Chapter Text
Chapter 1: The "Perfect Soldier"
A series of memories flashed by her eyes, a girl with white hair, pale skin and red eyes, an unsettling girl, an unwanted child. Looking out the window onto the street she could see what had been another orphan just like her, one who was now departing with their new family… she was the oldest now…
She’d been here for ten years, an orphaned Arkanian Sephi hybrid from a planet she couldn’t remember. The older you got in the orphanage the less likely you were to get adopted, that was a fact she’d learnt during all these years. She’d not spoken much to the one that was leaving today, he was a year older than her that much she knew… he’d gotten lucky it seemed.
That family had looked at her as well, but she knew they weren’t going to pick her… all the kids that had been here when she’d arrived were gone. New groups had come and gone, the only faces she still cared to recognise were those of the staff, the headmistress, the caretaker and all the others.
A voice came from behind her, one which belonged to the headmistress. “You needn’t mind Ashlin, you’re special, you always listen, you always behave, a role model for all the others.” The headmistress was old, wizened with the years and kind beyond belief. She spent most her time following the headmistress about, listening and helping with whatever was needed. “I hope that your day will come as well but even if it doesn’t…”, she paused for a moment, a deep sigh echoing out in the hall. “I know you’ll do better than every other child that has lived here.”
Yes, she was the best, she had the highest marks, the best behaviour… everything an orphaned child needed to be adopted. But it wasn’t enough in her case, she’d heard the whispers around her, cold, unfriendly… scary, they were scared of her, her demeanour and ghostly appearance.
And so it went on, time passed and eventually her eighteenth birthday came and went. She’d left the orphanage the day after, doing what was expected, leaving when she became an adult. The streets were packed with people but she ignored the bustle, simply looking around… looking for something to follow. Eventually she saw a recruitment poster, a large man in armour holding a republic flag in one hand and a blaster in the other. The picture was uninteresting to her, only the words at the bottom had any value to her, “Find your nearest recruiter and join up today to fight for the Republic.”
She stared at the picture in front of her for a while, she had been wondering what she was supposed to do after leaving the orphanage and here the answer seemingly laid. With her mind set she went where she was seemingly told to go. The forms were simple and efficient, at the bottom she wrote down the last name the headmistress had given her the day before and the first name she’d had since forever, Ashlin Rhone.
…
It felt like she was back at the orphanage just this time there were guns and pazaak cards everywhere. The other recruits avoided her, just like the kids at the orphanage, they seemed to both loathe, admire and envy her at the same time. None of them could match her in training, hand to hand, target practice, you could name anything and she was the best. Even her drill instructors seemed to be wary of her, but they of course used her as an example for the others, trying to inspire them to do better. “Recruit Rhone is the finest recruit I’ve seen in all my years, nothing compared to the rest of you scamps.” Is what the drill instructors had said more than once.
…
The moment her basic training was finished she got promoted to Lance Corporal and sent off to get Ranger training. Unsurprisingly to her it went the same as basic had, only this time things had gotten partially more difficult, yet she was still at the head of the pack nonetheless. Before she’d even seen combat she already had two medals pinned to her uniform, the Exemplar’s Ribbon and the Distinguished Recruit’s Badge.
…
She’d never forget her first combat engagement, a group of slavers on Manda. They’d been tracking said group of slavers for a day, the sun had been at its zenith an hour ago so the tree cover wasn’t letting in as much light as before. She was in the middle of their spread out column alongside Senior corporal Miles Vay, the deputy squad leader and private Jak’ra Szhen the radio operator.
The vanguard group suddenly went down on one knee signaling for them to do the same, the three of them in turn made the same signal to the rear guard commanded by sergeant Conner Rills, the squad leader. One of the vanguards, lance corporal Hal Reyl, quietly made his way back to their group whilst sergeant Rills made his way up to them at the same time.
Lance corporal Reyl was the first one to speak, reporting why they had stopped. “We’ve got a visual of the slavers, around a dozen or so from what we could see but there are probably more out of sight.”
“Radio in to company command that we’ve found our target and request further orders” Sergeant Rills said whilst signaling for the rear guard to come closer as they awaited their orders.
Rills formed up the group to be ready to fight when they would eventually get the order to engage, slavers against a Republic ranger squad wasn’t much of a fight even if the slavers had the numbers. Rills sent her into a fireposition on a ridgeline which looked over the slaver’s camp. She along with her DLA 13 blaster rifle were covered entirely by camouflage netting, crawling up beside a tree she rested the blaster against a root and began aiming, waiting for the order to open fire.
The wait didn’t take long, sergeant Rills voice sounded from the comlink in her helmet. “Let’s send these kriffin slavers to meet their makers, open fire!” She was first to fire, killing one of the slavers with a bolt to the head. The slavers started scrambling, managing to avoid most of the fire coming from the rest of her squad, so she got to work. She was side on to most of their cover so she simply let off blaster bolt after bolt into their unexpecting sides, felling them one after the other.
A minute or two was all it took before the first slaver raised their hands in surrender, quickly followed by the remaining survivors of the engagement. There'd been thirty two slavers and ten in their squad. It was more like a cleanup than a firefight, 25 dead and 7 captured, 20 of the kills belonged to her…
She had gone over to inspect the first slaver which she had shot. There was nothing remarkable about the human, the first person she’d killed, there was no natural reaction of disgust and the like which she had been informed of in the past. She felt no remorse nor any particular satisfaction from what she’d done.
She’d seen the unsettled looks from her squadmates in the days after, heard their whispers, she didn’t even have a reaction when we were piling up the corpses, she just went from one to the next killing them like sport. This had earned her the nickname of “Meteor” because one of her squadmates had likened her to one, something about being as ruthless and devastating as one. She just did her job like she was taught and ordered to do so she never really got the reason why they called her that…
Not long after, a month or two later, she was recommended for special forces and so began her road to fame, joining Havoc squad, hunting down her squad members who defected to the Empire, rebuilding Havoc from the ground up and all the rest.
—
The memories passed just as quickly as they’d come, replaced with the unmistakable smell of charred flesh, the feeling of your armour being covered in mud… they weren’t particularly new, these sensations. This was her job after all, one she was damn good at…
…
Whether it was Ord Mantell or on Coruscant, a core world or an outer rim one… it was still the same, with a confirmed kill count of 397 and unconfirmed somewhere over 500 this was all too familiar. But she couldn’t shake this weird feeling she felt growing in her chest…
…
She was staring at the corpse of her latest addition to her kill count, a grizzled imperial veteran by the looks of him. There wasn’t much that stood out about him, a grizzled veteran, exactly as she’d just thought… all that was left of him here on this force forsaken battlefield was that observation. Another republic victory brought on by Havoc squad… but this one felt different from all the rest, it felt hollow… there were about as many republic soldiers in this valley as there were imperial, if not more.
The best of the best, Havoc squad, her squad made up of rule sticklers and weirdos from Jorgan and Dorne to Vik and Yuun, M1-4X falling somewhere in between. Naturally you couldn’t exclude herself, their famous leader, Major Ashlin Rhose being in the middle with Forex balancing their group. She was a rule stickler and a weirdo to those around her, just like her time in the orphanage, basic training, ranger training and in her old squad… that much hadn’t changed over the years…
On the way back to basecamp she didn’t say much except for the necessary, the pointers and constructive criticism that had become second nature to her after becoming squad leader. Jorgan and Dorne were compiling every detail of the engagement for future reference while Forex walked behind them hailing their heroic efforts. At the back of the group Vik was counting the credits he’d managed to loot, likewise Yuun was peering over his own spoils, technical instead of strictly monetary.
That night was a sleepless one, there was nothing new that had happened… she just couldn’t shake that weird feeling that’d been stuck in her chest ever since the end of that latest firefight.
Has it finally gotten to her?
All the fighting and killing…
She’d never felt any remorse for those who’d been on the other end of her blaster rifle…
She was doing her job, what was there to be hung up on?
Her hands were still, not a tremor to be found…
She wasn’t feeling melancholic or anything like that either…
She just felt tired.
…
A week had passed since she’d begun feeling like this, tired. She’d applied for some personal leave for the first time ever, but the higher ups had denied it for some trivial reason. Something about the necessity of having her on standby, she’d asked for five days thinking that they would inevitably only approve 3 days… but outright refusal was unexpected.
…
Two weeks and five missions, nonstop without any real rest. She’d actually gone straight to spec ops command and told them to their faces that she would refuse any more missions if Havoc wasn’t given proper shore leave. Naturally they had been unable to refuse her when it was a face to face confrontation, few generals dared talk back to her so how the hell would these guys muster the courage to?
Applying for personal leave… confronting command… she’d never done these things before, things she’d never imagined herself doing. It felt strange….
The squad had split up, gone to spend their time letting loose or just winding down in some other way. She seemed to be the only one who couldn’t figure out what she was going to do, she just felt pissed off right now. Everything from command and their pompous attitude to this unfamiliar feeling stuck in her chest.
She cleaned her gear, sparred with the training droid and even tried watching a random holodrama. Nothing seemed to help… her mind wandered a bit, once again looking for the reason for this strange restlessness she’d been afflicted with. One thing she seemingly came back to was that imperial soldier… and this time she finally remembered why she seemed so caught up on him. He had fought to the last, to the bitter end… she’d seen that from imperials before, especially the veterans. But this time her memory of that particular soldier’s last stand stood out, he had a smile on his face the entire time, every time his face popped up in her mind it held a smile… even his corpse had a smile on it, although it was one which seemed resigned.
Was she going to end up like him?
Standing to the last with a smile on her face?
…
She threw herself out of her bed, grabbing a jacket before storming out of the ship.
Dying in battle… maybe once upon a time she would’ve accepted that, but now?
No… there was something that emphatically said no in her mind…
There was some strange pull she felt…
Something beckoning…
The night was lit up by the Coruscanti lights, the endless march of a planet constantly in motion. She found herself at a club of all places, her squad had invited her to party with them once or twice before but just like in her pre-Havoc days she’d refused the ones brave enough to ask. Clubs were places where you drank literal poison turned into palatable drinks to dull your senses, a place where you gambled all the money you'd gotten from your most recent paycheck… a place where you went to meet people, socialize…
Normally she would’ve never even deigned to look at this kind of place, but now she felt inexorably drawn to it.
The inside was dimly lit except for the multitude of differentially coloured and flickering lights. As an Arkanian offshoot she had infrared vision so even if there were no lights it wouldn’t have been an issue… but she wanted to experience it like most others did. Scanning the large room she saw people doing all manner of things, she began pacing through it all wordlessly.
There were humanoids doing lines of spice off of each other, others were dancing wildly either alone or in some sexually provocative manner. The bolder ones, or rather the drunk and high ones, were having sex in the open. A uniformed man, military police by the looks of him, was getting serviced under a table by two twi’leks on their knees. A larger burlier alien was pushing a small zeltron woman’s ecstasy filled face into a wall rhythmically thrusting his hips forward into her.
She’d never seen it in the flesh, the sounds her old squadmates had produced in the night and holovids being the closest thing to this. But they felt like a far cry from each other, she felt out of place here, she knew she was twisted in her own way, her entire life being the example of that, but this felt weird on a different level. She elected to stop walking around among the intoxicated masses instead going to the bar where a droid was performing its task like any other, diligently and without complaint.
She picked out a mixed drink, one which was mostly non-alcoholic. She continued her people gazing, taking in all those different moments. After a while she’d gone through a couple drinks, gradually beginning to feel that dulling sensation like a heavy blanket over her head. The night had gone on like before, gradually intensifying, probably because of all the spice and alcohol.
She’d begun thinking strange… at least in her opinion, she’d been caught up on other women time after time, ones who were made up to look their best. She observed and thought about what they did, they flirted with attractive men, danced freely and so on. They got the most attention, most of the stares, lustful or otherwise.
Her usual stone cold demeanour had started to crack, revealing the one encased within… She remembered those times when she’d been sad at the orphanage, crying and being consoled by the headmistress because no one would pick her. It’d been nearly 15 years since this hard shell had begun to form, every child other than her getting adopted only putting on another layer. She’d almost forgotten how it felt, being sad, of course no one would approach her… she wasn’t beautiful like the other women in this club. Why would things be different from how they’d been at the orphanage? She was still the same cold and unsettling looking girl she’d always been.
—
Nox was not in a good mood, yeah he owed Cipher Nine a big’ol favor and wasn’t about to go back on his word but he still loathed having to be on this forceforsaken metal husk of a planet. Having to hide himself in the force, hide his appearance and everything else was tiresome beyond measure. The only outlet he had at this point was the Coruscant nightlife, famous across the galaxy for its decadence only trumped by the likes of Nar Shadda.
Cipher Nine required extra muscle in the event of “mission failure” as the agent had so eloquently put it, hiding the actual words, those being to get the hell off of Coruscant as fast as possible because an entire army plus defense fleet would probably be trying to kill them. But that naturally meant that until such that he and his companions were needed he had all the free time in the world.
Being in such a foul mood with few conventional Sith ways of alleviating his ruined mood he’d opted for a surprisingly normal way. Go to a club, maybe find some good looking girl to wind down and have fun with to pass the time. This particular club reminded him of those on Nar Shadda, spice and sex in other words. Yet when peering across the room his gaze was drawn to a particularly pale skinned and white haired humanoid sitting at the bar, draped in a flurry of contradicting emotions.
Ignoring all the uninteresting people he strode forward like a shadow making its way through the crowd, there was an empty seat next to her which he took. She was dressed rather normally compared to all the other club goers, a plain pair of boots, leggings and an equally plain shirt under a cropped black leather jacket. Her hair wasn’t done up in any particular way, simply pulled behind her pointed ears and hanging loose over her back.
She seemed completely unaware of his presence, simply staring mindlessly at other people. If she was that out of it then he’d have to be the one to strike up a conversation.
“You seem rather out of place here.” Imbuing his voice with the force he made it focus on her to make sure she heard him. Her head spun around revealing a pair of eyes with blood red irises, eyes that completely contrasted against her otherwise white appearance. She looked confused, as if questioning if he was really talking to her.
“Uh, hello there…” Her words came out in a meek tone, clearly conveying some sense of unease or something akin to that. The haze of emotions surrounding her was quite astounding, trepidation, hope, despondency and everything in between, but hope was the one which was beginning to over power the other emotions.
Taking another look at all her features he couldn’t help but marvel at the beauty sitting in front of him. She looked like a fairy tale character.
“I couldn’t help but notice that you seem out of place among this kind of crowd.” He said waving his hand in a showing motion, gesturing to the club goers around them.
“Yeah… who would think that I fit in here, or even want to talk to me… an ugly and unsettling person like me…” Her gaze became quite distant when she uttered those words, words which he found rather strange coming from her. Strange… he felt something which he rarely did when he looked at her right now… he pitied her, he was actually feeling pity for her. It was like staring at a lost Massif puppy.
“Well, I am talking to you, compared to me all these other people are nothing… so you got the attention of the most important person here.” He was stroking his own ego as much as he was actually trying to console this woman. Her face seemed to visibly light up because of his words, like the whole ego filled part of them didn't exist.
“You… you want to talk to me?”
“I find everyone else here to be boring, so yes, I want to talk to the only interesting one here.”