I had gone without a real name for a while before my squadmates had all gotten tired of devising random names or using my titles as forms of address when we weren't on duty. I had decided on it as I lay staring up at the ceiling of the barracks one night and tried to come up with something that would set me apart from the others.

It was surprisingly difficult. I was running through my lexicon of Mandalorian and trying desperately to find something that would fit, but for a long time, nothing seemed to fit into place like I'd hoped it would.

I had been running through the "krill" section when I finally muttered the word "kando" My mental translator fixed me with a definition: worth, value. I had paused there as I stared up at the ceiling as the snapping voices of old overseers tersely rang out in my mind and reminded me that I was expendable. Initially, I wrinkled my nose at it and went to pass it up, but something stopped me. I tested the word out loud as quietly as I could, and the more I said it, the more Iru Bre came to mind.

I had value. He had told me that in his own slanted way. If one of the men who had designed me believed that I had value, that I was indeed worth something, then how could it be wrong? My worth was mine, and no one could take that from me. I was the result of thousands of hours of careful planning, of science and technology, of training and preparation. That had to count for something. My name was to be my reminder from that night going forward that I had value regardless of what the bounty hunters and overseers told me. That Kaminoan who had designed me, trained me, and oversaw my progress saw value in me, and that meant that I had to at least see it in myself. I owed Iru Bre that much.

Kando was my name. I chose it myself, and there was a certain power in that. It was another layer of confidence that permeated my being, that extra bit needed to really come into my own as a leader, and it helped when we did finally transfer out to our real posting.

When we first arrived on Coruscant, we worked in criminal apprehension. If someone broke out of prison, we tracked them down. If someone got away from the security, we tracked them down. If we happened to see someone fleeing a crime scene, we tracked them down. This task also, unfortunately, included our brothers sometimes, and we quickly obtained the title of "Fun Police" and got summarily ignored every single time we showed up in 79's. Usually, it was on some public intoxication call and the regular security didn't want to get involved with Clones. I mean, I get why. It usually resulted in a full-on fight between local security and a bunch of intoxicated and all-around fiesty Clones.

There will never be a more awkward feeling than showing up at 79's after a long day of work and having everyone turn to look at you at the same time with that look of annoyed sarcasm as someone shouted, "Fun Police on deck!" at the top of their lungs from somewhere in the back.

"Drinks on me for everyone except those guys" was another common phrase I heard more than once.

You know, coupled with "Snitches in the back", "Can we kick them out before they ruin the party", and "Cite me my rights and I'm kicking your kriffing ass".

It was normal. Normally nothing escalated beyond some name-calling, eye-rolling, and the occasional exchange of barbed remarks, but if anyone who wasn't a Clone decided to cop an attitude, I do have to hand it to them that they didn't let it fly. It was just one of the perks of having a couple million identical brothers, I guess.

We had been called in that night when a few Clones decided that they wanted to start a fight. Naturally, when we arrived, no one had seen them and definitely no one knew about any fight. I had my suspicions, but I didn't exactly voice them. It would have only made matters worse if we started pointing fingers. We gave up about two minutes in when asking if anyone had seen who started it and all we kept getting was "Oh, he looked a lot like me" and "Well, he looked kinda like my friend here" when we asked for descriptions.

We weren't going to get anywhere on this, so we just left our frequencies with the bartender and told us to give him a buzz if anything else happened. Almost as soon as our boots hit the ground outside, we got a ring from HQ.

"Good news, boys. Finally got something for you. We need you to head down one sub-level. Apparently, some senator's cousin just got shot. Suspect was reportedly heading in your direction. Reports say that it's a Nikto."

"Finally," Grek had groaned. "I was getting sick of these patrols!"

Red slowly turned to him, and I didn't need to see his face to almost visualize his expression, "You... you just sounded happy that someone got shot."

"I still can't believe they wouldn't tell us who started that fight," Tor had huffed from somewhere behind me, making Red and Grek turn to him with a shake of their heads.

"Cut the chatter before I slap it out of you. We've got a killer to catch."

The lower sectors of Coruscant were notoriously seedy. It was filled to the brim with everything that Coruscant wanted to keep away from its bright and shiny upper levels. We Clones were among the more detested of groups when it came to the locals, especially if you sported the red and white armor like we did. We had a reputation of breaking up spice smuggling rings and stopping slave trades, so naturally, the less than reputable elements of the underbelly didn't particularly like it when we were poking our noses around. Nobody liked us, and quite frankly we didn't like them, so the hatred was all very much mutual.

The place where the murder had taken place wasn't too far away from where we were at the time, and in the short jog there we didn't see anything too out of the ordinary aside from the usual scum of the lower levels. With only a block or two between us and the scene, we were starting to think that maybe we had missed the guy. A Nikto shouldn't have been too hard to miss, though, and that was what was starting to worry us.

Turned out that it would only get to start worrying us, however.

I rounded the corner and nearly slammed into a Nikto, who looked up at me in sheer terror before I grabbed ahold of his arm as he tried to spin away, "Now, now. Where do you think you're going?"

"P-please! Let me go! He'll kill me if he finds out!" The Nikto was half-crazed, eyes darting everywhere and looking every possible flavor of absolutely paranoid under the sun.

"Red stepped forward, "Who will? If you tell us, we may be able to help you."

"N-no! Nonono! You can't help me! No one can help me! If he finds out I told you, I'm dead!"

"Grek," I slung the Nikto into his arms and gesture back up the alleyway with my chin, "you and Tor take him back to base. Red and I will go check on the crime scene. Try not to rough him up."

Grek gave a low chuckle as he let Tor slap a pair of cuffs onto the Nikto, "No worries, boss."

That meant I probably should worry quite a bit.

I glanced at Red, "What are you thinking?"

"No idea," he replied with a shrug of his shoulders, "but whatever happened to him had him all shaken up. Think he did it?"

Something told me no. No one that flighty could have committed a murder, or so I thought. Part of me was still hoping that my gut was wrong as the two of us turned back down the street and headed for where the Nikto had bolted from. I wanted so badly for it to be him, but something in the back of my mind kept telling me that it all ahd happened much too easily. Nothing ever happened that easily in the Guard. There was always something else.

Red and I arrived at the crime scene to find the guards milling about and doing preliminary investigations. Whether they liked us or not depended on which way the wind was blowing that particular day, and today it seemed like having two extra sets of hands around was a good thing. They let us go about observing, checking potential hiding spots for our perpetrator and figuring out exactly how it is our poor sods got killed in the first place.

There were two bodies: one belonging to the senator's cousin and the other belonging to another man that I didn't quite recognize. Compared to the senator's cousin, he was plainly attired. I figured at first that he must have been some poor assistant or servant caught in the middle of some business dispute gone wrong, and I paid it little attention after that as I started observing the wounds.

The blaster shots were precise. Nothing on the bodies seemed to indicate that some terrified Nikto assassinated some senator's visiting cousin. I distinctly recall even thinking that his corpse looked pretentious as I looked down on him before I saw Red crouch down beside the other body.

"Well... this complicates things." I turned to Red and saw him stand up before he turned to me holding a silver cylinder in his hand. It took me a moment to register exactly what I was seeing, but it finally clicked.

A lightsaber.

"One of our victims was a Jedi, sir."

"Oh, wonderful," I sighed and passed a hand over my neck. If a Jedi was killed, then it meant that we were inevitably going to get one assigned to this investigation.

The last thing I wanted was to be working with one for a number of reasons, but my first issue was simply that they tended to bog down investigations rather than expediting them. They weren't too keen on forceful action, and that didn't suit my squad's style. We were result-oriented. If we hurt some official's feelings in the process or stepped on a few toes along the way, then that was too bad because the safety of the senators and the rest of the government was our top priority. If killing the suspect was the most prudent course of action, then we weren't going to sit around discussing the philosophy of morality. That shabuir was going to die if it meant keeping people safe. Jedi tended to be more "no killing unless absolutely necessary", and the funny part of that whole philosophy is that I often found that it just got more people killed.

Some people frankly didn't deserve second chances. If it had been a Clone that ahd been killed, then I certainly wouldn't be giving the person who killed them any chance to come clean. They were going down because they were a threat. A violent one.

Red and I exchanged looks behind our helmets as he turned the lightsaber over in his hands before he clipped it to his belt, "Probably shouldn't let this sit around all these sticky fingers, eh?"

"I'll turn it in to Commander Fox and see that it gets taken to the Jedi, but definitely bring it with us. The last thing we need is for some lightsaber to end up on the black market around here," I cast a cursory glance around as we spoke, and sure enough, the scene was attracting more unnecessary attention than I wanted us to have. "Let's wrap up and get out of here before people start asking us questions."

"Following you, Captain."

---

We had been waiting most of that night to hear about any confession that could be gotten out of the Nikto, but most of the guys who wound up working on him all said the same thing: whatever had happened to the poor guy had messed him up pretty badly. He was refusing to budge from the same basic set of lines he had given us, which meant that until we got some autopsy reports, we were at an impasse.

Fox had taken the lightsaber we found and agreed to see it taken to the Jedi. Not only was it the right thing to do, but it would also tell us who this Jedi was. The bigger question still remained to be why a Jedi was accompanying someone as relatively insignificant as a Senator's cousin.

We weren't getting anywhere, and to say that it wasn't frustrating would be a massive lie on my part.

"Grek, sit down," Tor huffed as we all sat in the barracks and awaited an update that would likely take hours to come. "You can't rush protocol."

"Protocol is stupid. We should be out there catching whoever did this!" Grek had shot back with all the temper we had grown accustomed to. Whoever engineered him and his batch needed to tone down on the aggression just a bit.

"Who? We don't even know who we need to be looking for!" Red shot back as he leaned back in his chair with a roll of his eyes.

I went to tell them to calm it down when one of the other Clones walked in with a datapad. "Okay," he began as he glanced down at the pad and then back up to us with a slight wince, "the bad news first: we have still gotten nowhere on the Nikto." A collective groan went through the squad, and Grek threw himself down into his chair. "The good news is that the Jedi have agreed to participate. They're sending one of their own down tomorrow to help with the investigation."

I definitely wasn't thinking it was good news by any stretch of the imagination.

"Apparently, the one they're sending is an empath. That might help with our Nikto problem."

None of us were to privy on what that exactly meant, but from what little I had gathered about Jedi powers, empaths were really, really good at the whole mental and emotional manipulation stuff. That definitely seemed like it could play out in our favor if the Jedi actually decided to kriffing use it.

After he left us to our own thoughts, Tor was almost giddy. "Captain, we get to work with Jedi! This is amazing!"

"Calm down," Red shook his head before he turned to me with a chuckle and gestured to the stripe of red hair he had running back across the left side of his head, "Think I should dye it for the occasion?"

"Knock yourself out," I replied with a roll of my eyes as Grek groaned and moved to his bunk. "Sleeping off the news, Grek?" I called after him.

"It's all you kriffing can do after an announcement like that. Wake me up when the Jedi is gone."

Sleeping that all off would have been nice. Sleeping off that entire assignment would have been even better.

So, there I was, working with a kriffing Jedi, of all people...