fic: look up to outer vastness unafraid

Now in the West the slender moon lies low,
And now Orion glimmers through the trees,
Clearing the earth with even pace and slow,
And now the stately-moving Pleiades,
In that soft infinite darkness overhead
Hang jewel-wise upon a silver thread.

And all the lonelier stars that have their place,
Calm lamps within the distant southern sky,
And planet-dust upon the edge of space,
Look down upon the fretful world, and I
Look up to outer vastness unafraid
And see the stars which sang when earth was made.
~ Stars by Marjorie Pickthall

They give her a gun and tell her to kill. A voice inside her, louder than their orders, shouts out in denial, in horror.

This is wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

If she kills for then, she kills herself, all the hidden things that make her more than just First Order stormtrooper TZ-1719. If she kills for them, she becomes their creation, a faceless, soulless automaton in gleaming white armour. If she kills for them, she will become ordnance, just another weapon in the First Order's arsenal.

TZ-1719 looks to her left, then to her right, gauging JL-3621 and JL-4410. They're waiting on her. She shakes her head, an almost imperceptible negation. They nod, just slightly, because she is the one they listen too, even if she doesn't technically outrank them. She is the one who bunks alongside them every night, and trains at their side all day, not the Commander who has brought Company 77 to Ansett Island on this training exercise, and ordered them to fire on civilians.

When 1719 changes her target, her squadmates follow suit. An officer dies as easily as a civilian, and then they're in outright mutiny, running and fighting for their lives. Their numbers grow as they fight their way free, and as they flee, a long-coddled spark in Jannah kindles to brilliant flame.

In the enveloping murk, she feels another candle, far distant, but she does not have the time or knowledge to reach out. By the time she and the other mutinying stormtroopers flee, their training company, once 200 'troopers strong, has been whittled down to 40. They manage to commandeer a ship, and run until they finally have to set down, on a mostly oceanic moon circling the gas giant of Endor.

Their ship turns into a city - a home, or something like it. They spread out, bunking in smaller groups by choice rather than as assigned, sharing the duties of cooking and cleaning up after themselves. If they preserve their power, the ship will have amenities like sonic showers and climate control long after they're gone. They research, trawling through the datacore on the ship and learning things that the First Order had restricted to ranking officers. It isn't the full scale of what they've been kept ignorant of, but it's a start.

They experiment with naming themselves. JL-3621 becomes Jayelle, because she is the first of the JL designated troopers to choose. JL-4410 becomes Forten. Their names are formalized versions of the nicknames they've used for years. It makes the names easy to remember.

1719 wants more. When she was younger, she allowed her squadmates to call her Teen-Teen, but that feels childish - not like a real name.

It takes her until Forten has tamed an Orbak foal abandoned by its herd to decide on Jannah. There is not a syllable of her new name that links her to the designation of TZ-1719. That is part of why she has chosen it. Jannah.

She is Jannah.

Every morning, she wakes, and she thinks this to herself. My name is Jannah, and I am a person. I am a free person. It means, every morning when she rises from her bed, she is smiling, and the fire that burns at the heart of her is just a little bit brighter.

[on ao3]