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“He’ll—he’ll die.”
Crosshair can feel his heart rate increasing, his vision darkening. Mayday will die if he doesn’t do something. If someone doesn’t do something.
Lieutenant Nolan doesn’t move, face set in a stone cold look of disgust.
Mayday coughs violently, blood dripping from his mouth. Crosshair turns to look at him, and watches as Mayday’s eyes widen momentarily. The two men look at one another for just a second, until Mayday’s eyes roll to the back of his head, and his body goes limp on the concrete.
Crosshair raises his hand from his side and presses two fingers to Mayday’s pulse point. His heart is beating, and Crosshair searches his face as he feels the time between the beats increase, and increase, and increase. Until, under his fingers, he feels nothing at all.
“He served his purpose as a solider of the Empire.” Nolan’s words are coated in slime, sliding out of his mouth. Crosshair lifts his gaze just enough to see Lieutenant Nolan walking towards him with long and steady steps.
He doesn’t understand. “You—you could have saved him,” Crosshair says, voice tight with anger.
Nolan steps up to Crosshair, eyes cast down with revulsion.
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me. He is expendable, as are you. And if you speak to me again with such disrespect, I’ll see to it you meet a similar fate, clone.” He spits the word ‘clone,’ as if expelling a sickness from his body.
Crosshair stares at the ground, head heavy, mind racing.
A shadow speeds across the concrete in front of his eyes. It looks like a bird, wings stretched to their full capacity, soaring quickly overhead.
He glances to Mayday, limp and lifeless. Only a few moments ago he was breathing, he was walking, he was even conversing with Crosshair as a means to stay awake, and not succumb to hypothermia or whatever else was manifesting inside of his body. To stay alive.
What does it matter, now that he is dead?
“Now, leave him and get back to work, while you’re still useful.” The sentence barely leaves Nolan’s mouth before he turns and starts to walk back to the facility.
Over the sound of wind rushing in Crosshair’s ears, he hears a deep caw echo from above. He looks up, seeing the bird return in a large circle in the sky. A vulture, it must be. It flies gracefully, no pumping of wings necessary. It just glides overhead, and away.
Crosshair can feel his body pulling him towards the earth. He’s exhausted, he can barely stand on his own two feet. But his eyes hold on the back of Lieutenant Nolan’s head.
Lieutenant Nolan, spewing words with no meaning, moving in one ear and out the other. Crosshair doesn’t truly have to register them to know that they are karabast.
“Lieutenant,” he grumbles, the corners of his mouth turned downward.
His arms hang at his sides, protesting in pain as Crosshair raises his left one up and up, blaster like a bar of beskar in his hand.
Nolan turns on his heel, eyes meeting the end of Crosshair’s blaster. He barely recognizes it before Crosshair’s trigger finger pulls back, and he fires a round right into Nolan’s chest.
Steam billows from the blaster. The shot is perfect—of course it is. Despite Crosshair’s exhaustion, his heavy breathing and the sweat dripping into his eyes, he doesn’t miss.
He never misses.
Lieutenant Nolan stands relatively still, shock evident in his expression: eyebrows raised, mouth parted open. He reaches a hand up to the wound gingerly before collapsing in a heap.
Crosshair follows quickly after, crumpling next to the body of Mayday. His heart beats heavy in his chest, pounding against the concrete. He turns his head to the side, temple touching the icy ground.
Mayday’s face has gone slack, eyes closed, mouth neutral. His hair moves with every gust of wind, and Crosshair can almost believe that with each movement, it is simply Mayday trying to find a more comfortable position to rest in.
Crosshair lifts his arm, tentatively reaching out towards Mayday’s face. With careful precision, he places his hand on Mayday’s cheek. His face is wet with sweat, and somehow warm from the beating sun. The skin above his eyebrow is peeling, probably due to a burn from sunlight reflected off the snow. His beard is full, and the little patches of stubble high on his cheek prickle against Crosshair’s palm.
He searches the dead clone’s face for something. For more information about him, facts that Crosshair would never get to learn. About the life he led before Barton IV, who he was without the Empire breathing down his back. Or forgetting about him entirely.
He looks and looks. But all he can see are his brothers.
His brothers.
Crosshair drops his hand from Mayday’s face and sits up quickly, scrambling on bruised hands and knees until he is at least fifteen feet away from the clone.
Mayday stays still. Of course he does, he’s just a corpse now.
Yet, something in Crosshair expects him to stand up, to walk over to him and say, Why have you chosen this life? To grab Crosshair under his chin, lift his head up, and stare into his eyes.
An answer to a question that wasn’t verbally asked is drawn out of Crosshair.
“I don’t know,” he whispers, hand grasping the side of his head. He feels the ridges of his skin, stretched and melded over his scalp where his inhibitor chip used to be. “I don’t know,” he repeats.
The voice doesn’t stop, Mayday’s smooth tone an echo amongst the quiet.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
Crosshair nods his head vigorously, eyes squeezed closed. In his mind, he sees Mayday standing in front of him, helmet clutched under his arm. A helmet that would end up with the rest, a monument to the clones who died for the cause. A cause they didn’t even believe in anymore.
“But what am I supposed to do?” He asks.
There’s a pause, long enough that Crosshair’s eyes crack open, and he peers through the slits in his eyelids to Mayday’s limp body.
From this distance, it looks like the sweat on his face is drying. Only now does Crosshair really see the cuts and bruises sustained from their trek through the storm, the holes in Mayday’s uniform, the physical damage caused by the avalanche. He’s been beaten by the elements as much as Crosshair has.
The wind picks up, whipping by Crosshair’s ear, and with it, a simple phrase: Go home.
Crosshair feels his breath catch in his throat, stuck behind his Adam’s Apple. He unknowingly bites down on the inside of his cheek, until the taste of blood fills his mouth, and he swallows the coppery liquid with a gasp.
Home.
Crosshair hasn’t known such a place, such a feeling, since he was a little boy. All the same, Kamino was a confusing point between safety and exile.
Was it a home because he was made there? Because it was the only place he’d ever known as his own? Because it had his bed, and his meals, and his weapon close by?
Was that the exact reason it became a prison?
Or, was it a home because he had his brothers. Because he was constantly surrounded by their company, their brotherly affections.
Is that what makes a home?
Even if Crosshair considers Kamino his home—which he doesn’t—it doesn’t matter anymore, because it no longer exists. Gone in a fiery blaze ordered by the Empire, burned to the depths of the sea.
Now, he was without a place to go.
But he wasn’t without a family to return to.
Family.
A bright and cheery tone echoes in his mind, the image of a young blonde girl with hope in her eyes conjured before him.
Omega had said that, despite his extended absence, Crosshair was family.
Standing on the landing platform, staring at the charred remains of the place they were all born, she reassured him that they were a family. He was her brother.
She told him that he was welcome back, despite their differences. In fact, he wasn’t just welcome. She wanted him to come back.
But does he want that?
Did home have to be a place? Couldn’t it be a person? A group of people?
All his life, Crosshair was perfectly fine with being the odd one out. He didn’t need to be friends with other clone troopers, didn’t need men to talk to or eat with.
He didn’t need people behind him to cheer him on, to show him a sense of affection, of brotherly love.
So why does he feel so empty?
The vulture’s shadow returns, flying free above Crosshair and Mayday. He looks up to outstretched wings, dappled grey against the blue sky.
Freedom. Flight.
Home.
Just leave, Crosshair thinks. You don’t have to stay here.
You don’t have to stay here.
“Apprehend him!” Someone shouts, muffled behind a helmet. Crosshair doesn’t really register the voice anyway—he hears it, sure, but it doesn’t mean anything to him as he stares at Mayday. At Hunter. At Wrecker. At Tech. At Echo.
Even at Omega.
Someone grabs his left arm, and someone else grabs his right. Crosshair is pulled up to his feet, but he can’t really hold himself up. All the blood has rushed to his head, leaving his limbs loose and heavy. His arms are drawn together behind his back, wrists cuffed.
“You’re sick,” someone sneers, before he’s yanked towards the base. Crosshair looks on as the group of clones lead the way, and he turns his head to see more clones on all sides, watching him.
Even while being dragged away from Mayday, Crosshair cannot tear his eyes from him, and stares over his shoulder.
There, with Mayday, lies his brothers. In him are the memories of a time before this. A time on Kamino, a time with the Jedi, a time where he was full of more.
Years ago, they were children with child-like thoughts and child-like tendencies. Outside of the constant training and discipline. Outside of every attempt Crosshair made to be like the other clones, when when he knew that he and his brothers were nothing like them.
Mayday’s face is turning red, though Crosshair isn’t sure if it’s from the blinding sun or from the biting cold.
No one moves to Mayday. Crosshair wonders if his body will be taken away and disposed of, or if it will be left for the vulture.
The breeze kicks up again, moving Mayday’s hair off of his forehead. In another life, perhaps he could be sleeping, exhausted from a hard days work. Crosshair would walk over to him, shake him awake, and ask, “Should we go home?”