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“Beyond the pre-agreed curriculum, courses, and SOPs, how you train them is your concern. I’m not here to hold your hand, and I don’t expect you to make Mando boys in my image. They are humans first, clones second, and you can’t see Ka’ra on this shabla planet anyway. As long as each commando is fit to fight better than you ever could, and he won’t fall apart when he ends up wearing the man next to him as a ghillie suit, job done. You raise soldiers, in whatever creed you choose. Or none. Who knows, that might be kinder.”
— Jango Fett to the handful of non-Mandalorian Cuy’val Dar, mostly Guild acquaintances and paramilitary veterans
Special Operations barracks, 501st Legion headquarters, Imperial Center (formerly Coruscant), two weeks after Order 66
Ennen’s datapad flashed as they wandered from the briefing.
“How short’s the straw, then?” Bry asked.
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Life’s full of unlikeable things.” Such as the Emperor’s enormous black-suited enforcer they’d just met or the Jedi he seemed to hate—not that Bry could say what made Lord Vader any different, except an obvious lack of bedside manner. Their new armor also left much to be desired: ashen and uninspiring, every angle off by one degree north of annoying, and the strict injunctions against modifying it. Their bloodstripes had been stripped away and no one, absolutely no one, not even Sarge, was around to witness or care.
Bry had to ask himself why he was still here.
“Padawan or clone?” he prompted. Who am I going to have to slot before they punch my ticket, like Sarge said?
“I’m not talking about our assignment.” Ennen scooped the rest out before Bry could really panic: “We’re bunking with the dregs of Omega.”
Bry relaxed a little. He and Ennen were still together; they hadn’t split up the last of Galaar squad. Bry knew it wasn’t out of altruism, but it meant he could endure a few more unlikeable things.
He echoed his brother’s sigh and then he had to be the moderate one again. “Huh. Their sergeant towelled off the bacta fast.”
“Fekkin’ vode,” Ennen spat.
“We knew it’d be a Mando squad. Just odds.” There were only a few of Corellian commandos left; even fewer Kuati or Onderoni. Hells, even the brutes that Zygerrian gladiator trained had been pretty well ground into dust. Only when Jango’s rolodex of fellow mercenaries, assassins, bounty hunters, and clan war veterans had been exhausted of Mandalorians did extend his recruitment campaign for training sergeants. Three-quarters of SpecOps had been reared on the beskar tit, some more fervently than others.
Hey, vod, you know you can’t spell commando without Mando. If Bry had a credit for every time he’d heard it, he could’ve bought his way out of the Grand Army.
“It’s better than some up-armored white jobs who might still have spots,” Bry added. Much better. I’d have been promoted to mind the poor bastards. And speaking of spots—“Did we draw a Padawan?” he asked again, curious about their target.
“Don’t know, but it’s not a clone. Someone named Jilam Kester.” Ennen holstered the datapad and returned to his preferred theme. “But why does it have to be Skirata’s prize brood? You remember his lectures. Buffing his beskar and grandstanding like he’d been at Galidraan. Calling us all son like he was doing us a favor.”
Their old sergeant Brims Brogan, an ex-CorSec TacOps captain who’d found himself on the wrong side of his own law, had had little patience for the tinheads. He’d left his trainees with even less. “They’re popping smoke left, right and dirtwards,” said Bry. “Maybe these guys will run and—”
“And we’ll just get another bunch of Kal’s.”
Skirata’s squads had some of the lowest casualty rates, but what could you expect from a sergeant who’d had both hands and the Nulls inside CLONINT? His commandos had the choice of taskings. They got the best intel. Of course his attrition had been minimal by comparison.
Bry couldn’t hold that against them, though—surviving.
He tried to counter Ennen’s bad mood with another thought. “Or maybe we’ll get one of Monett’s or Bralor’s. Still plenty of them left,” he said. They had reached their room; well, it was theirs insofar as they’d ever been attached to it. Since losing Ketch and Sonny, Bry’s world had narrowed further to wherever Ennen was. “And the zealots raised by women were always more—”
“Tolerant?” said Ennen.
“Level.”
Ennen’s warm hand found Bry’s neck as the door closed behind them. “Yeah, well, keep reaching past those stars,” he said, handily popping Bry’s cod seals like they were his own.
“What’re you doing, Ennen.”
“Reaching somewhere else. While I still can.” Hugging Bry to his chest in a clatter of Katarn, Ennen snaked a hand into Bry’s blacks and groped for his half-cocked interest. Bry hissed and arched into his brother’s grip.
Stang, but he loved this: Ennen firing him from the hip when they were up against the clock. It made nothing better, really. It might even make things a lot worse when one of them fragged in the other’s face, like both their brothers had. Misappropriated Arp-6s didn’t care about your training or your armor; if a commando encountered one of them the wrong way, he cracked all the same: badly. And there’d been a lot of wrong turns on Vallt.
Bry’s erection didn’t dwindle. It was divorced from his higher cognitive processes, like replaying a mission—correctly this time. Bry’s memory came complete with a heads-up display; if only he could blink away what his brothers had seen in their last moments. Their POV icons were burned into his retinas, flashing clearest at night when he was trying to sleep.
Given all that, Bry didn’t think anyone could blame them, him and Ennen, for clinging even closer in the dark.
“Think this’ll be a problem?” Ennen asked. He nibbled Bry’s bare earlobe, giving Sonny, studded in Bry’s flesh on the other side, a respectful berth. If Ennen was also wondering if digging deep always meant hitting bone now, it didn’t show.
See, this is nothing. Just routine kit maintenance. Kinder on the system than downers and better for morale, too.
Bry shrugged—shuddered with want, more like. His head thunked back on Ennen’s spaulder. “Hasn’t been yet.” But nothing is the same. Mandalorian squaddies took that brothers in arms stuff literally; their new sergeant might very well whip out the adoption papers with a firm injunction against … well, this. “Just don’t go running that belt-fed mouth of yours.”
That was asking a lot of Ennen. He talked to circuits like they were just shy and might one day chat back. Anyone patching into squad comms would’ve pegged him for sergeant, the way he clogged the waves. Sometimes Bry thought Sonny tolerated their karked-up thing—encouraged it even, always splitting the squad up like he did—because the only time Ennen had no burning opinions was when he was too busy warming Bry’s cock on his tongue.
“Come on, Brio boy,” Ennen urged, stroking Bry’s wetness down his shaft, pulling his skin to the welcoming threshold of pain. “Mark the floor. Give it something to remember us by.”
And Bry wanted to, his skin prickling at the idea of being so juvenile. Of leaving a sticky mess for the cleaning droid to smear across the tiles. Men were here. Alive, last we checked.
Ennen brought the hijinks out in him. He got Bry into trouble and always got him out, probably because he communed with the EM field. There were a few commandos out there who’d been juiced up like that for science—or on accident, depending who you asked. Even if Ennen wasn’t one of those, he had a native way with parts.
Bry’s fleshy nethers were no exception. His cock felt fatter and tighter than a loaded fast-rope.
“Let me see your white wad, bud,” Ennen said. “Make me want to lick it up. Which I would if it wasn’t, you know, the fucking floor.”
Bry shuddered.
“So karkin’ scared, you were, that first time,” Ennen chuckled. The hot breath in his ear bored straight into Bry’s brain, where their first time lived. His cock twitched, nerves sliding over the memory, wanting to feel Ennen’s lips around his shaky fingers again. “What were you even jerking off to?”
“Like I fucking remember,” said Bry throatily. He’d been six and spare with hair bushing in new places and not feeling particularly sterile or optimized for anything but making love to his own hand. If he’d known what to think about, it would have been even worse; an advert for skin cream would’ve made him poke a hole in his plates. “Wasn’t you.”
Ennen scoffed. “‘Course not. I just saved your ass and cleaned you up when you thought you’d burst your bladder and Brogan’s boots were echoing up the hall.”
“You were not my first time, Ennen.” The first time had put hair on his palms and convinced Bry he’d felt the Force. Nothing else came close … until Ennen did it for him. “Just my most inconvenient.”
“Why you got to hurt me like that? Let me have it. Let me have this. Shoot off for me. Make me thirsty. So fucking thirsty I’ll be too dry to talk, I’ll be good—”
Someone knocked on their door. A civil knuckle-rapping. No demanding fist like whoever it was was clocking the time till clocking you.
Fek. Bry tapped his brother’s hand. “Pack it up,” he croaked. If this was their new sergeant, manners were a good sign. They ought to reciprocate.
Ennen let the gription reseal and handed Bry his codplate. “I love leaving you wet. Like morning dew on an outrigger,” he whispered, never more fresh than when he smelled authority. “You always look so good when you’ve thrown a bloat.”
Bry disagreed. He was sure he’d shift funny and Ennen’s haphazard loading would go off in his pants, right in a stranger’s face.
But he had to open that door.
The commando on the other side was standard. Besides the age in his eyes, he and his armor looked mint, straight out of the Tipoca wrapper, no assembly required.
“Squad 40?” he asked, though he didn’t sound like he expected to be contradicted.
Bry nodded at him. “Yeah. Bry and Ennen. RC—I mean, IC-four-four—”
“That’ll do, son. I’m Niner. You ready to move?”
“Yes, Sarge,” Bry replied, wholly convinced now. Niner couldn’t have typified the rank better if he’d had a three-bar barcode on his forehead.
Ennen grabbed their packs and helmets without comment and they filed into the hall. Regime change smelled of acetone—another thing Bry didn’t like—but at least their new sergeant was as unsurprising as a box of Oaties.
Niner kept his helmet under his arm they walked, and Bry felt invited to do the same. So far, he liked this causal beginning; a gentle reintroduction to squad life, even if it wasn’t their squad.
Bry and Ennen had never felt more like cogs in a machine than when they’d returned to Corrie from Vallt, their pockets full of their brothers’ ashes, only to find themselves classed as surplus. The war had been its high-water mark and, somehow, there’d been nowhere to task two guys who’d just accomplished an insane self-extraction from a Separatist planet. They’d watched the Jedi Coup stood down, cradling a pitiful new feeling between them: that of being under-utilized instead of overcommitted.
The mood today was similar. It should’ve been Harvest Morning at HQ: a windfall of new assignments, armory doors opened at their widest. Commandos walked past with a little more purpose than usual, a little more hardware bolted on. But everyone knew what victory really felt like. Cleaning up after one that had been declared in a boardroom somewhere just didn’t carry the same satisfaction.
After a couple more turns in silence, even Bry felt compelled to speak. “You seem well, Sarge. Always reassuring to know SOBMED is a first-rate facility,” he said, in what he hoped was a neutral tone. He knew nothing about Niner except that he was one of those tub-thumping Mandos and that he had broken his back during Operation Knightfall.
Niner shrugged. “Well, you know what the best medicine is.”
Ennen joined in. “Fire superiority?”
“Great, we’ve got our smart-mouth. But, no. A buddy. Glad to see you both still have yours.”
That seemed like the end of the conversation. A little ominous, if you asked the Galaar lads. Bry and Ennen exchanged looks. Maybe Niner had sussed out their dynamic at first glance; sergeants had that sixth sense and all.
Just as Niner opened the door to the old Omega room, Ennen tossed his arm around Bry’s neck.
They found the fourth and final member of their new squad seated on a bottom bunk. He was reassembling a Deece in some kind of hurry, charges and tape and dets of every make strewn about him.
Bry whistled. “That’s a lot of death right there,” he said by way of greeting, nodding at the heat to break the ice.
“This is Darman,” Niner said. “Dar—Ennen and Bry. You can all scan tallies, I’ve got no head for numbers anymore.”
Their newest squadmate eyed them coldly for a long, long moment. “Well,” he said deadpan. “Fi would have been dead chuffed to meet you.”
Ennen shoved past Bry, bristling at the seams. “Oh and you’re not, pal?”
Niner grabbed the back of Ennen’s neck, deploying that overfriendliness of superiors. “Hey, Ennen—it’s Ennen, yeah?” If he’d gone for that thick-browed, Mando-kiss thing, Ennen would have butted him back from whence he’d come, where the only culture was what grew in the corners of his jar. “We’re all a little sour and down in the mouth these days. Ude— ... relax.” Niner sounded almost plaintive.
Bry watched Ennen’s shoulders unbunch. The air was heavy now, and Ennen would relax only when he was dead … but he responded to the sergeant’s intervention and bowed out, back next to the wall of caution that was Bry.
Niner tried again. “It may come as no surprise to you old timers, but our briefing’s been pushed back. Onto the landing pad. 1800. So,” he said, waving a hand around in that noncommittal, help-yourself-hospitality manner usual among SOBs, “get comfortable. Take a load off. Dar and I are going to grab some grub.”
The explosives man paused in his kit prep. “But we just—”
His sergeant shot him a look. Something silent and squad-specific occurred between them, before Niner’s stare returned to Ennen and Bry—or more like a thousand klicks beyond, past these new guys, to where his real brothers had gone: one dead, the other running hard in that direction, deserter that he was.
Bry didn’t miss the lead in Niner’s voice when he spoke again, heavy and leaking slow death:
“Me and Dar … we’ve had a nice, long war by minding our own os—our own shit. We plan on doing more of the same. And we look forward to working with you.” Then he hauled Darman up by the arm and they left the room in silence.
Before Ennen could throw some rude gestures out after them, Bry flattened his brother to the wall.
“What was that, huh? Where was Mister I’ll-Behave?”
“That waste of carbon-flush started it!”
“You were being provoking.”
Ennen shook his head. “Nah, Brio, just at the high ready.” He mimed assuming position and then held up a fist. “Two to clear.” Ennen’s grins weren’t quite shit-eating, not anymore; but the asshole was still obvious in the spread of his dimpled cheeks.
Bry caved, wondering why he even bothered. He balled his hand and bumped his brother back. “Two to clear.”
“Well, that could’ve been worse,” Ennen sighed, and tossed their helmets onto the top bunk to begin a quick bug sweep. “He even lowered himself to speak in Basic.”
“Was Fi the dead one or the bolter?”
“The dead one. Jumped on a grenade and the blast just waited for revenge. So I heard.”
“Pity.” Both commandos began sloughing plates. Get comfy. They didn’t need to be told twice. There was a time they’d have napped in full kit and standing, but they were black on enthusiasm now. “Think he was like us? Think they know?” Bry asked. He was still bothered by how first contact had gone. He’d expected some ambient tension, not a backdraft of hostility. Maybe they’d been luckier with Ketch and Sonny than they knew. Or maybe the enforced solitude was Niner’s way of apologizing.
“Maybe their Fi was just hot shit and he knew it,” Ennen chirped. He ran a hand through his thick slickback, nose stud catching the light.
“You shouldn’t have touched my cheek like that.”
“Look, if they’re going to read into a little brotherly affection, we’re already popped. And I’m going to read into their stiffness and assume they’ve never gotten their dicks licked. I’ve still got Ketch’s dirty ‘zines and I will wield them without mercy.”
“Maybe they have their own,” Bry said. “Fancy a spot of SSE?” Sensitive site exploitation wasn’t just something Ennen excelled at below Bry’s belt.
“After that shovel talk? No way. Besides, I don’t think I want to know what makes them go oya.” Ennen had reached his leg armor and looked at his cuisses in disgust. “Still don’t see why we couldn’t just paint the inside of these,” he mused. “Who’s going to see or care? This is my kit till I croak, more’s the pity.”
“Let’s break it in it first. Then you can knock yourself out.”
Bry didn’t need to tell Ennen how badly he missed them, too: the tight ladder of yellow stripes that once ran the length of their leg plates, from hip to ankle, denoting their distinctly Corellian courage. There probably weren’t enough legs in the Grand Army for all the bloodstripes that had been earned. But Galaar squad had won theirs as cadets, when it was hard to be uniquely brave because everyone was. There was simply no other way to be.
They’d gotten their signal opportunity during an arctic warfare exercise on Rothana. Three young civvies slipped past rusty warning signs and under low-voltage fencing into perfectly good skiing country. Galaar, tabbing less than a klick away, had been observing them with some dread; any interaction with the natives would result in automatic failure and helmet cams ran continuously. Wasn’t this a military exclusion zone? Was this part of a surprise evasion element? Then they watched in horror as an avalanche took the trespassers out.
Between the cadets, they possessed all the right equipment. A collective decision was made: mountain survival didn’t apply only to them, come what may. They stashed their helmets and warm plates and freed the skiers, probably looking not so much like heroes as a troupe of cultist backup dancers, utterly silent in their matching bodysuits and balaclavas.
When they fessed up, Sergeant Brogan slashed the paint down their legs himself. They were the first of his squads to earn them. His clemency was further justified when word reached Kamino: the teenage skiers who’d been bewilderingly rescued belonged to one of Kuat’s Ten Houses.
Galaar squad had been eight years old.
Now Bry and Ennen were fourteen, without their stripes or the brothers who remembered how they’d gotten them. The collapse of the Republic hit them coming and going.
Ennen was still staring at the shiny dark plate, like he’d lost his reflection in it. “Do you ever wonder—”
“I really try not to.” Bry had a bad feeling about whatever this was.
“No, listen. Do you ever think we should’ve just stayed lost?”
“Academic, Ennen.” We didn’t, because someone had to bring the shiny Special Weapons lobby a bit of Vallt mud. There might have been more to Bry and Ennen’s time-out than mismanagement. “We’re here now, and we have a job to do.”
Ennen wasn’t listening. “We were MIA and there were no MIA clones on that list.”
“How do you know?” It was a dangerous question, but this was a dangerous conversation, and Ennen wouldn’t have started it if he’d gotten a different kind of funny feeling. “A lot of shit went down the night of the coup. I bet the definition of deserter got an update, too, along with everything else.”
“I don’t want another mission. I don’t want another squad. I just want …”
“What?”
Ennen chucked the plate into the corner of the room, glaring after it. “I don’t know.”
Ketch would’ve offered up a candy bar no one knew he’d had. Rally up, little bro. Bry had nothing to share but that same feeling Ennen couldn’t articulate. I just want this to be over. But I don’t even know what this is, anymore.
“Right now, I’d settle for just one night in Coronet City,” Ennen finally said. He thumbed his pierced nose; a new compulsion. “Just you and me and a fistful of credits we didn’t have to bend over for.”
Something speared Bry’s chest. His his heart lurched, like it wanted to leap out and join Ennen’s under the harsh strip lights.
Something else was throbbing, too. Bry felt a lot more comfortable baring that, and he answered Ennen by flunking backwards onto the bunk. The things you do for brothers. “I’m right here, man.”
That got Ennen’s attention. “Hey, who said you got bottom?”
“You did. I’m more accessible or some such kark.”
Ennen stalked over towards him, a smile slowly coaxing itself across his handsome face. “I love being right.”
Bry’s thighs melted open in invitation. “Want to take a sip?” No point playing coy. His damp blacks showed that he was still as horny as a reek.
“A sip? I’m draining the whole tank, bud.” Ennen flopped down next to the bunk, where he could make a quicker getaway, datapad in his lap in case a prop was needed. SOP for their just-hanging-Sarge routine. He reached up to palm Bry’s damp bulge. “You full up for me?”
Bry shuddered and stuttered out something like a yes.
“Can’t reach.”
Oh—right. Bry unstuck his brain from where it had puddled into his groin. He rolled up and adjusted his legs around Ennen’s shoulders. When Ennen opened his codseam, Bry actually moaned. His cock stretched right for the stars.
Ennen’s mouth intercepted it, hungrily.
The suckjob was a means to an end for Ennen; it always left Bry a little breathless. Bry supposed that’s why he kept coming back for more: splayed open, balls out, wondering if Ennen would take it easy and let him linger on the edge this time, in that singular state of feeling, where he was all cock, no thoughts, his vision going janky like a HUD during dawn.
Not today, said Ennen’s mouth. He sucked Bry’s shaft with Hutt-thick strength. He tugged on his balls, dragging the skin to the right degree. Just when Bry felt a nip of chafing, Ennen dribbled more spit into his strokes.
Bry couldn’t help getting a little thrusty as his orgasm swelled. It felt too good. He grabbed Ennen by the curly forelock and held him there.
Then he lost all control. He came in one great quake down Ennen’s throat.
Bry fell back to reality with a soft thud, eased by the suckling pulls on his cockhead. His body bled off momentum between Ennen’s lips. When Ennen said he’d dry him out, he always meant it. And Ennen wasn’t good at letting go. Never had been.
What Ennen craved most was the soft scrunch of skin filling his mouth. To warm it. Not even doing anything to cook it, just ... holding his brother’s cock and leaving Bry feeling baked with comfort.
Apparently it had the same effect on Ennen. That was probably because it was the only time he patterned his breathing, or even stopped talking long enough to catch it.
Bry could never keep his cock from growing—hence the preparatory blow—but he could sure sit still. He was Galaar’s sniper. He had quiet bones and a patience that stretched over the horizon, farther than any Sep could run. Ennen had hinky nerves and off-color ideas about how to keep a low profile.
Let me swallow your shots, Brio boy.
The first thing Bry felt whenever he slotted a target was the recoil of his rifle.
But the best thing was the occasional satisfied hum around his balls, because Ennen said he liked to feel the kickback in his throat.
That afternoon, propped up against a bunk rail, it was the two short sucks that roused Bry and made him look down between his thighs. Whuff-whuff. The shine from Ketch’s diamond had smeared all over Ennen’s face. He was crying.
“I know. I know,” Bry said, thumbing the tears away. “Just another year, Ennen. Just another year of keeping your mouth shut and your Deece pointed anywhere but your skraggin’ skull and they’ll take our tallies and it’ll be twenty acres and a bantha on Bothawui. Hang in there, man.”
Bry kept watch. He stroked his brother’s curls with Sonny and Sonny’s favorite shanty in his ear, humming it until Ennen’s nasally breath turned placid and his jaw went slack.
Keep a dock empty for me,
I’m coming home from this twinkling sea.
Grim the voyage, long the night,
All forgotten if you’ll kiss me right.