Pidge sat in the back of the lecture hall, her claws digging into the desk as the whispers piled on. Murderer. Traitor. Monster. The words weren’t just insults — they were daggers twisting inside old scars. She had seen planets burn, felt blood spray across her armor, heard the screams of soldiers who begged for mercy she never gave. Those memories never left. They never would.

Every time a student’s eyes lingered on her too long, she could almost hear the crack of a blaster shot, see the flash of an explosion. The nightmares had a way of bleeding into her daylight. She barely slept anymore. When she did, she woke up drenched in sweat, nails cracked from clawing at her sheets, heart racing like she was still on the battlefield.

The faculty tolerated her. The students didn’t. Some spat near her feet when she walked the halls. Others scrawled slurs across her dorm door — Beast. Killer. Empire trash. It wasn’t anything worse than what she had already called herself, but every mark was another weight she carried.

She had traded her captain’s armor for a black hoodie, her bloodstained insignia for a pair of scratched glasses. But she couldn’t change the truth: she had been the Emperor’s second-in-command, the executioner who had left worlds silent in her wake. No disguise, no new life, no amount of running could erase that.

Some days, she thought about giving up — about disappearing into the void, letting the galaxy forget she ever existed. Other days, anger boiled in her chest, a raw and dangerous reminder that she was still Galra, still bred for war, still capable of becoming the very monster they named her.

But then she caught herself staring at her reflection in the mirror, ears flattened, glasses crooked, fangs bared in frustration. And beneath it all, she whispered the same words she had clung to since the day she deserted the empire:

“I have to be more than what they made me.”

Whether the universe would ever let her — that was another battle entirely.