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It's so easy to die. So easy to kill. You were born a machine and raised to be a fighting machine, a soldier. You know this, your dreams are scattered with screams and blood. When Fives comes, everything clicks in your mind. Too bad it clicked only as you fire your blaster.
Your brothers hate you and the nat-borns hate you.
It's fine.
You hate yourself too.
What's one more.
You stare at yourself in the mirror. Stubble on your chin and cheeks, you need to shave. Your hair is greasy, you need to take a shower. Too much effort, too much time. Everything takes too much effort. even the mere act of standing is too much.
Why do we live?
It's so easy to slip off an edge, tumble down. He miss-stepped, they'd say, what would they think? Good riddance? Or, I knew he was mad, even in training, I bet it was his conscience. Drove him mad enough to jump.
You're not mad. It's like how Thorn would laugh that he wasn't that dumb. You're not mad. Well, you are, but you're not insane. They would say that, you know, but you can't do it to your brothers in the Guard. You'd leave a hole none would know how to fill. You can't leave them alone to cope by themselves. At least, you were useful in one aspect.
The thought still lingers in your head.
Go ahead, no don't.
You want to scream.
It's so obvious to anyone who looked hard enough. Fives's death swept so easily under the rug. Countless signatures on forms that derailed the advancement of the GAR. Money being funneled away from the war. Money being spent elsewhere. How stupid was one to not notice that they were buying Seperatist equipment. If one looked at the files and
trails for more than half a second it would pop out. The signature was there. You'd forged the damned signature onto the check.
You want to die. You've been screaming inside your head for so long you can't think straight.
It strikes you one day, while you were sitting at your battered desk, writing signatures, you can't feel. You paused for a full minute. You couldn't feel. You had given a bitter laugh. If one says something long enough you'll believe it, was that how it went?
Oh, to be a monster.
It's that thought that stays with you as you hold Felix's cold hand in the lower levels. It's dark and it's hot and humid but you feel so, so cold. He wasn't a shiny any longer, his white plastoid with the signature Guard paint getting scuffed. You'd just talked a while ago to Felix about getting glow in the dark paint. The red spills from the ordered lines. His hand doesn't grip back. It's too cold.
It's that thought and a thousand others and Felix's face that are in your mind as the Chancellor spoke. Oh, about how'd they fix this economy, passing another law for parking lots (in a war), this and that as the senators licked up his words.
What was it that Barris Offee said? "You are so hypocritical"?
You don't agree with her methods but you have to say she was right.
The scale tips by just a fraction as news comes in from your HUD about another riot. Maybe it's the riot or the speech, or Barris Offee, or Felix's face, or maybe you are a monster, or the screaming that tips the scale.
Maybe it is not one of those things that tip you over. Maybe it's all of them.
Something has been winding inside of you and it snaps.
It's so easy to die. So easy to kill.
One, two-
There's screaming and a body in thick robes slumped on the floor. They drag you away.
Three, haha.
You're not screaming. You're laughing.
His face, oh his face! So surprised! As if he hadn't thought they would turn against him. Oh, to be a fool. It wasn't justice enough but it had to be.
You sit in your cell, and for the first time since your making, your mind is silent. Too silent. Somehow, you feel lighter. You were free. A temporary freedom at best, but you were cunning and wily. You knew what had to be done.
(The headlines the next day threw the GAR into a frenzy, inscribed on the top was as a holo-recording of you laughing as you were taken away. It wasn't the chancellor's death that rattled them. It was your hollow, maniac laughter. They whisper around. He's gone mad, he always was.)
Alone, it's too quiet.
You finally scream-