Notes:

'It's like poetry, it rhymes.'

- George Lucas

"Atten-tion!"

The holoscreen above your head flickers to life.

"Sa-lute!"

Loud, brassy fanfare booms over the speakers as a distinguished baritone voice announces: "4 million brave souls met a fiery demise when the Death Stars were destroyed by Rebel terrorists—"

"How do they eat, then?" The guy behind you whispers.

"What?" His friend whispers back.

"The Mandos." The ensign continues—way too loudly. "If they can't take their buckets off, how do they eat?"

"They don't, 'cause they're droids."

You better shut them up before the C.O. notices—otherwise it's write-ups for everyone. Faster than you can say 'collective punishment.'

"Never forget the sacrifice of your brave comrades! Never forget the treachery of the New Republic!"

Breaking salute is out of the question. You resort to some passive-aggressive throat clearing and hope they catch the hint. It misses them by a whole parsec.

"Um, actually, they're human—I read an article on them—" damn it, now it's contagious.

"Ya hear that? He read an article —"

"—and they can take their helmets off. They just can't show their faces."

"Isn't that the same thing?"

It's too early for this shit. You just pulled three consecutive late shifts, your neck hurts because you slept on it wrong, and to top it off—the caff machine's broke. You wait for a particularly loud swell of trumpeting and hiss: "Shut the hell up."

The effect is instantaneous—being six feet tall and half as wide has it's uses. It's a shame, all you seem to do nowadays is throw your weight around. Reminds you too much of the last SPC—he was a real piece of work. Everyone was relieved when he got transferred to Navarro about five months back—in fact, that's how you got this promotion. You're worried that's all they'll see in you; just another Heavy with a big gun, eager to bulldoze the greenhorns.

"Long live the Empire! Death to the Rebels!"

"Long live the Empire!" Three hundred voices shout in unison. "Death to the Rebels!"

The Imperial March slowly fades out and the screen goes blank.

"At ease, men." The C.O. commands.

You drop your salute and relax back into parade rest, resisting the urge to roll your neck.

"Well, I heard if they take their helmets off— they die."

Oh for God's sake.

The morning announcement always leaves you feeling vaguely guilty afterwards. To be honest, you're not much of a patriot. Sure, you believe in the cause as much as the next Trooper, but when it comes down to it, you're a simple man with simple needs. You have your wife back at home, who's been holding the fort for the past four years, so with two kids to raise, future university to pay for, and the minimum wage still wallowing at 25,000 credits a year, you need the steady employment. All that high-minded stuff about returning things to the "natural order" pretty much goes over your head.

For the past 14 hours, the Lightcruiser has been swarming with activity, in preparation for a skirmish against the Mandalorian terrorist Din Djarin. (You're not holding out on too much hope for the caff-machine getting fixed any time soon).

Like everyone else, your knowledge on Mandalorians amounts to a ragged patchwork of hear-say and hyperbole. As much as you consider yourself a well-travelled man (one of the perks of being Imperial), the universe is extremely large, and if there's one thing this economy's not short on, it's weirdos.

The Mandos are reputed to be the best warriors in the galaxy—which is impressive, given that there's so few of them left . And this one isn't helping their track record. Especially after sending Moff Gideon that little message: 'Your days are numbered, prepare to feel my wrath, blah blah blah.' It literally phoned ahead and announced its intentions to attack the base like some spotty kid on a date. Completely ruined the element of surprise. Now, you may just be a regular grunt, but that's pretty kriffing stupid by anyone's standards.

No matter. All the better for you guys. As they say, the only thing better than a great ally is a stupid fuckin' foe.

You try not to think about it too much, because even with the trickle-down, second-hand intel, you can sense an edge of frenzy behind this stupidity. And you don't like that at all.

("The asset is a child. It travels with a Mandalorian bounty hunter.")

So you don't think about it.

(Tress went missing by Lake Dahu when she was three. She couldn't swim. You were stupid with fear. You screamed at Dosey for not looking after her. God, you're so ashamed. The boy was only six, what could he have done? It was your fault, all your fault.)

You're not paid to think.

Here's one thing the holo-films never get right about war. It's boring. Mind-numbingly so. Every burst of action is preceded by hundreds of hours of preparation, the Hurry Up and Wait, the briefing. (Dear God, that's an oxymoron if you've ever heard it.) You are briefed going in and you are debriefed coming out. The first and last thing you do before every fight is stand in the corridor/hanger/doorway in full gear, waiting until your feet go numb.

Lieutenant Mace finishes his usual puffed-up spiel and Sergeant Auger takes over, to everyone's great relief. The Sarge is a granite statue that learnt to walk through sheer force of will. She can drown out a foghorn and recite the Articles of War like a sonnet.

Here is the jist of it: the Mando will be walking straight into a trap. The 601st will feign a retreat, lure the terrorists deep into the ship, and then join the 701st and 650th to keep them pinned down until the Prototype can finish them off. The Prototype is some kind of secret weapon developed using the Asset. That's all you've managed to puzzle out from the piecemeal info.

('It looks like two ears sticking out of a burlap sack' is your first thought. 'It's tiny' is your second.

"This creature may look weak and harmless." The Moff paused coolly, seemingly in anticipation of a reply, as if anyone with even half a brain would dare speak up right now. "However, I can assure you, it is anything but." He makes a sharp gesture with one gloved hand.

The two Stormtroopers who had been ordered to bring the Asset to him look slightly more nervous than before, but jump to obey—is that Frank? Oh no, what did the poor bastard do this time—

Frank suddenly threw himself at the wall.

No. He didn't throw himself, he was thrown —)

So, that little green thing had the same powers as the legendary Darth Vader. You always thought the rumours were a hoax, conjured up by overworked spice-huffers trying to lessen the monotony. Hell, you still wouldn't have believed it if you hadn't seen it with your own two eyes. That frail, unassuming creature picked up two grown men and knocked them around like a capricious toddler's action figures. The thought should scare you. And it does. But in your recollection, you can't stop seeing the Asset's shivering little body and Frank's advancing form towering over it. Something about the picture is all wrong now, like one of those optical illusions that are both frog and bunnycorn, one is invisible until you see it and hard to unsee it once you do.

You shake your head, as if errant thoughts were fleas and very deliberately narrow the focus of your mind. What is the Prototype—and who's going to be manning it? The other Heavies haven't seen it either, so that probably rules out a new gun or cannon.

Whatever it is, it eats up a lot of kriffing power. It's been kept at a very costly standby. For the past 7 hours, dorm lights had been reduced to 30% and the sonic no longer has any hot water. Hellova way to wake up, that's for sure.

The minute your shift ends, you make a beeline for the dorms, hoping to catch some shut eye before dinner.

Lucky and Dave are already in their respective bunks, headlamps switched on to fight the gloom. Dave is half-heartedly flipping through a month-old bike rag, while Lucky meticulously polishes his already-spotless blaster, gun oil suffusing with the ever-present aroma of sweaty socks.

"Filled in your TPS reports yet?" You nod pointedly at the discarded datapad.

Dave frowns. "They're not due until tomorrow."

"Better make it tonight—Mace is on a rampage. Again. "

"No rest for the wicked, eh Jorge?"

Below him, Lucky is bouncing slightly in his bunk, evidently itching to tell you something. There goes your chance of resting. Lucky has a face straight-out of a recruitment holo (The Empire Wants YOU!) with his bright blond hair and dim but well-meaning smile. Talking to him has all the effects of a swamp fever, leaving you exhausted and desperately thirsty. His real name is Luke, a very unsightly coincidence that he covers up like a zit.

"D'you think it's the real Boba Fett?" Lucky asks. He raises the blaster with a grin and squints down the sights.

Are they getting younger and younger these days? Or are you just getting old?

"…Who?"

"The other Mando! The famous bounty hunter! Jon from comms—you know Jon, right? Great guy—he showed me the footage. I wasn't assigned there. I just snuck in—don't tell anyone, OK?"

A dull throbbing is growing behind your eyeballs. "You did what?"

"I saw that too!" Dave broke in from above. "Damn, what a fight! I wish I coulda seen the whole thing. We were just starting to get the upper hand—"

"Does the word 'canned' mean nothing to you idiots?"

"—But I think it's just someone else wearing his armour, 'cause he got eaten by a sarlacc, like, six years ago, so like, I don't think he suddenly got bored and climbed out—"

For security reasons, the dorms are never completely dark. You count the vent holes in the ceiling as you wait for sleep to claim you.

(This was Dosey's third day at boarding school. You got a call from the headmaster in the middle of the night. Scared the hell out of you. But turns out he was just homesick. You couldn't even get mad at him, hearing him sniffing through the receiver like that. "Da, come pick me up...please." He stopped crying the moment you pulled up in the hovercar. You must have looked like such an ass in your bathrobe—)

The Asset is kept in a soundproof cell. You heard nothing at all during your entire shift, and you did not look though the reinforced transparisteel porthole.

The transport ship arrived at 0500 in the morning, with 78 new heads as reinforcement. Time being relative in the black vacuum of space, mornings just mean shaving before your daily allocation of Mystery Mush.

"All that for a handful of terrorists?" Dave remarks around the buzzing of his razor. "This has gotta be the overreaction of the century."

"Well..." Lucky likes loitering around the sink to feel included. "I heard the Mando did quite a number on Nevarro. Rumour has it, the Nite Owls are with 'em now. Makes you wonder how come Mando wants the baby—I mean the Asset —so bad. Is it valuable?"

You can see them shooting curious glances at you in the mirror. You are the only one senior enough to get guard duty. "I don't know."

Lucky flinches. Good. They can both shut up and take a damn hike. God, you're not cut out for this job. You're not special forces. You're just a regular grunt. If the Moff weren't so short on men, you wouldn't be anywhere near such a sensitive subject. A haggard face stares back accusingly from the mirror. You managed six hours with the aid of a sleeping pill, but you don't feel rested at all. (The Asset's eyes were brown, too big for its wrinkled little face. They seemed to stare right at you through the helmet's visor.)

'Protect And Serve' goes the mantra. Your duty is clear: you serve the Empire; you protect your fellow Troopers. (Frank doesn't look like Frank when he's armoured and helmeted. His twitchy finger on his blaster. The Asset trembles in his shadow—)

Fuck. You've nicked yourself.

Drills and hard labour have a way of hammering even the most unruly thoughts into a smooth, frictionless plane. The rest of the day passes quickly and uneventfully.

The excitement of seeing new faces after six months in space has worn thin by fifth bell. It's also the fifth time today you've had to show someone where the 'fresher was. (Two were from the same person). You're starting to wonder if there's something about your face that invites stupid questions.

"ID?"

"TK 77-19, I'm taking TK 02-50 to the broom closet."

The Petty stops in the middle of scanning your chip and stares at the Trooper beside you. "250? You were on Endor ?"

"Yesssir," 250 rasps drily. His salute is not as crisp as you'd like, but at least he has the presence of mind to finally stop chewing baccy under his damn bucket. (It's impossible to maintain a smoking habit on a spaceship, for obvious reasons). "Early in line, I was. Look where it got me."

The Petty is either impressed enough or simply doesn't hear. "Good man."

"Likewise, sir."

The motion detector lights of the "broom closet" activate when you walk through, revealing racks upon racks of guns, they stand wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, neater than the Dewey Decimal System. The automated shelves part with a quiet whirring.

250 laughs in a burst of static. "All that, but no one can refill the soap in the 'fresher?" He takes the lead, strolling through the racks like a curator in a gallery. "So...You got a special someone, Jorge?"

It takes you a second to understand he meant the guns. "I'm not partial."

'Partial?' Why the hell did you say that? You sound like a ponce. In the army, you wear regulation clothes and you say regulation words; 'I dunno' or 'I duncare.' Tall poppies get beheaded.

"I'll help myself, then." Even at rest, 250 keeps one hand on his hip. He has a modified version of the regulation snub-nose blaster. It's scuffed, brown and ugly from its long service. God knows how he was allowed to keep it, must have pulled enough strings to knit a sweater. You feel strangely wrong-footed—in spite of, or maybe because you technically outrank this man. Troopers nowadays are mostly greenhorns or vets. You're caught somewhere in the middle, too old to be shiny, too young to have seen real battle.

250 is a lot chattier in his element. "When's your next leave due?"

"Four months and twelve days."

"Got anything planned?"

"I'm gonna go to the butcher's—straight from the spaceport—buy a dozen steaks, and have a barbecue—" You stop short, embarrassed by your own fervour, and the mundanity of it—but half a cycle of eating dehydrated and rehydrated food will do that to you. "How 'bout you?"

250 makes a dismissive sound. "Ages off." The baccy migrates from cheek to cheek. When he speaks again, his tone is fond, almost in spite of himself. "My old man was a shit cook. Everything he made was drier than a Tatooine nun . "

"My family doesn't suffer quite as much."

"You got kids, eh?"

"Two. A boy and girl." Even after all this time, it still makes your throat close up for a brief moment.

250 gauges your face and does some mental arithmetic. "In school yet?"

"Yeah, grades 9 and 5. They're real bright. Teachers all say so… must take after the missus, 'cause they sure as hell don't get it from me—You won't believe the stuff my daughter can write. Last week, she got her story published in the school paper."

"About what?"

"Oh, ice fishing. We went there the last time I got leave."

"Huh...dint know you could do that. What's wrong with the freezer?"

The joke isn't funny, but it's so unexpected you laugh like it is.

250 lifts a E-22 off the rack and cocks it, testing the heft and aim. He goes through the motions like clockwork, chewing his baccy meditatively.

"Do you have kids?"

250 barks a sharp laugh. "Do I look the type?"

"There's all sorts," you reply diplomatically.

He replaces the gun with a soft 'tssk' that is barely picked up by his vocoder. "Hand me the E11 behind you—not that one, further left."

You've never seen a Mandalorian fight before. And you never want to ever again.

The Moff had been counting on the Mandalorian to be rash and emotionally compromised, and he was right. But the Mando was not leading this operation: Bo-Katan Kryze was. Bo-Katan had terrorised the galaxy for the better part of two decades. Her hatred of the Empire was matched only by her savviness. And rats never bite the same poison twice.

(Your squad is waiting in Bay 6, ears cocked for updates. Next thing you know, Captain Slaw was snapping terse orders to move out, immediately. Bo-Katan had suddenly called for a retreat. Squad 2 and 5 had managed to cut them off at Bay 4, just before the hanger, but they needed backup. Stat.

Your squad gets to the doorway, but no one makes it through. Because right at that moment, in rolls a little silver ball of death, beeping and twinkling merrily. You don't even have time to scream. Next thing you know, you're twelve meters across the room, thrown back by the force of the explosion, arm twisted awkwardly beneath you. Can't breath. You don't remember getting back up, but you must have, because you're falling down again. It's so hard to walk, the room is spinning and you keep tripping over bodies—Blaster. Where is your blaster—You take cover by the wall, hunkering down as low as you can go. Shots fly past, so close you feel the heat. The gun in your hand is unfamiliar, but it shoots just fine. Muzzles flash around you and Captain Slaw screams orders into your earpiece.

You see it faintly on the HUD: a silver streak moving in and out of the smoke.

The Mandalorian is a man. You are sure of it now. It runs like a man; it falls like man; it jerks backwards with each punch of blaster fire like a man. But every time it goes down, it rises to its feet again, slowly and painfully and as inexorable as the rising tide, like a demon, a one-man phalanx.

It fights like it has nothing left to lose.

Your HUD flickers as it struggles to compensate in the firefight. Bright enough to aim, dim enough not to permanently blind you. Troopers scattered by the explosion get caught in the crossfire. It was unavoidable. The Mando hugs them as closely as a brother, at first under the impression that Captain Slaw would avoid friendly fire, then simply to use them as meatshields. Their shadows jerk like fish on a line before collapsing in a smoking heap. Did any of those shots come from you? You can't be sure, and you can't stop. Your finger is locked on the trigger.

It's quickly apparent you have the superior numbers and firepower. Suddenly, the Mandalorian switches tactics and makes a break for the west corridor. Your squad follows, only to realise—too late—that it was a tactical retreat. How did it get the ship's plans? Once inside, the doors are jammed. And just like that, you're forced into a choke point.

Here's the thing about choke points: it doesn't matter if you have 10 men or 10,000. If they are forced to run three at a time down a 30m corridor with one the galaxy's most deadly sharp-shooters on one end, the result is going to be the same: a bloodbath.

Captain Slaw didn't order you to pin him down and wait for the techies to unlock the doors so you could flank the Mando. No, he ordered you to charge.

And it worked.

The funny thing is, in the end, the bodies piled up so high you guys were able to use them as cover. No, it's not funny at all, but you can't stop laughing.)

You're still laughing in the med-bay, as a droid applies bacta to your broken wrist. (That's strange, you don't remember breaking a wrist). It stares at you with indifferent curiosity. You switch off your commlink, shaking silently inside your armour. It takes two tranquillisers to make it through the debriefing that follows.

The Mandalorian is in the brig. Soon it will be interrogated and executed. During the chaos, the terrorist posse managed to shoot their way back to the hanger. They were at least smart enough not to stick around. So much for loyalty.

When you check the HUD's clock you're surprised to discover that the whole fight only lasted 24 minutes from start to finish. That's how long it took to kill 63 people. Less time than a soap opera. Why does it feel like the whole day? It feels like you spent your entire life out there, but at the same time, you cannot recall a single second of it.

Your memory has blurred into the blaster in your hand, the smell of cooked meat, and a vague understanding that this was the most gut-wrenching terror you have ever experienced.

God, the smell. It won't go away. It's like bacon hitting a hot skillet. 'Pah-hiss!' That rich, fatty smell, (like a lazy morning, your wife humming in the kitchen) most people survive blaster fire —the heat cauterizes the wound—they lie there on the floor and beg you to kill them. The smell. It's inside your helmet. Crawling up your nose.

You need a drink. You need a week-long coma. You need to stick your head out of the airlock.

They take off the Mandalorian's helmet.

It's broadcasted to the entire ship so that everyone can watch. You're in the mess with about two hundred other men and women, their heads craned upwards towards the flickering screen. You didn't get a particularly good view. You're so far back you have to stand on a table with five other guys. Put your foot right in someone's kriffing mash, too.

The firefight has left you with two fist-sized patches of blue right in the middle of your field of vision. They move when you move; when you blink, you can see them imprinted on your eyelids. The med-droid assured you it wasn't permanent.

The Mandalorian appears, heralded by curses and jeers. All around you, the voices rise to a deafening crescendo, like a tsunami about to crest, and you are carried along with it. You shout until your throat goes raw.

The Mandalorian is forced onto its knees in a parody of submission. Its body was a bolt of silver lightning frozen in mid-strike, straining against the restraints. It doesn't speak. Doesn't even make a sound.

Moff Gideon stands before it like a black spear thrust skywards, cape billowing out behind him. He presses his palms to the distinctive T-visor helmet, and slowly, almost tenderly, lifts it from the Mandalorian's face with all due pomp and circumstance.

You guess it doesn't kill them, after all.

It's some sort of big taboo, the Moff addresses the crowd in ringing, austere tones. A fate worse than death. It has broken its creed and was no longer considered a warrior.

It's just about the dumbest fucking thing you've ever heard. Disgust and loathing churn inside of you like magma. You can name a hundred things worse than death, worse than losing some fancy headwear.

You wanted to see the Mandalorian pay. You wanted to see it suffer. But what you got is a let down. Stripped of its fancy steel and sophisticated weapons, the Mandalorian is just a man. Two eyes, two ears, a nose and a mouth, pixilated and blue. So ordinary it looks familiar.

But it has evil eyes. The cold, pitiless eyes of a killer.

You turn away in disgust, grabbing a fistful of napkins on your way out. You don't even stay for the beat down. You've had enough.

End Notes:

A great big thank you to Shirokokuro for being my beta, your advice has been indispensable.