#murdertoothpick

on the way to work, you blindly reach for your speeder keys in the bowl by your front door. it’s a normal action when you’re heading to work, nothing to worry about on a typical day. key word: typical.

“son of a- ugh!” you shout and immediately retract your hand from the bowl. next to your keys was yet another chewed toothpick that your soulmate tossed away without a care, the splintered wood the reason you were holding your hand protectively to your chest. when you meet them, you swear you’re gonna give your soulmate an earful about how gross and inconvenient their toothpicks are when just trying to go about your day. maybe buy them a trash can as a first gift as a semi-joke.

you know you lose stuff a lot, but it’s never anything that gross (you don’t think) or that can hurt them if they weren’t paying attention. there were very few things that your soulmate lost that weren’t errant toothpicks; it made you feel a twinge of guilt when you threw the abundant toothpicks away but seriously, what were you going to do with dozens of chewed toothpicks?

being a secretary for the coruscant guard was no glamour job, but it paid well and you always came home with an interesting story or two. there wasn’t much downtime even on a good day but you didn’t mind the chaos. it kept you on your toes and paid the rent. the days, which started out as tedious and draining, gradually grew shorter when you started to make friends with some of the clones that frequented your desk.

some of the friendships were instantaneous; you bought a bone and some treats for grizzer once and ever since, hound has called you his favorite civvie. other friendships took time to cultivate into something stronger, that trust harder to earn; lunch breaks spent with commanders being forced to rest, sometimes with gossip flowing or a comfortable silence. it took several months, but you learned that commander fox was a hardcore gossiper and somehow had the best access to what thorn calls “piping hot tea.”

“good morning, eros!” you called to a familiar trooper as you made your way to your desk. he waved with a smile as he approached, taking his usual perch on the corner.

“hey birdie, got something for me?” eros took to calling you birdie when the two of you would spend lunches together. any gossip you relayed to him was kept under the guise of “a little bird told me” to save face, and the nickname just stuck with the rest of the guard.

“as a matter of fact,” you reply, digging in your bag for a moment before pulling out two bottles of expensive bath soaps that made his eyes widen comically. “my friend gave these to me but didn’t remember that i was allergic to the main ingredient. thought you would enjoy them.”

the resulting grin on his face could power the entire senate building. “thank you! kriff birdie, you didn’t have to do that! i-“

“i know i didn’t have to, but i did.” you turned away from him for a moment to log into the data system so you could begin the day’s work. “now get outta here kid, you’re bothering me!” you chuckle as you say the inside joke (a reference to the one time stone had to interact with a senator’s young son) and he pats your cheek with a grin before he departs.

it’s less than an hour before another toothpick graces your morning. you roll your eyes at it fondly before tossing it into the trash can under your desk. at this rate, you could have built a wood hut on some backwater moon out of the things and run away from all responsibilities. your soulmate would probably think it’s as idiotic a thought as you do and you chuckle to yourself at the absurdity.

a clatter on your desk registers in your mind. thinking it’s a trooper preparing to give you paperwork or stop for idle chitchat, you give a small wave and ask what they need.

you get no answer.

that’s weird. they might not have heard you, so you ask your question again.

still nothing.

your eyes flit up to where an average trooper’s eye level is and find nothing still. you start forming ideas for payback if it turns out to be one of thire’s stupid pranks again, turning back to your work.

that’s when your eyes find the weapon. “holy shit!! what in the- fox!! thorn!!” none of the men you knew would just leave firearms on your desk, which was what made this weapon’s sudden appearance incredibly baffling. and even then, you’d never seen one that looked quite like this before.

footsteps pounded on the floor at your shout, both commanders and any surrounding clones immediately rushing to your aid. you could see the eyes of the ones without their helmets bulge from their heads in shock. “birdie, where the kriff did you get a firepuncher?”

you scrunched your face in confusion for a moment before realizing that the model name must be firepuncher. weird, but okay. “if i knew where the thing came from, i wouldn’t have shouted!”

fox was the first to approach the gun with notable caution. “it’s a 773 alright,” he mumbles as he looks it over. it had several modifications that were very rare to come by for an average trooper, much less a secretary. it looked to be gar-issue, which he confirmed when he read the familiar firearms coding system that cataloged every blaster manufactured for the war effort. it just compounded the confusion as to how it got there; how would a guardsman get his hands on such a modified beauty of a rifle, and why would they just leave it with you?

“i’m gonna take it down to the armory, see if they can search its code in the gar systems. thorn, check surveillance. there’s a chance our perp was caught by one of the cameras.” the men around him nod, a couple of them giving you reassuring glances and small embraces. they couldn’t imagine how frazzled you were about this, and not to mention how worried they are about your safety with this bizarre circumstance. “birdie, come with me. they’ll probably want to ask you a few questions.”

eros squeezed your hand, noticing that the idea of being interrogated by the armory has you a bit uncomfortable. “it’ll be fine birdie, fox won’t feed you to the wolves. he likes you too much.” you laughed at him and let yourself be escorted to the armory.

“and you just found it on your desk?”

“why is that so hard to believe?” the weapons inventory specialist was grilling you about what you just learned was called a 773 firepuncher. you’d have lost your patience long ago if it weren’t for your friend’s reassuring hand on your back. “i was working when i heard a thud on my desk. thought it was a trooper but when i looked, this thing was just laying there!”

despite the circumstances that brought you to the armory, you enjoyed the meticulous organization of the room, how everything had a place specifically for that one thing. weapons and accessories you couldn’t even imagine were stored here and you just casually walked by them every day.

there were a few things out on a nearby table that caught your eye while fox handled the rest of the business. some were easily identified, grenades and the like (too many late nights spent at home watching holodramas), but there was a small pile of small reflective discs that were oddly familiar.

to you, they were handheld mirrors, maybe kept in a bag for makeup on the go or whatnot. your soulmate has lost two of them; you kept them in a box in the top of your closet for safekeeping with the other non-toothpick relics from your soulmate. any reason why the guard would have makeup mirrors lying around was beyond you — wait a minute! the guard wouldn’t have compact mirrors laying around in the armory. so if they weren’t normal mirrors, what were they?

“hey fox, what’re these?” you have the sense to not pick them up, instead waving your finger around them. the armorer had their back turned to your friend while digging through the munitions database, leaving fox to wander the armory however he pleased.

he approached you with a smile. “those, birdie,” he replies while picking up several of them, studying them reverently, “are bolt reflectors. they work similar to pinball — place them around a space and shoot a blaster at one, and the blaster bolt will bounce along them like a path.”

your eyes lit up. “i have two of these at home, my soulmate lost them! i just thought they were makeup mirrors, but-“

“you have these at home?!” you almost put the commander into cardiac arrest with the admission.

“yeah, it’s not like i knew-“

“hold on a second!” the armorer shushed you both. “so you just found the bolt reflectors?” you nod. “and then the firepuncher just magically showed up on your desk?”

fox’s comm chirped. thorn’s voice confirmed what the armorer was slowly beginning to suspect: there was no one seen on any of the cameras depositing the weapon onto your desk, and you didn’t pull it out of your belongings. the thing seemingly appeared out of thin air.

fox thanked his brother before hanging up, no closer to answers in his own mind than he was five minutes ago. when he looked to the armorer though, they seemed to know exactly what was happening. “so what does this mean?”

they smirked as they looked at you and the baffled commander. “it means,” they pulled up the weapons logs on their datapad, “that your soulmate is most likely the owner of this 773 firepuncher.”

seriously?! how does a soulmate go from leaving toothpicks behind like footprints to losing an entire blaster rifle? “well whose is it then?”

“goes by crosshair, a member of clone force 99,” they hit a few more icons on their datapad and pulled up another page. “and they’ll be landing planetside in three days’ time.”

three days! three days? three days?! that’s no decent amount of time to prepare for meeting your soulmate! once you got your answers from the armory, fox led you back to your desk with a grounding hand between your shoulder blades.

“if you need to go home for the day, i understand. this is a lot of information to take in.” the twinge of sympathy in his voice makes it unclear whether he’s talking about finding out when you can meet your soulmate, or if it’s because your soulmate is a clone.

you know he internally hates the idea of you leaving for the day; you doing your job makes his job easier. the fact he was offering the option meant a lot, but you knew him well enough not to take him up on it. and how were you supposed to just twiddle your thumbs at home until then? news flash, you weren’t.

“you can’t get rid of me that easy.”

fox nods in thanks, silently relieved that you decided to stay. he isn’t sure what else to say except that he’s there if you need him, so he gives your shoulder a squeeze and a few more words of reassurance.

the longest three days of your life have now begun.

“how do you lose an entire 773?”

“if i knew how it happened, i would have kept it from happening!”

“maker’s sake, bickering about it won’t bring the karking thing back!”

tensions aboard the marauder have been at an all time high for the past several hours. the mission was a success (by mere technicality), but everything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong. tech did everyone a favor by keeping the team updated on the likelihoods of each misstep and every concentrated disaster in real time, which was a real morale booster.

to start, the wrong files were given to the team before the start of the mission. every vantage point and building schematic that they memorized was in vain and incredibly useless, leaving them to walk in blind.

to add flair to the fiasco, tech was shot, wrecker dislocated his shoulder, and there was an avalanche on the hill where crosshair was in position. said avalanche resulted in crosshair losing his prized 773 firepuncher and plunging the inhabitants of the havoc marauder into a state of chaos.

the closest base that had a firepuncher was on coruscant, three days out and somehow exactly where they were supposed to be for their next mission’s briefing. it was quite strange for there to be only one cataloged firepuncher on coruscant of all places, where hardly any of the guardsman needed such weaponry. the serial number wasn’t attached, which would normally be a bit fishy, but no one felt like looking this gift blurrg in the mouth. they were just going to take it as a win and keep on keeping on.

“just shut up and get some rest, we have three days till we hit the triple zero.” with that, hunter retreated to his bunk to find respite from tech and crosshair’s bickering.

crosshair wasn’t able to rest. he felt like shit; that 773 was the same one he’d been using since his first mission off kamino and losing it was like losing a limb. tech’s barrage of complaints about how everything turned out added fuel to the fire and all he wanted was to just curl up in his bunk and not wake up for a month.

but he had responsibilities and enough pride for him and his brothers to spare. moping wasn’t allowed no matter how warranted he believed it to be.

as he retreated to his bunk, he played through everything during the mission that led him to where he was now.

could he have found another vantage point that wasn’t involved in the rock slide that would have given his brothers the same, if not better, cover? what if he had held on to his rifle a bit tighter, jumped off the rocks he was perched on earlier? would he still have it then?

he was without his rifle (he named her naberrie but no one knew that but him) and felt utterly incompetent. what kind of sniper loses his rifle? he wasn’t some shiny reg that didn’t know what he was doing, he was an enhanced sniper! that rifle is his life and he just lost it like a fool.

loud clanging from outside his bunk had him rolling to face the wall. he didn’t want to deal with whatever this was about to be but as usual, he wasn’t given a choice in the matter.

“cross,” wrecker called from just outside his bunk. very seldom was wrecker’s voice that soft and quiet but here he was almost whispering.

crosshair, in intrigue and slight worry about what could get wrecker to sound like that, rolled back over and faced his brother. “what is it, wrecker?”

“i’m sorry you lost naberrie,” his hand was rubbing the back of his neck, eyes downcast and not as bright as normal. “i know she means a lot to you.”

he wasn’t prepared for wrecker to know what he named his rifle but his younger brother didn’t give him time to dwell on how he knew that information. “if i lost lula, i don’t know what i’d do.” if he didn’t want to listen to the rest of what wrecker was going to say, he would have made a snide remark about how crosshair thinks his brother would react to losing his tooka plushie.

“don’t think that naberrie is what makes you a good shot though,” one of his hands reached for crosshair’s shoulder and gave it a comforting squeeze. “that rifle didn’t keep us safe on missions, cross. it’s always been you.”

wrecker left crosshair to his thoughts with a soft smile. out of all the things his brother could have said, that was not one he had planned on hearing. it didn’t quite get rid of all the negativity he had been feeling, but it did help him not go to sleep angry.

the past three days yielded a drastic uptick in chewed toothpicks being scattered through your environment. your first thought was that it had to do with the rifle fox was keeping safe in his office. since the armorer said your soulmate was a sniper, you could only imagine how anxious they’d be about losing their primary weapon. you just hoped they were doing okay.

no other information was given to you about the unit your soulmate was from; despite your role as secretary for the guard, you were still more or less a civvie. it was a pile of bantha shit in your opinion, but none of the guardsman who knew anything about clone force 99 would tell you anything. you’d think you were asking them to put a blaster to the chancellor’s head with how adamant they were about not telling you anything.

a cleared throat called your attention away from your wandering thoughts. “excuse me? are you alright?”

“yes, i’m sorry. what can i do for you?”

the clone in front of you… was almost not a clone at all. if he weren’t kitted up and not in front of your desk, you would’ve thought he was a civilian. “yes, i came to pick up a 773 firepuncher and the armorer directed me to speak to a commander fox. would he happen to be in his office at the moment?”

holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!

“may i ask who needs to speak with him?” this just seems like a simple request a normal secretary would make, but little did he know.

what you knew was your soulmate’s name: crosshair. if this wasn’t crosshair (you didn’t think it was), they couldn’t take the rifle with them. it was ingenious and you thanked your stars that you were good friends with the commander.

“my name is tech. i’m from clone force 99, we sent the request for it three days ago.”

you knew this wasn’t crosshair! you’re not sure how you knew, but your gut knew. but the clone in front of you was in crosshair’s squad, which almost made up for the fact you still weren’t meeting your soulmate.

you commed fox and told him that tech was there to retrieve the rifle and his reply was swift and exactly as planned. “i’m sorry tech, but commander fox directly ordered me to not allow anyone that isn’t your squad’s sniper to retrieve the firepuncher.”

the man was thrown off by your words. he was dumbstruck and probably about to turn indignant, but whatever he was about to say was cut off by his vambrace beeping.

“did you get it?”

“the commander wouldn’t let me have it. his secretary said that crosshair specifically had to be the one to retrieve it, which is highly peculiar.”

an exasperated groan came from the vambrace. “just head on back, we can send him after it later.”

“roger that.”

you smiled at the trooper, hoping that his squad wasn’t too put out by the plan you were executing. “i’m so sorry about this, tech. i could try and convince the armory to part with a few toys to make up for the wasted trip if you’d like.” you said that with more confidence than someone who only learned its location three days ago should have, but it passed.

he pondered this a moment before accepting the offer. before he turned to leave, he saw something fall from the corner of his eye.

you were turning back to your datascreens when you were hit in the face with something you couldn’t identify. “ow! what in the world?” you found the culprit on the edge of your desk and when your brain identified it, you wanted to scream. “alright, that’s it! i’m buying that asshole a trash can as soon as i leave today! this is ridiculous!”

tech didn’t think anything of it at first. maybe one of the clones in passing flicked the toothpick at you while they were walking by and you were frustrated at them. once again he was about to leave but his hud started blinking at him, saying that it found traces of crosshair’s dna nearby.

now that couldn’t be right. crosshair wasn't even here with him and had never, to tech’s knowledge, been to this sector of the guardsman offices. his curiosity piqued, he asked to scan your desk and the area around it to see what could possibly have triggered his hud to send that alert. once you gave him permission, he began to search the area.

there was a multitude of small splotches of residual dna scattered on and around your desk that belonged to cross. tech knew for an absolute fact that none of the batch was in or anywhere close to coruscant during some of the approximate aging of the dna splotches. he looked at you and there was some on your face! and there was some on the thing in your hand that must have hit you-

oh holy maker, that’s a toothpick in your hand.

tech’s brain is speeding miles a minute as it tries to comprehend what could possibly explain this. each spot of residual dna is the approximate size of a toothpick, all with similar lengths and widths. the toothpick that just hit you in the face not only had crosshair’s dna on it, but the dna was absurdly fresh. the toothpick materialized out of thin air, he saw it happen.

he had come to a conclusion in moments, but he just had to test it. there was no way he was wrong about this though, not in a thousand years.

tech called for your attention once again, a glint in his eyes that you recognized as hellbent determination. “although you can’t give me the rifle, could you possibly give me its identifier code? describe its physical appearance in any way?”

every free moment since you found it has been spent studying that rifle, every scuff and mechanism that made it work. you wanted to learn about this thing that was so integral to your soulmate’s life, to who they were as a person. you knew it’s identifier code by heart and the armorer taught you how your soulmate used it.

there was even the tiniest word in aurabesh on the barrel — naberrie — which you recognized as senator amidala’s born last name. your soulmate must have named the rifle after her, a fact you found endearing.

you started with the identification code and after that, added a few of the unique characteristics that made the rifle special to your soulmate. the more you talked, the more awestruck tech appeared to grow.

“this is absolutely astonishing…” he takes a thoughtful pause, his eyebrows raising when he thinks of something else to say. “do you happen to have any bolt reflectors as well?”

with how interested tech was in everything you had to say, you would have thought he was your soulmate instead. it became apparent quickly that this was just how he is.

his current line of questioning was about some of the other things you’d found of crosshair’s while adding tidbits of information about the few things crosshair found that he knew about. turns out, crosshair was extremely secretive about your things. it was sweet that he was so protective of the things you lost but to tech right now, it was a hindrance to his discoveries.

you’d pause here and there while you worked, giving him more of your attention in small spurts. currently he was telling you the story of how crosshair found one of your high heeled shoes mid-battle. you had a feeling that tech wasn’t exaggerating when he spoke of him throwing it into a group of droids as a distraction and nailing one directly in the face.

you turned back to your work after a good fit of laughter, reaching for your stylus that you used to sign important documents in the place you would’ve swore you left it.

tech was quick to notice you looking for something and asked you what it was and what it looked like. you thought that maybe he was going to help you find the thing, but nope. he picked up his comm and asked crosshair if he had seen your stylus.

to his credit, crosshair didn’t let his perturbation be heard through the comm as he confirmed that yes, he did in fact, have your stylus.

“in that case,” tech gave you a look that said watch this before he continued. “i found naberrie and those reflectors you lost back on shangri-la.”

“you what?!” crosshair knew exactly what his brother was implying and couldn’t believe he didn’t think of his soulmate having naberrie after he lost it. but for tech to have found them first? he wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or enraged.

“i thought you’d be thanking me for finding your soulmate. talk to commander fox’s secretary, they’ll take care of everything.”

click.

tech had never felt so smug in his life. he knew the time before crosshair sought revenge for his antics was numbered, but he never felt prouder of his abilities. “as much as i’ve enjoyed talking to you, i fear that it may be time for me to go. we’ll keep in touch.”

he rose to leave and you got up with him, giving him a small farewell hug. “maybe i can soften him up so cross won’t throttle you in your sleep.”

“who knows? stranger things have happened today.” he hugs you back with a moment’s hesitation before leaving you to your work.

crosshair tore through the coruscant guard offices like a bat out of hell. finding the nearest trooper, he grabbed them by the bicep and snatched them into his space. “where is fox’s secretary?”

tech tried his luck by pulling that stunt with the stylus. cross and his brothers knew that tech had cameras installed in the marauder and that he could pull up the feed at any time. that’s the only way he could have known about the stylus. he couldn’t let himself believe otherwise.

the trooper didn’t seem too startled at crosshair’s brashness. “oh you’re looking for birdie? just follow the signs to fox’s office, they’ll be sitting right in front of his office at the desk.”

jackpot.

he quickly pushed the trooper aside before continuing his trek.

“you’re welcome!” the trooper called and crosshair just waved a hand in dismissal. he didn’t have time to deal with meaningless pleasantries with a reg, he needed answers. the toothpick between his lips cracked in two under the pressure. with a huff, he spit the useless thing out and continued.

crosshair soon found that the only difference between this building and kamino was that this one had directional signs. all the hallways in both buildings were painted the same as all the others and were just as winding, and they tested his rapidly dwindling reservoir of patience far too much.

it felt like hours before he finally found himself in front of the commander’s office and in front of him was your desk.

your empty desk.

he couldn’t believe it. all this searching and walking and anticipating to find an empty desk. oh he was gonna murder tech when he got back to the ship, that slimy weasel. using not just his rifle, but his soulmate as prank material was a line brothers just don’t cross.

he turned on a dime, itching to set upon his warpath and rain fury down upon his brother. then, he was going to tell hunter what happened and watch with sadistic glee as he tore into the dirty liar himself.

you were walking back to your desk one moment, then flat on your ass the next after bumping into something that definitely wasn’t there when you went to the refresher. getting up from the floor to see what could have possibly knocked you over, your eyes only had a moment to capture the stranger in front of you before something all too familiar landed directly into your eye.

“son of a bitch! seriously?!” make that two trash cans on your shopping list because this was out of hand. the toothpick was barely together, snapped by your soulmate’s teeth into a ninety degree angle and holding on by a splinter.

crosshair watched as you got up and immediately started to hold your eye. “are you okay?” he wants to smack himself for the ridiculous question. clearly you weren’t fine, you just had something fall into your eye.

nodding at the stranger, you wipe your eye one more time before walking back to your desk with a slight limp. did he really bump into you that hard? “i’m fine, thank you. my soulmate just has an affinity for spitting toothpicks wherever they deem fit and this is the second time one of them has landed on my face.”

you sighed and rolled your eyes, plopping down into your chair. “believe it or not, that’s actually not the weirdest thing they’ve lost. earlier this week i had a 773 firepuncher just show up at my desk before lunch,” you wave a hand in dismissal as you turn your chair to face him. “but you probably don’t care about that. now what can i do for you, trooper?”

crosshair was dumbstruck. the toothpicks, the rifle… it’s all coming together. “are you the one they call ‘birdie?’”

“yes i am, did you need anything specific?”

your eyes take in the clone in front of you. he was another that you wouldn’t have called a clone if he were wearing civvies. he was extremely tall and sinewy, his slate grey armor adding bulk that he wouldn’t have otherwise. silver hair cut short and a sharp jaw and chin, and a crosshair tattoo across his eye.

wait a minute, a crosshair tattoo! if he was here on official business you’d have to ask for his name anyways, it wouldn’t hurt anything. you’re about to ask the fated question when he begins talking once again.

“i’m here for a 773 firepuncher, my brother told me to find you.”