went down to see my V.A. man } 𝙿𝙴𝚁𝚂𝙾𝙽𝙽𝙴𝙻 𝙵𝙸𝙻𝙴.

[militaryson]

DECLASSIFIED

COL SARKINIEN, PETER

FAMILY NAME	SARKINIEN
GIVEN NAME	PETER
CALLSIGN	"SPARKY". SIMPLE PLAY ON FAMILY NAME.
AGE	30 YEARS
HEIGHT | WEIGHT	5'8" | 130LBS. NOT SKINNY, BUT VERY SLIM DUE TO MUSCULAR ATROPHY.
HAIR	BROWN. SLIGHTLY TOO LONG FOR REGULATIONS - HE'S STARTED GROWING IT OUT.
EYES	HAZEL (CLIENT REQUEST)
VOICE	WORKING CLASS CORUSCANTI ACCENT. [ Analogous to a real-world working-class English accent (as opposed to something more posh like Tarkin's). ] GRATUITOUS USE OF PROFANITY AROUND OTHER SOLDIERS, BOTH CANONIZED REAL-WORLD EXPLETIVES AND STAR WARS SPECIFIC ONES.
EDUCATION	ROYAL IMPERIAL ACADEMY, SUMA CUM LAUDE
LENGTH OF SERVICE	12YRS, 2MO, 4D
DIVISION	IMPERIAL STARFIGHTER CORPS, 163RD STRATEGIC WING (FORMER)
POST	PILOT -- ARC-170 STARFIGHTER -- WING COMMANDER (FORMER)
RANK/PAYGRADE	COL/O-6 (DISCHARGED)
NATURE OF DISCHARGE	HONORABLE -- PSYCHIATRIC
RIBBONS & COMMENDATIONS	_______________________, __________________, ________________, ____________________, _______________ ________, _________ ______________, __________________, _______________________, ______________, TIE ADVANCED COMBAT MEDALLION, DISTINGUISHED FLIGHT MEDAL, GALACTIC WAR ON INSURGENCY MEDAL, PALPATINE CLUSTER, SILVER VALOR MEDAL, IMPERIAL MEDALLION OF SERVICE, IMPERIAL PURPLE HEART MEDAL, MEDAL OF VALOR ---NONE FOLLOWS---
MARITAL STATUS	DIVORCED, FILED BY WIFE -- NO FAULT/IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES
SEXUALITY	OPENLY BISEXUAL, NO INTERNALIZED HOMOPHOBIA. PREFERS WOMEN. MONOGAMOUS. INTERESTED IN HUMANS AND HUMANOIDS/NEAR-HUMANS.
RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION	ATHEIST. PYRE CREMATION REQUESTED.
NEXT OF KIN	VICE ADMIRAL ARTHUR SARKINIEN, IMPERIAL NAVY, MEMOIR AUTHOR (FATHER) / DR. SHOAN HARCLEW - ROYAL IMPERIAL ACADEMY, ORGANIC CHEMISTRY DEPT HEAD, TENURED (FATHER). NO SIBLINGS. LARGELY RAISED BY NANNIES.
GENETIC STATUS	ENGINEERED, EXTERNAL ARTIFICIAL GESTATION. STERILE.
CONTENT WARNINGS	WAR/VIOLENCE, MENTAL HEALTH STIGMA, INTERNALIZED AND SOCIETAL ABLEISM, FASCISM, LIMB LOSS, SEXUAL ASSAULT MENTIONS, RENAL FAILURE/DIALYSIS, CANON-TYPICAL MISOGYNY.
SERVICEMAN SUMMARY	Peter is the 30-year-old, Kaminoan-engineered nepo baby son of an imperial admiral (created by request out of a desire to secure future military contracts with under-the-table favors for influential members of high command) who wrote a widely-read memoir, a former colonel and wing commander in the Imperial Navy whose life and career unraveled in a matter of days after an emergency landing on a remote world with an undetected Alliance cell led to a violent, unsalvageable injury to his wrist and his capture as a POW. Minutes prior to his capture, he encountered a single rebel only to panic in the moment of truth and miss the opportunity for a clean shot—requiring that he finish the man at point-blank range. This graphic, intimate first 'real' kill (as opposed to distanced, bloodless explosions), and the three days spent without medical treatment for the excruciating compound fracture of his left wrist, led to the development of severe PTSD after his return from a high-profile, televised POW exchange for more valuable alliance pilots solely due to his father's connections. Following his release from a lengthy hospital stay for septic shock and a lifesaving amputation of the hand and forearm, Peter was declared unfit to serve on psychiatric grounds and discharged, rendering him a disgrace to his admiral father in a hypermilitaristic society: he surrendered and was captured alive, he developed PTSD after performing the core duty of a soldier (killing), and he ultimately failed in the line of duty even despite being genetically engineered to excel. But the writing's always been on the wall: despite his upbringing, engineering, and the expectations placed upon him from birth, Peter has never had the sort of disposition that makes a good soldier, only a good leader: he's reserved, introspective, and sensitive, warm and attuned to the people around him, quiet but not cold or callous in the way the Empire (and his father) want him to be. Peter feels things deeply and is prone to the 'failure' of compassion; he cares about the lives and pain of other people and was only able to kill for so long because being unable to see the other pilots allowed him to compartmentalize. He's an overachiever, constantly seeking to distance himself from his familial privilege to feel seen as an individual and recognized on his own merit - but he's not used to thinking for himself, and he grew up in a world in which joining the military as an officer was the only future ever really on the table for him, a member of the privileged class in a fascist society that had never given him any reason to question the propaganda he was immersed in or treated himself and his family anything but very well until his sudden disability. At his current canonpoint, Peter's trying to determine where he fits into a fascist, militarized society now that he has outlived his usefulness as a cog in the imperialist war machine at the age of thirty. He's a man staring down the barrel of 'What happens now?' whilst trying to navigate life with a severely disabling mental illness and coming to terms with the trauma and grief of very sudden limb loss, but he doesn't know—he's not used to thinking for himself, and his destiny has always been decided by others before he was even born. It's important to note that while his prosthesis is cutting-edge (again, due to privilege) and is hard to visually differentiate from his organic limb at first glance, characters will likely notice that he avoids using his left hand, instead leaving it hanging unnaturally at his side, and has poor fine motor skills when he does use it due to a number of skipped occupational therapy appointments.
SOCIOECONOMIC BACKGROUND	Mixed. Vice Admiral Sarkinien rose to a position in high command from a solidly working-class background; Dr. Harclew, his organic chemist (and eventually professor) spouse, was born into an affluent family of academics with a degree of generational wealth and status - the Republic's old intelligentiya. By the time Peter was "born", the two of them were very, very wealthy, but both parents are fairly ascetic, and Sarkinien took pains to parent him in such a way that he would share in his working-class sensibilities. Peter grew up without the usual trappings of wealth, but he was largely raised by nannies, has never has to think about money as a concern, didn't have to work while in university, etc. He's hyperaware of his own privilege and insecure about it as opposed to being out-of-touch, and he has a more middle-class value system (and accent), but there are still some things Peter doesn't always catch: he hasn't consciously registered the role of institutional privilege in things like his access to extensive physical and occupational therapy (which he skips) to learn to use his prosthesis, for example, or the way that who he was born to determined which surgeon at an upper-echelon hospital performed his surgery—and therefore how much of the limb was able to be salvaged in an unusual and difficult operation.
PERSONALITY	Peter, in some ways, turned out to be exactly what you'd expect from the kid of a vice admiral and a respected academic with a known name. He's a serial overachiever who constantly feels the need to prove his own merit and divorce himself from the privilege his father's status allowed him; praise on his looks, or anything that was engineered on request (like reflex times), means nothing to him. He's spent his entire life yearning to feel like he's worthy of attention on his own merit only, and, until his capture, Peter bent over backwards to obfuscate his connection to someone so influential, always feeling that nobody would ever think he earned anything he had. (The reality lies in-between, as is usually the case: better commanders than him got promoted more slowly because less attention was on them; thirty is quite young for a colonel. Peter excelled in the military academy and graduated suma cum laude due to his own focus, drive, and rigorous study schedule... but he also didn't have to worry about money or spend any of his time working instead of studying because of family affluence.) In general, he's not really the typical soldier, let alone the kind of personality that one is used to seeing in fighter pilots. Peter is introverted and reserved; while he's well-liked and cordial, he doesn't ooze charisma and is more comfortable at the periphery of social gatherings than occupying the center of attention, though he's had quite a bit of practice getting used to it. He's very observant and aware of the people around him, and he's good at picking up on shifts in the temperature of the room, in part because he's more prone to enjoy socializing by watching and listening to other people talk than more actively inserting himself into the center of things. Peter was engineered to carry a single-nucleotide polymorphism that creates the genetic predisposition for sociopathy, which his admiral father has, because that parent would have an easier time understanding and bonding with a child who shared his truncated emotional range as opposed to trying to parent a child who felt social emotions (e.g. shame, guilt, remorse) he only understood intellectually. But ASPD isn't a single-gene trait like something like cystic fibrosis, and Peter never developed it—instead, he's cut from the same cloth as his other parent, a chemical engineer and a tenured professor at the Royal Imperial Academy, introspective and sensitive. What Peter feels, he feels deeply; the lives and stories of others move him, and he cares a lot about the wellbeing of the people in his periphery. He was only ever a slightly above-average pilot despite his genetic advantage (visual acuity, reflex speed, shorter stature, strong vestibular system), but it was this personality, something that can't be engineered, that made him an excellent and very well-liked commander: his ability to be levelheaded, fair, and reassuring, and the ease with which he bonds with those under him, made him a departure from the standard fare in an Imperial officer corps that taught the use of fear and aversives as motivation. Peter's ability to compartmentalize in the cockpit would seem at odds with his predisposition toward compassion until one considers the conditions in which the killing he performs occurs: Peter, in his career as a fighter pilot, has never had to see the human being inside of spacecraft he fires on—he just sees a detonation and destruction of the craft itself, which makes it very easy for him to detach the human element from what he's doing. In general, he's not used to thinking for himself, and Peter's never really sat down and asked himself what he wants and whether that's the same thing as what his parents and his society want. He went to the Royal Imperial Academy and entered the military as an officer because that's just what one does when they're the only child, and son, of a member of high command in a fascist, militarized society—there was never room in his world for him to consider any other course of action as even being possible; it was just sort of a given. He's very, very indoctrinated, and the Empire has treated himself and his family very well and, until he became disabled, had never given him any reason to want to bite the proverbial hand that had done nothing but feed him. Peter's attachment to Admiral Sarkinien keeps him from being able to look at the Empire's war crimes, and his father's own participation in atrocities, with an objective eye—it's very difficult to reconcile the idea of a loved one with the devastation they've caused, especially if you've been raised in a society that validates those actions. Largely thanks to an abnormal childhood in which his parental figures were very erratic with how and when they expressed affection and childrearing was largely left to nannies, Peter doesn't do well in relationships and struggles with emotional intimacy. He has a disorganized attachment style largely born out of parental inconsistency—he becomes deeply attached to someone, then gets startled and draws back, avoiding their attempts to bond with him further and attempting to evade deeper conversation until he's settled down, at which point he begins the cycle anew. He's erratic in when he does and doesn't want to be touched and in when he wants to give or receive affection, and he's a difficult person to be with in a relationship, closed-off and wanting to share a deep emotional bond with a partner without actually having the emotional skills to do that - this was the main reason that his wife filed for divorce after two years of marriage; being with him became exhausting and it was a sort of "you can bring a horse to water, but..." situation.
HISTORY	Peter was "born" in 30 BBY, i.e. 30 years prior to the events of A New Hope, making him 8 at the start of the Clone Wars and 11 at the time of the regime change, during which both parents were party-line loyalists to Palpatine. He was genetically engineered and artificially gestated by the less-sophisticated predecessor to the Kaminoan eugenics program in an effort to curry favor with his well-known father, Arthur Sarkinien, a career Navy man and then-admiral in the Republic who would ultimately distinguish himself as a brilliant tactician in the Clone Wars, write a widely-read military memoir about his time in the service, and rise to the rank of a vice (three-star) admiral in the Imperial Navy. To understand the man Peter would become, it's important to understand a little bit more about the two men who raised him in their image. Arthur met his husband and Peter's other father, an organic chemist named Dr. Shoan Harclew, when he was brought on as a subject matter expert in the development of chemical weapons to be used against the Geonosians. After the Clone Wars, he became a professor at the Royal Imperial Academy, and after the regime change gained tenure and a position as the chemistry department head—because he was willing to sell out those colleagues who didn't follow the party line to get that position. Shoan was and is an intellectual, thoughtful and attuned, a very beloved professor students hope they'll get when the time comes for them to take that class, and is friendly, in touch with his emotions, and very approachable. Peter significantly takes after him where disposition is concerned, and was always much closer to Shoan than Arthur, a sociopath capable of loving in his own way, but devoid of the capacity to feel so many of the major emotions his son would have to grapple with. The future chosen for Peter, and Arthur’s narcissistic motive for having a child, was written into that son’s very genomic information: the Kaminoans, upon parental request, gave him modest physical advantages in the cockpit and even a genetic predisposition toward developing Arthur's inability to feel 'social emotions' like remorse, guilt, and compassion, although the latter is not a single-gene causality and Peter was, to Arthur's mild disappointment, born neurotypical, disadvantaged by the presence of feelings that would stop most ordinary people from ordering the sorts of atrocities his father carried out in the name of both Republic and Empire without much feeling at all, things Arthur could only intellectually understand but not truly relate to. There was no real room for Peter to be his own person when he was growing up; to become an officer like his father and rise the ranks was, in his mind, simply his lot in life as an Admiral’s son, and it was never presented as negotiable. So, like any up-and-coming officer with the right connections, Peter entered the Royal Imperial Academy at 16 and graduated on time at 19, suma cum laude, because that's just what people like him do. Post-graduation, he followed the "correct" trajectory and spent the next 11 years serving in the Imperial Starfighter Corps, where he climbed the ranks a little more quickly than usual thanks to a combination of his own performance and institutional favoritism; though he was only ever an above-average pilot, he was well-liked as a commander thanks to the soft skills that weren't gene-edited. At 25, he even married—but his ex-wife, a social worker from an affluent family named Elana, filed for divorce two years later, unable to deal with his difficulties with interpersonal closeness. Three months ago, Peter’s charmed(-ish) life and career went off the rails with an emergency landing on a remote world that led to the excruciating compound fracture of his left wrist and his capture as a POW. Minutes prior to his surrender, he encountered a single rebel, panicked in the moment of truth, and missed a clean shot—requiring that he finish the man at point-blank range, a vision that now haunts him: despite climbing to the rank of colonel in the Imperial Starfighter Corps and shooting down countless craft, there had always been a great distance that enabled someone like Peter to kill and compartmentalize the feelings that came with it very easily. Faced with the humanity and suffering of the man he shot on the dune, he had to truly kill for the first time—and ultimately failed to meet the expectation of the remorseless killer his training as a soldier had raised him to be. Peter's situation was a medical emergency, but he was taken prisoner by a very small group that lacked the capability to treat such a severe injury. In more agony than he'd ever thought himself capable of experiencing, and knowing that he was going to lose his hand if not die if he didn't get treatment, he swallowed his pride and, to his great shame, told them that he was Admiral Sarkinien's son and the Empire would be willing to trade him. It took three days of negotiation and bureaucratic tape clearing for a prisoner exchange to actually be approved - during which Peter's condition steadily began to decline as local infection became sepsis. By the time the medevac arrived for the prisoner exchange, he had gone into septic shock, and had to be resuscitated twice on the way to the hospital. Peter survived thanks to a high-profile, televised POW exchange for more valuable Alliance prisoners solely due to who his father is, but he Came Back Wrong: killing an enemy he could see for the first time in his career, and the three days he spent without medical treatment, led to the development of severe PTSD and depression. He spent the first two months of his homecoming in the hospital recovering from sepsis and undergoing multiple surgeries—first, to amputate his left arm from the elbow down to remove necrosis and get the infection under control, then to install a top-of-the-line myoelectric limb. He was in the ICU on intensive support for the first two weeks as his internal organs slowly recovered - but he continues to be on dialysis, his kidneys only about 30% functional, and is waiting for transplant organs to be grown from his own cells and a surgery to replace them in the near future. He became severely depressed, and started showing early signs of post-traumatic stress disorder; it was around the middle of the second month that he was subjected to unwanted sexual advances and touching from a nurse who felt she was doing him a favor and 'thanking' him—when, in reality, it was clear that he wasn't consenting or enjoying this and had simply frozen in place and shut down until it was over; following that incident, he doesn't like being alone in rooms with healthcare providers and anyone getting on top of him is enough to trigger him into another freeze-and-dissociate episode. He hasn't processed this and doesn't consider it sexual assault in part because of his own misogyny - in his mind, the fact that he was a bedbound patient and she was a nurse is eclipsed by the fact that she was a woman and therefore couldn't have power over him, a man and a colonel in the military. The other part is because he simply can't handle thinking about it now with everything else he's dealing with. Following his release, Peter was declared unfit to serve on psychiatric grounds and discharged, rendering him a disgrace and embarrassment to his father in a fascist, hypermilitaristic society: he immediately surrendered and was captured alive, he developed PTSD from a single kill at the rank of colonel, and he ultimately failed in the line of duty even despite being genetically engineered to excel. Today Peter Sarkinien is a man staring down the barrel of "What now?": He's in the earliest stages of attempting to reassemble his life and process the loss of a limb and learn to use its replacement, all while trying to figure out where he fit into a society that had no place for him now that disability had suddenly taken away his usefulness as a cog in the imperialist war machine.
NOTES ON PROSTHESIS	Following the amputation of all of his left forearm save for about two inches of residual limb below his elbow, Peter was outfitted with a top-of-the-line myoelectric limb at the Emperor Palpatine Surgical Reconstruction Center thanks to his father’s connections within the Empire. While medical science in the Star Wars universe is quite advanced, it’s still a prosthesis as opposed to an organic limb, and this comes up in Peter’s daily life. VISUAL NOTES: Upon initial examination, his prosthesis cannot be differentiated from his organic arm. It has the same amount and pattern of arm hair, it matches his skintone at rest, and it looks like it has veins; the joining with his residual limb is seamless; it's weighted to match an organic limb and matches his body temperature. If one looks closer, though, there are a few discrepancies, mostly in that his prosthesis is not dynamic in the way that his organic arm is. The hair on the artificial limb doesn't grow back and doesn't stand on end when the hair on the rest of his body does; the hand doesn’t flush when it’s hot or cold because it doesn’t have blood. For the same reason, it doesn’t form bruises or bleed when cut; and the skin is tougher and harder to puncture than real human skin. The fingernails on that hand don’t grow, and then nails don’t blanch if pressure is put on them. FUNCTIONAL NOTES: Peter can feel some things through artificial touch receptors, but he doesn’t have the same level of feeling he does in his organic arm: he has full sensation in the hand, but feeling in the forearm is largely limited to pressure and pain—he doesn't have the level of sensitivity needed to feel things just brushing past his skin. Though he has the level of technology needed to achieve a natural level of dexterity, he hasn't: it's somewhat obvious that he hasn't had much training or practice with the prosthesis and doesn't really know how to use it well, which is largely due to apathy brought on by his recent depression leading to a lack of practice and a lot of skipped occupational therapy appointments. Peter uses his dominant hand more exclusively than a person more confident with a prosthesis or a person with both organic hands would naturally do; he avoids using his prosthesis and it usually hangs at his side in a way that seems slightly unnatural. When he does use his prosthesis, his fine motor control is slightly clumsy and doesn’t match the level seen in most people’s non-dominant hand—things like tying laces and fastening buttons are still very hard for him. Peter also still has phantom pain. This can manifest as reliving the pain of his compound fracture, or as burning, tingling, or pins and needles. Regardless of the intensity and form of the discomfort, there’s no way to medicate it.
OTHER MEDICAL	The small rebel cell that took custody of Peter lacked the medical resources to properly treat an injury requiring surgical intervention, and the only antibiotics they had (and were slow to administer) were expired and had lost potency. By the time that the prisoner exchange with the Empire, slowed by its own bureaucracy, was facilitated three days later, the infection in Peter's hand had spread up to his forearm and become blood poisoning. He had lost consciousness due to septic shock and was in the early stages of multisystemic organ failure with a few more hours left until death; treatment began in the medevac. Peter went into cardiac arrest twice, once on the transport and once in the operating room, and his kidneys came very close to complete failure. He only has about 30% of his original renal function left and is currently on dialysis, with another surgery to have artificial kidneys grown with his own cells transplanted scheduled two months from his present canonpoint to allow his body the recovery time needed to be able to withstand open abdominal surgery. His liver function is also impaired, and he lacks the aerobic stamina that he used to have. Though he was never superhuman, he was born at the upper end of the bell curve for cardiopulmonary function, and now it's permanently below average. He isn't immunocompromised, but when things do get past his immune system, they hit him much, much harder than they would a person without his bodily damage; his reactions to infection are similar to what is seen in the elderly as opposed to a young adult in his prime, and he is now in 'vulnerable groups' for both infectious disease and air pollution. Peter has been through six weeks of inpatient physical therapy due to impairment of balance and his ability to walk in the aftermath of the septic shock. Full function was restored and his gait is typical again, but he has a degree of muscle atrophy compared to the condition he was in pre-injury.
NOTES ON MENTAL ILLNESS	Peter seems stable until he's not. He reacts more emotionally and with sudden outbursts when he gets upset, some of which include shouting, which can make him unsettling and even scary to be around. He has recurrent night terrors, most of which involve replaying the sight of the man he killed struggling in the moments before his death or the moment in which he realized he couldn't feel his left hand (nerves severed) and took off his glove to see the graphic mutilation of his own body; he sleeps poorly and physically looks the part. Where triggers are concerned, he gets extremely tense and quiet when he's subjected to the auditory stimulus of high winds; the automated voice of a flight computer or instrument alarms sets him off to the point of freezing and having flashbacks. Peter reacts very poorly to sudden loud sounds: he jumps, his pulse skyrockets, and he becomes incredibly defensive, terse, and hostile. Seeing graphic violence or shooting, even onscreen, will send him into a full episode. Hospitals are a very triggering environment for him, in part due to a sexual assault that happened while he was a patient - the aggressor, a female nurse, felt that she was 'thanking him' and 'doing her part' for someone she pitied due to his disability by subjecting him to unwanted touching; Peter, already conditioned to feel helpless and not in ownership of his own body, froze and dissociated instead of protesting verbally or physically; the nurse ignored the lack of affirmative consent. Peter does not consider what happened to have been sexual assault for a number of reasons - internal misogynistic beliefs make him feel that because she was a woman she never could have been in a position of power over him (despite the uneven power dynamic between nurse and patient), and 'if I just told her to stop, she would have, but I didn't' rationale chief among them. He just considers it to have been bad sex - but being alone with healthcare providers without a third party present is intensely anxiety-inducing for him, and if he were ever to get to the point of physical intimacy with another person, having someone else on top of him or leaning over him is enough to make him panic and completely dissociate. On the topic of sex, Peter also has a complete loss of sex drive and erectile dysfunction, both of which he feels shame about. In a relationship, he's likely to keep kicking the can down the road on intimacy until it's no longer possible, then very awkwardly explain the situation.

CODE `RANK AND SERIAL` BY militaryson FOR OWN USE ONLY.