Aliit ori'shya tal'din.

Family is more than blood.

It was one of the first phrases of Mando'a I learned.

On Kamino, talking about not having shared blood was a little cheap considering you were one of a few million identical brothers.

The fact of it was that it was never that shared blood that really tied us together. See, for a time on Kamino aside from the bounty hunters who had been hired to train us, we were the only humans there. I was among the batch that vaguely remembered Jango Fett and the First Battle of Geonosis - probably only batch two or three of thousands that were to follow. I was as close to First Generation as you could get without being First Generation, and back then our fates were even more uncertain than they wound up being. Nobody knew what we would be like on the battlefield, and proving ourselves was going to be the hardest part. We all had to look out for one another then because the Republic was even less trustful of us than they were later on. We were a wild card ordered and paid for by another wild card that nobody outside of the secretive Jedi seemed to know anything about.

Their mistrust was fair then. It was understandable. It only served to bring us clones all closer together. We were brothers until death decided to part us - and on Kamino, we were the only ones who genuinely cared about each other. The camaraderie you fostered and gained there lasted until well after you left. Another Clone was almost always a friendly face, and you were guaranteed to have someone willing to have your back in a fight. You had to have that on Kamino, because without it you wouldn't survive.

The Kaminoans, on the whole, were cold and distant. We were experiments, products that they needed to package and ship as quickly as possible. If you didn't fit that mold, you were disposed of. There were no two ways about it, and that was simply how things had to be. You got tapped for roles pretty early on in your training. No one was more confused than me when I got pulled aside and set in with a whole new group of cadets at the midpoint and tersely informed by one of our Kaminoan overseers that we were going to be molded into a security force for the Republic.

The Coruscant Guard, asked for at the request of the Senate itself, was going to help maintain order in the city, protect the government, and guard the prisons. All of it was overseen by a quite, stern-faced Kaminoan named Iru Bre.

Iru was... odd. Unlike some of the Kaminoans we worked with, he never came across as completely callous. He'd say and do things that would occasionally make us believe that perhaps, beneath that long neck and indifferent tone of his, he had a heart buried somewhere in there. He looked like most Kaminoans - you know, tall, white, extremely fragile looking - and spoke like them, too, but he never treated us wholly as some product on a conveyor belt. There was a certain way that he regarded us with those dark eyes of his that sometimes bespoke something I figured was akin to pride. He'd get this tiny smile on his face when we'd succeed at our training and pass some slanted complement our way with his hands folded before him as he walked past us, eyes averted to a spot off to his right or left that was more worthy of his attention.

But he said the words. That was what I remember at the end of the day. No other Kaminoan would do that.

We were all sitting in our briefing room one day before we got divided up into training squads and one of the cadets rolled his eyes with a melodramatic sigh, "Everyone already knows that to the Kaminoans we're just a set of numbers. Why put in so much effort, anyway?"

Iru had been sitting at his desk in the far corner of the room, and I glanced over at him in time to see his iris' slowly slide over to look at the cadet who had spoken.

"The Director is right there, idiot!"

"Like he's going to say anything."

I had kept my eyes averted and was reading over a datapad rather than even attempt to interject. Learning Mando'a had suddenly become a lot more interesting when I saw Iru rise from his desk with an elegance that I truly did respect. He seemed to glide across the floor, and soon he was standing in front of that cadet, whose fire was remarkably gone. "Do you wish to know what I think of you clones, Cadet 10-1750?" We were all surprised he knew his number without even looking at his identification tags.

"I... I suppose, sir..."

"You are not merely numbers. You are art," he gave an emphatic gesture as he spoke, a supple wave of one of his hands that made every voice in that room go absolutely silent. "You are art made for battle, lovingly crafted from the DNA of a bounty hunter, but you are pieces yet unfinished. It is my honor to mold and sculpt you into magnificent pieces to be displayed before the galaxy - models of duty, honor, loyalty, and prowess. That, Cadet 10-1750, is what I think of you."

That was the difference between Iru and the others. Kaminoans used to have a certain respect for what they created before they turned it into an industry. I still believe to this very day that Iru Bre was one of the last Kaminoans who genuinely believed that cloning was an art form and not just an economic necessity.

No one could think of anything to say in response, so Iru glided to the front of the room and folded his hands before him with an irritated twitch of his nose, "The Republic will never appreciate you the way that I appreciate you simply because they do not understand the work that went into creating you. Some of my colleagues feel the same way as they do: that you are tools and little else, blunt weapons to be hurled against masses of uninspired machines, but I know better. You all sit before me as balls of sea clay or iron waiting to be transformed into something wholly glorious, but you must allow me to do my work or you will never leave Kamino. You will be cast aside unfinished and broken, and you will have deserved it."

That was always his only stipulation. We had to work with him, trust him unconditionally to do what was best for us, or we would fail. Thing was, he always did. Iru was one of the few people on that sodden planet that never lied to us about anything. He was blunt, sometimes rude, but he never used aby double-speak. He never tried to trip us up or confuse us. If there were any lies, they were lies of omission.

Still, he pushed us and molded us into soldiers that would one day tirelessly defend the Republic.

And we did.

I spent years training on Kamino. You honed your body and your mind while under the watchful eye of bounty hunters and Kaminoan overseers, and you never thought much about who you came from. From time to time I wondered about Jango Fett and what he really thought of us. Was he proud of us? Did he feel anything for any of us, or were we simply a paycheck for him?

Aside from the fact that he was Concordian, we never knew much else, and the only reason we knew even that was that some of the bounty hunters who were training us happened to be Mandalorians, too. They stayed cloistered together, and they weren't training any common Clones, either.

No, most of them were relegated to training the Commandos, but they always were some mythical archetypes to me. You grew up learning the history of the Mandalorian Wars, we were taught a smattering of the language, and it was like something in those lessons came to life in me. I took it upon myself to really learn Mando'a, to learn to write and speak it with as much flare as a native. It was my reprieve from missions. It took my mind off of the training and the ever-looming threat of potential deactivation. My instructors had fun snapping at me when I would default by accident to speaking a language that my quiet self used more than Basic, even if some of the bounty hunters found it more than a little amusing.

They brought me to life. I wanted to follow the codes, learn to be the legendary warriors that the Mandalorians of old were, so I buckled down on my weapons training. I became the best shot I could, practiced until my arms smarted and would spasm and then practice some more. I would run the simulations so many times that I could do them blindfolded. If I couldn't figure something out, I researched it. If I needed guidance, I went back to my instructors after hours and listened as if my very life depended on it. I had tackled the dummies in the riot suppression sims so much that my chest, arms, and knees were bruised so badly that I needed bacta injections.

I was pushing myself too kriffing hard at the time, and Iru was the first to notice it. Maybe he was the first to notice it and decide not to let me burn out, but one day as I was shooting on the range, he had somehow slipped inside without me noticing, and as I swore quietly under my breath and tried to unjam my blaster, he had moved up beside me and watched the target slide forward on its track. I was in the red, that small circle just befor ethe bullseye, on all of my shots. Iru regarded it calmly, and I jumped when I finally looked up and saw him standing there with his hands folded in front of him.

"Director! I... Sorry, sir, I didn't see you there."

"I have noticed," he began, each word practiced and so carefully selected that it was hard not to notice, "that you have been remarkably hard on yourself as of late, Cadet 7209."

I was frankly surprised that he had even been paying attention to me out of all of my brothers from around the facility, but he had been. "Yes, sir. I just want to be sure that my performance is above the satisfactory levels, sir."

Iru gave something of a little chuff that I immediately believed to be a laugh, but he didn't hold that quick smile for more than a blink before his face had returned to its stoic expression once again, "Cadet, you do understand that the body needs adequate rest or it will fail, yes? I hoped that I had taught you that much."

"You did, sir, it's just..." I had trailed off when he slowly turned his head to face me and those dark eyes held me in their gaze.

"Continue, Cadet."

"I just don't want to be a waste of resources, sir." It was only partly the truth, and I could tell that Iru knew it. He refused to press me for an answer, he simply stood there looking down at me from his almost impossible height before he turned back to the target and reached out to trace the holes in it. "I want to be the best soldier I can be, sir."

"You're afraid of deactivation?" Iru kept his eyes on the target, his fingers still tracing all eighty of my shots.

"Yes, sir."

"Why?" He still hadn't looked at me, but I noticed that his fingers had stilled on the gaping hole in the bullseye.

"Well..." I never did feel like I was adequate. No matter what I did, I felt like I could do better. Nothing ever felt good enough.

"Out of your eighty shots on this target, fifty-seven were centered directly on the kill spot and the other twenty-three were lethal on most sentient lifeforms and on any number of Separatist droid units," He had lowered his hand as he spoke and turned to me, his hands folding once again before him. "You have outperformed ninety-seven percent of all of your contemporaries and ninety-three percent of all current Clones who have taken these tests. Cadet 7209," a brief flash of a smile crossed over his face as he said my number, "you have no reason to be deactivated nor should you even be concerned."

It was an unexpected reassurance, but it made me lower the training rifle and heave an audible sigh of relief. It was oddly comforting to know that, in a way. "Thank you for letting me know, Director, sir."

"Being a good warrior is not simply about your skill, Cadet 7209," Iru passed me slowly in his gliding gait, "but also your confidence. Perhaps take your time to perfect that as well as hone your skill in combat, and then perhaps you will find that piece of you that you feel you lack."

I hadn't even told him that was how I felt. When I wheeled around to ask him how he knew, he had already stepped through the door and gone away, leaving me alone with my thoughts, my training rifle, and a dummy full of holes.

---

The first time I ever saw combat was on Christophsis. Before we could effectively be used as security, we needed to have actual combat experience, and as far as anyone was concerned, it needed to be done actually serving some purpose. I was told that I was being given a squad of misfits who had squeaked by their training by the skin of their teeth.

It was how I met The Breakers. My future squad.

Iru believed that they needed a guiding hand, but he also mentioned that they had potential if I could manage to get them in line. He assured me that he believed that I had the stuff to make it work since I had taken his advice and worked on building up my self-confidence just a smidge. Sure enough, I was given leadership positions on a graining squad who I was under the impression I was going to be deployed with. Needless to say, Iru had other plans for me.

The move wasn't uncommon. A freak accident had taken out The Breakers' leader and they needed a new squad leader. I was Iru's candidate when a replacement was asked for, so there I was, hopping aboard a gunship bound for the planet's surface with men I barely knew.

When I had been thrust in as their leader, two of the three of them seemed okay with the transition, but the third, I knew was going to be trouble.

First up was CT-2453, better known as Red. He was a quieter Clone a little on the side of friendly. He went right along with me showing up, going out of his way to welcome me aboard. After him was CT-21-9023 who we eventually started calling Tor - the Mando'a word for justice. He was... okay, Tor was a walking regulation and tactical manual, but he was far from the worst rule-junkie in existence. He followed me without question in a flurry of "yes sir"s and quick snaps to attention. Lastly was CT-18-4443, or Grek as we dubbed him, wasn't as receptive. he was the stubborn one of the four of us and giving up the reins from their old squad leader to me was far from what any of them had in mind.

Each one had their little bits of difference that made them unique. Red had a strip of his long hair dyed a new color every few days when we were in actual civilization. Tor was always clean-cut and free of tattoos and kept his head shaved to the skin. Grek had every inch of his body he kept covered littered in winding tattoos.

Christophsis was a show and a half, and it solidified us as a squad. I'll be the first to admit that I'm unorthodox, and that tends to make me less easy to work with than a Clone who has adopted a more... ah, kriff, let's call it an orthodox approach. It gave Tor a near-heart attack, Red was finding it way too fun, and Grek loved me after it was all said and done. When it was all said and done, they decided to stay with me and I chose not to transfer back to my old squad. The Breakers may have gone into Christophsis with the reputation of breaking everything they touched and floundering their way through every mission, but we managed to start piecing together a system there that would help us through the rest of our careers in the Grand Army of the Republic.

Tor was a great sniper who had been forced into a tech's role. Red was a great tech who had been assigned to heavy weapons. Grek was a demolitions and weapons expert who had been assigned into a pitifully defensive role. The squad was a mess when I stepped into it, and frankly, once we figured out how they misplaced everyone, our new system wound up working so well that we left Christophsis with promotion while heading directly into our new home on Coruscant, and it was an adjustment that I'm still not sure how we made.

We served as a fugitive apprehension squad for several years before our first big test came in the form of a string of murders. None of us realized it at the time going into this mission how greatly it was going to change everything.

It all started with some Senator's cousin and his Jedi escort turning up dead in the lower levels of Coruscant.