In Some Other Lifetime

|| Present Day

“Nice seeing you again, Six-Two.”

The Imperial Commando barely tilts his bucket at your taunt as he strolls by. ICWS readily grasped, his gloved hands seemingly loose but you've always known they're always a change of stance, a switch, and a pull of a trigger away to actually incapacitate someone. And for the thousandth time during your imprisonment in Tantiss, you feel your heart plunge to your stomach at their ruthless and unquestioning capability to hurt someone.

Slowly, the echo of his boots against durasteel fades away. Rhythmically swallowed by silence the further he puts distance between your detention cell and wherever his end post is.

Having nothing to do, your ears have sharpened—you count. You count everything.

Every drip of water in the sink per minute that you'd notice there has to be something wrong with the water source if it drips too early or too late.

You count meal intervals. You aren't granted the luxury of having a chronometer that you use them as your chronometer. Three meals a day. Never too late. Nor too early. The droid arrives precisely when it means to.

Guard shifts. Their footfalls and how long it takes until it completely fades as they turn around the corner. How long is the corridor? You know. You do the math too. Your cell is located just right in the middle of a T. Gray walls, gray walls, gray walls. Lights. Gray walls.

Scorch's patrol.

The Imperial Commando does his rounds, passing by your cell, twice a day. A while after your lunch, and a long while after the supposed curfew that must be 2200 on the dot. You bet on 1300 and 0100—twelve-hour intervals. Tantiss is big. Every inch of it, every chatter, every hustle and bustle – all spells neverending chores, serving for the glory of their own hell.

Hemlock's lapdog. Sworn to secrecy, treated as nothing but an object they've always seen the clones as. Guard duties. Exhaustion is absent, not even through his footfalls that always sound tireless and steady. Always at the ready. His helmet—his buy’ce, he taught the word to you once—marshals every kind of expression. That man never sleeps. Your heart sinks again if that actually is the truth. You wonder if he swallows stim every damn day to forgo exhaustion. How many cups of caf does he have? Does he ever drink caf at all? You wonder too if he'd ever stripped out of his katarn-class armor for more than ten-minute-regulation shower.

His armor. Too clean. Makes you wonder whether he took a new set and discarded the decorated one. But he kept the paint; gunmetal grey and yellow streaks. His identity. Former identity, pre-Empire. What for? As far as you're concerned, he is not the man he once was. Now he's an Imperial puppet like many others. So why keep the paint that surely reminds him of his old armor?

No speck of dust and grime dotted across every inch of surface. You've always liked them dirty and dented and scratched. It spoke of experience. Battlefield is the other home to them. When talking about Scorch, them follows. Followed. Delta Squad is no more. Sev had been MIA. Last time you heard, their training sergeant headed to Kashyyyk. You never got the chance to hear what came next. The rest of the squad is nowhere to be found—not even in the ranks of the army. Dead. Or in hiding. Or living in a farm somewhere milking nerfs and butchering nunas and bounty hunting for a living. You throw your thanks to the Force either way.

Because they don't deserve to live like this.

You think about Scorch again.

Their brother is still within the grasp of the Empire. Controlled. Puppeteered. Existing as the absolute role model of a clone, 100% alike to what they've always imagined clones to be. Never questioning orders. Submissive. Obedient.

Your heart sinks again, this time burrowing impossibly deeper into your chest. It's almost painful.

You can't remember what ticking time should feel like. How long the interval is supposed to be between one second to another. Even with the silent option, you always had your chronometers ticking in your small apartment somewhere on Coruscant. If there wasn't any, you relied on the sun's trajectory. Easy to answer every what time is it? thrown at you when you were travelling. Now? No. Gray walls. Gray walls. 

Now, is hopefully an hour has passed. You've finished your meal, the tray picked up by you're sure the same droid. After they take your blood sample in the morning right after you and the other prisoners wake, they leave you to your own. Not even given a hole in the wall to peer outside. You don't even know what outside looks like. Is it rocky terrain? Endless sand dunes? Damp rainforests? Is it even breathable, that the foul bowels of Tantiss had to be fueled by oxygen tanks?

It's not like you're able to do anything, anyway.

So you meditate.

You were shit at meditating. You were famous for it. Even Qui-Gon Jinn himself, in his amusement, came down to teach you, a tough crecheling, the art of patience. Rest his spirit. And the others that had fallen during the Purge, too.

It hadn't always been like this.

The Temple was warm. It was home. You knew where your homeworld was—your parents believed in your destiny when they willingly trusted the Order to train you in the ways of the Force. Master Plo Koon was the one who found you (Force, you don't even know what happened to him. You hope he survives.) and showed you space travel for the first time. You were so young, you barely remember anything.

The ways of the Force taught you of life. Peace. Everything that is good, an image of what the galaxy is supposed to be. (If only not for that damned Chosen One prophecy. Look where you are all at now.) Unfortunately—that's your own branding to the matter and certainly not the other masters’—the way of the Jedi taught you not to relent to your soulmate mark, since it is by all means attachment, which they strictly forbid.

Your focus breaks like glass.

Seated on your bed, your back is against the wall. The source of light in your cell above your head smacks you in the eye as soon as you open them. Gray and boring durasteel insults you back, its blank and dull panels looking down upon your pathetic fate.

Or is it?

You stifle an annoyed groan as you will your body to sway to the side and your head to hit the excuse of a pillow. It gets thinner by a quarter inch every other day. You try to fluff them up, but it's the kind of comfort meant for inmates.

You snuggle into it, your head playing tricks for you into smelling a scent that wasn't there.

You wonder if he still smells the same. You'd only hugged him once, but you committed his scents to memory. Hot night summer air. Gunpowder. Fresh explosives. Firecracker. They all still hold fast, branded into your brain and bottled and displayed and ready for you to take a sniff any time. Soon you associated him with other things too that weren't relevant at all, but they strangely do all the same. Buttery breakfast waffles. Three sets of 15 push ups. Fun fairs. Honey. Forehead kisses. Bolts being screwed in. The joy that one gets after being gifted with homemade handicrafts. A crackle in a helmet’s voice modulator.

You wonder if it's one of the ways of the Force. You don't know. They didn't exactly teach you this in the Temple. The bottles never break, its content safely contained, the scent never fades, just like the mark etched along the inside of the ring finger of your left hand like a permanent inkwork.

As soon as you earned your mark the moment your age turned ripe, you were sent into a spiral of clashing ideals. You looked up the holonet to find that this happened to people too, and that it was a normalcy. You felt betrayed. A little. But you were so closed off. The outside world enticed you, or perhaps was it the prospect of romance? Of living with a partner that loves you and you only? A promise of happily ever after, without a threat of losing them to anybody else because the Soul Mark is for eternity. A certain ‘till death do us apart’ with no risk, no fear. A promise of love. A promise of easy things.

Disgustingly easy.

No.

Not with the mark on your skin being 1262 and the owner of that name will do his other patrol in approximately eleven hours. The same man who submitted to a corrupt order—to his thoughts that's not his own. Never his own.

And you're here to set him free.

Confidence burns bright in the beginning. Yet like fire, it smolders down into embers. It's only a matter of time where you'd regret for ever enlisting in Project War Mantle at all with the disguised noble cause—only a matter of time where the embers would eventually die and leave everything surrounding it in utter darkness.

You're teetering along the edge. The sounds of his boots are your only savior. Reminding you that he's still here, not lost to you yet even though he's lost to his own mind. Giving you hope to continue your true cause. Your true intention behind putting on a show to bow down to the Empire and following every single order and task given to you and the rest of the first Elite Squad.

Then you hope you could've gotten to some of the clones that rebelled against the chips. Gaining their testimonials. How did it feel? Were their own thoughts screaming and begging them to stop from shooting at their own traitorous brothers, or was it an on-off switch that wouldn't budge to the other way once flicked on all along?

You hold out your hope that it's not the latter.

Hope gives you nothing new behind the cell bars of Tantiss. Metal bars. Old school. Not even a ray shield. It's clever. It's mechanical. Hard to budge, impossible to slice within seconds. They don't need to deactivate something to kill someone inside. They only need to push the barrel of their blaster through the gaps. A tilt, a pew, a thud.

You continue to meditate. As always, the Force never answers to you. It gives you pain instead. Physically painful to reach out and latch onto what once used to be a set of comforting tendrils, the ones like a winter coat draped over your shoulder. It's as if the Force mocks you in the face. Yeah, you can't blame it. You sever your connection abruptly like a partner caught cheating and the argument erupts in the middle of a pavement—a public breakup that's full of betrayal.

You ignored them. You never reached back. You were annoyed how they tried to warn you before you could react, until they stopped altogether. You betrayed them. You scolded the young cocky bounty hunter that had been you.

Your meditations nowadays no longer seek for enlightenment. You’re bored and you have nothing to do to pass the time. Gray walls. You're certain to fall asleep somewhere in the hour. You wake up. Gray walls. You try to look for peace. For consolation. Solutions.

Nightfall arrives when you open your eyes. Still the same gray walls, though. Mourning the absence of enlightenment you used to gain, you were definitely sleeping. You have an inkling the droid would come soon to slide the tray of tasteless meal through the gap at the bottom of the door—dinner.

You hum. You turn the tap on to drink. Wash your face. Taking number 1 and 2 in the same room, flushing the stink before it could waft up and around the corridor and let it be sucked through the exhaust fan above you. You wash your hands. You lie down again. You sleep properly this time. Early. It's not even curfew yet, but you have your own intentions.

In your sleep, you used to always dream about him. You knew from the start he was a clone. The numbers made sense—those are his serial numbers. Where people have a name, you have numbers. Your soulmate is a clone. Once you found out, you didn't mind. You never do. You were intrigued, curious to see how this would go.

 Hearing his voice, his snickers and his jokes and the laughter that followed. He was such a ray of sunshine. The heart and soul of his team. The brightest—like the world seems to be for a moment once his explosive handiworks detonate. He captivated you easily. It only took you three nights that those weren't mere dreams—the dreamspace is a means of two-way communication. You looked up the holonet again to find that it's true. He was projecting his daily situation. Maybe unconsciously.

Guess what. No.

“I did all that for you!” the wisps of his boyish voice said, behind which you could hear an elated grin. “Thought maybe you'd love to see what I'm doing during the day.”

You finally found peace in his sweet thoughtfulness. The dream allowed you to see nothing more than projections. He was clever for figuring it out first before telling you the gist of it. They don't allow you to take form in the dreamspace. Just bodiless voices, and it's whispery, like faint streaks of clouds, like a comm without holo.

You woke up feeling well rested, as if you weren't awake all night talking with him. He couldn't promise to always be there for you because of his deployment, but he'd kept his word that he'd return home for you. You remembered imagining his shocked facial expression when you told him you were a bounty hunter. And again when he vocalized such a disbelief for the hundredth time—when you and him met face-to-face for the first time.

His footfalls from the end of the corridor awaken you.

Blame him for your kriffed up circadian rhythm. The lights in your cell all turned off during curfew, the ones in the corridor taking the turn to be the source. It's bright enough. Your berth is tucked to the side and away from the door, so you still have a little privacy. It's a rare luxury these days. Your toilet is in another corner of your cell.

You crawl out of your inmate berth, patting down your inmate suit, slipping your inmate footwear on. They give no sound when you take a careful step, and so you do, until you rest your shoulder against the wall by the door.

It takes you a little bit of courage and reassurance that this man is not the same as the one you used to… supposed to love.

“Fancy seeing you again, Commando.”

He was handsome. Raven black hair styled in fringe-up—the hair gel he used was shared with his brother. Warm amber eyes and beautiful bronze skin like any other clone. Explosion scar from a miscalculation and sloppy accident that threw him off his feet and claimed the skin of his chin and the bottom half of his face. Scorch was handsome. So beautiful, your eyes were practically sparkling when studying every single inch of him. Shame it was only one time. His schedule was tight. Managing a bagel and caf date was a miracle. And it was perfect.

“What are you doing, ES-08? It's curfew.”

Katarn with blue HUD glares down at you. ICWS in hand—the only time he's shown how threatening he is with the bigger gun. It doesn't hurt you. What hurts you is his armor paint. Gunmetal gray and yellow. The same colors, the same pattern, when he used to be a Delta—and yet the man behind them is not the same.

This is not your Scorch. Never your Scorch.

“I'm not bailing out of here, am I?” you try to relax, your voice lowered, “Shouldn't I be the least of your worries?”

The commando merely stares at you. Seemingly unimpressed. You can't tell. You stopped dreaming a while ago. You couldn't match his stance and whatever he's thinking right now to your dreams where your Scorch used to live.

Then he pivots on his heels and walks away.

Your heart jumps. Losing him out of your sight is a constant fear that grips your heart. Before you can even stop it, your mouth is already spilling, “Did you ever take off your gloves, Commander?”

He stops.

Six-Two. Delta. Commando. Scorch. These were the names he used to answer to. You always call him by his name—the one he earned after that ordnance accident he'd always have quite a joy telling you about, the one that he took with pride (and a little fear because his training sergeant was everything but soft). A fool's hope to use them in his face. Commander. You sneer. It tastes foul in your tongue. So wrong.

Every time you take off your left glove should be a reminder of why I'm here, you want to say.

You can't. You'd get a bolt to the chest.

“I don't see answering to you necessary, ES-08.” Force, even his voice sounds so wrong. Still the same old Scorch's boyishness during the glory of the Republic, but the ice cold hostility behind it now sounds so, so wrong. “Back to your cell.”

“Already in it,” you say, glaring down his blue HUD, “Not so easy to get rid of me, Scorch.” You swallow. There. You used it. As an emphasis, you raise your left hand where the Soul Mark is and wiggle your fingers his way. “As if you wanted to, anyway.”

That has to speak lengths because the Imperial Commando, Hemlock's beloved mind-controlled lapdog, goes silent.

“Oohh, contradictory body language against your thoughts? Against what they want you to think and do?” You smirk. “I can hear your brain clunking like a set of gears.” No you don't. But one thing after roaming free in the wilderness outside the dogma of the Jedi, is that you're helplessly in love taunting people. “Or maybe some of those dets you love assembling and juggling in the air back in the day?”

A click in his rifle. The barrel? No longer aimed at the wall. At you.

Is it a safety switch? A stun switch? Was it on stun all the time, that now he’s just switched it to live lethal rounds?

“Return to your berth now, ES-08,” he unwaveringly says, “And to your routine in the morning.”

You let out a breath. Blasters don't scare you. You were a hunter, after all. But finding yourself at the wrong side of the barrel? Your chest grows tight, your next taunt disintegrating from your tongue.

He nears your cell in slow, calculated steps. With raised hands against his weapon, you step backward, the back of your knees meeting your berth. The moment you plop down onto the mattress, you try to draw drowsiness to your person, the same moment where you dare the devil in the face. Fearing that he'd step away from the door at any moment, you take the chance.

“I've always been here for you,” you mumble, knowing his enhanced audio receptor would catch it. “And I won't stop. For you.”

You bite back cyare. You don't wanna be shot down. You don't know what kind of a man he is now.

The second he steps away and continues his duty, you gather all your spirit to ignore the pain in your chest. It's excruciating. Enough to put you down in a strike of fever perhaps, but you wouldn't let it. You let the hurt in, though. You let your tears fall and absorbed into the inmate pillow. Your eyes are closed with the hope of another dream.

And of course, like any other day since the fall of the Republic; none comes.