It was just my luck to be reborn as a Clone.

Do you have any idea what shitty lives clones lead even BEFORE they shipped us out to fight in a civil war?

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Alright, I'll start from the beginning: I was a 21-year old girl with severe anxiety issues that, out of the blue, had a stroke.

No, really, I was just chilling at a train station when I suddenly lost my hearing.

I got very dizzy, so I sat down, the silence ringing in my ears as my sight went the same way as my hearing and the headache, that had plagued me the whole week, got worse.

The last thing I remembered from that life was not being able to feel my body.

The next thing I remembered is getting taken out of a slimy capsule.

I got swaddled by a droid and put away into a cot. I was in a new body with uncoordinated limbs and blurry sight.

Thankfully I didn't get killed for my screaming freak-out.

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As soon as I, apparently my designation was CT- 0913, and my batch mates were old enough at 6 Months, our training started.

Don't get me wrong, I was very glad to get out of the phase of not being able to do anything.

But having to train every single day? Of always being watched and measured and observed like a science experiment?

It was awful.

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The worst thing about growing up as a Clone, however, was the helplessness.

I couldn't show how strange I was.

I couldn't leverage the few bits of foreknowledge I had.

Being different meant decommission.

CT-0918, my batch-brother, had a rebellious streak and often mouthed off, no matter how we warned him against it.

We were physically 6 years old (in reality only a year and a half) when he was decommissioned in front of the whole batch.

It stuck with us.

We were one of the best behaved squad after that, in the records.

But in the barracks, things were different.

Before, my brothers didn't understand why I helped those falling behind.

Why I cautioned those that were excelling.

Why I cared so much to not get the best, nor the worst scores.

Why I fudged the details.

But when they cornered me I had a panic attack, gasping, not getting enough air, and they stopped asking and accepted it as one of my idiocies.

On the upside, I got the nickname Bold of the deal, since I was the very opposite of it.

I was the first named one in my Batch.

It was different after CT-0918 got decommissioned.

That evening I assembled all of my batch brothers and told them that this happened when you got extraordinary.

CT-0918 had been groomed to be our squad-leader, taking on more responsibility.

But he got reckless and toyed the line and see where it got him.

They, shaken from seeing our brother get murdered, agreed with me.

Somehow this meant that I became the new leader.

It was pure stress.

I had to balance being good enough to stay as a leader and getting the squad good enough, but not getting too good.

Too good got one noticed, meant you got more of the Long-Necks attention.

We were a good average, but not too good. We were not bad enough to need extra training, but not good enough to get groomed for something else.

No one else got decommissioned when we were shipped out, only 5 years old but with a 20-year-old-body.

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Five years are a long time.

Despite what the Long-Necks tried, they couldn't fill every minute of our days with lessons.

We had meal-times and bed-times, during which we could talk.

The meal-times were supervised, but we could say in our barracks what we wanted without fear of anything going back to the Kaminoans.

Anybody who has similar anxiety to mine know that trying to sleep, when you are not bone-deep exhausted, is an exercise in futility.

There are way too many things you can obsess about, even if it only is one conversation of the day where you replay your words and fret if you were misunderstood.

Shortly: I didn't sleep very well.

Most of the nights when we were really young I was the only one awake.

But the older we got, the less sleep we needed, so we could talk for a stolen hour here and there.

I don't know how, but I suspect the tooka-eyes of my brothers were the ones that convinced me to tell them stories.

I never knew how many stories a normal Human from home knew until I had to tell a good-night story to my brothers every night.

We didn't sleep in our squads.

We slept in barracks, where hundreds of brothers slept at once.

After a while, everyone jostled each other to get somewhere they could listen to my stories.

They even organised a rotation where one clone would steal a glass of water, so I could speak longer.

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It made my homesickness worse, staring into all of those sweet faces hanging unto my every word.

So in a fit of nostalgia, I started teaching them German, my mother tongue.

CT- 0915 had researched and hadn't found a similar language in the galaxy, so I taught them the language as best I could.

It was something I could do, something just for us.

Something against the helplessness I felt, something to fill my sleepless hours.

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I needed a while to realise the impact of simply teaching them a language.

The Clones were bred intelligent.

They were trained not to question their superiors, but assimilating a language into their arsenal? It took them a year.

Every one of my barrack told others during meal times or during a lull in our lessons about the snippet I had bestowed on them the night before, so every single clone learned German.

We didn't call ourselves vode, like in canon.

We called ourselves "Brüder", Brothers in Basic.

We didn't really see ourselves as Mandalorian, even the brothers that were trained by the Original.

We called ourselves Deutsche.

I tried to teach them as much as I could.

I especially told the story of Nazi-Germany again and again as a cautionary tell.

But I also told them of other ways to raise up against oppressors.

Of interpreting orders creatively. (Please…)

I wanted to be unremarkable and I stood by it.

My Brothers helped hiding my lessons, stories and history-retellings from the Long-Necks.

But somehow every one of my Brothers listened to me, even the Commanders.

It was scary, having this much influence.

But it also gave me hope.

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The rings under my eyes weren't only caused by my anxiety.

I couldn't count the many times I jolted awake, not being able to scream, not getting enough air, "Execute Order 66" echoing in my ears.

I hated it, hated the chip and the ways the Chancellor could control myself and my brothers.

People will never know how much they should cherish their free will until it is taken from them.

Being just a marionette- it's an absolute nightmare.

I worked against it by trying to be as in control as possible.

I calculated the exact test-scores we should get to be a little above average.

I taught my brothers German.

I taught them the traditions, even though we couldn't celebrate things like Christmas or Easter or Birthdays.

I taught them about war. About PTSD, how therapy worked and how it could help.

I spoke every night until either my voice was croaking or no one was awake anymore.

It didn't really help.

At least they got experience handling people having melt-downs and panic-attacks, even if I didn't really set out to teach them that.

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Being a clone meant having thousands of brothers.

It meant never really being alone.

It also meant that you shared your face with thousands of people.

My body-dysphoria didn't only mean that I had problems acclimating to this new body I found myself in.

It meant that I had problems working with my new dick, even though I was very happy about the lack of breasts and periods.

Sometimes it meant getting lost in your head, just feeling lonely and not appreciated. I was known, of course.

Bold was someone everyone knew.

But myself?

I couldn't really tell anybody about my reincarnation.

I feared that they would abandon me since I wasn't a REAL Clone.

But I also never really belonged, even though I saw my face every time I looked into my brothers faces. I just knew too much.

My Emotions were complex and sometimes I was not able to analyse what exactly I felt, the few precious minutes I had for self-reflection.

The accelerated growth and the ever changing hormone- cocktail didn't help.

I was a hot mess and the five years on Kamino only made the problem worse.

So I couldn't believe that they made me a Captain.