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weyrwolfen · 1 month

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Eidola: Chapter 20 - CT-22-1981 Snap

Rating: T

Characters: Gen, Clone Trooper OCs, Captain Rex, Ahsoka Tano, and other canon members of the 501st/332nd and the Bad Batch

Warnings: canon-typical violence; references to self-harm, injuries, and substance abuse; PTSD; it’s post-Order 66 and nobody is having a good time (but they’re all working on it)

Summary: The mission was never to bring down the Empire. Not really. The mission was to save every single one of their chipped brothers. But if doing do helped break the Empire’s stranglehold on the galaxy? Well, that was just a bonus.

“The kriff are those?” Snap asked without thinking. He almost flinched at his own language, half-expecting somebody to call him on the profanity. But there weren’t any kids around anymore, so he could say kriff again, all he wanted.

Osik’la consolation prize. He missed Gida and the other Lawquane kids already.

Fuse set down the odd carrier full of vials, each containing slips of some kind of plant, suspended in a hydrating nutrient gel. The leaves were dark green with rusty orange veins, but Snap didn’t recognize them. Cut had made sure they knew everything there was to know about the plants they’d been keeping on base, and whatever these ones were, they were new.

“A soporific, hopefully,” the medic said, leaning against the work bench. Snap pulled a sour expression, to which Fuse elaborated. “A sleep aid. Apparently you can dry out the leaves and make a tea with them.”

Right.

“A tea, huh?” Snap asked, not really expecting an answer. Kriffing everybody on base seemed to have sleep issues, at least some of the time. Insomnia. Nightmares. Whatever. Snap definitely had, especially at first. He’d kind of evened out over the last several months, but he still had his moments.

“It’s not as strong as the tabs, but at least it’s not habit forming,” Fuse answered anyway. “If we can get a decent crop of our own going, then we won’t have to worry about spotty supply issues either.”

Well, alright then. Half of their hydroponics units had been emptied out and the plants shipped off to Wadj, so it wasn’t like they didn’t have the room to experiment.

“What’s it’s chem-profile?” Snap nudging aside the box of scraps he’d been about to take to the reptavian colony and leaning closer to the mystery plants. He pulled one of the vials out of the carrier and gave it a closer look. At least it had been grown in something similar to the matrix their own machines used. If they’d been in actual kirffing dirt, like those pop-peas Rasp had brought back… what? Two missions ago? Kriffing nightmare, prepping those for the frames, and half of them had died anyway.

“Uh, no idea,” Fuse admitted, fishing a small datastick out of one of his belt pouches. “But they came with this?”

Snap took the stick and scowled. “Came from where?” he asked.

Fuse shrugged. “It was in the latest delivery of supplies the Mandalorians unloaded.”

That might be good news. Their grow units were Mando-design, maybe they’d luck out and whatever data was on this stick would have the correct chem codes up front and center. If not, Snap would have to figure out how to manually program one of the units again. He was pretty certain he remembered how to do that.

He was a heavy gunner, not a kriffing farmer. This hadn’t been part of his training.

But Cut and Suu had worked hard to teach Snap and his brothers before they’d shipped out, and Snap wasn’t going to let them down.

He grumbled a thanks to Fuse, who took that as his cue to beat a retreat back out of the workroom door.

There was a stack of datapads tossed on the end of the long workbench. Snap picked one up at random and plugged in the datastick. It took a second, but the file did eventually open.

Snap glanced through the text. Apparently the plant was called maara vine, chem profile 3, light level 1. Easy enough.

“Hat Trick!” Snap yelled, pretty certain that his brothers wouldn’t have worked their way so far down the halls as to be out of easy earshot.

The reptavians screeched in response from the neighboring room.

“Yeah?” Hat Trick said a few moments later, leaning over into the doorway.

“Can you handle this?” Snap asked, nodding vaguely in the direction of the crate of scraps. “The medics just dropped a project on me.”

Hat Trick grumbled something, no doubt uncomplimentary, under his breath, but he did pick up the crate and hit the door panel with his elbow. The demanding edge to the reptavians’ shrieks intensified when the door slid open.

Snap scrolled through the text, eyes catching on the pertinent sections. He traded the pad off to one hand and picked up the cradle of slips in the other. There was an isolated growing rack in the room Suu had set aside for the cadets’ science modules. It would probably be a good idea to keep these things separate from the food crops. Accidentally dosing the entire base’s meals with a sleep aid didn’t seem like a smart plan.

A group of Mandalorians had taken over the training mats in the back of the base’s gym, which was setting Snap on edge. It wasn’t like he’d been planning on sparring this shift, but he tended to get his hackles up around unfamiliar natborns.

Usually, this was a peak time for the gym facilities on base, but so many brothers had shipped out that the space felt weirdly empty, even with the addition of five Mandalorians. Not that Snap was entirely alone with them, there were a few other brothers in the room. Ajax was on one of the inclined benches, doing sit ups with a weight held against his chest. Whelk was guiding Feral through a few exercises.

Snap stacked his armor against one of the walls and took a few minutes to stretch out. Then he picked out a weight machine which would let him keep an eye on the rest of the room. The scavenged and improvised training equipment relied on actual, metal weights instead of grav-resistance generators, but Snap found he didn’t mind the clank of the objectively more primitive gear. He set the weight a notch higher than he had last time, settled into the chair, and curled his hands around the grips.

Counting reps wasn’t nearly enough to keep his mind fully occupied, but the Mandalorians were providing more than enough of a distraction. He didn’t know any of their names, but their armor was distinct enough that he was starting to recognize at least some of them on sight.

Black Cuirass with the Red Chevrons was currently kicking Orange Spaulders with the Weird Spikes around the informal ring. One of the ones he’d heard called a Nite Owl was acting as a referee or a spotter. Her armor was painted in the same colors as Kryze’s, mostly blues and grays, but it was far simpler in design. Two others, Three Shades of Green and Gold and Gray Stripes were standing off to one side, helmets angled towards one another, clearly talking about something, even if Snap was far too far away to overhear.

He couldn’t see any of their faces, but if he had to guess, Snap would have said that Orange Spaulders was younger than Black and Red, even if he was the taller and broader of the two by quite a bit. He was fast, but uncoordinated to a degree that would have gotten a sixth-year cadet sent to remedial training. Or worse. Black and Red, by comparison, moved like she knew what she was doing. The two of them were sparring with blades, and every point Not-Kryze had called so far had been in Black and Red’s favor.

The longer the fight went on, the more one-sided it became. Orange Spaulders was obviously letting his frustration get the better of him, getting more aggressive and less controlled with each successive attack. Black and Red wasn’t having any of it, dancing just outside of her opponent’s range and adding some well-placed kicks whenever he tried to charge her.

Not-Kryze called the match, right after Snap had finished adjusting his machine’s grips to their next configuration and started on his second set of reps.

Kark, that kid was skimming for trouble. He stomped out of the ring, body language all but shouting his anger and embarrassment. Snap snorted to himself, thinking of all of the karking awful osik that would have happened to him or any one of his brothers if they’d dared to act like that with one of their trainers.

And then, the puffed up di’kut turned and said something to Feral and Whelk, who were the closest two clones to the sparring ring. Whelk’s head snapped up at whatever had been said, but Feral?

Feral froze.

And then he bared his teeth in a way that couldn’t have ever been misinterpreted as a smile.

The weights slammed down with a sharp clang of abused metal when Snap released his grips mid-rep and rose.

Given his name, Snap would lay good credits on Feral always having been a little bit off, but anymore he came across as brittle, in a dangerous kind of way. He reacted oddly to things. Unpredictably. And maybe Snap had been in the 437th during the war, not the 501st, but Feral had been assigned to hydroponics, and that meant he was Snap’s responsibility.

And Snap was going to tear a strip out of that puffed up natborn, for whatever the kark he’d said to his little brother to get such a reaction.

Whelk had already moved to put himself between the Mandalorians and his brother. Snap didn’t hear what the medic was saying. Truthfully, he didn’t hear much of anything, except for a distant ringing in his ears. His vision had tunneled down dangerously as he crossed the room.

Snap was maybe six steps away from introducing himself to Orange Pauldrons, fist first, when someone intercepted him, fingers driving inward against the inside of Snap’s left bicep and down toward the bone, which sent a jolt of burning pain shooting along Snap’s nerves and made his arm involuntarily jerk back in a pained, defensive curl.

Kark, that really kriffing hurt.

Karking Corries.

Because of course it was Ajax. Of course it was. Whatever the kriff those painful ‘grab-and-squeeze’ techniques were, they weren’t part of the standard training regimen back on Kamino. And Ajax liked to feign complete ignorance whenever any of his brothers tried to ask him about them.

At least the moment Snap’s forward momentum stopped, Ajax loosened his grip enough for Snap to catch his breath. Kriffing ow.

“… Still recovering from a head injury,” Ajax was saying, when Snap got his head on straight enough to actually listen. Ajax was also giving Feral a hard side eye. “So, no. CT-37-4148 will not be cleared for sparring any time soon. However, CT-22-1981 or I would be happy to spar with any of you.”

Snap wasn’t sure if the use of their designation numbers was intentional, or if Ajax was also slipping into old habits around unfamiliar natborns.

He also didn’t exactly care all that much, just then.

Movement on the periphery of his vision drew Snap’s attention, and he tensed when he noticed Three Greens easing his hand off his holstered blaster.

Ajax’s hand went slightly tighter again, in obvious warning.

Snap didn’t relax, but he also kept his mouth shut. Kriff.

Apparently even Orange Pauldrons had realized he’d stepped in osik, if the tense, defensive set of his shoulders was any indication. He did manage to mumble a very half-hearted, awkward, “Uh, sure.” And then, when Not-Kryze shifted her stance pointedly, he amended, “I mean, I would be honored to.”

Ajax gave Whelk a very pointed look, and the 501st medic nodded minutely. Feral didn’t look very happy with being herded up off his bench and away from the situation, but he went along with it anyway. No one sane crossed a medic, and even if Feral wasn’t always on the right side of that line, even fewer of the clones on base would cross any of the Corries.

“I’ll suit up,” Snap said, eyes sliding back to Orange Pauldrons. The kriff had that overly-tall shebs said?

Ajax nodded, but he didn’t move to do the same. “You prefer blades?” he asked casually.

Too casually.

Snap refrained from snorting. So it was going to be like that?

By the time he’d strapped on his lower plate and rose to start in on his upper armor, Ajax was already in the ring, completely unarmored, holding two blunted practice knives against Orange Pauldrons’ full plate and powered down vibroblades.

Snap knew where he would place his wagers though.

“First to ten points,” Not-Kryze was saying, when Snap walked back within easy hearing distance, bucket in hand. She had her arms crossed over her cuirass, but her helmet was canted at an angle Snap would have called ‘dubious,’ or maybe even ‘concerned.’

But Ajax, unarmored and functionally unarmed as he was, just nodded and said, “Understood.”

Not-Kryze simply stepped back out of the ring, dropping her arms and making a brief gesture of invitation with one hand. Under her breath, Snap could just hear her mutter under her breath, “Your funeral.”

Ajax didn’t look terribly concerned. He simply widened his stance and raised both practice daggers in a reverse grip, dulled edges facing forward and down.

Orange Pauldrons looked conflicted. He was tense, obviously knowing he’d stuck his foot in it, but his pride was also stung. He took an uneasy stance of his own, single vibroblade leading, balled fist back and ready to punch.

Ajax just waited, expression so blank he almost looked bored.

Orange Pauldrons stepped forward, making a small feint with his blade.

Ajax stepped smoothly to the side, squaring back up with his opponent.

One more cautious jab, then another, slightly more emphatic. Then Orange Pauldrons lunged forward, fully committing to a powerful, backhanded slash with his blade.

The Corrie dropped low under the attack, left arm raised, knife angled up to catch or block any retaliatory swipe, and slammed his other fist, gripped around the hilt of his other practice blade, into the inside of Orange Pauldron’s right knee, in the gap between the man’s cuisse and greave.

The leg buckled.

Ajax rose even as his opponent staggered, catching Orange Pauldron’s arm in the hook made between the back of his blade and his left vambrace, right hand reversing, then diverting at the last second so that the side of his forearm, and not the tip of the practice knife, struck the side of the Mando’s neck, up close to the juncture where his helmet just covered his jaw line.

Orange Pauldrons dropped like a stone.

The other Mandos shifted there own stances at that, clearly adjusting their assessment of the fight unfolding in the ring between them.

Snap probably should have put his bucket on. He was having a hard time not smirking, because he clearly knew something Not-Kryze and the other Mandalorians were only starting to suspect.

Ajax was pulling his punches.

That knee-strike could have been debilitating if Ajax had wanted it to be, tearing up cartilage and tendons to the point that only bacta could have really fixed it.

Ajax wasn’t an ARC, or an RC, or any of the other named designations for special forces within the GAR. The Corries weren’t exactly sharing whatever hierarchies and training specializations the Guard had built for itself, but the three of them had been on a hand-picked team which had been sent to Mandalore and help subdue a rogue Sith. None of them were pushovers, the rare times their brothers could entice any of them into the ring, but of the three Guards, Ajax was indisputably the best.

Orange Pauldrons rolled on his side with a muted groan and pushed himself unsteadily to his feet.

Not-Kryze cleared her throat, but her voice was cool and steady when she said, “One, zero.”

Orange Pauldrons took a more defensive stance and waited, right leg visibly wobbling, clearly meaning to approach the rest of this fight with a little more caution.

Ajax obliged him, leaping forward with a quick series of punches and kicks. The Mando did manage to successfully block them, but he was also back on his heels, fully on the defensive.

And that was clearly what Ajax wanted, because the second Orange Pauldrons misjudged, staggering on his injured leg, Ajax was on him, deflecting his left arm high and directing an upwardly angled punch into his unarmored armpit.

Snap, having never actually been punched in the armpit before, didn’t know what the kriff Ajax had hit with that move, but Orange Pauldrons made a noise that sounded like the worst parts of a wheeze and a squawk.

Kriffing Corries.

Snap broke down and decided to put his helmet on, because he was dying here, and he didn’t trust in his ability to keep a straight face for much longer.

Not-Kryze looked at Orange Pauldrons, who was bent double, left arm tucked against his chest, clearly trying to catch his breath. “Two, zero,” she said, and then asked, tone flat, “Zane, are you out?”

“No,” Orange Pauldrons, Zane, managed to say as he straightened into a defensive stance once more, bristling angrily.

A very small, Snap would call it mean, smile curled up one side of Ajax’s mouth.

He took a ready stance very close to Zane, almost daring the Mando to reach out and grab his unarmored opponent.

And because the only thing keeping Zane on his feet was pride, and because Ajax was intentionally stinging it, the di’kut lunged forward and tried to do just that.

Except Ajax threw one of his knives at the man’s visor and followed through with the unexpected distraction by driving his heel onto the top of Orange Pauldron’s booted foot. His synthleather, not beskar, covered foot.

Caught thoroughly off guard from yet another unexpected burst of pain and flailing to regain his compromised balance, Orange Pauldrons barely seemed to notice when Ajax dropped low to sweep his other foot out from under him.

He hit the ground hard, helmeted head clanging loudly against the floor.

Ajax, retrieved his knife and rose, dropping into a ready stance again.

Zane looked up at him briefly and then let his head drop back down on the floor again. “Yeah, no. I’m done,” he admitted, sounding hoarse through his helmet’s vocoder.

Ajax nodded and offered the Mandalorian a hand up.

Snap wasn’t particularly discrete about the fist bump he offered Ajax when the Guard walked past him, but when Ajax returned the congratulatory gesture with an otherwise blank, composed face, Snap also leaned over and whispered just loud enough for his bucket’s mic to engage, “What the kriff did he say to Feral and Whelk?”

“He asked if they had ever fought a Force user,” Ajax said quietly. “I suspect he meant Maul, but Feral and Whelk took it about like you’d expect.”

Force. They were lucky Feral hadn’t dove on the di’kut, right then and there. Everybody knew, but nobody talked about what had happened on Coruscant, when the Order had gone out. That had been true, even before the eight 501st survivors had been brought back from Hadros.

Something of Snap’s scowl must have shown through his bucket, because Ajax said, “Weaver and I will handle any explanations, but I suspect it won’t be necessary.” He glanced pointedly over his shoulder, and Snap turned to follow the pointed look. Not-Kryze and Gold and Gray were hovering over Orange Pauldrons, who had slumped back down against the wall. It looked like the two of them were giving the shiny, and with his helmet off he looked barely old enough to even be a shiny, what looked to be a very quiet, but very thorough dressing down.

Good.

They did not need a bunch of Mandos accidentally dumping salt into those particular wounds. Not if they wanted to maintain the uneasy peace on base.

Ajax gave Snap a pointed look, and then continued off in the direction of his own armor, point apparently made.

“So,” Snap drawled, catching the Mandalorians’ attention. “Any takers for another spar?”

Three Shades of Green crossed his arms across his cuirass and snorted. “Depends,” he said in a deep, oddly accented voice. “Do you fight as well as him?”

Snap grinned under his bucket, and even though he knew he wasn’t in Ajax’s league, he still answered with, “Only one way to find out.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” Snap grumbled, hitting the control pad with his elbow. “Calm the kriff down.”

The reptavians, if they understood him at all, did not calm the kriff down. In fact, they only got louder. The ear-splitting screeching did settle down into slightly more tolerable hissing when he opened the cover on the food chute and poured in the day’s allotment of kitchen and gardening waste.

They were pretty little things, mean as osik and vicious, but brightly colored. Snap and his brothers collected the feathers, whenever they cleaned out the enclosure, but it was more out of force of habit than anything else. Ris wasn’t using them in lessons for the cadets anymore, and Ferin wasn’t popping in at off hours to request stuffing for the bedding and soft tubie toys Suu had asked him to make for Gida.

It felt wrong to just incinerate them though. Wasteful. Maybe they’d figure out something else to do with them.

One of the bigger females took a flying leap over her sisters and hit the grate in front of Snap’s face and clung, sharp talons catching on the heavy metal wires which twisted together to make the walls of the cage. He jerked, spilling some of the food waste on the floor for his troubles.

“Duchess, you shebs,” he said, shaking the last few scraps into the chute and then setting the empty crate aside. He bent down to pick up the scattered fruit peels and other, less identifiable bits of organic debris. When he rose and moved to drop them into the chute, the reptavian, Duchess, hissed and rattled at the walls of her cage indignantly.

Snap sighed, but shifted the pile of scraps into one hand so he could poke one of the larger pieces of peel through the study, metal grate.

The violent little ingrate snapped the orange sliver of rind and threw her head back, swallowing the food in one go.

He offered her another piece.

He really shouldn’t get attached to any of the reptavians, they were here to be food after all, but he couldn’t really help himself. Duchess was a little shabuir, but she had an unusually bright, blue-green crest of feathers down her back, and he’d named her, so that was apparently that.

Honestly, it was a safe enough choice. The brothers assigned to the kitchens had gotten into a habit of taking the males for meat, once their red-ruffed manes came in, but leaving the females behind to keep laying more eggs. It wasn’t like she was going to end up in his rations any time soon.

Not that he’d been eating the reptavian meat dishes lately anyway. But that was just because he didn’t like the flavor. Really.

Snap poked the last bit of food through the cage and then showed his hands, back and front, like a sabacc dealer. “No more,” he said, and the little osik hissed at him anyway. As if there wasn’t a giant pile of additional scraps in the bin on the floor. “You can karking well fight your sisters for the rest.”

The reptavian cocked her head to one side and gave him the most scathing glare out of her bright, red eye, before seemingly taking his words at face value, leaping down off of the wall of the cage and landing on two of her siblings, who screeched in indignation.

While the flock was thoroughly distracted, he walked around the corner of the cage and started unlatching and sliding open the nesting drawers.

Cut had walked Snap through the process of sorting eggs before he’d shipped out. The trick was, they changed colors when they were fertilized. The off-white eggs went straight into the freshly emptied crate, while the darker tan ones stayed in the drawers to hatch the next round of voracious little monsters. Any eggs with a more ambiguous color could be held up to the room’s overhead lights. The fertilized ones usually had an opaque band of shell around the middle.

There were enough unfertilized eggs this time to fill the bottom of the crate, carefully stacked three deep.

Maybe they could get the Mandos who’d signed on to take shifts in the mess to make more of that spicy egg casserole.

He’d left his helmet in the workroom while he’d dealt with the reptavians. After he punched a message into his vambrace alerting Spoons that the eggs were ready for pickup, he picked it up and noticed an alert flashing inside. Pulling it on, he found a message from Weaver waiting.

Apparently the Guard wanted to know if Snap would be interested in the additional help, which, kriff yes! Especially since they were expecting a bunch of returning Mandos as soon as the mission to Abainya was settled. Reading further, he found the catch.

The whole list of volunteers was made up of unfamiliar, Mandalorian names.

He’d have to ask if Delta, Link, and the other 501st brothers would be willing to put up with them though. That might be a hard sell. As for Snap himself, he found he didn’t mind the idea that much.

“New toy?” Snap asked, grabbing the seat next to Tenor. Somebody had shoved the exercise equipment into even closer quarters to make room for two rows of metal-composite benches scrounged up from kark even knew where. He could have stayed upstairs to eat his lunch, but why do that when he could take in a show instead?

Tenor looked up from the small knife he’d been rolling over and over in his hands. It was a simple-looking thing, barely longer than his hand, with a straight spine, a curved edge, and a handle wrapped in some kind of braided cordage. Definitely non-regulation, but the edge looked sharp enough.

“I guess so,” Tenor finally replied. He sounded weirdly conflicted. “Woves showed me how to make it.”

Snap speared one of the cubed, red chunks out of his bowl – a Difranian helituber [chem profile 2a, light level 6], unless he missed his mark – and stuck it in his mouth, chewing slowly and considering. He’d really thought he’d learned all of their newest brothers’ names at this point, but he didn’t know anybody on base named Woves.

“Who’s Woves?” he finally asked, stabbing at another tuber chunk.

Tenor eyed Snap for a second before his gaze pointedly slid across the still-empty sparring ring, to the Mandalorians clustered on their own set of benches. There was a wide gulf of empty space between them, but Tenor’s voice still dropped low when he answered, “See the pale one in the gray and green armor?”

Wait, Woves wasn’t a brother?

It didn’t take long for Snap to find his target. Tenor hadn’t been kidding about the man being pale. Pale hair, pale skin, pale shades of green and gray over a pale gray bodysuit. He was speaking to two other men whose armor Snap did not recognize. “The one who looks like he fell in a vat of bleaching agent?” he asked, also speaking in a quiet tone of voice.

“Uh huh,” Tenor said, carefully testing the edge of the blade with his thumb. “I don’t know. He says he owes Buckler for something, but Buckler shipped out, so I guess I’m the next best thing.”

Snap’s eyes widened suddenly, looking down at the odd blade in a new light. “That’s not…” he trailed off.

“Beskar?” Tenor asked with a snort. “No. Just some spare alloy the recycler kicked out.”

Oh. That was a little disappointing. But still… “Think he’ll teach you how to make armor too?”

Tenor’s expression twisted weirdly again. “Maybe?”

That had a lot of potential. It wasn’t exactly a secret that while plastoid was cheap and easy to work with, it wasn’t the strongest material out there. Snap wore his armor like a second skin and poured his soul into maintaining his paint, but at the end of the day, his plate was mass-produced gear for a mass-produced army. “Let me know when you start taking orders for durasteel,” he said, only half joking. He was sure the Reaper and Raider teams would get first dibs, but just because he wasn’t on the front lines anymore didn’t mean he’d turn down a sizable upgrade in his equipment.

“Who’s taking durasteel orders?” Ding asked, sitting down on the bench behind Snap and Tenor. Some of the remaining brothers from engineering and the deck crew were filing in after him.

“Nobody,” Tenor grumbled.

“Tenor,” Snap said, at the exact same time.

Ding looked back and forth between the two of them, one eyebrow inching upwards.

Tenor just heaved a very put-upon sigh and said, “One of the Mandos taught me how to make this.” He held up the cord-wrapped blade. “And Snap’s reading way too far into it.”

“Let me see,” Ding said, sticking out a hand, palm up, for the knife.

Tenor handed it over, and Ding eyed it appreciatively.

Snap didn’t comment, even if he was sorely tempted to. He didn’t actually think he was reading too far into anything. Mandalorians took their weapons and armor very seriously, and they had this whole cultural thing about making them. Instead, he just speared a spike shoot [chem profile 2, light level 2], popped it in his mouth, and chewed on it.

“They’re certainly trying awfully hard to win us over,” Ding said, flipping the knife around and handing it back to Tenor hilt first.

Snap pointed his empty fork at Ding. “Right?” he said, thinking of the first batch of maara vine leaves he’d passed along to the medics.

Tenor just glowered.

Snap didn’t know what the kriff his problem was.

“But we’re still under orders to conceal the location of our other bases,” Tenor finally said.

Arches leaned around Ding, joining the conversation with, “You think they’ve told us about all of theirs?”

“No,” Tenor replied, sharp and obviously annoyed. “But I also think Lady Kryze hand-picked people who were the most likely to keep the peace.”

“And then threatened them if they didn’t,” Arches agreed.

This was all starting to sound an awful lot like politics, which was firmly Corrie business and not Snap’s.

But at the same time, he wasn’t sure he agreed with the political conclusions his brothers had reached, so he asked Tenor, “Think she asked Woves to teach you how to make knives?”

Tenor didn’t have a quick answer for that, cynical or otherwise.

Neither did any of the others.

“So, speaking of Corrie business,” Ding finally said, clearly dropping the subject. “Ajax is fighting…” he scanned the board some enterprising brother had hung up on the wall. “Ergan Vayn. Who the kriff is Ergan Vayn?”

“Red helmet,” Cutter volunteered, from his seat a few spots down from Ding. “And the cuirass painted to look like a ribcage.”

Right. Snap actually did recognize him.

And after that would be Zipps, who’d joined a few other brothers in erasing his number from the bracket and replaced it with his actual name, and Black and Red, whose name Snap had finally learned was Lytra Krest.

She’d knocked Snap out of the competition yesterday, and while his back still smarted from the bout, he couldn’t exactly argue with the way it had ended. Krest was kriffing quick and fierce. Zipps was going to have a time with her.

“The Abainya mission went well, so Captain Rex should be getting back soon,” Snap said, leaning back to grin at Cutter. “Rumor is, he’s going to fight whoever wins this bracket.”

That got some very interested looks.

“And does the Captain know about that?” Ocher asked dryly.

Snap grinned.

“Weaver’s supposed to tell him.”

The mess was packed, with third shift cycling off for their late meal and sleep cycle, first shift grabbing caff before rotating on duty, and several newly arrived Mandalorians, fresh from Abainya. Half of them were missing pieces of armor, exposing bacta bandages and a variety of medical braces underneath. The smell of burn cream filled the room, even over the sharp scent of heavily spiced food.

Snap tried to make his way through the room without bumping into anybody, assuming for every injury he could see, there were probably three more hidden under body suits and armor plates.

He found Ocher and Nails already at the caff station. Ocher was adding sweetener to his caff, but Nails was filling his own mug out of a smaller carafe containing hot water. Snap wouldn’t have pegged Nails for a tea-drinker, but whatever.

Except the little fabric pouch he dropped in the cup had a medical tag hanging off of it, and Snap’s sleep-fuzzy brain finally made the connection.

“How’s that working?” he asked Nails, nodding at the mug in his brother’s hands.

Nails looked up sharply, as if expecting some kind of a trap, but after only a moment’s pause, he just shrugged. “Well enough,” he admitted, but then he grimaced a little. “It’s bitter as all kriff.”

“Ask Fuse if you can add some sweetener or something,” Snap suggested, reaching for a cup of his own. “Gotta be something that can mask the flavor without mucking with the effects.”

Nails scrunched up his nose, but he didn’t outright reject the suggestion.

The caff sloshed into Snap’s mug, near to overflowing. He bent awkwardly to sip some of the excess off, so he wouldn’t spill more.

“Let me know when you’re headed out to-,” Snap paused, eyes landing on the closest Mandalorians, and rapidly adjusted what he’d been about to say. “Your old corps, and I’ll pack up a couple of the plants for you.”

He probably should have run that past Fuse or one of the other medics first, but whatever. If the tea was working, it was working, and Snap knew perfectly kriffing well that their brothers on Wadj were having at least as many sleep issues as the ones stationed on the Draboon VIII base.

If anything, Nails’ expression got even more sour. “I’ll probably kill it.”

And now it was Snap’s turn to shrug. “So give it to somebody with a clue,” he said, picking up his cup and stepping a little to the side, so he wasn’t blocking access to the caff anymore. “I’ll send instructions. They’re kriffing hard to kill.”

Truthfully, the vines were growing like weeds. Snap was going to have to start cutting them back one way or the other, and he knew perfectly kriffing well how many grow racks they’d packed up to send with the Lawquanes.

Nails nodded, coming to some conclusion that made him square his shoulders a little. “I’m on the next ship out,” he said.

“Good,” Snap replied, because it was good news, even if it didn’t leave him much time to prep the plants for transport. “I’ll get some cuttings ready to go.”

The Captain turned to eye Weaver flatly. “This is the ‘diplomatic effort’ you needed my assistance to pull off?” he asked, tone very dry.

A wave of badly suppressed snickers rippled through the crowd, clone and Mandalorian alike. The gym was packed, standing room only, even with extra chairs dragged in from all over base. Snap had given his entire team the shift off to attend, and he was pretty certain the other teams on base had done the same. No kriffing way was he going to miss this, but hopefully somebody was off minding the comms and life support systems.

Weaver, to his credit, didn’t quail under the Captain’s thinly veiled accusation. “It has been remarkably good for morale and inter-faction cooperation in your absence, Sir,” he said mildly.

Captain Rex sighed like his soul was leaving his body, and he eyed Ajax critically.

Ajax, who was already in the ring with his bucket tucked under one arm, just smiled placidly.

Kriff.

Never let it be said that the Corries lacked stones.

“I’m guessing Commander Fox gave you some pointers?” the Captain asked, sounding more than a little resigned.

Ajax’s smile got just a little sharper. “No more than Commander Cody gave you, Sir.”

The Captain pulled on his bucket and asked, “Rules of engagement?”

“First to ten points,” Panz said. And wasn’t that saying something, that they’d tagged a medic to referee this fight?

“First to submission,” Ajax countered blandly, tugging on his own helmet.

The Captain tipped his head to one side, then the other, obviously making a show of stretching out the muscles along his shoulders. “First to submission,” he agreed.

Panz looked like he wanted to murder both of them.

Weaver held out a hand expectantly, and Captain Rex’s shoulders moved like he’d just huffed a laugh which was too quiet to be picked up by his helmet’s internal mic system. He drew both of his blasters and handed them off, but he didn’t stop there. His charge packs followed, then a pair of thermal detonators, and then he unsnapped his pauldron and draped it over Weaver’s arm before loosening his utility belt to access the fasteners for his kamas.

Ajax’s smile widened into a grin that showed off most of his teeth.

Snap figured he knew where the Captain was coming from. He wouldn’t want to offer up the Corrie any free hand holds either.

Manx elbowed Snap in the ribs and tipped a bowl of fried, spiced legumes [chem profile 7, light level 3] in offering.

Kriff, yeah. Snap took a handful and popped one in his mouth.

“You got any bets riding on this?” Manx asked.

Di’kutla question. Everybody had bets riding on this fight. Maybe not in credits, but in favors and intel, shift assignments and bragging rights. Snap had overheard three Mandalorians joking about proposing marriage to the winner. At least, he thought they’d been joking.

“Captain Rex, of course,” Snap said, with only the smallest flicker of doubt. Betting against the Captain was generally a losing proposition, but Ajax was really kriffing good. One way or the other, it was going to be one haran of a show.

By the time Captain Rex stepped into the ring, he’d pretty well stripped down to his bare plate, with only a single vibroblade hanging off of his belt, which seemed only fair, because Ajax had also kept his two knives in the custom sheath he kept in the small of his back. Neither one of them drew their weapons though, they just fell in on either side of the wide ring, watching one another.

“I will call the match, if I think it’s medically necessary to do so,” Panz said darkly and then stepped back, out of the ring.

How the kriff the medic managed to make being a total wet blanket so threatening was a complete mystery to Snap.

But apparently that was all the signal either man needed, because both of them were moving, Ajax in a wide circle and Captain Rex in a smaller pivot, tracking his opponent without giving ground, letting the Guard close distance, if that was what he really wanted.

Apparently Ajax did want that exact thing, because he was abruptly spinning, directing a kick towards the outside of Captain Rex’s leading knee.

Kriff, he was fast, but Captain Rex was a gen one, amongst the oldest CTs in the GAR, and that experience showed. He drew back, just enough to shift out of immediate range.

If Snap had been in the ring, he’d have surged forward, trying to take advantage of Ajax’s exposed back when the initial kick missed, except the Guard wasn’t stopping, continuing his rotation even as he dropped lower, pivoting to the opposite foot and then following through with sweeping reverse kick at the Captain’s ankle.

But it looked like the Captain had anticipated that move as well, because he shifted his stance one more time, lifting his foot just high enough to pass over Ajax’s lightning-quick kick. Then he planted his foot and followed through with a kick of his own, with the full weight of his body twisting to add force to the blow.

Ajax managed to roll away, tumbling with the force of the kick and darting back up to his feet, seemingly unscathed, with an unnecessary, almost playful bounce in his stance.

One of the Mandos whooped, breaking the breathless silence of the crowd.

“Get him!” one of Snap’s brothers, probably Boar, shouted.

Snap had no idea which ‘him’ that was directed at, but it probably didn’t matter.

He kind of felt like he should have been taking notes: Ajax’s speed and precision against Captain Rex’s economy of movement and punishingly powerful blows.

When Snap would have tried for a block or a dodge, the Captain accepted the hit, shifting just enough that Ajax’s strike glanced off of his armor instead of the more vulnerable spots exposed between the plates. That gave him a fraction of a second more time to close distance with the Guard and slam a knee into Ajax’s side with enough force to make the plastoid creak in protest.

Instead of retreating out of the range of one of Captain Rex’s incoming punches, which was definitely what Snap would have tried, Ajax actually twisted to the side, reaching up and grabbing the outside of the Captain’s wrist with his right hand and then snapping an open palm against the back of Rex’s elbow. And maybe the hit didn’t land exactly dead on, because the Captain was already shifting his trajectory to minimize the damage, but it certainly got his entire attention.

Snap normally would have been yelling out suggestions and making additional side bets, but he found himself utterly riveted. Sure he barked out a laugh or cheered when one of them managed to pull off some ridiculous move, but he didn’t exactly have the words. This was ARC osik, or whatever version of that training the Guard had put together for itself. The kind of half-mad druk that would have had them digging latrines for the duration of the war if their commanding officers had ever caught them pulling such dini’la stunts mid-battle.

Except this wasn’t a battle, which was kind of the whole point. It was fun.

Ajax had somehow managed to rip off the Captain’s belt, for some karking reason. It had ended up tossed into the crowd and picked up by Weaver for safe keeping.

Snap wasn’t sure what the kriff Ajax’s plan had been, because that stunt had been both intentional and the source of his current limp. Seemed pretty stupid, just highly, uncharacteristically di’kutla to Snap, but whatever. All it had managed to do was made the Captain’s plackart hang a little awkwardly low. It wasn’t even affecting his movement noticeably.

Of course, the Captain had picked up a slight limp of his own from one of Ajax’s sharp punches which had actually managed to land more or less on target, and that was affecting his mobility at least a little.

Which was a kriff-ton more than Snap probably could have managed against either of them, so maybe he should withhold judgment.

Except then Ajax tried to tackle Captain Rex head on, which ended up earning him one haran of a slam to the mat, followed by a swift kick across the bucket, hard enough to break its magnetic seal and spinning it dangerously to the side, no doubt utterly karking his vision. So maybe Snap had seriously overestimated Ajax’s previous displays of intelligence and strategy.

But then Manx sucked in a sharp breath, drawing Snap’s attention back to the Captain, and holy kriffing kark! Was that a vibroblade hilt sticking out of the Captain’s ribs?

Kark. It was!

Granted, it wasn’t in all that deep, just kind of jammed in between the Captain’s hanging plackart and his cuirass. For just a moment, Captain Rex stood perfectly still, his arms frozen at his side like a statue. Then, one hand inched upward and grabbed the hilt, easing the powered down blade out from his side. The Captain gave the blade a brief inspection before dropping it on the floor. A thin trail of red ran down the Captain’s plackart, enough to make Snap wince, but the Captain’s visor remained unreadable. That is, until it snapped up towards Ajax, who had managed to roll further away and get up on one knee, but was still scrambling to either straighten up his helmet or tear it off.

Captain Rex took one step towards Ajax, but Panz stepped in front of him and stopped him with a hand in the middle of his cuirass, scowling fit to strip armor paint. “Armor off, you’re both done.”

Snap booed.

He wasn’t the only one.

Except then one of the Mandalorians, a tall one in orange and midnight blue armor, took it one step further and walked into the ring, complaining loudly. The second, the absolute moment his hand touched Panz’s shoulder, the medic whipped around and drove a fist into the man’s throat, sending him staggering backwards with a rasping gasp.

“You’re done too,” Panz said, pointing a finger at the wheezing Mandalorian.

Captain Rex collared Cutter, who was in the process of taking violent offense with anyone laying a hand on a brother medic.

Not-Kryze and Krest ended up stopping a few of their people from doing something equally incendiary. Between the three of them, and Weaver, who’d helped a clearly concussed Ajax to his feet before laying into the closest troopers, they eventually got most everybody calmed down and chased out of the gym.

Maybe it was the promise that once the gym was fit for use again, they’d start a new bracket. And whoever won that could have another go at the Captain, assuming he wasn’t deployed somewhere off-base by then. And if he was, then Ajax would be around to do the honors instead.

Assuming the medics signed off on whatever additional injuries the two of them were clearly hiding under their armor.

Snap wasn’t too worried, there hadn’t been that much blood to mop up. And he would know, he’d ended up sticking around with Cutter, Boar, and two of the Mandalorians to put the room back into something resembling order. They’d all five been there to see when Ajax and Captain Rex finally had been escorted off to the infirmary by Panz and Fuse. They’d both been smiling.

Snap knew perfectly karking well that he didn’t stand a chance of making it to the finals, but after he erased the names from the board and redrew a blank bracket, he went ahead and added his name, not his number, to one of the empty slots.

AN: Previous chapters are available here.

Dividers by @freesia-writes using helmets by @lornaka. More designs available here.

I've been mentally restructuring a few things about this fic, so I have a question for you all if you're game. Do you prefer one long fic with distinct parts within it or multiple separate fics linked together as a series? I'm leaning towards option 2, but I thought I'd poll the audience. Thanks in advance.

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