The Coffeelorian

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.

Bad Batch/Omega Fic

No warnings. Sweet fluff ❤️✨

(Inspired by a wonderful ELO song of the same name). Squad 99's Force sensitive Night Sister (NOT Asajj) lulls a scared Omega to sleep with a lullaby from Kashyyyk.

It's my first time drawing them together im pretty happy :>

A/N : self indulgent (my neck is in HELL)

It's been a long day. or not really. your body's all sore, your neck and lower spine specifically; good posture was nonexistent during the day, bending your back and your neck and your everything, right up to their limits, and now everything hurts and you have no one to blame but yourself.

thankfully, your love, Russel, is willing to help you out.

having you in a proper posture was the first thing he made sure happen; straighten up your back, neck forward.

after a quick grumble from him ("you know, if ya just didn't bend weirdly all the time, you wouldn't be sore now"), he starts to gently massage your body, starting from the neck and shoulders, before gently maneuvering down to your back.

I USED TO PRAY FOR TIMES LIKE THIS