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The Kaminoans hate soul marks.
Rex knows this from the day he knows to ask. The Nulls and Alphas don’t have any soul marks, just scars where there was once a promise. The eldest clones at least have records, where the scientists had taken photos before beginning the surgeries, but the marks themselves are long gone.
Prime had found out about the removals and thrown a fit, raging so intensely that Nala Se had ended up intubated from the damage he’d dealt, and she hadn’t been the only one. Rex isn’t old enough to remember that, but Cody is, and he whispers the story in the dead of night more than once. Nobody likes Prime very much, except Boba, but that’s one of the few instances they can point to and say ‘he cares more than he likes to admit.’
It’s anathema on Mandalore, one brother claims, a light in his eyes that Rex hasn’t ever seen before. That’s what I heard him telling one of the aruetti trainers.
So is refusing your children so much as a name, another grouses, and the conversation dies an ugly little death. So is letting your children die just because you don’t think they’re good enough. So is turning your back from even letting them be part of your house, let alone part of your clan. Sounds like he cares more about our soul marks than he does for our lives.
Rex doesn’t know how to address that.
He does get a personal visit from Prime, one day, gets asked to show his little marking to the man that is, in some ways, his father.
“Another one,” Jango Fett mutters to the trainer that came with him, the woman holding a datapad and ready to record whatever it is that they’re looking for. He passes a thumb over the marking, frowning. “A lightsaber, lit white, with pale blue halo, between a set of symbolic Jaig eyes. The eyes are dark blue, slightly desaturated. I think they’re meant to frame it like an exaggerated beskad crossguard.”
“Sir?” Rex asks.
“That makes six,” Jango says, still so quiet, and then shakes his head. “Thank you for showing me, 7567.”
“Rex,” he corrects, before he can second-guess himself. “I’m Rex.”
“Thank you, Rex.”
--
The rumors say that anyone with a lightsaber soul mark is going to have a Jedi for a soulmate.
Rex isn’t sure how true that is, but he’s eager to find out.
Prime gets more erratic, more unpleasant at times and almost awkwardly nice at others. Rex meets the others who got Jedi soul marks. He’s the youngest, so far.
Jango tells them all to hide the markings, and to keep them secret. They’d already all known that much, that only batchmates should be told about soul marks. All the adults that should know already do, after all.
“Where’s your dad going?” Rex asks once, when Boba’s been handed over to Cody’s squad for looking after while Prime goes haring off on some trip that nobody gets to know about. Rex hangs out with Cody’s squad more than his own batch, it feels like, but that’s a whole thing that he’s not supposed to talk about since the late transfer to command track.
“Dunno,” Boba says, kicking his feet back and forth. “My soul mark came in. Something about it made him really angry, I think.”
Rex doesn’t ask to see it.
It’s not his place.
--
The Alpha batch is getting quieter, angrier, and end up in hushed conversations with Prime and some of the trainers so often that the rumors start up harder than before. Rex keeps his head down, because the Kaminoans get antsier in time with Jango. Soul marks come up more often, and Rex gets called in to talk to the Alpha clones about his mark. He’s not supposed to, but Prime says it’s important, and Prime is in charge.
“Oh, is that all it took?” one of the Alphas sneers, and Prime shoots them a look that has Rex taking a few hasty steps back. The Alpha clone isn’t even fully grown yet, by natborn standards, but they don’t back down. “What, ready to stop being a dar’buir–”
“That’s enough,” Prime says, low and hard, and the Alpha clone rolls their eyes. “There’s a child here.”
“So now you care about that?”
Rex is escorted back to his rooms.
--
Decommissioning finally stops, for all that it requires Jango almost decapitating a Kaminoan. Someone Rex hopes he never sees again shows up.
(His memory is blurred. He’s sure the man was human, and tall. Elderly enough to have white hair, probably? A… there was fabric that swished when he turned, something dramatic, but…)
(He is not the only one that cannot remember.)
It takes years for anything else to come of it all… at least where the clones can see.
--
Rex is fully grown, as far as clones go. His aging is supposed to slow down to ‘natborn normal’ now, because he’s reached his full height and most of his brainpower, and he’s officially old enough to fight on the field if the war starts tomorrow.
It might.
“Hey, look up.”
Rex listens, and looks, and sees a natborn with Taun We, pale skinned and with reddish hair, soaked to the bone. They wear robes, brown and heavy-looking. Even as he watches, another natborn jogs up from behind, also sodden and pale, but with darker hair that sticks up despite the water. A third joins them, a tad slower and more controlled; this one wears all white, and they—maybe she?—are slight and small and poised in a way that Rex thinks might be how a natborn leader carries themselves, if they aren’t a soldier.
They pass on through the walkway, showing emotions that the Kaminoans can’t read and the clones absolutely can. None of those emotions are… good.
“Shit,” someone mutters. “That was a Jedi.”
“Venn—”
"Did you see their faces?"
"Hey—"
“What if they don’t want us?”
--
Rex is called to Prime’s rooms.
He tries not to look at the wide eyes of the brothers he’s been gossiping with, just stands and pulls on his full kit. He hesitates at his bucket, but then pops it on and marches to what might be his doom. It’s probably not.
He hopes it’s not.
He knocks, and is let in by Boba, and sits down on the couch when Prime tells him to. He removes his helmet when asked. Boba hops up onto the couch between Rex and his father, and leans in against Rex’s side.
There’s a list on the table, one he recognizes, someone having quickly written out all the paired elements on the Jedi-Clone soul marks. Nobody who isn’t already involved in the project would know enough to recognize it for what it is. He spots the ‘yellow tickets’ that Bly got tattooed on his face recently, the ones he won’t claim are or aren’t related to his mark. He spots his own listing of Jaig eyes.
“Prime?”
His… progenitor, maybe, in this situation, looks at him, and holds up a hand. “You saw the list. You can guess why Rex is here.”
Oh. Prime’s using his name without prompting. That’s nice.
“I can’t read it,” the younger Jedi says, with something that might be a pout. Rex wants to roll his eyes, but his helmet is on the table. People would see.
“It’s in Mando’a,” the elder tells him, voice low, and then glances between Rex and the younger Jedi. “Fett, how did you know which one to call? I can guess some things, but—”
“I have a good eye. The hilts are all different. Only one matches.”
“I see.”
Rex fidgets, and tries not to wonder at… at… oh. The younger Jedi’s lightsaber hilt does match Rex’s soul mark.
Boba notices when Rex starts picking at his glove, pressing a finger right to the mark on his wrist, and frowns up at him. He grabs Rex’s hand to still it, and tries to ask a question with his eyebrows. He is mostly unsuccessful.
“Anakin,” the elder Jedi says. Rex still doesn’t know the man's name. “Your hand, please?”
“Why?”
“…you’ll understand in a minute,” the Jedi says, long-suffering in the way of the trainers who dealt with the youngest cadets. “Your hand. No, the other one.”
“Why do you need my hand?”
“Reasons, Anakin. You there, ah… Rex, was it?”
“Yessir.”
The Jedi flinches. “Ah. I suppose I’ll have to get used to that, or… right, Rex, can you come here? I imagine you know what it is that I’m looking to compare.”
Rex has been taught to listen to Jedi, but he has no idea who he’s supposed to listen to here in this moment. The older Jedi is probably in charge, but Rex hasn’t been assigned to anyone yet, so isn’t Prime still technically the closest thing he has to a CO?
He glances at Prime, who just gestures for Rex to go ahead with it.
Rex pulls off a glove, tugs back his sleeve, and bares the symbol on his wrist for inspection.
The younger Jedi’s face morphs from confused irritation to surprise, and then… something Rex doesn’t want to analyze too closely. He’s not sure if it’s wonder or horror. He wasn’t aware the expressions could look so similar.
The Jedi—Anakin—pulls back his own sleeve, moves his wrist to Rex’s and watches as the marks glow faintly from the proximity.
“Looks like Fett was right,” the elder Jedi mutters. He doesn’t sound happy. He looks at the other natborn, the one Rex is pretty sure is a woman, and raises an eyebrow.
She shakes her head, eyes closed.
“You said there were others?” the elder Jedi prompts, and Prime nods. “We are no more open about our marks than most, but I can spot one, maybe two, that I can guess at. I’d need to see the actual markings to confirm, of course, and I imagine that wouldn’t be something anyone would be happy with.”
“The rest can happen naturally,” Prime dismisses. “This was just proof.”
“Not just proof, I hope,” the Jedi mutters. “I’m… I have to call the Council.”
Rex sees the panic in Anakin’s face, and is seized by the urge to do something, anything, to fix it.
“Obi-Wan, you can’t let them–”
“Nobody’s going to separate you,” the elder Jedi says, long-suffering as anything. His name is Obi-Wan, apparently. “And there’s no ‘let,’ Anakin, they outrank me. Significantly. Right now, I’m concerned about the implications of this war, of multiple of these cloned soldiers that have been indoctrinated to fight for and serve the Jedi having soulmates among us, especially given that I have no idea how recently our wartime protocols on such things were updated. There is an entire army that is supposedly in our name, all but enslaved, and ordered by a man ten years dead.”
“Count Dooku is involved,” Prime says, dark and satisfied and petty. “Calling himself Darth Tyrannus. The Kaminoans mostly believe he is an isolated and reclusive Jedi Master that serves as their contact when Sifo-Dyas is unavailable.”
The Jedi named Obi-Wan closes his eyes and breathes deeply, and then stands. “Right. That’s… well, alright, I absolutely have to call the Council now.”
Prime smiles, pulling Boba into his side. Rex finds himself tugged down to sit where Obi-Wan had been a few moments earlier.
“Why are you telling us all this?” the natborn woman says. “This Count sounds like he hired you, did he not?”
“The project predated his involvement, but yes, he’s my supervisor, so to speak.” Prime smiles that same dark smile, runs a hand over Boba’s head and pointedly doesn’t look at Obi-Wan. That smile is… unpleasant. Rex doesn’t want to look at it, and so he looks down to the faint glow at his wrist instead. “Did you know, they told me the clones would be sub-sentient and halfway to droids? Not really people? That my DNA was for the bodies, but the minds would be little more than lines of code? Do you know how much they hated that I saw the evidence of their lies written into my children’s skin?”
Rex jolts, head whipping about and hand pulling away from his soulmate, staring at Prime, his mouth agape in a way a soldier’s shouldn’t but—but he’s—
Rex has never, ever heard the Prime refer to any of them except Boba as his child. His copies, his echoes, his clones, but not his children.
A hand curls into his, and he looks down to find Anakin’s lacing their fingers together. He looks up into a hopeful, unsure smile.
Anakin tilts his head and leans in, lips to Rex’s ear, and says, “When I told Obi-Wan he was like a father to me, he didn’t even know how to respond. Just made a bad joke about it and then pretended it didn’t happen. Is this the same?”
“…close enough,” Rex breathes out, because now isn’t the time to explain just how different a clone’s existence is from what they’ve seen in the holos meant to prepare them for interacting with civilians. That ‘family’ here has always been brothers, your squad and any brother that chooses to take you on, or a brother you choose to nurture, that the Alphas raise them more than Prime or the trainers do, that the older squads are who they turn to because the adults won’t help, that they don’t have parents, and they are discouraged from thinking of children in their futures.
(Protecting intellectual property, one of the scientists had mused. They’d made it very, very difficult for any of the clones to impregnate a partner. Not impossible, because to make it impossible was itself impossible, but… nearly so.)
“There’s millions of us,” Rex says instead. “He doesn’t… he doesn’t usually acknowledge most of us as his.”
Anakin’s face twists, already angry, and the glare he aims at Prime is ghastly. Rex might already be a little in love, just for that. The way Anakin’s fingers squeeze around his is nice, too.
Prime does not notice.
“Can I see the contract you say you signed?” the natborn woman says, and Prime eyes her. He nods, at length, weighing her worth and finding she measures up to whatever it is that he’s decided is necessary.
“Boba, go pack like we’re going on a hunt,” Prime says, pulling out a personal datapad and only dropping his gaze to find the right file. “We’ll probably be leaving tonight.”
“Okay, buir,” Boba says, sliding off the couch. “Am I telling the Alphas the thing you said?”
“No, I’ll handle that myself. You just pack.” He stands, nods to the natborn woman, and moves around the table. “Senator, I’ll sit with you, if you don’t mind. I imagine you and Knight Kenobi are the best suited to get this problem fixed.”
“And me?” Anakin demands.
“You,” Prime says, with a just a hint of condescending drawl. “have just met your soulmate. I assumed you’d want some privacy to get to know each other.”
Anakin flushes, a little angry and a lot embarrassed. It’s frighteningly cute. “I—I mean—I don’t—”
“The clones are mentally the ages they look, but do remember they’ve had practically no time to gain any sort of experience,” Prime says, already ignoring them in favor of pointing something out on the datapad to the senator. “Take advantage of any of my kids, and I’ll be the one hunting you down. I’m told I’m rather good at it.”
Anakin’s face does some acrobatics. Rex would pay more attention, but he can feel himself turning just as red.
“Rex, you know where the private meeting room is,” Prime says, and waves a hand in the direction of the tiny, tiny office that’s by the door. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Be nice,” the Senator hisses, smacking Prime’s arm.
“He’s ten.”
“…still.”
Rex just stands and pulls Anakin away to the little room before things can get worse.
They’re delayed when Obi-Wan asks what they’re doing from the kitchen he’s been using to get a spot of privacy, but then Anakin says “we’re just going to talk, Master,” and they get an aggrieved sigh and a response of “the clothes stay on, padawan, and you’ll need to finish up whatever conversation you have soon, there’s work to do and being a padawan only excuses you from so much.”
Rex backs into the meeting room, yanks Anakin in, and then decides to throw caution to the wind and just press their lips together.
Oh.
Okay.
His Jedi is kissing back.
Lack of caution: good.
The mark at his wrist thrums, warm and comfortable, and Rex pulls away. He stifles the noise he wants to make. When Anakin whines, small and soft but clearly disappointed, Rex offers him a small grin he knows would get him called ‘shy’ by his asshole older brothers.
“We probably should actually get to know each other,” Rex says. “I don’t even know your last name.”
“I… yeah, I don’t know yours either, unless it’s Fett.”
“It’s not. I don’t have one.”
Anakin’s face does another one of those ‘I’m angry for you’ twists that Rex is quickly coming to recognize, and then he sighs and falls into one of the chairs. “Okay. So. I don’t know much about the soldier life. Tell me about it.”
And he does.