Fives finds Tup in the medbay, sitting silent next to Dogma’s cot. It’s a futile vigil, Tup knows that. Even so, it’s his sixth night here in a row.
Dogma’s been completely unresponsive since he arrived back from Kamino. In and out of consciousness, Kix says, but entirely dead to the world. He’s still trying to sort brain damage from trauma.
Tup hasn’t noticed Fives yet. He’s too busy screwing with Dogma’s hands, fidgeting with his fingers and tracing patterns on his palms. Dogma’s staring with half-lidded, blank eyes at the ceiling.
Fives comes up to the side of the bed. “Hey, kid.”
Tup startles, dropping Dogma’s hand back onto the sheet. “Kark! Fives, what…?”
Fives takes Tup by the shoulders. “Come on. Time for some dinner.”
Tup rolls his eyes. “Fives, I’m not going to—”
“He’s not going to disappear while you’re gone. Come on. Food.”
He’s not sure how long it’s been since Tup had a proper meal, but it can’t have been too long with the way he picks at his plate. Vividly, Fives remembers the hunger of the end of his eighth cycle, eating anything that stood still long enough and quite a few things that didn’t. At that age, emotions have little effect on appetite.
Well, if Tup isn’t going to eat his fries, Fives sure as Hell is. He reaches across the table.
“Hey!” Tup lunges for him and misses, nearly knocking his plate over. “Fives!”
“What? You weren’t going to eat them,” Fives mumbles around a mouthful of tuber. Aw, they even left them in the oven long enough this time, fuck yes.
Rather than retort, Tup just shrugs and looks back down at his half-eaten pasta. “I’m not hungry.”
“Want something different?”
“No.” Then, petulant, “I want to leave.”
“Then go,” Fives answers, amused at the way Tup’s head shoots up and his face goes blank with disbelief.
It only lasts a moment, though, before Tup’s huffing, “Fine. I will, then,” and going to put his tray away.
Fives watches him until he’s almost out the door, looking back down at his plate every time Tup turns his way. Then, he gets up and follows at a moderate distance.
If the sudden increase in route complexity is anything to go by, Tup realizes he’s being tailed about a minute out from the caf. He goes down a level, over a unit, and then up three levels, but he never uses the lifts, so Fives figures he doesn’t want him gone that badly. They walk past the medbay and around the armory, tiptoeing around Intelligence and Communications and taking the shortcut through the water cyclers to the HVAC department. They skirt the training salles and go up to the viewing decks, then turn off into the library.
Tup stops in front of a study room. Fives opens the door and waves him inside. “Sit the fuck down, kid,” he commands. Tup sits on the thin, stained carpet. Fives sits across from him. “Talk to me.”
Tup looks down and away, hiding behind a cascade of loose hair. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Fives doesn’t respond and Tup doesn’t repeat the question, so they spend a long few minutes sitting in silence. Fives listens to the hum of the boilers below them.
Tup breaks the silence carefully, like someone else might hear them. “I miss him.” He clears his throat, then looks up at Fives with his face all flushed and tears shining in his eyes. “I miss him, and don’t say some bullshit like, ‘Oh, he’s right there, Tup, aren’t you so lucky? You got him back! You can’t miss him,” because I can and I do and I want to kill all of the—
“I’m so angry all the time,” he whispers. “It hurts and I can’t make it stop and I don’t want it to stop because I can’t feel anything else.”
Fives waits until it’s clear that Tup’s said his piece, then shuffles closer to him, stopping when they’re knee to cross-legged knee. “You can’t live without him, but you can’t stop waking up. Like a nightmare in reverse”
Tup nods, hair bouncing with each frantic bob of his head. “I just feel so bad,” he says, pleading, like Fives could somehow make it stop.
“Why? Why do you feel bad?” Fives presses, keeping his voice low and soft because, more than anything else about those first weeks, he remembers the guilt.
“I just… Fives, sometimes I wish that—“ Tup’s voice breaks “—I wish that they’d killed him. It would almost have been kinder.”
Fives tugs him into a near-painful Keldabe, breathing slow and steady against Tup’s hyperventilation. He closes his eyes, holding Tup close when he tries to pull away.
“I’m a horrible person,” Tup whispers.
“No,” Fives insists. “You’re not horrible, ad’ika.”
“But—“
“What happened to you and Dogma isn’t something you can try and put morals to. There’s no making sense of it and there’s no wrong reaction. You just cope the best you can and do your best to cause no further harm.” Fives rubs Tup’s back, measuring the shakes and nodding when they start to taper off. “Good. Keep breathing.”
“I miss him, Fives. I miss him so much.”
“Yeah, kid. I understand.”
They land on H-45b in the late afternoon, setting up camp in a lonely little field a dozen klicks from anything remotely town-like, not that there’s much of that. The moon hasn’t even been named yet, and according to Tech, the population can’t top two million, all immigrants. It’s nearly untouched, a stark contrast to Bracca, and it’s that observation that tips Echo off to where Hunter’s disappeared to.
He finds him on the roof, sitting with arms akimbo and legs hanging over the edge of the Marauder. Echo approaches quietly. After years of working around a startle reflex, it’s odd to ‘sneak up’ on Hunter, even when Echo knows he can hear him.
He sits a meter or so away, stretching his legs and sighing. The stars are gorgeous tonight.
Hunter’s breath catches every few minutes. Echo doesn’t look at his face, just stares out into the sky.
“I fucked up,” Hunter murmurs. “Badly, this time.”
Echo says nothing. A meteor flies by, fleeting.
“I can’t save them.” Hunter’s voice catches and breaks, and Echo looks his way for the first time. His face shines in the starlight, cheeks soaked in tears.
“Hunter,” Echo says, “you have to know Crosshair wasn’t your fault. Neither was anything that happened to Omega.”
Hunter laughs, short and sharp and loud. “Do you think they were the first?”
Echo is silent. Hunter sniffs, wiping a stray piece of hair back from his face.
“I’m ET-012,” he says, and Echo nods. “Crosshair’s ET-037.”
Echo had known that, but he’d never really wanted to think too deeply about it before.
“The first… six? seven? didn’t come out right. They died in the chambers, or right after being taken out. Then, apparently, they figured out they’d need to go XX if they wanted some of the mutations to work. Like they did with me. They went back after a while, but…”
Hunter pauses, scrubbing a hand over his face. It takes him two tries to get the words out right. “I. Hmm. Logically, I know— I know I shouldn’t be able to remember them. Maybe it’s nightmares that I substituted for reality, or maybe I saw their files once, or maybe, somehow, I actually do remember them, but.
“Echo, they, Eight and Nine and Ten, they didn’t look human. They were. I can’t even. Sometimes I have these nightmares where I look in the mirror and…”
Echo puts a hand on Hunter’s shoulder. “It’s alright. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
Hunter gives him a shaky, side-eyed smile. “I know. I just, I feel bad sometimes. For them. I don’t want them to be forgotten.” He takes a deep breath. “Eleven was mostly normal, and then I came out right, somehow. I think I was a fluke, because Thirteen and Fourteen and Fifteen and Eleven all died or got decomm’d pretty quickly. After that, they started to get the hang of it.”
Echo hums. “What about Tech and Wrecker?”
“They were supposed to be regs. Threw ‘em in with us when they were still alive come third cycle.” Hunter smiles softly, lost in memory. It’s gone too soon. “But Echo, there were. The Bad Batch used to be a full squad. There were five of us.”
Echo bites down on a gasp. His stomach turns.
Hunter pauses to swipe at a fresh bout of tears. “Twenty-Two was seven and a half,” he says, and Echo has to cover his mouth to keep the horror contained.
“Hunter, I…”
“I couldn’t protect him.” With those words, Hunter breaks, falling forward with the force of his sobbing. “I couldn’t protect him, I can’t protect any of them, I couldn’t, Crosshair, and I’m going to get Omega killed, and—”
Echo gathers him close, pressing Hunter’s face into his shoulder. “Breathe, Sarge. It’s okay. It’s not your fault. It’s okay.”
Hunter shakes his head, crying harder. He’s starting to hyperventilate.
Sometimes, Fives would get like this. The guilt would catch up to him and he’d spend the night a sobbing wreck, curled up in Echo’s bunk because he couldn’t bear to be alone with his own head. Echo would hold him close and press natborn kisses to his hair and tell him it’ll be okay, ner vod, it’s not your fault, brother.
Hunter’s hair is soft. It smells like sweat, mostly, and that unique hair-smell that everyone seems to have. Echo presses his lips to the top of Hunter’s head and gives the first blessing he’s given since Fives, since the night before the Citadel.
“You did everything you could, verd’ika. Everything. None of that is your fault. Don’t carry someone else’s blame, not like that.” He curls a hand around the back of Hunter’s head, willing the words to sink through his thick godsdamned self-sacrificing skull. “You saved your family. You did everything you could.”
Hunter cries for a long time. Echo holds him for longer. Eventually, he exhausts himself.
“By the time I noticed something was wrong, he was already gone,” Hunter rasps. “I always thought that if I just fought hard enough I could keep them safe, but I didn’t even know he was gone.”
Echo sighs, carding his fingers through Hunter’s hair. “Yeah, kid. I understand.”