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It starts after Ryloth.
Rex finds Ahsoka in an empty supply room. It’s one of the few spaces on the cruisers that he finds ill-planned: a ways away from the main hangar and main cargo hold, and not easily accessible by lift. It’s stood empty for the entirety of the war. At least until now. Someone—likely Jesse, he thinks—has begun to store spare armor paint inside. There are only a few cans, stacked neatly on a shelf beside the door. Mostly 501st blue, one can of red, and one of yellow.
He doesn’t move further inside until Ahsoka looks up.
Her eyes are red-rimmed, though she scrubs away the tear tracks before he can see them. “Rex.” Her voice is hollow. “I’ll be up to the bridge in a moment.”
Rex steps out of the doorway and navigates around a couple shelves to stand beside Ahsoka, still some distance away. Inexplicably, there’s a window here. It doesn’t face Ryloth; all he can see is endless black and a few scattered stars. Rex reaches out a hand to it, tracing mindless designs with a fingertip. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Ahsoka watching, interest and confusion warring across her features.
He’s not sure what to say. True, he came here to find her, but now that he sees the red-rimmed eyes and hunched shoulders, his training is out the window.
Back on Kamino, he’d enjoyed working with young brothers, and you couldn’t go a week without at least one screaming, sobbing cadet. But that was Kamino, where weakness was as good as a death sentence. This is empty space. This is his superior officer staring into the middle distance and refusing to acknowledge the way her knees are gathered so closely to her chest that Rex is convinced it’s cutting off circulation.
Eventually, he sits down next to her, stretching his legs out in front of him.
She glances at him, looking down again before he can make eye contact. “Are they okay?” It’s barely a whisper.
Two of her pilots are in the medbay, after their disastrous attack. One other is uninjured. The other six…
Axe!
He shakes away the memory of Ahsoka’s desperate scream. “Kix says they’ll pull through.” Her head is angled downward and all he can see are the blue and white montrals when he looks down at her. “Maybe you can go visit them, sir.”
She visibly blanches, and he’s not sure whether it’s the suggestion or the sir that gets the reaction. “I don’t think they want to see me.”
Rex sighs. “They want to know that you care.”
She whips her head up at that. “I–they think I don’t care? My stupidity cost more than half of them their lives! I killed them!” Tears are gathering in her eyes again when she suddenly stops. “I killed them,” she says numbly.
Sometimes Rex forgets that his commanding officer is not yet fifteen years old. She had not lived expecting to go to war, but she will grow up on the battlefield nonetheless. Rex had been made for war, but that didn’t make him immune to its effects. He’s seen enough death for a thousand civilian lifetimes. Ahsoka, too.
On rare quiet nights, Rex wonders what it might have been like to grow up without the shadow of war across his shoulders. Fighting is all he’s ever known; no war means no clone troopers, too. His childhood was spent studying battle strategies, collecting bruises on the training ground, learning how to use blasters and blades and fists and feet to hurt.
He knows that Ahsoka has learned some of the same. But before the war, her childhood was spent studying the history of planets and species and cultures, learning negotiation techniques. Not war. She didn’t learn how to hit a battle droid to prevent a spray of shrapnel, or where to place detonators to cause maximum damage. She didn’t spend her days on the mat, learning how to hit without breaking bones, and then where to hit to break as many as she could. Those were the lessons of war, lessons that Rex himself had guided her through. It hurt, sometimes, to see a fourteen-year-old clone cadet in Ahsoka’s words and movements and mannerisms. It hurt to be the one to teach her to hurt, to bleed, to kill. Even if he’d done it a hundred times.
But failing a lesson never compares to failing in the battlefield. His Commander broke formation and got two thirds of her squadron killed. Those are the choices that will haunt her nightmares for months—years, part of him whispers—to come. And even if Rex has never directly defied an order, he knows that feeling, so he turns his head towards Ahsoka and tells her what he needed to hear the first time he brought his squad into a death sentence.
“You’re not wrong.” It’s harsh, and Ahsoka physically balks away from him, but it’s the truth. “That’s the reality of war. You didn’t follow orders, and you didn’t see the big picture, and six of our men died for it.” Ahsoka’s frame is shaking, and Rex isn’t sure if this is his best strategy but he goes on anyway. “But,” he says, holding up a hand. He sees one of her eyes follow. “But, you know that. You made a mistake, kid. Everyone does. We listen and we train, but none of it fully prepares you for what’s out there. You have to learn the hard way. And when you’re in command, that means that your mistakes have consequences for everyone. Our men pay for our mistakes. We honor them by remembering, and learning from them.”
He thinks her grip on her legs is loosening, because now he can see both of her eyes, trained determinedly on his chest plate. It’s a start.
A single tear slips down her cheek. “What do I do now?”
“You own up to it. You apologize. And you learn,” Rex says firmly. “You learn, and make sure it doesn’t happen again.” He hesitates for a moment before carefully setting a hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t move, and he takes that as a good sign. “Command is a bigger responsibility than most can handle. But we have to handle it.” Rex pauses, feeling again like he is in unfamiliar territory. “I know you can handle it.” The impulse to add a sir is nearly overwhelming, but he moves past it.
He feels her shoulder move as she takes a deep breath, slowly uncurling her legs to match his position on the floor. Belatedly, he realizes he’s kept his hand on her shoulder and curses internally—but then his Commander leans into the touch, breaths getting stronger and more even. They sit quietly for several minutes, the ship softly humming around them. It’s comforting, almost, and keeps away that feeling of silence that comes after costly battles.
Thunk.
Rex looks down in alarm at his Commander, whose head has fallen on his shoulder. But her breathing is even, legs bent but no longer pressed flat to her torso. Asleep. He has the sneaking suspicion she hasn’t slept at all in the last rotation, between nerves over first space command and everything that came after. She must have been exhausted.
Rex should be reporting back to the bridge, or checking on the men in the barracks. But Ahsoka is peaceful in sleep, the crease between her brows smoothed away. At least for now. He knows she’s had nightmares before.
He doesn’t want to leave her alone. So he stays.
After an hour, Ahsoka’s hands start twitching. Her face begins to twist, too, the crease between her brows returning as she makes a sound that’s almost out of Rex’s hearing range.
“Commander,” he says, shaking her shoulder gently. “It’s just a dream. Wake up.” She doesn’t. “Kid,” he tries again. “You’re having a nightmare.”
At that, she jolts awake, montrals nearly clipping his chin. “Axe?”
Her eyes are wide with surprise and hope, and he sees the exact moment she comes back to reality and folds back in on herself. “Oh.”
“Just Rex, kid,” he says gently.
“I fell asleep?” She frowns at the supply room, then looks out the window to the same empty space, then looks back at Rex. “How long?”
“About an hour.” The General had commed him, looking for her; Rex had sent a message back that she was sleeping. Skywalker would likely come looking again soon.
Ahsoka looks up at him. “You–you stayed?”
Rex nods, a sense of awkwardness creeping in. “Er–yeah. Most clones don’t like being alone. I figured…” he trails off.
A smile breaks out across her face. It’s small, and bittersweet, but it’s there. Rex smiles back.
“Me, too,” she whispers.
Togrutas are very group-focused, Rex had learned from Kamino and what research Coric had gathered together when they found themselves with a very new and very non-human Commander who seemed very keen on getting into all kinds of scrapes. He wonders how she coped in those first days when the General was second-guessing having an apprentice and she was surrounded by strangers.
Rex has been surrounded by brothers his entire life. Clones aren’t meant to be alone. And maybe that was why he found himself wandering the halls of the Resolute, trying to find a fourteen-year-old Togruta who was never meant to be alone, either.
In that, they’re the same.
It continues.
Through weeks and months and then years, a mostly-abandoned and ill-planned supply room is a refuge, a place where two commanding officers don’t have to be alone. A thousand different constellations pass across a small window, a hundred planets spin across the background as they make their way from one side of the galaxy to the other. Old paint cans are replaced with new, montrals and wiry limbs grow taller and stronger, furrows develop between brows and armor gets scuffed and scratched. Some things never change.
(Until they do.)
Rex doesn’t know if she’ll come.
He knows that she remembers hours spent in an almost-abandoned supply room. Sometimes they’d sit in silence and process the burning weight that was having control over who lived and died; sometimes they’d talk, telling stories of their childhoods or of their families. The stories began to overlap as the years passed by.
But this is a different ship, and a different time. It’s been months since he last saw Ahsoka, since she had walked down the Jedi Temple steps without looking back. They’ve both changed since then. He’d been worried that she wouldn’t like the tribute the men had given her. But the shine in her eyes hadn’t been faked, when she’d turned back to Rex after seeing the lines of helmets. He knows little of what Ahsoka went through in their months apart, but he’d seen his Commander in that room, no matter if she refused to accept it.
Still, he’s been waiting for a while, and should sleep soon. Coruscant to Mandalore is a long, long way, even in hyperspace. It’s time he should be using to get adjusted to Mandalore’s cycle. And he needs to get every piece of information about Death Watch, Maul, and Mandalore as a whole out of Bo-Katan.
The door to the cargo hold slides open.
Familiar hues of blue and white and orange move inside, and when he makes eye contact with Ahsoka he can’t help but grin.
“Wasn’t sure you’d be here,” she says wryly.
He chuckles. “Could say the same to you.”
They sink down to the floor together, stretching out their legs. Ahsoka crosses hers on top of each other, lightsabers swaying with the movement. She notes his glance and says, “It’s good. To have them back.” She looks up at Rex as she speaks, and he feels his smile soften.
“Missed you, too.”
She leans her shoulder into his, and it’s the familiarity that gets him. He’s missed his vod’ika, more than he would have admitted before now.
Ahsoka claps her hands together. “I need the story. I feel like so much has changed.” She says it lightly, but Rex catches the hint of guilt and regret behind her eyes. He knocks his foot against hers. “I see Jesse made ARC.” She hesitates then, and he knows that feeling of hope and fear that’s flowing through her all too well. “Is Fives…”
Rex swallows. “He didn’t make it.”
“May he find peace, and may we live to remember,” she says, bowing her head. It’s a Togruta saying, roughly translated, one that struck a chord with him because of the similarity to Mandalorian remembrances. He’s recited too many names in this room.
Ahsoka looks like she wants to ask about Fives, but every time Rex thinks about that Coruscanti warehouse he feels like he’s being ripped to shreds. She sees that, and drops the topic. He can’t decide whether to be grateful.
But if he can’t give her the story of Fives, he can give her this. “Right before you came back, we ended up on Skako Minor with Clone Force 99. And–and we found Echo.”
Ahsoka narrows her eyes. “...What?” she says slowly.
He explains. She quickly catches on, and her shock is palpable as she claps a hand to her mouth. She’s smiling by the end of the story, a genuine smile. “Where’s Echo? Is he here?”
“Ah, no,” Rex says, mood falling a bit. “He stayed with the Bad Batch. I think after everything that happened to him, and after…” he doesn’t say Fives, but it hangs above them, “...he felt better, with them.”
Ahsoka nods consideringly. “I’m glad he found what was best for him. And I can barely believe–” she lets out a disbelieving laugh. “He’s really alive. And he’s okay.”
“I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you, next time we join up on a mission,” Rex says. “Or, uh—that is, if you’re sticking around.” Shab. He hadn’t meant to bring up the bantha in the room.
Ahsoka shifts her position on the ground. “I–” she sighs. “I missed this. All of this. You, Anakin, Jesse, all the men. This is–” she falters again, and Rex thinks this may be the most unsure he’s seen her since Ryloth, “This is home.”
“Then stay,” Rex says, like it’s simple. He knows it isn’t.
She smiles sadly. “I’m not a Jedi anymore. I can’t command legions as a civilian, and...I can’t go back. Not now.”
“You know the Generals would approve you as an advisor on any mission,” Rex offers. It’s selfish, he knows, but he doesn’t want to lose his sister like he’s lost his brothers. Ahsoka is here, and he can’t help but feel that if he lets her walk out that door she’ll never walk back in again.
Ahsoka’s hand is tapping frenetically on her knee as she answers. “I know Anakin would. He wants me to come back. So badly. But Obi-Wan is—he’s more complicated. I don’t think he approved of my decision. And he’s on the Council. I’m supposed to just let go of that?”
Rex knows General Kenobi to be a good man, but he couldn’t look him in the eyes for weeks after Anakin stormed onto the Resolute without a familiar figure by his side. Yet Rex also remembers a worried Cody watching over a weary Obi-Wan for weeks after Ahsoka’s trial. Kenobi hadn't been eating, and Cody swore that his hair grew more gray streaks with each passing day.
“You shouldn’t have to let go of it,” he eventually tells Ahsoka. “Squads should never leave a man behind. Yours did. But General Kenobi, he was a wreck after you left. Anyone could see it. Nearly as bad as General Skywalker. He never let go of you, not by choice.”
Ahsoka’s sigh is so, so heavy. “The worst part of all of this is that I understand. They didn’t have a choice, not really. They had to cede to the Senate. But that doesn’t change anything! I still would have been executed if not for Anakin. The Jedi were who I was, and it was ripped away in the span of a moment. I still don’t know who I am outside of that.” She gathers her knees to her chest. “I have to find who I am outside of the Jedi, I think, before anything else.”
It’s quiet for a minute before Ahsoka speaks again. “You know, Obi-Wan left the Jedi, once.”
“What?” Rex says incredulously. “By choice?”
She dips her head in assent. “He and his Master were ordered to return to the Temple, but they were on a planet at war. And the soldiers, they were children. He said he couldn’t leave. So he stayed. As a civilian. I don’t know for how long. But he was there, not as a Jedi. Just as Obi-Wan. He stayed until the fighting was over, and then he returned to Coruscant and rejoined the Order.” She swallows. “He had a choice, but not really. He had to stay.”
Rex has to take a moment to process that. “I never knew.”
“He didn’t talk about it much.”
Child soldiers. A planet at war. Rex didn’t know which planet this fight had been on, not when such things happened on a thousand planets in a thousand systems. But General Kenobi had left the Order.
“General Kenobi found his way outside the Jedi,” Rex says at last. “I know you will, too.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to go back.” The admission is barely a whisper.
“You don’t have to know. You didn’t have a choice before, but you have a choice now,” Rex says, and prays for it to be true. “You don’t have to return to the Jedi unless it feels right.” It hurts to say, to acknowledge that they may not stick together ‘til the end. But her path is different now.
She tips her head onto his shoulder. “I think that I would want to go back, someday. Just–not today.”
The words are cool relief. “Not today.” Rex taps one of her montrals. “I can work with that.”
They sit, together, for most of the way to Mandalore.