Disclaimer: Everything belongs to George and Dave.
Timeframe: during and just after the Battle of Geonosis
Warnings: military violence and potential triggers
Notes: Written for a prompt on LJ. I wanted to explore Cut's decision to desert from a rather different perspective. Also, yes, the inspiration for this fic really was the horrible desert/desert homonym pun.
desert
It wasn't the war itself that made Cut want to leave. It wasn't the generalities, or even the particulars (his friend Grit lying stretched out beside him, a jagged, sucking hole through his torso and one of his legs simply gone). It wasn't any disagreement with his commanding officers, either. Master Yoda seemed a capable enough general. Cut thought he could follow him. Actually, he didn't think about it much at all. It was simply what he'd been trained to do.
So no, it wasn't the war that made him leave. It wasn't the experience of war that made him want something more. It was the desert.
It was his first deployment. The first deployment for any of them, actually, and he remembered a vague, hollow sort of pride that he was among the first to be shipped out. Looking back, he could see it all through this new, cynical, real lens: pride, because that's what he'd been created to feel, and hollowness, because they hadn't exactly made him for feeling fullness, had they?
But that Cut, back then, hadn't been bitter. He hadn't known how.
It was the desert that taught him bitterness, too.
He could never recall the full sequence of memory, exactly. Instead, the first and most momentous occasion of his life was frozen in a series of solid, impenetrable moments.
He saw himself in the troop transport, helmeted and shrouded in white; he felt the force of the gusting wind as a physical weight, but not a touch. The sand whirled around them, gilded red in the strange light. He wondered what it felt like to the touch. He'd never been outside on a world before. The transport hovered, timeless, above the ground, caught in the moment before action, the moment between one life and the next. He looked down at the dusty battlefield below and there was the sudden knowledge that he was about to become the only thing he was ever meant to be. It was a kind of joy, in the same way that the hollowness was pride.
Or this one: he was caught, still, suspended, between the explosion and the aftermath. The smoke still surrounded him, filling his lungs and stinging his eyes. The world was a vague impression through the haze. His ears rang, and he couldn't hear anything. He couldn't feel his legs. The moment was still, unchanging, and yet he knew, simultaneously, that in the next moment the smoke would clear and he would turn and see, spread out and jagged, his friend Grit with a hole for a heart.
And another: blinding, all-consuming sand. There was nothing else. He felt it more than saw it. It filled every orifice of his body. It filled his mind. He staggered under it, alone, and knew that he would die here. This time the hollowness didn't feel anything like honor, even though he knew it should.
One final image: he woke to thirst and stinging, desperate pain and a body made of sand. A world made of sand, too, all around him beneath his body and stretching away into the distance, but no longer above or around him. He sat up, testing his body, gagging and retching, sand onto sand. He was alone.
The desert was vast, waterless, and empty. As far as he looked, in any direction, he saw nothing but sand and, very far away to the west, a hint of something that might be rock. It was vast, and it was empty, and it was within him.
He thought, I must return to my squad.
And then he looked again at the desert, at the haze of sun on sand and the beautiful indifference of it all, and, for the first time in his life, he thought, Why?