Chapter Text
Tatooine is bare and barren. Tatooine is an endless wasteland, no life and no features rising from the indistinguishable, featureless sands save perhaps for the enormous bones of a fallen krayt dragon. The beasts’ hides are too tough to pierce by the primitive methods available to natives, and so it lays there until the sands flay the armor from the meat below, and the meat is stripped by the savage Tuskens, and only the bones remain. This massive skeleton will be carved in through the center of the massive ribs and vertebrae by desperate, subsapient creatures who lick the marrow from the cancellous centers of the bones, or shelter from the furious sandstorms in the eye sockets of the dragons’ skulls. These feeding events are a burst of activity lasting up to two Coruscanti years, after which the carnivorous beasts of Tatooine– womp-rat, anooba, Tusken– fade back into the sands. No study has been undertaken of their survival outside these ‘windfall’ events. Where there are cities, they are as desperate as the beasts– always on the verge of starvation, economies falling to bits. The slaves are often human, and the masters often not, which is an aberration, and one that would concern the Empire more if it occurred on a world with more social influence. This is the truth of Tatooine, from orbit.
Tatooine is a city. Tatooine is Mos Eisley, and the ships that arrive come from above, and the ships that leave leave that way, and to the side there is nothing but a void. The lifeless sands, and the path that leads to Jabba. Tatooine is your moisture farm on the edge of that city, and your insects and plant life that you sustain with the moisture you have farmed, and your slaves you sustain on those insects and plant life, so they can work your moisture farm. Tatooine is all these things, and not the void at the edge of your awareness, the void your slaves sometimes enter, and cease to be. Cease to be yours, anyway. Maybe those thieving karking sith damn Tuskens have something to do with it. Isn’t there something you can do about that? You implant explosive chips, which kill the slaves before the void takes them. You listen to a holotransmission for Business Moguls, which talks about acceptable loss. Only a small-time businessman would be bothered by losing a few workers. You’re big-time. You’re self-reliant. Tatooine is self-sustaining, which is a nice way to say has no major exports . That’s not important. Look what you have made! Look how many slaves you have, at the size of your moisture farm, at the money you bet on podraces. You have meat nearly every week. Jabba the Hutt sends people to speak with you personally about the money you borrow-- no, that he invests in you. He would not do that if you were not so important on Tatooine. This is the truth of Tatooine, when you are powerful in Mos Eisley.
Tatooine is a living thing. She breathes. The sands shift without regard to those who pass across it, and the sandstorms rage whether the desert is empty or full of life. Even the krayt dragon has only temporary effect on the geography of the desert, even a thousand thousand generations of the Tuskens and their bantha have had their carvings scoured away again by the sands of Tatooine. This is why their dances are so important: they tell the stories of the Tusken, all the way back before the Dune Sea, when the great desert basins were filled with water, when the canyons were only streams, before the first cities of the outsiders sprang up, when Tatooine was as she will one day be again: a creature at peace. It is certain this day will come: the stories of the Tuskens say the deserts appeared only after the first cities, and cities never last long on Tatooine, never more than two hundred years (by their reckoning of a year). Tatooine wears them down with her sands, or opens beneath them and swallows them whole, or sends her people, the original people, the Tuskens, to pillage them and tear down their walls. One day, they will all be gone. This is the truth of Tatooine– as she was, is, and will be– from the back of a bantha.
Tatooine is a land of opportunity! Tatooine is full of suckers, and every one of them needs something, and none of them watch their ships properly, which means it’s not theirs anymore. It’s so easy to take what’s lying around, and no one tries to steal things you rightfully claimed when you’re in the awesome rolling fortress you and two hundred of your best friends built out of the cool stuff other people abandoned. You make an awesome market that moves around wherever you want to go. Sometimes you almost manage to get some hick moisture farmer to buy a brand new moisture collector, but then his freaky toddler touches it and somehow spots a hole? Bummer, but you’ve got other priorities. Your bro thinks he’s got a chance with this hot human girl in Mos Eisley. This is the truth of Tatooine from inside a fortress, blasting Norvr the Rodian’s Smooth Jizz station to set the mood as it rolls toward Mos Eisley.
There are other things on Tatooine. Moisture farms, too far away from cities for the masters to care about, not productive enough for Jabba to notice, usually too ephemeral for the Tuskens to care– though everyone knows if you stay in one building for more than eighty years, the Tuskens are likely to burn it. Moisture farms can’t be passed down through the generations. The people who work these farms were often slaves, often still carry the massive, knotted scars from where the chips were hacked out. Those born into slavery, chips implanted too deep as babies, are sometimes missing entire arms or legs. There’s no time to go digging around for these things, not when there’s a detonator out there and the master’s an unpredictable being.
There’s a military base, but not a big one. The troopers there are an odd mix– the child of a Person of Some Importance, doing military service to further a political career. He can’t be trusted with a real weapon, but he can’t be discharged either. A squad most recently deployed to Kashyyyk. The leader’s a real patriot. Hell, they’re all as devoted as the Empire could ever dream of. They killed sixteen Wookiees between them, but they all shot wide of a cub. They’re on Tatooine, the worst deployment in the Outer Rim, until their aim gets more precise. There’s even a clone, or at least someone who looks like a clone. People say clones used to be whip-smart and dedicated, that their ability to think was why the Empire beat back those Separatist insurgents. They say clones are mindlessly loyal, that they’ll do what they’re ordered at any cost. This one isn’t like that. He never talks. He just stares.
“I think he has brain damage,” says the future politician. “Look at that scar. Must have taken a serious hit.” He is hoping that the clone is a real war hero of some kind. Can clones be real war heroes? Don’t you have to be– well– a real person, for that? Maybe he can avoid the issue, just not mention it. I was honored to serve with a hero from our glorious war against the Separatists, he thinks. The kind of man who suffered great injury on behalf of us all, and never complained– the kind of man who would not even want compensation, or his name mentioned here, in the public eye. Shouldn't our tax credits go to support all the new recruits, men like he used to be? No problem there. Guy doesn’t even have a name to say anyway.
“Put your safety on your karking blaster before you blow your bits off,” says the squad leader. He doesn’t think the clone has brain damage at all. He thinks the clone is watching. Gathering information. Waiting for something. He wonders if it’s too late to get out of here. Wishes he could go back in time, back to when his squad had sighted that cub. Wonders if they could do it, could serve the Empire properly this time.
The clone doesn’t say anything. He just watches, and gathers information, and waits. He isn’t seeing Tatooine like a Jawa, or a Tusken, or a master, or even an Imperial. He sees it like the people working the moisture farms in the city. He sees it like the settlers out in the Dune Sea. He sees Tatooine like a slave– and also like a man who, one month ago, helped dispose of a corpse with a circular hole all the way through its chest.
The way the clone sees Tatooine, the way slaves see Tatooine, is like this: Tatooine is a waiting game. You lie in your pallet at night, which is the only time your mind is really your own, and you think about the end. The day you can finally go. You think, perhaps, about the thing in your belly, the one you can’t explain, and how it’s going to be born into slavery. How its chip will be grown-over by layers of muscle and skin and maybe even bone, how it might not be able to be removed one day. If you had run when you first knew what was happening, you could have saved this thing in you from that fate. You tell yourself the end of this is close, just a few months. You’ll run better when this thing is out of you. You will run. (And then what? You have nowhere to run to. You know you’re too afraid.)
Or you know you’ll die here, you just don’t know when. You source a chain code for everyone who comes to see you, but only six in ten live to use them. You know you’d do better if there was a medical droid, and supplies, but that’ll never happen. You could take out your own chip, but then you’d be gone, off with your family who went last year, who have a farm out near Mos Espa, and who would do this work? Only a few months more, a year at the outside. Your cough is getting worse. Your apprentice is getting better. One more year. This was Tatooine when you are carrying the Chosen One. This is the truth of Tatooine as a slave.
***
There is something the clone hears when he is down in the slave quarters of Mos Eisley. He is patrolling, although no one has told him what he is expected to find. He suspects, as do the members of the squad from Kashyyyk, that the point is simply to say that patrolling was done. The point is to let the people of Tatooine see that the Empire is there. If enough patrolling is done, then the people will not dare revolt, and patrols will remain unnecessary– proof they are working, and reason enough to continue.
“If you want to run,” says a woman’s voice, “make sure you have somewhere to run to. If all you are is running away– well, they’ll find your bones out in the sands. Going into the desert is certain death, and if all you want is to die you don’t need my services, do you.”
The clone hears this through the wall, and he rounds the corner. There is a young man standing next to a heap of rags, and the man twitches and flees. The rags stand, slow and creaky, and then there is an old woman before him, human or almost-human. There is something wrong with her mouth, twisted up and to the side– the clone can’t think of another species with a mouth like that, but he could have sworn he had seen one like it before. Is it possible she is defective? Her hands are very pale, and covered in purple scars.
“Why are you here?” she asks him.
The clone has never been in this situation before. He doesn’t know what to expect. He doesn’t know what is expected of him. “Why would anyone come here?”
“Most of the time,” says the old woman, “I tell people not to run without a plan, and that’s the hardest thing they have to hear. I don’t think that’s why you’re here, though.”
“I’m not here at all,” says the clone, “or at least I don’t mean to be.”
“No,” she agrees. “You’re not here, not really, not all of you. I think that’s half the problem.”
“What’s the other half?”
“You have a plan you're not using,” she says. “I can see it in your face. A good plan, a plan that’ll get you away from your own masters. You probably have for a while. I’m telling you to use it.”
Away from my masters. “That’s treason,” says the clone. It is obvious, now, what he is expected to do. So he does, and the sound of the blaster echoes down the hallway of the slave quarters, and he does not feel better, or obedient, or patriotic.
"Now what?" he asks the pile of rags at his feet.
"Now," says a voice from behind him, "we see what's left of you, my dear." The clone hears a hum from behind him. The hum is almost as familiar as the voice.
"Who are you?" asks the clone, who already knows. He reaches to the clip on his belt, pulls something free. He presses a button. Red-red-red, the hum triples in volume, discordant and strange, and he can see a soft purple glow on the walls.
"Why don't you turn and see?" The voice sounds amused.
The clone turns fast, raises the dual blades of his lightsaber, brings it down in a great, crushing blow. Red meets blue.
It's all over quickly.