Chapter Text
The door of the medical bay opens with a hiss and immediately your eyes harden.
The three junior nurses, a togurata, a Twi and another human jump to life, one dropping a tray and the other two frantically grabbing the nearest object in an attempt to look busy. You stand in the doorway and glare frostily at them, aware of a patient in the examination room through the two-way window.
“What’s going on here?” you snap.
“We were just prepping our equipment to treat CT-9904,” stammers the human.
“That’s not what it looks like you’re doing,” you glare, folding your arms. After spending the last twelve months working front line triage your patience is completely non-existent for these shinies, nurses that are training under you for deployment and treat you like the dark lord of the Sith because you demand efficiency above all else.
“He’s an enhanced clone,” the Twi answers nervously.
“So?”
“We felt you might be more suited to examine him,” finishes the human.
You look around them and clock the so-called enhanced clone for the first time. He’s sat tall and straight with his long legs dangling off the edge of the examination table and his long arms braced either side of his knees, gripping the edge of the table. He’s fair… no, you correct yourself, he’s grey. That’s different. You know how their accelerated aging works, but even the first generation aren’t going grey yet. You extend your hand for his file and the togurata scrambles to hand it to you. You ignore their hopeful looks that you’re about to do their job and look at his file.
“He’s been shot, upper right arm. It was patched by the front-line medics but needs a skin graft patched over it,” the human offers.
“Get BZ-3 to do it,” you snap his file shut and extend it back to the togurata, but she doesn’t take it instead pointing at the droid.
It’s been shot, dead-centre, clean through the middle. You stare at it in disbelief, not that it’s been shot, that’s happened a few times and one clone who went by Hevy had a reputation for it but that these dumbasses you’re training didn’t take his weapons first. Which you tell them in no uncertain terms, your strident terms clearly reaching through the wall because at the end of your furious dressing down you see his head turn towards the sound. He can’t see you through the glass but clearly heard the yelling and you see him smirk. Instantly you go from ticked off at your staff, to ticked off at him and storm into the examination room.
“Blaster! Now!” you snap at him as the door snaps shut behind you.
He barely reacts, not even bothering to pull the toothpick he was chewing on out of his mouth. He takes all the time in the world to answer, lazily crossing one leg over the other. “No.”
That sneery, smug tone nearly halts you in your path but you manage to push through it. He barely looks like a clone and doesn’t sound like one full stop. That part of your brain you have no control over identifies that voice as sexy but you shove it aside, work mode and annoyance taking over.
You storm over to him and extend your hand. “Hand over your blaster or you can get some unhygienic back-alley doc in Coruscant to do a skin graft on that wound, get gangrene and lose your right arm which means you will have to get used to using your left hand for your favourite activity which I’m reliably told takes some getting used to.”
That comment raises the slightest of responses of mild surprise out of him. He reaches behind his back and drops the small blaster in your outstretched hand which you place across the room and drag the medical trolley forcefully across the room with you, smashing its metal frame into the side of the examination table as close to his left knee as you dare. He doesn’t even flinch, which only serves to rile you even more.
“I don’t appreciate my medical equipment being damaged,” you state coldly.
“I don’t like droids.”
“And I don’t like clones treating my medical ward like the training alley. Bring a blaster in here again and I will personally make my greenest nurse work on you and go for a coffee,” you rage.
“Do you promise?” he retaliates with a smirk.
You don’t answer, glaring at him from close quarters beyond furious that he’s clearly enjoying this. Most clones would be cowering by now, you’re not sure if its because they’re male and babies or if its latent Jango genetics but the mere sight of the medical bay sends most of them running. Throw in you, the battle-hardened front-line nurse sent here to ‘recover’ after Umbara and you’re lucky if your patients give you more than a timid mouthful. Not this particular clone though it seems…
“What do you go by?” you ask frostily.
“Crosshair.”
You look up, meeting his coppery gaze framed by a tattoo of a crosshair across his left eye. “My that’s creative,” you sneer.
That raises a smirk out of Crosshair, who doesn’t answer rolling the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. You load a syringe up with anaesthetic then remember the bit about ‘enhanced clone’ and look at his file before doubling the amount. Worst case scenario he can’t flip anyone off for a few hours you decide, as his files indicate he needs more numbing than the average clone but the dosages from previous procedures vary wildly. You drop the syringe and begin organising the skin graft cells made from Jango Fett DNA.
“Most nurses smile. It puts their patients at ease,” he starts again.
“You try being the Head Nurse responsible for the next batch of front-line nurses who get rolled out in a few weeks and can’t even face a measly sniper,” you mutter.
He watches you for a few moments, chewing thoughtfully on the toothpick. “Inefficiency is something we have ample supply of around here.”
You’re annoyed the ‘measly sniper’ didn’t get the raise from him you wanted. “Shirt off,” you wave dismissively at him, watching the skin cells in the petri dish begin to coagulate together.
You step around him, ignoring the flutter in your chest at the sight of his lean build. He’s definitely skinnier than most clones and with no chest hair. Most clones take after their host, Jango, with moderate to impressive chest hair but Crosshair barely has a snail’s trail. You can tell from the dappling of scars, scrapes and healed wounds its not the first time he’s been shot either. You force yourself to examine his wound, aware that his head is centimetres from your own and his warm breath is trailing down your neck. Against your will a shiver trails down your spine making your breath catch in your throat which you mask by coughing into your elbow. You turn back to the wound and force yourself to focus.
“Lucky shot,” you muse. “Right between the plates of your armour.”
He doesn’t answer straight away but trails another breath down the nape of your neck, which he’s definitely doing on purpose to rile you. You look up, meeting his gaze that’s barely centimetres away. Those eyes… it doesn’t matter that you’ve seen them a million times from cradle to grave in every Jango clone, his are somehow different with an intense gaze that could melt Hoth in an instant. And right now, there’s a devilish glimmer to them, like he knows he’s got the jump on you.
“Lucky me,” he answers finally in that sneery tone that so weirdly attractive.
You pull away and return to the petri dish of skin cells. One advantage of clones above everyone else is that there aren’t the usual worries about blood transfusions, organ replacements or skin grafts where the body rejects the new material because its all the same material and it all comes out of the same lab. Of course, not every clone is exactly the same, you operated on one last week that weirdly was cloned with only one kidney, but they’re as close as identical as you will get.
You take very little care when stabbing the needle of anaesthetic into his arm, just above the wound. He grimaces slightly as you load the wound and then give it a few moments to do its job. You drop the syringe into the trolley with a clatter and arrange your other implements. You’re aware of his gaze following you but you ignore him.
“Your bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired,” he states, clearly smarting from the injection but trying to hide it.
“Grow a set.”
He uncrosses his legs and watches you, chewing on that damn toothpick still. “Well, aren’t you just a ray of sunshine.”
“Bedside manner didn’t save lives at Umbara,” you mutter.
Crosshair hums in agreement. “Umbara was a blood bath I’m told.”
“You weren’t there?” you ask looking up momentarily.
“No. It’s a big war.”
“Too big.”
You freeze, realising you overstepped several marks in an instant and look up to see Crosshair’s reaction.
You became a nurse on Coruscant as a bright-eyed optimistic teenager long before the Battle for Naboo. You intended to become a midwife, you loved kids and the thought of bringing them into the world just seemed like the perfect job. Despite there being droids that could do the job many women preferred the hands-on approach of a human, not a droid which made perfect sense. You flew through medical school, usually at the top of your class and loved every moment of it.
You were part way through your rotation in the ER for Coruscant General when Naboo happened. The Matron saw your talent for handling high pressure situations and convinced you to put in your application for triage nurse with the Grand Republic Army. You didn’t even know about clones until you got to Kamino. On your first day you were given a tour of the facility by the head doctor and you had to excuse yourself to throw up in the bathroom at what you saw. Even to this day you can’t walk into the incubation chamber or nursery without feeling ill at how far removed from nature it is. How the Jedi High Council who proports to be the moral high ground in this war and the allegedly democratic Republic Senate could allow, let alone endorse the creation of millions of clones, accelerate their aging and then use them as a disposable army was beyond morally abhorrent.
And then they put you on the front lines.
Any last shreds of optimism or hope for humanity vanished at a rapid rate of knots seeing clones used as cannon fodder. And they were just that. Cannon fodder. Oh, sure the Jedi were there bouncing around waving their glow sticks and acting as generals which was a joke in itself but it was the clones doing the heavy lifting a paying the price. Umbara though was a completely different kettle of fish, even before General Krell’s betrayal was exposed. You were working triage late one night when a certain General Skywalker came in, back from swanning around the Senate or whatever the hell he was doing and suddenly you were in the middle of a screaming match with a Jedi Knight. You had to be pulled away by Captain Rex and after they left a number of the clones who overhead the incident wanted to thank you personally wink, wink, nudge, nudge. After that incident, upper management deemed to you a liability and sent you back to this watery hell hole. You had been back here a couple of months and every day you grew to hate this war and the people behind it even more.
Its not that you would defect, the Separatists, though not using clones were just as morally corrupt and reprehensible just for different reasons. The weapons they developed specifically to target clones that you had to attempt to repair told you enough of that. You just wanted to leave. Some far away planet a million miles from the chaos, the destruction, the-
You suddenly realise you’ve been staring up into Crosshairs coppery eyes for a solid minute, likely with a dumb look on your face. You realise with a start that his expression has softened and you suddenly wonder if part of his enhancements included mind reading. Its not on his file.
This time he takes the toothpick out of his mouth. “You don’t like clones.”
The edge of hostility in his voice makes your hair stand on end. “No, I don’t like this war,” you’re quick to correct him. “The clones are innocent victims in all of this.”
His expression softens as he calmly raises a hand and flicks the toothpick across the room without breaking eye contact with you. Seconds later you hear it hit the rubbish bin with a faint clatter and you can’t help but be impressed. Crosshair is still watching you, his mind clearly ticking over behind his eyes.
“How do you figure that?”
You force yourself to turn away from him, picking up the petri dish. The cells have finally bonded into a mushy paste that you will paint into the wound site before exposing to a UV light. After a week under a protective bandage mostly to prevent sunburn that has led to skin cancers, Crosshair will barely be able to tell where he got shot. You step around him and begin mushing the paste into the wound as you try to figure out how to answer that. Its not that you don’t know how you feel, you do, but a lot of it sounds worryingly like treason.
“None of us were asked to be born but at least the majority of people in the galaxy have choice of life, careers, partners… Clones don’t have any of those options which the last time I looked is called slavery. In some ways, it’s worse than slavery.”
He takes a moment to answer, watching you work. “You’ve been around enough Doc to know the Republic doesn’t condemn slavery, just the kinds that interferes with its agenda.”
You freeze, staring up at him, slightly shocked that he’s voiced such opinions. “The walls have ears,” you breathlessly remind him.
“Like you said before,” he smirks. “Grow a set.”
“Wow… ok.”
You roll the light across the room and spend a couple of minutes positioning the light, your mind spinning. You had never raised these thoughts with anyone before, instead letting them fester inside your head but you never expected to share them with a clone whose ideas were just as jaded as your own.
“Turn your head away,” you instruct.
Crosshair obeys silently as you drop your UV resistant goggles on and fire up the light. You’ve never had the procedure done on yourself but you’re reliably told the light feels cold not hot. You run the light for a couple of minutes, watching the cells adhere to the wound through your goggles. When it done you switch off the light and push it aside to examine the wound. The skin is pink and healthy looking, like a new born human baby’s skin… not one fresh out of a tube.
You look up at Crosshair whose watching you again. “I never expected a clone to share my point of view on all of this.”
“Most of the regs don’t think beyond the next battle,” Crosshair replies darkly.
You’re feeling braver but still don’t want to be overheard so don’t raise your voice above a whisper. “One day this war will end. Then what? If we win will the surviving clones be given citizenship to the Republic? A place in society?”
“Hardly,” Crosshair responds darkly.
You reach across for a med-patch when your eyes fall on a marker pen. In one of those moments where you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing you begin scribbling on the inside of the med-patch. Crosshair frowns, watching you write.
“I will need to look at that wound again,” you announce loudly, wondering if the trainee nurses watched all of that or not. You turn the med-patch around revealing your room number and door code on it for Crosshair to see before you carefully place it across the wound. “Sometimes small melanomas form in the repaired site and I will need to see it before you ship out again to ensure that hasn’t happened.”
Crosshair pulls his shirt on before sliding off the examination bench. For a moment you worry he hasn’t got the cue as he rummages in the pocket of his blacks for a fresh toothpick. He sticks it in his mouth, barely taking his gaze off you.
“Any particular time Doc?”
Your heart flip flops wildly in your chest. “I work day shifts mostly, unless there’s an emergency then you’ll have to wait your turn.”
“Noted,” he says before slinking out of the med-bay in long, jaunty steps.
The door closes behind you and suddenly you feel breathless, like you want to sit down and breath into a paper bag. You instead lean on the trolley and begin rearranging your things, forcing yourself to focus on your job, not what just happened. To your relief when you push the trolley back into the nurse’s station the three juniors have left. Normally you’d rip them a fresh one for not staying and watching you work but this time you don’t care. You sit with a flop in the chair and take a few deep breaths aware of your nerves jangling.
It wasn’t just what was said, it’s what wasn’t. The looks, the gestures, the way he moved… everything. You’re insane for giving him access to your room and if you’re both caught together alone the consequences would be catastrophic, for both of you. Best case scenario is you get sacked and have to work some back-alley Doctor’s surgery in the lower levels of Coruscant but for Crosshair the prognosis is worse. You know what happens to clones who don’t tow the line. You’ve seen it happen. You take another shuddering breath and try not to think about that praying that Crosshair is smart enough to ignore your offer. That would be the smart move its just you don’t think that’s what’s going to happen…