Work Text:
“As you can see, the training is oriented around the wellness and development of the clones themselves.” Nala Se waved one hand to encompass the rows and rows of younglings.
Second-cycle cadets. She reminded herself. Not younglings. Twos, some of the Rancor men would call them casually.
It was difficult to see them and not think of younglings at the Temple, and that brought her to padawans, which was not a place she would allow her thoughts to linger. Shaak left the future to the Force.
“Contrary to whatever concerns you might hear, our methods remain largely unchanged.” The Kaminoan stood by the door at the end of the balcony, ready to have the Jedi follow along at her heels. “They are precisely as agreed upon by the terms of our contract, excepting the changes you personally requested for the handling of defective product. Our methods are as effective and humane as they have ever been.”
Humane was not a word she would apply to those methods. What Colt and his men had told her about those methods. Shaak did not move to follow Nala Se. She lingered instead, looking out at the rows of almost identical dark heads. Not quite identical. The occasional lighter brown, two with reddish curls, and one fair hair. They were all unique in the Force. Shaak had learned that when she first fought beside them, but the more time she spent on Kamino, the more obvious all the small differences became.
Calling them ‘the clones’ felt wrong. It suggested they were simply collective, interchangeable. They might be from the same source, but they were not the same. She wished she’d had the word ‘brothers’ for them sooner, or as she had learned from Colt, vode .
Shaak liked being able to think of them in their own language, reluctant as Colt was to call their version of mando’a that. In a way, she understood his hesitance.
She had lost so much of her own culture to become a Jedi. Shaak looked like a Togruta, but she had been raised as part of the Order. Reconnecting with her people once she’d become a Master, being able to train her padawans on Shili, those experiences had been valuable, but they did not erase her feelings of displacement.
“General Ti?” Nala Se’s tone was a mix of impatience and concern. Not for Shaak herself, but for the program, at the thought that Shaak might have found an objection to raise.
She had many objections, but none she could raise. Shaak slipped her hands into the sleeves of her robe. “Please lead on.”
The Kaminoan continued the tour through the usual classrooms and training rooms, the workout centers, and the sparring halls. Whenever they toured the facilities together, the routine was the same, regardless of the issues discussed. Shaak knew there were areas that were kept off limits, and in her time she’d made a point to know exactly which areas those were.
They were all but finished with their typical lap, passing one of the Medical bays when Shaak paused.
“So you believe there is no uptick in cadets being sent to medical with unexplained injuries.” Shaak knew there was, had seen the medic’s numbers. She also was pretty sure she knew the reasons why.
“Accidents happen.” Nala Se narrowed her enormous dark eyes.
“They do. Particularly among those cadets training with certain trainers,” Shaak agreed. She knew, everyone knew, Jango Fett himself had fought Dred Priest. Yet, even that had only slowed the number of his cadets turning up in the infirmary.
“We did not select the trainers.” Se’s voice was ever less emotive than usual. “Regardless, the results the current training methods provide meet our standards.”
There would always be an impasse. Nala Se and her kind did not see the cadets as anything more than property, products. By law, the vode were property. They belonged to the Republic like the guns and tanks did.
How the Jedi could ever recover from that, Shaak could not begin to imagine.
“And my role here is to ensure the Republic’s troops are protected from all unnecessary dangers.” And that included the dangers brought to Kamino under the guise of care.
Nala Se had her job to do, and Shaak Ti had her own. It would have been ideal for the pair of them to work together, but situations were not always ideal.
“So with that role in mind, I will visit the cadets currently in Medical.” Shaak didn’t want to make enemies. She would need Nala Se on her side for other issues in the future.
This wasn’t personal. It was, in fact, deeply impersonal.
That was part of the problem.
“If that is of interest.”
Somehow, the Kaminoan still make it sound like Shaak had asked permission. Nala Se seemed to know as well as Shaak did which med bay Priest’s cadets were in. That had started the whole tour, with the Kaminoan out to reassure her nothing was out of the ordinary despite Tals’ urgent knock on her door before first meal.
“I can find my own way back, thank you.” Shaak dismissed the scientist with one placid nod.
Shaak let herself into the medical bay and told herself to stop thinking about the Kaminoan.
Three cadets were still in beds. There had been two more when Tals had first called his brothers to help bring them in. The others had gone back to their bunks with bacta patches and bruises to finish their recovery.
Priest might no longer organize the fights amongst the cadets under his supervision, but Shaak considered that a far cry from putting a stop to it.
“General, sir.” The words were clumsy, slurred. One of the cadets, maybe fourth cycle, shifted to sit up more properly in his bed. There was still a bacta patch on the side of his face, another one one hand. The other arm was in a plasto-cast.
“As you were, Cadet.” She moved closer, turning her back on Nala Se on the other side of the viewport, looking in. One of the other two was sleeping, clearly the worst off of the three even as the bruises were fading, the other was looking past Shaak with worried eyes.
Nala Se was all but forgotten to her.
“How are you feeling?” She asked the most engaged of the three.
He dragged his eyes from the viewport to meet her gaze. “Well, sir.”
Shaak hummed, sure that was not true. The worst of the three had a head injury that required a thick wrapping. Shaak straightened her shoulders and nodded to the edge of his cot. “Do you mind?”
“Sir, no, please.” He shifted as best he could before gritting his teeth.
There was already plenty of room. “Be easy, Cadet.”
Shaak rested a hand on his knee to keep him from moving, but he started at her touch. She wished any of their brothers were in the room to put them at ease. If Pots or Baar had been tending them, they must have found something urgent to do. She reached out slowly, making sure he could follow her hand, and stroked his curls off his forehead to get a better look at the bruising on his face.
He was perfectly still, hardly drawing a breath until she stroked his cheek in an effort to comfort him. A ragged breath that was very close to a sob escaped and there was nothing Shaak wanted more than to wrap him in her arms and let him cry it out.
Even if that would help, it likely would not be welcome. “What is your name?”
“CC-8117, sir.”
Yes, she should have anticipated that. “And what do your brothers call you?”
He watched her for a long moment, eyes wide and doubting. She noticed now that his eyes were a hair off the gold of his brothers, brighter to something like amber.
“Jolly, sir.”
“Thank you for sharing with me. May I call you that?” It was rare anyone asked a cadet for permission for anything, but Shaak wouldn’t take more than what he had given.
She could just see his cheeks flush as he nodded.
“Thank you, Jolly.”
“Down the row, that’s Ransom.” Jolly gave her a ghost of a grin. “The middle’s our CT. He says his squaddies called him ‘Hawkeye’ ‘cause he’s the best sharpshooter since Crosshair, but no one believes they called him anything that cool.”
No matter the circumstances, they would always act like brothers. She breathed in the quiet and tried to project comfort and peace to them. Finally, she couldn’t put the words off any longer.
“What happened last night, Jolly?” Shaak moved slowly, but she wrapped her hand around his, careful not to cause any more pain to his bloody knuckles.
“You know how it is, sir. Cadets scrap.” He ducked his head, and the room lights caught a thick line of fading bruises on his neck. “Clones are made for war.”
Shaak swallowed down her reaction to the words he obviously didn’t believe. This was why Tals had come to her, not Colt or one of his command staff. Colt could barely keep himself from fighting Vau. He’d kill Priest given half a reason.
And while the Jedi believed life was sacred, how much harm did one being have to do to others before there was a justification to ending that threat? The Jedi had sent her to Kamino to look out for the welfare of the troopers, and perhaps that fell under her responsibilities.
The thought of removing Dred Priest was more tempting than Shaak would admit.
“In my experience on the battlefield, your brothers are formidable in battle,” Shaak agreed, reaching out to tip his head up with one gentle finger under his chin to meet his eyes. “But also so much more than mindless weapons.”
His gaze was defiant, defensive.
If it wasn’t for her rank, he would have spoken sharply.
If he’d been healthy, he might have pulled away.
The reaction was all too similar to the way Colt described the brother he had lost to Priest, the cadet taken from his close-knit CC squad. The refusal of comfort, the inability to trust Colt had mourned in Neyo as their relationship was all but severed by the trainer.
Even though Shaak had maneuvered some time for the two to be together lately, it was barely enough to begin healing the rift between them. It hurt to think of the worries Colt had for him, and all the ways he still couldn’t quite reach him. It hurt to see these cadets and imagine the same future awaited them.
Shaak wished there was more She couldn’t bear to see him hurting like this, and yet she could not stop it.
She moved her hand to rest gently on his shoulder, concerned with aggravating any injury she didn’t know was there. He sunk back into the thin cushion.
Her morning started with Tals at her door, all but shaking with a tangle of anger and frustration as he whispered that he’d found them in the showers by the sparring halls, pressing cold cloths to fresh bruises and trying to wash off dried blood.
He’d carried one and herded the others down quiet pre-dawn halls. Tals had taken them directly to Pots for treatment, and hoped his brother could fix them.
And Pots had done his best, Shaak knew. Rancor’s head medic was talented. He’d saved countless other brothers during the Battle of Kamino, and healed plenty of training injuries.
But this wasn’t a training injury.
This was deliberate violence encouraged by someone who was supposed to look out for their welfare. Most of the trainers were indifferent at best. A few seemed to genuinely care for the cadets. The Alphas were caught in the middle, in a role between trainer and brother. All of them deserved better, deserved the opportunity to live more than the lives that they had been handed.
“We appreciate your concern, sir. But don’t worry about us.” Jolly smiled, but it was a hollow, fixed sort of thing. “We’ll be back to training in no time.”
Colt would know how to reach them, put them at ease and reassure them. They were his brothers. She could worry about them, care about them all she wanted, but she was still an outsider, still on the side of those sending them to their deaths.
Shaak wanted these cadets, these little brothers, healed, happy. She would rather they never went back to their trainer, if Dred Priest could never get his hands on them again.
Before she could answer, Shaak heard bootfalls. She kept her mind shielded around Colt’s brothers even though she’d become more accustomed to easing the shielding around Colt. That didn’t make her Togruta hearing any less keen.
“Sir.” Jolly looked past her, straightening himself in his medical cot.
She gave his hand a gentle squeeze and stood to face the new arrival who did not walk like a brother.
Mij Gilamar went wide-eyed when he spotted her. “General.”
“Trainer Gilamar.” Shaak stood her ground. He was a medic, and far more reasonable than many of his fellow trainers, but there were three injured cadets who needed someone to stand up for them. She waited him out, gaze steady with that Jedi calm she knew flustered so many of the Mandalorians.
He looked past her for a moment, looking toward the bruised and beaten cadets on their cots. “I came to swap the patches out. Check on their improvement.”
He was a medic, and this was the med bay.
Shaak stepped out of his path. If it resulted in better care for the cadets, she wouldn’t stand in his way.
She didn’t leave though, keeping an eye on the cadets as Gilamar inspected Ransom’s plasto-cast before replacing the bacta patch on the side of his head. He was even more careful with the CT, the smallest of the three and wrapped in the heaviest bandages. Gilamar didn’t like what he saw and grumbled to himself as he worked, unwrapping, replacing, and rewrapping the wound.
“And you, Jolly?” Gilamar greeted the cadet like they knew one another well. “Keeping out of trouble I see.”
“Always, sir.” Jolly almost gave the trainer a genuine smile. “Feeling better, too.”
He did seem the least injured of the three, and Shaak couldn’t help but wonder if that made him the ‘winner’ of their ‘unsanctioned’ fight.
“Brought these.” Gilamar stepped away from Jolly’s cot and handed him one of the little pudding cups that were given out with meals from time to time.
“No one sneak his while he’s resting,” Gilamar teased, leaving a cup and multitensil beside the sleeping CT before handing the last one to Ransom. “Your medic will be back with your trays after first meal, but these might be a different sort of medicine.”
Jolly and Ransom already had the flimsi-plast peeled back. Jolly paused long enough to flash a small smile at the trainer. “Thank you, sir.”
“General, if you have a moment?” Gilamar straightened and turned to her, nodding towards the door.
“Certainly.” Shaak gave the cadets one more smile and followed Gilamar out of medical.
The door had barely wooshed closed when the trainer spoke.
“Priest did this.” He was past anger, into something cold and hard. “He might not be there to order the fights, but they know what they’re supposed to do. This is still his fault.”
Shaak inclined her head. She was well aware. Everyone was well aware. “My morning was spent with Nala Se. From what I hear, there is no increase in cadet ‘accidents’.”
Gilamar glared. “This is not an accident.”
“I am well aware.”
Shaak had used every ounce of leverage she had as a Jedi and as a representative of the Republic to improve conditions for the cadets. She had won the argument to put an end to decommissioning, spoken out every chance she could about the brutality of the trainers. And yet, there were three cadets in medical for no reason other than to feed a sadistic trainer’s ego.
“I’d kill him, given half a chance.” Gilamar said the words with the kind of sureness that suggested he’d nearly done so more than once and he would if the moment presented itself. “I’m used to saving lives, and I’d gladly end his.”
Being a Jedi, the only Jedi, on Kamino sometimes put Shaak in the role of confessor. She was outside all of the other social structures on the planet, close enough to understand, far enough removed to listen. To someone like Gilamar, who would she even have to tell his confession to if she wanted to tell?
“I believe there would be a long line of beings waiting to join you,” Shaak agreed darkly. She was a Jedi, and believed life was sacred, but she also believed in justice. “If your roles do not allow for proper recourse, perhaps you could pass future concerns in my direction.”
Shaak knew she didn’t know everything she ought to know about the goings on with the cadets. Rancor had taken a long time to trust her with their concerns, but they had come around. If the trainers did the same, she might almost be able to do her job fully.
“I’ll keep that in mind, General.” Gilamar wasn’t even looking her way. General was likely only slightly more palatable to him than ‘Jedi’, but as long as their purposes aligned, Shaak would be glad for any cooperation she could get.
Gilamar peeled off down a hallway without any sort of farewell, and Shaak bit back a sigh. Sharing information was a start. It was best not to ask too much.
Instead of arriving late to first meal, Shaak turned towards her own rooms. She needed time to work through her feelings and release them into the Force.
“Sir!” Pots jogged a few steps to catch up, his junior medic behind him, laden with trays. “Tals informed me-- well, that you-- about the cadets,” the medic faltered.
“I am just returning from visiting the cadets,” Shaak agreed, trying to reassure him. “Trainer Gilamar looked in on them while I was there.”
Pots seemed to digest the intent of the words - his brothers were looked after while he was away.
“If there’s any way I can be of further assistance…” Shaak let the implication hang.
“Thank you, sir.” Pots’ smile was warm, genuine. “If you could keep this away from the Commander? We’ll handle the rest.”
Oh? Shaak would ask, but she knew there were some things it was better for her not to know. “As you say.”
Pots’ smile was almost boyish, almost secretive, and Shaak hoped whatever he - and undoubtedly his brothers - had planned would turn out just as well as they wished. “Sir.”
The two medics continued on to the med bay and Shaak let herself into her rooms.
Meditation would be best. It would help her release the anger she had carefully contained all morning, soothe the frustration of not being able to do enough.
Instead of moving to the spot Shaak had set aside for meditation, she went to the holotable. According to her chrono, Luminara should be awake, and still in transit, and Shaak needed to speak with someone who wouldn’t suggest she put a saber through the source of her troubles.
After all, her Commander Gree was one of Colt’s squadmates. Even if they hadn’t discussed it, Shaak was sure her fellow Jedi would understand.
“Shaak, a pleasure to hear from you.” Luminara lit up as she took the holocall, but the smile faded quickly. “I see from your face that this is not a social call.”
In the end, Colt’s brothers would choose their own path, but Shaak refused to do anything less than everything she could to help them.
“Indeed, it is not. But, it is not a Jedi matter either.” Shaak leaned on the edge of the table. “I find myself in conflict, and I could use your perspective, my dear.”
“I see.” Luminara hummed. “Let me get a glass of tea, and we can begin.”
“Very wise,” Shaak agreed, moving to do the same for herself.
A cup of tea and a long talk would not fix the galaxy’s problems, Shaak hoped the Force would show them a path forward.