amjartwork

Lt. Prant Solen is an Imperial Intelligence officer who survives by clinging to order. Hierarchy, procedure, and predictability—after the war and the fall of the Republic, these become his way of keeping the world stable enough to endure. Change terrifies him and stagnation feels safe.

Shortly after the formation of the Galactic Empire, Solen is assigned to supervise a new asset, CT-6119 (“Graft”). On paper, it is a straightforward arrangement: an experienced interrogation specialist without rank, reassigned to Bureau oversight; a junior officer tasked with evaluation, coordination, and performance reporting. He expects a problematic asset, as he always does. Instead, he gets something worse: a clone who fits the system too well. No ego, no emotional noise, just compliance. Graft functions exactly as the Empire believes people (and clones) should. And that is the problem. Graft does not want anything: not freedom, not his own identity, not even survival. His self-erasure is sincere. Even after the War Mantle project is set in motion, CT-6119 expresses no concern for his future. For Solen, this becomes first an intellectual fault line, and then a personal one. He begins justifying constant joint interrogations with Graft as efficiency. Then he starts quietly protecting him—adjusting workloads, intervening in reviews, rerouting attention from the clone. Prant can’t accept a system that would erase something this precise, this competent, this valuable (and he simply likes working with the clone). Yet Graft destabilizes him further by failing to see the point of Solen’s sacrifices at all and calling him out on them.

In the end, Solen does the thing he fears most: he changes. He discards his career, his position, and his safety, and defects from the newly formed Empire—not to free Graft, not to fix him, but simply to keep him alive. It is an asymmetrical bond: Solen values Graft’s existence more than his own stability, while Graft never asks for any of it (but he eventually grows grateful for it).

tl;dr: dude with a saviour complex has unrequited workplace friendship with a clone and his life goes to shit. and he is not, like, a good person. maybe an okay one at best.

and they unironically talk like this: