Author's Note: This little oneshot is my way of expressing my aggravation that Karen Traviss wrote the first Imperial Commando novel, which really doesn't have much in the way of a plot, and then denies us of a proper conclusion to her series. This provides answers to some of the questions that I had after Imperial Commando, although not all.

Disclaimer: I own nothing pertaining to Star Wars apart from my own interpretations of things.

Reviews: Reviews are the only form of payment that I get for my effort, so please be generous with them. Thanks.

Survival's Guilt

Scorch stared out over the terrain of Mandalore as he absently shed toki peas for the motley crew that everyone had come to refer to as Skirata's clan. He still found it hard to just view the beautiful landscape for what it was, because he still had the mind of a commando even if he had deserted a Galactic standard week ago. That meant that whenever he looked at the mountains and dales of the world all he could see was how easy it would be to conquer or defend those locations. On a whole, though, he was very pleased with Delta's latest career choice. After all, it was nice to be able to sit outside, watching the sunset and helping to prepare supper like a mongrel civvie for once and not to have to worry about his head being blown to all the edges of the galaxy as he did so. He had never imagined that he would experience anything like this in his life, and now that he was he found that he was rather overwhelmed by its very simplicity.

Normally, he wouldn't be outside alone, especially not when his brothers, Jusik, Kad, Vau, and Skirata were all clustered in the living room together, since antisocial behavior was Fixer's forte, not his. However, Fi had been holding court, his eloquence as he offered wisecrack after wisecrack suggesting that being in a coma hadn't destroyed his gift of gab at all.

Scorch knew that he should be glad that Fi had recovered from being brain dead so well, and he was. The only problem with Fi was that he reminded Scorch too much of Sev, and the thought of Sev still caused a lump the size of Alderaan to form in his throat. That was why he couldn't join with the others as they laughed, smiled, rolled their eyes, or just looked less severe as Fi unleashed the full repertoire of his wit upon them.

As Scorch heard steps behind him, he stiffened, but when he realized that it was Vau's distinctive tread, he relaxed somewhat.

"What brings you out here, Scorch?" Vau asked, seating himself beside his former trainee. "I thought it was Fixer who enjoyed being alone."

"I'm resisting the temptation to turn the whole living room into a crater in order to get Fi to close his mouth, Sarge," answered Scorch, trying to keep up his usual good humor so that Vau wouldn't recognize that he was upset about Sev. Vau didn't appreciate weakness of any kind in those he trained, and Scorch wasn't stupid enough to give the older man a reason to thrash him.

"You are an uncivilized pyromaniac." Vau shook his head as though this were a great failing in a squad demolitions expert, and Scorch felt his stomach perform an astonishing array of gymnastic stunts. If there was one thing he had learned under Vau's tutelage, it was not to disappoint his training sergeant. "Besides, Fi isn't that bad, and some of his jokes are even funny."

"I suppose that the only problem I have with Fi is that he reminds me too much of Sev," Scorch admitted, gazing off into the sunset so that Vau wouldn't detect how much the memory of Sev burned him. "Both snipers. Both of them had vats that were obviously spiked. Both crazy, cheeky di'kuts."

As he established as much, Scorch realized with a pang that looking at the sunset wasn't doing the trick of concealing his grief, for the fading sun reminded him of Sev as well. Before Sev had gone MIA so long that he had to be dead, Scorch had never minded the sunset, but now he revolted against it. Watching the muja, crimson, pink, and purple splendor of the sun as it died made him think about how short and glorious Sev's life had been, and how Sev had gone down fighting, just as the sun had. If a mongrel's life was like a day, then a clone's was like the sunset—filled with fire and struggle, and beautiful only to the outside before surrendering entirely to the darkness. Fierfek, though, this was not an airlane that he wanted to be spacing down right now.

He focused on Vau again, as the man observed, raising an eyebrow, "That's odd. I always thought that you had more in common with Fi than Sev did."

"Really, Sarge, what beyond the smashing good looks that we both inherited from Jango do Fi and I have in common?" Scorch's eyes widened, and he was shocked enough by Vau's comment to be momentarily distracted from reflecting on Sev.

"You're both the squad wise guys." Vau shrugged. "You both are the calmest members of your squad and are responsible for boosting your squad's morale."

"Right. I'll have to get together with Fi sometime soon to have a heart-to-heart about how it feels to be the only clones with a sense of humor." Scorch forced himself to smile so that it wouldn't be obvious that he was wondering who boosted the morale of the squad morale booster.

"Both of you construct facades of serenity to hide the turmoil that sometimes fills you." Vau's hard eyes scrutinized him, and Scorch sensed that he hadn't managed to conceal his distress from his former training sergeant. Of course, he had been a fool to imagine that he could. Vau could never be deceived by his commandos, since he had known them all for as long as Scorch could remember. "Both of you tell jokes and smile to hide any pain and vulnerability from others. Both of you flee from everyone else when you can no longer keep the mask up, and quickly resurrect it if someone intrudes on your solitude. Now, Scorch, I want you to explain to me why you fled from us this evening."

"I didn't flee, sir," Scorch mumbled. "Fleeing is for cowards. I made a calculated tactical withdrawal, as Fixer would say, which is for intelligent commandos."

"Explain why you retreated then," Vau pressed on, refusing to be diverted. "What pained you so much?"

"Nothing, sir." Scorch bullied himself into meeting Vau's piercing stare.

"Don't lie to me, Six-Two." Vau's voice had gone dangerously soft, and Scorch flinched inwardly. That tone never boded well. "I am an expert at drawing information from unwilling sources, and I was the one who trained you to resist interrogation. There is nothing that you can hide from me."

"I miss Sev, sir," Scorch confessed, obeying Vau automatically, since it was ingrained in him to comply instantly with that particular tone. If Vau told him to jump in that voice, Scorch wouldn't even bother to ask how high; he would just leap as high as he could and hope that it was high enough. Hardly aware of what he was doing, he shoved a toki pea into his mouth. He chomped down on it for a moment before saying, "This is spicy. It's the sort of food that Sev would have gobbled up if he could get his hands on it, never mind that it would give him indigestion and wind afterwards."

Swallowing hard, he remembered the last time he had mocked Sev for his digestive system's intolerance of spicy foods, and went on, as some damn inside him broke, "On the last anniversary of Geonosis, he was stuffing his face with spiced warra nuts. I told him not to because it gave him indigestion and wind, and I wasn't about to take him over my shoulder and burp him like a baby. All he did was belch out that I'd miss him when he was gone."

"What did you say?" The harsh lines on Vau's face had eased somewhat, and the memory of how Vau hadn't thrashed him for his breakdown on Haurgab gave him the courage to reply honestly.

"I told him to make himself useful and help me out." Scorch had to work hard not to choke over the mountain that had formed in his throat. "That's not what I should have told him, though. I should have told him that I would miss him more than he would ever know when he was gone. That way he would have known how much I cared about him, and how much he meant to the rest of the squad and me. Now, because I am a di'kut, he died not knowing that."

Scorch gazed out into the sunset again, wondering if Sev had ever realized just how much he mattered not only to Scorch and the rest of the squad. He hoped that Sev had, but he couldn't be certain, because he had never had the courage to tell Sev how important Sev was to the whole squad, which was why as soon as Scorch died and joined the overspirit the Mandalorians believed in he would track down Sev's spirit and explain to the squad's psycho just how much he had missed him every minute since he left.

After all, Scorch may have been the squad wise guy, but every good comedian needed a counterpart, and Sev had been the one who had complemented his humor. Where Scorch's wisecracks were light like the day, Sev's had been dark like the night, and Scorch missed Sev as much as the day would miss the night if it suddenly disappeared. Indeed, Scorch reckoned that if the night were to die abruptly, it would not be the biggest shock in galactic history if the day darkened to try to mimic and make up for the absent night, so it was not really so odd that Scorch had become more morbid every day since Sev had been classified as MIA.

"He knew how you and the rest of Delta felt." Vau cut in, his voice unusually husky. "He knew you all since you were boys. He knew what every tone and expression of yours meant. He knew that Boss shows his affection with orders, Fixer shows his by reminding everybody of the rules, and you show yours with banter. When someone knows you that well, they know how you feel about them without needing to be told."

"How do you know all this, Sarge?" Scorch felt his heart lighten somewhat, but he didn't dare place too much faith in this idea while it was so new.

"When I heard that Sev was MIA, I found myself wondering if he recognized how much I cared about him, and that the only reason I was so hard on him was because I wanted to ensure that he would survive," said Vau, sighing.

"He knew that, Sarge," Scorch said. "We all know that. We may not all be blessed with eidetic memories like the Nulls from Bonkers Squad, but we all recall how you told us the first day that everything you did to us from then on was to ensure that we survived even if you didn't. Call us gullible, but we believed you, and you would have succeeded if we hadn't been di'kuts."

"What do you mean, Scorch?" Vau's perpetual frown was firmly etched in place again.

Scorch hesitated, since he didn't want to confess any wrongdoing to Vau, but, then again, if he did, maybe Vau would thrash him for it. If he was punished, Scorch could stop feeling guilty. With that in mind, he burst out, "Etain said that Omega could take out the Separatist cruiser in fifteen minutes, and, because we are easily provoked into competitive displays of our masculinity, we took up that dare. Maybe if we hadn't, Sev would still be here."

"Did you take any risks that you wouldn't have normally?"

"No." Scorch shook his head.

"What about Boss, Fixer, and Sev?"

"Not that I know of." Scorch shook his head again.

"Then the fact that you accepted Etain's challenge doesn't matter," Vau told him crisply.

"But, sir, I don't know for sure that Sev didn't do anything stupid because of the dare." Scorch snatched up another pea and chomped on it, trying to release some of the horrid tension he felt. "After all, he was the squad psycho, and I'm not completely positive that the red markings on his armor were actually paint. Maybe Sev would still be here if we hadn't been so obsessed with kicking Omega's shebs, and with being the first—being the best. Perhaps Sev would still be with us if we had figured out that being the best isn't worth a decicred if you aren't around to enjoy the bragging rights, and that being good enough and alive is better than being the best and dead. You should probably give us a good hiding for that, and make us all feel better."

"I can't give you a good hiding for being as competitive and aggressive as I raised you to be," Vau answered, and silence descended between them as they both contemplated whether Vau's whole approach to training had been flawed, after all.

Then, Scorch muttered, "I wish we hadn't mocked Omega so much about being a broken squad when we were working together on Triple Zero. We thought we were so smart, but we didn't know anything about how it felt to lose a brother, and we thought that we were so amazing that such a thing would never happen to us. Sure, we knew that everyone snuffs it eventually and that clones die sooner than everyone else, but we didn't really think about that. We were so full of ourselves that we felt we could cheat death even as we dished it out to others. Now that we've paid for our hubris, I can't help but wish that I had been the tuition fee instead, Sarge."

"That's survival's guilt talking, Scorch," snapped Vau. "Don't listen to it."

"No, Sarge, it's logic," Scorch insisted. "I'm the squad's weakest link."

"How did you arrive at such a strong conclusion?" Vau arched his eyebrows elegantly.

"Boss is consistently good at everything just like he was on Kamino, which is why you made him our sergeant. Fixer is as skilled a hacker as anyone in the Bonkers Squad, and he helped you invent new close-quarter combat tactics back on Kamino. Sev may have been the squad's resident lunatic, but he was probably the fiercest warrior of us all, and nobody can deny that he was a one man killing machine." Scorch shelled the peas rapidly as he explained. "Then there's me. All I can do is make things go bang."

"That's what you're supposed to do—you're the squad demolitions expert, and, theoretically, you could blow them all up if you wanted to," Vau said.

"Yeah, I'm great at making things go bang as long as you don't mind the occasional singed eyebrow, Sarge," Scorch snorted at the memory of how he had earned his nickname from Vau in a training exercise that had left them both temporarily without eyebrows.

"That ordnance did more than singe my eyebrows, I'll have you know, but that was a mistake, Scorch, and you were a child learning how to be a soldier. You have a right to make a few errors in that case."

"You didn't say that then, sir," Scorch reminded him, closing his eyes as he remembered the lecture Vau had given him for that mishap.

"Of course I didn't." It was Vau's turn to snort. "I wasn't going to raise any of you to be soft like Skirata's bunch."

"Skirata's bunch are soft, all right," Scorch agreed, but he felt more envious than scornful. "The reason that Darman stayed with Niner as an Imperial commando was because he couldn't abandon him like we abandoned Sev."

When Vau did not respond, Scorch continued awkwardly, "I think the worst thing about the whole affair is that I know we should have gone back for him. We should have gone back and tried to save him if we could, or at least tried to find proof that he was dead. We shouldn't have obeyed Yoda's order right away like that and just have claimed comm interference later."

"An army that disobeys orders is a rabble, Scorch." Vau shook his head. "Rabbles tend to die quickly."

Scorch ignored this, as he plunged on, "I should have fought Boss and Fixer harder when they wanted to abandon Sev. I know I could have done it, because all those years on Kamino, I was terrified that you would think that I lacked the proper warrior edge and make me chose to fight either you or one of my brothers. Maybe I never had to make that choice, but I know which one I would have made if I did: I would have picked to fight my brother. That means that I had the ability to fight my brothers and I just didn't want to on Kashyyyk. I would have cared more about avoiding a beating from you than about saving my brother. I think I deserve a shiny medal for the sheer patheticness of that. I may have shouted at Boss and Fixer that I would never forgive them for turning their backs on Sev, but I can. It's myself that I can't forgive."

"You wouldn't have been able to defeat Boss and Fixer in a fistfight," Vau informed him bluntly.

"I know, Sarge," Scorch answered simply. "If I had fought them to the last, though, then I wouldn't have abandoned Sev. Abandonment is a choice, and I was dumb enough to let Boss and Fixer talk me into doing it."

"It wouldn't have done Sev a whit of good, for he would have been left behind anyway."

"It would have made a difference to me," Scorch declared vehemently, sticking out his chin. "If I had fought them, I wouldn't have abandoned him."

"You're being selfish, Scorch." Vau treated him to his most disapproving glower. "You aren't worrying about what would have made a difference to him; you are fretting about what would have mattered to you."

"I don't know that it would have done Sev no good, Sarge," argued Scorch. "Just because we couldn't hear him any more over the comlinks, that doesn't mean he couldn't hear us. That doesn't mean that he couldn't have heard me fight Boss and Fixer to the last to return to him. That doesn't mean that he couldn't have known that at least one of his brothers loved him enough to never abandon him. Instead, because I am a coward, if his comlink still picked us up, his last moments of life must have been the worst of his entire existence. If his comlink still picked up our voices, he would have known that his brothers—the people who loved him most in the galaxy and who should have protected him with their last breath—had abandoned him for a couple of meaningless orders. He must have felt more alone than he had ever felt in his life once he realized that he couldn't rely on his brothers, because no matter what happened in the past at least he could depend on us. That's not fair at all. Sev deserved better than that."

Vau was quiet for several long moments, and then he announced, "You can't break now, Scorch."

"Why not?" Scorch gave a dry chuckle that contained only a fraction of his usual mirth. "Now is an excellent time to go around the twist, since I'm not at war any more, and the odds of my becoming a firework are greatly reduced."

"No, it is not a fine time to go insane," Vau countered testily. "You may not have realized this, but you are the heart of your squad, and if you go crazy, the rest of your squad will go mad as well."

"I doubt it, sir." Scorch shook his head. "If I lapse into depression, I'll probably stop joking around, and, since my jokes drive everyone up two or three walls, my going gaga would most likely have a positive impact on Fixer's and Boss's mental health."

"That's not true." It was Vau's turn to shake his head. "All too often people's words don't reflect what goes on inside them, and all too frequently people don't even know what is going on inside them or how much they care about someone until it is too late. Many beings make disparaging remarks to wise guys without realizing how much the wise guy's jokes help to improve their spirits and keep them calm. The strength and the courage wise guys provide others with often goes unnoticed and unappreciated, as does the intellect it takes to turn serious matters into less terrifying, laughing ones, but I think you deserve to know the truth that wise guys really aren't so different from wise men. Now that you know how much your good cheer and your sense of humor mean to Boss and Fixer, can you abandon them?"

"No, I can't abandon them," Scorch replied immediately, thinking that the answer to his earlier question of who boosted the morale of the morale booster was the callous training sergeant. "If I get depressed that won't magically bring Sev back to life, and now that I know how awful it feels to abandon a brother, I could never do that to Boss or Fixer. Besides, I didn't come here to grieve, and if I died, I wouldn't want my brothers to cry for me so much that they forgot how to be happy as that's a poor tribute to me, so I won't do that to Sev ."

"Why did you come here?" Vau asked, as Scorch finished shelling the peas and they both rose.

"I guess Sev's death made us all realize that we really were mortal and that if we didn't get out, we'd end up dying as slaves in a war that we didn't care about that never seemed to be over even after it was won. We didn't want that." Scorch shrugged. "We wanted to have a little taste of freedom before we died. We wanted to eat real food and not the canteen's idea of it. We wanted to take showers on a regular basis, so that we wouldn't go through life smelling worse than Mird. We wanted to sleep late on comfortable mattresses. That's about as far as we planned it, Sarge, and we figured that we should seize the chance when we got it. When Darman, Niner, and that new clone who was put in their squad disappeared on their mission here, Holy Roly sent us out after them, and we knew that such an opportunity would never come again. After all, since the Spaarti clone who couldn't walk, look at his HUD, and talk at the same time that was supposed to replace Sev got shot, we just had to say we didn't want a new squadmate when Holy Roly asked and disappear here like Darman, Niner, and their Spaarti clone did. I feel a little sorry about tricking Holy Roly, though, since his command style is rather like Skirata's on stilts, and it is a shame that I never got to enjoy the caf and cookies that would have been at briefings next or the commando of the month sequence with a keg of ale as a reward for the most mission-focused man. Of course, I wouldn't have won that, but Boss or Fixer would have, and I would have been able to leech off them."

"Nobody knows how to tell a story like you." Scorch couldn't tell whether Vau was amused or not as they went into dinner. "While we're on the subject of stories, you had best not tell anyone about our conversation. I would rather Skirata think that I brutalize you than coddle you."

"Understood, Sarge." Scorch grinned. "If anyone asks, I'll say you flayed me to within an inch of my life. That will make us both sound so macho."