Chapter Text
“You have that look again, Rau. What is it now?” Methos resisted the urge to sigh at the blond-haired Mandalorian. Fenn Rau was an exceptional trainer, to be sure; he’d been hand-picked to train pilots on Kamino years before, and could probably outfly anyone who wasn’t a Jedi, but he could be infuriating at times.
“Your chosen commander. Sever,” Fenn replied, his expression dissatisfied. “He’s determined enough, I’ll give you that. But determination alone does not make one a leader. His youth works against him, for one. He lacks confidence in his ability to lead men older and more experienced than he is, though once he’s in the thick of things he overcomes this often enough. When it is quiet again, however, his doubts crowd back in.”
Methos grimaced, but did not contradict Fenn’s assessment. Sever was young; he and the rest of Sigma Squad had been almost a year from completing their training on Kamino when he pulled them out. That barrier would be overcome soon enough, especially given the kriffing accelerated aging inflicted on these clones. But even that wasn’t enough. The Century needed an effective captain now, not a year or two from now.
“Anything to add, Rav?” Methos asked, trying his best to keep any sort of snark out of his voice for once.
Bralor’s clan leader pursed her lips thoughtfully, tapping her fingers on the table.
“The standard training for troopers, even any command-level training Sever might have received, did him no favors. I look at him and see glimpses of the leader he can be, but the constant demand for conformity on Kamino has stifled him. Every time Sever seems about ready to try something unorthodox, he stops short and falls back on the doctrine he learned on Kamino. And since the doctrine never came naturally to him, he fails to soar. It’s frustrating, Atin.”
Frustrating. Definitely a good word to describe Sever’s training experience on Concord Dawn thus far, Methos agreed. Sever needed to be the same clone who defied all the authority he’d ever known to try to save a pair of clones and later a disgraced Kaminoan. He needed to trust himself as a leader before his men would do the same. Which was made more difficult by the fact that he’d been repeatedly treated as a failure constantly on the verge of being decommissioned because he didn’t properly fit the standards of what Kamino defined as being a “good soldier.”
“He’s trying to stuff himself back into a box he never fit in the first place.”
“So it seems,” Rav agreed, shaking her head.
“This little experiment of yours will fall apart if Sever can’t pull himself together and be the leader he needs to be. He needs to prove himself a true Mando’ad.” Fenn looked challengingly at Methos, as if daring him to disagree.
“You’re right.”
The three of them shared a moment of silence around the table: Methos slouching back in his chair, nursing his mug of ne’tra gal; Fenn standing by the window with his arms crossed; and Rav still tapping her fingers absently.
“I think I know what you have in mind, Atin. But before you get ahead of yourself, it can’t be you,” Rav warned. “Nor can it be me. You are his Jedi and general, I am his clan leader. He needs to trust us completely. All of them need to trust us. Many of your Century are already damaged in one way or another. If either one of us breaks trust now, it might break them forever.”
“I guess that leaves me.” Fenn looked wryly at the other two. “If it’s me, at least there’s a hope that Sever might eventually accept it was all for the best. Can’t say I’m looking forward to this. If it works, you’ll owe me drinks for the next ten years.”
Methos’s announcement that he would be leaving for Coruscant did not come as a great surprise; he’d been in and out on multiple occasions already. The fact that he was taking Humble, Junior, and Yarrow, however, did, as did Methos’s near-caginess about when they would all return. That made them nervous.
“Look, you can’t rely on me being there all the time,” the Jedi told Sever point blank. “There are too many circumstances to count where you might be out of contact with me during a mission. Think of this as fog of war. Trust yourself, Sever. You and the rest of the Century will be fine without me. Rau and Bralor know what they’re doing.”
Then, mere hours after their departure, Rav Bralor was called away. “Urgent clan business” was all she would tell Sever.
“Fenn Rau is more than capable of handling your instruction for a time,” she announced. “I will return when I can.”
And then she was gone.
That was when the monster emerged.
“So. You are the one that Methos chose to lead this rag-tag rabble.” Rau stared down his nose at Sever, eyes narrowed. “Thus far, you haven’t shown me that you’re capable of leading even a sanitation squad. Your performance ratings from Kamino are nothing short of abysmal. You never received any command training at all, and the only area you showed any sort of promise was marksmanship. Is that all you’re good for? Shooting things? Even droids can do that. If your… Century… went out as it is, half of you would be dead after the first mission, and the other half dead within a week. Because their chosen commander was a boy who didn’t know what he was doing.”
Sever gritted his teeth and stood there, eyes staring straight ahead. He’d endured all sorts of verbal abuse from trainers back on Kamino. He could handle Fenn Rau. But… Rau wasn’t exactly wrong, was he? whispered a nasty voice in the back of Sever’s mind. He was on the younger end of the clones in the Century. He’d never been off Kamino before coming here to Concord Dawn and had no experience of combat, like Cover or Gaffer or Gimbal or Ochi. He couldn’t even qualify for sniper training on Kamino because of his less-than-stellar ratings in other areas.
Good soldiers follow orders. You can’t even do that right! The old taunt echoed in his head.
His batch brothers, Apex especially, had done what they could to help him keep up, to ensure that his scores didn’t fall too low because they were afraid every day would be the one where Sever would be decommissioned.
Just do what they want, Sever, at least until we’re done with training and get out there.
But what the kriff did they want this time?
If Methos’s training regimen was hell, Sever did not know how to describe Fenn Rau’s.
Sever could barely bring himself to even eat anymore after a week of enduring Rau as a taskmaster. When it wasn’t combat training, it was unwinnable scenarios with the rest of the Century.
“Pathetic. This is nothing. You would lead these men to their deaths on a real battlefield.”
When it wasn’t basic flight training, it was logistics and crew resource management.
“I’d sooner wish for a bowl of tiingilar to run a command. At least then I’d be guaranteed a single meal before I died.”
And all of it with Rau reminding him non-stop how much of a failure he was, how he would never succeed, how he should just give up now and save the rest of the Century grief.
Not to mention the fact that Sever was enduring his last growth spurt. So he was, quite literally, utterly bone-achingly exhausted.
Despite the occasional encouragement from the others, Sever didn’t know how much more of this he could take.
He could barely keep his head up as he poked at the food on his plate. What would Rau throw at him next?
“The day I take such insolence from anyone is the day I no longer call myself Mandalorian!”
Silence fell on the mess hall, and all eyes turned to Fenn Rau, who loomed over Flight like a specter of doom. Flight, for the first time since Sever had known him, appeared almost frightened, all but cowering before the Mandalorian. Rau shifted his harsh gaze to Cover, who was standing next to Flight with his arms crossed.
“And you. You call yourself an ARC trooper. You’re just like the rest of this undisciplined riff-raff. Your Jedi thought he could make something of you and dragged me into this exercise in madness and futility.”
Enough was enough. Sever could ride out Rau’s cruelty so long as he confined it to him alone, but now the man had turned his sights on his brothers.
“Stop.”
The word rang out harshly across the room. Sever stood and stalked towards Fenn Rau, jaw set and determination growing with every step.
“Got something to say, clone?” Rau’s expression oozed scorn, all but daring Sever to challenge him - something Sever could not do. Not only was this man their trainer, he was the leader of all Concord Dawn. To challenge him was to challenge all of Concord Dawn.
“If you want to be an utter bastard, be that bastard to me.” Sever now stood before Rau and did not look away.
“You’re clones,” Rau sneered, his pale blue eyes glinting. “One is just like another. You were created to be expendable. Cogs in a machine ready to be replaced by one exactly the same. You’re just like all the rest. Really, I don’t know what Bralor was thinking. You’re unworthy to be in her clan, or any other clan of Mandalore.”
A fury rose in Sever, unlike any he had felt before. Or maybe it had been growing in him all along and only now burst forth. He was done enduring the abuse. Maybe good soldiers followed orders… but he had never been a good soldier, had he?
“You know nothing about us! You claim to be Mandalorian, but it seems to me that you don’t know anything about brotherhood! How we came into this life means nothing!” He wanted to throttle the smirk from Rau’s face, to beat the man senseless, but something held him back. “Yeah, we’re clones. We share a face. But what makes us brothers, what makes us vode -” and there was a flicker of something in Fenn Rau’s expression at Sever’s use of the word, “-isn’t genetics. It’s standing up for each other even when our lives are on the line. It’s watching each others’ backs in battle. It’s sitting up all night with them because they can’t sleep. It’s facing down a bully who likes to throw his weight around on those he knows can’t fight back!”
“A bully, am I?” Rau crossed his arms and stepped forward into Sever’s personal space challengingly.
Sever’s dark brown-gold eyes flashed in defiance as he held his ground.
“Yes. Ori'buyce, kih'kovid.” All helmet, no head.
“Picked up a little Mando’a, I see. But saying a few empty words does not make you a Mandalorian.”
“Ba'jur bal beskar'gam,
Ara'nov, aliit,
Mando'a bal Mand'alor—
An vencuyan mhi.”
Sever looked around the room, taking in the faces of all the clones who were watching the confrontation.
“These men are my aliit. I’m their alor’ad. We may not have been born on Mandalore, but we are born of Mandalore. And I won’t let anyone, not even you, threaten them. And my words aren’t empty, Rau. Verd ori'shya beskar'gam, bal alor’ad ori’shya buy’ce. A warrior is more than his armor, and a captain is more than his helmet.”
The expression on Rau’s face was unsettlingly triumphant, as if Sever had somehow fallen into some unseen verbal trap.
“We shall see, then, won’t we?”
With that final… threat? Warning? Fenn Rau left the room. Sever felt the eyes of his brothers on him. His knees felt rubbery, like the time he faced down Tani Du in the cold rain of Kamino. This time, however, he kept his feet.
“Okay, boys, hang onto your buckets, because we’re going to show this son of a gundark what we’re made of.”