A/N: Originally posted on tumblr (eirianerisdar). Cross-posted here as a companion fic to another one of mine, For the Brother I Did Not Deserve.
A Face in the Crowd
Eirian Erisdar
Little Meron Junshi is not sure whether he likes this Republic Day parade.
It technically hasn't started yet, but the heat is stifling here in the masses milling behind the railings along the Senate boulevard. His father has put him on his shoulders, and the air is a little clearer up here, but Meron would much rather they be back home on Alderaan, where the air is sweeter and the skies much, much bluer.
And less loud. There are many interesting species around him that he has not seen before, but Meron finds the noise rather distracting. And the boulevard before them is still empty, except for the red-and-white armoured clone troopers that stand guard at equal intervals along the railings themselves.
But he will behave, because he his a big boy of eight and his father is here to do important business with Senator Organa, and Meron is only here because he pleaded and pleaded until his parents said yes.
And then suddenly, there is thud of a plasma cannon from high above, so deep and low that Meron feels it shudder through his frame and down to his father's wide shoulders; and the guarding troopers snap to attention with a muted thud of armoured boots against duracrete.
This first thud echoes across the suddenly silent masses; and in the distance, under the Senate Building itself, comes an answering drumbeat.
Then another. And another.
And then a steady tramp-tramp-tramp comes filtering down the boulevard, and before Meron can do anything but sit up straighter on his father's shoulders, the first company of clone troopers come into view.
The Coruscant Guard is first, led by a proud-shouldered trooper with a helmet visored in grey and painted in red, the etched plaques on his armour marking him as a commander.
Meron gapes as row after row of red-white troopers follow, posture ramrod-straight, each holding a blaster at parade ready. The cadence of their steps are so well-matched that if Meron were to close his eyes, he could imagine a singe titan was thundering down the boulevard, and not nearly a hundred and fifty men of one company.
The crowd around them is shrieking with excitement.
A company of soldiers, each with stylised wolf-head painted on their grey-lined white armour, and striding confidently at their head, a Kel Dor Jedi with russet robes flowing jauntily in the wind.
Plo! The crowd is screaming. Plo Koon!
The Wolfpack! Meron stares, wide-eyed, so engrossed in the clean lines of General Plo's wolves that he nearly misses the ground-shaking thud that follows.
Five paces after the last grey-painted trooper comes twin files of eight AT-TEs, six-limbed bodies creaking with every solid stamp of durasteel legs. And marching between, standing on, and holding to the side of these giant assault walkers are many yellow-striped troopers. Most strikingly, somehow balanced perfectly on a walker placed centrally between the two main lines, is a blue-skinned Twi'lek woman with a smile on her face and a lightsaber at her hip.
SECURA! The masses yell, in a hundred thousand different sentient voices. SECURA!
She stands tall, but her smile widens.
Company after company come, whole battalions and legions painted every colour of the galaxy, each with a Jedi marching before them, or sometimes two, with the younger marching alongside a clone captain.
Meron watches, dumbstruck, as hero after hero steps off the war-reels and into reality, like toy soldiers ripped from the holonet and placed within reach.
But then a roar of pure sound sweeps through the masses like an oncoming wave, and Meron is nearly unseated from his father's shoulders.
The troopers coming into view now are painted with bold gold stripes.
And at their head, stepping with a calmly fluid gait-
-is a Jedi with red-gold hair and cream robes, and eyes the colour of a silent sea above a beard trimmed to immaculate neatness.
Meron forgets to breathe.
Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Negotiator.
The multitude raves. There is no collective chant, now, not like before; overlapping screams of KENOBIand NEGOTIATOR and OBI-WAN rise in an increasing cacophony of unleashed madness.
Throughout all this, Meron only watches the Negotiator.
General Kenobi steps in time with his men, but something in the smooth effortlessness of his pace and the gravity of the tabards over his shoulders speaks of a noble sadness, mixed with extraordinary determination.
Sadness, in the middle of the greatest parade of the year?
Meron lowers he hand he was using to wave, and frowns. He is struck with the sudden impression that General Kenobi would look much the same leading his men into battle.
But then there is a blare of trumpets, and Meron nearly gives himself whiplash as he jerks his head to look.
These new troopers are painted blue.
The crowd is shouting in synchrony, now.
SKYWALKER! SKYWALKER! SKYWALKER!
The Hero With No Fear himself is stood next to Chancellor Palpatine, on a slow-moving barge surrounded on all sides by a sea of blue-and-white armour. His smile is rakish, his waving casual, and the scar that curves around the edge of one eye effortlessly cool.
Meron stares at Anakin Skywalker, and wonders if he imagines that those ice-blue eyes flicker towards him, if just for a moment.
Meron does not waste it. He straightens up so abruptly that his father grunts in surprise, but he does not pause to think about it - instead, he nearly slaps himself in the forehead as he salutes.
He is halfway through the motion already before he realises General Skywalker is looking at him.
Krayt spit! Meron tells himself, knowing his father would give him a good scolding if he heard the words out loud - I probably look stupid!
But what is done is done. The edge of his right hand is pressed to his forehead.
The General watches him for a moment - it cannot be more than half a second, but it seems the longest moment in Meron's short life - and then suddenly, General Skywalker raises two fingers to his forehead and flicks them to the side in a jaunty salute.
In return to his.
Meron's brain smashes into a wall of disbelief and disintegrates into awed smithereens.
It is only after the barge has passed by, and the next company is marching past that Meron remembers that he should drop his hand. He lets it fall by his side, numb.
He barely registers the rest of the parade.
He is grinning so widely his cheeks ache.
"Father," Meron says, later, when a squadron of LAAT/is have flown overhead and the crowd is beginning to disperse, "I'd like to join the Alderaani guard."
"Oh? And why is that?" his father says distractedly, holding one of Meron's ankles to stop him from sliding off.
"I want to be a General," Meron says.
There is a long pause. Meron's father slows his pace, and stops.
"War isn't as fun as you think, Meron." His father's voice sounds different.
"Oh."
"Talk to me when you're eighteen. We'll see then."
"Okay!" Meron chirps happily, as his father carries him across the sea of Coruscanti crowds, and away from the Senate boulevard, its white duracrete surface stamped grey with the feet of two hundred thousand men.
Twenty years later, clutching a blaster and kneeling in a white-walled corridor swamped with shadow, Meron Junshi thinks of that long-ago Republic Day. Of the sun and the chants and the bright-painted soldiers with their Jedi Generals.
He had gone to his father when he was eighteen, and he had gotten his wish.
The Alderaani guard had led to a permanent place in the Rebellion, and the Rebellion…here.
Behind him is a short passageway, and beyond that, the Tantive IV, with a precious person aboard. In front of him is a darkened corridor, which lies silent and still beyond the echoing howl of the klaxons.
And then Meron becomes aware of another noise.
A sawing, unnatural breathing, like air rasped through a grille of harsh desert sand.
And the passageway is lit with a bar of crimson plasma.
"Open fire!"
Oh, Meron thinks, as his finger tightens on the trigger and plasma spews uselessly out of the barrel of his blaster. You were right, father.
War is not a parade, with sun in your eyes and bright-painted soldiers and their much-loved generals marching before them; war is red-painted white walls, and flashing bolts, and screaming, and the never-quickening and never-slowing breaths of a shadow that reaches for you, and grasps you with invisible hands, and sends a screaming blade of blood-red light slashing towards your chest.
"Take it! Take it!"
And Meron knows that perhaps there is a little truth in what his eight-year-old self thought about war: War is nothing without hope.
Hope, to a boy watching a war parade on his father's shoulders, is to receive an acknowledgement from the General he loved so much as a hero.
Meron stares into those hard black lenses, and holds this image in his mind as he dies.
He has no time, before the end, to wonder if he imagined Darth Vader flinch.
END
A/N: If you want to read the companion fic to this, go to my profile or tumblr and find For the Brother I Did Not Deserve. Thanks to all those who review and favourite!