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.
He looked out over us, memorizing our faces, reading over our names, and he stopped on me. We locked eyes with one another, and I had no trouble meeting his gaze. I had seen bigger and badder men than him. I wasn't afraid, or so I kept telling myself. He smiled at me, and I couldn't help but giving something of a smile in return. "What's your name, cadet?"
I had a name, but that name didn't matter anymore. It wasn't who I was. "Cadet Sixty-Five-Seven-Eighty, sir."
He hesitated for a moment at my response before he gave me another smile, "You'll do alright, Shiny." He turned his attention from me to the rest of the group, "My name is See-Tee Seventy-Two-Oh-Nine, but you will call me Captain Kando or Sir, and during your time here I will be taking you from weak, pathetic roaches and turning you into elite soldiers for the Empire. They say I can't do that..." He gave one confident smirk that told me everything I needed to know about him in a matter of moments. "I'm going to show them how wrong they are."
He let us know immediately where we stood in the grand scheme of things. Kando never beat around the bush or minced words. Whatever qualms many of the other cadets may have had about studying under a Clone were quashed rather early on when we found ourselves more adept than some of the other cadets at our combat readiness training.
I don't know why he and I got along as well as we did in the beginning, but he took a shine to me early on and pushed me harder than he did some of the other cadets. I went in this scrawny twig of a cadet and emerged one of the tallest, most athletic cadets in our group. He pushed me to run the gauntlet of simulations, to do the hardest of them, to put my training droids just one level higher each time I thought I was getting the hang of it, and because of it I began to find myself getting a little harder and harder to beat when sparring sessions came around.
I almost enjoyed it. The physical aspects of training may have left me sore and yearning for death from time to time, but the discipline of it all was exhilarating. The feeling of running those urban warfare tests, of passing and setting new, top class times, of seeing all of the hard work pay off into real development, all of it made me feel like I had a purpose for the first time in my life. I knew I had found my calling after a month in that academy, even if some of the cadets and instructors were less than agreeable.
There were social rules to it all, of course. You didn't associate with the pilots or the officer kids. They were a whole social rank above you that you couldn't even fathom and because of that you were forbidden by those unwritten rules to even consider speaking to them. Kando liked to call it out for what it was: elitist rubbish. Still, he admitted that we had to respect it for what it was as well, which was a storied and long-honored tradition among the academy elites to be entitled snobs. Nothing we could do would change it, and he taught us early on that sometimes bowing to the status quo was better than letting yourself break by trying to change it.
Most of his advice fell into the much more practical categories, however.
"This," he'd say, jabbing a finger at his scar whenever some cadet would complain about our helmets or some other safety precaution, "is why you wear your buckets and you don't do anything stupid."
I had always liked him. He was hard on us, ribbed us for every little mistake, but I was doing alright until Scarif, and I knew I had him to thank for it.
One day, I had decided to hang back after the lessons. We had our leisure time to do with what we wanted. Most cadets headed to the cantina or back to their rooms for that coveted extra nap in the afternoon. My performance on the Walkers had been less than ideal, so I stayed around to work on the simulations again. It was either I passed this portion with exemplary marks or I was stuck doing grunt work for the rest of my career and frankly, I wasn't in the mood to be glorified cannon fodder. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary, except that Captain Kando had been watching me flounder about in the simulation time and time again. I had to have been on my fourth go around when he finally spoke, "You're never going to pass by doing the same thing over and over again, Shiny."
I hadn't even realized he was there, and him speaking up out of the blue nearly launched me out of my skin. He gave a barking laugh at the fact I did literally jump up a foot off the ground as he came towards me, arms crossed across his chest and a knowing smirk on his face.
"I've watched you for the last half hour. Ever thought about changing your tactics up a smidge?"
"I've tried literally everything," was my protest, but it only served to make Kando give another chuckle as he shook his head.
"No..." He gave an incline of his head to the simulation booth looking more than a little amused, "You've tried two tactics interchangeably over the past fifteen tries and neither of them has worked. You've tried to brute force your way through it and then tried to avoid those rockets entirely. How's that working for ya, Shiny?"
Admittedly, not well. I just gave a little shake of my head in reply and suddenly found the texture on my boots to be the most interesting thing in the room.
"Ever considered being defensive for a change? Just because you're a big metal monstrosity doesn't mean you have to go to them."
It was stupidly obvious. It was so stupidly obvious that I am sure looking back on it that every ounce of blood went to my face in sheer mortified embarrassment. Kando thought it was hilarious. He was laughing so hard I swore he was going to pass out before he clapped a hand affectionately on my shoulder and shook his head.
"Shiny, don't overthink it. You're a good cadet, but you think too much. Now, get back in there and pass the sim."
And I did with Kando watching. When I stepped out, still feeling a little stupid, he was standing there with a smile on his face. He threw his arms out with a knowing grin as I passed a hand over my neck, "Thank you, sir."
"Ah, it's why I think you should do these tests as a group. The first time you'll work with anyone is when they actually let you in one for the actual training," Kando gave his eyes a sardonic roll as his arms fell back down to is sides. "Some of you don't need to be anywhere near a Walker, I understand, but how the kriff are you supposed to learn to coordinate altogether in one?" He cut himself off before a tangent and just gave a sigh as he shook his head. He turned to me after a time and smiled as he clapped a hand on my shoulder, "Eh, you're ready, Shiny. Just stick close to your seniors and listen to your commander. Trust the men to your left and right and be sure they can trust you."
"Sir, why do you call me 'Shiny'?" It had been an honest enough question. Kando glanced at me with a grin forming on his face, but he didn't say anything for a long while as the two of us made our way out of the simulation room.
"Your armor's still got that off-the-rack shine to it. It's what we used to call new troopers before..." Kando trailed off for a beat, and I saw something in his face change. His smile faltered a bit and I saw his brow twitch. "Well, doesn't really matter now, does it?" We halted at the stark metal crossways that led to the cadet lodgings and the instructor ones, and Kando turned to me again with a smile that was smaller than the one he had worn earlier. "Get some rest, cadet. You've got a test tomorrow that I expect you to pass."
*
I shared a room with three other cadets. All of them were from some backwater planet in the Empire because you weren't much without some form of pedigree, planetary or otherwise. Two of them were craned over manuals while the third was fast asleep. One of them looked up when he saw me, a mousy-haired kid about two years my junior that I dubbed Twitch. He was new, brought in from one of the Outer Rim planets and flinched at literally everything. He smiled at me, and I gave a small wave back while his bunkmate didn't even look up. That one didn't like me. Couldn't say I cared too much for him, either. "Kando's pet's back, isn't he?" He asked without looking up from whatever field manual he had his nose shoved in, and I decided to ignore him. Kando liked me, and I was in that small niche that he did actually seem to enjoy teaching. There were about seven of us in that little group, and Blondie, as I dubbed him to myself the first day when he threw my open pack onto the other set of bunks, - kriff, I hold grudges - was a little miffed that he wasn't in it.
I figured giving the Walker manual a once over couldn't hurt, and I pulled it off the nightstand. I remember the way my eyes drifted over the pages, not absorbing a single word, for at least an hour. If I passed tomorrow's test, I'd be free from standard grunt life forever. It opened up the possibility of maybe, just maybe, getting an officer position. There was potential in my stars if I worked a miracle on the examination. All I could see was getting a nice set of greys and a polished rank bar.
Of course, I was a kriffing idiot kid at the time. I was sixteen and believed in meritocracy.
Well, we see where that got me.
All wasn't totally lost, however. Did I pass my exam? Yes. I passed with flying colors. The proctor was a stuffy officer I had seen around the academy. He was a quintessential Imperial. Just picture what you expect out of an Imperial officer, the most stereotypical one your mind can conjure up, and that was him. Pristine uniform, impeccably groomed, clean shaven, the whole nine yards. Kando stayed to watch and would proudly remark that we were 'His boys' when we passed. I went in and nothing felt real, almost like I was watching myself from the outside, but I followed the little Kando-sounding voice in my head and I somehow passed. My marks weren't even close to perfect if I judged the number of nitpicking notes scribbled down in the blank area of my rating chart, but the impeccably written note at the bottom detailing the final verdict was: Cadet has passed with a rating of Extremely Satisfactory.
The best part: I beat Blondie. I remember clearly sitting in that simulation cockpit telling myself that I could pass with a 'Barely Satisfactory' if Blondie got something lower than that. When they pinned the results to our door, Blondie was fuming. He pointedly refused to acknowledge my existence thanks to his own 'Barely Satisfactory' rating. Even worse was that Twitch had even managed a 'Satisfactory'. I took him out to dinner for that, and on what little stipend I had, we ate street food like kings.
*
We had to run the urban combat simulations one day under the watchful eye of Commodore Caius Morrissey. He oversaw our particular section of the academy – the Stormtrooper Corps – and he liked to watch for potentially gifted cadets to pull into other programs. Our class was never watched particularly closely due to the tags we had been given by even being placed in Kando's command in the first place, but the Commodore was obligated to do something with us every now and again, so there he was.
He stood beside Kando and looked as though he wanted to be anywhere else at the time. The individual runs were to assess overall cadet readiness, and I was sitting by and hoping I didn't make an ass of myself as I watched Twitch, who was alphabetically before me on the roster, shakily stand and move to the little elevator to go for his run. Kando had made his way over to me and glanced over me in my gear with a little smile, "Feeling alright, Shiny?"
"I think so," I replied as I stood and checked the clip on my practice rifle with a shrug. "Ready as I'll ever be, honestly, sir."
He reached out and gave my shoulder a slap as Twitch's run began, "You'll do fine, kid. Remember what I told you: eyes ahead, head down, blaster up."
"Yes, sir."
"Pretend Morrissey isn't here, if that helps."
"Not afraid of the Commodore, sir."
He smiled again at me, "Ah, aren't you now?"
"No, sir. He's just another man, after all. Shoot him, he bleeds like the rest of us," he cocked a grin before I turned to see Twitch fail the run again. He got lucky that the ones we were doing were just plain practice sims. He had already failed his first two tries. It was good on him, though, because he definitely made it farther than the last time he did it.
I was up next and made my way over to the small lift where the simulation one. I passed twitch, who looked like he was about to cry, before I finally settled onto the lift with a quick exhale, "Alrighty, Shiny," I breathed, "You can do this."
Something that day just worked right. I had the best run I had ever done that day and set a personal best record. I only realized that it must have been somewhat impressive when I arrived back up on the viewing platform and the observing officers were all whispering to one another as I passed and resumed my seat beside Kando, who reached out and squeezed my shoulder with a little smile before he turned to Morrissey, "How did he do, Commodore?"
Morrissey said little before he looked up from his pad and glanced between the two of us, "He passed. Exceptionally, might I add."
It made Kando square his shoulders just a little bit more and smile at me as one of the other cadets lined up for his run. "You did good, kid."
"Thank you, sir."
"Thank yourself for a run like that."
I smiled as I looked down at the training rifle laid across my lap and turned it over in my hands.
I didn't really realize it at the time, but Morrissey had taped a sticker to me that day. If Kando realized it too, he never mentioned it to me. Being under his radar was never necessarily a good thing, but it usually meant a promotion in your stars, if you could keep it up. Morrissey had this reputation amongst the academy elites of being a man that made the careers of officers and troopers alike. He could send you to Scarif, get you into Intelligence, find a way to make you a Novatrooper. I never liked him. He came across as an elitist snob, which he was. Kando, of all people, didn't like him either, and I knew one thing better than anything else: never doubt Kando's instincts.
After that whole mess with most of our class passing the simulations, Kando sat down for the first time in a while and ate with us. It was a bit of surprise, but he said he needed to discuss our scores with us, and that was indeed how it started off.
"You all impressed Morrissey," he chuckled between mouthfuls of whatever exotic meats they decided to feed us and gestured to the round table of wide-eyed cadets with his fork, "and impressed me. Those scores were wonderful, all things considered."
There was a certain measure of pride I took in impressing Kando. His approval always meant more to me than I was willing to outright admit.
"I'm hoping that this means they'll stop breathing down our necks now, but I feel like that's wishful thinking," he shook his head and leaned back in his chair.
"Who ran the fastest times?" Hatchet, named for his inability to not break things, asked, bouncing up and down in his seat and receiving a look from his bunkmate, who we dubbed Volt for his rather creative uses for shock batons in combat sims.
Kando looked at the overly excited cadet and shook his head, "Dorn and Aabe tied for the first-place position with four minutes and twenty-six seconds."
"He tied Aabe?" Blondie's disbelief would have been mildly insulting had I been tied with any other cadet, but Aabe was notorious for being one of the shining stars of the Stormtrooper Corps.
And for being Morrissey's favorite.
He was a nice enough kid and was prime officer material. He had the tact, the bearing, the natural knack for leadership that put him head and shoulders above most people. From what we had heard, he was going to be getting transferred to Scarif at the end of his preliminary training, and he honestly would have deserved every second of it. Tying with him was a feat that impressed even me at the time.
I glanced over at the door where the official times were posted and saw Aabe glance over my direction when his squadmates pushed him to the front so he could see his time. He looked more surprised than angry, which was a relief. He and I had been forced into some assignments when we did cross-class training, and I frankly enjoyed working with him.
"You did good, Shiny," Kando grinned at me as Hatchet excitedly shook me by my shoulders. Twitch was even grinning at me. "Are you ready for group combat sims tonight, though?" Kando asked as he sat back in his chair. "Tonight will make or break your class standings."
"We have Shiny!" Volt gestured haphazardly to me and almost smacked Blondie in the face as he did. "We'll be fine."
"Shiny isn't leading," Kando crossed his arm and everyone at the table except me looked ready to throw their trays down. "Jacks is."
"No way!" Blondie practically knocked over the table when he stood up. "Jacks is a stupid nerf-herder! We're going to fail!"
Jacks was one of those cadets that was too many brothers late to get a commission and too stupid to go into Intelligence or Engineering. He missed the mark on his mother's brain and his father's brawn and was, for all intents and purposes, complete dead weight. I don't often accuse people of sabotage, but whoever put Jacks in charge wanted us to fail.
Much to my surprise, Aabe walked over to our table and stared down at me looking almost apologetic, "I saw your squad lineup, Shiny. For what it's worth, I hope he grows an extra pair of brain cells before nineteen hundred."
"Uh... Thanks, Aabe."
"Hey, you're alright. I don't mind your competition, honestly," Aabe shrugged and smiled at me. "Good luck."
As he left, Blondie turned to me with a scowl on his face, "Since when were you two best friends?"
"We... aren't?"
That was the truth of it. We really weren't.
And when nineteen hundred rolled around and we all found ourselves back in the practice room, we were going to be running with Aabe and his squad. We literally could not have looked any worse if we were dead banthas.
Everything was going semi-decently until Jacks froze. He literally just... just stopped. The only sound coming out of his mouth was "Uh" as he began to panic. I could see it on his face. I wasn't going to fail. Not there. Not in front of Morrissey, and definitely not in front of Kando.
"Sit back and shut up, Jacks!" I snapped and grabbed him by the side of his helmet as I flung him to the ground and took up his spot, "Eyes on me, Cadets. I don't know about you, but I'd sooner shoot the Commodore than fail this test. Form up. Twitch, Blondie – you handle the tank. Take our detonite charges and get them up under the thrusters. Hatchet, Volt, you two cover me and move up when we can. We need to hit that command center. Jacks, follow them."
I gave my rifle a once over an jumped up as the signal for everyone to get moving.
And move we did. Twitch may have been a jumpy mess, but he was one hell of a demo guy. Shocking, I know, especially considering that the explosions made him jump every single time. Blondie wasn't a half bad shot himself, and the two of them had those tanks down faster than I think even they were expecting. I also don't think I ever got shot at by those droids once thanks to Volt and Hatchet. I don't know to this day what Jacks did back there, and frankly I didn't care. When the command droid went down with a shot to the head, it left the entire center lane free from orders and disorganized, and the rest of the sim was a cakewalk. Much to my shock, we hit the end before Aabe's squad, who showed up a minute later looking more than surprised to see us literally waiting for them.
I caught Aabe smile as their arrival pinged the sensor and we all crowded onto the elevator to leave the arena. He pulled his helmet off and grinned, "Shiny... Damn."
"You guys move fast," I nodded to his squad, but I could feel the prickling tension behind me, and all of it seemed to be directed right at Jacks, who was glaring daggers into my back.
Almost as soon as we stepped off, the reviewing officers were on top of Jacks, bombarding him with questions and rather tersely informing him that he failed. Completely.
"But 65780-!"
"Cadet 65780 is the only reason you all weren't killed! Hesitation kills, Cadet 19082!"
Kando pulled myself and the other cadets away and looked down at me, "Shiny... Congratulations. You just saved the other four members of your squad from an automatic failure by a grand total of ten seconds."
*
But nothing was ever easy. We had all been sitting in the mess hall a year later when Twitch leaned over that one day and asked me, "Hey, did you hear that we may be getting sent to Mimban?"
Blondie looked up from his lunch and furrowed his brow, "Why that backwater?"
Considering that Blondie came from Jakku, that question almost made me laugh. Twitch gave a haphazard shrug of his bony shoulders, "Not sure. All I heard was that there were some uprisings. Rumor has it we may be the next batch getting sent to help put it down."
"Think Kando knows something?" Another cadet nearby asked and all eyes on our section went immediately to me.
"What?"
"What do you mean, what?" Blondie rolled his eyes. "Your Kando's favorite in our section. He'll tell you."
So, I stayed after the lessons. Again. Because no one else could ask Kando a question, of course.
I walked over to him as he finished putting the last of the training weapons up, and he turned to me with a raised eyebrow and pitched a sigh. "Let me guess," he began slowly, "the other Shinies have a question and were too scared to come and ask me themselves."
"I guess, sir," he smiled at my shrug and nodded at me as a sign to continue with the question. "There was a rumor..."
"This oughta be good."
"...about us getting sent to Mimban when we graduate."
Kando gave his eyes a roll to end all rolls and he brought his hand to his face with a groan, "Shiny, where in the Void did you hear that?"
"Twitch said he-"
"If Twitch said that angels were real, would you believe him?"
I was half offended. What did I look like? Some Outer Rim Spice pilot? "No!"
"Then stop taking it so seriously." He rapped his knuckles against my forehead and gave me the sort of gesture you give a little kid you're shooing away as he turned back to the weapon racks. I turned to leave myself when he called over his shoulder, "Oh, and Shiny?"
I turned back, "Sir?"
He was half-turned to face me with a wicked little smirk on his face, "Tell them I said 'Hoth, not Mimban'."
Hoth. The very name makes me cold and gives me flashbacks, but that's a story for another day. I did what he told me to do, and sure enough, I ruined the potential future for every member of my section. I'm fairly sure that even to this day, our instructors have no idea how that rumor got started, but the sheer number of announcements that they tried to make to convince a class of distressed students that they weren't getting sent to Hoth still makes me grin.
*
Naturally, I figured passing the Walker test as well as I did was a good thing. Myself, Blondie, and a handful over the seven of Kando's prized students passed that exam with marks that most hadn't expected out of what were essentially the outcasts, and Kando, in his infinite realm of persuading me to do certs and tests I didn't even know a thing about, got me to take an extreme environment certification test. It was a strange request, but I figured that having more credentials couldn't be too bad.
Mistake number one.
The gist of it was that just two months after I turned eighteen, I passed and had a big stamp on my bucket that read, "Send me to whatever Corellian Hell you can find, Emperor, because I can handle it!"
Sand? Got it.
Heat? Got it.
Cold? Got it.
Snow? Got it.
Swamps in the middle of what is literally a sodden hell with mud up to your knees? Where your Walker gets stuck every four paces and you have to dig it out? Where the title 'Mud Jumper' is not only a unit nickname but a literal way of life?
Oh, got that too.
So, where did they send me and that group of seven cadets - oh, plus Blondie and Twitch?
Was it Tatooine? No.
Was it Hoth? Let me say, I would have killed for it to have been Hoth.
No. They stuck us under Kando's command and sent us to kriffing Mimban.
*
Thing was, we didn't get sent right away. They told us where we were going – Mud Hell, in this case – and just let us stew in that knowledge for months. In that time, I found myself falling under the ever watchful and endlessly arrogant gaze of the Commodore who helped run the academy. Morrissey was his name. He was one of the typical brass tacks that absolutely loathed the fact that I breathed the same air within the planet's atmosphere as them. I may or may not have beaten his star pupil in hand-to-hand combat during training and embarrassed him in front of the esteemed Commodore.
See, Cadet Aabe was a nice guy, all things considered. He was cursed with the Coruscanti drawl, but he was far from being an abrasive ass. All things considered; he was a damned good cadet. He was a fast learner and smart, but he wasn't exactly strong, so getting the upper hand on him in a fight wasn't too difficult to do. Morrissey had taken a liking to him because his dad was also a career militarist who had served the Republic, and as far as the Commodore was concerned the kid was absolutely golden.
Well, until I came along and proved him wrong.
See, I had this nasty little habit of excelling. Being born a street urchin with nothing to lose gave you a certain level of tenacity that most other cadets tended to be lacking, and with an instructor that pushed me as hard as Kando did, me getting partly decent at soldiering was bound to happen. Morrissey retaliated to my academic excellence by setting a training droid to level nine protocols and having it beat the Kriff out of me. I mean, I broke the droid in reply because I was a stubborn little nerf who didn't realize that having someone like Morrissey breathing down your neck was a bad thing.
While I recuperated in the hospital with a broken rib and a broken leg, Morrissey was apparently pondering what exactly should be done with someone like me, and I soon found out what after days of stewing over it in the room with Twitch and Blondie, who were being just as conspiratorial about it as I was. Blondie was more hoping that I would literally get executed while Twitch was being slightly more optimistic with expulsion.
Actually... expulsion would have been worse, now that I think about it a little bit more.
Kando was firmly convinced that Morrissey was going to demote me to sanitation duty and leave it at that, and frankly, had he done that, I would have had nothing but unabashed contempt for that man, but I would respect it in a way. Instead, I found myself being herded down the sterile hallways of the officers' offices by some jumpy twig of an aide, who deposited me in the waiting room and buzzed me in almost nervously.
I found Morrissey sitting there quietly at his desk. The ass didn't even look up from his paperwork to greet me, instead making me wait there until he decided it was time for us to talk. I had a face that bespoke of being eternally unamused at that point, so it worked in my favor when he looked up hoping to see impatience and frowned when he saw disinterested boredom instead.
"Cadet 65780," he began and his drawl made me want to roll my eyes, "I brought you in here to discuss your rather particular set of martial skills."
I was convinced he was going to have me killed.
"You showed a remarkable amount of prowess for a student of your... your rather particular upbringing."
Of your rather particular upbringing...
That was code for the phrase: for a degenerate orphan. Everything with these guys was some form of double-speak, but once you learned how to read it, it was as plain and as rude as day. "Could you elaborate, sir?" I asked while keeping any ounce of disgusted emotion out of my voice.
Morrissey folded his hands on his desk and gave one of those practiced, forced smiles that grated on my nerves more than anything else, "You possess skills that should be used far beyond mere Stormtrooper training. Many of my colleagues would protest to this, but I am offering to sponsor you into specialized training. Despite your shortcomings, I believe you may be a great asset to the Empire."
Looking back on it, the logical part of my brain told me that I should have screamed "Yes", that I should have just swallowed my pride, bitten my tongue, and been a good little cadet and parroted "Yes, sir. Of course, sir." I didn't, though. I didn't because I'm Dorn and I'm a prideful, stubborn bastard.
I just stood there at attention and bit the inside of my cheek to keep me from slinging back something into that old bastard's face that I would have regretted and he was watching my quizzically, "Well, Cadet? Say something. Do you accept or not?"
"No, sir, I don't."
Morrissey looked like he was ready to explode. "What do you mean, "no"?"
"I do not want the position, sir," I replied and tried to bite back the rage I felt at the way he seemed surprised that he could stand there, insult me, and then expect me to grovel and eat out of his hand.
Morrissey had actually stood up and leaned across his desk towards me as if it was supposed to be threatening. See, when I had been a kid on Corellia, I was beaten and intimidated by gangsters that made some members of the Imperial military look like kids playing dress-up. This guy, all crisp uniforms and perfectly coiffed hair, didn't scare me. Not one single bit. "You will never get another offer like this. Not with your upbringing."
"I'd rather keep my dignity than grovel for table scraps, sir. You have insulted me and belittled me since I stepped foot in this room, sir, and frankly," and there I gave a little smile, "I want absolutely nothing you have to offer me."
"You'd rather go to Mimban?"
"I'd rather go to hell before I'd take your offer, sir. Now, if that's everything..."
The Commodore looked dumbfounded. I doubt he'd ever had some gutter rat like me ever refuse anything he had thrown off his plate at them, but there I stood – the dumbest of all of them. I should have jumped at the chance to seize ahold of a position like that with both hands and never let it go. I didn't though. Instead, I walked dismissed out of that office with one seething reply shouted at my back, "You will never amount to anything, 65780!"
Maybe he was right, but right then, striding down the pristine halls of those offices, I could have cared less.
*
I was in the cantina with Twitch, Blondie, and Hatchet eating our lunch and relaxing on our one solitary day off during the week. Hatchet was chattering on about something I was only half-listening to as I pushed around the gorak on my plate with the prongs of my fork. Twitch kept looking over at me and Blondie was pretending not to notice I was distracted as he rolled his eyes at Hatchet every few minutes.
"How was the meeting?" Hatchet finally managed out between breaths. "Morrissey never calls just anyone into his office. Must have been because of how you fried that training droid, right?"
It was. Partly. I didn't want to talk about it though, so all I gave him in reply was a shrug of my shoulders before I went back to examining the gorak with my fork, rolling it around on my plate and through the thick red sauce as I watched Hatchet's face fall slightly in disappointment.
"Uh... Well... What was it about? Was he offering you a promotion?"
"...Sorta."
"Did you say "yes"?"
"Lay off," Blondie cut in sharply and made Hatchet jump. "He clearly isn't interested in answering your inane questions."
I was about to thank Blondie with the rest of my ration card for that day, but before I could the telltale chime of the overhead intercom came on and sure enough we found ourselves amid a silent cantina as the droid voice rang out overhead, "Cadet 65780, please report to Captain Kando's office immediately."
The entire table turned to look at me as I pushed my gorak to Twitch and stood up, "Guess I'll tell you all later."
I made my way to his office in silence with a million things running through my mind as I did when I stepped through his office doors and found him with a file in hand. My file, to be exact. He took one look at me as I snapped to attention, "Cadet 65780, reporting as instructed, sir."
Rather than give me any sort of dismissal, he stormed forward with the file in hand and smacked me upside the head with it, making my entire head jerk sharply forward as it made contact with the back of my skull. It was surprising, but not unexpected. "What were you thinking?" he shouted at me as I reached up and massaged the sore spot near the base of my skull. "This was a once in a lifetime chance, Shiny! You could have gotten out-!"
Something about the Captain always made me speak my mind, and this time I replied back with more snap than I had ever used with him before, "And done what, sir? No matter what I do or who promotes me, I'll always be an orphan with some whore mother who dropped him on the steps of a kids' home because she wouldn't take care of him! Kriff, even the Commodore said it! I wasn't an outstanding cadet. I was a cadet from "rather particular circumstances". I'm nothing to them. I will always be nothing to them! At least here I'm..." I struggled to find the words for a moment. I didn't know how to explain it, so I took a collective breath and let it out slowly as I looked up at him. I locked eyes with that Clone for a second before a wave of shame hit me like a speeder and I dropped my eyes, "At least here I'm still an orphan who has some worth, you know? I'm not a charity case with you and the others. I don't want to be some Commodore's charity case."
I watched Kando's face for a long time before he finally smiled and gave the back of his neck a passing rub, "Sorry I smacked you, Shiny." He got it. I could tell from the look on his face that he got it. I knew that he would.
"I think I kinda deserved it," I admitted with half a smile and a shrug as he gestured to the seat across from him at his desk.
"Nah. That old shabuir is a bastard anyway. I'm kinda glad you're sticking around," he smiled at me, one of those wise smiles that made his whole face light up, and I couldn't help but smile back, "because someone needs to keep Blondie's ego in check."