Smile
Ideal 2. Rebel.
Everything in his life was regimented.
From the day he was born, everything existed in perfect order. Little boys were strings of numbers that walked down pure white hallways to pure white rooms. Grey was the only break in the line of white, though sometimes it was spattered with bits of electronic aquamarine. Little boys with little faces, all the same, led around by white creatures with grey galaxies in their eyes and assonating voices. There was no color inside the buildings, the labs, the barracks.
As he grew older, the sound of methodical marching joined the blankness of the white; it was steady, rhythmic, soothing. The regularity felt safe, secure. Days were a steady march through time, of waking early, to pass through white corridors into white training halls, then to white cafeterias for grayish food and pale blue milk. The tramp of little boys' footsteps grew heavier with time, as the bodies the feet carried put on weight and bulk, muscle and sinew and names. But the order of the day never varied: wake, dress, train, eat, train, eat, train, undress, sleep.
Names were precious at first. They were little acts of defiance in the face of the dull rhythms of daily life. Little boys whispered them to each other quietly with wide eyes, half afraid they would be scolded for daring to be more than strings of numbers. Even as those little bits of uniqueness were ignored by the teachers and technicians and geneticists, the days drilled on as they always had.
Even those taken for special training, command training, independence training, were taught the same. There were days he wondered if the individuality, the creativity, he'd been taught to utilize in command, was simply another way of molding his mind, his personality, his thoughts and opinions. He was made from the same grey clay as every other, and even those in special training were receiving the same special training to become the same kind of independent.
He was always grounded by the life of a clone.
Above him, she was flying through the air, weapons drawn. Twisting, feet slowly rising overhead as she vaulted into the fight, her bright orange body served as a perfect contrast to the pale blue of a cloudless desert sky. She never moved with the steady regularity of soldiers. Every motion was fast, startling, swift. No movement wasted, and all of it light and irregular, perfect and deadly.
They were not where they were supposed to be, but he followed her orders and followed her into battle, and wanted to know what it felt like to rebel against gravity and orders, and defy every rule there should be in the galaxy, from gravity to hierarchy to expectations.
He feared for her, for the day her rebelliousness would not be the thing to make her fly, but rather the thing to bring her down.
But until that day, she would burn bright and beautiful and above, and Rex would think to himself that maybe she would never be contained.
And he would aspire to be the same.
I wanted to write something like this for awhile, and couldn't quite get the right setting/tone in my head. After 'Princess' randomly wrote itself, this came to mind. I love how Clone Wars has been presenting us with some strong female characters to cheer for, and I'm glad we've got headstrong Ahsoka around.
~Queen