One of Us
By Kudzu
"The training is nothing! The will is everything! The will to act!"
Henri Ducard, Batman Begins
They had, thus far, enjoyed uniformity.
They were identical men, brothers. They were all clones of Jango Fett, the late Mandalore and one of the greatest bounty hunters to ever live in the galaxy.
Everything was going to change, though. They had known, deep down, that it was inevitable. That the holes war had made in their ranks were not always going to be filled by the limitless and constant stream of Fett clones from Kamino or Coruscant, but eventually by lesser men brought forth to fight and die in their armor and in their formations, by their sides and in their masses of white-armored bodies. Their phalanxes would no more be entirely of the finest troops to ever see any galactic sun.
The newcomer was wearing his suit of gleaming armor when he arrived, and this made it all the more disheartening and even infuriating to his new comrades-in-arms. His helmet was tucked under his arm, perhaps just to allow them to see for their own eyes that his face was not the same.
He held himself differently than they did, walked differently, shoulders held out more in front of him in an almost aggressive manner. He was maybe two centimeters taller than them, and his hair was a dark blond. His eyes were blue-green, and a few freckles spotted his milky nose. His skin tone was light and his skin looked to be textured more smoothly than theirs. He saluted, as was the custom for clone troopers.
Clone troopers.
This man was a recruit.
He had, until now, lived a normal life (more or less), laughed and cried when he was a little boy with no fear of his instructors deciding that he was too temperamental or sentimental and dragging him off, never to be seen again. He'd grown up, progressed from infant to toddler to child to adolescent to teenager to young man at an ordinary rate. He hadn't been propelled through the successive stages of his life at double-speed with growth-accelerated genes, too fast for him to adapt normally and so forced to cope at twice the speed anyone else had to, to make him strong.
This man was probably in his late twenties. He was more than twice the age of any of the true clone troopers present.
"This is Private Aldin," the thin Etti Jedi Knight said. "He'll be joining your platoon."
Against his better judgment, Sergeant Vix raised his hand. "Question, sir?"
"Go ahead."
"Why is it that a recruit like Private Aldin can join our ranks and be called a clone trooper when he's never even set foot in a cloning facility before?"
There was a very long, very annoyed silence. Many of Vix's compatriots gave him incredulous, awed looks, as if they couldn't believe he'd just said that - said what all of them were thinking.
"Because that is the way that it works, Sergeant," General Meu said sleekly. "The position of Republic infantry is not your gene set's exclusive domain."
"No, sir, not anymore," Vix retorted.
A spidery vein on Meu's temple twitched. "Glad we all understand this, then."
Vix was seized suddenly with a very outlandish desire to tear his blaster from its holster and gun the sanctimonious Etti down where he stood. But the Jedi was, whether he liked it or not, his superior officer, and that would hardly be an acceptable course of action for him to take.
"Vode an," he muttered sarcastically to his squadmates standing at attention beside him.
"Yessir."
"Aye, sir."
"Right, Sarge."
Brothers all. They weren't any longer. Brothers-in-arms, perhaps, but this recruit was not his brother. Who the clone troopers were had been drastically redefined. It was the beginning of the end - soon, more men like Aldin would come to replace more and more Kaminoan-made clones. The quality of the feared infantry ranks would decrease, as would the quality of their pilots, tank drivers, and gunners.
They would be made ordinary.
Just as ordinary as Aldin was.
The next week, the 45th Fast-Response Brigade was dispatched under Senior Clone Commander Q to react to a raid on the planet Sikking, in the Expansion Region.
Separatist forces had dropped out of hyperspace in the system and proceeded to land a force of battle droids, apparently with the intention of capturing data and material from the Sikkin main factories. Unfortunately for them, the 45th had been stationed at nearby Iktotch, and had arrived to counter them aboard the Venator-class Star Destroyer Harm. While the Star Destroyer knocked out the CIS ships in orbit, CR25 carriers took the Brigadiers to ground in pursuit of the raider droids.
It was only when their company was fighting for its very life, surrounded by enemy troops, that Aldin said over a private helmet comm channel, "I am like you."
Vix didn't respond immediately. He shot down three skeletal B-1 droids with his carbine and tossed an electromagnetic grenade into another group of them, then rolled behind the body of one of his fallen brothers to use it for cover while he snapped off a few more bolts from his weapon.
"I am much like you."
"We're on the same side, and you're wearing my kind's armor," Vix snapped in reply.
"Your kind?"
He answered, "Aye, that's right," through clenched teeth as he dodged out of the way of a rocket-propelled explosive grenade and mowed its assassin droid wielder down while he was in midair.
"Your kind and my kind, Sarge."
Eerie, almost, Vix thought. "The hell are you talking about, Private?"
"We are brothers," Aldin said flatly, shooting off a droid's head.
"I am a clone of Jango Fett," Vix returned, tossing another EMP explosive. It went off and lashed the throng of droids in that area with blue electrical fire.
"Yes, I know. And Jango Fett died an enemy combatant."
He blasted more droids, barely still cognizant of what he was doing and focused numbly on taking as many of the Separatist machines down as he could. "We are the perfection," he said.
"A lot of people say you're abominations," Aldin replied, dropping to a knee as a droid arm shorn off by high explosives whizzed at maybe sixty kilometers an hour through where the trooper's head used to be.
"Propaganda and a lack of understanding," Vix said, distantly aware that perhaps he shouldn't be having a conversation while in a desperate struggle to stay alive under enemy fire, but not really caring.
The recruit continued firing and said, "Lack of understanding. Not everyone can be Jango Fett, Sergeant Vix."
"I know. That's why we stand out. That's why we are the best."
"Your inheritance, I think, makes you arrogant."
A blaster bolt barely missed the sergeant's shoulder. "We have all the right."
"Do you even know what the Republic is?" Aldin asked suddenly, sharply.
"It has been my utter devotion since the beginning of my life, Private," Vix said, feeling true anger within him. How dare this man, this inferior, this recruit, question his loyalty to the Republic?
"Not my question," said he.
He ducked behind another fallen body to avoid a torrent of red flame from an oncoming mass of super battle droids, and lobbed yet another grenade into that new lot. "What is?"
"I've grown up knowing the Republic," Aldin said. "I have learned to love it. If I love it enough that I am willing to die for it, just to keep these Separatists from destroying it and all that it stands for, why should you seek to deny me that?"
Vix was, for one of the first times in his life, lost for words. His confusion did not keep him from continuing to fire upon the steadily advancing battle droids, and he noticed with some surprise that he and Aldin were among only maybe two dozen soldiers left on the field. One more clone trooper was gunned down by enemy fire even as he watched, finger still holding down his own trigger.
The gun clicked empty, and he crouched down and jammed a new power pack into it. He raised himself up again and hurled a trio of miniaturized thermal detonators into the pack of adversaries.
"Sarge?"
"Look, Private, kinda busy -"
"Sarge, we're about to die." Aldin's voice was quiet, almost anguished. "I just want to know what you hold against me."
He's right, Vix knew. They were hopelessly outnumbered, surrounded, cut off, with no reinforcements inbound. The game was up, and they would never surrender.
"Private," he replied gruffly, "you are not like me. You've lived a normal life, been happy and sad and allowed to be like any other normal person. You haven't been trained from the top by the hardest drill instructors in the galaxy since you were two months old. You've been given a chance to grow up and into who you are now."
He dropped behind the dead clone trooper again as the blasterfire thickened and the enemy tightened like a noose around them. They were down to perhaps twelve.
"You have the capacity to love, whether the Republic or anything else. That sentimentality was burnt out of us as children. You've been given the chance to be a man and not just a soldier. You've had a life outside your armor. You're of less professional and less refined stock. You don't have the sort of legacy we've got to live up to. That's driven us."
Two troopers yelled and died almost at the same time, both blasted in the gut by rocket darts from the super battle droids. Vix avenged them with a full-automatic burst into the hulking formations.
"Private, you're just not one of us." We're the last of the old, he added silently, and you, Aldin, are the first of the new. "And so we resent you for that."
There was no reply.
"Private Aldin?"
No reply.
Then Vix realized: Aldin could be any of the anonymous troopers dead on the coarse, sandy ground right now. Hidden behind a battle helmet, his face did not matter. He was one of the ranks of Republic infantry made faceless, because they did not need features to do their duty.
They were meaningless.
They did not matter.
Aldin was just one of them, as was Vix.
It had taken him until the last seconds of his life, surrounded and outnumbered, to realize that truth: that Aldin was the same sort of soldier he was. His armored profile was a copy of the next man who'd stood beside him and the man beside him as well. A duplicate, with the same white plasteel plating in the same familiar mold. A clone trooper, though not in gene, which did not matter next to his will and motivation, but in not only armor but in purpose.
One of us.