Chapter Text
In hindsight, it probably would have been better for Crosshair to have kept his hands to himself. He should have known better, he really should have, but apparently he didn’t and it screwed them all over royally .
It was almost exactly five months to the day from his decant day, Wrecker, Omega, and Hunter had all had theirs and Tech’s was in a few weeks. Life was going on in the way it was wont to do. They’d been going back and forth between doing jobs for Cid and missions for Rex and Wolffe and so far Hunter had been managing to keep up with their finances, or at least he was managing to feed them, Crosshair wasn’t about to interrogate him about it so he could really only assume that his brother was keeping up with it. He seemed less stressed than he had before Rex and Howzer’s helpful intervention though, which made Crosshair think that they were no longer balancing on the precipice of disaster every second.
At that moment they were doing a mission for Rex and Wolffe, a slightly unusual one. The two commanders had been monitoring their contacts, looking for more cries for help from the brothers that had yet to escape the Empire’s clutches. Freeing the regs from the prison didn’t appear to be enough for them. Crosshair got the feeling nothing would be enough for them until every single reg was freed. He couldn’t fault them for that, even if they were chasing what was most likely an impossible dream. If it had been his brothers he would have kept at it until each of them was freed, so he understood. Rex and Wolffe just happened to have a lot more brothers than Crosshair did.
To that end they had set up a meeting with a contact, one who refused to talk in anything but in person for security’s sake. Rex and Wolffe didn’t feel it was safe to bring this person to the Dantooine base, so Howzer had volunteered to be ferried out to meet them and speak in person. Apparently this was acceptable to all parties involved and the commanders had enlisted the Batch’s help to be the transport and Howzer’s backup should anything go wrong.
So they had all packed up and taken off to meet this mysterious contact. The location of the meeting that had been agreed upon by all parties was an old Jedi temple on Sicemon. The planet was grassy and open and the Temple was a massive structure with towers that stretched up towards the sky and roots that dug deep into the ground. Crosshair didn’t like it, but that was largely because the last time they’d gone to an abandoned Jedi temple he had been in a very very bad headspace and he didn’t want to be reminded of that period and the freakout he’d had that had led to his brothers having to track him down through the jungle. Just bad memories all around. He didn’t want to think about it.
He didn’t want to think of anything anymore, he was still so tired all the time, even if he was doing better than before. He had kept up the habit of keeping his audio player jammed in his ear and playing either music or a drama so he could distract himself from the unpleasant things always scrabbling around in his brain, but he couldn’t have it on during a mission where it might distract him at a key moment. Tech had also insisted he continue practicing meditation so he had a fallback in situations where the audio player wasn’t an option and Crosshair didn’t fight him on it. He’d wished he’d had a fallback like that in the prison, so he understood Tech’s logic and went along with it, even if it was a struggle. He couldn’t meditate while on mission either unfortunately. He needed to remain focused.
Once Tech had landed the Marauder in amongst the tall grass that made up the wide plains of this planet's surface the seven of them loped down the ramp and made their way towards the temple. Omega trotted up alongside Crosshair and reached up to hold his hand as they walked. He glanced down at her, but didn’t actually do anything to stop her. Maybe she was remembering the incident at the last Jedi temple too. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to hold on to him if that was the case.
About a month ago Hunter had managed to procure some new clothes for her, clothes and armor, although it was a cobbled together set rather than anything as uniform as what the clones or TK troopers had been issued. It mostly consisted of a jacket with heat resistant plates sewn into it meant to safely disperse blaster bolts and an open faced helmet. They couldn’t afford anything fancier, but as a sniper Crosshair approved of the added headgear, even if it didn’t protect her face. Anything was better than nothing.
They made it safely inside the temple and Omega gripped Crosshair’s hand a little tighter, he understood that too. The place was creepy, but then again dark abandoned buildings full of huge cavernous spaces were often creepy. Too many places for something to come out of. Crosshair made a sacrifice to allow her to hold on to him by pulling out his hand blaster instead of his rifle, since it didn’t require him to use both hands. His brothers had drawn their weapons as well. They didn’t know what they were walking into and it was better to be safe than sorry, even Howzer had drawn his weapon, a DC-15A blaster carbine.
Crosshair took in the details of the temple as they walked carefully through its arched ceiling hallways and rooms, there were carvings and statues everywhere, old fountains long since dry, and more doors than he could count. The place wasn’t too dark for Crosshair to see, it’d have to be pitch black for that to be the case, but it was too dark for Howzer and the rest of the Batch and they had to turn on their helmet lights to avoid stumbling around in the gloom. Crosshair didn’t like that either, it made it dead easy to pinpoint their location and that made him nervous.
“Did this contact of yours ever tell you where in the temple he wanted to meet us?” Hunter asked the captain in a hushed voice, leery of breaking the oppressive silence that seemed to swallow all the sound around them.
“In the atrium,” Howzer replied just as softly.
“Too bad we have no idea where that is,” Crosshair griped.
“Well atriums are usually quite large and this temple is only so big,” Tech told them with unusual optimism, “I would recommend we try to find the center point of the temple and then use a spiral search pattern outwards from there.”
“Easier said than done,” Echo replied.
“Well do you have any better ideas?” Tech scoffed.
Echo just grumbled something under his breath that Crosshair didn’t catch.
“If you’re done,” Howzer said in a clipped tone, “I have the guy’s comm code, maybe he can give us directions.”
“Worth a shot,” Hunter agreed.
Howzer let out a huff and pulled up his vambrace to speak into his comms. “Deego, this is Captain Howzer, we’re at the temple but we don’t exactly have a map of this place, mind telling us where the atrium actually is?”
They waited but no noise came out of the other end of the line except empty static.
“Okay I don’t like this at all ,” Hunter said, tense.
“It does sorta feel like a trap huh?” Wrecker rumbled.
They wandered around for a while longer until lo and behold they found the atrium entirely by accident. As Tech had said, the space was huge and thanks to the skylights it was actually fairly well lit with pools of daylight reaching the floor interspaced every few meters. There were pedestals in intervals around the room, with the pattern being a door and then a pedestal and then a door and so on. On the pedestals were various junk, statuettes, old lightsabers in crystal cases, and even a holocron on one. The Batch kept Howzer in the middle of their group, given they were there to protect him, but they spread out throughout the room a little, looking around.
“Looks empty,” Omega observed, finally having let go of Crosshair’s hand to examine a small carved figure of some sort of animal sitting on one of the pedestals.
“Sounds and smells deserted too,” Hunter agreed. “All I hear are little animals a ways away, probably living in the walls, and all I smell is dust, nobody has been here for a while.”
“Looks like you got stood up, Howzer,” Crosshair said dryly.
Howzer let out an irritated noise and replied, “It is sort of looking that way isn’t it?”
They spread out even further in the atrium, still within sight of each other, but checking about nonetheless. Crosshair ran his eyes over the darker corners of the room before something caught his attention. There was something reflective in one corner. He paced over and found that the reflection was coming from a polished silver orb sitting on a dusty pillow on top of one of the pedestals. He picked it up without thinking, examining it and seeing only his warped reflection in its polished surface. He couldn’t imagine what about it could possibly be so interesting that they felt like it was worth putting on display…at least until he let out a yelp and dropped the thing.
Hissing Crosshair pulled off his gauntlet and checked the palm of his hand only to find it already red and blistering, the air smelled like burned fabric, probably from his scorched glove.
“Cross what happened?” Hunter asked, already jogging over to him.
“The karking thing burned me,” Crosshair hissed.
That drew the rest of their party over and Tech clicked his tongue as he checked over Crosshair’s palm. “It certainly did, this is a second degree burn. It must have been quite hot to inflict this so quickly even through your glove.” Crosshair’s brother was already pulling bacta and a roll of bandages out of his pack to deal with the injury.
“That’s what you get for touching random weird junk in a spooky abandoned building,” Howzer told him wryly. Personally Crosshair didn’t find it particularly funny.
“Look, it's got Cross’s handprint on it!” Omega said, catching all their attention.
Crosshair followed where she was pointing to see the reflective orb sitting where it had come to rest after he’d dropped it. It looked the same except there was indeed a handprint on it, glowing orange like superheated metal.
“That feels like a bad thing,” Wrecker observed. “I hate it when things glow, somethin’ bad always happens when random things start glowin’.”
“That’s because those things usually proceed to explode,” Tech pointed out, having slathered bacta on Crosshair’s burned hand and then wrapped it in bandages. When he was finished Crosshair tugged his gauntlet back over top of it while he watched with morbid fascination as his handprint on the orb went from orange to white, like it was still getting hotter and hotter.
“I don’t like that it looks like it’s doing something,” Howzer said in a low voice.
“Me neith—“ Hunter started to say, only to be interrupted by the orb exploding in a huge flash of light that sent them all reeling. Crosshair had just long enough to cuss himself out for being so stupid before he blacked out.