Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Rex’s ears were ringing as he came back to consciousness in fits and starts. He blinked open his eyes, seeing purple sky and red-orange bits of ash floating through the air. Something near him was probably on fire; he could feel the faint heat on his skin, not quite close enough to be painful. Lying flat on his back, he cataloged the various aches in his body. He thought he had come off fairly lucky. Probably nothing more than bruises. He hadn’t meant to be this close to the explosion. Or was it that the blast had just been bigger than he was expecting? He tried to remember if there had been a plan.

Alright, he maybe had a bit of a concussion.

Distantly, the thought resurfaced that this was supposed to have been a reconnaissance mission, not an active sabotage job. That it had turned into this was par for the course in his life. Rex’s next thought was that he should probably get out of here because whatever Imperials hadn’t been in the section of the factory he’d blown would probably be coming to look for him.

Before he could bring his slightly-worse-for-wear body to act on that, he heard two voices, coming closer to him. He froze.

“Luke, look! Somebody’s over there!”

Not Imperials, then. The voice clearly belonged to a child. Rex remained still, hoping that the kid would just leave, too scared to get caught up in this mess. No such luck: the sound of two sets of hurrying footsteps grew closer. Rex sighed and pushed himself onto his elbows, turning to see what he was dealing with. The world spun around him for just a second. Two kids: a brunette girl with a pair of wild braids that seemed to be coming undone and a boy with an equally messy sandy blond mop, who were both wearing expressions of curiosity and concern. He didn’t think they could be described as teenagers yet, but they certainly weren’t toddlers anymore. Rex didn’t guess at an age more specific than that: he could never really tell with nat-borns.

“Are you okay, mister?” the boy, probably Luke, asked. Rex groaned.

“Get out of here, this is no place for children,” he told them in the most authoritative and gruff tone he could muster. (Which was pretty good, considering how much he had had to use it.)

By the time he had said this, both children had dropped eagerly down onto their knees beside him, their little hands bracing them on the ground, apparently without much thought to what kind of sharp detritus might be littering the dirty alleyway. Their wide eyes bore into him almost intensely, heedless of his warning, making Rex a bit uncomfortable. They were obviously just old enough to have lost whatever shyness or sense of self-preservation younger children seemed to have around strangers.

“I’m fine kid, you shouldn’t be here. Or did you not notice the dangerous explosion?” He didn’t have time to worry about these two kids getting in the crossfire when someone less friendly finally showed up.

“Of course we noticed, that’s why we’re here,” the girl said from her position behind Luke’s shoulder, quirking her lips frustratedly, with a tone that suggested she was tired of adults underestimating her. It made him think of Ahsoka, which then made him glad that she had stayed back on base for this particular mission. He had come alone, and now he was in hot water alone too. Rex could admit that he fell into his tendency to put her protection above anything else more often than he should. (At least he had never been as bad as General Skywalker.)

“Dad’s gonna be mad,” Luke muttered under his breath.

“Dad won’t even know we left,” she replied testily, as if they had already gone over this and she was annoyed to have to explain it again. Rex started to stand up, hoping he could leave the kids there arguing and be far away from them by the time the stormtroopers caught up with the situation.

“You never saw me, alright?” he said, half turning and taking a step down the alleyway and away from the burning building.

“You blew up the starfighter factory, didn’t you?” the girl blurted critically, not distracted enough by the argument about their father’s opinion on their apparently unsanctioned trip to a disaster zone. Right about now, Rex was wishing their dad had a better handle on his deceptively innocent-looking kids. The man probably had his hands full.

“Uh, no I didn’t,” Rex turned back to her and lied. How could she have known? He was pretty sure he’d never seen either of them around the factory before. The little girl jumped to her feet and crossed her arms looking unimpressed. Her brother was still on the ground, looking back and forth between his sister and Rex with an almost comically enthralled expression on his face.

“You’re wearing a uniform,” the girl said, tilting her head like that explained everything. She wasn’t wrong though; he had been posing as a worker at the plant for several days now, trying to gain access to the plans on the new model of starfighter the Empire was building here. Then everything had gone sideways, and here he was, trying to convince two kids that he didn’t have anything to do with this mess.

“Yeah, but I didn’t exactly plan to get blown up at work today,” Rex shot back. That wasn’t wrong either.

“Then why were you out here and not in there when it exploded?” she questioned. She had him there. He let his shoulders slump a little and resigned himself to switching tactics.

“Look—”

“You did blow it up? Wizard! I’ve been trying to convince Dad to do that for years!” the boy interrupted him, jumping up excitedly to join his sister. Rex’s eyes narrowed. What kind of kids were these? They had the wild air of street urchins about them, except their clothes, while ordinary, weren’t nearly ragged enough for that and their faces were far too clean.

“Look,” he began again, “I don’t know what you kids are after, but we all need to get out of here before somebody comes poking around,”

“You can come back with us! We’ll help you!” Luke offered brightly.

“Luke—” his sister hissed.

“Thanks, but I’ll just get you in trouble.”

Luke opened his mouth to protest, but then shut it again, abruptly. Both children’s gazes simultaneously snapped towards the opening of the alleyway. They could have just heard something that he didn’t, but the ringing in his ears had abated at that point and he hadn’t heard anything.

Rex’s mind screamed at him: weird-bad-wrong-familiar.

Kriff. Now they were all in even deeper trouble.

He thought they were too young to have been Jedi during Order 66, but they must have somehow escaped the Empire’s detection since. His mission had just gotten even more complicated: he had to make sure these kids stayed hidden. Easier said than done when they were with a guy who had just committed an (unplanned) act of terrorism. Maybe he should have brought Ahsoka along on this mission.

The next thing he registered was the girl grasping his hand in her tiny hand one, jerking his shoulder down as she tried to pull him forward, saying urgently,

“It’s the Imps, c’mon!”

The world spun a bit as Rex was pulled the first few steps, but then his mildly concussed brain caught up with the situation and he freed his hand, starting to run right along next to the kids. When they reached the main street, Rex quickly looked to his left and saw gleaming white armor approaching from a couple blocks down. When he looked to his right, he saw Luke and his sister already heading in the opposite direction. What else was he supposed to do but follow them?

These kids were faster than they looked, and it took Rex several strides to catch up to them.

A shout of, “Hey, you! Stop right there!” came from behind them. The clattering of stormtrooper armor echoed off the buildings lining the street. A bit more unsteady on his feet than he would have liked, Rex put on another burst of speed. The civilians in this district must have cleared out pretty quickly when the factory had gone up because the streets were much too empty: they needed some cover. At this distance, if the stormtroopers decided to start shooting at them, they’d probably miss. But once they got closer, there would be nothing to hide behind, and Rex wasn’t very keen on getting shot in the back today. There was an intersection coming up. With any luck they could turn down that street, away from the factory, and get themselves lost in a busier part of town.

“This way!” Luke shouted breathlessly, pointing in the direction Rex had already decided to go. All three of them rounded the corner and Rex stumbled a bit. He felt the girl’s small hands on his back, urging him along, and he managed to get his feet under him again. She had destabilized him more than she had helped, but he felt an odd sort of gratitude for her apparent unwillingness to let him, a complete stranger, get left behind.

They came across a few more pedestrians and passed several smaller side streets as they continued. Rex’s heart raced and he glanced behind him to make sure he wasn’t getting too far ahead of his two companions (which was a bit of a misnomer considering they had never actually agreed to go anywhere together or even help each other at all). He wasn’t: they were only a few steps behind him, their short legs pumping almost double time compared to his. The girl’s braids bounced off her shoulders and flew behind her. She wore a scowl that might have been a bit intimidating were it not for her round cheeks and button nose, eyes dark with concentration, but her brother (Force help them all) had a gap-toothed grin on his face and his eyes shone with enjoyment.

“Right!” the girl shouted, directing them down another side-street. Rex obeyed, slowing just enough to take the corner without falling over again, fine with letting the two kids, who obviously knew the area better than he did, direct him. Whether they were directing him towards anywhere specific, he didn’t know, and maybe he should have been more wary of that. But he found himself trusting them, for some reason.

His head ached, that specific spot on the right side of his head where he had his scar seeming to throb more intensely than the rest. He shouldn’t have been leaving his escape from the Empire up to these two scrappy siblings who were who knows how young. But he was.

They’re not even Jedi.

They just could have been.

The crowds on the streets grew denser as the two kids led him down a few more twists and turns. He threw a few glances behind them, not seeing any of the telltale white armor. Rex slowed down, because he was beginning to get an uncomfortable stitch in his side and because they would stick out too much in the throng of beings if they kept running full tilt. His two young companions shot past him. Rex had been bred with quick reflexes though, and he managed to catch both children’s wrists before they were out of reach, his bruised shoulder blades protesting at the sudden jerking.

They didn’t struggle against his grip, but two identical confused expressions greeted him—evidently, they didn’t understand the need for subtlety now that they had superficially thrown off their pursuers. Kids.

“Stop. Slow down,” Rex panted, “we can lose them better this way.”

Luke looked deeply skeptical.

“But we’re almost there!”

Rex narrowed his eyes,

“Almost where?”

“Home!” the boy replied, as if it should have been obvious. Rex glanced furtively behind them again. He didn’t want to lead the Empire to these kids’ home, especially if he was right about them being force-sensitive. The street was still clear of hostiles, and Rex thought that if they hadn’t truly shaken them, the stormtroopers would have caught up by now. He did need somewhere to lay low: he wasn’t scheduled for pickup for another couple rotations and getting off the planet on his own would probably be near-impossible now that he’d just blown up a sizeable portion of one of the biggest Imperial installations in the whole system. (Catching sight of the column of smoke rising in the distance sent a thrill of vicious pride through his chest all the same.) He nodded slowly.

“Then let’s walk—casually—the rest of the way to your house.”

Both of their little faces grinned widely up at him.

“Dad owns a mechanic’s shop—he’s really good at fixing stuff—it’s just a couple of streets over, past the market,” Luke started telling him excitedly, and they all began to walk.

“Is your dad going to be… okay with me coming there? I’m not exactly…” Rex asked cautiously as the two kids led him weaving through the busy streets. The kids looked at each other meaningfully.

“You’re a rebel aren’t you?” Luke’s sister asked Rex in a stage whisper, leaning close to him, and Rex’s heart jumped to his throat. She was very observant—clever, even—for a little kid. He wasn’t sure whether it would be a good idea to admit to being with the Alliance, but they had already figured it out. Rex glanced around to see if anyone around them was listening (they weren’t) before nodding.

“Well, Dad hates the Empire,” she assured him. Then her tone changed, “but he never does anything about it!”

“It’s stupid,” Luke pouted, agreeing with his sister, “he’s always telling us that the biggest problem in the galaxy is that no one helps each other.”

“Will you convince him to let us be Rebels too?” Luke asked Rex, but the boy barreled on before he could come up with a response.

“I’ve heard the spacers say Rebels fly X-Wings, and I want to fly an X-Wing!”

“Some of them fly A-Wings,” Rex offered, glad he had something to say instead of responding to the boy’s initial question.

“You’ve never flown a real ship in your life, you nerfherder,” the girl told her brother as they ducked into an alley, not unlike the one Rex had met them in. After surveying the alley and finding nothing unusual or threatening, Rex glanced down at Luke in time to see him scowl at his sister.

“Dad’s already teaching me how to fly speeders! And I study all the controls of the ships he works on. I’m gonna be the best pilot in the galaxy, Leia, I am!”

The exchange had the air of something well-rehearsed and oft argued, but Luke kept glancing at Rex with big eyes as he spoke, like he wanted to make sure Rex was listening.

“The best pilot after Dad,” the girl—Leia—appended.

“After Dad,” Luke agreed, as if he thought it should have gone without saying.

Leia raised her hand to punch in the code for the lock on the door they had stopped in front of but hesitated.

“Luke, you go in first and see where Dad is. You can distract him while we—”

“Are you kidding? We can’t hide. Dad’s gonna find out, you know he is,” her brother replied.

“But if we—”

“This is your fault! I told you he would be mad—”

Rex shifted uncomfortably. They were too exposed out here, they’d spent too much time lingering. He looked away from the bickering children and kept his eyes on the entrance to the alley. Debating just leaving these kids once again—clearly his presence was going to cause problems, and that was the last thing he needed, he’d already done enough of that—Rex took note of a cluster of trash cans a few feet away they might be able to use for cover if someone found them.

“My fault? You’re the one who wanted to bring him back with us! I just wanted to have a look around!”

“He’s hurt, Leia—"

And then Rex abandoned thoughts of ditching them again. They were good kids, and if he was right about their powers, they were at risk from the Empire. He needed to do something; their parents might not even realize the danger these kids might be in. He had a duty. (After everything he and his brothers had done.)

And, well, even their arguing was strangely endearing, like the echoes of a favorite song long forgotten. Despite himself, Rex liked these kids. And he wasn’t that hurt: he thought he should probably set them straight about that so they wouldn’t stick their necks out for him more than they already had (except that these kids seemed to get some sort of thrill from sticking their necks out and he got the feeling they would have managed to find trouble even if he hadn’t been there).

Though he started to open his mouth to refute Luke’s assessment of his health, he never got to say anything because the door neither child had punched in the code to open yet opened, and the three of them came face to face with Luke and Leia’s father.

“Leia Amidala and Luke Anakin Skywalker, you two are in big—” the man began, in the distinctive tenor of a parent, exasperated and angry in order to hide a bone-deep worry.

Then two pairs of eyes met—gazes that once held a profound trust between them—two men, neither of whom expected to ever see the other again—

It should have been impossible—and to find him here, now, in this context, of all places! But then, if Rex’s eyes and ears didn’t deceive him, this was General Skywalker, and he had always managed to find new and unusual ways to get himself into—

“…trouble.”

Chapter Text

Rex wasn’t sure whether it was the heap of information he had just uncovered—the multitude of dots just screaming at him to connect them—or his probable concussion that was making his brain short-circuit. Maybe both. General Skywalker didn’t seem to be having a similar problem.

“Kids, inside. Now,” he ordered in a low voice. Luke and Leia (Skywalker’s kids) exchanged a startled look with each other and then obeyed without protest, squeezing past their father’s imposing frame, which was stock still as it filled a good portion of the doorway. They didn’t go far; their confused faces poked out from right behind their father’s body, watching him and Rex.

“Are you here to kill me?” General Skywalker asked, dangerously quiet, his face stony and unreadable.  But Rex heard him just fine. A small hand snuck out and gripped the fabric of Skywalker’s shirt tightly.

Rex’s lips parted in surprise.

“No!”

The Jedi’s eyes softened a fraction but he didn’t otherwise move.

“Why not?”

“I don’t have my chip anymore, sir.” Rex also seemed to have misplaced his blaster somewhere between setting up the explosion and waking up in a burning alley, so he doubted he could have killed Skywalker even if he had wanted to.

“Your… inhibitor chip?”

There was something in Skywalker’s voice: something beyond simple ignorance of the circumstances. Rex thought he might have recognized it if it hadn’t been almost ten standard years since they had seen each other last.

“You didn’t realize about the chips?”

Skywalker didn’t say anything, just pressed his lips together. That hadn’t changed—the silence and that particular expression had always meant just give me the bad news already. The General had never been one to mince or waste words if the situation was truly a serious one, though of course there were many scrapes they had gotten themselves into during the war that he hadn’t considered such, in which case the troops were treated to his acerbic wit and flare for the dramatic. Rex wondered if Skywalker was ever like that now, or if time and dreadful circumstance had hardened and cooled him as much as it had others.

“They had a kill switch that forced us to turn on the Jedi. Do you remember Fives?”

The barest quirk of his mouth (Rex wasn’t sure if it was rueful, pained, or nostalgic).

“Of course I remember Fives.”

“He was right about everything.”

General Skywalker hung his head at that, so that Rex couldn’t see his expression. Silence.

“I—I know in my head that it makes sense. That it wasn’t any of your choice. It’s the kind of thing he would do, just—”

Though you wouldn’t know it by looking at him, Rex had always gotten the sense that Anakin Skywalker, for all his power, had understood what it was to be helpless. Rex himself hadn’t until Umbara and then—worse—Order 66. And, he thought the intervening years would have made anyone understand it better—anyone that wasn’t an Imperial military officer.

The knowledge made you more understanding of other beings, yes, but it also made you fight like hell to never experience the same helplessness again.

His head still bent, Skywalker visibly steeled himself: a deep breath, a sudden set to the shoulders, a widening of his stance. Then he looked at Rex again.

“You have any weapons?”

“No sir. Lost ‘em.”

It was the truth, and it also earned him—after a beat—a faintly wry head tilt from the Jedi. In another time, another life, the confession might have earned him a reprimand (which would have been entirely hypocritical; Captain Rex had kept a count of the number of times his General had lost his lightsaber).

Rex could have been lying about his intentions—though he wasn’t actually sure if a clone was capable of doing something so complex as lying while under the influence of the inhibitor chip’s imperative to execute Order 66—but whatever General Skywalker saw (or sensed) in him must have convinced him.

“Get inside,” Skywalker said, stepping back as though to let Rex pass through the doorway, but he was forced to stop short when he ran into Luke and Leia who were still pressed very close behind him.

He looked down and back to them, though Rex noted that, when he did, he did not fully turn his back on the alley. Or Rex.

“Think we should let him in?”

“Is he a bad man, Dad?” one of them asked in reply, confused. Rex couldn’t tell who because their faces were still blocked by their father’s body. All he could make out was shadows of two pairs of short legs behind Skywalker’s long ones and a child’s fist still clenched in his shirt.

“Only, we thought he was a Rebel.”

“Just because someone’s a Rebel doesn’t mean they’re good, Luke. Lots of people do bad things even when they fight for a good cause,” Skywalker said softly.

“He didn’t try to hurt us,” Luke protested.

“He could have, but he didn’t,” Leia finished.

Skywalker looked again to Rex for a moment, and the cold storm in his eyes had melted. He looked more like himself.

“Alright, step back, let him in,” he said to the children, but it didn’t have the same tone of an order in it. Rex subtly craned his neck to see past the doorway. He thought that one pair of legs had retreated, but the other remained, along with the hand holding on to their father. Anakin looked behind him again, then bent down and picked up—Leia, Rex could see now. She eyed Rex much more warily than she had before, but there was no accusation in her gaze. Skywalker stepped back from the doorway and pivoted to press his back against the wall. Jerking his head as much as he could without knocking it into his daughter’s, he gestured Rex inside.

The door slid shut quietly behind him and all four of them then stood in the dimly lit hallway. Rex could see that, a few paces down, the wall on the left opened up into a room that was clearly a kitchen and the right side was lined with closed doors. Skywalker nudged Luke, who was furthest down the hall, towards the kitchen and the boy led their strange procession into the room.

“Is there anything for dinner yet?” the boy asked once they had all stopped by the table sitting in the far corner of the room. The domesticity of the question was jarring, especially after the negotiation of a tenuous trust, the heavy mentions of betrayal and blame. Rex was glad for the chance to process things.

Skywalker lowered Leia to the ground. “Well, I had started to cut up the stuff for Nerf casserole, but then I decided I would need to go out looking for you, so no.”

Both children wrinkled their noses at the statement.

“My casserole is good, you just don’t like all the vegetables I put in it,” Skywalker protested. “Besides, you snuck out of the house to do something dangerous that I specifically told you not do. What did you expect? Dashan Curry?”

Luke and Leia’s eyes brightened.

“Please?” Leia boldly asked.

He tilted his head to the side, considering for a moment before he looked down at both of them, unimpressed.

“You know what, nope, that would take too long. You two set the table while I cook and Rex tells us all what’s going on.”

Luke and Leia looked between their father and Rex and then at each other.

“I call the cups!” Leia blurted, darting across the room, her brother close on her heels.

Rex’s face must have been doing something confused—whether it was about Leia’s statement or the absurd feeling the whole encounter had taken on, he wasn’t even sure himself—because Skywalker said,

“We have a weird assortment of cups, and they have some system for who decides who gets the ‘good’ ones.”

Rex’s lips briefly quirked and so did the General’s. It sounded like something Fives and Ahsoka would have done.

Skywalker collected a cutting board, knife, and bowl from the counter and moved them to a different spot. Rex noted that it placed his body between where Rex was standing awkwardly next to the table and where his kids had clambered up on the counter to pull cups down from a cabinet.

“So,” General Skywalker said, gesturing with the knife with an air of casualty, though Rex saw it more as a reminder of a warning that he had never been explicitly given.

“How did you come to be at the scene of today’s crime against our glorious Empire?”

Across the room, Luke and Leia stilled, their hands in the middle of reaching for plates. They weren’t being very subtle about sneaking glances at the adults, so it was obvious to Rex they were listening. That was alright, he owed them an explanation after they had basically saved his shebs.

“They’re manufacturing a new type of starfighter at the factory here and we needed to get our hands on the specs, so I posed as a worker to get in.”

 “The new TIE model,” Skywalker supplied knowingly, laying out slices of tuber in the bottom of a large baking dish. Rex nodded. Neither said anything about who “we” referred to.

“I’ve been here for about five rotations, but tonight I got made sneaking around after my shift. My escape route took me by where they keep the fuel, and I had a few thermal detonators on me, so—”

“I see.” Skywalker had moved on to a container of ground Nerf now, dumping it into a pan to brown it. His kids moved over by Rex, dumping a colorful assortment of cups on the table. Skywalker carefully kept his eyes on all three of them, not needing or wanting to look down at the sizzling meat.

“I managed to get clear of the building before they went off, but I must have still been too close. Next thing I knew, I was coming around and your—” it felt too weird to say out loud yet, so he settled for: “—Luke and Leia found me.”

“Were you staying with anyone?”

“An informant on the other side of town.”

“And you didn’t go there because…”

“Stormtroopers in the way, sir.”

“Did they get a good look at any of you?”

It was becoming clear to Rex that General Skywalker didn’t really care why or how Rex had caught the attention of the Imperials, just whether he was going to bring any trouble down on them because of it.

“They were a couple blocks behind us; mostly saw our backs. And I’m not sure whether anyone who knows I was a spy made it out of the factory.”

“You were unconscious long enough that Luke and Leia managed to sneak all the way to you by the time you woke up, but no Stormtroopers found you quick enough to get a good look?”

“No one said they were very competent. And—” he hesitated to even say it, but he wanted to be completely truthful. And with the kids eavesdropping, he might as well let them know they hadn’t hidden it well enough. He felt strangely responsible for making sure they could stay alive.

“Your kids have pretty good senses. Knew they were coming.”

All three Skywalkers froze, clearly understanding the implications of Rex’s couched language. Luke and Leia had abandoned any pretense of ignorance and were looking to their father. Anakin brought up his left hand to rub at his furrowed brow but seemed to realize at the last second it had meat juice on it and left it to hang in the air in front of his face. Then he turned back to the stovetop, suddenly focused on the food, but Rex could imagine the expression that would be showing on his face: balancing on that thin edge between fear and anger.

“We didn’t mean to, Dad, honest!”

Skywalker took a deep breath and moved the now-cooked meat off the heat.

“Good. Because if you had intentionally revealed that you have—” the next words were obvious to everyone in the room, but still he elided them, “—to someone you didn’t know…”

He turned to look at them dangerously for a long moment. Luke and Leia squirmed slightly but were silent. General Skywalker’s face changed. Rex thought of the Citadel mission and Ahsoka and coming out of carbonite.

“But it kept you from being caught. You two are extremely lucky that Rex is someone who—”

Someone who we can trust? Rex wanted to be.

General Skywalker never finished the thought, instead waving his hand and then rummaging through a drawer for a few seconds. He pulled out a few containers of spices and mixed some of each into the meat without measuring exact amounts.

Rex looked across the table to Luke, who was watching his dad with a cautiously optimistic smile. The boy nudged his sister’s shoulder and then pushed a placemat across the table, in front of the chair closest to where Rex stood.

Then, Rex realized that there were four chairs at the table and only three Skywalkers who appeared to live here. There could have been any number of reasons for having an extra chair.

But, neither child had said anything about a mom.

Rex certainly wasn’t going to ask about that yet; he had stepped into enough minefields for today. And he still had a headache.

“Hold on, hold on,” Luke blurted into the delicate moment, “Dad, you called him Rex. Like the Rex in your stories?”

Stories, huh? Rex felt his chest puff up a little at that.

Skywalker, on the other hand, looked incredibly uncomfortable as he dumped the seasoned meat into the casserole dish. Rex wondered how much he had editorialized the war stories either to craft an image of himself or to spare his kids some of the less savory details. General Skywalker had never been one to concern himself with sparing Ahsoka’s childhood innocence on the battlefield (which would have been a lost cause even if he had tried) so Rex was inclined to think it was mostly the former.

“I tell a lot of stories. Not all of them are true, you know that,” Skywalker hedged.

“He totally is!” Leia interjected.

“Did you really kill a slaver by throwing a spear at him so hard it went through his chair?” Luke asked, eagerly leaning over the table. It took Rex a moment to figure out what he meant.

Oh. Of all the things—

“Leia thinks Dad was exaggerating, but I think it’s true!”

“Uh—I—I really don’t know where he heard that story, he wasn’t even there—” Rex spluttered, looking desperately to General Skywalker for some guidance on how to answer.

The Jedi was busy sliding the full baking dish into the nanowave oven. When he closed it and looked over at Rex, he paused for a moment then seemed to make up his mind about something, drawling,

“Well, Captain, they’re not going to believe anything I say about it.”

 “I guess that’s pretty much what happened,” Rex said to Luke. Honesty seemed to continue to be the best policy, or maybe he just found it hard to tell anything less than the truth to a Skywalker.

“Arguably the coolest thing you’ve ever done, and I wasn’t even there for it,” General Skywalker muttered, shaking his head.

“Wizard!” Luke exclaimed, looking at his sister triumphantly. Leia just nodded thoughtfully and considered the four cups she had set on the table in front of her. She decisively grabbed a tall, shiny yellow cup that looked like it was made of some kind of transparisteel rather than the plastoid of the other ones and set it down on the corner of the placemat Luke had pushed towards Rex. Leia met his eyes as she did so, and he felt like he was maybe missing something important.

With dinner in the oven, General Skywalker came over to stand behind his children, settling an easy hand on top of each of their heads. In a kind of recreation of the scene from the alley before, the Skywalkers and Rex stood on either side of the obstacle of a partially set dinner table. There was less tension than before, but more awkwardness.

Leia looked up at her father’s touch and said, very seriously, “I wonder how far I could throw a spear.”

Rex’s eyes widened, but he really should have been expecting something like that.

Then she looked at Luke and said, “I bet we could find something in the garage to practice with!”

Finally, she looked at Rex, and he just knew she was going to ask him to teach her when insistent knocking echoed through the apartment. It sounded like it was coming from down the hallway, the opposite direction of the door they came in.

“Is it the Imps?” Luke asked.

“I don’t know. If it is, you know what to do,” Skywalker replied, already moving towards the sound.

“Don’t let them catch us,” Leia answered.

Apparently, this was the answer Skywalker had expected because he was already moving on,

“Rex—”

“Or you. Or Rex.” Luke finished for his sister. General Skywalker stopped. Rex wondered if he meant for his face to look so dangerous.

“Luke, we don’t have time for this. The grown-ups can take care of themselves,” he snapped. Luke scrunched his nose but didn’t protest. Rex noticed he had taken a firm hold of his sister’s hand. The knocking came again.

“Rex,” Skywalker said, already halfway out of the room, “you can’t be seen in that uniform.”

Rex followed him a few steps down the hallway before realizing that he meant that he was going to handle this alone. It was probably the sensible thing to do—Rex would be a wanted man—but that didn’t mean he liked it. Skywalker tapped a closed door as he passed it.

“In here, you can change into something of mine.”

Rex reached for the knob and Skywalker watched with his own hand on the door that was set at the end of the hallway.

“Protect my kids,” he said.

Rex surprised himself with how easy it was to nod. Even after nine years, Rex was still ready to give his life for this man. That it had extended to his children so quickly wasn’t a exactly surprise either. But the thought had come as readily as it always had, even in the face of obvious distrust.

With a familiar unity of movement, Rex ducked through the door and Skywalker through his, which revealed a quick glimpse of what was clearly a mechanic’s space beyond, containing a half-assembled ship. He assumed that there was another entrance that was for customers, and that was where their unexpected visitor was. If not for the distinct possibility that they were all about to be arrested, Rex would have found it laughable that Jedi General Anakin Skywalker was a businessman. He had a shop. With perfectly ordinary customers.

Barely examining the room he had entered longer than what it took to locate the set of drawers, Rex dug through Skywalker’s clothes. He had been half expecting Jedi robes, but of course he didn’t find any. Changing quickly and kicking the discarded, singed factory uniform under the dresser, Rex strained his ears to hear whatever confrontation was going on.

Voices: the particular words indistinct. At least they sounded calm for the moment, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Rex would have to wait for the exchange to become more heated if he wanted to understand what was being said. In the meantime, he did a more thorough scan of the room, noting almost immediately the small window next to the bed. Small, but big enough for him to climb through, he thought, and close enough to the ground.

The rest of the room really was nothing much, possibly distasteful in its asceticism and aesthetics by the standards of an ordinary being, but Rex had spent most of his life on living military bases. There was nothing in it that would indicate anything about the type of person who inhabited it, besides that they were a humanoid. There wouldn’t have been, not for General Skywalker; Rex had gotten a glimpse of where the droid and starship parts were likely kept, and leaving a lightsaber lying on the nightstand wouldn’t have been a good idea (he knew that General Skywalker had slept with it exactly there during the war, but that was a story for another time). Rex debated whether it would be a good idea to search the room for the weapon—the General had almost certainly not gotten rid of it, despite how incriminating it would be to have a lightsaber found in his possession.

Most Jedi he had known during the war had been at least a little touchy about other people using their lightsabers. The more stuck up ones insisted that only one strong with the Force could wield one properly. Rex thought, at the end of the day, it was still a sword, and it could still kill any stormtroopers that came looking. Skywalker (and Kenobi) however had never objected to a clone scooping up the weapon when he dropped it. Besides, protect my kids was a pretty open mandate—Rex could probably get away with a lot.

Rex listened to the voices from the other room, still indistinct and un-agitated, as he felt along the wall for a seam. It would be in a secret compartment somewhere, he guessed. Hiding it at the bottom of a dresser drawer felt too mundane, and there was no closet.

Then there was an unnaturally long lull in the conversation. Rex’s heartrate picked up, and his head throbbed in tandem with it. Either whoever it was had left, or—

Rex continued his search of the room for a weapon but barging out of the room and following Skywalker regardless was becoming a more attractive option by the second. Maybe if his mind had been a bit less messed up, it would have been easier to resist the temptation. If he couldn’t find any kind of seam in this last wall he was checking, Rex told himself, he would go.

The creak of a door. The one Skywalker had disappeared through. Rex froze, crouched in the corner of the room. There really wasn’t anywhere to hide here, like Luke and Leia were (hopefully) doing in the kitchen. Their presence ruled out using the window as an emergency escape hatch, there was no way he would leave them—

The door to the room opened and Rex whirled towards it so fast he was a little dizzy even after he stopped moving. Blinking rapidly, but with every muscle tensed, Rex realized that it was General Skywalker who had opened the door, and that he was alone.

He looked a bit concerned, but there was nothing urgent in his face.

“At ease, Rex,” Skywalker said, clearly noting Rex’s odd position in the corner of the room at the same time. Rex obeyed, though he probably would have even without the order.

“It was just someone whose speeder broke down,” he explained. Rex’s vision swam with relief, and then he felt his face heat up because getting caught snooping in your commanding officer’s someone’s room wasn’t the best look.

“Oh. I was just uh—looking for weapons—in case—” he explained haltingly.

“Ah.” Skywalker looked pleased rather than offended. “Wouldn’t have found any—I rigged it so you’d need the Force for that—but good thinking.”

“Anyways, the twins are probably pretty spooked so…” Skywalker gestured over his shoulder towards the kitchen.

“And there’ll be enough food for you if you’re hungry,” he added quietly as he stepped out of the doorway. Rex followed him back to the kitchen, where the oven was still on and the table still set, but no sign of the kids. Skywalker didn’t seem concerned by this, standing next to the table and tapping his foot against the wall three times. A large square piece of it was pushed outwards and tipped unceremoniously onto the floor. Luke and Leia crawled out after it. So, Rex had been on the right track earlier, about hiding things in the walls.

He wondered how many “close calls” they had (or expected to have) with the Empire to have this odd sort of routine worked out.

Both children scrambled upright and pressed themselves close to General Skywalker.

“Was it the Imps, Dad?” Leia asked.

“Nah, just someone whose repulsor on their speeder went kaput” he answered lightheartedly. Rex didn’t miss the way he smoothed a hand over each of their heads and then rested them protectively on their shoulders.

“There was a big spider in there,” Luke grumbled.

“There are worse things than spiders,” his father said darkly, “this is what happens when you decide to mess with the Empire.”

“People’s speeders break down?” Luke asked.

“Luke is right for a change about one of your stories being true?” Leia added.

“Hey!” father and son protested simultaneously.

“My stories are at least seventy percent true,” General Skywalker said. Then his expression turned serious.

 “And no, I meant that when you mess with the Empire, it’s hard to stop worrying that they’ll mess back,” he admitted softly.

Rex understood the sentiment, but it was different when your home was a rebel base and you were poking the bear with a stick on purpose. That kind of thinking had faded to the background in his life years ago. Besides, he was a soldier, and he was bred to not think about those things in any context beyond pure strategy.

“But you worry anyway!” Luke whined. “At least now we have a good reason to draw their attention,” he said, looking back to Rex with a blinding smile on his face.

Rex took a step back. Sure, he had some people whom he cared about and who cared about him, friends he’d known for a long time. But these kids he had just met made him feel strangely important. They had probably never seen another clone, he realized. It wasn’t just that.

“Okay there, Rex?” General Skywalker asked.

“What? Yeah, I—”

“You were hurt in that explosion though, weren’t you?” Leia accused.

Rex resisted the urge to shrink back from the sudden combined scrutiny of all three Skywalkers.

“Ah, I just hit my head a little, that’s all” he said defensively.

General Skywalker released his kids and stepped towards Rex. He looked him straight in the eyes. Rex knew that he was probably just checking his pupils for a brain injury, but the weird Jedi intensity—like they could see into the dark corners of your soul—was still uncomfortable. Skywalker raised a finger and Rex knew he was supposed to follow it with his eyes as he waved it in front of his face, so Rex did.

Shrugging, Skywalker said, “If you have a concussion, I don’t think it’s serious. We’ve got some painkillers if you want. Also, you should sit down.”

“Thanks,” said Rex, realizing that he had indeed been standing awkwardly right next to the table this whole time. He sat, and so did Luke and Leia while Skywalker briefly disappeared down the hall.

Soon after he came back with the medicine, the oven’s timer went off. Seeing General Skywalker with oven mitts on was really…weird. Rex was glad he hadn’t worn an apron too, because that might have been the straw that broke the Eopie’s back in terms of Rex’s tolerance for the strange and unexpected today. Except now Rex was imagining the image, and that wasn’t much better.

“So Rex,” Skywalker asked as he dished out the food, “how long were you planning on staying here? I mean before…”

“I had an extraction scheduled two days from now, but I’m not sure if that’s a good idea anymore,” Rex replied, watching Luke turn up his nose at the food on his plate and pick at it with his fork.

“Do you have a way to contact them?”

“Unless my comm got damaged in the explosion, yes,” Rex said, thinking that he really should have picked up his discarded uniform, which had the comm hidden in a secret pocket, from Skywalker’s bedroom floor. But the thought that he shouldn’t be sharing this information about the Rebellion never crossed his mind. It was General Skywalker.

“Well, if you decide they’ve cracked down on security too much,” Skywalker ventured, keeping his eyes on his plate, “I guess you can lay low here until it’s safer to leave.”

Luke and Leia both straightened excitedly in their chairs. There was a muffled thump from under the table and Leia twitched, turning to look at her brother. Luke glanced at her expectantly from the corner of his eye. She hastily swallowed her food before grinning at him.

Rex smiled too.

He hadn’t expected it to, but the nerf casserole tasted pretty decent.

Chapter Text

When they were all finished eating, Luke and Leia ran off to go fetch C3PO, whom Rex had entirely forgotten about in the intervening years since the war. Funny, how certain things had faded completely from his mind, so ephemeral he had forgotten there was anything to forget, while other things hadn’t dimmed in clarity or detail at all. Like the way General Skywalker had walked, talked, furrowed his brow and held his mouth when he felt a certain way.

It wasn’t the same now—the context was so different Rex found it hard to predict exactly how his General would react to a given statement, and there were some new things in there Rex couldn’t decipher—but he caught an expression every few minutes that was so quintessentially Skywalker he expected to blink and be back on the Resolute. Even more jarring was to witness these familiar elements in the faces of Luke and Leia.

Case in point was when, after C3PO had started tidying up (reminding Rex how annoying yet unintentionally comical he could be), General Skywalker asked his kids whether their homework was done.

Both twins made practically identical expressions, which were in turn nearly identical to their father’s when General Kenobi had helpfully reminded him he would need to write a report for the Jedi Council explaining the absurd success of his latest unconventional plan. And Skywalker’s face now—well, it didn’t seem that it made much of a difference whether he was telling his padawan or his own children to do their schoolwork.

“But, Dad!” Luke protested.

“No ‘buts’, you two. Now’s not the time for me to be getting another call from Headmistress Rowthe. Besides, we’ve discussed why it’s important for you to keep up with your studies, and all of that is still true—even tonight,” Skywalker retorted.

That puzzled Rex a little bit, since offhand comments from General Kenobi had always implied that Skywalker himself had never been a very fastidious student, even if he had been a good one. And Commander Tano’s education—at least in those things that hadn’t been either lightsaber, leadership, or Force-use techniques—had never seemed to come before the business of war. As far as Rex was concerned, they were still at war. He abruptly realized General Skywalker might see it differently, or he was at least trying to pretend.

Leia tilted her head to the side, jutting her bottom lip out for a second, obviously gearing up to argue, which wasn’t a Skywalker mannerism Rex recognized. Her father cut in before she could speak.

“You know, Leia, I salvaged a flight computer from an old fighter the other day. I was going to ask you to help me slice into it, but I could just do it myself,” he said. Leia huffed but was silent.

“That goes for your speeder lessons too,” he told Luke.

This apparently was enough to convince the kids to do as their father said, because they turned to leave the room. As they did, Leia reached out to poke her brother in the side, who exaggeratedly dodged the attempt before reaching out a finger to try and get her back. By the time they disappeared around the corner, their steps were light and Rex wouldn’t have guessed they were going off to do something they disliked.

“I probably bribe them too much,” Skywalker said exasperatedly as he watched them go. He looked faintly amused.

Was Rex supposed to… agree? He had grown up trading KP duty or the ‘good’ ration flavors with his brothers for favors—he didn’t exactly see a problem.

“I dread the day they realize you’d give them practically anything they asked for, Sir,” Threepio remarked primly, reminding Rex that the droid (along with Artoo, if Skywalker’s rough translations of his binary had been to be believed) was, in addition to being both annoying and comical, also terribly observant and judgmental.

“Yeah, well…” Skywalker trailed off, seemingly agreeing with him. Rex cleared his throat and stood. His abused joints protested a little, but his vision didn’t swim with the change. Small victories.

“I’m going to—go get my comm,” Rex informed him, trusting Skywalker to fill in the blanks of what he meant.

“Right,” Skywalker said, his face shifting from fond to calculating in a split second. Rex felt the Jedi’s eyes follow him as he let the room.

Entering Skywalker’s bedroom again, Rex wondered whether he should let him in on the call he was about to make. That was against almost every protocol an Alliance information agent should have followed, but Rex might get away with it considering this type of intelligence work wasn’t his usual beat to begin with, and he was calling Ahsoka.

Rex paused in the middle of bending to fish the encrypted commlink out of the pile of discarded uniform. The thought hit him: did Skywalker think she was dead? That Rex had killed her? Had he believed that for all these years? Rex was suddenly ten times more grateful to Luke and Leia than he already had been, because he didn’t imagine his initial reception would have been nearly as…calm if Skywalker hadn’t had them there. And if Rex had killed Ahsoka, as he had come so horribly close to doing he still had nightmares about it, Rex might have gladly let Skywalker extract whatever revenge he wanted.

His fingers finally closed around the cool metal of the communication device and Rex was glad for the tangible reminder that he hadn’t.

Of course, Rex should have General Skywalker there when he contacted her. It was a chance to right a wrong in the galaxy Rex had believed he would never be able to absolve. He didn’t often get the chance to do that.

Rex felt his leftover grief belatedly drain from him—grief borne from the notion that he had failed his General, the man he had served and protected and fought beside for years, by not being able to give him the same rescue as Commander Tano, or even the final dignity they had given to Jesse and his brothers.

Rex had never claimed to truly understand the full dimensions of a Jedi Master-Padawan relationship, but he was probably among the most qualified people left in the galaxy to speak on the subject. To separate the two halves of such a whole was an injustice. Ahsoka hadn’t meant him to, but Rex had caught snatches of the pain thinking her master was dead had caused her. To let either of them remain ignorant about the true fate of the other for a moment longer was cruel. Their reunion would be, in a way, a victory in and of itself for their small Rebellion—against an Empire that had made a point of decimating the Jedi Order seemingly beyond repair.

Thumbing the button on the device that would alert Ahsoka to the fact he wanted to speak to her in real time, Rex straightened from the floor and made his way back to the kitchen. When he came back, General Skywalker apparently hadn’t moved. He was staring at some distant point, thinking, and his attention was only attracted when Rex set the communication device on the table with a small clink.

“I’ll let you—” Skywalker began, standing.

“No,” interrupted Rex, “you should be a part of this.”

The General’s brow furrowed.

“I’m sorry if I’ve given you the wrong idea, Rex, but—” he sucked in a breath, “I’m not certain that I want to be involved more. The reason I’m not with the Alliance isn’t because I didn’t know about it or didn’t have a way to contact them, it’s—”

He stopped speaking.

Rex, on some level, had already realized this. Just because he couldn’t empathize didn’t mean that he didn’t have some idea of the reasons. Yes, yesterday he wouldn’t have expected the Anakin Skywalker he once knew to be turning down a chance to fight the Empire, but Rex hadn’t known about Luke and Leia then. He hadn’t heard then what Skywalker had said to them before dinner.

The Alliance was a complicated proposition, Rex knew that, but perhaps he hadn’t realized just how much until now.

But that was a separate subject that Rex was happy to put aside momentarily.

“This isn’t about that, General,” he said.

“Then what?” Skywalker asked.

The comm device answered the question better than Rex could have when it chirped and displayed a hologram. The Fulcrum symbol. A stylized version of Ahsoka’s facial markings that meant she was ready to receive his transmission.

It was easy to tell General Skywalker had recognized it. His left hand moved to grip the back of a chair, the knuckles revealingly white. He was so still Rex couldn’t tell if he was even breathing.

Rex punched in the code to begin the live transmission.

 “Torrent to Fulcrum, please respond.”

“This is Fulcrum, what’s your status?”

Skywalker still hadn’t moved, and maybe some context would be appropriate for her sake, so Rex began:

“They found me out. The mission objective is incomplete, but at least I managed to do a fair amount of property damage on my way out. I—"

“Ahsoka?” General Skywalker said reverently, seemingly coming to his senses enough to cut Rex off.

Rex probably should have been bothered by the complete disregard for her codename, in case the Imperials had somehow managed to tap into their conversation and could trace it back to them, but he found he didn’t care. Let them come, he thought fiercely. The three of them were so close to being together again. Not much else seemed to matter beyond that.

“What?” Ahsoka replied, and he could hear the confusion in her voice despite the scrambler that distorted it. The technology they were using was probably sophisticated enough she could recognize that whoever had spoken had been a separate, second person on Rex’s end, but it was still meant to make Skywalker’s voice unrecognizable as his own.

“It’s me,” Skywalker said, “Anakin.”

No response came from Ahsoka for several seconds. General Skywalker stared at the Fulcrum symbol being projected above the comm like it could make her teleport in front of them.

“I don’t—” Ahsoka finally spluttered, “—how?”

“It was a coincidence,” said Rex, “the kind of property damage we’re talking about tends to attract attention.”

A bewildered laugh came through the speaker. “No, but how? Master—I thought—I thought you were dead, I—”

“I thought you were dead,” the General said, instead of answering. He blinked rapidly. Released the chair to swipe the hand over his eyes. Rex felt the need to look away.

He heard Skywalker’s shaky breath,

“You have no idea how glad I am you’re alive.”

“Oh, I have some idea,” Ahsoka challenged, though not unkindly, Rex thought.

“No, really,” said Skywalker, shaking his head, “you were right to leave. I should have never put you in danger again by sending you—”

“You shouldn’t blame yourself!” Ahsoka cut in, “I chose to go. And Maul warned us something terrible would happen. I’m the one who should have done more—”

“No, Snips, you don’t know what—”

“Are you two really going to argue who’s to blame for things that never actually happened?” Rex interrupted, seamlessly falling back into an old role. Nevermind that he didn’t feel completely blameless in this situation either. But, they were all alive and free to argue about it, and that was a sight better than most of the Jedi and their clones.

The background static from Ahsoka’s transmission was the only sound for a few moments.

General Skywalker was the first to laugh, an almost desperate but unmistakably relieved sound, and Ahsoka was quick to join him.

“Stars, I missed you,” Skywalker said, “both of you.”

“I want to see you,” Ahsoka replied once they had calmed, “I’ll come and pick you both up and we’ll take you back to base with us.”

“Of course I want to see you,” Skywalker said, but there was trepidation in his tone. It wasn’t agreement, it was sugarcoating.

“And Rex,” Ahsoka said, moving on happily, also forgoing codenames in her excitement, “really the mission was more of a success than we could have planned. We might not even need those specs anymore, not with a pilot like you on our side, Anakin—”

“Ahsoka.”

The topic they’d sidestepped earlier was back.

“It’s not that simple,” the General insisted sternly.

“What? Did you learn something about those fighters? Are you working with another cell?”

“I can’t just start fighting for the Alliance,” he explained, staring stonily at the hologram.

“What do you mean?” she asked incredulously.

“I can’t help you. There are things here I have to protect. It’s—it’s bigger than the Empire.”

“Bigger than the Empire?” Ahsoka sounded angry now. “Master, what could possibly be bigger than what the Empire is doing to the galaxy? They slaughtered our people, they’re enslaving millions—silencing every opposition!”

Rex wanted to interject. She didn’t understand; she didn’t know what he knew. She might have still disagreed with her former master, but they wouldn’t have had to go picking at what Rex suspected were old wounds for both of them.

“Ahsoka, please, it’s complicated, I don’t want to discuss it now—” Skywalker’s shoulders tightened defensively.

“Didn’t you see Senator Amidala’s funeral on the holonet? Palpatine had her killed! How could you possibly—"

General Skywalker slammed his metal hand down on the table, and the sound seemed to strain at the edges of the room like a chained Nexu violently testing its restraints. If Rex had been anyone else, he would have flinched.

“Exactly!” he yelled.

“What—”

“Exactly, Ahsoka.” His voice was shaking.

“He hated Padmé and he hates me. He’s hunting Force-sensitives. If the Empire finds us because I was naïve enough to think that I could somehow—” Skywalker lowered his head and took a deep breath.

“—I can’t lose anyone else.”

Ahsoka misinterpreted his words. Rex knew her and knew that her blood would still be high. Maybe he should have gone into this better, spoken to her alone first. He suspected they’d built each other up in their minds to an extent, as martyrs, and now it was coming crashing down. General Skywalker had been out there in the galaxy for years. He hadn’t gone looking for her, he hadn’t helped.

“If you think you can stop me from doing this, you’re wrong. I’m careful, Master, I promise. And I’m willing to sacrifice. I thought you would be too?”

“I know I can’t tell you what to do anymore, Ahsoka,” Skywalker conceded, “and I won’t try, but I would die before I ever let Sidious get his hands on—”

Skywalker cut himself off and looked in the direction Luke and Leia had disappeared to do their homework.

“Who? Get his hands on who?” Ahsoka asked, seeming to finally realize she was missing something important.

“I’ll tell you, I promise. After all, you’re their—” Skywalker stopped himself and smiled, “I’ll tell you, but when we see each other. This connection might not be secure.”

They’d been acting in defiance of that possibility when they’d called each other by their real names, but Rex supposed that was all the more reason to wait. The fewer connections a eavesdropper could draw, the better.

“It’s encrypted four ways—” Ahsoka protested. Rex hoped her curiosity would bury any remaining argument.

“Good, but still. When I see you,” General Skywalker insisted.

“About that,” Rex interjected, “based on the Empire’s previous movements when there’s been attacks on their facilities, we’ll need to be careful. They’ll be monitoring inter-planetary travel much more strictly.”

“For at least a week,” Ahsoka agreed, “until they decide that you’re more likely dead or escaped already.”

Rex watched General Skywalker nod at that.

“Any chance they might chalk it up to an accident at the factory?” he asked.

Rex shrugged.

“If none of the ones who recognized me for a Rebel survived the blast, maybe.”

Ahsoka’s garbled chuckle came through the comm.

“Just how much property damage are we talking about, Torrent?” she asked, amused.

“Oh, a fair amount,” the General said offhandedly.

“Good,” Ahsoka said decisively, in such a way that Rex knew she hadn’t forgotten about their argument about fighting back against the Empire but was willing to accept Skywalker’s promise of more information. Rex was getting pretty good at reading her voice through the scrambler, he thought, impressed with himself.

“Anyways, we’ll say five standard days from today, same time and place as the original agreed upon extraction?” she continued.

Rex opened his mouth to agree, but Skywalker spoke first.

“Wait--make it six days from now,” he said, “The Primeday after next is the start of a holiday week here. They’ll have their guard down.”

“Smart,” said Ahsoka.

“Sure,” agreed Rex.

With their plans made, there was nothing else to discuss, and every minute longer spent on the comm was probably dangerous, but evidently none of the three of them wanted to be the first to hang up. General Skywalker studied the Fulcrum symbol, flickering just slightly in the holographic display, and Rex studied him. It was probably a bad idea to be curious about Ahsoka’s disregarded question: how had he survived Order 66? And also a bad idea to be curious about what she would undoubtedly ask about in six days: how did that fit in with Luke and Leia?

(Senator Amidala’s funeral had been broadcast on the holonet. Rex and Ahsoka had watched it while sitting in the corner booth in a seedy bar on a planet he could no longer remember the name of, and she had cried.)

Given they had just signed him up for a six-day stay at the Skywalker residence, Rex thought it would probably just get harder to skirt around the questions as time passed. But they would probably manage to avoid them nonetheless—Rex and his General had plenty of practice pretending things that mattered didn’t exist.

A muffled child’s voice exclaiming, “hey!” from the other room broke the stalemate for Rex and his General, even if it was probably too faint to be picked up and transmitted to Ahsoka. Rex wondered what Luke and Leia could be arguing over about their homework assignments. Or maybe they had been trying to listen in on the adults; he wouldn’t have been surprised.

General Skywalker cleared his throat.

“Anything else?” he asked as a formality, looking across the table at Rex, who shook his head. When another beat passed, Ahsoka said,

“I’ll see you soon, then. Stay safe. Contact me if anything changes.”

Skywalker smiled. Another indignant noise came from down the hall.

“Will do, Snips.” He hesitated, reaching out for the communication device but not deactivating it just yet. He said quietly, genuinely,

“I can’t wait to see you.”

Chapter Text

Rex would learn many things about General Skywalker and his twin children in the next five days, mostly because there wasn’t much else for him to do but talk to them.

Their home didn’t have a spare bedroom, so Rex slept in the corner of the garage that apparently doubled as a living room. There was a threadbare rug spread on the concrete floor and a holoprojector against the wall, facing a brown couch, which had clearly seen better days but was surprisingly comfortable. Or maybe Rex was too tired to care during the first few nights he slept on it; and after that he’d gotten used to it.

General Skywalker had shown him to the space right after they had disconnected with Ahsoka, able to tell that Rex was tired at the very least or needed to sleep off his injuries at worst. He had said he’d be back; Luke and Leia’s argument in the other room had audibly escalated and he’d gone to mediate. Rex assumed he had come back at some point, just when he was already asleep. The next time Rex saw Luke and Leia, they were acting thick as thieves again, so whatever it was hadn’t been too serious.

The first morning, the children weren’t around when Rex woke up. It was late in the morning, or at least much later than Rex would have normally slept. He’d evidently slept through the sounds of General Skywalker working on a ship. The Jedi was clearly midway through a project when Rex came back to the world, but it didn’t stop him from uncannily knowing that Rex was awake even without being able to see him.

“Morning, Rex,” Skywalker called, after giving Rex a few moments to blink awake.

“Morning, Sir,” Rex responded, sitting up.

Skywalker set aside the hydrospanner he had been holding and directed his full attention towards Rex.

“You don’t need to call me ‘Sir’ anymore,” Skywalker told him, “in fact you probably shouldn’t. Everyone here knows me as Tonra Lars—there’s not any reason for anyone to call him that.”

That was going to take some getting used to.

“I’ll try,” Rex replied, and almost immediately proved himself wrong by tacking “Sir” onto the end of it.

Skywalker took him into the kitchen, promising to give Rex breakfast, and Rex followed him, caught in the strangeness of the hospitality. All the places they had ever been together, both of them had always had the exact same right to be there: battlefield, command center, mess hall. Even on the rare occasion Rex had been inside the Jedi Temple, they had both had the necessity of professionalism coloring their actions. In fact, Rex could only think of one other time he had ever been anyone’s guest like this: Cut Lawquane. The amount of parallels between then and now was unsettling and so Rex focused instead on trying to remember if he had heard either part of Skywalker’s alias before. It seemed very distantly familiar.

Another mystery to add to the pile.

“The kids are already at school,” Anakin explained in the kitchen, tossing him a muffin. “You slept so long I was getting worried I’d have to wake you up to make sure you were okay.”

“I’m fine,” Rex said, quickly swallowing the urge to tack on another ‘Sir.’

“I’m just a little banged up, but nothing Ahsoka will have to know about.” In six days, he’d probably be mostly healed.

Skywalker focused on the smooth countertop he was leaning against. Rex unwrapped the muffin.

“About Ahsoka,” he said slowly, “what happened? On Mandalore, I mean?” His brows furrowed. “Last night she said something about Maul giving a warning.”

Rex sat down at the table and told him, in between bites of muffin, which gave him just enough of a distraction to stave off the memory of the foreboding feeling, the gut-wrenching guilt, the pounding adrenaline of those days and hours.

Anakin listened silently until Rex reached the point where they transported Maul to the star destroyer. Even then he only interrupted because Rex had finished his muffin and there was no reason for them to remain in the kitchen.

“Let’s go back in the garage. That twi’lek guy isn’t going to be happy if I take forever to fix his ship.”

He hesitated. “It’ll be good for me to have something to do while I listen anyways.” He admitted this last part—the implied vulnerability of it—warily, but he did admit it, which was more than Rex would have known him to do before.

With Skywalker’s face hidden for the most part in exposed ship mechanics and Rex sitting on a stool off to the side, Rex told the rest of the story. Anakin glanced over at him a couple of times, but Rex knew he was really listening by the way he froze briefly at certain moments—Ahsoka being stupidly loyal and going back for Rex, Maul’s escape, digging the graves of Jesse and hundreds of other men that had once been his to command—and seemed to require visible effort to start moving again.

Rex described how they had laid low together at first—grieved—then went back to Coruscant to look for survivors, for someone to save, but had gotten separated for over a standard year before they found each other again. Then they had both joined Bail Organa and his fledgling rebel cells.

When Rex had been silent for a long stretch, his story finished, Skywalker turned away from his work to look at his Captain.

“Thank you,” he told Rex, “for saving her. For taking care of her.”

It had been a long time since Rex had considered the possibility of being thanked for what happened. Ahsoka had tried, in the first days, but Rex hadn’t been able to think past the rows of orange-painted helmets and the memory of the smell and subtle recoil of his pistols as he had shot at her. And now, even with those regrets, he couldn’t fathom any alternative in which he had not done everything he could to save her.

Rex could only nod.

“It’s a long way from Christophsis,” Anakin said, almost wistfully. He finished the rest of the repair while a contemplative but companionable silence stretched between the two of them.

Rex went back to the kitchen, with C3PO helping him fix a lunch for both of them while Skywalker settled up with the ship’s owner. For the rest of the afternoon until the twins came home, their conversation remained firmly on safer topics.

Luke and Leia entered with a flurry of movement and noise. Their loud yell of, “Daaaaad, we’re home!” reached Anakin and Rex all the way at the other end of the garage from the alleyway door. Skywalker stood up to greet them as they burst through the door to the shop, dumping their bags unceremoniously on a workbench.

“Hey kiddos,” he said, “anything interesting happen today?”

“No,” they both chorused, flopping down on their backs on either end of the couch and draping their legs haphazardly over the arms. General Skywalker walked over and leaned his elbows on the back of the sofa, looking down at them.

“Nothing interesting ever happens,” Leia informed Rex, raising up her head to look at him.

“Except for that time Yana’s mom got into that really loud argument with Headmistress Rowthe in the middle of the hallway,” Luke corrected.

“That was ages ago,” Leia protested.

“I bet interesting stuff happens to you all the time!” Luke said, also to Rex.

“Sometimes,” Rex said noncommittally, watching General Skywalker carefully, not wanting to cross any boundaries. The twins’ matter-of-fact enthusiasm and interest made him want to answer, though. Maybe in a few days they would wear him down.

“After you get a snack, we can go have that speeder lesson,” Anakin told them, very effectively changing the subject.

Luke whooped and sat up so fast he almost smacked his forehead into his father’s. Leia looked pleased too, but she couldn’t hold a candle to her brother’s excitement. Both children bounded off the couch and back through the door they came from.

“You coming with?” Skywalker asked him after they had gone. Rex chuckled.

“No thanks, I’ve flown with you in a speeder before,” he teased.

“Luke’s actually a fairly safe driver so far,” Anakin said, and Rex tried to tell if he was teasing back. Either it was a joke or Skywalker’s definition of “fairly safe” was not even in the same category as most others’ in the galaxy. At Rex’s skeptical look, he admitted,

“Well, that’ll probably change once he gets the hang of it.”

A joke then.

“And here I thought all Skywalkers would be born reckless flyers.”

General Skywalker’s face clouded, a shadow passing over his expression, but it was gone in an instant.

“Well, it’s fine by me if you stay here. I’ll close up the storefront so no one bothers you,” he said, in the same light tone as before.

Ten minutes later, Rex watched the three of them leave, with Artoo in tow. The brief encounter with the twin’s energy left him feeling tired again, and a little bit old. Telling the story of his life since they had last seen each other had been draining, even though Rex didn’t resent his General for asking. He hadn’t exactly meant to take a nap, but he sat down on the couch and the next thing he knew, the smell of food and Luke and Leia’s voices drifting through the air were waking him.

They had brought back takeout from some restaurant, and between that and last night, Rex couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten so well. Luke and Leia bombarded him with questions during the meal, but they kept the content to Clone Wars escapades and other ordinary questions.

(Rex’s favorite color? Blue. It was yellow for Luke, and green for Leia, apparently.  His favorite animal? Rex had never really thought about it but they both said theirs was a Krayt Dragon. And so on.)

Rex figured they had picked up on their father’s reticence around anything to do with the Rebel Alliance, but he wondered why they went along with it when they hadn’t before. Maybe Skywalker had said something to them.

The next three days passed in a similar fashion to the first. Witnessed moments—windows into a family’s life—that Rex suddenly found himself a strange participant in. Routines, inside jokes, familiarity, and beneath it all—

Love.

And Fear.

Rex and Skywalker talked while he worked during the day. One afternoon was spent on General Skywalker explaining the politics of Luke and Leia’s school, which was surprisingly more interesting and nuanced than Rex could have ever imagined (Luke’s earlier comment had only scratched the surface) which then led him to explaining the politics of the city in general. And politics in this case didn’t really mean what it had meant to Rex when he was in the GAR—before, it was Senators and their friends and enemies, who was in the pockets of which corporations, the military bureaucracy and the power struggles within it between clones and nat-born officers—but now, it meant which families hated each other, which merchants were in competition, which children were popular at school, which parents made a stink with the school administration and about what. And who may or may not have certain unfavorable opinions about the Empire.

General Skywalker had always joked with General Kenobi that he didn’t have much of a head for politics, but Rex was beginning to disagree, based on the depth of information he had apparently collected. Rex told him as much.

“It’s not politics. It’s just—our life,” protested Skywalker, “and besides, I just keep my ear to the ground. Listen to what people say.” He shrugged, “It’s not the same. I can’t really do much of anything.”

“Why not?” said Rex. He hadn’t forgotten what Luke had asked him in the market; with each passing minute he disliked more and more the thought of having to leave Skywalker (and Luke and Leia) behind in a few days.

“People might start to ask questions. The Empire might start to ask questions.”

Rex mulled that over.

“It’s odd,” he said. General Skywalker looked strangely at him when he didn’t elaborate on the non sequitur.

“What is?”

Rex tried very hard to sound as if he were not passing judgement; he was just stating observations.

“It used to seem like you were everywhere. Doing everything. Your name was one of the most known in the entire Republic. I met a lot of brothers who thought you could do anything.”

Anakin laughed, but it was mirthless. Rueful.

“They were wrong.”

It was a tone that Rex knew brokered no argument and no further discussion. They were silent for a long while.

Rex picked up a holomanual for some type of speeder he didn’t recognize and flipped through it, his mind elsewhere. There were moments when Luke and Leia reminded him of those brothers. Of Ahsoka. He wondered if General Skywalker fully realized that.

They were wrong, he had said. He blamed himself for what had happened to the galaxy almost ten years ago. Why?

Then the twins returned home, and Anakin asked them if anything interesting had happened, and they said no, and that was that.

That night they all played Sabacc together, betting with small pieces of candy instead of credits. Rex saw the twins sneak a few from their father’s pile when they thought he wasn’t looking. Luke and Leia had terrible Sabacc faces, and they were still learning the game, but General Skywalker’s Sabacc face had only gotten better since they’d last played. Rex, of course, was no slouch either and the two men split the rounds fairly evenly. Leia eventually got upset at her poor performance and after a gentle lecture from Anakin on how she would need to practice to get better and they were playing for fun anyways, they devised a new method of playing. General Skywalker advised Leia on what to do playing against Luke, who had Rex as a teammate. Things went much better after that.

Then Anakin proclaimed that it was time for them to go to bed, because it was getting late and they had eaten too much candy already. Luke and Leia protested that they hadn’t eaten any yet, to which he responded with an amused eyebrows-raised look at the piles of sweets—clearly smaller than they had been before.

The next morning, Rex woke early enough to witness Luke and Leia get ready to go to school. There was a chaotic sort of dance through the house, which Rex sat at the kitchen table and watched as he sipped a cup of caf. There were breakfasts and packed lunches being made, hair being tamed, jackets and backpacks and datapads hunted for across the house. It reminded Rex of nothing so much as a hangar bay as pilots scrambled their fighters for battle. Once the twins were out of the door, it only lasted about a minute before they came back. Luke had forgotten to grab his melioruun fruit off the counter, but then they were off again.

Rex and Anakin’s conversation in the shop that day was mainly about the twins. Funny things they had done when they were younger, habits that they had grown out of or were growing into, their likes and dislikes. At one point, Skywalker even showed him some baby holos of them, courtesy of Artoo. Rex responded in turn with stories about his strange, short childhood on Kamino. The Kaminoans had been strict, but the clones also had been children, with their own traditions and pranks wars and friendships that no amount of training could have really eradicated.

At Luke and Leia’s age, a clone cadet would have been almost ready to ship out to the front.

The Skywalkers made a trip to the market that afternoon, but Rex stayed behind to avoid being seen by anyone. Over dinner, Leia chattered excitedly about the upcoming Corellia smashball game that would be broadcast that night. All four of them settled onto the couch to watch it, Leia having produced a blanket from somewhere with the Corellian Dreadnaughts logo printed all over it. Rex had never really cared for the game and hadn’t understood why Fives and Hardcase had liked it so much, but he found a new appreciation listening to Leia’s running commentary.

She expressed exasperation whenever the Dreadnoughts employed a strategy or formation she found stupid—her pouts and angry glares at the screen made comical by her delicate child’s features and small, unimposing frame. Leia offered her opinion of the players to Rex: assessments mostly based on their playing ability and game stats but occasionally punctuated by statements such as “but I read that his favorite color is green, so he’s alright,” or “and he’s actually from Naboo, so I like him.”

Rex was thrown for a loop, when, as soon as the game entered its first advertising break with a commercial for star liner cruises, Luke and Leia brightened and leapt off the couch, pulling at their father’s hands to make him stand up too.

“C’mon, C’mon, C’mon!” they chanted, and Skywalker relented, pulling himself upright and then pushing the low table in the middle of the rug off to the side, creating a large space between the couch and holoprojector. No sooner than he had turned back to them than Luke and Leia latched themselves onto his body—one attempting to climb onto his back while the other latched onto his leg. General Skywalker pretended to be overwhelmed by their combined weight and sank to the rug. The next minutes that followed were a combination of a 2 vs 1 wrestling match and the twins using their father’s body as a jungle gym. Anakin would manage to capture one squirming child in a bear hug hold while the other baited him into trying to capture both at once, allowing the first sibling to escape. When the game broadcast returned, Luke and Leia were trying to drag their grinning father across the carpet by one leg. All three froze when they heard the announcer’s voices and immediately moved back to the couch to watch.

Luke got there first, sprawling out over both his and General Skywalker’s previous spots on the sofa.

“Shove over,” Skywalker told him fondly. Without waiting for him to actually comply, he scooped his son bodily off the couch, sat down, and settled the boy in his lap. Luke giggled and leaned back into his father’s chest, tucking his blond head under his chin.

The next commercial break, they resumed their game, and the next, until all three agreed they were too tired for another round. By the time the smashball game finished, having turned into somewhat of a blowout in the Dreadnaught’s favor, Luke was asleep, and Leia almost was, both tucked against Anakin’s side.

“Goodnight, Rex,” Anakin said softly, extricating himself from his children and standing up. He bent back down to gather Luke into his arms. The boy stirred but didn’t wake. Leia whined faintly at the loss of her human pillow and then blearily followed her father and brother out of the room.

On the fourth day of Rex’s stay with the Skywalkers, Anakin set to work on a mangled speeder bike that had apparently wrecked during a street race. Such racing was, of course, illegal in the city, by order of the Empire. Certain parts of the city, one of which the Skywalker home was on the outskirts of, harbored a not-insignificant number of criminals. By a gradual turn of conversation, he and Skywalker moved from this topic to the Rebellion’s and Rex’s own illicit activities.

Rex told General Skywalker about his and Ahsoka’s formal and informal roles in the organization—Ahsoka as a spymaster and himself as a jack-of-all-trades: supply run man, muscle for quick bombings of military targets, and strategic support—and how their meeting was even more coincidental than it seemed because Rex didn’t do these kind of extended infiltration intelligence-gathering missions often. But the spy who Ahsoka would have sent had been captured and killed a standard month ago, so here he was.

The more information, and hints at information, that Rex gave, the more leading Anakin seemed to become with his questions. How had Bail Organa begun to contact and organize individual dissenters into an actual military organization? And just how robust was it? What kind of ships had they been able to acquire? Bases? How did Bail fund it all? How many beings were now in the Alliance? Had they managed to establish spies in the Imperial Navy? In planet-based garrisons?

The give and take, the content of the questions and the crisp way he began to ask them, was achingly familiar to Rex. He wondered if General Skywalker even realized that he had turned their meandering conversation into essentially a military briefing. It was a conversation that could have fit seamlessly into any of the times Rex had stood by his side as they prepared for another mission to support a rebellion on a Separatist-controlled world.

They both had been silent for a few minutes, the exchange of information having reached a natural stopping point, when Rex worked up the courage to say, carefully,

“If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine we’re back at the command center on the bridge of the Resolute.”

Skywalker, who had been poising himself to bend a crooked rod of metal on the bike back straight, paused at the words and then relaxed his stance. He stared at the misshapen piece of metal for several seconds, seeming to accept the truth of what Rex had said for himself as well. He exhaled sharply.

“I didn’t even mean to—” he said, sounding stunned.

I didn’t even mean to step back into that role. Anakin Skywalker, General in the Grand Army of the Republic. Gifted military strategist. Rex filled in his meaning.

“Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever lose that part of myself,” Skywalker said, not looking at Rex.

“You would want to?” Rex asked. He wouldn’t. Couldn’t. To lose his identity as a soldier would be to lose himself. Maybe Rex should have resented that fact.

“I—” Skywalker faltered, “—it’s not a question of want. It doesn’t matter what I want.”

The statement might have been bitter—Rex had heard the whispers of the prophecy that his General was supposed to be the subject of and had even caught Kenobi and Windu discussing it in hushed tones once. It might have been noble—Luke and Leia were obviously paramount, and if their father could protect them with the skills he had once sharpened to a deadly point, he could never give them up. But it sounded resigned, to Rex’s ears. War changes people—weaves its ways into your bones and refuses to leave. To incorporate the rhythm of it, the routine, the reactions into yourself was, to Rex, human nature itself. To rid yourself of it was as natural and easy as halting Kamino’s unrelenting waves.

“Do you miss it? The war?” Rex asked.

“I—” Skywalker tried to reply right away but found that he could not. His expression slowly morphed into something almost offended—stricken—as if the cutting nature of the question itself was the problem, and not the fact that he couldn’t find the answer.

“Parts,” he eventually said. “It was far from perfect.”

Rex missed the war. It was almost the same life as he had now, except he had had more support, more confidence his missions would succeed, and he had had the 501^st.

“This, at least,” Skywalker said, punctuating the words by grabbing a hammer out of a nearby toolbox, and raising it over the bent metal, “is simpler.”

He swung the hammer and the look in his eyes told Rex otherwise.

Things became even less simple when, upon arriving home from school, Luke and Leia gave their father a non-ritual answer to his ritual question. Something interesting had happened. They had learned that the Imperial governor of the entire system was coming to speak at their school tomorrow, and both twins were adamant that something sinister—or an opportunity—was on the horizon.

Chapter Text

“Maybe the governor’ll have all the students interrogated! Maybe he’s going to tell us we have to help the stormtroopers catch traitors! Maybe we’ll have to lie to them, like real spies!” Luke speculated, excitedly, without most of the seriousness that should have been associated with the idea.

“Maybe he’ll accidentally spill some important Imperial plans because he thinks we’re just a bunch of dumb kids who won’t understand,” Leia predicted, slightly more reasonably, in Rex’s opinion, though he had a little bit more faith in the Empire’s operational security than that.

“The governor is going to come and tell you all a bunch of propaganda about how great the Empire is and how you should all work hard so you can join the Imperial Academy when you’re older,” their father corrected them. “I know you’ll be too smart to believe him, but that will be all he will say.”

“But what if the stormtroopers do ask us questions?”

“Then you won’t give them any answers that could get you in trouble. You won’t do anything that could get you in trouble.”

He gave both of them a pointed look.

“But don’t the Rebels need information about the governors to stop them from doing bad things?” Leia asked, turning the question towards Rex.

“Yes,” Rex said, since that was—in a way—the entire reason he was there, “but you dad’s right that we probably can’t get that information from a speech in a school.”

Luke and Leia looked crestfallen, and it made Rex want to take the statement back.

“If you want to help Rex,” Anakin cut in, “you won’t draw any attention to us, so that he can get safely back to the Rebellion soon.”

“He’s going to leave?” Luke asked, looking hurt.

“He can’t fight the Empire from here, can he?” his father said.

“Neither can we!” Luke shot back, quick to reach for indignant anger. General Skywalker sighed.

“You can’t fight the Empire from anywhere, because you’re nine years old, Luke,” he rebutted.

“Because you won’t let me!”

“That’s right,” he said, tightly.

“That’s unfair!” cried Luke, crossing his arms over his chest.

General Skywalker’s shoulders slumped and he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Luke—”

“You always tell us the same stupid thing!”

“We helped Rex, didn’t we? We were old enough to do that,” Leia cut in, more level-headedly but still in total agreement with her brother.

“You did something reckless and you got lucky. Don’t confuse that with being ready to fight a war,” their father said, darkly. Rex had never witnessed anger feel so cold coming off General Skywalker before. Rex stood where he was, rooted to the spot, unsure of what he should do, if anything. Not since the first night here had he felt like such an outsider. The truth was, Rex could see both sides.

“We’ll never be ready if we keep doing nothing!” Luke protested.

“You’ll do nothing yet. That’s final,” Skywalker said.

Luke huffed frustratedly, shook his head, and mutinously mumbled, “Come on, Leia.” He took his sister’s hand. They both marched from the room and Anakin watched them go, stormily. There was something in his expression Rex couldn’t place.

Rex thought very hard about what he should say. Wondered if he should say anything.

It was the first time he had seen them like this, having disagreements and frustrations with each other—they had seemed so cohesive, with trivial exceptions, until this moment. But it wasn’t strange to Rex. They were a family, like the one he had lost. And maybe, they were the beginnings of one he could rebuild for himself. If he could just convince one stubborn, fearful, man to take the leap of faith his children already had—

“Sir—” he started, and then stopped because his mouth had been working ahead of his brain. Rex had only decided that he would say something, but he was far from figuring out what that should be. Shavit, he used to be better at this. Tup had called him the General-Skywalker-whisperer. Right now, Rex just knew he was going to say something too blunt. He opened his mouth and observed,

“They have a point,” at the same time General Skywalker was saying, “Don’t—"

They stopped and stared at each other, cagey. Skywalker pinched the bridge of his nose between metal fingertips again.

“Maybe,” Skywalker conceded, “but they don’t understand what they’re asking.”

Rex thought that the General meant that the twins didn’t understand what war was like. Shinies never did, and yet wars still needed to be fought—at least this one did, even if the last one hadn’t. More salient to Rex was the fact they didn’t know what they were asking of their father. But Rex understood and was even starting to empathize. He wanted to see Luke and Leia safe—the intensity of it continued to surprise him, yet it seemed second-nature.

“Maybe I should talk to them,” Rex offered, though he had no idea what he would say. The act-first-and-think-later Skywalker method was maybe rubbing off on him too much.

Anakin shook his head, then looked in the direction his children had disappeared.

“No,” he said, “just—let them stew for a little while. They’ll come around, or at least accept they’re not going to get anywhere.”

Rex could hear the wince in his voice as he said it, even as his posture appeared resigned. General Skywalker had never liked to fight—well, verbally. And especially not with the people he cared about.

Rex didn’t press the issue, and they both went back to what they had been doing. Rex still had time, he thought, to find the right words.

Dinner that night was a mostly quiet affair, and afterwards the twins went back to their room, claiming they needed to do their homework, which Rex thought was probably untrue. General Skywalker retreated to the garage, even though the speeder bike from earlier was in good shape. Rex suspected, as he flipped mindlessly through channels on the holoprojector, that the half-disassembled ship he saw Skywalker working on was more of a personal project—like the Twilight had been.

It was late when Rex finally decided to sleep, giving up on keeping his thoughts at bay by watching holodramas. General Skywalker had put away his tools about an hour before and left Rex to his own devices. Rex assumed he would have been asleep, but when he went down the darkened hallway to use the refresher, he found Skywalker leaning against the doorway to the twins’ bedroom, peering into the dark at their vaguely-defined shapes.

It reminded him of when the 501^st would camp somewhere and Rex would be on a night watch shift. Some nights, in the wee hours, he would look over towards wherever they had set up the command tent and see his General’s outline, illuminated from the inside by the eerie blue light of holomaps. During the day, Rex would have been at his side, pouring over the same reports, worrying about outcomes and casualties and resources, but those nights had always felt strangely delicate. Too personal for even Rex—when they practically lived out of each other’s pockets—to intrude upon.

Rex had almost decided not to acknowledge him at all when Anakin said, softly so as not to wake Luke and Leia,

“I used to do this a lot, when they were smaller.”

Rex hesitantly stepped up next to him then, having been tacitly invited to join the strange ritual. He saw that a shaft of moonlight fell upon the plane of Leia’s cheek, illuminating the fine curves of her ear and a few dark curls of hair that were splayed upon her pillow. The strip of light reached all the way across the room to Luke’s bed on the other wall, where Rex could see the sole of his foot and loosely curled toes poking out from under his blanket.

“I would wake up in the middle of the night, and I would just get this feeling that—” He hesitated.

“—I would have to go in and put my hand on their backs—feel to make sure they were still breathing.”

Rex found he had a surprisingly easy time picturing that—the aching gentleness and calm of such a moment. He never would have called General Skywalker either of those things, before, but having spent the past week with this family, he could see it.

“And they always were,” Rex said, almost whispering, having felt something protective stir in him at the thought of the alternative.

“Yeah. But I keep checking.”

Looking more closely, Rex could see it—the subtle rise and fall in Luke and Leia’s sleeping forms that meant they were alive.

“I never really did that with Ahsoka,” Anakin mused. “I mean—there were a few times. But she’d been injured. There was always a reason.”

“Why not?” Rex asked.

“I don’t know. She was already fourteen when we met her. I never knew her as a baby.” He laughed then, once, so quietly it was more of a gesture—a shrug of his shoulders—than a sound.

“Master Plo showed me a holo of her once, though; she must have been three or four. It was very cute.”

Rex tried to imagine what that must have looked like, but he ended up just picturing a scaled-down version of Ahsoka as she had been on Christophsis, even though he knew Togruta biology didn’t work like that. The holo, and any others of a young Ahsoka, had probably destroyed along with the Jedi Temple and along with General Koon.

“You had confidence in her skills,” Rex offered after another moment, trying to answer his own question. Skywalker nodded in agreement, but in the dim light he didn’t looked convinced of the explanation.

“Maybe—even then—I didn’t fully realize how easily the universe could take things—people—away from you. Gone like they meant nothing at all.”

Rex shuddered. Anakin’s eyes, flickering blue in the shadows, looked as haunted as the words made Rex feel. It was a familiar horror—one that he’d heard, seen, and felt too often.

“I’ve met a lot of people who would say that about the Empire—not the universe,” Rex said.

General Skywalker hummed thoughtfully. He watched his children sleep and took a deep, slow breath.

“Both. Either. I don’t know,” he said. Another pause. “I never knew why exactly she died. Whether it was him. If it was because he hurt her. Or if it would have happened anyways.”

Senator Amidala.

In the silence, the revelation settled like fine dust over the two of them, weighty in Rex’s lungs. He felt strangely emboldened by it.

(If your Jedi is carrying a load, it is your job to carry it with them, he remembered being taught on Kamino. If they trust you with something, you must see it done, no matter the cost. The Jedi are the most skilled warriors in the galaxy. They will do what needs to be done to protect the Republic—it is your birthright to do it with them.)

The Rebellion needed General Skywalker. It probably even needed his children, someday in the future. And Rex thought General Skywalker might need it just as much. And now, he thought he knew what to say.

“Then fight it,” Rex said, “The Empire, if it was the Emperor’s fault. Or the universe, by doing what she would have done had she lived.”

He could see Anakin mulling the statement over in his head.

“I think a lot about what she would have done—what she would have wanted me to do. I know she would have worried about them too.”

“I can see why you both would,” Rex began, because they were brave and gifted and impulsive—he had seen that right away. “But, I don’t know if you’ve noticed: I’m already pretty far gone for them. Ahsoka will be too. Organa, even. They’ll be protected.”

“It might not be enough.”

“Maybe. If the galaxy stays the way it is, maybe.”

Another silence stretched between them.

“You want me to come with you,” Skywalker said, eventually.

“Yes.”

 “You could do it,” General Skywalker admitted suddenly, but still hushed. “From what you told me, you might be able to actually do it. Eventually. It’s a decent start, and Organa seems like he knows what he’s doing.”

“It won’t be easy. We’ll need you,” Rex reminded him, cautiously optimistic at the statement. In his experience General Skywalker was usually right, although he had never made any prediction near as long as this one.

They both watched Luke and Leia breathe from the shadows for several more minutes, neither saying anything.

“Goodnight,” Rex whispered eventually, sensing that whatever was going to be said between them on the subject that night had already been said.

Anakin looked Rex in the eyes for a brief moment and nodded before turning back to the darkened bedroom. Rex went back to the couch. He had no idea how much longer Skywalker remained like that, but he thought it might have been a very long time.

Rex awoke to General Skywalker coming through the door to the garage after seeing the twins off to school. They didn’t talk as much that day, perhaps having exhausted their desire to have a conversation that could turn serious after last night. Rex instead asked if there were any tasks he could help with, since he was beginning to feel too much like a freeloader. Skywalker cast his gaze around the shop for several seconds before telling him sheepishly that the pile of spare parts hadn’t been sorted into the appropriate drawers and shelves around the garage for an embarrassingly long time.

Rex’s knowledge of mechanics was surface-level at best, but he thought he did an admirable job, and the day ended up passing quickly. He occasionally had to ask Anakin where something went, which always led to an answer and occasionally led to a story. They were surprisingly entertaining stories; leave it to Anakin Skywalker to have a borderline-unbelievable yet comical life experience involving a space-freighter coolant valve.

The shop seemed to be handling a lot of minor fixes that day, and it kept Anakin going back and forth between the larger part of the garage where Rex was and the front room where customers came in. He was up there when the twins came in, a littler later than they had been the past few days, and not yelling for their dad like they normally did.

Rex couldn’t place the look on Leia’s face at first, but once they told him what they had done, he realized it was the same one that General Skywalker wore when he told them about a plan that was going to entail a very long mission report afterwards.

“Hiya, Rex,” Luke said as they approached him by the pile of spare parts, “where’s Dad?”

“In the front,” Rex told them, then asked cautiously, “how was the governor’s speech?”

The twins exchanged a look.

“He mentioned you,” Leia started, offhandedly, “he told us that if any of us knew who you were or where you were that we needed to tell him or one of our teachers.”

“We didn’t tell on you, by the way,” Luke said matter-of-factly, picking a strange-looking, palm-sized panel out of the pile and pushing the buttons on the front experimentally.

“Other than that, he said pretty much exactly what Dad said he would,” Leia shrugged, her expression quickly turning mischevious, “but it’s not what he said we thought you might like. Gimme the thing, Luke.”

“What thing?” Luke said innocently, pulling another part out of the pile. Leia’s lips parted in surprise and her head whipped around to her brother.

“Luke!” she cried indignantly, and then sighed when he reached into his pocket and she realized he had been teasing her.

“Nerfherder,” Rex heard her mumble as a grinning Luke placed something into her outstretched palm. She showed it to Rex. It was a shiny-looking datastick, with the Imperial cog stamped into one corner.

Rex stared at it, sitting there in her palm.

“How did you get this?” The answer would be a good one, he was sure.

“Get what?” General Skywalker’s voice called from the front of the garage, and all three of them stiffened. Rex turned towards him, but saw Leia hastily stuff her hand into her pants pocket out of the corner of his eye. Her father joined their group around the remaining pile of spare parts.

“This!” Luke lied, holding out the odd part he had pulled from the pile moments earlier. “G27 thermal couplings are rare, aren’t they, Dad?”

Anakin looked at Rex then back at Luke.

“Nice try,” he said slowly, “but I’m pretty sure that Rex doesn’t even know what that is.”

Rex was about to just tell him what they had been talking about, since what was done was done, but Leia beat him to it.

“The governor dropped this,” she said, pulling out the datastick again. He took it and studied it for a second.

“Somehow I doubt that.”

“It fell out of his pocket, we swear!” Luke said.

“It fell,” Anakin said, dubiously.

The way Luke was obviously fighting back a smile, Rex thought that it might have “fallen” with some help from the Force.

“Really, it’s his fault for having it sticking out in full view the whole speech,” Leia chimed in, dripping with false innocence, basically confirming Rex’s theory.

“I told you not to—” their father stopped, frustrated, then continued flatly, “—you have no idea what could be on here.” Truthfully, Rex had expected him to be a little angrier by now, but perhaps the fact that both his children were standing there perfectly unscathed was helping.

Rex saw Leia squint at her father, and he could tell she was thinking something along the lines of that’s the point.

“That’s why we took it home with us,” Luke told him, having significantly less tact than his sister.

“And you think the governor’s not going to start to miss this?” Skywalker asked, holding the datastick up to the light between thumb and index finger to illustrate the point.

“Of course he’s going to miss it—if there’s anything important on it—” Leia said smugly, “—but there’s no way anyone could think it was us.”

A staring contest ensued, one that Rex highly doubted General Skywalker was going to win.

“Alright, I’ll bite,” Anakin conceded, “how did you do it?”

“Laney was sitting in front of us,” Luke burst out, obviously having been waiting to tell the story, “so I reached my hand out like I was gonna pull on her lek. But I was really making the datastick fall out of the governor’s pocket while he was talking! And then Leia thought that I should actually pull on it, and Leia would tattle on me, so Mrs. Ra’lesh would make me help clean up the auditorium. Then we did it and it worked. Afterward, I just made sure I got to put the podium away and picked it right up off the ground when nobody was looking.” He finished off the story with a self-satisfied shrug.

Rex had to try not to laugh out loud. He had to admit, it was a pretty excellent plan that created plenty of plausible deniability. And it was something only the Skywalker twins could have pulled off. General Skywalker’s eyebrows had climbed up his forehead and he looked at a loss for words.

“Did you at least apologize to Laney?” he finally managed.

“Yes, I apologized to Laney, Dad,” Luke said, exasperated.

General Skywalker considered both of his children, standing there looking pleased with themselves, then sighed and extended the datastick to Rex.

“Keep this safe,” he ordered. Rex took it.

“We’re not going to find out what’s on it?” Leia complained.

“For all we know, trying to get past the encryptions could activate a tracker and lead them right to us,” her father explained.

“But—”

“Yes, even if you tried to crack it, Leia. I’m sure the Rebellion has some codebreakers who would know what to do with it.”

Leia pressed her lips together but didn’t protest further. General Skywalker let her stew for a few seconds before casually looking at the ceiling, as if what he was about to say wasn’t important.

“They might even let you watch them do it, if you ask nicely,” he offered.

Both twins’ eyes narrowed as they processed their father’s statement. Then they looked at each other with growing excitement. Rex could no longer keep the smile off his face as he pocketed the all-important datastick. So General Skywalker had decided, then.

Luke was the first one to break the stunned silence.

“We’re going to get to meet more Rebels?” he exclaimed.

Rex saw Skywalker quickly smirk before donning a more serious expression and kneeling down in front of his children “Come here,” he said, and Luke and Leia both stepped closer to him.

For half a second Rex expected him to next reach into his pocket and pull out a holoprojector—to map out ingress and egress routes like he was planning an assault with Torrent company—such was the familiarity of his pose. But the moment passed quickly.

“Someone from the Rebellion is coming tomorrow to pick up Rex. We’re going to go meet her.”

Luke and Leia watched him intensely—expectantly.

“We might even—we might even go with her for a little bit.”

Leia straightened her posture and Luke’s eyes went wide as saucers.

“Go with?” Luke asked, “Like leave the planet?”

General Skywalker nodded.

“Forever?” Luke asked, a hint of trepidation creeping into his voice. His father frowned.

“I don’t know,” he said, “probably not. But I want to talk to the beings who are in charge of the Rebellion. To see how I can help.”

“What about us?” Leia asked, “Do we get to help too?”

“Leia,” her father said seriously, running his hands down the length of her arms, “I know you want to help. And you, Luke,” he added, settling a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“It’s very brave of you to want to help—”

He cast about for the right words.

“I should have said it before, but I’m proud of you for that. It’s just that the beings who do this know the risks and they are very well-trained. And you’re not. Yet. Do you understand?”

The twins both nodded, matching their father’s intensity.

“You can train and learn now so that you can fight the Empire when you’re older, if that’s really what you want.”

“It is,” Luke assured him earnestly.

“I know,” Anakin murmured, with the softness that Rex had so rarely seen in him before Luke and Leia. He pressed a palm to each of their cheeks in turn.

“But you both have to promise me that you’ll work hard to be careful, and smart, and that you won’t do something like this again on your own.”

“We promise,” said Leia. Luke nodded.

“I’m going to hold you to that,” their father pressed, “because—because you’re my babies and I couldn’t stand to see you hurt.”

Luke fidgeted at the declaration, and Leia looked uncomfortable too.

“We’re not babies anymore, Dad,” she reminded him. Skywalker was silent for a moment, studying them.

“No,” he agreed, standing up. He kissed them both on the forehead. Luke and Leia might have acted uncomfortable, but Rex saw the way their eyes slipped closed in contentment at their father’s touch.

“Now,” Skywalker said, brightening considerably and throwing a teasing grin at Rex, “Why don’t you go put that thermal coupling away, Luke? Force knows Rex won’t know where to put it.”

The next morning, the four of them were ready to set out across town for one of the smaller spaceports, where Ahsoka and her ship would be waiting for them. Each of the Skywalkers carried small bags with them—presumably with a change of clothes and some essentials, which Rex suspected in Luke’s case meant his stuffed bantha. Rex, on the other hand, left with no bag and only slightly more than he had arrived at the apartment with, though he was wearing some of General Skywalker’s clothes instead of the singed factory uniform. And he had the governor’s datastick tucked safely in an inner pocket—an effort to not make the same mistake as the governor himself had. Falling victim to a hapless, unsuspecting pickpocket was the last thing they needed.

The twins were bombarding their father with questions about Ahsoka, which had started last night as soon as Skywalker had told them her name and they realized she had featured prominently alongside Rex in their bedtime stories.

“That can’t all be real,” Leia was saying as they stepped out into the alley and General Skywalker input the code to lock the door behind them.

“I mean it!” she said, when her father laughed, “Nobody who learned from you could possibly be that cool.”

“You’re right, Princess,” he said with false seriousness, “she’s even cooler.”

Leia groaned at her father and raised her eyebrows at her brother as if to say, see what I mean?

As they entered more crowded streets and navigated the cramped spaces between the stalls in the market, Rex thought that General Skywalker’s good humor was only half sincere. His eyes shifted back and forth among the marketgoers, drawn to any flash of white in the crowd, even though the set of his mouth looked relaxed and easygoing. And he wasn’t wrong to be on edge. There were stormtroopers stationed on the corners of most major intersections, though they were far outnumbered by the crowds of beings that flooded the streets. Rex mentally thanked his General for adjusting their plan to coincide with the holiday—it made it much easier for them all to blend in.

When they were just leaving the more densely packed area of the city, with Skywalker expertly herding his children through the tangle of beings and Rex following a step behind, a shout came from the other side of the street.

“Tonra!”

General Skywalker’s head shot up, face slack with panic before he replaced it with a suitably pleasantly surprised expression.

“Headmistress!” he called back congenially, and Rex sucked in a quiet breath. It probably meant nothing, he told himself. Anakin and the children started over to her when she kept watching them, making it clear that she meant to strike up a conversation. Rex was unsure whether to follow, and fractionally faltered in his step. Behind his back, General Skywalker moved his hands in their old hand signal for go, and so Rex went on ahead, pretending he didn’t know them.

Rex continued on for two more blocks before he found one without a stormtrooper in sight. He leaned casually up against a wall and waited. Technically he could have continued all the way to the rendezvous with Ahsoka, since General Skywalker knew where they were going, but Rex decided to wait for them as long as he didn’t look too suspicious. Getting separated was never a good idea if you could help it, and it was the last thing he wanted right now.

It only took a few minutes before the Skywalkers rounded the corner, walking slightly faster than might have been strictly normal. The twins looked annoyed.

“’Oh, Mr. Lars, your children are so very unique,’” Leia quoted angrily in a Coruscanti accent, once they were in earshot of Rex, “—like we’re not even there!”

“And then there’s the part where she told me to be careful raising you,” Skywalker added.

“Do you think she knows?” Luke asked, suddenly. Rex had been wondering the same thing. Anakin glanced behind them once, quickly, like she might be following them.

“No. She felt like—” he stopped himself, “—it was the same disapproval she always has—nothing new. Besides, I’m pretty sure we’d be arrested by now if she knew.”

Rex fell into step with them again and dared to ask, “The same disapproval?”

General Skywalker waved his hand, “Oh, she thinks we’re an affront to the Empire’s traditional family values. And she thinks my hair is too long to be ‘proper.’”

“She thinks we’re troublemakers,” Luke summarized.

“Even a broken chrono is right twice a day,” Skywalker quipped, smiling down at Luke and reaching out to ruffle his hair. Luke dodged his hand and narrowly avoided running into a passerby in the process.

“Don’t mess up my hair or Ahsoka’s gonna think I’m weird!”

“Ahsoka thinks all hair is weird,” Rex informed him.

“But at least she won’t disapprove of us,” said Leia, with what Rex thought was a hint of doubt coloring her voice.

“Alright, you two,” General Skywalker began, perhaps picking up on the same thing Rex had. They were not far at all from where Ahsoka should be waiting. “I know we’re all excited to see Ahsoka, but she doesn’t even know about you yet. I’m sure she’ll like you very much, but you might need to be a little bit patient with her.

“Patience is my middle name,” Leia said cheekily. Her father scoffed.

“It is not.”

Skywalker said they all had to quiet down as they entered the spaceport. The key to not looking suspicious was looking confident, but a close second was not drawing undue attention. Rex wasn’t worried about their ability to do the former, but loud familial bickering would have easily blown the latter objective. Rex had, in fact, learned these particular principles from General Skywalker—it might seem that balancing the two would be difficult for anyone, let alone a Skywalker, to pull off, but all three of them did it well as they made their way to hangar 8.

They found it easily, and the familiar profile of the ship Ahsoka used for most of her non-solo missions greeted Rex. The Twilight Dawn, she called it, as a joke. Both it and the original Twilight could be similarly described as “lovingly-modified buckets of bolts.”

Rex banged his fist against the hull five times in a pre-determined pattern. It indicated that it was him, that they weren’t being pursued, and therefore didn’t need to make a quick exit. In retrospect, he couldn’t remember getting to use the pattern very often. He reflected that this whole week had been an unexpected, but perhaps very needed, change of pace.

The ramp hissed open and Rex led the way up. Ahsoka was standing in the doorway to the cockpit, and in the split second before she saw General Skywalker, Rex thought she looked more nervous than he had seen her in years. Then a fond smile curved on her lips, and her eyes lit up. Rex moved off to the side of the cramped hold, hearing Skywalker’s footsteps on the metal floor come to a halt. Anakin looked Ahsoka over, clearly sizing up all the ways that she had grown in ten years. He sighed audibly—happy and relieved—and he grinned, brilliantly. Ahsoka took one step towards him before she froze, her eyes widened, and her lips rounded into a shocked O. Luke and Leia, being shorter than Anakin and Rex, had just come into full view as they made their way up the ramp.

Skywalker gestured them over and they came close to him, suddenly timid.

“Ahsoka,” he started, and Rex could hear the waver of emotion in his voice, “this is Luke and Leia. They’re my kids.”

Ahsoka looked searchingly at her former master for a long moment, as if to gauge the truth of his words before staring again at Luke and Leia.

“Luke…” she breathed slowly, looking at him carefully. Luke nodded tentatively, then looked over to his father for reassurance, who smiled back.

“…and Leia,” she said, more confidently, the smile tugging again at the corner of her mouth. Leia responded with a shy smile of her own.

“Oh…I…” Ahsoka murmured, and sank down to the floor on one knee, either to get down on the twins’ level or because she was surprised. She seemed lost in thought for a moment, and the lack of quick reaction wasn’t something Rex was used to seeing in her.

“It’s very nice to meet you,” she said eventually, gently, as if the moment might shatter. “I’m Ahsoka.”

“We know. Dad told us about you,” Leia responded simply—for both of them, since Luke looked slightly awestruck. “It’s good to meet you too.”

Rex watched as Ahsoka turned that over in her head. Dad, meaning her old Jedi master, told us about you.

General Skywalker leaned against the bulkhead to watch and the only word Rex could use to describe his expression and the way he held himself was pride. He didn’t seem anxious at all about Ahsoka’s cautious reaction.

“I— and you two are twins?” she guessed.

“Mmhm,” hummed Leia, which seemed to break the spell over Luke.

“I’m older!” he blurted.

“Only by three minutes!” was Leia’s automatic response.

Ahsoka’s bright peal of laughter filled the whole ship.

She looked to Anakin, no longer tentative, but shining with happiness. He spread his hands wryly.

“Master!” she exclaimed, half a teasing admonishment, and half greeting. She rocketed from the floor and into his arms and he held her tightly.

“How are ‘ya, Snips?” he asked, and Rex guessed that the smile in his voice might not fully go away for days.

“I’m pretty great, Master,” she laughed, “how are you?”

“Pretty great.”

Her answering giggle was slightly watery.

“I can’t believe—”

“I know!”

When they released each other, Anakin reached over to ruffle Luke’s hair, obviously brimming over with happiness, and this time his son couldn’t dodge. Then he sobered slightly.

“You have, uh—” he began, looking at the floor, looking at the twins, then looking at her, “you have three extra passengers to—wherever you’re going—if you’ll have us.”

Confusion flickered across Ahsoka’s delighted face. “I thought you said—”

“I changed my mind,” he told her, “at least partly.” General Skywalker glanced over to Rex meaningfully and Ahsoka’s eyes followed his gaze. She gave Rex a blinding smile, which he immediately returned, caught up in the moment.

“Well, that’s a first for you,” said Ahsoka, again addressing her master.

“Eh,” he said, “a few people were very persuasive.”

“And,” Rex cut in, uncomfortable with being cryptically referred to like that, “we brought you this.” He pulled the datastick, which was thankfully right where he had left it, out of his pocket and tossed it to her. She caught it on reflex then examined it, perplexed.

“But you said you had to abandon the mission!”

“I never said I got it,” Rex said. Ahsoka looked to Skywalker, impressed. He shrugged.

“Don’t look at me.”

Ahsoka looked back down at the small piece of technology in her hand before she put the pieces together and her gaze settled on Luke and Leia. Rex hadn’t seen Ahsoka surprised, at least in a good way like this, in a long time. She smiled.

“I like you already,” she proclaimed pompously, obviously only pretending that they would have needed to do anything to make her like them. Both twins beamed back at her.

“Come on,” she told the room at large, jauntily tossing the datastick into her other hand and using the fist that closed around it to hit the ramp release, “let’s go to Alderaan.”

“Alderaan!” Luke exclaimed as Ahsoka was entering the cockpit, “That’s all the way in the Core! Wizard!”

Luke scurried after her and Leia followed him.  Rex began to do the same, when General Skywalker drew up beside him and slung an arm around his shoulders.

“Thank you,” said Anakin, as they watched Luke examine the buttons on the control panel with enthusiasm and Leia clamber up on a seat, straining her neck to see out the windows. The embrace felt right, but Rex stopped, not used to being thanked so earnestly.

“For what?”

“For bringing us back together.”

“That wasn’t me,” Rex hedged, “it was really mostly luck.”

“No, Captain,” General Skywalker insisted, “it was you.”

Anakin gave Rex a happy, knowing look and clapped him firmly on the shoulder, in a long-missing gesture of camaraderie.

They both joined their family in the cockpit.