Chapter Text
Splice wasn’t anything special, as far as clones went. Not a commando, not a pilot, not an ARC. Just a trooper, one of millions in white. And Splice had no problem with that— let the ARCs and the spec ops boys get all the glory.
No, Splice wasn’t one to stand out from the crowd, even in his own batch of five. Kicker and Shok were better marksmen, and Pip was better with hand-to-hand, and Sprint could kick their asses in any strategy game and make the worst field rations taste good. So, content with fitting in as just another face among millions, Splice was decanted and trained, growing up with five identical brothers with five identical suits of shiny white armor and five identical haircuts. They studied and trained and bickered and grew closer under the watchful eyes of the Kaminoans and trainers. They passed their tests, and, at nine years old, Splice and his brothers shipped off Kamino, watching the rain-soaked world grow smaller behind them. They joined a Jedi’s battalion, painting their white armor in violet. Shok got a tattoo of a krayt dragon on his back (Kicker never stopped teasing him about it.) Splice grew out his hair, and Kicker learned to braid it. Pip dyed his hair blonde, and then orange, and then red.
They lost Pip. Two months later, Sprint. On a campaign, Shok went MIA, and they found his body a week later, rotted and half-eaten by the worms. Splice grieved. He carried on. He held on tighter to Kicker.
When Splice and his remaining batchmate were tasked with delivering a message to their Jedi general, it was just another job— small, in the grand scheme of the war, but it would help them win this battle, and wasn’t that his whole purpose?
And then their LAAT went down in enemy territory. When Splice managed to crawl his way out of the burning wreckage with Kicker, he thanked whatever or whomever out there bothered to listen to a clone’s prayer. He thought he was lucky.
It wasn’t long before he discovered how wrong he was.
The building must have been beautiful once, before the war. As the Separatists dragged Splice and Kicker into the massive, high-ceilinged room, a tiny, distant part of Splice’s mind took in the ornately carved stone walls, the lush colors of the stained-transperisteel windows, and the crumbling statues. Once, this place might even have been a church, and that same tiny, detached, and profoundly unhelpful bit of Splice’s mind was darkly amused at the irony of that as the soldiers dumped Splice and Kicker at the Separatist general’s feet.
The thin-faced human looked down at them, frowning. The dozen people in his entourage gathered in around them. Their faces were sharpened by hunger, their hands always-moving at their sides. A woman with long, thin fingers brushed her hand against her blaster. Behind her, a man with thick, scarred hands stared at Kicker, slowly spinning a knife through his fingers. Splice sat up, angling his body in front of Kicker’s.
“Where will your troops attack next?” the Separatist asked without preamble.
Splice said nothing.
The human sighed, briefly closing his eyes, before opening them again and fixing Splice with a hard look.
“I can promise you that my men will be far less merciful than I am trying to be. I am giving you the chance to walk out of here with your lives, clone. Are you capable of understanding that?”
Splice tilted his head, looking straight into the Separatist’s eyes and curling his lip. It would take more than words to loosen his tongue.
The Separatist sighed again, his shoulders slumping. The lines around his eyes deepened, and he turned away. He waved his hand, and four of his men moved forward, men with a hardness to their faces that made Splice’s stomach twist.
“Make them talk.”
Splice gritted his teeth, clenching his jaw hard. The woman with the knife and the red nail polish knelt at his side, pressing into his space, too close. Splice focused on breathing. His left eye socket was a mess of blinding pain.
“C’mon, sweetheart,” Red-nails said. “Give us something. I don’t want to cut up that pretty face any more than I have already.”
When he didn’t answer, the knife moved in his peripheral vision again. Another sharp point of pain, another dragging line of hurt.
“Leave him alone!” Splice registered Kicker roaring at the woman. Distantly, he urged Kicker to shut up before she turned her knife on him. As always, Kicker didn’t listen. “Hey! Ne shab'rud'ni, demagolka!”
She ignored Kicker.
“Tell me where your Jedi is going to attack.”
Red-nails tangled her thin fingers tighter into his hair. Her knife dragged slowly across the bridge of his nose. He couldn’t stop the strangled cry that escaped him.
“We don’t want to hurt you any more than we have,” she said softly, lifting the knife away and stroking her hand across his face in an imitation of comfort. “Just tell us, and this can stop.”
“F–fuck you.”
Red-nails sighed.
“This isn’t working.”
She withdrew, leaving Splice a shivering mess on the floor. One of the men, the one with crooked front teeth, spoke.
“Clone. Look at me.”
Splice ignored the order, focusing on breathing, keeping his eyes—eye—screwed shut.
“Clone. Look at me now,” Crooked-teeth repeated.
Blinking the stinging blood from his eye, Splice squinted up at the looming form of the Separatists, and his heart froze in his chest.
Crooked-teeth knelt above Kicker, his knee pressing into the side of his throat. His blaster pressed hard against Kicker’s temple.
“Allow me to make this simple for you, clone. Give us what we want, or I blow a hole clean through your brother’s head.”
Every training, every lesson, every furious trainer shrieked the same thing in Splice’s head: Don’t talk. Never talk. I am CT-5151, soldier of the Grand Army of the Republic, and I will not break. I am stronger than pain. I serve the Republic. My duty is to the Republic.
Kicker stared at him with wide eyes. High-pitched, desperate gasps escaped from between his bared teeth.
My duty is to the Republic.
And this was Splice’s brother.
My duty is to…
Kicker was his brother. His last batchmate. These Separatists wanted him to choose between his brother and the Republic he had been bred to serve over everything else.
And, in that moment, Splice found that it wasn’t a choice at all.
Splice woke up on a table.
Everything hurt. Something rough wrapped his face, covering his eyes. He tried to reach up, to push the covering off his eyes, but his hands wouldn’t obey him, only twitching sluggishly at his sides. He tried to speak. He couldn’t.
He forced his floating mind to focus. Something held his jaw open. He flexed his jaw, feeling along the plastic shape pressed against his lips, the sticky press of tape, and the thick pressure of something soft along his jaw. He tried to pull away from it, but it moved with him. He tried to sit up, but he came up against the broad shape of a strap, wrapped tight around his chest, holding him down. Panic spiked in his chest, breaching through the drugged haze. He tried to swallow, and something tugged inside him. And then he felt the hard, plastic shape pressing flat against his tongue. The tube snaking down his throat.
Some small, detached part of his mind supplied the words “endotracheal tube,” plucked from long nights listening to Pip’s muttering as he studied for the medic’s tests he never got the chance to take. That same, small, distant part of him knew he shouldn’t touch it, that it was there for a reason.
Splice’s hands shot up of their own volition, seizing the mess of plastic tubes and pulling.
The wet, garbled scream that came from his mouth didn’t sound like him.
Large hands seized his fingers and wrenched them open. A slow, water-cold voice cut through his panting attempts at speech.
“Stop, or you will damage yourself.”
He fought against the hands, bucking, biting down on the tubing.
“Stop.”
The hands wrenched his wrists down to his sides. He didn’t feel the circular shape of restraints closing around his wrists until it was too late. His mouth moved around the tube as he snarled out inhuman sounds. He didn’t know what he was trying to say, just that he couldn’t be here, and he needed to see Kicker with sharp-edged desperation, and that he needed this thing out of his mouth.
“Do not attempt to speak.” A long-fingered hand closed around his shoulder. “Your vocal cords are damaged.”
His mouth moved again. Another bloody gurgle.
“You are on Kamino,” the voice said, seeming to understand. The hand moved, brushing against the crook of Splice’s elbow, where he could feel the pinch of an IV. The cold rush of sedatives dragged him down again.
“You’re so useless, you know that, don’t you?” Kicker said.
Splice sighed. “Are you going to help me or not?”
“What’s the magic word?”
“You’re an asshole.”
Kicker, not looking up from his book, waved one hand slowly in an obnoxious “I’m waiting” motion. Splice hissed out a sigh through his teeth.
“Please.”
Kicker smirked and stood up from his bunk, making his way across the barracks to where Splice sat, his hair a tangled mess of knots and pins and rubber bands.
“Force, you’re high-maintenance. What would you do without me, vod’ika?”
“Crash and burn, I’m sure,” Splice answered dryly.
Kicker chuckled and combed his fingers through Splice’s hair, pulling the pins and rubber bands free and detangling the knots in less than two minutes, which just wasn’t fair— Splice had been trying for twenty minutes, and all he managed to do was turn his hair into a rat’s nest.
“Braids?” Kicker asked.
“Two.”
Kicker hummed in acknowledgment, reaching past Splice’s shoulder to grab two rubber bands. Splice smiled to himself. If he could turn around, he knew he would see Kicker frowning in concentration as he braided, the two rubber bands held in his teeth. Unlike Shok, who had all the delicacy of a feral aak hound, Kicker rarely pulled his hair, and Splice let himself relax as Kicker worked, settling into the soothing rhythm of the repetitive tugging, staring out the window into the roiling rainstorm. Distant thunder rumbled, a low undertone beneath the sharp lashing of the rain against the window. Kicker’s fingers moved against his scalp, tugging his shoulder-length hair into two neat braids.
“There. All done,” Kicker said, tying the braids off.
“Thanks, Kick.”
“Don’t get all mushy on me now, vod’ika,” Kicker said, rolling his eyes and tugging on the end of one of Splice’s braids. “I know how helpless you are without me.”
Splice told them everything. He spilled his guts, and he answered every question, and he didn’t turn his remaining eye toward Kicker. He didn’t want to see the look in his brother’s eyes.
Finally, finally, the Separatists ran out of questions. Splice let his head drop against the floor, the marble cool to the touch and tacky with half-dried blood. He drifted, not bothering to listen to their voices moving above him.
And then the footsteps moved away from him.
Toward Kicker.
Splice forced his eyelids open, gasping as his wounds stretched with the motion, blinking blood out of his eye. Across the room, Crooked-teeth stood above Kicker.
“Open your mouth,” Crooked-teeth said.
Kicker snarled out an animalistic refusal.
“He might not look it right now, but your talkative little brother is still alive,” Crooked-teeth said. Splice distantly felt someone prod his shoulder. “He still has one more eye to lose.”
Kicker stared at him, his eyes meeting Splice’s, his jaw clenched tight. Splice tried to shake his head, but he couldn’t make himself move.
“Open your mouth.”
No no no, please no…
Kicker opened his mouth, glaring up at the Separatists with red-hot hate. Toxic panic wrapped around Splice’s chest, ripping at his insides. He tried to stand, to stop them, but Red-nails jammed her knee into his back and tightened her grip on his hair. Splice couldn’t do a damn thing but watch as Crooked-teeth jammed the barrel of his blaster into Kicker’s mouth. Kicker gagged as the blaster’s muzzle hit the back of his throat. Crooked-teeth smiled his wide jackal’s smile.
And then he shot Kicker through the head.
Splice screamed. He screamed harder than he ever had before, harder than he thought he even could, as Kicker crumpled to the floor. His last brother. His brother who hated red ration bars and always cheated at sabacc and braided his hair, who used to crawl into his bunk after nightmares and kick him in his sleep. His brother whose brains now painted the wall red.
Crooked-teeth shoved Kicker’s body away and holstered his blaster.
“I’ll inform the generals.”
“What about this one?” Red-nails said, tangling her hand tighter into Splice’s hair.
“We got what we needed from him,” Crooked-teeth said, heading for the door. “He’s all yours. Have fun.”
Splice woke up underwater. The previously blaring pain had faded to a dull undercurrent. He opened his eyes, but the world remained dark. He turned his head, looking for a light source, but he couldn’t see anything, though he could feel his eyelids moving as he blinked. His eye sockets ached. He kicked, trying to propel himself to the surface, but he couldn’t move. His hand brushed against a curved, smooth surface. Glass. A tank? He shifted, making his still-drowsy mind focus. Harness straps dug into the flesh under his arms and across his chest. A breathing apparatus wrapped around his face, through which cold oxygen flowed across his tongue. He was in a bacta tank.
A muffled voice spoke outside the tank. A moment later, the harness moved, lifted him up out of the bacta. Large, gloved hands moved against his face, removing the breathing apparatus. He shifted against the harness, wincing as, without the bacta supporting him, it took his full weight, digging into his skin. He shivered as the cold air played across his naked skin.
The hands moved again, taking hold of his chin and wiping his face clean with rough swipes of a cloth.
All at once, Splice could see again. He blinked against the bright lights of the lab. A tall male Kaminoan stood before him. Splice, still in the harness, hung at eye level with him. He stared at Splice for a long moment with shriekhawk-gold eyes. Splice shivered.
“My name is Vola Ka,” the Kaminoan said. “What is your designation?”
Splice tried to speak. His throat burned. He brought one hand up to feel across his neck, finding thin, tender surgical scars on his throat.
“Designation,” Vola Ka ordered again, his golden eyes sharp.
“CT-5151.”
The hard, electronic voice of a droid answered Vola Ka’s question, and Splice jerked back against the harness, swinging his head around to search the lab. Every detail stood out in crisp detail, but he found no droids.
“Very good,” Vola Ka continued. “With which legion and which Jedi did you report to?”
Splice made himself focus. “187th legion, under the command of General Mace Windu,” the electronic voice said, again answering for him.
With a swoop of sick shock, Splice traced his shaking fingers down his throat again. That was his voice.
“Sir? What happened?”
“You were injured. I repaired you,” Vola Ka said, looking down at his datapad.
“What—?”
Vola Ka shoved the datapad in his face. “Read the letters as far down as you can.”
Splice obeyed, reading down to the last, tiny line of text, one that, he distantly remembered, even the best of the GAR’s snipers struggled to read. His voice shook. The skin around his eyes burned.
“Sir—”
“Now, CT-5151, what was the—?”
“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO TO ME?”
Vola Ka finally looked up from his datapad, blinking slowly in the face of Splice’s roar. For a long moment, the only sounds were Splice’s sharp breathing, the patter of the bacta dripping off his body, and the creak of the harness holding him suspended above the bacta tank.
“You were severely damaged. Calculations showed costs to repair and rehabilitate you would far outweigh the costs to replace you. You were slated for decommissioning.”
Vola Ka continued typing on his datapad. Splice tried to breathe.
“I requested that you be transferred to me instead.”
“W-why?” he said through his chattering teeth.
“I am the head of Tipoca City’s cybernetics research division. I research, draft, and test cybernetics for potential use in the field. You are here because it would be wasteful to use healthy, battle-ready clones for my experiments. I take the injured, deformed, and unstable and give them purpose.”
Splice asked again, forcing a low, hoarse whisper from his mouth.
“What did you do to me?”
“On your previous mission, you were captured. You held intelligence the enemy needed. Under duress, you gave them that information, and the battle was lost. The Separatist leaders, with your intelligence, were able to hold back the forces of the 187th and then escape unscathed. When the troops stormed the capital building, all they found was your deceased squadmate and you, barely alive.”
Shame constricted around Splice’s insides.
“Severe physical trauma and blood loss. Vocal cords damaged beyond the ability to heal, and both eyes cut out. Some argued for your immediate execution. You betrayed the Republic you were bred to serve.”
Splice wanted to ask why, then, he wasn’t dead, but he couldn’t make his mouth move. Maybe he didn’t want to know. What use could there possibly be for a clone who betrayed his duty, for a half-dead betrayer, for a brother-killer?
Vola Ka leaned in uncomfortably close, his golden eyes fixed on Splice. He smelled like ocean brine and chemicals.
“But I have become adept at finding a use for cast-off things,” he said. “Tell me your designation.”
“CT-5151.”
“Good.”
Vola Ka pressed a button on his datapad.
“Tell me your designation,” Vola Ka said again.
Splice opened his mouth to answer him.
Nothing came out.
Splice tried again, his lips forming the familiar shape of his designation, but, again, no sound escaped his mouth but a weak hiss of breath.
Vola Ka’s eyes were sharp. He pressed another button, and Splice’s vision went black, like flicking a switch. He gasped, jerking back against the harness, his breathing harsh in his ears. Through the pounding of his heart, he heard the sound of Vola Ka tapping another button. A blanket of thick quiet descended over the lab. Splice opened his mouth and tried to yell, but no sound came out. He thrashed in the hold of the harness, his feet making contact with the bacta, splashing, but there was no sound. His heart pounded hard against the inside of his chest, but he could only feel it, not hear it.
And then everything rushed in at once. Light glared at him from the harsh overhead lights, too bright as it reflected off the silver instruments and metal equipment. The harness creaked as he swung in its hold, and the bacta splashed against his legs. Something clicked in his throat, and then a cry escaped him, high-pitched and panicked.
“Stop.”
Vola Ka’s voice cut through it all. Splice forced himself to hang limp in the harness, to clamp his teeth shut, before Vola Ka dragged him back into the silent, voiceless dark.
“Very good, CT-5151,” Vola Ka said, his voice soft. “Very good.”
Tell me what your Jedi is planning.
No.
Another slice, another line of fire. Sharp fingernails dug into his scalp and ripped at his hair.
Tell me where the troops will attack.
No.
Another cut, and another, and another. Each came closer and closer to his eye. Splice sank his teeth into the knowledge they wanted, and he didn’t bother praying. He knew how this would end.
Tell me—
No.
Blood ran down his face and traced down his throat, soaking into the neck of his blacks. Kicker watched him bleed and writhe, his eyes flat. Blood ran from the corners of his mouth, dripping off his chin and onto the floor. Blood and bits of brains splattered the wall behind him.
Open your mouth.
Splice thrashed. He fought. Hands ripped at his skin. Tangled themselves, claw-like, in his hair. The questions had stopped a long time ago, and now there was only pain.
Open your mouth.
NO!
Splice woke with a choked scream, Kicker’s name frozen in his throat.
No. No no no no…
Splice jerked upright and bolted across his cell, toward the ‘fresher, his stomach lurching. He stumbled toward the toilet just as his stomach heaved. Vomit burst from his mouth, hot and sour, splattering down the back of the toilet and across the tiles. The sour stench hung heavy. Vomit dripped from the ends of his sweaty hair.
Please no, please stop please please—
The ghost of Red-nails’ touch scraped across his scalp, pulling at his hair. He jerked away from nothing. He gasped and gasped, sinking down to the cool tile floor.
—stop, please stop—
He had to control this.
Stop!
He had to stop and make himself calm down, or Vola Ka could see. Reaching up, he caught the edge of the sink and hauled himself upright. He leaned against the sink, the smooth metal cold against his flushed skin. Kicker would have walked him through a count, some stupid breathing exercise. Kicker would know what to do.
Kicker wasn’t here.
Splice turned the sink on, cupping water in his shaking hands and splashing it onto his face.
In his peripheral vision, something moved, and Splice jerked away, his body moving on auto-pilot before his brain could catch up and recognize the threat as his own reflection in the ‘fresher mirror.
Splice tried to catch his breath as his reflection stared back at him. He hadn’t looked at himself yet. He hadn’t wanted to. Now, faced with the stranger in the mirror, he couldn’t tear his eyes away.
Half-healed cuts covered the stranger’s face, sparse around his jaw and temples, growing deeper and more jagged around his eyes. Instead of the same deep brown all clones had, two artificial white eyes stared back at him. The surgical scars were shiny and pink in the yellow light of the ‘fresher. Splice ran his hand across his neck, shuddering at the thought of the metal hidden under his skin, a metallic infection, a cybernetic parasite.
Vola Ka had called it a choker. A prototype. A potential solution to clones spilling Republic secrets. It allowed him to switch Splice’s freshly installed cybernetic voice box off. If you were ever captured again, your voice box could be deactivated remotely, Vola Ka had told him. You would be unable to talk to the enemy, even under duress. My modifications would also allow both your hearing and your eyesight to be deactivated.
Deactivated. Like a droid.
His mouth tightened, and the stranger’s face moved in time with him, watching him with ghostly white eyes.
Splice’s fist shot out, slamming into the mirror. Sharp pain. Blood splattered into the sink, and the stranger shattered into a hundred little shards.
Something moved behind him. Splice whipped around. Vola Ka’s medical droid hovered outside the ray shield, watching him with round, glowing eyes. They stayed at an impasse for a long moment before the droid beeped and moved away, taking its watching eyes with it.
Shit.
A moment later, Vola Ka appeared on the other side of the ray shield. He wore thin, loose sleep clothes in place of his neatly pressed green robes or his white surgical garb. His inscrutable eyes took in the whole scene, looking down at the broken mirror, Splice, and his bloodied hand for a long moment before he deactivated the ray shield and turned away.
“Come.”
Splice followed Vola Ka down the hallway of little rooms, all dark except for his, until they reached the lab. Without the harsh overhead lights, shadows lingered in the corners of the lab. Vola Ka went to the wide table and flicked the light above it on, casting a pool of white light in a circle around it.
“Sit.”
Splice obeyed, hopping up onto the table. His bleeding knuckles throbbed in time with his heart. Beside him, Vola Ka took his time setting out supplies and pulling a pair of medical gloves on before reaching out and taking hold of Splice’s wrist.
“Tell me what happened,” Vola Ka said. He swiped disinfectant over Splice’s knuckles, and Splice bit down on a hiss. “Refrain from lying to me.”
Splice considered lying anyway. Words came to his lips, something vague about slipping on the tile, but his voice froze. Finally, he gathered up the strength to speak.
“I had a dream. About… about them.”
Splice couldn’t say their names. He had never heard them, never, not in all those hours they had him. In the jumbled chaos of his memories, all he had were the details his panicked mind had latched on to. Red nail polish at the ends of the thin fingers tangled in his hair. Red-nails. A man whose crooked front teeth showed behind his lips as he asked his endless questions. Crooked-teeth. And Splice knew it didn’t matter, that having a name to put to Red-nails or Crooked-teeth or any of the others wouldn’t change a damn thing, but he hated not knowing, hated not having a single scrap of knowledge about them when they knew everything about him, when they had ripped him apart and learned every intimate detail by force.
“Your captors?” Vola Ka prompted. “You dreamed of them?”
Splice nodded.
“And then I looked in the mirror and...” Splice curled inward, turning his face away, letting his matted hair fall in front of his face, a thin curtain between himself and Vola Ka. “And I thought about what you did to me. It made me angry.”
“You think I am like them.”
Splice’s silence answered for him.
Vola Ka continued to bandage Splice’s hand without another word, and Splice didn’t break the quiet. Finally, Vola Ka spoke again.
“After you gave them what they wanted, did they stop hurting you?”
Splice stayed silent.
“CT-5151. I asked you a question.”
“No. They didn’t stop,” Splice whispered.
Vola Ka nodded, as if confirming a suspicion. He finished wrapping Splice’s hand, but he did not release him.
“Why?”
“Why?” Splice echoed back at him.
“Yes. Why? If they had what they wanted, why continue?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
Vola Ka leaned in closer, narrowing his eyes.
“You do.”
Something gnawing and violent woke in Splice’s belly.
“Because they liked it!” Splice snarled. He yanked his hand away from Vola Ka. “Because it gave them some sick fucking pleasure to cut me up and hear me beg!”
Vola Ka looked down at him with the same perpetually aloof, expressionless mask every Kaminoan seemed to wear.
“And you think this is why I brought you here? For the same reason?”
When Splice didn’t answer, Vola Ka’s gloved hand moved Splice’s chin up and then shoved his tangled hair out of his face, forcing him to meet his eyes. Vola Ka curled his long fingers around the side of Splice’s neck. A jolt of electric fear pulsed through Splice, from his head to the soles of his feet, but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. Vola Ka’s thumb pressed into the side of his throat, against the edges of Splice’s surgical scars, holding him in place.
“My work has purpose, CT-5151. I pulled you from the scrap pile for a purpose, I augmented you for a purpose, and you will continue to live for a purpose. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Splice managed to say.
Vola Ka released him.
“The droid will take you back to your room.”
The silent droid reappeared at his shoulder. Splice slid down off the table, and the droid placed a hand in the middle of his back.
Sudden anger roared in his chest. He wanted to hit the droid, to smash it to bits. He wanted to destroy it.
He didn’t.
The droid pressed harder, its metal fingers hard against his spine, and he allowed it to push him out of Vola Ka’s sight and back to his little room.
In his room, it was as if nothing had happened. The shards of the mirror had been swept away, the wall above the sink was bare, and the blood in the sink and the vomit splattering the tile were gone. The droid hovered, watching as he moved into the cell and sat down on the bed. Finally, it moved away, leaving him alone again.
Splice waited until it had gone before he curled up on the bed, pressed his face into the rough blanket, and began to cry.
It took two weeks until Vola Ka was willing to give him a comb and a razor. Two weeks of the irritating itch of his beard against his face, two weeks of feeling his hopelessly tangled hair mat against his skull, no matter how much he tried to comb through it with his fingers. Two weeks of Vola Ka refusing him anything sharp, anything that could be ground down to a point.
As if he wouldn’t have been able to rip up his bedsheets and tie them into a noose, or make a grab for a scalpel during one of his check-ups.
The droid hovered behind him as he shaved, watching. Splice tried to ignore it and the silent threat it represented: Vola Ka was only a call away if Splice tried anything.
Wiping the last remnants of shaving cream off his face, he put the razor away and located a comb in the bag of supplies. He turned back to the small mirror he’d balanced on the sink, turning his attention to his hair. It hung in matted tangles around his face, and something about the sight of it made his chest tight. When Splice had grown his hair out after leaving Kamino, he took great care in its upkeep. He managed to buy special shampoo and conditioner for it while planetside, replacing the cheap Republic-issued soap that left his hair dry and brittle. Despite his squad’s mockery of his “fancy nat-born soaps,” his hair became soft and glossy with its use (and he caught Pip and Shok trying to steal it more than once.) Splice was always shit at braiding his own hair, but Kicker learned to do some fancy thing where he braided Splice’s hair along his scalp. Like Shok’s krayt dragon tattoo and the intricate designs Kicker painted on his armor, it was something all his own. Something he took pride in.
It was such a little thing. He shouldn’t care about something stupid like his hair. But he did. So few things belonged to a clone trooper like him. He had the same face, the same body, and the same purpose as his brothers. His hair was one of the few things he could make his own.
Splice took a deep breath and tried to pull the comb through his hair. The comb’s teeth snagged in a hard knot of hair and stuck there. He applied more pressure, and the cheap plastic teeth snapped.
In the corner of his eye, the droid continued to watch him, and it made his skin itch.
Splice tried again. And again. And again.
All he managed was a tangled, frizzy mess. Dotted throughout his snarled hair, the stupid white plastic teeth of the comb caught deep in his hair.
All at once, staring at the stranger and his ruined hair, he wanted to hit something. He wanted to cry.
The droid moved closer, its joints whirring.
“Do you require assistance, CT-5151?”
Splice felt like glass, like an open wound, and the thought of any hands touching him made his mind go white with panic.
“No.”
The droid beeped once and moved away again.
Splice stared at the stranger, hating him with something foul and gnawing in the pit of his stomach. Just the brush of the ends of his hair against his neck made him want to claw his way out of his skin.
“Can… can you get scissors for me?” The words left Splice’s mouth before he could stop them.
The droid cocked its head, its round eyes staring for a moment before it spoke.
“Will you attempt to damage yourself with them?”
“No,” he ground out through his teeth.
“This is acceptable. Wait here.”
The droid moved away, returning not long after with a pair of scissors that it handed off to Splice. Clenching the scissors in his white-knuckled grip, he glared at the stranger, and the white-eyed bastard looked back at him.
He seized a fistful of hair and began to hack it off.
Splice holstered his blaster and trotted off the training course, toward the tall figure watching him. He stopped and stood at attention before Vola Ka.
“You did well, CT-5151.” Vola Ka reached out, seizing Splice’s chin in one large hand and tracing the still-tender scars around his eyes. “Have you experienced any problems with your eyes or your internal cybernetics?”
“No, sir.” The voice that answered him, electronic and strange, still didn’t feel like him, as though the stranger was answering for him.
“Hm. Very good. Your final test is complete. You are cleared for active duty.”
A flicker of something not-quite-warm in his chest. “Will I be rejoining the 187th, sir?”
“No. I have decided that you will remain here.” Vola Ka’s cold hand still rested against Splice’s face. Splice wished he would stop touching him.
“Here, sir? On Kamino?”
“Yes, 5151. Your primary duty will be to serve in the Kaminoan Guard, but your secondary duty will be to me. I was impressed with how compliant you are, for a clone. Unfortunately, not all of my subjects are so well-mannered. You will assist me with those who decide to be… difficult.”
Splice’s blood turned to ice. He was going to be a lab-pet. One of the blood-traitors who helped the Kaminoan scientists. He wanted, more than anything, to refuse, to throw Vola Ka’s hand off, to hit him again and again and again until his fists were bloody. But he didn’t. Because he was well-mannered.
And the electronic stranger who spoke for him answered Vola Ka.
“Yes, sir.”