#aka this is me failing at comfy-vember

[star-farer]

the fall

Summary: Worlds burn and hearts break. AU: Imperial Taglist: @kybercrystals94 @fionas-frenzy @padawancat97 @margindoodles2407 @comfy-vember @dreamsight73

Comfy-vember 2024, Day 6: Weak crying

Tipoca City is a burning island. They watch the smoke rise in heaps and tendrils, curling up to the young blue sky. For once, in a very long time, the rains have given up their ravaging.

“It’s…all gone.”

She’s right. It is gone, every last piece of it. Not even the stilts stick their fraying heads out, lost in fragments somewhere beneath the waves.

Good riddance, spits his mind, bitter and writhing. Kamino deserves its desolation, for all the horrors it has housed. All those years of morbid experimentation and acerbic testing and ruthless training, shadowed by the clinging fear of being terminated for inadequacy.

Crosshair shakes his head once to the side, glowering at the waters' surface.

Let it burn. Let it all burn. Let it sink forgotten to the ocean floor.

But let it burn.

The clone girl who stands closest to dying Kamino, meters away from the platform’s edge, however, sniffles and swipes her sleeve under her nose. Her hair is still lank, curls dripping and unfurled for the most part. He thinks he even sees a tremor run through her, but he isn’t certain if it’s because of the cold or her sorrow.

What was a living hell for him and his brothers described the only home she has ever known. Their dearest instances spent in her company were mostly set against grey rooms and white walls, in that nigh-empty room she bore for a nursery.

A pang thrums against the chambers of his heart as he watches her shoulders slump, her arms winding tight around herself. Hunter takes a step towards her, a hand resting gently on her shoulder.

She turns, and Crosshair catches a glimpse of her heartbreak in the tears that run down her face. Her lips twist in an attempt of a smile, perhaps because Hunter is smiling down at her himself, but it falls short of any semblance of joy.

The arm on her shoulder curls her close into his side, and she falls back willingly against his legs. They watch the fiery remains of the city, red-orange-black flickering as it consumes the grey and glass.

Tech clears his throat softly, making them all — except for Omega — turn to him as one. “We should leave before Imperial scouts show up.”

It’s not so much he sees than feels Wrecker’s eyes on him. He knows the question before it’s spoken.

“Are you coming with us?”

He stiffens, feels the tick of his muscles near his nose with the harsh scowl that slips over his face. How dare he ask such a question? How dare he look at Crosshair with such hope gleaming behind his guarded gaze?

They all turn to him, this time — yet again, Omega does not relinquish her watch on the black plumes billowing portside.

“None of this changes anything,” he snarls.

“You offered us a chance, Crosshair.” Hunter, the bastard, steps up towards him, expression impassive. “This is yours.” And while he keeps to the side, he’s still the closest to Crosshair, still only a nudge away from standing between the sniper and the squad.

As if Crosshair could ever be a threat to them when he is unarmed.

He doesn’t trust you, even without your weapon.

It hurts more than Crosshair wants to care. He wishes he didn’t care, wishes he were as cold-blooded and ice-veined as the Kaminoans intended him.

“I made my decision.”

Perhaps the Kaminoans haven’t failed after all.

There’s a flicker of some emotion in Hunter’s eyes before the walls come slamming down, and Crosshair is too tired to parse out the hidden language of gazes and glares. Hunter presses his lips into a tight line as he considers Crosshair, gaze lingering a parsec too long on the puckered scar along the side of his head.

Hunter sighs at last, and Crosshair wonders how he fits so much into one huff of breath.

“We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn’t mean we have to be enemies.”

And that’s the moment everything clicks into place.

He’s trying for a compromise, trying to reach their middle-ground. Trying to please both sides of the party, to keep the peace.

Any other time and Crosshair would have laughed at how predictably, inherently Hunter it is of him. Yes, the leader, the eldest, the support bending under the weight of his responsibilities.

But at heart, Hunter is a peace-maker and peace-keeper. A man who despises conflicts, unnecessary or not. A man who would rather talk things out than fight, even if the odds were in his favor.

Gold eyes flick momentarily to the despondent and soaking form of their little girl, then return to hold Crosshair’s dark gaze once more. A message sent.

And a message received.

Do it for her sake. If not as brothers, and if not as allies, then a truce where neither is affected. Do it for her sake.

Anger flares within his chest.

As if he has been doing any of this for his own sake. As if any of his decisions haven’t been for her.

Does he see Crosshair as that egotistical? As such a selfish man to disregard his own daughter’s welfare?

Stupid doesn’t begin to cover this living embodiment of insanity that is called Hunter.

With a sharp frown, with narrowed eyes, with folded arms, he turns his head away to where the sun slowly climbs the sky. White-gold and brilliant, like the curls of his little heart.

Tech is the first to turn for the ship. His youngest brother turns his back on Crosshair first.

Echo follows soon after, and it’s hardly a surprise. They are close, dear friends. Of course he follows after Tech.

Wrecker turns away next, the dead med-droid hugged against his side with one arm.

Hunter, he walks over to Omega, places a hand on her head. She peers up at him, brown eyes glassy, and Crosshair sees his shoulders fall with his exhale. He murmurs something, too faint for Crosshair’s un-enhanced hearing, stroking her hair down. Presses a lingering kiss to her forehead and squeezes her arm.

He turns towards the Marauder, not once sparing a glance at Crosshair. Not once peering sidelong. His gaze is stuck on the ship as he walks past the sniper.

And Crosshair is left with only his daughter standing with her back towards him, her face towards Tipoca City, the ash-grey clouds, and the slim horizon beyond. Arms still clutched around herself, shoulders drawn and head bowed, she looks so little and lonely, a lone star in a crumbling galaxy.

He can’t bear this. To see her suffer so terribly at heart and do nothing. But he has all but denounced them and, by extension, her. He would pull her right here and now into his embrace and hold her warm and safe and sure.

But it’s no longer his place to do so.

His fingers dig into the plates around his biceps, a restraint upon himself, even as he grits his teeth in defiance.

If they would just stay. If they would just follow orders—

It’s a futile train of thought, and he doesn’t want to add it to his pile of growing grievances. With a snarl, he shoves it out of his mind to burn with Kamino.

She turns at that very moment, bent and weary, and runs towards—

She runs past him, even as his arms instinctively fall open to receive her. He berates the hope that thrills through his vibrating pulse, fists his shaking hands at his sides. Watches from his periphery as she heads for the Marauder and his traitor-brothers.

Remembers a time he watched her take her first steps.

His eyes close the moment she passes him, his head bows with the weight of failure.

The tattoo of feet against the platform stops.

Stops, then shifts as if, as if it turns towards—

Him. They turn towards him, those feet.

And when he chances a glimpse over his pauldron, truly enough, there stands his daughter with wide eyes and quivering mouth. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t say the first word. Simply watches him and waits.

There is only so much anticipation a sniper can take. And in the matters of his heart, he is shamefully impatient.

“What?”

True to his nature, the word is growled and icy, and he hates himself for the way it makes her eyelids flicker.

“Thank you,” she says in a halting yet sincere voice, “For saving AZI.”

AZI. AZI.

She thanks him for saving a hunk of metal when he had been saving her.

Oh, but it’s just like her, isn’t it? He ought to have expected it from a child raised in their care. A clone child, nonetheless.

Ever thinking of another, and never of oneself.

He nearly laughs. He nearly cries.

Nearly. Only nearly.

He doesn’t know how to respond, doesn’t know what to say. He wants so dearly to scold her for being so reckless in those debris-filled waters. He wants so dearly to hold her in his arms and never let go.

“Consider us even,” he says instead, like the fool he is, thinking only of the time she had rescued him from drowning and not from himself. He doesn’t even deign to face her, so great is his sorrow.

Her mouth twists as she considers the dry platform, something crazed in the way her gaze flits about an unseen shape. Her hands clench and unclench at her sides nervously. There’s a desperation in her face that borders on an unfathomable fear.

She blurts at last, “You’re still their brother, Crosshair.”

Time stands still. Tears run down her face.

“You’re my brother too.”

She turns, she leaves, she runs for the Marauder and the traitors. The engines rumble, the ship lifts into the air, the ramp closes. It turns, they turn, and leaves, they leave.

All of this registers as a distant echo, his mind vacuous of sound and space. Save for a single ricocheting thought, screaming hoarse and bloody.

Brother. She called him brother.

Not Crosshair. Not Buir.

But brother.

It's the equivalent of having his heart ripped out of its cage.

He wishes his hearing had been taken first.

They had taught her, when she was so young and so small, to call them by their names or call them brother in the unlikely event they were discovered with her. It was a precaution, a safety measure, for her sake and hers alone.

The Kaminoans took any and every reason to eliminate them. It was a miracle — or more likely their enhancements and success rate — that kept Nala Se from decommissioning or reconditioning them when Omega had been discovered in their keeping.

Even if it had never come to use, still they had insisted upon the habit.

But now, now, when Tipoca City and all its damned facilities have fallen, no trace of the demagolkase who lived there remaining; now is when Omega used it, drenched from head to toe in rain, sea, and tears.

When she had no need of it. When she bade him farewell.

All this time, hunting them down, serving under the Empire, doing the bidding of those who considered him worth dirt underfoot, he had believed there was still a chance to bring back what was his. To reclaim those he had lost to insanity and guide them home to him.

He turns to watch the Marauder leave the atmosphere, to watch it disappear like a star blinking out of view.

And all his hopes are dashed with a single word from a weeping daughter, a word once meant for safety now cleaving his soul like a sharpened dagger. He understands that, no matter what, she will not stay. He understands that, no matter what, she is no longer his to keep.

His head dips to glare daggers at the empty platform.

They will not return. He doesn't expect it of them. He doesn't need it of them.

He has made the right decision, there is no doubt.

Why, then, does he get the feeling that he has lost everything?