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Thorn hadn’t always been Thorn.
Back in the early days after Kamino, when his fresh batch was dumped into their first real battalion like factory-standard replacement parts, his new Commander had barked out a demand for his name. When CT-6828 stiffly reported his digits, the officer snorted and shook his head.
"I don't care about your karking serial code, trooper. You need a name out here. Everyone needs a name," the commander said, before handing him a piece of bleak front-line wisdom: “But watch what you choose to call yourself, shiny. A name is just an open invitation for the universe to kill you.”
That was exactly why Commander Void, the battalion’s second-in-command, had chimed in with a dry shrug, crossing his scarred arms over his chest plate. “And for kriff's sake, keep it grounded. You don’t want to go by 'Crusher.' Can you imagine me reading the morning casualty report? 'Crusher was crushed by a battle droid.' It sounds borderline idiotic. Pick something that won't make the boys laugh at your funeral. Bad for morale.”
It was a stupid, paranoid superstition, obviously. But when you’re bred in a sterile test tube specifically to fill a government-funded casket, you get weirdly attached to omens. Death was an inevitable job hazard; an embarrassing death, however, was completely unacceptable. You couldn't control the blaster bolt, but you could damn well control the punchline.
So CT-6828 went back to the drawing board, suddenly forced to choose his identity with the paranoid caution of a bomb defusal squad. It was frustrating, honestly, because a name had never naturally stuck to him. Back on Kamino, his batchmates had tried every trick in the book to pin a nickname on him during cadet drills, but nothing ever fit his cold, unreadable glare. He had remained a blank slate, a ghost in the sterile domes. Now, left entirely to his own devices, he spent long nights running potential names through his head, trying to find something that fit the quiet, burning devotion he felt for his purpose. Because beneath his rigid, standard-issue exterior, CT-6828 deeply, earnestly loved his duty and the grand promise of the Republic. He wanted a name that reflected that pride—preferably one that didn't double as a prophecy.
But every time he leaned toward something noble, the cold, ugly reality of the front lines slapped him right back into the mud. He thought about calling himself 'Shield,' a proud defender of the democracy he revered, until he realized a shield's only real purpose was to politely take hits until it shattered into useless junk. He considered 'Honor,' but out here in the trenches, honor was just a luxury for politicians on Coruscant, usually buried six feet under in a shallow, unwashed ditch.
He even briefly toyed with 'Valor,' but quickly discarded it after watching a highly decorated native captain—a man with enough medals to sink a gunship—take a random, deeply unheroic sniper bolt to the throat while trying to take a leak during a routine march. There was no glory in dying with your pants down.
Every name that sounded like a soldier's dream felt like a cosmic death sentence in disguise. So, CT-6828 chose to stay nameless, stubbornly clinging to his digits as a makeshift shield against the universe's twisted sense of humor. He figured that if he didn't give Death a target, he might actually survive the war.
As it turned out, avoiding an idiotic death was easier said than done, and Commander Void himself didn't survive past their second deployment.
He was pulled through a ruptured hull breach right into the freezing vacuum of open space. The old veteran’s superstition had proven entirely, brutally accurate—the void had literally reached out and claimed its namesake.
But looking back, Thorn couldn't help but think that vanishing into the black was probably one of the better ways to go out. No screaming, no agonizing minutes bleeding out in the mud, no burning plastoid melting into skin. Just a sudden, breathless transition from the chaos of war into absolute, silent nothingness.In a galaxy this loud, a quiet death was a luxury.
But while the universe swallowed Void whole, it seemed entirely unsure of what to do with CT-6828, who remained stubbornly nameless.
Even after their fourth deployment, when a Separatist ambush completely obliterated his entire battalion, leaving him crawling out from under the scorched armor of his brothers. And even after—on the literal first day of his reassignment to a brand-new division—the entire unit was wiped off the map during a brutal, relentless siege.
He was the only one left standing in the smoking ruins when the extraction gunships finally broke through the clouds. The Admiral who stepped off the ramp to survey the slaughter looked at the solitary, blood-streaked clone, shook his head, and let out a grim, exhausted laugh.
"You’re like a karking thorn in my side," the Admiral growled, lighting a ration-pack cigar amidst the wreckage. "Just won't damn well die, will you?"
And just like that, CT-6828 finally had his name.
Thorn.
A stray comment from a bitter officer, and just like that, his whole world shifted. He figured—why the hell not? It fit his bleak reality perfectly. Besides, he actually liked the idea: being a stubborn, annoying presence that everyone was forced to deal with sounded like a pretty good plan.
Then came the endless cycle of the machine: new deployments, fresh assignments, victories that felt hollow, and devastating losses that felt all too familiar. He watched entire units get replaced around him like interchangeable parts, while he just kept ticking forward. Eventually, the meat grinder of the Outer Rim spat him out onto the polished, deceptive streets of the capital, assigning him to the Coruscant Guard.
Through the shifts in scenery, the promotions, and the red paint slapped onto his plastoid armor, Thorn remained exactly the same Thorn. Cynical, hyper-focused, and utterly unyielding—a constant headache for corrupt politicians and lazy bureaucrats who preferred their clones quiet, obedient, and out of the way.
Naturally, Void's old superstition never truly left him. On the rare quiet nights between deployments, Thorn would find himself wondering, What kind of death is waiting for me?
How exactly would his name choose to claim him?
It had become a pathological habit over the years. Whenever he met a new clone and heard his name, Thorn’s mind would automatically start drafting the man’s obituary, guessing exactly how that identity would eventually claim him. The grim mathematics of it were terrifyingly consistent. In at least fifty percent of the cases, he’d get it more or less right, even if the battlefield added its own messy footnotes. If a brother went by 'Bruiser,' Thorn would picture him going down in an epic, bone-crushing brawl with a Magnaguard—only to watch the poor bastard get vaporized by a cheap, random mortar shell. The logic was there, but the universe rarely cared about cinematic consistency.
Eventually, the boys in the Guard caught wind of his habit. They’d crowd around him in the barracks, laughing and demanding he read their futures: "Hey, Thorn, do I go out like a hero, or am I catching a stray on patrol?" Thorn would scowl, waving his hands to shut them up—you didn't invite trouble when the universe was listening.
But one night, Commander Fox stayed behind. He fixed his tired eyes on him and asked quietly, "What about me, Thorn? How do you think I die?"
Thorn froze. The question itself was absurd, and for a second, he honestly didn’t know what to say. It wasn't like he possessed some mystical foresight; he was just a cynical soldier making grim guesses that, to his ongoing regret, happened to come true way too often. But looking at the heavy exhaustion in Fox's face, Thorn knew a defensive shrug wouldn't cut it. He had no clue how actual foxes died in nature, but somewhere in the back of his mind, a cold, persistent instinct whispered that a fox always ended up in a trap. Cornered, snapped, and left to rot in the dark.
And that was exactly why Thorn looked his Commander in the eye and lied.
"You'll survive the karking war, Fox," Thorn said bluntly. "You'll die of old age at a dusty desk, drowning in bureaucracy. The universe loves irony, remember?"
Fox let out a short, humorless breath, and Thorn walked out into the corridor, praying that for once, his percentages were wrong.
It was a heavy, exhausting way to look at his own kind. Whenever those thoughts crept in, he’d find himself remembering his fallen brothers, the faceless sea of armor left behind in the mud. He remembered Void, of course. But weirdly enough, he also thought about that very first Commander—the man who had grimaced at his numbers and started this whole paranoid obsession.
The grim irony was that Thorn couldn't remember the man’s name. He couldn’t even remember how or where the Commander had died. For a long time, Thorn had a nagging urge to look it up in the Coruscant Guard’s military database, to just type in the old battalion code and read the casualty file. But he never did. The datapad would sit on his desk, and he’d just let it gather dust.
Maybe it was better that way. Leaving it as a blank, unsolved puzzle gave the dead man a strange kind of immortality; it kept him alive in Thorn's head far longer than a cold casualty report ever could. And deep down, a cynical, quiet part of Thorn actually liked the idea. If a hardened veteran could leave a lasting, haunting print on a shiny's mind without even leaving a name behind... then maybe, just maybe, Thorn could do the same for someone else.
But still, the question remained: how exactly would his own name choose to claim him? Would he be left behind on some godforsaken rock, holding a position completely alone until the enemy finally overwhelmed him? Would he die bleeding out in a ditch, a discarded piece of battlefield scrap that nobody bothered to log? Or maybe he would simply choke the life out of whatever finally managed to kill him, a thorn catching deep in the throat of Death itself as it tried to swallow him down.
Whatever it was, he just hoped it wouldn’t be a joke.
The days bled into months, and the relentless machinery of the war kept grinding on.
It was during the escort detail to Scipio—safeguarding Senator Amidala—that the cycle finally came full circle. The Coruscant Guard was always stretched thin, leaving no time for formal introductions back at the capital; the fresh batch of shinies had been assigned to Thorn's unit right at the cruiser's boarding ramp.
Now, cooped up in the cold steel belly of the transport as it cut through hyperspace toward the Banking Clan's icy stronghold, Thorn finally walked the line of his new men. Their pristine, unblemished armor looked entirely out of place against the weathered interior of the hold.
Thorn stopped before the first rookie, who stiffly reported his digits, his wide, anxious eyes locked onto the Commander's visor.
Thorn looked at the kid, felt the phantom weight of his own years, and shook his head.
"I don't care about your serial code, trooper. You need a name out here. Everyone needs a name," Thorn said, his voice dropping as he parroted the words of his very first Commander. “But watch what you choose to call yourself, shiny. A name is just an open invitation for the universe to kill you. Keep it grounded.”
The rookie swallowed hard, his throat bobbing behind his pristine collar. He shifted on his boots and muttered, "Right. Sir. I... I'll think of one. Whatever happens... I just don't want to get flattened by a karking tank."
Thorn let out a short, grim bark of a laugh. "Well then," he said, patting the shiny's shoulder as he walked past. "Don't go calling yourself 'Crusher.'"
"I already picked mine, sir! They call me 'Dash'!" another clone standing next to them blurted out, his chest puffing out slightly with pride.
Thorn let out a dry, silent chuckle under his bucket, but offered no reply. He just kept walking.
The kid must have been chewing on those words for the remainder of the hyperspace jump. He kept his mouth shut through the final armor checks and the transition into the planetary dropship, staring at the floor plates in silence. But as the target world grew closer, the quiet in the hold became too loud.
"And what about you, sir? How would you want to go out?"
The rookie blurted the question out over the low, heavy hum of the gunship's engines, just as the red tactical lights kicked on, signaling their final descent toward the frozen surface of Scipio.
Thorn froze, his hand tightening on the overhead grab bar. He looked back at the kid, his eyes narrowing behind his visor. "Eager to read my obituary already, shiny?"
The rookie flinched, shifting uncomfortably against the bulkhead. "No, sir. Sorry, sir. I just... I remembered what you said."
For a second, Thorn didn't say a word. The years of drafting obituaries and playing games with fate finally caught up to him, leaving a bitter taste in his mouth. He slowly turned his gaze away from the kid and toward the opening blast doors, letting the freezing wind of Scipio whip against his armor.
"Honestly? No idea, shiny," Thorn said, a faint, tired smirk cutting through his voice over the rumble of the engines. "Tell you what—ask me again after we clear this escort detail. If we’re both still breathing, maybe I'll have an answer for you. For now, shut up, lock your armor, and just do your karking job. Move!"
The hold erupted into motion.
The rookie slammed his helmet’s locking seal into place and raised his rifle, falling back into formation. The tactical light finally flipped from red to green, signaling they had hit the drop zone.
Thorn didn’t look back. He stepped off the ramp and disappeared into the white.