Worth: A Star Wars Story

1. Kamino Blues

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.

I was one of the first generation run of troopers put out in Kamino. There was a special status that was attached to that sort of thing amongst us Clones. Being one of the first batches was a status symbol. You were everyone's Big Brother at that rate. Little cadets gave you these awestruck stares when you'd pass, younger batchers would always come to you for advice, and in general you found yourself being this odd beacon of knowledge for other newer batches that inevitably came along after you.

I always got asked about what it was like being one of thousands of brothers. The best way that I could describe it... was like... being in a platoon of soldiers who you have known for your entire life. I had nothing to compare it to. We didn't have regular families. The squads we were trained with were the closest thing we had to a family in the traditional sense. Sometimes, the instructors we had would become something akin to paternal and maternal figures, I suppose. But us? We Clones? That was a whole different type of relationship.

We were siblings - all several million of us - and like any siblings our relationships were singular contrary to what a lot of people would think. We were all close, yet we fought, we cried, we raged, and all of it together. The only thing we knew from the time we were created was that we were all the same, yet not. We had the same faces, but we were all different. I could tell all of my brothers apart, even before we cut our hair and dyed it or took trips to special facilities to get our eye color changed. It was a world that was just us. The only people we trusted were faces like ours. I don't know if that sense of camaraderie was bred into us or if we came by it naturally. Jango was a native Mandalorian, and those people valued family above all else. Maybe that bled over instinctively into us, too. When we were taught about the outside world, it was inconceivable to believe that there were people and aliens out there who looked so drastically different that they didn't even look human. We never really even knew what a human female was until some were brought to Kamino to help train us - tanky Mandalorian women and whipcord bounty hunters, all incredibly dangerous for opposing reasons. We understood the concept - Kaminoans, after all, were gendered beings - but to see a woman who looked in so many ways like us and yet not was a lot for our little kid brains to understand. 

Don't even get me started on the concept of a nuclear family. You know, mommy and daddy and their gaggle of little ankle biters. My father was Jango Fett and my mother was a tank. Going out into the galaxy and seeing families... I would be lying if I said that a small part of me wasn't envious of the kids holding their moms' hands or riding on their fathers' shoulders.

Like most things on a world as isolated as Kamino, one of the greatest constants from the time we were children were the people who made us. The Kaminoans weren't nurturing by any stretch of the imagination. Lama Su had a vision for what the Republic wanted, and we were supposed to be the ones to give it to them in spades. The Kaminoan overseers who looked over our training and observed our progress were the most distant people imaginable. The one who watched over my group in particular was a stoic, cold Long-Neck named Iru Bre. Despite his overall callous nature, I had a certain respect for Iru in many ways. Unlike many of the Kaminoans, he had scars. He didn't let "genetically inferior" Kaminoans do his risky procedures. Around his throat were long claw marks of one of the fauna that he had been working on doing genetic testing on. It had broken free and wrapped a foot around his throat, but he was able to subdue it. It was big talk at the time considering that Iru came from an "unmodified genetic line", as they liked to call it. In short, unlike many other Kaminoans, Iru Bre was about as close to a pureblood as you can get. He walked in with bacta patches wrapped around his neck and on his head fin and taught that day as if nothing had happened.