there for a long few seconds, reacclimating to sitting up and situating the room in his mind to help with the brief spinning sensation. He could hear a quiet rhythm of snoring from directly above him and thought with a smirk that Hunter had picked the worst brother to bed down with for the night. Tech was the only batcher that he had heard snore so far, and even though it wasn’t an obnoxious noise, it likely sounded like the rumble of tanks to Hunter’s insanely keen ears.
Echo stood up, hearing the bones and assorted hardware in the small of his back pop as he straightened. His spine had been tampered with, he knew, but he hadn’t looked over all of the scans and reports yet. Tech had given them to him, all neatly stored in numerical order and nestled inside folders that were labeled according to the parts of his new anatomy that the documents within detailed. They were ready to be opened, to be read and studied so he at least had some idea of how to handle his new problems and medical issues when they would inevitably arise…but he didn’t feel like looking at them yet. He knew he would at some point. Just not now.
Especially not when he was already cranky from lack of sleep.
He breathed deeply and was once again surprised by how the smells of the shuttle didn’t launch a shock and awe assault on his nostrils. Four guys, living in this ship as they bounced from grimy mission to bloody battle, and somehow the Marauder wasn’t half as bad as some other places he had stayed. He had expected Tech to be the reason the ship wasn’t a flying petri dish, since he seemed more logical than the others, but to his surprise the engineer was rather lax with the state of the world around him. He chose to remain preoccupied with problems his big brain found interesting rather than engage in really any sort of tidying up – hence the pile of half-finished projects Hunter had unceremoniously swept aside to climb into his younger brother’s bunk. Crosshair, shockingly, was the clean one – though in hindsight, Echo guessed he should have known that a man who was fanatic about cleaning every weapon on board after even target practice would have a larger form of OCD as well. He also wondered if the sniper’s enhanced eyes allowed him to see germs, because as hissy as he got when he saw anything spilled or dirty, or when anyone touched him or his stuff without his permission, that seemed a logical conclusion. The smell factor was helped by Crosshair’s constant cleaning of everything, but having a sergeant who could literally smell a gnat from the other side of the ship certainly didn’t hurt. Echo had suspected that Hunter was the reason for the citrus scent he would catch a sniff of every now and then, and his suspicions had been confirmed that morning when he had seen the tracker spray down the bunkroom with a can of air freshener. Living in a place where his senses were constantly under stress would not have been good for him, surely, though the cyborg assumed that after living with his mutations for so long Hunter would have adapted to some things.
Echo stretched up on his toeless feet and peeked over the side of Tech’s bunk, one eyebrow raised in curiosity. He grinned.
Tech’s snoring was apparently not one of the adapted-to items. Hunter was back to back with his younger brother, close enough that he was touching him but keeping his head as close to the wall and as far from Tech as he coud manage. The tracker’s head was on the mattress and his pillow was clamped down over his ears. With the bandana no longer there to tame them, his curls were tangled and it almost looked like he was smothering himself. Tech was goggle-less, for once, with the eyewear hanging on a hook near his own pillow. His serenity was so opposite Hunter’s obvious discomfort that it was comical.
Both of them were sleeping, though, for now. Echo didn’t think Hunter had slept a wink the night before, so that was probably why he was sleeping through Tech’s log-sawing. Crosshair was asleep, too – or at least, he looked asleep.
Echo felt his heart jump when he couldn’t see the sniper’s chest rising and falling. The cyborg held onto the bunk and stretched further, trying to zero in on any sign of life. He wasn’t stupid enough to wake the sniper up – no seasoned soldier was dumb enough to shake his buddy awake without knowing if said buddy was a ‘knife-under-the-pillow’ guy or not – but he was beginning to get concerned when thirty seconds passed and he didn’t see any movement…
Crosshair’s hand twitched and his eyelids fluttered suddenly. Echo let out a sigh of relief as the white-haired batcher tapped his finger against the mattress, like a dog wagging its tail in a dream, and then went back to his motionless slumber.
Apparently, where one brother snored when sleeping, the other one played dead. Noted.
A single light was on in the cockpit, a faint whitish glow that emanated from the lamplight on the dash. The shuttle was quiet, which was amazing, considering that Wrecker was the brother on watch, but Echo doubted the ordnance specialist would intentionally do anything to disturb his brothers. He was already learning that the big clone was incredibly sensitive and empathetic. His soft heart was unexpected, due to his size and enthusiasm for his profession of destruction, but not shocking. Wrecker was just Wrecker , and Echo already couldn’t imagine him being any other way.
His prosthetic feet landed quiet but unmistakably metallic footfalls along his path to the open door, then he paused at the threshold. The 99s probably cherished their time alone as much as any other troopers, especially living in such close quarters for months on end. Maybe he should just go back to bed and wait until sleep or dawn came…
“You good, Echo?”
Echo winced. He’d been spotted. Probably not heard, at least. He was still adjusting to being quiet with his new limbs but Crosshair had told him that Wrecker was basically deaf in his left ear, which had been shredded in the explosion that had taken all his hair and half his eyesight. One day Echo would ask for the details of that story, if Wrecker didn’t volunteer first. Not tonight, though.
The biggest batcher wasn’t in the pilot’s seat like Echo expected. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor between the two chairs, comfortably leaning against one of them as he kept half his attention on the blinking dots that adorned the dashboard and the other half on the mesmerizing lights that was hyperspace. At the moment he was tilting his head curiously, his eye repeating the question as he watched Echo hesitating in the doorway.
“Yeah,” the cyborg answered lamely. “Just…looking around.”
Lovely. That sounded like he was snooping. You’re kriffing great at small talk, you know that? his brain chided mercilessly.
Wrecker huffed, a solid breath out that sounded reassuringly content instead of suspicious. “Kinda hard to sleep the second night off a mission.” He must have clocked Echo’s look of confusion, because he explained almost immediately, voice still low in the stillness. “The first night you’re dog tired and can sleep about anywhere, no matter what. Second night, you’re not so tired and you gotta get used to the quiet. Not being under fire or waiting for the go-ahead or whatever. It gets weird when everything’s calm, y’know?”
“Yeah.” Echo did know. He knew from his own countless missions how hard it was to go from a raging battle to a quiet barrack, but this quiet was different. He’d been trapped in solitude and silence for so long that he didn’t want it to be quiet anymore. He wanted to go to sleep, but he would prefer to do it with something going on around him, some kind of noise or touch or something to prove to his overtaxed and traumatized brain that he wasn’t still in that coffin-like icebox.
He should go back to bed and logic out his demons out later. So far he’d only made bland or one-word contributions to this conversation and still he couldn’t seem to focus, not even on the beauty of the stars rolling by at lightspeed.
“Wanna sit up here?” Wrecker patted a spot on the floor beside him. “If ya can’t sleep, might as well have company.”
Echo padded over as quietly as he could and sat down, folding his legs over each other so he was cross-legged too. He was a few inches to the other clone’s left, so that he wasn’t too close if Wrecker didn’t feel comfortable enough having him right on top of him. That consideration was pointless because Echo hadn’t even been sitting for two seconds before a long, burly arm wrapped easily around his thin frame and pulled him gently against the giant’s side. As soon as he made contact with Wrecker’s ribs, Echo felt the heat rolling off the bigger clone and shivered as it permeated his chilled bones. Wrecker’s immense size was all muscle, so he automatically generated more heat than his brothers with the constant burning of calories that fueled his giant frame. Add to that his incredibly high metabolic rate and he was basically a furnace – one that was quite welcome if you were a half-metal, cold-natured cyborg.
“Force, you’re warm,” Echo muttered. The arm still hadn’t let him go and he felt the vibration of Wrecker’s chuckle run down to his huge fingers.
“Yep,” the giant agreed. “Can’t help it. But it comes in handy when there’s a chill. Or when Crosshair is freezing, like usual, and wants to snuggle up for some body heat.”
Crosshair snuggling was definitely something Echo was not prepared to see. He might have had a tentative heart-to-heart with the sniper but he still attached to him the mental image of a porcupine. Maybe he was soft and squishy inside, maybe not. Echo wasn’t quite prepared to brave the spikes in order to find out.
Yet .
“You’re kinda cold too,” Wrecker was saying. His voice was still above Echo, even though they were sitting down. The cyborg could certainly see how the gentle giant could be terrifying, especially if someone ticked him off to the point of not being gentle. He hadn’t seen the bruiser in close combat yet, but he could imagine the destruction that would follow such an event. “Want a blanket?”
Echo shook his head. “No. I’m fine.”
For a few minutes they sat together in silence, watching the brilliant dazzle of hyperspace gleam by in a quiet blaze of colors. Echo was happily lost in picking out different shades of stars passing by in the rush when he registered Wrecker’s thumb running back and forth over his shoulder. He suddenly felt like it was easier to breathe and realized some of the tension had left his shoulders and neck. He was leaning a little forward now and a little onto Wrecker, his body instinctively curling toward the warmth and the source of the touch. He glanced up and saw that Wrecker was still watching the stars, not even looking at him. It was like the movement was habitual, like he was just reacting to something he’d sensed or felt or known and it wasn’t a big deal.
The big bruiser was very emotionally intelligent, Echo was learning. He was also shockingly sensitive, not just physically (Echo had watched in shock that morning as he was downed by a simple tickle from an annoyed Tech) but to the attitudes and postures of those around him. It was almost disturbing to see how this giant of a man, who brushed off blaster bolts like pesky sting-gnats and had no qualms about ripping a tank gun from the turret and hauling it to his shoulder to “get a better shot,” could immediately identify when one of his squadmates was even a little out of sorts. Maybe he’d sensed that Echo wasn’t just restless. Maybe he could tell that something deeper – like the fear of waking up gripped in a nightmare, or worse, waking up and realizing all this was a dream – was keeping him from sleeping and had drawn him to the light in the cockpit.
“Here.”
Echo exited his reflections and found that he was holding something he hadn’t been a moment before. He looked down and realized that it was a tooka doll, long ears and all. It was well-worn and had obviously been stitched back together a dozen times, maybe more, but it was soft and squishy and felt kind of like a hug. The red tips of the ears contrasted the darker colors that made up the rest and unsurprisingly reminded him of the black and gray armor.
He glanced up and realized Wrecker looked a little embarrassed.
“Might seem stupid,” the bigger man said, almost bashfully. “Big fella like me, still havin’ one of those.” He tweaked one of the tooka’s long ears and shrugged. “But she’s one o’ the only things we’ve had forever, except each other. Y’know, since we were cadets. Tech wasn’t even allowed to keep his datapads for long. He’d get ‘em the way he liked ‘em, with all the programs right and all, and then the longnecks would swap ‘em out or something.”
Well, that only mildly put Echo in the mood to punch someone. Clones had not been allowed many personal effects on Kamino, but eventually, they all found or made or snuck in something to be theirs and theirs only. Fives had had a stylus that Shaak Ti had dropped one day. He never used it for anything, just kept it with him. Echo had found a pendant when he was a sixth-year, one evening while he was wandering the halls between classes. It was a simple chain affair bearing a small but delicately engraved mythosaur. It had probably been lost by one of the Mandalorian trainers, but Echo had never heard of anyone coming back to look for it, so it hadn’t likely been special to them – not like it became to him. He’d spotted it in the bright white hallway, picked it up without a second thought, and had worn it ever since.
His eyes suddenly stung and he blinked rapidly. He’d been wearing that pendant on Lola Sayu, when he’d gotten blown up at the Citadel. When he’d awoken as a prisoner of the Separatists, the pendant was gone. At the time he’d noticed the absence of his limbs more than the loss of the necklace.
Now, the sting over something so small seemed impossibly sharp.
“Where’d you get it?” he asked Wrecker, his voice steady even as he fought to keep it from trembling.
“Our first ori’vod made it for me.” Wrecker smiled, a glowing sight even among his maze of scars. “His hands weren’t so steady sometimes, so I think he got Cross to help him. Cross’s never admitted it, though.” He snorted. “Probably never will. He’s a stubborn cuss.”
“So I’ve gathered,” Echo smirked back, then looked down at the tooka again. His fingers stroked one of the long ears, and he was taken off guard by how soft the stuffie was. It was certainly well-loved, with stitching replaced everywhere and the fabric looking plenty worn from being cuddled and held. He had the overwhelming urge to squeeze it. For a moment he was embarrassed, but the only person awake was Wrecker. He gave in and squished the tooka to his chest, softly at first, then before he realized it he was all but crushing the stuffie against his sternum. It was… surprisingly therapeutic. “What do you mean, he was your first older brother?”
“Well, he was the oldest in our batch, but the three of us younger ones always called Hunter our ori’vod , so we never really called him that.” Wrecker’s eyes softened and he turned to look at the stars that were spinning by as they hurtled through the hyperspace lane. “We just called him by his name. He seemed fine with it.”
The not-him-related conversation –and admittedly, the tooka doll – was beginning to soothe Echo’s nerves, and he found himself leaning more heavily on the warm giant. If Wrecker was currently set on cuddling him, the cyborg certainly wasn’t going to complain about it. His new biggest brother’s arm could have snapped him in half easily, but Echo felt surprisingly safe. “What was his name?”
“Ninety-Nine.”
Echo felt the bones in his neck snap to attention as he jerked his gaze up from the tooka and pinned it to the Wrecker’s head. Rather, the side of it, since the bruiser was still watching the streams of stars whizz by. “What?” His voice came out hoarse and quiet.
“Ninety-Nine,” Wrecker repeated. “Cuz he was a defective, too. That was his name – well, I guess it was his number. But he never wanted it to change. He said it let everybody know that we were a batch, even if he had been decanted a couple of years before us.”
Echo felt like his heart was going to pound straight through his durasteel sternum and he struggled to control his breathing. Flashes of a hall on Kamino, of red-tinted tile and the strange combination of clinical detergent mixed with the smell of burning oil and smoke pushed against the edges of his mind, wanting to overwhelm him if he let down his guard for just one moment.
He remembered hearing the thud of a body hitting the floor over the shriek of bolts flying around him. He still heard himself screaming that name – that number – and flinging himself from the column where he’d taken cover with Fives, trying to make himself a more open target so the droids would turn their attention from the maintenance clone who had somehow proven to be just as much or more of a soldier than all of them that day. He remembered the final droids in the hall crumbling under the clones’ enraged volleys and then falling to his knees beside Ninety-Nine, knowing it was too late but hoping desperately that it wasn’t .
His voice faltered but he hoped Wrecker chalked it up to the cold. “How…how did that work?”
The biggest batcher's smile fell a little, as if he were remembering something unpleasant. “We were all supposed to be a normal batch, all of us decanting together. But once the Kaminoans noticed Ninety-Nine’s mutations not working right, they stopped the experiment until they could figure out what went wrong, y’know? Dunno if we were put on ice, or if we just hadn’t been created from the DNA batch yet. He was a fifth-year when we were finally decanted. By that time the longnecks had figured out the rapid aging and bone deformity thing, I guess.”
Echo felt like he was going numb all over. So many things made sense now, so many kriffing things that should have told him this to begin with. They were CT-99s so why hadn’t he assumed they had known the only other defective clone he’d ever met? He would have never guessed they were a batch, but it made sense, especially when he considered that Ninety-Nine had mentioned a rapid aging mutation and added to that Wrecker’s explanation of a delayed decanting for the other four.
And their armor . Their kriffing squad name. Lula’s colors. Everything in the blasted ship. What he’d first concluded were peculiar preferences for everything to match suddenly took on a different meaning and broke his heart.
Gray and red . Rex had told him and Fives after they’d joined the 501st that the colors of their armor said something about them, that they should be careful what they chose to adorn their plating with. Blue meant reliability, which was completely congruent with Rex. Gray meant mourning a lost loved one. Black meant justice, while red meant mourning the loss of a parent or parental figure.
With as particular as the Batch was with everything else, especially the skulls that adorned their armor in the most conspicuous places, marking all of them as different and as the same batch there was no possible way that the color scheme they had chosen wasn’t purposeful. It practically screamed to anyone who knew the Mandalorian traditions – or in Echo’s case, someone who was finally lucid enough to think about it – that this squad had lost someone important, someone who had been instrumental enough in their lives to warrant remembering every day whenever they wore their armor, to merit telling everyone who saw them that they had loved and been affected by. The black was the background of their armor scheme, and so far it fit everything Echo had witnessed. This batch did not do what they were told, but what they thought was right – what they thought was just .
They had once had different armor. Training armor, he guessed, the same kind that they had given him on Anaxes. But they had changed it to reflect what they felt was important. Then they’d marked that old armor with a skull, just before giving it to him. Like they had kriffing known he was going to leave that planet with them.
They couldn’t have, right?
“He’s gone now,” Wrecker was saying. “Battle of Kamino. Took a while to get used to it.”
Echo swallowed hard and squeezed Lula even tighter. He worried about holding her too tight, but he figured that he wasn’t capable of half the squeeze that Wrecker was, so the tooka was probably safe for the time being. “Losing brothers…is hard to deal with,” he agreed hoarsely.
Should he tell Wrecker? Should he tell them all that he was there when Ninety-Nine died? That he was part of the reason Ninety-Nine died?
Wrecker, once again, saved him from answering his own question. “Yeah,” the bruiser rumbled. A hint of sorrow lingered in his voice, but it lessened when he turned his gaze to Echo. “But time makes it easier, y’know? Like this.” He pointed at his damaged eye, drawing attention to the mangled ear and dramatic scarring. His one brown eye shone and the white one glistened. “Hurt like haran when it happened. Now I hardly notice it…except when I look in a mirror,” he chuckled.
Echo smiled. “It makes you look tough, big guy.”
Wrecker grinned back down at him. “Looked tough without it. But it don’t hurt none, yeah?”
There was a muffled beep and Wrecker leaned forward to check a light that had started blinking on the dashboard. Echo took advantage of his bigger squadmate’s distraction to bring Lula to his face and take a deep breath in.
His eyes squeezed closed as the scent filled his nostrils. It was human and earthy and smelled a little bit like grease, as if the tooka had come into close contact with a blaster-cleaning kit before. Lula smelled like the memory of his pendant had felt – familiar and well-loved and real .
The cyborg took another breath of the smell before Wrecker settled back against the chair, apparently satisfied with whatever he had checked over. The huge arm draped back over Echo’s shoulders and the thumb started rubbing again, right over his collarbone. Silence filled the void but it seemed easy and smooth, unlike the ragged pricks of quiet that had been present in the Anaxes medbay or in Echo’s dreams.
But eventually, Echo had to say something. There was a nagging question at the forefront of his mind, one that had initially plagued him when he’d left Rex to join the Batch, and now seemed as good a time as ever to ask it. “I'm not, like, intruding?” he asked suddenly. “You know…killing the dynamics?”
Wrecker looked down at him and, Maker bless him, there was unfeigned confusion in his gaze. He tilted his head a little to the left and narrowed his eyes a little. “What’dya mean?”
“I mean, you guys are a batch. You’ve been together your whole lives, and I’m just…here, now. I don’t want to ruin your squad structure or…whatever.” His words seemed to get tangled and refused to cooperate.
“Nah!” Wrecker’s smile was wide and genuine, and he pulled Echo into a sideways, not-too-tight hug that was warm and comforting. “It's actually really nice to have a fifth brother again. Just…feels right .”
Echo felt a weight he didn’t know he’d been carrying completely slide off his shoulders. He felt lighter somehow…not that he wasn’t already lighter than he’d ever been, with his ribs still showing through the fabric of his blacks and his bones feeling eggshell-fragile beneath his skin. He felt better knowing that at least one of the three younger men didn’t see him as some stray Hunter had randomly adopted off the streets – or in his case, death row. He figured that even the confident sergeant wouldn’t have made the decision without consulting his brothers – he might not have even been the first to bring it up – but Wrecker’s vote of confidence still helped.
Oddly, the cybernetic was beginning to feel sleepy. He’d come to the cockpit to escape tossing and turning in his bunk and now he was in danger of dozing off…
“And you know that’s what ya are now, right?”
The question rattled him and made him look up from Lula to the giant beside him. He blinked questioningly, but Wrecker’s eyes were serious.
“You’re one of us now, okay? Just wanna make sure you know that.” The biggest batcher shifted his shoulders against the chair. It looked like he was trying to make sure he had time to think and make sure he said what he wanted to, the way he wanted to. “You’re not just here . When Hunter asked if you wanted ta come along, he was askin’ for all of us. And we don’t let brothers go through stuff alone. If ya ever feel like you’re on the outside, just tell us. I mean, hopefully you won’t, but still…”
A quiet snore mercifully interrupted the explosion expert’s monologue, drifting sluggishly up from his side. He looked down and smiled.
Sometime during his little speech, Echo had completely succumbed to sleep. The cyborg looked weirdly peaceful, far more at ease than he did when he was awake.
Wrecker knew that Echo had been hurt worse than most people could imagine and that he would hurt for a long time from what had been done to him. He would struggle, and he would ache and sometimes he wouldn’t want to talk about it and then sometimes he would probably fall apart.
But that’s what we’re here for , he mused silently.
There wasn’t one of his brothers he hadn’t comforted at some time or another, just like there wasn’t one of them who hadn’t helped him, especially after that explosion. When he’d thrown himself in front of his three siblings, he’d expected to die. Sometimes he thought that would have been easier than all the therapy and healing he’d had to go through afterward. His entire body had been on fire when he’d awakened, the left half of his awareness numb and void, and that was after three days of being knocked out in medical. But Hunter, Crosshair, and Tech had stayed with him the entire time, and they’d all gotten through it together. And best of all, he still had them – he’d been able to protect them, even at the price he’d paid with his eye, hearing, and looks (which even he could admit had been better previously). He wouldn’t have traded the outcome now for anything in the galaxy.
Now he had another brother to help protect, to help heal. Echo was still broken, but Wrecker sure wasn’t going to let him stay that way. None of them would. He was one of them now, and whatever else happened in the war or the galaxy at large, the Bad Batch stuck together. They had to. And more than that, they wanted to.
Maybe if they stuck close enough to Echo, they could convince him that he didn’t have to be strong enough alone anymore. Maybe they could squeeze him tight enough that all his broken pieces fused back together. They’d leave scars, but scars were just signs of healing, weren’t they? Wrecker’s own scars had long ago ceased to represent the pain of his injuries. Instead, he looked in the mirror every morning and saw the symbols of how hard his brothers had fought to keep him alive and with them, how much he’d overcome to do the same. Echo would have scars, but hopefully he’d come to look at them like medals, like signs of a battle he’d won.
Wrecker didn’t know it, but Echo was dreaming about scars. Not his own, though. In his finally restful slumber, Echo’s vision flashed with glimpses and snatches of a deadly black skull, a crosshair tattoo, someone snoring, and a fluffy black and red tooka prancing around the Marauder , with whitish scars stretched across its face. There was a soft click as something seemed to snap back together behind his half-metal ribs, and when dream Echo looked down at his chest, he realized it was his heart.