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weyrwolfen · 1 year ago

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Eidola: Chapter 12 - CT-441-9891 Frag

Rating: T

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

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.

“Mom and dad are fighting,” Lighter said in a mock-conspiratorial tone.

Frag stopped turning the makeshift spit over their cooking fire and craned to look back towards the dormant lava tubes which had become their base of operations. Sure enough, the Captain and Commander were back there, having what looked like a very heated argument. “What’s their problem?” he asked.

He wasn’t really expecting anybody to answer, until a long-suffering sigh drew his attention back to the group of brothers sitting around the firepit.

Lighter seemed to be as confused as Frag, but Echo and Tech were looking pointedly at their squad leader. Hunter was giving them both an annoyed glare.

Right, Hunter had been engineered to have better senses than the rest of them. So, he probably could hear whatever their commanding officers were on about. Frag put on his best tooka eyes and turned them on Hunter.

The unimpressed glower Frag got in return could have melted transparisteel. “You’re going to burn those again, kid,” Hunter said, pointing at the skinned and seasoned, lizard-adjacent things Frag was supposed to be babysitting for Eidan.

With a sigh, Frag started turning the spit again.

Maybe his piteous fishing for gossip had been doomed to failure, but Echo looked and sounded genuinely concerned when he prompted, “Hunter?”

Apparently that did the trick, because Hunter finally relented and said, “He doesn’t like that she’s planning on going into the temple without backup. And she’s pointing out that if it’s the kind of temple that pulls Force stunts, it’s very likely that none of us could follow her in, even if we tried.”

Yeah, that’d do it.

Jedi or not, natborn or not, the entirety of the 332nd had seemingly adopted the Commander as their collective little sister. Most of them would have liked to wrap her up in blankets and store her in a safe house, if they thought there was even a small chance she’d stay put.

Which of course she wouldn’t, because whether she claimed the title or not, she was about as Jedi as they came.

It was kind of funny, when viewed from a certain angle. Frag and his brothers had been raised, conditioned, to see the Jedi as the next best thing to gods. And yet, here they all were, worrying themselves ragged because they didn’t think their Jedi could wander around some dusty old ruins without getting herself killed.

On second thought, no, it wasn’t funny at all.

“He knows that he is going to lose the argument,” Tech said matter-of-factly, zapping the tangle of parts in his hands with a compact soldering iron. He’d been tinkering with the wiring of what looked to be a spare set of goggles for a while now.

The Bad Batch’s technical expert seemed to be completely oblivious to the sharp looks which had turned his way. “And how do you figure that?” Lighter finally asked.

“Because he asked me to make her this,” Tech said, holding up his half-completed project. “It will transmit live data on her location and vitals, as well as a visual feed I can use to generate a photogrammetric map of the temple’s interior, should we need to mount a rescue attempt.”

Frag was more familiar with the kind of electronics that went boom, but that sounded like the kind of stuff the commandoes’ fancier buckets could do. Neat.

“And if it transports her to a different point in space or even time?” Hunter asked dryly. At the blank stares that comment earned, he just tapped his ear. “I’m just relaying the potential complications she’s been laying out to Rex.”

Tech’s expression turned sour. “Spatial displacement is traceable with her existing comm tracker, but temporal displacement remains a highly theoretical area of research. I have no way to account for it at the present time,” he said, looking and sounding annoyed and almost embarrassed by his lack of actionable knowledge. On time travel, like that was anything anyone could seriously expect him to be able to handle.

These 99 brothers were something else.

They did have a point though. Frag really, really hoped the temple didn’t decide to get ‘highly theoretical’ on their Commander. That was just about the last thing they needed. Given the dour faces around the fire pit, he wasn’t the only one having similar thoughts.

Nobody spoke for a few minutes. Hunter seemed distracted and Lighter concerned. Echo was definitely keeping a discreet eye on their two, still-arguing COs, and Tech was once again fully absorbed with the electronics in his hands.

Frag traded hands on the jury-rigged spit when his arm started to get tired and kept going. His gloves were good for keeping him from getting burned, but they didn’t do a thing for preventing repetitive motion cramps. This was absolutely droids’ work. Maybe he could sweet talk Tech into making a little belt driven motor to turn the spit in the future. After he finished up his project for the Commander, of course.

“Hey, Frag!” Eidan called from the makeshift kitchen tent. When Frag glanced over at his brother, he was immediately asked, “Is that batch done?”

Frag stopped turning the lizard-things and gave them a critical once over. They looked… the expected shade of reddish-brown? Kind of crispy around the toes and the tips of the tails? Sort of like the last batch, minus the accidental charring?

“I think so?” he yelled back, not bothering to keep the question out of his tone.

“Then bring it here!” Eidan said before ducking back behind the packing tarps which had been strung up as minimal protection from wind and rain.

Frag stood up, grabbed the spit by the closest end, and lifted it out of the forked supports.

Echo rose with him, clearing an easier path for Frag to escape the fire circle without accidentally whacking anybody with the spit. “I’ll let them know the food’s basically done,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Captain Rex and Commander Tano.

He found Eiden stripped of gauntlets and vambraces, blacks rolled up to his elbows, piling up some chopped fungi into a pile on the stripped-bare inner surface of a repurposed stormtrooper cuirass. A mound of cooked leaves, green and purple and mushy-looking, already filled a similarly gutted skid plate. They’d have to get creative with how they’d been serving their food. The Jekai’s galley wasn’t exactly set up for preparing or doling out real food, it had really only contained a weird assortment of mismatched utensils and trays too small for anything other than single-serving field rations.

Frag pulled the lizards off of the spit and piled them up next to the others on a spare piece of shuttle paneling they’d coopted as a platter. Eidan had prepped enough for everybody to have one for themselves and several extras on top of that, just in case. They’d already figured out that Wrecker would easily eat three times the amount a regular trooper could pack away, and Lighter had shared the strongly worded message Kix had sent, basically ordering the Raiders’ medic to cram as much high-protein food into the Commander as possible.

“What else needs doing?” Frag asked once he’d balanced the last carcass precariously on the pile.

“Nothing really,” Eidan said, glancing down at his bare, food-smeared arms and shrugging. “Just comm everybody to let them know the food’s ready.”

“I think Echo’s already–” Frag started to say when the tarp behind him was pulled open once again.

“What’re you cooking?” the Commander asked brightly. “It smells great!”

She looked so cheerful. Any other day, Frag might have totally bought her act. Between Kix’s message, the argument he’d just witnessed her having with Captain Rex, and the couple of comments Hunter’s team had dropped about the situation back at the Imp base, Frag took a second, harder look.

She was smiling, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes, which were red-rimmed and shadowed. She looked tired. Tired and sad and very, very young.

It was easy to forget that sometimes. In terms of cycles lived, she was older than all of the clones, especially Frag, who at ten was the often-teased baby of his Raider team. She was, or had been, a Jedi, a wartime Commander, but none of that negated the fact that there were several planets in the Empire where she still wasn’t old enough to legally purchase an alcoholic drink.

Ah hells. Who was he kidding? He was just as bad as his 332nd brothers.

“Some kind of fluffy lizard,” Frag said, handing her a tray and two of the piping hot carcasses, fresh off the fire. He might not be able to bundle her away somewhere safe, but he could do this. “Dunno if the leaves and fungi will agree with you, but they’re ready too. Dig in.”

Frag hung around the food tent, helping Eidan serve up the evening meal as their brothers filed through, picking up trays and making semi-joking bets about whether the evening’s food would be a success or only edible in the strictest, most clinical sense of the term.

None of that seemed to be setting the newcomers’ minds at ease. Apparently nobody had read them in on the culinary situation on the island.

All of them, even Wrecker, eyed the food with a little trepidation. In the end, Captain Rex had just joined the food line without saying a word, and Tech had made an offhand comment about all clones sharing an engineered resistance to most foodborne pathogens. That seemed to be enough to convince the rest of Clone Force 99 to dig in, even if they didn’t seem particularly excited about it.

Frag wasn’t sure if he should be offended. He’d snuck a few tastes, and the evening’s dishes were all pretty good. Nothing like those scrawny waders from their first week on Wadj, which had been nasty.

Hunter just wrinkled his nose and stepped into line after the Captain. Echo took substantially smaller servings than anyone else, splitting a lizard with Tech, who himself made up the difference with a sizable serving of the leaf stuff. Wrecker piled enough food on his tray to more than balance out his brothers’ smaller shares and then some.

When the last of their brothers had been served, Eidan and Frag loaded up their own trays and exited the tent to join the others. Frag was more than a little surprised when Trip immediately caught his eye and waved Frag over to join him.

Frag settled down between Wisp and Ripple, feeling unaccountably nervous. Not that he didn’t get along with their team leader. He did. It was just, Trip was... Trip. Getting summoned by an officer always made Frag’s stomach drop, like he was about to get dressed down for something. Didn’t matter that he hadn’t done anything deserving of a reprimand, the immediate attack of nerves came anyway.

But Trip knew that about him – by this point, he knew all of their team’s quirks – so he didn’t leave Frag in suspense for long. “You might be going into the Temple in the morning,” he said, cutting immediately to the point.

Oh.

Wait, what?

“I thought the Commander didn’t want an escort?” Frag asked, glancing around the small circle of clones. The sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach worsened.

“She doesn’t,” Lighter replied, sharing a look with Trip. “Captain Rex talked her into some concessions. You’ll only go in if she runs into trouble.”

Well, that was wholly unexpected. “Why me?” he dared to ask.

Trip shrugged. “From what little we’ve seen of the inside of the temple, it’s a mess,” he admitted. “We’re expecting we’ll probably have to clear debris, assuming the interior hasn’t completely collapsed. In which case, it’ll be a short mission.”

So maybe some controlled demo work. It had been a while, but flash training wasn’t exactly something you forgot overnight. And bonus, he’d get to pull out some of his old toys and dust them off.

Assuming he didn’t get possessed by some ancient Jedi’s ghost or some other absurd Force garbage. What were the chances? “Any other recommended gear for reality-bending Force temples?” he asked, trying to bury his very legitimate concerns with dry humor.

Before Trip could say anything, Ripple answered, “Rations.” His tone was flat, and he kept his eyes on his own food, eating mechanically. “You never know.”

Four whole words out of Ripple, all strung together like that. Things were serious.

Frag felt kind of bad about cutting the column apart, but they didn’t really have any other options. Most of the floor-to-ceiling columns, decorated with carved figures and incomprehensible text, had somehow survived the eruption which had engulfed most of the building. They were oddly beautiful, and all the more impressive for their age, but this specific one fallen across the entrance of the only passage that seemed to lead further into the mountain. It had to go if they were going to explore further.

And Commander Tano was pretty insistent that she needed to explore further.

With a sort-of-Jedi on hand, shifting debris wasn’t really the problem, but this column was too big to easily maneuver without running into the other supports. Even Wrecker, with his obvious enthusiasm for blowing things up, had admitted that they shouldn’t worsen any of the alarming cracks which were already in the walls and ceiling. So Frag and his laser cutter had been tasked with carving a wide enough slice out of the column to reveal the door they could just make out behind it.

The row of figures under his hands seemed terribly unimpressed with him, but Frag was making an effort to cut along the empty band between the carvings and the next section of incomprehensible text. Whatever it was, it was too old to be in any current database, but Tech said that it looked similar enough to a few languages that he might be able to translate it eventually. Apparently he had co-opted the Marauder’s main computer to run a few analyses on photographs of the text on the building’s façade.

CT-436-6148 would have freaked out if he’d been here to see this. He would have freaked out over the whole temple really – he’d liked learning about the histories and cultures of other species – but he would have absolutely melted down over Frag destroying something this old.

But CT-436-6148 wasn’t here, and Frag didn’t know where he was or even if he was still alive. They’d been separated some time after their chips had activated, together in one disjointed memory and then not in the next. Frag tried to put his batchmate out of mind.

Instead Frag distracted himself by wondering who these Jedi had been. If they’d even been a Jedi. The Raiders had been calling it a Jedi temple, but was it? Really? It felt weird. Not bad weird, but too-peaceful-to-be-real weird. Like somebody really wanted them to let their guards down and rest, weird. And maybe that was okay. Maybe that was just the light side of the Force, or whatever, but maybe it was a smokescreen, concealing something dangerous.

Nobody had been dumb enough to go poking around without an actual Force-sensitive on hand to make sure it wasn’t a trap, but Commander Tano was here now, and she seemed to think it was okay. Or at least okay enough to explore. He’d overheard her telling the Captain she could hear something singing underground, so that was a little disconcerting.

Frag could see most of the rest of the team milling around the temporary command center. Tech was doing something to his holoprojector, which was projecting a model of the temple’s entrance hall. It flickered and shifted, leaving ghostly, half-formed models of the people moving around the room.

This end of the huge entrance hall was just barely bright enough to limit the utility of their night vision settings. It was kind of creepy, in all honesty. Every time the model updated, or someone walked in front of one of their yellow chemlights, or just turned their head and sent their helmet lights shining off in a new direction, the shadows moved too. It made the carved figures look like they were moving. Frag wasn’t a fan.

“I’m about to make the final cut. Are you ready down there?” he called down to Wrecker, not able to see the big clone around the curvature of the column without standing, but knowing he was there.

“Just finish up,” Wrecker yelled back, sounding more than a little impatient.

Frag scooted himself into position so his helmet light could illuminate the right spot, double checked the laser cutter’s depth setting, lined it up so the sensors reported he was angled just right, and activated the beam. Centimeter by centimeter, the last sliver of rock holding the section of column in place burned away. He was tense, waiting for the rock to crack, to shear away unpredictably, but the gray-white, crystalline rock didn’t seem too prone to doing that. It held up, right until the last second, when Frag’s laser sliced through the last sliver of stone and the entire section settled with a heavy, grinding thud.

Frag pulled his cutter away, keeping his hands well clear of the gap, and then noticed with a lurch that the huge section of column had started to roll.

But then Wrecker yelled, “Got it!” and sure enough, the column’s progress continued in starts and stops, as if he was finding handhold after handhold to roll it along. Tech and Hunter had assured him that Wrecker was plenty strong enough to deal with a section of column twice the planned size of this one, but Frag hadn’t been entirely convinced until that exact moment. He wondered what the Kaminoans had done to their brother to make that possible. Human bone could only handle so much force before it cracked under the strain, and that wasn’t even getting into the material limitations of the body’s other tissues. Maybe they’d slipped some non-human genes into Wrecker’s DNA? Grafted something synthetic into his tissues? Who even knew?

Probably Tech. Maybe Frag would ask later.

Frag stayed where he was, on top of the main section of the column, and watched the doorway slowly appear as Wrecker rolled the huge slice of stone out of the way. It was arched, framed in the same mysterious writing that covered the walls and ceiling of the rest of the temple, and only a little crushed by whatever had sent the huge column crashing into the wall.

“Here,” Commander Tano said, from next to the holoprojector. “Let me,” and the column abruptly rose with her lifted hands, rotated to the side, and drifted towards the distant wall.

Frag sat up, secured the laser cutter in his pack, and then started to pick his way down the side of the column, finding hand- and footholds on the line of carved figures. The relief was low enough that he couldn’t manage that for long – plastoid boots were great for keeping your feet from getting crushed, but kind of garbage for wriggling into shallow, tight spaces – so Frag finally just let go, slithering down the side of the column in a semi-controlled fall. He landed with an awkward little stumble, but still managed to stay on his feet. Not bad, given that he’d needed the Commander to hoist him up there in the first place.

Captain Rex and Echo were already checking out the doorway, helmet lights shining into the dark corridor, when Frag finished dusting himself off and making sure nothing had been dislodged from his utility belt in the fall.

The hallway didn’t look like much. Dark. Creepy, just like everything else in the temple. The feeling of unnatural peace seemed to flow out of the door.

“See anything interesting?” the Commander asked, apparently done securing the section of column.

“Not really,” the Captain replied, turning to look back at her with his visor angled a little down and to the side so he wouldn’t shine his lights directly in her eyes. It wasn’t an issue for the other troopers, their HUDs could adjust, but the Commander’s modified goggles didn’t have that feature. “Can you sense anything?”

She nodded, expression distant and eyes unfocused behind her tinted goggles. “It feels like Ilum,” she said, not that Frag had any idea what Ilum was.

Apparently Captain Rex did, because he just nodded. “Your call,” he said.

“I’m going in,” she said firmly.

And that pretty well settled it.

Frag dropped his pack off next to his blaster, against one of the intact columns, and joined the rest of the team. The map had already updated itself, showing the shifted piece of column and a little bit of the hallway beyond the doorway. There were even little wisps of vaguely person-shaped blurs, where everyone was standing.

Commander Tano exchanged a few words with Echo and Captain Rex, made sure her hood wasn’t obstructing the camera or lights Tech had affixed to her goggles, and started down the hallway.

The darkness seemed to swallow her up.

“The floor is angling down,” she said, sounding calm. “No cracks in the walls or anything, so far everything looks to be in good shape.”

Frag snuck a sideways peek at the direct feed from her camera on Tech’s datapad, but all he saw was an empty hallway with blank, stone walls and a low ceiling.

The Commander kept up a steady stream of chatter, talking about the lack of carvings on the walls, the thick coating of dust on the floor, the song of the Force. That was part of the deal the Captain had cut with her. As long as her vitals were normal and she kept in touch over the comms, their team would stay put in the entrance hall.

The projected map grew, even if it wasn’t terribly interesting so far. The long, straight corridor narrowed down considerably, but it was in surprisingly good condition. Given the damage to the entrance hall, Frag had kind of assumed that things would get dicier the further into the volcano they went. So had everybody else. That was, after all, the entire reason he’d been assigned to the team: to help deal with any debris or ceiling collapses they encountered.

The first grave they encountered was a surprise. Much to Tech’s obvious annoyance, everyone pressed in close to get a better look at his datapad. Each rectangular nook, carved at chest height into the wall, contained the dusty, half-crumbled remnants of what had clearly been humanoid skeletons. A spray of crystals seemed to grow out of each ruined ribcage, some even anchored directly to the brittle bones. They caught Commander Tano’s lights, flashing and casting odd shadows on the back wall of the alcoves.

“Those are kyber crystals,” Commander Tano breathed, bending close to get a better look.

“The things Jedi use to power their lightsabers?” Hunter asked after a moment’s silence.

“Yes,” the Commander said, sounding almost reverent. “But they’re more than that. It’s… hard to explain.” She moved on to the next grave, looking, but not touching the remains or their crystals. “They’re not exactly sentient, but they might as well be.”

That didn’t make any sense. How could something without a brain be almost sentient? Frag just filed that under ‘weird Jedi stuff’ and looked back at the map. There could be miles of tunnels down there, filled with dead Jedi.

Creepier and creepier. He was kind of relieved that it looked like he might not be needed anymore.

“I thought the Jedi cremated their dead,” Captain Rex said carefully, as if he was worried he might offend the Commander with a more direct question.

“We do,” she said, but her voice faltered and she amended, “We did. But traditions change, and I’m not sure these are actually Jedi. I don’t mean that they’re Sith either!” She rushed to clarify, apparently realizing how that statement was being taken by her backup squad. “I just meant, these graves are old. I don’t know how old, but kyber crystals take a long time to grow. They might pre-date the Jedi order, or they might be a separate group, which broke away from the rest of the Jedi. Nothing says they have to be Force-users at all. There have been lots of religious sects who worshipped the Force, even if they couldn’t really wield it. Monastic groups, just all sorts of other possible things.”

Frag caught himself thinking about CT-441-9898 again. He would have loved this.

Frag didn’t love this. Sentient crystals growing on dead, not-exactly-Jedi were not his idea of a good time. Not that he was going to admit to anybody how much his skin was crawling over the whole situation.

“I should keep going,” the Commander said. She sounded distracted, like she was listening to something else. Or someone else, because obviously the situation wasn’t creepy enough.

She found more graves as she went. The single row became two, then four, lining either side of the hallway from floor to ceiling. Some of the skeletons were clearly not human, even though Frag would have been hard pressed to identify every species, especially in the dim lights of the Commander’s video feed. Others had crumbled to dust and fragments which could only be identified as bone with a little creativity. There didn’t seem to be a link between the condition of the remains and the extent of the crystal growth. A few of the smallest clusters of kyber had grown in the most decayed nooks, while one grave had been spilling over with crystals, glittering from the walls, the ceiling, mounding up over a shroud-wrapped body, pieces of the woven fabric perfectly preserved and encased in kyber.

The hallway forked numerous times, but Commander Tano never hesitated, taking turns and ignoring corners with uncanny certainty. She did switch back on her own trail once, making a series of four left turns in rapid succession. Frag thought that was weird, but then Tech made an annoyed sound under his breath.

Echo leaned over, giving the model a critical eye. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

Tech indicated the location of her first turn. “The model is now registering a wall across that entranceway,” he said, and sure enough, there was a faint barrier where one hadn’t been before. “I cannot explain it.”

“Could it just be an error in the program?” Lighter asked.

Tech gave him a nasty look. “No,” he said sharply, despite the clear evidence projected in his model.

“You still with us, Commander?” the Captain asked over the open comms.

The video feed from her headset jerked, like the question had surprised her, but then she finally answered, “Yeah, still here.”

But then her video feed winked out.

Tech barely had time to announce the oddity before the Captain had grabbed the datapad and flipped it around to get a better look. Frag couldn’t see anything from the new angle, but the map started to glitch oddly too. Disconnected fragments of hallway sprung up in isolated patches, spread far enough apart to suggest she was moving incredibly quickly, even for a Jedi.

“Commander, report,” Captain Rex snapped, watching more, disjointed sections of map spring to life.

She didn’t answer.

Tech snatched his datapad back from the Captain and looked at it, scowling. “Something is intermittently blocking her signal,” he said, scowling down at the device. “Her heartrate and cortisol levels seem to be spiking.”

Frag knew where this was going, even before Captain Rex spoke.

“We’re going in. Fire everything up,” he finally said, already striding in the direction of the dark entrance. “Beacons, lights, cameras, everything.”

This seemed like a Force problem, and not exactly a shoot-it-with-blasters problem. But, Frag wasn’t about to argue with the Captain. He also wasn’t about to just abandon the Commander down there alone, so he stuffed down his reservations, punched the correct codes into the keypad on his vambrace, and gathered up his gear.

“Tech, we’re going to need directions,” the Captain said as everyone formed at the tunnel’s entrance.

“I cannot guarantee your armor won’t be affected the same way as the Commander’s,” Tech replied distractedly, wholly absorbed with whatever data were rolling across the screen of his datapad. “I will guide you as far as I am able, but you may need to rely on Hunter’s skillset, if your comms are compromised.”

“Understood,” the Captain said, sounding a whole lot more confident than Frag felt. “We’re not here to collect souvenirs,” he said, turning his attention to the rest of the team. “Don’t touch anything you don’t have to.”

As if Frag had been considering grave robbing a bunch of dead Jedi, even before the Captain’s pre-dawn briefing on the Force complications they might encounter if they ended up following the Commander into the temple. Frag didn’t care what the black-market value for kyber was, it wasn’t worth getting haunted over.

Captain Rex and Hunter took point. Frag and Lighter followed them, with Echo and Wrecker covering their backs. The Commander’s smaller, booted footprints were clearly visible in the thick layer of dust on the floor. The team set off at a controlled jog down the tunnel, following her trail. Wrecker complained that he was going to hit his head if the ceiling got any lower.

He had a point. The hallway was claustrophobic already, barely wide enough to let the clones move in two parallel lines, and Frag didn’t have Wrecker’s extra height and bulk to consider.

The graves were just as creepy as Frag had expected, not that they slowed down to inspect any of them too closely. Empty eye sockets watched them pass. Crystals caught their helmet lights, scattering multicolored flashes against the walls of each carved nook.

The hallway didn’t feel peaceful anymore. It felt watchful, expectant.

Tech kept up a periodic commentary on the Commander’s location, and sometimes the Captain asked him follow up questions. She had apparently slowed down, she was circling back on her own path, her vitals were still within ranges consistent with significant stress and exertion, but not injury.

Most everyone else was quiet. It was silly, but Frag got the impression that if he spoke, if he even breathed too loudly, he might wake something up. For long stretches, the only sound was their footfalls, soft as they could manage in full armor.

They’d just turned another corner when their comms crackled to life. “Everyone stop,” Tech said, tone sharp. “Go back, you should have taken the other fork.”

What fork? Frag and Lighter shared a look, confusion clear even with their buckets sealed, and then glanced behind them at an equally bewildered Echo and Wrecker.

“Tech, there wasn’t a fork,” Echo said, turning to shine his helmet lights behind him. “It was just a turn in the hallway.”

The silence wasn’t exactly heartening. Finally, Tech said, “Show me.”

Frag felt a hand on his shoulder and looked over to see Captain Rex, who jerked his helmet a little to the side in an obvious request to let Hunter and him through. Frag shuffled closer to the wall to get out of their way, trying not to bump the closest skeletal occupant with his pack in the process. A glint in Frag’s peripheral vision caught his eye, and he turned his head to see what it was.

A half-crumbled skull with a spray of crystals growing out of its eye socket stared back at him.

Frag flinched, and then felt like an idiot for it. Sure, the light caught the crystals oddly, making them look almost alive, but that wasn’t any excuse. He really needed to get his helmet on straight.

“There’s no other hallway here, Tech,” the Captain repeated, shining his helmet lights over the graves in the offending section of wall.

“Rex, look at this,” Hunter said, crouching down and pointing at something on the floor.

Echo and Wrecker had shuffled closer to try to see what had caught Hunter’s attention, so Frag and Lighter were left to try to crane around them.

“What’s going on?” Lighter asked, apparently coming to the conclusion that trying to see around Wrecker was a losing proposition.

“Commander Tano’s footprints stop in front of that wall,” Echo replied without looking around. He sounded grim, but the words made no sense. It took a second for them to really register with Frag.

“What?” he asked, because surely he’d heard that wrong, but Echo didn’t repeat himself. He just rested his organic hand on the butt of his blaster, fingers clenching and unclenching around the grip.

“I really don’t like this,” Wrecker said under his breath, speaking for all of them.

“Tech, are you sure she went through here?” the Captain asked steadily, but there was an edge in his voice that sent Frag’s stomach twisting.

“Yes,” came the immediate reply, but it lacked Tech’s usual certainty. “But I will check my program again.”

“I don’t think it’s your program,” Hunter said, straightening from his half crouch. “It’s not just her tracks that end at this wall.”

Well, that couldn’t mean anything good. Hunter had to be referring to his other senses, but that was ridiculous. People didn’t just disappear through walls.

Except apparently, they did.

Right… Haunted Jedi catacombs.

Hunter cautiously pressed a hand against the floor separating two of the stacked graves, as if half-expecting it to dissolve in front of their eyes, but the stone was solid.

The Captain stepped up next to him, running his hands over the wall as well, obviously searching for anything other than rough-cut rock. “Frag, get over here,” he ordered. Frag jerked, surprised by the summons, but then hastened to comply, awkwardly shouldering his way past a very tense, uncharacteristically quiet Wrecker. “Can you cut through this wall?”

“Uh, yes, but…” Frag trailed off, really not wanting to question a superior officer, especially not this one. The wall was just stone; he’d come prepped to blast through even tougher materials. He just needed to bore a hole, insert one of the smaller charges from his pack, and boom. New door. But…

But dead Jedi, disappearing halls, sentient Force crystals… What if we wake something up?

The Captain gripped Frag’s shoulder, apparently understanding his silent reservations. “Start small, just something we can see through first. Then we’ll figure out where to go from there.”

Frag nodded. He could do that.

“I’m guessing this is the interference Tech mentioned,” Captain Rex said, turning to look at each of them in turn. “Keep your eyes and ears open.” Then he motioned for Hunter and his team to follow him further down the hallway, obviously intent on continuing the conversation without the two Raiders. A moment later, their comm symbols winked out in Frag’s HUD as the open feed was shut down.

Frag kind of wondered what they were discussing, but then again, he probably didn’t want to know.

He tapped his gauntleted knuckles against the stone, working his way up and down the walls separating the neighboring columns of graves from the corner. It really did just feel like regular stone. He pulled out his laser cutter and started fiddling with its settings, increasing the diameter of the beam and dialing the depth of penetration way back. He figured he should try this in five centimeter increments, in case he cut through the wall and into the back of another grave or something.

Lighter was hovering at Frag’s shoulder, angled so he could watch the bend in the corridor not currently filled with their higher-ranking brothers. He wasn’t sure what the medic could actually do about shifting hallways and dead Jedi watching them with creepy, kyber eyes, but Frag felt better having someone watch his back all the same.

Frag eyeballed the center of the stretch of wall separating the graves and set the cutter parallel with the waist-height floors separating the alcoves, figuring that’d be the most structurally sound spot to cut. When the sensors read the correct angle, he activated the beam, burning a small hole into the rock.

Nothing happened.

Frag pulled out his backup flashlight and shone it into the fresh bore.

Yup, that was a small, round hole in a rock wall. And the Force hadn’t struck him dead for the transgression. So far, so good.

He dialed up the length of the beam and continued.

After a couple additional passes, his flashlight beam wasn’t strong enough to shine all the way to the bottom of the hole, but the cutter was still reading resistance every time he upped the depth. As best as he could tell, there wasn’t a hallway on the other side of this wall. As best as he could tell, there wasn’t another side to this wall, just a solid mass of Force-possessed volcano which had eaten their Commander.

Maybe it was going to eat them too.

Frag dropped his forehead forward to rest against the wall. When that didn’t do anything to alleviate the sick, twisting feeling that had set up shop in his gut, he pushed himself back with a frustrated snarl and set his cutter against the wall again.

“Force osik,” Lighter announced in between cuts, obviously trying to sound flippant, but failing miserably.

He was scared, too.

That made Frag feel both better and so, so much worse.

Lighter was a generation one, decanted around the same time as the Captain, so Frag wasn’t just being a total tubie about this situation.

On the other hand, Lighter was a generation one, a veteran of who even knew how many campaigns. He’d seen it all, done it all, and had the scars to prove it. Nobody could call him a coward with a straight face, so if he was scared, then maybe Frag should be terrified.

“That’s Mandalorian, right?” Frag asked, trying to distract himself.

Lighter nodded. “Mando’a, but yeah.”

Mando’a. Right.

Frag had been deployed early, when he was only eight cycles old. The Republic had been getting desperate near the end of the war, demanding soldiers at a rate the Kaminoan backlog of growing clones couldn’t support. He’d had maybe two weeks’ worth of advanced combat training with a human bounty-hunter named Gard before being sent off to Felucia, and then maybe two months before Order Sixty-Six had gone into effect. He’d barely earned himself a couple yellow stripes on his armor and picked out a name for himself before all of it had been taken away from him.

He’d heard that some of the higher-ranking, first gen brothers had learned directly from Jango Fett, and they’d picked up some Mando’a from him. After that, they’d been deployed of course, adding words and phrases, mostly insults and profanities, from the species and cultures they’d encountered. Then the next wave of clone troopers had been deployed, and the next. They’d all picked up new words and dropped old ones, adopting a seemingly random selection of slang from at least a half-dozen languages into their day-to-day conversations.

Frag could follow along, sort of, using context clues and repetition, but he’d barely been with the Raiders longer than he’d served in the entire war. It made him feel like a shiny still, despite the solid year he’d been on the front lines after his chip had activated, putting down local uprisings for the Empire. He’d been stuck with a mostly-natborn regiment, and none of them had cussed in anything other than Galactic Basic.

“That means excrement, right?” he asked Lighter, dialing up his cutter’s depth settings again.

Frag risked a glance when Lighter didn’t immediately answer. He couldn’t read the expression on the medic’s face, but he could guess what it was from the way his brother’s helmet was canted. “You’re seriously asking me to teach you to cuss, at the bottom of a Force-cursed Jedi crypt?” he asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, I guess I am,” Frag replied, setting the cutter against the wall and adjusting the angle. “Kind of feeling like I don’t have the right words to describe our current situation.”

Lighter snorted at that. “I can’t argue with that. Yeah kid, osik means ‘excrement,’ but it doesn’t have to be literal.”

That made sense.

He was about to ask about ‘kark,’ which seemed to be one of the most grammatically confusing swears he had yet to hear, when the rest of the team’s open comm symbols flickered back to life in his HUD and the Captain asked, “Making any headway?”

“Not really, sir,” Frag said, letting his cutter fall to his side and turning around to face the rest of the approaching team. “Two point five meters in, and no end in sight.”

Captain Rex just nodded, like he’d been expecting that answer. Like that wasn’t completely insane. “We need to find out if any of the side passages loop back around to her trail. You two, stay here in case anything changes,” he said, obviously directing that last bit to Frag and Lighter. “The rest of us will scout up ahead.” He nodded towards the tunnel they’d started down, before Tech had stopped them.

Lighter cocked his head a little to the side. “Why not back the way he came?” he asked. “There were some side tunnels back there.”

Echo and Hunter shared an unreadable look behind the Captain’s back.

“The way’s blocked,” Wrecker said when nobody else seemed like they were going to answer. He sounded grim.

Wrecker never sounded grim.

“Like, a rock fall, or like…” Frag jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the out-of-place wall, not bothering to finish his question.

He really wanted it to be a rock fall. A rock fall he could handle, easy.

It wasn’t a rock fall. Quiet as the catacombs were, they would have heard something.

“Our tracks end in front of another wall,” Hunter said, confirming Frag’s suspicion.

Lighter said something under his breath that had the definite cadence of Mandalorian. Mando’a. Whatever. Frag couldn’t follow it, but it sounded rude, and angry, and resigned.

Frag just swallowed, not appreciating the way his stomach was twisting itself into knots at the news. “Okay,” he finally managed to say, sounding more than a little choked. “We’ll stay here.”

“Keep your comms open, we won’t be long,” the Captain said, but even though he sounded perfectly collected, something in his tone sent the skin down the back of Frag’s neck prickling.

Their brothers set off with the Captain in the lead and Wrecker last, trudging along like he was marching to his own execution. Frag couldn’t think of anything to say, everything that came to mind felt a little too close to a goodbye, and he refused to put that kind of thought out there for the cursed tombs and their doubly-cursed occupants to hear.

“First right,” Hunter reported a few seconds later, and then after a longer pause he continued, “Bypassing a left fork. Tech, are you getting this?”

Frag jerked when a loud burst of static assaulted his ears. Lighter did too, so it wasn’t just a glitch in Frag’s helmet. It must have gone out over all their comms. Tech’s designation had rolled up to the top of their group with the unexpected sound, but they couldn’t hear anything intelligible in the noise.

“Tech, say again?” Hunter demanded, as soon as the static stopped. “Te–”

Everyone except Lighter abruptly disappeared from Frag’s HUD.

The silence made the dark just that much more oppressive.

“Lighter, did your comms cut out too?” Frag asked, clinging to the hope that his bucket was just acting up.

Lighter glanced at him, visor unreadable, and then turned to look down the hallway where the others had disappeared. “Yeah, kid. They did,” he admitted.

If their comms had cut out, then the Captain and the others would notice too, right? They’d turn around and come back, regroup and decide what to do next.

Frag didn’t say anything. He didn’t trust his voice not to crack if he’d tried. He just checked his chronometer – it read 10:14 – and watched the hallway for their returning team.

They didn’t appear.

He checked his chrono again, but it still read 10:14, which didn’t make sense. Sure, he was being a little impatient. Given the situation, he thought he’d earned the right to be, but it had really felt like longer than one minute.

His chrono flickered, rolling over to 10:15, but then immediately skipping ahead to 10:49.

Maybe there was something wrong with his helmet after all? Could there be something down here that was messing with their electronics? Some kind of radiation or radio signal? That would explain at least a little of the weirdness, not the walls appearing and disappearing, but the comms…

Except no. Hunter definitely would have sensed something like that.

“Lighter, is your chrono acting up?” he asked, and sure enough his voice cracked like a mid-puberty cadet. Humiliating.

“What do you mean?” Lighter asked, just as Frag’s chrono skipped again, this time falling back to 10:46. They were both silent for a moment, and then Lighter said, “Yours just did that too, right? Went backwards a few minutes?”

“It’s gotta be something electronic, right?” Frag asked, but all he could think about was Hunter’s dry recitation of the argument between the Captain and the Commander yesterday. Time. Sometimes Jedi temples could mess with time. Had they just jumped back in time a few minutes, or forward a full cycle? Or more?

Lighter didn’t answer. He just took a hesitant step in the direction the other four had disappeared.

Frag forced himself to stop thinking too hard about it, because the other option was going to end with him hyperventilating right there in the hallway. He leaned against the wall, instinctively seeking out a little extra support, but stumbled backwards when his pack didn’t meet the expected solid stone.

His involuntary shout of surprise sent Lighter whirling around, blaster ripped from its holster and ready to fire.

They both froze. Frag’s arms were still flung out to his side, seeking balance or at least a handhold to catch himself.

He was standing in the missing hallway. The wall, complete with his drill hole, had disappeared again.

“Okay,” he said, mouth running with nerves. “Okay,” he repeated, forcing himself to lower his arms and look around himself.

Lighter stepped forward, blaster still out and ready. His helmet light skimmed up and around the doorway.

Frag looked down and sucked in another surprised gasp. “Lighter, look here!”

The Commander’s small tread was there, but now there were others too. One unusually large set, even if the tread was familiar, just the standard pattern on the bottom of all their boots to give them better grip on unsteady footing. One other was oddly angular, with a different pattern, and there were a few more that were a perfect match for the prints Frag himself had just left, stumbling through the dust.

Frag wasn’t a great tracker, but he knew a few of the basics. He’d lay every credit he’d ever seen on these tracks belonging to Wrecker, Echo, Hunter, and the Captain.

Or something wanted him to think that?

Lighter stepped forward cautiously into the hallway, lights joining Frag’s on the floor and the tracks left there in the thick blanket of dust.

“Do we follow them?” Frag asked, falling back on training and experience and trust that an older brother would know what to do.

But Lighter seemed just as shaken as Frag. “I don’t know,” he admitted, voice strangled. “What if it’s a trap?”

This whole place was a trap. What kind of question was that?

“Look,” Frag said, half trying to psyche himself up and half trying to legitimately work through the problem at hand. “Look, even if those don’t belong to the Captain and the others, the Commander’s were definitely real. Hunter smelled her, or… or whatever it is he does. They were real.”

Were they? Was any of this?

“Yeah, okay,” Lighter said, taking another step forward and scanning the hallway like he was still expecting an ambush. “You might have a point.” He still looked back over his shoulder, hesitating.

“We could leave something, in case…” Frag trailed off, not wanting to give voice to the numerous reservations and fears which were vying for attention in the back of his head. “Just in case. A note or something.”

“Did you bring some karking stationary with you?” Lighter asked sarcastically, but Frag would take it, if it meant the medic kept sounding more like his usual self.

“We’ve got to have something we can use, between our two packs,” Frag insisted.

In fact, they had several things. Lighter wasn’t about to give up any of his bandages as a banner, but they managed to tear a strip out of Frag’s thin, thermal blanket and the medic burned a message into the fire-resistant material with his field cauterizer.

‘Hallway to Commander opened. Following her. L&F’

The letters were a little wobbly, and the arrow Lighter added as a crude set of directions was worse, but it was legible, which was all that really mattered. They left it at the junction where the two hallways came together. Frag weighted it down with one of his containers of two-part explosive putty, much good it had done him so far on this mission. If he ended up needing some later, he had more.

“Eat something,” Lighter repeated with just enough of a threat behind his words that Frag gritted his teeth, but did not argue. His stomach wasn’t interested in food in the slightest, but arguing about it wasn’t going to do any good.

“Fine,” he grumbled, reaching behind him and finding his way into the correct compartment of his pack by feel alone.

Their chronometers were still acting up, skipping around or slowing to a crawl for no obvious reason. Nevertheless, when the broken thing had rolled over noon, Lighter had started pestering Frag about eating and drinking something.

Medics.

Frag slung his blaster rifle over one shoulder, opened the ration bar, then popped his seals and pulled off his helmet to start eating. They didn’t stop walking though; he could see well enough in the light from Lighter’s bucket.

The skeletons in the graves were less visible without his HUD’s light adjustment settings. He wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse. It definitely didn’t make him forget the oppressive feeling of being watched from those dark alcoves.

Frag didn’t have a good word to describe how the hallway smelled. Dry, like old flimsi, and stale, like a shuttle whose CO2 scrubbers were in desperate need of changing.

The ration bars tasted like dust and something worse. Decay. When he’d finally gagged half of it down with a few swigs of water from one of the canteens he’d packed, Frag was more than relieved to seal his helmet back up. He had a sneaking suspicion that the pervasive dust wasn’t just coming from the stone walls.

“Your turn,” Frag said, extending the other half of his ration bar in his brother’s direction.

Lighter was silent for a few seconds, and when he answered, it was only to say, “Later.”

Frag still didn’t argue, even if the refusal made him grit his teeth. He understood the need to stretch their supplies as far as they could. Neither one of them had any idea how long they were going to be down here. But it still felt like Lighter was treating him like a cadet. Between the two of them, having a healthy and functioning medic seemed like a much higher priority than whatever Frag was on this mission. Dead weight. The most useful thing he’d done so far was follow Ripple’s recommendations to pack extra rations, but so had everyone else. He was less than worthless down here, just one more mouth in need of their limited food and hydration, with nothing tangible to provide in return.

Frag shoved the half-eaten bar back into his pack and promised himself to refuse another bite until Lighter ate something too.

The footprints in front of them kept changing. Sometimes there were multiple sets, from way more than four pairs of boots. Other times, they only saw the commander’s smaller tracks. Her stride was really long, a sure sign that she had been running at this point, but towards what or away from whom, they couldn’t tell.

Frag was trying to ignore the graves on either side of him, but when he spotted a half-familiar crystal formation spilling out of one nook like a frozen waterfall, he couldn’t help glancing into it as they passed. There was a skull there, near-human, but sporting a crown of small horns. They looked similar to a Zabrak’s, but the count and spacing weren’t quite right. The first time Frag had seen it, he’d distracted himself by wondering if maybe the horns’ owner had been a hybrid of some sort.

The second time he’d seen it, he’d stumbled in surprise and sudden fear. The hallway they’d been following since leaving their message for the others was long and straight, and they hadn’t turned off of the path once. He’d bumped into Lighter – the two of them had started walking so closely they were constantly bumping shoulders anyway, as if both of them were worried the tunnels might throw a wall up between them if given the slightest chance – and had cracked a joke about his own clumsiness. It had fallen thoroughly flat, but Lighter hadn’t questioned him further.

This was the fourth time he’d seen that same, distinctive skull, toppled over in the same, staring position. Frag clenched his hands around his blaster rifle and walked past it.

He still hadn’t told Lighter about it. The medic was being overbearing enough as it was. No reason to stress him out even more.

Frag tried to even out his breathing, catching himself slipping closer to shallow, panicked panting if he didn’t make an effort to calm down.

Same thing with thinking about the impossibly repeating skull, or the impossibly disappearing and reappearing footprints, or the impossibly moving walls, or, or, or…

He couldn’t think about any of those things, not without cracking up completely, so he just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the next and hoped.

The press of the darkness and the pervasive feeling that the dead Jedi were watching him were really starting to get to Frag. He kept thinking he heard footsteps or voices, echoing oddly up and down the silent corridors, but he didn’t want to ask if Lighter was hearing them too. He wasn’t sure if a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ answer would be worse.

Apparently his brother could follow his thoughts just fine though, because only a few minutes later Lighter said, “Whatever you’re seeing or hearing, just ignore it.” He sounded tense and harsh and almost angry. “This place is trying to kark with us.”

Yeah, Frag definitely needed to work out the exact definition of that word. He could use some descriptive profanities just then. He choked down a laugh he was pretty certain would have come out sounding more than a little hysterical. “It’s doing a good job of it,” he admitted, hating how unsteady he sounded.

“Don’t let it.”

Easier said than done.

When Frag didn’t immediately answer, Lighter caught him by the spaulder and yanked him around. “We’re getting out of here,” he said, his voice a harsh grate. “We’re finding the others, and then we’re leaving. We’re going to be fine.” He almost sounded like he believed his own osik.

“You don’t know that,” Frag muttered under his breath, dropping his blaster to one side, and then repeated, louder, when Lighter just stared at him. “You don’t know that.” He was sick of Lighter treating him like a tubie, sick of feeling utterly powerless, sick of the temple or the dead Jedi or whatever was playing games with him. Sick of all of it, really.

Lighter shoved him back against the wall of the hallway. Frag’s pack hit the uneven graves with a clatter of jostled equipment and plastoid. It sounded like something dry and brittle had snapped under his weight, but Frag didn’t have much time to really think about that before Lighter was in his face, hand locked under the bell of his spaulder, arm pressed against his chest where a little pressure could send it up and against his less armored neck.

Frag instinctively grabbed Lighter’s wrist with one hand, halfway towards executing a twisting maneuver to break the medic’s grip, when he paused. This was his brother. His older brother, who outranked him in every way that mattered. Everything in his training was screaming at him to not fight, to listen, to obey.

“So what’s your plan then, kid?” Lighter said, and there was none of the usual affection in the way he drawled over that last word. “Gonna tuck tail and run? Leave your brothers and your Jedi down here to die?”

Frag saw red.

He had no idea how he managed it, and probably couldn’t repeat the maneuver in a moment of sober lucidity. But even though Frag was pressed flat against the wall, he somehow managed to kick a booted foot between Lighter’s legs, hook an ankle behind his brother’s foot, and send Lighter and himself both crashing to the floor. After that, the situation devolved into a tangle of knees and fists and elbows.

The words streaming out of his mouth were mingled denials and the most scathing, insulting combinations of half-understood terms he could imagine. He was pretty certain he wasn’t making sense, especially around the point he’d managed to tear off Lighter’s helmet while suggesting the medic do something anatomically inadvisable with an acklay.

He didn’t care.

He knew he was going to lose. He knew Lighter had more training, and more experience, and just more of everything than Frag had been given a chance to learn. He knew he was the weak link on this mission, but that didn’t mean he needed to be coddled or guilted or lied to in order to convince him to do what needed doing. He wasn’t planning on leaving anyone down here in this cursed tomb, not if he could help it at all, but he was going to leave a boot print across his brother’s face if it was the last thing he managed to do.

“Force, kid, calm the kark down,” Lighter said through gritted teeth. He had already ripped Frag’s helmet off and was holding one of his arms twisted up behind his back. With his other hand, he was struggling to pin Frag’s face down against the floor in an attempt to subdue him further. “I didn’t mean–”

Frag bit Lighter’s gloved fingers. Hard.

Lighter yelped, and Frag used his momentary distraction to twist out of his brother’s grip, getting just enough leverage to half stand and throw himself backwards in a move that should have slammed Lighter against the far wall, dislodging him further.

It didn’t work out quite like that.

They both went sprawling into a side passage that had not been there when the fight had started.

Lighter let go of Frag completely and staggered to his feet, looking around wildly at their new surroundings.

Frag picked up a smashed helmet light, neither knowing nor caring which one of them had lost it in the fight, and hurled it down the new hallway with a snarl of unfocused frustration and rage at whatever was toying with them.

The broken light hurtled out of sight before it hit the ground with a sharp crack, bounced, cracked against the floor again, and then collided with something softer.

Frag froze, fear dousing his irrational fury in an instant.

Whatever it was, whoever it was he had hit with that stupid, thoughtless stunt, moved.

Frag staggered back, instinctively putting himself between his brother and whatever he’d managed to wake up.

Something scraped against the stone floor, sounding like booted feet, and a pair of eyes reflected back the lights from their helmets, red-orange pinpricks.

Frag raised his blaster and was instantly answered with a rush of static followed by a low hum of energy.

Two unfamiliar, yellow-green lightsabers blazed in the darkness.

“Oh, Kark.”

AN: Other chapters are available here.

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

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