Chapter Text
Generally, Tech did not mind enclosed, cramped spaces.
Crosshair had once compared him to a loth cat, in that he seemed to defy all laws of physics when he wedged himself into a corner to curl up around his datapad or whatever project he was tinkering with. Let alone how he would practically fold himself and his tools into the smallest of spaces while making repairs or upgrading the Havoc Marauder.
Now, however, was not one of those times that Tech was enjoying the tight vent that he was currently squeezed into. Of course, it was difficult to appreciate any place that was also occupied by a currently-counting-down explosive and shared a thin wall with an irradiated fusion reactor.
Despite Tech’s current predicament, by all accounts their current mission had seemed to be going better than most usually did when they were involved.
One of the Marshal Commanders, Bacara, had hailed them on an urgent comm, stating that one of the Outer-Rim medical stations, one that stood as a way point between Kamino and the rest of the galaxy, had been taken over by the Separatists, and since Clone Force 99 had just wrapped up a mission on nearby Rodia, they were being sent to re-capture the base.
When they’d arrived in the system, they weren’t even sure they were in the right place. There was no activity whatsoever around the station, and certainly no droid ships on their scopes. But when they’d tried to comm, their messages were met with silence, which certainly did not bode well. Despite the lack of communication, there were heat signatures on-board the station, which suggested that it wasn’t completely vacant. Perhaps the droids had jammed or completely severed the station’s communications array, but time was of the essence and Tech could not afford to do a more thorough scan when the clones on-board were still in very real danger.
Tech had landed in the hangar meant for small transport ships, only to find that every other ship in there had been destroyed or disabled and there was no deck crew to speak of whatsoever—clone or droid. Without waiting for direction, Tech ran another scan of the station, this time looking for droids, and coupled with Hunter’s senses they realized that the droids that remained had set a trap for them while holding the staff and patients hostage.
The plan itself had been relatively simple. Hunter and Wrecker would spring the trap while Crosshair and Tech would make their way through the vents and past the bulk of the droids that were waiting just outside the hangar for them. The pair would then make for the bridge of the medical station and dispatch of the command droid and track down any stragglers, with the team meeting up somewhere in the middle.
Wrecker and Hunter had fearlessly charged into the fray, creating a hell of a distraction that enticed nearly every droid on the station to join them. Tech and Crosshair had only had to take out a small squad on their way to the bridge, and the squad was certainly not anticipating two clones running loose aside from the pair making a commotion in the hangar. They’d easily taken out the command droid and a few minutes later, Tech had hacked into it and was calling out where any pockets of remaining droids were hidden.
When the batch had reached the holding room where crew not caring for patients had been kept, the staff immediately had a visceral reaction to their appearance as an alarm blared and a countdown began, and it was then that the batch learned the full extent of the Separatists’ plans.
The droids had anticipated that the Republic would send someone to take back the medical station, hopefully a jedi or larger unit than just Clone Force 99. They had rigged a small explosive in the vent Tech was now in, just beside the reactor, in the hopes that even if said rescue team knew about the explosive, they would not have the means to deactivate it or to evacuate the station in time before it exploded.
Wrecker was generally their explosives expert, and even though he had large hands that weren’t always the best when it came to fiddling with small wires, he had proven time and time again that with the right tools, he could disarm just about any explosive and with plenty of time to spare. But there was no way Wrecker would have fit in the vent Tech currently occupied. As it were, Tech hardly fit, but with his lean, wiry body and thin armor, he was the best choice.
Now, Wrecker was watching Tech’s work via a datapad that was transmitting the footage from the recording device fixed to his youngest brother’s helmet.
“No, don’t touch that wire, Tech!” Wrecker called in his ear and Tech couldn’t help the way his face scrunched in annoyance.
“You don’t need to shout, Wrecker,” Tech said gently, reigning in his frustration before continuing. “Which wire should I cut next?”
“That yellow one, the one that goes to the transmitter. Then you’ll cut the blue feeding into the conductor and remove that and it should be disarmed,” Wrecker replied. “Just be careful, Tech.” The brawler’s voice was laced with concern as he watched through the datapad.
Tech followed the instructions to the letter, and less than a minute later, he had removed the conductor and the device powered down. He let one breath out, then took another in, and then finally, Tech let his helmet fall the the floor of the vent and let out a sigh. “The bomb has been disabled. Mission complete.”
“Good work Tech, Wrecker,” Hunter said over comms, a hint of pride coloring his words. “Get out of there and meet Cross and I up at the bridge. The station commander said they might have a few supply missions for us to run until we get called elsewhere.”
Wrecker groaned. “Supply runs? Can’t we do something fun?”
“I’m sure you’ll have the chance to give away our position on a stealth mission soon enough, Wrecker,” Crosshair retorted, though without any bite.
Tech managed a small snort before shaking his head. “Alright, I’m coming back out.” He rolled to his side, somehow managing to stow his tools and the disassembled parts of the explosive in his various pockets before shimmying his way backwards.
Wrecker groaned in his ear after a few minutes, clearly impatient. “Come on , Tech. Can you crawl any slower?”
“I thought you did not want to participate in the supply runs,” Tech grit out as he continued the precarious art of crawling backwards.
“I don’t, but I do want to eat, since we haven’t done that in a while. And they probably have actual food here instead of rations,” Wrecker muttered, walking at a lazed pace towards the hallway Tech would be emerging into from the vents. “Do you want me to help pull you out?”
Tech saw the lighting change and felt one of his feet slip out of the cramped vent and into a wide open space, and he let out a small breath of relief. “No, I am quite alright on my own, Wrecker.” He pushed himself the rest of the way out of the vent, immediately pulling out his datapad to check the readings on the reactor and ensure they were within normal ranges.
But, as he was often reprimanded for by both his teammates and their former trainers on Kamino, Tech was not paying close enough attention to his surroundings.
Coming out of a storage room to his left, the door sliding silently open and closed, was a commando droid, blade poised to strike the wayward clone knelt next to the vent.
Tech started to stand, gaze still trained on his datapad and unaware of the new threat. “Hunter, the reactor is in stable condition, and I do not believe the droids that attacked the station caused any damage to it outside of—” He cried out in pain as the droid adjusted it’s stance to account for Tech’s height, it’s sharp elbow hitting the side of his head hard, just as Wrecker came around the corner.
“Tech!” Wrecker shouted over his own blaster fire, watching as his younger brother fell practically in slow-motion. Wrecker couldn’t help the roar that was torn from him as he fought through the flack of the droid’s blaster before grabbing its arm and ripping it off, throwing the droid into the wall in the process.
The lights in its eyes flickered before winking out completely, wires sparking as the droid’s body stilled.
“Wrecker? What’s going on?” Hunter called over the comms.
“You didn’t somehow manage to re-arm the bomb, did you?” Crosshair drawled, clearly bored.
Wrecker lifted up his helmet as he knelt beside Tech, eyes searching his younger brother’s frame for any form of consciousness before his gaze fell on the left side of his helmet, which was caved in and practically shattered from the droid’s hit. “It’s Tech, he’s down,” Wrecker said into his comm, trying to keep his voice from shaking as he wracked his brain for what he had learned—or at least attempted to learn—during their field first-aid class back on Kamino.
There was a pause before Hunter panted, “Down?”
“Yeah, a—a droid hit him as he was coming out of the vent, hard in the head. I—I guess I missed one,” Wrecker managed, kneeling beside his younger brother and pressing his fingers against his brother’s neck, trying to feel for a pulse. But Wrecker’s own pulse, intensified from his adrenaline, made it almost impossible to feel anything beneath his gloved fingertips. Instead, he put a hand on Tech’s chest and let out a sigh of relief as he felt the steady rise and fall of Tech’s breathing.
Wrecker mentally ticked “make sure the man down is alive” off of his memorized checklist of “what to do if one of his brother’s is injured in combat.” The next step was to assess the gravity of the injury. Wrecker carefully gripped either side of Tech’s helmet before starting to pry the bucket off.
The plastoid creaked and groaned with each movement before Wrecker gave up and sat back on his haunches, not wanting to force the helmet off and hurt his brother further. He rubbed his brow before glancing down and seeing the hilt of his knife tucked against his outer thigh and pulled it out, squinting at the blade. A moment later he was cutting carefully around the damage, and after a few painstaking minutes, was able to slip the remains of the helmet off of Tech’s head completely.
Beneath it, especially where bits of shattered glass and plastoid were dug into his skin, the left side of Tech’s face was a bloody mess and his skin had lost its olive pallor.
Wrecker re-sheathed his knife before resting a hand on Tech’s chest, glad to feel it still rising and falling beneath his cuirass. But a moment later, Tech’s face twitched and his eyes fluttered open before squeezing shut once more.
“Wrecker?”
“Yeah, I’m here Tech. Are you?” Wrecker asked, voice airy and unsteady.
Tech’s face scrunched up before he let out a quick, pained breath, one hand reaching towards the left side of his face.
Wrecker quickly grabbed his wrist, holding it to his brother’s chest instead. “Best not to touch that right now, Tech.”
“W—what happened?”
Wrecker hazarded a reassuring smile, trying to ignore the blood on the side of Tech’s face. Distantly, he wondered if this was what he had looked like, though probably much worse, when he had suffered the injury that had stolen his left eye and hearing on that side. How Tech and his brothers had managed to stay calm during that emergency was a mystery to him. “Don’t worry about it. Just lie still.”
About then, three more sets of footsteps came down the hall, two of them thundering with purpose while the third skittered unsteadily.
“Wrecker, how is he?” Hunter asked, kneeling beside him and resting a hand on Tech’s chest. A moment later he answered his own question. “Pulse is weak but his heart is keeping a steady rhythm. Airways sound clear.”
Tech softly groaned. “I could have told you that.”
The third set of footsteps belonged to one of the medical station’s nurses, a young Pantoran who stood beside Crosshair, face tense from shock. “Do—do you have a med scanner? I can check for a concussion but you need to scan the head injury, just to make sure.”
Crosshair knelt and pulled the med-scanner from Tech’s backpack, jostling it and punching random buttons until the screen lit up.
Hunter stood, pulling Wrecker with him as they gave Crosshair and the nurse some space, eyes fixed on Tech’s still frame that was sprawled out on the floor, their little brother’s fingers twitching restlessly as he waited for Crosshair to finish. “What sort of damage are we looking at, Cross?” Hunter asked.
“Give me a few minutes,” Crosshair hissed, lip curled as he waved the scanner over Tech and took in the readouts, trying to remember everything from their basic field-medic training and what Tech had taught him whenever he had assisted his younger brother.
The nurse pulled out a small pen light, shining it in each of Tech’s eyes before adjusting and carefully feeling along the back of his neck, her face pulled taught in concentration. “Pupils are slow to contract but responsive. There’s inflammation in the neck, but nothing broken or unstable,” she said after a moment.
“Wrong,” Crosshair replied, passing over the medscanner. “There’s a fracture in his left sphenoid and he definitely has a concussion. Not sure to what extent.”
“Can you treat that here?” Hunter glanced at the nurse who was now sitting back on her haunches, studying the readout of the medscanner.
“Sir? There’s… no real treatment. Yes, he has a broken bone and a concussion, but all he needs is rest and observation. The sphenoid is not something we can splint or cast,” the nurse murmured, standing up.
Wrecker gestured to the remains of the helmet beside Tech, “Look at his bucket! It can’t be just a concussion!”
Tech winced at Wrecker’s volume, holding a hand up to placate his brother. “Wrecker, helmets are meant to shatter—”
“Then what is the point of them?” Wrecker retorted.
“Wrecker,” Hunter grit out, trying to not be harsh but beyond overwhelmed by the state of his youngest brother and not needing the brawler to continue shouting practically in his ear.
Tech closed his eyes, letting out a breath. “Helmets are designed to redistribute the energy of a blunt force so as not to cause major damage to the brain. If a hit is hard enough, the energy will cause the helmet to crack as it absorbs the blow.”
“He is correct,” the nurse added softly. “While he does have some cuts on the side of his face, it is nothing we cannot address with some stitches and bacta. I can stitch him up now, if we get him down another floor or two.”
Crosshair squinted at the nurse. “Just give us the supplies we need. We should take him back to Kamino.”
“Are you sure?” the nurse asked, looking between them.
Hunter sighed. “It’s not our first time stitching each other up after a mission. But is he okay to make the trip to Kamino?”
Tech carefully pressed himself so he was sitting, closing his eyes for a moment as a wave of nausea threatened him before fixing his gaze on Hunter. “As long as I am not jostled around and get plenty of rest, there is no reason why I could not make the trip back to Kamino.”
Wrecker grit his teeth, opting to ignore his dazed squadmate as he turned to the nurse. “And there’s no medical transports, are there?”
“No, they were all destroyed when the droids came. But he is right; as long as you are mindful and observe him, he will be fine. While there is a break, it is stable. It won’t be moving at all. You’ll just need to keep an eye on him and wake him up every few hours to assess his symptoms,” the nurse replied quietly, glancing between them all.
There was a pause before Hunter grabbed Tech’s backpack, mind now moving a mile a minute. “Wrecker, get Tech to the ship. Crosshair, you go with him and make sure we’re prepped to leave. I’ll grab the supplies and meet you there,” he said firmly. “He can rest up on Kamino and be ready by the time we take our next mission.
Wrecker nodded solemnly, letting his helmet slip back over his head before carefully helping Tech up. “You got it, boss.”
They limped along for a few paces before Crosshair groaned, shaking his head as Tech sagged on his unsteady legs when they neared a corner. “Just pick him up, Wrecker. It’ll be faster.”
“I am quite alright,” Tech mumbled, attempting to take another step forward before swaying and falling back into Wrecker’s broad chest. “Then again… getting back to the ship in a timely manner seems to be a good idea…”
Crosshair rolled his eyes as Wrecker scooped their younger brother up, making sure the uninjured side of his head was comfortably resting against his shoulder. From then, they raced through the medical station to the hangar, and Wrecker carefully laid Tech out on the bunk, trying to ignore the multi-colored, grotesque bruise that was slowly flowering from his brother’s left temple and across the surrounding areas of his face.
“Hey, uhh, Crosshair? How long until we reach Kamino?” Wrecker asked, watching as the vitals on the medscanner fluctuated.
“One day from here,” Tech replied in his stead, eyes slipping closed as he tried to get comfortable on the bunk.
Wrecker’s head snapped up. “That long?”
Crosshair nodded. “There’s a large, uncharted nebula directly in our path. If Tech were flying the ship we could perhaps risk it, but…”
“I don’t think I could keep my eyes open that long,” Tech finished sleepily.
Crosshair scoffed. “Well that’s a first.” He gave Wrecker a terse nod before effectively ignoring him and prepping the ship. He was nowhere near as quick as Tech would have been, still having to think through the processes of opening up the fuel cells and turning on the engines in the right order, let alone remembering which buttons did which said tasks.
But just as Hunter was stepping up the ramp and closing the hatch, Crosshair had managed it.
“Let’s get to Kamino,” Hunter said, throwing his helmet onto a seat and gently placing Tech’s ruined helmet beside it.
“You want to help me get the ship out of the hangar first?” Crosshair muttered, jerking his head towards the empty co-pilot’s seat.
“Don’t break my ship!” Tech called from his bunk, still somehow awake. But his voice was far too loud to his own ears and he winced, squeezing his eyes tightly shut.
Hunter snorted, shaking his head as he rested a hand on Tech’s shoulder. “Just rest, Tech. I’ll make sure Cross doesn’t clip a wing on the way out.”
“He’s a better pilot than you are, Hunter…” Tech managed as his body finally sagged with exhaustion, his chest rising and falling steadily with each breath.
Hunter rolled his eyes before going to join Crosshair up front, helping to get the Havoc Marauder out of the station and into hyperspace before sitting back and pinching his brow. “How’s he doing, Wrecker?”
“I got his stitches done and he’s asleep,” Wrecker replied, looking between Tech’s pale features and the readout of the medscanner, which showed relatively normal numbers for someone who had just received a head injury. Wrecker had managed to get his younger brother’s armor off so that he was only in his blacks and had carefully tucked a sorry excuse for a pillow beneath his head.
Hunter groaned, clambering to his feet and going through the hold to the bunks. “We should probably wake him up in a few hours, but he seems stable enough.” He took the medscanner and flicked it off, tossing the instrument haphazardly onto Tech’s workstation. The silence that followed as the device was no longer beeping along with Tech’s steady heart rate was welcome, and Hunter slipped onto his bunk across from the one Tech was presently occupying, part of him desperately wanting to follow Tech’s lead after the utterly cacophonous mission that was liberating the medical station. But with a brother down—and the one that generally kept an eye on the rest of them—sleep was the very last thing he could make himself do.
Wrecker shifted from where he still stood beside Tech, looking down at his younger brother’s all-too-still form. Even asleep, Tech was never this motionless. “He--He’ll be okay, right? As long as we keep him still?”
“Yeah. He should be okay,” Hunter replied, though the words felt empty.
A couple hours later, Wrecker and Hunter were trying to find some semblance of normalcy on the ship without Tech’s usual chatter. At first they had all maintained a silent watch together, standing or sitting stock-still in the hold as the ship flew on autopilot towards their home planet.
But the silence had been deafening.
Surprisingly, Hunter was the first who could no longer stand still. At first he resorted to pacing the length of the ship before he annoyed himself with the sound of his own tired gait, and he opted instead to clean and repair Tech’s armor as best he could. Tech rarely let the others near his armor, especially with all of the instrumentation and complicated wiring he’d built into it. But Hunter could at least repair the cracks and burns induced from their more recent missions, buff out the carbon scoring, and throw a fresh splash of paint on it. His helmet, though, was beyond saving, with the one side practically crushed and the rest cut into pieces by Wrecker’s knife.
Tech was, more often than not, the one that maintained their armor and saved it when it appeared beyond saving. With Wrecker’s help, he had modified each of their armor for their specific needs and the ways they fought, and Tech’s own armor was no different. Hunter found himself wishing he could do more than just buff out the burns and scratches on Tech’s cuirass. He found himself seized by guilt as he painted a fresh red stripe down the middle of the chest plate. If he had been there to meet Tech, like he should have, if he had paid more attention to his senses, he would have known the commando droid was there and been able to protect his brother. They would have been eating on the station before being sent on a supply run instead of flying back towards Kamino with Tech in a stable but injured state.
Wrecker was the next to break formation, unable to stand the sight of seeing his brother so still and lifeless. He opted to go to the cockpit, grabbing their GNK droid along the way and doing his usual routine of lifting in an attempt to divert his mind and compartmentalize all that had happened. He too felt guilty for being so wrapped up in complaining that he was slow to reach Tech and slow on the draw, only able to dispatch the droid after Tech had been hit. His gaze kept finding the remains of the shattered helmet before he opted to turn away and face the blue light of hyperspace, not wanting to be sucked back into the memory of helplessly watching Tech crumple to the ground.
Crosshair, however, had refused to move, still sitting at their injured brother’s side to keep watch. Being a sniper, sitting perfectly motionless for hours on end and simply watching was his specialty. And it was just as the others were beginning to find some kind of stability that Tech began to stir. At first it was hardly noticeable to anyone except the sniper, who’s enhanced vision had him picking up on the twitching of Tech’s fingers. Then came a soft groan as his heart rate picked up and finally his eyelids fluttered open.
Crosshair stood, joints aching from lack of use, and he rested a hand on Tech’s chest. “Hey, Tech, can you hear me?”
Tech closed his eyes again and softly groaned in response, one of his hands clumsily reaching up to cover Crosshair’s. “Where—?”
“On the ship,” Crosshair said softly, no drop of venom in his thin voice. “Don’t move, Tech. Do you remember what happened?”
Tech patted his hand, eyes slowly opening once more. “O--oh. We were on the medical station, I had disarmed the bomb...” he trailed off as his mind flashed white hot with pain, the memory of the droid getting the jump on him coming back all too quickly. But everything after that was blurry flashes and disjointed scenes that made no sense. “I was injured,” he finally settled, closing his eyes again.
“Something like that,” Crosshair managed a snort before shaking his head. “How are you feeling?”
Tech opened his mouth to respond before his hand gripped Crosshair’s wrist and the other one flew to cover his mouth, eyes going wide as he started to heave.
Hunter, who had been watching from a respectful distance, was there in an instant. “Help me turn him over,” he commanded as he and Crosshair pulled Tech into a recovery position, mindful to make sure that he was not on his injured side.
There was a painful few minutes of Tech purging his meal from that morning and then dry heaving until there was absolutely nothing left and he choked in a breath, hand clutched so tightly around the edge of the bunk that his knuckles had long-since turned the same shade of white as the hallways on Kamino.
Crosshair carefully wiped the mess from his face before pulling back in shock as the tissue came back soaked red, blood seeping from Tech’s nose almost as if it were broken. “Wrecker, you said the droid got him in the temple, not the nose!” he called, face twisting into a sneer as he looked towards the cockpit and their eldest brother, trying to staunch the nosebleed that had come from seemingly nowhere.
Tech winced, thinking back through his hazy memories to try and piece everything back together. He definitely remembered the hit to his temple—the way the helmet had collapsed beneath the hard joint of the droid’s elbow, the plastoid cracking loudly and fragments burying themselves in his skin was a hard sensation to forget. Nevermind the pain that sat deeper in his head from the injury.
Deciding that the attempt to make sense of his scrambled memories was a waste, and more pain than it was worth, he decided to take stock of his own state. Tech raised a hand to his nose, trying his best to process all of the external stimuli of the ship humming around him and his brothers debating his course of care and the way he’d received his injury. Distantly, he wondered if the way he currently felt—like a raw nerve that someone could not stop messing with —was how Hunter felt on the regular, and he found himself gaining an even deeper respect for his sergeant and older brother. When he pulled his hand away, Crosshair replacing it with a damp cloth from the 'fresher, he stared at his glove in confusion, the material now sticky with blood and… some other clear-ish fluid.
“Get me to my workstation,” Tech said firmly, some level of focus now seeping into his consciousness and corralling his loose and disjointed thoughts.
Hunter pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, Tech. You have a concussion and a serious head injury. You shouldn’t be tinkering, let alone even moving .”
Tech closed his eyes, sucking in his lips for a moment and organizing his thoughts before letting his eyes open again. But his vision was dark and blurred, taking a few seconds to focus and find some semblance of clarity. “It is for the good of my health, Hunter. Let me at least run this through a test, then you can put me back on bed rest.” Not that I will have much of a choice if my hypothesis is correct…
Hunter opened his mouth to argue further but Crosshair was already moving, helping Tech onto unsteady legs and taking him to the cluttered workstation further up the hold.
Tech leaned most of his weight into Crosshair, falling heavily into his seat once he felt it behind him. He fumbled at the assorted tools on the countertop, his vision blurring once again as he fought to find his medscanner and hold it above his hand. A beam of light scanned the blood and other fluid from his nose before shutting off as the screen started spinning and analyzing the results while Tech slumped, blinking in a daze as the lights— all of them—pulsed irregularly around him.
Hunter knelt beside him, taking his hand and attempting to clean it up before opting to pull the soiled glove off altogether. “How are you feeling?”
Tech closed his eyes, deciding that getting a seizure from the kriffing lights—seriously, what was Wrecker doing with the power?—would only serve to worsen his already precarious position. The nausea he had awoken with was still very present, though not nearly as insistent now that nothing remained in his stomach. And his eyes… even with them closed, he could tell something wasn’t quite right. But both of those items were easily explained by the concussion.
“Dizzy,” he finally settled on, deciding it was better to not panic his brothers about his state unless he absolutely had to.
The medscanner made a pleasant ding and Tech opened his eyes, now to find that the world around him was almost completely dark and blurred far beyond what he was anticipating.
“Did—did Wrecker turn the lights off?”
Hunter shifted beside him, pressing a canteen into his hand. “No one turned the lights off. Tech…?”
“Oh,” Tech trailed off, deciding not to answer Hunter’s unspoken question as he had a sip of the water before looking down at the medscanner. It took almost a full minute for his vision to focus enough so that he could make out the words, and even then the screen was perhaps only a few inches from his face. Almost as soon as he could read the results, he wished he couldn’t. Instead, he bit the inside of his cheek hard , suppressing his gag reflex and forcing himself to operate as if the blurry readout on the screen belonged to someone else entirely—and certainly not himself.
Sometimes, his smart mind was more of a curse than a blessing—at least, that was how he felt in that moment as his hypothesis was confirmed.
But Crosshair had felt him tense and snatched the device away.
Even in the dim lighting—was Hunter certain that Wrecker hadn’t turned the lights down?—Tech could just see his brother’s face pale.
“We need to turn the ship around.”