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The worst part might just be how relieved everyone expects him to be.
Dogma supposes it’s an understandable assumption, and it’s not entirely untrue – stepping off a transport to Coruscant and being taken to the military prison, when the alternative was backed up against a wall and asked if he wanted a blindfold, had been its own sort of relief; being sent back was another kind. In his shoes, any man would be relieved. Treason is not an offence you live to repay even without dead Jedi and dead generals, let alone a dead technically-Jedi general, and he’d chalk it up to a miracle if not for the strings someone must have pulled.
(They hadn’t told him who was responsible. He still isn’t sure who to thank, and the situation feels so fragile he’s afraid of looking too closely lest it all unravel again.)
But most of the time when they say it they’re thinking of something else: the realisation he doesn’t have to blindly follow orders. He can think for himself, should think for himself like they do. Wasn’t the burden heavy? Isn’t it nice to know freedom like this? Doesn’t that feel better?
All of which Dogma doesn’t begin to know how to answer. Of course it was heavy. It is, still. The obligation draped over his shoulders still exists, stripped of a few commands, weighed down by more. Just because they aren’t absolute doesn’t mean they aren’t there. And freedom, freedom is…
He’s not free, for one. They’ve said he is but they’d meant it only to say he wasn’t in jail. He’s no more free than the rest of his brothers, and though even with his own loyalties shifting front and centre he wouldn’t leave the GAR by choice, it isn’t the important part: he couldn’t if he wanted to.
It’s also terrifying. No, he does not feel better and he doesn’t care if that was a rhetorical question.
Dogma has not been this angry in his life and that includes fingers on the trigger, aiming for Krell. He misses the cold wash of calm, actions clicking into place so firm he knew exactly what he was about to do, and doing it. He’d known what he was doing and he’d meant it when he shot him. But he misses simply the absence of anger, hot and furious and persistent like this: of following orders because they are orders given to him, his focus settled firmly and reigned in, of temporarily flaring irritation as brothers shirked rules, of the rules in binary. Right, wrong.
Because the thing is –
The thing is, put him there again with brothers lined in a firing squad, tell him to order an execution, and Dogma would not. He knows this.
And that’s worthless, because that will never happen. It’s gone. He’s already done it.
Dogma’s prepared for it but it’s over. The next time everything is pulled into question, he’ll be back there scrambling over morals and orders, trying to decide what to do.
The next time—he does not know if he will be right.
When they keep saying it must be a relief, Dogma wants to know what about him gives them that impression. He’d never have been relieved to break a rule before and he isn’t now: either there’s a change only they can see, or there isn’t one at all. Because he doesn’t feel different. His thoughts chase the same logic. He hadn’t wanted to hurt his brothers; it was always about his orders.
In the sort of conversations held only in undertones in a cramped bunk or planetside cot, brothers talk sometimes about feeling like a different person. A new person, and not necessarily a better one. Dogma’s heard them. Never had a conversation like it himself, and it’s not looking very likely with his batchmates about as far across the galaxy as the GAR goes, because they’re the only people he could imagine wanting to talk to him about it.
It makes him a little guilty because he should feel broken, shaped by it in a way he’ll never be able to undo. Should eat him up inside how he got a second chance far worthier brothers have died without and he can’t even figure out how to use it to be better. Maybe he really is broken, because mostly?
Mostly he’s just… the same.
Same anxiety thrumming in his blood when he thinks about rules and breaking them; same pull in his chest and his stomach when he can’t stop thinking about breaking them. That, and the permanent heaviness which settles somewhere in his chest because he killed a general they’re not going to let that slide they’re going to come back you can’t do that—it’s loud and it’s shaping up to be a hell of a thing to shake, even as the days pass and nobody comes to drag him back onto a transport for Coruscant. But the physicality of it all, stress headaches and nervous hands? The turning it over and examining it and running the mental tally of endless rules? That’s Dogma since he was old enough to grasp there were such things as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
Umbara has not changed him, and that’s worrying.
They let him out, and he’s afraid they’re wrong, and he hates them. He won’t let them take him again but he shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t and there’s no solution because everything is a dead end when his options branch off. Keep quiet, let nobody know about the defect quietly tearing him apart, see how it works out for him this time. It’d be hard to do any worse.
And people think he’s supposed to be relieved. Relieved.
Anger fills that void, and not with much difficulty. Spills over when he tries to talk to someone or tries to be around someone or tries to think about anything else, and he tries, but it’s so incredibly frustrating because—
Because his morals have been tearing him apart for years and somehow, somehow everyone else just picked it up one day as cadets and thought yes, you can break the rules if you have to, that makes sense. Turned it over in their hands and tucked that information into their back pockets and, worst of all, understood innately what qualifies as needing it.
All of them. Individually. Never said a word about it to each other, just knew. Didn’t talk about it because it didn’t need talking about, because it’s right there, idiot, can’t you see it?
Dogma had not.
Dogma had not, through the ensuing years, absorbed from the rest of his classes this information. Had not figured out independently something which they were all capable of discovering – he knows there’s never been a single moment of instruction when they were sat down and given the circumstances in which they were allowed to disobey, because those circumstances are never and they did have that instruction – each and every one of them, by themselves. Had not even gained it from his batchmates’ concerted efforts to get it through his head it was not the end of the world to break a rule for once.
(The last stings the most, because they tried. Because they must have.)
And it’s obvious he’s flying blind, adjusting to the realisation when they’ve all had their time to do so when the consequences are—not irrelevant, never irrelevant, but lesser. It’s the harnesses when they first start climbing, in their blues, it’s safety-locked blasters: it’s falling down and getting back up and learning to do it again. He does not have the luxury of a mistake or two like they had.
(Well, if it was a mistake as bad as he’s made, a cadet still in his blues wouldn’t have fared much better, but—)
So Dogma is angry, a constant flame just itching to catch and flare in his chest every time someone brushes past, offers him a few words. Even lying in his bunk at night, one stray thought and he’s so furious his hands shake. At them, at his brothers, at himself, take your pick. They knew. He didn’t. It’s not their fault but if it’s not their fault, he has to blame his training and he can’t blame his training—the traitorous thought lodges his heart in his throat, long after he’s tried to bury it—so when he thinks about it, it circles back to the same place. He didn’t know what he didn’t know, but that’s not an excuse. It’s not even an explanation because he’d spent the last month and a half in jail thinking of nothing but what slipped through his fingers and has yet to find out how or why.
And when the entire point of standardised training is to be suitable for them all, where else would the blame lie but at his feet?