Chapter Text
Stitch had been locked down in the base’s medbay during the siege, along with those of their staff that weren’t field medics, and he’d waited the whole thing out, feeling the ground shake and hearing the far off sound of laser cannon fire and explosives. Honestly it was the closest Stitch had ever been to a real battle. Coruscant was dangerous and the Guard had one of the highest death rates in the entire GAR, but there’d only been a few times the war had ever made it to Coruscant and it was never like this.
It was scary, Stitch had to admit, a different kind of scary from his usual fears; the fear when Fox disappeared again, knowing when he turned up he’d probably be injured or near death; the fear of seeing his brothers brought in looking like they might not make it; the fear whenever anybody was sent off-world on a mission, into a galaxy full of danger without the rest of them there to back them up; the fear of somebody warning him that there’d just been an SOS and that they were about to get a new case, never knowing what it would be until they walked in the door...or were carried in. This was different, now Stitch was afraid they’d lose the battle, that everything had been for nothing and they’d be wiped out or captured and sold into slavery all over again. That and the fear that one of those bombs might get dropped right on top of the medbay and all of them would die. It was different, but the feeling of that fear wasn’t foreign to Stitch, not when he’d lived the last four years of his life in a constant state of terror.
Nothing got dropped on their heads however. Fox and the other Guard commanders managed to protect the base and it wasn’t destroyed or overrun, even if apparently there’d been some close calls. They didn’t lose the battle either, they won, but Stitch was too busy being swamped with injuries to celebrate. A lot of clones had been hurt in the fight…and they’d lost some too. The idea that those brothers had died for this, during this fight after everything else they had survived, made Stitch want to sit down and cry. It wasn’t fair, none of it was fair, not what any of them had suffered, even the GAR troopers. The war had destroyed all of their lives, lives they had never thought would be worth anything to begin with, and now that they’d had a sliver of hope, a taste of freedom, they had had to fight all over again, to lose brothers all over again, and for what?
Palpatine was dead. Stitch had to take solace in that. He was dead, and at least this time their fallen brothers got a funeral. This whole thing had been stupid and unnecessary, all of it, but at least they’d been able to mourn their fallen properly for once and at least that evil son of a bitch could never hurt anybody ever again, could never take anything else from them, could never torture Fox in body and spirit ever again. For now, it seemed like they were safe, and there were celebrations mingled with shows of grief.
Even once they’d treated all the battle injuries, Stitch didn’t expect to be anything but swamped for the foreseeable future, not with over a thousand clones to dechip, more than any of them had ever had to do at once. The rest of the Guard were focused on keeping their chipped brothers captive, keeping them from escaping and keeping them healthy, if not in good spirits, but the medical staff were mired in back to back brain surgeries. Stitch had lost count of how many he’d done in the last week, it had to be at least fifty, and they weren’t even an eighth of the way done.
At least nothing else had gone wrong. There’d been several scares, operations where there were sudden complications, even some where the brother they were trying to free had nearly died, but so far nobody had been lost. Stitch was being as careful as he possibly could, taking the time he needed to do each operation, even when all he wanted was to finish them as quickly as possible.
Fox’s idiot little brother, Rex, had asked if it would help for them to see if they could acquire some automated surgical suites, which had sent Stitch on a whole tirade about how shitty those fucking things were and how they couldn’t be trusted for shit, at which point he learned that apparently not just Rex, but the Bad Batch, and at least twenty or thirty other clones under Rex’s command had had their chips removed by the machines with not so much as a field medic overseeing the operation, let alone a real surgeon, which had been so completely horrible and infuriating that once Stitch had got done yelling about it he kicked a hole in the wall of his office and collapsed into his desk chair in tears, exhausted from the constant helplessness of the last four years.
Rex had not tried to touch him, like some of the other GAR troopers had when they’d seen him upset, like Commander Cody had, but he’d stood on the opposite side of the room and spoke in calm gentle Mando’a, assuring him that if he didn’t want to use the automated surgical suites that nobody would force him, that Stitch had control over how these procedures were done and if something wasn’t safe then they didn’t have to do it, and that everyone who had been under the knife of those dummy surgeons had come out unscathed. That last bit was pure luck, Stitch knew that viscerally, but hearing that nobody had been permanently fucking lobotomized by the things did help a little. Rex talked to him softly until Stitch’s breathing evened out, and then offered to get him something to eat, which he accepted in defeat because he’d missed his last meal, too busy with the back to back surgeries to step away for it.
It was hard, trying to get used to being around the GAR troopers all the time, even with all that the commanders and everyone had done to try and mend fences, to close the gap. Things might be okay now, batchmates finally reconciling after years of nothing but hostility, but Stitch made no effort to let any of them in. He didn’t like or trust any of them, even Needle, who had been the previous CMO and whom Stitch worked with constantly. Maybe everyone else had forgotten what it had felt like to be isolated, and just who had made that necessary in the first place, but Stitch wouldn’t, couldn't, forget. He’d had that lesson, the fact that GAR troopers just fundamentally couldn’t understand them and that none of them had ever made any effort to try until it had been spelled out for them, engraved on his heart by his own shitty batch.
Tally, Stitch’s closest brother, his closest batcher, another medic with whom Stitch had studied and trained on Kamino and who had been the only one of Stitch's batch to ever understand what it was like, even without knowing what was happening on Coruscant, was dead. He had died early on in the war, had died saving a brother in one of so many endless battles none of them could keep track anymore, had died with the spent stim still in his hand, and when Stitch had wanted nothing but to mourn him, his batch had shut him out, had told him he didn’t deserve that, because he wasn’t a frontliner and had never done anything to help anybody.
He’d disowned them on the spot, could only disown them, because nothing had ever hurt him as badly as those words, as being told to his face that he was just a worthless pencil pusher who sat behind his desk all day and put bacta on flimsicuts, who’d never helped anybody, who didn’t deserve to mourn his own brother because he could never understand what it was like to be a real medic.
Stitch hadn’t spoken to his batchmates since, had smashed his comm so even if they had wanted to call him, they couldn’t, and frankly good riddance. Who needed brothers like that anyway, not him, that was for sure…but then Stitch finished scrubbing up for his fifth surgery of the day and stepped into the OR, only to find Buzz, one of those same batchers, his littlest brother, unconscious on his table, a mask over his face, a face whose expression was slack in sleep. Stitch had stood frozen in place for so long that it took Needle snapping his fingers in his face for him to do anything but stare at his unconscious baby brother, at one of the people who had destroyed his life, who had ripped his heart out of his chest and crushed it beneath the heel of his GAR issued boot, laying on the table while everyone else waited for Stitch to unfreeze.
“Stitch?” Needle asked him gently, “If you’re too tired for this, I can take over.”
“No,” Stitch rasped, “No I’m okay it’s just…he’s my batchmate…”
The expression of the other medics cleared and several of them nodded in understanding, only they didn’t understand, they’d taken it for the opposite meaning than what Stitch had intended, because Kix said, “He’s in good hands, vod, he’ll be good as new before you know it.”
Stitch saw the way Sawbones, the only Corrie medic in the OR for this surgery, winced. He knew about Stitch’s batchmates, everybody in the Guard knew about Stitch’s batchmates, because it had been used as the prime example of why talking to one’s GAR brothers was dangerous. That said, Sawbones didn’t correct any of them, even if he gave Stitch a look of real understanding, of real sympathy, while Stitch shook himself out and finally approached the table.
Buzz was the only one of the three Stitch had treated so far and he was suddenly reminded that he had no idea if Scratch or Mosco had even survived the war. Even so, Stitch treated Buzz the same as he had treated every other brother he’d ever done surgery on, even though after it was done he had to retreat to his office, biting back angry tears. Sawbones had called Fox in to talk to him and Fox had assured him that he’d talk to the other commanders about it and see if something could be done, if there was some way to make sure he never had to interact with his batchmates. Stitch had simply nodded, only for Fox to reach out and pull him in for a keldabe that he held for a long long time, that he held until Stitch’s breaths had stopped rattling in his lungs.
Stitch didn’t know how to feel, because he couldn’t say he’d ever wished his batchers had been killed like Tally had, but at the same time some angry hateful part of him wished he could trade them for Tally, for the only batchmate that had ever actually cared about him. He couldn’t though, and it was his duty to care for them the same way he cared for every other brother…so he did, he cared for Buzz, setting him up in the recovery room to rest with Kix as the attending medic when his surgery was finished, then braced himself for the other two, for whenever they would appear on his table like Buzz had. He would care for them…and hope that somehow he’d never see them again afterwards.
As if anything he’d ever wished for had ever come true. As if anything he’d ever hoped for had ever been anything but totally futile.
It was stupid of him, of course it was, and he should have known better.
***
Buzz woke up feeling groggy, felt like something was wrong with him, and he tried pushing himself upright, only to end up flopping over sideways with a groan. He blinked blearily around the room and some still sluggish part of his brain said medbay. Had he been hurt? He couldn’t remember…
What had he been doing?
For a moment he just laid there in the hospital bed and tried to piece the murky strands of his memory back together. The war…it had ended, hadn’t it? It ended, the Jedi were traitors…something happened to Commander Bacara and he betrayed too, was arrested. It was strange that Buzz hadn’t been shocked by that, by the idea that Commander Bacara, who was so determinedly upstanding and perfect, would betray them…but it had happened. He remembered seeing him escorted off the flightdeck in binders after shooting an officer…
Why?
And after that…they hadn't promoted anybody to take Bacara’s place, they’d just folded what remained of the Nova Corps in with several other legions that had survived the rounds of decoms that had thinned their numbers so heavily.
The decoms…
They’d been killing them, the Empire was killing them en mass…after everything, everything they’d done, everything they’d sacrificed…like they were worthless! Buzz had to lay there for a second and just try to keep breathing, just try to get his head around it. He didn’t know why now was the first time he’d ever cared, why this was his first time ever even thinking about any of it. It had…had made sense before…
He was sure it had made sense, but now it didn’t, now none of it made sense.
And then everything got stranger, more nonsensical. The Empire was gone, they were thrust back through time, but the commanders had banded together to find the Emperor, young as he may have been, and then…they’d gone after more of their men, trying to rally their troops to set it right, to win the Emperor back his empire.
They’d—they’d fought them instead, their own brothers, they had tried to kill them!
Buzz shoved himself back up on shaking arms, only for somebody to put a gentle hand on his shoulder, a familiar voice speaking in soft Mando’a. A clone’s voice.
“T-Tally?” Buzz mumbled, overcome by the smell of antiseptic and the sound of beeping machines, but he knew it was wrong the second his fallen batcher’s name left his lips. Tally had been dead for years, he was gone.
Instead he looked up into the face of a brother he didn’t know, one with armor that was painted in 501st blue and had the medic’s symbol on the pauldron. “Easy, vod,” the medic said, a little stern, but not hard, not unkind.
“Where…?” Buzz mumbled.
“Let’s get you sitting up properly,” the medic said instead of answering his question, helping Buzz to settle back properly in the bed before taking a seat beside him on the edge. “I’ll explain, just…it’s a ride, so buckle in I guess.”
All Buzz could do was nod. It was a ride, as it turned out, he wasn’t lying. It had…it had all been a lie, all of it, the war, the Republic, the very reason for their creation, all of it was one giant trap that had snapped shut on all their necks. Buzz ended up sitting in silence once the medic, Kix, had finished explaining it all, his ears ringing, as he stared blankly down at how he’d knotted his fists in the blanket covering his lap.
“What about my batchmates?” he asked almost numbly, “Did they make it?”
“We don’t know exactly who we’ve got yet,” Kix told him, “But if you come up clear in a couple hours, you can ask one of the Corries to walk with you through the occupied cells and see if you find them, okay? They’ve done that a bunch now as we’ve been dechipping more and more brothers.”
“The–the Corries?” Buzz gasped, his eyes jerking up and his heart leaping into his throat.
If the Corries were here that–that meant Stitch was here…if he'd made it, but—
Buzz deflated a second later as reality came back and hit him in the face. Even if he was here, Stitch wouldn’t want to see him. If he had wanted anything to do with them, he’d have reached out at some point in the last four years…but he hadn't, not once. It wasn’t…wasn’t right. They’d been too harsh, they never should have said those horrible things to him, even…even if he did have a good post, they shouldn’t have used that as a weapon against him, not when it wasn’t his fault, not when he’d never asked for that post, even if there had been times during the war when Buzz couldn’t help but be jealous thinking of the safety of triple zero, that haven they only got to see after months and months of endless fighting. No matter what, Stitch had deserved to mourn Tally’s death just as much as the rest of them, he had a right to it, and yet they’d denied him that.
“Is Stitch here?” he asked through numb lips, but the frown that flickered across Kix’s face made his stomach twist.
“Yeah, he’s our CMO, but…sorry, vod, I don’t–I don’t know how to explain this, but the commanders have put you on…probation, I guess would be the word. You’re not going to be allowed back in here after this, unless you’re hurt.”
“Probation?” Buzz asked him with a confused frown, “What did I do?”
“I don’t know,” Kix admitted, “Nobody seems to want to talk about it, but I think Stitch asked them to…or something. He’s been even more withdrawn since he first saw you on the table. There’s something there I’m guessing, right?”
Buzz drew his knees up to his chest and rested his arms on top with a sigh, that was it then. Stitch had seen him and asked the commanders to separate them, to keep Buzz away from him, and they’d considered him enough of a danger to Stitch's wellbeing that they’d agreed.
Fuck.
“I’ll keep away from him,” Buzz sighed again, his heart heavy in his chest, so heavy, like it was waterlogged with tears he was too tired to cry, tears that were too little too late, that wouldn’t change anything.
Kix just frowned even more, looking over his face for a second before he spoke up again, “Vod,” he said in a low tone, “We were wrong about them, really wrong…”
Buzz blinked back up at him in confusion, not understanding, but Kix sighed and launched into a second explanation, one that had Buzz’s stomach hit the floor. The Senators had been torturing the Guard, raping them, killing them…and this whole time the rest of them had written them off as pencil pushers, as useless desk jockeys who hadn’t suffered a day in their lives and couldn’t understand what it was like to be a real soldier, a real medic, a real commander, a real brother…
He felt like he’d been hit in the face with a brick, had that been happening from the beginning? All those times Stitch didn’t answer his comm, or showed up late to a call and claimed there’d been an emergency…had somebody been dying on his table? Had he been elbow deep in a brother’s guts trying to keep them alive…only to get ridiculed by the people that should have had his back the most?
During their fight…he had screamed that he had seen just as much death, had been trying to save their brothers just as much as Tally…and they’d spat it back in his face, had told him he wasn’t a real medic, that he’d never understand what it meant to help anybody, to fight, any of it.
All Buzz could do was take a shuddering breath and bury his face in his arms. He’d known it was wrong, had had second thoughts as soon as he came to his senses, as soon as Stitch had shattered his comm with that final cry that they weren’t his brothers, the last thing Buzz had heard him say in four years. The last thing he’d ever thought he’d hear from him. It had been wrong, would have been wrong even if Stitch had just been sitting at his desk handing out micropatches all day, but for them to have said those things to an actual medic, a fucking surgeon, who had been desperately trying to keep his men alive against all odds…it was unforgivable.
No wonder Stitch had asked for Buzz to be separated.
“How long until you can let me out?” Buzz mumbled when Kix reached out and put his hand on his shoulder again. He’d respect that, that distance, he’d give Stitch the space he wanted, even if the need to apologize burned in Buzz’s stomach like lava. Stitch deserved more than some pathetic half-assed apology that came years too late to matter and Buzz couldn't think of anything he might possibly be able to give him that would even begin to be what he really deserved after how they'd treated him.
“Are they gonna kick me out?” he mumbled, the sudden fear of it shooting through him as the possibility occurred to him. He’d deserve it if they did, but…but he didn’t know how he would survive without the GAR, without his brothers. And what about Scratch and Mosco? If they’d made it here, would they be kicked out too? All three of them dumped in a ditch on the side of the road?
Kix frowned at him, but let out a heavy sigh, “If you pass your physical, we’ll let you out later today and…and I don’t know, vod, nobody is telling us what's going on. The Corries all seem to know, but they’re so fucking cagey about everything already and getting them to talk to us about this has been kriffing impossible, but…you did something bad right?”
“I’m dar’vode…” Buzz admitted, the words dropping from his lips and hitting the floor like bile, like maggots, like the most foul rotten thing imaginable, and Kix’s brow creased, but he didn’t argue or deny it.
“I don’t know,” he said again, “but I don’t think they’d just–just throw you to the wolves…”
Buzz sighed, but nodded his head against his arms, “I guess…if they’d at least let me check if Scratch and Mosco are here, whatever else they do with me is okay. I probably deserve it…”
“I’ll make sure you’re allowed to check,” Kix vowed, “I promise.”
“Okay,” was all Buzz could think to say, “Thanks.” He didn’t know what he’d do if they really did throw him out and it felt cruel to hope that if they did, they’d throw Scratch and Mosco out too, because he couldn’t wish for them to be abandoned like that, but…he didn’t want to be alone…even if he deserved it.
Even if he’d earned it.