1. Shiny

                                    

                                          
Contrary to propaganda, you're not born a Stormtrooper. 
                          
Not anymore, anyway.  
                          
Back during the Republic's reign, there were the CT's born and bred for that sort of thing. Literally. When I showed up, there were still some around training new cadets and serving as senior officers. The rest of us were either plucked up off the street or joined up out of some idealistic sense of patriotism. It was the usual fare. You start out a starry-eyed cadet in awe of everything. There's a glamor to it in the beginning. The bright white armor, the TIE fighters, the Star Destroyers, the endless propaganda twisting war and glorious combat in service to the Empire as some glamorous, heroic movement. You would be a hero, just like all the people on the posters and in the holos.
                          
I was some street rat from Corellia. The Empire brought some order with them. The Stormtroopers gave me food. What else was I supposed to do? They had guns. They fought the bad guys that waged war in the streets. They were the good guys.
                          
I still think that. No amount of Rebel grandstanding and propaganda is going to change my mind. The main difference is that now I don't think about it so holistically. The Empire has its fair share of incompetent bastards the same as anywhere else, but it also has good men and women dedicated to what the Empire is supposed to embody: law, order, and structure. The principles were good. You can argue whether the means to that end were justified until Corellia quits producing ships, but the same could be said for the Republic. The Rebels want to bring back a corrupt bureaucracy that failed the galaxy more than once. They don't want to change anything in place regardless of how well it works. They just want to bring back an idealized system of what they believed was the better choice. I always found that a little on the arrogant side.
                          
Maybe that was why those defections in the early days of my schooling disgusted me so badly. Maybe that was why I refused to be swayed away from becoming TK-65780. I'm not sure. What I do know is that those defections left a bitter taste in my mouth. It was always the kids from Jakku, from Tatooine, from Jedha. Our instructors looked at all of us either from those backwaters or that came from any upbringing that was any less than stellar with that suspicion. They usually didn't say it outright, but they trusted us as much as you trusted a Nexu. 
                          
They didn't. 
                          
We had stepped off the shuttle that first day as a bunch of knobby-kneed, gangly recruits. I had stopped to stare up at the vast amount of lights and glitter that was Coruscant. Coronet City had been a big city too with all of the amenities that came with it, but Coruscant had a certain allure to it at the time. It didn't take me long to realize that it was the same as anywhere else, but at that moment, it was the only place I had ever been besides Corellia.
                          
It was beautiful.
                          
We were an experiment, or so we were told. My shuttle was full of street rats that just so happened to have scored high enough on an aptitude test to have been found useful, and we found ourselves shoved on a shuttle and sent to the Royal Imperial Academy on Coruscant. It was a high honor.
                          
Or it should have been had we been any regular recruits.
                          
We had all been herded into a small area and lined up. Compared to the well-fed children around us, we looked out of place. Our uniforms didn't fit quite right. Our shoes seemed too big on or feet. We looked as out of place as a gundark in a glass shop, but there we were. It didn't take too long after to have our instructor led up to us. "Enjoy your misfits, clone," One of the other officers had sneered as he peeled away with his own section of cadets, and that smug look he had on his face was seared into my memory.
                          
CT-7209 was one of the few Clone Troopers still active that I had seen. They all had the same face, the same tanned skin, dark eyes, and black hair. He had a big scar on the right side of his face. It went close to his eye, and those same eyes didn't match the rest of his face. They were so much older than every other part of his body that it was almost surreal to see. His temples were going silver and strands of that grey had worked their way up into the rest of his hair. Still, he looked like he could break any one of us in half, and that was more than a little terrifying.