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Chapter Text

“What is the bird call that you most prefer?” 

Despite the fact that he hadn’t spoken in over an hour, Tech asked the question with a casually conversational tone that took Echo a little off guard.

The cyborg blinked at the engineer with more than a little confusion. He’d only been with the Batch for two days and he was already learning that the brains of the bunch tended to live and think at a higher speed than the rest of them. It fascinated Echo, his half-mechanical mind whirling as he imagined what his new sibling was capable of with his immense knowledge and lightning-fast computation skills. It was also beginning to grate a little at times, such as now, when Tech would randomly come back to reality and act as if everyone was aware of what had been going on in his exceptional brain while he was stuck inside it.

Echo wondered just how far inside his own head the inventor had been, since he went so quickly from tinkering with the cyborg’s new comm device to asking him about birds .

“ Bird ?” Echo finally responded, repeating the word as a question.

Tech breathed a slight sigh, his eyes shining from behind his goggles in a way that could have been taken for condescending. After Wrecker had explained the engineer’s often anti-social behavior, Echo knew the real emotion he was expressing was just vague chafe, likely at his companion’s slow uptake of his topic. “Which bird call do you find most pleasing or interesting?” he repeated. “Or, which avian itself is your favorite?”

Echo felt rather stupid with Tech staring at him expectantly like that, but then again, the engineer had that effect on nearly everyone. Should he have a favorite bird? Was that a normal thing to have? 

As soon as the thought crossed his mind he banished it and would have kicked himself if he could have. He was the most normal clone in this squad, with three prosthetic limbs and all! If having a favorite feathered creature was the status quo, surely he’d know. Rex would have told him, or Fives would have. He would have known Fives’s favorite bird. 

Surely it must just be another Bad Batch quirk.

Tech cleared his throat gently and Echo realized he’d been staring off into space again. None of the Batch ever seemed angry about the little pockets of time when he would fixate on something and mentally leave the planet, but he had noticed that Tech had begun to try to coax him out of them more quickly. The engineer was probably worried that the episodes were a side effect of his mental trauma from Skakko and the Techno Union.

If anything was going to make Echo feel worse than not knowing he was supposed to have a favorite bird, it was causing his brilliant new batcher to worry about him unnecessarily. He turned his brain inside out quickly for any kind of bird he could remember seeing or hearing of. “A…an avril?” he ventured. 

Tech made a face. It was so unexpected that Echo nearly burst out laughing. The combination of Tech’s usual determination in everything, even being miffed, and the way his goggles seemed to magnify his eyes and the funny little scrunch his nose acquired was far too adorable to be seen on a battle-hardened war veteran.

“An avril is a fair favorite, as it is a formidable creature in its own right,” the engineer said almost cautiously. Echo realized with surprise that the man was trying not to hurt his feelings, thinking surely that the creature really was his favorite bird. In reality, the cybernetic didn’t know what the thing even looked like. He wasn’t even entirely sure where he had heard of it. “However, the cry it makes is cacophonous – some natives of the moon it inhabits have described the sound as ear-shattering .”

Well, Echo thought, better make a note of that for the next time he was asked about birds .

“The creature also makes a habit of feeding upon the young of said natives, the Melodies, choosing them even over the more readily available reels and purellas.” Tech was continuing steadily, his hands still working over the comm device, tweaking different things or maybe just checking them. He was moving his fingers so deftly and quickly that Echo couldn’t tell. “While it is not considered sentient and therefore not innately bound to the basic idea of morality, this would render its cry a less than ideal choice for your callsign, even if the humanoid throat were capable of replicating it.”

Echo’s head tilted sideways and his eyes narrowed. “Callsign?” he repeated again, and wanted to kick himself again . He was beginning to give the engineer a taste of why he’d been given his name in the first place.

“Of course.” Tech, once again, succeeded in making him feel very stupid, those big brown eyes blinking owlishly at him from behind the glass lenses. “You are now part of our squad. As Hunter, Wrecker, Crosshair, and I each have a unique bird call by which we can be recognized, it follows that you should choose one as well.”

Now the cyborg was more intrigued than skeptical. “You use bird calls as identifiers?”

Tech was already working on something else that had been lying on his worktable. Echo was beginning to think that the other man’s brain was hopelessly symbiotic with his fingers – that one couldn’t operate without the other going a hundred kliks a minute, too. “When necessary or convenient,” he answered. “Our personal call signs have come in handy quite often in a few of our more risky missions, or in the many times one or more of us has been captured or isolated from the rest of the squad. Birds are common inhabitants of nearly all planets, so their sounds are not usually taken into account as important. Even though each of our chosen calls belongs to a different species, the particular four of which would not be present on the same planet under any circumstances, not a single opponent has ever noticed this or seemed to think it relevant if they have.” 

Echo settled into the pilot’s chair, easing his scomp arm onto the armrest gingerly. The now-nonexistent part of his arm where his elbow used to be was sore and throbbing dully again, the phantom pain still a mild irritant in his day-to-day life. He wondered if it would ever end.  “What are the others’ calls?”

Tech’s eyes took on the new glow that showed up only when he was talking about his brothers. At first, Echo had thought it was just a brighter gleam than usual, but he had been paying close attention over the last two days and he had discovered that the light actually seemed to emanate from inside the engineer’s eyes. It was as if his heart itself was glowing. 

“We chose our calls as cadets, which resulted in the species of choice being slightly imaginative ,” he answered. “Crosshair’s call is that of a Cloudripper, a species native to the ocean moon of Kef Bir in the Endor system. I believe he chose it more for its high-flying capabilities than for its rather low, gull-like cry.”

Echo was silent, soaking up the information like a sponge. He had expected the Batch to take longer than two days to warm up to him completely, especially with the hard-nosed exclusivity the group had displayed among the regular ranks of the GAR. Yet here he was, hardly forty-eight hours into his new life aboard the Marauder , and one of the two most outwardly wary 99s was freely telling him personal, apparently cherished memories from his cadet hood. He wasn’t sure if he should be honored or shocked.

If he was honest, he was a little bit of both.

“Wrecker was far more indecisive. First, he thought he would choose a Mantellian flutterplume, a carnivorous bird from Ord Mantell that possesses four legs, wicked talons, and a blindingly rainbow array of feathers. Its grotesqueness piqued his imagination, but upon learning of its inborn attraction to death and blood, and its habit of preying upon the injured left on battlefields, he dismissed it in favor of an Argonian Ruffle bird."

At Echo’s confused expression, Tech smiled and explained further. “A small, downy-feathered bird found on several moons in the remote Belderone system. Its plumage ranges from dark gold to bright purple, with the young of the species remaining silvery blue until adolescence. According to many sources, it is, to quote directly, quite adorable .”

The cyborg snorted. “That’s Wrecker’s callsign?”

“In his defense, he was not aware of the appearance of the creature until after he had chosen it. At the time I had access only to recordings of the bird’s song, which is a series of whistles and chirps that are rather simple to imitate and easily passed over if one is not listening for them. By the time I discovered what the Ruffle bird looked like, it was too late. Besides,” Tech continued with a smirk. “Hunter believed it suited Wrecker quite well, as far as the word adorable applied.”

“Uh, what?” Echo couldn’t help but ask. The sight of Wrecker was likely to give any Ruffle bird a heart attack. Echo would probably have one as well, if he ever saw the bruiser imitating the call of such a tiny little avian. One that was apparently “adorable.”

“Remember, we were cadets. Fourth-years, at the latest. Wrecker did not receive his trademark scars until we were sent out to battle, and even though he quickly surpassed the rest of us in size he was arguably the least visually displeasing of our batch. According to General Shaak Ti, at least.”

That got Echo’s attention even more than the Ruffle bird. “You knew General Ti?”

“Yes.” Tech blinked at him with one of those wasn’t it obvious ? looks again. “She knew our oldest brother, who is now deceased, and he introduced us to her at some point during our earlier years. When her time on Kamino overlapped with ours, she was fond of coming to our barracks to gauge our welfare. Wrecker was her favorite, no doubt owing to his naturally outgoing personality.”

“And because he was cute.” Somehow Echo still had a hard time imagining Wrecker as a cadet, especially a cute one.

“She was also fascinated by his red hair.”

Echo stared at him. “Wrecker had red hair?” There he went, echoing again. But what else was he supposed to do with that bombshell?

Tech nodded. “A few of the other cadets had at one time sported hair pigments genetically divergent from the Kaminoans’ standard clone, but I do not believe General Ti had ever seen one with red hair. At least, I gathered as much from her reaction.”

“Wrecker had red hair,” Echo repeated again, more to himself.

“I will find a photo for you, once I have completed resyncing the comms,” Tech assured him. “The explosion in which Wrecker gained his facial scars seems to have rendered him permanently bald, so there is little chance you will see what it looked like otherwise.”

Before the conversation slipped into a melancholy tone (if that was a possibility with Tech – Echo thought he was far more happy to have his brother alive than to waste time worrying over how he felt about being bald for the rest of his life) the cyborg shifted it back to the main topic. “What about Hunter’s call?”

Tech shot him a grin. An actual grin . Echo’s heart thumped quickly in his chest, knowing nothing more than the fact that Tech hadn’t even grinned when telling him about Wrecker’s flutterplume or ruffle bird so this had to be good .

“Hunter is capable of vast vocal ranges, so he had far more options to choose from, whereas the rest of us were constricted by our more commonly structured plica vocalis . He chose the Shyyyo bird. It is a rare creature, once thought to be only a legend, and is found on Kashyyyk, where it is known as an excellent hunter and preys upon the giant spiders and slugs that plague the forests. The Wookies hold it in high regard as a symbol of peace and protection, and claim its feathers bring good luck.”

Leave it to Hunter to pick something based on its symbolism over any other attribute, Echo mused. He was idealistic enough for something like that. 

But Tech was still grinning, and he hadn’t picked up on anything that should be embarrassing or funny about Hunter’s callsign. Echo was beginning to wish he’d read birding guides instead of regulations manuals. 

“And it’s funny that he picked it…why?” he prodded.

Tech’s eyes were practically dancing with amusement now. “The Shyyyo bird is massive . One of the tallest avians in known existence.”

Echo sucked in a breath. He was sure his eyes were bulging with the effort to not laugh.

Then Tech chuckled, and after two days of seeing the rather stoic engineer instead of this more emotional person in front of him, Echo did too. He laughed and realized suddenly that he hadn’t laughed like this since before the Citadel. Before he’d lost Fives.

He’d never thought he’d laugh like this again.

Nope . He stubbornly threw that thought back into the black space at the back of his mind and focused on the moment instead. He’d deal with his demons later. 

“He’s always been shorter?” He let the laugh die off and brushed his hand across his eyes quickly. 

Tech was smiling easily now. “Wrecker has been much larger than the rest of us since decanting, but for several growth cycles Crosshair, Hunter, and I were the same height. Then during our sixth-year growth spurts, Crosshair and I suddenly gained several inches and Hunter did not. Whether it was due to some anomaly caused by his enhancements or merely another defect, even the Kaminoans could not tell. His height has been a running joke among us ever since.”

“I’ll make sure not to mention it,” Echo grinned.

“He is not as sensitive about it as you might think. He did, after all, have to survive Kamino as the only clone with long hair. And his insufferable nose .”

Echo choked on his sound of surprise. The engineer smirked. “Believe me, he is quite aware of his differentiating facial features. We did grow up with Crosshair, who possessed even less of a verbal filter as a cadet than he does now.”

That was almost as hard to imagine as Wrecker as a ruffle bird.

“Back to the topic at hand, the callsigns,” Tech remarked. He was still holding the comm unit in one hand, but it seemed more of a placeholder than a current project of importance as he settled into the other pilot chair. “My own is a –”

“Wait, let me guess.” To Echo’s surprise, Tech acquiesced and waited for him to give his reply. 

The cyborg looked at the inventor closely, trying to think of any bird he’d ever heard of or thought he had heard of to pinpoint one for Tech. Wrecker may have chosen a creature very different from himself, but Tech seemed more practical and Echo doubted he was quite as fanciful in some ways as his brothers. 

“An owl,” he finally said. He was rewarded with a blink and a smile from his new sibling. 

“Yes,” Tech said with a slight undertone of pride that Echo allowed himself to think was the result of him guessing correctly, and not because of the apt choice the engineer had made as a cadet for his own callsign. “A convor, actually.”

“Because of the goggles?” Echo asked, because he had to. 

“My eyewear certainly adds to the resemblance,” Tech agreed. “However, Crosshair actually helped me decide. As my projected usefulness to the GAR included my splicing and hacking abilities, he thought I should select a stealthy creature for my call. Convorees are quite the sneaks when they like to be, and often work in groups to attack their own predators and drop them to their deaths from the treetops on their homeworld of Wasskah.”

“Yikes.”

“That was my opinion of the matter. But Crosshair assured me that I can be, quote, “very mean” when I want to be, and therefore the convorees would not be offended.” Tech looked at him expectantly. “On my datapad, there is an expansive collection of the most interesting avian species in the galaxy, and many of the audio files are downloaded. You are welcome to look through them, if you would like, and select the one you find most fitting. That way we can solidify your callsign as soon as possible, before we are sent on any major assignments.”

For the next hour, Echo learned more about birds than he ever thought he would want to, but somehow the time flew by and he hardly noticed. After letting him scroll through the files on his own for a while and realizing he was getting hopelessly distracted by the detailed descriptions and photos of brightly feathered creatures, Tech decided the rest of the communication adjustments could wait and joined him in poring over the datapad. The engineer was obviously very interested in birds – or maybe just in everything, and birds were the current topic – and Echo found himself enjoying listening to the other clone’s endless stream of knowledge as it poured out in his clipped, Coroscauntian accent. One day he’d have to ask him where he’d picked up that manner of speech. He was pretty sure an accent couldn’t be engineered, and even if it could, the Kaminoans would have had no reason for doing so.

“This one would be a good choice.” Tech pointed out a medium-sized avian that bore two ear-like crests on its head and feathers that gleamed in varied shades of yellow, blue, and orange. “The Tiga Loreng of Bimmisaari is held in high regard by the natives of that planet, due to its regal appearance and its long history of surviving in secret even when hunted nearly to extinction. The Law Elders of the planet have placed a ban on killing any of the species, and it has rebounded with surprising resilience after being almost eradicated from the face of its homeworld.”

“What does it sound like?” Echo wondered aloud.

Tech reached over and scrolled down the page until he came to another photo of the bird. An audio file was nestled next to it, and he activated the sound function. A baritone trill emitted from the datapad’s speaker, surprising Echo with the deep sound for such a light-colored and almost fragile-looking bird.

“I believe that should be a simple enough call for you to make, with your gruffer tone of voice and a little practice,” Tech mused.

At the engineer’s urging, Echo tried it a few times. He felt his cheeks heat up as he, an elite ARC trooper, clumsily imitated a bird , but Tech seemed unbothered by the seemingly embarrassing nature of it, so he decided to not let it bother him so much. Now, if Crosshair came in, that would be a different story.

Finally, Tech approved his recreation of the bird call and took the datapad to look up Echo’s file. The cyborg was confused until he realized that the engineer wasn’t updating his GAR file, but an unshared one that seemed to be much more personal. When Tech clicked out of the document after noting that Echo’s call sign was now a Bimmisaari Tiga Loreng , the ARC saw four more files next to his on the list – Wrecker, Crosshair, Hunter, and Tech. His was right beneath Crosshair’s and somehow it looked like it already belonged with the other names.

“Hey, anybody in here?” Wrecker’s booming voice echoed into the cockpit from the open hall. Three sets of footsteps – one thunderous, the other solid, and the last hardly audible – told the two other clones that their three comrades had returned from the supply run to the nearest village. This little inhabited moon they had landed on the night before wasn’t glamorous or even welcoming by any means, but Echo had been surprised to see the ease with which the Bad Batch navigated the locals and seemed to be perfectly at home in the crowded market area. He had come to the conclusion that they had been there before.

Tech gave a brief eye roll as he rose. “Yes, as you could have deduced from the fact that we never left ,” he called back. He strode through the doorway, leaving Echo alone with the datapad for a moment as he undoubtedly went to inspect what his brothers had brought back. Echo had quickly learned that if Tech was well-informed about most other topics, he was dialed in on nutrition and his siblings’ health seemed to be something of an obsession. The cyborg could almost hear Wrecker hiding some kind of food item that he knew wouldn’t pass the Tech test.

Before walking out to join the others and presumably take up for the loveable hunk of muscle that was his new biggest brother, Echo clicked the datapad on once more and tapped his way to the bird files again. When he reached the Tiga Loreng – his bird, he thought contentedly – he noticed something he hadn’t when he had first glanced over the description with Tech. Beneath the photo and audio file belonging to the Tiga Loreng’s profile, the engineer’s crisply typed notes read:

The Law Elders have placed a ban on the killing of any tiga lorengs, with the punishment for infractions ranging from five standard years of hard labor to death by firing squad. As the birds have become a planetary symbol of resilience and survival, the sentence is usually death.

Well, that was a little harsh. Or maybe not. Echo wasn’t very fond of other beings trying to kill him, so he couldn’t imagine the fluffy little bird in the photo was either. Still…he wondered if Tech had another reason for guiding him toward this particular avian. In Wrecker’s brief warning about how the engineer could be, in his words, “sort of not good with people stuff,” the giant had mentioned that their brilliant brother often expressed himself in different ways. Ways that were so subtle that regular people couldn’t see them, or perhaps didn’t understand them.

Tech had made a clear point of noting the creature’s resilience, which not even Echo could miss as a comment on his recent trials. Did that mean that the rest of this description applied to him, too? Would the Batch really kill for him – and was Tech comfortable enough to tell him that, after only two days?

He had a lot to think about. Not just about the bird and its maybe-message from Tech, but the engineer had let it drop that the 99s had another brother who had died . Rex hadn’t told him that. Actually, Rex hadn’t told him much about the Batch before he’d left. And what did Tech mean by their time on Kamino occasionally overlapping with General Ti’s? Were the 99s taken off-world as cadets for…some reason? 

He had even more questions than he could list at the moment, most of which would have to wait to be asked. When he looked down and saw his name on the folder next to the others’, he felt his brain start spinning again, trying to understand the answers he already had. Tech must have begun the file as soon as he'd boarded the Marauder – maybe even before that, while they were still on Anaxes – to have this much information compiled about him already. Some of it was about prosthetics and there were notes beside the illustrations, mostly shorthand scribbles done with a stylus and nearly all recommending ways to improve or strengthen the pictured design. 

A warm hand clenched around his heart and gave it some kind of almost painful squeeze. He glanced back at the beginning of the document and took careful note of the bird name and callsign that had been added just beneath his name. With a jolt, he realized that he didn't feel so disconnected anymore. Somehow having the Tiga Loreng right there, just like Hunter's Shyyyo bird, Crosshair's Cloudripper, Wrecker's ruffle bird, and Tech's convor, made him feel like he had both feet on the ground again instead of stumbling blindly along. 

He sat there, looking at the file for a few more minutes while the talking and cheerful banter rose in volume in the next room. He trilled the little bird whistle again, as quietly as he could, and a piece of something that had broken deep in his chest inexplicably clicked back into place.

Chapter Text

After the variety of items from Wrecker, Crosshair, and Hunter’s supply run were put (i.e., wrestled after much banter and disagreement) into their proper places aboard the Marauder , Echo was amazed at how streamlined Tech and Hunter managed to keep the shuttle (because Crosshair and Wrecker were certainly very little help). The Omicron wasn’t the smallest ship in the GAR, but it was certainly not the largest, and with a fifth person now living on board it was beginning to feel a little cramped. Wrecker had assured the Batch’s newest member that he’d feel at home in the snug quarters within the week, while Tech seemed a little more worried about how the cyborg would adjust to such close living arrangements so soon after being released from his solitary imprisonment on Skakko.

Echo, on the other hand, wasn’t sure he would have been able to function without vode near him nearly every waking minute. After the Bad Batch, General Skywalker, and Rex had busted him out of the Techno Union’s fortress, he’d been lucid enough, but once they’d escaped their pursuers and helped the Poltecs his adrenaline had quickly faded into a white emptiness that left his veins hollow and his head pounding. The last thing he remembered of the flight back from Skakko Minor was the Marauder walls suddenly doing a 360 in his clouded vision and someone catching him as he fell into a boneless heap. It might have been Rex, but from the quick reflexes – the person had grabbed him before he had even realized he was falling – and a vaguely remembered flash of crimson and brown that had filled his vision, he thought it had been Hunter. 

In either case, he’d woken up in medical on Anaxes and promptly flipped out on the medic who was trying to check his vitals. In the ensuing struggle, he’d nearly overpowered three medical officers, his emaciated body turning into an unfeeling machine as he tried to escape whatever had him. He hadn’t calmed down, his brain looping the white walls and bright lights into a nightmarish replay of the T.U. labs until someone had rushed from nearby and almost crushed him into their arms. For some reason, the unapologetic, unhesitating embrace had jolted through him in a way the careful, clinical actions of the medics couldn’t and had broken the stream of horrors spinning through his terrified mind. He hadn’t had the willpower to open his eyes again for a long time after that, opting to stay in the dark where the white wasn’t so bright and it was easier to think of something else, but the person who had grabbed him and dragged him back from the nightmares had stayed with him. 

He had been sure that time that it was Hunter. He had also been sure that whatever happened after he was cleared for duty, he never wanted to be alone. Not after a year of being stuck in a cryo chamber, only half-aware of what was going on around him but cruelly certain that he was on his own, separated from anyone he had ever known as a friend and likely forgotten among the realms of people who were still alive, who weren’t alone . Rex used to joke that he and Fives were joined at the hip, but now he was positively clingy . 

He’d been worried about that when he joined the Batch. When he had seen them on the battlefield and in Purkoll, he hadn’t known who they were. Once he had been enlightened, he’d been almost blindsided. After all, these were the elite Black Ops. Some rumors even suggested that they’d been trained by a Null – others were adamant that they’d been trained by all of them. They were Clone Force 99, Cody’s apparent pride and joy, and while he loved the commander to death, there was no way anyone could have ever equated the 212th commander’s serious approach to life with Rex’s just as fierce but less rigid personality. Surely his 501st background, with Skywalker’s insane antics and the relatively relaxed view of regulations, would grate with these hard-wired killing machines. 

Within the first five minutes of their trip to take down Trench, he had changed his mind. The Bad Batch might be an elite squad – the only one with a one hundred percent success rate – but there was no way they could be called serious , not in the same meaning of the word as it applied to Cody. They were rambunctious and quick to adapt to any situation, regardless of the propriety of their solutions. They didn’t do what anyone told them to – at least not the way they were told to – and Rex had mentioned that Hunter had even refused to directly answer General Skywalker. They laughed more than any other soldiers he’d known and only hours after he’d met them, he’d witnessed at least three pranks one member had played on another – the prankster usually being Wrecker. 

But above all, they were tactile. More so than his own batch had been. In the two days he’d been their companion, he’d seen Wrecker unceremoniously walk up to Tech and suddenly pull him into his side in a sort of half-hug, holding onto him and acting as if it were a usual occurrence. It must have been because Tech had merely huffed to voice his annoyance at being jostled and went back to whatever he was reading. Crosshair had a habit of sitting so close to his brothers that he was practically pressed against them, and Echo had been surprised on his first night on the Marauder to see the snappy sniper pull Hunter into an abrupt, full-arm embrace. Granted, everyone else had been asleep (or supposed to be) when the oldest and the youngest Batchers had done their changing of the watch, but the show of vulnerability Crosshair had displayed had stunned the cyborg. The man who had successfully warned all regular clones far from his immediate vicinity on Anaxes and had instigated not one, but two fights with the 501st within a matter of hours, suddenly reaching out for comfort and just existing in that hug for a while was not something Echo had been prepared to see. Yes, the Batch was extremely tactile, and so close to one another that Echo doubted you could drive a lightsaber between any two of them. 

But why shouldn’t they be? From what he'd heard from Rex, the captain himself hadn’t even known that the four-man squad existed outside of rumor until Cody had announced their arrival on Anaxes. He could only imagine how the longnecks on Kamino had kept such a unique project a secret – it was mind-boggling, to say the least, and likely included some kind of secret lab where the Batch had spent who knew how long being crafted into the one-of-a-kind soldiers they were now. They were so separate from the other clones that they were likely the only vode each other had ever known, resulting in their close bonds that rivaled anything Echo had ever experienced or heard of. 

And for some reason, these four misfit legends had quickly opened their arms to him. He hadn’t even put words to the idea that he wasn’t one of the regs anymore before Hunter was on the tarmac telling him to find them, or more subliminally to come with them . It had been more a spontaneous adoption than a military transfer, and Echo wasn’t quite sure how he felt about it or why it had even happened.

“Quit it, reg,” Crosshair’s voice slunk coldly into his thoughts and coiled irritably behind his eyes. He always saw the white-haired member of the batch as a snake, in his mind, curled up and ready to strike. The man’s usually annoyed attitude toward life and all creatures that shared it seemed to shift the memory of the shift-change hug into an imaginative hallucination.

Echo tried to put on his best devil-may-care expression as he looked up at the sniper. He figured that the best way to be friends with Crosshair was to be just as much a snarky, irritating son of a gun as he was. “What?” 

“You’re staring off again. Stop it.” Crosshair had sprawled his lanky frame on the top bunk he claimed as his own and was lying on his stomach. His angular face peered over the edge, amber eyes glaring at the cyborg.

“I’ll stare if I want to, thank you very much,” Echo retorted, nose in the air.

Crosshair huffed and disappeared back over the edge of the bunk. He’d been up there a long time – since Tech had banished both him and Wrecker from the organizing and putting away committee for trying to sneak too many not-Tech-approved food items under his nose – and little scratching sounds had been the only noise besides his eerily even breathing. 

What was he doing?

Echo pushed himself up from the bottom bunk’s painfully thin mattress (being Wrecker’s, he guessed it had probably been crushed to death long ago beneath almost three hundred pounds of muscle) and stood on his metal toes to peek over the edge of Crosshair’s bunk.

“Hey,” Crosshair hissed. His eyes narrowed even more and the defensive gleam in them should have been warning enough.

Echo ignored him and stretched higher. The silver lining to the crapstorm that had been the last year of his life was that the prosthetics actually made him a little taller than he had formerly been. His metal limbs gave him the inch or so of extra height necessary to see over the corner of the mattress and into Crosshair’s elevated sanctuary.

Crosshair jerked his arm closer to his body, taking something along with it and pulling it toward his chest. He was fast – another attribute that gave him a snakish quality – but not so fast that Echo didn’t catch a glimpse of what he tried to slide out of sight.

The cyborg’s eyes widened. “Are you drawing ?”

Crosshair snarled like an angry cat. “Back off,” he growled. The sound was still disquieting, but there was considerably less venom in it than Echo thought there should be. 

But now Echo was even more interested than before. “I didn’t know you could draw.”

“I didn’t know you were nosier than Wrecker ,” the sniper shot back.

Echo wrinkled his nose and glared the other man down. “What are you drawing?”

“None of your business .” Crosshair had rolled over slightly and was now reclining on his side, his arm still covering the majority of the sketchpad he’d so abruptly jerked from its original place in front of him. Echo glanced at what portions of the paper he could see and his mind began to abstractly connect bits and pieces of shaded sketch.

He pointed to the right corner that was tucked almost beneath Crosshair’s torso. “Is that a wave?” 

Crosshair’s thin eyebrows drew together as he frowned and looked down, lifting his arm a little to see better. “Kark,” he hissed. He slid the sketchpad back into the open and scowled at the smudged artwork. “See what you made me do?”

Echo was able to get a better look at the drawing and realized that the soft, undulating lines he’d seen were not waves. Actually, they weren’t even supposed to be there. When he’d jerked the sketchpad out of Echo’s view, Crosshair’s elbow had caught the corner and his thick blacks had smudged the soft lead and now where there had been hard, purposeful lines, there was a grayish cloud marring the cream-colored sheet. Beyond the smudging, though, the detail of the drawing was shocking, at least to Echo, especially given the scene it was portraying.

It was the Bad Batch, and him , as they saluted Rex before leaving Anaxes. Crosshair had somehow pictured the scene in his mind and transferred it immaculately to the paper. It was nothing short of an act of sorcery to someone like Echo, whose best art had been the stick figure he had once drawn on Fives’ face when his vod was asleep on Rishi. The smudged portion of the page was at the bottom of the drawing and had turned all their boots into one block of gray, but the rest of it was undamaged by Crosshair’s urgent evasive maneuvering.

They were all there, looking at him from the page as if he were the one they were saluting. Wrecker with his pale facial scars and whitened, unseeing eye. Crosshair, threatening and sharp as ever even without his signature rifle in his hands. Tech was still loaded down with his dozens of “necessary” accessories tucked into leather sheaths along his white armor, and Hunter was wearing the expression Echo remembered seeing when the sergeant was around General Skywalker and Rex – serious and firm, his eyes dark and grim enough to match the tattooed half skull that adorned the whole left side of his face. 

And then there was Echo himself, encased in armor that he honestly had no idea how the Batch had gotten ahold of. He hadn’t asked and he probably didn’t want to know, unless the four-man strike team had made a habit of hauling around hefty suits of extra armor on their already cramped shuttle. All that had mattered at that moment was having armor, some kind of protection against the stares he knew he would garner anywhere he went, a sort of shell to go over the thin blacks that had been found for him to wear. (Actually, he was pretty sure those had come from the Batch too. He remembered something about Tech’s old set and they’d be too big but he’d fill out and then they'd fit, and then Hunter saying that anything was better than letting him shiver the whole way back to Anaxes. Then everything went black again and he thought he had gone to sleep.)

The cyborg fought back a wince as he let his eyes wander to his sketched-out face. He knew he’d looked awful that day, and he still looked terrible, but he hadn’t quite made himself believe that he’d basically been death warmed over for those first two days out of Skakko. In the sketch, his face was still gaunt, though Crosshair had added a little flesh that didn’t exist yet to pad his bones and unhealthily sharp angles. He had all three clunky metal limbs and his eyes appeared almost too big for his head, sunk back into his sockets like they had retreated back with his sanity to find some kind of safety during his imprisonment. His skin wasn’t shaded quite as much as that of the other four, still accurately portraying his chalky pallor, but at least his ribs weren’t showing. At least the armor had been a shell, something to hide the vulnerable parts of him that even Crosshair couldn’t have easily penciled over, the scars and stumps of his legs and arm where metal met flesh, where the machine his captors had tried to turn him into was forced to cooperate with the mangled man they had left him.

Then there was the skull, he noted dryly. Crosshair had been sure to draw the small, seemingly insignificant skull that had been stamped into the left of the chest plate, high over Echo’s now mechanically supported heart. Now that the cybernetic thought about it, the skull had not been worn down like the rest of the armor. It had been quickly, maybe even hastily stenciled onto the plating before he’d gotten it. Probably to mark the armor as the Batch’s, to make sure no one would try to take it before it got back to them.

He’d zoned out again. Crosshair was glaring at him, though the glare wasn’t so cold as it was curious. Maybe the sniper was wondering how many times his new squadmate could lose sense of reality in twenty minutes.

Echo cleared his throat softly but kept his eyes on the picture. “Hardly recognize me,” he managed. “I mean, you guys didn’t see me before, but…” His voice trailed off for a few seconds as what he had once looked like, who he had once been , flashed through his mind. “It wasn’t that.”

He was left in the quiet for a moment before Crosshair spoke. “I know what you looked like.”

Echo scoffed. “Yeah. There’s twenty million of us.”

Crosshair huffed, indignant at being misunderstood. “No, I know what you looked like.”

That made Echo look up from the sketch pad and at the sniper. “What?” 

“Rex was looking at a holo while you were still unconscious. Saw it when I went to medical with Wrecker. He wanted to check on Cody. ” Echo noticed that Crosshair had purposefully not said that he had wanted to check on Cody. The “killer toothpick-man” he’d heard Kix describe to the recuperating commander still had his reputation to keep, after all. 

“Why didn’t you use that , then?” Echo asked, a little annoyed. More than he should be, really. He should be grateful to be in the picture at all, he supposed. It wasn’t like Crosshair had to include him in the sketch of his brothers.

Crosshair narrowed his gaze into a blade that could have killed a bantha. “That’s not what you look like now.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed.” Echo didn’t mean to snap. It just happened. He was four days out from being rescued and he knew what he looked like. He certainly didn’t need the reminder of that, or of how everything had changed. How everything was different and he couldn’t go back and change it. How his arm and legs – or lack thereof – were starting to hurt again and he couldn’t do anything because there was nothing there that should be hurting.  

“Shut up,” Crosshair shot back. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bunk, making Echo step back a little to keep from getting kicked in the chest. The retort and the accompanying scowl manifested so sharply that Echo blinked in surprise. “Stop acting like it changes anything.”  

Now the cyborg’s temper was teetering dangerously close to anger. “It changes a karking lot , Crosshair.” He flung his good arm – his remaining arm – out to gesture to all of him. His entire body in its mutilated, pale glory. “Look at me!”

“I see you. I can see you better than anyone else,” Crosshair reminded him. “I don’t know what you see, but right now I’m looking at an ARC trooper on the brink of wallowing in self-pity.”

“I think I’m already there,” Echo grumbled. He didn’t want to fight with Crosshair. He wasn’t even really angry at the sniper. He was more angry at himself.

“No, you’re not. But you’re close,” the white-haired man told him. “Close enough you need to take a big kriffing step back and think about what's happened since Tech yanked you out of that stasis chamber.”

“You weren’t there,” Echo pointed out. He leaned against the other bunks and let most of his weight rest on his right foot, where the pain wasn’t so bad. The throb in his left knee or where it should be dulled a little when the pressure was taken away.

“I was there right after,” the sniper shot back. His amber eyes were dagger-like, his look saying clearly don’t interrupt. “You were kriffed up. I thought you were dead, when we walked in and Tech hadn’t unhooked you yet. But as soon as he did, you cracked a stupid joke and showed us the way out. Then you had the bright idea to steal a ship from a guarded dock, and when that didn’t work you were the first to jump onto a Keeradak. A day and a half later you were electrocuted after shutting down the on-world droid forces with a command you sent from your brain and two hours after that you woke up to ask how many were left.”

His hands were already focused on the sketch again, rubbing off the smudges of soft lead and brushing it away. He and Tech were similar in that regard, at least. Their hands had to be moving, had to have something to do if they were going to hold a conversation of any length. Tech’s crutch was a datapad or his tools, Crosshair’s was toothpicks or weaponry…and apparently, sketching materials. “You’re tougher than a kriffing krayt, so quit acting like this is gonna kill you. Because it isn’t.”

Crosshair’s gaze, Echo realized, was unnervingly cold and piercing when it was leveled at you. Honest, too. Like there was no room for guile or warmly honeyed words in such a thin, cold-natured man. He said what he thought and didn’t bother sugarcoating it. What he said was what he really believed.

Echo’s throat was suddenly dry. He desperately hoped those weren’t tears pricking at the backs of his eyes. “How do you know?” he finally croaked.

Crosshair gave him a self-satisfied hint of a smile. “Because you won’t let it. Too karking stubborn.”

Echo had to return the grin, unsteady though it might be. “Takes one to know one, I guess.”

Instead of disagreeing, Crosshair just hmmed and looked back to the drawing. It didn’t look terrible, now that he had erased most of the damaged part. He’d have to redraw that portion, but the entire thing hadn’t taken him more than a couple of hours. He’d probably have it repaired by late meal.

“Hope it’s not too bad,” Echo said, testing the waters for changing the subject. 

Crosshair didn’t look up at him. “Lead’s too soft. Junk pencils. Smears if you breathe on it.” He flicked a few more particles of the crumbly lead off the page and picked up the pencil again, holding the pad of paper in his lap as he reclined against the wall to continue, his white hair brushing the roof. It looked like he was done with the conversation.

“I didn’t know you could draw,” the cyborg said lamely. He’d said the same thing before but for some reason, he didn’t want to stop talking yet. Maybe it was because he’d been able to forget about his twinging stumps when he was arguing.

The sniper’s scoff was a little softer this time, more friendly than fierce. “You don’t know a lot, yet,” he said cryptically. The next seconds were filled with the sound of the scratching pencil on paper.

Well, that’s that , Echo thought morosely. He was beginning to feel stupid, standing by one bunk and just looking up at Crosshair on the other. Surely there was something else he could be doing to take his mind off things he’d rather not think about. But Hunter and Tech had gone hunting – Hunter hadn’t said he needed a partner, but Tech had decided he wanted to look for a certain herb and also that Hunter could not be trusted to find it on his own or remember to bring it back – and Wrecker was lifting Gonky or powering through an impossible amount of pushups on the flat ground immediately outside the ship. Echo had little desire for a workout at the moment, especially with his limbs hurting, but if Crosshair was going to let the awkward silence hang, he’d just…

“I didn’t know I could, either. For a long time.” 

The sniper’s voice startled Echo and he stared up at the top bunk again. Crosshair hadn’t turned to look at him, his eyes still fixed on the sketch. “Tech used to bypass the Kaminoan’s firewalls and get on the holonet. He found all kinds of things he wasn’t supposed to. Hunter was worried the longnecks would find out but they didn’t.”

The pencil tip broke and the sniper grunted. He reached down to his boot and retrieved a small knife to sharpen the lead back to a point. “One time he found a program that simulated drawing. He saved it and showed us all how to draw on his datapad with a stylus. Wrecker got tired of it pretty quickly, but Hunter did alright. I was better. I drew a lot after that, when we were stuck in our barracks or waiting between testing cycles.”

Echo didn’t want to know what those were. Actually, he did, sometime in the future. Not now.

“The Kaminoans found out somehow. They wiped Tech’s files and said that if it happened again, they’d confiscate the datapad. Most of our handlers didn’t like him having access to that kind of freedom anyway. Nala Se was the only reason he was allowed to have it or any of his other tools. She said they supplemented his mental development.”

Echo was enthralled, Not just by the story, but by how long Crosshair was choosing to talk. He hadn’t heard this many words from the sniper’s mouth in four days, wrenched out of him or otherwise. 

“So you just stopped?” The cyborg realized he’d spoken before his brain told him he was going to. 

Crosshair gave him a brief but burning frown. “That datapad has always been the only thing keeping Tech from going insane. And maybe us, I guess. Without it, he would have had nothing to do but go over old lessons, or pick the locks and hack the computer systems like he used to before Se let him have the ‘pad. That got him into just as much trouble as the holonet did.”

“So you stopped drawing to keep it from being taken away.” Echo put the pieces together and was awed again by the way Crosshair hid his true nature. Maybe he wasn’t friendly to everyone, but with his brothers, he was a different person. An emotional little brother who had worried that his older sibling would lose something special to him if he didn’t sacrifice one of his own few cherished things.

“For a while.” Crosshair was looking at the paper again. He didn’t want to meet Echo’s eyes, it seemed. “Then one day I got back from range practice and Tech and Wrecker were grinning like idiots. Hunter was at the lab getting his own tests run, but he’d left something after he got back from combat drills. A sketchbook and pencils.”

“Where could he have gotten it?” Echo wondered aloud. Things like that certainly weren’t popular on Kamino under the longnecks’ supervision. And if they had threatened to take Tech’s datapad for a mediocre, one-time offense, he highly doubted they would have given Hunter art supplies .

“Don’t know. Didn’t ask.” Crosshair glanced down at him out of the corner of his eye, watching him subtly. A sly grin turned up the ends of his thin lips. “He wasn’t just scary to the Kaminoans because he’s predatory, you know. He was more than they could handle on that front alone, with the fanging out every now and then. But if Hunter ever wanted to hide, especially when we were cadets, his handlers knew they’d never be able to find him. He’d stay a few steps or corridors ahead of them until they gave up and had to wait for him to show back up.”

“He could hear them coming, I guess?” Echo ventured.

“Hear. Smell. Taste. Whatever he does when he says he feels it.” Crosshair shrugged. “Anyway, he could have snagged the stuff from anywhere if he really wanted to.”

“And he did it so you could draw.” Echo grinned. 

Crosshair scoffed but reflected Echo’s smile with a knowing tilt of his head.

The silence was comfortable now when it filled the space between them. Echo let the scritching of the pencil and the quiet hum of his own headpiece fill his ears as he glanced aimlessly about the small bunkroom. His eyes landed on the poster near the door, a tattered affair that looked like it had probably hung there from the day the ship was commissioned. It was a meaningless wire diagram, but it was crooked, its rectangular shape hanging just enough sideways that it irked Echo’s inner organizer. 

He pushed off from the bunk and stepped over to straighten it, leaving Crosshair to his artistry. When he shifted the paper his eye caught a flash of color, and he peeled the corner back.

Beneath the poster, painted in tiny, meticulous detail on the gray wall, were four birds. To conserve space, all had been drawn the same size, but it was easy to identify them after the lesson in avians that he’d gotten from Tech that morning. Echo could tell at first glance that the four feathery creatures pictured were an Argonian Ruffle bird, a Cloudripper, a Shyyyo bird, and a convor. The Batch’s call signs.

He heard the rustle of paper, almost pointedly loud, and glanced back to see that Crosshair was watching him.

“Gotta add yours, now,” Crosshair grumbled. He acted like it would be an act comparable to walking over a bed of hot coals, but from the care with which the other birds had been crafted Echo doubted he meant it. “Tech said you picked one.”

“A Tiga Loreng, or however you say it,” Echo answered. 

Crosshair nodded. “A flashy one,” he commented.

“To match my sparkling personality,” Echo quipped back, surprising himself a little.

Crosshair’s low chuckle put him at ease again and pulled a small smile from his lips. “Sure, reg. Sure.”

And somehow with that quiet laugh, another piece fit back into his broken heart.

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.

Chapter Text

Echo yawned and dragged his flesh hand over his face before returning it to the hot mug that sat in front of him. 

The Marauder was still in hyperspace, speeding along the Rimma Trade Route to some kind of rendezvous on Sullust. He didn’t know why they were going and he wasn’t sure who they were meeting. He was honestly surprised he was coherent after his comatose-like sleep cycle. At some point after their little heart-to-heart while watching the stars, Wrecker had bundled him into his own bunk (or rather Hunter's that he was borrowing) and he hadn't even stirred. He’d only awakened when he’d heard the squad’s sergeant descending from the bunk above him and heading to the fresher. Apparently Hunter was the earliest riser out of the four batchmates – Echo hadn’t noticed the day before, because he’d slept far later than the others after a rough first night onboard.

The cyborg yawned again. He was still groggy and foggy-headed like he had slept too hard. He was hoping the mug of caf he held in front of him would remedy the situation – that is, if it ever cooled below the melting point of beskar. He blew on the dark, steaming liquid and was considering whether to risk his tastebuds for a sip, when he was distracted by a yawn that wasn’t his own. 

Hunter stalked into the forward cabin with the amiability of a rudely-awakened masiff. His hair was wrangled back behind the bandana that managed to maintain a semblance of control over the long locks, and his tattoo wrinkled along with his nose as he squinted into the dimness of the still-dark room. Luckily, when he spoke his voice was more welcoming than his face.

“M’rning.”

“Morning.” Echo tried not to snort at the image of the confident and charismatic sergeant looking so kriffing rumpled . “There’s caf in the pot,” he offered. 

“No thanks.” Hunter shook his head sleepily, the few strands of hair that had already escaped the bandana’s restraining influence fluffing into curls around his ears. “Don’t drink it.”

Echo blinked in confusion, parsing the short reply as the sergeant bypassed the caf machine completely. Instead, he reached into one of the overhead compartments that were nestled above it. “How do you not drink caf?” 

The cyborg was so surprised that he was almost appalled. Caf was the only thing that had kept Rex human half the time, and he was pretty sure he remembered Commander Cody downing an entire pot of the stuff, one piping hot cup after the other, when the 212th and the 501st had been together on Christophsis. He wouldn’t venture to say that Cody was human , per se, especially after the droid-kicking incident, but the caffeinated brew was certainly one of the few things keeping him sane .

“Bitter,” Hunter grunted. He finally felt what he was looking for and drew out a square, bright blue tin no more than four inches wide. He popped off the lid and a faintly floral smell wafted from the container to tint the air of the cabin. “Tastes sharp . ”

Echo’s eyebrows angled downward and he scrunched his nose at the unfamiliar description. “Sharp?”

“Yeah. My enhancements don’t really appreciate the flavor, either. Smell’s okay, though.” 

“Your enhancements extend to taste?” 

Hunter scoffed loathingly. “They extend to everything .”

The cyborg was beginning to realize that he didn’t understand half of what had been changed in the tracker’s DNA, or why. Crosshair’s and Tech’s enhancements were rather cut and dry – eyesight and intelligence, respectively – and not a lot of further explanation was needed. Wrecker’s almost inhuman strength and over-muscled frame made it quite clear what his own desirable mutations had been. Hunter, on the other hand…

What had thrown Echo off the most, was that Hunter didn’t necessarily look like he was a 99. Sure, he was a little shorter, but lacking an inch or two in height didn’t really count as what Cody had specified was a “desirable mutation,” right? His hair was longer and a dark brown rather than black, but that could be chalked up to personal preference with the style and a random genetic blip like the one that had made Rex a blonde. His nose was unique, and his eyes were a slightly different shade than other clones’, but those were overall insignificant differences. With a haircut and different armor, Hunter may have been able to pass as a reg like himself. 

Then the things started to come to his attention, things he hadn’t really paid attention to when he’d been busted out of Skakko or when he and the four brothers had gone with General Skywalker to save Anaxes. Echo had noticed that Hunter clapped his hands to his helmet when Tech had called the Keeradaks, as if that could help the sound that had affected him more acutely than it had the others. When he’d scomped into the pillar in Trench’s flagship, he’d realized that the tracker was staying as far away from the tower of technology as he possibly could while remaining in the room. But when they were on Anaxes itself, the sergeant had answered a comm before it had buzzed. He'd flinched when one of Echo's legs shorted during Tech's in-flight exam on the way back from Skakko, and the discomfort in his expression had stemmed from something more physical than his concern for their POW cargo.

Those and other little quirks had finally built up to his first interaction with Hunter’s otherness , when he’d stepped on board the Marauder as a squad member and instantly been the target of the sergeant’s senses. He’d been feeling kind of dizzy on the tarmac, but he hadn’t told anyone and thought he was hiding it rather well – until Hunter had shoved a ration bar into his hand and refused to leave him alone until he’d eaten it. 

With Tech’s abrupt takeoff, Echo had felt more nauseated than hungry, but he’d finally given into the tracker’s demand and had dutifully eaten. Once he had, Hunter had only nodded and walked off. Crosshair had been the one to explain in his irritating fashion that arguing with Hunter about food was, quote, “stupid and a waste of time.”

“But I wasn’t hungry,” Echo had insisted. Sure, he did feel better after eating, but –

“He doesn’t care if you’re hungry,” Crosshair had shot back. “He smelled your blood sugar drop and wants to make sure you don’t.”

That had been the moment that Echo realized something very strange indeed had been grafted into his new squadmate’s DNA, something he wasn’t even sure if Hunter understood.

While the cyborg was thinking, Hunter was still working through what was apparently his morning routine. His hands were moving as if they were independent of the rest of him, in a way that said he’d perfected the steps of this ritual long ago. A mug was retrieved from the little cabinet overhead, and with it a little utensil that looked like a mesh ball with a silver line attached. Hunter unclasped the halves of the mesh and scooped some of the tin’s contents – which to Echo looked like crushed grass – into it before clipping it back shut and setting it in the mug. Hot water from the back of the caf machine was poured over the ball and instantly the floral smell became stronger and more complete.

The sergeant sat down across from Echo and sighed softly, setting the cup in front of him and breathing in the steam. He yawned again and Echo noticed that the skin beneath his eyes was darker than it should be – at least on the uninked side of his face. The half-skull tattoo made a similar evaluation impossible for the left eye.

“Tech’s snoring?” he asked tentatively. He imagined that with Hunter’s hearing, even a moderate snorer sounded like a freighter engine.

“Nah.” The answer came packaged in a kind of huff that was partially amused but utterly tired. As it dissolved, the glow in the sergeant’s eyes dimmed a little. “Nightmares.”

“Mmm.” Echo understood that all too well. He also knew that there wasn’t anything to be done about it. He took a sip of his still steaming but less-than-boiling caf, and suddenly his brain conjured up why the scent of Hunter’s own drink was vaguely familiar. Once again, it was a memory of Christophsis.

“That smells like the tea General Kenobi drinks,” the cyborg commented. His nose wrinkled a little at the warm orchid smell that was getting even stronger. 

“It is,” Hunter answered simply.

Echo raised an eyebrow at him. That was certainly a confident answer . “How do you know what tea he likes?” 

The sergeant had picked up the line attached to the mesh tea ball and was moving it around in the liquid, letting the hot water flow through the tea leaves before allowing the ball to settle to the bottom again. “Because he’s the one who gave it to me.”

Caf did not taste the same when it went up your nose. At least his sinuses would be clear.

Echo’s jaw hung open like the hinge had snapped in half. “What? ” 

Hunter nodded absently and continued staring into the cup as if he were looking for the reason he’d gotten up in the first place. “On Coruscant. Cody called us in for a special assignment to the General, and before we left someone mentioned tea. The General found out from the boys that I drink it and wanted me to try the different kinds he had.”

“Just like two buddies? Drinking tea with a Jedi?” Echo was still in the disbelief stage. Soon he’d be in the next one – telling someone. His brain was already subconsciously choosing who it would be. Crosshair wouldn’t be a new recipient of the news but he seemed the most likely to spill some details or enjoy a good gossip session…Wrecker would probably lose interest and Tech didn't seem like one to get excited over the mundane aspects of life.

“Not like that,” Hunter laughed. “I think he just wanted to see how good I was at detecting flavors. One of them had some kind of infused citrus and Teth rose petal thing.” The sergeant made a terrible face and Echo had to act quickly to suppress a snort. “That one almost killed me.”

“Why?”

“I could tell by the smell that it probably wouldn’t be a great combination, but I tried it anyway. Choked as soon as it hit my tongue. Cody laughed.” Hunter sounded betrayed.

“It was pretty bad, then?”

“Guess it was good enough if you have unenhanced taste. He drank it.”

“Kenobi?”

“No, Cody.”

“No way.” The cyborg laughed and shook his head. “Tough-as-nails Commander Cody sits around and drinks tea with his general?”

“Mhmm. Well, he tolerates the stuff, I guess. It seemed to make Kenobi happy, having someone to share it with.” Hunter shuddered and swallowed, the memory fresh on his tongue. He drained the tea ball and set it to the side, hoping a sip of the better tea in front of him would banish the remembered taste. “Teth rosebuds taste like acid. Smell fine – a little purpler than the ones on Pantora. More like a dark red-purple, because they harvest them right before they wilt. But the taste is awful , especially mixed with that kind of yellow – I mean, lemon.”

The sergeant looked up as he lifted the cup to his lips, and realized Echo was staring at him. He raised one eyebrow in a question. “What?”

“You just called tastes colors .” The ARC’s gaze was steady but confused. “And you said that it smelled red.”

“Red-purple,” Hunter corrected. He let the golden-green tea wash over his tastebuds and down his throat, forcing the rosy lemon tint from the forefront of his mind and focusing on the new taste of smooth, peachy orchid. “Red’s more of a sound thing. Like blaster fire.”

Echo’s right eye twitched a little. “Things aren’t supposed to sound like colors. Colors don’t have sound.”

“No. But to me, they do.” Hunter shrugged apologetically.

Echo gave an exasperated sigh and leaned back in his chair. “What happened to reality ?” he dramatically asked the air. “I used to memorize every regulation in the GAR because they were constant and now I’m on a ship where smells have colors and tastes have sounds.”

Hunter laughed.

“Seriously.” Echo gave the other man a glare that despite his words, was only half-serious. “It’s like I stepped on board and logic died. ”

Hunter’s eyes shone with amusement but he managed to pull an apologetic expression. The cyborg found it annoying that even with a gallon of ink stretched across an entire half of his face, the sergeant could still look as innocent as a newborn tooka if he wanted to. “Sorry, vod’ika ,” he replied. “It’s the way it is.”

Echo stopped laughing and looked quizzically at him. Hunter could feel a prickly sensation that emitted from the cyborg, whether it was his implants or his organics reacting, and immediately associated the new tinge of black and tingly with confusion. After about thirty seconds of Echo staring at him, the sergeant couldn’t take it any longer.

“What?” 

Echo blinked back at him. “I’m older than you.” 

Hunter matched his confused face with his own. A strand of hair thwarted his view and he brushed it back with a huff. “So?”

“How am I your little brother?”

“Oh. Because I’m the ori’vod .”

Echo frowned at him, “That literally did not help. At all.” He took a stabilizing gulp of caf. “You just said it differently than the first time. How am I the vod’ika if I’m older?”

Hunter shot him a mysterious smile. “What were you just saying about logic?”

Echo gave an acquiescent grunt and took a longer, comforting sip. Silence descended to give solace to both of the still-awakening men for a few minutes until Hunter spoke again.

“You know, sometimes listening to something when you fall asleep helps.”

The cyborg raised an eyebrow. “Hmm?”

“With the nightmares,” Hunter clarified. “Listening to something can take your mind off the stuff you can’t stop thinking about. That way you can avoid tossing and turning all night.”

The comment was just a tad too on-target for Echo not to notice. He winced. “You heard me?”

Hunter gave him a sympathetic look, one that said he knew what it was like to be in the grip of involuntary insomnia and that it wasn’t Echo’s fault. “Yeah. Figured Wrecker would be a better candidate for you to talk it out with, since that’s where ya headed anyway.”

“How did you know I needed to talk?” Suddenly it registered. “You can hear through walls?”

Hunter winced. “I don’t mean to. And these walls aren’t really that thick. S’not eavesdropping if I can’t help it.” 

Echo wasn’t angry. He was almost horrified. “That actually sounds pretty terrible. Not being able to turn it off, I mean.”

Hunter shrugged. “It was a lot worse when I was a cadet. I can handle it better now…but yeah, still can’t turn it off.” He took another pull from the mug in front of him and seemed to wake up a little more, returning to the conversation he’d attempted to start. “Tech has a whole library worth of audiobooks on one of his datapads. There’s gotta be something on there you’d like to listen to.”

“Tech likes audiobooks?” And yet somehow, that fact was less surprising than it probably should be. The engineer always had his nose glued to the screen of his beloved tablet, scrolling through text at a rate that could not be healthy, but for all Echo knew he could also listen to the information at that speed. 

Hunter’s smirk was half mischievous, half amused. “Where do you think he got that accent?”

Echo snorted. “That’s how he learned to talk ?”

The sergeant nodded and settled his shoulders more comfortably into the back of the seat. Echo hoped that meant he was in for a cadet Batch story. He was right.

“Hard to believe it now, but Tech’ika actually didn’t talk until after Wrecker did. Then when he finally decided to let the world in on whatever was going on in that big brain of his, he talked too fast for anyone to understand him. He’d trip up over words until he’d finally get frustrated and go radio silent again.” Another sip of tea. “Wrecker and I started talking for him and Crosshair, but we could only do that for so long. Ninety-Nine was worried the longnecks would decommission him if he didn’t find a way to condense all that brainpower into something that other people could understand.” 

“What about Crosshair?” Echo interjected.

Hunter shrugged. “He used to have some vocal chord issues, and when Tech looked into ‘em he said that maybe Cross wasn’t supposed to talk, since his purpose was to be a sniper. Either way, Se never seemed to mind that he didn’t say much.”

Echo almost reacted to the casual reference to Nala Se but schooled his pale features. He’d only ever heard her called Mistress Se before, and remembered his encounters with her and the stories about her with the sensation of dead ice on his skin. The thought that the Batch had been her pet project for their on-Kamino lives was disturbing. The idea that something had been experimented with Crosshair’s DNA in an attempt to make him mute was even more so.

Hunter was still talking about Tech, though. “But Tech was created to be a talker, in a way. He was supposed to learn as quickly as possible, and then apply that to whatever the situation called for. He couldn’t do that without speaking clearly. He already had the datapad for his training, and it had all the precautionary blockers on it, but him and Ninety-Nine figured out some way past ‘em and started downloading audiobooks.”

The tracker drank some more of the still-steaming tea and smiled. Echo realized that was really the only time he’d seen Hunter smile so far – when he was talking about or to his brothers. “Tech listened to them all the time . At triple speed. Ninety-Nine finally got him to slow down and repeat the recording as it played, and that fixed most of his stuttering. Once he got that down, though, it was over. He started ‘experimenting’ with how fast he could speak intelligibly until even his trainers couldn’t keep up with what he was saying. They could understand him because he was speaking clearly, but they just couldn’t take in all the information he could dump on them in a thirty-second burst.”

Echo chuckled. “Like a machine gun.”

“Yeah.” Hunter stretched like a cat. It must have realigned his spine from the frightful volley of cracks that Echo heard. “Soon he was running out of books. That's when he began honing his forging skills.”

Echo almost choked on his caf. “Forging?” He sputtered.

The sergeant’s grin was bright against his black tattoo and tanned skin, his eyes glittering with mirth. “Well, he couldn’t sign up for library slots as a clone cadet, could he?”

The cybernetic barked a laugh of pure surprise. It took a moment for him to recover. “The GAR’s best slicer started out on library cards ?”

Hunter chuckled into his tea. “The first one he did was overcomplicated. He picked a Chiss name. Fedaf'pur'iliory.”

Echo snorted. “ Tech… ” He shook his head.

“Crosshair called him Fpuri for weeks. Then he kept running out of borrows, so he created another profile, complete with another backstory. That one was Framle Link. There were three or four other ones. I can’t remember them all.” Hunter’s smile widened. “Wouldn’t think it of him, would ya?”

The newest Batcher laughed and shook his head again, disbelieving. “No. But if Tech was going to be a criminal, that would be why. Library cards .”

The two brothers enjoyed a few more moments of comfortable amusement, mugs nearly empty in front of them, before a sound from the bunkroom called their attention. Echo looked up and Hunter turned around halfway in his seat, just in time to see Tech himself walking in. True to form, the engineer was already nose-deep in something of import on his datapad.

“Good morning,” he said crisply.

Echo slid his cup forward as he sat back in the chair, throwing his scomp arm over the back of the seat as his expression turned mischievous. “Well, good morning, Fpuri !”

Tech stopped in his mission to reach the caf machine and leveled his gaze at Echo, eyes slightly squinted behind his goggles. He glanced at Hunter and put two and two together in his characteristically rapid fashion. “I see that Hunter has been divulging our cadethood secrets.”

“I deserve to know when I am sleeping in a room next to a criminal!” Echo insisted. He heard Hunter huff and saw his grin widen.

“Libraries are free , Echo.” Tech rolled his eyes and continued to his previous destination. “There were no economic or material consequences for anyone involved, therefore it was perfectly acceptable and while deceptive, likely not to be seriously considered criminal activity. I did, however, have to create five separate identities due to the suspicion that would have arisen should one adopted Chiss child from Corscuant be found to have checked out 200 books in the course of a month.”

The engineer turned back to them with his caf in one hand and the datapad in another – and a devilish glimmer behind the yellowish-tinted lenses of his goggles. “So technically, you have now offended Framle Link, Allree Neasobe, Clireg Mounhoul, and Marfre Lutmois by only greeting their fellow and not them.”

“Oh, Force.” Hunter rolled his eyes and went back to his tea.

“Well, please tell your other four personalities that I sincerely apologize,” Echo laughed. 

“They accept.” Tech flipped the other chair down from the wall, the seat’s flat surface nearly smacking Hunter’s leg on the way down. The tracker jumped to avoid it.

Tech seemed more concerned with the contents of Hunter’s cup than the glare his oldest sibling was currently pinning on him. “Please tell me that you are nearly finished with that abomination .” His nose scrunched and Echo fought back a giggle at the look. The googled brother was arguably the most ridiculous-looking when he was bothered.

Hunter pulled the tea closer to him, as if to protect it from whatever measures Tech might take to remove it from the immediate vicinity. “Go sit somewhere else and you don’t have to smell it,” he retorted. “It’s staying right here.”

Tech set down the datapad – a miracle, in Echo’s estimation – and brought his own mug up to take a scalding sip. “It is a waste of drinking water.”

“You’re all wasting breath .” Crosshair’s snark came through the doorway just before he did. Wrecker wasn’t far behind. “Shut up.”

Echo sniffed. “Oh, well now I know who’s not a morning person.”

“Crosshair does not find emotional satisfaction with any part of the day.” Tech blew on the caf before blinking owlishly at the cyborg, all the while pointedly ignoring the sniper glaring bloody death at him. “He was decanted contrary and moody.”

Echo blinked at the slicer in surprise, then turned to look at Hunter, who had started laughing at his expense. 

“Look who’s talking,” the sergeant commented.

“Yeah, Techie.” Wrecker pushed his way past the engineer on his way to the caf pot, that source of caffeine and happiness that Echo was suddenly beginning to think was too small for five grown men. Especially when one of them counted as three. “You’re just as prickly in the mornin’ times.”

Tech hmmphed and went back to his datapad – until a toothpick flew through the air, bounced off his forehead, and plunked directly into his cup. The engineer yanked his gaze up and fixed two amber, murderous daggers on his youngest brother.

Crosshair held up his hand innocently, using the other to reach for a mug from the shelf. “Oops.”

Echo didn’t hear Tech’s reply if there was one. He didn’t really hear anything in particular for the rest of the relaxed time in the cabin, with his four new brothers bantering around him and the comfortable atmosphere of warmth and camaraderie wrapping around him like a blanket. He couldn’t think of the right word to describe it, until it suddenly wrote itself behind his eyes with a clarity that stood in contrast to the hum of activity around him that he couldn’t quite focus on.

Family.

That was what this was. This was what Torrent had felt like, before that horrible day at the Citadel. This was what he’d never thought he’d get to experience again.

After all the nightmares, real and imagined, he had a family. A family that argued, that teased and irritated each other, that sat around a cramped table critiquing each other’s drink choices while hyperspace zoomed alongside the ship they called home.

Echo smiled and took another sip of his caf. It tasted the same as it had earlier, but this time he barely noticed the heat. It couldn’t compete with the warmth that had found its way inside his chest.

Chapter Text

After his talk with Hunter, Wrecker's help the night before, and a day of surprisingly few issues with his implants, Echo thought he was in a solid enough mental state to try sleeping without his prosthetics. 

That was a mistake.

He climbed into the bottom bunk again, listening to the half-hearted banter that still bounced off the walls as Tech, Crosshair, and Wrecker settled into their own places. Hunter was in the cockpit, taking the first shift on watch again, humming lowly and looking out as the stars passed by in hyperspace. Echo tried to follow along with the unfamiliar tune as he braced himself to slip off his metal legs, but there were too many dips and swells in the strange cadence and he gave up. 

He was still attempting to place a name to the song when his fingers brushed the attachment clip for his left knee. The cyborg suddenly shivered and waited for a second before proceeding, trying to push the logical side of his brain to take over. He didn’t relish the thought of being without three-quarters of his limbs, relatively helpless if something were to happen in the night – but even his paranoid side had to admit that anything requiring a fight was not likely, not when he was safely in a secure shuttle, hurtling through space with three highly-trained commandos bunking next to him and the humanoid equivalent of a guard dog on watch. He had to admit that he also didn’t love the thought of more issues with his mangled stumps, issues Tech was adamant would develop if he constantly wore the prosthetics and continued to refuse to sleep without them.

Echo took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying desperately not to let visions of Skakko Minor and other unnamable, unethical laboratories overtake him. They shimmered at the edges of his consciousness but he forced them back into the darker recesses with a determined set of his jaw.

He would have to take the prosthetics off sometime. It might as well be now.

He rested his fingertips against the clip, then slid it forward into the unlocked positon. He heard the telltale metallic click and felt the secured sensation of metal and padding held tightly against what remained of his leg melt away as the heavy prosthetic came loose. He gave it a slow twist, and the leg popped off at the knee.

He set it aside and quickly turned his attention to the other one, trying not to think about the clinical coldness or even the necessity of the process too much. The same chilly feeling of not good settled resolutely in the pit of his stomach as the second leg joined the first on the floor next to the bunk. 

The scomp was next. Removing it was even harder than taking off his legs. He didn’t look at those every other second, didn’t reach for things only to remember that he couldn’t hold anything with what had once been his dominant hand because it just wasn’t there anymore. The clips were also a little more difficult on the arm attachment, since there were two. One sat like a small black blemish on each side of what should have been his elbow, and both had to be released at the same time.

He looked at the clips for a long few seconds, until he felt Crosshair’s eagle eyes focus on him. He could ask for help, he knew that – Crosshair wouldn’t be as rambunctiously thrilled to help as Wrecker might be, but he wouldn’t mind. The sniper would probably make some dry remark about Echo switching his caf cup that morning with the one that held the dregs of Hunter’s tea, assist him in wrestling off the scomp, and then ascend back to his secluded corner never to mention the incident again. In many ways, all the members of the Batch understood what Echo didn’t want to say, the struggles he was going through, and that eventually, he wouldn’t be able to do something on his own and would be forced to ask for help.

But Echo didn’t want help. He wanted to be able to do at least this by himself. The thought sounded stupid, even inside his head, but with all that had been taken from him he needed any shred of confidence or self-sufficiency he could find. 

He was pretty sure his four new siblings understood that, too.

It took a little maneuvering, but he eventually found a way to stretch his hand around his elbow and activate the clips with the tips of his middle finger and thumb. He closed his hand around the scomp’s cool surface, acknowledging the contrast of the smooth metal to his warm, living palm, then turned it to the left. The disengaging pop was louder than the one his legs made, being closer to his head, and held a hollow ring of finality. He’d done it. He felt unbalanced and as helpless as a day-old tooka kitten, but he’d done it.

Echo couldn’t quite repress the shiver that rattled down his spine as he precariously leaned over the edge of the bunk, acutely feeling the lack of weight where his limbs should be and trying to compensate for the loss. He set the scomp next to the pair of prosthetic legs and swallowed hard as he straightened up to catch his breath. It was suddenly hard to pull air into his lungs while he stared at the three metal things that were his only chance for any semblance of a life now. They were still hideous in his eyes, but they were part of him whether he liked it or not, and now they were off. He’d set them close enough to reach them, but they were still far enough away that it would take a few moments for him to re-engage them to the sockets bolted to his bones. 

He felt Crosshair’s eyes lingering on him, as if the sniper were gauging whether he was going to go crashing sideways out of the bunk or not. If it went on for much longer Echo was going to chide him for staring, but Wrecker spoke before he got the chance.

“You alright, Echo?” The bruiser’s voice was low in the dim bunk room, but his one good eye shone with concern when Echo’s gaze met his.

The cyborg’s heart clenched at how worriedly the words were spoken. It was nice to know that they were sincere. “Yeah, big guy. I’m good.” 

He felt Wrecker and Crosshair watching him as he laid back onto the bunk and settled his head on the overstuffed pillow that definitely wasn’t standard issue – probably another one of the Batch’s off-Kamino finds. His body felt lighter but weirdly still in sync with itself. For a moment, he could almost imagine that he still had those missing limbs. It felt like he was lying in his bunk just as he had any other night before the Citadel.

He tried turning over, tucking his arm under the pillow and lying on his side facing the wall. He felt his spine twist agreeably like it hadn’t been able to in a week of sleeping on his back and suddenly a volley of cracks echoed in the bunkroom. Pressure he hadn’t even known could build up between vertebrae immediately released, and he groaned in relief.

“How about now?” Crosshair actually sounded a little worried behind his raspy growl.

“ Great .” Echo nuzzled into the pillow, glad that they couldn’t see him – or that if Crosshair could, he wasn't commenting on the action. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, reminding himself that he was safe and everything was okay because he wasn’t alone. They were right here, they were with him, nothing could happen. “G’night.”

He drifted off to sleep within seconds, foggily thinking that he hadn't been this comfortable since he'd gotten blown up.

Then the terror reared its taunting head, nightmares with all their dark terrors and inescapable labyrinths of horror that he never could tell were false or real. Sometimes he would see the slaughter that had taken place on the Rishi Moon and look on in horror all over again when Cutup was eaten by a giant eel and when poor Droidbait was shot down. He’d be trying to get away with Fives and Hevy, the only ones left…and then Hevy was suddenly ripped away from them too, in a blaze of sacrificial glory that Echo had never thought he’d have to live with. Sometimes it was the shuttle explosion after he’d made it out of the maze of fortress called the Citadel, and there was nothing but fire and the smell of burning flesh, searing pain devouring limbs that he could clearly tell he no longer possessed. He distinctly remembered seeing what was left of his legs just before he blacked out for what he assumed would be the last time, and the memory never ceased to make him want to vomit or pass out. Then he’d be strapped to a cold metal surface in an even colder room, unable to fight the modifications being made to his shattered body as expressionless droids and strange figures in masks floated in the void that threatened to swallow him, orchestrating his transformation from an ARC trooper into some twisted half-machine creature that he didn’t want to be…

Tonight the nightmares took him to Kamino.

The sterile halls were flashing crimson, the red alarm signals washing across the white tile like a symbol of the blood being spilled around the city. His blood ran hot with adrenaline and the stinging fear-excitement of battle while his heart pumped in a rhythm chilled by dread. There were blaster bolts screaming around him, and through the visor of his helmet he caught glimpses of Commander Cody and Rex and Fives and –

“Ninety-Nine, no!” 

His own voice echoed inside his bucket as his vision blurred, then focused on a figure in light blue crumpled on the floor. He heard the droids’ shooting grow more frenzied as he stepped out to block the hall, his own blaster growing heated from the rapid firing, but he glanced over his shoulder anyway.

Ninety-Nine had been wounded in the leg but was struggling to his feet, trying to heft the bag along with him down the hall. He was fighting to get up, to get the ammunition they needed…

And then suddenly he was down again, this time with two blaster wounds burned into his back. 

Echo knew in his gut that the older clone wasn’t getting back up. An outraged roar broke from somewhere nearby and served as the background to the furious bolts he sent flying toward their enemies. It took him a few seconds to realize that the sound was coming from him. 

The next few moments went by in a cacophonous whirl. One second he was standing over Fives, letting bolts of energy sear holes through anything inanimate in the search for the remaining droids. The next he was stumbling to his knees, dropping his blaster and hearing it clatter to the tile as he gathered Ninety-Nine’s malformed, too-still body into his arms.

He knew he was dead. What cruel irony – dying in the same buildings where he was decanted, on tiles he’d likely cleaned a thousand times after being relegated to maintenance. Ninety-Nine should have been an Alpha, he remembered Hevy saying once, but something had gone wrong with his DNA. It had been corrupted, or maybe some of the Kaminoans had tried experimental mutations that just hadn’t worked out right. The man had never been outside Tipoca City, never seen a battlefield. While his siblings had been slaughtered in the millions on distant planets, he had been the one left behind, left to live as an outcast while the rest of the clones forged bonds with each other in the fires of battle. But he’d died a true soldier, fighting alongside his brothers…that had to count for something, right?

Echo blinked quickly, then again, trying to keep tears from rolling down his flushed face. His body was drained from the last few days and he was so tired…he really just wanted to close his eyes and sleep…

He forced his eyes open and his world shattered into pieces. He was no longer holding Ninety-Nine. 

He was holding Hunter.

The sergeant was a mess. There was blood smeared over his face and many – too many – blaster burns bored through his armor. His long hair was matted with crimson and he was deathly still, his skull tattoo stark and mocking against his pallid skin. 

Echo was horrified to realize he wasn’t breathing .

“Hunter!” His voice cracked halfway through and he fumbled as he checked for a pulse. There wasn’t one.

He whipped his head to the left to look for Fives, for Cody or Rex, for anybody , but he couldn’t find them. His frantic gaze fell on three new, familiar figures in the red-tinted dimness – Crosshair, Wrecker, and Tech, each sprawled near their discarded weapons in dark red puddles.

They were all dead. 

Echo screamed their names, but the calls went unanswered and suddenly he couldn’t breathe. Black dots danced in his vision and he couldn’t see past them except for the flashes of red and gray and Hunter’s closed eyes. He tried to move but something was frozen onto his legs and his right arm. He couldn’t make them work. It was almost like they weren’t there at all.

“Echo!” 

Someone was coming for him. He heard them running down the hall, footsteps far louder than they should have been. He couldn’t see them, his eyes still fighting the spinning dots and dimness of the hall. Was he passing out? Because it sure was taking a while….

“ Echo! ” 

The voice was so close it rattled his brain. He flinched back and tried to answer but all that came out was a muffled sob. He was crying, a grown ARC weeping in front of whoever had come to rescue him and his brothers. He didn’t remember how they’d gotten here or what was happening and he didn’t want to. He wanted to punch someone, preferably the person who was yelling at him, the person who was shaking him and acting like he couldn’t see Echo’s dead brothers, like he hadn’t been too late to save the 99s…

“We need ta calm him down,” a different voice suddenly said. It wasn’t yelling but it was big and right next to him.

“Just grab him before he hurts himself!” A third voice joined in, sounding like crisp new sandpaper.

“Wait! He's just been through a traumatic year of imprisonment and a violent rescue and is currently in new surroundings. Any unannounced touch may contribute to a higher level of–”

“Kark it, Tech, he's scared .” 

Wait, that raspy voice was Crosshair. But Crosshair was dead, right? Crosshair was worried about someone? It must be somebody special for that cold devil to be concerned – one of his brothers, definitely. Echo wanted to open his eyes and see who this special person was but he couldn't seem to wake up. Was he even asleep?

“I think not touching him is worse right now.” Hunter’s voice agreed with Tech’s and Echo felt something brush against his face. It was rough and cool and felt like a palm. Someone was holding a hand to his cheek.

“Echo.” Hunter’s tone was lower now, but urgent. “ Vod’ika , please. Stop moving or you’ll hurt yourself.”

Was he moving? Echo didn’t know. He just knew his heart was thumping way too quickly in his chest and he felt like he was going to be sick. Ice was clotting in his veins and he was so cold he thought his hands were frozen, at least the one he could still feel.

“It’s okay,” the voice continued. The hand stayed on his cheek and Echo abruptly felt the world grow calmer, like the ground wasn’t shaking so badly. He could breathe a little easier and he thought he could almost see something through the black. “ You’re okay, Echo. You’re safe on the Marauder .”

What was a Marauder ?

Echo blinked and suddenly he could see. He stared up into a pair of concerned amber eyes and realized Hunter was leaning over him, dark curls framing his face in the dim light streaming in from the cockpit. There was no top bunk blocking his view to the ceiling and no mattress underneath him. He must have thrashed out of the bed and fallen to the floor. 

“You with us, Ey’ika? ” Hunter’s voice was smoky and low, like he was talking to a frightened aakhound.

Without answering, or maybe as an answer, Echo launched himself up with his one arm as leverage and plowed into the sergeant’s chest. 

Hunter’s arms were ready and waiting and closed around his shoulders, holding him tightly and pulling him close to his chest. Echo's fingers clutched the back of the tracker's blacks so tightly he thought they might rip the fabric. He couldn't bring himself to care at the moment, and he doubted Hunter did either.

He was breathing too hard, his heart still threatening to pound through his half-metal sternum and his chest heaving as if he'd just run a mile in a minute. He buried his face in Hunter's shoulder and forced himself to pay attention to the warmth of the sergeant's blacks, the rhythmic breathing right beside him. Hunter was alive and so were the other three. 

The cyborg tried to stifle a cry of relief but instead it manifested as a strangled groan. He felt Hunter’s fingers start rubbing circles between his shoulders and realized he was shaking. He shuddered as a wave of cold blasted him directly in the chest, and held onto the sergeant even tighter.

After a second he heard movement to his left, and Wrecker’s big arms wrapped him and Hunter into a warm, almost crushing embrace. Tech was the next to appear and join in, pushing just under Wrecker’s huge bicep to make sure he was holding Echo in a way that wouldn’t cause discomfort to the stump that remained of his arm. The engineer hugged him tightly and rested his chin on top of his head, being careful around the ports in his skull. A thinner arm found its way around Echo’s chest, and he realized Crosshair was quietly taking his place at the opposite side. The sniper had to settle for basically his arm and shoulder, but his whispery breathing added another layer of comfort to the cyborg’s bleeding psyche. Echo was only a little surprised to realize that all four of the close, steady heartbeats were in sync.

Echo squeezed his eyes shut tightly and tried to force his own heartbeat to slow down. While he was safely out of the nightmare now, the cold adrenaline in his system hadn’t gotten the memo. He regretted that he’d woken them up, but the feeling was fleeting. They weren’t put out about it – they understood. He knew they did. 

He felt the twinge of guilt pair up with his headache and winced. They’d seen him at his worst moments and yet there was something still not in the open. Something was biting at his conscience, something that wouldn’t let him go until he put it to words.

“Hunter?” he said quietly. His head hurt too badly to raise his voice much louder than a whisper, but with his face nearly pressed into Hunter’s shoulder, he figured that the tracker could hear him anyway.

He was right. Hunter shifted just a little and Echo guessed he was looking down at him. He would have to guess because his eyes had just stopped throbbing and he was not eager to reopen them. “Yeah?”

“I knew Ninety-Nine.” There it was. Something that, to them, probably wasn’t capable of eating them alive from the inside, but something he needed to say nonetheless.

“Mmmhmm.” Hunter’s answer vibrated in his chest, but when he spoke he kept his voice down.  “Heard you yell. Tech found out you were at Kamino when he died.”

There was a lingering note of reminiscence that made Echo’s heart ache again. If he had the timeline right, Ninety-Nine would have been Hunter’s ori’vod , the only one the enhanced cadet would have really been able to interact with before leaving for battle. 

“He died trying to save us.” Echo moved his head a little to the side, so Hunter’s shoulder wasn’t muffling his words so badly. “Actually, I guess he did. He got us to the armory…before we made a stand in the halls.”

“Tech found the footage, from the security cameras.” Echo imagined that Tech would usually have been the one to offer that information, but it seemed even the talkative engineer had decided to let Hunter take point in this situation. Maybe they always did, in these circumstances. “He died like he wanted to.”

“I didn’t know there were five of you.” Echo swallowed hard. That was probably the hardest part…his admission to himself, that he had once thought less of Ninety-Nine, even unintentionally, because he was different. He wondered how he would have reacted to meeting the four younger 99s, before Skakko. He was glad he’d never know.

Hunter was still rubbing his back, still holding him pressed against his shoulder. “There still are,” he reminded him softly. 

Echo felt tears prick his eyes and he squeezed them more tightly shut. For the first time since he remembered waking up on Skakko, he wasn’t hurting . He’d thought it would always be painful to live, that it would always hurt to keep breathing after everything that had happened, from the explosion at the Citadel that ripped away his legs to the experiments by the Techno Union that left him half machine and half the twisted remnant of a man, to learning of Fives’ death and being quietly excluded from the ranks of clones he’d once lived his life with.

But now, in a blissfully comfortable way that he couldn’t begin to appreciate fully, much less comprehend, it didn’t .

He was still a mangled ghost of who he had been, his body augmented and pieced together with foreign elements that were never meant to be implanted in a humanoid form. He still bore the scars of everything that had been done to him, from that shuttle explosion to the last operation on Skakko and the surgeries he’d had to correct some of the physical damage. He still struggled to keep from drowning when the memories of what he had once been, what and who he had once had, washed over him and threatened to overwhelm his still-healing mind. And deep in his stubbornly human heart, he knew was still an outcast to most of the men he had once called brothers.

But maybe that wasn’t worth worrying about, anymore.

On Kamino, Hunter had been experimented on as much as he had – even more than the other 99s. Foreign genetic material had been grafted into his DNA to make him what the longnecks had wanted him to be, and it had changed him in ways not even Tech had been fully able to ascertain. Wrecker’s visible scars were far more grotesque than Echo’s own, and yet the great big sweetheart the cyborg had come to know hardly seemed bothered by them. He acknowledged them but never tried to hide them – he had accepted them as part of himself, and his brothers had done the same. 

Echo had heard Jesse call Crosshair all sorts of things when the clone had come to check on Cody in medical, none of them flattering, and he now was convinced that every one of them was incorrect. The Crosshair that was presented to the world was cold and offish; the Crosshair that existed beneath that veneer was, to Echo’s sorrowful surprise, vulnerable and incredibly introspective. He had just as many issues as Echo, though not many were physical, but he relied on his brothers to help him through the toughest times, and they did. Tech dealt with similarly invisible demons, his enhanced intelligence and incredible brain often driving him to the brink of exhaustion and sometimes insanity with his endless stream of thoughts pushing him ever farther in its pursuit of closure.

They were all outcasts, but they had each other. Growing up separated from the other clones, secreted away in the hidden parts of Kamino, they had only ever been able to rely on each other for safety and comfort and help. For their entire lives, it had only been the four of them.

Now they were welcoming – had welcomed – Echo into their fold, their strangely symbiotic and unique brotherhood that was stronger, he felt, than that of any other squad he’d ever seen. He might still be an outcast, but so were they, and they were giving him a chance to be an outcast with them. A chance to be part of a family, to be accepted for his differences and loved anyway.

A chance to be one of the broken pieces that made up their whole.

The decision to stay on the floor, all five siblings nestled into a pile, was reached silently but unanimously. Wrecker’s arm was long enough that he could reach to the lower bunks and tug down a few pillows and blankets, but by the time he did Echo was already dozing, tucked safely between Hunter and Tech.

~~~~~

When the cyborg awoke a few hours later, it was still night, and the others were still asleep. He lay awake, taking in the quiet and the relief of waking up for the first time in a week with absolutely no lingering terror in his mind.

Wrecker shifted in his sleep and his big, meaty hand that wasn't holding onto Echo slipped from behind his head to thunk onto Crosshair's white hair. If he’d been awake Echo was sure the sniper would have snarled or snapped, miffed at the great offense done to his dignified person. But he wasn’t awake – he was nearly curled into Hunter’s arms, his head resting beneath the sergeant’s like that was where it naturally should be. His finger had been unconsciously tapping on the Marauder floor since he'd fallen truly asleep, in a way that was at the beginning unnerving but had over the last hour evolved into something actually quite endearing, like a mastiff wagging its tail. When Wrecker’s hand fell on his head the sniper’s only reaction was to grimace briefly and squeak . 

Echo stared in shock for a moment. Then he found himself nearly choking to hold down the laugh trying to force its way from his throat and into the silent room. His shoulders shook from the effort to remain quiet, and he thought about trying to extricate his organic hand so he could hold it over his mouth for insurance. He tried tugging his arm from beneath Tech but realized that he’d been lying in the same position for so long that the limb was asleep from the elbow down. 

Laugh abating (thank the Force), he glanced over at his tinglingly numb hand and suddenly froze. 

Tech’s fingers were intertwined with his own, holding onto him so securely that Echo wasn't sure if he could have untangled their hands if he'd been able to try. The engineer had taken off his goggles before bunking down for the night and somehow looked bio years younger, almost like a cadet, when he was asleep. 

Echo swallowed hard, trying to work around the lump that had unexpectedly clogged his throat. He wiggled his fingers gently, the sensation of prickly needles running up from his palm to his forearm, the appendages feeling heavy and thick. 

But he needed to feel it. He wanted to feel it.

Slowly the circulation recovered in his wrist and his arm faded back into reality. He could feel the warmth of Tech's hand, the callouses that textured his fingertips and the scar chinked into his forefinger. The strength with which his younger brother was holding his hand, though, was the most grounding feeling he was aware of. Tech's fingers were like a vice around his own, as if he could hold onto him tightly enough to pull him back from the haunting nightmares. As if he were afraid Echo might disappear if he let go.

Echo lay there for a long moment, letting the sounds of Wrecker's and Tech's soft snores, Crosshair's rhythmic tapping, and Hunter's steady breathing surround him with the concrete knowledge of where he was, where he was not . That everything was okay.

Then he tightened his fingers around Tech's and held on for dear life. 

He had known the moment that Tech and Rex had pulled him from the stasis tank that his life, or what was left of it, would never be the same. Maybe that was why he had been so willing to go on the risky mission to stop the siege of Anaxes. Why he had not needed much convincing to step off that tarmac and onto the ramp of the Omicron cruiser when Hunter had given him that option. He had been afraid, yes, but not because of everything he'd leave behind – he really had nothing to leave behind anymore. He'd been more worried that he would ruin their tight-knit unity, tear some kind of ragged hole in their brotherhood.

As Tech squeezed his hand and the other three surrounded him like living shields, he realized that they had not been waiting for him to earn his own place among them. They had already made him one, before he'd stepped on that ramp.

All he had to do was accept it.

He felt Hunter twitch on his left, as if he felt something else nearby, and the next instant Wrecker's hand slid from Crosshair's head to smack the sergeant in the face. The tracker’s own hand intercepted it in time to deflect the thick fingers, then Hunter went back to his quiet slumber. The bandana had slid down from its usual place and was now covering his eyes like an improvised sleep mask. 

Echo smiled and carefully turned more on his side, surprisingly unbothered when he looked down at his stump of a left arm. He let his head rest on Tech's upper arm and adjusted his own shoulders against Wrecker's rather comfortable bulk. He could hear Crosshair's finger still tapping and Hunter's breathing was once more even and deep.

The cyborg settled into his place among them and closed his eyes. All the pieces in his chest that had been shattered by what he’d been through, what he’d suffered and lost, suddenly clicked back into place.

The nightmare didn't return. For the first time since the Citadel, he spent a non-medicated night without terrors coming for him in the dark. The four heartbeats around him thumped in time, a steady drumbeat warning away his demons. He doubted they were gone for good, but he knew that when they did return they wouldn't kill him. 

He had four brothers they'd have to get past first.

~~~~~

When Hunter stirred the next morning, his thirst for something with caffeine overpowering his need for more sleep, Echo was resting peacefully with his hand still entwined with Tech's. The tracker sensed that something was different. It didn't feel like he should be worried, or like that something was big and noticeable…it felt subtle and secret. But something , Hunter knew, had changed. 

He listened closely. Then he smiled, a wide grin breaking across his face like the sun appearing through the dusty shadows on a horizon. Usually, there were four heartbeats, his included, thumping in time on the edge of his consciousness. That was what had changed – Echo's heartbeat.

It was beating in time with their own.

Chapter Text

Echo let the cool beach breeze ruffle through his hair and breathed out a sigh. He knew that his short black locks were flecked with sand but he didn’t care. He didn’t have to care, because he didn’t want to.

When Hunter had said they could do whatever they wanted now, he had been right – as usual. In spite of everything that had happened, Pabu was still their island paradise, and no matter where he went on his travels with Rex he knew it would be waiting when he wanted to come home.

Home . That was certainly not a word he’d ever expected to use for himself. Now he and his siblings had more than a home – they had people who cared about them, a whole island full. 

He glanced over to the initials carved into the palm tree not far away and smirked. Some had immediately cared more than others. No matter how much Tech tried to play off his emotions now, that big T+P was there to remind everybody he now belonged to a certain lady pirate and was no longer allowed to be a purely logical being.

“Echo!”

He winced at the sharp call that bore through the breeze and pierced his eardrums. Phee’s sense of importance had rubbed off on her niece and Cassie was not a quiet little girl to begin with.

The cyborg heard the little pattering footsteps trotting towards him on the sand but waited for the girl to almost reach him before he showed any sign of it. Then he whipped around and snatched her up, his flesh and metal hands carefully lifting her high about his head.

Cassie squealed then started giggling. Echo smiled as he lowered his arms and set her down on her small brown sandals in the sand, away from the water’s edge.

 “What are you doing out here, little missy?” he growled, getting up in her space. She grinned and leaned in to boop her nose to his.

She’d learned that from the cat – the scruffy little stray thing that Wrecker had brought home from the docks. With one missing ear and two different colored eyes, Darik had promptly named the creature Gonky and neither of his cousins had protested. “Mama says it’s time to eat!” 

“Well, we’d better get inside then.” He picked her up again and beamed as her bubbly giggles resumed. Being the bachelor bouncing between his two married brothers’ houses had required more of his adapting skills than he had anticipated. If it had been Darik telling him that Phee said it was time to come inside, he would have had at least another hour and a half before he had a reason to get up. Tech’s wife was many things, but punctual was not one of them.

Sheona, on the other hand…

Echo swore she had married Hunter because she had an empty slot in her itinerary that day and needed to fill it. Oh, she loved the former sergeant, alright – but Maker help him if he was late for dinner.

The cyborg knew Hunter loved every moment of it. 

All of the Batch was happy – happier than they’d ever been. They had been through the wringer after the war had ended, especially after Crosshair’s chip had activated and they’d thought they’d lost Tech. Now they had both of their brothers and their little sister safe with them, and the universe was being decent enough to keep the Empire’s reach away from Pabu for the time being, and the Bad Batch was focusing on doing something they'd never been able to before.

Anything they wanted.

“Echo Kyr'bes!” 

Echo fought the urge to roll his eyes. Almost anything.

This time the call came from the porch of the house only a few hundred yards from the shoreline. The short blonde on the steps might not look like much of a fighter, but Echo had seen her back Mr. Hunter-the-Troubled-Tough-Guy into a corner so he wasn’t taking chances. If she wanted him on time for dinner, he’d be on time for dinner and he’d even wipe his feet off on the mat first.

Sheona watched him do just that before he carried Cassie up the stairs, making sure the sand stayed on the ground and didn’t even make it to her carefully swept porch. “You’ve been out there all afternoon,” she reminded him. “Is something wrong?”

“Nope.” He shook his head. “That’s why I was out there.”

She grinned back at him, then plucked Cassie out of his arms and pointed inside. “Hands. Washed. Now. Then you can go drag my husband and Wrecker up from the docks.”

“What about Crosshair?”

“He’s in the attic reading.” A twinkled bloomed in her soft brown eyes. “I’ll send Cassie in after him.”

Cassie nodded and squirmed to get down. “I’ll get him!” 

Sheona set her down and Echo grinned as she took off like a missile, her new mission underway to capture her second -favorite uncle.

The cyborg washed his hands – living on a beach necessitated a waterproof prosthetic arm – and straightened in front of the hall washstand, his back cracking comfortably after lying on the beach for most of the day. He glanced in the mirror and noticed that his necklace was…off. The charm had slid around to the back of his neck.

He reached up and drew it back around to the center. The stone charm was cool to the touch and glittered a mesmerizing green against the part of his chest that showed above the neck of his tank top. It was a Tia Loreng, and he never went anywhere without it. He’d found it on one of the runs he’d made with Rex the year after Tech and Phee had gotten married, in a stall run by a trinket dealer who apparently had a monopoly on the bird pendant market. After sifting through the seemingly bottomless crate of necklaces for half an hour and thoroughly exasperating Rex, he’d successfully come up with the Tia Loreng and its four companions – an Argonian Ruffle bird, a Cloudripper, a convor, and a Shyyyo bird.

He was pretty sure Crosshair’s Cloudripper was currently in the possession of one Koda Kyr'bes, who had stolen it by blinking fast and asking nicely. Other than that, his brothers wore their own pendants religiously. They understood what he had meant by giving them the trinkets, something he had never been able to find a non-awkward way to say.

Thank you .

The Batchers weren’t the first brothers he’d ever had, but they were the ones who had pulled him out of the depths of darkness and torment and dragged him back to life whether he liked it or not. They were the brothers who had given him a special sign so they always knew where he was, so if he needed them he could call; who had immortalized their ties in a sketch that Echo now had framed in his room. They were the brothers who had stayed up with him and silently comforted him the night he couldn’t face his demons in the dark; the brothers who had talked with him over steaming cups of tea and caf to let him know stupid stories from cadethood and to promise him that he would never be alone again.

The brothers who he had built a home with on Pabu. The ones who had included him when they chose a name.

“Echo!” 

He felt a weight wrap around his legs and smiled down.

The brothers whose children insisted on tackling him, or trying to, every time they saw him. 

Koda was clinging to one of his metal legs and Darik had seized onto the other. Both were breathing hard and sweaty. Koda was letting his tongue hang out as he panted like he was a puppy.

“I won!” he announced. 

“Nu-uh!” Darik clung tighter to Echo’s prosthetic and scowled at his younger cousin. “You were first inside but I grabbed Echo first! I get to sit beside him!”

Echo chuckled and picked up each boy with one arm. “I have two sides, you knuckleheads.”

Hunter suddenly appeared in the door, and sagged in relief when he saw Koda trying to climb to Echo’s shoulders. “There they are.”

Echo snorted. “You lost your son and your nephew again?”

“ No .” Hunter flipped his hair away from his forehead and pushed his bandana up higher. “They decided to race but Koda can get distracted and I thought he might run to the you-know-what again.”

The you-know-what being the pasture, in which a little energy-rich Koda was known to get lost in quite regularly if he didn’t have a guardian on hand. Echo was really beginning to consider the morality of keeping children on leashes – at least this one.

Koda had made it to his coveted perch on Echo’s shoulders and was happy as a clam, kicking his legs over his uncle’s collarbones and grinning down at Darik. Then he sniffed the air and froze. If they could have his ears would have perked up. 

“Mama made pancakes!” he shouted.

Hunter chuckled and shook his head. “Inside voice, son.”

Koda leaned over to look directly into Echo’s eyes. “Mama made pancakes,” he whispered, amber eyes glittering with excitement.

Echo blew in his face and the boy laughed. “I know.”

Omega squeezed through the doorway past Wrecker and darted to the kitchen, calling back over her shoulder. “Where is Pancake, Koda?” 

Koda’s eyes widened and he pulled something from his shirt pocket. “I forgotted her!” he yelped. He held out his hands for Echo to see the little purplish-silver sugar glider curled up in his cupped hands.

Echo smirked as Pancake blinked up at him, her big black eyes sleepy as usual. She’d probably been asleep the whole time she’d been in his pocket. “I’m pretty sure she didn’t mind, Koda.”

Koda cradled the little glider close and nuzzled her with his nose. “She was sleepy,” he explained. “She didn’t wanna walk.”

“Because she knows you’ll carry her everywhere!” Wrecker laughed. “That lil’ thing pinned us for easy pickins the minute ya found her.”

“Hey, she’s got an excellent deal going for her.” Echo reached up and stroked the glider’s small head. She didn't budge. “She gets free rides, free fruit, and free housing. She’s golden.”

“Like you.” Crosshair smirked their way as he emerged from the living room, Cassie balanced on his hip and playing with the ties on his shirt.

“And you , Sparkles,” Phee’s voice shot back amiably. She strode in with a plate of sushi in her hands and Tech in tow. The engineer was reading as he walked, his datapad giving off a bright glow as he ducked into the door. “Echo ain’t the only one who eats for free.”

“I pay for it with my presence,” Echo quipped. Koda giggled and set Pancake on his hair. She promptly curled up again and closed her eyes.

“All three of you bachelors are freeloaders and we love you anyway,” Sheona reminded them from around the corner. “Koda!”

Koda looked toward the kitchen. “Hmmm?”

“No pets at the table!”

“Okay.” Koda sulked but handed Pancake to Echo. The cyborg carefully set the little creature in her potted tree and watched her cling to her favorite branch. 

“I’ll get your supper later,” Koda whispered to her loudly. 

Hunter pulled his son off Echo’s shoulders and carried him down the hall. “After supper you’re getting a bath .” 

“But I’m not dirty!” Koda insisted. He looked over the tracker’s shoulder at Echo, eyes pleading for support.

Hunter’s laugh was deep in his chest. “Son, you are the definition of dirty.”

Echo noted the trail of sand the kids had left on their way in and had to agree. Koda had been the only one of the twins to inherit their father’s enhanced senses, but from what they could tell the mutation wasn’t nearly as advanced as Hunter’s. At least the olfactory senses weren’t – the boy could play in the swamp all day and still insist he didn’t need to wash. 

“Okay.” Koda sighed and slumped over Hunter’s shoulder like a sack of flour. “Can I have a story?”

“If Echo feels like telling it.”

Echo grinned as he followed them down the hall. He always felt like telling a story…especially when it was about his brothers. He’d collected quite a few good ones over the years, and a lot of embarrassing ones. He wondered if he’d told Darik that his father was a criminal yet, wanted by six Corsucant libraries for false identity. He didn’t think he had. 

Tonight would be a good night for that one. 

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