Ava Ashcroft

The Bad Batch: Captain Howzer x Maren (oc)

This is my first Star Wars fan fiction, and only the first chapter. I'm hoping to post the chapters bi-weekly. Please take a gander. Any feedback is greatly appreciated! This is mostly a romance.

Trigger warnings apply (this is my first time publishing on Tumblr so I may not be doing this right, but read with caution, especially the later chapters). Also, this is for mature/adult audiences only (not so much this chapter but will definitely be later on).

Chapter Two — Comms 

Patch was a terrible patient, which was how Maren knew he was going to live.

The first two days he wandered in and out of consciousness. Maren sat for long hours by his side the way she had once sat beside her sisters, sponging his feverish brow, dribbling tinctures between his lips, and attentively listening to any changes to his raspy breathing. By the third day the rattling inhales had abated and he was sitting up, eagerly ingurgitating her homemade broth. By the fourth day he was feeling well enough to argue. By the fifth, he had opinions about everything; that she changed the dressing too often, that her table had a warped corner, that the bitter purple draught she made him drink tasted, in his exact words, like something had died in a swamp and then died again out of embarrassment. 

She laughed, surprising herself. It seemingly erupted out of nowhere, a real laugh, not the soft practiced giggle she was trained to produce when it was wanted, regardless if it was warranted. She immediately halted, quieting the way she always did when something truly genuine slipped out. She glanced towards Patch, who was grinning wildly. 

That was the trouble with the clones, she was learning. They were impossible not to love, and they made it look easy, like it cost nothing. She knew exactly what it cost to make a person feel that they mattered. She knew because it had been built into her, that gift, and it caused in her a tortuous diffidence when trying to express her true self. 

 But in Patch it seemed to come from somewhere real and unforced, some stubborn warmth that no one had installed and no one could take. Watching it she felt a grief, a forlorn yearning, that she haphazardly shoved down. Because she knew what he was. A man grown for a purpose, named by only himself or his brothers, one of a thousand identical faces — and someone anyway. Specifically, defiantly someone. She knew what that cost. She had clawed after the same thing her whole life and had to withhold parts of it. So, she loved him a little in silence and called it nursing.

“You’re quiet,” Patch observed on the sixth day, watching her grind root at the table. “The captain said you were quiet.”

Her hands didn’t stop moving. “Did he? When?”

“Commed me. You were out. Said you saved my life with leaves and a steady nerve and said, oh what did he say…” Patch intentionally drifted off, a mischievous grin spreading slowly over his features as he took on the voice and air of his captain, “totally calm, entirely thorough, very capable, gentle.” Patch shifted against the pillows, wincing but maintaining his smirk, watching her with a medic’s irritating perceptiveness. Once settled more comfortably, for which he waved her off when she tried to help, the smile finally faded. “He notices people. It’s a command thing. Most captains, you’re a number on a report. Not him. He knew the name of every man we lost at that ridge. Said all of them, out loud, on the gunship. Every one.”

She thought of the captain’s voice over the table. Stay with me, Patch. That’s an order. She thought of how it had cracked something open in her, watching a man treat one of the many as though he were the whole world.

“He sounds,” she said carefully, “like a good man.”

Patch smiled into the middle distance, the loose easy smile of someone talking about home. “He’s the best of us,” he said simply. “Don’t tell him. It’ll go to his head.” He winked. 

The first message came through the public relay in Lessu nine days after he’d gone, routed to the only contact he had for her — the town itself. It was short to the point of severity, the way a man writes who has rationed his words his whole life:

To the healer at Lessu. Requesting status on the trooper designated Patch. Would message him directly but his self-assessment may be skewed — Captain Howzer.

She read it three times. Chuckled quietly at how astute Howzer’s assessment of his medic was. Then she wrote back more than the question had asked for, because she could not help it. At the end of it she did something she had not done for anyone.

Captain — He’s mending well and complaining better, which is the surest sign of recovery I know. He’ll have a scar he intends to be unbearable about. He’s taught me a card game I’m certain he invents new rules for whenever he’s losing, and he misses you all, though he’d sooner bleed again than say so.

If it’s easier, you can reach me directly. My personal comm code is below. — Maren. His reply came two days later, and it came to her comm. It was a small, battered handheld she kept clipped at her belt, that had never once chimed for anything that mattered. It chimed now, and she stood very still in her garden with the dirt still on her hands and read it twice before she exhaled.

That’s a kindness. I’ll prepare the men for his endless bragging about his new scar. Unfortunately, the card game has no rules; he invents them when he’s losing, and he’s always losing. You have my sympathy. — Howzer.

She read that one more than three times.

____________________________________________

Patch left at the end of the second week, walking slowly, swearing, but on his own feet, to a transport that set down in the scrub below the town. At the door he stopped and looked at her for a moment with a medic’s clear eye, and she braced for whatever he’d seen.

“You ever need anything,” he said, “anything at all, on any world — you find a clone, you say my name and yours, and it gets to me. We don’t forget the ones who pull us back. You understand?” Then, lower, with a small knowing tilt of his head she pretended not to catch: “Write to him. He won’t say he wants you to. He does. And we’ll be by.” He offered a wide grin. 

And then he was gone too, the way they all went, carried off across the ridges to rejoin his company on someone else’s orders. Her house was silent again, and there was a small battered comm clipped at her belt that had his code in it now.

She wrote to him.

____________________________________________

It became, across that long season, a routine she didn’t want to admit she eagerly anticipated. 

The comm rode at her hip through every ordinary hour — kneeling in the garden, grinding root at the table, walking the market with her basket — and when the valley’s signal was kind, if whatever battle hadn’t knocked out a relay, it would chime, and her whole day would shift. The signal was not often kind with the increasing conflict. Nabit sat low between the red ridges, and the relay that bridged it to the fronts beyond the ridges was old and temperamental; messages queued for hours, arrived in the wrong order, dropped into nothing and had to be sent twice. She learned the rhythm of it, the way you learn the moods of a sick patient. She learned to be patient. She had never wanted anything badly enough to be patient for it before.

They were never love letters. Neither of them would have known how, and neither would have dared. They were about Patch, at first, and then about nothing at all.

Patch has told the whole company you’re better than the medical droids, and better than most clone medics. He did not include himself in that list. He insists his scar is lucky — Howzer

How sweet, if misguided, he is.  He made a great show of his scar before he left. I hope for your sake your medical droids and medics are more capable than me. Do you rest, when you’re out on the ridges? — Maren

Rest is not so easy to come by. The men have decided that you must be lucky. Patch hasn’t had a scratch since being on the frontlines. They insist that any minor scrape can wait to be treated by you. I’m sorry in advance. —Howzer

I’ll prepare more herbs. As long as they don’t complain as much as he does, I think I’ll be alright. Have you had any injuries? You inquire into the health of every man in your company, but you’ve never once                       said how the captain is. I’ve noticed.— Maren

I’m whole. That’s more than most days offer. You’re the first person in a long while to ask after the man and not the company. I find I don’t have a good answer ready. I’ll work on it. Can you hear the war from your home? — Howzer.

She read that one walking home through the market and had to stop and stand against a wall for a moment.

Yes. Some nights I can just make out the lights from artillery. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I’m convinced I can see smoke as well. Be safe - Maren

____________________________________________

What it was doing to her, it was doing to him too — worse, if anything, several klicks south where the war was.

Howzer reread her messages more than a man of his rank, or a clone for that matter, had any business admitting. He kept them, which was the first sign of trouble, and he knew it was the first sign of trouble, yet in defiance he didn’t delete them. Every fragment that limped through the bad relays, saved onto the battered datapad he carried through innumerable conflicts, read in the thin minutes between battle. He told himself it was the novelty of it. A steady, kind voice from somewhere outside the war. Any man would hold onto that.

It wasn’t the novelty. He knew that too.

It was her. The way she noticed, across a whole company of med, that he never once made a deal about his own self. I’ve noticed, she’d written. He had read it standing up and had to sit back down. The memories came for him at the worst possible times — flat on his belly behind a rock with the air lit up from blaster fire over his head, of all the moments to pick — of a narrow house full of gold light and the fresh smell of herbs. Of two soft careful hands cleaning the blood off his jaw like he was something worth the trouble of caring for.

He thought about how she said she could see artillery fire. In Howzer’s professional soldier’s opinion, that meant the war was too kriffing close to her. He’d have to change that.

And then, because he was a man as well as a soldier, the memory would get away from him and go somewhere he had not sent it.

He’d think of her hands and quit thinking about his jaw entirely. Of how soft her fingertips were as they held his chin. He’d think about the line of her throat when she’d leaned in close that afternoon, the warmth coming off her, the clean floral scent of her skin, how her delicate collar bone jutted out as she leaned forward. How fast and how shamefully some half-starved part of him had wanted to put his mouth to the soft place under her ear and find out whether she smelled like that everywhere while he dragged his lips down her neck. He’d think about that long dark braid loose and down, and his hand fisted in it. About what her voice might do, low, with no comm to flatten it and no one else in the house. About hands as gentle as hers on him, tracing every scar. If she was as soft underneath that dress. How blue her eyes looked against the brown landscape.

It shamed him, out there in the field. He’d met the woman once. He knew next to nothing about her — not where she’d come from, not what had given her that sad faraway look, not one hard fact a sensible man would want before he let someone this far in. She’d saved his brother and been kind to him for a single afternoon, and here he was lying in a fighting hole on the wrong side of a war wanting her like a green recruit. It was not decent, and he could not make himself quit.

Mesh’la, he thought once, before he could stop it. Beautiful. He had never once said it aloud to a living soul. He lay in the dirt and turned the datapad over in his scarred hands and thought it, helplessly, at a woman a klicks north.

The order came down the line to move, and he shook the thoughts of her from his mind.

He took the datapad with him, tucked safe in his pack. He always took the datapad.

____________________________________________

There’s a formation low over the ridges tonight — three stars in a curve. Patch called it the Hook before he left. Is that the one you meant once, the one like Kamino? — Maren. No. The Kamino sky never had stars. Only rain, and the city’s lights thrown back off the water. Grey on grey, every day, my whole life there. I didn’t know I disliked it until I’d stood somewhere else. These ridges would have startled me, I think, the first time. All that open. — Howzer.

She reread that one for an entire evening. My whole life there. A man telling her that his life had begun in a grey dour place not of his choosing, among others exactly like him, under rain. She did not write back what she truly wanted to, which was: I know that grey. I was raised somewhere I couldn’t choose either. Different weather, the same kind of dark. She wrote about her garden instead.

A farmer’s girl came to my door this morning burning with fever. She’s sleeping now, fevers gone down a bit. I think it might be hubris, but I am proud that I grew what brought down the fever myself. It’s so dry here, I find it a bit miraculous every time a seed I plant ends up living and useful. I don’t think I’ve ever told a soul this. It feels almost sacred. Creating a living thing where there was none. I don’t know why I’m telling you. — Maren.

His reply was slow coming — the signal, or the war, or him choosing the words. When it arrived, it was the longest message he had ever sent her.

Because I told you once I’d never seen a thing grow on purpose. Only things built to spec, for a use, and then discarded. I’ve turned that over more than I expected to, out here. There’s a difference I didn’t have words for until talking to you. There’s something different about nurturing your garden than building machines, or clones.Keep telling me. I’d rather read about your garden than anything this war has to offer. — Howzer.

I’ve never been anywhere, you know. Two years here, and before that nowhere I’d choose to remember. I used to tell myself that if I were ever free I’d go and see all of it — every world there was, just to prove I could go where I liked. And here I am, free, and I’ve gone nowhere at all. Tell me somewhere. Anywhere you’ve been. — Maren.

I’m a poor guide for it. They keep us where the war is, and the war’s been here on Ryloth for me. Except Geonosis. Also dry with red ridges. More bugs. Figures. Red ridges and dust are the most of the galaxy I’ve seen. A staging moon once, no name, all mud. Two hours in a spaceport on Pantora in the rain. I remember a street of blue lanterns and the food and not much else. Kamino, where I started, which I’ve told you about. That’s the list. Not much, for a soldier.

But I’ll tell you the one place I think about. If I ever did get to go somewhere just to go, not sent, not for the war, I’d want somewhere with water. A great deal of it, and not too warm. Green. I was trained on a world that was all cold, grey, and steel, and I’ve spent a long time now on a world with almost no water. Somewhere between the two there must be a coast where there’s water but  the land is green, and there isn’t so much dust. I’d like to stand in a sea like that, just once. That’s the whole of my dreaming. Don’t tell the men. — Howzer.

She read it twice, and then a third time, and pressed the little comm flat to her sternum, over the ache, and shut her eyes.

She did not write back the first immediate thought; that of all the wishes in all the worlds, he had reached out blind and closed his hand around the very one she carried, the one she had held in the dark since before she was free. I know that water, she did not write. I’ve never seen it either. I’ve wanted it my whole life. She almost withheld it, but something in her was compelled to share it with this man she had met once.

I always dreamed of the ocean too, but I haven’t had the chance to see it. Or the courage. I haven’t deciphered which is the real reason - Maren

____________________________________________

And then, because desire had been getting harder to govern for weeks, and his blunt words had a way of slipping under her guard, she found herself thinking of the man, and not only the letters.

She would be cleaning herbs at her table and think, with no warning at all, of his hands. The rough scarred expanse of them, carefully holding her cup. The contrast she could not stop turning over - that the most calloused hands she had ever seen had been glued to his side, never once raised to her. Not a single touch. She’d think of the gold light along the side of his face while she cleaned his jaw, and how still he’d sat, like a man who’d forgotten he was permitted to be touched at all. And then her thoughts would go somewhere uninvited consciously, low and warm. His hands cupping her cheek then idly dragging further down. Undoing her braid. His lips replacing where his hand had been. If his body was as scarred as his hands. How warm his hands must be, how warm his body must be, how taught, if the heat from his jawline was anything to go by. She would come back to herself standing with the pestle idle in her hand, her face flushed, and her heart going as though she’d run a distance.

It frightened her more than the silence from the front ever could. Wanting had always been a thing done to her, or a thing she performed — a currency, a snare, a leash held in someone else’s hand. She had never once in her life simply wanted a man because the thought of his hands made her breath go shallow. It was new. If she was honest with herself, it was the first time wanting something was entirely her choice, and it frightened her. She scarcely knew how to conduct herself with this overwhelming feeling, arousal and need and embarrassment.

She did not let herself call any of it by its name. Naming things made them real, and if it was tangible, it could be wrenched from her. She had learned that lesson well. So, she resolved to simply carried the little comm closer, and slept with it within reach, waiting for the chime the way her garden waited on rain.

Then the chimes stopped.

Three weeks, and the comm at her hip gave her nothing — no queued message arriving late, no fragment out of order. She thumbed it awake a hundred times a day to check it was still working at all. It was. The valley simply would not let anything through, or there was a relay down, or there was nothing being sent, and she had no way on any world to tell the difference between blackout and gone.

She told herself it was the signal. Perhaps the Separatists had bombed a transmission relay. She kept her hands busy, tended her garden and her patients, laughed with her friends in the market, was by every outward measure exactly the quiet healer she had built. Inside was the coiled snake of anxiety, repeatedly striking at every inopportune moment.

When the snake struck as she was trying to fall asleep again, she finally sat up and acknowledged the ache in her chest, the pit in her stomach. It was the absence, the silence from a man hours away, in a war zone. A man who knew so little about her, and she about him. 

This is dangerous, said the old voice, the survivor’s voice, the one that had kept her alive. 

She did know. She knew exactly. She just wasn’t sure if she cared. 

On the twenty-second day, the comm chimed.

The message was five words, sent from an outpost she’d never heard of, by a man she had begun, against all her training and all her terror, to treasure:

          Still here. Coming back through. — Howzer.

The Bad Batch: Captain Howzer x Maren (oc)

This is my first Star Wars fan fiction, and only the first chapter. I'm hoping to post the chapters bi-weekly. Please take a gander. Any feedback is greatly appreciated! This is mostly a romance.

Trigger warnings apply (this is my first time publishing on Tumblr so I may not be doing this right, but read with caution, especially the later chapters). Also, this is for mature/adult audiences only (not so much this chapter but will definitely be later on).

Chapter One — The Healer at Nabit

Where Maren came from, hands meant harm.

Always rough. Calloused, scarred, quick. Hands that took hold of you and did not ask. Did not let go. She had learned to read them when she was young. She could read a man’s whole intent in the way his fingers closed. The lesson had been simple and total – hands were dangerous, and the people who owned them more dangerous still. 

So when she had finally been free to decide anything at all, she had decided about her hands first.

She kept them soft. Silken, clean, gentle. Scrubbed, nails tidy and barely longer than the tips of her fingers. None of the vibrant polish or lacquered ornaments she had once been made to wear. It was a small, quiet defiance that not a soul on Ryloth would ever think to notice; that her gentleness was chosen. That every time she laid a careful hand on a feverish child or a disoriented elder, she was refusing the ruination hands had meant before. 

On the morning the war came back to the valley, her hands were deep in cool garden soil.

It was a small garden, walled in pale stone the heat had bleached to the color of old bone, tucked behind a narrow house at the edge of Nabit, just outside of Lessu, where the settlement thinned into scrub and great red ridges rose against the sky. She grew things there that had no business growing on Ryloth’s arid terrain — silverleaf for fever, the bitter purple stalks she still had no name for that drew the poison out of a wound, a vicious carnivorous plant that kept the insects at bay, a low creeping vine whose sap numbed pain when bacta ran short. And bacta always ran short. She had learned that somewhere far from here, on a cold world, by a lamplight she wasn’t supposed to be using, reading words she wasn’t supposed to know.

Her dark hair was braided back off her face. That was the way she always wore it now. In a plait running down her back if she was working. Sometimes she would experiment with other braids, off her neck, at her temples, depending on the chores of the day. He had liked it short once. Liked it curled and pinned up in a particular elaborate way, displayed just so, exposing her neck and shoulders. Nowhere to hide. She had grown it long and learned to braid it herself, and she wore it back not to hide her face but because for the first time in her life no one got to tell her how to show it.

Maren heard the sound she heard too often over the plateau, the high tearing whine of repulsors, and under it the deeper concussion of something falling that was meant to fall on people. Maren went very still in the dirt and listened to the war come down out of the sky.

___________________________________________

Howzer had buried a lot of brothers.

Sometime back in the first year he almost considered letting himself drop the count. Counts are a heavy weight. A man has to chose what to set down or carry, and he decided then he was going to carry this. Howzer was then even more compelled to keep his brothers alive. He refused to bury Patch. He refused to bury Patch to a wound Patch himself could have closed. 

That was the part that kept clawing at him as they ran. The squad’s medic was bleeding out across his shoulder and Tarn’s, and the one man inside thirty klicks who’d have known how to stop it was the man it was happening to.

It had gone wrong fast, the way these things did. A relay station they’d been sent to hold, a ridgeline that should have been clear and wasn’t, droids coming up out of a dry brush where no scan had put them. Howzer had gotten his people into cover and turned the fight, but not before a bolt caught Patch low under his chest plate, in the soft place no armor covered. It put him down in the dirt with both hands clamped to his middle and that flat, terrible calm in his voice that medics get when they have seen these wounds before and know exactly how much trouble they are in.

“Field station’s an hour out,” Tarn had said, low, so Patch wouldn’t hear. And they had both known an hour was an hour Patch did not have.

It was an old Twi’lek woman who saved his brother’s life, in the end, by pointing. She had a wrist that had been broken once and set straight. She took one look at the clone dying across Howzer’s back and pointed up a thin dirt street toward a narrow house at the edge of the scrub, and said a string of words he didn’t follow and one word he did. Healer. The pale one. Closest. She’ll take him.

He had nothing better. He had nothing at all. So, he went up that hill at a dead run with his brother’s blood running warm down his armor, and that was how Howzer came to her gate.

She was already in the doorway when they reached it. Like she’d heard them coming and decided what to do before they arrived.

He took her in the way he took in most things, fast and efficient — slight, pale, dark-haired, a simple dark dress with dirt on the knees, and hands too clean for the rest of her. And calm; calm in a way he couldn’t place at first, until he understood it wasn’t the blank calm of someone who didn’t grasp what was bleeding toward her door. She grasped it fine. She’d already turned to hold the door wide.

“Bring him in,” she said. “The long table, not the cot — I need the height. Get that armor off his chest. Someone find me clean water, there’s a cistern through the back.”

And Howzer, who outranked every soul on that hill and had been the one giving the orders since dawn, found himself doing exactly what the petite woman in the doorway said, because she said it evenly and calmly, and competently. A desperate part of him heard that and grabbed on the way a drowning man grabs a line.

He took watch at Patch’s head and held his brother’s shoulders down on the table when the pain surfaced through whatever she was doing. Howzer did the one thing he’d ever been any good at that wasn’t violence, which was to put his voice low and steady and keep it there.

“Stay with me, Patch. Eyes on me. That’s an order, trooper, and you don’t get to ignore a direct order, so don’t you dare. Stay.”

That was the thing nobody outside their ranks ever understood — the entire galaxy managed to look at millions of identical faces and miss the individuality. That there was nothing identical about it from the inside. That this was Patch. That Patch was loud, and worked too hard, and laughed like a dying engine, and cheated at every card game ever dealt, and had once carried Howzer two klicks on a ruined ankle complaining the whole way. There was not another man in all the long rows of clones who could be lost in his place and have it come out even. The galaxy saw stock. Howzer saw his brother. He always had. It was, if he was honest with himself, the one thing about himself he had never been willing to give up.

So, he held Patch’s shoulders and kept talking, and across the table, the woman worked.

He had watched a lot of people treat a wound. Field medics, surgeons in proper bays, his own brothers doing rough, desperate treatments with whatever the kit held. He had never seen anything like her. There was no searing agitation or roughness. No uncomfortable disquiet. Her hands went down into the worst of the wound meticulously, without a flinch, sure and unhurried even when the blood welled up over them. She packed the wound with something out of a jar — some bruised purple stalk, not bacta, nothing he could name — and the bleeding slowed under it like the plant had been told to. She talked to Patch the whole time too, low, in a different key than Howzer’s voice. Telling him he was doing well. Telling him to stay where the captain put him. Soothing in a way most soldiers never had the pleasure of hearing. Never once stopping.

It took the rest of the day and the sun started to cast gold and pinks over the dusty city as it set. Howzer could see it exhausted her, and by the time she was finished, the cost of exertion had settled over her fine features. She let out a soft sigh as she straightened, washed her hands, and then wiped her brow. 

She turned to Howzer and said softly, wearily, “He’s through the worst of it now.”

He looked down at his brother and finally registered Patch’s slow and even breathing, the deathly grey color abandoning his face. Alive. 

He didn’t have words for what that did to him. An ineffable feeling of relief, wonder, and gratefulness washed over him. He wasn’t sure where to put that emotion so he sat with his hand still on Patch’s shoulder and breathed, and his ears went hot, and he said nothing at all for a while, because anything he tried would have been utterly inarticulate.

Maren glanced at him while she was cleaning up, then stopped suddenly and frowned at him. 

“You’re bleeding too,” she said gently. “Here — hold still and let me see to it.” “

“It’s nothing,” he replied, too brusquely for his own liking. 

“Please.” She was already wetting a cloth, already crossing over to him. “Let me take care of it.”

He went motionless. He was good at it; stillness was a better part of the job. But it was a wholly different thing to be still while she leaned in close with the cloth, closer than anyone had ever been to him that wasn’t a brother or a droid trying to kill him, and cleaned the dried blood off the graze along his jaw, her touch so light he barely felt the sting.

And that at moment he was ambushed by his own senses. 

He smelled her.

Not blood. Not char from blasters or bacta or machine oil or the flat recycled tang of a hundred identical clones on a ship. Her. Something fresh and faintly floral, green, clean. The warm ordinary scent of a woman who had spent the morning in a garden and not in a war. He had not, he realized, smelled anything like it. He had nowhere to put it. It vaulted straight over every wall he constructed and lodged somewhere undefended, and the careful, dutiful captain sat very still under the tender work of her hands. He did not trust himself to speak.

And this close, for the first time all that long day, he looked at her. Not the way you clock a stranger in a doorway, but the way you observe a person. Her eyes were gazing down at his jaw, her brow drawn in concentration, and he found, with an emotion near enough to alarm, that she was beautiful. Not the arranged, artificial kind of beauty he’d caught now and then on a holoscreen or on a senator’s arm. It was quieter, and a great deal harder to look away from. A few tendrils of dark hair coming loose at her temple. A soft, sorrowful mouth. Skin too pale for the parched environment of Ryloth. Eyes a blue that ran toward green where the low gold light of the sunset caught them, lowered and focused on his wound. Wholly unaware of him watching. He hadn’t let himself see it before, with the blood and the running. He saw it now, all at once, and it landed about as gently as a blaster bolt.

Her hands. Soft, clean, careful. He looked down at his own where they rested on his knees; rough, scarred, a soldier’s hands, good for exactly one thing. He could not work out how a person came to have hands like hers in a galaxy like this one, nor what it was about being touched by them that made his chest feel like ground giving way underfoot.

“There,” she said, and stepped back, and the air rushed into his lungs again. “Keep it clean and it won’t scar.”

“Thank you.” He said, then hesitated before adding, “For him. For me. You didn’t have to take us in.”

“It’s no trouble,” she said softly. “I don’t mind. I’m only glad he’ll be all right.” She set the cloth down. Here eyes met his. “Maren. My name’s Maren.”

“Howzer,” he said. And then, because it seemed to matter and he couldn’t have said why, he added. “I won’t forget it.”

___________________________________________

The rest of his squadron came for him at dusk.

He heard the gunship settle in the scrub below the city and read the coordinates off his comm. He felt the soldier in him take over from the moment of softness he just experienced. His helmet tucked under his arm, the strange afternoon was already stowing itself away into the place where he stored memories he wasn’t technically supposed to keep. Patch was sleeping. He would rest here a week, the woman, Maren said, and she’d keep him safe. And Howzer believed her. That was the part he couldn’t account for, how completely he believed her, a stranger, on the evidence of one afternoon.

He stopped at her gate. There was no reason to. There was a gunship waiting and a war that did not care what any man, clone, wanted. He stopped anyway and turned the helmet once in his rough hands.

“We’re pulled to the southern lines by morning,” he said. “I won’t be able to get back through here. Not for a while.”

“I’ll look after him,” she said. “I’ll send word when he’s well.”

He should have put the helmet on and gone. He didn’t, for a moment, and he couldn’t have told a living soul why. He’d known her one afternoon. He had no business standing at a stranger’s gate in the last of the light feeling like he was setting down something he’d want back. But that was the feeling, clear as the ground under his boots. So he swallowed, took a breath, and he looked at her one more time, the way he looked at everything, head-on.

She was looking back at him with a soft and wistful gaze. Her chin tilted down and a little to the left. And something moved in her face that he had no word for; open and tired and sorrowful and real. He didn’t understand it. He only knew it landed somewhere in him the armor didn’t cover, and firmly planted itself there.

“Goodbye, Maren,” Howzer said, because it was that, or say a something he might regret.

Then he put his helmet on, and the soldier took over the man and carried him out.

___________________________________________

She stood at her gate long after the gunship had lifted over the red ridges and the engine sounds had thinned away to nothing. She pressed one hand flat over the strange new ache beneath her sternum.

She was a healer. She was familiar with most wounds.