#My Vikings headcanons become increasingly specific and more unhinged from canon but you know

[eriexplosion]

Idk how to copy paste emoji on phone very well but Happy, Angsty, Shippy and Family for Echo Badbatch and Athelstan Vikings bc I am, nothing if not Predictable. Also Crosshair bc ilu 💜

*Rubs my gay little hands together* Hope you're ready to read because I am not joking when I say all this came out to over 1500 words.

Echo first, our beloved sad bby.

🟡 - Happy

99 Always watched over their batch from the very beginning and probably the first real memory they have of an ori'vod paying specific attention to them was 99 stopping what he was doing to check on them after a hard training session. It was right after they got their name, when they still very much did not appreciate it, and the best way they could think of to protest was to go to the opposite end and just completely clam up. Can't be an Echo if you just don't talk. 99 aas the one to check on them all crammed up in a tiny corner and he coaxed them out and got them talking again - when he talked, he made it seem okay to be an Echo, and that was a first step to embracing the name their batch gave them, even if it still took some time to completely accept it.

...This came out more bittersweet than fully happy but. I TRIED.

🔴 - Angsty/Sad

Rex had to be the one to bring Fives up to them after they were rescued. Not because they weren't thinking about him, they were, ever since they came out of the fridge and saw that he wasn't there to greet them. But they knew Fives wouldn't have EVER passed up the chance to save them, so... if he isn't here, they already know why. It'll be painful to find out how he died, they know he's dead, and they're already in so much pain as it is both emotionally and physically that they've been terrified to bring it up. Rex knows what they're doing, so he lets it go for a little while but he can't let them leave with the batch without having this conversation, which is just as painful as they both expected it to be.

🟣 - Romantic/Sexual/Shippy

Echo is SO so shy when it comes to romance, especially coming into the Batch. They're the New person and very much coming in on a highly established team with longstanding relationships between them, and they didn't come in with expectations of ever being anything but the outsider. They are in fact SO resigned to always being the outsider that they do not notice they're being flirted with for several weeks. Tech is the first one to give up on subtlety and just ask them if they're interested in being more than Squadmates.

👪 - Family

Echo, as a reg, has the best relationship with the vode in general. Where the batch is super reluctant to intermingle due to the general tensions that have managed to root in between them and the regs, to Echo they're still very much important Family. And so they take it super personally when things keep erupting into food fight violence. They really thought they'd have more time to try to work on getting everyone to get along.

Unfortunately, instead, Order 66 happened. And now not even their batch family is together anymore. This is just going to make them more desperate though to make everyone get along as they meet up with more vode, though, because goddamnit there are not enough clones left to be fighting like this.

Crosshair next to keep the Batch babes together:

🟡 - Happy

He's actually in a good mood much more often than most people would assume, he just doesn't show it in ways that anyone outside of his batch would notice. Happy Crosshair tends to sit closer to people, sometimes lean his whole weight on them, it's like having a cat really. People that aren't used to it tend to think he's trying to aggressively get in their space to prove a point, which is what Echo thought at first when he started planting himself directly in their way all the time until they actually got to know him more.

🔴 - Angsty/Sad

Do I dare do the Lula headcanon? Do I? I think I do.

Lula wasn't always just the name of a stuffed toy. Once, a few regs got their hands on a tooka that they brought back to Kamino for the cadets to take a look at, since the kids don't get off planet except for the occasional starship tour bringing back small animals is always a huge hit for the children.

Wrecker managed to get his hands on the little tooka and brought it back to their room, named her Lula, and absolutely adored the little creature just as much as he loves his Lula now. It's adorable. But this is a Crosshair headcanon, so where does he come in?

Well, the kaminoans didn't think much of the distraction of a pet, but they let Wrecker keep it for a short while because they saw potential for a test. She turns up missing Wrecker is losing his entire mind, and in the middle of it all Crosshair gets called in for a solo test. There's just one target, and the real test isn't if he can hit her it's if he'll do what he's told even though it will destroy Wrecker. He does, but not because of any real will to follow orders, he just knows it will be worse for them if he doesn't. He makes the replacement Lula to try to make up for it - it's not the same, but it's all he can do. (If this sounds similar to my Twelve Seconds fic it's because I imagine they did this to him multiple times with increasingly brutal targets to make sure he actually would shoot anything he was directed to before putting the batch out in the field.)

🟣 - Romantic/Sexual/Shippy

He probably gets the most hookups outside of the batch and literally no one knows HOW he manages this, because it's not his pleasant demeanor. Hitting on people usually takes the form of antagonizing them and seeing if they smack him or make out with him first and somehow people keep taking the second one.

He also tends to mood drop after them, but still won't recognize that this probably means there's something he's not getting out of it (like actual companionship) and so he comes back upset half the time to lay down with one of them and Radiate Sadness. Usually Wrecker, because he has the most Comforting presence and they've been together the longest by FAR.

👪 - Family

It is pretty much his only priority at all actually. There is a reason he takes it SO hard when he thinks they've abandoned him and it's because he has genuinely not at any point bothered to find anything else to live for. (And the reason he's still going at this point is that he does hope that they'll push back against his attitude and just make him come home so he can save face by not having been the one to give in first.)

Also the softest part of his brain really envies the life Cut and his family have, far away from fighting, but he tries not to listen to that part of himself because he's 1000% sure that kind of life is not for them.

And SOFT BOY ATHELSTAN:

🟡 - Happy

Athelstan keeps all of his journals as they fill up, so that he can look back on them and reflect. This means that he ends up with dozens of these, and he can open any of them to a random page and easily guess when he did it just by what he finds there. Even if it's just a sketch, how he draws the world and people around him changes as he shifts from being afraid to truly feeling like he belongs.

This means he can go back and usually pinpoint right around where he started to fall in love with someone, because he can see it in how his art of them changes.

🔴 - Angsty/Sad

Even years down the line he still has nightmares about his dead brothers. He's tried to move on from it and make peace and in many ways he has, but the nightmares haven't gone anywhere. Sometimes he thinks he's forgotten his brothers faces but then the bad dreams make it very much apparent that he hasn't.

These are also the only dreams that Ragnar can't help much with, which drives him insane because Ragnar HATES to think there's anything he can't fix. But this is one of them.

🟣 - Romantic/Sexual/Shippy

His favorite way to wake up is kisses, so he gets them every morning now from SOMEONE. Usually Ragnar or Floki will get him up this way but if they're not available metamours will do it (Helga especially loves to give him an adorable kiss to the cheek and make him make a SQUEAK of surprise.)

Of course being in a partner's arms just makes it better, please hold him while he wakes up. (This also helps when he's been having bad dreams, which he has OFTEN. As long as they're not the above mentioned brother nightmares that is.)

👪 - Family

So obviously my headcanons and fic go off the rails sometime around season three but I adore Alfred too much to let him go just because of something as small as 'Athelstan isn't fucking Judith in this version' so therefore. Athelstan has baby Alfred with someone else, in this verse Helga. They're not Together as a couple, but they're close and Helga is happy to parent a child with him, once a polycule becomes Complex enough it's all just coparenting anyway.

Also they're precious together so sue me. He loves her, and whether it's romantic or not really doesn't matter to him, she's just important to him.

#Eri Answers #The Bad Batch #cloneshipping #Vikings #My Vikings headcanons become increasingly specific and more unhinged from canon but you know #we're having fun here #headcanon posts