Hunter’s hiding them somewhere, Cody realizes. And if Hunter’s hiding them, Cody’s chances of finding them are slim with a side of fucking none. Cody will have to bring the kids to him.
He starts in their bunk room, standing at the side of Hunter and Crosshair’s bunk and knocking on the frame in the 1 2 1-2 rhythm he’s taught them means ‘ori’vod.’ “Hunter,” he says, speaking at a conversational volume. “Hey, it’s Cody. Where’d you go?”
He stands stock still for a few moments, breathing steadily. Nothing. That’s alright, he wasn’t expecting anything yet.
“Hunter,” he tries again. “It’s just me. Coast is clear.” He knocks on the bed frame one more time, then leaves the room. He turns left, heading down the hallway towards the D-37 hub. If something happened or someone spooked them, Hunter’ll have taken them this way, away from the medical wing. There are a few places he’s tried in the past, places he’d found them when they were younger and Hunter hadn’t yet learned the best ways to hide from everyone, but he doesn’t bother with them now. Tech would never let Hunter repeat a hiding spot, and Wrecker’s probably gotten too big to fit in half of them.
He sings to himself as he walks
Kote, darasuum kote.
Come on, Hunter, he thinks. I know you can hear me, kid.
Te racin ka’ra juaan kote.
Gods, he hopes they’re okay. As much as he hates how easily they spook, as much as he hates to watch the little ones shake while Hunter stares him down with steady hands on a too-big knife, he hopes they’re just overreacting. Hopes he’s overreacting.
Kote, darasuum kote.
He reaches the main hub and turns around. It’s been almost five minutes. He’s waited long enough.
Te racin ka’ra juaan kote.
He gives up on singing as he approaches their door for the second time, focusing instead on keeping his breathing slow and measured. His heart pounds in his throat. He knows ( think you know, you only think, this could be the time they don’t come back) what he’ll see on the other side of the door, but still—
“Cody!”
—There they are. Cody drops to his knees as the door closes behind him, bracing himself for the one, two, three, four cadets who come running to him, throwing themselves into his lap and gods, but they’re getting too big for this. He huffs a laugh, setting Wrecker to one side to make room for Tech and Crosshair. “Hey, ad’ike.”
Hunter tucks himself under Cody’s other arm, burying his face in Cody’s reds. He’s trembling. He’d been standing at the ready when Cody’d opened the door, feet apart and skinny shoulders set like he could hide the huddle of kids behind him, protect them from whatever might come into their room.
“You’re back!” Wrecker yells. “We missed you.”
“Yeah, I see that.” None of them seem injured, but with the way Se experiments on them, there might be problems he can’t see. “How’s it going? I couldn’t find you guys when I came in here a minute ago.”
Tech squirms his way out from under Crosshair’s legs to look Cody solemnly in the eyes. His glasses are so thick now Cody can see the room behind him in the edges. “That is because Hunter wanted us to hide,” he declares, shifting like he’s going to point somewhere. An arm materializes from Cody’s side and swats Tech’s hand down, much to his displeasure. “I was just going to—”
“No.”
“Al right,” Tech huffs at the ball of reds and fluffy hair that Hunter’s become. “As I was saying, we were hiding. Now we are not.”
Hunter twitches. Cody tugs him closer, doing his best to provide some soothing pressure even with the awkward position they were in. He nods to Tech and reaches around him to brush a cowlick back down onto Crosshair’s head. The kid bristles like he doesn’t want to be touched, which might be more believable were he not in Cody’s lap.
“What time is it?” Wrecker interjects around a jaw-cracking yawn. “I wanna go to bed.”
“It is seventeen minutes after twenty-one hundred hours,” Tech declares, wriggling out from under Cody’s arm. “It is not bedtime yet.”
Crosshair escapes, too. He follows Tech to their table and hops up to sit next to him, watching Cody intently from his new vantagepoint. After a moment of silence in which Wrecker crawls back into Cody’s lap, Crosshair says, “I’m tired, too.”
Tech looks from Crosshair to Cody, then tries to catch Hunter’s eye. Hunter’s still making an attempt to become one with Cody’s reds, but he senses Tech looking anyway. “Tech can stay up ‘til bedtime,” he decides. “Wrecker and Cross can go to sleep if they want.”
Tech seems satisfied with that answer. He pulls several datapads towards himself, arranging them in a half-circle on the table and turning them on. The blue light reflects off his goggles. Wrecker crawls out of Cody’s lap and goes to retrieve Lula from her spot on Crosshair’s bunk. Before he can settle down, though, Hunter pulls back from Cody’s side to say, “Hit the showers,” with a sort of determined finality. Cody frowns. The batch don’t question the order.
It’s not until the ‘fresher door slides closed and the sound of the sonics starts up that Hunter disentangles himself completely. He sits crosslegged on the floor in front of Cody, fixing him with a wide-eyed stare that jumps around his face, taking in his forehead, his nose, his mouth, everything but his eyes.
Cody blinks at him, long and slow. Hunter blinks back quicker.
“Kid,” Cody says, and Hunter bursts into tears.
“Oh, kiddo,” Cody soothes. He knows better than to touch Hunter, so he grabs Lula off the table and presses her into Hunter’s arms. She’s taken immediately and hugged with such ferocity that Cody thinks she might pop a stitch. “Oh, ad’ika, it’s alright. Everyone’s safe.”
Hunter keens into Lula’s ears, little hands frantically clenching and unclenching as he starts to rock with desperate intensity.
“Everyone’s safe,” Cody repeats. “You did so well. Everyone’s safe. Everyone’s safe. Everyone’s safe.” Hunter pitches himself forward, nearly falling on his face with the force of his rocking. He starts hitting Lula against his forehead in time with Cody’s mantra. “Everyone’s safe. Everyone’s safe. Everyone’s safe.”
At last, when Cody’s voice is hoarse and Lula’s lopsided face has a damp spot from Hunter’s crying, Hunter begins to quiet. The rocking loses its frantic edge and his sobs quiet into exhausted post-meltdown tears. Between one breath and the next, Cody gets a lapful of Hunter and Lula, and he pulls them as close as he can.
Hunter takes a shuddering breath. “They wanted to take Tech and Cross again,” he whispers to Cody’s collarbone. “I heard them, heard them, heard them.” Hunter breaks off with a frustrated huff, then starts again slower. “I. Heard them. Heard them. Talking about what they were going to do.”
Cody takes a deep, measured breath. There’s nothing you can do, he reminds himself. Interfering could make it worse. Something deep in his chest burns. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. So I hid them. And they couldn’t find us.” Hunter (Cody’s fucking kid, his ad, they’re doing this to his kids) shudders. “But. But.”
But they’ll come back. But all Hunter can do is delay the inevitable and put himself on the line instead because he’s a stubborn fucking di’kut with a heart too big for his chest.
“Can you stay here tonight?” Hunter asks. Then, quieter, he admits, “I’m tired.”
“Yeah, kid, of course I can.” Cody blinks frantically, trying to hold back his own tears. Not now, damn it. “You can get some sleep, alright?”
“Alright,” he says, and Cody meant that he could go over to his bunk and settle down for the night, but Hunter seems to have taken his promise as permission and within minutes, he’s asleep on Cody’s shoulder. Cody wonders when last he slept. He hasn’t seen the Batch in almost a week, and there’s no telling how long Se’s been looking for Tech and Crosshair.
Cody gathers Hunter up in his arms. He’s smaller than the others and even nearing the end of his fourth cycle, he’s easy to pick up and bring to the bunks. He stirs a bit as Cody tucks him in, muttering something nonsensical and wrinkling his nose when Cody brushes his bangs out of his eyes. Then he’s back out, curled up around Lula and drooling on his pillow.
The other three are out of the sonics and into Hunter’s bunk by 2145. Tech seems to have forgotten his project, because he’s fast asleep with the rest of them in no time at all. Wrecker’s snoring in Crosshair’s ear and Crosshair’s feet are hanging off the end of the bunk. It doesn’t seem to bother him. Hunter sleeps on.
Cody sets up camp at the table, pulling out his datapad and preparing himself for a long night of keeping watch. At least he’ll catch up on coursework.