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HN-1474 is thrust into combat. Her scores were always in the upper-middle average range, she has the best accuracy of her unit, but the blaster in her hands is shaking because NJ-1674 has just gone down.His helmet is cracked open, mesh beneath his armor torn, and there’s a bloody handprint as he gurgles something lost to his damaged communicator. Their letters are far off, but their numbers were close, a pattern that doesn’t actually mean anything except for how there’s precious little else to find meaning in, when all you’ve got is a designation.It’s their first live combat and NJ-1674 goes down hard. It’s not even the kind of injury they can hide—a downed Stormtrooper is a decommissioned Stormtrooper—because it’s the kind he won’t be able to get up from. The blood is an indicator, but the proof is in how NJ1—the only NJ in their whole battalion-- doesn’t get up. NJ1 would rather space himself than lie on his back, be vulnerable in front of anyone, much less combatants, and the blood—The sounds of battle are muted, blaster fire and screams sounding as if from far away and not all around her, but all she can see is white armor and black mesh, red leaking out. Last of his cohort, shoved into the surviving HN unit because of his test scores, so stiff and formal at first that they couldn’t even get him to sign for months.His fingers move, a twitching of her call name, and then he’s still.On her knees beside him, the blaster slips from numb fingers. She doesn’t drop it, is too well-trained to drop it, but she can’t breathe—can’t—and there is a ringing in her ears that starts in her heart and—She stares. She can’t move, can’t draw in breath fast enough, even as the instincts in her are screaming to move, to dodge and run—Someone is screaming. She’s scared it might be her, but her teeth are clenched tight so it cannot be, and though NJ1 is dead before her and others are grunting as they go down, no trooper would scream in pain.Go, go, go urged every nerve under her skin, and her hands are shaking, she is shaking all over, and in front of her a trooper from a sibling unit, someone— FN-1226, Twelve-twenty-- who is always willing to stealthily trade his fruit-flavored bars for the fish ones HN-1474 hated, takes concentrated fire to the shoulder and goes flying, arm mangled.NJ1 is dead and the battle rages around her, more rebels killing more troopers and vice versa, and the tacnet strikes two more names from the formation and rearranges orders to compensate; they’ve got an objective here, which will in turn serve some gambit of the First Order, and it’s one important enough that only fresh troopers were deployed on this mission.It’s one important enough that HN-1474’s unit was sent out for, even though they’d spent years doing special training, and that training is paying off because despite their losses they’re gaining ground. There is something lodged in her throat, and she moves numb knees enough to cover NJ1’s body with her own, half-stumbling. A laser canon shoots over her head two seconds later.GO urged everything she knew, but it was too jumbled, too confused; stillness meant death but she was still heaving, still shaking, legs screaming to run forward and run back in equal measure, and—There was still a sound half-like a scream, half-like a claxon, drowning out the rest, a white surge of noise that threw her to her knees even as she tried to stand.Something in her throat, when she hasn’t even eaten this cycle; NJ1 and blood beneath her, red sinking into the earth; tallies marked in the tacnet of her helmet screen, dropping like flies, one designation after another after another—HN-1474 shoves her helmet off, gulping in great lungfulls of air.There is blood on the white of her armor and none of it is hers and—Something cracks apart and breaks in her breastbone, a culmination, an end.Fifty meters away the reason for this mission jerks his head around, looking and looking, for what she doesn’t know, because she’s already on her feet, each step away from NJ1 hurting like a punctured lung—from Twelve-twenty, from Nines, from JJ8-- and she wishes she had time to hold his hand, to take anything of his, to have some goodbye or some reminder but they are storm troopers and they get neither, just another tally in the tacnet.Adrenaline and instinct carry her feet in desperate flight, away from—just, away, as no trooper has ever had the option of, as she does not have the option of, but her feet carry her anyway with NJ1’s blood on her armor seeping into the mesh.The blaster has been thrown because she cannot—she cannot—Across the battlefield, Kuro Nobi runs his bloody lightsaber through someone, then turns bodily around, black cape curving over his shoulders in an unseen wind, eyes landing solidly on her.They burn bright, a familiar hum of blue twisted apathetic and cruel.She runs.- HN-1474 returns when the battle is through, practiced motions carrying her feet into line. She is another trooper, a nameless faceless facet to her unit’s success. The others fall in to cover for her without hesitation, an unflinching loyalty. HN-7472’s fingers twitch a greeting, the shape of them on their blaster handle poised for worry, sick-grief clear in the spread of their pointer and middle fingers.Fine, she signs back with the smallest flicker. It’s the greatest joke in the universe, the storm trooper sign for ‘fine’. It means acceptable; it means battle-ready. It means ‘I get to live, and that’s all that matters. They won’t be decommissioning me today.’Seven-forty-seven signs the universal response, the hand-gesture equivalent to a snort. It’s the second most common sign, the first you learn after ‘fine’—are you okay? Yes, fine, battle-ready—and the first one you learn before your name-sign. Three truths follow the troopers, the same in every unit. You are battle-ready, so you won’t die today; you’re fine and that’s hilarious; and, finally, the most dangerous secret in the universe: you are a person and you have a name.A call-sign, a shortening of your designation. Something to make you more than a tally in the tacnet, one more trooper shot down. A statistic. HN-1474 takes a shaky breath, grateful for the anonymity of a helmet, the way the communications relay system inside is designed to filter out such unimportant sounds.Who cares if a storm trooper is breathing?HN-1474’s name sign, like all name-signs, is reserved for the quiet moments between training sessions and, now, between real battles. It’s special, drawn in the dark when they’re meant to be asleep, drawn softly onto the soft skin of her sisters’ and brothers’ hands, the way she draws theirs.It’s shameful to do out in the open, a dead give away to how shaken—how not-fine, how not-remotely-battle-ready she is—to all the other troopers, but she taps her fingers in time with her heartbeat, a drum-tattoo of ego on the metal of her blaster. It’s enough to calm her down, to quiet the pulse of battle memory threatening to take her back to the blood and the bodies flying.She breathes and her comm won’t pick it up.It means that by the time Kuro Nobi marches a prisoner, tied and beaten, to the line of troopers near the ships, he can’t tell the difference from one trooper to another. Regardless of what he’d noticed during the firefight, he—like all the First Order who didn’t start in the troops—couldn’t tell unit from unit, much less trooper from trooper.She’s steady enough to remember her training, to dart forward with Seven-forty-seven as easy as breathing, they coming in on the prisoner’s right and she on the left. They catch her, frog march her behind the Sith lord. Kuro Nobi did not even look, certain of their obedience.Certain of their training, which had always and would always surpass the human inconvenience of individualism—but no, of course, that doesn’t apply to storm troopers. The urges for such are trained out of them. They are one and the same, all individuality stamped out, all urge for individuality stamped out—NJ1, dead on the ground—No.Seven-forty-seven tilts their helmet, which makes her breath catch; it’s the most dangerous form of sign, the most obvious, and she shoves whatever useless feelings she has deep. Fine and battle-ready. She’ll give them no reason to split up her unit, the ultimate fear of every one of them, if they had the luxury to be afraid. Shame tucks in under her chin, a reminder of where she is, what they’re doing.It’s their first mission, regardless of the training sims and their test scores.The prisoner is half-limp in their grip; her chin lulls to the side, eyes barely registering what’s going on. She’s definitely concussed, jade hair matted with red at the temple. Unconsciously, HN-1474’s hand tightens on her bicep.She was a Resistance prisoner, HN-1474 reminded herself, tamping down the instinctive horror. Not a storm trooper. (She had no helmet, she was hurt too much and everyone could see, they would decommission her and maybe the rest of her unit, too, if they’d helped hide it and—)No, not a storm trooper, for all that HN-1474 had never met someone outside of the First Order. Every point of contact she’d ever had is within this StarKiller, the one their ship quickly flies to. They’d boarded in silence, Kuro Nobi snarling at the first order communications officer at the flight controls. No chairs around, save for Kuro Nobi’s throne in the middle of the nav, no flight long enough to refresh or be assigned tiny bunks in tiny rooms.(No dimmed lights and name-signs traced silently into skin, a wordless reassurance that everything will be okay. Something she somewhat desperately needs right now, the weight of her armor increasing until each step is hard, though of course she doesn’t limp or struggle. There are easier ways for a trooper to space themselves.)She stands with the prisoner, determined not to think of her as a person—as an armorless brother or sister, skin three shades lighter than JJ8’s but much darker than NJ1’s, stripped of her rank and about to be thrown out of the airlock, never to be seen again. She’s not a sister, she’s not, though her brain insists she could be: she’s only ever seen her own cohort out of uniform, the ten units grouped into one flight or ground squadron, whose lessons and training sessions and cafeteria time schedules overlap.And she only ever freshes and sleeps with her unit, of course.So this prisoner could be any of them, her brain insists, traitorous. Isn’t her hair like JJ-7007’s? Or didn’t her limp hands remind her of CT-6744, the trooper who didn’t sign often, but when he did, always said just the right thing? Couldn’t she be any of them, under the mask?Storm troopers were battle-ready or they were decommissioned; there was no middle ground. Therefore, every storm trooper in the universe covered for each other. Twisted ankles, concussions; it didn’t matter what. If you could buy them some time, buy them any time, to heal, it was possible to keep a brother or sister alive long enough that they could do the same for you, over and over, units clutching as close to one another as possible without touching.It wasn’t just units, either.The prisoner’s head lolled around, and HN-1474 caught herself shifting her shoulder just so, to hide how limp she was, disguise the angle. A study in misdirection, most useful when no one notices you move in the first place.HN-1474 was certain about many things in her life, had no choice but to be.Any trooper she met, regardless of temperament or loyalty or test scores, would make noise in just the right way, draw the eye without drawing the attention, keep her injuries hidden in any way they could. It was a truth of the universe.
NJ1, dead on the ground, no amount of covering with her body enough to hide him, no distraction possible long enough to give him time to heal--
The prisoner would be fine, she reasoned.She had information, so they’d give her medical care. With enough water, she could fight the dizziness. She wouldn’t want to vomit over herself in the cell, so she’d keep her chin up. With your chin up and the blood washed away, even without the helmet, it was easy to disguise a head wound.The ship docked inside the Star Killer. Seven-forty-seven helped her walk the prisoner down the hallway, Kuro Nobi a dark fire spilling in front of them, marking the way.She will be fine.They drop her into the cell, and if it’s more a careful leveraging, no one can tell from the outside. They have too much practice feigning roughness with gentle hands.Misdirection and sleight-of-hand.The gloves on a blaster appearing firm, professional but telling a funny story in slips and twitches anyway; standing a certain way to ensure a commander looks your way without realizing he’s being led, without seeing anything wrong, without seeing the slight lean to a brother with a busted knee; the way they were careful to keep below-their-best scores on simulations, creating a window of success they could meet while grimacing from the pain of a bruised rib.Misdirection and sleight of hand: all the power a storm trooper had.Misdirection, good for nothing when everyone was a target; sleight of hand, useless, when someone was bleeding out and no amount of overt action could save them.Breathe-deep, Seven-forty-seven signs sharply, when they rise within the cell. It’s the sign for setting a bone, for bracing yourself; here it means get yourself together, worry-concern making the gesture faster than it should be. You’re scaring me, they mean.HN-1474 can’t respond, hands limp, fingers numb.Kuro Nobi hadn’t looked at them at all, merely spending a few minutes in with the prisoner before stalking out, barking orders and they—the fools who had stepped out of line to assume the duty, back on Sabaku below—move to stand guard outside.Now they’ll be here until someone relieves them, late to the debriefing—Seven-forty-seven’s thumbs twitch in relief for her, despite the promise of extra hours on duty—and left to the white quiet of the corridor.It’s a quiet life, the life of a storm trooper. Filled with constant motion and readiness, training and exercise until your muscles ache and you’ve filled your quota of everything. The life of it is between the lines; sign-jokes instead of spoken words, the trace of fingers before sleep, gestures and nods between scheduled duties.Every spoken word must be careful, measured; every action, perfectly in line with the standards set by the First Order; every performance, before and during and after a simulation, carried out well enough to reflect well on your unit and yourself. To stray outside of the allowed is to be decommissioned; worse still, it might mean the same for your sisters.The silence is less quiet with her heart thundering, heavy in her chest.It’s a ringing, a resounding, an echo building in her ears.Is it her pulse, going mad in her veins? Is it a real sound, though Seven-forty-seven shows no sign of hearing it?An urgency presses from the outside, the air on her skin becoming heavy, meaningful.Something within her rises to meet it; inexorable, unhesitating.Once more she sees NJ1 before her; she sees every tally marked on the edge of her helmet’s screen, a slow march until it reaches the pre-determined number of losses that would mean mission-failure and retreat. Once more her throat feels tight, though now the nausea stays at bay.Now she is not shaky and fearful, choked with the need to flee.Now the sensation within her is stronger, more certain; now it says go and there is a to, not a from.Now there is no time; a chance, now or never.The swell of it crests, a feeling she can now name, though it’s hardly a feeling at all.It is a decision, a culmination, a beginning.NO, she had thought earlier, with all of herself, a concept and a sensation so unfamiliar, she hadn’t recognized it—storm troopers did not say ‘no’, barely knew the word--but it hadn’t been enough; it had been then a denial, useless in the unflinching face of what had already happened, and could not be changed.An incomplete thing, born of desperation.The first piece of her world to burn.Everything she knows blazes in the fire, the tattoo of it harsh and dry like the desert sand, bitter in her mouth. It burns, it hurts, and it sings like blood thick in her throat. It’s bigger than the no that had whispered through her, screaming and desperate. It’s huge, a wildfire, unstoppable. It’s got fuel; it’s the completed thought, the urgency bearing down on her.It’s apologizing with her hands, surprising her unit-mate and her sibling, neither brother nor sister but loved all the same, with a sharp blow—careful, so achingly careful—it’s the unlocking of cuffs, it’s the arm over her shoulder, the limp woman who shuffles to her feet in surprise, leaning heavily.This is not a denial, too-late-too-little-too-horrible, with blood seeping through the mesh of her armor, with screaming all around. This is not a reaction, but a decision, pressed upon her by some other force, some inner-and-outer knowing, instinct-turned-necessity.There is the feeling of now, please, now or not at all, and it slides over her skin and through her blood, urgent, urgent, urgent, offering her a chance to change; a hand held out, like a sister’s, desperate and open and honest fingers reaching.It’s everything in her rising up to meet it, surging even beyond the first earth-shattering no, the vivid, unrecognized refusal no storm trooper had ever dared feel; it’s a choice, it’s bigger, bigger than her and the monumental ‘no’ and the prisoner she carries, straight into the docking bay and into a captured fighter jet, yet-to-be touched by First Order technicians, still debriefing.It rings through the air around her, no longer screaming but triumphant, golden and hurt and red and painful, a healing wound, a second chance, the sign-words punching against her ribs from the inside, clear as any voice she’s ever heard:NO MORE.