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A soldier shouldn’t flinch at orders.
Relay knows this.
He learned it before he learned how to strip a blaster. Orders are structure. Orders are certainty. Orders turn hundreds of identical cadets into an army capable of moving with one mind.
Orders keep soldiers alive.
“Relay, stop.”
His body locks.
The tray slips from his hands and strikes the mess-hall floor. Metal bowls scatter beneath the tables. Caf splashes across his boots.
Relay doesn’t breathe.
Rain pounds against plastoid armor that isn’t there.
A four-armed shadow turns through blue fog.
You will obey.
“Relay.”
The voice is closer now.
Not Krell.
Thire stands several steps away, one hand raised. He doesn’t approach. He doesn’t touch him.
“You’re standing on broken glass,” Thire says. “Step backward.”
Relay looks down.
One of the caf cups shattered when it hit the floor. A jagged piece is trapped beneath his heel.
He steps back.
His pulse doesn’t slow.
Thire studies him for one long second, then looks toward the other Guardsmen in the mess.
“Someone get a broom.”
Three troopers move at once.
Nobody laughs.
That is the first difference Relay noticed about the Guard.
In the 501st, someone would’ve made a joke. Jesse would’ve accused him of losing a battle with lunch. Fives would’ve announced the casualty count. Hardcase would’ve found a way to break another cup for symmetry.
Relay misses that.
He also knows he would’ve hated it.
He crouches automatically.
“I’ll clean it.”
“No,” Thire says.
Relay flinches again.
Smaller this time.
Still visible.
Thire’s expression doesn’t change.
“You’ll sit down,” he says, quieter. “That isn’t a disciplinary order. You’re shaking.”
Relay looks at his hands.
They are.
He curls them into fists.
“A soldier shouldn’t react like this.”
“A soldier reacts however his nervous system decides after a Jedi General makes him execute his own brothers.”
Several conversations around them stop.
Relay’s stomach twists.
He doesn’t like hearing it said aloud. Umbara is easier when it remains a sequence of reports. Casualties. Operational misconduct. General Pong Krell killed while attempting escape.
Not Waxer staring up at them from the mud.
Not Krell laughing.
Not the trigger beneath Relay’s finger.
Thire pulls out a chair with his boot.
“Sit.”
Relay’s knees almost buckle before he reaches it.
The Guardsmen clean the broken cup around him without comment. One replaces his spilled meal. Another sets a fresh caf beside it.
No one asks what happened.
They already know enough.
Fox had brought him to Coruscant under sedation, declared CT-6922 dead, and removed Dogma from every system that mattered. The 501st received an execution notice.
His brothers believe he is dead.
Relay sometimes thinks they're right.
Dogma had followed orders. Dogma had believed good soldiers obeyed.
Relay shot a Jedi General in the back.
The name still feels borrowed, but at least it doesn’t belong to the trooper who stood beside Krell for too long.
Thire sits across from him.
“The order was because you were about to cut your foot.”
“I know.”
“You’re allowed to ask why.”
Relay looks up.
“What?”
“If someone gives you an order here and you don’t understand it, ask why.”
“That delays compliance.”
“Sometimes.”
“On Kamino, questioning trainers was insubordination.”
“This isn’t Kamino.”
It resembles Kamino more than the 501st ever did.
The Guard runs on schedules precise to the minute. Armor inspections happen without warning. Barracks remain clean. Reports are expected in exact formats, and Thire can detect a missing punctuation mark from across the room.
Relay understands that.
Discipline is familiar.
The difference is what happens when someone fails.
Nobody disappears during the night, returns from medical with empty eyes and a different posture, calls punishment training.
“Coruscant doesn’t feel different,” Relay says before he can stop himself.
Thire waits.
“There are more civilians here than I’ve ever seen. They look at us like he did.”
“Krell.”
Relay’s fingers tighten around the edge of the table.
“Yes.”
On the front, civilians usually stared because soldiers meant the battle had reached their homes. On Coruscant, some stare with curiosity. Others with disgust.
One man outside the Senate had clicked his fingers at Relay and ordered him to carry a case.
A woman on the transport platform had asked her companion why defective units were permitted in public.
A senator’s aide had looked directly at the tattoo covering Relay’s face and said Kamino should’ve corrected him before deployment.
Krell had called them numbers.
Coruscant has a million different words for the same thing.
“Some are worse,” Relay says. “At least Krell admitted he hated us.”
Thire leans back.
“I won’t tell you Coruscant is better.”
Relay hadn’t expected him to.
“But inside Headquarters,” Thire continues, “you are not property. Anyone who treats you like it answers to Fox.”
“Even senators?”
“Especially senators. Fox enjoys paperwork when it becomes a weapon.”
That sounds impossible.
... Relay has seen Fox make an admiral apologize to a medical orderly, so perhaps not entirely impossible.
A shout rises from the corridor.
“Commander!”
A young Guard enters carrying half a door.
Thire looks at it.
The trooper looks at the door.
“Training accident.”
“What kind?”
“Ghost told us to breach the room.”
“Why did you remove the entire door?”
“She didn’t specify how much breach.”
Thire closes his eyes.
Behind the trooper, two others appear with the remaining half.
Relay stares.
The scene is absurd.
For one brief second, Fives’s voice fills the space in his memory.
Technically, we got inside.
Relay’s mouth twitches.
Thire notices.
“Something funny?”
“No, sir.”
“That answer usually means yes.”
The troopers carrying the door retreat before Thire can decide which regulation they have violated.
The mess resumes around them.
Not the 501st’s noise. Not yet.
But noise.
Thire stands.
“Finish eating. Then report to Investigations.”
Relay’s muscles tense.
Thire pauses.
“You’ll be sorting witness statements,” he adds. “Nothing disciplinary. No one is angry. You aren’t in trouble.”
The tension loosens by a fraction.
“Yes, sir.”
Thire starts away, then stops.
“And Relay?”
“Yes?”
“You can refuse an order that is illegal.”
Relay stares at him.
The words make no sense.
Soldiers don’t refuse orders.
Krell had known that. That was how he used them.
Thire seems to read the confusion on his face.
“You won’t believe me today,” he says. “Keep hearing it anyway.”
Then he leaves.
Relay looks down at the replacement tray his brothers placed before him.
The Guard is disciplined like Kamino.
It is chaotic in ways Kamino never allowed.
Coruscant is safer than Umbara and somehow full of more enemies. The 501st believes him dead, and part of him remains in that dark forest with a smoking blaster in his hands.
He still flinches when someone gives him an order.
But here, they tell him why.
For now, that is enough to make him stay.