Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

After they return the third kid and relocate the third family, Ahsoka swivels in her pilot’s chair, and looks at Rex straight on.  Making their way back to Pabu, where she’ll drop him off and jet away as always.  She hasn’t given him that intense Jedi-stare since they parted ways after… after, so really, he can’t be blamed for being unused to it.

He braces himself for whatever heartrending thing is about to leave her mouth.  Goodbye.  Or, Goodbye; we cannot do this again.  Or, Our missions have only intertwined this once, so don’t get used to seeing my face around.  Or, I met the Bad Batch and now they’re my favorite clones. See you later, reg.

Instead:

“Rex,” low and serious.  Weighty.

He tenses, and takes a sip of his caf to disguise it.  It doesn’t help; she made it, so it tastes like shit, and it’s not endearing, her not having figured out human tastebuds yet.  It’s not.

“Yes, sir?” he says.  Adds a bit of flavor on the sir, bite away at the tension she’s about to bring down.

He’s so dedicated to keeping himself unbothered that she knocks his feet out from under him with a sentence.

“You and I should fuck.”

He chokes on the caf.  It tastes even worse coming back up, but he already knew that, unfortunately.

—

Hold up.  Let’s start from the beginning.

—

It takes a bit for Echo to comm Gregor and Rex and Howzer and the five new brothers they’d literally just managed to pick up, but when he does, it is—as always with Echo—both frighteningly deadpan and utterly fucking unbelievable.  

They’d found Tantiss.  Omega’d engineered a rebellion of her own, escaping and freeing other children—yeah, four of ‘em, found ‘em in the middle of a combat zone—by way of unleashing the Zillo Beast.  I know.  Brilliant.  They’d fought those shadow clones, a handful of them.  Speaking of, Crosshair lost his hand; well, not lost, it’d been chopped off, thanks to the aforementioned shadow operatives.  Also both Nala Se and Hemlock were dead, and they had a new sister their age—Emerie, she’s alright now, I guess, she’s working on it—who was willing to help out the, oh, about twenty new brothers he’d be bringing their way.  Hope Pantora Base is ready.  Rex, Hunter needs to coordinate something with you, so keep an ear out for his comm.

Howzer is left blinking, a little stunned, but Gregor’s cackling like the madman he is, since he’d become used to Echo’s normal manner of post-mission delivery.  The five new kids—not kids, he’s pretty sure a couple are Gen1s too—Throttle, Squawk, Raptor, Herc, and Lex, seem to view Echo’s transmission with varying degrees of either interest, skepticism, or flat-out awe.

Rex just sighs, and starts explaining.

“That’s Echo, my second,” Rex says, pressing a bacta patch against a lucky shot on the back of his knee.  As always, exfil had been a bit hectic; it’s essentially a tradition at this point.  No one had died, so that means it’s just a bit hectic and not an actual mess.  “Formerly ARC of the 501st, and then joined up with Clone Force 99 before we met back up after—” not the Order, not that, “—the war ended.  We’ve been looking for Tantiss for a bit, really, since they’ve been experimenting on brothers there.  Long story; sounds like he was successful.”

Squawk—curling tattoo of a skeletal hand carving up his neck—tilts his head.  “Did he say sister?”

Figures.  But Raptor, with a truly vivid red scar dragging his upper lip high towards his nose, just jostles him instead before Rex can start speaking.  “C’mon, Squawk, you don’t think the Kaminoans just played nice with their little dolls, did you?  Of course they experimented.”

Rex would love to join in, but his comm starts to flicker again, this time the code that the Batch set a while ago for short-burst transmissions.  Short-burst means it’s more likely to be heavily encrypted: more data available for security when you only have to encode text instead of all the data inherent in collating voice and image.

Hm.  

He cuts his eyes to Howzer, and nods.  Howzer returns it, and begins inserting himself into the conversation, answering questions about the operation and what the men should expect, normal procedures, the lovely little minutiae of logistics when it comes to a rebel operation.  Gregor’s piloting and joining the discussion as necessary, so Rex excuses himself to the cargo bay, limping only slightly.

There’s a message waiting for him, and it makes his heart stutter.

Rex closes his eyes and breathes deep.  He’d been too obvious.

Then he takes off his helmet and peels back the inner lining, digs out the tiny commlink that’s just for her, and presses the button.  If she responds, then he’ll think about it.  For now, he sticks the commlink back in, where it’ll vibrate against his temple—where the chip had been, a sick little bit of maudlin remembrance—if she responds.  She’s busy with another man’s rebellion these days, and he understands why (too dangerous to be around the brothers), but it still rankles some deep part of him.

Of course, she responds just as he’s stuck the commlink back in, machinery buzzing against the plastoid, so he hurriedly jams his bucket back on and switches to the private connection.

“Rex?” her voice crackles through. It’s rough, like she’s waking up. “What’s up?”

“Got some kids who need to be reunited with their families, Commander—held by the Empire for experimentation, but we got ‘em out.  Seems like it might be up your alley, if you’ve got the time for it.”

“Hello to you too, Rexter,” she says, and then laughs, tired and gentle.  “You’re right.  It’s definitely up my alley.”

“Thought it might be.”  Then, because that deep rankled part of him rears itself up: “Feel down for a tagalong?”

“Oh?” There’s something wary in her voice, and he immediately feels stupid.  Keeps going, though, because he’s already started digging this hole; might as well finish it.

“Just—I’ve dealt with one Force-wielding youngling, and she was enough of a handful.  Wondered if you wanted some help.”

“Rex, I used to escort multiple younglings on pilgrimage to—on pilgrimage.”  A beat.  “Also, I was a delight, thank you.”  He can hear her smirk through the poor comm quality, and he can’t help his own little smile in return.

“As I recall, you ran into Grievous on one of those missions.  Probably could’ve used the backup, right?”  A similar beat.  “You were a terror and you know it.”

“I will concede only a few counts of terror.”

“Which ones?  Because I’m still not going to excuse you convincing those shinies that you were venomous.”

“You say that, but I heard you losing your shit after you shouted at me.  You were nearly crying.”

He does have to stifle a snort at the memory of her being forced to apologize to a new squad, as both he and General Skywalker looked on, both trying to affect a stern sort of disappointment that neither had quite perfected at that point, not for her.  But then Skywalker had looked at him, mischief in his skew glance, and clacked his teeth together loud in the middle of Ahsoka’s apology.  One of the shinies had damn near jumped out of his armor at the sharp noise, and she’d turned around to start shrieking at her master, so of course Anakin’d begun shouting back, and then he’d had to break up their argument before it escalated into all-out warfare in front of the new troopers.

“I was despairing over your future.”

“You’re so full of shit.”

Rex lets himself breathe.  It’s nice to talk with her, to talk with someone without the weight of leadership pressing down his lungs.  After Teth… 

Well.  It’s just nice to talk with her.  But sometimes that’s all life gives you, and he has to be grateful for that much, at least.

“If you don’t want me to come along, I understand, Ahsoka,” he says.  “You’ve got your own deal going.”  Shrugs, even though she can’t see it.  “Just wanted to float the offer, that’s all.”

Her side of the link is silent, for a bit, until:

“Yeah.  Yeah, Rex, I think that’d be good.  I could use a tagalong.”

He laughs into the comms.  It’s not much of one, rusty and gruff, but it feels realer than most have, these days.

“Glad to hear it, Commander.  I’ll let you know more details once I have them; I think it should be a standard rotation before we have some dossiers.”

“Alright.  I’ll confirm receipt, and we can set up a rendezvous afterwards.”

“Sounds good.”  Then, for lack of anything better to say, “Rex out.”

“Tano out,” she responds, a little bit more punch on that last letter than necessary.  After that, it’s just static, and Rex toggles to the encrypted chat with Hunter.

—

It’s only Rex touching down on the surface of Pabu this first time.  He hasn’t visited before; it’d always been Echo, rightfully, but he can see now why Echo speaks so fondly of the place.  Hunter, Omega, and Wrecker are waiting for him at the top of the city, although Rex can see Crosshair skulking around in the distance.  

Along with those familiar faces, though, there are four technicolor children in roughspun clothes.  They look a little wary, but curious overall.  One’s quite a bit younger, almost a tubie, still in a sling, and comically tiny compared to Wrecker’s bulk.  Because of course Wrecker is wearing the sling.  This means he can’t crush Rex to him in one of his normal hugs.

Rex is very thankful.  He nods to the Batch, shakes their hands (except for Crosshair, still skulking; he gets a nod, though), but quickly focuses on the kids.  Gets down on one knee in front of them.

“Hi,” he says.  “I’m Rex, and my friend and I are going to help you get back to your families.  We have to go one at a time, and you’re not going to be able to live where you used to live, but you’ll be going somewhere safe.  Can you tell me your names?”

They shyly introduce themselves.  The young Mirialan boy is Jax.  The Iktotchi girl is Eva.  The Pantoran girl is Sami, and she’s also the one to introduce the baby:  “That’s Bayrn.”  Bayrn, a fuzzy little Tarlafar, coos at him, and Wrecker strokes his head-fur in response.

Little gods, Rex thinks, they really have gone domestic.

“It’s nice to meet all of you,” he says.  “We’re going to take care of Bayrn first; my colleague found his mother already, and I’ll be meeting up with them in order to help with the relocation.”  Once he’d forwarded the dossiers to Ahsoka, she’d responded saying that she was already close to Caraad, where missing-child bulletins matching the kid’s description had been blaring on the holonews for a month now.  Granted, they’d been stifled by Imperial publications, but apparently Ahsoka had her feelers out for things like this.

It’s good to know she’s doing good too.  Not that he’d doubted it, really, but it’s still nice to know.

The kids seem to understand.  Also, Bayrn’s the baby, and they get that he should be protected first.  Still, Wrecker unclasps the sling and the children—along with Omega, who holds herself more like a cadet than a child—cluster around Bayrn, petting him and telling him that he’ll be going home soon.  The Pantoran girl gives him a little kiss, right between the ears.

It’s a bit of a hassle, getting the sling around the armor.  He’s only half-certain that Hunter isn’t laughing at him, and Omega discreetly slips around his back and untwists the strap, and ah, that’s how it should go.  An unfamiliar weight on his front, and the baby coos and gurgles as he walks back into his ship and punches the coordinates that Ahsoka’d sent him.  It’s a relatively short trip, all things considered; she’d chosen a spot nearby, a nebula to hang out in and wait for his arrival. 

He meets her in deep space, about an hour’s real-time flight off the hyperspace route, and he only has to change a diaper once before he’s adjacent to her ship and they’re connecting the temporary docking tube.  

A small Tarlafar woman rushes through to his ship as soon as the connection is finalized, and Rex hurriedly unwraps the sling, hands her baby over.  She thanks him profusely, slightly broken Basic but so genuine in her appreciation to him and her love for her child that Rex can’t help but to blush a little.

Then Rex looks beyond her, to the opposite end of the docking tube, and he sees Ahsoka for the first time in a year.  She’s leaning on the port, her arms crossed, and she’s smiling wide.

“Hey,” she calls out to him.  He can see the shine off her eyeteeth from here, and there’s a bandage around her left thigh.  “Fancy seeing you here, old man.”

He smiles right back at her.  “It’s good to see you too, Ashla.”  Pre-arranged codenames.  “And don’t call me old, little ‘un. ”

(She’d explained to him once, that no, togruta didn’t really start to hit their full height until their late twenties.  No, she wasn’t gonna be short forever.  No, shut up, no she wouldn’t!  Rex, you’re horrible!  She’ll be taller than him someday!  Yes, the montrals are included, jerk!)

Ahsoka sneers at him, just a little, and he laughs.

Even with the knowledge of what they need to accomplish on this mission, Rex feels downright light as he grabs his pack to bring with him  The newly reunited mother and child are nuzzling each other nearby, and he lets the mother lead the way back across the docking tube to Ahsoka’s ship, where Ahsoka quickly gets them settled in a bunk, offering food, comfort, hope.  He disconnects the ships—Echo’ll come by to pick it up, or some of the new brothers, and it’d be a good test of their own refurbished trackers—and sets the next bit of coordinates. 

Rex is typing in the last set of digits when her soft steps enter the cockpit, and the door hisses shut behind her as she takes her seat in the pilot’s chair.

“You ready?” Ahsoka asks, her grin bright as she turns to him, her hand on the hyperspace lever.  

“Always,” he responds, and his cheeks hurt with the force of his own returning smile.  

She punches it.  Space becomes streaks, becomes blue, and he feels like he’s home.

Chapter Text

Predictably, Rex eyes up her injured leg while they’re tunneling through hyperspace.  It’s not like she’d tried to get it past him, really, not when she’d had to cut her leggings halfway, so she’s walking around the ship just continually flashing a kneecap.

“When’d that happen?” he asks, shooting a glance to the wrapped bandages.

“Week ago.”

“Bacta?”

“Ran out.”

He huffs a little, and reaches back to dig around in his pack.  Produces a bacta patch, hands it to her.  She unwraps her bandages, lets him see the deep burnt score across her thigh before she covers it with the patch.  It’s cooling and welcome, and she sighs in relief.  

“Thanks,” she says, flexing her leg out and then pulling her knee to her chest in a much-needed stretch.  

His eyebrows twitch.  “And you didn’t prioritize bacta because…” and oops, his voice is tight.  A bit pissed.

“Been a little busy, Rexter.”

Truthfully, extracting Ailish—the mother—from Caraad had been a little more fraught than she’d initially insinuated to him, but he’s probably put together the pieces and timeline, as she knew he would.  Before—before—he wouldn’t have argued with her, would have just taken her at her word when she said she’d run out, and would have kept his conclusions to himself.  Now, however, it’s like he can’t help but to worry about her.  It’s sweet, but if she didn’t understand why he worried so much, she’d be annoyed.

“Right, Commander,” he says, rolling his eyes.  “Busy.”  Then he lets his jaw set, and she can see him processing, re-evaluating.  Drawing up new strategies, as he was wont to do.  “Eh.  I’ve been busy too, so I can’t say too much or else I’d be a hypocrite.”

Rex leans back and sighs, staring straight out of the cockpit’s transparisteel at the blue waves of hyperspace.  But there’s a smile on his face, small and thoughtful, so Ahsoka swivels in her pilot’s chair, stretches out and puts her feet atop his lap as a footrest.

“Gross,” he says, but doesn’t push her off.  “It’s good to see you, Ahsoka.”  He cuts his eyes to hers, and they’re warm and lined.  “Glad you’re alive.”

(And oh, she thinks of the last time they’d seen each other in person, him angry and desperate to fight for his brothers and her with all the fight bled from her like fuel from a dying ship, and they’d both understood they would have to part, if only to not cut each other open on their disparate desires, if only to follow what they deemed as morally necessary.)

“You too, Rex,” she says instead.  “How’re things?”  

Rex lifts a shoulder, a noncommittal shrug he’d perfected in the war when delivering bad news.  “Lost some men.  Lost a base—it was on Teth, which should go to show you how desperate we were—but we’re picking ourselves up again.”  He folds his hands atop her ankles.  “Saw Wolffe.  Couldn’t get him to leave but he at least let us go free, so we’re keeping an ear out in case he needs to get out after disobeying orders.”

“And Senator Chuchi’s helping you out, right?”

Now he fully turns his head to her.  “Beg pardon?”

“Rex, it’s my job to know things now.”  It is.  Former Jedi, now errant spymaster, smuggler, and saboteur.  Also, Bail’d offhandedly mentioned that Riyo had been a proponent for the clones in the Senate, so Ahsoka’d done some digging into how, precisely, the woman’d gotten the footage of Kamino’s destruction.  There wasn’t much to be uncovered, but there was a singing in the Force that sounded familiar, so Ahsoka inferred.

And the ship had been demolished.  That was a handy bit of madness.  That helped with the inference.

She’d argued with Bail to help support the Underground, and while Bail allowed some small gestures, any specific overtures of support wouldn’t work.  Bail was planning long-term, and the Underground was only one facet of the very large beast that the Rebellion was shaping up to be.

(“Ahsoka,” Bail had also said, “do you really think they can’t handle themselves?  They’re the finest soldiers the Republic knew; you’ve said it yourself.  Trust the men, because your talents are needed elsewhere.”  

He’d been right, damn him.  She’s glad for the overlap of this mission.)

“Yeah, it’s your job, but forgive me if the fact that Senator Chuchi’s involvement is known makes me wary,” Rex says, his fingers clutching at her ankles.  

“It was pretty hard to find, in your guys’ defense.  The Force helped, and I’m familiar with your guys’ particular brand of chaos.”  She rolls her feet, kicking him gently.  “Probably one of the few people left in the galaxy who would’ve put the pieces together, Rexter, and I’m just glad you guys have support.”

He grumbles, and she kicks him a few more times.  “Cut it out,” he says, shoving her feet off of him.  She promptly replaces them, and he groans.

“Take me back,” he says, staring at the ceiling.  “I forgot how annoying you were.  Dump me at my ship.”

“Don’t be a jerk.  You know the information’s safe with me.”

Rex sighs, deep as when she’d first tried to explain the difference between a Padawan and a cadet, which is her only hint.

He clamps down on her ankles and yanks hard sideways, dragging her out of her chair; she whoops and catches herself before she thumps fully onto the floor in a clatter that’d wake up the mother and child in the berth.

“You know what’s going to happen,” he says gravely, even as he’s rising from his seat and standing above her, arms crossed.  Bastard was still taller than her.  “Prepare yourself.”

Oh, it’s been years.  Despite herself, she grins up at him, supine and propping herself up on her forearms.

He brings up an elbow, slaps it twice, and falls onto her.  Or at least he tries, because she’s familiar with that move and rolls out of the way, using the Force to stop his full descent and the ruckus of armor against a metal floor.

“Rex,” she says, shushing him.  “We can’t wrestle right now.  They’re trying to sleep.”  She sets him down gently on the floor, and he looks at her with a false scowl.

“What, you never tested how soundproof these doors were?  C’mere, Commander, we’ll fix that—” and he snakes up towards her, grabs her ankle again and swings the weight of his body around to get her in a heel-hook.

“Rex!” she says (shrieks, but only a little), and starts to slap the floor.  “Ow, ow, you shit, ow, I give, I give—”

He lets her go, chuckling in the easy victory, and she rubs at the bacta patch.  He’d gotten her bad leg.  “That wouldn’t have worked if I were healed.”

“Maybe prioritize bacta next time, then,” he shoots back, and he’s settling back onto his heels in a crouch with the most annoying self-satisfied smile on his face, so of course she rears up and charges him.  He goes low with his head, as she’d expected.  She catches him in a front headlock, tucks his head against her side, and rolls him over onto his back with an arm on his back and a twist of her hips—classic nexu catcher, and she’s curled around his hyperflexed neck as he grunts in pain.

“Yield, yield—” and Ahsoka relaxes her grasp on his head until she’s just plain curled up on top of him, neither of them breathing hard.  They’d once been able to go for hours, all of the men teaching her their best moves and drilling them as much as Anakin’d done with saber practice.

“I missed you, Rex,” she lets herself say to him, somewhere in the vicinity of where his head is.  Pressed against her stomach, seems like.

Then he tries to bite her, right through the cloth.  She does actually shriek this time, and pushes at him as he’s laughing, holding onto her atop him despite her false struggle to escape.  There’s a wet mouth-print on her shirt.  Gross.

“I missed you too, Ahsoka,” he says, grinning up at her.  The lines around his eyes are deeper now, and she reaches out to touch them—she won’t get lines like that ever, her lekku will simply get longer and longer—

The door hisses open.

“Sorry, I—oh, oh, so sorry!” 

Ah, shit, they’d been too loud.  Ahsoka turns around to the open door, where Ailish is standing with wide eyes and puffed-up fur.  

“My apologies, Madam Ailish,” Ahsoka says, pulling herself off of Rex to an easy, formal stance.  “My colleague and I got a bit carried away.”

Rex quickly stands on his own, brusquely shooing imaginary specks of dust off of his armor.  “I’m sorry too, ma’am.  It’s—uh—it’s traditional, in my culture, to greet someone… by… wrestling with them…”

He trails off as Ahsoka slowly looks at him, dumbfounded.

Why do you do this, she mouths to him.  He shrugs, looking as mystified as she feels.

“Sorry,” he says again, lamely.  “We’ll keep it down, ma’am; please, spend the rest of this time with Bayrn, and be assured it won’t happen again.”

The Tarlafar chitters—is that supposed to be a laugh?—and says no harm was done, she was simply worried, and shakes her head at the two of them as she hops up to hit the door control panel closed once again.

There’s an indeterminate moment of silence in the cockpit until Ahsoka can bring herself to speak.

“Rex, we have got to teach you how to lie better.”

“The General already tried.”  He sounds morose.  “Didn’t do much good.”  

Another long pause.

“In my culture,” she mocks, to break the silence and the memories of Anakin, and Rex shoulder-checks her without remorse as he moves back to the co-pilot’s seat.  “She’s gonna think we’re just having sex non-stop,” she continues.  Once he’s seated, she takes her own spot and plops her legs into his lap once more.  He places his hands atop her ankles in return.

“She’ll only think that if we keep wrestling so loudly,” Rex says.  

“Not all sex is loud, Rex.”

“I have not and will never ask what you got up to in your time away from us, Ahsoka, but please don’t make me draw conclusions,” he responds evenly, even as the tops of his ears flame bright red.  

“Of course not, that’d be unprofessional,” Ahsoka says, light and diplomatic and patently bullshit.  “Also, I was in a Night Owls camp a lot of the time, and most of the Mandalorians had paired off pretty well.  I’ve got better hearing than most, and you know how tents are for privacy.”

He groans a little.  “One common bunkroom on Teth.  One ‘fresher.”  She winces.  “I yearned for death, Ahsoka.”

“Your new base any better?”  Not a question if he’d found one, yet; he was a resourceful enough man on his own and with his brothers’ and senatorial help, he’d definitely got something.

“So far, yeah.  Built-in medical suite, to get the chips out ASAP,” he says. “It’s our first priority, before we even talk about whether they want to fight on or not.”

“Good,” Ahsoka says, and thinks of that report about Fives, pass-locked and flickering amidst a ship full of men who had once loved her, who she still loved despite being directly culpable in their deaths.  No, not the time right now.  “Good.  And… the bunk situation?”

“Well, we’re two or three to a room right now.”

“Who’s your bunkmate?”

“Echo.”

“Oh, of course.  How’s he?”  Rex’d told her Echo was alive sometime in the hyperspace journey between Ord Mantell and Bracca, and she’d been unable to process it.  Still can’t, really; she won’t until she sees him again, she supposes.

“Still fucking insane,” and she doesn’t even need to look at Rex’s face to know that he’s smiling as he says it.  “Hunter once told me he was one of the more responsible ones of the group, and I laughed in his face.  But he was serious!”

“Hunter—which one is he again?”  Doesn’t sound too familiar.

“Ah, you haven’t met him, or the rest of the Batch.”  Oh, now she can place the name, kind of.  Part of that same Ord Mantell–Bracca discussion; a bunch of “defective” clones, whatever that meant; gene mods, she supposed, but it was hard for her to understand defective as a whole since she was a) natborn and b) fully aware of the clones’ existence as individuals, given how they all shone in the Force.  “They’re a good crew.  They adopted another clone; she’s a good one, too.”

Wait, what?  “She?”  

Rex nods, faux-solemn.  “We have a small female brother.  Omega.  Another defective, apparently, I think; they mentioned m-count and she was captured with the kids we’re transporting.  I’ve got the full debrief from Echo…”

Ahsoka tunes him out just a little.  Force-sensitive children being abducted—m-count being midichlorian levels, of course, not that many would know that, and put into an experimental operation outpost—

There’s a squeeze on her kneecap, and she blinks to see Rex looking at her patiently.  She sucks in a breath and nods, an old signal that she’s ready for new orders.

“They took care of it, Ahsoka.  Crashed the whole operation; Echo and Omega made sure.”  He cracks a little smile, crooked and sly.  “The Zillo Beast brought down the entire facility.  Echo is extremely proud of her for setting it free, and none of us have heard the end of it yet.  But if you’ve got questions, I know a couple of folks you can ask.”

Rex squeezes her knee again, and she returns the smile.

“Yeah, probably,” she says.  “Just to see if I need to tie up any loose ends.  And I’ll probably do it through you, still.”

For some reason, that makes his face drop a little bit, but then he rolls his shoulders as if he’s pushing that emotion away.

“Of course,” Rex says neutrally.  He pats her knee, all gentle to bely what he says next:  “Now, get your fucking feet off me.”

Ahsoka kicks him a few times, good-naturedly, and he gives her legs a warning yank that has her shushing him even as she slips forward a few inches in her chair.  Free of her, he turns back to his pack and drags out a jumpsuit that has her raising her brow markings, but she dutifully spins her chair around to stare at the wall before the cockpit hosts the quiet, practiced sound of detaching armor and the soft whisper of cloth for a bit.  

She waits until he’s settled back in his chair before turning back around to look.

Huh.  

That’s… different.  Not as form-fitting as the blacks, but still… frighteningly revealing, although it absolutely isn’t, not compared to her old getup.  He’s pushed up the sleeves of the jumpsuit, too, and this is the first time she’s ever seen his bare wrists.  They’re more slender than she expected.

(She remembers holding tight to his wrist as he’d held her own, steadying her as she’d tried to drag the shuttle back to the hangar with the Force, and how that grasp had slipped, and then giving it all up once she’d heard him hurt.)

Rex must interpret something in her face, because the tips of his ears go red again.

“What,” he says, not asks.

“Nothing.”  She lets the silence settle for a moment, lets the anticipation build.  “I can see your arms.”

“I do have them, yes,” he grinds out.

“Oh, I thought you humans just popped ‘em off interchangeably.  Anakin could.”  Rex just puts his face in his hands at this and sighs deeply, so she kicks her feet up again and puts them in his lap.  “I like the new duds, Rex.  Looks good.”

“Well, I’m no fashionista, like Miss Minidress-In-A-Combat-Zone, but a man’s gotta try.”  He brings his hands down, and rests them against her ankles again, and for the first time, she feels the bare skin of his hands against her legs.  

Well, one of them, at least; the part of the legging that she’d had to cut short means she’s got one leg covered and the other one’s bare to the thigh.

It’s a very new thing, and she rolls her ankles experimentally just to get used to the sensation.  He must feel some kind of way about it, because he’s avoiding eye contact and his fingers are twitching, but they both know that him moving his hands would just make the situation even stranger.  So he gruffly informs her that he’s going to try to catch some sleep, to wake him up when they’re thirty minutes out, and she agrees with an easy smile.

True to his word—and his habits—Rex is out in about a minute.  Ahsoka uses the time to run through the plans in her head; should be an easy handoff, all things considered, and she’s already got contacts making excellent headway on homes for the other children, on stealing their families away from danger for resettlement.  Most of the time, she’s the one who has to go in for retrieval because of the inherent danger of potential Inquisitor interference, but in this case, the children had already been retrieved.  So now it’s just… reshuffling.

Hell, her scant network operatives probably could’ve taken care of this without much, if any, of her involvement.  She should be cultivating the contact Bail had discussed with her, a Coruscanti antiques dealer with revolutionary ideas, deep connections, and a heart like beskar; he’d be a much better fit for the spywork portions of what Bail was shaping this rebellion into, whereas her strengths fell elsewhere, in movement and inspiration and protection.  But Bail said he’d work the contact while she was out, as long as she was willing to show her face at some point or another for a more formal tradeoff of duties.  The word of a former Jedi still had weight in the right circles, after all.

So she’d said yes to Rex.

There’d been something so blatantly hopeful in his voice when he’d contacted her, that quick lapse into kindly ribbing like a breath of full oxygen after breathing shipboard air for months.  He’d walked it back, of course, and said, If not, I understand, and her heart broke with love for the man, so similarly duty-bound but unable to completely stop himself from looking outside of it.

She’d missed him too.  Missed him at her back, missed his gentle teasing, missed his solid presence, always so grounded and sure.  But he’d had the company of his brothers, and while she had Bail and her fledgling network it wasn’t the same at all.  Trust came hard in the subterfuge game, especially as a largely independent agent.  

So of course she’d said yes.  How could she not?

In his sleep, Rex’s bare hands flex upon her ankles, grip gentle, and she finds herself enjoying the grasp.  

Ah, she was a failure of a Jedi after all.  Attachment.  

Ahsoka meditates on that idea for a while until it’s time to leave hyperspace.  She slips her legs from atop his, and the movement alone has him awake immediately.  He stretches in his chair, and mumbles that he’s going to go check on the mom and the kid.  She lets him, still half-caught in her meditation as they make their descent towards Ansion.  It’s a nice enough planet, and her operatives will meet the family at the spaceport.

False codes accepted; minimal Imperial presence here, and largely incompetent, according to intel.  Still, she doesn’t let herself relax until they’ve touched down, and Rex is crouched next to little Bayrn, playing with him as Ailish packs up their scant belongings.

Ahsoka’s heart hurts for the woman; she knows what it is to lose a home.  She’ll be safe now, though.

“Madam Ailish,” Ahsoka says.  The other woman already knew what to expect: they’d had a long bit of travel from Caraad, and had spoken plenty then.  “Remember: if you ever need our help, you can always find us.”

The Tarlafar takes Ahsoka’s comparatively large hand within her own, and squeezes it three times as she bows over it.  “Thank you, Ashla,” she says.  “Will remember, yes.”  Then she does the same with Rex, but doesn’t know his name, so just calls him soldier.

Rex’s ears are still a little pink, and Ahsoka thinks it has something to do with the glances the other woman is shooting at the both of them, an amused little light in her eyes.

Ahsoka opens the hatch, and mother and child walk down the ramp into the waiting arms of her operatives.  A nod to confirm receipt, and a hand against Rex’s chest to keep him from being seen, and then the hatch closes on the sight of Bayrn’s face as he waves goodbye to her.

She turns back to Rex, and this is the first time she has touched something upon him that is neither armor nor blacks nor weapons.

He looks down at her hand, and then back up to her eyes, and there’s something easy, confused, anticipatory? in his smile.  “All of your jobs this simple, then?” and there’s something low about his voice, something she hasn’t heard before.

She feels off balance.

“Rex, don’t jinx it,” she responds, and pats his chest.  He watches her hand lift away like it’s a distant vulture droid, unwavering and focused in his sights.

Then he seems to shake himself, and that anticipation, that focus cutting through confusion—it all drains away.  

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he says, sounding like his normal self.  Her Captain, calm and ready for a fight.  Solid and dependable and expected and brilliant.

She feels off balance. She forces a smile on and walks back to the cockpit.  As always, at her six, he follows.

Chapter Text

Jax, according to Omega and Hunter’s dossier, had some escape attempts under his belt in order to get back to his family.  

Rex respects that.  Never give up a fight, not when there’s still a chance.  So he gives the kid a clap on the back on his way up the ramp of Ahsoka’s ship—she’s still inside the cockpit, having demurred at walking out onto Pabu herself—and hoo, he’s got thoughts about that for sure—

Mission.

“Tell me about your family, kid,” Rex says, smiling down at Jax.  The boy’s eyes are blue and scared, and he’s got dark green triangles tattooed beneath them along his cheekbones.  “I bet they’re excited to see you, huh?”

Jax squints a little, the triangles scrunching.  “My moms, yeah.  My little brother, I dunno.”  But he hugs himself as he says it, so Rex pats his shoulder.

“I’ve got a few younger brothers myself.”  Understatement.  “He might be more excited than you think.”  Preteens had a way of getting stuck in their own heads and Jax only gives him an anxious glance, so Rex quickly ushers him towards the cockpit, where Ahsoka is patiently running pre-flight checks.  

Rex introduces them, and Ahsoka smiles gently at the kid.  The boy blushes darker green.  Rex doesn’t blame the kid for his immediate awe—Ahsoka’s striking, even he’ll admit it.

“Hello, Jax,” she says, and the kid’s eyes get wide at being addressed directly.  “It’s nice to meet you.”  Her hand is moving in slow, undulating waves at her side as she says this, but only at an angle that Rex can see, and he just knows there’s some kind of Force Bullshit going on.

Jax tilts his head, like he’s trying to figure something out.  “You—you feel—” and Ahsoka winks, and Jax blushes even more, puts a hand to his temple.  “Oh.  Hi,” he squeaks, then clears his throat ferociously.  

“And you’ve already met Rex,” Ahsoka continues, and the kid’s head snaps back like he’d forgotten Rex was there entirely.  Maybe he had, given aforementioned Force Bullshit.

“Ashla’s friends are going to be getting your back to your family,” Rex says, crossing his arms.  “You’re in good hands.”  

Jax studies Ahsoka for a moment.  “So he’s—” and he tilts his head back at Rex, and Rex reminds himself not to be offended by a child, “—Omega’s friend, and Hunter’s friend, and you’re his friend, and then your friends are helping?”

“Of course,” Ahsoka smiles.  “That’s what friends do, right, they help each other out?”

“Uh huh.”  But the kid doesn’t look fully convinced.

“Rex is one of my oldest friends,” Ahsoka says, gently.  “And I don’t just mean that literally.”  Rex rolls his eyes.  “He’s a man of his word and always keeps his promises, just like Omega kept her promises to you.”  

“And Ashla’s always kept her word to me,” Rex adds, unnecessarily, since the kid doesn’t even spare him a glance, but Ahsoka shoots him a brief, warm look.

“What about your friends?” Jax asks Ahsoka, his arms still tight around himself.

“They like to help people, too,” and there’s that hand movement again until Jax’s spine relaxes a bit from its defensive curve.

“Okay,” he says, and then finally looks around the cockpit, like he’s shocked he’s there.  “How long will it be until we get there?”

“It’ll be a few days, kiddo,” Rex says.  Exfil from Mirial was taking longer than expected, apparently, but Ahsoka’d assured him it was under control.  He’d told her exfil always went wrong, and she’d just laughed.

“Uh.  Oh.  Okay.”  A twinge of nervousness, and Rex and Ahsoka look at each other.  A lack of trust in adults, or at least a lack of trust in Rex.  Probably had to do with clone stuff, as so many things did these days, and Ahsoka inclines her head towards Rex, subtly.  Take it, she’s saying, and he’s always followed his commander’s orders. 

So Rex kneels down beside Jax, leaving a clear line to both Ahsoka and the door.  Slowly, he reaches down to his boot, and pulls out a small vibroblade, scarred and worn and quite sharp.

“When I first started out,” Rex says, offering the hilt to Jax, “there were times when I felt alone, and I was scared.  A friend of mine gave me this to help me protect myself and keep myself safe.  How about you hold onto it while you’re here?”

Jax cautiously reaches out and takes the hilt, curls his hands around it.  “I don’t know how to use it,” he says softly.  He’s not hugging himself anymore.

“Well, either Ashla or I can teach you a bit, if you want that.”  Frankly, Rex is more surprised that Hunter hadn’t taught each of the children various stabbing strategies already, but maybe the man really was sticking to the I’m no longer a soldier rhetoric after all.  

“I—uh—” and the kid looks away.  He doesn’t let go of the knife, though, so Rex counts it as a victory and keeps going.

“You don’t have to give an answer right now.  For now, how about I show you the galley and your bunk while Ashla gets us going?”

“Okay.”  Jax looks at Ahsoka, who nods reassuringly, and the kid follows Rex out of the cockpit without complaint as the ship judders into atmosphere, with the bracing leap to hyperspace following shortly behind.

Rex shows Jax how to make an MRE (“I mean, always read the label—it’s not as good as Pabu’s food, I’ve been told, but we make do; avoid any ones labeled Nuna Sausage and Biscuits, trust me.”) and shows the kid a small, out-of-the way bunk.  She’d obviously put homey-looking blankets down and attempted to make things a little more comfortable, but Rex was willing to bet that if he looked inside her quarters they’d be spartan and unornamented.

“Hey,” he says to Jax, who is in the process of investigating the walls of the bunk.  The kid looks up.  “Ashla and I will be in the cockpit if you need us, or if you want to ask us something.  Depending on the shift, either she or I might be asleep in the bunkroom across the corridor, and I think she’s got some datapads floating around if you want something to read.  Just ask before you use them.  Refresher’s just down the corridor.”

“Okay,” the kid says, not making eye contact.  Rex very valiantly does not sigh.  

“Want me to leave?” he says instead.

A flash of startled blue eyes and a tightened grip on the knife.  The poor kid obviously doesn’t want to be rude, but definitely doesn’t want Rex to stay.

“I’ll be in the cockpit,” Rex says, and pats the doorframe twice, like he would against a shiny’s pauldron, before leaving to make his way up to the cockpit.  On his way back, he picks up a couple of ration bars and tosses one to Ahsoka as he reenters.  She opens it unquestioningly, but she seems a bit tense, and her fingers keep tracing over her comm.

“Status?” he asks, unwrapping his own bar and taking a bite.  Ah, cardboard flavor.  

“Exfil ran into issues,” and she ignores Rex’s I-told-you-so look.  “Everyone’s alive, but an operative blew their cover.”  Deep sigh.  “They’ve got other covers, but that one was… really well established, from back before the Empire.”  Ahsoka seems to let her mind wander for a bit, and then she takes an absent bite of her ration bar and winces at the taste..  “Status on the kid?”

Rex flattens his mouth.  “Scared of me.  Think it's a holdover from being kept in a clone base, but it could just be general trauma.”  Ahsoka hmms , her eyes still a bit distant, so Rex teases her about how Of course you’d get the kid on your side with just a smile, and the opportunity to be smug about it brings her back to solid ground more fully.

“So, arming children, now?” she asks.

“Last one came pre-weaponised,” he grunts, and she laughs, even if there’s something regretful in the sound.

“That was kind, what you did,” she says after a bit.

Half-shrug.  “Cody’s knife.  And a grossly oversimplified story.”

“Oh?”  She’s not turning in her seat to face him, but he can still feel the curiosity and reticence in her gaze as she looks at him from the corner of her eyes, so he gives a little, because it’s her .

“Eh, had a rough time of it back on Kamino.  CT-class with abnormal test scores who got tracked to the CC-class and ARC training?”  He shakes his head.  “Had to deal with some of the other cadets for a bit ‘til they got their priorities straightened out.”  Even now, he can hear them, their jealousy and anger, and he can still feel some of that fear that’d dogged him throughout it all.

She's still watching him carefully.  “You guys never really talked much about Kamino,” she says, and he can tell she’s forcing herself to keep her voice neutral, knows she’s reading into what he’s saying and probably coming up with an accurate picture of a child-soldier’s violence.

“Not much to talk about,” he says, lying.  “Anyways, you were our CO; no point in sharing cadet stories when we’re too busy trying to follow you into battle while also somehow keeping you alive.”

Rex takes another bite of the ration bar to distract himself from her gaze.

“I’m not your CO now, though.”

“Sure thing, Commander.” What he’s said belies those words, and they both know it; what he’s said is the most that he’s comfortable giving out, and they both know it.  She sighs, and then finishes off her ration bar with a little hum of disgusted satisfaction.

The cockpit door has been left open, so he’s not surprised when she doesn’t kick her feet up atop his legs.  Now that they’d gotten the giddy, living joy of seeing each other out of their systems, the air between them is calmer, softer.  So they sit in comfortable silence, staring out into hyperspace.  It’s said to drive a man mad, looking too long, but he’s already lived through madness and hell, so this won’t be the thing to do it.  

Other things might, but not this.  Never this.

“Rex?” Ahsoka asks, spilling open the quiet.

“Hm?” 

“What are you going to do once you’ve freed as many of your brothers as you can?”  Again, her tone is carefully neutral, and he turns to look at her.  

“I… can’t say I know,” he says.  “Don’t think I’ve let myself think about it much.”  And that’s true as all hell, isn’t it?  He fights for his brothers and the Republic, and the former won’t last too much longer and the latter is a dead thing.

Rex almost thinks she’s going to ask him to join her, but she just smiles, small and sad.  “I figured.”

Inexplicably, his heart breaks a little.  He looks away.

“I’m glad you’re doing it, though,” she continues, speaking to his side.  “That your brothers are finding peace, one way or another.”

“Yeah.”  He thinks of Teth.  Peace, indeed.  “Yeah, me too.”  He takes a breath, revisits an idea he’d had earlier.  “I know you can’t meet ‘em, but… they’d like you, you know.”

(A choking idea of his family all together. He swallows it down.)

“I wish I could meet them too.  But Rex—”

“I know,” he says.  Too many dangers, and they’re fighting separate wars, on parallel tracks and so rarely perpendicular.  This, even, is a massive, heart-driven risk, opening up aspects of their operations to each other, putting two senior officers in danger of discovery.  “I know.”  

He scrubs his hands down his face, and there’s a warm weight on his bare wrist, and she’s leaning towards him, earnest as all hell.

“But I’m happy that I get to do this with you,” she finishes firmly.  “If nothing else, it’s a nice break from running undercover.”  She squeezes his wrist, a lovely sort of pressure that grounds him.

So he smiles at her, and puts his hand over hers, presses it in return.  “I’m glad too,” he says, and once again, he knows that she’s reading into what he’s not saying, understanding the deep undercurrents of emotion that he knows thrum through most discussions with her.

(The pop of his helmet seals; you’re a good soldier, Rex, and the shameful tear sprinting down his cheek—)

Ahsoka squeezes his wrist again, and lets him go.

She’s taller now, though not by much.  The stripes along her lekku have begun to shift from her neat chevrons of youth into something more jagged and chaotic, and there’s a new scar on the back of her left montral.  Likely a blaster bolt.  She’s still got that beskar headdress, but the clothing is more muted, a tunic and (ripped) leggings with what seem to be a nod towards armor around her middle.  Her facial markings—ah, she’s looking at him, and he feels momentarily abashed. 

“Rex?” she asks, but her markings shift with the movement, and then for a moment all he can think about is paint, paint and the men.

He shakes himself out of it, out of all of his collated thoughts, pays attention to her.  “Yeah?”

“Wanna spar?”

They’ve got three days in hyperspace, he realizes, and it dawns on him that this is the first time they’ve spent traveling together with only each other, for the most part—no men to guide, no officers to placate, only a child to look over—and they’re not running from something, they're not fighting moment-by-moment through trauma and immediate, grasping horrors.

“…yeah,” he says.  “That sounds pretty good.  We should let the kid know, though.”  Ahsoka’s answering smirk is enough to spur his own, and she turns to set the controls as Rex walks back to Jax’s interim bunk.

“Jax?” he asks at the door panel, knocking twice.  It hisses open and the kid’s still holding the knife.  Eesh, but also ouch.  “Ashla and I are going to the supply deck to train, so if you’re looking for us, just follow the blazes.”  

“Train at what?” the kid asks, and this question throws Rex a little bit.  Any cadet would know what training was.

“…uh.  We’re training at our fighting,” he says clumsily, and then thinks he needs to explain a little more, given the kid’s face.  “We have to be able to protect others and ourselves—”

“I know what fighting is,” Jax says, and Rex gets the distinct impression that he’s thoroughly crashed his way through this conversation, and wishes he’d sent Ahsoka to do this.

“Alright,” he placates.  “If you feel like it, though, you’re free to come on down.”  Taps at the signal blazes painted in the hallway.  “Follow the blue.”

Jax just nods, and Rex, bemused, makes his way down to the supply deck.  It’s got a few crates—food and weapons, no surprise there—and he’s in the process of pushing them to the walls when Ahsoka makes her way down to help, and the two of them make short work of everything.

“No mats,” Rex says, rolling his shoulders in the cleared circle.  “This’ll suck a bit, huh?”

“When does it not, Rexter?” she says, and promptly folds herself into a forward bend, palms flat and relaxed against the metal floor.  They both go through their normal stretches: him, the GAR standard; her, a buffet of Jedi bends from various duelling disciplines.  She’d explained it to him, once, and if he racked his memory he’d remember the names, but for now he’s just content to watch.

As Ahsoka rotates her head, he sees that the play of muscles beneath the skin of her neck is lovely.  The gentle flexion and tension is smooth and unhurried and beautiful.

Then she grins at him, sharp-toothed and shining, and she lunges for him, and he can’t think those thoughts any more.

It’s not grappling, like they’d done in the cockpit.  He’s used to sparring with his brothers, who all had a mishmash of styles depending on their cohort, but all with the same common base and grounding flashtrained from Kamino.  But Ahsoka and Rex had rarely actually sparred while she’d been in the GAR; mostly, he stuck her with the shinies to help them out and then pitted her against the ARCS so she’d learn from them.  He’d stepped in when he felt he had something specifically to teach, but they’d laid hands on each other rarely, rarely enough that he’d be able to count it on just one hand, and always at the urging of the brothers and her teasing grin—

Well, they’d watched each other fight often enough, anyways.  She’d seen his matches and training against his brothers, watching from the sidelines while she half-heartedly focused on her studies, and he’d helped run drills with the General.

They fight, doing their best to get the other to the ground.  It’s not a playfight, like the cockpit, pretending to be the shinies they absolutely weren’t for the simple joy of finding each other alive.  But they’re also not out for blood.  They're two soldiers bringing themselves into tune with each other in their shared language of violence and breath.

It’s good.  It’s more than good, really.  He’s re-immersing himself in the fluency of her body, its twists and turns and faintest signals and cues.  Where she’s going to go, what she’s going to do next.  She’s doing the same.

(If she hadn’t gotten the chip out, he doesn’t know who would’ve died first.  Under all technicality, it probably would have been him, but he doesn’t think she could bring herself to kill him, and that mercy is what would’ve sealed her fate.)

The errant thought jars him enough that Ahsoka’s able to floor him and get her forearm to his throat, a gentle pressure.  She’s straddling his chest and twisted her legs around his to keep him from kicking up, her other hand holding his arms above his head, and for the life of him he can’t bring himself to even try to escape.  He probably could.  But she’s leaning down on him, her lekku brushing against his chest, and no part of him wants to move.

Against his will, Rex swallows, and Ahsoka’s predator eyes track the movement of his throat beneath her arm.

She takes a deep breath and unwinds herself from him, rocking back on her heels a bit.  Then she reaches her hand down to him, and he takes it without thinking twice.

“One for me,” she says, effortlessly pulling him back up to standing.  “C’mon, old man.”  Her eyes then flicker to the stairwell of the small deck behind him, and she waggles her eye markings at him even as she drops her hand and steps back, resetting to her normal wide-legged, arms-down starting stance.  

“That’ll be the last one,” Rex says, an instinctual rejoinder.  But if he’s read her correctly, the kid’s watching them fight, so maybe he should throw this one; make the child feel more secure in the idea that Ahsoka can beat him just in case Rex proves himself to be a danger.

From the smirk on her face, she’s also had this train of thought, and her eyes go to the stairwell again, and she winks in the direction of where Rex presumes the kid’s perched.  He’s proved correct by the tiny eep behind him.

“Loser makes latemeal,” says Ahsoka, pitching her voice just a little louder, and the kid giggles.

“Then I should definitely lose,” Rex grumbles, for her montrals only, and prepares himself.

In his defense, he does make her work for it.  But he lets her take him down this time, bypassing a few holes in her defense with gentle taps only—enough to let her know he’d spotted her mistake, but not enough to end it.  This time he ends up face-down on the floor, his arms twisted up behind him while her knees bracket his ribcage.

“I yield,” he says, loud enough for the kid to hear, and if he twists his head up—difficult, but doable—he can see Jax sitting on the stairwell, the vibroblade loosely gripped in green fingers.

“Hey Jax!” Ahsoka calls out.  “Wanna go choose three MREs for dinner?”  The kid smiles at her.

“Okay, Miss Ashla,” he says, but lingers a little, looking at Rex on the floor.

“He’ll be fine,” Ahsoka says, and he can hear the grin in her voice.  “We’ll be up in a bit,” and then she must give her best smile again, because the kid flushes bright green before scampering up the stairs towards the galley.

Once Jax is gone, Ahsoka eases up off of Rex, and he rolls over, stretching his arms out but content to stay on the floor.  They’re both breathing hard, and after a moment she sits down next to him, folding her legs like she’s about to enter meditation.

“Okay, Miss Ashla,” Rex echoes, and she tries to swat him upside the head but he’s a bit too quick.  “Little gods, he’s as bad as the shinies.”

She looks down at him, her brow twisting.  “What?”

“Ah, you know.  Later on, once any shinies saw you fight, they’d be half in love with you.”

“Wait, are you serious?”

Rex studies her.  She looks genuinely confused.  “Not…not love-love, I guess.  Massiff-crushes, you know?”

“Oh,” she says, still genuinely confused.  “No.  I didn’t know.”

“Well, you always scared the hell out of ‘em pretty soon after you met, so they’d get over it quickly enough.”

But she doesn’t respond, lost in thought.  He thinks of markings upon helmets, and a vast, crashed tomb, and wonders if she’s not thinking the same.

“Rex?” she says after a bit, her voice distant and… almost lost, really.  “Have you ever been in love?”

Oof.

Well.  That’s a question, isn’t it?

“I don’t know,” he says, and while he knows that’s true, that he doesn’t know, he knows there’s things he’s not saying.  Things he doesn’t let himself think about too much.  

(The flexion of strong muscle beneath skin, eyes alight and teeth shining and so alive—)

“I hope I haven’t been,” he says, instead of dwelling on the idea of her.  “Because I don’t know how to be, I think.”

Fuck.  More than he’d wanted to say at all.  The metal floor of the deck is cold through his civvies.

But she just smiles down at him from where she’s sitting, sad and understanding, and cards her hand against his buzzcut.  She’d done that once during the war.  After Umbara, when she’d found him with his helmet off staring holes in the deck of his bunk.  That'd gotten him through that night, he thinks, the soft stroke of her hand atop his skull, and they'd never once spoken about it or even acknowledged it afterwards.

“I don’t think I know either,” Ahsoka says, and her nails drag gentle against his scalp, and he shivers.

The feeling follows him to the galley—the kid’d chosen Nuna Sausage and Biscuits for Rex’s latemeal, the little barve—and the ‘fresher, where Rex stands in the sonic for too long, probably.  Ahsoka’s back in the cockpit, so he pings her to let her know that he’ll take his sleeping shift now, thank you, and she sends back an affirmation. Use my quarters; see you when you wake up.  Her quarters are depressingly bare, just as he'd predicted, and he tries not to think of her, alone in this ship, void of personality or decoration or sign of life. 

But if it makes her feel safe, he supposes, then he shouldn't get too caught up in it.  He shouldn't.

Rex has the soldier’s ability to fall asleep at a moment’s notice.  Even then, he feels the ghost of her fingers raking through his short hair and the idea of her sitting alone in her empty cockpit, and these ideas follow him in his unspeakable dreams.

Chapter Text

Rex wakes up to the ungracious, sudden hiss of the doorway opening, and he shoots out of the barren bed instantly, hands at his h—no, no holsters, no armor—his guns, where are his guns—

“Rex?” her voice filters in, and for a moment, he thinks he’s dreaming, and she’s bending toward him, lekku bright against her shoulders and eyes wide and concerned.  She’s beautiful.

“‘Soka?” he asks, wonderingly, and he watches as the nickname he’s only allowed himself in the back of his mind washes over her, rears her back, so he steps forward to hold her, unwilling to let her go.  No, she can’t leave, not again—

Then he realizes his surroundings, and his hand drops.  He’s in her barren quarters in his civvies.  Slept.  Keeping an eye on Jax, who doesn’t seem to like him too much.  Ahsoka is standing before him, blue and beige and orange, and his still-waking brain thinks she’s one of the loveliest things he’s ever seen.  

He shakes it off.

“Sorry about that,” Rex says, instead, and turns back to the bed and straightens it up.  Not a lot to straighten up—one threadbare blanket and a lump that can only charitably be called a pillow.  “Everything okay?”

Behind him, Ahsoka takes a long breath.

“Yeah,” she says, and there’s something a bit twisted in her voice.  “Jax is still out.  We’re on course, and my team is on track to the rendezvous at Vicondor.”

“Sounds good.”

“I made some caf.  It’s in the galley.”

“Ah, thanks.”

Probably no more ways to straighten the bed out now.  Rex pats down one last imagined wrinkle, and forces himself to face her.  There is nothing to be afraid of here, he tells himself.  

Ahsoka’s peering at him with a mixture of curiosity and worry.  She places one hand upon his bare forearm, her grip gentle and kind.

“Rex?” she asks.  “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine—” Commander, he stops himself from saying just in time.  Clears his throat.  “I’m fine.  Dreams.  You know how it goes.”  Her face creases in sympathy and understanding, and he’s just glad she’s not asking him to elaborate on what these dreams actually entailed.  “I’ll get some caf, and it’ll be alright.”

Her hand trails off his arm as he steps away, and the door hisses closed behind him.  

The ship’s lights are dimmed in its night cycle, but there’s enough illumination for him to find what is an already-forboding pot of caf steaming on the counter.  There’d been stories in the 501st—nay, legends—about the commander’s odd tastebuds, and part of him is scared to try the brew.

But she’d tried.  She’d made it for him, even though she didn’t drink it herself—she’d preferred an oddly meaty tea, one that’d made lesser men gag at the smell—and she’s not always the most giving of people, so he takes the gesture as the kindness it is and pours himself a mug.

Bracing himself, he takes a sip.

It promptly comes back up.  It doesn’t taste any better that way, either.

“How the fuck…” he whispers.  There’s no blue milk, no sweetener…  Wait.  Maybe?

Rex digs in the cupboard for an MRE, one of the few that comes with a dessert.  A freeze-dried three-blue-milk cake.  Dumps it in the coffee.  The cake disintegrates quickly—too quickly—and he stirs it with his finger, wincing only a little at the temperature.  Now there’s little chunks of cake swimming in the caf (Can it be called that? he wonders), and a thin film of fat coating the top of the mug, but he sets himself steady and takes another sip of the now frighteningly-thick caf.

Ugh.

It can’t be called better, and would certainly never be called good, but it’s… it’s doable.  Survivable.  Neither are ways to describe a cup of caf, but such is life, he supposes.

Thoroughly and unpleasantly awake now, Rex makes his way to the cockpit and catches up on his messages.

Hunter’s is a check-in.  Rex shoots him a question about how to bond with traumatized children, and gets an immediate response, asking if Jax is okay.  Rex simply says that he gave the kid a knife, and Hunter proceeds to give a worrying mixture of practical advice—patience, support, structure—and slightly less practical advice, all of it essentially saying that Rex wouldn’t know proper knifework if it fucked him up the ass and called him sweetheart.

Reading it, Rex wonders if Crosshair got ahold of the comm somehow.  It could happen.

As the vitriol increases, he starts to lend more credence to that idea.

He lets Hunter—or whoever it is—go on for a bit, get it out of his system, and once the diatribe has died down, Rex sends a Thanks :) and promptly closes out of that chat.

Echo’s message is more straightforward.  The new men—all dechipped by the time he’d left—have chosen whether they’re going to stay on to fight or retire, and so they’ve got another nine men who want to join their ranks.  Two are willing to return to the Empire as undercover agents, so Echo’s getting them prepped for re-entry while Gregor and Howzer focus on squad assimilation and tactics.  Dossiers are attached; hope the mission’s going well.

Rex takes a bit more time to respond to this one, making notes about potential subgroupings based off of the files Echo’s sent.  No doubt Gregor and Howzer had noted many of those already, but it didn’t hurt to give everything a look over himself.  The defectors who have agreed to re-entry, he examines more closely, but nothing truly suspicious stands out.  Keep an eye on the second, who’d been more brutalized during Tantiss according to the intake interviews, to make sure he was actually stable enough to reenter as a spy.  Perhaps keep him on probation for another month, put him with more public-facing clones to make sure this is what he really wants, and this isn’t a move from desperation.  Last thing we want is a potentially self-destructive man on the inside.  

The mission’s going well.  I can see why you like that planet; it’s a very good choice for what’s going on there.

Rex gets a Thanks :) in response from Echo, and he rolls his eyes at how fast the Batch spreads their bullshit.

There’s a slightly incoherent chain of messages from Gregor, mostly photos and videos of training.  In one, he can hear the man’s mad cackle as three new brothers try to take him down, and instead get absolutely blitzed by the commando in fifteen short seconds.

He’s not sure why Gregor has sent him these, but he’s entertained regardless.  Rex is still chuckling at the video of Howzer, disgruntled at being filmed while eating and giving Gregor a truly blistering dressing-down worthy of Alpha-17 when the soft pad of feet in the corridor makes him pause and look up.

Jax is standing in the doorway, knife in hand, rubbing his eyes.  Rex preemptively winces, but keeps his face as gentle as possible.

“Yeah, Jax?”  Puts his pad down, angles to face the kid fully.  Hands open by his sides.

“Is Miss Ashla here?”

Rex shakes his head slowly.  “Sorry.”  And he is sorry; the boy’s obviously more comfortable with Ahsoka, crush notwithstanding.  “She’s sleeping right now.”

“Okay,” Jax says simply.  But he doesn’t move from the doorway and doesn’t unclasp the knife.

Hunter’d written that Rex should let the kid come to his own conclusions when ready.  So Rex waits a good long while, his eyes trained slightly above the kid’s head.  Eventually, Jax steps fully into the room, and moves to the copilot’s chair.

“Do you want the lights on?” Rex asks gently.  Kids got scared of the dark, right?  Jax shakes his head no, though, so Rex doesn’t move to the controls.  Instead, it seems that the kid is content to sit and look at the blue gossamer of hyperspace, so Rex returns to the message backlog while keeping a wary ear open.  Senator Chuchi had messaged him, hmm—

“They didn’t turn off the lights a lot in the lab,” Jax volunteers into the silence.  His voice is soft and unsure. 

Rex wants to keep his eyes on his pad.  Some brothers, after trauma, couldn’t look people in the eyes.  But he does flick his gaze up once to see Jax staring out the transparisteel, and the kid keeps talking anyways, so Rex understands his role as witness.

“There was sunshine on Pa—on the planet,” Jax corrects himself swiftly, and Rex mentally congratulates the kid for his thinking.  “But the ship lights are the same color, like the lab, and they’re on a lot.”

Ah.  That could be an issue.

“If you’d like, we can keep the lights off,” Rex says, making his voice as soft as possible.  “It won’t bother Miss Ashla.”  

Jax just looks out the window, and Rex once again finds himself waiting out the silence.  Then the kid mumbles something that Rex can’t quite catch.

“Sorry, Jax,” he says.  “Didn’t get that.”

Still staring out the window, Jax mumbles a little louder: “Will it bother you?”  He is fucking steadfast with this whole no-eye-contact thing, and Rex mentally congratulates the kid again.

“Nah, kid,” he responds.  “It won’t bother me.”  Unless he was asking because he wanted Rex to be bothered, in which case Rex wasn’t quite sure how to approach this whole thing.  Another bout of silence.

“Okay,” the kid says, eventually.  “Let’s keep them off.”

Rex smiles.  “Alright then.  Want me to show you how to adjust the automatic nightshift scheduler?  That way we don’t have to keep hitting the lights ourselves.”

Jax nods, tiny and uncertain but a nod nonetheless, and Rex begins pointing out parts of the control panel and the order in which to hit the buttons, what to input, and pretty soon the kid’s invested in not only that task but in asking questions about the ship itself, which Rex answers as best he can.

(He does look at Rex’s cup of caf-cake sludge, resting on the console, with barely disguised disgust, especially as Rex winces when he drinks it.

“Miss Ashla made it,” Rex says lamely, like it’s an excuse, but the kid just nods gravely like he understands completely.)

Eventually, they move to the galley and make breakfast in the darkness, the warmth of the running lights their only illumination.   It’s pretty typical stuff, and Rex eyes the remainder of the pot of caf warily before carefully tilting it into the sink.  They’re just finishing up when a door hisses down the corridor, and Ahsoka walks on quiet feet to them both, snagging a ration bar for her own breakfast.

Damn him, but he spots the fond, proud little smile she gives the empty pot of caf, and something tightens in his stomach.  

Probably the caf, he thinks, knowing he’s lying to himself.

“Firstmeal in the dark,” Ahsoka says, settling herself in the booth right next to him and smiling at Jax, whose blush is still evident in the dim.  “I like it.”  But she shoots him a glance anyways, so he reaches down and taps out a later–objective on her knee.  He gets a return tap, a simple confirm, on his thigh.  

As Ahsoka draws Jax into more lively conversation, Rex finds himself pinned next to her, just listening to the flow of discussion.  She’s patient and answers the kid’s questions easily, which range from mundane things to questions about the feeling.  Ahsoka doesn’t call it the Force, but does tell the kid to trust it and how to practice with it unseen.  How to, in children’s terms, shield oneself.

She’s pressed right against him, is the thing.  Her thigh and hip against his.  It’s normal, technically; they’d had to squeeze close into busy transports before, and she was no stranger to the clones’ lack of consideration for body space amongst their own.

But it’s not normal.  It’s a warm line of heat that he’s never felt before, not through the plastoid of his armor or the blastweave of his blacks.  She’s just… against him, the sides of their legs touching.  Like it’s a natural thing, to be this close.

He forces himself to tune into the conversation.  Jax is a curious kid, it turns out, as long as he’s with the right person.  Then there’s more pressure against his leg, and she’s leaning into him via her gestures and natural sway, and he does his best to keep from leaning back into her. 

Eventually, Ahsoka cajoles Jax into going into the storage deck to learn more about knife skills.  Rex leaves her to it, excuses himself to the cockpit to double-check everything and instead spends a good moment breathing deep and collecting his scattered focus from its disparate pieces within his psyche.

Little gods, this was not the time for this.

He’d said it himself: he didn’t know how to be in love.  Doesn’t know if that’s even what this is.  Doesn’t know if this is unfortunate lust all twisted up in his affection for her, this person with whom he shared the unspeakable hell of that day.  He knows he loves her, but even if he thought he was in love with her he wouldn’t know what to do with it.  He’s a soldier.  She’s a former Jedi, and, aside from a couple of unfortunate crushes she’d had as a kid (the Bonteri twerp, and oddly enough himself, early on; he’d noticed and ignored it entirely, and it’d seemed to have died away), has no romantic experience as far as he knows.  He’s had sexual experiences, but they’d all been fleeting and so empty-feeling in the end, so he’d stayed abstinent more often than not.

Of course, who knew what she’d been up to in the interim, in the After.  She could’ve fallen in love with half the galaxy by now, could’ve slept with half the galaxy by now, and all those people would be better off for it to be held that giant heart of hers.  But he knows her well, and doesn’t think she’d let romance deter her from her goals.  That’s the crux of it: he is the exact same.  Even if those feelings did crawl in, there’s more to life than that.  

There are wars to be won, and brothers to be saved, and children to be rescued and rehomed.  There are empires to be toppled and people to be freed.  How does one put a personal need in front of the needs of many?

(It’s a question he grapples with every time a brother chooses not to join the Underground, but he is well practiced in telling himself that each person has their own needs.  It’s useless speculation, and he is fighting for their right to choose their fates, after all.)

No matter.  Still not the time for this.  This likely-unwanted affection from him, let alone being half-baked and confused, wasn’t appropriate for a friendship.

His comm chirps.  It’s Ahsoka, asking him to come down and help out with knife training.

Rex scrubs his hands down his face, takes a fortifying breath, and joins her.

The next couple of days go relatively easily: they trade shifts, and Jax slowly warms up to him.  The kid still giggles when Ahsoka puts Rex on his back during a spar, but Rex does the same to her a few times and the kid laughs then, too, although it may be mainly directed at the disgruntled look on her face when she gets the wind knocked out of her.

The kid’s not a natural with the knife, but he tries, and no one gets accidentally sliced.  Ahsoka still makes caf before the shift handoff, and Rex makes sure he drinks at least one mug before dumping the pot.  He’s found that if he downs the whole thing like a shot—difficult, but doable—it becomes bearable, if only because he doesn’t have time to taste as much of it.  He makes sure to thank her every time, and the proud little smile on her face shows up every time.

She presses against his thigh at every shared meal, and he doesn’t know what to do with that yet.

The handoff goes much like the last one: get to the planet, drop the kid into the contact’s arms, trust from there.  Jax gives Rex a very masculine and grown-up handshake before leaving, and blushes like a daybloom when Ahsoka leans down to give him a squeeze.

Then it’s again: Ahsoka’s hand on his chest, warm through his civvies, pressing him out of sight.  He closes his eyes and traitorously imagines chasing both her palm and that animal instinct that overrides at the most inconvenient of times, and then he opens his eyes to find her watching him curiously.

“You okay?” she asks, and he remembers himself and steps back.

“Yeah.”   Explain it, moron.  “Just a bit tired, I suppose.”  And she’d said he couldn’t lie.

She shakes her head.  “Go sleep, then.  We’re not on a base and we’re not on a regimented schedule anymore.”  So Rex makes his way to the kid’s vacated bunk and is in the process of neatening everything before a throat clears behind him.

“What’re you doing?”

Rex gestures wordlessly to the bunk, a duh implicit on his face.

Ahsoka rolls her eyes.  “Just use my bunk.  You were sleeping there already anyway.”  Then she takes the bundled blankets from him, shooing him away.  “We need to wash these.  You really wanted to sleep in here?”

He doesn’t know what to say.  It’s not a question of want.  It’s a question of trying to claw back the propriety he feels slipping away from him, barrier by barrier.

But that’s not something he can say, so he follows her orders, as always.  Throws her rag of a blanket over himself, and wills himself to sleep.  When he wakes, she is by the bed with a mug of that horrendous caf.  It smells different.  Worse, impossibly.  Oh gods, she’s experimenting now.

“We’ve got a problem with the next pickup,” she says, blue gaze twinkling with excitement.  She swings her legs over his, tangling them a bit in the blanket just to kick him more fully awake, and he shoves her off the bed, hoping the caf spills.  Wait, no, then it’d stink up the blanket, he realizes a little too late.  But she’s all tooka-toothed and graceful, so she just twists her hips in a complicated, wriggly move and ends up sprawling across his legs on her front, thrusting the mug up towards him.  “You down to help out?”

“Always,” he says, and chugs the terrible caf just to see her smile. 

Chapter Text

Ahsoka’s so glad he wants to go.  Well.  Not like she’d doubted at any point in her asking, really, but it’s nice to have the verbal confirmation.  It’s not long to the system and the space station, so they both gear up.  More accurately, she fully gears up; Rex puts on his belt and deeces along with that hideous poncho she’d left with him when they’d separated, but otherwise those form-fitting civvies stay on.  She briefs him on her operatives: a couple of Bothans and a Sullustan, who have all gone silent entirely, but she’s got their drop point and a localized tracer system that’ll pick up once they’re on-station, so it’s not like she doesn’t have a way to find them.

As she gives the run-down, she sways a little closer to him, takes the poncho, and rubs it between her fingers. It’s getting worn.  Could he not get himself another?  She’d stolen a couple more since, was wearing one to cover her sabers, did he want that one—

But Rex is looking at her with measured eyes as she lays hands on his clothing, and there’s something wonderfully warm in his gaze.  So she swallows that question and asks another.

“You sure you’ll be fine without your armor?”  She’s enough of a visual draw as it is; adding in some fairly well-known armor in front of the wrong people would have major shit crashing down on both their organizations.

“Done it before, and I’ll probably have to do it again,” Rex says, but he still rolls his shoulders and looks discomfited to her trained eye.  He pulls his hood up, and with the picture complete…he’s slighter than she remembers.  Huh.

“Follow my lead?” and damn her, there’s an unnecessarily questioning tone to it.  

“Obviously,” he says, and he’d be right to be annoyed at the question but instead it’s that warmth again.  

Huh.

It’s a quick landing, and Ahsoka pays off the attendant with some extra credits and a Force suggestion.  The place is a little skughole of a spaceport, really, all stinking and steaming.  Rex follows her like a shade in rippling coarseweave, and she feels echoes of their walk down the Tribunal’s corridors on the way to the hangar and their presumptive deaths. 

Mission, she tells herself, and shakes herself free of memory.  The tracker flashes a silent location, and the two of them find an unsecured pad outside of the hangar that they painstakingly slice into in order to get the overall station layout.  When she sees what building they’re in, she groans quietly.

Of course her operatives are in jail.  

Rex, when he sees this, wrinkles his nose, and once again she wants to trace the new lines upon his face.  “No chance to find schematics,” he says, and that’s true enough.  Neither of them are especially strong slicers.  “We going in blind?”

“Well…”

“Why do I ask?” he says, seemingly to the artificial atmosphere.  But she can see the glint of his smile beneath the hood, so she plays along. 

“I dunno, Rex, why do you ask?” she shoots back, dropping the pad and heading down the alley.  They thread their way through the port easily, following the tracker’s blip.  “Small station like this, it’ll probably be pretty lightly manned.”  It’s a short walk from hangar to jail; must see some overlap with smugglers.  Well, of course it did.  That’s why her operatives would’ve chosen it.  “We’ll need to be fast.  You down to run distraction?” 

“I dunno, Commander, why do you ask?” Rex half-laughs, clicking the safeties off on his guns even as they duck into another alley so he can hotwire some poor bastard’s unwatched speederbike.  

“Just checking, you know,” Ahsoka says.  There’s something wonderfully furtive about him crouched like this, beyond the grand theft auto, and she shifts behind him in order to watch his six, to cover his form from any prying eyes.  “Thought these were going to be blue milk runs, honestly.”

“See, you can’t just say stuff like that.  That’s what fucks it.”  Then he swears at the bike as it sparks, and she instinctively tenses in anticipation of an alarm.  “Nope, got it.”  She turns and he’s already swinging a leg over the bike, and his hood slips a little bit back on his head, showing his proud smirk.  

Instinctively, she reaches out to tug the hood back forward, and her hand wavers uselessly in the air as he beats her to it.  

“Good work,” she says, and forces her traitor hand into her pack, grabs what she needs, and presses a thermal detonator into his hand.  “Give ‘em hell.  RV at the ship in ten.”  He takes the detonator, squeezing her fingers for a moment as he pulls away.

Huh.

“Understood,” though, is all Rex says as he roars off.  She scales a nearby building to wait until he gives the signal. 

Thirty seconds later, there’s one hell of an explosion and the lights all along the quadrant flicker off—he must’ve crashed a transformer.  Good man.  Within a minute, a small squad of stormtroopers pour out of the prison, and she sheathes herself in shadows, jumps down, and slips in where they’d left.

It’s easy to avoid the cameras—not that it matters, since the power’s out—and it’s easy to knock out the remaining stormtroopers with well-placed jabs.  She’s right: the place is a skughole.  If this’d been run by actual troopers, she’d still be back at the entrance thanks to any kind of basic failsafe generator.  The roof hadn’t even been pressure-sensitive, for Force’s sake.  She finds her operatives easily too, all tucked uncomfortably in what looks like the drunk pen.  There’s also an Iktotchi man in there with them who looks pale beneath the normal dun coloring of his skin, and he’s clutching something in his hands.  

Hmm.  There should be another—not the time, not right now.

“Creche?” she whispers, and all four look up, their eyes widening at the sign of her markings.

“Fulcrum?” one of the Bothans—Creche 1, Pol Lya’Tu, former teacher turned freedom fighter who’d been busting slaves since before the Empire and had a soft spot for children—whispers back.

Ahsoka grins terribly, letting her fangs show, and tells her operatives to get away from the lock.  They cluster against the far wall.  She double-checks that the cameras are still out—what the fuck was up with this place, it was so junky—and slices through the lock with one short ignition of her saber. “We need to be in the air in eight.  This your package?” she asks Pol.

The Bothan looks tired and heartbroken.  “This is all I have.”

“Understood.”  There should’ve been another child.  Sixteen, maybe, and maybe not a child if her life’d been any reckoning.  But there should have—not the time.  

Sir,” she says to the Iktotchi man, “I’m here to take you to Eva.  Stay quiet, stay low, and come with us.”  The man slumps momentarily, and then takes a deep breath, tucking whatever’d been in his hands in his jacket pocket.

“Of—of course, ma’am.”  A pause.  “Fulcrum.”

Then Ahsoka remembers, and smiles at the man, gentle this time.  “What’s your name?”

“Eelar.  Eerlar Stacem.”

“Well met, Eelar.  Let’s go.”  Even now, the lights are flickering, and her mental clock is ticking away horrendously.  Time to go, time to go, and they slip from the prison.  Eelar and the other Bothan—Creche 2, Utri Sei’ab, Pol’s former student, good slicer and even better liar—both kick the downed stormtroopers’ bodies as they pass.

The operatives and the father follow close on the same back-alley route she and Rex had taken to get here, as quiet as they can be.  They have to pause a few times to let patrols rush past them (Oh, that’s where all the troopers are, Ahsoka thinks), but otherwise everything is holding well until Ahsoka’s comm chirps.  She waves at the group to stop, and opens the channel.

“Hey.  Double-time it,” Rex says, no introduction or greeting, and Ahsoka can hear distant sounds of shooting now.  The Bothans can as well, and it won’t be long until the others catch it.  “Attendant sold us out.  I’ll meet you there.  Try to beat them.”

“Yes, sir,” she says, and closes her comm.  Then she turns to her group.  “Time to run,” she says, and they all nod seriously, Eelar a little slower on the uptake.  He’s fast, though, and she’s able to run at something close to her normal pace as they duck through stinking byways.

The shooting begins just as they sprint into the hangar.  She has no choice but to draw her sabers, drawing fire in order to get them on the ship.  None of her operatives are armed; she’ll get them new weapons later.  The air is thick red with bolts and the place smells like cheap blaster gas, none of the piercing tibanna-cartridge smell of the wars.

“Creche Three,” she shouts, and the Sullustan’s already pushing ahead onto the ramp, “get us gone! ”  Eelar follows shortly after, his long limbs eating up the distance like it’s nothing.

The Bothans, however, are a little slower, so Ahsoka reaches with the Force, pushing the pair while trying to block all of the blaster bolts she can, and there’s a yelp as Pol gets clipped in the arm—and then there’s a space between bolts, and Rex is scowling from the shadows, guns drawn.  She focuses the Force on the Bothans and shoves them both inside the ship, twin shrieks following them up the ramp.

“Told you exfil was always shit!” Rex shouts as he hops out of cover, past her, and then sets up position directly behind her, covering her retreat as she deflects bolts from new braces of troopers.  And then it’s that familiar, vicious dance, movements paired as they duck and weave together, stepping back towards the ship every few beats, every six shots.  For every blaster bolt she reflects, there are another two coming from the guns singing by her montrals, her sides, her shoulders, and this synchronicity and shared rhythm feels good even as they walk backwards together onto the ramp. 

The surface of the station begins to fall away—Creche 3, Dua Sund, the pilot, former spice runner gone moral—and the two speed their retreat, Ahsoka finally smashing the ramp’s button, closing everything up.  

Rex is still at her back, and she lets herself lean into him for a moment.

“That was fun,” he says, and she feels the rumble of his chest against her spine.

“It was alright,” she responds, tilting her head back a little to look at him.  The tips of her montrals frame his jaw at this angle, and he turns his face experimentally within the close brackets of her bones.  His cheeks brush against the sensitive skin, and the near-silent shfff of his stubble sends a thrill across the back of her neck.

Ahsoka acts on impulse, following that thrill, and lets more of her weight rest against him, like she’d done each shared meal when they’d been watching over Jax.  It’s comfy.  He’s comfy, all warm, lean lines.  Rex immediately circles an arm around her waist to steady her, like she’s in a shaky lartie and he’s keeping her from toppling over.

Huh.

“—are you doing,” he breathes, more to himself than her, she thinks, but she’s not sure if he’s actually said anything or if he’s just subvocalizing too close to her sensitive auditory system.

Either way, it shakes her from this odd, fey mood.

Ahsoka straightens herself out, and Rex unclasps his arm from around her.  She misses the weight.

Mission, she thinks.

After Sund launches them into hyperspace, she meets with her operatives and Eelar while Rex makes himself scarce—familiar face and all that, he says, but she wonders if he doesn’t want a little time to himself, given that tiny whisper.  Creche had been able to extract Eelar and his older daughter with what they thought was little issue, but during the transfer on this station, they’d been caught out; something’d been flagged in their fake chain codes (Utri says this with utter self-disgust and shame, and Ahsoka makes a mental note to talk with them later), and a firefight had ensued.  Eelar’s older daughter got shot through the temple, and Eelar’d only managed to grab her bracelet—a gift from her mother, already long gone—before they’d all been dragged to jail to await further processing.

Ahsoka presses a hand to Eelar’s shoulder.  She doesn’t know what it is to lose a child, and she likely never will.  But the man’s grief, while still raw, is being pushed aside for the hope of seeing his remaining, surviving daughter.

“Please,” he says, voice wet but strong.  “You tell me Eva is safe.  But I need to see her.”  So she grabs Rex, has him set up an encrypted video comm in the cockpit to his own contact.  Hunter, she supposes, a grim-faced clone with half of a skull tattoo.  

“Captain,” he says, voice garbled through the encryptions.  “Don’t suppose it’s good news for you to be calling me.”  Then he angles his head back a bit in analysis, and Ahsoka realises she’s standing in the comm’s viewport.

“Commander,” Hunter says, warily.

“Ashla,” both Rex and Ahsoka correct him.  The younger clone flicks an eyebrow up but nods slowly, and Ahsoka backs out of the shot and squeezes Rex on the shoulder. Cover this.   

Two taps of his heel against the floor are her answer. Confirmed.

She collects Eelar from the galley and shows him to the cockpit, where the call has switched over to a young Iktotchi girl.  Rex waits just outside the door.  Eelar falls to his knees at the sight of his daughter, and Rex turns away from the man’s grief and joy.  The door hisses shut behind them.  

It is just the two of them in the corridor now, side by side.  But she’s not walking further, and neither is he.  Ahsoka closes her eyes and listens to the hum of the ship, of the muted conversation beyond the closed cockpit doors.

“How’s your team?”

“Alive.”  But Rex is patient in that canny way, and she can feel the pressure of his stare.  “My slicer’s drowning in self-recrimination, and I wonder if they made their mistake because I’ve been running them too hard.  But my lead said that wasn’t it, said mistakes happen.”

“Ah,” he says, noncommittal and quiet.   Then he’s placing a hand on her shoulder and pulling her towards him, and she leans against his chest gratefully.  

They both know there aren’t words for when lives are lost, not really.  There shouldn’t be mistakes when the penalty could be death.  But she’d had no way to control it, either; the girl’d been dead by the time her team lost contact.  Blame is both pointless and inevitable.

Knowing that there are no words, Ahsoka instead presses further into Rex and winds her hands around his back.  His arms are looped comfortably around her shoulders, her waist, firm and strong.

“You give good hugs,” Ahsoka tells him, because it’s important to her that he knows this.

“You’re the only one alive who’d know, I guess,” and there’s something deep and sad in his voice that he can’t hide, not from her, even as he gives it a half-hearted lift to try to make it an ironic sort of statement.

She can only squeeze him tighter after that.

“You down to bunk with me in the cockpit?” she asks.  “I’ve already given the guests the quarters.”

“What, and I’m not your guest?”  An attempt to lighten the mood, but she doesn’t want to be distracted by it right now.

“No, Rex.  You’re not.”  

He doesn’t respond except for with his hands and the start of a slow, gentle trace up and down the small of her back.  After a while—a long while—they pull apart, and Rex ducks away to go grab spare blankets and pads.

The door hisses open and Eelar is standing once more, his eyes and face damp but his back straight.

“Your—ah, your Hunter wishes to speak with you,” he says, jabbing one finger back at the comm.

“My friend will be back in a bit,” Ahsoka says.  

“No,” Eelar shakes his head.  “Hunter said you, said—ah, Ashla.”  Then, the ghost of a smile haunts his jaw.  “Spies and codenames, like a holo.  What an odd life this is.  Bana loves—would love it.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.  “For your loss.”  

He nods, his eyes going wet again.  “Go.  I will find Creche.  Utri is a good person, and they are not to blame.”

Feeling oddly chastised, Ahsoka walks into the cockpit and closes the door behind her.  The videocomm image of Hunter is flickering, just a little, but seems stable enough.

“Commander,” he says again.  

“Sergeant,” she responds evenly.  If he wants to play, so will she, and she’s rewarded when he sighs.

“Ashla,” he grates out.  “You and the good captain need to set down on Pabu.  That kid needs to see her father, and he needs to see his daughter.”

“That would happen in a normal pickup, and they’d have the ship.”

“Not what I mean.  They need a day—at least a day, if not more—to decompress.”

“Do they?” she asks idly, and is rewarded once again when he sneers.  “What keeps them from doing that on the ship?”

“Children need safe environments,” he says, an edge to his voice.  “And if that father can see—in person, in the sun—that his daughter’s been cared for and has been safe and is healing, it’ll do his heart a whole lot of good too.”

Her own heart goes out to this clone, this man she’d ruffled so thoroughly that she’d made him slip his calm.  According to Rex’s stories, Hunter was the leader of the Batch, in charge of corralling those wildly disparate personalities into the most effective team the war had seen.

To see him leap to the defense of a fellow father—well, it’s inspiring, even if she’s been intentionally needling him.

“My team,” she says instead.  “They’re Rebellion operatives.  Is our presence on Pabu going to cause harm?  Because if it potentially harms the people there, then I cannot authorize it, Hunter, and you know that.  You told Rex to use his best judgement, and his and mine often coincide.”

The door hisses open behind her, and she hears Rex’s familiar gait and the soft thump of blankets.  But he doesn’t talk, doesn’t join the comm call.  Just sits silently in the copilot’s chair and watches.

“If you’re as good at shaking tails and evading bullshit as Rex says you are, then it won’t be an issue.  This planet is protected and out-of-the-way, and while I don’t want your forces on here long-term, a short stay won’t endanger the people.”  In the image, Hunter scrubs his hands down his face.  It’s a familiar gesture, and her eyes shoot to Rex, who is viewing it all with a neutral expression.  “That family deserves some peace,” he says, quieter now.  “Let them have some before they’re thrown into the galaxy again.”

Ahsoka keeps her face impassive as she pretends to consider.  Lets her eyes stay open a little too long, in the way she knows humans subconsciously hate.  Hunter doesn’t crack, though, and she can admire that in a person.  Just bears up under the weight of her waiting, unmoving and determined.

“You make a good argument, Sergeant,” she says, finally.  “Thank you for reminding me of what peace should look like.  See you soon.”  She switches the comm off immediately after, but it’s still enough time for Hunter’s face to start to shift into relief.  

“How long did it actually take him to convince you?” Rex asks from the copilot’s chair.

“About twenty seconds in, I think,” she muses.  “He’s good.  I see why you like him.”

“Yeah, well, wouldn’t have trusted him with Echo otherwise.”

“Mmm.”

Once again, comfortable silence reigns in the cockpit.  Ahsoka’s already shown her team the bunks, and Eelar’d been headed their way anyways, and the debrief was over.

She sidles over to the pilot’s chair, plots in a few planned jumps to shake off any potential trackers, and sets in the final course for Pabu.  When she’s done, Rex has already spread out the mats, side by side but still two feet apart, and is straightening blankets atop both of them.

He takes the right, and she takes the left.  It’s not extremely comfortable, but she’s slept on worse and so has he.

“Rex?” she asks into the blue darkness.  She’s been staring into it for a while.  Thinking, half-meditating.  Those little spots of confusion throughout the day keep poking at her.  But she thinks she knows what they might mean, what they might imply.  

“Mmm?” is the grumbled response.  Man could fall asleep anywhere.  Right.  Ahsoka exhales slowly, and silently slides her mat along the floor so she’s closer to him; they’re not touching, but they’re close enough that she can curl on her side and count his life by the sound of his breathing. 

She counts until rest finds her.

Chapter Text

Ahsoka wakes in the middle of the night cycle, and Rex is still asleep by her side.  They haven’t moved to hold each other in the night, but he has turned towards her, his back and knees a comma opening to her.  One of his hands lies limp between them, fingers loose and gentled with sleep.  

She wants to twine her hand into his, she realizes.  

He said he hoped he’d never been in love.  That he didn’t know how to love.  She’d agreed then, and still does now.  

This is not a child’s intimation of love, of endless romance and flowers and all those other things.  None of them had been children for long in the war, first of all.  The popular depictions of love in pirated holodramas and novels had thrilled many of the men, but even now those lusty, dramatic portrayals of partners cleaving, constant and ineffective communicating, betraying—all of those ring false in the face of her lived experience.

She is no longer a Jedi and hasn’t been for a while.  She’s attached and she knows it; she also knows Rex would never countenance her to act cruelly to others in order to preserve him.  She’d already done that, after all, and the guilt would forever weigh the both of them down like shipwrecks.  That’s already their burden, and she won’t add more to it.

Psychologically, emotionally, she knows she loves him.  She trusts him with her body, her safety, and her morality.  Her stupid jokes and (she’s pretty sure) her bad caf.  She trusts him with decisions because she trusts his ethics and care to the core; he is a fundamentally good and loyal man she is proud to know.

The physical component, though.  

That was new.

She didn’t have much experience there; other than that pilfered kiss from Lux, she simply hasn’t had time to really explore anything like that, let alone with the right person.  There’d been a few moments, listening to muffled moans in the adjacent Nite Owl tents, when she’d let herself wonder.  But her imagination had never been good enough to conjure up some phantom lover, someone whose touch she could mirror over her own.

Between the two of them, Rex’s hand lies limp, fingers loose and gentled with sleep.

She wants to twine her hand with his, and more besides.

Ahsoka is many things, but she is not a coward.  So she—soft, quiet, smooth—scootches closer, and takes his callused, broad hand within her own.  He wakes for a moment, because he is a born soldier and sleeps lightly even in safe situations.

“‘Soka?”  His voice is groggy and only half-aware.  His fingers flex in the cage of her hands.

“Rex,” she murmurs.  She pulls the grip towards her chest, and he follows her move unquestioningly.

Well.  She’d decided, but she didn’t quite know how to ask.  (Doesn’t know how to love, not in the way of stories.)  So she just curls herself around Rex’s hand until he grunts and shuffles closer to her, slinging the arm she hasn’t captured around her back and pulling her into the protective brace of his chest.  Their legs tangle together as she brings him in tighter, until her face is mushed against his clavicle.  He smells like tibanna exhaust and caf.

There’s a clumsy, barely lucid stroke against her back, and Rex is mumbling again.

“Go back t’ sleep, ‘Soka,” and it’s gritty and low against her montrals.  “‘S’alright.”

So she does, and it is.

When Ahsoka wakes, more fully this time, there’s an empty mat beside her and she’s curled around the memory of warmth.  But there’s also a mug of her favorite tea where Rex had slept, and whatever incipient shattering his absence might’ve brought is averted with the familiar scent.

She’d hidden that stash, even from herself.  He must’ve gone digging while she overslept.  It smells perfectly brewed.

Right.

Shake out the limbs, stretch, take a sip (it is perfectly brewed, turns out).  Check on the nav coordinates; they’d touch down at Pabu later today.  She rolls up the mats and folds the blankets and makes her way to the fresher.  Once she’s done, she follows the sound of discussion to the galley, where Rex is talking with Pol while Utri and Eelar compare notes on some old Iktotchi stories.  Sund is grimly nursing a cup of caf, and flattens his prodigious jowls as she sandwiches herself between him and Rex.

“Your tea stinks,” the Sullustan tells her.  She just smiles in the most Jedi-like manner possible and takes another sip.  Rex is a comfortable weight to her left, and she presses against him a little more.

He doesn’t say anything, but he does glance down at her for a moment.  It’s a quick assessment, and he doesn’t stop his tactics discussion with Pol, but there’s a familiar tap on the dome of her knee.

Status, he signals.  Drinks more of his caf. Looks for all the world like he’s paying utmost attention to Pol.

Ahsoka takes a moment to think of how she wants to play this.

Proceed–confirm, she taps in response, directly onto his thigh.  Then, she lets her fingertips rest there, unmoving.

Rex looks down again, and doesn’t respond immediately.  There’s distant consideration in his eyes.

If she expected normal romance, she would be disappointed.  But she’s not, so she’s not.  This is Rex, and he’s brave and bold but doesn’t hesitate to weigh the moral and existential load of his choices.  It’s courage with both eyes open.

(They both know how this ends.)

He sets his mug down and clicks it against the table twice.  

Confirm.   

Ahsoka spreads her hand across his thigh, lets it hang out there with minimal, but varying pressure along her fingers, and it’s only because she knows him so well that she catches the tiny shudder across his shoulders.

“We’ll be staying overnight on the pickup planet,” Ahsoka says to the table at large, who all duly grow quiet.  “You all need a rest.  Creche, we need to go over the plan before I send you on the next exfil since this kid’s family has been the hardest to locate.  Eelar,” —and here she stops, because how do you say Take a night for security and peace before you drop into hiding again?—but Rex takes over seamlessly.

“Eelar, you’ll have time to talk with my contacts about Eva and how she’s doing, get to know how she’s been living the last couple of months in more detail.  They’ve all spoken well of her, Eelar.  You should be proud.”  Then he shifts his gaze to Ahsoka’s Creche operatives.  “Creche.  While Fulcrum’s still your point person, these are my contacts and I prioritize their safety.  That means you won’t be told the system or the adjacent hyperlanes, and if I hear you’re trying to sniff that information out, I’ll take care of you myself.”  His tone brooks no argument.

Sund looks at him—and then her—incredulously, and while both Bothans don’t have much of a visible reaction, their pinned-back ears belie their nervousness.  Three sets of eyes settle on her.

“His contacts, his rules,” Ahsoka says.  “In return, his contacts will abide by the same regarding our identities.  From here on out, I’m Ashla.  Pol, you’re Kai.  Utri, you’re Tryn.  Sund, you’re Dua.  Sort out your covers and run them by me before we land.”

“And him?” Pol asks, flicking her dark eyes to Rex.  “Haven’t gotten any sort of name from him yet.”

“Jaig,” Ahsoka says easily.  She runs her hand down Rex’s thigh and squeezes, and he smiles—a tiny, tucked thing, but it’s there as he finishes his caf.

After firstmeal clears out, Ahsoka spends some time with Eelar, who looks rather daunted by the extensive resettlement procedure that her team has mapped out for him.  

“If my Vilas were still with us—” he starts to say, and then stops to stare at the bracelet he’d been toying with during their discussion.  Ahsoka lets him breathe himself through it, but he very politely asks to be excused.  Her team finds her shortly afterwards with their cover story—a mother and child, along with the child’s boyfriend—on a research expedition.  Pol’s teaching history comes in handy, and Utri and Sund play a convincing enough pair that Ahsoka wonders if there isn’t some truth to the story.

Eventually, she is out of work to do, so she wanders the ship until she’s found Rex sitting in the cockpit.  He’s staring out the viewport, pad loose in his hands.  Every day, same as her, he’s been fielding messages and managing from afar.  But there’s something odd in his body language, something too despondent and yet gratified for her to parse.

He turns to face her as she walks in, and wordlessly offers her the pad.

“Rex?” Ahsoka asks.  “What’s the procedure he’s talking about?”  She hands the pad back to him.

“Suicide watch,” he says, simply, tiredly.  “If there’s a brother who knows him well, it’s best they stick together.”  Rex fiddles with the pad for a moment and turns it off, still holding it loosely.

They both know it’s out of the question that she accompany him on any of his missions, due to the dangers to all involved.  She doesn’t want his brothers to kill her; she doesn’t want to kill any more of his brothers.

“Hey,” she says, pitching her voice low and soothing.  She knows the dutiful heart of him, and knows he’s torn.  “You’ve got a good crew, and you’ll see them soon.”

Rex looks at her, and there is something so sad in his eyes (they both know how this ends), and the lines around those eyes deepen with his pain.

Earlier, she’d wanted to touch those lines.

She’s pretty sure she can, now.  (Confirm.)  So she walks to him and stands before his seated form, slips the pad away and places it on the console.  One more step and she’s standing between his knees to cup his sharp jawline, thumbs tracking the new wrinkles, the brackets about his mouth.  The solitary scar on his temple—which is when his arms draw around her waist to tug her to him more firmly, between his legs.  He presses his face into her belly, her sternum, and she moves her hands to the back of his head, carding through the buzzcut.

They both know how this ends.  Even now, the walls of the world are closing in, and their shackles of morality are slowly reforging.

“Ahsoka,” he says to her stomach.  “I—I don’t—” know what I’m doing, the thought completes in her mind.

“Me either,” she whispers.  “But we’ll figure it out.”  She runs her hands across his head again, and he presses his face harder against her.  Then his grip tightens, and she doesn’t know what to expect, what to do next—

—and the bastard blows a zoochberry against her belly.

Even as she sputters in disbelief, she thinks Okay, let’s play, and swiftly bends down to leave a kiss—and accompanying ochre lipstick print—against his blond hair.  Ha.  He’ll never know.  Her own little mark of him, temporary as it is, for everyone to wonder at.

But she forgets that he’ll react in some way, that she’s not operating on a closed system, so Ahsoka isn’t ready for his arms to loosen around her waist and settle on her hips instead, then her thighs, then back up, then around her shoulders like he’s sketching an outline.  After a moment, she realizes Rex is committing her shape to memory, and the levity he’d tried to introduce is gone just as quickly as it’d arrived.

The console beeps, signaling their impending approach to Pabu.  Slowly, they pull apart, but can’t stop themselves from locking eyes.  He smiles ruefully, and she mirrors it.

Proceed, he taps against the console, even as they’re initiating landing procedures, watching her with measured hope and tenderness.

Confirm, she returns.  

And they land.  Before the engines are even fully cut, Eelar dashes off the ship and skids to his knees in front of a small Iktotchi girl, wrapping her in his long arms so thoroughly that she nearly can’t be seen beyond the embrace.  Ahsoka can’t bring herself to watch the painful reunion, so instead is mildly contented with watching her team match the shape and hue of her lips to the print on the crown of Rex’s head.  Let them make of it what they will.

Hunter follows after Eva with what is, perhaps, the largest clone Ahsoka’s ever seen, as well as one of the smallest.  Wrecker and Omega, respectively, and aside from near-slips with Rex’s code name, all introductions go fairly smoothly.  Her operatives know how to match the mood and tone of an area, but after she sees both Pol and Utri darting curious glances to the nearby ocean, Ahsoka smiles and urges them to go see it.  They’ll meet back on the ship by 08:00 tomorrow, and the three set off to explore and, hopefully, take a load off for a bit.  Eva and Eelar have already been taken under some big, jovial man’s wing, and he’s extolling the virtues of their fair city even as they walk away.

“Jaig,” comes a hissing, disdainful voice, and a tall, skinny man stalks forward from a nearby verandah.  Must’ve been watching, Ahsoka thinks, even as the man takes her in with a dispassionate, calculating glance and dismisses her just as casually.  “You’ve got something on your head.”  His eyes flick to Ahsoka again, and she swears there’s a hint of amusement in his eyes on this second glance.

“Nice to see you too, Crosshair,” Rex says mildly, but runs his bare hands over his head anyways.  He pulls a face when he feels the waxy print, and fully scrunches his nose when he sees the ochre staining his fingertips.

Then he looks at Ahsoka, who waves merrily.

“You,” he sneers, but his stance is lowering and his shoulders are rounding in preparation to tackle her.  Her answering grin grows teeth.

Before either can act, Hunter steps between them, breaking their gaze.

“Not here,” he says, pained.  “Not in front of the kid,” he adds in a sotto voce.  But Ahsoka’s got damn good hearing, so she just laughs.

“Yeah, Rex, not in front of the kid,” Ahsoka echoes.

“You’re a fucking menace and I don’t know why I like you,” Rex responds, instant and even, even as he’s smiling. 

“Oh, that’s where Echo learned to swear!” Omega says.  She’s a cute girl, somewhere in her early teens, and she’s looking at Rex like she’s just solved a massive equation.  “He’s the only one in the Batch who really does.  Is it a reg thing?”

“Yes,” say both Hunter and Crosshair in unison.

“No,” says Rex at the same time.

“I don’t remember Echo swearing at all,” Ahsoka offers mildly.

“It’s against regulation to swear at your CO,” Rex explains.  “Once you hit ARC, though, all hell breaks loose.”

“Ohhh,” says Ahsoka.  “And even then, he wouldn’t have sworn at me, would he?”

“Not on his fucking life,” Rex says.  “I’d have shot him in the ass.”

“Why are you swearing at her now, then?” Omega asks.  Hunter looks extremely put-out and has clearly given up control for the moment.  Crosshair looks pissed, although Ahsoka’s not sure that’s not just his usual expression.  Wrecker looks as enthralled as Omega does.  “If she’s not—wait, she was your CO?”

Rex sighs.  “I’m swearing at her now because she’s my close friend.  She was my CO back in the war.”

“So—” Omega looks over Ahsoka carefully, thinking.  It’s fascinating to watch this kid operate, Ahsoka realizes.  “So you were—” and here she mouths a Jedi, “—then?  You’re too young to have been a navy officer.”

Hunter audibly sighs.  Crosshair is trained on the conversation.  Wrecker still looks enthralled, but there’s also a glint of pride as he listens to Omega logic things out.

Ahsoka looks at Rex, and he returns her gaze steadily.  Then that little half-shrug, the normal your choice movement.  There is no one else close enough to hear this conversation, and Rex trusts them.  Her choice.

Okay.

“I was, once,” Ahsoka says.  “But I left the Order about half a year before the war ended.  Rex and I reconnected, because we’re friends.”  It’s the truth, if a very clean, shortened version of it.

Behind Omega, Hunter gives Ahsoka a straight-up piercing glance, the kind she hadn’t seen since before leaving the Order.  But he nods, as if he’s thanking her.  She nods minutely in return, and she’s focused enough on that interaction that she nearly misses Rex moving until he’s by her side.

“Echo told me that Pabu has the best food this side of the Rim,” Rex says to Omega.  “Mind proving him right?”

It’s a flimsy distraction, but apparently Omega’s curiosity has been satisfied enough for her to accede to the bait.  She and Wrecker begin listing various delicacies while she leads them to what is, apparently, their little house on Pabu.  It’s a squat, homey thing, full of rounded shapes and warm clay tones and food.  Goodness, is there food.  Raw fish, some sort of local grain, mounds of fruits, and Ahsoka can’t help baring her teeth a little at the splendor.

“Puts MREs and ration bars to shame, huh?” Rex whispers.  

“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had raw meat, Rex?” she whispers back.  “Five months.”  He makes a face at her, mock-horror, and she keeps whispering to him.  “You’ve at least had some sort of cuisine where you are, so laugh it up, dipshit.”  She elbows him in the ribs on the last word, and he tries to trip her.  It doesn’t work, but it does have her doing an odd little hop to avoid his sweep, and he catches her around the waist to keep her from bumping into one of the overladen tables.

“Careful, sir,” he says, lowly, and her eyes widen just a touch.

“I said not in front of the kid,” comes a voice from behind them, and Hunter’s glaring down at them both.  Neither Rex nor Ahsoka jump, but it’s a near thing.

Unfortunately, it’s also too late.  Omega has caught on, and has apparently watched the two of them during this.

“Ohhhhhh,” she says.  Then she digs in her pouch and tosses a shining shell to Crosshair, who catches it without looking.  “You are that kind of friends.  Aw, that was my best shell!”

“Told you,” Crosshair says dryly, loading up a plate.  “Thanks, Captain, Commander.”

When Ahsoka chances a look at Rex, he is bright red.

He could be redder.  

(And he trusts these people, enough to tease her around them, enough to turn off the mission-mind they both fell into so easily.)

So Ahsoka wraps her arm around Rex’s waist as well, snaking her hand around to tuck her hand in his front pocket.  She has to press all along him to do this, and it’s a good, new sort of feeling, except the spars that left them chest-to-chest.  Not the aching tenderness of near-sleep and grief, just… playful.  It’s nice.

“Yes, I’m Rex’s very good friend,” she says, loading as much emphasis on those words as she can.  Wrecker hoots, Hunter groans, Crosshair snorts, and Omega’s eyes go wide; a theorist with a certifiably proven hypothesis.

“Still so certain you wanted me to meet them?” Ahsoka says softly, right up into Rex’s ear.  She can feel him shiver.

“You’re the pain in my ass,” Rex states.  He doesn’t move away, though.  Instead, he sets a hand on her lower back, his fingers twitching slightly.  “And I regret everything.”

“No you don’t.”

“You’re right.  I don’t.”  Then his hand stretches further and he grabs her by the hip, pulling a—truthfully very complex—crouch-toss combo that has her flying over his shoulder, and she yelps.  

“Need to put her back,” he tells the Batch unceremoniously.  “Gimme a minute.”  He carries her out of the house and across the way, until they’re on a mostly-unoccupied patio, where he puts her down.  He is incandescently red.

“You know you’re just adding fuel to the fire, Captain,” she says, but can’t stop the grin that’s sliding around her face.  “Everyone thinks we’re having sex,” she continues, and then she forces herself to shake that thought away.

“I’m aware,” he says grimly.  “That ship’s sailed; those four have the biggest mouths in the entire bunch.”  Then his eyes get wide.  “Echo’s going to hear about it.”

She laughs at the idea and his frozen expression until he thaws and begins to laugh with her, and they lean into each other.  The clay barrier on the patio is waist-high, and she jumps onto it easily.  He does the same, a little less gracefully, and they both swing their legs around so they’re facing out, staring down at the city.

It’s a beautiful place.  The air is clean and salty from the ocean, and the lights in the wind among the houses and businesses look like marshlights bobbing towards home.  The sun is setting, a great orange flare on the horizon that curves up to meet the overturned blue-black bowl of the night sky, which is so scattered with stars that it seems as though some giant hand somewhere dashed sugar against velvet.

They sit and watch for a while, hip to hip and silent, for the quiet relief of watching together.

Somewhere in this city, a grieving man and his daughter are having their first meal with each other in months.  Somewhere in this city, her operatives are relaxing and decompressing so they can approach the next mission with their heads on straight.  Somewhere in this city, people are clumping together and sharing food and arguing and sleeping together and worrying and raising children and weeping and dreaming.

Here, in this city, she knows she loves Rex, and knows he loves her, even though they’ve said nothing of the sort.

She doesn’t want to leave this city.

If she’d been born here, if he’d been born here.  If they’d grown up untouched by war, untouched by the need to help others and untouched by that drive to save so many because they knew, intimately, they were uniquely capable of it where so few others were—she wonders if they would still love each other then.  The idea of a normal love, unburdened by grief or guilt or the desperate, unconscious attempts to create joy whenever possible, is unfathomable to her.

Ahsoka leans further into him and rests her head against his shoulder.  He wraps an arm around her in return, and they continue to watch until the sun has died and night reigns supreme once more.

They both know how this will end.  

Eventually, they leave the low wall, and go inside to eat.  They sleep side-by-side on the floor of the house’s common room, hands clenched together.

In the morning, they leave the city.  Two days later, they successfully resettle Eelar and Eva on Iktotch. A day after that, Ahsoka drops her exfil team at a space station for further missions.

She wishes they’d watched the sunrise too, but they have always known how this will end.

Chapter Text

There’s an issue only half a day after the exfil team—Creche team—gets to work.  The fourth kid, Sami—her entire family’s missing.  Following the records has shown that they were killed shortly after Sami’s abduction.  No close relatives that aren’t Empire-adjacent, either; it was likely a cousin who actually made the report about her Force-sensitivity.

So: a kid without a home.  He’s already talked with Hunter, who was prepared to take her in.  Any number of families on Pabu would be willing to take her in, really, but Rex’s heart still hurts for the kid.  

Rex lets Echo know that he’ll be coming back earlier than expected after all, and to rework the plans for Wolffe’s rescue to include him too.  Even as he types the message, there’s a mixture of relief and worry.  He’s doing the right thing, he knows it, and yet—and yet.

Echo pings back almost immediately.

Then Echo uploads an image; it’s blurry and at a bad angle, but he can see Ahsoka slung over his own shoulder and she’s got a wonderful expression of both shock and joy on her face, and they’re half-silhouetted against the setting sun in the doorway. 

Another message pops up in a different chat, and Rex gladly switches over to Gregor’s channel.

“Hey,” Ahsoka says, and Rex jolts just a little, pad slipping forward before he catches it.  She’s got—oh gods, she’s got caf.  “Made this for you.”  

“Thanks,” he says, taking the caf warily, “but I’m not sure I need it.  Gotten more sleep this month than I feel like I’ve had in four years.”  Ahsoka takes the pad from his hand as he lets the mug warm his hands, and he watches one of her eyebrow markings—what did she call those, anyways?—rise.

“Told you they had the biggest mouths of the bunch,” he reminds her, and she just rolls her eyes. “Anyways.  Echo’s confirmed; he’s good for pickup… I think about an hour after we roll in, he says.”

“So we’ve got… about six hours, then, according to the travel estimates,” she says, looking at him from her peripheral.  He can feel the touch in her gaze.

“Yeah.”  The threat of a serious conversation rolls over them both, and damn him, he casts for a way to keep up this discussion.  “Longest I’ve ever been out of armor, too, this month, at least since the war started.”  He plucks at his civvies.

“They look pretty good on you,” Ahsoka says.  But she’s still not looking at him head-on, which means she’s thinking.  She’s planning.  “But I do have a soft spot for your armor, I can’t lie.”

“Of course you do.  I look excellent.”  Said armor is stacked to the side of the cockpit, and he doesn’t spend too long considering it, because that would acknowledge—

“I miss your pauldron, though.”  Oh, that thing; it’d been shot a few too many times, and it was stupid to mourn it, so of course he did.  “It gave you a certain… panache.”

“It did,” he concedes.  She’s still staring out into hyperspace.  “I like your new armor.”

At this, she flicks him a glance.  “Oh yeah?”  A little smile grows on her face.

“Mm,” he says.  “If someone’s a really bad shot and misses your giant head, you probably won’t die now.”

“Oh please, Rex,” and that familiar tease is in her voice now.  “They’ll be too busy drooling over your sexpot armor and scandalously bare pauldron to even notice my giant head.”  He laughs, and she joins, but it doesn’t last long enough.  She’s back to thinking.

Six hours.  Six hours, and it’s done.  Back to Pabu, where she’ll drop him off and presumably jet away while he waits for Echo’s pickup.

Ahsoka suddenly swivels in her pilot’s chair, and looks at Rex straight on.   She hasn’t given him that intense of a Jedi-stare since they parted ways After, so really, he can’t be blamed for being unused to it.

He braces himself for whatever heartrending thing is about to leave her mouth.  Goodbye.  Or, Goodbye; we can never do this again.  Or, All those touches and taps and teases were me testing the waters, and I’ve decided I want out of the ocean.  Or, I met the Bad Batch and now they’re my favorite clones; see you later, reg.

Instead:

“Rex.”  Low and serious.  Weighty.

He tenses, and takes a sip of his caf to disguise it.  It doesn’t help; she made it, so it tastes like shit, and it’s not endearing, her not having figured out human tastebuds yet.  It’s not, just like it’s not endearing when she teases him and doesn’t venture forth any sort of serious conversation about this thing between them.  (To be fair, he’s been avoiding it too.  He knows how this will end, and speaking things makes them real.)

“Yes, sir?” he says.  Adds a bit of flavor on the sir, bites away at the tension she’s about to bring down.

He’s so dedicated to keeping himself unbothered that she knocks his feet out from under him with a sentence.

“You and I should fuck.”

He chokes on the caf.  It still tastes even worse coming back up, but he already knew that, unfortunately.

“Come again?” he asks once he’s cleared his throat.  Ooh, poor word choice there—

“Ideally,” she grins back, but there’s an edge of tension and anxiety in there.

Oh, Ahsoka, he thinks.

It’s not like he hasn’t felt the same.  In the past few days, they’ve taken to looping their arms around each other when they’re alone, familiarizing themselves with the heft of each other’s limbs and lines beyond combat, slow soothing strokes against backs and pressing close, side-by-side.  He’s found that late in the night cycle, she likes to run her fingers along his face and around his eyes.  Rex can’t fully fathom why; it’s one face of millions, but it’s what she likes, so he rolls with it. In return, he likes to scoot close and skim his hands across her waist, her hips, her ribs, because he wants to be able to replicate the feel of her, even if only by muscle memory.

It’s six hours to Pabu and the drop-off and this is the first verbal discussion they’ve had.  Everything else has been done through dadita taps and body language.  He wonders at that, too—the extension of trust to the other to correctly infer intent comes easy to them, while the trust in the self required to fully speak is another fearsome thing entirely.

But Ahsoka’s brave.  She always has been, ham-handed attempts aside, and he loves her for it.  Even as he’s considering, her lascivious forced grin has died down into something solemn.

“Unless you don’t want to,” she says softly, understandingly—and there are notes of sadness and uncertainty there, too, ones that don’t belong in her voice whatsoever.  

Rex is brave too.

(They both know how this will end.)

He takes his buried desires and shoves them into the light.

“I do want to,” he says, and matches her softness.  “I just hope this doesn’t make it harder to let you go.”

Ahsoka takes a moment to look at him, that Jedi-heavy stare lightening into something less cutting and more like anticipatory grief.  Then she stands from her chair and walks over to him, silhouetted blue against the viewport’s hyperspace.

“It’s already going to be hard,” and she brings her hand to his cheeks as he talks.  “We’re used to hardship.”

Rex doesn’t call her out on the useless platitude, and he knows she knows it.  There comes a time when hardship is too much to bear.  But they both want this, and they want this enough to set duty and fear and self-imposed loneliness aside to actually speak that want, and for them, that’s… rare.  Exceedingly so.

So Rex lets the fallacy pass, and puts his hands on her hips as he stands.  For the entire specious present, they hang in the space above that ephemeral cliff together.  Her thumbs trace his cheeks and his hands curl on her hips.  They breathe and look and see and they reckon their coming parting, fast-approaching.

Their kiss, when they move, is neither frantic nor fearful.  It is slow, yes, and he marvels at their patience, but—it feels right.  New, but not unexpectedly so.  Natural.  Ahsoka’s hands trail from his cheeks to his shoulders, holding him like a brace, and he responds by pulling her closer, adjusting the angle to kiss her deeper and slot his mouth more firmly across hers.

She—well, she does as she always does when it comes to their paired activities, she tries to one-up him and shoves her tongue down his throat.  It is entirely graceless and he can’t help but to chuckle, so she pulls back a bit.

“Hey!” Her eyes are laughing too while she affects a pout.  “First-timer over here.  I’m gonna mess up.”

“You could never,” he reassures her, pressing his forehead against hers and tapping secure along the covered flesh beneath his fingertips.  “But maybe let me take point until you figure it out.”

She grins again, wicked; a virgin seductress aimed wholly at him and his heart, which is already full to bursting.  “Experience outranks everything, after all—” and she sticks her tongue through her teeth and bites it at him, “—Captain,” she adds, cementing the tease.

Rex lets loose a shuddering breath at his former title, and he can damn well see her log it away.

Well.  That won’t do.

Rex puts one hand under her chin, pulling her face towards him, and kisses her as best he can, finding what really makes her rev, until she’s all soft and swaying in his arms, and that teasing grin is replaced with wide-eyed anticipation.

Then he steps back, hands up and off.

She whines.  Doesn’t make grabby hands at him, but her fists are clenched with tension.  It’s adorable.

“Rex, if you don’t—” 

“I’m not going to fuck you, Ahsoka.”  Let it settle for a beat, let her think.  Let her assume, the wild woman. 

Her eyes narrow suspiciously.  

Now.  “We will have sex.  That’s a guarantee.  But we’re not fucking.”

There are lots of different euphemisms for sex, is the thing.  Rex has heard so many—too many—from his brothers’ tales of varied conquests.  Two-person pushups had always made him laugh, but secretly, his favorite had always been the soggiest, weepiest one of all.

He spells it out in finger-sign, just in case she’s misunderstood.

M - a - k - i - n - g— and he cuts his eyes to her, and she’s already tapping out confirm–confirm–confirm–confirm and oh, her smile is so bright and breathless and he cannot stop himself from mirroring it for all the blasters in the world.  

Just for a moment—but also for a day and also then until death of memory—they will have this.

Rex takes Ahsoka back to her barren quarters, and lays her down, and loves her.

It is a wonder and it is not; it is a revelation and it is not, and it is a glory and it is not, because so many of these sensations have been held deep within his imagination for so long that he feels he’s dreaming, even as she breathes hard and crushes her thighs around his shoulders because he has to pin her hips steady while he eats her out, lest she break his nose.  But there are things he can’t have imagined; the true taste of her, for one, or the sound of her cries as she finally ratchets over into orgasm.  Nothing like her rare cries of pain, nothing at all, it’s groaning and sweet and unexpected and she blushes in the aftermath like she’d never heard it herself.  

He can’t have imagined her determined face as she pushes him down atop that shitty blanket so she can ride him herself, or her shaky gasp as she’s fully seated.  He can’t have imagined her joy throughout, as he skims his hands around her lekku, her ribs, or the soft, soft skin at the base of her neck, and he can’t have imagined how she kisses his incipient wrinkles and the scar on his temple with such aching fucking tenderness it almost makes him cry.  He can’t have imagined that she’d bury her face in his collarbones and mouth at them mindlessly as he chases her into another oblivion, and he can’t have imagined that he’d murmur her name, endless and unceasing throughout the process, and that she’d echo his name right back to him.

After—after they come down, after they turn to face each other and cradle each other in their arms, after they spend too long cataloging each other with wide eyes and gentle, silly touches—there is the distant sound from the cockpit of the hyperspace alarm.

They pause in their ministrations, and take one more moment to look and to see and finally, finally, to reckon.  

Confirm, one of them taps.

Confirm, the other responds.

Another moment, and then they close their eyes, and open them, and they are themselves once more.

All things must end in his life, as all things must in hers.  Creatures of duty, the both; the subsumption of another into one’s heart does not play out when so much depends on the independent self. 

“Ten minutes out,” Ahsoka says, and the words are slow and unwilling, and she rolls out from the bed.  There’s a hitch in her walk and she’s naked, and the white markings along her ribs and spine shift from illumination to shade as she steps into the corridor.

Rex shifts onto his back and stares at the ceiling.  His civvies are across the room.  She returns with his blacks and his armor, and helps him get dressed, something she’s never done.  He returns the favor, stepping her into her leggings and kneeling down to fasten her boots as she runs a hand through his hair.

Fully kitted up, they return to the cockpit, and initiate the landing procedures.  It’s deep night on Pabu when they land, and the only person awake to greet them is Crosshair, who gives a lazy wave before turning and leaving.

At the base of the ramp, Rex stops.  Ahsoka stops with him, and he allows himself to take her hand.

“Commander,” he says.  And then—

He can’t say it out loud.  

It feels too much like a goodbye, a concession, an acknowledgement that this trip was one of those unforeseen positive anomalies that the universe rarely ever gives out.  That she is fighting a war and he is fighting a war and while someday they may fight together, it is not at any point in the foreseeable future.  He feels like a comet caught in its elliptical sling around a star, and that every time he is lucky enough to draw near he will be different and changed while she remains radiant and timeless; he knows he will always want to draw near because he is trapped in the gravity well of her existence.

“Captain,” Ahsoka says, and squeezes his hand.

Proceed–confirm, she says.

Confirm, he responds.

She presses her lips to his and successfully, gracefully slips him some tongue.  He laughs, and she grins.  She should always be grinning, he thinks.  He wants to see her happy, more than most things.

“I’ll see you next time, Rexter.”

“And you, ‘Soka.”

Then Ahsoka turns, walks up the ramp into her ship, and lifts off.  Rex watches her go for as long as he can, and puts his helmet back on when he can’t.  

The seals hiss closed and he is once again fully within the armor.  He begins to look over Echo’s exfil plan again, because exfils always go to shit.

(Fifteen years later, he is wrinkly and paunchy and bald when she turns around, and he calls her old just so he can get in the tease before she beats him to it.  In front of the new kids, they hug like the very adult and mature friends they are, but the moment they’re out of sight, Ahsoka trips him and pins him to the floor.  Her smile is as bright as starlight, and Rex’s soul relishes in the tug of that old orbit.  She follows him down.)