꿈속에서

but they’re grateful, too. because even if no one remembers them in the grand scheme of the war, dogma’s little camera would. so they all scrap their credits together and manage to buy him a nice one with a holopixel and frame rate quality miles above his normal run of the mill reusable.

miraculously, it’s one of the few things that survives dogma’s defection. and it’s a good thing it does—that tiny camera has been his lifeline more than once, when giving in seemed easier than pushing back and fighting, fighting, fighting. it’s something to keep his brothers alive, to make him feel a little less alone.

so dogma doesn’t know what to do when he finds out face-to-face that “the other clone” wandering through the galaxy is rex. neither of them knows what to say for a few days (is it shame? guilt? how do you say sorry for something that was neither of your faults?)

but eventually, they break the ice when dogma seeks him out one night and wordlessly extends the same camera rex and the boys had gifted him. dusty, a little scuffed, but the light blinks on, and the memory’s intact. still good. (a little bit like them, huh.)

they sit under the shadow of rex’s y-wing, and they huddle close as dogma silently clicks through snapshot by snapshot:

tup strumming over an old guitar; a cringey selfie of dogma’s fresh tattoo when he thought lip biting was sexy; a shot of fives pretending to saber battle jesse with mop handles; out-of-focus pictures of hardcase and kix sake-bombing at 79’s; rex at dawn, looking tired and old but full of hope. overexposed and poorly timed outtakes—everything’s there.

(there’s a conspicuous gap after umbara. if rex notices, he says nothing.)

every now and then, they come across fake vlogs and snippets of inside jokes where dogma and a digital ghost of one of their brothers pretended that they were twenty-something year-old civvies enjoying youth and life instead of brothers aged too fast and lost too soon. (tup grins into the camera lens, “welcome back to our channel!” dogma’s vision blurs.)

photo by photo, conversation returns to them, awkward and rusty from unuse but no less warm than they remember.

they both laugh harder than they have in years as they watch echo and dogma’s blurry smack cam compilation on fives and jesse, poor imitations of wookiee cries, perfectly cut screams right as rex came into the frame.

and they tell themselves that their tears are because they’re laughing the kind of laughter that aches in your stomach and doubles you over. the haggard sob that leaves dogma’s chest is just him gasping for air. they tell themselves that they’re hugging each other so so tight because it’s good to be brothers in arms again. (they’re all that’s left.)

they’ve mourned somber for too long.

there’s a very special kind of safety and pride in talking with a brother and seeing your general struggle to pick up what little fragments they recognize. a clone’s existence is so cruel, devoid of control, slated for military initiative over the simplicity of living for living’s sake. they don’t truly own anything, not even their own bodies. so it’s only fair that they can have their language, this single thing, as theirs alone.

and it’s something to pass on to shinies that can’t be lost or replaced in the ways blasters and buckets can. the older clones teach the younger batches the basics, and the younger clones offer them hip new catchphrases in return (it’s how you can tell who’s really old).

companies have impromptu lessons on slang over dinner. captains offer feedback on informal oral exams between briefings. squadrons designate a specific comm channel for shinies to practice tongue placement exercises during uneventful patrols (to really nail those tricky sounds).

better yet, battalions create their own shorthand and develop their own accents. oh, you were under doom’s command? that’s why you rely so much on active articulation. wolffe? your alveolar t and d sounds are nearly indistinguishable (and it makes fox want to pull his hair out). your first deployment is with bacara? good fucking luck—his battalion’s accent might as well be its own new language entirely. but once the shinies have caught on, once they’ve completed that rite of passage, they emerge having forged one of the strongest bonds of kinship in the entire army.

language—their language—builds systems of support and trust. it shapes how they celebrate and grieve and nurture each other. soldiers they may be, but there are at least twenty different ways in the grand army to say ‘i love you’—colt tells his men ‘you are my pride,’ and monnk’s translates loosely to ‘let me be your shield.’ each means the same thing on a rudimentary level, and yet their nuances make them nothing alike. the words they share cannot truly be understood by anyone but themselves.

it lets them bond as much as it allows them what little measures of autonomy they can glean from the republic and the jedi. their dialect may be a clone of their mother tongue as much as they are clones themselves, but it is no less real. they are no less precious. (and it lets them talk shit about their generals.)