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K2SO, how were you named?
Imperial security droids take their designations from the supervisory unit, a protocol droid in K2’s case - back when he was not K2 yet - an upright little fuck with an accent like shards of glass being chewed. He was unimaginitative and named R3TL, or something like it.
O2TA
R2LD
N2MT
K2SO
(When he meets Cassian, years and years later on a ship being overrun by rebel troops in their filthy scavenged uniforms, K2SO is a security droid on a probationary assignment in deep space after being a prime suspect in the violent dismemberment of a protocol droid.
Named R3TL, or something like that.)
When he begins, he is named, right then and there on the assembly line from which he was newly constructed. Beside him, his replicant fellow droids - fixed white optics and humanoid-but-not-enough frames.
And what he feels in that instant, shackled and pinned down by the oppressive black oblivion that is his programming (a droid, a robot, what did Jyn say? After she shot the droid that was not me - of course she could tell us apart, of course she knew it wasn’t me, it’s not like we’re all identical - )
Is boredom.
K2SO is newly awakened to a world of white beetle shell armor and silver protocol droids that grant designations like benevolent gods and ships that conquer solar systems. And he is bored.
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K2SO, who is Cassian Andor?
(Once upon a time a rebel computational scientist jimmied open my cranial casing and crossed a few wires up behind my optics and sealed me back together, and she thought she was very clever for doing so.
But she was not the one who called me K2.
Cassian Andor did.)
“Are you ever going to stop following me around?”
“I can run the probability of that for you, if you’d like.”
“Yeah? What do those numbers look like?”
“...Not in your favor, Captain Andor.”
Once upon a time, as K2SO tells it, a burgeoningly sentient security droid patrolling the hallways of a deep space exploratory vessel was minding his own business and calculating the odds of a hull breach when a squadron of rebel troops rounded the corner, and the fucker at the head of their little parade shot him through the cranial unit.
Once upon a time, Cassian Andor interrupts, I shot a hole through this bucket’s head and the first thing he said once Toshka repaired him and booted him back up was, “Where the fuck did the bastard who shot me go and how do I kill him”
(Once upon a time a security droid designated K2SO by an uppity protocol droid who later had his head removed from its neck mooring was patrolling the halls of the Rivalry, running through the numbers of how many hours it would take him to collapse into permanent standby if he just blew a hole through the hull and got it over with, and whether those numbers were in his favor or not, when a high-pitched whistle made his jaw jerk up and the world went heat-red and white and black.)
(Once upon a time Cassian Andor killed K2SO to save him.)
(Once upon a time K2SO will kill himself to save Cassian Andor.)
(But that comes later.)
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K2SO, what do you know of the Rebellion?
The Imperial sigils stamped to his pauldrons were never removed once he was rebooted. He thought that was odd, at first.
After a while, he figured it out.
Years and years into the future a pilot named Bodhi Rook will lose his entire world for the chance to make a new one, and he will run into Imperial fire with rebel guns brandished and primed at his back. He will take a data chip from Galen Erso that will save the world, and he will keep it safe until the day his time runs out on a beach full of blood and death.
No one will remember him. The songs will be sung of Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor, of brave Leia and precocious Luke and poor, strong Padme. No one will name their child Bodhi, no one will throw parades with flowering wreaths and bright bursts of fireworks in his honor.
Years and years later, a Stormtrooper who was designated FN-2187 will become a man named Finn, and he will put his back to a rebel pilot in a TIE fighter and kill his own brothers and sisters to escape the hell he was conditioned to call home, and he will take the hand of a scavenger girl and run so far away he will end back where he began, in blasterfire and the grotesque right light of a lightsaber and death. And when it is over there will be those who hiss “stormtrooper”, “spy”, “double agent”, as he passes in the hallway. There will be those who have seen the pain his white armor has caused and they will not forgive.
But before them all was a security droid named by an empire that did not care about him, with a random set of letters and numbers to distinguish him from the others of his kind. He will be killed in service of the empire and wake up again in service to the Rebellion, but they too will not love him. They will not brand him with their symbol of fire (did you ever wonder why - ), and they will not call him friend or partner or comrade in arms, they will call him a reprogrammed security droid.
(The moral of the story is that no matter what you become, if you were first part of the empire, you will always be what you were.)
K2SO knows this of the Rebellion.
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(K2SO, what do you know of the Rebellion?)
(I know that they fixed me when I was not broken, and somehow that made sense to me. I know that they are not one thing, no one unified beetle shell white front approaching the battlefield. They are everything, to everyone, everywhere, and that means different things.
I know that I am not part of the Rebellion the way Cassian is, yet I rebel. I know I am not part of the empire the way Krennic is, yet I carry their mark.
I know that years and years hence, when a Stormtrooper designated FN-2187 who became a man named Finn looks at a Resistance pilot named Poe with a familiar kind of fondness, Bhodi will owe me twenty credits.)
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K2SO, what do you know of love?
K2SO?
K2 has loved Cassian Andor since the moment the spy two feet shorter than him but full of jet fuel and vitriol rounded on him in a crowded hallway and shouted, “For the love of the Force will you stop following me around you useless puppy dog droid!”
K2SO has loved Cassian Andor since the day in the mess hall where he flopped down next to Toshka with a mug of stims and bags under his eyes and said, “Tosh, do me a favor and help me reboot K2’s executive function modulator? He’s been struggling and I can’t figure it out.”
And K2SO had asked “K2?”, but maybe forgot to do so out loud. Because it had felt right. Because he never wanted Cassian to be discouraged from calling him that every day of the rest of his function.
K2SO has loved Cassian Andor for years and lifetimes.
And he knows that Cassian loves Jyn.
So when he brings a crippling haymaker Cassian once taught him how to do down into the data vault controls, smoldering with phaserfire and riddled with corrosive holes in his armor and circuitry, and his optics flicker and wink, K2 very clearly thinks -
For fuck’s sake I hope they at least get a chance to relieve all that sexual tension
- before the world goes heat-red and white and black.
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K2SO, who is Jyn Erso?
Too much trouble to be worth it.
(That isn’t true - she’s worth every spark of full-system annoyance he experiences, every stupid pigheaded decision and ridiculous act of heroism, every stubborn word from her mouth and every glance she steals away from Cassian. She is worth each and every second K2 knows her, and here is why:
K2 meets Jyn Erso by suplexing her into the dirt outside of an Imperial labor camp. Her face is dirty and she’s bleeding where her lip cracks against the sharp edge of his forearm, but her eyes roll back from the back of her head and she blinks through the haze of a concussion at him with pearlescent eyes. Eyes that still know how to cry.
And Jyn is brash and presumptive and will never, ever listen to his well-calculated and sage advice, but at the core of her K2 knows that Jyn Erso is genuinely good. It’s in every word she directs toward him when she could address Cassian, every time she never calls him droid, every time she treats him like a fellow human being.
K2SO knows that Jyn is a good person in a war zone, and knows that the war came to her - Cassian and he were made amidst it, firefight is in their blood and circuitry, but Jyn has veins of wide open skies on a farm light years away from the death that plagues her.)
(So when the Death Star is fired and the horizon comes hurtling to embrace Cassian and Jyn, their hands sand-burned and clutching each other, there is Force there.
There is Force there in the form of a tall mechanoid crouched before them with kindness in his pale blank optics the color of the coming explosion, in the form of a staff laid against Jyn’s back to lean back against and a hand at the center of Cassian’s with a buzz like a heavy blaster in his ears and the roots of his teeth.
This is what K2SO knows.)
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K2SO, what is your purpose?
When he first onlines, and after the protocol droid gives him his own personalized set of random letters and numbers, K2SO is given operational parameters.
Calculate mission success probability.
Calculate margin of error for this schematic’s actualization.
Calculate the probability of defection for this squadron.
Calculate,
Calculate,
Calculate.
Repeat.
When K2 reboots, this suddenly does not apply.
“Toshka, the advisability of that experiment is - “
“No need to worry, K2SO, I’ve got this.”
“Cassian, I calculate the odds of your success in challenging Admiral Akbar to a drinking competition is - “
“K2, remind me to readjust your sarcasm input filter.”
“Would you like to know the probability of her using it against you?”
(The point is that he had one, once - a purpose. A reason for being. It wasn’t a very good one, and to be honest behind the blinders that his programming put on his perception he hated it with every fiber of his being, but still.
And then it… got lost, somewhere along the way. Or maybe he no longer needed it. Or maybe it turned into something else entirely, and he’s just as blinded to it as he was before, when he was a walking calculator for the empire.)
(Maybe it’s still there, inside him somewhere, sleeping.)
(It’s that kind of shit that keeps me up at night - that, and not needing to sleep.)
The point is, when K2 can no longer lean against the hard contours of his program parameters, when they’ve been reset into a configuration he cannot map, the way he imagines Chirrut must feel in new places he cannot map with his eyes, he finds his own.
Keeping Cassian Andor safe makes a nice load-bearing joint. Being of service to the Rebellion is good for keeping his stabilizers steady. Missions make up his walls. And over it all like a canopy, is the thought that one day he can find a new purpose, all on his own. Make himself one, with his own circuits, like everyone else.
Like humans do.
Like Cassian and Jyn did, like Chirrut and Baze and Bodhi and Galen Erso and Krennic and every living flame in the dark.
(Did you ever wonder why - )
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K2SO, what is your legacy?
(Years and years after a data ghost that once was a security droid curls itself around Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso on a beach disintegrating into a supernova flash, silicate fusing in millionths of a second, glass and ash and the two people on this planet that droid loves more than living itself and the legacy they will leave behind, years and years after that has passed, there will be two men on an Imperial destroyer.
“Why are you helping me?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do.”
This is his legacy.
And these two men will meet again one day on a launch pad.
“That's my jacket.”
“Oh - !”
"No, no, no, no. Keep it. It suits you. You're a good man, Finn.”
This is his legacy.
(The same eyes in different people, funny way of saying the same stories told over and over again, turned by the tides like river rocks until they’re shiny and smooth and you can almost miss seeing them, almost forget they line the bottom of the water, almost - )
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K2SO, did you ever wonder why the Rebellion chose fire as their sigil?
(No.
I never had to.)
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("K2SO, do you know who I am?")
(Yes, Princess. Now, if you're done with the interview, however flattering - let me tell you exactly what's on this drive. It was a lot of trouble getting it, you know.)
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