Chapter Text
Quinlan growled at the hand that shook his shoulder with an insistence that continued even as he slapped the annoying hand away.
"Hng."
"Hey, wake up!"
"Aayla, for the sake of the Force, let me sleep."
He realised the moment he said it that there was something wrong: Aayla had hands bigger than that. She had not woken him up in years, too.
"My name is Omega, not Aayla," a high-pitched girl's voice said.
Quinlan reluctantly opened his eyes when he was shaken again and met the serious gaze of a child looking at him quizzically.
"… What?"
"You're sleeping on the toddler beds."
" What's wrong with that?"
"We have real adult beds a few rooms down the corridor."
"So what? There are beds here too, they're made for sleeping."
"So, the ori'vode won't be happy if you're here, this is a room for the ikaade."
The unknown word sobered him up and woke him up more effectively than anything else. He was up in seconds, surprising the child – a clone, Quinlan realised, taking full measure of the child who could not be more than twelve.
She was a girl, he could see it, at least ten, and blonde, but she had exactly the same eyes as the adult clones, the same skin tone and even their noses looked similar.
"My name is Quin. How old are you?"
"I'm eleven, nearly twelve, I'm everyone's big sister here."
"Big sister?"
The girl did not seemed to find his amusement hilarious but simply shrugged.
"It's the accelerated ageing thing, and they don't take me seriously either, you know? But I love your hair, it's so pretty!"
"Thank you," he replied immediately, still dumbfounded as he moved out of his makeshift bed, careful not to frighten her even though she seemed very confident even with a stranger as imposing as him.
Accelerated ageing? For her to be theoretically everyone's big sister, she would have to be... older than even the adults? So what, they were physically twice their real age? How old was Fox exactly?
Was Quinlan about to marry a child?
He would rather freeze to death in the snow.
"And the older ones, how old are they?"
"The very first ones are almost twelve too, I can't wait to finally be their size, but it's so long for me!"
"Enjoy your youth," Quinlan advised distractedly. "It's easier to sneak in when you're small."
The baby clone nodded enthusiastically and smiled happily at him, continuing to talk, looking happy to be chatting to someone.
Maybe there were not many clones like her who aged normally, maybe there were not many girls either, maybe she was a failure at whatever had been done in their production and was lonely because of it, he had nothing to lose by being a bit nice and distracting her.
"Do you want to help me look after a group?"
"A group?"
"The children, we help look after the children."
"You're a child. And there's no need to play the age card with me, kid, I'm a real adult."
"The others too," she laughs, shrugging her shoulders. "You just have to watch them so they don't swallow anything dangerous, that sort of thing. You could tell us about some of the places you've been, it's the first time they'll see a stranger."
But not you, Quinlan astutely observed. You've seen non-clones before.
"Okay, I'll help you if you want."
"Great! I'll come back with them, you stay here, don't move!"
The Jedi Master laughed softly when she insisted several times that he should not move, clearly she did not want to be left alone again, and waited until she returned with a children walking behind her with a moderately confident step.
"I've got a guest! His name is Quin! Come in and sit down!"
The Kiffar noticed their curious and intrigued looks as well as their caution as they sat around the tables. It was... incredibly cute. They looked like normal children apart from the obvious fact that they were all exactly the same.
Also... Okay, he would probably call this girl a "baby clone" just for the joke but these were real younglings. What were they, three years old? So, in all probability, about a year and a half?
What did children that age even do?
"Here are the pencils."
Omega handed out sheets of paper and pencils or markers and very quickly the children forgot about him and tried to draw according to the models laid out on the tables and Quinlan grabbed a sheet with a model to colour when he received a packet after Omega had selected a Wookie for herself, immediately starting to colour.
"We're going to stay until it's time for the others to go to bed."
"I'll do that. Not in the mouth," he said to one of the kids, throwing an eraser at him as he brought the tip of a felt-tip pen to his mouth. "You can bite the cap," he added when all the children around him looked at him.
After going through the drawings and finding neither a long-haired human man nor a Neti woman, Quinlan chose the thin Twi'lek woman fortunately decently dressed – otherwise he would have had to go and shout at the first adult clone he saw, really, he wouldn't have had a choice – and grabbed the rare shade of blue that matched his Padawan's skin colour.
"You are doing brown eyes?" Omega asked as he quickly added the finishing touch.
"Yes, why, don't you like it?"
"I don't know, I don't think it's very aesthetic, it doesn't stand out."
Quinlan chuckled and refused to answer when the girl asked him what was so funny. He would tell the young woman as soon as possible. For her, who was always sexualised, hearing that she was "not very aesthetic" would probably be a first.
It was much later, long after Quinlan was hungry for his day with nothing but breakfast and then had ignored it enough for his body to forget he was hungry, long after he had helped several children make very ugly but pleasing doodles and long after one of them had fallen asleep in his arms that the door opened on an adult clone dressed in casual red clothes similar to the children's blue outfits who stopped dead in his tracks when he saw him.
Yeah, he thought as the man reached for the blaster gun at his waist, that was to be expected.